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Why China is winning the trade war

73 points by bloppe 1y ago

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
oxqbldpxo 1y ago
America has lost its prestige. Idk that Trump can bully China.
epistasis 1y ago
> It wants to build a Chinese-led system on the ruins of the old liberal trading order, one which will rival Mr Trump’s empire of tariffs. Already China has shifted the geography of its trade: in the year to September its goods exports grew by over 8%, even as those to America fell by 27%. I keep on wondering what the potential positive result is here for the US. Certainly doesn't seem to be a single one, though there are plenty of people very happy to soldier on as if there is some light at the end of the tunnel. I fear the true reason this is happening is that autarchy makes for very strong dictators, even as it makes the population very poor. An obvious reason, but such a sad one.
- nemomarx 1y ago
  You wouldn't tariff raw material inputs if you wanted to revive manufacturing. The cost of metals alone is hurting lots of American businesses right now
  - epistasis 1y ago
    From yesterday: Automakers urge Trump not to impose tariffs on factory robots, machinery https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/automakers-urge-trump-not-impose-tariffs-factory-robots-machinery-2025-10-22/ https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/automa... Sudden massive tariffs don't allow enough time for investment. However they do allow a bargaining period where bribes or other mechanisms can exclude certain parties from the tariffs.
- gaindustries 1y ago
  [dead]
- runako 1y ago
  > the potential positive result is here for the US The central campaign promises were to reverse the demographic changes of the last few decades, at the costs of making Americans poorer & reducing America's long-term competitiveness and economic growth. The administration is delivering exactly what voters were promised. The "positive result" that voters chose here was a reversion in demographic changes.
- readthenotes1 1y ago
  It's a sorry state of affairs for a country when the materials needed for its weaponry must be imported from its most potent rival. Or when a significant portion of its medicines are manufactured outside its jurisdiction. Let's just hope the USA doesn't follow Japan's precedent for raw material acquisition.
- dboreham 1y ago
  It's not supposed to be positive. Trump has a mental illness that causes him to want to destroy everything not related to himself.
- bilbo0s 1y ago
  > It wants to build a Chinese-led system on the ruins of the old liberal trading order, one which will rival Mr Trump’s empire of tariffs. Already China has shifted the geography of its trade: in the year to September its goods exports grew by over 8%, even as those to America fell by 27%. That's fine, but it's not just China and US here. The EU is also making moves. The reality is that it would be malfeasance for the steward classes in the EU and China to not at least try to replace the US in the face of the recent US missteps. So China and the EU will both be trying to be the reliable and responsible big dog. Which will most likely lead to some kind of multipolar world where the prestige and power of the US is greatly diminished. But it doesn't necessarily translate into automatic Sino-pax. Sino-pax is definitely one of the possible outcomes. It's even likely, but not a foregone conclusion. So their current moves and bets will very likely pay off, but maybe not as big as they think those moves and bets will pay off.
- blululu 1y ago
  The uncomfortable reality here is that the Chinese are simply better than us at most things. But simply surrendering all of our core industries is not a viable plan for any country. This puts the US in a difficult position. We are loosing the trade war, but if you recall during Covid we were also unable to secure a lot of basic medical supplies because of this dependence on a non-aligned foreign power. So unless you assume that the CCP are suddenly outstandingly altruistic then you could reasonably prefer losing a trade war to being rendered a vassal state. There might be better ways to avoid this fate, but given the magnitude of China’s advantages right now I am not sure that these are going to be much better. There will be a lot of pain from these tariffs, but doing nothing is also going to cause a lot of pain.
neom 1y ago
https://archive.ph/20251023140752/https://www.economist.com/leaders/2025/10/23/why-china-is-winning-the-trade-war https://archive.ph/20251023140752/https://www.economist.com/...
Reubend 1y ago
The tariffs have been a disaster for the American economy. What a tremendous unforced error.
- garciasn 1y ago
  We have been assured that short-term pain will turn into long-term gain. Unfortunately, politicians never play the long game; only the citizenry does, by force.
allenrb 1y ago
My knee-jerk response is that they (China) can “make stuff” and we (USA) cannot. And thinking about it a little more, not sure this is all that far from the mark.
- epistasis 1y ago
  The US can make stuff, and up until Trump took office it was going through the most massive expansions of factory capacity it has seen since the post WW2 boom. However this year seems to be trying to cancel all those big wins. We do have chip manufacturing, but since most of the battery, solar panel, and EV factories went into largely Trump-voting areas, they are all at risk since they are politically disfavored technologies.
  - maxglute 1y ago
