Tag Archives: Shein

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U.S. vs. China: Cutting Our Own Throats

Under Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), China’smilitary might , including its nuclear capabilities, have been expanding rapidly while it “has demonstrated an increasing willingness to use military coercion and inducements to achieve its aims”, according to the U.S. Department of Defense.

China’s dominance in global manufacturing is greater than it’s ever been. Its government subsidies are giving industries leverage to out-compete with American products. It had a nearly $1 trillion trade surplus with the rest of the world in 2024. 

China has an aggressive, global spy network and influence operation aimed at expanding and solidifying its power.

China is supporting the Russian war machine and is openly preparing for a war to take over Taiwan. 

China is aggressively bullying the Philippines and other countries with its claims on the South China Sea. 

The U.S is falling further and further behind China in shipbuilding, threatening maritime security around the world. A new report by the U.S. Trade Representative found, that U.S. international trade is “carried out on vessels made in China, financed by state-owned Chinese institutions, owned by Chinese shipping companies, and reliant on a global maritime and logistics infrastructure increasingly dominated by China.”

All together, China presents a clear and present danger to the United States,

But American consumers continue to subsidize the Community regime by procuring the countries products as though there’s a fire sale, American companies continue strengthening their ties to China and the strongest signal President-elect Donald Trump is sending to China isn’t, “I’m determined to protect American security”, but “Let’s make a deal”. 

Nothing illustrates that better than Trump’s words and actions with respect to TikTok, owned by the Chinese company ByteDance.

In April 2024, with bipartisan concern about the national security threat TikTok posed to the United States and its use as a tool to spread misinformation and propaganda, the House of Representatives voted 360 to 58 in the House and the Senate voted 78 to 18 for a bill requiring the sale of the social media platform to a U.S. company or face a shutdown.

Trump actually tried to ban the app himself in his first term by signing an executive order in August 2020 asserting that the app was capturing mass amounts of information about Americans and raising risks for the country.

“These risks are real,” the order said. “This data collection threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information − potentially allowing China to track the locations of Federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage.”

In March 2024, however, Trump flipped his position, saying he was opposed to banning the app or forcing a sale. “Frankly, there are a lot of people on TikTok that love it,” Trump said on CNBC . “There are a lot of young kids on TikTok who will go crazy without it.”

On January 18, TikTok  did shut down, but after Trump promised to issue an executive order on Monday to “extend the period of time before the law’s prohibitions take effect,” it came back up. It announced, “In agreement with our service providers” the company “is in the process of restoring service. We thank President Trump for providing the necessary clarity and assurance to our service providers that they will face no penalties providing TikTok to over 170 million Americans and allowing over 7 million small businesses to thrive.”

The law allows Trump to grant a 90-day reprieve to TikTok, but only if he can certify at that point “evidence of significant progress” toward a sale. During that 90 days, of course, China’s alleged efforts to undermine United States security would continue, an issue of apparently little concern to Trump.

Trump’s inclination to pacify China and TikTok, reminds me of the protests of young Americans against the TikTok shutdown, favoring their personal TikTok addiction over American security.  These same self-absorbed young people are likely many of the same people who  are sustaining China’s economy by buying massive amounts of cheap fast fashion from Chinese companies like Temu and Shein, despite extensive reports  that the apparel hides the dirty laundry of environmental damage and labor exploitation.

Trump’s moves are not, however, going unchallenged.

Sen. Pete Ricketts (R-Nebraska), chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has urged US companies to halt operations with TikTok. “For TikTok to come back online in the future, ByteDance must agree to a sale that satisfies the law’s qualified-divestiture requirements by severing all ties between TikTok and Communist China,” Ricketts said.

Also breaking with Trump, U.S. Senator Tom Cotton, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, also issued a stern warning for companies deciding to work with TikTok after its resumption of service. “Any company that hosts, distributes, services, or otherwise facilitates communist-controlled TikTok could face hundreds of billions of dollars of ruinous liability under the law, not just from DOJ, but also under securities law, shareholder lawsuits, and state AGs, Cotton posted on X. “Think about it.”

Meanwhile, TikTok’s CEO is planning to attend a Trump victory rally at the Capitol One Arena in Washington, D.C. tonight (Sunday) and is expected to sit on the dais for Trump’s inauguration on Monday.

It’s a good time to remember Franz Stangl, the commandant of the Nazi concentration camp Treblinka in occupied Poland from Sept. 1942 to August 1943. Gitta Sereny, an Austrian born journalist, biographer and historian. wrote “Into That Darkness” based on interviews with Stangl after the war. Trying to understand how he acclimated to running the camp, she asked him how he managed to do it.  “It was the small steps. Small compromises,” he said. ” You see, if you can get people to stop believing in absolute right and wrong, you can get them to do anything.”

Americans succumbing to the allure of Chinese goods, American companies allowing their drive for profits to justify strengthening China’s economy and American politicians setting aside their legitimate concerns about the challenges from China are guilty of small steps, too.

Stay tuned.

