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Not my style.
My father was retired Navy. He was in China when we were kicked out. (Late forties.) One of the last with the 'China Service' medal.

Source.

Retreat to Taiwan

In October 1949 Chairman Mao's communists took control on the mainland and Chiang Kai-shek withdrew his Kuomintang army to Taiwan, taking with him China's entire gold reserves. More than 1.5 million refugees fled with him adding to resentment among native Taiwanese against what they saw as a mainland invasion.

In December Chiang declared Taipei the temporary capital of China, vowing that he would eventually "recover the mainland". He also issued a decree imposing perpetual martial law - an order not rescinded until 38 years later. As part of the claim to represent all China, all the institutions of mainland government were transferred to Taiwan, including the parliament, which had representatives for all mainland provinces.

Chiang's government imposed harsh restrictions on civil and political liberties, jailing or executing thousands of opponents and clamping down on the use of native Taiwanese dialects.

Initially the US kept well out of the stand-off between the two Chinas. But with the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 and Chinese troops fighting in Korea, Taiwan was seen as part of the west's bulwark against communist expansionism. The US poured in money and military supplies. A planned communist invasion in 1950 was thwarted when President Truman ordered the US 7th Fleet into the Taiwan Straits.

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"Common sense economics" is a phrase used to describe the eco-nomic reasoning of the proverbial man in the street. In many in-stances, this knowledge may rest on principles that are essentially correct. For example, we have that old truism that there are no free lunches.

Tariffs Are Taxes

A tariff is a special kind of tax. It is a tax paid directly by impor-ters for the right to offer foreign products for sale on a domestic market. Indirectly, however, the tax is borne by a whole host of people, and these people are sel-dom even aware that they are pay-ing the tax.

Trade War, Statist Style

One advantage of the direct sub-sidy to protected industries is that such subsidies would not normally result in trade wars. When one nation sees its products discrimi-nated against by another State, it is more apt to retaliate directly. It threatens to raise tariffs against the offending country’s products unless the first country’s tariffs are reduced. If there is no re-sponse, pressures arise within the threatening country’s State bu-reaus to enforce the threat. That, it is argued, will frighten other nations which might be consider-ing similar moves. So the tariff war is born. The beneficiaries are the inefficient on both sides of the border and the State bureaucrats; the losers are all those involved in trade and all consumers who would have liked to purchase their goods at lower prices. This kind of war is therefore especially pernicious: it penalizes the productive and subsidizes the unproductive.

Tariff War, Libertarian Style

When some foreign State de-cides to place restrictions on the importation of goods from another country, what should be the re-sponse of that latter country’s eco-nomic administrators? Their goal is to make their nation’s goods at-tractive to foreign purchasers. They should want to see the inter-national division of labor main-tained, adding to the material prosperity of all involved. If this is the goal, then policies that will keep the trade barriers at low levels should be adopted. Instead, there is the tendency to adopt re-taliatory tariff barriers, thus sti-fling even further the flow of goods. This is done as a "warn-ing" to other nations.

If the 1930′s are anything like representative years of such warn-ings, then we should beware of conventional tariff wars. In those years a snowballing effect was produced, as each nation tried to” out-warn" its neighbor in an attempt to gain favorable trade positions with all others. The re-sult was the serious weakening of the international specialization of labor and its productivity. At a time when people wanted cheaper goods, they imposed trade restric-tions which forced prices upward and production downward.? Pro-fessor Mises’ old dictum held true: When a State tries to improve economic conditions by tampering with the free market, it usually succeeds in accomplishing pre-cisely the results which it sought to avoid (or officially sought to avoid, at any rate).

The best policy for "retaliation" would be to drop all tariff barriers in response.

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hy·per·bo·le
1.
obvious and intentional exaggeration.
2.
an extravagant statement or figure of speech not intended to be taken literally, as “to wait an eternity.”

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And severely underestimating the Chinese. I'm beginning to believe Blaen is is either extremely jingoistic, xenophobic or just outright racist.

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