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Globalization and free trade are dead because most of the promised benefits for the west failed to materialize. Yes, we got significantly cheaper goods, but one

Globalization and free trade are dead because most of the promised benefits for the west failed to materialize. Yes, we got significantly cheaper goods, but one of the major promises was that free trade would liberalize the world. Instead, China has taken all the benefits and used our money to build a system of oppression that would make George Orwell blush. Globalization will live on, but only for countries who align themselves with the west.

pishP05h 4y ago
Meanwhile in the US we’re not allowed to care anyone else exists by putting more research and economic agency into better healthcare. We tacitly decided no one is worth keeping alive unless they coincidentally happen to be rich under a system intentionally funneling money to the top like all the rest. Why care what anyone else has to say if their existence is not something I have an obligation maintain?
CodesInChaos 4y ago
Even in the West you have complications, like the Schrems II decision which ruled that the US does not offer an acceptable data protection level.
trasz2 4y ago
- throw_m239339 4y ago
  > Also, the country with largest percentage of imprisoned people is US, not China. It’s also not China where police routinely murders random people on the streets with impunity. This is a very tough argument to make given how China has very little freedom of press, speech, association or information.
- godelski 4y ago
  I'm not sure what people think comments like this accomplish. Americans aren't super gung ho about America. The great universal American past-time is criticizing America.
  - trasz2 4y ago
    At the same time many Americans don’t quite believe non-Americans are proper humans. See how they justify invading other countries. Or how any comment critical of US gets flagged as “Chinese comment farm”.
    - BobbyJo 4y ago
      > At the same time many Americans don’t quite believe non-Americans are proper humans. I think it's the broad, off-topic, pro-China/anti-US comments, like this that make people feel like it's probably a bot or human equivalent. If the post was actually a reply or rebuttal to any of the comments content it probably would give that vibe.
  - Fricken 4y ago
    Yeah that's the thing. China rolled up it's sleeves and Americans bitched and moaned. HN is a particularly whiny place when it comes to China.
    - godelski 4y ago
      > HN is a particularly whiny place when it comes to China. China is the #2 economy in the world. America is constantly whining about the #1 economy in the world, why would they not also whine about #2? The truth is that there's nothing unique to Americans complaining about China. A lot of what Americans complain about China is quite similar to what they complain about America. This is especially true with authoritarian sentiment, with the fear that China will be the model used for the US against themselves. Yeah, there's a few "fuck China, America best" but I'd be shocked if the was anywhere near the mean or average sentiment. People are more complicated than this and Americans are just vocal about everything. Because they're so vocal, it is easy to ignore some things and pay attention to others, especially when they validate your internal biases (such as complaining about your country, which is nationalism).
- rebelos 4y ago
  [flagged]
- ChrisClark 4y ago
  The problem with these Chinese comment farms is they think we like the US. They take something bad about China as an insult to them personally, and think doing the same will bother the western world. Hah, nope, we hate it too. A fundamental misunderstanding of how people think. But they tie their identity to their own government so completely they are literally blind to the rest of the world.
  - trasz2 4y ago
    The problem with American shills like the above is they don’t understand the difference between what they consciously (want to) believe - like them not being racist - and what they actually do believe subconsciously, eg that anyone who points out their shilling is some “Chinese comment farm”.
    - bubblematrix 4y ago
- klipklop 4y ago
  Ah yes, the propagandist take on things. I’ve seen more than a few videos of Chinese police robbing people/business right out in the open. Anybody that stands in their way gets brutalized. The CCP are so dishonest we have no idea what even happens to most of their prisoners. It is likely China executes the most prisoners in the world. You are comparing apples and oranges.
  - trasz2 4y ago
    And here we have another cornerstone of the racist hate speech - substituting “Chinese” with “CCP”, same way they used to replace “Jews” with “Zionism”.
- BobbyJo 4y ago
  > It’s also not China where police routinely murders random people on the streets with impunity. Tiananmen Square?
jfengel 4y ago
China indeed has an oppressive government, but it's not much like the impression you appear to be getting. Many Chinese are very happy with the system, especially given how poor they were not long ago. China has lifted many millions out of poverty, in a very capitalist way. They don't have many freedoms you take for granted, like voting, but it turns out to be less fundamental than you imagine. If the regime does not oppress them they don't feel the need to change it. Obviously there are horror stories, magnified by their control over media. But we Americans have our own horror stories, and worse, many ignore them despite the fact that they are quite well known. China isn't the hell scape as it's often presented. Which actually makes them more dangerous to Western ideals and values.
- e40 4y ago
  I agree, but the fly in the ointment here is the behavior of CCP wrt to covid lockdowns. That is making the lives of people there much worse. The good news, it seems the government is finally easing the policies, but it is early days on that.
- ipaddr 4y ago
  They are being oppressed in a variety off ways each day that they are and are not aware of. Are people on China happier today because of additional wealth (but also additional pollution / increased loneliness)? Surveying them would be like asking citizens in cold war era Russia if they are happier than before and if they are lacking what the west has. They might reject it but they don't fully understand what they are missing.
- sidibe 4y ago
  The reason China was able to develop so quickly after Deng Xiaoping was because they didn't do it earlier. The same rapid development happened in Taiwan, HK, and SK decades earlier because they didn't have to deal with Mao and his sycophants who kept throwing wrenches in the gears. Xi is more in the Mao class of leaders than his predecessors (both are uneducated populists who are not interested in developing strong institutions). I wouldn't count on China continuing to do well until they find a way to smoothly and consistently replace non-totalitarian leaders, which I think is related to free press/speech, as leaders want to set precedents so they aren't persecuted by the next guy.
