So hows that Free trade with China again?

[1prophet]

The turning point was when Bush senior overlooked Tienanmen square under pressure from corporate interests, because they recognized that in China they can bypass unions, rules & regulations that wouldn't let them keep all the profit here in the USA, and Clinton put in the finishing touches to MFN.
http://adst.org/2014/05/managing-a-massacre-the-ramifications-of-tiananmen-square/

But let me just say that on China policy, after Tiananmen and that first round of sanctions, I think that Kissinger and Nixon called Bush, the President, and said, “You can’t let the reaction you’re getting from fuzzy-headed liberals/bleeding hearts about the suppression of demonstrators destroy your/our China policy. You’ve got to work out with the Chinese an understanding of what has to be done to repair this relationship.”

SOLARZ: There was no serious effort to force the administration to suspend our diplomatic relationship or to close down our embassy, for example. I think most people recognized that would be counterproductive. The issue fairly quickly became what should we do about MFN?


Clearly, most-favored nation tariff status, given the level of Chinese exports to the United States and its importance to China in terms of their whole modernization program and hopes for economic development, constituted the major source of potential leverage the United States had over China.


But that begged the question of what one could get for it.
Essentially, there were three schools of thought. One expressed by the administration was that cutting off, or conditioning, MFN would be ineffective at best and counterproductive at worst, and that we would in any case be shooting ourselves in the foot by depriving American consumers of opportunities to purchase lower-priced Chinese goods or handicapping the efforts of American investors to invest in China since China could be expected to retaliate if we cut off MFN.


Then there were those who argued that what happened at Tiananmen Square was so egregious that we had no moral alternative but to terminate MFN and it was inappropriate to provide this preferential tariff status to China even though MFN in effect was the tariff status we gave to just about every country in the world. Finally, there were those who tried to strike a middle ground (I was among them) who said that we ought to try to use China’s desire for MFN to enable us to leverage changes in China in terms of human rights by establishing some conditions for the renewal of MFN, which would give China an incentive to move in the direction that we wanted it to move in order to preserve the benefits of this tariff status.


My recollection is that the effort to take away MFN was consistently rejected, but legislation was adopted establishing conditions on MFN, but that was vetoed by the President and the veto was not overridden.

So, it never became law until Clinton became President and he by executive order established conditions in the first year of his administration for the renewal of MFN. In the second year when he concluded that those conditions had not been met, and was confronted with the reality that he might have to terminate MFN, he changed the policy and decided to renew it anyway, on the grounds that we would have a better chance of achieving our objectives in the context of continuing MFN than in the context of cutting it off.

Depriving American consumers of their rights to cheap, in other words they tried to sell it to the American public as some sort of right to cheap goods and somehow they were going to leverage that buying power to change China's human rights policy.

Well today we have lost millions of jobs and China is still China while the corporates made bank,without having to deal with all that pesky worker rights, environmental, and safety regulations we are all told to hate.

but hey at least we still have our right to an over abundance of cheap throw away goods.

 

[werepossum]

Well said, sir. :thumbsup:

Thanks.

The turning point was when Bush senior overlooked Tienanmen square under pressure from corporate interests, because they recognized that in China they can bypass unions, rules & regulations that wouldn't let them keep all the profit here in the USA, and Clinton put in the finishing touches to MFN.
http://adst.org/2014/05/managing-a-massacre-the-ramifications-of-tiananmen-square/

Depriving American consumers of their rights to cheap, in other words they tried to sell it to the American public as some sort of right to cheap goods and somehow they were going to leverage that buying power to change China's human rights policy.

Well today we have lost millions of jobs and China is still China while the corporates made bank,without having to deal with all that pesky worker rights, environmental, and safety regulations we are all told to hate.

but hey at least we still have our right to an over abundance of cheap throw away goods.

If it's any consolation, the elites tend to get theirs as well. In China, new ventures have to be 50% Chinese-owned, so either they are joint ventures or foreign companies simply contract Chinese companies to do their manufacturing. Pretty soon the Chinese are also doing the design. Pretty soon the Chinese no longer need the American companies at all and spawn lean, efficient all-Chinese companies to compete with the now-bloated American companies who've grown fat on higher profit.

Of course, the smarter elites recognize when the jig's up and bail, either selling the company or just closing it, without losing most of what they've earned. Having the Chinese take your job after making tens of millions is rather different from having the Chinese take your job when you're an ordinary working stiff with a mortgage. And the worst part is, politicians of both parties have done it to us with our complicity. Can't happen otherwise.

 

[1prophet]

Thanks.


