China or The US , Which Economy is being hurt the most by the Trade War

China's is a manufacturing economy, and a manufacturing economy will ALWAYS beat out a service-based economy like the one we have in the US. It's only a matter of time before China becomes THE dominant economy of the world. China's vast and ever-growing middle-class already puts the U.S. middle-class to shame. Most of the US's middle-class is living paycheck to paycheck while the Chinese middle-class has plenty of money to vacation abroad if they choose to, and some even come to the US to buy houses. I am an American but I have lived in Asia for few years until recently, and I've seen the shift in prosperity the Chinese middle-class has. There simply is no comparison between the Chinese and the Americans. While the "average" American Is struggling and having to downsize ,the "average" Chinese are getting wealthier and wealthier with no end in sight. Economist Jim Rogers is right when he says : The 21st century belongs to China . Welcome to The Atlantis Report. I am not sure that China has even felt the trade war. China has more than a billion people. Or roughly three times the consumer base of the United States. It has an increasingly more equitable wealth distribution average and has quite famously brought as many people as the US has in total, up into the Middle-Income bracket in just 30 odd years. Most of China's Trade is internal. They are buying and selling to themselves. They import what they don't have and what they don't manufacture. They manufacture almost everything. Maybe 12% of Chinese exports go to the United States. So tariffs as a powerful mechanism are inherently doomed to fail. China could simply replace much of that trade by expanding into new developing markets. Doing that would still leave 85% of their economy unfazed. The goal of China is to increase labor participation and worker pay. That is viewed as the most crucial element to National Security. Their ultimate goal is self-sufficiency. China's most significant products are consumer-based. Now contrast that to the U.S. We have deliberately bypassed labor in favor of profits. We imagine ourselves to be self-sufficient but require constant external meddling to achieve that. Our most significant product is debt. The Trade War basically had no real impact of the Chinese middle class . The stock market is down, and somehow the trade war has triggered sales of billions of dollars of bitcoin through Hong Kong. But no impact on the real economy. The reason for this is that China is far less dependent on exports to the United States that most Americans think. When the 2008 financial crisis hit, the export sector got impacted very hard and factories closed down left and right. So for the past decade, the Chinese government has been pushing the economy away from Western exports. Running an economy is hard, and there are a lot of things that the Chinese leadership is worried about, but the trade war is not particularly high on their list of worries. I’m not sure what Trump’s grand strategy is but if his objective was to scream at the Chinese government to get some minor trade concessions, he has made a major miscalculation. The problem is that all of this has shown the US to be very fickle, and it makes no sense for China to make concessions to the United States, only to have Trump tear up the deal a few years down the line and renegotiate. So Trump might have convinced the Chinese government to take a hard line on the theory that the less dependent China is on US markets, the better. China is achieving its socialist utopia through cutthroat capitalism. It's fitting since they kind of invented capitalism and then invented the earliest forms of socialism to manage capitalism. China has the largest market on Earth. China has the most dynamic workforce and a better than average education system that is designed to produce skilled labor. There is an economic flow chart that is circular. Employee-employer-customer-employee-employer-customer and on and on. We've knocked down the employee portion of that little graph. This is self-defeating because the consumer becomes the employee who works for the employer who seeks out the customer. By reducing labor participation, we are reducing the customer base and relative purchasing power. Increasingly in the United States, the customer and employee are actually becoming the product. Facebook sells your attention. All media does to a degree. Banks hold your money, use it to issue loans, which they then bundle and sell. The loan isn't the product, the borrower and the collateral are. They hold client money but then charge fees to access it and honestly charge fees on the transactions you make. Last month a banker told me I was crazy about paying cash for goods and services for the business. I could be getting money back if I used a credit card. Of course, they charged enough to make a profit on that. A profit my vendors pay, just like I do, every time I swipe the card. China doesn't fee its populace into oblivion. At least not yet. They have commoditized labor value and leveraged that for societal momentum, but wages go up in China. That's the real core issue too. In the last 40 years, Chinese wages have only gotten bigger while their options have increased. Meanwhile, American workers have, on average, less money, less social stability, fewer savings. Which country has a population that is more likely to weather the rough patch? Trump's approach to the trade war is just ass-backward. He seems to want to take us back to the 1950s without fully comprehending that today, China is having its 1950's. I'm not sure that the regular Chinese citizen has even felt the trade war. China is just philosophically and ideologically grounded differently than the US. The goal of China is to increase labor participation and worker pay. Now contrast that to the US. We have deliberately bypassed labor in favor of profits. While worker wages in the U.S. being stagnant for 40+ years. China's annual GDP growth still hits 6% whilst the U.S. annual GDP growth stays at less than 3 %. The U.S. represents only 5% of the world market. I think China will do just fine without us as a customer. The tariffs are hurting U.S. consumers, not the Chinese anyway. They will find other markets, and we will be left out in the cold. No one will want a trade partnership with the U.S. We are screwing ourselves and our children. China is a major economic power house and has been trading globally long before America was even discovered. In fact, they wrote the book. They literally have one of the oldest civilizations on this planet. However, I don’t think Trump paid attention in history class. A more rational approach would’ve been if the U.S. continued their commitment to the Paris Agreement. Then they could’ve rallied some allies to confront China with sanctions targeting their carbon emissions. It would’ve made more sense since climate change is a global threat whereas Trump’s approach is not even nationalistic but more about himself trying sell the idea that he’s the tough guy in the room. If only “would’ve” and “could’ve” could make any difference now. But the powerful and the corrupt in the U.S. never cared about the world. So instead of listening to the people, the establishment forced their voters to elect a malignant narcissist as their leader, an ignoramus with delusions that inspire him to use phrases like “beautiful clean coal” in his lexicon. Trump is quite literally fighting against the planet and you’d be hard-pressed to find other world leaders who truly think they can work with him. Widely disliked, he has no true friends or allies to support him. So, to summarise, this trade war is like me joining an amateur chess club after watching a YouTube video and immediately challenging Magnus Carlsen. Then, because my ego is a fragile shell, I go on to insult everyone who advises me that I should first learn the game. Learning is not my thing, so I double down instead.








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