Tuesday, March 30, 2021
2020 turned out pretty well for China
In short, if you think Donald Trump somehow limited the power of China, you'd be wrong. I'm no Trump fan, but I really thought that if he did anything, at least he addressed the trade imbalance with China.
Except, he didn't. As it turns out...
-- Chinese companies dealt with tariffs by passing the cost on to their American customers. Basically, they ended up being a tax hike that we paid.
-- China was the only major economy that grew in 2020.
-- The driver of that growth was exports, including to the United States.
-- One tiny part of that export growth? Manufacturing Trump flags and MAGA hats, of course. Do Trump fans even bother to read the label? Hessler reports: "After the Capitol was stormed, on January 6th, Jin Gang, in Shaoxing, reported a spike in orders for Trump flags. He sent me pictures on WeChat of the new designs that were being manufactured by the Johnin assembly lines: “Trump 2024: The Revenge Tour,” “Trump 2024: Take America Back,” and “Trump 2024: Save America Again!”
-- What American media do the Communist Chinese allow their citizens access to? Fox News. As Hessler describes it, "In a detail that is unlikely to appear in any of the station’s promotional materials, the Communist Party didn’t bother to block Fox’s Web site, unlike those of CNN, the Times, and other American sources."
-- Hessler teaches English at a Chinese school. One of his anecdotes: "All November, a student in the front row of my journalism class wore a “Trump: Keep America Great” baseball cap. He referred to the President as Chuan Jianguo, an ironic Chinese nickname that pairs the Trump surname with a Communist-era patriotic moniker—essentially, Make-China-Great-Again Trump."
There's more, but maybe I'll just leave it with "Make-China-Great-Again-Trump."
