[lbo-talk] Boycott Japan and China

Marvin Gandall marvgandall at videotron.ca
Thu Aug 10 20:03:31 PDT 2006


Yoshie writes:


>> Everybody wants to sell their products in the US, which harbours the
world's
>> largest and freest spending body of consumers.
>
> Not everybody, ...I finally got around to reading the NLR article that
> John Gulick
> recommended to me offlist, which sketches a triangle relation among
> Japan, China, and the USA...For many Japanese
> working-class households, the end of job security has been partly
> alleviated by waves of cheap Chinese imports of food and clothing.
================================== Sure, but isn't it still the case that the US has the world's largest pool of relatively well off consumers and its most profitable corporations which is what draws suppliers of goods and capital to its deep markets? China's domestic market is growing rapidly, but its consumers and firms do not yet rival the US as "buyer-of-last-resort" in the world trading system. Nor I wouldn't think does the more developed Japanese market, which is just recovering from a long recession. This gives the Americans more power than the Chinese and Japanese governments to use the promise or denial of market access as an instrument of foreign policy. I think that's become an even more important means of imperial control than raw military power in an era when advances in transportation and communications have greatly facilitated world trade. That's my impression at any rate.


> But this is more a sketch than anything else. It would be nice if we
> had an article that fleshes it out with figures, proportions, and
> historical trends.

Yes, it would be nice to have some hard data to support or refute our impressions, but I have'nt had much success googling, and have neither the time nor skill to identify and assemble stats on the trend volume of exports of goods and services to the US, Japan, and China as a percentage of GDP or some other measure.



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