Reducing our dependence on China
It can’t happen fast enough for me:
The Trump administration is “turbocharging” an initiative to remove the US from dependency on a China-based supply chain and weighing imposing new tariffs to punish the Communist Party in Beijing for its response to the coronavirus pandemic, according to a report on Monday…
A number of agencies, including the Commerce and State departments, are looking at how to move the supply chain and manufacturing from China using tax incentives and other measures, the report said.
They are examining which manufacturing work should be considered “essential” and how to make those goods outside of China.
“There is a whole-of-government push on this,” an official told Reuters. “The White House’s policy on China has always been caught between pro-trade advisers and China hawks, but the current situation has given the hard-liners new ammunition.”
Good.
It seems obvious that Trump is the right president to do this. And it should have bipartisan support.
I know; dream on about that last bit.
It’s a lot easier to cause this to happen in the case of heavily-regulated industries…like pharmaceuticals and aircraft parts…than in the general case.
There is a company in Texas that makes the masks. They have been running their normal shift this whole time. Why? The owner points out that hospitals and agencies will go for the absolutely lowest bid every time, and thus pass over his company to buy from sketchy Chinese sources.
He has offered to do long-term contracts with hospitals and agencies. His prices are a little higher but not much. No one will enter a long-term contract with him because they can go back to buying from China (or 3M’s China subsidiary). Thus, he would be crazy to spend the money to ramp up production, as he won’t get it back.
“No one will enter a long-term contract with him because they can go back to buying from China (or 3M’s China subsidiary).”
This is what happens when efficiency isn’t just AN economic value but becomes THE economic value, literally the only thing that matters when making business decisions.
Mike
I was reading about an interesting precedent for our current situation re China: the US chemical industry, especially the dye industry, vis-a-vis that of Germany in the years before 1914. Here’s some history from the April 1930 issue of Mechanical Engineering magazine:
“The first use of the chemical or aniline colors dates back to about 1850, when the chemists of Germany presented several new colors obtained by subjecting various fabrics to the action or absorption of liquor holding a derivative of coal tar in solution…America did not make much progress in this direction owing to certain complications and the lack of consolidated action. What was produced here was in most cases equal to the imported product, but owing to the greater facilities for producing the color, the greater attention given to research, substantial government financial aid, and, primarily, the exceedingly low labor cost abroad, competition was out of the question. Hence up to 1914 we had practically no dye industry and depended on Germany not only for dyes but also for many valuable pharmaceutical preparations as well as for phenol, the basis for many of our explosives.”
Most people, including government people, probably thought (if they thought about it at all), “Well, dye for fabrics isn’t exactly a strategic resource…sure, we like wearing & seeing attractively-colored clothes, but it’s not really a matter of life and death”…but missed the connection to the pharmaceuticals and the explosives.
And, even more importantly, the degree to which Germany’s success in this field was an indicator (and to some degree a driver) of the extent to which Germany was getting very, very good at emerging areas of technology.
Rest assured that Pelosi, et. al., will find fault with Trump’s plan.
And any Dem who might win in 2020 would not do anything meaningful.
Joe Biden’s China problem is another reason why he will get pushed out.
“it should have bipartisan support.”
Hatred makes people crazy and stupid.
Democrats’ hatred is so intense we need to invent new superlatives for batshit crazy.
This year there are a reported 350,000 or so students from China currently studying in our Colleges and Universities here in the U.S.–in recent years the greatest number of students from any foreign country–and often including among them the children of the ruling elite of Communist China.
These Chinese students often take the places of our U.S. students, because China will pay their full tuition.
There have also been reports that some of these students–who are working on various research projects here in the U.S.–have been helping China to steal all sorts of U.S. intellectual property.
Finally, it’s pretty obvious that when these Chinese students–who we here in the U.S. have educated–return to China, they help to advance China–our chief geo-political, economic, and military rival—in its efforts to supplant us.
