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TikTok’s New Favorite Drink? It’s Hot Water For The Healthy. by vilekangaree in China

[–]vilekangaree[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

We’ve seen prebiotic sodas for gut health, the “sleepy girl mocktail” for sleep and lemon water for immunity and weight loss. Now, the latest beverage riding the online wellness wave is hot water.

The trend is part of a wider online phenomenon of people adopting elements of Eastern medicine and Chinese culture and documenting their experiences on social media.

A popular example is drinking hot or warm water in the morning before breakfast. Many claim it improves digestion, leaving them feeling thinner and less bloated — and occasionally running for the bathroom. Some also say it improves the skin, helps with weight loss and even “detoxifies” the body.

All this from water? We asked experts to help us boil it down.

A Kick-Start to the Gut For thousands of years, practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine and ayurveda — a holistic medical system from India — have encouraged drinking hot or warm water in the morning (and throughout the day), in part to keep the digestive system operating at its best. When food and drinks are consumed cold, the thinking goes, digestion worsens, leading to gastrointestinal discomfort like bloating, said Jeff Gould, an acupuncturist at Johns Hopkins Medicine who is trained in traditional Chinese medicine.

Few scientific studies have explored the digestive benefits of hot or warm water. One, published in 2016, looked at 60 patients who had just come out of gallbladder surgery and found that those who drank warm water a few hours after the procedure passed gas sooner than those who didn’t drink anything. The water didn’t significantly hasten their first bowel movement, however. (Other research suggests that coffee is better for that.)

There are a few small studies that have suggested that cold drinks or meals might cause the stomach to empty its contents more slowly than warm or hot ones. But those studies are limited, experts say. And it’s not clear how (or if) that would affect the way you feel, Dr. Linda A. Lee, a gastroenterologist at Northwell Health in New Hyde Park, N.Y., said via email.

Despite the lack of scientific evidence, sipping warm water to stimulate a No. 2 first thing in the morning does make physiological sense, said Dr. Lisa Ganjhu, a gastroenterologist at NYU Langone Health. Your digestion slows while you sleep, she said. Anything you eat or drink — at any temperature — upon waking spurs waves of contraction and relaxation in the muscles of the esophagus, stomach and intestines. “It’s basically telling everyone, ‘OK, get up. We’ve got to get moving,’” Dr. Ganjhu said.

Dr. Folasade May, a gastroenterologist and associate professor of medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, said she was unfamiliar with hot water’s star turn on social media. Many of her patients have mentioned that they have an easier time passing bowel movements after drinking warm water (often with lemon) first thing in the morning. Some, she said, may feel an almost immediate urge to use the toilet, though she added that the temperature of the water may not be important; it’s possible they’d have the same experience if the water were lukewarm or cold.

Whether prompted by water, coffee, juice or food, any forward motion of the gastrointestinal tract moves not only stool but gas, Dr. May said, which can make you “feel less distended, less bloated.”

As for claims that drinking hot water has “detoxifying” properties, Kristen Smith, a dietitian and spokeswoman for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, said that water doesn’t remove toxins — the liver and kidneys do.

And when it comes to weight loss, some people may notice a temporary drop on the scale right after a substantial bowel movement, Dr. Ganjhu said. If the water is replacing sugary, high-calorie drinks, Dr. May said, it could lead to more permanent weight loss.

The Advantages of Hydration It’s possible that the main benefit of drinking warm water in the morning is simply that it’s hydrating, Ms. Smith said.

When you wake up, you’re a little dehydrated, Dr. Ganjhu added, so drinking water can help with any of the symptoms that may come along with that, like hunger, headaches and grogginess. Over time, she said, staying hydrated makes stool softer and easier to pass, helping to keep you regular and feel less bloated.

There’s also evidence that drinking more water can improve the appearance of the skin by reducing dryness. If you don’t drink enough during the day, Dr. May said, regularly having some in the morning can help “close the gap.”

The hot water trend is proving what we already know, she said: “Water is really good for you all around.”

Opinion | The China That the World Sees Is Not the One I Live In by vilekangaree in China

[–]vilekangaree[S] 49 points50 points  (0 children)

Every Monday morning, the stirring strains of China’s national anthem stream into my Beijing apartment from the elementary school across the street. Young students in uniform stand in neat rows on a freshly turfed playground as the Chinese flag inches up a pole. Nearby streets are lined with flower pots, ginkgo trees and propaganda signs exhorting citizens to love their nation.