    TBF Trump1 had consistently positive manufacturing PMI until covid. A lot of that didn't workout. Biden sustained that for 1st half of his term, but manufacturing PMI negative since 2023 and hasn't recovered. Some of that was reshoring effort from covid... question how that played out. Rest of it was dumping chips money. More accurate to say US tried to make stuff under Trump1 and Biden in response to PRC making all the stuff. But it's questionable US will end up making anything except chips because that's strategic priority, which they can't do as profitablly as TW, but it's sector with high capex that skews manufacturing PMI to appear US plans to make more stuff than they acutally are. Though TBH, as you say Trump2 isn't even trying to build according to PMI because he's fixated on engineering a 3rd term.
- alecco 1y ago
  With plentiful energy and a scalable supply chain it would be easy to recover using robots and AI. But the West's leadership has been destroying both for decades. And I mean both sides in most Western countries (Republicans/Democrats, Tories/Labour, etc). "Madness. Madness and stupidity."
  - ToucanLoucan 1y ago
    With plentiful energy and scalable supply chain we could've also done it with the people we already have, without creating huge swaths of the country that look barely better off than the fishing villages we blew to shit in Vietnam. Unfortunately that's not as profitable in the short term as financializing the entire economy was, and we don't make decisions here based on good long-term planning, we let the failsons of the last generations industrial titans decide things they barely comprehend from positions they didn't earn, and they ran the economy into the ground, exactly as the monarchs of eras past did elsewhere.
alecco 1y ago
Ah, The Economist. What a lovely group of people. 1990s: Let's move all our industrial base to Mexico and China so we can make everything cheap, let the market forces do their thing! 2022-2025: China is winning the trade war and Trump/Biden are to blame, what a bunch of idiots.
- epistasis 1y ago
  Biden?
- bryanlarsen 1y ago
  Have you actually read the Economist?
  - dh2022 1y ago
    I have read it for a few years. And I learned that back then the Economist mission was something along the lines of a robust defense of international trade. Something like what the GP wrote.... I stopped subscribing to it when I realized that all of their economical analyses were 100% bogus. They managed to get better marks on political analyses. But these were not worth paying $40 / year.
- linksnapzz 1y ago
  The Economist has always been the mouthpiece for the financial interests of the Cadbury & Rothschild families. There isn't a banking uber alles status quo they won't support.
  - paganel 1y ago
    Add the Elkann (former Agnelli) family to the list. Still remember their (The Economist's) feud with Berlusconi in the late 2000s, plus a "special" hit-piece on several pages they printed against the owner of Nutella, the Ferrero group.
  - fidotron 1y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti%E2%80%93Corn_Law_League https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti%E2%80%93Corn_Law_League In case it's not obvious (because it's not mentioned on the page) the Economist started as a newsletter of the ACLL which most definitely was a curious organization.
leviliebvin 1y ago
Hypothetically speaking, if the average Chinese person was as wealthy as the average American, how would that affect the world economy and geopolitics? What is America so afraid of?
- 4gotunameagain 1y ago
  > What is America so afraid of? Everything. The whole empire exists on the basis of exploitation, and existence of enemies. The US military industrial complex has immense power, and it needs a reason to exist, and keep existing.
- axus 1y ago
  One global hegemon is bad enough, then we'd have two! But actually it will be embarrassing when China puts an end to the "freedom of navigation" of all those US Navy ships circling their borders.
- realusername 1y ago
  The day the US isn't the top economy, the status of the dollar is threatened and that's the top reason why the US is where it is in the first place.
  - neom 1y ago
    Worth noting the conversation around this, however: https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/content-series/atlantic-council-strategy-paper-series/why-the-us-cannot-afford-to-lose-dollar-dominance/ https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/content-series/atlantic-coun... and https://www.chathamhouse.org/2025/04/us-dollars-role-international-monetary-system-now-dangerously-flux https://www.chathamhouse.org/2025/04/us-dollars-role-interna...
- bluGill 1y ago
  China is clearly aiming to take over Taiwan, and if they can't do it peacefully they are building up a military that can do it. America should be afraid of that. China clearly support Russia in their war on Ukraine despite pretending neutrality. Europe should be afraid. China is doing lots of other geopolitical things that you should be afraid draws you in.
rybosworld 1y ago
This is America's version of Brexit. People are getting what they voted for and they'll be very unhappy with the consequences.
- locallost 1y ago
  Unfortunately it will lead to further manipulation, as nobody can accept it's their fault. The world is in terrible shape.
  - vdupras 1y ago
    America is in terrible shape. The world without it as the World Police/Bully is not necessarily worse.
    - locallost 1y ago
      Unfortunately since the rhetoric worked in the US, copycats have been multiplying in the west, and it's been working. Whatever the forces at play are, they seem to be the same everywhere. Discontent is a fertile ground for manipulation.
      - vdupras 1y ago
        Fortunately, they're copycats, plural, so it won't be a hegemonic force.
        deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
- tim333 1y ago
  Did they really vote for that? I'm not American but have been quite surprised by the ever changing Trump tariff lottery. Brexit on the other hand was kind of predictable.
  - 1y ago
gethly 1y ago