It seems to me that drastically reducing the large number these foreign Chinese students allowed to enter the U.S., and to study at our Colleges and Universities–or even barring them entirely–should also be one of the components of the steps taken by the U.S. to “decouple” from, and to punish China.
Speaking of U.S. Colleges and Universities, another good decoupling step would be to close down the eighty or more Confucius (Chinese propaganda) Institutes which our liberal educational institutions have allowed the Chinese to embed in many of them, and to send their staffs packing.
I worked in R&D in a major chemical company for many years. One day a young Chinese guy down the hall was escorted off the premises, and his things were boxed up and brought out to him. When I asked why, I was told that he was caught sending proprietary information back to mainland China.
This surprised me, because the area in which he was working was not particularly high tech or important. They will steal anything.
Snow on Pine,
Unfortunately, universities love those tuition fees.
Headline in today’s Wall St Journal:
“Senior Trump Aides Ease Up on China Pressure
“Amid tensions over the coronavirus, officials signal no economic punishment for China if it abides by January trade deal”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/senior-trump-aides-ease-up-on-china-pressure-11588633528?tesla=y&mod=article_inline (subscr)
Snow:
The National Association of Scholars put out an anti-Confucius Institutes paper some time ago. https://www.nas.org/reports/tagged/confuciusinstitutes
It has gotten the attention of some in DC, viz.:
https://www.nas.org/blogs/article/senator-chuck-grassley-issues-stern-warning-about-confucius-institutes
Fortunately these propaganda institutes are declining in number; one recently got kicked out of Penn State. At their zenith, there were about a hundred of these, all saying nice things about Chicomms, funded by Beijing! Tiananmen Square? Huh?
But college administrators are truly whores who will do anything for a buck or a yuan. It took Harvard several days to return the $8.7 million to Treasury that it got as part of the helicopter money exercise, despite its $40 Billion endowment.
@ David Foster:
Along with the transformation of Meiji Japan, the German catching up and overtaking of Britain during latter half of C19 is amazing when you look at what changed in the space of 50 years.
(I’m no fan of China and the CCP and many of their policies. Fair to say their concept of Intellectual Property is very self-serving, too.)
Same thing goes for China. Most of them couldn’t lie straight in bed and are very tricky to do business with, but quantity has a quality all of its own. By this I don’t just mean economies of scale, but also the vast infrastructure of capabilities and know-how that has been offshored and in some cases developed ab ovo because technologies didn’t exist before offshoring began.
Forget about electronics or biotechnology, just have a look at the literal case of a MacBook Pro. I mean just the aluminum outer shell, not interested in discussing the guts here. Now it might take some eclectic Mutant Genius Englishman with a shitty accent who hates people who type (butterfly keyboard anyone?) to design such a beauty, but how many companies in the West exist that can manufacture these at scale? Answer would be zero. This ability never existed in the West. Japan could do it a generation ago, and probably could manage it again at a pinch.
So there’s a lot of learning curve ahead.
Back to the Dyes = Chemical Industry at Scale = Explosives, there’s another tale.
In the first decade of the 20th Century, Germany instituted a program to dump cheap clocks on the British market. Why? To put clock manufacturers out of business. What happens when you go bankrupt and the receivers come in? Well one thing that happens is that your capital stock gets liquidated and repurposed — sold off and converted to other uses or melted down for scrap.
Now guess what every country in early August 1914 was ordering their clock manufacturers to switch production to stat? Time fuses for artillery shells. In ye good old days, the only way to ensure that a shrapnel shell exploded above ground (right) rather than after impact (wrong) was to have a simple time of flight clockwork fuse.
So what to do? Could the British hop in a time machine and unmelt down from scrap all that clock-making machinery? How many technicians who used to work in clock factories had been mown down at the Marne by the time new time fuse factories came on line?
It doesn’t take a brain the size of a planet to think ahead and pull stunts like this. It just takes a less mutant brain than the sort that makes its way through the Ivies or their B-schools and so on to the commanding heights of our Managerialist Bugmen Dominated Pirocracy (I won’t call it an Economy).
