How We Can Fix Our ‘Made in China’ Problem

It won’t be easy, but there are steps that both individuals and the government can take.

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Many years ago when Woody Allen was still kosher, he wrote a joke about his brother-in-law who thought he was a chicken. Cutting to the punch line, Allen confessed that the family didn’t want to take the fowl-minded brother-in-law for treatment because “we need the eggs.” Consider the tale an apt parable of America’s China dilemma. We want to cut ties, but we love the eggs.

How many times have you searched for some Amazon product, earnestly looking to ensure it isn’t a product of slave labor in China? And given up because a) it’s impossible to reckon where it came from; and b) it’s cheaper. What about Chinese state-owned companies listed on U.S. exchanges? Do you own stock? Better still, does your pension fund? Don’t know? Me neither.

Bet you were grossed out when you heard LeBron James defend the People’s Republic repression of Hong Kong. Embarrassed for your country when John Cena slobbered—in Mandarin, no less—his apologies because he called Taiwan “a country.” (For the record, it is a country, albeit one Beijing insists is part of greater China.) Did you cringe when Tom Cruise edited the patches on his Top Gun leather jacket to make sure the Taiwanese flag once there wouldn’t offend his Chinese overlords? Groan when Nike CEO John Donahoe called Nike a “brand of China and for China”?

Were you shocked by that New York Times story about the Chinese breeding a nation of social media Manchurian candidates, all of whom parrot the same praise about their lives under the Chinese Communist Party? By the arrest of Hong Kong press magnate Jimmy Lai? The concentration camps in Xinjiang? Chinese domination of the World Health Organization? COVID?

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  1. Pohl

    I have belatedly read this, but thank you, Ms Pletka. I have been conducting a personal boycott of Chinese products for decades and have a sixth sense about country of origin and will buy from almost any other non-Communist country..
    I ask people to imagine buying so much stuff from the USSR, not that they made anything good. We have enriched an evil regime and created Frankenstein’s monster.

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    Ben Connelly

    This was great, but I’d really appreciate a follow-up piece going into greater detail/specifics on how exactly individuals can change their consumption and investment habits to decouple from China. It seems somewhat overwhelming at times.

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    Everybody Digs Bill Evans

    Good article overall, but one correction: Donald Trump didn’t give one whit about the Uighurs. He was more concerned about his “deal” with Xi Jinping. Credit to Mike Pompeo for publicly recognizing that it is genocide occurring in Xinjiang, and also for officially supporting Taiwan and deepening our ties with them. Trump, however, heaped praise on Xi and rarely - if ever - called out the PRC for their human rights abuses and atrocities.

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    Bobby Burton

    This is a great read and I appreciate the examples of what we can do to better hold China accountable. I will start with letter to my congressman urging action. Thank you again Ms. Pletka for a great read.

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    Haiku Jonah

    I don’t understand why the US hasn’t made it a vocal and visible priority to develop stronger trade relationships with countries in our own hemisphere and facilitate ways for them construct the factories and educate their citizenry to build iPhones and Teslas—a Marshall Plan for South and Central America, if you will.

    It’s admittedly a generation-long project. I know there are daunting corruption problems with government and non-state actors, and I know we’ve had some massive FUBARs in the past in this regard. But it’s not the Cold War anymore, and it is in the US’s interests that Mexico, Guatemala, Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina etc. are economically healthy. If they are, they are safer and more politically stable, pressure in their people to unsafely and illegally migrate is reduced, and China has economic competition.

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      Narwhal

      I’ve said we should have done something like that instead of invading Iraq in 2003 for a long time. Just imagine if we had. We would almost certainly be in better shape in a number of ways.

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    CP

    If you want more on China, this is a pretty great (and funny) news show: https://www.youtube.com/user/NTDChinaUncensored

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    Narwhal

    “ If China wants to extort subservience from Australia, sanctioning everything from its wine to its timber, then the United States and Europe should develop a concerted campaign to buy Australian.”

    The most telling thing about the sanctions China imposed on Australia are what they they didn’t include in the sanctions. Iron ore. China can’t do without Australia’s high grade iron ore right now and for the foreseeable future. I don’t claim to know the best way for the US or Australia to deal with this Chinese weakness. But, it is a weakness of theirs for now. And of course we shouldn’t forget the ways in which we found ourselves at war with the Empire of Japan. So, refusing to sell them high grade iron ore may not be the best approach.

    Re-shoring chip manufacturing should be a top priority for our government. It appears it is becoming a priority. That is good.

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  8. Allen Brooks

    It would seem a ban on importing products made with forced labor and a border adjustment tax on products made at lower environmental standards (calculate the difference in cost of production and apply the tax, or just use carbon credit system that already exists) than those of North America would solve a lot of the problem of cheap goods from China. It would push prices up on iphones and nikes, but if you can afford those items you should be willing to pay more for products that do not use forced labor. The fact apple looked the other way as child labor was used to mine the cobalt used in their products makes their use of forced labor in china less surprising (https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2019/dec/16/apple-and-google-named-in-us-lawsuit-over-congolese-child-cobalt-mining-deaths ).

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    DougAz

    Pletka once again shows her utter ignorance of the isolated Ivory Tower of the American (coughcough) Enterprise (we were for China globalization before we were against it) Institute (means we listen to ourselves and bond to our donors. Thinking not allowed outside the coloring book boundaries)

    Here is a cogent action plan for American response to China:

    https://www.piie.com/publications/policy-briefs/assessing-potential-economic-policy-responses-genocide-xinjiang

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/06/24/china-solar-forced-labor-imports-custom/
    Biden administration bars imports of solar panels linked to forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. This is a week old. Pletkas knock on Biden is just partisan hackery

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    Earl King

    When manufacturing moves around it becomes hard to buy American. Our steel production went to Japan, the South Korea then China....It may Vietnam it will go to or some African country. Why does it move? Steel is not hard to make.....So countries that have lower levels of manufacturing ability can do it cheaper than most modern countries. All the chip in the world were built in the US...but as other countries developed the skills soon there were built overseas. Clothing left a long time ago...So it's China or India for now. You may find assembled in US but there are whole swaths of manufactured goods that are not made here anymore. It will be tough to find substitutes. As for TPP......Nothing is perfect but in general our market would be more open while many of our products would still be subject to tariffs. It benefited high end workers rather than lower end workers...and would reduce patent protection for pharmaceuticals as an example. Who knows if it would have passed the Senate. Look how long Nancy held up the NAFTA redux.

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