I am stating this because of the beef that South Korea still have with Japan.

And yours to all your comment about Asia's war history. Both the relationship between China, US and EU are tied up at the moment , it cannot be broken easily. The fact that one make a sweeping statement that China is not as important to the United States at this very moment bemused me.

My point is pretty straightforward.

If China and the West were to cut off trade then the West would be inconvenienced but get along just fine. Meanwhile China would immediately collapse and lose decades of progress on standards of living.

The trade off is massively assymetric

This post was edited by NetflixAdaptationWidow on Oct 4 2022 12:32pm

No they won't because the truth is , you cannot cut off trade with the Chinese at the moment, you want to but you can't and that is the reason why we have this thread.

Once you take out Russia, that is the time when you have a chance to tame the Chinese. And you will not be able to replicate the same relationship when it comes to producing goods the same way you can with other parts of the world.
The closest you can replicate this relationship is with India.

You are more tied to us than we are to you.

perhaps its a translation issue but you're clearly missing this simple point.

we are stuck with each other, we want you, you need us.

without you our people will fall on hard times and will have less money. without us millions of your people starve and die.

neither of us will be forced to be self sufficient, but only one of us is capable of it.

It can't happen in a split second obviously but we can replace every thing China makes over a few years. The same can't be said in the reverse direction.

Not in a few years, that is way too early.
The reason why I say it will be almost impossible unless you can replicate that relationship with India.

If you can do it , you would have done it with Africa, Indonesia and Vietnam.

They tried doing it in Indonesia and Vietnam before China. Didn't really work.
They tried it in Japan, it was a great success, but the Japanese economy was creeping too close to the US and the US screwed them over in the mid 80s and their economy haven't really recovered from that.

If you want to decouple from China or control them to your interest, you better hope the West screw Russia over big time in this current war. If you can't split Russia up , you will find it quite a challenge handling China in the near future.

This post was edited by Hamsterbaby on Oct 4 2022 12:45pm

The bold is already happening. China is becoming too expensive and our manufacturing is already moving to the places you listed. We like having China for cheap labor, but we do not need them. There's plenty of cheap labor in the world.

Here is the problem, you cannot control India's workers the way the government in China can control their citizens.
All these countries infrastructure are not up to standard at the moment.

So you have to ask yourself, are you going to spend billions of dollars to help them upgrade their infrastructure and their quality control to your standards ?
And another important issue, these are democratic countries, they have unions.

This post was edited by Hamsterbaby on Oct 4 2022 12:48pm

you're way out of date on automation if you think we need people long term. we're quickly nearing a point that shipping will be too expensive to need Chinese manufacturing.

Automation is up and coming. Andrew Yang already talked about it a few years back in the US. I am not exactly out of date. But to think that the Chinese are going to be there for a long time to just do cheap labor is quite a far stretch.
And if that is the case it would also imply that the US will not need other countries to provide them with Cheap labor in the future.

And when this happens if technology advance to a point where companies start moving their production back to the USA for example. What will happen to your work force?
And if that is imminent , how will your population react?