June 27, 2024 • 48 mins
From cars to toys to clothes, we're just used to seeing the label "Made In China" on all sorts of things. But how did China become a go-to destination for manufactured goods in the first place? Who actually recognized that there was a huge opportunity to tap the abundant, low-cost labor to sell goods to Western consumers? On this episode of the podcast we speak with Elizabeth Ingleson, a professor at the London School of Economics and the author of the book Made in China: When US-China Interests Converged to Transform Global Trade. Ingleson traces the roots of the US-China trade relationship to a handful of US entrepreneurs in the early 1970s who first went into the country and recognized its opportunity as an export powerhouse. We discuss who these individuals were, the obstacles they had to overcome, and how they reshaped the entire global economy.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio News.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast.
I'm Joe Wisenthal and I'm Tracy Alloway. Tracy, needless to say,
always a lot of anxiety about the US China trade
relationship these days. I feel like there are new tariffs
and new developments or new conversations about overcapacity and evs,
and new headlines about planes and stuff basically every day
(00:40):
right now.
Speaker 3 (00:41):
Yeah, there were new headlines this morning, weren't there from
one of Trump's economic advisors, right, I can't remember what
it was. Oh, that's why God created tariffs. Oh yeah,
but you're absolutely right. I mean it's been years, if
not decades now where China manufacturing has been this sort
of thing that looms large over the US economy. And
(01:01):
I think what's interesting about the US China economic relationship
is the way we think about it, or the way
we talk about it. It seems almost like it was
an inevitability, Like it was inevitable that the two biggest
economies in the world were going to have, you know,
some sort of trade relationship, and maybe because of specific
(01:22):
decisions undertaken by the Chinese leadership, like Deng Chaoping or
whoever to build out the Chinese economy in a certain
way led to a lot of the increased tension. But
you know, in advance of this discussion, I was kind
of thinking about it like there was no inevitability, right,
Like India could have been our biggest trade partner.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
Yeah, that's a really great point, or we might not
have like a big trade relationship at all. Or China
could have been more like Russia, in which trade is
very modest. Right, Like this idea is like, Okay, the
US is rich and we do services and stuff like that.
Here in China is poor. Their comparative advantage is cheap labor. Therefore,
(02:04):
China produces everything or produces a lot. That's how we talk.
And it just sort of seems, as you say, like
like yeah, inevitable, this is the natural order of things.
But there are lots of countries that have big populations
that aren't particularly rich or that aren't manufacturing powerhouses the
way China has. So I think it's interesting as you say,
(02:25):
like there's this conversation like it's sort of inevitable, and
we talk about it now like Okay, this is the
state of things. Do we want to change it, et cetera,
but really not much conversation about like how we got
here or how we built this relationship in the first place.
Speaker 3 (02:38):
Yeah, I think there's going back to that inevitability point.
There's usually an underlying tone of like, well, the market's
gonna market. Yeah, market's gonna market, market's gonna market.
Speaker 2 (02:47):
And in visible hand's gonna invisible hands.
Speaker 3 (02:49):
That's try and that's how we ended up with, you know,
lots of stuff being built in China where there is
cheap labor. By the way, Joe, I'm old enough to
remember when I was living in the both, but go on, Yeah,
when I was living in Japan in the nineteen eighties,
I distinctly remember that most of my toys, like my
cheap little plastic toys, they all came from Taiwan, right,
(03:12):
And I remember when I was like six years old,
not really understanding where Taiwan was or what it was
at that point, but I distinctly remember like thinking that
it was this magical land where all the toys were made.
But you know, like in the nineteen eighties, I guess
we were in that transition point from moving from Taiwan
being a massive manufacturing base into China, but even as
(03:34):
late as like the early nineteen eighties, Taiwan was still
making a lot of stuff for me.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
When I was ten years old, I lived in Malaysia
for a year, and then I have this memory of
like visiting a friend's house when I was eleven back
in the US, and I noticed that one of his
hot wheels was made in Malaysia, and I was like, Oh,
that's so cool. I didn't even know, like anyone that
else had heard of Malaysia, and so the idea like
that this company had gone to Malaysia to manufacture the
hot way, I just thought it was like so cool.
(04:01):
It was like, oh, I've been to that country. I
didn't know anyone else knew about it, let alone going
up to setting up a toy manufacturing operation. I guess
there's a little bit of a diversion, but it does
remain true that a lot of the countries that are
powerhouses of advanced manufacturing or one time powerhouses and still
are of low end manufacturing.
Speaker 3 (04:21):
Absolutely, so I think it's worth digging into how we
actually ended up in this now contentious trade relationship with
China and why it is that, you know, instead of
maybe selling a bunch of American made goods into that market.
We ended up buying a bunch of Chinese made goods.
Speaker 2 (04:38):
And this is the other thing, the other key point here,
which is that for a long time, and even still
to some extent, you hear like the dream of selling
it to China. Oh, if we could sell one you know,
box of tissue to every one billion or more than
one billion now citizens of China, that'd be billions of dollars,
et cetera. And I think a few companies have done that.
(04:59):
You know, Starbucks sells a lot in China, and Nike
sells a lot in China, et cetera. But by and large,
the idea of China is this huge consumer market for
American made brands. It exists to some extent, but probably
not exists to the full dream that people have imagined.
Speaker 3 (05:15):
Yeah, I think that's right.
Speaker 2 (05:16):
Okay, Well, I'm really excited. We do have the perfect
guest to talk about how the US China trade relationship
was really born. We're going to be speaking to doctor
Elizabeth Ingleson. She's an assistant professor at the London School
of Economics and the author of a new book that
came out this year called Made in China when US
China interests converged to transform global trades. So doctor ingleson,
(05:40):
thank you so much for coming on out.
Speaker 4 (05:42):
Lots Hi, Joe, Hey, Tracy, it's great to be here.
Speaker 2 (05:45):
Thank you so much for coming on. Why don't we
start with why this book? What was it about this
topic made in China that in your view, was important
enough that this is a focus for a book.
Speaker 4 (05:57):
Huh. Well, it's interesting hearing the two of you recollect
your own engagements with Made in Taiwan or Made in Malaysia,
because in many ways I didn't start off thinking I
want to write this book. I started off as a
history undergraduate and actually a major in literature, even more
(06:17):
in history, and was really as an Australian growing up
just as the Cold War was ending and into the
nineteen nineties and two thousands, the US and China were
always the two biggest hours in the region. They still
are today. And it was the early twenty tens and
at that period of time, political scientists, policymakers, they were
(06:41):
talking about the US China relationship in terms of its
economic interdependence. They were saying, there's so much at stake
in the relationship, especially economically, that the US and China
aren't going to risk what they have for some kind
of geopolitical conflict or diplomatic tens all worse right, or war,
(07:02):
that the interdependence itself is enough to mitigate that. And
I wanted to learn more about this. I wanted to
think through where did this interdependence come from? How did
we get to a state in the twenty tens where
the United States and China did have such an entwined
economic relationship. And that really took me down this path
(07:24):
of research and thinking and going to archives all over
the world, but particularly the United States. And here we
are today with the book.
Speaker 3 (07:34):
So when I think of the way a lot of
people talk and write about China's economic history, I feel
like so much of the focus is on China's opening
up right and caveat here. Right before I cracked open
your book, I was reading another book on China called
wild Ride, A Short History of the Opening and Closing
of the Chinese Economy. And I mean the clue is
(07:56):
in the title there, right. The emphasis is very much
on the decisions that are being made by China. So
I'm curious why you decided to comment it from a
slightly different way, and from maybe some of the decisions,
both diplomatic and economic, being made by the US and
the rest of the world.
Speaker 4 (08:14):
I think one of the things that you are trained
to do as a historian is to denaturalize things, to
look at a moment in time, and you seek to
question the assumptions of the people operating in that period
of time. And so, as I mentioned, I wanted to
sort of historicize a workout where this interdependent relationship came from,
(08:38):
and it led me to the nineteen seventies. It led
me to this period when the US and China were
rebuilding a trade relationship after over twenty years of Cold
War isolation. So throughout the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties,
both countries had very little, in fact none at all
economic contact and very little social and political contact at all.
(09:01):
It was a very strict Cold War embargo. It was
a consequence of the Korean War, but it was also
a consequence of mal declaring the People's Republic of China.
So it's this height of the Cold War tensions. And
then in the nineteen seventies you have the famous Nixon
Mao meeting, the opening up of relations and the softening
of these tensions. And it's in that period in the
(09:23):
nineteen seventies that the two countries rebuilt a trade relationship.
And you've really got to sort of think about what
it is that these people seeking to rebuild a trade
relationship were assuming, and rather than accepting those assumptions, critiquing them.
And so that led me then to not just look
at the business people within the United States and within China,
(09:46):
but a whole range of other actors who were part
of this interdependence that was being built. So I look
at diplomats in both countries, I look at labor unions,
I look at consumers, particularly within the United States. I
look at retailers within the US. And one of the
things that I found as I was doing this research
(10:08):
was that understanding how this relationship was rebuilt was really
a story not only about rebuilding a trade relationship, but
a much bigger question of how does China, the world's
largest communist nation, how did it converge with global capitalism. And,
as you've mentioned, Tracy, when people think about the history
(10:29):
of China's engagement with the capitalist world, Dung Xiaoping's reforms
loom very large and rightly so, the very very significant
moment in the history of China's political economy. But in
looking at this nineteen seventies period, started to see well,
actually a lot of the experimentation and a lot of
the groundwork for what led to Dung's reforms in the
(10:52):
very late nineteen seventies and really the nineteen eighties. A
lot of those experimentations within China were already happening in
the nineteen seventies. And even more than that, I realized
that one of the major assumptions that needed to be
critiqued was that China wasn't just converging with a static capitalism.
