[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.

[mc32]

Arguably, had the Romans not invaded and expanded, much of the Mediterranean and the rest of Europe would have remained 'barbarian' for quite a while. They arguably brought civilization with them into the far-reaches of Europe (obviously at a great toll to the local populations)..

[mruniverse]

Recent history reparations wouldn't be absurd. For instance, the US should start with the American Indians and then the African slave trade.

[mruniverse]

I think reparations are the way to go.