About 20 years ago I bought a new circular saw. I don’t remember all my options but I defeinietly could buy a Makita saw made in Japan, a Bosch saw made in Germany, and a number of brands made in the United States. I went back this year to my local big box retailer and there were 5 or six brands of circular saws, all made in China, even the Bosch. Looked at some of the other power tools and found the same thing.
Circular saws are a relatively small issue but the problem of putting all our manufacturing into China is a very real problem, whether its circular saws or pharmaceuticals, or any number of other products. China is not a reliable and trust worthy partner, as has been evident for many years but is now glaringly self-evident during this Covid-19 pandemic. And the problem is not 1.4 billion Chinese people but the 90 million strong Chinese Communist Party that runs the country, particularly the Party’s General Secretary, Xi Jinping. Whether outsiders see him as an all powerful, omniscient Emperor Xi or a bumbling Grand Pooh-baa, his constricting of freedoms within China and aggressive projection of power outside China is a threat to all free peoples throughout the world.
We need to wake up to it, and the sooner the better. When I was in law school I read an autobbiography by a noted former leader of the Communist Party USA later to become a noted anti-Communist, Benjamin Gitlow. At the school at the time I had access to all sorts of data bases for contact information for people and was able to find the phone number for one of Gitlow’s sons. I called him, I think he lived somewhere in Massachuetets. One of the things he said was that the Marxists/Communists of the world had not given up their plans of world domination even though the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact had disinegrated almost 20 years earlier and Fidel Castro in little old Cuba seemed to be the lone Marxist holdout. I was really surprised. This was 2006/2007. the idea of a resurgent Marxist threat seemed far from my concerns. But what the younger Gitlow told me has turned out to be preceisely true.
Xi is an unaplogetic and committed Marxist, no different from Lenin or Stalin or the other leaders of the Soviet Union and the communist dictatorships of that era. The organ harvesting from religious and political prisoners, the “re-education” camps for China’s Muslin minorities, the lack of freedom of speech/freedom of the press/freedom of assembly/due process, the list of recurring themes goes on and on. When one thinks of the new China the image projected is one of power and influence and immense cities with glittering new sky scrapers. That’s the image Xi wants to portray. Then remember that the country has 200-400 million people living on less than $5 a day and the percapita income is less than the world average. China is the Potemkin country, and we tie our fate to the fate of the Chinese Communist Party at our great peril.
Whereas the Soviet Union projected its power through nuclear missles and men with guns, the Chinese Communist Party projects its power through the enticement of roughly a billion cheap laborers and the Siren song of a 1.4 billion consumer market. And the world’s leaders, in politics and business, are addicted to the largesse and cheap products spinning off from this feudal dictatorship.