Zaphod….”Forget about electronics or biotechnology, just have a look at the literal case of a MacBook Pro. I mean just the aluminum outer shell, not interested in discussing the guts here. Now it might take some eclectic Mutant Genius Englishman with a shitty accent who hates people who type (butterfly keyboard anyone?) to design such a beauty, but how many companies in the West exist that can manufacture these at scale? Answer would be zero. This ability never existed in the West. Japan could do it a generation ago, and probably could manage it again at a pinch.”
IIRC, these cases were milled from single blocks of extruded aluminum (checks)…yep. I think I also remember that the CNC milling machines were purchased & are owned by Apple itself, rather than by FoxConn.
Here’s a post on the process:
https://appleinsider.com/articles/08/10/14/apple_details_new_macbook_manufacturing_process
Not sure we couldn’t do that here. You need a lot of people who can *run* the CNC mills, but they only have to be programmed once.
The story about the clocks and fuses is fascinating. Who in the Kaiser’s German y would have thought of such a thing? May not take a super-high IQ, but doesn’t seem like the sort of thing the General Staff would have thought of.
This would be good given that china is cooking its book in the china sea.
indonesia recently chased them away… but if you look at what they are claiming
and the countries around the claims losing their resources and more… you can clearly see that they will forbid china ship passage… ie… china would be forced to go north and around rather than down and over… meaning that it wont be able to go between asia land and indonesian islands, and japanese islands and so on… a big bathtub in which they would be bottled up in and unable to compete as they did for lack of passage.
Zaphod you forget to mention how much of this knowlege was also passed down father to son… people who dont ahve fathers and lost their grandparents and so, have no such skills from early as part of family history… a key destructive quality of feminism (on top of many since its not what it purports to be and well known to those who know history, how it destroys populations and the intelligence that exists in the ether of community… we used to even write about it… before we forgot it)
Zaphod:
The BEF in WWI, who with the French stopped the Germans at the Battle of the Marne and stalemated the Germans in the late 1914 battles in Flanders were the “Old Contemptables” the regular army, not the Lord Kitchener army of lads that volunteered and was decimated in the Somme of 1916. Your timeline is a bit off.
@ David Foster
You’re probably correct about it having been the Prussian General Staff. They didn’t suffer fools gladly and very nearly won WWI in the first month. Damned Close Run Thing as Wellington would have put it.
Not aware of any specific skulduggery, but another case of the Germans stealing a march was in optical rangefinders. Actually in anything that comes under the term Feinmechanik — pretty sure this term existed in German long before we began to speak of Precision Engineering in English. At the beginning of WWII, governments either requisitioned or compulsorily purchased anything their citizenry owned made by Zeiss/Contax, Leica, etc. It was just better. There was a running joke about German stuff being better in Dad’s Army series.
Fair enough re the CNC milling machines. Be interesting to know who manufactures *them*. And where does the doubtless very specific feedstock alloy come from? And who manufactures the cutting bits — which I bet need replacing all the time. They do only need to be programmed once, sure… but as you say, the care and feeding of them requires trained people too. Narrowing down the Dodger’s broader point, the care and feeding of them requires Institutional Knowledge, not just fungible ‘trained people’ — again something our Managerialist Bugmen Overlords simply cannot grasp because they have never had much to do with the Real World of Things.
We’ll know the big one is on when all our DJI Drones suddenly turn on us.
Om: You’re correct.
Dodger:
Re Chinese being bottled up behind First Island Chain: If they were smarter they’d go pirate copies of Mackinder and not Mahan. They’re just not very good at the Life Aquatic… pretty good at eating Aquatic Life to extinction though.
If they took Siberia they wouldn’t need to go to Haikou (where it’s too bloody hot) to see blonde birds singing Kalinka sans their gear. A no brainer.
@ David Foster:
Wasn’t just the Prussian General Staff who were putting their brains to good use.
