China surpasses US as world's largest trading nation

Re:China surpasses US as world's largest trading nation by skwirl on Saturday January 11, 2014 @02:11PM (#7043393)

It's possible, but the argument that Starbucks/Google shifting sales from the UK to Ireland implies that the United States is playing accounting tricks with imports and exports is non sequitur. And the implicit assertion that if all countries were playing tricks, they must be playing it equally enough to cancel each other out is also not valid without providing additional supporting evidence.

The article provides an estimate that 1/3rd of Chinese imports were from China itself. I have never heard any kind of claim of that magnitude leveled against the present United States.

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Re:China surpasses US as world's largest trading nation by iaw on Saturday January 11, 2014 @03:08PM (#7043565)

This is a more articulate and well-thought out than I could have crafted, but it expresses my sentiment perfectly.

The one point I'd like to add is that China incentivizes their companies to export through tax rebates and then incentivizes imports from HK through the absence of tariffs. The makes it profitable for companies to artificially boost exports. I have not seen similar mechanisms available in the US.

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Re:China surpasses US as world's largest trading nation by monsterix on Saturday January 11, 2014 @03:25PM (#7043622)

That's a very interesting observation.

It's important to note that China does have a dual system of Governance within itself: Democracy (Hong Kong) + Communist control (Mainland). Thus it can, and does, leverage best of both worlds to doing business efficiently.

This also means that Hong Kong, for a city, is in a very strong position to grow up into a cutting edge city of future given the volumes it has to handle for mainland China.

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