I'm interested to know to what extent this is just assembly of parts imported from China, or whether the real control over things like the M1 chip assembly, secure element, logic board, etc. are also moved to Vietnam? Seems like that's the secret sauce / real proprietary stuff that tells you whether the high value is moving too. (or maybe that is not even in China either)
And do they have the surrounding parts + engineering ecosystems that is so touted as why China is the place to get things built?
As state before, China is already assembling lots of parts from other Asian countries. Additionally, iPhones are made in special export zones (SEZs), so the parts along with the machinery used to produce an iPhone are all imported without tariff (and even the company doing this is Taiwanese, which embodies a lot of the higher level hardware/production engineering that easily transfers to Vietnam). Consequently, iPhones have to be re-imported into China before they can be sold to Chinese consumers, incurring tariffs at that point. I assume Vietnam has something similar set up.
We do. Furniture companies use it a lot already. You can be licensed to import lumber, manufacture using local labor, and export -- without having a license to sell locally. We don't have SEZ, but do have big industrial / IT parks offering support for foreign enterprise. Some are pretty nice.
Overall, the permitted activities on your business license matter. Getting licensed is usually easier than people think, except a handful of sensitive areas.
A small slice of life: this does make furniture tradeshows sad affairs. You can see great things made in Vietnam, but you can't actually buy any of them. This has improved a lot over the last 10 years, but it's still somewhat of a thing.
From my reading of the situation, it’s not discouraged, rather the companies would rather avoid finally paying tariffs and instead sell abroad. Not sure how significant the charges are?
It depends how you look at it. I doubt it's the companies avoiding tariffs, it's that customers in Vietnam wouldn't buy the goods because the tariffs would make them too expensive. If Vietnamese would buy the goods anyway I'm sure the companies would love to sell their goods in the country.
I was born in China and my family runs factories here for many years.
What you mentioned is true, the absolute majority of the supply chain of the big name companies are still in China, and many of the alternatives in Vietnam are somehow managed by PRC background capital.
However, it’s absolutely a good start. The eco mic crisis raising in China will be like the 1930s in US, if not worse. My family are actively searching for ways to selling out everything and move out the country but it’s clearly prohibited by the Gov. We are worrying it will eventually becomes a new Third Reich in near future, when the supply chain will be completely destroyed.
>My family are actively searching for ways to selling out everything and move out the country....We are worrying it will eventually becomes a new Third Reich in near future, when the supply chain will be completely destroyed.
May I ask is this in mainland china? I'm a bit surprised because we usually don't think like this. Most older generations (50s-60s) from the mainland would not consider migration unless they are from extremely previledged background with huge assets (still very unlikely, at least in mainland). Also I doubt any mainland chinese person would be familiar with the concept of the great depression and the third reich.
My ex-wife is Chinese and over the years she did mention a bit about her education.
Things like the great depression were covered in school. These make excellent examples of the "evils of capitalism" and how a communist government would protect you from these "evils".
* Xi Jinping's increasingly tight and authoritarian control
* the upcoming demographic crisis in China: 1. its population will start shrinking (earlier and faster than assumed until recently), 2. the dependency ratio (proportion of non-working age population to working age population) will go up massively, 3. due to the demographic development (inverted pyramid), selective abortion and increasing women's liberation, the imbalance in the "marriage market" will get massively worse (150+ men per 100 women).
I'd assume that if they are given free choice, Chinese women are going to prefer husbands who do well in life. That would imply that the 1/3 of men who end up perpetually single are most likely poor farmers from the countryside, i.e. people without the means to travel abroad to meet someone there.
Depends on why you think it's good. If you think it will hollow out PRC industry and will lead to collapse of CCP into Third Reich leading to collapse them you will probably be disapointed. CCP _wants_ PRC companies to expand in region because it's "cooperative" sourcing strategy that helps PRC geoeconomic posture by increasing dependence. Especially in Vietnam where PRC control over Mekong = influence over Vietnamese agriculture and energy via Laos hydogeneration upstream. The TLDR PRC moved into Vietnam long before tariffs, and while tariff dodging is nice perk, it's mostly another layer of influence/control over Vietnam.
> supply chain will be completely destroyed.
...
> clearly prohibited by the Gov
Ergo why PRC supply chains won't be destroyed because apart from getting rid of polluting light industries where value:externalities do not compute, most relevant strategic supply chains will be protected in PRC for domestic use. I have family / friends who run factories as well, the ones in lowend got fucked whereas the ones higher up supply chain are doing fine. Those levers introduced last few years to prevent capital flight is why PRC is managing the eco crisis fine... a crisis by the way they chose to initiate (i.e. real estate) like past deleveraging efforts specifically because they have more lever to prevent actual crisis. But yeah people don't like the wild rides coming would be wise to look for excape plan, but it's going to be harder and harder to escape with much. Lots of people going to be fucked, while lots will continue to get rich, which is to say, same old China since the 90s.
Which will be great. The more countries that gets developed on labour driven export based manufacturing, the better. Before automation starts closing that window.
That is only on the surface, you then have to look at companies that are listed elsewhere but are actually Chinese ( A Chinese company listing its HQ somewhere else ), or completely owned by the Chinese Investment.
You then look at rest of non-Chinese owned companies, how many of those are completely dependent on Chinese customers ( If 60%+ of your revenue are from China ) or dependant on Apple ( given this is an Apple Supplier list ) where Apple has a tendency, habit or even a strategic mindset to help Chinese companies into their supply chain as part of its diversification, or cost reduction.
And if people ( as few on HN are already doing ) continue to think Apple relying on Taiwanese company called Foxconn. You may want to do a search on Luxshare or more commonly known as ICT. And see how it started and Tim Cook’s opinion on it. Dating back to 2016.
Isn't dispersing a core business, that the global economy relies on, to other countries a bad move for Taiwan? If advanced micro chips are made in another country doesn't that mean China might be more likely to use a forceful invasion and other countries can say "Yes, this is terrible - but at least we still have our chips!"
Taiwan doesn't own TSMC. They don't tell TSMC how to do business any more than the US government dictates to Intel. I'm sure it wields influence, of course. The US government offers incentives for companies to build foundries in the US, and there's a large pool of skilled workers in the industry in that area. Also Taiwan is a small country, so it's quite possible TSMC needs to expand internationally in order to be able to scale up it's business.
Sure, but the US gov't provided no seed money or had any role otherwise in founding of Intel, unlike TSMC. Up until recently the US chips companies were pretty much on their own without much special pampering. TSMC has little or no desire to expand beyond their tiny island -- not only b/c of the gov't investment's national stake in TSMC, but also TSMC's business model doesn't work -- and certainly can't maintain its fat profit marign -- without gov't largess and econ protection.
Yeah I do wonder about this. Atm, US is putting on immense pressure on chip manufacturers and their countries to control the supply and add factories in US soil.
Once the factories are built, would US be as invested in defending Taiwan and further, South Korea? I know US won’t give them up easily, but when push comes to shove … I don’t know.
Didn't TSMC buy all of Motorolas fabs in Austin a long time ago? I'm not sure if any of their FABs in Austin still exist or are current with the most modern processes, or if they are just running design centers there at this point.
China is the one assembling parts imported from abroad or other parts also assembled there. As far as I know no high value parts are actually made in China, though I’m sure some sub components could also be assembled there.
In fact for most of the iPhone's history the value of components manufactured in the US, and therefore the investment in the US in iPhone manufacturing, was much greater than the value added in China from final assembly.
In terms of semi-conductors, yes. But in terms of industrial machines, chemicals, and pharma, China is an important player and has been advancing by impressive leaps.
The result might be close to two nodes behind, but the design and production cost might be higher since they don't have access to EUV machines. I'd say they're further behind than "two nodes". But still, pretty damn advanced.
If their process is essentially copied from TSMC, can they keep up with R&D though? China is becoming an increasingly less desirable place to live, so just poaching Samsung and TSMC engineers and copying the process might be increasingly difficult. And I doubt they'll be able to build the tight relationship with machine designers/manufacturers like ASML that TSMC has.
Of course it depends who you ask. Hypothetically, China could tomorrow claim ownership of Japan, and then the answer to the question of Japanese sovereignty would also "depend on who you ask."
This isn’t even that far fetched. The justification for the “nine-dash line” that claims all of the South China Sea in violation of international maritime law is based on some spurious claim like “China controlled this sea at some point in the past”.
It’s only a step from there to making Korea and Japan vassal states because they were at some point in the past.
It's exceedingly far fetched considering PRC claims have consistently reflected her inherited claims originally made by ROC (Taiwan) as determined by post WW2 treatises, no more, but frequently less. See PRC resolving 12/14 land borders with mostly concessions, reduced ROCs 11dash claim to 9dash for North Vietnam. PRC territory literally shrank under CCP whose settlement history has demonstrated the opposite of expansionism. The "spurious" history claim meme is ROC/TW legal rhetoric that PRC maintains for legal lulz but really it's ROC claimed this, so PRC gain ROC claims after UN recognition shifted to PRC and ultimately that's enough, no reason for PRC to concede on any claims it didn't make but again, inherited.
Also PH vs PRC Arbitral Tribunal ruling is NOT formally recognized by UN or UNCLOS therefore PRC's SCS claims is not in violation of any international law. As in actual international law per UN, not make believe, actually spurious, rules-based-order west likes to pretend is international law. UNCLOS does not supercede territorial disputes that predated it nor have legal authority to settle these disputes, especially when party of dispute (PRC) did not accede to the optional arbituation system.
