This is the reason why Chinese products are beating everyone else, and it's also a reason why we need to impose tariff on Chinese products made by workers in inhumane working conditions, e.g. 996.
It really isn’t… Chinese products are beating everyone else because their labor costs are cheaper, period. In the case of newer industries like electric cars, because they are heavily subsidized by the state. I won’t get into the debate of whether this needs to be protected against… Possibly, but a very complex topic. According to the article 996 applies mostly to software products where America is still absolute king of the hill.
I don't think this is true? And the trend seems to be down. Looking around me, my car, phone, home appliances, and most of my furniture were not made in China. My Macbook probably was, but I just read that Apple is moving some production to other countries (like Vietnam).
A lot of random things I own like hand tools were made in China, but they tend to be relatively low-technology products commonly manufactured in many places.
I could be an outlier; certainly there are many electronics items (screens, gaming devices, phones, etc) made in China. But it's not obvious that they're "beating" the competition. Would love to see meaningful statistics.
Yep. Labor laws that can be bypassed by outsourcing+importing are a complete joke, this was known when they were passed, and the resulting "compromise" reflects the reality of who was actually in charge. We need to fix this, but we'll have the same opponents as we had before, so it will be an uphill battle.
It would be pretty funny to see Capitalist America twist Communist China's arm into un-fucking their labor relations. The irony would be palpable. Alas, this is going to be one hell of a tough sell in Capitalist America precisely because we are Capitalist.
> Labor laws that can be bypassed by outsourcing+importing are a complete joke,
All labor laws can be bypassed by importing; it's a natural economic consequence of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factor_price_equalization . Only restrictions on trade can slow the equalisation of wages across two countries.
What's wrong with restrictions on trade? Alexander Hamilton's 1791 Report on Manufactures spells out why they are so damn important, and this line of thinking ruled American policy for the next 150 years. America industrialized itself using protectionism. It's trade liberalization that is the recent anomaly, although it has now run for enough decades that its promise of "better for everyone, honest!" can be evaluated against reality. The results are in: the benefits accrued to capital, who saw a many-fold return on their assets, and the costs accrued to labor, who saw stagnant wages for decades.
If you want the macroeconomics assessed in detail and the usual apologetics evaluated against evidence, I refer you to "Trade Wars are Class Wars" by Klein and Pettis.