China was converging with a system that itself was undergoing
(11:15):
significant transformations in the nineteen seventies, and the biggest capitalist
power at the time, the United States, was at the
heart of many of these transformations occurring within the capitalist system.
And so what I trace in the book, and what
I realized needed to be historicized and understood, was a
way that these two different spaces experimentations within China but
(11:41):
also the United States and its economic turbulence during the
nineteen seventies, The way that those two different spaces intersected
and ultimately, through the decisions and actions of certain groups
within those two places, ultimately converged. And so it's a
story of change within the capitalist system as much it
(12:02):
is a story of change within China. And I was
particularly struck by the way that those two factors began
to converge in particular ways.
Speaker 2 (12:27):
It would be an easy story if the story were
simply just Mao dies. There's a little bit of turmal
trying to spend a couple of years figuring out who's
going to replace him. Don't show pen comes into power,
opens up suddenly their capitalist or someone. But obviously that's
not the story. Let's talk about some of these specifics
in the early part of the nineteen seventies, who were
(12:49):
the first movers in the US who sort of sensed
an opportunity to trade with China in some form or another,
And then how did they do it? Because still I
guess maybe I just my mind is in sort of
the standard narrative where it's like, oh, trade with China
is impossible. It's a communist country where there's no free
enterprise or anything like that under mile. But talk to
(13:11):
us about like the first people who sort of sensed
an opportunity and sort of operationally what they were able
to do under the existing environment.
Speaker 4 (13:19):
Yeah. Well, there are a couple of different groups of
individuals or groups of business people that I particularly focus on.
It was very important to my own analytics unpacking was
to think about which kinds of business people and which
kinds of American actors were beginning to trade with China.
So on one level, there were the big companies, the Boeings,
(13:42):
the Westinghouses, etc. So they were these very significant and
large titans of American industrial capital who were looking to
China really from the get go and saying we want
to sell our planes, or we want to sell fertilizer
factories or what have you to China, and sort of
result of those attempts were far more murky, and I
(14:03):
can get into that in a minute. But some of
the more surprising groups, in addition to perhaps the more
standard or expected groups of American business people, were these
very maverick, entrepreneurial American business people, some of them with
very little prior business expertise, who saw in China opportunities
(14:24):
to really take a gamboll. And so one of the
people that I look at who really was at the
forefront in opening up the trade relationship with China was
this woman named Veronica Yap. She was an architect in
the early nineteen seventies who was born in Shanghai, had
family in Hong Kong, but had grown up in the
United States, and she when she sort of heard that
(14:46):
Nixon was easing trade restrictions, saw an opportunity to import
from China, and so she began, through her connections in
Hong Kong to import a whole range of different kinds
of goods. So she was importing cheap pals and now
coats and a whole range of things that were overtly Chinese,
(15:07):
and she very quickly made enough money that she was
able to quit her day job. And she was one
of a group of these small scale importers who really
led the way in not only importing from China, but
the result was that they were selling China to American consumers.
They were helping the larger diplomatic thaw by easing American
(15:32):
consumers and therefore American voters into engaging with China in
a very new way. And so in the early nineteen seventies,
one of the really important results of these importers was
not only in the diplomatic and economic realms, but in
the cultural shift in sort of allowing for an acceptance
(15:53):
of engagement with China, and that I think has a
really important longer term impact on the way that the
trade relationship unfolded. So I traced the story of Veronica
Yap and a few other importers who by the mid
nineteen seventies, while they continued to import malcoats and continue
to import things that were overtly Chinese, also began to
(16:15):
import things that had no real connection to China at all.
So Veronica Yap, for example, imported these really amazing nineteen
seventies high heeled men's shoes and my really seventies stuff
that had no connection to China other than the label
saying made in China. And in order for that acceptance
(16:40):
of engagement on everyday granular level with China, in order
for that to occur, it necessitated the large scale, celebratory
cultural transformation of engagement with China that was certainly there
from the start of the nineteen seventies and very much
continued throughout the seventies as well. So there's this real
(17:01):
dynamic occurring whereby American importers and retailers, those selling Chinese
goods begin this much larger transformation in what it means
to even trade with China, because, as you mentioned at
the beginning of the segment, for centuries, not just American
traders but foreign traders had looked to China and seen
(17:25):
in the China market a promise of selling to China.
You know, in the early twentieth century, a very well
known American ad man, his name's Carl Crow, a Maverick
businessman of his own with his own fantastic story. He
wrote a best selling book in the United States called
four hundred Million Customers. It won the National Book Award.
(17:46):
It was this really big moment in thinking through what
the China market represented, and so he sort of crystallized
this idea that China represented four hundred million customers. And
yet thirty odd years are after Carl Crow's book. In
this nineteen seventies moment, I began to see that, yes,
you have your Boeings and your Westinghouses wanting to sell
(18:08):
to China, sort of treading the path of the Carl
Crow vision of selling your goods to China. But I
began to see also the actions of people like Veronica
Yap and other importers and retailers began to reconfigure what
it means to speak of the China market and what
it means to speak of US China trade.
Speaker 3 (18:29):
So you just laid out the sort of cultural diplomacy
via textile imports very well, but it still sort of
leaves a little bit of tension between diplomacy and geopolitical
aims versus economic ambitions. And one of the things I
thought was interesting in your book is you sort of
(18:50):
lay out a difference in mindset between the US and China,
which is very often Chinese leaders are sort of putting
diplomacy or geopolitical goals before business. So if you agreed
to do what we want in terms of politics, then
we'll trade more with you. But for the US, it's
(19:11):
very much business before diplomacy. So let's build up our
economic relationship and then we'll see how all the other
stuff goes. How were they sort of able to surmount
that difference of perspective in order to get the economic
relationship really going.
Speaker 4 (19:28):
Yeah, well, this was one of the things that was
so surprising to me about how I make sense of
the diplomacy of this trade relationship, and I had assumed
that the trade relationship would, from the US perspective, be
understood as something that would assist the larger diplomatic aim
because in this period, the diplomacy of the period is
(19:50):
really what was driving the relationship, and it's certainly what
has driven scholarship on the topic. So it's a period
where the two countries sought to re work how they
can have full diplomatic normalization. And the big sticking point
was Taiwan's So how can the United States and China
have embassies and a full diplomatic relationship and what did
(20:13):
that mean for Taiwan? So that was the big question,
and that's usually how people think about nineteen seventies US
China relations. They don't focus on the trade relationship. And
a very significant reason for that is that the trade
numbers were really low. But precisely because the trade numbers
were low is why it's really important, because when we
(20:33):
look at the trade not in terms of sort of
the quantity of trade or the level of trade, but
in terms of qualitative changes, that's where it matters. And
so if I come back to this point that I
made earlier about unpacking the assumptions of your actors at
the time, the US actors that I look at the
US diplomats and at the executive level, so Nixon, Ford, Kater,
(20:56):
they all assumed that the trade relationship that they had
reopened with China, that that would assist the larger diplomatic
aims that they had, which is full normalization with China.
And so because trade was understood as a tool to
assist this larger diplomatic imperative, it was sort of seen
as a secondary thing that would ease What really mattered
(21:19):
to them was this normalization, and that therefore coincided with
very different, as if outlined Tracy, a very different assumption
on the part of Chinese policymakers, who, as the archival
documents reveal, who took a very overt and very different
approach towards the relationship between trade and diplomacy. They said, no,
(21:39):
we're working towards normalization with you United States, but you
only get trade benefits with US after we have improvements
in those diplomatic conversations, So only after we can have
concrete steps towards normalization. But where the sticking point lay
was in Chinese sales of goods to the United States,
(22:02):
because even though Chinese leaders said no, we're going to
take a very different approach, trade comes after improvements, not before.
There was a distinction where they said, okay, we'll allow
for our sales of our goods to the United States.
That wasn't the sticky point. That was eased partly because
it gave them cash to buy other things from other
countries and so, in other words, imports to the United
(22:25):
States of Chinese goods became a space that was within
Chinese leaders political interests, but it also became one within
the US policymakers interests too, because of that assumption that
they had, which is, let's use trade to help the
larger diplomatic situation, and because the numbers were so low,
(22:45):
it didn't seem to nutter that, you know, helping China
sell some of its textiles to the United States that
wouldn't have a big or was perceived to not have,
you know, a particularly negative consequence. Of course, the story
is far different to that, but the political assumption was
something that I myself really wanted to denormalize and denaturalize
(23:09):
and unpack.
Speaker 2 (23:10):
So when people think about the history, there's the male era,
there's the dung era opening up. Okay, so maybe that
was an important shift, but there was more to it.
