Americans need to force an economic break with China.
- Don’t do business with companies that are hurting our interest by dealing with China.
- American companies like Google and IBM have been roundly criticized for helping to create and expand China’s modern surveillance state.
- Ford and Tesla have built factories there that give jobs to Chinese workers at the expense of Americans.
- Apple produces products in China that could be built by friendly nations instead.
A lesser-known consequence of globalization is that countries and companies share their technology, their data, and their strategies with each other, even for vastly different objectives. American companies like Google and IBM have been roundly criticized for helping to create and expand China’s modern surveillance state. Even companies that would seem to have no interest in state censorship or surveillance are key players. Recently, U.S. game developer Riot Games was contracted to help enforce the Chinese government’s monitoring and control over gamers in that country. Full article here.
Decoupling for those that don’t know, is separating your economy from the economy of another nation. Right now, the US and China have heavily intertwined economies because we opened relations with them under the Nixon Administration. They make basic goods and materials and ship them here, where we buy them and ship money back to China. Whereas Americans used to be known for making things, now we’re just a nation of financiers and consumers. That’s mainly because of our relationship with China.
But it isn’t just that America should be making things rather than buying them from China. There are also national security risks at play- because of our economic relationship with China, we don’t make the basic materials and supplies needed for wartime. Rare earth minerals, pharmaceuticals, technology products, and more are all made in China and are things we would desperately need for a future war with them. Would we really be able to win without producing our own medicine?
For those reasons and more, it is high time for America to decouple from China. We need to separate ourselves economically from them as soon as is possible so that we are once again economically powerful and militarily self-sufficient.
And I’m not the only one who thinks so.
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