West moved to service-based economies whilst east built their heavy industries and mining. As services can be always built, the west doomed itself the day it started shipping manufacturing to the east and thinking it can just do the high paying easy jobs from thereon. This is simply the effect of doing globalism the wrong way. The best part? There is no fixing this. The west cannot afford to start industrialising because it lacks skilled manual labour, it put too many legal obstacles regarding ecology, the costs are astronomical which makes it unviable form day one, and most importantly - it lacks cheap energy which is absolutely crucial to have a blossoming heavy industries. In short, the west is f'd. Especially Europe as the continent has depleted its natural resources over the millennia.
- noir_lord 1y ago
  People can be trained, legal obstacles can be removed and yeah it'll be expensive if they choose to do it. That said if Putin went completely off the deep end and invaded eastern Europe you'd be amazed how fast planning laws on building stuff went out the window - Democratic governments can move fast when they have to but tend towards inaction when they don't. It's also quite entertaining to just write off Western Europe based on resource availability - China itself is quite poor on natural resources (which is why they've played the long game in Africa so well, they get resources and build a market to sell manufactured goods to at the same time - it's been masterful realpolitik from them).
  - dataviz1000 1y ago
    Also, Afghanistan. I met a Chinese woman while I was traveling Japan. She was showing me pictures of her last two trips, Nigeria and Afghanistan. She owns a business in her city and employs people from those two countries. They had invited her to visit their homes. I remember thinking looking at how much the people adored her in the images and videos from Afghanistan that she is very dangerous and probably doesn't know it. She had me holding her bags as she was shopping for Rolex watches and handmade tea sets in Kyoto taking advantage of the currency rates in Japan. I'm in South America now and saw first hand how China has huge influence in Peru and Panama. My neighbors in the airbnb in a luxury condo in Lima were mostly business people from China in the mining industry who also spoke English. There is a lot of Canadian mining influence in Peru also. China is also far more connected to Ecuador and Bolivia. Good thing the US still has close ties with Colombia .... oh, wait, they attacked the US Embassy with bow and arrows last week. If Elon wants access to that lithium he needs to get his shit together. Good thing for the United States the single most influential person in Latin America is from the United States, Bad Bunny.
uvaursi 1y ago
This was true in the 90s if you were lucky enough to immigrate to China and work there for a bit. You would have seen it unfolding and the West would have been none the wiser, as they were fed with an outdated, short lived period of China which painted it in a slow moving, old fashioned light. This didn’t happen yesterday and it’s not because of Trump. This started decades ago and unfortunately people who raised concerns were laughed out of the room.
- shrubble 1y ago
  Yes people were complaining in the late 1990s about large plants being bought by the Chinese and then the Clinton administration allowing 20k visas for the Chinese workers to take the plant apart and ship it to China.
- UncleEntity 1y ago
  Oh, it's worse than that. The companies who moved production overseas are the ones who taught them the advanced manufacturing technologies necessary to make the now offshorn products (looking at you, Apple). While being able to walk into a Walmart and buy a microwave for $20 is good for 'society' its not so good if you want to onshore microwave production and have to compete against these 'Everyday Low Prices' coming in from overseas.
fidotron 1y ago
The fundamental thing the Economist and so on are in denial about is Trump is doing what he's doing because China have been comprehensively winning every trade engagement for decades, largely because western governments have underestimated them at every turn. There is a certain large VC firm bankrolling many on here that behind closed doors has been saying for a long time that they just look at China for ideas for what to fund in the west, and the closely held honest appraisals of companies like Huawei make embarrassing reading for their supposed western superiors. What Trump is doing may be too little too late but failure to assert anything would just be continuing to boil the frog. Given how pathetic the western elites are when their comeuppance arrives it will certainly be deserved.
- palmotea 1y ago
  > What Trump is doing may be too little too late but failure to assert anything would just be continuing to boil the frog. Given how pathetic the western elites are when their comeuppance arrives it will certainly be deserved. Exactly. The globalization folks fucked this one up, and for some reason they're really set on sticking to their existing losing course. The root cause seems to be too much stale 90s ideology and short-term thinking on their part. The problem with the "pathetic...western elites" getting their "comeuppance" is they'll actually make it out fine (they'll stay rich, but the rest of us will lose out more).
dandanua 1y ago
It's not a China's win, it's America's loss. Moreover, America is losing it on purpose, so that its rich will get richer and its poor will get poorer (relatively, of course).
WaitWaitWha 1y ago
> The final reason why China is winning is that the trade war has made Mr Xi and the Communist Party stronger, not weaker. I am not so sure of this. The CCP just had to go through a massive purge [0] on the top, right before elections. This is not an indicator of "stronger" position of a despot. [0] https://apnews.com/article/military-officials-expelled-china-corruption-76d038816f5f5f9df4df05fa87e2e7e5 https://apnews.com/article/military-officials-expelled-china... Overall, I prefer to read articles that are more factual versus this weasel-word salad.
