America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

> To put it short; the reason you cannot afford a home isn't because of Bezos, Musk, and Blakrock.

When one person holds the wealth equivalent to the total yearly economic output of a mid-sized American metropolitan area, yes, it's going to introduce distortions, even if only because the people who actually do the labor under those people are being paid less in order to better fund the equities that make up the wealth of that person.

And that's before getting into the other problems with the housing supply.

I feel misunderstood. I'm definitely not advocating for tariffs. The point is that even if this strategy worked for bringing manufacturing back (it won't in general and widespread because of labor shortage), it would result in products that are not going to be internationally competitive.

>The slow and steady way that post-WW2 Korea and Japan did needs a unanimously agreed 10-20 year long game plan between industry and government, which is incompatible with democracies who change colors and strategies every 4 years where the new administration begins to tear down everything the previous administration did because they serve different voter bases and corporate lobby groups.

The message of "we're gonna find some way to undo some of the damage of off shoring and find some way to put heavy industry back to work" has been included in one way or another in every presidential candidates platform at least as far back as Obama's first term.

The specifics change from party to party and candidate to candidate but this isn't a new thing. The common man has been clamoring for some sort of change from the status quo for the better part of a generation now. It's only recently that the situation has become such a priority that elections are won or lost on it.

I fully expect that whatever administration comes next will continue on the path of on-shoring, if perhaps in a more reasonable way.

>It is also incompatible with the US since a lot of corporations made bank due to offshoring and will fight it every way they can since they don't want to deal with costly US labor who can unionize or sue you for millions if they break a finger at work

The people who actually run manufacturing and heavy industry really resent the current off-shoring status quo. They only do it because the sum total of other policy pushed by short sighted wall street financiers and/or environmental/labor advocates makes it the only viable option. I think they'd be happy to come back if doing so was financially viable, they just want it to be predictable (something current policy making surely isn't, lol) so they can plan around it because investments in those industries are made on decades long timelines.

I think we're at the point now where there's the political will to let the punch press eat some fingers to keep the factory open.

Thanks for pointing out the typo, I fixed it.

Yes, but they're culturally related. Anywhere where people write with Chinese characters or used to write with Chinese characters has legends about nine-tailed foxes, for instance. The intelligentsia had access to Chinese literature and this diffused into the public imagination. [1]

For me it started out with being willing to enjoy media in an unfamiliar language (first Japanese) that gradually became familiar. Then playing the Japanese game Dynasty Warriors that got me thinking about the Romance of the Three Kingdoms and about the characters and the place names and other old Chinese stories like Journey to the West and pretty soon I am enjoying Chinese pop culture about old stories and new stories of the fantastic and even learning some Chinese, getting curious about Chinese mobile games that aren't known at all in the west because Chinese people cosplay as characters from them, etc. (At the university where I work I overhear conversations in Chinese almost every day)

Yes, Japan is a different culture which I still enjoy and appreciate, but for me it was also a gateway to China. [2] I was an anime fan for 30 years but in the last 3 years I've had the same kind of giddy feelings for Chinese pop culture that I had about anime at the beginning and of course that means I'm going to buy a whole fish and eat it with my family because my son's Chinese friend suggests it.

Lately I've been playing the Japanese game Dynasty Warriors Origins which has both Chinese and English voices and find it strange on one hand to hear legendary Chinese heroes speaking Japanese which I mostly understand and then listen intently to the Chinese which to me is still a wall of unfamiliar syllables where I struggle to pick out proper names and an occasional word or phrase -- but I have a great time trying!

[1] See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinosphere

[2] ... and it goes the other way, China's pop culture is inspired by Japan (I think it's funny that many Chinese games like Azur Lane use Japanese voices in the west because they know the kind of person likely to play that kind of game knows phrases like suki da! and has an emotional feel for Japanese even if they aren't fluent in it)

America doesnt really have an empire. What is America's Hong Kong, India, etc?