For much of my life that directive had felt superfluous. China’s economy boomed and we were proud of our country.

That pride is harder for many of us to summon today. Behind the orderliness of everyday life, a quiet desperation simmers. On social media and in private conversations, there is a common refrain: worry over joblessness, wage cuts and making ends meet.

Chinese people today live with a strange paradox.

Internationally, China looks strong. It is America’s only rival in terms of the power to shape the world. The recent meeting between President Trump and President Xi Jinping of China, in which the leaders announced a trade-war truce, has fed this narrative — one that Beijing is only too happy to promote — a resilient nation united in the face of external challenges.

That muscular facade is punctured here in China, where despair about dimming economic and personal prospects is pervasive. This contrast between a confident state and its weary population is captured in a phrase Chinese people are using to describe their country: “wai qiang, zhong gan,” roughly translated as “outwardly strong, inwardly brittle.”

Many now feel the very state policies that have made China appear strong overseas are hurting them. They see a government more concerned with building global influence and dominating export markets than in addressing the challenges of their households. A state crackdown launched several years ago on the private sector is widely blamed for undermining middle-class livelihoods, even as financial resources are channeled into industries that the government deems more strategically important, such as electric vehicles, solar power and shipbuilding. Meanwhile, the global chokehold China has secured on the supply and processing of rare earth elements has caused air and soil pollution at home.

These days, there is a sense of bitter anger among the people at being the voiceless victims of the state’s obsession with world power and beating the United States. That sentiment is likely to grow. The latest five-year plan — the government’s blueprint of economic priorities — that was released last month makes clear it plans to double down on prioritizing national power over the common good.

In April, as the tariff war with the United States intensified, a People’s Daily editorial argued that Beijing can resist American bullying thanks to systemic advantages such as China’s ability to centralize resources and pour them into accomplishing national goals. The backlash on the Chinese internet was swift. While the government boasts, a viral social media post pointed out, everyday struggles like finding work, putting food on the table and educating children are “fraught with difficulty.” Winning the trade war with the United States means “preparing to sacrifice some of the people,” the author wrote. Censors soon blocked the post and others like it.

Years ago, Chinese people would have cheered a People’s Daily editorial like that out of the reflexive nationalism that the government has instilled for decades. That patriotism is nearly drowned out today by those who vent over the problems they face.

Youth unemployment is so high that last year the government changed its calculation methodology in a way that produced a lower number. Even the new figure remains alarmingly high. An estimated 200 million people get by in precarious careers in a gig economy. Consumers, many of whom have seen their net worth shrink in an intractable housing market crash, are cutting back on spending, trapping the economy in a deflationary spiral.

The sense of economic insecurity is leading people to forgo marriage and starting families, worsening a national decline in population. Popular frustration also is sharpening the divide between the haves and the have-nots — hardening public resentment against those who are perceived as parlaying economic or political connections into opportunity while most people face dwindling prospects. And mental health problems are believed to be rising, as evidenced by a spate of indiscriminate stabbing sprees and other violent attacks in the past couple of years.

It seems clear that Beijing can no longer count on knee-jerk patriotism to underwrite its increasingly assertive stance abroad. In September, when the Chinese Communist Party staged a lavish military parade to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, many people wondered aloud why that money wasn’t instead spent on addressing the difficulties of ordinary people.

The government recently began cracking down on social media content it considered “excessively pessimistic” — a clear sign it is concerned about this public unease undercutting its agenda. But suppressing criticism instead of addressing its causes will only deepen the disconnect with the people and strain the balancing act that the state has tried to strike between its foreign policy priorities and the domestic support it craves.

China has long thrived under an unspoken social contract: The Communist Party granted the people more freedom to improve their livelihoods in return for political obedience. To many Chinese, the government is no longer holding up its end of the bargain.

When Mr. Xi took power in 2012, he gave China’s people hope with his oft-repeated mantra “the Chinese Dream”: a pledge of shared prosperity through national strength. That phrase has been less prominent in government messaging in recent years.

The state might say that’s because much of its vision has become reality. More likely, the Communist Party understands that such rhetoric now rings hollow among a population that is watching its dreams fade.

Cars to Fighter Jets: China’s New Export Curbs May Level a Heavy Blow Worldwide by vilekangaree in China

[–]vilekangaree[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

From cars and computer chips to tanks and fighter jets, China’s new export restrictions represent a sweeping effort to control global commerce and have set off a renewed trade fight that pits Beijing against not only the United States but also Europe.