But the other thing you said, which I thought I
wanted to go back to, is that capitalism in the
United States was not some fixed, permanent state. That the
US was also undergoing a transition. And there was the
(23:31):
inflation of the nineteen seventies, and there were the wars,
and there was the fact that Nixon went off the
gold standard in nineteen seventy one, and that was a
big deal. Talk to us about the state of flux
that America found itself in the nineteen seventies, such that
both for diplomatic and I guess trade or sort of
commercial reasons, there was this impulse to figure out more
(23:56):
about what could be done with the China market.
Speaker 4 (23:58):
Yeah, I mean, this is such an import a part
of the story. Right as you say, Joe Nixon ending
a gold standard, the end of Breton Woods. It occurred,
you know, within a month of Nixon's announcement of his
about to go to China. And so they're often paired
as these two Nixon shocks are prepaired because they were
shocks because of their style rather than the substance underpinning them.
(24:22):
But when you look at American business people and American corporations,
these two Nixon shocks actually worked together, and so they're
how I begin the book is with these two shocks
and their lasting and very unintended consequences. So something like
the ending of the Breton Woods system, but also by
(24:42):
sort of the mid nineteen seventies, US Congress passes the
nineteen seventy four Trade Act, and some of these key
legislative changes are crucial to the ways that American policy
makers sought to encourage the development of American manufacturing and
finance and the relationship between those two things. So we
(25:05):
speak today of sort of neoliberalism or of globalization, but
these are very much processes that were the products of
deliberate decisions, and in the book, I suddainly try and
pull out some of those core decisions that had these
long lasting repercussions. So the end of Breton Woods and
the sort of the freeing up therefore of capital was
(25:27):
crucial to the capacity eventually of US corporations to invest
their money overseas and have offshore manufacturing. It's hard to
imagine today, and I always stress it is, you know,
in twenty twenty four. We take for granted the fact
that we have sort of outsourced manufacturing and supply chain
(25:48):
networks and all the rest of it. But in the
nineteen seventies, these dynamics were very much only developing. There's
nothing about that that was certain American businesses, as you mentioned, Joe,
there's new signify inflation, they very much felt like they
were under attack from a whole range of different spaces.
Labor unions were very very active in this period, and
(26:08):
so there was nothing guaranteed in the world that we
live today, but there were certain steps, both legislative as
well as within the corporate world that did lead to
what we now have of of sort of offshore manufacturing
and other things. So just to give you an example,
j C. Penny is one of the big sort of
retailing companies that I look at in the book, and
(26:30):
they had in sort of the early nineteen seventies nineteen
seventy three, only about ten percent of their entire stock
was goods that were made not in the United States.
And jac Penny, I mean, it's big now, but it
was it was really, really, really dominant in the market
in the nineteen seventies. I think it was the second
largest retailer in the period, and you're having gone through
(26:52):
their company archives and their records.
Speaker 3 (26:55):
And j C.
Speaker 4 (26:56):
Penny's company plan outlined in nineteen seventy three what their
goals were going to be for the next five years.
And one of the key goals in response, and it
was very much in response to Nixon's ending of the
Bred and Wood system, and the gold standard was to say, Okay,
we're in flux right now. Things are challenging right now,
but our five year plan is to increase the amount
(27:20):
of goods that we sell in our stores that's manufactured overseas. So,
in other words, we want to strategically and deliberately choose
to turn to outsourced manufacturing. And within that company plan,
they listed a range of countries that they thought would
be good to get cheap labor from, and China was
listed amongst those spaces. And this is very early days
(27:42):
right nineteen seventy three. Like China, they've only been trading
with each other for about eighteen months, stuff to twenty
odd years of isolation, and jcpenny is listing China. It's
a potential space with which they could engage, and that
really tells you something about the very deliberate and overt
but also encouraged ways in which outsourced manufacturing was a
(28:02):
product of decisions. Similarly, if we turned to the Trade
Act of nineteen seventy four, just briefly, is this really
important again legislative moment where Congress said, after a number
of years in which Congress had introduced legislation that would
have limited the roles of manufacturing corporations and limited the
(28:24):
capacity of manufacturing multinational corporations to invest overseas a range
of bills, including the Mills Bills and the Burt Hark
Bill in the early nineteen seventies, by nineteen seventy four,
Congress passed this Trade Act of nineteen seventy four, in
which they chose to limit their own legislative powers after
(28:45):
the early seventies, where their own members had tried to
sort of curtail of what they saw as a liberal
international order. With the Trade Act of nineteen seventy four,
one of the consequences of it was to decrease Congresses
powers in making trade decisions, in imposing tariffs and other things.
So what the Trade Act did was it it gave
the powers some powers of tariff making and other sort
(29:08):
of conditions on trade. They gave those powers to the president,
to the executive branch. And this is really really significant
for a number of reasons, not least of which is
that this is happening right at the heart or of
the Watergate scandal. So faith and trust in the executive
office and in the president is at its lowest. And
yet Congress voted and passed this trade legislation that increased
(29:33):
the capacity of the president to impose restrictions and whatever
else on trade, precisely because of the assumption that the
capacity to uphold the liberal international trading order would be
far more protected and far more guaranteed with the office
of the executive the president than it was with this
(29:54):
sort of unruly Congress, which was sort of introducing labor
backed policies and introducing sort of early, sort of in
the early seventies sort of legislation that might have been
a threat to this movement to offshore manufacturing. And it's
precisely that increase in power that Donald Trump has been
able to impose the tariffs that he has. It's precisely
(30:16):
that change from the Trade Act of nineteen seventy four
that Joe Biden, too has been able to continue that,
and so in the seventies, the assumption was the president
is going to uphold and protect free trade and liberal
international trade, and that certainly was the case for a
number of decades, but as we're living through today, that
assumption is no longer something to be guaranteed.
Speaker 3 (30:53):
I'm glad you brought up Trump and Biden because I
wanted to ask you about the current state of affairs.
Do you think there's any path to maybe going back
to that sort of time in the nineteen thirties or
even earlier where China was regarded as a potential market
for consumers. And one of the reasons I ask is
(31:16):
because I think you mentioned in your book, but when
China joined the World Trade Organization in I guess it
was two thousand and one or something like that, I
think part of the narrative then was this idea that
they could be customers for Western goods. And of course,
in the years since then, that idea has sort of
fallen away again, and we are very much used to
(31:36):
talking about China as a competitor for manufactured goods and
a cheap source of labor and all that stuff you've
been discussing is there any way we could go back
to a place where maybe it's regarded as more of
a market to sell things into.
Speaker 4 (31:51):
There are a couple of things I want to say
that The first is first and fomust. China is a
major consumer market. It consumes products that many of its
own workers make. But the bigger question that you're asking
right a sort of how can we is there a
possibility of going back to a different kind of trade order.
I think one of the major problems that we're living
(32:13):
with and through is that in many ways we're not
so much as going back as remaining, at least rhetorically
back in the early twentieth century when it comes to
US political conversations about trade. So even to this day,
Biden speaks in terms of his tariffs protecting American jobs,
(32:34):
and Donald Trump even more so in terms of sort
of China is stealing American jobs and we've got to
protect them. The problem with that thinking, and it ties
back to seeing China as a space to sell to it,
is that it doesn't take into account the very profound
transformations in how manufacturing and finance and trade more broadly
(32:57):
operate and have operated since the nineteen seventy that the
ways that corporations operate and the ways that a good
that is labeled made in China operates, we know, contains
a really significant set of other dynamics underpinning it. That
a good labeled made in China has involved many other
(33:17):
countries along the way. So in the age of COVID
and all the rest of it, we're familiar right with
this idea of made in China as representing a very
sort of intertwined global system. And yet politically and rhetorically,
the conversations about trade and the conversations about China remain
very bound by the nation state. They remain bound by
(33:38):
very early twentieth century notions of made in China represents China,
and that's a threat, and made in the USA is
the solution, and that's going to support American jobs, when
really the reality of trade is such that the central
power and the central space of profit moves far more
fluidly between and among nation states. That it's not just
(34:02):
made in China anymore, but that a corporation made it,
that it's Apple, or it's Gap, or it's any of
any of the brands. That they are the ones who
need to be understood as central to these dynamic It's
not just anymore about a nation state, but the kinds
of labels that we're familiar with that say made in
X place. They are a product of late nineteenth century trade.
(34:26):
There are a product in fact of the UK of
Britain in the very late nineteenth century looking out at
the world and seeing a threat from the industrial power
or the industrialization of Germany. And so in the late
nineteenth century, the UK introduced legislation that would say, we
want to limit goods coming from Germany because of its
(34:48):
industrial might, and we're going to do so by labeling
products from Germany with made in Germany. And the idea was, well,
if you know, British consumers see made in Germany, they're
not going to want to buy it, and that's gonna
be good for us, because we want to serve stymy
their powers. But what's really really important, right, So there's
(35:09):
a very common thread here, and that is nationalism, and
that is sort of wanting to create this sort of
this threat. But really, really importantly, when I looked into
this history, I was like, Okay, that's really interesting. But
then I looked at the legislation and I looked at
what it was that the British had passed and they
in the law said we're going to know if it's
(35:32):
coming from Germany because of where the ship left. This
is in the law they said, if the ship leaves Germany,
then we're going to know that all the stuff on
that ship was made in Germany. And that's how we
will know to put the label made in Germany. And
that reflects a very very different way in which trade
(35:54):
operated compared to today. We know that trade operates differently. We
know that we can't don't make an economic decision or
a trade based decision based on sort of the ship
that the goods are left from. We know that things
operate very differently, and yet the labeling itself and the
(36:14):
politics around these labels has remained very static. In many ways,
we're still in the late nineteenth century way of thinking
about trade and manufacturing and goods. It's the same reason
that we're still seeing tarots as being wheeled out as
the one way which Biden as much as Trump is
(36:35):
seeking to sort of control trade. It's very very nineteenth
century way of thinking, despite the fact that we know
it operates very very differently.