The Kaiser also wasn’t a particularly vicious anti-Semite… or if he was, he was at least a practical one rather than a crazed self-destructive one.
I give you one Fritz Haber, who single-handedly probably did more for the efficacy of both the blow you up *and* liquefy your lungs aspects of German ordinance manufacture before and during WWI.
Interestingly the father of the Chinese A-Bomb was a Chinese guy who had worked on the Manhattan Project. Ran into security clearance issues during the Red Scares and went back to China and the rest is history.
The Kaiser actually had some Jewish friends…interesting that when he went to visit him in their homes, his wife refused to come. After the war, though, he went pretty much full anti-Semite.
One of the great what-ifs of history…Kaiser Wilhelm’s father, Frederick, was on the throne for only 99 days before dying of throat cancer. He and his wife Vicki (Queen Victoria’s daughter) had a lot of liberal (in the old, benign sense of the terms) about them…I’ve heard it claimed that if Frederick’s operation had been carried out in Germany rather than in Britain (where Vicki was convinced, probably incorrectly, that the British doctors were better than the German local talent) he might have survived, in which case Wilhelm might never have been Kaiser, or if he had, when much older.
One thing people forget; even if we somehow cut out dependency on China manufacturing is not guaranteed to come back here. Long before we had issues manufacturing was already moving to Southeast countries like Vietnam because pressures from workers over wages
“One thing people forget; even if we somehow cut out dependency on China manufacturing is not guaranteed to come back here. Long before we had issues manufacturing was already moving to Southeast countries like Vietnam because pressures from workers over wages.”
Quite true, but reducing the concentration of sourcing from a single country–and that country a very geopolitically-ambitious one–is still a good thing. AND, there are some trends that will make US-based manufacturing more attractive for many kinds of products. For example…
For example, an Atlanta-based company called Softwear Automation is selling a robotic system for production of apparel and related products. (Also available on a rental basis) Product types handled include mattress covers, pillows, automotive floormats, t-shirts, and shoes (uppers).
Apparel is a *huge* industry in much of the third world; if the Sewbot product and others in the same space are indeed able to remove most of the labor from the process and bring it to the US and other high-wage countries, that will be good for those countries but devastating for those countries for which such work is now a kingpin of their economy. See my post here:
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/59010.html
“…is still a good thing…”
Well, UNLESS one believes:
1. That the ability of that particular “very geopolitically-ambitious [country]” to be able to hold the US (and the West) over a barrel is a very, very GOOD thing, and/or
2. That “leading from behind” is a most effective, audacious and intellectually compelling foreign policy….
(But seriously, who might ever believe anything as foolish as that?…)
That depends. If you are talking of high speed detail milling of small aluminum parts using end mills or even burrs, the United States is, surprisingly, in a fair position. Or a secure one, at this moment.
Haas Automation of Oxnard, California, has surged to the fore as a manufacturer of matching systems and accessories, with over 15,000 units sold annually recently. I believe I also read that their revenues were one billion. Most of their product,is made in their US facility.
That is a phenomenal amount of business for a machine tool company based in America.
Fadal, a onetime US machining center manufacturing success story out of California as well, was purchased from the family that started it, fell on hard times, and is apparently back in business with new ownership partly based in Michigan.
Fadal built somewhat heavier machines, and from their presentation referring to CAT 40 tooling, look to be planning to do so in their new life.
These machines fall under the classification of “commodity” type machine tools. So it is surprising and doubly pleasing to be able to note their success.
Re, “security” in the form of at least partial redundancy.
During the heyday of the American machine tool industry, production of these critical industrial machines was spread, and essentially reduplicated in capacity through several regions in the country. New England produced all types of machine tools that I can think of, apart from some special purpose high production machines used in the automotive industry.
Ohio, and Michigan represented another independent region, with every form of machine tool and production machine being represented apart from some screw machines; including gear machinery and some of the world’s best grinders and lathes.
