Marble Falls I’ve been to China. Admittedly, my last visit was 20 years ago in Beijing and Shanghai, when we were looking at how the country handled flooding. Earlier I had been in Hong Kong and Macau, largely on plane layovers. I’ve never been to the megacities that have sprung up in recent years or the industrial and manufacturing centers that have driven their economy, so at this point, what do I know, other than the fact that’s China is huge now on the world stage and looking the US eye-to-eye.
I have to also admit that every time I try to get my mind wrapped around this whole China-US thing, a song from the alternative country singer from Minnesota, Greg Browen, pulls out the earworm of his song, “China.” It’s almost doggerel, but the line, China and far away sticks with me, when he sings,
O maybe somewhere down the line O china
China, chi-nay, far away
We’ll get back the same time from china
China, chi-nay, far away
I have a friend and colleague, who boils at the way the New York Times covers China as biased and a tool of US government propaganda, but we all do our best to sort out truth from fiction. Alexandra Stevenson, who handles their China business and economy beat, co-wrote some pieces on rent-to-buy and contract purchases during ACORN’s Home Savers Campaign some years, and is now their China hand, so I read her with interest. She wrote a piece on their economy which seems to be walking the line between throwing some bones to the China hawks out there, maybe among her top brass, while slipping in warnings that the country’s economy is still roaring on its way to record trade surpluses despite Trump’s tariffs, because of the strength of its manufacturing sector.
She walked the aisles at some of their trade emporiums, noting how many have substituted exports to the US elsewhere, particularly other Asian countries. She raises a flag that those countries may in the future throw up barriers to protect their own domestic manufacturing, but it doesn’t alter the fact that this minute, China is managing a workaround in the trade war. She dutifully notes other problems in the Chinese economy with deflation, the property and housing collapses, restiveness on wages, and more, but between those lines, it’s clear that the country is playing hardball and more than holding its own in the middle innings. She notes that China has “let vendors use internet that bypasses China’s Great Firewall so they can hawk their goods on platforms that are banned everywhere else in China, like TikTok and YouTube,” which is a warning to us all.
She paints a very contradictory picture on the other hand, saying,
People are anxious about their incomes and cautious about spending money. Households instead have been saving nearly as much as they did during the pandemic, when people faced indefinite lockdowns with no end in sight. Prices across the economy are also plunging, and there is little prospect that they will turn around. Youth unemployment is high. Urban wages have slowed to a record low, and in some industries, they are shrinking. The cost of land, critical for local government revenues, has tumbled.
Invariably, both the good news and the bad news are likely walking side by side in China far, far away, but the real message on this side of the world is that both the US and China are being hurt by Trump’s trade war. We seem to be playing Russian roulette. Maybe the first bullets won’t kill us, but the longer it lasts, the more likely we’ll all feel too much pain, and as people and bystanders in both countries, we might be willing to take a draw now, while we’re both still standing.