I've thought this for the last 10+ years or so. I even tried to not buy anything that was "made in china" for many years. I'm so amazed that people were fine with the recent higher gas prices because it would be helping the war in Ukraine. But yet no one wants to end trade with china because it would rise the costs of goods. Just 40 years ago there was literally nothing coming from china. They flood our markets with cheap crap that is made by burning coal, nobody cares that the end product breaks in mere days or weeks because you can just "buy another one". They've ruined the entire aftermarket parts industry for cars as almost every replacement part you buy at autozone is a chinese knockoff that will leave you stranded on the side of the road (my family runs an auto shop, the parts reliability issues are insane while autozone stock goes to the moon).

And then the main issue is all this cheapness is possible because workers are paid pennies a day and take meth so they can work 15 hour days doing tedious hand assembly because the person labor is cheaper than using a machine to automate. And now our media is flooded with news bites about how oppressive and racist america is while china gets away with literal slavery and everyone there believes all non-chinese are inferior.

Screw these people and their government.

Are you implying everyone sent their factories to China to "help the Chinese out of poverty" and not to reap record profits based on basically slave labor?

We need to fix the systems that allowed and made this decision in the first place or another stupid one will follow.

In some ways, and I know this will be unpopular, but is it free market capitalism that enabled the CCP to rise to such power? ie "You're freedom to choose cheap shit"?

I'm certainly not arguing for communism ourselves, but I mean, China didn't force us to move manufacturing there, won't it just happen again ?