You could probably tag Illinois and Wisconsin as a separate and nearly complete capability region with Kearney and Tracker in Wisconsin, and IIngersoll in Rockford.
As I understand it, after WWII some of the defeated Axis nations–especially Germany and Japan–actually got a benefit from our destruction of much of their old plants and equipment because, when they started over, they were often building new, and updated plant and equipment that they would be using to compete with us, when we still had our older and less modernized plant and equipment.
It would seem to me that–with regard to the manufacturing capabilities we are able to drew back to the U.S. from China–we might be in somewhat the same situation–often replacing old factories and equipment that our companies used in China with newer, more capable and efficient U.S. plant and equipment and perhaps, as well, using new manufacturing techniques–more AI and robotics, new materials, etc. to improve products and profits.
There is undoubtedly enough truth in that to make quibbling over dates and definitions pointless.
A ramble follows.
In my first serious job out of college, I clambered over, photographed, speced, and monitored the refurbishment of hundreds of post war – 1950s through 1970s, – manufactured European machine tools; enough, to appreciate some of their interesting design qualities, as well as their drawbacks.
But nothing I saw on a year for year production comparison basis favorably compared with or matched American product in the same era, especially in Numerical Control ( the precursor of CNC) where the Unied States was not only preemiment, but stood alone and without peer for many years. That would be from 1945 to 1980 or thereabouts.
I have no doubt that post war, there was some serious modernization in Europe and Japan in this regard. There had to be as you say. I even have family photos of a Japanese and Italian engineer being entertained by my young newly wed parents. These men were sent to America through a 1950s US government initiative, in order to receive training in the US.
In their particular cases they wound up being sent to a Midwestern gear machinery company where they witnessed the host company manufacturing the latest in gear hobbling, splining, shaving, and grinding machines, as well as the machines needed to make the tooling used to actually cut the gear blanks (e.g. hobs).
The cold war and the demands of the automotive industry continued however, to drive American manufacturing innovation, as did the profit motive.
Now that said, there were numerous machine tool companies in the US in the 1980s and awhile later , still producing somewhat antiquated but well regarded models. And a reported joke in the industry was that the manufacturer of the most modern machines often had nothing on their own production floor in comparable sophistication to what they produced for sale.
I think though, that a really good case of contrast in line with your observation, would be with England.
Before WWII England lacked certain critical classes of machinery ( milling machines for example) and had to import these from the US during the war. Almost all the old wartime production footage you see from England involves turret lathes, or as they call them, capstan lathes, or drills of some kind. I’ve personally seen lots of English built machine tools which were brought into the US. . Principally engine lathes, vertical turret lathes, horizontal boring machines, and radial drills. Some grinders. Never saw one millng machine made in England.
Anyway, after the war, they were broke as everyone has been told. And so far as I know, no Marshall Plan existed to help them. I don’t thiink they ever did modernize their plants, though some notable exceptions and innovations, did exist. Marwin high speed sheet profilers in the 80s, might serve as an example.
Speaking of CNC…there’s a guy who was once a professional boxer, got in trouble with the law, straightened himself out by learning CNC machining, and is now teaching it to others. He’s also done a multi-part video series, profiling various American manufacturers:
https://academy.titansofcnc.com/
People often talk as if Robots in manufacturing are something new, but actually, a CNC or NC machine tool (and the latter I believe were pretty common in American plants by the mid- or late-1970s) should properly be considered robots, even if they don’t look like the science fiction version.
@ David Foster.
Yeah, it’s a bit difficult to define just what is meant by a robotic mechanism. This is especially the case as robots or mechanical men were imagined, and elecrto mechanical systems with some kind of feedback were in operation long before most of us had ever heard of much less grasped the so called computational theory of mind. Old pick and place and machining transfer systems have some of the appearances of robot like action, and it is difficult to say just how many sensors must be included in the feedback loop of a PLC based system to give the operating program some semblance of what we usually think of as robotic action.