- rib3ye 1y ago
  It worked for Hitler.
  - bluGill 1y ago
    It worked for Stalin too until Hitler attacked Russia and he didn't have generals who knew what they were doing.
- palmotea 1y ago
  >> The final reason why China is winning is that the trade war has made Mr Xi and the Communist Party stronger, not weaker. > I am not so sure of this. The CCP just had to go through a massive purge [0] on the top, right before elections. This is not an indicator of "stronger" position of a despot. A despot that can pull of a purge is stronger than one who cannot, and purges might be necessary to keep people in line an maintain strength.
- dh2022 1y ago
  Purges are a product of strength.
blitzar 1y ago
Did America even say thank you? They don't have any cards. They could have at least worn a suit.
rib3ye 1y ago
To all those saying “China can make stuff and the US cannot”: it seems like the “robots” are really coming to both economies in the next decade, and they’re going to put more Chinese human labor out of work than US labor due to the sheer scale of China’s labor force. With hundreds of millions of dudes out of work, I don’t think “good” things are going to happen with regards to East-Asian political stability.
- maxglute 1y ago
  PRC roboticizing more than RoW combined to PLUG bluecollar workforce gap, they're already short on manufacturing labour supply. Well rather kids don't want to assemble widgets. The goal is always to maintain current industrial base with fraction of headcount from demographic contraction, and by "100s millions" out of work, we're really talking about 10s of millions going to retirement and hopefully robots can keep the machine brrrting to replace productivity and drive down costs so system can caretake 10sm retirees with cheap goods - PRC manufacturing sector already down to like 120m from 250m high in 200s. Another 20m in next decade is easily absorbable. PRC just trying to keeping things steady, bad things are going to happen to every one else when they realize they don't have PRC industrial chains to replicate affordable abundance. It's going to extra screw developing economies now labour saving tech + US shifting away from global consumer via tariffs going to kill export-led model dead, and there really isn't another model on the horizon to replace it. VS west PRC going to weather fine at least longer for the simple reason they have stupid high household savings rate, this isn't leveraged US households living paycheck to paycheck that will lead to different tier of instability.
  - jacknews 1y ago
    this is as impenetrable as it looks
    - cadamsdotcom 1y ago
      Not impenetrable, just contrarian. China is doing the robot thing so it can cope with demographic shifts as it shifts toward an older population and deals with youth not wanting to do tedious/dangerous factory work. Automation at huge scale while maintaining the industrial base will allow a shift toward a more consumption driven economy but still keeping things cheap. Might be the only way to keep things from toppling with their huge population.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
tim333 1y ago
I'm not sure anyone is a winner from that sort of trade war. It's more that the US is able to shoot itself in the foot while causing modest damage to China. Sort of like the wonders of Brexit that the UK is still dealing with.
locallost 1y ago
One reason I agree with the article is that the more you have, the more you fear to lose. The US is currently still a much more developed country, but this makes it more fragile, as people are more afraid to lose what they have. This was IMHO the exact reaction that led to Trump's election. Another reason is, Trump went to war with the whole world. This works for now as other countries still obey the wishes of the most powerful country, but I have no doubts new alliances are being forged. At the end of the day, people will do what's in their interest, and if they can get a a better deal, they will ditch alliances with the US. And all that before you remember there's a war on the US educational system going on as well.
ChrisRR 1y ago
I haven't read the article, but my presumption is that because china hold all the cards
dakial1 1y ago
The main difference here is that Trump is satisfied with the narrative/appearance of winning, and not really winning. There is no 4D chess on his side other than appear tough and a winner. China is in it for the long run, they have a strategy and the poorly thought and planned actions of Trump have opened the world to China, so these 3 next years might be the definitive moment when China becomes the de-facto leader of the world. I imagine that the nail in the coffin would be China managing to get the Yuan as the international currency to trade with its partners.
amai 1y ago
Make business with dictatorships and that is what you get. Globalization should have only happened between democratic countries. Now all those rich dictatorships will use their leverage to blackmail naive democratic countries and in the worst cases destroy democracy. At first we have to show those dictatorships a taste of their own medicine. We need to be unfair, don’t give them access to our markets, don’t let them buy our companies. Steal their intellectual property. And also introduce tariffs. That is what they do for ages and we just let that happen. Dictatorships never play by the rules so we also don’t have to.
RijilV 1y ago
There aren't winners in a trade war, one side just loses more slowly than the other.
r-johnv 1y ago
https://archive.ph/KHusi https://archive.ph/KHusi