difosfor 4y ago
We got much more out of it than China at first; basically thanks to a modern version of slave labor. We were just short sighted to think that would work forever and for some reason that doesn't really seem to be changing as we just dig in deeper into our old ideas.
- nebula8804 4y ago
  I suspect the answer to this question depends on if you are the upper middle class 'knowledge worker' that benefited greatly and achieved the American dream in the 21st century or a middle/lower middle class factory worker that now has a destroyed family legacy(due to drugs/suicide), a destroyed community, and an uncertain if any future.
  - sitkack 4y ago
    Don't worry, corporatism will come for the knowledge workers. Upper management is already asking how we can incorporate ChatGPT into our workflow.
    - nebula8804 4y ago
      Oh I don't deny that at all. I believe this whole Twitter saga is a test to see if vultures can start buying up tech companies, slash them to the bone, extract all the value and then let the zombie company loose into the world to die off. So far it looks like its working (but way too early to tell).
      - sitkack 4y ago
        Twitter should have auctioned off its work force instead of layoffs. Don’t they have a gross imbalance of H1B? Isn’t there a ratio they are supposed to stay above?
    - sublinear 4y ago
      ChatGPT is still not a meaningful threat because knowledge workers are paid to do things with the knowledge, not merely know things. As well, there has been zero progress towards eliminating the need for a knowledgeable human participant to converse with the bot. A chat bot will, by definition, always need a human to push the conversation forward and that's the heavy lifting of the whole thing really. I have never seen an example of a chat bot questioning whether the human's query even makes sense let alone dispense constructive advice. ChatGPT replaces use cases where Google was always a bad fit, not knowledge workers.
nostrademons 4y ago
I think we're about to find out just what globalization did for us. Globalization is what held down consumer prices as unprecedented amounts of money were injected into the global financial system over the last 13 years. Globalization solved our garbage problem - many municipalities are no longer offering recycling now that we can't ship it to China to dump in their fields. Globalization made the Internet much more useful - how many of you are fans of Factorio, Telegram, or World of Warships (all developed in former eastern bloc countries), or Alibaba or TikTok (both Chinese)? Globalization has led to unprecedented global peace over the last 30 years. I suspect that once de-globalization really starts rolling along, we're going to see economic dislocations that are civilization-destroying. We won't get nation-states, we'll get civil unrest, regional secession efforts, anarchy, and war. Then some new form of political organization will arise, but I doubt it'll be either nation-states or globalization.
- burritas 4y ago
- integricho 4y ago
  This is an overly pessimistic extrapolation of current events and trends, your argument is pure speculation basically.
- safety1st 4y ago
  Everyone printed money like crazy, not just the Western governments, nations at all levels of development are paying the inflation price. I don't think that alone will change the balance of power meaningfully. It's fair to say that less trade with a totalitarian rival power means less deterrent to war. Yes that's bad but the alternative of financing their military buildup and their oppression of their own people is not really a good one.
  - rrrrrrrrrrrr2 4y ago
    I'm not sure "financing" their military buildup is the right way to analyze what's happening in China. Do they really have a dependence on U.S./western goods? It seems like almost all their production is domestic besides imports of chips and software (Microsoft, Apple, etc.). I doubt they'll have much trouble replacing those U.S. imports either. And, at least from western reporting, it seems that China has significant coercive control over their people even in their daily lives. If all this is true, then it makes no sense to quantify China's efforts in dollars and to think that somehow the West is financing it. It makes more sense to look at China as a self sufficient economy with a potential labor force of 1.4B and compare it to the U.S., EU, India, etc. which have a similar position and are for now buddies in competition against it.
mytailorisrich 4y ago
"Liberalisation" is a marginal benefit at best. Does it really matter to me what political regime is in place in another country across the world? Not really. A much bigger benefit is that globalisation promotes peace through increased inter-dependence. This is the same idea that was used at the very beginning of what is now the EU. Of course the West also benefited tremendously from cheaper imports and larger markets for exports.
- woeirua 4y ago
  Except the war in Ukraine has also shown that this is false.
  - mytailorisrich 4y ago
    No, it hasn't. Picking a war to demonstrate that the world is not more peaceful is not a convincing argument. The world has actually become much more peaceful.
- karp773 4y ago
  Globalization promotes inter-dependence. That's all. In a way, it's like chaining yourself to your trading partner. Now, you have to be very careful who you chain yourself to. Is it a stable democracy that shares your values, or is it some authoritarian hellhole with a tyrant and maniac in charge?
throwaway123989 4y ago
> China has taken all the benefits I thought Trumpism is not welcome here? > Globalization will live on, but only for countries who align themselves with the west. So globalization is just westernization?
- philwelch 4y ago
  > So globalization is just westernization? Yes, except “the west” these days includes Japan and South Korea.
  - midoridensha 4y ago
    Plus Taiwan. Taiwan's economy is critically important to the west (or "the west") these days.
- throwaway0x7E6 4y ago
  reddit is down the hall and to the left
- BobbyJo 4y ago
  > I thought Trumpism is not welcome here? China having an export surplus precedes Trump's presidency by a few decades. > globalization is just westernization? I think the idea is that countries need similar regulations to complete fairly in a shared market. I.E. The US can really only trade with other western countries if they want to avoid a lot of the present pitfalls with global trade.
ken47 4y ago
The promise of globalization was primarily about improving economic efficiencies, not liberalization. Has it succeeded in that regard? Given the extremely myopic system under which our largest corporations (in America) operate, they've engaged in globalization in a way that largely maximized short-term benefit (to them) without regard for the long-term externalities. It's a shame that globalization had to be given a bad name by being executed poorly.
