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China

(drewdevault.com)
847 points kick | 1 comments | 20 Nov 19 15:44 UTC | HN request time: 0.295s | source
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sneilan1[dead post] ◴[20 Nov 19 16:13 UTC] No.21585119[source]▶
The conversation about China has shifted from being relatively peaceful during the Obama years to war like today.

The author of this article doesn’t understand how the presidential bully pulpit slowly changes the national conversation to war.

Not to say that China isn’t violating human rights. They are. But we, the Americans, are the ones who started this fight by goading them on.

Also: the crux of the argument in this article is “trade is bad for the little guy because our jobs are gone” which is one of the memes our political establishment is using to get us interested in war.

Dear author, can you go deeper into why trade is bad for anyone other than the 1%? Something beyond a ramble and some half baked repetitions of what we hear every day?

1. christophilus ◴[20 Nov 19 16:17 UTC] No.21585170[source]▶
> we, the Americans, are the ones who started this fight by goading them on

That depends on how you measure it. There's a good case to be made for the thesis that we've been in a trade war ever since opening trade with China, but it's only recently that we've actually started counter-attacking.

Also, while it's gained traction recently, the political scientists I know personally have been decrying China's human rights violations for the past 20 years. Some of them were hoping things would improve as trade continued and the Chinese economy forced liberalization on the political sphere. That doesn't seem to be the way things have played out.