Plam Bay, Florida, is trying their best to avoid Chinese products. The mayor of the self-proclaimed "blue collar" town issued an ordinance that bans all Chinese products, with the exception of those that costs less than $50, has no subsitutes, and is more than 50% made in China. No other city in the US has attempted this, but of course there's the on-going boycott of Cuban goods (think of good cigars) in America, so this isn't new.
Fact: low cost Chinese goods have saved American consumers some $600 billion in the last decade, and prices have fallen on products where China is the top exporter. Jijun Fu, director for government relations and media, said: "Chinese products have a reduced cost for the American customer. They will suffer from this ordinance."
And they probably will. It's not just US vs China, but a global issue. If Americans want to retaliate against tainted goods from China or jobs outsourced to China, fine. But beware, America would just have to import perhaps more expensive tainted good from elsewhere, and jobs would just be outsourced elsewhere, say India.
Banning Chinese imports isn't a win-lose situation; this is no zero-sum game. Failing to acknowledge China as a trade partner will just be a lose-lose situation, just that China's loss would be less. Maybe I'm biased, but what do you think?
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