Can someone explain the "China's been cheating us" meme to me in some detail?
The only two points I know of when it comes to "cheating" is China manipulating their currency to keep their exports strong and them abusing USPS "de minimis" rules to ship chinkshit to America at super low prices. That's it.
How does China agreeing to do dirty work of steel and other industrial manufacture starting from the 70s their fault? It was America's businesses that made the decision to outsource factories to China. China just said "yes". That's it.
Beyond the obvious examples of currency manipulation, intellectual property theft, forced technology transfers, consistently flouting WTO and UN rules, bypassing US tariffs and sanctions via transshipment hubs in Vietnam, Thailand, and Mexico, abusing the "de minimis" provision and international postal charters to flood the domestic markets of the USA and Europe with cheap, direct-to-consumer goods, and the many
, many instances of meddling in the private sector by the Communist Party?
Here's one aspect of global trade most people
generally aren't privy to unless they either work in logistics or keep up with geopolitical podcasters or content creators on places like YouTube: China
dominates global ocean freight. COSCO is a Chinese state-owned enterprise, yet they handle an overwhelming majority of the world's sea freight. I don't know exact figures off the top of my head, but it's something ludicrous like 65-70% of the world's ocean cargo is handled by COSCO in one form or another. The
remainder of the world's cargo is handled by ONE (Ocean Network Express), Maersk, Evergreen, and so on. Air cargo is
thankfully more diverse, but the flip side is that it's only diverse because air cargo is fundamentally meant for more specialised/expedited cargo volumes in the first place. If you're willing to endure 1-3 months for your container to arrive at the Ports of Los Angeles/Long Beach, Houston, Savannah, Newark, etc, then there's little incentive to avoid using COSCO in the first place.
That's a stark disparity, which in more wistful and nostalgic times, wouldn't have raised too many alarm bells. Everyone was delusional enough to think that the Communist Party would liberalise further and allow for more domestic freedoms and greater access to mainland Chinese domestic markets. The Chinese gamed the system
hardcore and they've basically positioned themselves as a keystone of global logistics whether we want to admit it or not. Sure, it was the rest of the world's fault for centralising everything in China. Having said that: Chinese capital eventually became a weapon to entice people into sacrificing their own desires to toe the CPC's line (i.e. Hollywood movies being censored for the Chinese market, Tencent having a minority or majority stake in various games publishers and studios, etc).
Here's to hoping that the new executive orders Trump passed in the last week or so regarding domestic shipbuilding and restoring the USA's long-lost maritime glory yield promising fruits sooner rather than later.