If it's any consolation, the elites tend to get theirs as well. In China, new ventures have to be 50% Chinese-owned, so either they are joint ventures or foreign companies simply contract Chinese companies to do their manufacturing. Pretty soon the Chinese are also doing the design. Pretty soon the Chinese no longer need the American companies at all and spawn lean, efficient all-Chinese companies to compete with the now-bloated American companies who've grown fat on higher profit.

Of course, the smarter elites recognize when the jig's up and bail, either selling the company or just closing it, without losing most of what they've earned. Having the Chinese take your job after making tens of millions is rather different from having the Chinese take your job when you're an ordinary working stiff with a mortgage. And the worst part is, politicians of both parties have done it to us with our complicity. Can't happen otherwise.

And that was their strategy overall, sucker them in using their greed, learn, steal IP & trade secrets, while building themselves up and as they get to a proficiency level where they can do most if not all of it themselves, then squeeze, because they know they got you since you can't just turn around and build up your manufacturing base overnight once it is gone.

And our answer is get more education, burden yourself with debt, and when you are finally making it outsource or h1b your job, since now you are too expensive

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/leo-w-gerard/china-protects-its-worker_b_7994856.html
China Protects its Workers; America Doesn’t Bother

Confronted with a dire situation, a world power last week took strong action to secure its domestic jobs and manufacturing.

That was China. Not the United States.

China diminished the value of its currency. This gave its exporting industries a boost while simultaneously blocking imports. The move protected the Asian giant’s manufacturers and its workers’ jobs.

Currency manipulation violates free market principles, but for China, doing it makes sense.

The nation’s economy is cooling. Its stock market just crashed, and its economic powerhouse – exports – declined a substantial 8.3 percent in July *– down to $195 billion from $213 billion the previous July.

This potent action by a major economic competitor raises the question of when the United States government is going to stop pretending currency manipulation doesn’t exist. When will the United States take the necessary action to protect its industry, including manufacturing essential to national defense, as well as the good, family-supporting jobs of millions of manufacturing workers?

While China lowered the value of its currency on three consecutive days last week, for a total of 4.4 percent, the largest decline in two decades, a respected Washington think tank, the Economic Policy Institute, released a report detailing exactly how the United States lost 5 million manufacturing jobs since 2000.

The report, “Manufacturing Job Loss: Trade, Not Productivity is the Culprit,” clearly links massive trade deficits to closed American factories and killed American jobs. U.S. manufacturers lost ground to foreign competitors whose nations facilitated violation of international trade rules. China is a particular culprit. My union, the United Steelworkers, has won trade case after trade case over the past decade, securing sanctions called duties that are charged on imported goods to counteract the economic effect of violations.

In the most recent case the USW won, the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) finalized duties in July on illegally subsidized Chinese tires dumped into the U.S. market. The recent history of such sanctions on tires illustrates how relentless the Chinese government is in protecting its workers.

Shortly after President Obama took office, the USW filed a complaint about illegally-subsidized, Chinese-made tires dumped into the U.S. market. The Obama administration imposed duties on Chinese tire imports from September 2009 to September 2012.

Immediately after the tariffs ended, Chinese companies flooded the U.S. market with improperly subsidized tires again, threatening U.S. tire plants and jobs. So the USW filed the second complaint.

Though the USW workers won the second case as well, the process is too costly and too time consuming. Sometimes factories and thousands of jobs are permanently lost before a case is decided in workers’ favor. This has happened to U.S. tire, paper, auto parts and steel workers.

In addition, the process is flawed because it forbids consideration of currency manipulation – the device China used last week to support its export industries.

By reducing the value of its currency, China, in effect, gave its export industries discount coupons, enabling them to sell goods more cheaply overseas without doing anything differently or better. Simultaneously, China marked up the price of all imports into the country. American and European exporters did nothing bad or wrong, but now their products will cost more in China.

Chinese officials have contended that the devaluation, which came on the heels of the bad news about its July exports, wasn’t deliberate. They say it reflected bad market conditions and note that groups like the International Monetary Fund have been pushing China to make its currency more market based.

Right. Sure. And it was nothing more than a coincidence that it occurred just as China wanted to increase exports. And it was simply serendipity that in just three days, “market conditions” wiped out four years of tiny, painfully incremental increases in the currency’s value.

If the value of the currency truly is market based and not controlled by the government, then as Chinese exports rise, the value should increase. That would eliminate the artificial discount China just awarded its exported goods. Based on past history, that is not likely to happen. So what China really is saying is that its currency is market based when the value is declining but not when it rises.

China did what it felt was right for its people, its industry and its economy. The country hit a rough spot this year. Though its economy is expected to grow by 7 percent, that would be the slowest rate in six years. Its housing prices fell 9.8 percent in June. Car sales dropped 7 percent in July, the largest decline since the Great Recession. Over the past several months, the Chinese government has intervened repeatedly to try to stop a massive stock market crash that began in June.