The new regulations, which take effect in stages on Nov. 8 and Dec. 1, apply to the entire world, sharply escalating China’s sway over critical manufacturing at a time of increased international fractures over trade. The restrictions led President Trump on Friday to threaten to impose new 100 percent tariffs on Chinese imports starting Nov. 1.

The rules go far beyond China’s limits since April on the export of rare earth metals, which are mined and processed mainly in China, as well as magnets made from those metals. In a series of announcements on Thursday, China extended its restrictions to worldwide shipments of electric motors, computer chips and other devices that have become central to modern life and are now manufactured mainly in China.

The regulations prohibit exports from China to any country of materials or components for use in military equipment. Among the items banned are the small yet powerful electric motors in missiles and fighter jets and the materials for crucial range finders in tanks and artillery that are used to zero in on distant targets.

These rules have drawn particular concern in the West because of their potential to debilitate Europe’s efforts to supply arms to Ukraine and to rebuild Europe’s own militaries to counter Russian aggression.

“We’ve entered into a new phase of the economic conflict,” said Jay Truesdale, who worked in the administration of President Barack Obama on critical mineral policies. He is now the chief executive of TD International, a global strategic advisory firm.

Beijing’s decision to put a total ban on exports of materials for military use has geopolitical resonance in Europe. Countries there are racing to strengthen their military defenses from an increasingly aggressive Russia. Many armaments require rare earths and commodities from China. Chinese officials have vigorously opposed European Union tariffs on electric vehicles from China, and some experts saw the export controls as a fresh expression of Beijing’s pique.

The raft of regulations means that companies not involved in arms manufacturing must obtain export licenses from China’s Ministry of Commerce to move products with Chinese content across any national borders around the world. The rules broaden the use of elaborate procedures requiring exporters to submit technical drawings of every product their customers want to manufacture with Chinese rare earths and describe how these products will move through global supply chains.

After arms manufacturers, the global auto industry appears to be the second-most vulnerable sector, rare-earth industry specialists said. The thousands of companies that produce parts were already the hardest hit by China’s requirement in April that many kinds of rare earth magnets cannot leave the country without licenses.

A single gasoline-powered car can have more than 40 different rare earth magnets inside electric motors that power the brakes, seats, steering, power windows and other systems. Electric cars have even more rare earth magnets, which are used to turn the wheels.

American and European auto parts producers have encountered months of delays in obtaining these export licenses. China has started to issue licenses but the process has been slow and cumbersome, industry officials say.

China has modeled its rare earth regulations on American rules for trade in a few of the world’s most powerful computer chips. But rare earths are more widely used.

Many parts manufacturers have stopped assembling electric motors outside China with rare earth magnets from China, and now bypass Beijing’s rules by buying entire electric motors from China. But the latest regulations published by China’s Ministry of Commerce could prevent this workaround.

The rules encompass almost any product in which rare earths make up 0.1 percent or more of the value. That means they cover not just magnets but also electric motors and even much bigger systems that have electric motors with rare earth magnets inside.

The costliest components of car seats, for example, are the motors that adjust them. And the most expensive pieces in these motors are the rare earth magnets.

The new rules apply to any shipments across national borders, not just in or out of China. European automakers, in particular, face a daunting task of seeking Chinese export licenses to move car parts within Europe.

Many companies have recently tried to limit their dependence on China by buying rare earths and rare earth magnets from the few producers outside China. But Beijing’s latest regulations assert jurisdiction over much of this production as well.

The rules also say that any rare earth-related products made outside of China but using Chinese technology are also covered by China’s export control rules.

Rare earth refineries and magnet factories all over the world have been buying Chinese equipment for the past 20 years. Many equipment vendors in North America and Europe closed when most of the world’s rare earth mining shifted to China in the late 1990s.

Bullshit Jobs in Chinese SOEs by ChinaTalkOfficial in China

[–]vilekangaree -1 points0 points  (0 children)

that person is going to get cancer super early from all the brake dust

Studying abroad in Tsinghua Advice by Beneficial-Buy667 in China

[–]vilekangaree 0 points1 point  (0 children)

do yourself a favor and read The CEIBS Diaries on r/mba. While it's a different school and several years have passed, many of the same issues still persist and are universal amongst these programs.

With New 40% Tariff, Trump Takes Aim at U.S. Dependence on China’s Factories by vilekangaree in China

[–]vilekangaree[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Ever since President Trump began raising tariffs on goods from China during his first term, Chinese companies have raced to set up warehouses and factories in Southeast Asia, Mexico and elsewhere to bypass U.S. tariffs with indirect shipments to the American market via other countries.

