With public ownership of the means of production (in any public sector industry) it is by definition socialist. By every definition socialist.

It’s only socialist if you accept the framing that the state (ie the government) is the manifestation of the will of the people. This is demonstrably untrue in China given how regularly they suppress protest movements and attempts by workers to organize. They are NOT the will of the people. They are the will of the party, which has always been the case in every state communist country that has ever existed.

And I don’t get my information on China from western media sources. I get it from people I know who live in China and from my own experiences in China.

anyone can join he government and take on the boring admin work, there are checks at every level to reduce corruption and no one person ever has absolute power. Technically “the evil dictator Xi Jinping” could be ousted with a single vote, or multiple lower regional votes. The same is true for all positions. Appointments are democratically placed, so corruption is minimal.

Replace “China” with “The US” here and it sounds exactly like it comes out of a grade school civics textbook in the US describing the American political system. This is the exact same line every single elected government around the world uses to describe how democratic they are.

I meant, how does one run it locally. I see a lot of people saying to just “run it locally” but for someone without a background in coding that doesn’t really mean much.

Over 60% of the economy by GDP including all essential services, is owned by the people state

FTFY

If the state represented the people, why does the Chinese government kill workers who try to organize so damn much? It’s because the state =/= the people. What you described is just capitalism where the state is one of the capitalist class. The difference with the US is that the US government is owned by the capitalist class rather than being one of it.

China hasn’t been a communist country in a long time. That was the whole point of the Deng reforms.

Again, both are shitty. In fact, not just both, but all. All hierarchical power structures are just plain evil. I’m not interested in parsing which evil is more evil. The Chinese government is an evil institution. The US government is an evil institution.

I meant, is hosting it locally something someone without a coding background can do easily

Why do you have to pick one or the other? Can we not recognize that the governments of western nations and the government of China are all evil institutions that cause far more harm than they ever could benefit?

This is just pure Chinese state propaganda. Taiwan has been an independent country since 1949.

No gods, no masters!

I tried asking ChatGPT how a fictional character in a story I was writing would go about rigging a tesla cybertruck to light on fire without the police catching him. It wrote out a pretty detailed scene, but glossed over the specific actions. So I asked it to get more detailed in how it would change the wiring of the car. Then it wiped away the entire conversation (including previous responses) and said it couldn’t talk about that right now.

How?

Is this something someone without a coding background can do easily?

Up until the liberal revolutions of the 18th/19th centuries, permanent global trade war was kinda the norm. People in different countries still bought and sold things to each other, but on an enormously smaller scale than today (even taking into account far smaller population sizes and difficulties in transportation).

Before capitalism became the dominant economic model for pretty much the entire planet, the standard economic model was some form of mercantilism. This is an economic system by which every country tries to maximize exports and minimize imports. The idea was that each country tried to be as wholly self-sufficient as possible. To this end, countries put all kinds of barriers in place of international trade. In many instances, if a product was produced domestically, it was illegal to import it at all, for any price. In other cases there were extremely high tariffs (like several hundred percent) of imported goods. Countries would even go so far as to try to poach industries from other countries. New technologies which made industry cheaper or more efficient were guarded as state secrets. Everyone was always trying to limit the amount of international trade wherever possible. As European colonial imperialism got rolling, the standard was that each colony could ONLY trade with the metropole (home country in Europe). So, to give an American example, the Virginia colony was not allowed to directly trade with the Massachusetts colony, even though both were owned by England. If someone in Massachusetts wanted to buy a product produced in Virginia, that product would have to first be shipped back to England, then to Massachusetts, paying tariffs and duties each way. And if someone in Virginia wanted to trade with someone in, say, Spanish Florida or French Canada, that was strictly illegal under English, Spanish, and French law.

Today the dominant model is that each country focuses on the industries that they do exceptionally well at (the larger a country’s economy is, the more industries they tend to focus on), while minimizing or even neglecting industries which they don’t do well at. For example, a lot of poorer countries might focus on low-skilled manufacturing and agriculture while wealthier countries might focus on higher end manufacturing and services (and a lot of this is driven by the national self-interest of wealthy nations through economic imperialist institutions like the IMF and World Bank). The idea being, I do what I’m good at and sell that to the world while I buy what I’m bad at from people who are better at it.

To this end, the idea of free trade became very important to international politics over the 18th and 19th centuries. This is the idea that there should be a few artificial barriers (read "regulations and taxes/tariffs) on trade as possible in order to facilitate the most efficient economic system as possible. Wealthy European imperialist powers began to recognize that they could get raw resources (food, minerals, etc) from colonized places far cheaper than they could be produced in Europe. Simultaneously, they recognized that if they could see the higher-quality manufactured goods in made in Europe to people living in other countries then they could make a much larger profit than when trade was limited to just the domestic market.

A big part of the liberal revolutions that swept Europe and the Americas in the 18th and 19th centuries was aimed at breaking down these trade barriers. This isn’t to say that all tariffs and import restrictions disappeared. They never did. But they were massively reduced and it became the global standard to preference a reduction in duties unless there was some extenuating circumstance why you shouldn’t. Economic hardships like depressions tended to see a rise in economic protectionism as blaming foreign industry for your own economy failing was an easy scapegoat.