There's a great scene in the book Shogun. Toranaga says "There is never any justification for a vassal to rebel against his master". Anjin San replies "There is my lord. If you win!"
It's really complicated regarding Taiwan, though. There are groups in both countries that say there is only one China and the other one is just occupied by an illegitimate government.
> It's really complicated regarding Taiwan, though
It’s a defacto independent country with 50% wanting to be independent, 25% wanting the status quo, and 10% wanting to be part of China. Not especially complicated.
I think that’s underselling it, no? The world’s most populous country has a breakaway state from a civil war a hundred years ago, both sides claim to be the rightful government of the whole country. The worlds dominant superpower both supports one side and has an ideological disagreement with the other (while being completely dependent on it for both industry and finance). Both sides of the conflict recognise that there is one China but neither can agree on who should be in charge and there is not even a remote hope a resolution, the most likely outcome is the status quo continuing on forever but diplomatic blunders from the USA have both stirred the pot locally and potentially caused a knock-on effect in the Ukraine conflict (with China recently announcing joint military ops with Russian forces)
And even then I'm simplifying it and omitting some other complicating factors. China/Taiwan issue is many things but straight-forward isn't one of them
I don't think so. Some displays are (maybe used to?) made by a Chinese company called BOE in China. Specifically they are made in Sichuan Province, China.
I wonder how long it will be until Apple is running their own fabs, or at least diversifies away from heavily relying on TSMC. Has anyone seen news to this effect?
I think it is more likely that TSMC is diversifying away from building only in Taiwan. They have the expertise. Apple's expertise is engineering, design, and marketing.
They don't own their own factories because that is not their expertise, and they probably don't want to bring that in house.
Designing their own chips in-house wasn't "their expertise" either, a few years ago. You won't expand into other areas unless you at least make it a priority and try.
Getting into semiconductors is probably substantially more complicated. Only a handful of companies are able to do it well and they have bene at it for decades.
I think a few years ago there were rumblings about a 2/3nm Apple fab being made in Berlin, but I've heard nothing about it since, so it may be a lie.
That being said; the other commenter is right. If Apple had to release the M1 on 10nm or even 7nm, they would end up sacrificing at least >200% performance-per-watt; a death blow to either the battery life or performance. Apple's move to dominate the 5nm supply was another demonstration of their manipulation of supply chains akin to their iPod hard drives. There are indeed interesting parts of Apple Silicon, but the performance is driven wholly by their exclusive 5nm ARM cores.
It is getting tiring to hear the same lies over and over again on this site. Extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence. Show me a clear proof that Apple's performance per watt is reliant to a 200% improvement on the 5nm process. Perhaps I can point you in the direction of the A13 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A13), Apple's last 7nm chip. Apple claims their subsequent 5nm node (A14) is 40% more performant than that one.
7nm is considerably less dense than 5nm, since it's increased size compounds across two dimensions. That being said, A13 was indeed on 7nm, as well as the A14x they put in the dev kit. I don't think those benchmark numbers would be competitive against 3D Cache Ryzen or current Alder Lake offerings. Furthermore, I question how far Apple will be able to push Apple Silicon. As we've seen with the M2, when Apple can't get a clean node upgrade, they're forced to increase heat/power like Intel and AMD so they can scale their performance. With the upgrade to 3nm being much less dramatic than 10nm -> 5nm (and with Intel catching up rapidly), Apple is under extreme pressure to engineer themselves out of this situation. It may not be technically feasible.
So, let's do some quick math. Assuming the A12z runs in the same power envelope as the M1, it uses roughly half the power of the preceding Intel chip. That makes sense, since both the performance and efficiency cores are using a much denser process. Generously speaking, both of these chips have a similar performance profile, which leads me to believe that Apple's real 'boon' here was simply switching to a denser node. Comparing IPC across ISAs is largely guesswork, but I'm not convinced that AMD or Intel are incapable of manufacturing 5nm chips that decimate Apple's offerings. Apple hasn't allowed it to happen, so we can't say for sure.
Are you comparing an x64 chip with an ARM one and then deciding the only difference is the node process?
We’re talking here about what is unequivocally the most complex manufactured goods in the world. You can’t just boil it down to one thing. Apple made so many decisions that lead them to their extraordinary performance, including financial ones. They heavily paid TSMC for priority access to their new node.
And once again, the gains are nowhere near 200%, your initial claim that is patently wrong and that you refuse to acknowledge as a mistake on your part.
I'd love to compare it with a 5nm x86 chip, but thanks to Apple we can only make conjecture. You can agree with me or say my approximations are wrong, but I acknowledged that there's an architectural difference (which is why I used Geekbench instead of comparing useless numbers like clock speed or memory bandwidth). x86's performance on 14nm seems to correlate with ARM's performance on 7nm. Again, if you think that's a BS conclusion; fine. I'm painting funny-numbers with Geekbench scores and approximate power scaling. You'll just have to be contented with waiting until we have a 5nm x86 chip to compare it with, because apparently we can't make ballpark estimates on HN without getting pitchforked.
Apple's chips are fast because they have lots of money. If you disagree with that, then you're no different than the kid at Disney Land who thinks Splash Mountain got built because some genius invented it. We can fight about exact figures until the sun sets, but I think my approximation was fair.
Apple is spending $275B to advance Chinese manufacturing.[0]
They can easily afford 1/10th of that to build a fab that's ready in five years right here in the US if they wanted to. (Las Vegas is ideal, no natural disasters of any kind.)
Hell, they could write a check and buy Intel outright.
Las Vegas is currently having their water coming from the Colorado River (and reservoirs fed by it) limited, along with several other states and Mexico. If I were a betting man, I'd bet it will get worse in the near future.
Getting far off topic here, but Las Vegas is one of the safest water supplies.
There is the often quoted statistic that Las Vegas gets 90% of its water from Lake Mead/Colorado River. But Las Vegas reclaims and recycles 99% of consumed water and pumps it back into the lake via the Lake Mead Wash.
Because they get 99 return-flow credits for every 100 gallons, any draw limits from the watershed will have minimal impact.
Las Vegas also has a large groundwater table that supplies 25% of its peak summer demand.
As a last resort, the Casinos will never let the city run dry. While they only consume 6-7% of the cities water, they depend on their employees being able to live in the city to keep operating.
Why would they? They identified the best semiconductor manufacturer, and gave them so much business they basically do whatever Apple wants, and prioritize their capacity over everyone else.
A convergence of many reasons, including the uncertainty caused by locking down entire cities.
TBH its likely that it was a question of when not if this would happen. Will be interesting to see the geopolitical effects of a diversification of manufacturing capabilities. CCP wouldn’t be able to sustain the current export focused model.
China demography is going way down. Within a decade they will lose 200 milion workers and gain 300 million retirees in the pool. That will force a strain on the system plus current mortgage issues and protests already pushing bankrupting cities and PRC to a brink of collapse.
this is rather to limit economic exposure to a war that the US is planning. as now the US war against Russia in the proxy war in Ukraine, Europe and especially Germany will be the main victim.
The US foreign politics is the main evil in the world and the EU is still following the Americans. It is incredible.
We must get rid of all American influence in Europe, ban US tech, ban US military, get rid of the US propaganda, brands, social media.
Rus-Ukr war isnt a Proxy war between USA and Russia. Proxy war requires both parties to support XY forces from behind while here one of the "sides you mention" is active participant showing its own incompetence and destroying prospects of its most vibrant industries and second is Ukraine. Support of NATO for Ukraine is really really tiny in unbiased view.
Right now it is more of a economic war by EU with Russia. But triggered and forced by Russia. It is beyond real how badly Russia prepped this war, Russia doesnt even know what is the end goal. |
Go back to 20 of Feb 4 days before invasion and tell me WHAT IS THE REAL GOAL on Russian side ? IT feels like pre WW1 e-peen lets make a war because of "reasons" without any real goal.... but even at that time they had more realistic casus belli and any goal.
> We must get rid of all American influence in Europe, ban US tech, ban US military, get rid of the US propaganda, brands, social media.
I'm sure Russia would love this. Fortunately the rest of the world is sane enough to see this war for what it is and not fall for what the Russians want the world to think it is about.
If anything this war will lead to more US basses in the EU not less.
Look into it. It's definitely not a black and white aggression war. It definitely has elements of a proxy war that conveniently weakens both Russia and Europe
> Look into it. It's definitely not a black and white aggression war. It definitely has elements of a proxy war that conveniently weakens both Russia and Europe
In what way is it not a black and white war of aggression?.
The actual collateral damage will be the Russians. Ukraine will get better, meanwhile Russia is unlikely to survive in its current shape - and when Moscow gets cut off from from easy money from parasitizing on its colonies, it will crash terribly - much worse than in 1990, because back then Russia still had allies; now even China doesn’t want to cooperate; it complies with sanctions and is dropping strategic investments.
In a way, this is a proxy war - against China, at Russia. Western response means Russia has no future with the West and has to pivot to China. This would give China advantage, so I think it’s unlikely for US to preserve Russia in a shape that could be useful to China as an ally.
Still a Chinese manufacturer… (Luxshare Precision Industry)
If it had been a non-chinese company, it would have been a great move. Western companies will need to reduce their reliance on China in their supply chains.
