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martchattoday at 11:18 AM0 repliesview on HN

Problem is that China had both cost advantage (both human capital and energy) and a large internal market. If as a company you decided not to invest and build a factory in China, you were quickly losing vs your competitor. The solution to this problem for EU and US however won't be as simple..

Once China built an industrial base, and has cheap energy sources, you cannot directly out compete it. You can only try to maintain your own industrial base by locking competitors out of your market. There is no other way. In the end that's the result of globalization - US&EU companies thought they can produce cheap, sell expensive. Instead they trained their own competition, and due to weak IP laws enabled this exodus of industry know-how to China.

Now, if China was a smaller country - let's say Japan or Turkey - this wouldn't be such a huge problem. But for the global economy, having a single country that produces 80% of all consumer goods is also a huge problem. That was never the case before with the US (except maybe directly after WW2). US+Europe, Japan+Korea, Canada, Australia supply chain was much more diverse and distributed.

What happens now is dangerous because in the end the profits are not spread across the world, and economies of scale cause this monopoly to appear, which will be hard to mitigate.

Can countries "slow" down China and move production to diversified locations? For that to work, coordinated tariffs for advanced goods from China would have to be introduced, and production reallocated to multiple other countries - very difficult to execute..