Peloni: The writing has been on the wall for a very long time now, but self interest, corruption and globalist ideology has prevented the proper response to this all of economy assault. Now, the same motivations which led to America surrendering its economy to China are supporting an insurrection against Trump’s policies meant to solve this catastrophe.
by Daniel Greenfield
Photo by Reinhold Möller, (CC BY-SA 4.0)
American officials usually accuse China of trying to take over our manufacturing, but that’s old news. China took over our manufacturing long ago. And the parts it still hasn’t taken over are usually the parts that it doesn’t want or that are too uneconomical to be worth taking over.
Taking over America’s manufacturing was never China’s endgame. Taking over our economy is.
Undercutting, stealing and dumping its way to manufacturing supremacy was how China got its foot in our door. Americans came to think of China as an assembly line for cheap junk, but the cheap junk built China’s production capacity. The next step was moving up to components for bigger products and then the products themselves. Once the components were being made in China, it made more sense for the companies to simplify by moving everything to China.
China’s undercutting of American manufacturers convinced many of them that profitability and survival lay in closing down U.S. factories and moving their production eastward, lured by the promise of lower costs and access to a growing market. But China quickly demonstrated that it could copy any product, no matter how large or sophisticated, and rip off any brand or IP.
By moving their production to China, American companies gave away their intellectual property and their R&D and all of their methods allowing China to rapidly produce copycat products.
At every stage, American leaders and companies refused to take China’s ambition to be more than our 99-cent store seriously. When China stopped going after our manufacturing and came after retailers, it took them by surprise. China had been signaling its intention to move away from low-end manufacturing businesses, sticking them in Vietnam, experimenting with Africa and focusing on Xinjiang whose large Turkic Muslim population were rapidly turned into a cheap and dirty labor workforce for the western markets in what human rights activists misleadingly describe as ‘concentration camps’. China had bigger plans for its own people and economy
And for us.
Go to Amazon and sign up as a third-party seller for the United States market and you’ll find more Chinese banks than American ones. Amazon dominates American retail and Chinese third-party sellers dominate Amazon, along with eBay and other American ecommerce platforms. Disguised by its obnoxious billion dollar shows, its founder’s mega-yacht and the ubiquity of its smiley swoosh boxes, Amazon long ago became a platform for Chinese sellers. But China quickly showed the ability to create their own successful platforms like Temu and Shein.
While American social media platforms, which weren’t allowed to operate in China, believed that at least those Chinese companies would be dependent on them to harvest big data and advertise their wares to customers, the launch of TikTok and China’s takeover of gaming platforms showed that hope was also futile. Chinese retailers use Chinese social media platforms to hawk products to Americans. Even as President Trump tried to fight back with tariffs, Chinese manufacturers turned to TikTok, recruiting American influencers to urge Americans to download Chinese shopping apps and buy copycat products directly from them.
Much like COVID-19, this can be seen as a test and in economic terms, a more crucial one.
China has assembled all the building blocks for taking over our economy. It has hijacked our manufacturing from the ground up. What began with 99-cent store fare now includes high-end smartphones, ebikes and laptops. Its hackers and employees from Silicon Valley to our defense industry provide pipelines of stolen techniques, trade secrets and R&D to supplement whatever we haven’t exported already to provide China with assured manufacturing supremacy.
After swallowing our manufacturing, China began consuming our retail sector. Amazon cannibalized our brick and mortar retail by dumping Chinese products in America on a massive scale, but Chinese retailers cannibalized Amazon and turned it into a front for their products. China’s retailers have been figuring out how to rapidly move products into this country, how to set up warehouses and eventually how to master rapid last-mile delivery. And then Amazon will have nothing more to offer Americans than a billion-dollar woke version of Lord of the Rings.
But if Chinese retailers need to, they can also make a diverse show with transgender elves and black dwarves. And they’ll be able to do it at a fraction of the cost that Amazon did.
Even the dot coms that drive the stock market have not proven to be immune from China’s reach. The Chinese employees who serve as cheap labor in Silicon Valley took the secrets and techniques home with them. TikTok proved that China could launch social media platforms aimed at dumb teens. Recent games and gaming company acquisitions show that China can compete in gaming and esports. If this goes on, Chinese companies will dominate content consumption for American teens even as Amazon spends $10 billion a year on woke shows.