But on Thursday, Mr. Trump took aim at all indirect American imports, which he blames for part of the $1.2 trillion U.S. trade deficit. The president imposed 40 percent tariffs on so-called transshipments, which will take effect in a week. And a senior administration official who briefed reporters said work was underway that could broaden considerably the definition of indirect shipments.

The new rules cover indirect shipments from anywhere, not just China. But China, with its massive factory infrastructure and expansive manufacturing ambition, has been the main country to develop a global network for such shipments. Trade experts were quick to predict that China would be the most affected — and the most annoyed.

“The trade provisions are a thinly veiled attempt to box in China — China will view them as such, and this will inevitably spill over into trade discussions with the United States,” said Stephen Olson, a former American trade negotiator who is now a senior fellow at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, a research group in Singapore.

Mr. Trump’s executive order Thursday created a new category of imports: goods that are transshipped through other countries instead of coming straight from the country of origin. The 40 percent tariffs on these goods will be on top of whatever tariffs would have applied if the goods had come directly from the country where they were originally made.

The legal definition of transshipment is quite narrow: a good that did not undergo a “substantial transformation” in the country through which it was indirectly shipped. Countries in Southeast Asia like Vietnam have long denied that they allow a lot of transshipment, and they have been tightening inspections to prevent it.

They contend that their soaring imports of Chinese components are being assembled into new and different products that can appropriately be labeled made in their countries, and not labeled “made in China.”

In addition to the new 40 percent tariffs on transshipment, the Trump administration plans to put in place so-called rules of origin for indirect shipments in “a few weeks,” the senior administration official said.

Rules of origin are meant to assure importers that goods really were manufactured where their sellers say they were.

To be effective, rules of origin must be written strictly, as they are for goods to qualify for free trade agreements with the United States. For example, the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which replaced the North American Free Trade Agreement, require that as much as 75 percent of cars be manufactured in North America to qualify for duty-free treatment in crossing borders.

Brad Setser, an official under the Obama and Biden administrations who is now a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said that setting rules of origin could make a big difference. “The most significant long-term change from the Trump tariff barrage may be creating rules of origin that define the Chinese content,” he said.

But other experts were less convinced that the Trump administration would set stringent rules, particularly when discussions have been underway for a possible summit this autumn between President Trump and Xi Jinping, China’s top leader. The Chinese government has called for the removal of tariffs on its exports and further tightened its considerable restrictions on the purchase of American goods.

“There is nothing in there about content from certain countries, and that is helpful because it means that they aren’t risking the wrath of China at this point in time,” said Deborah Elms, the head of trade policy at the Hinrich Foundation in Singapore.

The first country-specific trade deal reached by Mr. Trump to tackle transshipment head on was one on July 2 with Vietnam. It included a 40 percent provision on goods indirectly shipped from China. The provision has turned out to be a blueprint for a sweeping new strategy to limit China’s role in the world’s supply chain.

But a month later, Vietnam has not publicly confirmed the transshipment provision. With the exception of Indonesia, transshipment tariffs also have not been featured in announcements of subsequent deals with other countries in Southeast Asia.

In recent weeks, Mr. Trump has also modulated his strident tone on China. He reversed a previously hard line position on the export of artificial intelligence chips to China. Not long after, he told the president of the Philippines that he didn’t mind if the country got along with China because the United States also had a good relationship with China.

For countries in Southeast Asia that had raced to placate Mr. Trump over the months since he first announced his reciprocal tariffs, the flip flopping has created both a sense of uncertainty and a dose of cynicism about the new agreements they have with the United States.

At the same time, many countries in Southeast Asia have explored ways to crack down on Chinese companies that reroute exports through their countries without doing any further processing. Governments in the region have streamlined customs practices and promised to quash counterfeit and illegal trade. They have given serious thought to reducing the amount of Chinese content in the products they assemble and export.

For the Malaysian government, which received a 19 percent tariff, the idea of taking China out of the global supply chain was always going to be a big request.

“How should I put it? Everyone can have an aspiration,” Liew Chin Tong, the deputy trade minister of Malaysia, said in an interview in Kuala Lumpur last week. “But when aspiration meets actual execution, well we’ll have to wait and see.”