- eindiran 4y ago
  I agree with you up until the last sentence, which reads exactly like American communists decrying Stalinist purges only insofar as it has given "true Communism" a bad name. The theoretical promises of some -ism are really only as good as their execution.
  - quickcheque 4y ago
    Well, how does futurism fit into this statement? After all, it is about the future so eternally theoretical.
  - 411111111111111 4y ago
    Eh, there is some truth to that too... Communism is great if you don't have bad actors, that's also why small scale attempts are often loved by participants. It just breaks apart if you're trying to apply it to large nations. It's also good to remember that the person that's often credited for socialism, Carl Marx, didn't actually have a hand in it's creation as far as I know. He only wrote about what capitalism will cause, and his predictions were pretty much spot on. From acknowledging these issues, socialism was created... But the person that created it wanted to be in power, so it created way bigger issues then the ones they addressed.
  - Aunche 4y ago
    The difference is that Communism promised to distribute power to the proletariat, but that has been a complete failure with every iteration. Globalization has improved economic efficiencies and dramatically increased the standard of living in Asia.
klntsky 4y ago
It is still possible that it will deliver, just not today or tomorrow. E.g. China has a large population that eventually will not be satisfied with just material comfort. They may start demanding more rights to themselves.
hilyen 4y ago
Not a fan of any authoritarianism, but USA could also be described the same way. We have massive data warehouses that just collect everything, phone calls, texts, internet packets. We just have different owners, but its the same game. If you haven't read up on the unclassified docs that have been released about the secret agencies of this country, you should. We've done everything and worse to our own citizens. Including firebombing entire cities, sending the military to kill people striking, dosing unaware Americans with LSD... the list is long.
- ledauphin 4y ago
  I'm not a fan of any authoritarianism either.... and if you're describing the US the same way you describe China, then you're missing the forest for the trees. Two things can be and often are _true_ at the same time, but often the difference between them is that, for a given conversation, one of them is a proportionate contribution, and the other is a troll.
- ch4s3 4y ago
  > Not a fan of any authoritarianism, but USA could also be described the same way. We have massive data warehouses that just collect everything, phone calls, texts, internet packets. We just have different owners, but its the same game This is hardly a reasonable comparison. Most of the crazy shit you're talking about like breaking protests with the military and the LSD trails are from 60 years ago. Firebombing cities happened during WWII and was the accepted (though terrible and it turns out strategically wrong) air doctrine of all sides. Yes, US bulk data collection is wrong, but we know it isn't being used to round up people en masse for wrong think. We don't run massive reeducation/forced labor camps for ethnic minorities. The Xinjiang internment camps have housed basically the equivalent of the whole US prison population and where there is institutionalized forced sterilization, mass rape, water boarding, torture involving electrical shock, and beatings. Even the worst US prison is basically day camp by comparison, and the people of Xinjiang are being rounded up largely for their ethnic identity. You false equivalence is frankly, fucking bullshit.
  - hilyen 4y ago
autokad 4y ago
There were good and bad. We may soon find out whether it was a good deal or not as globalization gets reversed. I think the timing of it was really bad, as we are choosing to end globalization as the baby boomers are retiring. We are going to find we don't have enough workers to produce the goods and services we want to buy. With all the hate on automation, right now automation is the only thing that can save us. As far as evil China, I don't disagree with that, but the US wasn't much better in a lot of regards. The US weaponized trade. We were like that drug dealer that gives you drugs for free to get you addicted, and then threaten to cut you off if you don't pay high prices. "you don't agree with our culture? we will cut you off!" It wasn't just trade, but the monetary system as well. Needless to say, I am not optimistic about our future.
Aunche 4y ago
> one of the major promises was that free trade would liberalize the world This was wish a mix between wish-fulfillment and propaganda used to reverse the effect of Cold War propaganda. The main goals of globalization were economic and diplomatic, and those have been wildly successful. Billions of people have been lifted out of poverty, and nuclear war is completely unthinkable. > Instead, China has taken all the benefits and used our money to build a system of oppression that would make George Orwell blush. You don't need technology to build an oppressive regime. China were still closed off to international markets, they would be a lot closer to North Korea than it is right now.
chrisco255 4y ago
> Globalization will live on, but only for countries who align themselves with the west. That's just a return to status quo, isn't it? A patchwork of defense alliances and trade agreements? It's more interesting to me, to point out the relative decline in the relative power and influence of the West. Whereas U.S. was 25-30% of global GDP post WWII, we are down to 15% and declining. The so-called "global south" nations, interestingly a lot of these nations are rising in relative economic power and influence and yet many of them straddle the line between aligning with East or West (see India's oil / energy agreements with Russia, or south America's reluctance to join along with Russian sanctions). In this sense, it's more apt to point out that globalization will live on, but only for countries that neither strongly align themselves with the west nor the east.
- ROTMetro 4y ago
  Post WWII almost everywhere but the USA had all their production bombed and destroyed. What a strange statement you make. 'When most production in the world was destroyed, the USA, one of the few countries not bombed, accounted for most of the worlds production. Once other countries rebuilt, the USA's percentage went down'. Again, what a silly statement to make.
  - chrisco255 4y ago