Chinese social media platforms will drive American teens to Chinese shopping apps and platforms to buy Chinese products using Chinese AI tech. The only role American workers will have in this economy will be to drive the delivery trucks over to your house. And even that will be supplemented by Chinese drones and autonomous delivery vehicles.
And what will happen to America’s economy? We’ll be reduced to a third world country.
After gobbling up manufacturing and retail, China will continue to nibble away at whatever parts of our service economy that it wants to outsource. Finance will also move to China as those Chinese products will be bought from Chinese platforms with Chinese loan apps. American objections to these intrusions will be steamrolled the way that objections to the destruction of our manufacturing were with lectures about the virtues of free trade, of the incredible wealth that a trade deficit blesses us with and with the American cutouts for China’s economic invasion whose businesses will depend on carving up the rest of our economy and shipping it eastward.
If this sounds too fantastic, much of this is already here. Gen X bought ‘Made in China’ products in American stores, Millennials bought them on Amazon, Gen Z buys them in Chinese apps. Gen X watched ads on network television from American companies for products made in China. Millennials clicked on Amazon affiliate links to Chinese products on American websites. Gen Z watches TikTok videos of American influencers pitch them on installing Temu. Once generative AI is fully up to speed, the influencers, as the last to be eaten, will also be replaced.
American retail is turning into a wasteland just like the Rust Belt did. Today’s department store is yesterday’s defunct manufacturing plant. Coastal cities are promising to bring back retail the way that midwestern towns once promised to bring back factories. The Amazon warehouses dotting the landscape seemed to offer some relief allowing American workers to pick up a few dollars packing up Chinese junk before putting it on trucks. But those warehouses are only an intermediate step in destroying American retail by pandering to American consumers. Once there’s no competition, free one-day shipping won’t be needed to dump products in America.
That is why President Trump launched another bid to stop China before it’s too late. There have been plenty of warnings about China’s economic warfare over the years, but too few of them understood what was at stake or the scale of their plans to destroy our economy. Like a virus, China parasitically infiltrated our economy while at every stage always moving upward.
If we don’t decouple our economy from China soon, we’ll have no economy left to decouple.
Reader
The test will be not in discussion with me but how you react to the science of Tyndall and Fermier.
@fquigley
Well, I made up my mind about what is going on 15 years ago, so I don’t pay much attention to it.
I do feel that environmental protection laws should not be dismantled and should be introduced where they are lacking but the clean energy stuff should develop at its own pace and should not be forced on everyone or weaponized and politicized.
Reader
“Not everyone was traumatized by maccarthyism, I guess.”
You highlight a very bad time for free thinking.
Despite all…I suspect most scientific inquiry didn’t stop, kept their head down and studied harder
Hoping for another day
Are you fascinated as I am about climate science?
I do believe this is an issue. If the subject of climate science has a very ancient history…how does that stack up with modern deniers as in Trump: ITS A SCAM
No it is a science and has to be studied. It totally fascinates me.
Edgar far from me engaged in harangue…I don’t recognise me doing so
I am discussing Fourier
Let me delve into what you said about Fourier.
Firstly he seems to have been hugely recognised and no insignificant figure.
But I am deliberately focused on Fourier as the founder of the Greenhouse Effect
What was his contribution? And very very early…about 1820
One thing I concluded… Climate Science as such is a very old science
Sebastien
That is a long comment full of personal stuff, and about stuff concerning tiny groups in America, and I don’t have anything in common and don’t understand them.
