China Needs New Places to Sell Its Mountain of Stuff

To deviate a bit from the dominant response this thread carries: Nowhere is their a clearer example of call for a multi-lateral agreement on labor, emphasizing both economic justice and sustainable resource management, as a backbone for trade agreements. The undercut of labor conditions must cease as a bottomless pit of underbidding, at all our cost! Thank you, Stefan Brün [email protected] Chicago, Illinois

Don't think China's world wide trade surplus is $1 trillion. Serious error. More like 2% of GDP, well within WTO limit. Also U' S.'s tarrif, with its new tariff on steel and other plus the tariff on CHinese imports, is now higher than China's overall tariff, as far as I recall.

There are no shortage of negative adjectives we can fairly use to paint Donald Trump, but I have to admit that he's kind of proving a point here. I always felt like the previous three administrations underplayed the American hand when it came to dealing with China. I think that hand was stronger 20 years ago, but it's still clear that the enormous trade deficits we've been running with China were to China's advantage rather than ours.

I just wish our deficit wouldn’t continue to grow at the rate that it does. That’s a very wearing thing considering who owns the majority of our debt.

Maybe make less stuff?

Vietnam should help China its enemy of 1,500 years? Yeah, right.

Overproduction and overconsumption is the problem! We don't want all this shoddy junk that will be tossed out between 0 and 2 uses, so they should stop making it.

The sleeping giant of the Chinese economy is their domestic consumer. The personal savings rate in China was last reported at 37% in 2016, compared to about 6% in the US in 2019. This is almost certain to translate into greater domestic consumption in China in the future, easily offsetting export losses to the US. Domestic production is already shifting from cheap export commodities to more advanced manufacturing, from electronics to electric vehicles. And China has been developing global infrastructure to keep raw materials flowing from the developing world in Africa, Asia and South America, especially as China faces huge long term climate change risks to domestic food production. The US was foolish to abandon the TPP, which was designed to contain China, while opening new export markets to the US. But US companies are not the same as the US government and will move operations to the free trade zones in the world, like Mexico.

I despise Trump, but with respect to China, he's the first president willing to take them on with respect to unfair trade practices and intellectual property theft. We can disagree with his approach, and I do in many respects, but before Trump, our Presidents and Congress just sat on their hands while the trade deficit grew and grew through grossly unfair trade practices. It would have been less painful to have tackled this years ago.

The elephant in the room is that there are too many people in the world. The population bomb exploded twenty years ago and we did not notice. Just as we stopped needing every fifth person to produce food a long time ago, we no longer need so many workers in a car factory or the back office of the bank. What are these unemployed people going to do? At one time wild-eyed optimists thought we would all paint or play piano in our spare time. Ha! Turns out those things are hard and not so much fun as watching TV. And they don't bring in the simoleons. May be our greatgrandkids will have an easier time of things by 2100 when the world population is projected to start coming down. That is if by then the earth has not a) been blown up into a radioactive cauldron by nukes, b) heated into a pizza oven, or c) turned into a treeless desert like Easter Island.

"Trade wars are good and easy to win." https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/02/trump-trade-wars-are-good-and-easy-to-win.html Trump must be happy with his trade war results so far. Our farmers are NOT selling soybeans, corn and pork to China. The Chinese are not selling as much cheap stuff to us. Both economies are being hurt. Realistically, ONLY Trump must be happy with his trade war results so far, because the US farmers are not (even with $28 Billion of corporate welfare) and the Chinese are not. Sounds just like what happened when we passed the Smoot-Hawley Tariffs back in 1930. We know how well that worked out. So what is the solution? Vote on November 3, 2020. Vote for WHOMEVER the Democrats nominate to run against Trump. Vote against Trump's principal enabler, "Moscow Mitch" McConnell. Vote as if our democracy and our economy depend on it, BECAUSE THEY DO.

Trump continues to insist that China is paying for his trade war and not American citizens. Just yesterday, however, The Administration announced another $16B will be given to our farmers to compensate them for their losses in agricultural sales to China as a result of his trade war. I wonder where Trump thinks the $16B will come from? Could it be the US Treasury that holds our tax dollars? Sure glad it's me!

It seems to me that the income inequality is the biggest impediment to the development of Chinese domestic market. Money sloshing around in the upper crust are going into real estate, luxury goods and foreign education (mostly for vanity) instead of getting productively employed. Meanwhile, half the country don't have enough to consume what China makes. The export oriented China Model, or Korea Inc or Japan Inc for that matter, may work great when the investment opportunities (for exports) are abound and there is shortage of capital. But that also creates huge inequality by channeling the capital in the hands of a few. It's now time for Chinese to turn to the domestic market by addressing the inequality, and this trade war with the US may just be the opportunity.