    No, it's a factual statement, not a silly one. And for the record, the U.S. was bombed, just not on the mainland continent. The percentage was even higher than 30% in the wake of WWII (40+%), but it remained elevated until the year 2000 (32%). https://www.forbes.com/sites/mikepatton/2016/02/29/u-s-role-in-global-economy-declines-nearly-50/?sh=6a8c39545e9e https://www.forbes.com/sites/mikepatton/2016/02/29/u-s-role-... The world quickly rebuilt after WWII, but it did so along two axes: the U.S. aligned western European countries, British commonwealth nations, plus Japan; and the U.S.S.R. east of the iron curtain, which included more communist aligned nations including China. The difference in economic productivity between the rival systems was stark: Western-aligned economies performed far better. And it's the reason why the U.S. has had so much unilateral leverage over global trade and foreign relations since WWII, in addition to the Bretton Woods agreement, which made USD the global reserve. But as the article points out above, the global GDP % of U.S. dropped from the year 2000 at 32% to around 15% today, now 22 years later.
deleted 4y ago
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darthrupert 4y ago
All countries should align with the west. Mankind really needs to unify in some common framework, and west's is the best we have come up with so far. Every other path will lead to doom. I mean, the framework could be something better than west's. But we first need such a thing, because it certainly has not been discovered yet.
- midoridensha 4y ago
  The west's framework is the best, but it needs to be a more equal alliance between western-aligned nations, rather than being so dominated by the US. The US, Canada, EU, UK, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Aus/NZ, etc. should all be a part.
rsj_hn 4y ago
It was never about "liberalizing the world". That was just the argument used to persuade those who valued liberalization. Like the British Empire got religious Britains on board by focusing on the sending of missionaries that would Christianize the world. But the expansion of the Empire was not done to send missionaries. The idea of liberalizing -- e.g. converting to Western values -- was the more modern version of this missionary argument, but it's basically the same argument, and really the same target audience, just shifted in time. Shockingly, most of the world has kept their previous religion, although there are liberal inroads/enclaves scattered all over, particularly in coastal trading cities.
peoplefromibiza 4y ago
> Globalization and free trade are dead because most of the promised benefits for the west failed to materialize Not sure about that. [1] [2] [3] [4]* Global increase in purchase power have completely changed many markets, even in the West. Except, probably, the USA. My speculation: when people say "globalization did not work" they mean "for my western Country, that got rich exploiting developing Countries" But globalization is simply "the process of interaction and integration among people, companies, and governments worldwide" and achieved most of what it promised. EDIT: talking a bit about the article, what's happening to TSMC is not due the fact that globalisation is dead, but because Taiwan is technically still part of China and the USA don't wanna go to war against China for Taiwan. Despite the fact that they support a free Taiwan, they never voted for its independence at UN. "We oppose any unilateral changes to the status quo from either side; *we do not support Taiwan independence;* and we expect cross-Strait differences to be resolved by peaceful means" (https://www.state.gov/u-s-relations-with-taiwan/ https://www.state.gov/u-s-relations-with-taiwan/) --- [1] https://www.statista.com/graphic/1/263770/gross-domestic-product-gdp-of-china.jpg https://www.statista.com/graphic/1/263770/gross-domestic-pro... [2] https://www.statista.com/graphic/1/263771/gross-domestic-product-gdp-in-india.jpg https://www.statista.com/graphic/1/263771/gross-domestic-pro... [3] https://i.insider.com/4d3dca0accd1d578410b0000?width=607&format=jpeg https://i.insider.com/4d3dca0accd1d578410b0000?width=607&for... [4] https://ourworldindata.org/exports/gdp-per-capita-maddison-2020-3ab83f45c2a1301257164c1511b0658a_v22_850x600.svg https://ourworldindata.org/exports/gdp-per-capita-maddison-2... * warning: logarithmic scale!
33955985 4y ago
>Globalization and free trade are dead because most of the promised benefits for the west failed to materialize. Your statement about the promised benefits failing to materialize is spot on, but this not the reason globalization is dead. Globalization is dead because the United States has stopped patrolling shipping routes with US warships and has, in general, lacked a foreign policy and interest in developing one. The two might be linked, but just barely —- I suspect that one too many generations of mothers and fathers saw their children killed, maimed, or traumatized by senseless military misadventures, thus the appetite for these excursions remains low. Coupled with the fact that the US is aging —- fast —- and has fewer children to spare, the great unwinding is indeed before us. But I doubt, sincerely, that politically or spirituality the voting electorate had any realization of the sort you called out. That is, no contingency of American voters woke up to say, “Yes I can get a flat screen TV for $120, but what’s the real cost?”
scrubs 4y ago
Def true at a national security and foreign policy level. And at a macro economic level, the US is now at a place where we prefer jobs (with attendant security) over cheap prices. I just got back from Brasil. Gotta like it that a lot of stuff Brasil uses is made there.
bruiseralmighty 4y ago
> Globalization will live on, but only for countries who align themselves with the West. I think your treating 'globalization' as equivalent to 'American-style liberal democracy' in your last sentence there. If only a hemisphere of the globe is 'globalized' than clearly the term has become disconnected from any literal meaning at that point. Both democracies and autocracies are increasingly de-globalized at the moment, its a statement about the network and not the nodes on it. Although not yet directly comparable to the surveillance state that the CCP has created, there are have been highly successful forces within our own government to generate and implement systems of oppression within the United States. There is a definite inclination among regime elites to favor more centralized control of the public. Just recall efforts to nationalize voting, policing, housing, and the internet. To say nothing of the covert surveillance or the plans to phase out non-digital transactions in order to curtail 'money laundering', or the gentle reminders of the IRS that they will pursue ever smaller transaction amounts. Or even the sword of 'regulation' that hangs over the head of social media companies should they not heed the _"""advice"""_ of executive agency functionaries. It may be less formalized than China, but there can be no mistaking the current of this undertow.

