Comment by atomicity | Hacker News Reader

Comment by atomicity | Hacker News Reader

So, global-yet-Western corporations outsourced manufacturing to to China, some "unfair" trades that have long-term benefits for China happened, and now Chinese companies can now compete against those corporations (at least on Amazon).

I don't see how the West is lost, even after the author claims that if there's a war against China, "You’d need to walk around naked because you have no shirt, pants, socks, or underwear". Global-yet-Western Companies that outsourced manufacturing to China like Nike and Apple seem to be doing very well.

Furthermore, why is the fact that Chinese companies can compete after 30 years (while following the CCP rules) a bad thing? Did globalization go wrong because this wasn't supposed to happen? Was China supposed supposed to just be the world's cheap manufacturing for eternity? If so, a better title for this article would be "How China Was Not Lost".

> if there's a war against China, "You’d need to walk around naked because you have no shirt, pants, socks, or underwear".

I agree that this is hyperbole and a bad example.

I'm not sure how long the author thinks such a war would last, or the aggregate US stockpile of textiles, or the source of cotton inputs into Chinese textile manufacturing, and so on...

Both I'm going to go out on a massive limb here and assume that even a decade-long cold war with China wouldn't result in a single American walking around naked who would have otherwise been clothed.

There are geopolitically significant manufacturing sectors where the west has ceded important ground in the last couple decades. Daily-use textiles isn't one of them.

What was supposed to happen is openness to the West was supposed to move China away from dictatorial government. Approximately nobody cared whether China got rich or stayed poor; the goal was that China become free.

The original goal was to divide and conquer the communist block (taking advantage of the sino-soviet split/wedge).

After the collapse of the USSR western companies and governments saw shiny ($) ($) in their eyes and could not help themselves. They thought giving up some intellectual property rights was worth getting a leg up on their other western competition because they thought they’d be able to fend off completion local to China as they presumed it would adopt western ideas (law, intl conventions, governance, etc.) despite history indicating otherwise.

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