Interestingly the father of the Chinese A-Bomb was a Chinese guy who had worked on the Manhattan Project. Ran into security clearance issues during the Red Scares and went back to China and the rest is history.
That story, slightly altered, is in “Noble House”, Clavell’s novel about Hong Kong.
I’ve heard it claimed that if Frederick’s operation had been carried out in Germany rather than in Britain (where Vicki was convinced, probably incorrectly, that the British doctors were better than the German local talent) he might have survived, in which case Wilhelm might never have been Kaiser, or if he had, when much older.
I have that story in my history of medicine book. It is from a medical history by Jurgen Thorwald.
Germany was cut off from quinine supplies in WWI and developed derivatives from methylene blue that resulted in Atabrine and chloroquine by WWII. More evidence of their organic chemistry industry.
England in WWI had a terrible time getting aircraft engines. The best were all made in Germany.
DNW…If the dials on a 1975 NC machine had been turned by some kind of arm-like contraption instead of by internal servos…then I bet they would have gotten a lot more public attention and gee-whiz press coverage….
Mike K….I think I actually got the story about Empress Vicki’s mistaken judgment of surgeons from you, in a discussion at CB.
One thing the Germans were not able to overcome in WWII was a shortage of certain raw materials not indigenous to their country. The jet engines on the ME 262 fighter had a time-between-overhaul of something like 10 hours, due mainly to inability to make the right high-temperature alloys.
The Germans were always in a search for raw materials. It got them into two word wars that they lost. I have done a lot of reading about WWI, which is still a bit of a mystery to me.
I used to read a lot of German history, but don’t remember reading about the Germans cornering the strategic markets in WWI, although it doesn’t surprise me. The Prussian General Staff may well have had a department dedicated solely to that kind of enterprise, even though the greatest strategists of the prior generation were no longer running the show by 1914.
I find it hard to believe that the triumvirate of Bismarck-Moltke-Roon, which engineered the defeat of France and the creation of the German Empire in 1871, would have countenanced the outsourcing of vital strategic materials to any country, much less one with demonstrated malignant intent. The Americans of a prior generation to ours would have been a bit smarter as well, I hope.
Crown Prince Frederick was not quite so liberal as he is sometimes made out to be, and (the early) Kaiser Wilhelm II not nearly so reactionary, but you have to read a lot of back-story to see the details. I am not sanguine that Kaiser Friedrich III would not have been drawn into war just as his son was, because a lot of the hegemonic action was being driven by the military.
Both men, however, were certainly convinced that Prussia (nominally Germany) must be the leader in everything, and would fight to get and keep the upper hand as needed. Not all of the former sovereign states incorporated into the Reich were happy with the situation.
Princess Vicky, the Empress Friedrich aka Victoria Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, was the eldest of the many daughters of Queen Victoria; most of the crowned heads of Europe were related to the British monarch in some way. (The Windsor dynastic surname was taken in 1917.) She did not get along with her son, nor he with her, to say the least. I think sometimes he did things just because she wanted the opposite. Also, no one of Bismarck’s stature replaced the chancellor when Wilhelm essentially fired him, and the emperor’s subsequent political advisors were only about as savvy as the usual run of courtier-politicians of any age.
Hitler’s sometimes counter-productive adventurism outside of Europe, and especially into Russian territory, was driven by the need to acquire rubber, petroleum and other resources that they did not have in Germany, although their chemists were able to devise substitutes for many things that they then could manufacture themselves. The catch IIRC was that most of the synthetics still needed petroleum as a component.
Feinmechanik at one point created a problem rather than solving it: some of the guns used by the Germans were very precisely engineered, and thus very accurate, but they could not be maintained in the field and became useless against the Russians’ crude weapons, which continued to fire when muddy and nearly frozen.
A story from the trenches of WWI, recalled as best I remember it:
Many Germans worked in Britain prior to the war, very often in restaurants and other service businesses, and spoke English well. During one stand-off, the Brits were surprised by a dud lobbed into their lines, but found a note on it that read, essentially, “We are Saxons; you are Anglo-Saxons; let’s be friends.”
