On the 11th of December 2001, China was officially admitted into the World Trade Organization. From there, greedy corporations outsourced their factories to the country, taking advantage of its low wages, poor regulations, and government corruption, causing American businesses to become much less competitive, in turn leading to mass deindustrialization. There, that was the Rust Belt collapse, right? Not quite.
While yes, these events were major contributors to the socio-economic meltdown of the Rust Belt, they are not exactly the full story, despite what the mainstream media might lead one to believe. The reality is that simplistic narratives like these that pin all the blame for this catastrophe onto one root cause undermine the systemic problems that exist under our own country’s current policies and actions. The truth of the matter is much more complicated.
The year is 1920, and American politicians are currently working towards rebuilding the country following the aftermath of the first World War. One area of particular importance was the nation’s shipping industry, as many mercantile vessels had been reappropriated for service in the Navy and had been severely damaged or out of commission as a result; the latter of which can be attributed to Germany’s infamous U-boat campaigns that the country carried out on Entente merchants during the conflict.
Without its pre-war commercial capacity returning, legislators reasoned, the economy would never truly recover. It was then that the strength of America’s domestic fleets became an acute matter of national security. Realizing this, lawmakers created new legislation known as the “Merchant Marine Act of 1920,” or simply the “Jones Act.” This stipulated that all vessels traveling through the United States’s inland waterways had to be staffed by American citizens, built by American companies, owned by American corporations, and sailing under the American flag. In the short term, the Jones Act did provide a nice safety net for American shipping companies and their employees, as they were able to guarantee their businesses and jobs were safe from foreign competition.
In the long term, however, the consequences of the Jones Act have since resulted in American companies engaging in increasingly non-competitive behavior. Their fleets, for instance, are in dire condition. With an investigation by the Cato Institute, an American-based think tank finding that “Among oceangoing ships of at least 1,000 gross tons that transport cargo and meet Jones Act requirements, their numbers have declined from 193 to 99 since 2000, and only 78 of those 99 can be deemed militarily useful. Even in their expressions of support for the Jones Act, government officials concede that the U.S. shipping industry and its associated ecosystem have been depleted.” The fact that America’s number of up-to-code vessels has been slashed in half should raise some concern.
Imagine that the Jones Act had been recently repealed, if the United States had run into the same issues it finds itself in now, the country could easily provide the temporary solution of relying on its deluge of allies and partners to fill the gaps in its fleet while America passes antitrust provisions that mandate these companies maintain their ships. Instead, the world’s largest economy by GDP is seemingly gridlocked into stretching its shipbuilding industry thinner as it continues to grapple with, for instance, the terrorist operations carried out by Houthi rebels in the Red Sea, or the various controversies surrounding the poor-quality materials used to construct vessels for the Navy.
The Mississippi River and its various tributaries are a vital artery lodged deep into the heartland of the United States. Think about all the towns and communities by their waterside that would grow exponentially economically if not only the ships and goods of other countries were permitted to sail through them, but also if American businesses were forced to compete toe-to-toe with their European or Asian counterparts.
The problem runs deeper than just the shipping industry. What about America’s sprawling network of over 160 thousand miles (260,000 km) of railways? It is by far and away the largest of any country, could that not be used at least in some part to remedy the Rust Belt’s crippling socioeconomic inequality by allowing, say, an employee who lives in poverty-stricken, deindustrialized Detroit to reliably commute to their office in Pennsylvania by train, or even perhaps, high-speed rail? Creating this form of transit would alleviate the worries of traffic and road maintenance, cutting down what would today be a nine-hour drive significantly.
For those worried about the impact of a higher amount of vehicles in service concerning climate change, passenger trains also emit much less carbon dioxide than cars, with the Environmental and Energy Study Institute stating, “A typical passenger vehicle emits 404 grams of carbon dioxide (CO2) per mile, while national rail emits 66 grams of CO2 per mile.” With all of these positives, what is exactly holding America’s railways back?
