The Benefits of Free Trade with China

Poisoned pet food - a perfect example of the wondrous benefits of free trade with the People's Republic of China:

ZHANGQIU, China, April 28 — As American food safety regulators head to China to investigate how a chemical made from coal found its way into pet food that killed dogs and cats in the United States, workers in this heavily polluted northern city openly admit that the substance is routinely added to animal feed as a fake protein.

Workers at the Shandong Mingshui Great Chemical Company say they commonly add the chemical melamine in the process of making animal feed. Melamine appears as protein but has no nutritional value.
For years, producers of animal feed all over China have secretly supplemented their feed with the substance, called melamine, a cheap additive that looks like protein in tests, even though it does not provide any nutritional benefits, according to melamine scrap traders and agricultural workers here.

“Many companies buy melamine scrap to make animal feed, such as fish feed,” said Ji Denghui, general manager of the Fujian Sanming Dinghui Chemical Company, which sells melamine. “I don’t know if there’s a regulation on it. Probably not. No law or regulation says ‘don’t do it,’ so everyone’s doing it. The laws in China are like that, aren’t they? If there’s no accident, there won’t be any regulation.”

The PRC has hugely benefited from American free trade policies, greedily running American businesses out of the marketplace using China's artificially deflated currency and cheap-as-slave-labor wages (and, quite often, actual slave labor), or forcing U.S. companies to relocate their manufacturing facilities out of the U.S. Meanwhile, China has plowed the hundred of billions of dollars in profits from these ventures (many owned or controlled by the Chinese military) into an ambitious military modernization and build-up whose goal of to turn China into a counterweight to the U.S. and thus drive American influence out of Asia. Meanwhile, in Washington, the usual suspects have turned their heads and repeated their tired mantras about the benefits of free trade.