Speaker 2 (36:43):
Yeah, the idea of like, oh, it comes from X place,
therefore it's from X is. It seems like we sort
of understand the flaws and then we try to, like, well,
as it's sixty percent, this was it forty percent?
Speaker 4 (36:54):
This?
Speaker 2 (36:54):
Where's the value add? And obviously very difficult. I just
have one last question. You know, it's funny I'm reading.
I pulled up a story while you're talking nineteen seventy
two by The New York Times fashion writer Bernardine Morris
about Veronica Yap and her introduction of these various Chinese
styles and they're sold at sax Fifth Avenue and Bloomingdale's.
(37:14):
But he uses in the article uses the word China hand.
So Veronica Yap is referred to as a China hand.
And you hear about that today, someone with a lot
of familiarity, who knows both countries very well and could
sort of facilitate trade and dialogue, et cetera. Can you
talk a little bit about that first generation of traders
identifying goods made in China that might appeal to the
(37:36):
US fashion market. But then the next level is, okay,
not just stereotypically or typically Chinese goods, but just any
good You mentioned shoes that could theoretically be made in
China more cheaply or more efficiently than somewhere else. And
that's sort of like the beginning of the huge boom,
which is anything can theoretically be made in China. What
(37:56):
was the role of the Veronica Yapps of the world
is that time of setting the stage for the next
generation that wasn't just selling sort of Chinese style jackets
and so forth, but in sort of identifying China as
this huge potential production market for more and more and
more and more advanced goods that type, eventually getting to
(38:18):
the point where we are today where there significant concerns
about China being at the technological frontier of manufacturing.
Speaker 4 (38:25):
Yeah. I mean, so it operated in multiple ways. So
it operated in terms, as I mentioned earlier, of the
cultural transformation of accepting regular everyday goods that were made
in China bah exactly with that label. But it also
operated at as you mentioned, an expertise level. This is
a new generation of American business people who have been
(38:48):
shut out of the China market. They're competing with the
Brits and with the West Germans and the Japanese who
had been trading with China much longer throughout the nineteen
sixties because of their governments that have ended the trade
embargo that the United States continued to uphold. And so
the Americans were late comers to the China market, and
so the importers began to create a set of conversations
(39:13):
and expertise amongst themselves. This sort of cultivated China hand,
if you will, in which they explained to one another,
here's how you trade with China, and in this phrase,
doing business with China was ubiquitous. It's a real trope
within the literature, and I began to see it, and
perhaps this is the consequence of my earlier stage of
(39:34):
being a literature undergraduate. I saw this as itself a
body of literature, as a genre of writing, because it
was a huge number of hamphlets and books and what
have you about how to trade with China, and in
providing that expertise, it actually created a set of expectations
and ideas about what China represents and what American business
(39:57):
people wanting to get involved should expect. And one of
the key and most striking things was the advice which
said you might lose money. In fact, you probably will
lose money. Very very few business people and corporations made
much of a profit from trade with China in this period.
(40:18):
Some of the larger companies were so big that they
could absorb the loss. JC Penny absorbed the loss, for example.
But part of the advice was to companies like Ford
Motors or to Philip Morris, a cigarette company, and their
advice that they were given was, Okay, you want to
sell to China. You want to sell your cigarettes, or
you want to sell your cars. Sure, but in order
(40:40):
to get there, you need to buy from China first.
And so the advice that was coming in to these
huge titans of American capitalism was buy the rugs, buy
the porcelain, buy the tea, and so you have Coca Cola,
for example, buying tea from China, not selling folks or
(41:02):
setting up its bottling plans that came later. And the
advice and therefore actions that were being taken on an
economic level were importing from China. It was to encourage
a whole range of different stuff coming from China into
the United States. And that's set in motion a dynamic
in which with the exception of I think one year
(41:24):
and nineteen mid nineteen eighties, and it was due to
the recession. US imports of goods from China has continued
to grow for the rest of the twentieth century. And
that dynamic started in the nineteen seventies. And as I
mentioned earlier, that was that dynamic that didn't really raise
big question marks at a political level because of the
(41:45):
assumption that trade would assist the diplomacy, but also because
the numbers were low. But it's structural change that I
think is really really important, and that structural change is
what matters. There was one group who did see the
repercussions of this. There was one group who said, we're
looking at what's going on here, and we can see
the writing on the wall, and that was American labor
(42:07):
right from the get go, organized American labor. And it's
a complex dynamic, and it's one that I sort of
don't present as a simplistic story of workers versus corporations
or workers versus the government. But it was a complex
story in which there were concerns being raised right from
the get go about what this might mean for ordinary Americans,
but precisely because of political assumptions that labor was an
(42:30):
impediment or sometimes an irritant to larger geopolitical concerns. It
was not a central and in fact, one story that
I tell it was suppressed as a consequence, and so
this is a dynamic in which certain parts of the
US economy were prioritized over others.
Speaker 2 (42:47):
That was fantastic. We could probably do a whole hour
on labor. We have to run because they're going to
kick us out of the studio. But Elizabeth, thank you
so much for coming on. That was fantastic.
Speaker 4 (42:55):
It was a real pleasure to be here. Thanks for
the opportunity.
Speaker 2 (43:09):
Tracy. I thought that was a really fascinating conversation. And
I think the first thing that just sort of jumps
out to me as being important is that, if nothing else,
the story of Chinese development, in China's integration with the
rest of the global economy is not some like switch
that was flipped when Deng Chopeng took over after a moth.
Speaker 4 (43:29):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (43:30):
Absolutely, I mean you have to have two participants to
every trade relation, and I think it's very true that
we tend to view China's economic opening as this sort
of unilateral thing.
Speaker 4 (43:40):
Almost so.
Speaker 3 (43:41):
Yes, Kissinger was involved in the nineteen seventies on the
political side, but very much so when it comes to
the actual trade relationship. We think about the liberalization stemming
from China, and I thought Elizabeth's point about, well, there
are two sides to this, and a lot was going
on in the US in the nineteen seventies in terms
of economic development and the way the economy was sort
(44:04):
of evolving, and that that played a huge role too.
I also think the timeline is really interesting here, So
the idea that in the nineteen thirties, you know, you
had I think it was an ad executive shright writing
a book about China and four hundred million customers, and
then thirty years later or forty years later, it's more
of a market for labor.
Speaker 2 (44:24):
That point is really wild to me too, because that
book four hundred million customers, Like you could totally imagine
some book having been written like nineteen ninety four right
by some like Nike executive called like a billion customers
that was like, oh, this is and I'm sure that
book probably exists. I don't know who wrote it, but
it is funny that there has always been literally basically
(44:46):
for almost a century now, this dream of the huge
Chinese consumer market, and yet that basically for the most part,
and there are obviously exceptions, the big opportunities have been
on the sort of supply and production side.
Speaker 3 (44:59):
Absolutely. The other thing that I thought was kind of
funny was the discussion of the you know, made in
whatever country labels and the idea of how we still
have them today and yet they are not particularly well
suited to global supply chains. And I was thinking back
to in the midst of all these supply chain disruptions,
(45:20):
I remember someone it might have been like an official
branch of the US government, to just study where they
looked at a bunch of different businesses as base cases
for the global supply chain. And I remember they looked
at this one company in particular, I think it made
hot tubs or saunas or something, and the saunas or
the hot tubs were always pitched as made in America,
(45:42):
like they made a big deal of it in their marketing.
But then this report had a diagram that showed how
the hot tubs were actually put together and where all
the components came from, and it was like everywhere you
could imagine in the world, Vietnam, China, there was a
piece coming from like all sides of the basically and
then being assembled somewhere in Montana or something like that.
Speaker 2 (46:04):
Not surprising, but funny. I also thought like something that
came up which I hadn't really appreciated it all before,
but the idea of like fashion and style being sort
of at the very forefront of that. And I you know,
I mentioned it on the show, but like, you know,
going back and reading about Veronika Yap and the idea
that and it makes sense, right the first consumer excitement
(46:26):
and you know, Elizabeth Tyled her book Made in China,
was like this idea of like, oh, this is really exciting.
This is a style of jacket, this is a style
of baby carrier that they use in China that's made
in China, and how like that was sort of along
with the Nixon in China moments, like a key step
in the opening and these first few business people that
went over there and sort of discovered this opportunity and
(46:48):
then taught other business people about that.
Speaker 3 (46:51):
Yeah, absolutely, shall we leave it there.
Speaker 2 (46:53):
Let's leave it there.
Speaker 3 (46:54):
This has been another episode of the All Thoughts podcast.
I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway.
