China

I'm a Chinese. I admire your courage to post this article.

But there's one thing that's fundamentally wrong in your article. Trading with China is, for now, beneficial to EVERYONE, including you, Drew DeVault, and the top 1% richest. Specialization and trading are the fundamental ways to advance the economy. Surely there will be blue collar workers in the US losing their jobs, but that's just how economy goes. We care about individuals, and it's a tragedy that anyone loses job, but looking at the big picture every working individual should be able to learn new skills and ready to move to new industries if the current industry no longer provides enough jobs.

When Samsung moved its factories out of China and into Vietnam, lots of Chinese workers lost their jobs. One day if Samsung pulled their factories out of Vietnam and moved to an even cheaper country, workers in Vietnam will lose their jobs too. What should those workers do? Learn new skills and move on to other industries. That's a cold thing to say but that's how the economy works. Workers in country A lose their jobs because of the trading with country B does not mean trading with country B is wrong.

If you hate (and you should) what the Chinese government has been doing, the right thing to do is work together to move factories, plants, and companies out of China and to another country, if and only if they can still provide the products/services at the same or even better quality with a lower cost.

A company is only going to move their production to another country where production is cheaper if they know their consumers will continue consuming despite where said production is taking place. So I disagree, trading with China is NOT beneficial to everyone; we are simply feeding the dragon.

I think it is not about not trading persay - it's about not supporting a totalitarian mercantilist. While we both benefit on paper, the fact that so much of this wealth is concentrated at the top in America slows the velocity of money, and the fact that the Chinese are using it to fuel totalitarian measures compounds the trade deficit to the point where it is no longer simply about money and jobs.

Maybe having a gigantic trade deficit is natural and okay, but when it is being used to fund the CCP it is problematic. America may have to take a short term hit, but if it moves its factories out to India, Thailand, Taiwan, Mexico, even back to America the marginal loss in wealth due to trade will be outranked by the substantial benefit to society we will get from not fuelling a nation that seeks supremacy at the cost of humanity.

Samsung just announced they are moving some production back to China. Mainly ODM work for their lower end devices due to the cost.

> Trading with China is, for now, beneficial to EVERYONE

No, it's beneficial from an idealized economic perspective for economies.

Economics makes no guarantee that all individuals within an economy benefit economically benefit from free trade. And if you look at the actual average effect for US workers over the past few decades (period of opening trade with China), their purchasing power hasn't increased: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us...

How can this be? "The economy" is still growing on average because the top 1% have been getting richer and richer. Also China devalued its currency to protect its own industry (https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/beggarthyneighbor.asp). Not exactly "free trade"...

But coming back to this:

> every working individual should be able to learn new skills and ready to move to new industries if the current industry no longer provides enough jobs.

Yes, from an economic ideal perspective, working individuals "should" do that to maximize their own income. And in the US, people have been doing it for a while, leading to a drain of talented individuals from rural communities to urban areas and repeatedly disconnecting people from their friends and families as they chase economic opportunities around the country. Now everyone is lonely and depressed, there's a huge political divide between rural and urban areas, and, well, Trump happened.

So I don't think chasing the shiny economic ideals is necessarily going to lead where we want to go as a society.

Also a Chinese here, I think free trade and globalization should be coupled with strong domestic redistribution. Otherwise, inequality will go through the roof.