#us china trade

[randomberlinchick]

The People's Republic of China | United States Trade Representative

Not even taking into account how much US debt China holds (currently 870 billion dollars) and concentrating strictly on trade, I'm not sure why some politicians are so comfortable with the "enemy" rhetoric. Pay off the debt and manufacture/assemble your own products, then you can talk shit. Or as my mom used to say, "Don't let your mouth write a check your ass can't cash."

But we all know how this story will play out: the debt ceiling will likely be raised, as the alternative would create havoc in global financial markets. For more see this article in Foreign Policy.

[afro-elf]

yeah the biden quote about japan/korea IS pulled out of context but the context doesn't make it much better in my opinion ksdgjslkjglskjg

[elbiotipo]

I don't know how else to say this, but the level of wealth, entitlement and lack of social awareness you got to have to ship a "rescued" dog from China to the US and adopt it is obscene and gross

[fatehbaz]

Nothing in the past, moreover, gave any cause to suspect ginseng’s presence so far away. Or even closer by: since antiquity, for well over a millennium, the ginseng consumed in all of East Asia had come from just one area -- the northeast mountainous lands straddling Manchuria and Korea. No one had found it anywhere else. No one was even thinking, now, to look elsewhere. The [...] [French traveler] Joseph-Francois Lafitau didn’t know this. He had been [...] visiting Quebec on mission business in October of 1715 [...]. He began to search for ginseng. [...] [T]hen one day he spotted it [...]. Ginseng did indeed grow in North America. [...]

Prior to the nuclear disaster in the spring of 2011, few outside Japan could have placed Fukushima on a map of the world. In the geography of ginseng, however, it had long been a significant site. The Edo period domain of Aizu, which was located here, had been the first to try to grow the plant on Japanese soil, and over the course of the following centuries, Fukushima, together with Nagano prefecture, has accounted for the overwhelming majority of ginseng production in the country.

Aizu’s pioneering trials in cultivation began in 1716 – by coincidence, exactly the same year that Lafitau found the plant growing wild in the forests of Canada. [...]

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Since the 1670s the numbers of people [in Japan] clamoring for access to the drug had swelled enormously, and this demand had to be met entirely through imports. The attempt to cultivate ginseng in Aizu -- and soon after, many other domains -- was a response to a fiscal crisis.

Massive sums of silver were flowing out of the country to pay for ginseng and other drugs [...]. Arai Hakuseki, the chief policy maker [...], calculated that no less than 75% of the country’s gold, and 25% of its silver had drained out of Japan [to pay for imports] [...]. Expenditures for ginseng were particularly egregious [...]: in the half-century between 1670s through the mid-1720s that marked the height of ginseng fever in Japan, officially recorded yearly imports of Korean ginseng through Tsushima sometimes reached as much as four to five thousand kin (approx. 2.4–3 metric tons).

What was to be done? [...] The drain of bullion was unrelenting. [...] [T]he shogunate repeatedly debased its currency, minting coins that bore the same denomination, but contained progressively less silver. Whereas the large silver coin first issued in 1601 had been 80% pure, the version issued in 1695 was only 64% silver, and the 1703 mint just 50%. Naturally enough, ginseng dealers in Korea were indifferent to the quandaries of the Japanese rulers, and insisted on payment as before; they refused the debased coins. The Japanese response speaks volumes about the unique claims of the drug among national priorities: in 1710 (and again in 1736) a special silver coin of the original 80% purity was minted exclusively for use in the ginseng trade. [...]

[T]he project of cultivating ginseng and other medicines in Japan became central to the economic and social strategy of the eighth shogun Yoshimune after he assumed power in 1716. [...]

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China and Korea were naturally eager to retain their monopolies of this precious commodity, and strictly banned all export of live plants and seeds. They jealously guarded as well against theft of mature roots: contemporary Chinese histories, for example, record that the prisons of Shenjing (present day Shenyang) overflowed with ginseng poaching suspects. So many were caught, indeed, that the legal bureaucracy couldn’t keep up. 

In 1724, the alarming numbers of suspected poachers who died in prison while awaiting trial led to the abandonment of the regular system of trials by judges dispatched from Beijing, and a shift to more expeditious reviews handled by local officials. [...]

Even in 1721. the secret orders that the shogunate sent the domain of Tsushima called for procuring merely three live plants [...]. Two other forays into Korea 1727 succeeded in presenting the shogun with another four and seven plants respectively. Meanwhile, in 1725 a Manchu merchant in Nagasaki named Yu Meiji [...] managed to smuggle in and present three live plants and a hundred seeds. [...]

Despite its modest volume, this botanical piracy eventually did the trick. By 1738, transplanted plants yielded enough seeds that the shogunate could share them with enterprising domains. [...] Ginseng eventually became so plentiful that in 1790 the government announced the complete liberalization of cultivation and sales: anyone was now free to grow or sell it.

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By the late eighteenth century, then, the geography of ginseng looked dramatically different from a century earlier.