Speaker 2 (47:00):
And I'm Joe Wisenthal. You can follow me at The
Stalwart Follow our guest Elizabeth Ingleson. She's at Liz Ingleson.
Follow our producers Kerman Rodriguez at Kerman Arman, dash Ol
Bennett at Dashbot and Keilbrooks at Kelbrooks. Thank you to
our producer Moses ONEm From our odlots content. Go to
Bloomberg dot com slash odd lots, where have transcripts, a
blog and a newsletter and you can chat about all
(47:21):
of these topics twenty four to seven in the discord
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Speaker 3 (47:27):
Od lots and if you enjoy all thoughts, If you
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China trade, then please leave us a positive review on
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(47:48):
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Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio News.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast.
I'm Joe Wisenthal and I'm Tracy Alloway. Tracy, needless to say,
always a lot of anxiety about the US China trade
relationship these days. I feel like there are new tariffs
and new developments or new conversations about overcapacity and evs,
and new headlines about planes and stuff basically every day
(00:40):
right now.
Speaker 3 (00:41):
Yeah, there were new headlines this morning, weren't there from
one of Trump's economic advisors, right, I can't remember what
it was. Oh, that's why God created tariffs. Oh yeah,
but you're absolutely right. I mean it's been years, if
not decades now where China manufacturing has been this sort
of thing that looms large over the US economy. And
(01:01):
I think what's interesting about the US China economic relationship
is the way we think about it, or the way
we talk about it. It seems almost like it was
an inevitability, Like it was inevitable that the two biggest
economies in the world were going to have, you know,
some sort of trade relationship, and maybe because of specific
(01:22):
decisions undertaken by the Chinese leadership, like Deng Chaoping or
whoever to build out the Chinese economy in a certain
way led to a lot of the increased tension. But
you know, in advance of this discussion, I was kind
of thinking about it like there was no inevitability, right,
Like India could have been our biggest trade partner.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
Yeah, that's a really great point, or we might not
have like a big trade relationship at all. Or China
could have been more like Russia, in which trade is
very modest. Right, Like this idea is like, Okay, the
US is rich and we do services and stuff like that.
Here in China is poor. Their comparative advantage is cheap labor. Therefore,
(02:04):
China produces everything or produces a lot. That's how we talk.
And it just sort of seems, as you say, like
like yeah, inevitable, this is the natural order of things.
But there are lots of countries that have big populations
that aren't particularly rich or that aren't manufacturing powerhouses the
way China has. So I think it's interesting as you say,
(02:25):
like there's this conversation like it's sort of inevitable, and
we talk about it now like Okay, this is the
state of things. Do we want to change it, et cetera,
but really not much conversation about like how we got
here or how we built this relationship in the first place.
Speaker 3 (02:38):
Yeah, I think there's going back to that inevitability point.
There's usually an underlying tone of like, well, the market's
gonna market. Yeah, market's gonna market, market's gonna market.
Speaker 2 (02:47):
And in visible hand's gonna invisible hands.
Speaker 3 (02:49):
That's try and that's how we ended up with, you know,
lots of stuff being built in China where there is
cheap labor. By the way, Joe, I'm old enough to
remember when I was living in the both, but go on, Yeah,
when I was living in Japan in the nineteen eighties,
I distinctly remember that most of my toys, like my
cheap little plastic toys, they all came from Taiwan, right,
(03:12):
And I remember when I was like six years old,
not really understanding where Taiwan was or what it was
at that point, but I distinctly remember like thinking that
it was this magical land where all the toys were made.
But you know, like in the nineteen eighties, I guess
we were in that transition point from moving from Taiwan
being a massive manufacturing base into China, but even as
(03:34):
late as like the early nineteen eighties, Taiwan was still
making a lot of stuff for me.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
When I was ten years old, I lived in Malaysia
for a year, and then I have this memory of
like visiting a friend's house when I was eleven back
in the US, and I noticed that one of his
hot wheels was made in Malaysia, and I was like, Oh,
that's so cool. I didn't even know, like anyone that
else had heard of Malaysia, and so the idea like
that this company had gone to Malaysia to manufacture the
hot way, I just thought it was like so cool.
(04:01):
It was like, oh, I've been to that country. I
didn't know anyone else knew about it, let alone going
up to setting up a toy manufacturing operation. I guess
there's a little bit of a diversion, but it does
remain true that a lot of the countries that are
powerhouses of advanced manufacturing or one time powerhouses and still
are of low end manufacturing.
Speaker 3 (04:21):
Absolutely, so I think it's worth digging into how we
actually ended up in this now contentious trade relationship with
China and why it is that, you know, instead of
maybe selling a bunch of American made goods into that market.
We ended up buying a bunch of Chinese made goods.
Speaker 2 (04:38):
And this is the other thing, the other key point here,
which is that for a long time, and even still
to some extent, you hear like the dream of selling
it to China. Oh, if we could sell one you know,
box of tissue to every one billion or more than
one billion now citizens of China, that'd be billions of dollars,
et cetera. And I think a few companies have done that.
(04:59):
You know, Starbucks sells a lot in China, and Nike
sells a lot in China, et cetera. But by and large,
the idea of China is this huge consumer market for
American made brands. It exists to some extent, but probably
not exists to the full dream that people have imagined.
Speaker 3 (05:15):
Yeah, I think that's right.
Speaker 2 (05:16):
Okay, Well, I'm really excited. We do have the perfect
guest to talk about how the US China trade relationship
was really born. We're going to be speaking to doctor
Elizabeth Ingleson. She's an assistant professor at the London School
of Economics and the author of a new book that
came out this year called Made in China when US
China interests converged to transform global trades. So doctor ingleson,
(05:40):
thank you so much for coming on out.
Speaker 4 (05:42):
Lots Hi, Joe, Hey, Tracy, it's great to be here.
Speaker 2 (05:45):
Thank you so much for coming on. Why don't we
start with why this book? What was it about this
topic made in China that in your view, was important
enough that this is a focus for a book.
Speaker 4 (05:57):
Huh. Well, it's interesting hearing the two of you recollect
your own engagements with Made in Taiwan or Made in Malaysia,
because in many ways I didn't start off thinking I
want to write this book. I started off as a
history undergraduate and actually a major in literature, even more
(06:17):
in history, and was really as an Australian growing up
just as the Cold War was ending and into the
nineteen nineties and two thousands, the US and China were
always the two biggest hours in the region. They still
are today. And it was the early twenty tens and
at that period of time, political scientists, policymakers, they were
(06:41):
talking about the US China relationship in terms of its
economic interdependence. They were saying, there's so much at stake
in the relationship, especially economically, that the US and China
aren't going to risk what they have for some kind
of geopolitical conflict or diplomatic tens all worse right, or war,
(07:02):
that the interdependence itself is enough to mitigate that. And
I wanted to learn more about this. I wanted to
think through where did this interdependence come from? How did
we get to a state in the twenty tens where
the United States and China did have such an entwined
economic relationship. And that really took me down this path
(07:24):
of research and thinking and going to archives all over
the world, but particularly the United States. And here we
are today with the book.
Speaker 3 (07:34):
So when I think of the way a lot of
people talk and write about China's economic history, I feel
like so much of the focus is on China's opening
up right and caveat here. Right before I cracked open
your book, I was reading another book on China called
wild Ride, A Short History of the Opening and Closing
of the Chinese Economy. And I mean the clue is
(07:56):
in the title there, right. The emphasis is very much
on the decisions that are being made by China. So
I'm curious why you decided to comment it from a
slightly different way, and from maybe some of the decisions,
both diplomatic and economic, being made by the US and
the rest of the world.
Speaker 4 (08:14):
I think one of the things that you are trained
to do as a historian is to denaturalize things, to
look at a moment in time, and you seek to
question the assumptions of the people operating in that period
of time. And so, as I mentioned, I wanted to
sort of historicize a workout where this interdependent relationship came from,
(08:38):
and it led me to the nineteen seventies. It led
me to this period when the US and China were
rebuilding a trade relationship after over twenty years of Cold
War isolation. So throughout the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties,
both countries had very little, in fact none at all
economic contact and very little social and political contact at all.
(09:01):
It was a very strict Cold War embargo. It was
a consequence of the Korean War, but it was also
a consequence of mal declaring the People's Republic of China.
So it's this height of the Cold War tensions. And
then in the nineteen seventies you have the famous Nixon
Mao meeting, the opening up of relations and the softening
of these tensions. And it's in that period in the
(09:23):
nineteen seventies that the two countries rebuilt a trade relationship.
And you've really got to sort of think about what
it is that these people seeking to rebuild a trade
relationship were assuming, and rather than accepting those assumptions, critiquing them.
And so that led me then to not just look
at the business people within the United States and within China,
(09:46):
but a whole range of other actors who were part
of this interdependence that was being built. So I look
at diplomats in both countries, I look at labor unions,
I look at consumers, particularly within the United States. I
look at retailers within the US. And one of the
things that I found as I was doing this research
(10:08):
was that understanding how this relationship was rebuilt was really
a story not only about rebuilding a trade relationship, but
a much bigger question of how does China, the world's
largest communist nation, how did it converge with global capitalism. And,
as you've mentioned, Tracy, when people think about the history
(10:29):
of China's engagement with the capitalist world, Dung Xiaoping's reforms
loom very large and rightly so, the very very significant
moment in the history of China's political economy. But in
looking at this nineteen seventies period, started to see well,
actually a lot of the experimentation and a lot of
the groundwork for what led to Dung's reforms in the
(10:52):
very late nineteen seventies and really the nineteen eighties. A
lot of those experimentations within China were already happening in
the nineteen seventies. And even more than that, I realized
that one of the major assumptions that needed to be
critiqued was that China wasn't just converging with a static capitalism.
