China has taken its business model from the Japanese. The Japanese have always looked long-term and were willing to sell at a slight profit for many years in order to gain market share.
But, China is also very leary of the West. It won't buy finished goods from foreigners but it will buy the manufacturing expertise to make the products themselves. They also don't allow any foreign investor to own >50% of any company in China. All industry in China is controlled by the ChiComs, either directly or indirectly. We dance with the devil every time we make a deal with China because they have already made their intentions towards the US known. They don't even try to hide their contempt for us, but we're tooo greedy to let it stop us from becoming the instrument of our own demise.
Make no mistake, when China is militarily ready to take on the US, it will do so without thinking twice.

 

Thoughts of red dawn come to mind!!
Oh-well...shotgun.rifle.and a four wheel drive

 

The 'Official' US 2005 DoD budget is $402 billion. That doesn't include Iraq or Afghanistan, estimated at $50 billion and undisclosed supplemental funding, the new 'Homeland Security' for $31 billion, Dept of Energy nuclear weapons activity and development of 'bunker busters' $18.7 billion, $17.6 billion of disclosed State Department funded military aid to allies and a few more for 'chump change' under $5 billion each.

We currently do close to 50% of all combined world military spending, almost all of it on the cuff, the national credit card. Now let's start adding compounded interest for say 20 years on that number and see what our costs actually are. $800 billion or a trillion, depending on how interest rates go? In reality 35% or more of the entire 2005 budget with a dim economic future?

China doesn't have to be a financial genius to enjoy watching us deplete ourselves policing parts of the world for idealistic self-interests that provide no return on the expenditures. It just makes it that much easier to manipulate our currency and control a large portion of our import financing. Given a few more good years, China will probably raise their labor rates, quicky become the world's largest consumer nation and still reap satisfactory profit on the export and interest pieces. While we face taxes from our public head in the sand period that will make indentured servitude look somewhat attractive.

 

Lots of good points here .... including


government controlled workforce that is willing to work for extremely low wages and their manufacturers aren't being strangled with legal, labor , and environmental issues like those that plague the US

That's right on the money (pun intended).

I heard once that China is a much more capitalist country than US. At first, it seems utterly absurd of a statement. I mean, how could that be? They are communists dedicated to communist ideology, which is *still* world domination. The Party Line was never rejected by the way.

However, there are no environmental laws, no minimum wage, no ADA (Americans with Disabilities), no EPA, no FDA, no IRS-like agecies, etc. etc. so that in conjuction with the fact that the employees get paid a small fraction of workers in other countries, means they are successful - and we are not.

You know, the US prognosis for the next 5-10-15 years is very grim, even worse than I thought.

I expect everything to be made in China. H#ll, everything is alredady made in China and it will only get worse. As they progress in their manufacturing techniques, learn more about computers, they will build chips, airplanes, shuttles, pencils, software, anything you can imagine.

Has anybody noticed that a lot of things which were made in Japan are now made in China? Like Casio watches, boom-boxes, etc. All the stuff in Walmart. So it is not a US thing, it is a global trend. No law will overrule it.

The next decade will mean *all* trucks and cars and heavy industrial vehicles made in China. You occasionally catch bits and pieces of news to that effect, Ford making such and such deals with China. They will in fact move whole factories there for production and assembly. These Fords are the last generation of domestically-built vehicles.

 

Iraq and Afghanistan, Homeland security, most of the DOE stuff and some of the foreign military aid don't contribute in the least to our ability to protect our national interests or our allies.

We have to be able to deal with China, North Korea, the Middle East and numerous other hot spots and maintain the capability to intervene in all of them. China doesn't have that problem so them spending 1/4 of what we do means they can get a lot of bang for their buck.

I will pose the same question to all of you folks that think we spend too much on the military that I did to JSKU. What would you do differently? Everyone likes to complain about things without having any better ideas. I'd like to hear the solution to our foreign policy "problem."

 

A different topic, but an easy answer. Pull all US occupation troops back to the US (If S. Korea feels a threat and considers our small contingent there a deterrent, let them pay for that force on a mercenary basis or field their own defenses, the same with others), cease aid to Israel, let the market determine crude oil prices and continue the NATO policy of war only if an ally is attacked. Put a $50 billion price tag on Bin Laden and in the event he again hits us start taking out sections of the Afghanistan/Pakistan Border with tactical nukes until he's turned over or destroyed. Consider that Russia was not 'chased' after those infidels left the Mideast following their aborted attempt to put a pipeline across Afghanistan and Bin laden was our 'ally' in that one. Mind our own business; this isn't the puritanical 1600s, the Old West or WW11 eras and we can't force our beliefs on even a small country the size of Iraq.

With regard to the size of the military, model it along the lines of other developed countries, Russia and China included, with manpower adjusted to maintain defense of our borders and maintain the capability to use our air/missle technology to destroy any enemy who does attack us. Without occupation, we have no liability to rebuild a country who attacks us.

There, I've solved our foreign policy problems, cut the military budget in half and provided a future opportunity to compete with China on a level playing field after the depression drops our standard of living to where it should be instead of going through a long agony to get there. Welcome to the real 21st Century.