pishP05h 4y ago

Meanwhile in the US we’re not allowed to care anyone else exists by putting more research and economic agency into better healthcare. We tacitly decided no one is worth keeping alive unless they coincidentally happen to be rich under a system intentionally funneling money to the top like all the rest. Why care what anyone else has to say if their existence is not something I have an obligation maintain?

CodesInChaos 4y ago

Even in the West you have complications, like the Schrems II decision which ruled that the US does not offer an acceptable data protection level.

trasz2 4y ago

throw_m239339 4y ago
> Also, the country with largest percentage of imprisoned people is US, not China. It’s also not China where police routinely murders random people on the streets with impunity. This is a very tough argument to make given how China has very little freedom of press, speech, association or information.
godelski 4y ago
I'm not sure what people think comments like this accomplish. Americans aren't super gung ho about America. The great universal American past-time is criticizing America.
- trasz2 4y ago
  At the same time many Americans don’t quite believe non-Americans are proper humans. See how they justify invading other countries. Or how any comment critical of US gets flagged as “Chinese comment farm”.
  - BobbyJo 4y ago
    > At the same time many Americans don’t quite believe non-Americans are proper humans. I think it's the broad, off-topic, pro-China/anti-US comments, like this that make people feel like it's probably a bot or human equivalent. If the post was actually a reply or rebuttal to any of the comments content it probably would give that vibe.
- Fricken 4y ago
  Yeah that's the thing. China rolled up it's sleeves and Americans bitched and moaned. HN is a particularly whiny place when it comes to China.
  - godelski 4y ago
    > HN is a particularly whiny place when it comes to China. China is the #2 economy in the world. America is constantly whining about the #1 economy in the world, why would they not also whine about #2? The truth is that there's nothing unique to Americans complaining about China. A lot of what Americans complain about China is quite similar to what they complain about America. This is especially true with authoritarian sentiment, with the fear that China will be the model used for the US against themselves. Yeah, there's a few "fuck China, America best" but I'd be shocked if the was anywhere near the mean or average sentiment. People are more complicated than this and Americans are just vocal about everything. Because they're so vocal, it is easy to ignore some things and pay attention to others, especially when they validate your internal biases (such as complaining about your country, which is nationalism).
rebelos 4y ago
[flagged]
ChrisClark 4y ago
The problem with these Chinese comment farms is they think we like the US. They take something bad about China as an insult to them personally, and think doing the same will bother the western world. Hah, nope, we hate it too. A fundamental misunderstanding of how people think. But they tie their identity to their own government so completely they are literally blind to the rest of the world.
- trasz2 4y ago
  The problem with American shills like the above is they don’t understand the difference between what they consciously (want to) believe - like them not being racist - and what they actually do believe subconsciously, eg that anyone who points out their shilling is some “Chinese comment farm”.
  - bubblematrix 4y ago
klipklop 4y ago
Ah yes, the propagandist take on things. I’ve seen more than a few videos of Chinese police robbing people/business right out in the open. Anybody that stands in their way gets brutalized. The CCP are so dishonest we have no idea what even happens to most of their prisoners. It is likely China executes the most prisoners in the world. You are comparing apples and oranges.
- trasz2 4y ago
  And here we have another cornerstone of the racist hate speech - substituting “Chinese” with “CCP”, same way they used to replace “Jews” with “Zionism”.
BobbyJo 4y ago
> It’s also not China where police routinely murders random people on the streets with impunity. Tiananmen Square?

jfengel 4y ago

China indeed has an oppressive government, but it's not much like the impression you appear to be getting. Many Chinese are very happy with the system, especially given how poor they were not long ago. China has lifted many millions out of poverty, in a very capitalist way. They don't have many freedoms you take for granted, like voting, but it turns out to be less fundamental than you imagine. If the regime does not oppress them they don't feel the need to change it. Obviously there are horror stories, magnified by their control over media. But we Americans have our own horror stories, and worse, many ignore them despite the fact that they are quite well known. China isn't the hell scape as it's often presented. Which actually makes them more dangerous to Western ideals and values.

e40 4y ago
I agree, but the fly in the ointment here is the behavior of CCP wrt to covid lockdowns. That is making the lives of people there much worse. The good news, it seems the government is finally easing the policies, but it is early days on that.
ipaddr 4y ago
They are being oppressed in a variety off ways each day that they are and are not aware of. Are people on China happier today because of additional wealth (but also additional pollution / increased loneliness)? Surveying them would be like asking citizens in cold war era Russia if they are happier than before and if they are lacking what the west has. They might reject it but they don't fully understand what they are missing.
sidibe 4y ago
The reason China was able to develop so quickly after Deng Xiaoping was because they didn't do it earlier. The same rapid development happened in Taiwan, HK, and SK decades earlier because they didn't have to deal with Mao and his sycophants who kept throwing wrenches in the gears. Xi is more in the Mao class of leaders than his predecessors (both are uneducated populists who are not interested in developing strong institutions). I wouldn't count on China continuing to do well until they find a way to smoothly and consistently replace non-totalitarian leaders, which I think is related to free press/speech, as leaders want to set precedents so they aren't persecuted by the next guy.