I am having a civilised discussion about the climate issues which are going back to the beginning of science, preceding even Charles Darwin, in a science that is all entangled with all other branches of science
You know an exchange of views
Hopefully I can learn from them and vice versa
I have a point of view on many issues, I state it and am always glad to
If anyone thinks I am wrong say why and how…the magic words
@Sebastien
I rescued your comment
@fquigley
So, what, you think it’s cool to harangue people until they cry, “uncle,” and agree with anything you say just to get you off their back? This is why, back in the 80s when I was a Marxist working with Marxists of almost every possible tendency in coalitions and front groups on every imaginable issue, nobody wanted to work with Trots or Maoists. except at first, because they would always try to take over. With the exception of Sam Marcy’s Worker’s World which started out as Trot but became more like a militant version of the CPUSA in the ’50s when the militants who had been expelled from the CPUSA joined. They split from the main Trot Socialist Workers Party in 1956 when they supported tye Soviet invasion of Hungary, and they would go on to support the Soviet invasions of Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan. . They sponsored many of the coalitions that sponsored the big demos. I saw A.N.S.W.E.R. mentioned as a sponsor of one of these recent pro- Hamas demos. I believe that was them. Also All People’s Congress. For most of the time I was a Marxist, I took jo position between Trots, Stalinists, Maoists, etc. I worked with everybody. This isn’t ideological. This is about politeness.
Edgar
I am going to untangle some of these issues when I submit my piece about especially Tyndall which includes your reference above about Tyndall.
But your interest will help in its publication
Some of my work is in conflict with Greta Thunberg
Sebastien the problem is that you do take up a definite position. Dead horse and all.
What’s the use of silence?
Actually Joseph Fourier was fairly new to me. No more than a few years and more intensely some months ago. But I am weak in names even friends. But his work was independent of Napoleon. The latter hired him because of his ability.
Can you elaborate on this work though.
He was a mathematician and he calculated the heating from the sun.
@fquigley
BTW, American anthropologists overwhelmingly rely on the Marxian model.
This was told to me by a very experienced professor of anthropology.
Not everyone was traumatized by maccarthyism, I guess.
FELIX-
I think upo mean Joseph Fourier. And his work was contingent on Napoleon putting him in the position where he could freely pursue his discoveries.
Still, his and Tyndall’s discoveries were only the tip of the iceberg. More advanced and scientifically educated 20th cent. scientists were able to identify and calculate the potential progress of Global Warming and also prognosticate the eventual result.
Of course this was hotly disputed by opponent, equally well qualified, who, whilst acepting that Global Warming was occurring , that humanity had little or nothing to do with it and could not affect it negatively no matter what steps they took.
Most of the world still pollutes heavily and the civilised part can do nothing about it.
@fquigley
Learn to distinguish between a pleasantry and a political statement, will you. . I was just humorously trying to defuse the atmosphere which you are perpetually determined to ignite with a banal pleasantry. Do you prefer “How ’bout those Mets?” 
. As to the politics, I no longer care to discuss this issue. I’ve made my position clear many times as have you. I agree with Peloni, both his position, and that This is beating a dead horse. A waste of time. I have nothing further to say on “climate change”.
You attack me, every time I take a conciliatory tone and are silent, allowing Reader to take up the cudgels for yoy when I refute your nonsense with facts. I call that cowardice.
You remind me of the stereotype of the comically humorless, ever politically correct female commisar in Paris in the movie, ” Ninotchka.” And you have no business accusing anyone of ad hominem attacks since practically every word out of your mouth has been an ad hominem attack. Much like your toxic heros, Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky. As to Edgar G’s contention that you are a good person. I wouldn’t know. I don’t know either of you, personally. Only what you have written.
Sebastien
Weatherwise America as a whole is facing very difficult situations due to Global Warming of the planet. This is due to chucking greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Do you oppose the facts?
The weather was nice today. Have a nice day.
I will in fact by the weekend produce a small piece on John Tyndall for presenting for publication on israpundit
Edgar the Little Ice Age or LIA
I was most glad you brought it up
But it had zero to do with our present predicament with global warming of the planet
I didn’t reply because I focused on the long answer
Our present which can only get worse is a case for the study of the discoveries of two men
James Fourier of 1820 approx
John Tyndall of late 1850s early 1860s
Their work is central
It is a pity that our editor has applied the brakes on this knowledge
But I plan to produce something on Fourier and even more Tyndall
Tyndall though born and educated became the central British science figure. His work was very advanced
Peloni
You say there is a limit as if you can simply cut yourself off
That is a very difficult concept because the discussions I am initiating very definitely involve many of your positions being expressed by you
In that.case you must answer
Reader
It certainly is hate speech by Sebastien
More widely this has been a pattern since the earliest writings of Marx and Engels.
We are facing the legacy of nearly two centuries of such low tactics
But the fate of mankind hangs on their writing