After two trips to China in the last four months, I have been trying to say this everywhere, I know how: friends, they simply do not understand.
Covid had terrible effects on human health and mortality, but also had a terrible effect on our ability to understand China. American and European business executives left China in units at the beginning of the pandemic. Very, very few of them return. They trusted their businesses from China to local managers. While they left, Beijing tok a great leap forward in the advanced manufacture that the world lost. He has created a manufacturing engine like which he can never have a sea of legs in history.
China controls a third of all global manufacturing (compared to 6% in 2000), and if you are talking about cars, robots or phones, what comes out of China today is not only cheaper and faster. It is cheaper, faster, better and smarter, and everything is about to be dramatically supercharged by China’s main haste to put artificial in everything he does.
This engine is the product of decades of mass government investments in education, infrastructure and research, behind the protection walls, in a society where people are ready to work from 9 am to 9 pm, six days a week. While China was building that, the new United States industry was political polarization and their children are addicted to Tiktok and Instagram.
A tsunami or exports
From China’s article on Monday of my colleague of the Drafting Room: Monday:
“Recent data from the Central Bank of China show that state -controlled banks provided $ 1.9 billion to industrial borrowers in the last four years. Apart from cities throughout China, new day and night factories are being built. Katherine Tai, who was a trade representative of the United States of former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.”
That is why President Donald Trump’s strategy is so silly. Instead of putting tariffs around the world, we should seek to align all our industrial allies on a united front to tell China: you can’t do everything for everyone. While China controls a third of global manufacturing production, it represents only 13% of global consumption. That is not sustainable, and it is not only to go crazy to the United States and Europe, but also Brazil, Indonesia, India and others; Even Russia has suddenly reduced automatic imports from China.
Instead of doing our United States strategy against everyone in tariffs, Trump should have turned it into all industrial democracies, led by the United States, against China.
The purpose would effectively negotiate a path to follow that both force China to redirect their energies inward, to invest in its low social security network and a medical care system and stimulate its domestic demand, while inviting China to build new factories, not in Hanoi, Vietnam, but in Hamtramck, Michigan, and transfer their technologies and provide chains to the US Venturations to the joint.
Time is running out
Unfortunately, our president and vice president were so busy flexing their muscles in Greenland, firing our main generals for not being servile enough for the beloved leader and insulting our European allies because they are too much that they affect Wellage Severid The has been done the engine of the Theve.
But this is what United States business leaders really do not understand: Trump and vice president JD Vance have scared China and the European Union for their erratic behavior. When they see a president of the United States, they simply ignore a commercial agreement with Mexico and Canada, the United States-México-Canadá agreement, which he negotiated, they wonder: how do we trust any agreement to reduce with him? This could take China and the EU more together.
I heard my American fellow citizens say: we just have to reach half of the exams and make the Democrats recover the camera, and we will be fine. Sorry, friends, we can’t wait so long. Another 20 months or so of this erratic leadership, and our country will be irremediably broken. We need a handful of Republicans in the camera and the right of the Senate now to cross the hall and stop this devastating economic disaster made by man.
Thomas Friedman is a New York Times columnist.
