Trading issues with the Chinese

There are issues with trade with China that for some reason keep getting brushed under the carpet and it is about time that they were addressed.

1. China is allowed for reasons that baffle most of us out there to keep a fixed currency rate. The rate is set at a particularly low level making Chinese goods ridiculously cheap. Every other country that you can name has to float their currency at a "market rate", which means that the rates fluctuate. I have seen one estimate which has stated that if the Chinese currency floated the way that all other currencies do, it would rise some 300% (!) in value.

As things stand, this fixed currency rate causes a massive glitch where trading is concerned. Nobody else can compete on a level playing field, and consequently large numbers of jobs are killed in manufacturing in particular elsewhere in the world.

Either the Chinese should be obliged to float their currency the same as everyone else, or the rest of the world should calculate the actual value of the yuan (the Chinese currency) according to standard market criteria and apply a tariff where necessary to ensure that the price was fairly fixed.

2. There are standards of air cleanliness and pollution by which companies across much of the world are forced to abide. China has the bulk of the world's most polluted cities, indicating that these rules are not applied there (which again means that they create unfair competition by avoiding paying the sums necessary to ensure that anti-pollution measures are in place, which most everyone else is obliged to have). The WTO (or similar) should inspect ALL Chinese facilities to ensure that the same standards apply there as everywhere else.

3. Workers' rights are not observed in China as they are in much of the rest of the world (the country is Communist in name only - actually it is a brutal extremist capitalist dictatorship). The ILO should be allowed to access all Chinese workplaces and should ensure that working conditions are the same in China as applies across the rest of the world.

It has been noticeable for some time anyway that some countries (Indonesia, South Korea and Thailand come immediately to mind, there were definitely others) were far more successful economically when they were dictatorships than when they became democracies (although the country being successful does not necessarily equal the fact that the people as a whole benefited! Usually most of the advantages stayed firmly in the hands of the rich and the powerful). One wonders what would to happen to China if their chronic dictatorship gave way to democracy.