China is losing the tariffs war and retreating as fast as it can

[Callen]

The key is understanding what KIND of goods America gets from China. China sells nothing that can't easily be sourced from other countries. The effect is twofold, the immediate loss of capital influx, as well as the long term loss of market share. The point being that the Americans won't have to "outlast" anything, we sill simply shop elsewhere. China can't "outlast" a market shift, as once sourcing changes, it will never come back.

Most of what is made in China and shipped to the US is not currently made elsewhere in the quantities Americans want. That's a fact. Some American companies like Mattel, Nike, Black and Decker and Apple are moving out of China to other cheap countries but that doesn't happen overnight, it takes years. Small business after small business say they can find new supply chains.

 

[Uncensored2008]

Most of what is made in China and shipped to the US is not currently made elsewhere in the quantities Americans want.

Such as?

Electronics are exempt from tariffs, so we are talking mostly plastics and steel.

That's a fact. Some American companies like Mattel, Nike, Black and Decker and Apple are moving out of China to other cheap countries but that doesn't happen overnight, it takes years.

It's been going on for years. Apple is exempt and the American shoemakers like New Balance and Sketchers can easily fill whatever void is left when Nike loses their slaves.

Small business after small business say they can find new supply chains.

This will impact large corporations mostly.

 

[Tangmo]

I'm not arguing who has more to lose. I'm simply saying that Xi's control over his citizenry is such that the people of China can outlast the less stoic citizens of America. The Chinese will have no choice but to put up with the hardship, Americans won't put up with it.

800 million urban Chinese are middle class comfortable, smug and soft. They confidently expected smooth progress and stability in their lives that they're not getting any more.

Factories are closing and young workers thrown out of jobs are going back to the farms to slop pigs just as before. Beijing has stopped publishing the unemployment rate among young people because it's exceeded 20%. The young can't pay to support the old any more either. The birth rate is 1.6 when 2.3 is needed which has China's young and old alike calling the present population "the last generation."

Deflation which no one posting here acknowledges because it doesn't fit their wistful paradigm of China being perfect is strangling the economy.

CCP Boiz in Beijing are not enforcing their 125% tariffs on US imports because the Chinese aren't buying at the pretariff prices. Household consumption is 40% of GDP which is pathetic and takes 'em nowhere which is where the Chinese are right now. Xi has bitter enemies in the PLA and their knives are out. The PLA will not fire on its people as it did at Tiananmen Square in 1989 which was a different time -- the people know this.

A billion Chinese don't buy suffering any more either. Yet conventional wisdom of casual observers abroad doesn't get this new aspect of life in what was supposed to be the prosperous and rising China that never was.

 

[Uncensored2008]

800 million urban Chinese are middle class comfortable, smug and soft. They confidently expected smooth progress and stability in their lives that they're not getting any more.

The utter fiction of a Chinese middle class always amazes me. The poverty line in the USA is $32,150 - so what is the average per Capita in China? It is 13,300 U.S. dollars in 2025 - less than half of what constitutes poverty.

China: GDP per capita 1985-2030| Statista

Per capita GDP in China was estimated at around 12,600 U.S. dollars in 2023, slightly below the average level in East Asia and Pacific.

www.statista.com

Factories are closing and young workers thrown out of jobs are going back to the farms to slop pigs just as before. Beijing has stopped publishing the unemployment rate among young people because it's exceeded 20%. The young can't pay to support the old any more either. The birth rate is 1.6 when 2.3 is needed which has China's young and old alike calling the present population "the last generation."

Deflation which no one posting here acknowledges because it doesn't fit their wistful paradigm of China being perfect is strangling the economy.

CCP Boiz in Beijing are not enforcing their 125% tariffs on US imports because the Chinese aren't buying at the pretariff prices. Household consumption is 40% of GDP which is pathetic and takes 'em nowhere which is where the Chinese are right now. Xi has bitter enemies in the PLA and their knives are out. The PLA will not fire on its people as it did at Tiananmen Square in 1989 which was a different time -- the people know this.