Step by step. Hard lesson learned from dependency on Russia's oil and gas will hopefully open people's eyes - you can't depend on the hostile regime, even if it occasionally pretends to be a nice guy.
The answer to that question could fill several books. Among more recent events are the human rights violations, the increasing saber-rattling about Taiwan, the increasing joint military exercises with Russia, and the mass addition of malware/spyware to chips meant for foreign markets.
Rather than take my word for it, though, I encourage you to do some research on your own - preferably not entirely through Internet sources. In particular, the current issue of the World Affairs journal (volume 185, issue 3) has several relevant articles.
"Between 2001 and 2005, CIA officers captured an estimated one hundred fifty people and transported them around the world.[12][13][14][15]
Under the Bush administration, rendered persons were reported to have undergone torture by receiving countries. Journalists, civil and constitutional rights groups, and former detainees have alleged that this occurred with the knowledge or cooperation of the administrations of the United States and the United Kingdom."
"5th April 2010 10:44 EST WikiLeaks has released a classified US military video depicting the indiscriminate slaying of over a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad -- including two Reuters news staff."
I'd take the United States versus China any day of the week.
People keep making China out like they some kind of benevolent dictator. Keep in mind that all the shit talking everyone does on Hacker News and other sites is a no go in China. Ask Jack Ma about how well things go when you go against the China's CCP.
Although tbh the American way to "re-educate" religious fundamentalists usually means executing them from a safe distance.
It _appears_ that China is worse, but once you start looking at actual data instead of the rhetoric found in media, you'll quickly find that it simply doesn't check out.
You can't measure something (eg a length or time) without comparing with something else, and the same way you can't claim hostility without comparing it with other states. Especially in the context where it's very obviously about China vs USA.
Not just that. China claims a large part of the international sea by drawing a bullsh*t line on the map, bullies other countries in the area: Japan, Philippine, Viet Name, Indonesia, Brunei, ...
> Among more recent events are the human rights violations, the increasing saber-rattling about Taiwan, the increasing joint military exercises with Russia
that's not hostility towards the west, that's simply China defending their interests, which is their prerogative.
Taiwan is still formally and technically part of greater China, human rights violations are not rare in (an by) the US military and non military personel, do you consider Ukrainian soldiers training in the UK [1] as the UK being hostile towards China?
U2/SR71 spyplanes overflying other countries. This alone is considered "an act of war". what would the US do if someone flew over their country on spy missions?
Then there is the absolute rampant lying about things.
U2 is shot down, US president is told that should this happen the pilot wont survive. Surprise, Gary Powers is alive and the USSR exposes the US lies to the world.
"weather aircraft drifted off course" indeed.
Ron Reagan and his "Evil Empire" speech. USSR shoots down a commercial flight and Ron leverages this to the max.
US shoots down a commercial aircraft, refuses to accept responsibility and eventually caves under international pressure, offering peanuts in compensation?
You can somewhat see what took place with the USSR's issue. The US was flying spy missions right at their doorstep. They felt this was another spy plane and shot it down.
Why exactly did a US warship go into another countries waters and shoot down a commercial aircraft?
The "puppet governments" and overthrowing democratically elected governments alone could fill several books.
You wrote: <<U2/SR71 spyplanes overflying other countries.>>
True, 20+ years ago. Today: Spy satellites that can hide and re-position on-command. "Spy planes" are mostly Tom Clancy'esque fiction these days, at least from the perspective of over-head visual light photography. (Radio signals monitoring is a different segment.)
Then you wrote: <<This alone is considered "an act of war".>>
False. There is no single, absolute defintion. In my experience, the Internet is "full of" posts like this one. Words and deeds are two very different things in the Real-Politik World View. Ultimately, no words matter until the "first shot is fired". See China's recent behaviour around Taiwan. Still, not a single shot fired, but a lot of potty/bully talk. (BTW -- I highly recommend China's PR mouthpiece "Global Times" as a parallel equivalent of "The Onion", vis-a-via US-China relations. Their English is but one step above Kim Jong-Un/NK media.)
Finally, you wrote: <<what would the US do if someone flew over their country on spy missions?">>
In the current context, the US military will probably trap the spy plane mid-air (surround with fighter jets) and force them to land in US (or US-friendly) territory. The pilot(s) would be captured as enemy combatants, similar to other spy planes downed over enemy territory over the last 75+ years. FYI: China did this in 2001. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hainan_Island_incident
As a thought experiment (and I do think this will happen one day): What if China parks an aircraft carrier "one meter" outside US territorial waters (East or West coast), then runs constant military exercises, 24x7, for months and months? Think more brazen: What if Chinese military jets were speed-running over Midtown Manhattan during day light hours "daring" the US military to escalate? It can, and will, happen in our lifetime. Maybe London/Tokyo/Sydney too.
"It was important that the overflights be undetected, because normally an unauthorized invasion of another country’s airspace was considered an act of war. "
Do you think it is more likely that China will invade Taiwan (unprovoked) or US will invade China (unprovoked)? This is a bold post to assume the latter (#2). You seem to imply that US is waiting for a good opportunity to invade Mainland China. (Are you serious, or do I misunderstand? China is a recognised nuclear power. Invasion is almost literally impossible for these countries.)
The entire human civilization isn’t ruled by a single group/government, so it isn’t outlandish to compare different nations or nation-blocs.
But you do point to an interesting problem and that is one of humans’ impact to earth (and hence our habitat). Whether humans can adjust course without a single government coming up with rules and regulations remains to be seen.
Well, honestly it was more about the absolute scale metric: when a little portion of global population (5-10%) consumed more than 70% of the resources globally and was responsible for more than half of the global pollution over the past 3 generations, how bad is it in absolutes scale?
At least China represent 1/4 of global population and resemble a global government more than all western countries combined, including their power of influence over large scale events,like climate change.
If they bail out from climate talks and zero emission plans over, say, interference on the Taiwan issue, is it bad or good?
What is the best solution globally, pissing off China or human survival?
The island of Taiwan is part of the People's Republic of China, and they will decide what to do with it and when. What Americans think, want or say is irrelevant.
I think the majority of the western world would disagree with the first sentence, I know I would. But at the same time the people of Taiwan generally prefer things to stay as they are right now; independence with everything it involves isn't the number one option there. It's definitely _the_ main option for United States - because, as usual, the war would be waged far away from US territory, so they wouldn't suffer losses.
Given the joke of US military whose proxies are being slaughtered in Ukraine, the bases and military presence do not mean anything. Yes, they can kill innocent civilians in Afghanistan or Iraq that's all good those morons are good for.
People slaughtered in Ukraine by Russian nazis aren't "proxies", they are civilians. To a Russian this distinction might be hard to understand, but civilised countries generally try to fight armies instead of levelling cities. Note how civilian casualties in Syria were order of magnitude higher than in Afghanistan?
You are welcome to believe whatever nonsense you want to believe. The point remains, PRC decides whats to be done with the island of Taiwan. And US interference will only lead to annihilation of US. As a citizen of the 85% of the world's population who have not sanctioned Russia, we are firmly supportive.
If my memory serves me right (and it rarely fails), you are someone whom I have up-voted countless number of times with my old account and occasionally using this one. I am pretty sure you are not an idiot (like many of the top commenters in this forum) who believes that "Ukraine is winning" or "Russia is doing badly in this war" because of ideological reasons, so I will give you the benefit of the doubt that you are misinformed.
I think if you live in reality it’s pretty undeniable that Russia is doing badly in this war.
Russias man power has been so degraded they had to resort to recruiting people from prisons and forced conscription of Ukrainians in Luhansk and Donbas.
Russias heavy armour has been destroyed so badly that we are seeing T62s rolled out to the front lines. These T62s are so old they don’t even use the 3 man setup that all more modern Russian takes do because they don’t have a autoloader.
Russia is also incapable of protecting territory it has captured. The occupied territories of Ukraine regularly have car bombs and ammo depots explode, Crimea even has Russian air bases spontaneously exploding so much all Russian tourists fled back to Russia.
The West really needs to work on it’s education system, if this is the level of critical analysis and thought you see in a forum which claims to be above average intelligence.
> The West really needs to work on it’s education system, if this is the level of critical analysis and thought you see in a forum which claims to be above average intelligence.
This really isn’t an answer to any of my points, it would be great if you could respond to the substance of the message instead of attempting to attack the person who sent it.
But if you want to think that being into month 6 of a 3 day war is going great I guess that’s up to you.
Any source I give will be just dismissed as Russian propaganda without evidence; or without consideration of the history, context, how accurate they have been in the past, etc. You only want to read or listen to anyone who screams "Russia bad" or "China bad".
The author of that article is at best very unreliable and at worst just straight up Russian propaganda here is a retort to pretty much everything he has said.
It’s also interesting that article as far as I can see does not at all cover the current wars losses, all it seems to do is repeat a bunch of Russian propaganda.
It’s always funny to see Russia trying to involve NATO countries in this war in there propaganda, because it’s okay to lose to NATo where as it’s kinda pathetic for Russia to lose to Ukraine.
Well thanks for enlightening me. From now on I will only trust NYT, WSJ, Washington Post, Guardian and BBC - they are the only truthful and accurate sources in the world today.
> Well thanks for enlightening me. From now on I will only trust NYT, WSJ, Washington Post, Guardian and BBC - they are the only truthful and accurate sources in the world today.