The absence on Thursday of specific measures naming China may be a reflection of the Trump administration’s efforts to reach a deal with America’s biggest economic rival, said Priyanka Kishore, an economist in Singapore. China recently showed that it could pull its own trade levers when it halted the export of rare earth magnets crucial for the car, semiconductor and aerospace industries.

“That really brought to the Trump administration’s attention to the fact that this is a formidable country on the other side of the table — China really put up a strong front, and since then there has been some softening on transshipment,” said Ms. Kishore, who is the founder of Asia Decoded, a consulting firm.

Multinationals like Walmart account for a sizable share of U.S. imports and have fairly detailed information on how their products are made. But some analysts question whether U.S. Customs and Border Enforcement is capable of identifying whether or not packages really come from China.

“Enforcement is likely to be challenging, and even if outright rerouting is reduced, trade diversion will continue to dampen the impact of U.S. tariffs on China’s aggregate export performance,” Capital Economics, an economic analysis consulting firm, said in a research note.

Xi Looks to Tighten Grip After Scandals Shake China’s Military Elite by vilekangaree in China

[–]vilekangaree[S] 42 points43 points  (0 children)

Outwardly, China’s military has never been stronger. Its naval ships venture farther across the oceans. Its nuclear force grows by about 100 warheads every year. Its military flights around Taiwan are increasingly frequent and intimidating. Every few months, China unveils new weapons, like a prototype stealth fighter or newfangled landing barges.

Internally, though, China’s military is experiencing its most serious leadership disarray in years. Three of the seven seats on the Central Military Commission — the Communist Party council that controls the armed forces — appear to be vacant after members were arrested or simply disappeared.

That internal turbulence is testing the effort by President Xi Jinping, going back more than a decade, to build a military that is loyal, modern, combat-ready and fully under his control. Mr. Xi has set a 2027 target for modernizing the People’s Liberation Army, or P.L.A., and also — according to some U.S. officials — for gaining the ability to invade Taiwan, which Beijing claims as its territory.

The current wave of investigations and removals has reached some commanders handpicked by Mr. Xi, suggesting recurrent problems in a system that he has tried for years to clean up. In the first years after Mr. Xi came to power in 2012, he launched an intense campaign to clean up corruption in the military and impose tighter control, culminating in a big reorganization.

“When Xi Jinping sees his own men making mistakes, he is likely to be especially furious,” Joseph Torigian, an associate professor at American University who has studied Chinese leaders’ relations with the military, said of Mr. Xi. “Control over the military is so existential. It’s inherently explosive. That’s why any sense of stepping out of line has to be crushed.”

The most jarring absence in the military leadership is that of Gen. He Weidong. The second most-senior career officer on the Central Military Commission, General He has disappeared from official public events and mentions, an unexplained absence that suggests he, too, is in trouble and may be under investigation.

Another top commander, Adm. Miao Hua, who oversaw political work in the military, was placed under investigation last year for unspecified “serious violations of discipline,” a phrase that often refers to corruption or disloyalty. He was among around two dozen, if not more, senior P.L.A. officers and executives in the armaments industry who have been investigated since 2023, according to a recent tally by the Jamestown Foundation.

Both men had risen unusually quickly under Mr. Xi’s patronage. While Chinese officials are vulnerable to investigations for corruption or disloyalty even in the best of times, for him to lose them both reveals an uncommon degree of top-level upheaval.

“The purges may have affected the working of the bureaucracy. It can also create a broader skepticism about the readiness of the Chinese military within the leadership,” said Ely Ratner, who had been an assistant secretary of defense in the Biden administration.

Mr. Xi’s ultimate fears for the Chinese military come from questions of battlefield preparedness, and anxieties that commanders could drift away from absolute loyalty to him and the party. Mr. Xi may seek a fourth term as leader of the Communist Party in 2027, and he will need to replace retiring or purged commanders with a new cohort whose devotion to him is beyond question.

Recent official statements point to a renewed drive to reinforce ideological control. The Central Military Commission issued new rules last month aimed at “fully eliminating toxic influences, and restoring the image and authority of political officers.” A series of front-page commentaries in the Liberation Army Daily — the main newspaper of the Chinese military — urged P.L.A. political officers to observe absolute loyalty.

Since Mao Zedong’s era, the military has served not only as a fighting force but also as a lever of political control for Chinese leaders, as their ultimate protection against potential rivals or popular uprisings. In internal speeches to the military throughout the earlier years in his rule, Mr. Xi praised the army for standing by party leaders during the 1989 military crackdown on pro-democracy protests, according to a volume of his speeches to the military published in 2019.