Addendum

In still engaging wholeheartedly with China, American companies are repeating how so many have responded (or not) to Russia’s aggression in Ukraine.  According to Foreign Policy, as of 2023, around 800 multinational companies from Western and like-minded countries were still operating in Russia—either because they decided to stay or because they were still generating revenues there despite having pledged to leave. Around 60 percent of those global firms that operated in Russia before the full-scale invasion began in February 2022 still continue to do so. Second, Germany, the United States, and France are—by far—the top three countries of origin for Western firms that retain a presence in Russia, accounting for around half of them.

What is undeniably true , according to Foreign Policy, is that the hundreds of Western firms staying in Russia are helping Moscow finance the war in Ukraine. The data is eye-popping. In 2022 and 2023, firms from the G-7, European Union, and like-minded economies generated around $370 billion in revenues on Russian soil, which was more than Moscow’s military budget over the same period. In the first two years of the war, Western firms transferred more than $11 billion in corporate taxes to Russian state coffers, with Austrian bank Raiffeisen alone accounting for one-tenth of this amount. The data is not available yet for 2024, but a ballpark estimate suggests that Western firms probably paid another $4-6 billion in corporate taxes, bringing the total to roughly $16 billion funneled to the Kremlin since the invasion began.


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What Hath God Wrought: The Devastating Impact of Fast Fashion

Talk about shooting yourself in the foot.

A swarm of trade liberalization polices in the 1990s, including the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994, effectively wiped out most import restrictions and duties on foreign-made clothing, all in the name of global prosperity. 

It was supposed to be a good thing, but it is also a validation of the statement that you can’t have it all. The embrace of free trade has meant trade-offs.

Most significantly, it has almost demolished the U.S. apparel manufacturing industry, driving garment production to Asia and Latin America. Then it stimulated an explosion of environmentally destructive fast fashion. And behind most pieces of fast fashion is a story — too often a grim story about low pay, long hours and exploitation.

In the early 1800s, most garments worn by Americans were homemade. After the Civil War, U.S. factories that had produced uniforms transitioned to producing men’s suits, then to making cloaks and jackets for women. By the end of the 1860s, Americans bought most of their clothing rather than making it themselves.

Department stores rose up in the 1880s. By 1915, ready-to-wear departments had become regular features, supplemented by the arrival of mail-order catalogs from companies such as Montgomery Ward and Sears, Roebuck & Company.

Still, even by 1960, about 95% of clothes sold in the United States were made domestically. By 1980 it was about 70%. But by 2000, the amount of clothing sold in the United States that was made domestically had plummeted to 29%.  And in 2022, only about 2% percent of the apparel sold in the United States was made domestically.

Even companies that proudly proclaim their American heritage have largely abandoned their roots.

“For more than 150 years, Pendleton has set the standard for American style,” Pendleton Woolen Mills proudly proclaims. But is the iconic family-owned and operated Portland, OR-based company, rooted in late 19th century Salem, OR, still an American institution?

The honest answer – Barely. Pendleton has shifted its production, without much fanfare, almost entirely out of America.

Similarly, Made in Oregon points proudly to how has built a reputation as a purveyor of high-quality, local products. But, in fact, its ubiquitous stores have opened their shelves to products , including clothing, that are manufactured offshore if they are “designed” in Oregon, an exception you can drive a truck through. 

Not only is most American clothing now imported, but we have vastly increased the amount of clothing we buy. 

In 1960, the average American bought fewer than 25 garments each year. Now Americans buy an average of 68 items of clothing a year. Some of that is because of our culture of consumerism, driven by pervasive advertising and the availability of easy credit and the availability of a wide range of clothing products. But it’s also driven by the emergence of fast fashion, where fast-changing trends have replaced the previous focus on quality and durability. 

And that has meant an estimated 11.3 million tons of textile waste in the United States end up in landfills on a yearly basis. That’s equivalent to approximately 81.5 pounds per person per year, according to Earth.org, an environmental news site. 

Good On You, an organization that rates clothing and accessory brands, defines fast fashion as “…cheap, trendy clothing that samples ideas from the catwalk or celebrity culture and turns them into garments at breakneck speed to meet consumer demand…so shoppers can snap them up while they are still at the height of their popularity and then, sadly, discard them after a few wears.” In essence, fast fashion plays into the idea that outfit repeating is a fashion faux pas.

And this is a message fashion writers perpetuate. A Feb. 19, 2024 New York Times article, for example, tried to advise on what’s in and out:

“For women, it’s time to retire the ankle boots known as mojo booties,” the article advised. “People really wear them to anything — jail, a funeral,..Just no, girl. This is not an all-weather moment. No-show or ankle socks were once ubiquitous. Now, showing ankles is “pretty polarizing. Try layering socks over leggings, or a crew sock or quarter-length sock that shows a little bit over flats or sneakers…Infinity scarves are out, but blanket scarves, skinny scarves and mid-width waffle-knit or cashmere scarves in neutral colors are good options…”

It’s all reminiscent of Joan Didion’s trenchant observation years ago, in a 1979 New York Review of Books essay on Woody Allen, to be exact, about “…a new class in America, a subworld of people rigid with apprehension that they will die wearing the wrong sneaker, naming the wrong symphony, preferring ‘Madame Bovary.’ ”

This is at the heart of the rapidly expanding offshore clothing companies that free trade has enabled. It has allowed offshore employment to expand, improving living standards in many other countries, but not without cost.