Well they are all more truthful then the Russian media who believes that Ukraine has genetically modified super soldiers and black magic battalions.
To be fair it doesn’t matter because your source doesn’t even cover anything I said it just tries very hard to justify the genocide of Ukrainians.
I was talking about the Russian armed forces performance in the war not about if it was justified or not(which it isn’t).
> Well they are all more truthful then the Russian media who believes that Ukraine has genetically modified super soldiers and black magic battalions.
As I said, the education system in the West really needs a revamp. I just gave one example and already knew that you are going to post that one link as a retort (which does not provide any counter arguments to the points made by Jacques Baud at all). Hope your heroes from Azov were "evacuated" safely, as reported by the Western press. Honestly, I find it hard to believe that people can trust the Western press after the absolute nonsense they have reported so far and continue doing.
I don’t know why you keep hanging on about the education system.
Your article didn’t address any of the points I made all it tries to do is justify the genocide of Ukrainians.
> Hope your heroes from Azov were "evacuated" safely,
I’d feel safer as a azov member then as a propagandist in Moscow right now.
> I find it hard to believe that people can trust the Western press after the absolute nonsense they have reported so far and continue doing.
I mean your telling me the press that said
“Russia will not invade Ukraine” the day before it happened
“Ukraine using black magic battalions”
“Ukraine using genetically modified super soldiers”.
Tells the truth?.
I don’t understand how you can think that a country that held a area (Crimea) for years and then started another war and has had 4-5 explosions losing half their Black Sea fleet aircraft is “winning”.
Is losing 1000 tanks and having to roll out T62s “winning”;
Is using soviet anti aircraft carrier missiles against malls “winning”.
Is having oil refineries and ammo depots hit in Russia proper “winning”.
Is having 20,000 troops caught in Kherson with no easy way to leave or resupply “winning”.
The situation is so dire in Crimea that there was a traffic jam of people trying to leave.
Funny how some people are so brainwashed they assume anything that doesn’t match their own state propaganda is somebody else’s propaganda, not a honest opinion.
A couple of years ago I'd assume that someone who can't tell it's a joke wouldn't be able to create an account on HN, or - if they somehow succeeded - would die of suffocation by forgetting to breathe while writing a comment.
Nowadays I'm not sure anymore, so I tend to add "/s" in all but most obvious cases, like this one.
I know where Tibet is.
I know that the Chinese Revolution succeeded in 1949, and Tibet was subsequently invaded in October of 1950. China also entered the Korean war in October of 1950 when 200,000 Chinese nationals crossed the Yalu river and repelled American soldiers.
A lot of comments here are criticizing Apple for chasing cheap labor.
Ignoring for a second the fact that this has a lot more to do with geopolitics and hedging geopolitical risk, I think it's important to think more carefully about the impact of companies investing in developing economies.
By and large, the factory work done by people in developing economies is dramatically better in terms of quality of life and safety than the agricultural work that they would be doing without economic development. It would be better if the factories were more often owned domestically (instead of owned by Chinese companies), but the actual workers are not suffering in the short term as a result of Apple bringing jobs. The complete opposite is true.
There is a lot of dishonesty around Westerners complaining about foreign cheap labor.
They claim to be championing labor rights, but they are often just angered at companies for stopping all manufacturing in the West. They see it as an obvious weakness in their ideology that companies can just walk away from their labor movement and go elsewhere.
The obvious truth, and what literally all of these Vietnamese workers will tell you, is that foreign tech manufacturing is an amazingly better paying job than what is currently available.
The true story with China is that moving Western manufacturing to China raised the standard of living for literally hundreds of millions of Chinese people out of poverty.
> There is a lot of dishonesty around Westerners complaining about foreign cheap labor.
This is a strawman.
You're conflating different groups of people with different interests. Some people complain about labor conditions, some people complain that jobs are leaving the country. Almost nobody is "dishonest" about this.
So? Most people's entire existence is predicated on unsustainable consumerism. There is literally too much to care about. If you require that people must care about all issues to care about any issue, then progress won't be made. Maybe that's your intention.
I don’t require everyone to care the same about all issues, that wasn’t my point.
My point was people who care about labor rights, shipping jobs offshore, etc are selective about those specific issues. Never said they had to care about other issues.
The same type of argument can be made about any specific issue. For instance, labor rights is incredibly broad. I don't think it's a realistic requirement for someone to care about every possible labor-rights issue. It's fine if people want to be selective.
My point was that people are inconsistent due to the intersection between their advocacy and their own sense of nationalism. The issues are amplified when they pertain to Americas enemies and lessened when it pertains to Americas Allies.
Maybe to help explain what I think you are getting at. A year or two ago, you had senators preaching about how we needed to stop china's slave labor of the uighyurs. Okay, fine, I agree with that. But what about the horrible labor practices American companies rely on in central Africa where there, slavery also exists? The people who say bad China about labor practices have their blinders up to our allies who use the same labor practices. The reality is, if you think a company should not use slave labor in China, you should also thing they shouldnt use slave labor in Africa or Vietnam or any other emerging country/economy/third world country.
For a specific example, I did a quick search and Malaysia is one. Malaysia has the same or worst labor practices then China, but no one complains about tech companies relying on Malaysia's poor labor practices.
So your point is that you can’t call out an instance of slavery unless you call them all out? That doesn’t make sense to me. You should be able to highlight an issue without someone retorting “what about X?”, which is literal whataboutism.
Everybody is a hypocrite on almost every issue. Take a major issue like climate change. Almost every human in the U.S. and Europe has massively large carbon footprints. Does that mean Americans or Europeans can’t care about climate change? We’re not ideal beings working in an ideal system. We’re flawed being in a flawed system trying to make things a little better.
Why is it not ok to align with American foreign policy? I guess you’re implying that Americans are ok benefiting from other forms of labor exploitation? Why does that matter? Going back to the climate change example: everyone benefits from GHG emissions. Allowing arguments to be derailed by “NO U” is a quick way to stifle all discussion.
To me, your argument, fully constructed, is: “you can’t care that Uyghur’s are enslaved because America also uses slave labor and American foreign policy is anti-China.” How is that an argument?
Not necessarily. If someone only knows about the case of the uighurys, buts not the case of Malaysia, you can't hold someone against that. However, once the issue is raised and they are made aware, if they still only care about the uighurys, then it is targeted for a reason. We are all only as good as our information is and none of us know everything. The issue with the senators is, when they started that campaign, a bunch of information dropped about those same practices elsewhere they they definitely had access to and still refused to acknowledge it. Instead, they created an extremely target bill specifically at China. Maybe I am just an ass because I expect our representatives to be a little more thorough than the average citizen, especially when they are the ones drafting legislation. I and other average citizens don't have access to the wealth of information and resources our representatives to. So I expect them to use. I don't have the power to subpoena people to answer questions before congress, they do.
But no, Jim Bob isn't a hypocrite if the information was never brought before him. Jim Bob does become a hypocrite when the information is in front of him and refuses to acknowledge it.
That's the same thing. It's just an arbitrary line in the sand you have drawn where you say if care about these issues but not these you must be dishonest.
It’s not the same thing, if you only care about these issues when they are related to Americas enemies (eg China, Iran, etc), then you are inconsistent.
99% chance the people complaining about labor conditions are doing so on a made in China phone.
Let’s be honest, people complaining about labor conditions have a pretty weak understanding of economics and what is actually going on with regards to these factories. China isn’t stupid. They weaken their currency specifically to bring in the cheap labor jobs to lift the poorest to a slightly less poor tier. Unless you realize how poor they started out with it’s hard to appreciate the gains in wealth even if it still looks dirt poor to an armchair labor rights activist.
I'd be willing to bet that many who complain about "labor conditions" being too poor would still rather preserve a $200 discount on their phone instead. But having come from poverty, most people complaining about labor conditions on behalf of poor people have never experienced poverty themselves. It's possible for a capitalist society to have actors that willfully exploit people, but it is not the default that simply employing the poorest people equates to exploitation. People are just whiny that jobs are being lost to someone poorer.
I think you can get a Fairphone in some parts of the world (Europe). But it's not a particularly viable option in the USA.
This kind of reminds me of the plot of The Good Place [spoiler warning] -- in the show it's essentially impossible to get to Heaven because every decision you make has transitive dependencies on awful labor practices, abusive behaviors, and other unseemly things. So everyone ends up in Hell.
I don't think using a smartphone built with evil labor practices is inherently evil. But buying one every year when you could use one for 5 years is probably a bit evil.
Economists hardly understand the economy, so I’d say they’re in good company…
Jokes aside, demanding better treatment of workers and onshoring of jobs doesn’t seem as insane as people here are making it seem? This whole thread feels kind of irrelevant.
Especially when said iPhone assemblers aren't even complaining about their work conditions as much as some clueless American... if one is going to complain, complain about one's own conditions, or something one actually knows about...
The people complaining on Twitter that foreign cheap labour is being used are writing on devices that were produced by that same labour. Those very same people are the ones that are demanding that we bring those labour back but unwilling to brunt the cost that companies will then pass on to those same customer. It's not a strawman its the reality of Western society, whatever feels wrong is totally and completely detached from any logic or intellectual discussion about why the reality they feel like they are entitled to is at conflict with their own contradictory desires.
