https://xcancel.com/davidrkadler/status/1878841904571597116 (Video)
Yesterday, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum delivered her 100-day address to a PACKED Zócalo.
“We will not return to the neoliberal model. We will not return to the regime of privileges and corruption… We say: For the good of all, first the poor.”
Mexico has already laid out plan to cut Chinese imports in apparent nod to Trump today. The threat of tariffs is working. The US gets what it wants on the condition that it will then relax the tariffs.
But what can you do? 80% of Mexico’s export is to the US. The tariffs might inconvenience American automakers and inflate car prices at home, but for Mexico it means a substantial loss of export revenues, factories cutting production, unemployment and hence lower demand for consumption, a downward spiral toward recession. The damage exerted to either country is disproportionate.
Unlike China who wants to promote win-win cooperation, America coerces other countries into a lose-lose situation and the only choices you are given is to lose small or to lose big. The answer for most sane leaders is obvious.
It’s a situation i am very aware of, it just fucking sucks that our future is extremely intertwined with the US due to geography. For years i’ve imported tools i need for work from China since literally everything costs AT LEAST twice as much here in Mexico due to inefficient production and price gougers, and quality is just bad.
“¡Pobre México, tan lejos de Dios y tan cerca de Estados Unidos!”, ‘‘Poor, Mexico, so far from God and so close to the US!’’
Nemesio García Naranjo
I wonder if that article is also spinning Mexico’s policy in a more anti-China way than it actually is since its Reuters.
the worse part is that china can’t help; even with brics support. the united states typically sends in their military to occupy mexico’s ports anytime it has a government that’s unfriendly to the united states to choke off trade with anyone else and starve the government of the funds it needs to survive. it’s part of a 2 pronged attack along with arming & training right-wing/fascist militias within the country.
i’m betting that they’re going to do the same thing with the new port in peru that the chinese built as well as the other countries in latin america that make any kind of overtures to china or brics.
Not directly intervening for Mexico, but I have written elsewhere that China is the only country with the economic strength to directly challenge US hegemony.
But that will require China to give up its huge export industries by turning inward, so they can create a strong consumer base to absorb the export demand from the rest of the world without the West (i.e. flooding the Global South with freshly created RMB to displace the dollar). This will return the world to a more balanced trade situation, and allowing for industrial capacities to be redistributed to the poorer, developing countries. This can deal a fatal blow to US hegemony as long as the US doesn’t resort to nuking the world.
However, this scenario doesn’t seem likely now, especially with China just accumulated $1T trade surplus this last year. China has decided that export-oriented industries are too precious to give up, and that will make it more dependent on the neoliberal order than ever.
I once read someone saying that BRICS is more likely going to be a multipolar neoliberal order than anything close to resembling socialism, and it’s kinda true if you think about it.
I’ve been thinking about this idea lately, since one of your previous comments on the topic.
I think it could make sense that China maintains it’s current position as the means of production for the world, as exporting that role to the majority of available non-socialist countries would mean the greatest odds of handing it back to the control of foreign capital.
By China maintaining trade surplus and a strong control over global manufacturing as well as natural resource allocation, it can provide the strongest guarantee to itself that it can strike decisively and precisely when the moment is right.
When a new technological breakthrough is found which can catapult progress forward, China will be able to have it built in a few years because of the way their economy is currently functioning. Only China is in a position to, say, actually design and then make a scalable fusion reactor and build a dozen of them within a few years to then cut off the need for fossil fuels entirely. This is one of thousands of potential examples of technology that is being worked towards which, as soon as we find something that actually works, needs to be scaled up massively as quickly as possible, but you get my point. No one else is going to be able to actually figure these things out and then make them real on the scale necessary while also defending themselves from all sides by 5 eyes and improving the average citizen’s life year after year. Being able to do these sorts of massively scaled, expensive, and innovative projects as quickly as possible is the only way to lower the coming death tolls from climate disasters and protect not only China but the world’s future.
When disasters strike, as they will more and more, China will be able to not only help their people more effectively than everyone else, but we see in the case of COVID that they were able to keep their economy stable when all others were heavily impacted. Huge populations in China will need to likely be relocated during the next 40-80 years, which is a really short time that most of us will be alive to see. Their economy in it’s current iteration and relationship with foreign capital supports this position, and as long as imperialists stay meddling, it seems wise to maintain course.
Then there is the BRI which needs a lot of money to essentially help accelerate the ability for the undeveloped world to develop, which will also further squeeze the foreign capitalists themselves. The only way for the investments into BRI to be most likely to pay off is to ensure that a lot of capital can flow to other countries with no guarantees aside from better deals on natural resources which mostly benefit you if you are a manufacturing hub. You need to be able to absorb billions in losses for when the US orchestrates a coup in the country you invested in and destroys what you’ve invested in. At the same time, China is maintaining a fantastic balance of livelihood growth, with more and more Chinese citizens being more and more satisfied while still maintaining the working conditions the undeveloped world.
It costs a lot for a nation like China just to have to engage in a world with the US, and I think the Chinese can see the US shuffling off to die in the cave and knows better than to prematurely turn it’s back until it is clear that the predator can no longer strike. China is preparing for a shift that has not arrived yet, but is coming swiftly and I think China is consistently keeping up with being in the best position possible to leap forward at every opportunity without exposing itself to potentially fatal attacks.
I think your analysis of how China must shift it’s economy in order to progress along the road to socialism is true, but it is not of the current moment and won’t be until we firmly enter the new era. I think we will see this type of shift begin to happen in two or three generations, after the fall of imperialism at it’s own hands, a world of disasters which no one is prepared for, and then the rebuilding of a socialist world from the ashes under the leadership of China. Assuming nothing catastrophic happens by then which drastically changes China’s position as a communist nation, I don’t think the CPC is on the wrong trajectory, even if it feels like things aren’t happening fast enough most of the time.
The question is why would you need to accumulate so much trade surplus in order to achieve what you’re saying?
The surplus means money they cannot use. In fact, it means they have earned so much that they don’t know how to use them. That means Chinese workers are practically working for the West for free. The only party that truly benefits here is Western countries.
You do need some foreign reserves to maintain the stability of exchange rate if your currency is pegged to another currency (like RMB is soft-pegged to USD), but China has $3.3T reserves (!!) and they can easily slash 2 trillion of those and still be fine. China does not need more trade surplus lol, they are already accumulating so much foreign currencies that are just sitting there. They need to start raising the living standards of their workers by actually raising their wages. In fact, it makes their industries dependent on export and thus vulnerable to manipulations from Western countries that control the market.
Imagine telling your employer to pay you only 50% of your salary and switch the other 50% to bottle caps. You’re practically working your ass off for the company to collect bottle caps - collectibles that are practically worthless. The party that benefits here is the company who only have to pay half of your salary.
I think you’re overfocusing on financial instruments relative to real production.
Imagine your employer can decide to nuke your house at any moment. That might incentivize you to accept a 50% bottle cap salary.
Cheap labor is how China has paid off the West and made itself indispensable to the market. It’s unequal exchange.
lol this is why the West was genuinely afraid of Mao but not anymore since China has opened up.
Mao used to casually taunt the US to drop their atomic bombs on China and see who lasts longer. He would constantly talk about China engaging in a “10,000 years” long war (lol!) with the Western imperialists even until the end of the world.
These days the US just crosses red lines after red lines because they know that their opponents have no appetite to truly fight back and risk a nuclear war.
You aren’t wrong, but on the other hand we haven’t had a nuclear war either. That counts for something.
Although now we’re zooming to a climate catastrophe that will make Earth just as uninhabitable so lol