A billion Chinese don't buy suffering any more either. Yet conventional wisdom of casual observers abroad doesn't get this new aspect of life in what was supposed to be the prosperous and rising China that never was.

I generally agree with your statement, but reiterate that the vast majority of Chinese live in crushing poverty. There is no middle class, thriving or otherwise. There are the obscenely rich, the Apparatchik caste of government workers, the industrial poor - the laborers who are too often literal slaves, and the peasants.

 

[Tangmo]

The utter fiction of a Chinese middle class always amazes me. The poverty line in the USA is $32,150 - so what is the average per Capita in China? It is 13,300 U.S. dollars in 2025 - less than half of what constitutes poverty.

View attachment 67568621
I generally agree with your statement, but reiterate that the vast majority of Chinese live in crushing poverty. There is no middle class, thriving or otherwise. There are the obscenely rich, the Apparatchik caste of government workers, the industrial poor - the laborers who are too often literal slaves, and the peasants.

Your points are well taken that everyday life in the CCP is overblown as some sort of full on middle class society. The fact is that among other deleterious factors, the CCP-PRC economy has spent the past several years in the Middle Income Trap. There's no getting out of the middle income trap either. Indeed, the standard of living and quality of life that anyway was considerably less than in the West is falling rather than rising or remaining steady.

And now deflation is strangling the economy while Xi and his apparatchiks are unable to cajole, prompt, push or motivate the mass of its middle income population to spend. Xi has had to lift his 125% tariffs on US goods which the Chinese weren't buying anyway because they won't spend. Had Xi left the 125% tariff in effect the Chinese people who have lost confidence in him would have dismissed him outright as any kind of effective or competent leader. So the Chinese population is seeing Xi mimic Trump erratically in announcing tariffs then calling 'em off while pretending he's in control.

I lived in China 10 years until 2022 and I did see a middle class in the urban and metro centers up and down the seacoast, from Dalian and ShangHai to GuangZhou, ShenZhen and Hong Kong and in between. The CCP mercantile export economy has required a generation of young Chinese to copy and adapt western designs for products, operate and run the factories, run the marketing and shipping and receiving, to secure the resources needed to build or renovate factory buildings and products and so on. Construction jobs were everywhere yet there were never enough workers. When I taught at a university near HKG one of the classes I had were majors in Economics and Trade who knew their English well because their waiting jobs required it.

These neoYuppies live in a good apartment, drive their very expensive Toyota or BMW or Lincoln from the USA. They go to pop music concerts, restaurants, clubs and to see American movies at the cinema that they follow along exactly with their English. Yet solely and singularly, and because of Trump's tariffs during his training wheels presidency and now with gusto, that time in China is over.

The whole of it is history already. Since the doctrinaire Maoist Xi who has put the Party and its apparatcks in control of everything GDP has declined without relief, from just under 10% when Xi came to power in 2013, to maybe 3% this year before the tariffs and 1% with 'em. There's no going back either. The CCP maze of an export economy is done. Chinese people know the CCP economy is done and that the CCP has no answers of what could come next after it. Hence nobody is spending and deflation rules.

 

[tharock220]

This retreat was expected. Lan Fo'an tried to recruit Japan, Australia, Canada(the US's redheaded stepchild), and other countries to side with them against US trade policy. He received an unequivocal no. So here they are now, asking us to talk.

 

[Callen]

This retreat was expected. Lan Fo'an tried to recruit Japan, Australia, Canada(the US's redheaded stepchild), and other countries to side with them against US trade policy. He received an unequivocal no. So here they are now, asking us to talk.

Got anything to support that claim? If not then we can consider it wishful thinking at best.

 

[Pound4abrown]

That's right, the same ****ing idiot who filed for bankruptcy 5 or 6 times.

The same clown who thought bleach would get rid of covid.

View attachment 67568271

to be fair, it would. It would just also get rid of the host body too.