China was converging with a system that itself was undergoing
(11:15):
significant transformations in the nineteen seventies, and the biggest capitalist
power at the time, the United States, was at the
heart of many of these transformations occurring within the capitalist system.
And so what I trace in the book, and what
I realized needed to be historicized and understood, was a
way that these two different spaces experimentations within China but
(11:41):
also the United States and its economic turbulence during the
nineteen seventies, The way that those two different spaces intersected
and ultimately, through the decisions and actions of certain groups
within those two places, ultimately converged. And so it's a
story of change within the capitalist system as much it
(12:02):
is a story of change within China. And I was
particularly struck by the way that those two factors began
to converge in particular ways.
Speaker 2 (12:27):
It would be an easy story if the story were
simply just Mao dies. There's a little bit of turmal
trying to spend a couple of years figuring out who's
going to replace him. Don't show pen comes into power,
opens up suddenly their capitalist or someone. But obviously that's
not the story. Let's talk about some of these specifics
in the early part of the nineteen seventies, who were
(12:49):
the first movers in the US who sort of sensed
an opportunity to trade with China in some form or another,
And then how did they do it? Because still I
guess maybe I just my mind is in sort of
the standard narrative where it's like, oh, trade with China
is impossible. It's a communist country where there's no free
enterprise or anything like that under mile. But talk to
(13:11):
us about like the first people who sort of sensed
an opportunity and sort of operationally what they were able
to do under the existing environment.
Speaker 4 (13:19):
Yeah. Well, there are a couple of different groups of
individuals or groups of business people that I particularly focus on.
It was very important to my own analytics unpacking was
to think about which kinds of business people and which
kinds of American actors were beginning to trade with China.
So on one level, there were the big companies, the Boeings,
(13:42):
the Westinghouses, etc. So they were these very significant and
large titans of American industrial capital who were looking to
China really from the get go and saying we want
to sell our planes, or we want to sell fertilizer
factories or what have you to China, and sort of
result of those attempts were far more murky, and I
(14:03):
can get into that in a minute. But some of
the more surprising groups, in addition to perhaps the more
standard or expected groups of American business people, were these
very maverick, entrepreneurial American business people, some of them with
very little prior business expertise, who saw in China opportunities
(14:24):
to really take a gamboll. And so one of the
people that I look at who really was at the
forefront in opening up the trade relationship with China was
this woman named Veronica Yap. She was an architect in
the early nineteen seventies who was born in Shanghai, had
family in Hong Kong, but had grown up in the
United States, and she when she sort of heard that
(14:46):
Nixon was easing trade restrictions, saw an opportunity to import
from China, and so she began, through her connections in
Hong Kong to import a whole range of different kinds
of goods. So she was importing cheap pals and now
coats and a whole range of things that were overtly Chinese,
(15:07):
and she very quickly made enough money that she was
able to quit her day job. And she was one
of a group of these small scale importers who really
led the way in not only importing from China, but
the result was that they were selling China to American consumers.
They were helping the larger diplomatic thaw by easing American
(15:32):
consumers and therefore American voters into engaging with China in
a very new way. And so in the early nineteen seventies,
one of the really important results of these importers was
not only in the diplomatic and economic realms, but in
the cultural shift in sort of allowing for an acceptance
(15:53):
of engagement with China, and that I think has a
really important longer term impact on the way that the
trade relationship unfolded. So I traced the story of Veronica
Yap and a few other importers who by the mid
nineteen seventies, while they continued to import malcoats and continue
to import things that were overtly Chinese, also began to
(16:15):
import things that had no real connection to China at all.
So Veronica Yap, for example, imported these really amazing nineteen
seventies high heeled men's shoes and my really seventies stuff
that had no connection to China other than the label
saying made in China. And in order for that acceptance
(16:40):
of engagement on everyday granular level with China, in order
for that to occur, it necessitated the large scale, celebratory
cultural transformation of engagement with China that was certainly there
from the start of the nineteen seventies and very much
continued throughout the seventies as well. So there's this real
(17:01):
dynamic occurring whereby American importers and retailers, those selling Chinese
goods begin this much larger transformation in what it means
to even trade with China, because, as you mentioned at
the beginning of the segment, for centuries, not just American
traders but foreign traders had looked to China and seen
(17:25):
in the China market a promise of selling to China.
You know, in the early twentieth century, a very well
known American ad man, his name's Carl Crow, a Maverick
businessman of his own with his own fantastic story. He
wrote a best selling book in the United States called
four hundred Million Customers. It won the National Book Award.
(17:46):
It was this really big moment in thinking through what
the China market represented, and so he sort of crystallized
this idea that China represented four hundred million customers. And
yet thirty odd years are after Carl Crow's book. In
this nineteen seventies moment, I began to see that, yes,
you have your Boeings and your Westinghouses wanting to sell
(18:08):
to China, sort of treading the path of the Carl
Crow vision of selling your goods to China. But I
began to see also the actions of people like Veronica
Yap and other importers and retailers began to reconfigure what
it means to speak of the China market and what
it means to speak of US China trade.
Speaker 3 (18:29):
So you just laid out the sort of cultural diplomacy
via textile imports very well, but it still sort of
leaves a little bit of tension between diplomacy and geopolitical
aims versus economic ambitions. And one of the things I
thought was interesting in your book is you sort of
(18:50):
lay out a difference in mindset between the US and China,
which is very often Chinese leaders are sort of putting
diplomacy or geopolitical goals before business. So if you agreed
to do what we want in terms of politics, then
we'll trade more with you. But for the US, it's
(19:11):
very much business before diplomacy. So let's build up our
economic relationship and then we'll see how all the other
stuff goes. How were they sort of able to surmount
that difference of perspective in order to get the economic
relationship really going.
Speaker 4 (19:28):
Yeah, well, this was one of the things that was
so surprising to me about how I make sense of
the diplomacy of this trade relationship, and I had assumed
that the trade relationship would, from the US perspective, be
understood as something that would assist the larger diplomatic aim
because in this period, the diplomacy of the period is
(19:50):
really what was driving the relationship, and it's certainly what
has driven scholarship on the topic. So it's a period
where the two countries sought to re work how they
can have full diplomatic normalization. And the big sticking point
was Taiwan's So how can the United States and China
have embassies and a full diplomatic relationship and what did
(20:13):
that mean for Taiwan? So that was the big question,
and that's usually how people think about nineteen seventies US
China relations. They don't focus on the trade relationship. And
a very significant reason for that is that the trade
numbers were really low. But precisely because the trade numbers
were low is why it's really important, because when we
(20:33):
look at the trade not in terms of sort of
the quantity of trade or the level of trade, but
in terms of qualitative changes, that's where it matters. And
so if I come back to this point that I
made earlier about unpacking the assumptions of your actors at
the time, the US actors that I look at the
US diplomats and at the executive level, so Nixon, Ford, Kater,
(20:56):
they all assumed that the trade relationship that they had
reopened with China, that that would assist the larger diplomatic
aims that they had, which is full normalization with China.
And so because trade was understood as a tool to
assist this larger diplomatic imperative, it was sort of seen
as a secondary thing that would ease What really mattered
(21:19):
to them was this normalization, and that therefore coincided with
very different, as if outlined Tracy, a very different assumption
on the part of Chinese policymakers, who, as the archival
documents reveal, who took a very overt and very different
approach towards the relationship between trade and diplomacy. They said, no,
(21:39):
we're working towards normalization with you United States, but you
only get trade benefits with US after we have improvements
in those diplomatic conversations, So only after we can have
concrete steps towards normalization. But where the sticking point lay
was in Chinese sales of goods to the United States,
(22:02):
because even though Chinese leaders said no, we're going to
take a very different approach, trade comes after improvements, not before.
There was a distinction where they said, okay, we'll allow
for our sales of our goods to the United States.
That wasn't the sticky point. That was eased partly because
it gave them cash to buy other things from other
countries and so, in other words, imports to the United
(22:25):
States of Chinese goods became a space that was within
Chinese leaders political interests, but it also became one within
the US policymakers interests too, because of that assumption that
they had, which is, let's use trade to help the
larger diplomatic situation, and because the numbers were so low,
(22:45):
it didn't seem to nutter that, you know, helping China
sell some of its textiles to the United States that
wouldn't have a big or was perceived to not have,
you know, a particularly negative consequence. Of course, the story
is far different to that, but the political assumption was
something that I myself really wanted to denormalize and denaturalize
(23:09):
and unpack.
Speaker 2 (23:10):
So when people think about the history, there's the male era,
there's the dung era opening up. Okay, so maybe that
was an important shift, but there was more to it.
