I’ll point the finger at any country who lets their national environment(which is really a global resource, we all share the same air and oceans) get trashed in the name of industrialization to serve consumerism. Western countries have a system that controls those externalities at least to some extent, in the US we have the EPA, OSHA, and our various institutions of permitting make sure of that, at a very real cost to businesses and consumers. By not caring about the environment developing countries absolutely are burdening the species long term. The lack of a level playing field in this regard enables consumerism because you are allowing consumers to not pay for externalities, else we should really be placing tariffs on any country who doesn’t meet at least EPA regulations and probably all of our regulations and laws—building, safety, worker compensation—but that would likely shock the global economic system. This is what “developing” countries disrupt, and why I think that ultimately globalization and environmentalism(which I prioritize personally right now) are incompatible. This is a problematic conclusion because war is probably worse for the environment and globalism is the only thing that’s made this era so relatively peaceful.
I don’t think you can blame both sides, because on one side you have a relatively organized group of people with power who rule a country, and on the other you have a mass of people with 0 organization and no structural power whatsoever. Blaming the /populace/ of any country for a problem is a very slippery slope indeed.
In other words: it's bad that China is offering, but it's also bad for the west to take them up on that offer.
> Also the factory orders were coming from multinational corporations, they have no real allegiance with the West, they disrupt Western political, taxation and legal systems just like anywhere else.
That's IMO just giving up. Corporations are not yet independent governments, they should still be taken to account in the countries they originate from and those they operate in.
> China has not only enabled western consumerism, it disrupted the natural economic forces that would prevent such a thing from arising in the first place.
Not sure what they disrupted. It looks to me they played by the books, simply arbitraging labor costs like everyone else does in a global economy. Still, it's a feedback loop - China is enabling western consumerism, but growing consumerism is driving further growth in environmentally unsound manufacturing, most of which happens in China. If China did not enable it, probably some other nation would. It's a feedback loop, and both sides of it are to blame.