In order to mass produce millions of inexpensive garments in a hurry,  factories are often sweatshops where laborers, too frequently children,  work for low wages and long hours in dangerous conditions. 

The shift in garment production offshore has also cost American jobs and raised sustainability concerns.

Americans employed in manufacturing apparel – 1960: 1,233,000

Americans employed in manufacturing apparel – 2022: 93,000

In 1960, 1,233,000 Americans were employed in the manufacturing of apparel, 5.5% of the total manufacturing workforce, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. By 2022, only about 93,000 employees were part of the apparel manufacturing industry in the United States.

Meanwhile, apparel from stores such as Forever 21, Zara, and H&M are mass-produced by legions of workers laboring for long hours in third world countries in sweatshop-like conditions.

Then there’s Temu, an online marketplace operated by the Chinese e-commerce company PDD Holdings. Temu, which racked up  roughly $9 billion in U.S. gross merchandise value and  spent $1.7 billion on marketing in 2023,  has emerged as a major player in the fast fashion universe in the United States. “Temu is disrupting U.S. e-commerce with tried- and-true tactics used by Chinese companies: earning razor-thin profits or losing money in exchange for market share and gradually squeezing out competitors,” says the Wall Street Journal.

Another fast-fashion behemoth is Shein, founded in Nanjing, China in 2008 as ZZKKO. Now headquartered in Singapore, while keeping its supply chains and warehouses in China, it has become the world’s largest fashion retailer. 

Shein plans to go public in 2024 (It confidentially filed for an initial public offering in Nov. 2023), though there is continuing controversy over allegations of Shein’s (and Temu’s) use of forced labor from the autonomous region of Xinjiang in China. In late 2023, Rep. Jennifer Wexton (D- VA) led a bipartisan call for the SEC to halt Shein’s IPO until it verifies that the company does not use forced labor within its supply chain.

Meanwhile, Shein and Temu “are accelerating the fashion cycle to unimaginable speeds,” Quartz,  a website focused on international business news, reported in January 2024.  The speed is being accelerated by Tik Tok, which is addictive by design. “The rise of TikTok has led to trends changing so quickly that brands and consumers cannot keep up,” Stacey Widlitz, a retail analyst, recently told the New York Times. “Everything Gen Z consumes is driven by influencers,” she said. “As fast as something comes in is as fast as something can go out.”

“The downside to all that cheap speed is, of course, the exploitation of everyone involved in its production and consumption,” said Quartz.  

The State of Fashion report, an annual publication from the industry outlet Business of Fashion and the management consultancy McKinsey and Company, notes that Shein is now producing an astonishing number of new items—2,000 to 10,000—every day,  and they are each shipping out more than a million packages to the United States daily, The Wall Street Journal reported in December.

Shein and Temu keep the costs of their fast fashion clothing down by taking advantage of a U.S. shipping provision called the “de minimis exception,” which waives duty fees for any packages with a retail value of less than $800. Since the typical order from Shein and Temu is much smaller than that, Shein and Temu paid no duty fees on imports to the U.S. in 2022, according to a congressional report. Sneaky, but legal. 

In the face of all this, there are still some America-based apparel manufacturers. Their growth and the emergence of more companies is possible with technological advancements in manufacturing and the increase in environmental and social consciousness. Reshoring apparel production is likely to be constrained, however, by supply chain issues as well as high labor costs and overhead expenses that will make it difficult for U.S. producers to price their goods competitively and maintain profitability.

So, what to do if you care about all this?

You are not helpless. You can learn to ignore Tik Tok influencers who must not be aware of Freya India’s admonition that “these people “… who do post everything are not people to aspire to. If they influence you of anything it should be to not copy their deranged behaviour and document your entire life online.”

As somebody commented on a recent New York Times story about Gen Z fashion, “Tik Tok ‘influencers’ aren’t style icons, they’re the new mall rats with a megaphone.”

 There are apps out there that give you the power to help create an ethical and  sustainable fashion industry.

GoodOnYou, for example, rates more than 3,000 clothing and accessory brands on whether they are doing the right thing for people, the environment and animals in producing ethical and sustainable clothing. Download the Good On You App

Then you can change your habits:

  • Stop buying so damn much fast fashion.
  • Be mindful of your consumption habits.
  • Remember that the most sustainable clothing is already in your wardrobe. Love the things you own.
  • Repair, rather than replace, damaged clothing.
  • Look for clothing that: 

– is manufactured in an environmentally conscious way.

– is designed and manufactured with human rights in mind.

– can be rented, loaned or swapped

– has been repaired, redesigned or upcycled

– is of high quality & timeless design

– is “Fair Trade Certified”

– is versatile and will see you through more than one season. 

Thanks to RedressRaleigh.org for some of these suggestions.

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