Some people seem to think trade = charity. The west isn’t trading with China out of the goodness of their hearts. Trade is a two way street, both sides benefits or there would be no trade.
The biggest difference between western and Chinese consumers’ spending patterns are actually an inversion of perceptions.
The average western worker might take home an enviable pay cheque compared to the equivalent Chinese worker in absolute monetary terms, but the vast difference in the cost of living in the west compared to China means the western worker has far less disposable income at the end of the day. Basically their entire pay cheque goes towards meeting their base survival needs of food, shelter, transportation, utilities and clothes etc. When even fast food is rapidly becoming a luxury to increasing numbers of westerners. For many western working poors, their salaries don’t even cover their most basic of survival needs, so they need to turn to credit to bring forward future spending power to meet pressing immediate needs.
On the other hand, the average Chinese worker can be a lot less careful with their money and still have a respectable proportion of their pay left over at the end of the month that they can save.
What the west insist is a weakness of the Chinese model is actually a massive hidden strength.
In the event of a trade war when things get though, who is going to be able to absorb price shocks better, the average Chinese worker with savings equivalent to several months or even years worth of their salary, or the average western worker with barely any savings if they are lucky or several months to years of salary’s worth of debt if not?
The average western worker is only not rioting in the streets right now because of cheap Chinese imports giving them some economic relief and quality of life.
A massive proportion of western economic wealth and might is actually just illusionary shadow play and creative accounting increasing prices without generating any actual value.
You think when there are literal empty shelves and riots on the streets that you will be able to buy shit with your Apple and Amazon shares when Apple and Amazon have nothing but empty warehouses and back orders they cannot hope to meet owing to no more physical goods delivery from China?
China’s economy will also be hit hard, but it has the means of making actual useful physical goods that will always have intrinsic value.
China doesn’t want a full scale economic war not because it is remotely worried about loosing said economic war, but because it’s basically inevitable that such a full spectrum economic war will lead to a hot war as the west will have literally nothing left to loose at that point, since their ruling elites will die at the hands of mobs of their own subjects without a foreign war to redirect all their rage.
