Chinese Control Over Critical Exports
China does a lot of things many people do not believe a sophisticated country should do. They don’t have much respect for copyrights or patents, but we are trying to fix this by getting them to agree to certain restrictions in our trade agreements. China states they will abide by these trade restrictions. Over the years China has stolen some of our secret technology and violated the aforesaid trade agreements and patents. China has a booming economy, or did have until everything slow down because of the Coronavirus. Much of the boom is based upon designs created by copying technology from other countries and using government support to undercut the price of goods exported. There were a lot of people who are unhappy with our current China policy and have said we are too friendly to the Chinese. I guess this is a matter of opinion and I am not going to get into the politics of these views. All I can say is I think it is better to have less countries as enemies than more. When I watch politics and see different politicians twisting facts to try and make things seem what they are, when they are not, I didn’t expect to see countries doing this to each other, but it seems while we blame China for the Coronavirus, they are sending out medical teams and supplies to other countries to assist them. It is obvious this is being done so we will forget about how they kept the Coronavirus secret until it could not be kept secret anymore since it was spreading throughout the world. Both China and the United States possess leverage against each other. One thing China does have, is a lock on certain items like medicines. The United States supplies much of China’s economy in with aircraft, soybeans, microchips and motor vehicles. Besides medicine being top exports are broadcasting equipment, computers integrated circuits and telephones but there are many other items the Chinese export. What I find interesting is the fact the United States is supplying microchips to China and one of the top exports is computers. The very top import for China is said to be integrated circuits and at the latest check, they imported $207,000,000,000 worth of them in a year. I could be wrong about this, but if China decides to withhold medicines and such from us, it would hurt them in advancing their technology and weapons programs. There are many people in China who like the United States, they have relatives here and know something about us. There are so many other people in China who believe the rhetoric of the Chinese government when they talk about us so they have no love for the United States at all. As the Chinese become more of an open society, which they really haven’t yet, they may regard at least some of the rhetoric from the Chinese government against the United States as being faulty. A sizable amount of people in Iran have come to feel their government is oppressive in the same thing could happen with the Chinese government down the road. China is also a country that supplies what is known as rare earth elements to the United States. Without these elements many of the industries in this country would not be able to run. These elements are used in so many different ways from being used in oil refineries and many other ways. In order to counteract this the United States government has said we are now going to look for rare earth elements in our own country. We have relied on China to supply us with a lot of vital items without regard to what would happen either in war time or if China decided to cut us off from these items. This problem should have been taking care of years ago, but because Chinese labor is so much cheaper than American labor many companies moved into China and let them manufacture their products. This is not a great secret and tariffs should have been put on these items to make them at least the same price or more than if they were manufactured here. This would be an incentive to get the companies to move back here and make our products cost-effective and competitive or better. I don’t understand why we let this happen, unless the Congress was unwilling to put these tariffs on the Chinese for some reason. That reason could have been lobbyists for China spreading money around Washington. In 2010 China and Japan were at loggerheads. China replied by severely limiting the amount of rare earth elements traded to Japan so they have used this club before. If China did not have a communist government with communist ideas, we probably would be great friends with that country. We were very close to China in World War II and may have remained that way. We have a long history with the Chinese people and if it wasn’t for the Chinese and the Irish we would not have had the early railroads since both races were the ones lying the tracks and building them. It is no secret the Chinese have territorial aspirations and have been building their military. While they don’t spend as much as we do on the military, they do get a much bigger bang for their buck. Recently China started acquiring aircraft carriers, better planes and more deadly missiles many of which are said to be ship killers. Their submarine fleet is also growing and they are flexing their muscles in areas in the South China sea and elsewhere. Many countries have asserted a claim to parts of that sea and China has begun to build artificial islands in some of the disputed areas to assert their claims. There is almost no doubt there will be more of these actions in the future. It is very foolish to supply ourselves with essential products from China which can be cut off at any time. It is time to act now.
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