This precious root, which had long been restricted to a small corner of the northeast Asian continent, had not only been found growing naturally and in abundance in distant North America, but had also been successfully transplanted and was now flourishing in the neighboring island of Japan. […]

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Colonial Americans, for their part, had developed their own new addiction: an unquenchable thirst for tea. […] This implacable need could have posed a serious problem. [...] [I]ts regular consumption was a costly habit.

Which is why the local discovery of ginseng was a true godsend.

When the Empress of China sailed to Canton in 1784 as the first ship to trade under the flag of the newly independent United States, it was this coveted root that furnished the overwhelming bulk of sales. Though other goods formed part of early Sino-American commerce – Chinese porcelain and silk, for example, and American pelts – the essential core of trade was the exchange of American ginseng for Chinese tea. [...]

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Yoshimune’s transplantation project had succeeded to the point that Japan actually became a ginseng exporter. As early as 1765, Zhao Xuemin’s Supplement to the compedium of material medica would note the recent popularity of Japanese ginseng in China. Unlike the “French” ginseng from Canada, which cooled the body, Zhao explained, the “Asian” ginseng (dongyang shen) from Japan, like the native [Korean/Chinese] variety, tended to warm. Local habitats still mattered in the reconfigured geography of ginseng. [...]

What is place? What is time? The history of ginseng in the long eighteenth century is the story of an ever-shifting alchemical web. [...] Thanks to the English craving for tea, ginseng, which two centuries earlier had threatened to bankrupt Japan, now figured to become a major source of national wealth [for Japan] .

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Text by: Shigehisa Kuriyama. “The Geography of Ginseng and the Strange Alchemy of Needs.” In: The Botany of Empire in the Long Eighteenth Century, edited by Yota Batsaki, Sarah Burke Cahalan, and Anatole Tchikine. 2017. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me.]

[mapsontheweb]

Countries whose largest trading partner is China or the USA, 2000 vs 2020.

[workersolidarity]

🇨🇳⚔️🇺🇲 💵 🚨

CHINA DUMPING US DOLLARS AS TRADE WAR BREWS

China has sold nearly $100 billion in US Treasury holdings since 2023, and nearly $49 billion in US Treasury bonds in just the last quarter.

The findings were published by the US Treasury Department and reported in the Business media, detailing a pattern of the People's Republic of China dumping US Treasury bonds as a trade war begins brewing between the two economic powers.

#source

@WorkerSolidarityNews

[william-r-melich]

Tik Tok on the Chopping Block - 04/25/2024

Yesterday, Joe Biden signed the Tik Tok Divest-or-Ban bill into law. I covered this bill extensively in my post, "Tik Tok Bill/HR 7521" back on March 16th of this year. This bill forces ByteDance to sell Tik Tok within one year. It's clear to me that this Chinese owned company is controlled by the CCP and is using it to gather information on US citizens and influence children toward committing self-harm and suicide.

Tik Tok's CEO, Shou Zi Chew released the following video statement yesterday. "Make no mistake, this is a ban, a ban on you and your voice. We are confident, and we will keep fighting for your rights in the courts. The facts and the Constitution are on our side, and we expect to prevail again." He was referring to how they circumvented Trump's executive order to ban the app in the U.S. back in 2020. Tik Tok's position is that through China's Counterespionage Law, its customer data is stored in Virginia and backed up in Singapore. They claim that they have never or ever will share U.S. data with the CCP. Yet the owner of ByteDance previously issued a letter of apology to the CCP about failing to follow the CCP's directives. It's obvious to me that they are more of an arm of the CCP than a private company and we should not trust them. At the same time, I'm also conflicted about trusting our own government. Regardless it's now signed into law, like it or not.

Tik Tok and ByteDance together spent over $7 million since the beginning of this year on TV and digital ads in an effort to stop legislation from passing the bill. A Tik Tok spokesperson said this, "This expenditure reflects work we do to educate policy makers about how legislation could affect our community of 170 million American users." Tik Tok officials lobbied Congress and Biden's executive office last quarter. Biden's executive office contains the National Security Council, the Office Management and Budget, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, and other divisions.

As I mentioned in my previous post on this bill last March, Donald Trump and Elon Musk both came out against it. Trump is concerned that it could expand government powers on other platforms, and Musk is concerned about censorship. The bill is intended to remove any foreign influence and investment in social media platforms and websites here in the U.S. The government would have to prove that a foreign entity is directly involved and then initially force divestment, and then later if necessary deplatform the app and shut down their operating websites.

I'm all for private companies operating platforms that allow freedom of expression, but not if they're being operated by a foreign adversary like China's CCP. Yet I'm always very skeptical of our government and their tendencies to over-reach in order to go after their political opposition. Especially with this current bunch in charge. All we can do is to stay informed and hopefully for the sake of our freedom and security vote in Republican majorities in both the house and senate, and get Donald Trump back into office, in my opinion.