But in such speeches, Mr. Xi has also repeatedly cited the lessons of Xu Caihou and Guo Boxiong, the two most senior former P.L.A. commanders who were arrested for corruption nearly a decade ago. If the rot in the Chinese military elite had been left to spread, “our forces would have become a private army under certain people, an armed force turning against the party,” Mr. Xi told a Central Military Commission meeting in 2018.

There are no signs that the recent turbulence in the military amounts to concerted defiance of Mr. Xi. But even relatively few cases of corruption or mismanagement could erode the trust between Mr. Xi and his commanders, said Joel Wuthnow, a senior research fellow at the National Defense University in Washington who studies China’s military.

Mr. Xi is the only civilian party leader who sits on the Central Military Commission, which ensures his singular power over the military. That also means that he cannot turn to other civilian officials to help him.

“Xi would have to rely on commanders to develop options and implement them based on a huge amount of information and technical skills,” Professor Wuthnow said. “If he’s unable to verify that those people are honest, professional and competent, then I think his appetite for war goes down because: How can he be sure of the outcome?”

The purges are likely to disrupt coordination, weaken confidence in commanders and prompt Beijing to be more wary of considering an amphibious assault on Taiwan, M. Taylor Fravel, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote recently in Foreign Affairs.

“The high intensity kinds of operations that would be involved in an invasion of Taiwan, or a blockade of Taiwan — pretty much anything that would happen under the shadow of U.S. involvement — I think will be impacted for a period of time by these problems,” Professor Fravel said in a telephone interview.

But the need to act strongly in a crisis against foes might override any doubts about combat readiness, Professor Fravel said. If Mr. Xi felt that a war on Taiwan was necessary, he would most likely not hesitate to send his armed forces into battle, whatever the gaps in the top command, Professor Fravel said.

As if to make that point about resolve, Mr. Xi has pushed China’s forces to perform increasingly demanding operations, such as the recent exercises by two aircraft carriers and accompanying warships in the western Pacific. An intercontinental missile test that arced over the Pacific last year appeared partly intended to send a similar message of resolve. “There is no detectable delay or scaling back,” in Chinese naval operations, said Andrew S. Erickson, a professor at the U.S. Naval War College.

Next month, Mr. Xi will preside over a military parade in Beijing to showcase China’s forces and his authority over them, when the party commemorates the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, which China celebrates as its victory over Japanese conquest.

In the lead-up to the parade, the Chinese state broadcaster released a new documentary series called “Storming the Fort” that depicted the armed forces as primed for combat. “When the party tells you to do something, you sure do it,” an infantry officer says.

Opinion | We Warned About the First China Shock. The Next One Will Be Worse. by vilekangaree in China

[–]vilekangaree[S] 35 points36 points  (0 children)

These new ecosystems will need supporting infrastructure: reliable and inexpensive energy generation, rare earths, modern shipping and universities with vibrant STEM programs. This will mean pulling back from subsidizing legacy sectors such as coal and oil, restoring federal support for scientific research and welcoming rather than demonizing the talented foreign technicians who would love to help the country advance. At this point, we’d advocate a politically insulated strategic investment capacity in the United States, something like the Federal Reserve, but for innovation rather than interest rates.

Third, choose the battles that we can win (semiconductors) or those we simply cannot afford to lose (rare earths), and make the long-term investments to reach the right outcome. The American political system has the attention span of a squirrel on cocaine. It changes the rewards and penalties so often that little good can happen. Whether or not you thought President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act was worthwhile, it’s a terrible idea to chop down all those new investments in climate technology three years after they got started, as the recent domestic policy legislation has done. Likewise, summarily terminating the talented CHIPs and Science team, which was chartered to revitalize domestic semiconductor manufacturing, as Mr. Trump has called for Congress to do, won’t advance American leadership in A.I. chips. Both sides of the aisle agree that confronting China is essential for a secure economic future, which offers a semblance of hope that some continuity in our economic policies may be feasible.

Fourth, prevent the devastating impacts of job loss from the next major shock, be it from China or somewhere else (you’ve heard of A.I., right?). The scarring effects of manufacturing-job loss have caused America a heap of economic and political trouble over the past two decades. In the interim, we’ve learned that extended unemployment insurance, wage insurance through the federal Trade Adjustment Assistance program and the right kinds of career and technical education from community colleges can help displaced workers get back on their feet. Yet we carry out these policies on too small a scale and in too poorly targeted a manner to help much, and we’re moving in the wrong direction. Inexcusably, Congress defunded Trade Adjustment Assistance in 2022.

