Should the US impose sancations and embargo China?

Inquiring minds want to know.

There would be no Christmas without China. Whether there should have been one put in place in the past and maintained is a different question. This poll is a few decades too late.

Howdy A

Long before your time ... that's the way it was ..... President Nixon opened Mainland ( communist ) China. Taiwan was/is the seat of Chinese National and a U.S. protectorate.



Thom Paine

No, that would be an absurd move given our existing trade relations with China due to our weak economic model and the amount of US debt they hold thanks to our fiscal irresponsibility.

Such a move would have an immediate catastrophic market and economic effect that would be kin to world war, and because of all the interrelations with the US, Europe, and plenty of Asian nations that also trade with China the results of such a move would take other markets and economies down with ours. Pretty much making this the most asinine suggestion of the decade.

Helping tyrants isolate their people from the rest of the world is not only terrible foreign policy but is also ethically deplorable. History has also shown over and over again that it never produces the benefits we think it would.

Change comes from education and interaction with the outside world. A culture can not grow and evolve without both.

RabidAlpaca said:

Helping tyrants isolate their people from the rest of the world is not only terrible foreign policy but is also ethically deplorable. History has also shown over and over again that it never produces the benefits we think it would.

Change comes from education and interaction with the outside world. A culture can not grow and evolve without both.

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No, financially propping up tyrants doesn't help those people. It imprisons them - and uses our money to do it. The money doesn't go to the people, it goes to the dictator and preserves his power. That is what history proves.

The USSR didn't go down because of economic interaction with the West.

What the EU and the USA should do is put a transport energy cost.

In other words. If it takes X amount of energy to transport from China to the USA or Europe, which causes this much damage to the environment either by water pollution or air pollution, then there should be a tax on that transport of goods that should be levied as a tariff. This would help drive the cost of chinese manufactured goods up and give local EU and US manufacturing a chance to be competitive. In other words, the price on chinesse goods goes up making less people interested in buying them automatically when similarly priced european/american goods would be available. And it would help with the environment.

This shouldn't be put only on China. It should be worldwide for all countries that fail environmental standards in regards to production and such.

I think we should move away from the dependency of china and places like Saudi Arabia. The only way to do this is to lift the restrictions on American production, however big business and government do not want this to happen because they're monopolizing on these trade relations. The trade relation isn't the problem with the American economy, in fact open trade brings in more economic growth and more valuable jobs, the problem is the restrictions on our own production

No. Good trade relations is one of the best deterents to armed conflict, at least in dealing with rational actors and China certainly is a rational actor.

I doubt there would be a lot of goods on the shelves in the entire Western developed world without China. The developed world cannot afford an embargo of China IMHO.

Living and working here in China has helped me to more clearly understand what is going on in regards to many of the policies in this country. What we often judge as political is actually economic in nature. So long as I believed it was political, I was against any actions in the West that would prevent China from being opened up more than what it has. Now, I realize that powerful economic interests are actually behind many decisions from the government. For example, Facebook and Youtube...though Mark Zuckerberg was here in my city just a couple of months ago meeting with Ma Wen (Jack Ma) of Alibaba, his company can not operate here. One would think it has to do with government restrictions, as we have, but I now see it as one way the Chinese equivalent does not want any competition in this country. This goes for Youtube as well. The quality of both of those products, as well as Amazon and many others is so much higher that they know that they would have to change here or go under. Alibaba operates to a much higher standard in the West than it does in China. It is a nightmare of bureaucracy to conduct business in China, or to produce quality product. I have to share that even in terms of the production of ships by the naval yards here, foreign engineers are repeatedly sent messages that this or that might happen, such as their wife might loose her visa and be sent home, if they do not pass an inferior weld or shortcut in the making of a ship. The list goes on and on. In the end, I think that it might be necessary to no longer overlook some policies as political in nature, and thus be firm in our openness, but instead see them now as what they are, unfair trade practices and protectionism. Over the next few weeks, there is a good possibility that Western Union might be the next target for stricter control. Though the word is being sent out that this is to be to control the amount of currency flowing out of the country, domestic banks will not have the same restrictions. In regards to air and water quality, I believe I heard that the largest swath of gray sky in the world stretches from Beijing in the north and all the way to just north of Honk Kong. I have seen perhaps a total of 20 blue sky days in the 7 months here traveling and working around the country, and 10 of those days were out west near Tibet. Pharmaceutical companies openly poor their wastes into the rivers that occasionally turn red with iron oxide, and their chemists hack persistently whenever you see them. Yes, China is opening up politically, or so one would think, but it is not practicing the same economically. Sanctions are overdue, not only for the health of free trade, but the environment of the world.