IF AMERICA IS SO MUCH AGAINST COMMUNISM, HOW CAN WE JUSTIFY CHINA AS OUR GREATEST TRADING PARTNER?

No matter how you put it, no matter what spin you put on it, you can’t morally justify that fact.

EDIT: However, private companies love the cheap work force China offers. The average person may be against China, but does that mean he/she is against the companies that deal with China as well? Logically, yes. But that’s not what’s happening. Probably because people just don’t care. So if that’s the case, what justification do the United States have for maintaining that embargo on Cuba? The human rights violations are around the same in both of those countries, after all.

It could also be because we don’t have any other choice. The market is flooded with products from countries with unfair labour laws such as China. We’ve become dependent, so to speak. If that’s the case, the only choice we have is to look on the bright side of life and hope that western influence might provoke further changes in that country.

My previous statement still stands. You can’t morally justify trading with countries like China, where things are made by children paid five pennies an hour. But it can still be explained by indifference and the lack of other options in the market. Man there’s a lot of grey when it comes to these kind of questions…

Ask Bubba, who gave China MFN and started the flood of Chinese stuff into this country – oh, wait, he’s a lib and they SUPPORT communism. Nevermind.

The USA is a capitalist country and our corporations would trade with the devil himself, if there was money in it for them. Our corporate leaders have traded with our enemies in times of war, which they did in WW2, and in other wars. It’s all about making profits, not about patriotism or morality.

China is starting to privatize their industry.
Wether or not we dislike thier from of government, it would be foolish to overlook 1/4 of the wrold’s population. In the end we have to hope that through trading with them, the average citzen will become better off in their education and living standard. Then the average citizen will cause the government to change. Besides, I like General Tso’s Chicken.

Simple greed – we are more concerned with getting their inexpensive goods than we are on their nondemocratic society and questionable human rights record

Political and economic expediency is what justifies it. The moral and ethical codes everyone has been talking about apply to individuals, not to nation-states. The moral considerations that frame a private, individual life simply do not pan out in international relations — and every time it has been tried, it has been a disaster.

Think about it this way. When you choose to stay away from people whose philosophies and lifestyles you find abhorrent, while always being friends with those who think alike, any economic or social cost of such consistency affects only you and your immediate family, and only in the short term. But when you are a leader of a nation, you are responsible for millions of lives — and if you pick friends and enemies for your country based solely on internal political ideology, the costs will be incurred by millions of your subjects over a very long period of time. We may be as fastidious as we like in our roles as individuals, but NATIONAL interests justify sometimes getting in bed with ideological opponents while being adversarial towards nations that adhere to an ideology similar to ours. In private life, it is very commendable to put principles before money and career; in public life, preserving a country’s principles at the cost of undermining its economy or geopolitical status is indefensible.

It is another question whether trading with China so much is actually good for the US economy. However, assuming for argument’s sake that it is — the mere fact that China is communist does not furnish an adequate basis for sacrificing American economic interests.