It is virtue signaling, largely to placate and pat themselves on the back to deflect blame from them, that their consumption, their vote with their money, and unwillingness to pay the true cost, is what creates this situation.
> but unwilling to brunt the cost that companies will then pass on to those same customer
HUGE "citation needed" here. Apple did a study years ago (when Obama was President) and the cost to manufacture iPhones in the US was well under 10% of the total cost, by their own calculations.
The cost of labor in China has only gotten worse since then (hence the move to Vietnam in the OP).
That quip was over cost of labour specifically. The broader point was US no longer had the manufacturing base or expertise pool to manufacture advanced Apple products at scale or timelines of modern release cycles at all, i.e. Cooks observation that PRC had enough tooling engineers to fill multiple stadiums vs US a room. The entire point was that cheap labour wasn't what was keeping Apple in manufacturing in PRC.
10% is many billions every three months. I don't think it's wise or ethical to manufacture in countries that have human rights violations but there's nothing ethical about a corporation.
-I knew someone who wanted to set up optical and circuit board manufacturing in Vietnam - the few factories they toured seemed to be set up very well. Also frequently with better female/male ratios in management levels (perhaps bc, at least what they were told, Vietnamese culture tends to be more matriarchal than elsewhere). Maybe why also a lot of Japanese electronic makers (Pentax, Nikon) had a bigger presence in Vietnam than expected
-the irony of Western manufacturing and standards of living - (coupled w/ strong policy and incentive support from the ccp) is that Xi Jinping seems to be actively going against perhaps one of the greatest economic partnership of recent times, namely USA/China. I think that is why there is likely going to be a contraction in the Chinese economy, if not already happen due to Zero Covid. If anything brings down the emperor/dynasty this time, it is because the grain ceases to flow (at least borrowing a phrase from an undergraduate Chinese history class...)
China's economy is in trouble. They've had a few property developers running Ponzi schemes and it's led to small bank runs. The government is propping things up and have massive reserves but it's not a good sign.
If you want to decrease inequality, it would make sense for people to be compensated for reducing inequality. This is what exactly what outsourcing is.
Why should we have to care about American workers over everyone else? On one side, you have a American factory worker loses the ability to buy steak. On the other, a Vietnamese worker gets access to running water, the consumer gets cheaper electronics and Apple shareholders get extra profits.
I'd say it a little more complicated then that when it comes to analyzing the American worker. You have the American worker, who has a high standard of living because the cost of goods are driven down by the fact that the Vietnamese worker gets access to running water. This is just to use your terminology/example. The reality is its not access to running water, but a job that will higher their standard of living. The American worker wants the to buy the 72 in TV, but also wants to have the job to make the 72 in TV and the only way he can afford the 72 in TV is if it is made in Vietnam.
In cities, sure, but much of Vietnam still lives in rural areas, which still are very underserved. The continued industrialization of Vietnam is indeed enabling more access running water.
> The true story with China is that moving Western manufacturing to China raised the standard of living for literally hundreds of millions of Chinese people out of poverty.
Even if this is the case, do you honestly not think the tradeoff is worth it? Lifting a billion people out of crushing poverty seems worth it even if it came at the cost of giving a dictatorship stronger geopolitical influence.
An authoritarian, nuclear armed government that is bent on expansionism by flaunting the established global rule of law and that is likely to start a world war over Taiwan? No, I don't think that's a worthwhile tradeoff.
I don’t think it’s accurate to say they are bent on expansion, but whether it’s worth it is more up to those 1 billion people to decide their fate and tradeoffs rather than foreign intervention. Oh and, due to China’s history of negative foreign interventions I doubt the population will take kindly to it now.
No it isn't. People with nothing to lose and living in poverty while seeing their democratic neighbors prospering are harder to control. People with education, jobs, and families - something to lose - are easier to control. How many Tienanmen Squares has China had since Asian and Western democracies opened their markets and enriched China.
Fun fact: due to the small labor market for terrorists and education spurring political interests, terrorists are disproportionally well-educated men from upper class families. Essentially, they're very intense lobbyists.
Tiananmen protesters were mostly students, young people with a lot of prospects in life, usually from a better-off families who could afford to send children to a university (instead of having them work and keep up the family).
They definitely had much more to lose than Marx's lumpen proletariat.
Of course, now people in China, especially in the rich coastal cities, have dramatically more to lose. They've been shown though that they would be allowed to prosper, as long as they do not try to disobey or even express doubt about CCP's rule. So it's pretty easy for them to convince themselves that CCP's policy is fine enough and not worth protesting against.
Aka nothing to lose. Having family and job would be considered having things to lose. Also let’s not consider students “educated”, they will be if they then build a career and actually practice their knowledge. Any clown can get a degree.
This is literally ahistorical. The overwhelming majority of consequential protests/rebellions/revolutions were heavily endorsed by the literati class. Why do you think freedom of speech and expanding education are classically liberal claims?
You can see it right now in Putin's Russia. Opposition to the regime, to the extent that it exists, does not come from the proles.
No, you are exactly backwards. Did the People’s Revolution win or did the students win? I seem to remember that the students were run over by tanks. Probably not being driven by highly educated PLA commanders.
That's true, foreign company, from tech company to manufacture company, all of them provides more friendly working environment than China local companies.
The workers in Shanghai Tesla work 12 hours a day, and paid less than 1500$ a month, which might be unacceptable for western labors, but even this is much better than other local car manufacture companies.
> you don't have to be a union activist to recognize that exporting american manufacturing jobs has been disastrous for our domestic working class
You do though. The reality is that "exporting" these jobs means cheaper products for everyone, and no one in what you call the "working class" wants these jobs to be in the US if it means they need to pay more for everything.
The US consistently manufactures more every year despite hiring fewer manufacturing workers because improved automation competes with US labor at lower costs.
> and no one in what you call the "working class" wants these jobs to be in the US if it means they need to pay more for everything.
look at a graph of productivity measures since 1990, a graph of real wages, and a graph of US GINI scores. i'm a knowledge economy worker like most people here, but we have been on a course of serious class warfare and economic cannibalism for decades. but thank you for letting us know that everybody actually wants it this way.
as a Vietnamese, we just laugh when we read about those things, so out of touch with reality. It's very condescending as well, the logic is that developing countries are stupid so whatever deal they negotiate for themself must be at a disadvantage and bad for them. When I read criticism of China in Africa I could not help but asking myself, if these developed countries care so much why don't they invest in Africa so that Africa has choices other than China? The fact is China (and Vietnam mind you) are the very few countries willing to invest in Africa at their own risk. I would not be surprised if one day it's "communist Vietnam"'s turn to be the scapegoat.
Funniest thing is that in the past Westerners were laughing at China for choosing manufacturing while glorifying their so called service economy. Now they are simping over manufacturing jobs.
> I would not be surprised if one day it's "communist Vietnam"'s turn to be the scapegoat.
Assembly plants are just one kind of manufacturing, albeit a very visible part. Petroleum refining and other chemicals are manufacturing. The US does a lot of that.
Manufacturing has been a growing share of GDP for the past few years, interrupted surprisingly briefly by COVID. Just that most of it isn't assembly lines.
I can hire a person here (UK) to do something for £x/hour or £y/unit. I can perhaps hire a person in say Vietnam to do something for £x/n/hour etc.
I don't do this personally but we should explore the possibilities.
The thing about capitalism is it is capitalism. You should drive costs down and profits up. Ideally you don't kill people on the "journey" but hey that's what laws n that jud, errr judiciary ... ... cops/police thing is all about or something.
I own a very small company in the UK. We don't go full on capitalism (whatever that monster really is) We strive to be able to sleep at night.
NZ is where you want to hire remote staff. Our wages are low and so is our dollar. We speak the same language and have a very similar culture. The time zone is an issue but remote workers normally will do strange hours to make it work.
The more people do that the better life gets here in NZ so I'm a big fan. Our exports are mainly agricultural and tourism. Neither are high earners.
When I cam to Canada from the USSR in the beginning of 90s people at place where I worked were telling me that I am more of a capitalist that they were.
> But now we can't build anything and if china embargoes us, we're doomed.
Firstly there is vastly more manufacturing in the US, Canada, and Mexico than you appear to realize. Secondly China is far more prone to being embargoed than the United States. If China cut us off then the price of certain goods would increase significantly and there’d be shortages of some goods and industrial inputs but we could feed ourselves, keep the lights on, heat/cool our homes, keep our industry going, and crucially our military capacity would be untouched. China would lose its largest and demographically healthiest consumer market which would vastly deepen its economic hole, lose a huge supplier of food which China can’t do without, and the US navy could interdict all energy shipments to China which would result in the country deindustrializing in a few months after its reserves ran out. Depending on how the embargo was effected it might drag in Japan or India both whose navies could single-handedly cut off China from oil shipments.
This is assuming that China's rapidly evolving navy cannot do anything about these blockades. They have massive shipbuilding capacity and currently the most advanced destroyer (type 055) in the world.
> They have massive shipbuilding capacity and currently the most advanced destroyer
The vast majority of their navy and ship building capacity is coastal. Their blue water navy is still minuscule and the challenge isn’t just manufacturing but experienced personnel which is decidedly harder to quickly scale up and is not aided by their terminal demographics.