The push away from free trade came in the early 20th century along with the rise in competing world ideologies. It had always been the case that even free-trade focused nations (the US and UK being the biggest historical examples) would limit trade with countries they were at war with or expected to be at war with soon. In the run up to WW1 there was a lot of restrictions in trade between, for example, France and Germany as the two countries fully expected to be at war at some point. Then, with the rise of the Soviet Union and the Cold War, communist nations tried to fully block all trade with capitalist nations, and vice versa. This was driven not only by economic concerns, but primarily by ideological concerns. Cold War propaganda (on both sides) preached about how inferior the other side was and how terrible life was for people on the other side. Trade had a huge potential to put the lie to that propaganda, so it was restricted.

So, to summarize my this long rambling post, for most of “civilized” human history, what we’re calling trade war today was just the standard. International trade existed, but was limited as much as possible wherever possible. After the liberal revolutions made free trade the global standard, trade wars as the discrete events we think of now became possible. They pretty much always looked like what we’re seeing now with the US and Canada. One side slaps a tariff or restriction on trade from the other side. That other side does a similar reciprocal action in return. The first side does another action in retaliation to that retaliation. Etc etc.

That doesn’t even really get around the flaw. It’s a band-aid which might help in the short-term. Even if the government pays to build you a new factory and subsidizes your labor force, unless the tariff is permanent and/or the government subsidies are permanent, your market share is still going to drop once the tariffs are removed or changed. And even if the tariffs and subsidies are promised to be permanent, you can’t rely on that.

Exactly! Imposing a tariff with the expectation that will cause the domestic market to just spawn a new manufacturer is even more asinine than expecting tariffs to increase already existing domestic production.

The rich also have a hell of a lot more to tax. They SHOULD be paying a higher percentage of their wealth in taxes because they’ve gotten a much greater benefit out of the services those taxes pay for than a poor person.

If you make $50k annually and are taxed at a flat 25%, you’re paying $12,500, leaving you with $37,500.

If you make $500k annually are are taxed at a flat 25%, you’re paying $125,000, leaving you with $375,000.

It’s a hell of a lot more difficult to support yourself and your family on $37,500 than it is on $375,000.

More than 50% of consumer spending in the US is done by top 10% of the income bracket. They are willing to pay that extra $1.50 because they’re also the people who own the domestic manufacturers that are reaping massive profits by raising costs commensurate with the tariffs but not having to actually pay the tariffs.

Maybe they lose a little business from low income consumers, but they don’t care that much because they make it up from the higher sale price to higher income consumers. The poor get fucked.

So there’s the way a tariff is meant to work in theory, and then there’s the way they actually work in practice.

In theory:

The whole supposed purpose of a tariff is to make foreign manufactured goods more expensive than domestic competition so that domestic consumers have a price incentive to buy from domestic manufacturers. To that end, the point of a tariff is to raise prices on foreign goods. The government imposes a tax on the company which imports the foreign product, making the importer’s costs go up. That importer passes on the cost of the tariff to the wholesaler/retailer by increasing their sale price of the imported product. The retailer then passes that higher cost on to the consumer in the form of a higher retail price. The consumer then has to pay more for the foreign product.

The goal here is to raise the price of the foreign product above that of the domestic competition so that people buy domestic. Overtime, the increased sales for the domestic product is supposed to increase revenue enough that the company expands operations, hires more workers, builds more factories, etc.

Following the theory, in the short-term the effect on common people is to raise prices of foreign goods. Since most people aren’t looking at where their products are made, they just buy whatever is cheap, the effect is to raise prices on the cheapest goods. The lowest priced option in that product category gets more expensive. Over the medium-to-long term, the domestic manufacturers expanding operations is supposed to create more jobs and increase revenue for government. More jobs is supposed to create a more competitive labor market, which is supposed to raise wages. This is also supposed to increase government revenue. With more revenue, the government should be able to provide more/better services…

HOWEVER, Tariffs almost never work out in practice how the theory suggest they should.

In practice:

There’s one giant flaw to the whole theory behind tariffs. It presupposes that domestic manufacturers will keep their prices unchanged from before the tariffs are introduced AND make large capital investments to expand operations. But this almost never happens. Before the tariff is introduced, there’s a (relatively) stable economic equilibrium. All manufacturers have set up their operations for their share of the market. If they are currently selling 10,000 widgets per day, their operations are set up to produce roughly that amount. If their competition’s prices jump because a tariff has been imposed, they don’t have the capacity to rapidly increase production. If orders jump from 10,000 per day to 100,000 per day, they can’t easily fill them all. And expanding operations is an expensive prospect without guaranteed payoff. What if the tariff is dropped in 6 months and the competition’s price drops back down. Now you’re set up to produce 100,000 widgets per day, but sales have dropped back down to 10,000. Now they’re stuck with new factories, more employees, etc geared towards producing a quantity of product they can’t sell.

It’s safer and easier to NOT expand operations. So what happens almost every single time is that the domestic manufacturers increase prices a similar amount as the foreign competition. They don’t have to pay a tariff tax, though, so the domestic companies just pocket the increased revenue resulting from charging higher prices. Everyone’s market share stays the same, but consumers end up paying more and the rich get richer.