Of all the things to fear in the world, I’m not afraid of China or particularly impressed by it.
But I might be in the minority on that.
With the fall of Kabul, a new Facebook meme this week regurgitated something former President Jimmy Carter said to President Trump in 2019 about our country’s wasteful spending on war.
“We have wasted, I think, $3 trillion,” Carter said. “China has not wasted a single penny on war, and that’s why they’re ahead of us. In almost every way.”
It’s a trope that many people nod their heads to, similar to the way Americans were impressed with the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics in 2008.
Of course, neither is the full story of China. The nation also has the great benefit of slave labor and a totalitarian government. If you know any history at all, you understand that’s an unbeatable combination for getting things done.
We do not owe Egypt’s Great Pyramid at Giza to space aliens, remarkable engineers or to the Pyramid Builders of Egypt, Local #172. We owe it to the labor of slaves, people who gave every ounce of their lives trying to survive the whip.
Same goes for those famous Roman aqueducts and roads still in operation thousands of years later. If you want built something impressive and immortal, you can’t beat free labor. China has the next best thing.
Labor in China is so cheap that Alaskan fish buyers can afford to ship whole fish to China, have the Chinese process it, send it back to the United States and sell it and still make good money. That’s one reason there are no more cannery jobs in Alaska.
This is how cheap Chinese labor gets. Three years ago the University of Alaska was planning to cut all its timber in the Chilkat Valley in one fell swoop and Haines descended into a debate about the wisdom of sending most of our local forest overseas as logs to China.
Knowing that our trees aren’t all that great for lumber, I asked our forester what our milled-up trees would be used for. Cement forms, he told me. That is, they’d be hammered into rough molds used to hold concrete until it dries.
Incredulous, I asked how it could pay to cut down trees in Alaska, ship them across the ocean and mill them up for such a low-grade use.
These logs won’t go to a sawmill, he told me. They’ll go into a field where 100 shirtless guys starving for money will wrestle logs through a single bandsaw. OSHA would not be there. The Fair Labor Standards people would not be there. A union shop steward would not be there.
China has been on the rise, though. It is gaining in wealth because U.S. corporations keen on slave labor are shipping our jobs there as fast as they can.
You see, China has another advantage over the U.S. that corporations can’t resist. Chinese capitalists working for U.S. corporations needn’t fear labor unions, strikes, or unrest of any kind because the Chinese government is not big on dissent.
If you have a problem with the labor laws in China or the government in China and you express that, you will mostly likely be poured into a cement form. The people of Hong Kong learned this lesson recently but it’s been obvious to the rest of the world for decades.
Why are we even trading partners with China? Only the Masters of the Universe can answer that question but I’d venture it’s the same reason that people shop with Amazon: “You can’t beat these prices!”
In a series of suicides that continued at least through 2016, so many Chinese workers threw themselves out windows at an Apple factory dormitory in China that giant nets were slung alongside buildings to catch them all.
That’s China’s growth model. Excuse me if I’m not impressed.