[gjsman-1000]

> If they suddenly decided to cut everyone in the nation's pay in half - or double it - that would have no bearing on what is right for you or I to do.

They literally did exactly that relative to the salaries of the rest of the world, and everyone took them up on it.

In retrospect, keeping China a weak communist nation was so easy. There was even internal dissent in the late 80s. It simply required refusing to make trade deals. US and worldwide wages would have been higher, discontent would have continued fermenting, the party would have remained relatively weak, human rights would not have been so easily sold out to the lowest bidder, the US would probably not have lost 6 million manufacturing jobs in a decade (3x the number of jobs in SV), and we blew it.

[kfajdsl]

The economic liberalization of China and its participation in global markets has led to the fastest and most widespread reduction in poverty in human history. Even if we could have kept China in the dirt, it's extremely questionable if that would be the right thing to do.

[rangestransform]

The US government shouldn’t care about the right thing to do, only what’s good for the US people. It’s easy to say from a position of postwar supremacy that countries should be somewhat altruistic, but now the US pays the price, and will continue to do so.

[nradov]

The thesis at the time was that through engagement and free trade we could gradually (over decades) transform China into something closer to a free-market multiparty liberal democracy. That policy obviously didn't work — in fact it has been a complete and utter failure — but even in retrospect it wasn't completely crazy or stupid. It could have at least partially worked if someone other than Xi Jinping had replaced Hu Jintao. Unfortunately a lot of major geopolitical trends come down to random luck and unpredictable individual personalities.

Now we have to pivot and focus on containment in Cold War II.

[thot_experiment]

China isn't meaningfully communist. In general them stealing our jobs is probably a good thing on the whole. It's a complex issue, and I would be happy if we were pressuring China hard because of it's human rights abuses but global wealth inequality going down is something to be celebrated, protectionism sucks. I know it's complicated, but I can't be too mad about our wealth being "stolen" to lift people out of poverty, it's something I think we should be doing willingly.

[philipov]

Great sentiment, but let's start by doing it domestically first.

[thot_experiment]

I think for my viewpoint to be internally consistent it needs to happen internationally as well as domestically. ofc this is all a pipedream anyway, there's barely an appetite for lifting the people in the tenderloin out of poverty and I'm trying to convince people that we'd all win by tending toward a "humanity vs the universe" viewpoint that's based on the idea that all the folks on the planet deserve to have it good.

"when you're used to privilege, the loss of it feels like oppression"

It will hurt to fix this, but I don't think it needs to hurt that much I think it would hurt a lot less if we were actually trying to make it happen rather than occasionally being dragged kicking and screaming in that direction.

(i do not have any meaningful ideas how to bring about this kind of change, (maybe a fake giant squid alien in manhattan? :P))

[myrmidon]

> In retrospect, keeping China a weak communist nation was so easy.

This is extremely naive, and fallacious.

As policymaker, you do not know beforehand how countries are going to develop over a 40 year period (not even your own country :P). Thus the only realistic option would've been a catch-all sanction regime against... possible future geopolitical rivals? Non-democratic nations? States with different cultural values? No matter which you pick, sacrificing trade like that would've been extremely expensive and limiting for US growth (might've included India, Africa, Vietnam, Thailand, Japan, Europe, Russia, depending on what criteria you pick).

You might have seen other countries jumping at the opportunity, filling the gap and benefitting immensely in the process, like the EU, or India, Russia, Japan, some pan-African Union... The only certainty in the outcome is that the US in such a scenario would NOT be as wealthy as it is today.

[portaouflop]

Capitalism doesn’t care about rights or how much you get paid — the only relevant metric is how much money you make so this was inevitable in capitalist America.