But the other thing you said, which I thought I
wanted to go back to, is that capitalism in the
United States was not some fixed, permanent state. That the
US was also undergoing a transition. And there was the
(23:31):
inflation of the nineteen seventies, and there were the wars,
and there was the fact that Nixon went off the
gold standard in nineteen seventy one, and that was a
big deal. Talk to us about the state of flux
that America found itself in the nineteen seventies, such that
both for diplomatic and I guess trade or sort of
commercial reasons, there was this impulse to figure out more
(23:56):
about what could be done with the China market.
Speaker 4 (23:58):
Yeah, I mean, this is such an import a part
of the story. Right as you say, Joe Nixon ending
a gold standard, the end of Breton Woods. It occurred,
you know, within a month of Nixon's announcement of his
about to go to China. And so they're often paired
as these two Nixon shocks are prepaired because they were
shocks because of their style rather than the substance underpinning them.
(24:22):
But when you look at American business people and American corporations,
these two Nixon shocks actually worked together, and so they're
how I begin the book is with these two shocks
and their lasting and very unintended consequences. So something like
the ending of the Breton Woods system, but also by
(24:42):
sort of the mid nineteen seventies, US Congress passes the
nineteen seventy four Trade Act, and some of these key
legislative changes are crucial to the ways that American policy
makers sought to encourage the development of American manufacturing and
finance and the relationship between those two things. So we
(25:05):
speak today of sort of neoliberalism or of globalization, but
these are very much processes that were the products of
deliberate decisions, and in the book, I suddainly try and
pull out some of those core decisions that had these
long lasting repercussions. So the end of Breton Woods and
the sort of the freeing up therefore of capital was
(25:27):
crucial to the capacity eventually of US corporations to invest
their money overseas and have offshore manufacturing. It's hard to
imagine today, and I always stress it is, you know,
in twenty twenty four. We take for granted the fact
that we have sort of outsourced manufacturing and supply chain
(25:48):
networks and all the rest of it. But in the
nineteen seventies, these dynamics were very much only developing. There's
nothing about that that was certain American businesses, as you mentioned, Joe,
there's new signify inflation, they very much felt like they
were under attack from a whole range of different spaces.
Labor unions were very very active in this period, and
(26:08):
so there was nothing guaranteed in the world that we
live today, but there were certain steps, both legislative as
well as within the corporate world that did lead to
what we now have of of sort of offshore manufacturing
and other things. So just to give you an example,
j C. Penny is one of the big sort of
retailing companies that I look at in the book, and
(26:30):
they had in sort of the early nineteen seventies nineteen
seventy three, only about ten percent of their entire stock
was goods that were made not in the United States.
And jac Penny, I mean, it's big now, but it
was it was really, really, really dominant in the market
in the nineteen seventies. I think it was the second
largest retailer in the period, and you're having gone through
(26:52):
their company archives and their records.
Speaker 3 (26:55):
And j C.
Speaker 4 (26:56):
Penny's company plan outlined in nineteen seventy three what their
goals were going to be for the next five years.
And one of the key goals in response, and it
was very much in response to Nixon's ending of the
Bred and Wood system, and the gold standard was to say, Okay,
we're in flux right now. Things are challenging right now,
but our five year plan is to increase the amount
(27:20):
of goods that we sell in our stores that's manufactured overseas. So,
in other words, we want to strategically and deliberately choose
to turn to outsourced manufacturing. And within that company plan,
they listed a range of countries that they thought would
be good to get cheap labor from, and China was
listed amongst those spaces. And this is very early days
(27:42):
right nineteen seventy three. Like China, they've only been trading
with each other for about eighteen months, stuff to twenty
odd years of isolation, and jcpenny is listing China. It's
a potential space with which they could engage, and that
really tells you something about the very deliberate and overt
but also encouraged ways in which outsourced manufacturing was a
(28:02):
product of decisions. Similarly, if we turned to the Trade
Act of nineteen seventy four, just briefly, is this really
important again legislative moment where Congress said, after a number
of years in which Congress had introduced legislation that would
have limited the roles of manufacturing corporations and limited the
(28:24):
capacity of manufacturing multinational corporations to invest overseas a range
of bills, including the Mills Bills and the Burt Hark
Bill in the early nineteen seventies, by nineteen seventy four,
Congress passed this Trade Act of nineteen seventy four, in
which they chose to limit their own legislative powers after
(28:45):
the early seventies, where their own members had tried to
sort of curtail of what they saw as a liberal
international order. With the Trade Act of nineteen seventy four,
one of the consequences of it was to decrease Congresses
powers in making trade decisions, in imposing tariffs and other things.
So what the Trade Act did was it it gave
the powers some powers of tariff making and other sort
(29:08):
of conditions on trade. They gave those powers to the president,
to the executive branch. And this is really really significant
for a number of reasons, not least of which is
that this is happening right at the heart or of
the Watergate scandal. So faith and trust in the executive
office and in the president is at its lowest. And
yet Congress voted and passed this trade legislation that increased
(29:33):
the capacity of the president to impose restrictions and whatever
else on trade, precisely because of the assumption that the
capacity to uphold the liberal international trading order would be
far more protected and far more guaranteed with the office
of the executive the president than it was with this
(29:54):
sort of unruly Congress, which was sort of introducing labor
backed policies and introducing sort of early, sort of in
the early seventies sort of legislation that might have been
a threat to this movement to offshore manufacturing. And it's
precisely that increase in power that Donald Trump has been
able to impose the tariffs that he has. It's precisely
(30:16):
that change from the Trade Act of nineteen seventy four
that Joe Biden, too has been able to continue that,
and so in the seventies, the assumption was the president
is going to uphold and protect free trade and liberal
international trade, and that certainly was the case for a
number of decades, but as we're living through today, that
assumption is no longer something to be guaranteed.
Speaker 3 (30:53):
I'm glad you brought up Trump and Biden because I
wanted to ask you about the current state of affairs.
Do you think there's any path to maybe going back
to that sort of time in the nineteen thirties or
even earlier where China was regarded as a potential market
for consumers. And one of the reasons I ask is
(31:16):
because I think you mentioned in your book, but when
China joined the World Trade Organization in I guess it
was two thousand and one or something like that, I
think part of the narrative then was this idea that
they could be customers for Western goods. And of course,
in the years since then, that idea has sort of
fallen away again, and we are very much used to
(31:36):
talking about China as a competitor for manufactured goods and
a cheap source of labor and all that stuff you've
been discussing is there any way we could go back
to a place where maybe it's regarded as more of
a market to sell things into.
Speaker 4 (31:51):
There are a couple of things I want to say
that The first is first and fomust. China is a
major consumer market. It consumes products that many of its
own workers make. But the bigger question that you're asking
right a sort of how can we is there a
possibility of going back to a different kind of trade order.
I think one of the major problems that we're living
(32:13):
with and through is that in many ways we're not
so much as going back as remaining, at least rhetorically
back in the early twentieth century when it comes to
US political conversations about trade. So even to this day,
Biden speaks in terms of his tariffs protecting American jobs,
(32:34):
and Donald Trump even more so in terms of sort
of China is stealing American jobs and we've got to
protect them. The problem with that thinking, and it ties
back to seeing China as a space to sell to it,
is that it doesn't take into account the very profound
transformations in how manufacturing and finance and trade more broadly
(32:57):
operate and have operated since the nineteen seventy that the
ways that corporations operate and the ways that a good
that is labeled made in China operates, we know, contains
a really significant set of other dynamics underpinning it. That
a good labeled made in China has involved many other
(33:17):
countries along the way. So in the age of COVID
and all the rest of it, we're familiar right with
this idea of made in China as representing a very
sort of intertwined global system. And yet politically and rhetorically,
the conversations about trade and the conversations about China remain
very bound by the nation state. They remain bound by
(33:38):
very early twentieth century notions of made in China represents China,
and that's a threat, and made in the USA is
the solution, and that's going to support American jobs, when
really the reality of trade is such that the central
power and the central space of profit moves far more
fluidly between and among nation states. That it's not just
(34:02):
made in China anymore, but that a corporation made it,
that it's Apple, or it's Gap, or it's any of
any of the brands. That they are the ones who
need to be understood as central to these dynamic It's
not just anymore about a nation state, but the kinds
of labels that we're familiar with that say made in
X place. They are a product of late nineteenth century trade.
(34:26):
There are a product in fact of the UK of
Britain in the very late nineteenth century looking out at
the world and seeing a threat from the industrial power
or the industrialization of Germany. And so in the late
nineteenth century, the UK introduced legislation that would say, we
want to limit goods coming from Germany because of its
(34:48):
industrial might, and we're going to do so by labeling
products from Germany with made in Germany. And the idea was, well,
if you know, British consumers see made in Germany, they're
not going to want to buy it, and that's gonna
be good for us, because we want to serve stymy
their powers. But what's really really important, right, So there's
(35:09):
a very common thread here, and that is nationalism, and
that is sort of wanting to create this sort of
this threat. But really, really importantly, when I looked into
this history, I was like, Okay, that's really interesting. But
then I looked at the legislation and I looked at
what it was that the British had passed and they
in the law said we're going to know if it's
(35:32):
coming from Germany because of where the ship left. This
is in the law they said, if the ship leaves Germany,
then we're going to know that all the stuff on
that ship was made in Germany. And that's how we
will know to put the label made in Germany. And
that reflects a very very different way in which trade
(35:54):
operated compared to today. We know that trade operates differently. We
know that we can't don't make an economic decision or
a trade based decision based on sort of the ship
that the goods are left from. We know that things
operate very differently, and yet the labeling itself and the
(36:14):
politics around these labels has remained very static. In many ways,
we're still in the late nineteenth century way of thinking
about trade and manufacturing and goods. It's the same reason
that we're still seeing tarots as being wheeled out as
the one way which Biden as much as Trump is
(36:35):
seeking to sort of control trade. It's very very nineteenth
century way of thinking, despite the fact that we know
it operates very very differently.