73 points by bloppe 1y ago

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

oxqbldpxo 1y ago

America has lost its prestige. Idk that Trump can bully China.

epistasis 1y ago

> It wants to build a Chinese-led system on the ruins of the old liberal trading order, one which will rival Mr Trump’s empire of tariffs. Already China has shifted the geography of its trade: in the year to September its goods exports grew by over 8%, even as those to America fell by 27%. I keep on wondering what the potential positive result is here for the US. Certainly doesn't seem to be a single one, though there are plenty of people very happy to soldier on as if there is some light at the end of the tunnel. I fear the true reason this is happening is that autarchy makes for very strong dictators, even as it makes the population very poor. An obvious reason, but such a sad one.

nemomarx 1y ago
You wouldn't tariff raw material inputs if you wanted to revive manufacturing. The cost of metals alone is hurting lots of American businesses right now
- epistasis 1y ago
  From yesterday: Automakers urge Trump not to impose tariffs on factory robots, machinery https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/automakers-urge-trump-not-impose-tariffs-factory-robots-machinery-2025-10-22/ https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/automa... Sudden massive tariffs don't allow enough time for investment. However they do allow a bargaining period where bribes or other mechanisms can exclude certain parties from the tariffs.
gaindustries 1y ago
[dead]
runako 1y ago
> the potential positive result is here for the US The central campaign promises were to reverse the demographic changes of the last few decades, at the costs of making Americans poorer & reducing America's long-term competitiveness and economic growth. The administration is delivering exactly what voters were promised. The "positive result" that voters chose here was a reversion in demographic changes.
readthenotes1 1y ago
It's a sorry state of affairs for a country when the materials needed for its weaponry must be imported from its most potent rival. Or when a significant portion of its medicines are manufactured outside its jurisdiction. Let's just hope the USA doesn't follow Japan's precedent for raw material acquisition.
dboreham 1y ago
It's not supposed to be positive. Trump has a mental illness that causes him to want to destroy everything not related to himself.
bilbo0s 1y ago
> It wants to build a Chinese-led system on the ruins of the old liberal trading order, one which will rival Mr Trump’s empire of tariffs. Already China has shifted the geography of its trade: in the year to September its goods exports grew by over 8%, even as those to America fell by 27%. That's fine, but it's not just China and US here. The EU is also making moves. The reality is that it would be malfeasance for the steward classes in the EU and China to not at least try to replace the US in the face of the recent US missteps. So China and the EU will both be trying to be the reliable and responsible big dog. Which will most likely lead to some kind of multipolar world where the prestige and power of the US is greatly diminished. But it doesn't necessarily translate into automatic Sino-pax. Sino-pax is definitely one of the possible outcomes. It's even likely, but not a foregone conclusion. So their current moves and bets will very likely pay off, but maybe not as big as they think those moves and bets will pay off.
blululu 1y ago
The uncomfortable reality here is that the Chinese are simply better than us at most things. But simply surrendering all of our core industries is not a viable plan for any country. This puts the US in a difficult position. We are loosing the trade war, but if you recall during Covid we were also unable to secure a lot of basic medical supplies because of this dependence on a non-aligned foreign power. So unless you assume that the CCP are suddenly outstandingly altruistic then you could reasonably prefer losing a trade war to being rendered a vassal state. There might be better ways to avoid this fate, but given the magnitude of China’s advantages right now I am not sure that these are going to be much better. There will be a lot of pain from these tariffs, but doing nothing is also going to cause a lot of pain.

neom 1y ago

https://archive.ph/20251023140752/https://www.economist.com/leaders/2025/10/23/why-china-is-winning-the-trade-war https://archive.ph/20251023140752/https://www.economist.com/...

Reubend 1y ago

The tariffs have been a disaster for the American economy. What a tremendous unforced error.

garciasn 1y ago
We have been assured that short-term pain will turn into long-term gain. Unfortunately, politicians never play the long game; only the citizenry does, by force.

allenrb 1y ago

My knee-jerk response is that they (China) can “make stuff” and we (USA) cannot. And thinking about it a little more, not sure this is all that far from the mark.