difosfor 4y ago

We got much more out of it than China at first; basically thanks to a modern version of slave labor. We were just short sighted to think that would work forever and for some reason that doesn't really seem to be changing as we just dig in deeper into our old ideas.

nebula8804 4y ago
I suspect the answer to this question depends on if you are the upper middle class 'knowledge worker' that benefited greatly and achieved the American dream in the 21st century or a middle/lower middle class factory worker that now has a destroyed family legacy(due to drugs/suicide), a destroyed community, and an uncertain if any future.
- sitkack 4y ago
  Don't worry, corporatism will come for the knowledge workers. Upper management is already asking how we can incorporate ChatGPT into our workflow.
  - nebula8804 4y ago
    Oh I don't deny that at all. I believe this whole Twitter saga is a test to see if vultures can start buying up tech companies, slash them to the bone, extract all the value and then let the zombie company loose into the world to die off. So far it looks like its working (but way too early to tell).
    - sitkack 4y ago
      Twitter should have auctioned off its work force instead of layoffs. Don’t they have a gross imbalance of H1B? Isn’t there a ratio they are supposed to stay above?
  - sublinear 4y ago
    ChatGPT is still not a meaningful threat because knowledge workers are paid to do things with the knowledge, not merely know things. As well, there has been zero progress towards eliminating the need for a knowledgeable human participant to converse with the bot. A chat bot will, by definition, always need a human to push the conversation forward and that's the heavy lifting of the whole thing really. I have never seen an example of a chat bot questioning whether the human's query even makes sense let alone dispense constructive advice. ChatGPT replaces use cases where Google was always a bad fit, not knowledge workers.

nostrademons 4y ago

I think we're about to find out just what globalization did for us. Globalization is what held down consumer prices as unprecedented amounts of money were injected into the global financial system over the last 13 years. Globalization solved our garbage problem - many municipalities are no longer offering recycling now that we can't ship it to China to dump in their fields. Globalization made the Internet much more useful - how many of you are fans of Factorio, Telegram, or World of Warships (all developed in former eastern bloc countries), or Alibaba or TikTok (both Chinese)? Globalization has led to unprecedented global peace over the last 30 years. I suspect that once de-globalization really starts rolling along, we're going to see economic dislocations that are civilization-destroying. We won't get nation-states, we'll get civil unrest, regional secession efforts, anarchy, and war. Then some new form of political organization will arise, but I doubt it'll be either nation-states or globalization.

burritas 4y ago
integricho 4y ago
This is an overly pessimistic extrapolation of current events and trends, your argument is pure speculation basically.
safety1st 4y ago
Everyone printed money like crazy, not just the Western governments, nations at all levels of development are paying the inflation price. I don't think that alone will change the balance of power meaningfully. It's fair to say that less trade with a totalitarian rival power means less deterrent to war. Yes that's bad but the alternative of financing their military buildup and their oppression of their own people is not really a good one.
- rrrrrrrrrrrr2 4y ago
  I'm not sure "financing" their military buildup is the right way to analyze what's happening in China. Do they really have a dependence on U.S./western goods? It seems like almost all their production is domestic besides imports of chips and software (Microsoft, Apple, etc.). I doubt they'll have much trouble replacing those U.S. imports either. And, at least from western reporting, it seems that China has significant coercive control over their people even in their daily lives. If all this is true, then it makes no sense to quantify China's efforts in dollars and to think that somehow the West is financing it. It makes more sense to look at China as a self sufficient economy with a potential labor force of 1.4B and compare it to the U.S., EU, India, etc. which have a similar position and are for now buddies in competition against it.

mytailorisrich 4y ago

"Liberalisation" is a marginal benefit at best. Does it really matter to me what political regime is in place in another country across the world? Not really. A much bigger benefit is that globalisation promotes peace through increased inter-dependence. This is the same idea that was used at the very beginning of what is now the EU. Of course the West also benefited tremendously from cheaper imports and larger markets for exports.

woeirua 4y ago
Except the war in Ukraine has also shown that this is false.
- mytailorisrich 4y ago
  No, it hasn't. Picking a war to demonstrate that the world is not more peaceful is not a convincing argument. The world has actually become much more peaceful.
karp773 4y ago
Globalization promotes inter-dependence. That's all. In a way, it's like chaining yourself to your trading partner. Now, you have to be very careful who you chain yourself to. Is it a stable democracy that shares your values, or is it some authoritarian hellhole with a tyrant and maniac in charge?

throwaway123989 4y ago

> China has taken all the benefits I thought Trumpism is not welcome here? > Globalization will live on, but only for countries who align themselves with the west. So globalization is just westernization?

philwelch 4y ago
> So globalization is just westernization? Yes, except “the west” these days includes Japan and South Korea.
- midoridensha 4y ago
  Plus Taiwan. Taiwan's economy is critically important to the west (or "the west") these days.
throwaway0x7E6 4y ago
reddit is down the hall and to the left
BobbyJo 4y ago
> I thought Trumpism is not welcome here? China having an export surplus precedes Trump's presidency by a few decades. > globalization is just westernization? I think the idea is that countries need similar regulations to complete fairly in a shared market. I.E. The US can really only trade with other western countries if they want to avoid a lot of the present pitfalls with global trade.

ken47 4y ago

The promise of globalization was primarily about improving economic efficiencies, not liberalization. Has it succeeded in that regard? Given the extremely myopic system under which our largest corporations (in America) operate, they've engaged in globalization in a way that largely maximized short-term benefit (to them) without regard for the long-term externalities. It's a shame that globalization had to be given a bad name by being executed poorly.