Most US / global industries wouldn't be going anywhere without PRC supply chains / rare earth processing. Besides PRC is calorie self-sufficient and produces enough raw resources domestically for war economy, and export to west is like... 5% of GDP total, i.e. trivial in total war scenario. Now go look up how much steel, oil and other primary inputs PRC generates domestically... it wouldn't remotely deindustrialize meanwhile PRC military capacity wouldn't just be untouched, it would be allocated the redirected industrial resources to sustain aquisitions multiple times current size.
It's 2022, India and Japan do not remotely have capability to blockade PLAN. Refer to the detailed studies coming out of US wonks recently are questioning the feasibility of whether US can effectively enforce a blockade at all, which btw is an act of war, and in age of networked mutual vunerabilities PRC has options to make US/containment partners to hurt comparably. The amount of oil US produces is not measured in millions of barrels but 130 vunerable refineries and other critical infra that PRC can target in retaliation. Absolutely expect US industrial outputs to come to a crawl, John Deere tractors bricked in the fields, and homes freezing because half the energy grid is compromised in event of PRC blockade. Or that we maybe in or near the timeline where PRC will gain conventional global strike capabilities that places US CONUS at conventional risk.
> go look up how much steel, oil and other primary inputs PRC generates domestically...
China is a massive net importer of oil.[1] I guess they can make steel with coal but they can’t get coal to the steel plants let alone run their whole industrial base if they lose Saudi oil. Russian western pipeline imports might continue for a while but after the super majors exited Russia that isn’t going to last regardless of embargoes.
> US wonks recently are questioning the feasibility of whether US can effectively enforce a blockade at all
What “wonks” are these? The US Navy is by far the largest blue water navy on earth. To disrupt most oil shipments to China could be done anywhere from the Gulf to Singapore and be far out of reach of the vast bulk of the Chinese navy. Just firing a cruise missile or two would do the trick.
> PRC has options to make US/containment partners to hurt comparably
Nonsense. Who precisely? China is surrounded by enemies or frenemies (ie Russia) the US is surrounded by trading partners and ocean and is a naval power second to none.
> 130 vunerable refineries and other critical infra that PRC can target in retaliation
The US has refineries dotted all over the country. The gulf coast refineries and the nation as a whole has one of the best security geographies on the planet. How is the PRC going to attack them exactly?
This is assuming brief embargo (blockade) and inevitable hot war after will last longer than PRC domestic production + strategic reserves + war rationing which is projected to stretch out over a year. 4M barrels a day plenty for war economy and maintaining industrial base for total war, indefinitely. PRC is not Japan who whithers on island resources alone. Which is really the scenario that anyway blockade will escalate to, total war. There seems to be this strange assumption that PRC would just sit there and eat embargo and passively erode away when they will run blockades by reflagging vessels under state and escalate/counter in other means including drawing US into first island chain defense commitments by attacking US forces stationed in JP/SKR.
>What “wonks” are these
Naval War College Review, something along the lines of "tactically tempting but strategically flawed". There's host of other recent literature that basically concludes that it's not viable at strategic level. Or that USN is large but not nearly large enough to maintain an active blockade for long without abandoning other important commitments. Amount of shipping going through Malacca is massive.
>Who precisely
Every US ally in first island chain is a few cruise missiles to ports/energy infra from regressing into developing country. They're all islands for functional islands _much_ worse food or energy security than PRC, which incidentally is what makes blockading PRC strategically flawed, because it can't be done without crippling US partners. Consider actual scale of force deployed in theatre (overwhelming in PRC favour and growing) and in actual war, US and allies aren't so much as surrounding PRC as being trapped within PRC's growing A2AD bubble. Surrounding PRC works fine for peacetime containment, but during wartime it forces US to go near PRC shores where USN is most vunerable due to security commitments. As for vaunted US naval power, it's limited to what US can deploy and sustain in theatre vs whole of PLA arsenal that's designed to dismantle US sustainment systematically.
>PRC going to attack them exactly
Cyber attacks on critical infra - there's a reason Biden communicated to RU/PRC despite all recent military sheningans and literal war against UKR that attacks on US critical infra = same as physical war. It doesn't matter how offensively capable US power projection is if US is defensively existentially vunerable on the homefront. Which flies over head most Murica strong and can blockade PRC relatively cost free proponents, sure, US can punch hard but like everyone else in networked infra era, US (likey) can't take a punch, but more historically importantly US isn't so out of reach by geography and technology anymore that it cannot be punched anymore. US want to blockade 10M barrels of imports a day? What if PRC takes out 10 million barrels of refinery infra. The scenario is not US can just starve PRC imports, but US and PRC will go balls out in escalation spiral to cripple each other's homefronts to the point of being unable to sustain modern life.
Or look at where PRC conventional hypersonic development and bulk of R&D/aquisition effort is trending. PLA is not rushing to catch up on 11 carrier groups or strategic bombers, they're focusing on precision strike conventional icbms that is able to hite every strategic node/asset in CONUS. Really around the world, i.e. Pinegap in AU. Every major strategic US platform like CVNs, SSBNs, B21s, have to sit still for maintenance sooner than later. Like entire USN runs on like 8 fast combat support ships for high tempo operation that rotates in theatre keep up replenishment. The MO behind PLA systems destruction warfare is to negate US military advantages and cripple US ability to operate at all. Of course PRC is similarly vunerable as well, but at the end of the day US loses much more being unable to defend global commitments because she can't support her blue water fleet than PRC who barely has any blue water obligations in the first place.
Without IPR restrictions, most of manufacturing can be quickly scaled up in places outside China. Also remember, India is nuclear power and understand Mutually Assured Destruction working between India and China.
Quickly is more likely decades to reach appropriate as in case of rare earth processing. There's 20 years of supply chains entrenched in PRC that's not going to be replicated without substantial effort or time. That means allocating resources so strategic companies can survive while everyone else that relies on those inputs die. Btw, most of those experts needed to scale up elsewhere? They're from PRC in PRC building out PRC capacity for last 20 years. There's not enough experts globally to do such a task "quickly".
>Mutually Assured Destruction working between India and China
Yes, which is why the idea India would blockade PRC is fantasy. They fight with fists over barren rocks to prevent escalation spiral, and India has been firm in preventing QUAD into becoming a security alliance. They're not going to escalate to full scale war with PRC while eastern theatre command can shower most of India with missiles from barren Tibet while India has very limited ordnance to reach PRC strategic east coast or XJ. At least not for decades.
There will conceivably be a time when PRC is disentangled from global supplies chains or PRC neighbours have built sufficiently capabilities to target PRC cost free, but it won't be in short/medium term.
".. and the US navy could interdict all energy shipments to China .."
Generally, agree with your points, but the US Navy simply does not have the capability to do this any more. Might have been possible in 1990 but not today. US Navy would get its backside kicked.
China was literally able to lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty with all the manufacturing that was moved there. I think most people don't understand anything about economics. Vietnam absolutely wants and will benefit from an increasingly industrialized economy.
edit: I'm seeing a number of comments pointing out how these are companies owned by Koreans. Which maybe isn't optimal, but the potential for knowledge transfer coupled with investment in infrastructure and logistics chains is a great opportunity that just needs to be used well.
No doubt about any of that, but China played a really tough game to become more than just a cheap workbench. All those forced joint ventures, and the immense discipline required to make those become more than just easy profit-share for some lucky ones who know the right people. They did a lot of things extremely well to get to where they are now. That won't be easy to replicate. Particularly when one of the partners knows that game so well. It could end as colonization 2.0.
Manufacturing for export with Western companies was central to China's rise - same goes for Korea, Japan, and Taiwan - but there was more to it than comparative advantage/labor arbitrage. There was a lot of heavy-handed government action: land reform dispossessing wealthy families, aggressive/protectionist state financing, etc.
How long before Vietnam pulls a move from China's playbook where they start to manufacture things based on the plans foreign companies brought them and sell the product under Vietnamese company brands?
That's just the algorithm. Every nation leveraging manufacturing for growth will do this.
When it eventually gets too expensive for native workers, manufacturing moves again [1]. Except the locals now have a sizable middle class and knowledge economy, and there are high value industrial processes left behind: automotive, aerospace, scientific, etc.
The whole world is growing up, and wealthy nations are paying for it (because they love low cost goods). It's a win-win situation.
([1] doesn't mean every nation shouldn't think defensively about its own supply chain for essential inputs and outputs.)
It's interesting how e.g. Germany retains quite sizable manufacturing which is not going anywhere, and actually benefits from the local highly trained, highly paid workforce.
SE Asian workers, outside of Phillippines, are too expensive for large scale, low end manufacturing. Malaysia and Thailand are already middle income countries and Indonesia is getting there as well.
I think most of people simply don't know the reality of developing country. They often form ideas that have good intent, but sound very out of touch for people actually from these countries.
This is false because majority of Chinese citizens do not make more than $1000 per year or something very low. The average GDP is something like $6000, which is far below its neighbours. Even the ones that do make more, while not in complete poverty, they are barely live due to expensive housing and cost of living.
I think many of us would be more supportive of outsourcing manufacturing to developing countries if their government aligned more with Western ideals. The fact is many countries, like Vietnam, are still "developing" because they have authoritarian governments that have been oppressing their population to some extent keeping their labor cheap while stunting their economic potential.