There are two main types of railways in the United States, freight rail, and passenger rail. Out of 160,000 miles (260,000 km) of rail in the country, 140,000 of them are reserved for freight, while just a poultry 20,000 across the entire country, from sea to shining sea, are reserved for passenger rail. This is predominantly due to the monopolistic practices taken by rail companies. Freight rail is simply more lucrative for them.
Following the widespread adoption of personal vehicles and the construction of national highways, rail companies were struggling to stay afloat. Their solution was to slash employee and infrastructure costs by focusing primarily on freight. Without passengers, trains only needed to travel from point A to point B, rather than paying a deluge of attendants and workers to make sure passengers were satisfied. By 1940, employment in the rail industry had crashed from a high of 1.5 million jobs to two hundred thousand in 2009. Because passenger trains were no longer a viable option of transportation, companies, by proxy, had much fewer people to hire, leading to a significantly smaller labor pool.
Rather than attempt to fix the problem, business leaders and politicians began to look for solutions elsewhere. In the 1970s, while America was deeply entrenched in a financial recession, the United States normalized its trade relationship with the People’s Republic of China, a country that, even at the time, had a well-established record of egregious human rights violations. In such a politically polarizing era like the Cold War, where communist countries were shunned by the West simply on the basis of ideology, why was America so keen on establishing economic ties to the P.R.C, especially when they had militarily funded its main adversary during the Chinese Civil War, the Republic of China, just a couple decades prior?
In 1949, after the People’s Republic of China was established by Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party, Mao boldly campaigned, along with a rapid, Soviet-style industrialization policy under the moniker of a “Great Leap Forward,” for families to have more children. The idea behind such a policy was that if the Great Leap was to succeed, the country would need an explosive growth of population to staff them sufficiently.
From 1949 to the mid-1950s, the food rations that each family would get from the state were focused on how many mouths they had to feed, with the expectation that a child would work on a communal farming plot until they grew old enough to work in a factory, effectively making back the additional food they were rationed during childhood. In terms of increasing birth rates, this policy worked extraordinarily well, as not only was it customary in traditional Chinese culture to bear large families, but these large family structures had also been devastated by the recently-stalled civil war and were in desperate need of sustenance.
After recovering from a wartime low of 0.5 births per woman, the birth rate had more than quadrupled to 2.1 births per woman by 1950. By the mid-fifties, despite numerous contraceptive campaigns by the Party, the population was continuing to grow rapidly, almost doubling from its initial size in 1949.
By the early 1970s, China’s agricultural sector was under significant strain, the Great Leap Forward, which called for the redistribution of land to the state for farming had completely backfired. The P.R.C had employed millions of peasants and their families to work the land, but due to these laborers’ lack of experience, the system effectively collapsed.
While official estimates of agricultural production are either unavailable to the general public or obscured to the point of complete ambiguity, the widespread effects of the famine that followed were documented to a greater extent, although the exact figures are still rather muddled. It is estimated that at least 30 million people died from the famine, in any other country, a disaster of this size would be cataclysmic, but by 1972, the nation had over 842 million people inside of it, allowing the country to mostly withstand the storm. However, their impoverished economy was still in dire need of reform, which would soon come after Mao’s death in 1976, and Deng Xiaoping’s ascension to office in 1978.
Deng wanted to open up the Chinese economy to foreign investment, and from here cheap wages and lax labor laws took over the world, right? The Chinese stole American industry, the end. No, such an outcome of Chinese industrial hegemony was helped in part by the type of blatant negligence and irresponsibility that our legislators of all types have displayed throughout the last few decades.
During the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, an event which took place in the summer of 1989, when pressured to pass measures condemning this blatant human rights violation, such as temporarily extending the visas of Chinese students studying in the United States, or limiting economic investment in the country, Republican President Bush’s administration faltered, instead opting to be softer on China, with the man himself vetoing the visa bill.