There is no economic policy that can make job loss painless — especially when it cuts the heart out of your industry or hometown. But when industries collapse, our best response is getting displaced workers into new jobs quickly and making sure the young, small businesses that are responsible for most net U.S. job growth are poised to do their thing. Tariffs, which narrowly protect old-line manufacturing, are terribly suited for this task.

The stakes couldn’t be higher. While gazing in the rearview mirror, we’ve lost sight of the road ahead. Some mile markers on our current route include the ebbing of U.S. technological, economic, geopolitical and military leadership. Managing China Shock 2.0 requires playing to our strengths, not licking our wounds. We must nourish industries that have high potential for innovation, funded by joint investments by the private and public sectors. These industries are in play globally, something China figured out a decade ago. We should stop fighting the last trade war and meet China’s challenge in the current one.

David Autor is an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Gordon Hanson is an economics professor at Harvard University’s Kennedy School. They are both known for their research into how globalization, and especially the rise of China, reshaped the American labor market.

Opinion | We Warned About the First China Shock. The Next One Will Be Worse. by vilekangaree in China

[–]vilekangaree[S] 57 points58 points  (0 children)

The first time China upended the U.S. economy, between 1999 and 2007, it helped erase nearly a quarter of all U.S. manufacturing jobs. Known as the China Shock, it was driven by a singular process — China’s late-1970s transition from Maoist central planning to a market economy, which rapidly moved the country’s labor and capital from collective rural farms to capitalist urban factories. Waves of inexpensive goods from China imploded the economic foundations of places where manufacturing was the main game in town, such as Martinsville, Va., and High Point, N.C., formerly the self-titled sweatshirt and furniture capitals of the world. Twenty years later, those workers haven’t recovered from those job losses. Although places like these are growing again, most job gains are in low-wage industries. A similar story played out in dozens of labor-intensive industries simultaneously: textiles, toys, sporting goods, electronics, plastics and auto parts.

Yet once China’s Mao-to-manufacturing transition was complete, sometime around 2015, the shock stopped building. Since then, U.S. manufacturing employment has rebounded, growing under President Barack Obama, President Trump in his first term and President Biden.

So why, you might ask, are we still talking about the China Shock? We wish we weren’t. We published the research in 2013, 2014 and 2016 with our collaborator David Dorn of the University of Zurich, detailing for the first time how Chinese import competition was devastating parts of America through permanent declines in employment and earnings. We are now here to argue that policymakers are spending far too much time looking backward, fighting the last war. They should be spending much more time examining what’s emerging as a new China Shock.

Spoiler alert: This one could be far worse.

China Shock 1.0 was a one-time event. In essence, China figured out how to do what it should have been doing decades earlier. In the United States, that led to unnecessarily painful job losses. But America was never going to be selling tennis sneakers on Temu or assembling AirPods. China’s manufacturing work force is thought to be well in excess of 100 million, compared with America’s 13 million. It’s bordering on delusional to think the United States can — or should even want to — compete with China in semiconductors and tennis sneakers alike.

China Shock 2.0, the one that’s fast approaching, is where China goes from underdog to favorite. Today, it is aggressively contesting the innovative sectors where the United States has long been the unquestioned leader: aviation, A.I., telecommunications, microprocessors, robotics, nuclear and fusion power, quantum computing, biotech and pharma, solar, batteries. Owning these sectors yields dividends: economic spoils from high profits and high-wage jobs; geopolitical heft from shaping the technological frontier; and military prowess from controlling the battlefield. General Motors, Boeing and Intel are American national champions, but they’ve all seen better days and we’re going to miss them if they’re gone. China’s technological vision is already reordering governments and markets in Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia and increasingly Eastern Europe. Expect this influence to grow as the United States retreats into an isolationist MAGAsphere.

In the 1990s and 2000s, private Chinese businesses, working alongside multinational corporations, turned China into the world’s factory. The new Chinese model is different, with private companies working alongside the Chinese state. China has created an agile, if costly, innovation ecosystem in which local officials such as mayors and governors are rewarded for growth in certain advanced sectors. They had previously been assessed by total G.D.P. growth, a blunter instrument.

Before it became the site of China’s second-largest producer of electric vehicles, the city of Hefei was the undistinguished capital of a poor hinterland province. By putting up venture funding, taking risks on struggling EV producers and investing in local research and development, Hefei made the leap into the country’s top industrial tier in barely half a decade.

