Naw, not really.
China has issues with human rights, obviously. But in the international economic they're not really "bullying" anyone. They're leveraging their economic power, but no more than other countries have done, or would do in their shoes. If you have the goods, you call the shots.
The most dangerous thing about the populist attitude towards China isn't that they dislike them, it's their arrogance. I prefer a global free market, and the more technology advances, the more that's going to happen. But we still we don't live in a perfect world. So to some extent you still have to see other countries as potential rivals and protect yourself against them.
But the idea that China only beats the US or UK or whoever because they violate IP laws or have import/export restrictions or just sell ****ty stuff is bogus. It's a huge country, of course they have unscrupulous dealers. But even then, largely that's because domestic companies are happy to buy cheap crap and sell it on to consumers who are happy to buy them, either because they don't mind cheap ****, or because they are easily duped. You can perhaps stop China from selling cheap crap on Ali Baba, but some other country will just fill the gap.
The bigger issue though, is that to a large extent China is just beating us fair and square. Can anyone really say that "Made in GB" or "Made in US" is really a mark of quality? There's a problem with our own countries, in our own market places. It's not like our citizens and businesses are inherently ****. We can point to dozens of smaller companies and custom/high-end producers of things that are fantastic. But that's just it-- they are smaller, high end companies. When it comes to larger mass production, our products are ****.
Increasingly, people are buying stuff from Xiaomi, Huawei and others because it's just the better product at the better price point. We're losing on the free market, not because China is cheating. What makes our policies so disastrous is that we fail to recognize both the quality of goods China is producing, and their end game.
Being a third world economy that competes only on price point is a ****ty way to go. You have to manipulate your currency to keep prices low, you have mass amounts of workers to abuse, you burn up all of your environmental and other resources by overproducing to gain short-term profits. It's not sustainable. So China is actually trying pretty hard to NOT be the China everyone stereotypes them as. They want to go after Apple and do the same thing that Korea did with Samsung and that Japan has done with their cars. They're trying to reduce their ****ty factories and farm that out to other Asian countries, so that those countries can kill themselves producing $10 motherboards that China turns arounds, slaps into some device, and remarkets for hundreds of dollars.
Trump is trying to race China to the bottom. It's a race they are happy to let us win. It's like "We'll show you China. We'll pay billions to get our own Foxconn factory so Terry Gou can screw us over like the ****head he is, and all our workers can work crazy hours and kill themselves." Why would we want to be the ****ty economy that China WAS, instead of racing them to be the good economy China wants to be? And the stupidest part of it all is that we are still winning the race we should be running. We're kind of screwing it up rapidly, but we still haven't thrown away our advantage totally. Until Trump came along with his stupid policies. Now I think we have lost the race.
[atishoo - cough]