In the meantime, the nation’s factories that make products like tires, auto parts, steel and paper continue to operate full speed ahead and ship the excess overseas. As a result, for example, the international market is flooded with underpriced Chinese steel, threatening American steel mills and tens of thousands of American steelworkers’ jobs.

This is bad for the U.S. economy. The U.S. trade deficit in manufactured goods rose 15.7 percent *– by $25.7 billion *– in the first quarter as imports increased and exports slipped. In the first half of this year, the trade deficit with China rose 9.8 percent, a total of $15 billion.

As EPI points out, that means more U.S. factories closed and U.S. jobs lost. If China had bombed thousands of U.S. factories over the past decade, America would respond. But the nation has done virtually nothing about thousands of factories closed by trade violations.

The United States could take two steps immediately to counter the ill-effects of currency manipulation. Congress could pass and President Obama could sign a proposed customs enforcement bill. It would classify deliberate currency undervaluation as an illegal export subsidy. Then the manipulation could be countered with duties on the imported products.

The second step would be to include sanctions for currency manipulation in the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal that the administration is negotiating with 11 other Pacific Rim countries. The deal doesn’t include China, but it could join later. The deal does, however, include other countries notorious for currency interventions.

American manufacturers and American workers demand rightful protection from predatory international trade practices.

 

[Fanatical Meat]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/leo-w-gerard/china-protects-its-worker_b_7994856.html
China Protects its Workers; America Doesn’t Bother

Some perspective:

Suicide nets at Foxcon

 

[who?]

And all because President Nixon changed his mind about communist China and tried to make them dependent on us for money.

 

[werepossum]

And that was their strategy overall, sucker them in using their greed, learn, steal IP & trade secrets, while building themselves up and as they get to a proficiency level where they can do most if not all of it themselves, then squeeze, because they know they got you since you can't just turn around and build up your manufacturing base overnight once it is gone.

And our answer is get more education, burden yourself with debt, and when you are finally making it outsource or h1b your job, since now you are too expensive

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/leo-w-gerard/china-protects-its-worker_b_7994856.html
China Protects its Workers; America Doesn’t Bother

Yup. China's leaders are in it to make China the dominant world power, forever. Our leaders are in it to make a quick buck.

And all because President Nixon changed his mind about communist China and tried to make them dependent on us for money.

Didn't really have much to do with Nixon. China could compete with us without doing us much harm; they were using decades-old technology and had no way to ever catch up. It was President Clinton and the Republican Congress that set the rules that made China the world's dominant manufacturing power, by removing barriers to technology transfer (allowing China to make up decades of progress in one decade) and trade with us on their terms.

 

[dullard]

China isn't part of TPP.

Looks like they now want to be part of it (well the modified version now that the US pulled out): https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/17/economy/china-cptpp-application-intl-hnk/index.html

 

[fskimospy]

Looks like they now want to be part of it (well the modified version now that the US pulled out): https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/17/economy/china-cptpp-application-intl-hnk/index.html

It's funny/sad to me how conservatives are so up in arms about the threat from China and yet don't seem to mind that Trump pulled us out of one of our best vehicles for containing them.

 

[Fanatical Meat]

Not really part of the goal is to set a standard of rules that China can live with so there is framework for the future. Which I say is complete BS.
We trade with many countries without trade agreements. Why do we need another trade agreement that's so secretive we still can't read the text or what can be read is worded in such a fashion that a non expert has little chance of understanding it.
Think of anything else in life its rare that the complicated solution is the right solution.

Revisiting this thread five year later I will admit some of the fear TPP stuff was *possibly* false, the other stuff I mentioned here held true. There was never a clear explication as to what we were trying to accomplish

 

[darkswordsman17]

Revisiting this thread five year later I will admit some of the fear TPP stuff was *possibly* false, the other stuff I mentioned here held true. There was never a clear explication as to what we were trying to accomplish

I like how in both of your posts you admit you don't know WTF you're talking about but are trying to gloat that you were right. "Ok false stuff might have been false, maybe, possibly." JHumeC dude, that's a post so ridiculous you went right to right wing level of idiocy. Turmp couldn't have said such self-fellating idiocy any better than that.

 

[Fanatical Meat]

I like how in both of your posts you admit you don't know WTF you're talking about but are trying to gloat that you were right. "Ok false stuff might have been false, maybe, possibly." JHumeC dude, that's a post so ridiculous you went right to right wing level of idiocy. Turmp couldn't have said such self-fellating idiocy any better than that.

Sure thanks for the feedback
to this day I haven’t seen a simple explication of what the tpp was from the government.
I have yet to see text that had clear goals as to what it was going to address and how.

I do appreciate your feedback.