Does it not seem at all astonishing that we outsource a ton of our manufacturing to a despotic one-party dictatorship?

Just briefly here, I read this report from the BBC on the late Chinese protests:

It is very unusual for people to publicly vent their anger at Communist Party leaders in China, where any direct government criticism can result in harsh penalties.

…and I have to say, it never ceases to amaze me that we have allowed China to become essentially the principle manufacturer of much if not most of the U.S.’s goods. That is very strange. China is a country where the government might wield you into the flat of the communist mega-block in which you live simply because you voiced some modest complaints about a three-year-long viral lockdown. It is quite plainly a tyranny, an awful place to live run by terrible people. And yet seemingly most of the very important things we use in our lives on a daily basis—plastics, tools, machines, housewares, electronics, appliances, phones, computers, toys, chemicals—all of it seems to come from China.

This is weirder than most of us are willing to acknowledge, perhaps because acknowledging it might force us to adjust our consumer habits in ways that can be uncomfortable. In our house we very deliberately go out of our way to avoid buying from China; wherever possible we buy USA-made, and if not we look for something from Europe or Japan or pretty much any other normal country. I needed a new kitchen tool a while ago and could find no version of it made in the U.S.; I finally settled on a German manufacturer, and I mean really if you buy something German-made it’s not exactly “settling,” but you get the point. It was, to be sure, markedly more expensive than the cheaper top picks off of Amazon. It also didn’t directly support a one-party autocratic police state. I just find that to be a completely reasonable tradeoff and a pretty easy one to make too.

The top complaint, I guess, is that buying things manufactured outside of China is too expensive. A world in which China is the dominant economic powerhouse with everyone else’s balls in a vise actually sounds like the more “expensive” option to me, in both the short- and long-term. And in any event it is easier than ever to buy USA-made products used on eBay, on Etsy, on Craigslist—we’ve gone that route plenty of times. There’s a million different avenues to consider for not supporting what is pretty obviously an evil Communist superpower.

I think it would be eminently wise for all of us to begin moving away from the China-dominant global manufacturing paradigm and toward something that doesn’t handicap our economy and put us in desperate hock to the Chinese Communist Party. It might not be the easiest thing in the world to do, but the “harsh penalties” of a world dominated by the CCP are doubtlessly much harder.