epistasis 1y ago
The US can make stuff, and up until Trump took office it was going through the most massive expansions of factory capacity it has seen since the post WW2 boom. However this year seems to be trying to cancel all those big wins. We do have chip manufacturing, but since most of the battery, solar panel, and EV factories went into largely Trump-voting areas, they are all at risk since they are politically disfavored technologies.
- maxglute 1y ago
  TBF Trump1 had consistently positive manufacturing PMI until covid. A lot of that didn't workout. Biden sustained that for 1st half of his term, but manufacturing PMI negative since 2023 and hasn't recovered. Some of that was reshoring effort from covid... question how that played out. Rest of it was dumping chips money. More accurate to say US tried to make stuff under Trump1 and Biden in response to PRC making all the stuff. But it's questionable US will end up making anything except chips because that's strategic priority, which they can't do as profitablly as TW, but it's sector with high capex that skews manufacturing PMI to appear US plans to make more stuff than they acutally are. Though TBH, as you say Trump2 isn't even trying to build according to PMI because he's fixated on engineering a 3rd term.
alecco 1y ago
With plentiful energy and a scalable supply chain it would be easy to recover using robots and AI. But the West's leadership has been destroying both for decades. And I mean both sides in most Western countries (Republicans/Democrats, Tories/Labour, etc). "Madness. Madness and stupidity."
- ToucanLoucan 1y ago
  With plentiful energy and scalable supply chain we could've also done it with the people we already have, without creating huge swaths of the country that look barely better off than the fishing villages we blew to shit in Vietnam. Unfortunately that's not as profitable in the short term as financializing the entire economy was, and we don't make decisions here based on good long-term planning, we let the failsons of the last generations industrial titans decide things they barely comprehend from positions they didn't earn, and they ran the economy into the ground, exactly as the monarchs of eras past did elsewhere.

alecco 1y ago

Ah, The Economist. What a lovely group of people. 1990s: Let's move all our industrial base to Mexico and China so we can make everything cheap, let the market forces do their thing! 2022-2025: China is winning the trade war and Trump/Biden are to blame, what a bunch of idiots.

epistasis 1y ago
Biden?
bryanlarsen 1y ago
Have you actually read the Economist?
- dh2022 1y ago
  I have read it for a few years. And I learned that back then the Economist mission was something along the lines of a robust defense of international trade. Something like what the GP wrote.... I stopped subscribing to it when I realized that all of their economical analyses were 100% bogus. They managed to get better marks on political analyses. But these were not worth paying $40 / year.
linksnapzz 1y ago
The Economist has always been the mouthpiece for the financial interests of the Cadbury & Rothschild families. There isn't a banking uber alles status quo they won't support.
- paganel 1y ago
  Add the Elkann (former Agnelli) family to the list. Still remember their (The Economist's) feud with Berlusconi in the late 2000s, plus a "special" hit-piece on several pages they printed against the owner of Nutella, the Ferrero group.
- fidotron 1y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti%E2%80%93Corn_Law_League https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti%E2%80%93Corn_Law_League In case it's not obvious (because it's not mentioned on the page) the Economist started as a newsletter of the ACLL which most definitely was a curious organization.

leviliebvin 1y ago

Hypothetically speaking, if the average Chinese person was as wealthy as the average American, how would that affect the world economy and geopolitics? What is America so afraid of?

4gotunameagain 1y ago
> What is America so afraid of? Everything. The whole empire exists on the basis of exploitation, and existence of enemies. The US military industrial complex has immense power, and it needs a reason to exist, and keep existing.
axus 1y ago
One global hegemon is bad enough, then we'd have two! But actually it will be embarrassing when China puts an end to the "freedom of navigation" of all those US Navy ships circling their borders.
realusername 1y ago
The day the US isn't the top economy, the status of the dollar is threatened and that's the top reason why the US is where it is in the first place.
- neom 1y ago
  Worth noting the conversation around this, however: https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/content-series/atlantic-council-strategy-paper-series/why-the-us-cannot-afford-to-lose-dollar-dominance/ https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/content-series/atlantic-coun... and https://www.chathamhouse.org/2025/04/us-dollars-role-international-monetary-system-now-dangerously-flux https://www.chathamhouse.org/2025/04/us-dollars-role-interna...
bluGill 1y ago
China is clearly aiming to take over Taiwan, and if they can't do it peacefully they are building up a military that can do it. America should be afraid of that. China clearly support Russia in their war on Ukraine despite pretending neutrality. Europe should be afraid. China is doing lots of other geopolitical things that you should be afraid draws you in.

rybosworld 1y ago

This is America's version of Brexit. People are getting what they voted for and they'll be very unhappy with the consequences.

