Google & YouTube employees on HN: how do you justify still working at this company? Enough of the cognitive dissonance. Face your choices and tell me how you square yourself with them. For shame.
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Buying made in China products supports this economic growth, and also the cheap, often exploitative, labor that went into producing them.
Besides, you should probably support the local manufacturing industry wherever you’re living.
I mean, from your description, I'd rather want a system that actually shows continued growth, rather than hollowed promises of growth.
Let's be honest here, democracy's real growth had been going to war with nations and extracting/exploiting resources from them. Hence why the past 50 years, there has been no real growth in democratic countries because they are not able to as easily extract from the rest of the world.
Hopefully, however, you have a voice (vote) in that government. The same obviously does not apply to you with China, nor generally does it apply to Chinese people within China.
You also generally have less choice when it comes to paying taxes, and significantly more choice when it comes to not buying things from China. If there are no non-Chinese alternative for X item, you can always choose to not buy X. However, that probably means not buying quite a few things, as you point out. But that was GC's point – it is fairly hard as a techie to not support the CCP. But just because something is hard to avoid does not mean you aren't doing it or aren't responsible for doing it.
I'm also fairly certain that the US (and other countries) have been warring a lot in the Middle East in the past 50 years, and many people claim that this is directly related to oil, an "exploited resource".
Has that not been happening either?