The Cheating China Price Bottom Line
This foundation chapter is an important one because it exposes the critical relationship between The Coming China Wars and the unfair trade practices driving the China Price advantage. This relationship may be summed up by these four crucial observations:
The Coming China Wars described in this book are driven by China’s rapid and unsustainable rate of economic growth, and China’s hyper rate of growth is largely export driven.
China’s ability to conquer export market after export market, often in blitzkrieg fashion, is made possible by an imposing set of weapons of mass production embodied in the China Price advantage.
As we have seen, many of the China Price drivers constitute unfair trade practices that flagrantly violate both the spirit and letter of international law and trading agreements. These mercantilist trade practices include blatant currency manipulation, illegal export subsidies, lax environmental, health, and safety regulations, slave labor conditions, and a Great Wall of Protectionism.
To the extent that the foreign direct investment flooding into China is attracted by these unfair trade practices, this surfeit of FDI constitutes an unfair trade advantage, too.
In the next ten chapters, we look at each of the major China Wars now being triggered by the cheating China Price and its weapons of mass production. The picture that will clearly emerge is that of a mercantilist country on economic steroids that has put itself on a collision course with the rest of the world. We shall also see why China increasingly faces a number of its own “wars from within” over everything from illegal land seizures, forced evictions, a crushing tax burden, and rampant government corruption to the transformation of China’s once idyllic farm lands into polluted cancer factories, and the shredding of China’s health-care system and social safety net.