We see the problems with this situation right now with Russia and China, whether it's buying oil from Russia or manufacturing in China, we've given these countries enormous amounts of power and influence by essentially funding their regimes. As we can see with the situation in Ukraine and Taiwan these regimes are not our friends or allies, even though we have allowed ourselves to become attached at the hip to them economically. As a western consumer I would much rather see my money either stay in country or go to a country that is a political ally and shares more western political and economic ideals.
> There is nothing intrinsically "western" about human rights.
It would be interesting if you could give an example of similar ideas from seriously non-Western cultures. Say, Asia has plenty of cultures, a number of them with highly developed, original schools of philosophy.
I'm not sure what you mean by "similar ideas" to human rights, but with regard to democracies in Asia: Japan, South Korea, Thailand, Philippines, India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Mongolia, Taiwan, East Timor, Micronesia
Right, but now you are talking about history. It's like calling our numbering system, the arabic numbering system. Sure - that's where it comes from historically, but now it's just OUR numbering system.
Calling democracy a "western" ideology makes it sound like it's not as relevant to eastern cultures - which is silly because it's now practiced widely in east asia.
Yeah, it's important to distinguish the two concepts.
The philosophies and ideas are of Western origin. But implementing those ideas is not restricted to people ethically descended from people from Western countries.
I agree, the term "Western Ideals" doesn't quite fit but it does go beyond democratic ideals which is why I didn't use that term. There are other aspects like a free market economy that extend way beyond a democratically elected government. I'm certainly open to a new term to describe it.
you are right, "western ideas" would be all theory, all talk and very little regard to practicality, such as Marxism, the Domino theory, Pax America, pretend democracy in South Korea, "human right" concerns that's comes from your mouth, instead of the actual humans you're trying to save.
> authoritarian governments that have been oppressing their population to some extent keeping their labor cheap
to think labor being cheap is the work of the communist party is pretty ridiculous. Authoritarian or not, no government benefits from their citizens being poor (capitalism does). The problem with authoritarian governments is that they are incapable of raising income, not that they do that by intent.
I suggest you learn a little bit of basic logic before calling people stupid. "Poverty happened under oppressive regimes", is pretty far from "oppressive regimes want poverty". I never said they didn't cause poverty, I said it's not what they want.
I'm not sure what more insulting: you calling me "incredibly stupid", or your incredibly poor understanding of basic logic. The former is kind of personal, but the latter is insulting to humans' intellect as a whole so it's a big deal.
Opression is necessary to development. Looking back for the cruelest opressions done by some nations towards American Indian, Asian, African in the early and haydays of industrial revolution.
You are going to see opressions happening again and again in the future as well. It's just a natural process of society development.
I can't agree with this at all. We have plenty of modern examples that show this to not be the case: West Germany versus East Germany, South Korea versus North Korea, Taiwan versus China. In all these examples less oppressions results in a stronger economy and a higher standard of living for citizens.
West Germany was marshal planned by US at height of economic primacy and was previously developed which made recovery to prior levels possible. SK and TW were both bloody authoritarian govs sponsored by US (for coldwar containment) who had industrial policies, again supported by US at height of economic primacy.
As far as I'm aware, there are zero countries that has ever successfully developed without initial phase of authoritarianism / wide scale abuse - europeans had their colonies, US her slaves - it's basically a prerequisite. The second requirement being either on the good books and gaining the support of reigning hegemons or at least not be actively contained by them (East Germany).
Historically, developing countries simply require massive repression (and the occasional dose of cultural genocide) to establish stable national identities and enviroments where people behave like good cogs in the machine to build up the material conditions to enable less opression / more liberalization for later generations. Authoritarianism is the worst form of government for developement... except for all the others that have been tried.
What about Finland? Very poor in the 1800s, rapidly industrialised and became wealthy in the 20th century. They did have a civil war but I'm not quite sure that counts as oppression by itself.
My understanding of Finnish history is rough but from what I understand Finland was also industrialized in late 1800s as Russian Dutchy under Alexander II's reforms. IIRC reward for being loyal unlike uprising in crimea and poland. It got the benefits of empire. Granted much slower than rest of Europe due to geography. Civil war over russification not unlike purges in SKorean or Taiwan/ROC, at the end of the day you need get the population in line under a national identity either through ideology or coercsion so they can focus on development instead of be distracted by sectarian drama.
No, oppression being necessary for development is an observation from history, which is true for the majority of the world's leading national economy.
It's different from a political ideology. Because such observation does not justify the oppression, unlike hitler's case.
But ironically, your own comment is indeed a prime example of your own ridicule: poorly informed individual making shallow derogatory snab without consecutive feedback.
If anything, the decline in needing cheap labor is going to be a problem for large countries like China. China needed those cheap labor factories to be the engine to help lift people out of rural poverty.
Unfortunately that engine will now falter and many will be left behind.
For an eye opening survey here, I highly recommend the book Invisible China.
+1 on Invisible China. Scott Rozelle's group at the FSI has been doing some good work on trying to alleviate the opportunity gap that exists in several prefectures in the PRC.
Xi Jinping know this problem all along. And his poverty eradication project is essentially siphoning embezzled fund from corrupted officials into rural areas.
I bet Xi Jinping knows research work in the similar lines of Invisible China.
Rozelle's group at Stanford has consulted at the prefecture level with the CCP [0]. The PRC is de facto federal with a significant amount of leeway at the prefecture (state) level. In fact, a number of PRC policy initiatives are often done in coordination with research groups at Stanford University. The Guiding Cases [1] is another ministerial level initiative that Stanford has consulted on.
They are well on their way of climbing onto the next rung of the manufacturing ladder and manufacturing more complex items with higher margins that can absorb higher wages
Nope. By most standards the PRC is stuck in the middle income trap.
To paraphrase an earlier comment I wrote sometime back:
Chinese household median income is around $4,700-4,800 in 2021, with massive disparities between First world comparable regions such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Tianjin, and rust belt regions like Wuhan [0]. Even the Chinese Premier Li Keqiang has noted that 600 million Chinese earn less that $140/month [1].
China is not a good example for the middle income trap. Middle income trap countries relied on cheap labors but could not move up in the value chain.
China has moved up the value chain. They're the top or close to the top for many things including mobile phones, chip manufacturing (7nm), AI, software, 5G, electric car batteries, nuclear power, fusion research, quantum computers, etc. They also publish more scientific papers than any other country, by a significant amount.
Conversely, true middle-income country like Brazil and Thailand have not moved up in the value chain one bit.
China, Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Japan are all East Asian countries. They all have very similar values when it comes to education, hard work, and entrepreneurism. It's only a matter of time until China joins the first world. Their major cities are already first-world.
Yes, there are countries that have cheaper labor than China right now but China should be able to replace that with higher value services such as exporting 5G tech or nuclear power plants.
Yet, median income [0] and HDI [1] both at the macro level and at the prefecture level are comparable to Brazil [2][3] and lag behind both Russia [4][5] and Mexico [6][7].
There is no denying the amount of growth the service sector in China has seen, yet a lot of this growth and development is among a sliver of the population living in better developed regions such as the various coastal prefectures. Beijing, Tianjin, Guangzhou, Shanghai, etc can be treated as developed, but what about the hinterlands such as Sichuan, Ningxia, Hunan, Guangxi, etc? This middle income trap is not a good thing by the way - I take no joy pointing this harsh truth out because this means hundreds of millions of PRC nationals are stuck in less than ideal economic positions.
Also, if we are talking about the value chain, Brazil is very high in the ONG (Petrobras, Odenbrecht), Aeronautics (Embraer), Automotive, and Defense (Odenbrecht, Embraer) value chain thanks to economic policies in the 90s and 2000s that are comparable to those the PRC has started adopting in the past 10-15 years.
>Yet, median income [0] and HDI [1] both at the macro level and at the prefecture level are comparable to Brazil [2][3] and lag behind both Russia [4][5] and Mexico [6][7].
This is the present. It does not mean China is a middle income trap nation. It continues to grow and advance in innovation.
Also, China's GDP PPP per capita has already surpassed Brazil. GDP PPP is a much better measure of stand of living than GDP/capita.
The biggest factor in whether a country stays in the middle income territory is innovation.
China is innovating. In some areas, it's already leading.
GDP and GDP PPP both quantify production, not income and living standard metrics. While there is often a correlation between production and rising living standards, it is a lossy indicator that fails to take into account inequality and differing regional CoLs. For this reason Median income plus HDI is the standard metric used in developmental economics to gauge QoL, as they give you insights on access to healthcare, education, inequality, and other metrics critical to the functioning of societies.
Countries can have cutting edge industries AND still lag behind in development - Brazil (Defense, Aerospace, ONG, Automotive), South Africa (Defense), Turkey (Defense, Automotive, ONG), Mexico (Defense, Automotive, ONG), Russia (ONG, Defense, Aerospace, Automotive), Malaysia (Automotive, ONG, Electronics), etc are all countries that are major innovators and even leaders in STEM/innovtion heavy industries, yet still have significant issues with spreading development across their countries. The PRC is facing a similar issue, and it is a hard nut to crack - I can't think of a single middle income to upper income economy that didn't also
1. receive a massive subsidy from either the EU (southern Europe, eastern Europe, Ireland) or the US (South Korea, Israel, Taiwan)
2. have a small population (<30mil at time of transition)
It is harder to lift a nation of 400 million poor (using PRC poverty definition) people than to lift a poor nation of 30-40 million.