 

Not true by a long shot. First off, the US, like many other countries, has import quotas. That's one of the reasons that Honda, Toyota, Nissan, BMW, SIA, etc., all make cars in the US for our domestic market. Secondly, China's domestic market will be their target market for quite some time. It's a captive market with an expected demand of over 10Million cars by 2025. They're going to be quite busy serving their domestic customers FIRST.
Thirdly, there is still a big negative WRT Chinese quality. While we may buy cheap tools from China, I doubt that we'll see Chinese car quality up to our expectations for quite some time.

 

Very true, but its my understanding that China's production quality standards are geared to consumer acceptance levels and their primary objective was to saturate those product markets where high quality isn't a factor to estalish cash flow, which they've accomplished, and then target the more sophisticated markets.

As examples:

Their forged steel high performance crankshaft blanks (not finished) are now well accepted by a majority of the automotive performance world, so their metullurgy and production of high quality steel is in place.

They've developed, from scratch, the J-10, a fighter-interceptor that became operational in 2001 and is considered on a par with advanced series MIG 29s. Thanks to our generous ally Pakistan, the primary obstacle of fly-by-wire performance aircraft technology using computer flight corrections was overcome in the late'90s by using our F16 as a working model. That pretty well covers the other metals and oil based composites.

I'd think everthing is there for most all products requiring mass production, when and how China desires to use it being the only issue.

 

Consumer acceptance for a cheap set of screwdrivers isn't the same level of quality needed to sell an automobile. While they may be able to make a few selected "high performance" alloys, they're stainless steel is very inferior as is their high strength steel used in outer skins on automobiles.
I agree that their quality is improving but there's a big difference between a can opener's acceptable quality and a car's.

 

China is a very big beast to handle. I think we can choose to either deal with them in an economic way or in a military way. I prefer the former, as most of us probaly do, but if something is not done to level the economic playing field, I fear there might not be any other way but the later.

 

So if I understand you correctly you would abandon the Middle East and our supply of oil (and with it our entire economy) to the whims of any local dictator that feels like starting a war. You would also abandon our allies overseas to whatever fate their neighbors could concoct.

You would bring our troops home and let Osama and his Taliban buddies rise back to power and re-establish their training camps in Afghanistan, where they would undoubtedly begin training for another attack unhindered. Once that attack took place you would begin dropping atomic weapons on two Muslim nations (one of them a nuclear power).

I'm glad you don't get to make these decisions

We would have problems within 10 years that make our current foreign relations situation look like it did just after WWII.

But hey you would cut that defense spending in half

Unfortunately our economy would probably be cut by 70% or so

 

Yikes, that in the same paragraph.

 

Canada is now our #1 supplier of oil, followed by Saudi Arabia and then Nigeria. There is one ally, Israel, a country of 5 million people with very aggressive real estate policies we don't condone in other countries, and just happens to be the primary reason for our Mideast involvement. Let the Mideast fight it out among themselves.

Afghanistan is now as unstable as the day we attacked it, the only difference being the Taliban are not officially in power, they merely control a majority of the country. We don't need another treasury draining Iraq.

Pakistan does not have military control of their border with Afghanistan, primarily due to the unpopularity of their government leader who enjoys support from the warlords who do control that border. Pakistan unofficially shields Bin Laden, has sold nuclear development information to the highest bidder and provides China with the latest US military technology we furnish to Pakistan on a pay for what you get basis. That's an ally?

I'm not suggesting appeasement to Bin laden, I'm saying mind our own business. Saudi Arabia is very capable of controlling him, if that's what they want. If Israel wants to grab neigboring land for agricultural, industrial and housing development, let's not be party to it, let them fight their own expanionist battles. Bin Laden doesn't refer to us as Zionist Infidels because of our heritage.

With our current rate of spending money we don't have, refusal to reduce spending and a declining industrial sector, in ten years we're going to have economic problems that will make our foreign policy a secondary issue. We're still operating on a cold war defense mentality when our only current enemy is a bandit hiding out in the country of an 'ally'. If someone does attack us, we'd still have the capability to destroy any country in the world, including China and Russia. I believe that's the definition of defense.

Cutting our defense spending by half, primarily our overseas occupations/expenditures and huge strike forces, would not reduce our economy by 70%. Few of those expenditures are circulated within our domestic economy.

These discussions merely point out economic advantages China enjoys by not playing world policeman in fruitless attempts to force their form of government on other nations. The new world battlefield is economic development, not invading tiny countries because they have a 'bad' leader. China is smart enough to know that's a hopeless task.

 

In the US and Canada we are incapable of setting a plan that lasts more than 4 years, and in effect, you have 2 years to accomplish the goals. It's the law.

We spend a lot of time and resources on politics that the Chinese are immune to.

It's impossible to set long term goals when you have two waring factions that can't agree on the smallest of issues. On top of that, each party is in a constant race to dangle the largest carrot in front of horse.

I'm not saying I want to move to China, just pointing out what may be the only advantage of their political system as opposed to those of the USA and Canada.

Kannata

 

I didn't call them an ally. I merely pointed out that they are a nuclear power and a muslim nation. One you propose to start dropping nukes on.

I'm not saying that military spending is what keeps our economy going. I'm saying global trade and a good supply of oil is. If we let crackpot leaders in every two bit country start wars all over especially with countries we trade with or countries we import our oil from our economy would be in big trouble.