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China Once Looked Tough on Trade. Now Its Options Are Dwindling

nytimes.com

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Re: China Once Looked Tough on Trade. Now Its Options Are Dwindling

#161

Post by pathseeker »

gonvaled wrote: post #74

Extremely one sided comments, with a US centric view. The world is not the US, and HN readers are not only US citizens, so let me express a different point of view. Assumption: Trump wants fair trade. HN readers want fair trade. What is needed: fair trading rules, fair IP rules, fair capital structures, and a fair currency. Tackling some of the unfair trade practices does not address all those issues. In particular i…

>the favouring of US IP holders (as incumbents and head starters)

You mean favoring the people that actually invented these things? I understand there isn't much of a notion of IP in China, but are you suggesting that it's unfair to not be able to copy IP and just manufacture without paying?

Re: China Once Looked Tough on Trade. Now Its Options Are Dwindling

#162

Post by Bucephalus355 »

A couple of points I’d like to add to your post.

Japan was able to endure a lost decade(s) due to immense social solidarity that few countries, perhaps even the US, possess.

China is known as an unusually fragile country in some ways due to its tendency to break up or devolve into Afghanistan-like warlordism.

A collapse of their economy, which seems probable at some point after 40 years of malinvestment, will crush any cohesion the CCP has built. To maintain it, they will of course try more authoritarian measures as they are doing now.

The bigger picture though is that they will shift this internal “civil war” outside the country in the form of a war against someone else. This solves the lack of manufacturing demand issue, deals with population issues (perhaps unloyal ethnic groups can be put on the front-lines), and would draw on a reservoir of nationalistic fever not really touched since WWII.

Steve Bannon has been clear that he believes WWIII will be a global, non-nuclear war between China and US. I used to think this would only be the case if Trump remained president, but now no matter who is elected, it still seems like a considerable chance.

Re: China Once Looked Tough on Trade. Now Its Options Are Dwindling

#163

Post by omegaworks »

sergiotapia wrote: post #138
gonvaled wrote: post #74

Extremely one sided comments, with a US centric view. The world is not the US, and HN readers are not only US citizens, so let me express a different point of view. Assumption: Trump wants fair trade. HN readers want fair trade. What is needed: fair trading rules, fair IP rules, fair capital structures, and a fair currency. Tackling some of the unfair trade practices does not address all those issues. In particular i…

Of course US citizens want a president that looks out for US interests. To think otherwise is laughable and naive. I want the president to fight for us!

> I want the president to fight for [bombastic, short-term wins at the expense of long-term global stability/wealth]!

Fixed that for you.

Re: China Once Looked Tough on Trade. Now Its Options Are Dwindling

#164

Post by pathseeker »

bachmeier wrote: post #159
sergiotapia wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course US citizens want a president that looks out for US interests. To think otherwise is laughable and naive. I want the president to fight for us!

Imposing taxes on US consumers is looking out for US interests? That's a strange way of looking at it...

Yes, that's how all tariffs work.

Re: China Once Looked Tough on Trade. Now Its Options Are Dwindling

#165

Post by gricardo99 »

pathseeker wrote: post #154
NathanCH wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting because you can replace "China" with "The United States" and most of those bullet points are still true.

The US doesn't implement capital controls so this replacement fails at step 2.

Possibly even at step 1. How many companies have 40-60% of their supply chain in the US? I would guess very few.

Re: China Once Looked Tough on Trade. Now Its Options Are Dwindling

#166

Post by NathanCH »

gricardo99 wrote: post #165
pathseeker wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US doesn't implement capital controls so this replacement fails at step 2.

Possibly even at step 1. How many companies have 40-60% of their supply chain in the US? I would guess very few.

