The United States has been trading with China since 1784, the year a U.S.-flagged ship set out from New York for Canton. American missionaries were preaching in China by the 1830s. For some 80 years now, the United States has gone out of its way to help China, starting with the embargo on oil exports to Japan on August 1, 1941. Then after that war was over, China was included as one of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council despite it being in a civil war at the time. The expectation was that China would eventually join the community of civilised nations and make a positive contribution to the world.

The big leg up for China was the granting of Permanent Normal Trade Relations by the U.S. Congress in October 2000. This became effective when China joined the World Trade Organisation at the end of 2001. The consequences for U.S. workers were immediate and dire. U.S. manufacturing employment had fluctuated around 18 million workers between 1965 and 2000 before plunging 34 percent to 2010. Some six million workers lost their jobs.

In a 2016 paper titled ‘The Surprising Swift Decline of U.S. Manufacturing Employment’, authors Justin Pierce and Peter Schott note that prior to 2000 U.S. imports from China had been subject to the relatively low normal trade relations tariffs reserved for members of the World Trade Organisation. These low rates for China required annual renewals that were uncertain and politically contentious. Without renewal U.S. import tariffs on Chinese goods would have jumped to higher tariff rates. This uncertainty decreased the incentive for U.S. firms to incur the sunk costs of shifting operations to China. It was the removal of this uncertainty that triggered U.S. firms to shift operations to China, and U.S. jobs went with them. It was the risk associated with annual review of tariffs that had kept manufacturing employment in the U.S.

At the same time that they were starting to lose their jobs, the formerly employed started losing their lives at an increasing rate as shown by this graph in a paper by Anne Case and Angus Deaton of Princeton University published in March this year:

This figure shows deaths per 100,000 of population for men and women aged 50 to 54 for a number of countries including France, Germany, Sweden, UK, Canada and Australia; U.S. whites are the red line. All the other countries are stable or falling but the death rate for this age cohort started rising steeply from the time they started losing their jobs to China. Case and Deaton found a marked difference in death rates by race and education. Death rates among non-Hispanics -- both males and females -- are rising for those without a college degree. It is falling for those with a college degree. In contrast, death rates among Blacks and Hispanics have continued to fall irrespective of educational attainment. Death rates in comparable rich countries have continued to fall at rates that used to occur in the United States until the beginning of this century.

But which whites are dying at an increasing rate? Figure 1.1 from Case and Deaton’s paper shows that it is white non-Hispanics with a high school education or less:

For Hispanics the U.S. has increasingly become the happy kingdom. They are happy because they don’t live in Mexico and PC nonsense doesn’t get translated into Spanish. The death rate for whites without a high school education though has risen above that for blacks. What is killing these people is mainly deaths of despair -- drug and alcohol poisoning, suicide and alcoholic liver disease and cirrhosis as shown by the following graphs adapted from Figure 7 of the Case and Deaton paper:

We could get our jobs back from China, with a consequent decline in the death rate of working class whites, without too much legislative effort but that would still leave the problem of China’s thirst for military aggression. Closing America to Chinese goods would help choke off the cash flow that funds that aggression.

The mafia operation that runs China, the Communist Party of China, had its 19th party congress in October. President Xi’s speech at that congress didn’t impart new information. Because Mandarin is a tonal cacophony which makes the communication of anything more than a simple notion difficult, ideas tend to be imparted as word symbols. Thus these lines from Xi’s speech:

We have committed to "examining ourselves in the mirror, tidying our attire, taking a bath, and treating our ailments," launched activities to see members command and act on the Party's mass line, and initiated a campaign for the observance of the Three Stricts and Three Earnests.

We have taken firm action to "take out tigers," "swat flies," and "hunt down foxes.”

His most foreboding words were near the end:

The wheels of history roll on; the tides of the times are vast and mighty. History looks kindly on those with resolve, with drive and ambition, and with plenty of guts; it won't wait for the hesitant, the apathetic, or those shy of a challenge.

President Xi is no caretaker. He intends to provide the ambition that will get some history written in other people’s blood. He is also aware that the window of opportunity to do that is closing as China’s credit-driven growth finally stalls and its energy production starts falling.

Now is the time to ask Lenin’s question ‘What is to be done?’ North Korea provides the perfect excuse for imposing tariffs on Chinese goods imported into the U.S., with the rates continuing to rise until North Korea gives up on nuclear weapons and ICBMs. If China backs down and disarms North Korea, that would be an enormous loss of face which would likely topple Xi. If he doesn’t back down, U.S. workers would get their jobs and lives back. China has been indulged long enough. They have no intention of joining the community of civilised nations.  

David Archibald is the author of American Gripen: The Solution to the F-35 Nightmare