A sign in downtown Hickory, North Carolina. (Xinhua/Yuan Yue)
Editor's note: The 2016 presidential race is seen by many as the most divisive and scandalous in the U.S. history. A team of Xinhua reporters recently toured several battleground states to get the firsthand accounts of what American voters really think before the Nov. 8 election. Here is the first of a series of four in-depth reports they have produced.
HICKORY, the United States, Sept. 21 (Xinhua) -- James Bachand, in his 60s, grew up in the U.S. state of Massachusetts, where the textile industry was booming in the early half of the 20th century.
"My parents worked in textile mills in Massachusetts," said Bachand, who retired from his government post in Washington D.C. years ago and now lives in Winston-Salem, the state of North Carolina.
"They were called sweatshops because they didn't pay the people fair wage. Eventually the cost of labor of producing textiles went up, and they moved jobs to North Carolina."
"Then they got to claim the labor cost went up and they went to South Korea. It's all about jobs and labor balance," he told Xinhua in a scorching summer afternoon in a downtown park of Hickory, a furniture hub in the state that traditionally relied on furniture, textile and tobacco industries.
In North Carolina and other states that have seen big loss of manufacturing jobs in the past decade, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has been courting angry and frustrated blue-collar voters with protectionist messages, breaking away from the longstanding Republican orthodoxy in favor of free trade.
Throughout his presidential campaign, Trump has vowed to revive American manufacturing sector by preventing U.S. companies such as Apple Inc from making products overseas, penalizing foreign nations for "stealing" American jobs and renegotiating trade deals.
The tough trade rhetoric is especially conspicuous in the 2016 election cycle as a strong dose of economic protectionism has permeated the trade plans of both presidential candidates of the two major parties.
Vying for votes, his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton also doubled down on a defensive trade policy that has hardened her against the TPP and promising to confront China and other nations over alleged currency manipulation.
James Bachand talks to Xinhua in Hickory, North Carolina. (Xinhua/Yuan Yue)
Bachand believed it is the lackluster domestic economic growth that fueled up the trade rhetoric. Nearly nine years after the Great Recession plagued the world's largest economy, more than half Americans believed the economy was "getting worse" based on Gallup's August economic confidence survey.
"People are fed up because they are not working. College graduates are not working. We have a lot of people that are taking low-income jobs," said Bachand, a Republican supporter who planned to vote for Trump this year.
PROFIT
The U.S. economy shed more than 5 million manufacturing jobs from 2000 to 2010, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That seems to explain the allure of Trump's bold pledge to bring back manufacturing's glory days.
But many voters in North Carolina interviewed by Xinhua have made clear their understanding that it was for profit that American companies moved manufacturing jobs to where labor was cheap and production was efficient.
In the past decades, they said, these jobs moved from Northeast U.S. to the south, then to China, and now to Bangladesh, Vietnam and many other countries as the cost of Chinese labor force was on the rise.
Robert Ditch, a photographer who lives in the suburbs of Charlotte, North Carolina, said the manufacturing companies "left North Carolina long before trade was an issue. They left for cheap labor overseas."
"Trump said 'I want Apple to make all of their computers and iPhone in the United States,' and that is physically impossible," said Ditch, a registered Democrat who supports Clinton for president.
"They've got a quarter million people building iPhones and all the other stuff, but what city are they gonna go to in the U.S. and employ a quarter million people to build the iPhones," Ditch added. "It's never gonna happen."
Ditch's argument resonated with Apple founder and then CEO Steve Jobs back in 2011. According to The New York Times, at a dinner in February 2011, U.S. President Barack Obama asked Jobs what would it take to make iPhones in the United States, and Jobs replied, "Those jobs aren't coming back."
The reasons behind Apple's decision include: not just workers are cheaper abroad, but also the vast scale of overseas factories, as well as the flexibility, diligence and industrial skills of foreign workers, has outpaced their American counterparts.
LOW PRICES
"We send production to countries where labor is cheaper than here, and we benefit from that because products come back and we buy them," said Gail Summerskill, Professor of English at Strayer University.
"Probably the people benefit the most are the CEOs and people who own these companies," Summerskill added.
Gail Summerskill talks to Xinhua in her home in Charlotte, North Carolina. (Xinhua/Yuan Yue)
Among his policies, Trump has proposed slapping a 45-percent tariff on Chinese imports and a 35-percent tax on Mexican imports, arguing that by doing so, it will defend U.S. manufacturers and workers, and revitalize job growth in America.
However, an analysis released in June by Moody's Analytics, a subsidiary of the credit rating and research agency Moody's Corporation, projected that such large increase in tariffs on Chinese and Mexican imports further exacerbates inflation pressures as it increases overall goods import prices by approximately 15 percent.
Adding to the economic fallout from the hike in U.S. tariffs is the response by China and Mexico, the report said, noting that likely retaliation with in-kind tariffs on U.S. products "would be a big hit to U.S. exports, as we ship well over 100 billion U.S. dollars in products a year to China, and almost 250 billion to Mexico."
Tariffs posed on Chinese goods didn't help American employment even with not-so-outrageous rates. In 2009, the U.S. had slapped Chinese tires with an additional 25 to 35 percent ad valorem tariff duty.
A study by economists Gary Clyde Hufbauer and Sean Lowry of the Peterson Institute for International Economics showed, the tariff may have temporarily preserved 1,200 jobs in the U.S. tire industry, but because of the consequent price hike of tires, it is estimated that the move may have cost as many as 3,731 jobs in the rest of the economy.
GOV'T RESPONSIBILITIES
While many voters understand that companies moving jobs overseas was a natural progression driven by profit, some still believe the government should have done more to mitigate the sudden manufacturing job losses for hundreds of thousands of workers.
Trump supporters were more likely to believe that with better trade and taxation management, the jobs outsourced to other countries can come back. At least some of them will.
"Our trade deal can be better negotiated," said William Newell, a tutor to elementary-age children at a church in Wilmington, North Carolina.
"The government can find a way through taxation, as well as provide incentives to the industries to keep the jobs stay here," Newell said.
"I don't think those corporations should take the blame for going to a cheaper country, it's how capitalism works," said Henry Antenen, a real estate agent who grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio.
"The burden should lie on the government to introduce policies that can convince them to stay," he added.
Bachand believed the problem is taxation, "because we pay some of the highest corporate tax in the world, so at some point it's gonna go to another country where they don't have to pay as many taxes."
Even Democratic voters, who don't believe that low wage manufacturing jobs should be brought back, agree that the government should do a better job to retrain the unemployed workforce and help them transition into other industries.
"Manufacturing has changed and we haven't changed our job force," said Summerskill. "So I think the issue is not that our jobs have been sent overseas, but that we haven't retrained our populations."
"People need to retool, reeducate," said Ditch. "Politicians need to make more effort to create jobs and help people get reeducated." (Reporting by Li Changxiang, Yuan Yue and Li Ming; Editing by Zhou Xiaozheng, Zhu Lei and Ding Yimin)
