Making cheap stuff for Americans has helped China’s working class in some ways. In others, it has hurt them. Working in a factory making plastic gimcracks can be terrible for a person’s health, and terrible for the environment.

Why should we buy that cheap junk, anyway? Plastic stuff that ends up as poisonous smoke, or tiny particles that animals eat instead of food, or shards that will fill the sea and cover the earth for thousands of years. Nevertheless people mine for the materials, labor to make stuff out of them, ship it, shop for it, put it somewhere, forget it, and finally throw it away.

Stuff Americans always knew people suffered for so we could buy it cheap. Stuff to brighten our shabby lives. We’ve known all along that poor people have worked long days to bring us our changing fashions and collections of trinkets.

China’s booming economy has supported a growing middle class, which in turn encourages people to get more education and invent new enterprises. They now have many more options than making cheap plastic stuff for compulsive American consumers. They’re leading the way in sustainable energy technologies, for example, since Trump has hobbled that industry in the US in favor of fossil fuel development.

It’s better for all of us that we stop making, shipping, selling, and buying plastic things destined for landfill. Right now, in many workplaces, people are making personal protective equipment instead of plastic crap. Once the worst of the corona crisis has passed, maybe we can shift production again.

The long-term interests of Chinese people, Americans, and everybody else on the planet will be best served if we never go back to the plastic cycle. We need to make solar panels and windmills, trains instead of cars, pack seeds and plants instead of toys and knickknacks.

No matter how our governments fuss and struggle for dominance, let’s remember that Chinese people are just like Americans and everyone else. We all want to live, and our children to live, and our grandchildren. Building a new world where this can happen is our common cause.