Who's gaming the system, really? (Letter to SCMP)

Dear Editors at SCMP,

I appreciate Mr Jake Van Der Kamp's eloquent rebuttal (“Who's really working the system to their advantage”, October 9) of US President Barack Obama's accusing China of “gaming the trading system to its advantage”. However well-intended, the columnist's arguments are not infallible.

"Not Bad!"

First, the columnist quotes Obama out of context. The US President supported his claim that China had been “gaming” international trade by providing the example of currency manipulation, a problem China has acknowledged and taken measures to tackle, however “not enough” those measures are.

The President also cited as examples intellectual property and technologies not being properly protected in China, which is another legitimate concern not only for its trading partners but also for China itself. The columnist raises the iPhone as an example of “toy” in illustrating the “industrial miracle” of declining toy prices in the US. Ironically, isn't he aware how ubiquitous fake iPhones, and other “shan zhai” products, are in China? There are even fake Apple stores in Kunming! How is that “enriching US firms and consumers”? Plus, such disregard for patents and copyrights is haunting China itself by discouraging domestic inventions and creativity.

Sadly the columnist avoids the above issues but instead insinuates that American firms and consumers gain at the expense of factory workers in China, therefore are the real villain in "gaming the trading system to their advantage". This is his second debatable point. Granted, China's “industrial surfs” suffer and toil for the meager pay handed out by the “western evils”, so that American firms and consumers can enjoy higher returns and cheaper products. Without the foreign-invested enterprises, however, the workers would have been far worse off. Instead of “millions of industrial surfs working their skins off their bones every day”, imagine “millions of unemployed people starving their skins off their bones every day”. Job creation is one reason why China, along with the rest of the world, welcomes foreign investments. Both trading partners are supposed to be better off: the Chinese workers can feed themselves, the “US firms and consumers enriched”.

And I agree with the columnist, along with other points, that Obama blames China now in such harsh terms partly for his own political gain.

Again I have great admiration for Mr Jake Van Der Kamp for his eloquence and humour, and for his defense of a country not of his own. China is indeed a great country, but not without its own woes.

Yours sincerely,

Joe Xu Yi

This article was published as "US firms gain and Chinese 'serfs' do, too" in South China Morning Post on 16 October, 2011 (http://www.scmp.com/article/982079/letters)