I mean, it doesn't have to be order numnuts

Re: China Once Looked Tough on Trade. Now Its Options Are Dwindling

#167

Post by pathseeker »

nkoren wrote: post #153
doctorpangloss wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a commonly espoused narrative. I’m sure there were synergies in steel and auto production in US cities connected by rail between Pennsylvania and Michigan. I’d say the key misunderstanding is that you’re conflating China with “markets” in “it took China roughly two decades to build this kind of ecosystem.” If you read it as, “Markets took two decades to build this kind of ecosystem,” it should be clear that t…

Sure, there's nothing mystical about Shenzhen, and I'm sure it can be replicated elsewhere -- but on a decadal timeframe at best. There are many different factors which go into producing such an ecosystem. Raw number of STEM graduates is a very crude proxy, but it's probably as good as anything else for representing the "feedstock" of such an ecosystem, and gives an rough indication of how difficult the task might be…

This entire statement is predicated on STEM graduates being a proxy, but you provide no evidence that's the case. Building complex market ecosystems has very little to do with supply of STEM graduates. Having some supply is certainly a prerequisite, but there is no indication that the current supply rate is the prerequisite.

I suggest you read the mythical man month, it illustrates the fallacious thinking behind throwing more bodies at projects to get them done faster.

Re: China Once Looked Tough on Trade. Now Its Options Are Dwindling

#168

Post by cuboidGoat »

394549 wrote: post #95
cuboidGoat wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meantime, other soybean manufacturers will dial up production, so when the tariffs are dropped by China, the US soybean manufacturers will be selling to an oversupplied market, dropping the price. And given the US subsidies will almost certainly go when the Chinese tariffs do, the risk to the US soybean industry has only been postponed, rather than countered.

> Meantime, other soybean manufacturers will dial up production, so when the tariffs are dropped by China, the US soybean manufacturers will be selling to an oversupplied market, dropping the price. I don't think so. Doing some Googling, it looks like China's soybean imports (100 million tons) could be more than satisfied by the production of Brazil and Argentina (139 million tons). US production is 108 million tons.…

China, according to those links, purchases 60% of all global soybean exports.

Looking up the figures, about another 30% is the EU, with 10% for everybody else.

Now, the EU is increasing their US soybean imports, but they cannot make up the shortfall even if they wanted to, and are only really increasing their imports from the US because US soybeans are currently cheaper than South American ones.

Also, the EU are not really that interested in helping the US on this one without first getting concessions in the ongoing EU vs US trade war.

Out of this, the EU have so far managed to get Trump to promise to drop much of the EU trade war in return for the EU buying more US soybeans, which is something the EU were going to do anyway and as I said before, will only cover a fraction of the reduction in US exports to China.

Also, the EU continuing not to target US soybeans exports is all rather dependent on Trump keeping to his word on not continuing the EU part of his trade war, if he restarts it, those reassurances are going to leave the table.

Re: China Once Looked Tough on Trade. Now Its Options Are Dwindling

#169

Post by robszumski »

lacker wrote: post #144

One of the things that seems the most unfair to me about global trade is that for many American internet companies, China just totally bans them. Everything from Facebook and Google to smaller players gets hit by the great firewall. That is way more impactful than a tariff of 5% or 25%. With all of the talk of how China is or is not playing fair, I feel like their internet bans get taken for granted, and I wish there…

I agree, but it starts to get awfully close to the subject of encryption backdoors, more censorship/lockdown of political ads and other topics that are more convenient for the government to be handled separately, without the comparison to China, hence they don't bring it up.

Re: China Once Looked Tough on Trade. Now Its Options Are Dwindling

#170

Post by janekm »

throwaway2048 wrote: post #146
stephen-mw wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the path to get us there (reshoring chips) would be extremely painful, but it certainly would be a better position for the United States to restore our ability to produce these critical components. Also, just in time for this research to get off the ground: > If it all works out, the effect could be to make small groups of engineers capable of feats that would take 100 engineers to achieve today. https://spec…

few companies build chips in china, the most important role it plays in most electronic's company supply lines is assembly/PCB work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabricat... Note virtually all of the chinese plants in that list are nowhere near cutting edge process node sizes

27% of IC packaging (turning the raw die into something that can be soldered to a PCB) happens in China with most of the remainder in other south-east Asian countries.

https://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/business/china-no-1-i...

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