“The greatest fever of all was aspiration, a belief in the sheer possibility to remake a life.” That’s what Evan Osnos wrote in Age of Ambition, his remarkable 2014 book about life in emerging China.
Osnos reported that as of 2014 the Chinese were second only to Americans when it came to the purchase of Rolls-Royces and Lamborghinis, while they were already #1 with Louis Vuitton. One guesses they lead in all three now. But that’s not the point. Surely the bigger story wasn’t nor is it growing Chinese acquisitiveness.
Of much greater importance, the Chinese were finally eating. As of 2014, Osnos writes that the Chinese people were eating “six times as much meat as 1976.” Stop and think about that. It’s not nothing. And it’s in particular not nothing in light of what the Chinese people had endured: Mao’s mis-defined “Great Leap Forward” had revealed itself in a famine that killed between thirty and forty-five million people. It’s not just that the Chinese people were finally eating, it’s that they were no longer starving. Which means they are finally producing.
Implicit in this production that is that products and services manufactured and created in China will increasingly compete for global wallet share. This truth redounds not just to the Chinese formerly intimate with hunger, but also to those in countries for whom hunger has always thankfully been a choice (“dieting” is a luxury of the rich) instead of a condition.
China’s economic rise redounds to the American people most of all. Despite that, in a recent column the great Holman Jenkins wrote that “100 million Chinese shifting from peasant agriculture to factory work was a tsunami through the global division of labor, hurting many U.S. factory towns.” Jenkins could seemingly be persuaded otherwise.
The arrival of new machines and hands to the global division of labor has never been harmful to existing workers. To suggest otherwise is to suggest that the individuals who comprise any economy are harmed by rising specialization, and with specialization, the soaring productivity that always and everywhere associates with specialization.
What hurt U.S. factory towns was that the work in those towns was awful, and not infrequently life-threatening. As Wes Dorsett put it to future NFL Hall of Famer Tony and his other sons about the factory and mill work oddly romanticized at the moment, “Come in this place, you don’t know if you’re coming out. And if you do you might be missing an arm or eye or leg. Do something for yourself.” Translated, China’s embrace of the profit motive helped free Americans from work they hated.
It’s all worth thinking about now as U.S. politicians and pundits hide behind wholly manufactured fears of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) spying on Americans as a reason to ban TikTok. Readers shouldn’t be fooled by such grandstanding. What’s happening to TikTok is wholly rooted in protectionism, of American political and pundit types who were given life by anti-communism acting as sore losers now that the Chinese people are no longer acting like communists.
After which, readers would be naïve to presume that the odious, economy-sapping protectionism that robs the protected of increased specialization on the job will stop at TikTok. The outgoing Biden administration is already working on banning Chinese advances in telecom, GPS, and AI, while the returning Trump administration is no slouch when it comes to fomenting fear of foreign production. It turns out everything not made in America is a national security threat. Yes, protectionism.
Americans presently acting like sore losers need to recognize this. Protectionism not only doesn’t work, it’s also impoverishing. Envy generally is.
