[askaboutit]

Every economy has a plateau then a fall, then a pull back up again. I think the aggressive trade stance and hard line politics by China might have played a major role. As it’s frightened both the local businesses and foreign businesses and lead to all global powers starting to put tariffs and trade barriers up, all due to China wanting to get away with pretty blatant violations of fair trade, huge import taxes on foreign goods, great firewall blocking any foreign purchase easily, hugely subsidised mail, forced ownership sharing, lowered safety regulations, lack of pollutant regulation etc. chuck in a house market with terrible quality at a high price and you’ve got a balloon waiting to pop. I don’t blame the Chinese for wanting to buy any house outside of China. But they’ve taken their “build junk make bank” mentality to the world and it can’t last much longer.

[vkou]

> blatant violations of fair trade, huge import taxes on foreign goods, great firewall blocking any foreign purchase easily, hugely subsidised mail, forced ownership sharing, lowered safety regulations, lack of pollutant regulation

'Free' trade benefits industrialized nations, while mercantilism benefits developing nations. Every currently industrialized nation has, at some point in its past, been incredible protectionist, blatantly violated IP laws, had atrocious safety, employment, and pollution regulations, and large taxes on foreign imports.

China is just catching up to what the rest of the developed world has gone through.

Are you expecting them to look at the history of how the United States, and Europe developed, and go: "Well, gee, protectionism, lax safety regulations, and access to foreign resource markets worked really well for all these other countries... But we shouldn't repeat their success!"

[hopefulengineer]

>China is just catching up to what the rest of the developed world has gone through

in the past there was no world trade organization and there were no multi-national free trade agreements. It's like saying china should be allowed to enslave people because it happened hundreds of years ago. There are now laws against it

I've seen this argument parroted multiple times on many different websites. It's either just the blind leading the blind or Chinese sock puppets spreading lies to justify blatant trade abuses

[mruniverse]

Yeah they shouldn't follow that history.

The US also had slavery.

[HumanDrivenDev]

The US also had slavery.

Are you under the impression that China didn't?

[mruniverse]

I was and I stand corrected.

I was trying to address the idea that since the US did bad things in the past, it's ok for other nations to do them too.

[vkou]

Great, so now that you're at the top, you want to pull the ladder up?

[munificent]

If "pulling the ladder up" includes things like "not allowing the world climate to be destroyed" or "preventing disregarding human rights violations and worker quality of life" then, yeah, probably.

Giving each country a fair shot at developing even if they didn't happen to get on that ramp at the same time as some Western countries is a good goal.

At the same time, that's not such a vital principle that we should sacrifice other moral or pragmatic imperatives to get it. China may have gotten a late start, but that doesn't give them the right to ignore everything we've learned since then about a country's obligations to its people and the world.

[mruniverse]

Are we talking the slavery ladder?

[vkou]

I'm talking about all the other 'unfair' trade practices that have been cited.

If you don't want the developing world to follow in the West's footsteps, perhaps we should share some of our wealth with them? Would that be a more palpable alternative?

Earlier today, a study was posted on HN about how the British Empire plundered ~$50T (inflation-adjusted) of wealth from India over it's colonial history. If you want to even the playing field with the developing world, we have a lot of reparations to look forward to.

[henrikschroder]

> If you don't want the developing world to follow in the West's footsteps, perhaps we should share some of our wealth with them?

We are, it's called the global economy, and it has performed a wealth transfer of unprecedented scale these last decades.

> we have a lot of reparations to look forward to.

Colonial reparations are complete crock, because they are based on counterfactual history speculations, and there are absolutely no concrete limits on those.

The Roman empire obviously plundered the British isles for inflation-adjusted astronomical amounts during its colonial history, should modern-day Italians pay reparations to England?

It's absurd.

[mruniverse]

I think reparations are the way to go.

[HillaryBriss]

> build junk make bank

that's a useful description for an awful lot of products I've purchased over the last 10 years.

in some areas, this market strategy has prevailed so completely that it's really hard for a consumer to find something that's not junk.

[mike986]

> hugely subsidised mail

I noticed this many years ago when ebay vendors from china were able to sell stuff for less that what one has to pay for shipping

What's the implication here in this context?