eindiran 4y ago
I agree with you up until the last sentence, which reads exactly like American communists decrying Stalinist purges only insofar as it has given "true Communism" a bad name. The theoretical promises of some -ism are really only as good as their execution.
- quickcheque 4y ago
  Well, how does futurism fit into this statement? After all, it is about the future so eternally theoretical.
- 411111111111111 4y ago
  Eh, there is some truth to that too... Communism is great if you don't have bad actors, that's also why small scale attempts are often loved by participants. It just breaks apart if you're trying to apply it to large nations. It's also good to remember that the person that's often credited for socialism, Carl Marx, didn't actually have a hand in it's creation as far as I know. He only wrote about what capitalism will cause, and his predictions were pretty much spot on. From acknowledging these issues, socialism was created... But the person that created it wanted to be in power, so it created way bigger issues then the ones they addressed.
- Aunche 4y ago
  The difference is that Communism promised to distribute power to the proletariat, but that has been a complete failure with every iteration. Globalization has improved economic efficiencies and dramatically increased the standard of living in Asia.

klntsky 4y ago

It is still possible that it will deliver, just not today or tomorrow. E.g. China has a large population that eventually will not be satisfied with just material comfort. They may start demanding more rights to themselves.

hilyen 4y ago

Not a fan of any authoritarianism, but USA could also be described the same way. We have massive data warehouses that just collect everything, phone calls, texts, internet packets. We just have different owners, but its the same game. If you haven't read up on the unclassified docs that have been released about the secret agencies of this country, you should. We've done everything and worse to our own citizens. Including firebombing entire cities, sending the military to kill people striking, dosing unaware Americans with LSD... the list is long.

ledauphin 4y ago
I'm not a fan of any authoritarianism either.... and if you're describing the US the same way you describe China, then you're missing the forest for the trees. Two things can be and often are _true_ at the same time, but often the difference between them is that, for a given conversation, one of them is a proportionate contribution, and the other is a troll.
ch4s3 4y ago
> Not a fan of any authoritarianism, but USA could also be described the same way. We have massive data warehouses that just collect everything, phone calls, texts, internet packets. We just have different owners, but its the same game This is hardly a reasonable comparison. Most of the crazy shit you're talking about like breaking protests with the military and the LSD trails are from 60 years ago. Firebombing cities happened during WWII and was the accepted (though terrible and it turns out strategically wrong) air doctrine of all sides. Yes, US bulk data collection is wrong, but we know it isn't being used to round up people en masse for wrong think. We don't run massive reeducation/forced labor camps for ethnic minorities. The Xinjiang internment camps have housed basically the equivalent of the whole US prison population and where there is institutionalized forced sterilization, mass rape, water boarding, torture involving electrical shock, and beatings. Even the worst US prison is basically day camp by comparison, and the people of Xinjiang are being rounded up largely for their ethnic identity. You false equivalence is frankly, fucking bullshit.
- hilyen 4y ago

autokad 4y ago

There were good and bad. We may soon find out whether it was a good deal or not as globalization gets reversed. I think the timing of it was really bad, as we are choosing to end globalization as the baby boomers are retiring. We are going to find we don't have enough workers to produce the goods and services we want to buy. With all the hate on automation, right now automation is the only thing that can save us. As far as evil China, I don't disagree with that, but the US wasn't much better in a lot of regards. The US weaponized trade. We were like that drug dealer that gives you drugs for free to get you addicted, and then threaten to cut you off if you don't pay high prices. "you don't agree with our culture? we will cut you off!" It wasn't just trade, but the monetary system as well. Needless to say, I am not optimistic about our future.

Aunche 4y ago

> one of the major promises was that free trade would liberalize the world This was wish a mix between wish-fulfillment and propaganda used to reverse the effect of Cold War propaganda. The main goals of globalization were economic and diplomatic, and those have been wildly successful. Billions of people have been lifted out of poverty, and nuclear war is completely unthinkable. > Instead, China has taken all the benefits and used our money to build a system of oppression that would make George Orwell blush. You don't need technology to build an oppressive regime. China were still closed off to international markets, they would be a lot closer to North Korea than it is right now.

chrisco255 4y ago

> Globalization will live on, but only for countries who align themselves with the west. That's just a return to status quo, isn't it? A patchwork of defense alliances and trade agreements? It's more interesting to me, to point out the relative decline in the relative power and influence of the West. Whereas U.S. was 25-30% of global GDP post WWII, we are down to 15% and declining. The so-called "global south" nations, interestingly a lot of these nations are rising in relative economic power and influence and yet many of them straddle the line between aligning with East or West (see India's oil / energy agreements with Russia, or south America's reluctance to join along with Russian sanctions). In this sense, it's more apt to point out that globalization will live on, but only for countries that neither strongly align themselves with the west nor the east.

ROTMetro 4y ago
Post WWII almost everywhere but the USA had all their production bombed and destroyed. What a strange statement you make. 'When most production in the world was destroyed, the USA, one of the few countries not bombed, accounted for most of the worlds production. Once other countries rebuilt, the USA's percentage went down'. Again, what a silly statement to make.
- chrisco255 4y ago
  No, it's a factual statement, not a silly one. And for the record, the U.S. was bombed, just not on the mainland continent. The percentage was even higher than 30% in the wake of WWII (40+%), but it remained elevated until the year 2000 (32%). https://www.forbes.com/sites/mikepatton/2016/02/29/u-s-role-in-global-economy-declines-nearly-50/?sh=6a8c39545e9e https://www.forbes.com/sites/mikepatton/2016/02/29/u-s-role-... The world quickly rebuilt after WWII, but it did so along two axes: the U.S. aligned western European countries, British commonwealth nations, plus Japan; and the U.S.S.R. east of the iron curtain, which included more communist aligned nations including China. The difference in economic productivity between the rival systems was stark: Western-aligned economies performed far better. And it's the reason why the U.S. has had so much unilateral leverage over global trade and foreign relations since WWII, in addition to the Bretton Woods agreement, which made USD the global reserve. But as the article points out above, the global GDP % of U.S. dropped from the year 2000 at 32% to around 15% today, now 22 years later.

