Why call it a Dark Deal? Because in the small print of this pact between America’s and East Asia’s ruling classes was written misery for workers on both sides of the Pacific. American workers faced the exploitation and immiseration that resulted from underinvestment and its industrial heartlands being hollowed out by manufacturing in Asia and the underdeveloped Global South. Meanwhile, in China’s fast-industrialising coastal cities, workers suffered the frenzied exploitation associated with overinvestment
