Why 500m peasants scare the US

[cal04]

America's vast and growing trade deficit with emerging superpower China could prompt a full-blown trade war, says Will Hutton
It's the next big thing. In Britain we may take China seriously but it's not the overriding economic issue. In the US it's becoming a national obsession. Every month that passes there's another China statistic that spooks Congress yet more and ratchets up what is approaching paranoia. China is the next economic and military superpower, runs the argument; and because it's communist, its methods are dark and its ambitions even darker. The US had better stop it now, or suffer the consequences.
(snip)
It doesn't matter that after 25 years of near 10 per cent growth that has created a $2 trillion ($2 billion billion) economy, most people still can't name a single Chinese brand, and that its aspirant multinationals - Lenovo, Huawei, Haier - are tiny by western standards. By this stage in its growth path, Japan was boasting Sony, Honda, JVC and Toyota, to name but a few; a telling comparison about China's genuine autonomous economic strength.

(snip)
Nor does it allay American concern that three-fifths of China's exports are made by US, European, Japanese, Taiwanese or Hong Kong companies and not by native Chinese; they don't have the expertise, brand or technology. Made in China, as the Chinese increasingly lament, does not mean made by China. This is the world's final assembly centre, not its workshop.


(snip)
The losers are America's blue-collar workers in the closed or threatened factories and its small- and medium-sized businesses that used to be part of big multinationals' supply chain or that simply don't operate on the scale to justify a wholesale move of production to China. Others fear what might happen in five years' time. As a result, there's an emergent coalition of Democrats worried about lack of worker rights, human rights and unfair competition, and Republicans worried about small-town American business and resurgent communism, even if everybody accepts that Chinese communism looks more like authoritarian capitalism than anything else. Both sides think it's outrageous that China subsidises its exports by rigging its currency.

more
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,,1702263,00.html

[bemildred]

1. This is bullshit.

Congress went out of its way to create this situation, and they like it fine.

[teryang]

2. This is exactly what the outsourcing corporatists ordered

It increases productivity and depresses the labor markets. They could care less about what it does to the average American. Regime change has already been accomplished in America.