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darthrupert 4y ago

All countries should align with the west. Mankind really needs to unify in some common framework, and west's is the best we have come up with so far. Every other path will lead to doom. I mean, the framework could be something better than west's. But we first need such a thing, because it certainly has not been discovered yet.

midoridensha 4y ago
The west's framework is the best, but it needs to be a more equal alliance between western-aligned nations, rather than being so dominated by the US. The US, Canada, EU, UK, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Aus/NZ, etc. should all be a part.

rsj_hn 4y ago

It was never about "liberalizing the world". That was just the argument used to persuade those who valued liberalization. Like the British Empire got religious Britains on board by focusing on the sending of missionaries that would Christianize the world. But the expansion of the Empire was not done to send missionaries. The idea of liberalizing -- e.g. converting to Western values -- was the more modern version of this missionary argument, but it's basically the same argument, and really the same target audience, just shifted in time. Shockingly, most of the world has kept their previous religion, although there are liberal inroads/enclaves scattered all over, particularly in coastal trading cities.

peoplefromibiza 4y ago

> Globalization and free trade are dead because most of the promised benefits for the west failed to materialize Not sure about that. [1] [2] [3] [4]* Global increase in purchase power have completely changed many markets, even in the West. Except, probably, the USA. My speculation: when people say "globalization did not work" they mean "for my western Country, that got rich exploiting developing Countries" But globalization is simply "the process of interaction and integration among people, companies, and governments worldwide" and achieved most of what it promised. EDIT: talking a bit about the article, what's happening to TSMC is not due the fact that globalisation is dead, but because Taiwan is technically still part of China and the USA don't wanna go to war against China for Taiwan. Despite the fact that they support a free Taiwan, they never voted for its independence at UN. "We oppose any unilateral changes to the status quo from either side; *we do not support Taiwan independence;* and we expect cross-Strait differences to be resolved by peaceful means" (https://www.state.gov/u-s-relations-with-taiwan/ https://www.state.gov/u-s-relations-with-taiwan/) --- [1] https://www.statista.com/graphic/1/263770/gross-domestic-product-gdp-of-china.jpg https://www.statista.com/graphic/1/263770/gross-domestic-pro... [2] https://www.statista.com/graphic/1/263771/gross-domestic-product-gdp-in-india.jpg https://www.statista.com/graphic/1/263771/gross-domestic-pro... [3] https://i.insider.com/4d3dca0accd1d578410b0000?width=607&format=jpeg https://i.insider.com/4d3dca0accd1d578410b0000?width=607&for... [4] https://ourworldindata.org/exports/gdp-per-capita-maddison-2020-3ab83f45c2a1301257164c1511b0658a_v22_850x600.svg https://ourworldindata.org/exports/gdp-per-capita-maddison-2... * warning: logarithmic scale!

33955985 4y ago

>Globalization and free trade are dead because most of the promised benefits for the west failed to materialize. Your statement about the promised benefits failing to materialize is spot on, but this not the reason globalization is dead. Globalization is dead because the United States has stopped patrolling shipping routes with US warships and has, in general, lacked a foreign policy and interest in developing one. The two might be linked, but just barely —- I suspect that one too many generations of mothers and fathers saw their children killed, maimed, or traumatized by senseless military misadventures, thus the appetite for these excursions remains low. Coupled with the fact that the US is aging —- fast —- and has fewer children to spare, the great unwinding is indeed before us. But I doubt, sincerely, that politically or spirituality the voting electorate had any realization of the sort you called out. That is, no contingency of American voters woke up to say, “Yes I can get a flat screen TV for $120, but what’s the real cost?”

scrubs 4y ago

Def true at a national security and foreign policy level. And at a macro economic level, the US is now at a place where we prefer jobs (with attendant security) over cheap prices. I just got back from Brasil. Gotta like it that a lot of stuff Brasil uses is made there.

bruiseralmighty 4y ago

> Globalization will live on, but only for countries who align themselves with the West. I think your treating 'globalization' as equivalent to 'American-style liberal democracy' in your last sentence there. If only a hemisphere of the globe is 'globalized' than clearly the term has become disconnected from any literal meaning at that point. Both democracies and autocracies are increasingly de-globalized at the moment, its a statement about the network and not the nodes on it. Although not yet directly comparable to the surveillance state that the CCP has created, there are have been highly successful forces within our own government to generate and implement systems of oppression within the United States. There is a definite inclination among regime elites to favor more centralized control of the public. Just recall efforts to nationalize voting, policing, housing, and the internet. To say nothing of the covert surveillance or the plans to phase out non-digital transactions in order to curtail 'money laundering', or the gentle reminders of the IRS that they will pursue ever smaller transaction amounts. Or even the sword of 'regulation' that hangs over the head of social media companies should they not heed the _"""advice"""_ of executive agency functionaries. It may be less formalized than China, but there can be no mistaking the current of this undertow.