I understand that the majority of the internet world and even a majority of readers of this blog are in fact from the USA. Therefore, I thought I'd give a bit of time dedicated to blogging about the social, economic and political impacts and influences of the USA. This blog post is about challenging the conceptions given of China that is a evil growing superpower that plans to dominate the world, in favour of a more rational approach.
As the sweet turned sour in the USA and the rest of the world in terms of the economy, it can be seen that China is merely the USA's scapegoat for its own inherent problems. I will now explain why this may be the case.
Let's cast our minds back to the so called 'good times' where money was rolling in and prices remained fixed. At this time, the whole 'western' world (i.e. USA, UK, Spain) was engulfed by the greed for even more, and what happened? Well they got more. More money, more goods, more consuming and more or less more of everything, but the question I now pose is, at what cost?
Sure enough the good times can't go on forever and especially in this case the so called 'good times' had been stretched to the limit powered by greed and extreme confidence. As soon as it seemed to be never ending, it sure enough it did. Confidence was destroyed and money was lost, but out of the depths of the downward economic spiral out came a cry 'It's not our fault.'
The desperate attempt to blame something else soon came to be with China. Such attacks on this country escalated stating that it 'stole jobs', made things too cheap and generated unfair competition. However, I argue differently from this one sided narrow view that China is solemnly to blame for the problems in the USA. While I happily could go into the economics of this, I shall not for the purpose of simplicity (although I may, if popular, go into it at a later date) but rather focus on why the blame is not held totally by China.
We know that China makes a lot of goods for the USA, is this the problem of the USA? Well if it is then China is only supplying demand, the USA is not forced into demanding these goods but rather the USA is very familiar with living beyond its means (demanding more than what you can afford.)
Although, some may in response say that this is because these goods are so cheap, if they weren't so cheap then we wouldn't have this problem. I deny this argument for a number of reasons. Firstly, it makes the USA sound out to be some sort of shopaholic stuck in the centre of a Mall (Shopping centre for us UK people) and clearly this is absurd if the USA as a country cannot control itself. However, assume for instance that cheap goods in china did not exist, would this fix these problems? No I argue because it is a inherent problem with the USA (mainly USA but other countries such as in Europe too) rather than its overseas trade partners. If China did not produce cheap goods the USA would simply indirectly demand another developing country (such as India) to supply its never ending demand.
I hope that this gives a bit more insight to how slander is directed to countries that are simply scapegoats of powerful countries and how that there are inherent problems within one's own country rather than it being pinned on the rest of the world.
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