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this post was submitted on 14 May 2024
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Decoupling happening.
Only question is whether the west will actually manage to incentivize the creation or movement of means of production to replace this tariffed production from China. Certainly there are forces in India that would like to take on this role though the level of corruption and other endemic issues like lack of reliable utilities in many areas there and incomplete transport networks, etc makes it an uphill climb. With enough free money and subsidies it's possible I suppose given a few years even in the west. In the end succeed or fail this will hurt Chinese exports a bit, hurt US workers who purchase these things and have to pay massively more whether because of tariffs or higher costs from reshored production. At the end of the day this is shooting the foot efforts to mitigate climate change because this will lessen the appeal of moving to green energy, EV's, etc and it's pretty predictable at the end of all these high prices Republicans (bad cop) will come in, declare the whole thing a failure and gut the subsidies leading to shrinkage of the whole industry and its usage in the west to being a kind of luxury thing.
So not only is Biden abetting genocide in Gaza, he's pushing full steam ahead for full-scale eco-cide and the worst climate outcomes. China should really just gut-punch the US already, slap up a total stoppage on things and crash the US economy into the ground. US politicians are already badly hurting the proletariat with these moves and inflation so it would be a matter of getting very bad fast rather than slowly.
They won't, unless they abandon the neoliberal model and allow the rate of profits to substantially decrease
Well there's India and they hate China and would love to help hurt it and have a large population of people living in deep poverty. Of course they probably wouldn't allow the west to exploit them forever, they'd seek to move up the value chain if the west doesn't manage to coup them with compradors but it would at the least buy the west a quarter century of thinking time. There are problems there of course, it's run by extreme religious reactionaries, it doesn't have the proper infrastructure in many places, etc. But I don't ever want to be in a position of underestimating our enemies I suppose. As on the one hand I think it would probably take 10 years for India to get into position to take over a lot of this stuff, on the other it's impossible to tell what they might pull off and my assumptions could be very wrong or outdated.
There's also how they're destroying Europe (and the US too), if you lower the quality of life of an area, hit it with neo-liberal shock therapy, gut social services, hit it with harsh inflation that decreases costs of labor and lowers quality of life and puts pressure on people to keep or get jobs just to stay above water, immiserate the population and make them desperate and if they're quite happy being indoctrinated with liberalism and anti-communism then I see possibilities in the near-term, by 2030. They also have their prison slave population which is near free labor. I fear they are moving for enclosure. Higher prices to deal with the reshoring, more rent-seeking behavior instead of owning things to also deal with consumer inability to afford that. A future where you lose your job and it's not just your apartment but your TV, your computer, your phone, your blender they repossess and that will be life for the lucky ones. Not so lucky ones, exploited under the table labor, servants for the luckier population, uber drivers, grocery pick-up, we see it already. But I hope I'm wrong and if I am indeed I don't see anywhere for them to go though things will get very nasty in the west for workers for some time before we have a chance to make them better I fear.