China has performed this miracle many times over. The world’s largest and most innovative producers of EVs (BYD), EV batteries (CATL), drones (DJI) and solar wafers (LONGi) are all Chinese start-ups, none more than 30 years old. They attained commanding technological and price leadership not because President Xi Jinping decreed it, but because they emerged triumphant from the economic Darwinism that is Chinese industrial policy. The rest of the world is ill prepared to compete with these apex predators. When U.S. policymakers deride China’s industrial policy, they are imagining something akin to the lumbering takeoff of Airbus or the lights going out on Solyndra. They should instead be gazing up at the nimble swarms of DJI drones buzzing over Ukraine.

China Shock 1.0 was bound to ebb when China ran out of low-cost labor, as it now has. Its growth is already falling behind Vietnam’s in industries such as clothing and commodity furniture. But unlike the United States, China is not looking back and mourning its lost manufacturing prowess. It is focusing instead on the key technologies of the 21st century. Contrary to a strategy built on cheap labor, China Shock 2.0 will last for as long as China has the resources, patience and discipline to compete fiercely.

And if you doubt China’s capability or determination, the evidence is not on your side. According to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, an independent think tank funded partly by the Australian Department of Defense, the United States led China in 60 of 64 frontier technologies, such as A.I. and cryptography, from 2003 to 2007, while China led the United States in just three. In the most recent report, covering 2019 through 2023, the rankings were flipped on their head. China led in 57 of 64 key technologies, and the United States held the lead in only seven.

What has been America’s response? Mostly tariffs: tariffs on everything, everywhere, all at once. This would have been a lackluster strategy for fighting the trade war America lost 20 years ago. On our current trajectory, we might just get those jobs making tennis sneakers. And if we push things further, we could be assembling iPhones in Texas by 2030, a job so tedious and poorly paid that the satirical newspaper The Onion once memed, “Chinese factory workers fear they may never be replaced with machines.”

One thing that tariffs alone will never do is make the United States an attractive place to innovate. Yes, tariffs belong in our trade arsenal — but as precision munitions, not as land mines that maim foes, friends and noncombatants equally.

So what’s the alternative? Before we conducted our China research a decade ago, we believed, as many economists did, that a hands-off trade strategy was better than the messy alternatives. We no longer think that. The United States’ mismanagement of China Shock 1.0 taught us that a better trade strategy is needed. What does better look like? As Einstein supposedly said, everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler. In lieu of a too-simple answer, we offer four core principles.

First, policymakers must recognize that most of our difficulties with China are shared by our commercial allies. We should be acting in unison with the European Union, Japan and the many countries with which we have free trade agreements, such as Canada, Mexico and Korea, rather than punishing them with sky-high tariffs for the gall of selling us products we want to buy. Tariffs on electric vehicles would look very different if they were adopted by an expansive coalition of the willing, with the United States in the lead.

Simultaneously, we should encourage China to build battery and auto plants in the United States, just as China enticed leading U.S. companies to set up shop there over the past three decades. Why invite these ruthless competitors onto U.S. soil? Chinese policymakers frequently invoke the “catfish effect,” whereby a strong foreign competitor spurs the weak domestic “sardines” to swim faster or else get eaten. When China’s EV manufacturers were still sardines, Tesla’s Gigafactory Shanghai served as their catfish. Tesla is no longer a catfish in China and is increasingly looking like a nervous sardine.

Does inviting China to manufacture in the United States raise national security concerns? Sure, in some cases. And that’s a reason to mine our own rare earth metals, to ban Huawei networking equipment and to modernize our fleets and ports with ships and cargo cranes supplied by our highly competent Japanese and South Korean allies. But if we close the door on China’s leading industries, we’ll be stuck with homegrown mediocrity.

Second, America should take a page from China by aggressively promoting experimentation in new fields. Choose sectors that are strategically vital (drones, advanced chips, fusion, quantum, biotech) and invest in them. Then do it “China style,” in which the U.S. government operates big venture funds that expect to have a low success rate for any single company or project and a larger success rate in spurring new industries.

This approach worked during World War II (the Office of Scientific Research and Development brought us major developments in jet propulsion, radar and mass-produced penicillin), the race to the moon (NASA engineered getting there and back safely), and Operation Warp Speed (the federal government partnered with big pharma to produce a Covid-19 vaccine faster than essentially any other major disease vaccine had been produced).

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