It's a curiosity how China has developed such an extensive industry of manufacturing while the USA has next to no manufacturing at all anymore, but we have the most expensive medical system in the world where human illness and its treatment has become the money making industry of the nation. Health care jobs replaced manufacturing as the nation's leading employer several years ago. The well paying jobs in an auto plant have been replaced with a career at Walgreens or CVS as a pharmacist or pharmacy tech. The money is rolling in with the vast numbers of prescriptions that need to be filled by the proletariat masses who have just seen their doctor. Chronic illnesses are the bread and butter of the nation's economic health. It's like a stock that pays a regular dividend, or a printer that requires you to buy expensive ink cartridges every few weeks. This is a health care industry where preventable medical error is the third leading cause of death in the country. At least America is doing its part to prevent world over population.

The US economy is a product of building it from the ground up while the Chinese economy has been trying it from the top down. They are having problems because they have put all their eggs into one basket counting on exports to do for them what we did for ourselves in the US. While many in China have moved up the ladder economically in the past few decades the vast majority of the populace has not. The ratio of poor to wealthy in China is a much larger population percentage wise than we have in this nation. Our nation made some mistakes in negotiating treaties with China by not requiring a level playing field which is the reason for our moves under Trump. Had they done that from the get go we would not even have Trump as president today. Wealth is the most dangerous addiction out there. It has destroyed more families in the process. Power goes right along with wealth as they both are connected. China needs to slow things down and let their people in on the action if they want to increase their place in the world to equality with other nations.

Don’t miss the mention of Chinese tariffs being higher than US and EU. Also the case before the “trade war”.

China has more stuff than they can sell, the new car sales in the US have plateaued and are falling. The rich have been given a huge tax break and are hoarding their money. The employers say they cannot find qualified workers but refuse to increase wages. Gulfstream Aerospace is frantically looking for contract technical writers but are offering the same pay they offered eight years ago and just don’t get it, I’ve been contacted by several contract houses for that position and told them I won’t work for what I was paid by Gulfstream 8 years ago. Endless growth is not sustainable. Yet I have seen no articles by alleged economic experts discussing what I can see coming down Broadway, a global recession.

Domestic demand inside modern China dwarfs it's export trade to the US. This article is trying to paint China as cornered economically by US trade sanctions, but that is extremely misplaced analysis. A generation ago in China, domestic demand and consumption was focused on necessities such as housing, food, clothing, and transportation (public transportation for the most part). General consumer luxury items were of very limited consumption and at that time Chinese preferred imported products from Japan and the US (mainly for status it represented) Today, domestic demand inside China continues to grow at double digit rates and the Chinese consumer has now adopted buying and borrowing practices not unlike most western nations. And while this deep shift to China being domestic consumer driven does not yet remove the need for exports to other countries.. the fact is that China as an economy is maturing and over time exports will continue to be less important. That does not happen over night however, and many businesses inside China were built from the ground up to serve specific foreign markets... and these businesses either retool for domestic consumption or fail in the process. China real challenge economically is that it now looks and feels very much like the US domestic consumer market of the 2000 in the US.. and that represents a huge cultural shift for the Chinese. Their biggest consumer challenges will follow similar lines as it has in the 1st world economies.

There’s no reason to look only at goods. When you include services (such as the $300 billion/year Chinese spend on foreign tourism), China’s overall trade with the rest of the world is actually pretty balanced. The big surplus countries are the developed East Asian countries and Northern European countries. Germany alone has double the current account surplus of China despite being a much smaller country.

Their newish “middle” class, similar to ours, was built on the premise of unlimited growth supported by constant direct and indirect government intervention. Once reality sets in, as it always does, the long game requires major adjustments and causes a lot of hardships. There are limits to growth and it’s too bad they don’t teach that in Econ 101. It’s too bad we go through these cycles again and again because it never really gets us anywhere materially except more humans, eating more steak, produced faster smarter better. The fatalistic cynical side to this is that we are running out of things and people to exploit and ruin beyond use, exposing the raw limits of our environment. That typically only leads to some well known outcomes and Sally Struthers isn’t going to be able to hold the whole earth on her lap and beg for food from aliens in a late night infomercial.

I am no fan of trump, but it looks like in this trade "war", America is winning.

No country can replace the sheer volume of what China exports to the US. Now Americans are struggling to pay yet another tax on the poor in the form of a tariff. Meanwhile China has inherited the alliances and geopolitical position left behind by the US. And America is struggling to find a market for the goods it formerly sent to China. For some reason nations are unwilling to do business with a country whose word and promises are worthless. Who would have thought?

Doesn’t China have the ability to increase its domestic demand for products generally? It seems we have been waiting decades for the time that Chinese consumption from wealthier Chinese masses supplants exports as the main driver of the Chinese economy, for the benefit of the Chinese themselves.