locallost 1y ago
Unfortunately it will lead to further manipulation, as nobody can accept it's their fault. The world is in terrible shape.
- vdupras 1y ago
  America is in terrible shape. The world without it as the World Police/Bully is not necessarily worse.
  - locallost 1y ago
    Unfortunately since the rhetoric worked in the US, copycats have been multiplying in the west, and it's been working. Whatever the forces at play are, they seem to be the same everywhere. Discontent is a fertile ground for manipulation.
    - vdupras 1y ago
      Fortunately, they're copycats, plural, so it won't be a hegemonic force.
      - deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
tim333 1y ago
Did they really vote for that? I'm not American but have been quite surprised by the ever changing Trump tariff lottery. Brexit on the other hand was kind of predictable.
- 1y ago

gethly 1y ago

West moved to service-based economies whilst east built their heavy industries and mining. As services can be always built, the west doomed itself the day it started shipping manufacturing to the east and thinking it can just do the high paying easy jobs from thereon. This is simply the effect of doing globalism the wrong way. The best part? There is no fixing this. The west cannot afford to start industrialising because it lacks skilled manual labour, it put too many legal obstacles regarding ecology, the costs are astronomical which makes it unviable form day one, and most importantly - it lacks cheap energy which is absolutely crucial to have a blossoming heavy industries. In short, the west is f'd. Especially Europe as the continent has depleted its natural resources over the millennia.

noir_lord 1y ago
People can be trained, legal obstacles can be removed and yeah it'll be expensive if they choose to do it. That said if Putin went completely off the deep end and invaded eastern Europe you'd be amazed how fast planning laws on building stuff went out the window - Democratic governments can move fast when they have to but tend towards inaction when they don't. It's also quite entertaining to just write off Western Europe based on resource availability - China itself is quite poor on natural resources (which is why they've played the long game in Africa so well, they get resources and build a market to sell manufactured goods to at the same time - it's been masterful realpolitik from them).
- dataviz1000 1y ago
  Also, Afghanistan. I met a Chinese woman while I was traveling Japan. She was showing me pictures of her last two trips, Nigeria and Afghanistan. She owns a business in her city and employs people from those two countries. They had invited her to visit their homes. I remember thinking looking at how much the people adored her in the images and videos from Afghanistan that she is very dangerous and probably doesn't know it. She had me holding her bags as she was shopping for Rolex watches and handmade tea sets in Kyoto taking advantage of the currency rates in Japan. I'm in South America now and saw first hand how China has huge influence in Peru and Panama. My neighbors in the airbnb in a luxury condo in Lima were mostly business people from China in the mining industry who also spoke English. There is a lot of Canadian mining influence in Peru also. China is also far more connected to Ecuador and Bolivia. Good thing the US still has close ties with Colombia .... oh, wait, they attacked the US Embassy with bow and arrows last week. If Elon wants access to that lithium he needs to get his shit together. Good thing for the United States the single most influential person in Latin America is from the United States, Bad Bunny.

uvaursi 1y ago

This was true in the 90s if you were lucky enough to immigrate to China and work there for a bit. You would have seen it unfolding and the West would have been none the wiser, as they were fed with an outdated, short lived period of China which painted it in a slow moving, old fashioned light. This didn’t happen yesterday and it’s not because of Trump. This started decades ago and unfortunately people who raised concerns were laughed out of the room.

shrubble 1y ago
Yes people were complaining in the late 1990s about large plants being bought by the Chinese and then the Clinton administration allowing 20k visas for the Chinese workers to take the plant apart and ship it to China.
UncleEntity 1y ago
Oh, it's worse than that. The companies who moved production overseas are the ones who taught them the advanced manufacturing technologies necessary to make the now offshorn products (looking at you, Apple). While being able to walk into a Walmart and buy a microwave for $20 is good for 'society' its not so good if you want to onshore microwave production and have to compete against these 'Everyday Low Prices' coming in from overseas.

fidotron 1y ago

The fundamental thing the Economist and so on are in denial about is Trump is doing what he's doing because China have been comprehensively winning every trade engagement for decades, largely because western governments have underestimated them at every turn. There is a certain large VC firm bankrolling many on here that behind closed doors has been saying for a long time that they just look at China for ideas for what to fund in the west, and the closely held honest appraisals of companies like Huawei make embarrassing reading for their supposed western superiors. What Trump is doing may be too little too late but failure to assert anything would just be continuing to boil the frog. Given how pathetic the western elites are when their comeuppance arrives it will certainly be deserved.

palmotea 1y ago
> What Trump is doing may be too little too late but failure to assert anything would just be continuing to boil the frog. Given how pathetic the western elites are when their comeuppance arrives it will certainly be deserved. Exactly. The globalization folks fucked this one up, and for some reason they're really set on sticking to their existing losing course. The root cause seems to be too much stale 90s ideology and short-term thinking on their part. The problem with the "pathetic...western elites" getting their "comeuppance" is they'll actually make it out fine (they'll stay rich, but the rest of us will lose out more).

dandanua 1y ago

It's not a China's win, it's America's loss. Moreover, America is losing it on purpose, so that its rich will get richer and its poor will get poorer (relatively, of course).