[Qworg]

It is essentially abusing the UBU to subsidize trade from China. There was an excellent NPR story about it: https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?stor...

[aerophilic]

Thank you for that link, I am somewhat that it hasn’t become a political issue given the current environment. Do you know if anyone is trying to address this issue?

[gred]

US announces intent to withdraw from international postal rate system:

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/411828-us-announ...

[gregw2]

Trump has complained about it publicly and is working to withdraw us while the Democrats spin it as Trump trying to withdraw from a 200-year old treaty - we should fix it instead (but we also tried that once and failed in 2016).

I haven't followed it closely but it is a political issue, albeit a minor one that neither side for whatever reason wants to escalate into a major talking point.

(Not a Trump supporter but maybe on this one...)

[yostrovs]

It's amuzing how people feel forced to add the "I didn't vote for Trump" when defending his actions that they like. Lest someone think they're monsters. The reality is that business-wise he's actually working hard for America's economy, addressing structural nonsense like the mail post treaty. Why can't that be simply something you support, regardless of who you voted for. Why is it implied that the other party decides whether a position is right or wrong by simply choosing the opposite of what a politician they hate chooses?

[irq11]

“Business-wise”, he’s taking a series of random, poorly reasoned actions, some of which happen to be good. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

The parent is saying that Trump is bad on most things, but good on one particular thing. You’re trying to claim that he’s good on most things in a category.

[hombre_fatal]

People do this all the time for everything because it's a cheap way to supposedly increase the value of your commentary since you're otherwise allegedly unpleased by the subject. It also lets you pander to the audience with "I'm not one of those people, but...".

For example, you can see "I don't like {Javascript,PHP,Apple,Google,Facebook,$tech,$website,$thing}, but..." right here on HN, frequently.

[marmada]

Your first sentence was alright. Afterwards you injected a political opinion into your comment.

"The reality is that business-wise he's actually working hard for America's economy, addressing structural nonsense like the mail post treaty." is a statement that a majority of the people in the U.S would disagree with.

If you want to make your comment unbiased to one political party or the other, then you should remove that sentence.

[fareesh]

People need to do that for fear of losing their jobs or damaging their career prospects I think. Is it possible to be a Trump supporter at any of these big bay area tech firms? Many of my friends tell me they pretend to be apolitical for fear of being fired, but I don't know how exaggerated their stories are.

[Qworg]

As far as I know, the US is making noise about it. I don't know if any real changes have occurred.

[yostrovs]

US filed paperwork announcing withdrawal. There's, I believe, a two year period that kicks in for renegotiation. So the process of moving as fast as it can right now.

[jacquesm]

> all global powers starting to put tariffs and trade barriers up

That's a bit of a stretch.

[forapurpose]

> I think the aggressive trade stance and hard line politics by China might have played a major role.

It's a nice distraction to attack China when the source of such things, in this tale, is a U.S. that has taken those stances to extremes unimagined before Trump took office. The U.S. fetishizes "hard line" and "aggressive", and has underminedh norms stretching back generations and has destroyed the U.S.'s reputation on trade and international relations. And all those consequences are intentional, a nationalist goal.

> China wanting to get away with pretty blatant violations of fair trade

I don't know that they have done more than other countries similarly situated, beyond allegations by the current U.S. administration as a justification for nationalist policies. Some things on this list of allegations are insubstantial, and we could make a similar lists for other countries. Is there any independent basis that China is worse than other developing countries or than other economic powers (they are both)?

> they’ve taken their “build junk make bank” mentality to the world and it can’t last much longer

This is just an empty stereotype unless you can back it up. Many high quality goods are made in China, including some that you may be using. There is nothing wrong with making cheaper, low-quality goods either.

One might say that U.S. financial industry is the leading proponent of "build junk make bank", with by far the most serious consequences.

> Every economy has a plateau then a fall, then a pull back up again

That's not actually how economics works at all. In the real world, perhaps outside the wealthy country you live in that has had good economic management (though the U.S. and others seem to be losing their way), countries do fall and never recover.