Though this article does make several interesting points about China as a possible ally, in many ways the logic is rather flawed. The mistake is thinking that China is in anything but a harmful symbiotic relationship with the rest of the world.

China is, quite simply, a country that drives all upward trends backwards. They are the headwind pushing back progress at every turn. When there's attempts to raise global labor standards China pushes back with low price goods made by labors with no rights in a police state. When there's an attempt to isolate a rogue regime like Iran or the Sudan China pushes back by funding their military in exchange for their resources. The argument that its just that they really really need resources is very flawed. Europe and the US both really really need oil too, but we don't make a faustian deal to get it.

The problem is the consolidation of labor into China, not globalization. I would not say that China should be pushed out by high tariffs to protect certain factory jobs that are long gone in the US. What I would say is that the US and the world would be far better off with policies that only allow free trade without tariffs with functioning democracies that have a certain floor of fair labor standards.

These countries exist both in Asia (Cambodia, India) and especially in Africa. If there's anywhere our money should be going its to the poor in Africa and South America that have democratic countries and relatively low labor costs. Is Mexico going to have bottom of the barrel 1 dollar an hour wages? Maybe not, but they don't have those wages because they have a democratic system of law and order. By sending the business to China a message is going out that oppression will be tolerated by the US if it saves our companies a few cents on the dollar. A worldwide rather high tariff on any and all governments without fair labor laws would both preserve globalization (since most of our trade partners are already democracies) and push rogue states to either join the fold or collapse economically.

China does need the west since capital and advanced consumer markets are not found anywhere else. The west does not need China, there are plenty of other countries with cheap labor which will not use the money to fund Islamic extremists and genocidal regimes.

Posted on April 27, 2008 — by politico83

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Its a common fallacy to say China, along with every non-developed countries is "pushing back progress" by employing people with low wages. Its not 75% of the world's population being underpaid, but the 25% being severaly, unfarely overpaid. Without China, those 75% would be getting $0, because they won't have a job at all, while a tiny fraction of world population "push forward progress", progress in their own incomes.

Labour is a commedity just like everything else, when there's a high demand and low supply, wages rise. Inversely when there's high supply, prices drop. What China's entry into world labour market, along with all the country the previous commentators brougt up, is to suddly expand the labour market from the western world into the word as defined by earth, and as a result, basic econmics dictates that all companies will pay the minium wage they can find for any certain task.

China, along with all the developing nations's low cost labour is only low cost to those in developed countries, where they have lived in an grossly distorted labour market too long. For a pair of shoes, for example, a worker in North America might makes $10 an hour before China's emergence, but that $10 an hour comes at the cost of 100 people elsewhere getting $0 an hour because they can't even apply for that job, regardless of how much more efficent they are than the person in North America.

China has lifted more than half a billion people out of poverty by doing precisely just that, that is what I call real progress. Real progress is not to fatten 5% of the world's population at the cost of starvation of the other 95%, it is to raise everyone's income equally.

Every coutry's first priority is their own national interest, developed countries are no exception. People ultimately cares more about their own welfare, and thus employment than the good of the world, that's why you see Americans complaining about the shifting of their jobs to lower wage countries. they then invent concepts such as 'unfair trade' or 'slave labour' to rationalize that simple desire, irregard of harm it will bring should it really be implimented.

The world, the earth-world without China was a word where 5% of people was pushing forward progress, their own benifits, at the cost, and often lives of the remaining 95%. China forced those 5% to give away their wealth to the other 95%, raising everyone's living standard except the original 5%. China is pushing back progress, yes, for the 5%, but China is pushing foward progress more than any other civilization in human history when you look at the world not as the "western world", but as the humanity-world.

Posted on July 2, 2008 — by iewgnem

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