Speaker 2 (36:43):
Yeah, the idea of like, oh, it comes from X place,
therefore it's from X is. It seems like we sort
of understand the flaws and then we try to, like, well,
as it's sixty percent, this was it forty percent?
Speaker 4 (36:54):
This?
Speaker 2 (36:54):
Where's the value add? And obviously very difficult. I just
have one last question. You know, it's funny I'm reading.
I pulled up a story while you're talking nineteen seventy
two by The New York Times fashion writer Bernardine Morris
about Veronica Yap and her introduction of these various Chinese
styles and they're sold at sax Fifth Avenue and Bloomingdale's.
(37:14):
But he uses in the article uses the word China hand.
So Veronica Yap is referred to as a China hand.
And you hear about that today, someone with a lot
of familiarity, who knows both countries very well and could
sort of facilitate trade and dialogue, et cetera. Can you
talk a little bit about that first generation of traders
identifying goods made in China that might appeal to the
(37:36):
US fashion market. But then the next level is, okay,
not just stereotypically or typically Chinese goods, but just any
good You mentioned shoes that could theoretically be made in
China more cheaply or more efficiently than somewhere else. And
that's sort of like the beginning of the huge boom,
which is anything can theoretically be made in China. What
(37:56):
was the role of the Veronica Yapps of the world
is that time of setting the stage for the next
generation that wasn't just selling sort of Chinese style jackets
and so forth, but in sort of identifying China as
this huge potential production market for more and more and
more and more advanced goods that type, eventually getting to
(38:18):
the point where we are today where there significant concerns
about China being at the technological frontier of manufacturing.
Speaker 4 (38:25):
Yeah. I mean, so it operated in multiple ways. So
it operated in terms, as I mentioned earlier, of the
cultural transformation of accepting regular everyday goods that were made
in China bah exactly with that label. But it also
operated at as you mentioned, an expertise level. This is
a new generation of American business people who have been
(38:48):
shut out of the China market. They're competing with the
Brits and with the West Germans and the Japanese who
had been trading with China much longer throughout the nineteen
sixties because of their governments that have ended the trade
embargo that the United States continued to uphold. And so
the Americans were late comers to the China market, and
so the importers began to create a set of conversations
(39:13):
and expertise amongst themselves. This sort of cultivated China hand,
if you will, in which they explained to one another,
here's how you trade with China, and in this phrase,
doing business with China was ubiquitous. It's a real trope
within the literature, and I began to see it, and
perhaps this is the consequence of my earlier stage of
(39:34):
being a literature undergraduate. I saw this as itself a
body of literature, as a genre of writing, because it
was a huge number of hamphlets and books and what
have you about how to trade with China, and in
providing that expertise, it actually created a set of expectations
and ideas about what China represents and what American business
(39:57):
people wanting to get involved should expect. And one of
the key and most striking things was the advice which
said you might lose money. In fact, you probably will
lose money. Very very few business people and corporations made
much of a profit from trade with China in this period.
(40:18):
Some of the larger companies were so big that they
could absorb the loss. JC Penny absorbed the loss, for example.
But part of the advice was to companies like Ford
Motors or to Philip Morris, a cigarette company, and their
advice that they were given was, Okay, you want to
sell to China. You want to sell your cigarettes, or
you want to sell your cars. Sure, but in order
(40:40):
to get there, you need to buy from China first.
And so the advice that was coming in to these
huge titans of American capitalism was buy the rugs, buy
the porcelain, buy the tea, and so you have Coca Cola,
for example, buying tea from China, not selling folks or
(41:02):
setting up its bottling plans that came later. And the
advice and therefore actions that were being taken on an
economic level were importing from China. It was to encourage
a whole range of different stuff coming from China into
the United States. And that's set in motion a dynamic
in which with the exception of I think one year
(41:24):
and nineteen mid nineteen eighties, and it was due to
the recession. US imports of goods from China has continued
to grow for the rest of the twentieth century. And
that dynamic started in the nineteen seventies. And as I
mentioned earlier, that was that dynamic that didn't really raise
big question marks at a political level because of the
(41:45):
assumption that trade would assist the diplomacy, but also because
the numbers were low. But it's structural change that I
think is really really important, and that structural change is
what matters. There was one group who did see the
repercussions of this. There was one group who said, we're
looking at what's going on here, and we can see
the writing on the wall, and that was American labor
(42:07):
right from the get go, organized American labor. And it's
a complex dynamic, and it's one that I sort of
don't present as a simplistic story of workers versus corporations
or workers versus the government. But it was a complex
story in which there were concerns being raised right from
the get go about what this might mean for ordinary Americans,
but precisely because of political assumptions that labor was an
(42:30):
impediment or sometimes an irritant to larger geopolitical concerns. It
was not a central and in fact, one story that
I tell it was suppressed as a consequence, and so
this is a dynamic in which certain parts of the
US economy were prioritized over others.
Speaker 2 (42:47):
That was fantastic. We could probably do a whole hour
on labor. We have to run because they're going to
kick us out of the studio. But Elizabeth, thank you
so much for coming on. That was fantastic.
Speaker 4 (42:55):
It was a real pleasure to be here. Thanks for
the opportunity.
Speaker 2 (43:09):
Tracy. I thought that was a really fascinating conversation. And
I think the first thing that just sort of jumps
out to me as being important is that, if nothing else,
the story of Chinese development, in China's integration with the
rest of the global economy is not some like switch
that was flipped when Deng Chopeng took over after a moth.
Speaker 4 (43:29):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (43:30):
Absolutely, I mean you have to have two participants to
every trade relation, and I think it's very true that
we tend to view China's economic opening as this sort
of unilateral thing.
Speaker 4 (43:40):
Almost so.
Speaker 3 (43:41):
Yes, Kissinger was involved in the nineteen seventies on the
political side, but very much so when it comes to
the actual trade relationship. We think about the liberalization stemming
from China, and I thought Elizabeth's point about, well, there
are two sides to this, and a lot was going
on in the US in the nineteen seventies in terms
of economic development and the way the economy was sort
(44:04):
of evolving, and that that played a huge role too.
I also think the timeline is really interesting here, So
the idea that in the nineteen thirties, you know, you
had I think it was an ad executive shright writing
a book about China and four hundred million customers, and
then thirty years later or forty years later, it's more
of a market for labor.
Speaker 2 (44:24):
That point is really wild to me too, because that
book four hundred million customers, Like you could totally imagine
some book having been written like nineteen ninety four right
by some like Nike executive called like a billion customers
that was like, oh, this is and I'm sure that
book probably exists. I don't know who wrote it, but
it is funny that there has always been literally basically
(44:46):
for almost a century now, this dream of the huge
Chinese consumer market, and yet that basically for the most part,
and there are obviously exceptions, the big opportunities have been
on the sort of supply and production side.
Speaker 3 (44:59):
Absolutely. The other thing that I thought was kind of
funny was the discussion of the you know, made in
whatever country labels and the idea of how we still
have them today and yet they are not particularly well
suited to global supply chains. And I was thinking back
to in the midst of all these supply chain disruptions,
(45:20):
I remember someone it might have been like an official
branch of the US government, to just study where they
looked at a bunch of different businesses as base cases
for the global supply chain. And I remember they looked
at this one company in particular, I think it made
hot tubs or saunas or something, and the saunas or
the hot tubs were always pitched as made in America,
(45:42):
like they made a big deal of it in their marketing.
But then this report had a diagram that showed how
the hot tubs were actually put together and where all
the components came from, and it was like everywhere you
could imagine in the world, Vietnam, China, there was a
piece coming from like all sides of the basically and
then being assembled somewhere in Montana or something like that.
Speaker 2 (46:04):
Not surprising, but funny. I also thought like something that
came up which I hadn't really appreciated it all before,
but the idea of like fashion and style being sort
of at the very forefront of that. And I you know,
I mentioned it on the show, but like, you know,
going back and reading about Veronika Yap and the idea
that and it makes sense, right the first consumer excitement
(46:26):
and you know, Elizabeth Tyled her book Made in China,
was like this idea of like, oh, this is really exciting.
This is a style of jacket, this is a style
of baby carrier that they use in China that's made
in China, and how like that was sort of along
with the Nixon in China moments, like a key step
in the opening and these first few business people that
went over there and sort of discovered this opportunity and
(46:48):
then taught other business people about that.
Speaker 3 (46:51):
Yeah, absolutely, shall we leave it there.
Speaker 2 (46:53):
Let's leave it there.
Speaker 3 (46:54):
This has been another episode of the All Thoughts podcast.
I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway.
Speaker 2 (47:00):
And I'm Joe Wisenthal. You can follow me at The
Stalwart Follow our guest Elizabeth Ingleson. She's at Liz Ingleson.
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