WaitWaitWha 1y ago

> The final reason why China is winning is that the trade war has made Mr Xi and the Communist Party stronger, not weaker. I am not so sure of this. The CCP just had to go through a massive purge [0] on the top, right before elections. This is not an indicator of "stronger" position of a despot. [0] https://apnews.com/article/military-officials-expelled-china-corruption-76d038816f5f5f9df4df05fa87e2e7e5 https://apnews.com/article/military-officials-expelled-china... Overall, I prefer to read articles that are more factual versus this weasel-word salad.

rib3ye 1y ago
It worked for Hitler.
- bluGill 1y ago
  It worked for Stalin too until Hitler attacked Russia and he didn't have generals who knew what they were doing.
palmotea 1y ago
>> The final reason why China is winning is that the trade war has made Mr Xi and the Communist Party stronger, not weaker. > I am not so sure of this. The CCP just had to go through a massive purge [0] on the top, right before elections. This is not an indicator of "stronger" position of a despot. A despot that can pull of a purge is stronger than one who cannot, and purges might be necessary to keep people in line an maintain strength.
dh2022 1y ago
Purges are a product of strength.

blitzar 1y ago

Did America even say thank you? They don't have any cards. They could have at least worn a suit.

rib3ye 1y ago

To all those saying “China can make stuff and the US cannot”: it seems like the “robots” are really coming to both economies in the next decade, and they’re going to put more Chinese human labor out of work than US labor due to the sheer scale of China’s labor force. With hundreds of millions of dudes out of work, I don’t think “good” things are going to happen with regards to East-Asian political stability.

maxglute 1y ago
PRC roboticizing more than RoW combined to PLUG bluecollar workforce gap, they're already short on manufacturing labour supply. Well rather kids don't want to assemble widgets. The goal is always to maintain current industrial base with fraction of headcount from demographic contraction, and by "100s millions" out of work, we're really talking about 10s of millions going to retirement and hopefully robots can keep the machine brrrting to replace productivity and drive down costs so system can caretake 10sm retirees with cheap goods - PRC manufacturing sector already down to like 120m from 250m high in 200s. Another 20m in next decade is easily absorbable. PRC just trying to keeping things steady, bad things are going to happen to every one else when they realize they don't have PRC industrial chains to replicate affordable abundance. It's going to extra screw developing economies now labour saving tech + US shifting away from global consumer via tariffs going to kill export-led model dead, and there really isn't another model on the horizon to replace it. VS west PRC going to weather fine at least longer for the simple reason they have stupid high household savings rate, this isn't leveraged US households living paycheck to paycheck that will lead to different tier of instability.
- jacknews 1y ago
  this is as impenetrable as it looks
  - cadamsdotcom 1y ago
    Not impenetrable, just contrarian. China is doing the robot thing so it can cope with demographic shifts as it shifts toward an older population and deals with youth not wanting to do tedious/dangerous factory work. Automation at huge scale while maintaining the industrial base will allow a shift toward a more consumption driven economy but still keeping things cheap. Might be the only way to keep things from toppling with their huge population.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

tim333 1y ago

I'm not sure anyone is a winner from that sort of trade war. It's more that the US is able to shoot itself in the foot while causing modest damage to China. Sort of like the wonders of Brexit that the UK is still dealing with.

locallost 1y ago

One reason I agree with the article is that the more you have, the more you fear to lose. The US is currently still a much more developed country, but this makes it more fragile, as people are more afraid to lose what they have. This was IMHO the exact reaction that led to Trump's election. Another reason is, Trump went to war with the whole world. This works for now as other countries still obey the wishes of the most powerful country, but I have no doubts new alliances are being forged. At the end of the day, people will do what's in their interest, and if they can get a a better deal, they will ditch alliances with the US. And all that before you remember there's a war on the US educational system going on as well.

ChrisRR 1y ago

I haven't read the article, but my presumption is that because china hold all the cards

dakial1 1y ago

The main difference here is that Trump is satisfied with the narrative/appearance of winning, and not really winning. There is no 4D chess on his side other than appear tough and a winner. China is in it for the long run, they have a strategy and the poorly thought and planned actions of Trump have opened the world to China, so these 3 next years might be the definitive moment when China becomes the de-facto leader of the world. I imagine that the nail in the coffin would be China managing to get the Yuan as the international currency to trade with its partners.

amai 1y ago

Make business with dictatorships and that is what you get. Globalization should have only happened between democratic countries. Now all those rich dictatorships will use their leverage to blackmail naive democratic countries and in the worst cases destroy democracy. At first we have to show those dictatorships a taste of their own medicine. We need to be unfair, don’t give them access to our markets, don’t let them buy our companies. Steal their intellectual property. And also introduce tariffs. That is what they do for ages and we just let that happen. Dictatorships never play by the rules so we also don’t have to.

RijilV 1y ago

There aren't winners in a trade war, one side just loses more slowly than the other.

r-johnv 1y ago

https://archive.ph/KHusi https://archive.ph/KHusi