Shownotes Transcript
Now this is China's revenge on Western capitalism. You want to go through the story here? Okay, so there's a couple layers here. At the base layer, there are these videos that have been on TikTok for... She's baking a cake of China analysis. Watch this. Okay. So on the base layer is this. Now I'm just like, what?
Anyway, so the cake is the, there are these videos of Chinese factory, like manufacturers on TikTok saying that they are, you know, manufacturing for Nike or Lululemon or these expensive brands, but they can make the same cake.
you know, athletic wear or shoes or, you know, Hermes bags or whatever for a fraction of the cost. And a lot of, sometimes they claim to be the actual manufacturer that does Nike, right? And they'll just sell direct to consumer the same product without the label for a fraction of the price.
And sometimes they claim that they can just make the same quality item. Like the Hermes bag is a guy saying that, you know, his factory in China uses all the same materials that Hermes does and he can sell you a bag for $1,400 instead of, you know, $12,000 or $38,000 or whatever that an Hermes bag costs. So...
These videos were around before this latest round of tariffs. But now they've, in the last week, gotten a huge spike and more and more people are seeing them on TikTok. And then there are also these other videos that are saying, that take like clips of all these videos and say, oh, you know, China's the world's factory. We make all the world's luxury goods. We make all of these products like America can't survive without us.
You know, there's that kind of message that's built on top of these, like, manufacturers who are probably just trying to sell their, by the way, completely counterfeit and knockoff goods. Like, no way are these, these are not real Hermes bags. They are not real Gucci bags or...
you know, Nike shoes or whatever. It's similar to with like the, oh, look at this MAGA hat that's made in China. Yeah. But those are cheap Chinese knockoffs. They're Chinese knockoffs. And they try to claim that like, oh, all of these things are made in China, but actually Hermes makes all of their bags in China.
France they have a workshop not a cheap Chinese factor well because they do everything by hand and it takes somebody like 20 hours to make one bag which I guarantee is not happening in the Chinese factory because there's no way that they yeah you can use the same materials but if you're not putting the same I mean they're literally hand saddle stitching every bag yeah but anyway so
This is like the psychological warfare component right where it's like well China's the world factory You know, you can't get along without us. We make all of these luxury goods And insane markups and then the luxury goods companies like put these insane markups on and sell them back to you So who's the real? Villain in the story, right? Is it Western companies that are doing this to you? and then there are other videos who take this and like actually make that argument that like
Like, you know, this is China standing up to Western capitalism. And gets shared on X. Yes, exploited Chinese labor. Or, you know, America doesn't need a tariff war. America needs a revolution. That's literally what one of the guys in one of these videos says. The part they leave out is that the reason that
so many American manufacturers set up in China using cheap labor is because the CCP said come on over to China we'll work with you to exploit the Chinese people for cheap labor globalization you can make money well also it's not just the cheap labor we did this whole episode about it right where it's like the state and the entire state-run economy and their industrial policy is set up to Advantage Chinese right manufacturers heavily subsidized but the
Like if you're concerned about low wage workers,
being taken advantage of. Like it was the CCP that set up the entire system to create low paid workers who could be taken advantage of. It's the CCP who created an environment where those laborers are often people from the countryside who legally can't be residents of the city in which they're employed. So they have to live as second class citizens in their own country and often can't even bring their kids to
to live with them so the kids have to stay in the countryside with their grandparents and because of the hukou system. And this is how deeply, deeply exploited these hundreds of millions of Chinese factory workers are. And it's because of the system the CCP set up
And then US companies were like, oh, I can save money by doing this. And the funny thing is, like, part of the propaganda campaign has been, like, showing, like, these AI videos of, like, Americans in crappy factories. Yeah, it's like a sad... Why would Americans do this? It's a sad, overweight American guy sitting in front of a sewing machine, you know? And it's like, well, I mean, like, the premise of this propaganda is Americans don't want to do...
Work in the horrible conditions that Chinese people are in. Yeah, it's kind of weird cell phone Well, no, it's kind of a weird moral superiority thing about how like Chinese people are tougher, right? Like Americans are weak. They they can't handle. Yeah labor Yeah, basically actually I saw like a video that tried to combat that by showing actual Manufacturing yeah, it's quite skilled. Yeah, so but the
But this whole thing is like the psychological warfare, right? About how trying to turn the anger about the tariffs, instead of being like, okay, here's what the CCP has done to exploit the system for decades, that now the U.S. is saying, okay, no more. We're going to try to even the playing field with these tariffs. Now they're turning it so that, okay, who are the real villains here? Trump, Trump.
who's a hypocrite for getting his stuff made in China, even as he's putting these tariffs on, even though his stuff, like you mentioned, Chris, it's made in America. In the U.S. by unions.
And then you have like, oh, so it's Trump. And then it's also these Western companies that are exploiting Chinese labor and marking up these products to sell to you, you know, and to make you feel ripped off, right? Like to make you feel ripped off. And people are feeling that way. You see this reaction where people are saying, like, I feel sick.
That you know the Gucci is making all their stuff in China, and it's so Cheap to make and I'm paying so much money for it etc and then they're also saying like it's not just the Western companies now, it's America as a whole mm-hmm that is the problem with this trade war you know America needs a revolution I wonder how effective this is going to be because I feel like there is definitely a population in the u.s. That is very
anti-American that we're we're the bad guys but it seems like there is now a lot like a large and vocal like really like rah rah America contingent in the U.S. that I don't know if this will work well it will work on some people because uh I think the whole idea that sorry now I had a brain fart um
I was talking about how some people don't like the U.S. in the U.S. and some people in the U.S. like the U.S. Yeah, but I think, like, it'll work because they're not just talking about how the U.S. is the bad guy, but, like...
It's kind of like how they're trying to make it about the individual people, right? Like how they're like, oh, well, you're getting ripped off by these Western companies. So I think that's the emotional hook. That's actually going to work for people. Just like the propaganda videos where they're showing like American small business owners who are like, I'm going to go bankrupt because I make this children's toy and I can only get it manufactured in China. And, you know, kind of like these like,
Stories that then they're like, okay see the the American the small guy is getting hurt Yeah, and the propaganda groundwork has already been laid like the whole idea of like capitalism being evil and exploitative Yeah, the the whole like China's clapping back at Western capitalism video was made by this Australian woman. I
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