When China was admitted to the World Trade Organization in 2001, Democratic President Bill Clinton delivered a speech that detailed all of the United States’ interests in China throughout the years and how this advancement of relationship would benefit both countries foreign policies in the future. Despite repeatedly emphasizing that such an agreement was “not for economic reasons,” and was meant to “liberalize its people,” he conspicuously refuses to mention the Tiananmen Square Massacre or Great Leap Forward in any capacity, instead stating, “By joining the W.T.O., China is not simply agreeing to import more of our products; it is agreeing to import one of democracy’s most cherished values: economic freedom.” Something does not add up here.
It is telling that not even Clinton himself was unable to devise a more compelling reason than trade to initiate the deal. Shortly after China was admitted into the W.T.O, foreign companies did, in fact, use the low wages and general corruption of the country to their advantage, eventually developing an intoxicating dependency on them. This dependency is what has led to business leaders, like Elon Musk, who have significant assets in China, including one of the largest Tesla factories in the world, stating that Taiwan should become a “special administrative region” of China.
Even as China’s aging population now begins to decline, some companies, like the aforementioned Tesla, are staying in China. While Apple has made headlines for divesting some of its Chinese manufacturing resources into other countries like Vietnam and India, both also have dismal pay standards and human rights records. Legislation, like the Biden’s administration’s CHIPS and Science Act has helped restore a sizable portion of America’s domestic technology sector. However, these measures have yet to result in the triumphant revival many had hoped for, as foreign semiconductor firms, mainly TSMC, have experienced significant difficulties in finding qualified individuals to hire due to Americans simply not wanting or having the expertise to take blue-collar jobs, resulting in low employment numbers.
Currently, the United States’ education curriculum is focused on promoting and funding computer science initiatives. While there is nothing inherently wrong with that, such a sudden transfer to hard manufacturing from software programming would be a major undertaking that the infamously-mismanaged and underfunded academic institutions of America do not seem equipped to handle.
United States President-elect, Donald Trump has campaigned and won the 2024 election on a platform of taking the country’s industrial investments out of China and back to its own borders. While well-intentioned in practice, it remains to be seen whether or not the strategy comes to fruition, as the country seems to lack the manpower and academic framework to facilitate such a change, especially following Trump’s various comments stating that he would significantly limit the powers the federal branch of the Department of Education if elected. Such an apparatus is vital to providing funding for public schools nationwide through grants and other initiatives.
How Trump plans to effectively push for such a seismic change in curriculum under his proposed “state-led” system, is up for debate, particularly in the partisan climate the country finds itself in today.
One example of these sometimes-literal party lines is a group of 13 eastern counties in Oregon that have petitioned to join Idaho as part of what is known as the “Greater Idaho Movement.” The movement aims to unite these traditionally Republican-voting areas with Idaho because the latter also heavily leans toward Republican candidates.
Greater Idaho’s supporters state that a redraw of the state’s borders to this effect would help better represent Republican voters in these counties by preventing them from being outnumbered by western Oregon’s higher-population, left leaning urban-centers. Detractors of the idea argue that such an act would become a catalyst for more politicized border drawings in the country, thereby fostering instability across the nation.
Regardless of one’s stance on the issue of Idaho’s borders, considering that certain states have radically different views on hot-button issues than others, such as abortion, sexual education, or same-sex relationships, is returning education “back to the states” as rosy of a prospect as it may initially seem, especially to right-leaning individuals concerned about government overreach, or left-leaning individuals concerned about the lack of devotion towards education in our society?
On the home front, then, the causes of the Rust Belt Collapse were two-fold, a divestment of American capital into China, paired with a lack of investment into basic amenities like education and transportation for its workers, which both greatly affected the manufacturing sector, which had an outsized effect on the Rust Belt as they had nowhere else to turn to. It certainly does not help that monopolies and protectionist legislation were put in place that essentially deadlocked the region into a state of stagnation as important infrastructure, like railroads and shipping lanes were left to rot for the sake of an executive’s bottom line.