[junotter]

sometimes researching for avatar redesigns has you 6 layers deep into the Japan's Meiji era allies wiki

[bluegraywilde]

Who among us hasn’t been tempted to procrastinate grad school work by reading an academic paper on how Czech Hunter speaks to the continued salience of 1990s Western exploitation fantasy rooted in the fall of communism/the Iron Curtain

[jyndor]

lmao nancy almost slipped and called herself a victim in that clip on CNN, did you guys see that? right before she says the fbi should go spy on pro-palestine activists (namely muslim and arab americans of course, we've seen this play before). right before she says a lot of us are doing putin's bidding, as if the us sending so much weaponry to israel to commit genocide is making it harder to send weaponry to ukraine to fight russian imperialism but okay queen yes YOU are the victim here

[sunshinestate323]

The great intergenerational theft is a venal fact of modern reality that a lot of people are painfully aware of, or at least vaguely sense, but this guy, Scott Galloway, is the only person I know of (whose name is not Bernie Sanders) with the the stones to say it out loud in public.

I think he could hit a little harder on the corporate kleptocracy (and their Central Casting reality show frontman) that engineered said intergenerational theft, with the Boomers being the happy beneficiaries of same. But still, this is the mic drop of the century afaic.

[allthegeopolitics]

The Biden administration plans to impose major new tariffs on electric vehicles, semiconductors, solar equipment and medical supplies imported from China, according to a U.S. official and another person familiar with the plan. Tariffs on electric vehicles, in particular, could quadruple — from the existing 25 per cent to 100 per cent. The plan was described by the people on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to provide details ahead of a formal announcement. The tariffs, expected to be announced Tuesday, come as officials across the Democratic administration have expressed frustration over China's manufacturing “overcapacity” of EVs and other products that they say pose a threat to U.S. jobs and national security.

Continue Reading.

[solradguy]

I can speak any of the Romance languages just fine but for some god forsaken reason I CANNOT speak French like what the fuck is a bourgeoisie and why can’t I say it correctly for the life of me.

Yeah, French is pretty tricky... Figuring out what letters to pronounce is difficult and I can do the sounds for it in my head when I think I've figured it out (sort of) but my mouth lacks the flexibility to do them out loud haha

A long while ago I read Les Fleurs du Mal, and my copy is dual-language with the original French on the left page and an English translation on the right, and it drove me nuts that I didn't know how to read the sounds for the French so I read a crash course guide for it. It helped a lot once I realized that a good portion of the letters that aren't pronounced in a French word function similarly to an accented character in that it's there only to modify the sounds of the letters near it than to contribute in a major way to the overall sound of the word itself. My native Germanic language (English) brain really wants all of those letters to be doing something up-front instead rofl

Though, English also has its special words with sneaky little helper letters that aren't pronounced... ("sovereign...")

[vamptastic]

i genuinely don't understand what capitalist countries stand to gain by fighting each other instead of collaborating economically. like why does the us warmonger against china when we would benefit more from trade? ostensibly it's for moral reasons, but regardless of the veracity of any given claim i think the united states has shown itself to prioritize economic success over human rights on a number of occasions especially during the cold war. i suppose i assume most wars are waged on the grounds of economic gain (natural resources, global political power, straight up money in the form of the military-industrial complex) but you could make an equally solid argument that just as many are waged over purely social and political issues- ethnic and religious conflict, blind nationalism, the whims of a dictator. it just confuses me at times, i guess. i have a hard time believing that the united states is bound and determined to wage war against china over human rights abuses, infringing on other countries sovereignty, and neo-colonialism in africa when we've propped up fascist dictators in many a country who've done far worse. is it literally just the association with communism? because surely whatever evil fuckers actually want war know that china is very far from communist right now. is it just nationalism? the idea that we must be on the top of the totem pole, even if our economy would stand to gain from trade? because i suppose i could believe that, but i think if that was true we wouldn't have gotten to where we are today in the first place. blegh. at the end of the day i am also ignoring the fact that many many different groups of people want war against china for reasons ranging from sinophobic jingoist nationalism to a genuine belief that the united states is a global moral watchdog determined to establish ~democracy~ worldwide. but there is a definite slant to media coverage on china right now, genuine attempts at disinformation, and given that the media in the us is so deeply tied to corporate interests it leads me to believe that there has to be some economic motive here, and it frustrates me that i can't figure out what it is.

[mapsontheweb]

How have export destinations from Latin America to China and USA changed since the 2000s? Today, the 2022 ChinaLAC Business Summit is taking place in Ecuador to strengthen the bounds between Latin American & Caribean countries and China.

by u/RobinWheeliams

[awesome-casuallyfamouscollector]

But most entrepreneurs and investors, foreign or domestic, could still be deterred by President Xi’s desire to prioritize ideological control over economic objectives, analysts said.

“Most private businesspeople, particularly owners of small- and medium-sized firms, still prefer to lie low instead of making big investments in a market that stresses party control rather than the entrepreneurial spirit,” said Lam at the Jamestown Foundation.

P.S. As long as the oppressive CCP's dictatorship controls China's economy, it is a very bad idea to invest in their economy. Driven by greed, Western investors are giving the Chinese Communists an army and bullets, which will then be fired at the West...! 

The West is repeating the same mistake they made by investing in the Kremlin's economy. It's only a matter of time before CCP starts another war...and all your investments in communist economy go belly up...