A non-official truce followed for awhile, until one day another shell-delivered message appeared: “The Prussians are relieving us. Give them hell.”
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Helmuth-von-Moltke/Chief-of-the-general-staff
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Otto-von-Bismarck/Domestic-policy
https://www.royal.uk/saxe-coburg-gotha
David Foster:
I haven’t read much on the Kaiser specifically, but it stands to reason that he would favor the “Stab In The Back” theory, even unconsciously, because it would sit so much better than the “I F***ed Up” theory.
AesopFan:
IIRC at least one of the pre-WW1 British spy novels (a newish genre at the time) stoked a lot of popular fear of … German waiters.
See this story about the role Chinese students play here in the U.S.
See https://thefederalist.com/2020/05/05/tom-cotton-is-right-about-restricting-chinese-student-visas/
This is good. At the least, we should be diversifying, if nothing else to become less dependent on China in the first place… China has been bootstrapped into the 20th century… time to start working on the rest of the world.
I’ve commented about how the Chinese have been buying up companies here in the U.S., and mentioned the example of the iconic Smithfield meat packing company.
But, it doesn’t stop there.
It turns out that the Chinese have also quietly bought out Armour, and they also now own Nathan’s hotdogs.
So they now own quite a large chunk of the companies that supply us here in the U.S. with meat products, with pork.
P.S.–According to the article linked below, the Chinese now consume half of all the pork products in the world, and a lot of the pork produced by these former U.S. companies is now being shipped back to China.
See https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/05/how_china_is_buying_up_americas_food_supply.html
That’s an interesting development. As everyone knows by now, China has been experiencing a swine plague for the last several years. This has cut into the ability of Chinese citizens to indulge in their preferred status food, which they apparently see consuming as a sight of economic arrival. As pork prices in the United States had been at relative lows, as any one who had noticed the phenomenally low price of pork loins and similar cuts ( if not bacon) it no doubt was a sector ripe for buyout approaches.
By purchasing the American producers, they also lessen the overall advantage the USA would otherwise gain from the export of this product.
What I am most concerned about though is a dedliberate introduction of the swine disease into the United States by the Chinese as a form of economic sabotage, should the US begin to react officially to these neo-mercantilist ventures, and the Chinese then figure it better to bring everyone’s house down than lose the advantage and sourcing control they have gained.
Whether you personally consume it or not, the ready domestic availability of pork in the US has always added great elasticity to the demand scene here. It would be a huge negative should one or more of our traditional choices become dominated by foreign interests or destroyed by imported diseases.
Now, I think I’ll take a look at that link.
DNW–Someone commented here recently about the attempt by shippers in China to smuggle likely contaminated pork into the U.S.
Pork from China which, if it was contaminated with the Swine Flu–for which there is no animal vaccine—and which has decimated the Chinese pig population, could have decimated our pig population as well.*
Friends, the dots are just adding up in my mind, and the picture they are presenting is not pretty, not pretty at all.
To mention just a few major items–
We have Chinese Communist Party leader’s obvious ambition and intention to try to eclipse the United States as the leading world power, via things like their extremely ambitious, expensive, huge, multi-decade “Belt and Road Initiative,” a global development strategy reaching into 70 countries around the world.
We’ve had the appearance of that fairly widely publicized 1999 book on Chinese military strategy, written by two Chinese People’s Army Colonels, and titled “Unrestricted Warfare,” which argues that the only way that the Chinese can offset United States military advantages is to prosecute warfare against us using every possible means, conventional and unconventional–both fair and foul.
We have the Chinese construction, military occupation, and arming of seven artificial islands in the South China Sea, in an attempt to assert their ownership over the area, and to control seaborne traffic through this area; an area through which our warships and a good deal of the world’s commerce currently must transit.
We have the ongoing Chinese theft of our intellectual property to the reported tune of several hundreds of billions of dollars each and every year.
