> Actually, I was talking about something more like individual American companies & China vs. the United States. > [...] > The idea is that American companies

> Actually, I was talking about something more like individual American companies & China vs. the United States. > [...] > The idea is that American companies making profit selling Chinese-made goods to Chinese and Americans may not actually a very good deal for the United States. What it sounds like you're upset about is actually the growth of international trade and deindustrialization in the US. You're putting it in crude and xenophobic terms: China taking advantage of the US. American workers who have lost their jobs or who saw their wages decrease certainly were taken advantage of. It wasn't by the Chinese, or the Japanese, who were the bogeyman in the 1980s. It was by an impersonal and ubiquitous economic system. It's much easier to direct your hatred towards a specific, tangible enemy, however, which is why the xenophobic answer is so popular. Just point the finger at the foreign workers earning their pennies an hour, rather than understanding the broader economic forces at work.