Why does China always consider low commodity prices as an advantage?

China is a manufacturing powerhouse, even dubbed the “industrial juggernaut” and “crusher of developed nations,” because once our manufacturing enters a field, it can drastically lower prices. But upon closer reflection, doesn’t something feel off? Ideally, we should also set higher prices for our products, just as Western powers have done over the past two centuries—leveraging monopoly positions to earn excess profits and high added value, ensuring better wages and social benefits for domestic workers. This should be the ultimate goal of our so-called industrial upgrading.

When did this concept get twisted into believing that China’s manufacturing mission is to lower prices for the entire world? Did we really toil through cutthroat competition in education, incomes, and overtime, at the cost of young people losing their freedom and declining birth rates, just to create an affordable consumption environment for consumers in other countries? This is not what we want.

If today’s industrial upgrading still relies on low prices, unpaid overtime, and squeezing out minimal profits by cutting benefits, to be honest, it is essentially no different from the 1990s. Some might argue that this is the necessary pain of industrial upgrading. Since Western countries have a first-mover advantage and we’ve long been at a disadvantage, catching up means gritting our teeth and enduring—competing on low welfare, long hours, low costs, and supply chains—until we outlast our competitors to gain pricing power. But this argument doesn’t hold water.

Let me give you an example: The supermarket and retail industries don’t involve “chokepoint” high-tech fields, yet despite having the massive advantage of a 1.4 billion consumer market, no Chinese supermarket brand has managed to go global. Instead, domestic supermarkets are struggling, with the only outlier being the wildly successful and unabashed Fat Donglai. Despite beating foreign competitors, outdated management and lazy strategies have led this sector into decline. A lack of first-mover advantage is not an excuse for internal stagnation.

Take the solar photovoltaic (PV) industry, for instance. China outpriced global competitors, becoming the undeniable leader in the field. However, the anticipated good days for PV companies never arrived. Instead of making easy money through advanced technology and monopoly power, the industry turned inward, competing fiercely among themselves, driving profit margins so low that potential investors were deterred.

Chinese workers are known for their resilience. Domestically, low wages and benefits create a culture of intense internal competition, allowing us to achieve an almost miraculous level of industrialization in human history. But this model not only failed to grant us pricing power but might also turn our human resources into subsidies for foreign consumption. Worse yet, the outside world does not appreciate it.

Chinese companies are often accused of exploiting dispatched domestic employees abroad, while foreign workers enjoy normal treatment. Simply lowering product prices won’t win the acceptance of foreigners, who adhere strictly to rules. We’ve seen cases where countries impose punitive tariffs on Chinese exports under the guise of anti-dumping. Many Chinese don’t understand this, believing it to be unfair play by countries that can’t compete with China and use these alleged charges to protect their own industries and products. However, a different perspective reveals it’s not that simple.

The recent issue of beef imports in China allowed us, for the first time, to consider the anti-dumping argument from the perspective of a country being dumped on. This shift in perspective offers a deeper understanding of the issue.