We have Chinese Communist Party propaganda centers, their “Confucius Institutes,” “influence operations” embedded in 80 or so American Universities and Colleges around our country.
Of note, as well, are the 350,000 full tuition students from China who study each year at our Colleges and Universities, often displacing U.S. students.
Then, of course, we have off shored huge swaths of our former industrial base to China, which has decimated our middle class, and the middle of our country.
We are now seeing 60,000 or 70,000 deaths each year from drug overdoses, often from ODs on Fentanyl, which is manufactured in China and smuggled into the U.S. by Mexican gangs, or shipped into this country via mail. This also helping to destroy and hollow out our middle class and middle of the country.
The advent of the Chinese Coronavirus has also revealed and focused our attention on the heretofore unrealized fact that almost all of our medicines, their precursor chemicals, and our medical equipment is now being produced in China, and, as well, also revealed that Chinese interests are buying up large numbers of companies in key U.S. industries—like our meat producers.
Chinese penetration and influence over U.S. media and many other important sectors of our society—in the Entertainment Industry, in Academia–is increasingly being reported.
We have also just recently seen reported that the Chinese have made secret deals with some of our top people in Academia, scholars who have been doing secret research for the Chinese while being given secret payments to do so.
And, now, we have the “accidental” release of the Chinese Coronavirus, which has killed, as of today, over 73,000 Americans in just the last two months (and looks like its headed for 100,000) and has triggered the shutdown of our economy—these illnesses, deaths, and shutdowns causing tremendous psychological, familial, economic, and social damage to our country, and to many other countries around the world.
Of note, too, there have been articles discussing how some of the increasingly ubiquitous drones–almost all manufactured in China–are set up to direct the information they gather through China.
One recent report I saw mentioned that the Chinese manufacturer DJI has “donated” drones to police departments in 22 states around the U.S.
It has been some of these drones, I would imagine, which have been seen in the videos, out this week, of drones overflying areas, observing what is going on in them, and ordering people to “keep their social distancing.”
* See https://www.foxnews.com/food-drink/1-million-pounds-of-pork-seized-at-u-s-border-amid-deadly-chinese-outbreak
Snow’s list is very complete, and I see the advantage to China in nearly all of their perfidious proclivities, but I need some help here on one question —
— if China imports into their country much of the pork produced in the US (by mostly Chinese-owned companies, among others), why are they sending any kind of pork to the US, rather than selling it in China?
(It’s probably some arcane economic-financial reason, or about different types of pork products; I know that oil travels around the world because the source country doesn’t necessarily have enough refineries for the particular type produced).
I can see dumping contaminated pork on unwary buyers (as they have done with useless PPE accepted in good faith across the world), but spreading swine disease over here endangers their own food supply. (Can it be spread by, literally, dead meat?)
Covid-19 is hitting meat packers hard; again, that endangers some of their own food supply chain (the dependence goes both ways, but we are in more trouble than they are, I think, because they have a near-monopoly on our pharma).
What am I missing?
Per AmericanThinker linked by Snow:
“Chinese ownership of our essential food producers generates a similar vulnerability to our national security.”
I think us having a large portion of our pharmaceuticals held hostage by a hostile regime is a greater vulnerability than them having part of their pork supply held up from being exported by the US (which would never occur in normal times), but apparently they are smart enough to keep a stockpile of frozen pork and maintain their own pig farms, whereas we don’t seem to have kept either meds or med-makers in the States.
So: is trading pork for drugs gonna be the next step?
PS At this point, given the Chinese history of adulterating ingestibles with poisons and other contaminants, I would be very conflicted about taking those meds, as some of them are vitally necessary (I don’t actually take any).
However, now that the cat is out of the bag, they may be cautious about giving the US a real incentive to smash them back.
AesopFan–Yeah, the trying to smuggle in possibly contaminated pork from China puzzled me too.
Left hand-right hand problem? Freelancers? Stupidity?
I have no idea.