Also, this same trap that China is in is something that India, Vietnam, Indonesia, and the Phillipines will face in 20 years
>Countries can have cutting edge industries AND still lag behind in development - Brazil (Defense, Aerospace, ONG, Automotive), South Africa (Defense), Turkey (Defense, Automotive, ONG), Mexico (Defense, Automotive, ONG), Russia (ONG, Defense, Aerospace, Automotive), Malaysia (Automotive, ONG, Electronics), etc are all countries that are major innovators and even leaders in STEM/innovtion heavy industries, yet still have significant issues with spreading development across their countries. The PRC is facing a similar issue, and it is a hard nut to crack - I can't think of a single middle income to upper income economy that didn't also
Brazil does not lead in Aerospace, ONG, Automotive. South Africa does not lead in defense. And so on. They do not possess technology that other countries depend on. For example, Embraer's revenue in 2021 was 4.2 billion. Puny compared to Airbus' 52 billion. If Embraer stopped operating tomorrow, the world would not notice.
We're talking about actual innovation and a technology advantage. You mentioned that Mexico leads in automotive. What? Mexico does not have any cutting edge automotive technology that other nations depend on. Mexico is a hub for car manufacturing because it's close to the US and provides cheap labor. They do not produce any car tech that other countries cannot produce.
Before Tump's ban, Huawei was set to provide 5G technology to the UK, a country that could not produce 5G equipment on its own. A true middle-income country could never do this.
>This middle income trap is not a good thing by the way
One of OG researchers who coined the term believe phenonmenon is overstated, to the point of not being useful or existing at all. Fundementally, middle income trap is not a good concept in evaluating PRC because even according to the original middle income analysis countries with proper industrial policies designed to move up value chain (like PRC) is likely continue out grow developed countries and in PRC's case, close capability gaps. It's less about being trapped within arbitrary per capita bracket (which PRC is set to to reach upper income by years end anyway) and more about industrial stagnation that would theoretically lead to economic stagnation.
Reality is PRC as you recognize is almost like two countries, rich developed coastal that is still rapidly developing, and developing (really neglected) interior. This segregation was by design (Deng's let some get rich first policy), but that "sliver" living in T1 region is ~200M people, which is about Japan, South Korea, Taiwan combined. And really one should include another 200-300M T2 cities due to industrial synergies. Essentially you have a 500M strong rapidly developing country that is spilling out comparable STEM graduates as OECD countries combined while rapidly moving up value chain in every industry, not just a select few like in Brazil. This is the component of PRC that is globally competitive and building up comprehensive national power to the point of becoming pacing threat with US, even if it's dragged down by the interior poor. Just look at record youth umemployment which is absolutely not something to brag about but reflects just how much oversupply of talent resulted from education reforms 20 years ago meanwhile PRC moving up every research and innovation index controlled for quality and have indigenous industries in almost every sector, many of which are increasingly competitive. Even with demographic crisis looming, rich PRC is really just getting started because it is increasingly oversatuated with talent for moving up value chains.
Yeah there's still 600M undereducated poor that can't really be integrated into modern economy, hence common prosperity wealth transfer programs. Think of it as rich high-growth high-income PRC giving handout / economic aid to lower income PRC, not enough that rich PRC stops growing, but just enough that poor PRC isn't spiraling in subsistence and ready to rebel. Ultimately it's useful to think of PRC as massive developed China supporting massive low income China. It's better to have a country with 100 people where 50 rich people can build advanced tech but 50 are stuck being poor farmers then a country with 100 people with equal wages that can only make shoes or farm. Now consider India with 1400M people has 20% of PRC GDP... and while a drain, it really does not take crippling amount of resources relative to PRC GDP to subsidize 600M poor. Last time I did the math, if PRC spends 6% of GDP / 1 trillion per year, it can double income of the 600M poor on 1000rmb per month to 2000rmb. Which isn't great but enough to maintain stability especially if spread out over multiple years so people percieve they're getting richer YoY.
What you have described is BY DEFINTION the middle income trap. Economic growth and development is not linear - the type of strategy that brought incomes up from $400 to $2000 a year are not going to be the same to bring them up from $2000 to $10000.
The kind of regional income transfers you mentioned is a MASSIVE legal undertaking that will inevitabely face a significant amount of opposition from the richer coastal prefectures that would be subsidizing said development. You would need a revamping of tax brackets and also, you would still need to work on getting education quality in hinterland regions up to speed. We all want to say China is doing it's own thing for the first time, but this is the exact same story we saw with Malaysia and Mexico in the 90s and Turkey/Russia/Brazil in the 2000s-2010s. And it's not like economists and policymakers in the PRC are blind to this - Shaojie Zhou and Angang Hu at Tsinghua are two econometricians I can think of off the top of my head who are doing reseach on this conundrum specifically while also still in China. Li Keqiang himself is a former developmental economist btw and I wouldn't be surprised if a number of the recentish reforms that have started happening were lobbied by him.
Paraphrase from previous comment:
Countries can have cutting edge industries AND still lag behind in development - Brazil (Defense, Aerospace, ONG, Automotive), South Africa (Defense), Turkey (Defense, Automotive, ONG), Mexico (Defense, Automotive, ONG), Russia (ONG, Defense, Aerospace, Automotive), Malaysia (Automotive, ONG, Electronics), etc are all countries that are major innovators and even leaders in STEM/innovtion heavy industries, yet still have significant issues with spreading development across their countries. The PRC is facing a similar issue, and it is a hard nut to crack - I can't think of a single middle income to upper income economy that didn't also
1. receive a massive subsidy from either the EU (southern Europe, eastern Europe, Ireland) or the US (South Korea, Israel, Taiwan)
2. have a small population (<30mil at time of transition)
It is harder to lift a nation of 400 million poor (using PRC poverty definition) people than to lift a poor nation of 30-40 million.
>Countries can have cutting edge industries AND still lag behind in development - Brazil (Defense, Aerospace, ONG, Automotive), South Africa (Defense), Turkey (Defense, Automotive, ONG), Mexico (Defense, Automotive, ONG), Russia (ONG, Defense, Aerospace, Automotive), Malaysia (Automotive, ONG, Electronics), etc are all countries that are major innovators and even leaders in STEM/innovtion heavy industries, yet still have significant issues with spreading development across their countries.
Again, these countries do not have any innovation advantage in those industries.
Here are actual leaders in those industries:
Aerospace --> USA, EU, UK, Japan
Defense --> USA, EU, China, Israel, Russia
Automotive --> USA, EU, Japan, South Korea, and soon to be China
ONG --> USA, UK
Electronics --> USA, Japan, EU, China, South Korea, Taiwan
Energy --> USA, EU, China
Gaming --> USA, Japan, China
You're confusing having a large industry with leading SUSTAINED innovation.
When was the last time you bought a Malaysian brand electronic? When was the last time you drove a Mexican brand car?
High income countries produce innovation, hence the ability to move up in the value chain, hence moving above middle income trap.
I don't think we're disagreeing that equitable development is a huge challenge for PRC, at PRC scale, but my main point is middle income is not a useful lens to evaluate PRC, because 1) it's arbitrary cutoff that PRC is going to pass sooner than later 2) stupid large countries operate on different dynamics/expectations. It's even very not useful to lump 32M malaysia together with 200M Brazil let alone 1400M PRC.
> BY DEFINTION
Conceptually middle income trap is about countries stops moving up value chain and income gets stuck in middle income levels. It's a dumb blunt indicator that has no bearing on equity of development. If country has 100 Tony Starks making 20Trillion dollars in GDP of wizard widgets, while 1.4 billion subsists on crippling poverty but GDP per capita is above middle income, then congradulations, that country has escaped the middle income trap and all the wizard widget would categorize it as an advanced economy even if 99.99% of the impoverished people starves. Techncially if PRC is stuck at +$1 above middle income, it has escaped the trap, but the real question is weather PRC can continue moving up value chain and build competitive comprehensive national power, even at the cost of extreme inequity, not how/whether such equity can be addressed, which obviously is still important consideration for policy makers.
On that note PRC per capita gdp is set reach upper income this year, if not already even with revised slow growth numbers. Official CCP stats is $12,551 for 2021, which will put PRC in upper income of $12,696 with 2% growth this year. If you entertain the Shanghai police leak demographic extrapolations seriously, PRC today has 100M less people and entered upper income years ago. Meanwhile PRC is climbing value chain rapidly in essentially every sector, it's not specializng in a few, like the mid sized countries, but issue is, PRC simply has too many people for everyone to be lifted into upper income range. The difference with Malaysia/Mexico/Turkey/Russia/Brazil is on paper, extrapolating from recent Asian Tiger and other historic medium size country development trends, there should be enough opportunities for middle sized countries of 20-200M to specialize and be competitive in some higher tier sectors and escape the middle income trap.
PRC is not a middle sized country.
My opinion expectation suitable for middle size countries is ridiculous to apply to PRC with 1.4B people where 200M-300M tier1/2/3 workforce (very course guestimate) are already specializing in most sectors + 100s of millions of bullshit makework jobs by SEOs just to keep people busy, while 100s of millions more drift in informal economy. Think of USA with 160M workforce who can do pretty much everything there is to do, except manufacturing, which during peak, PRC employed ~300M. There's simply not enough domestic opportunities or global demand for 1.4B people. A good example is central gov reluctantly holding on to inefficient collective agriculture that employs 450M when realistically mechanization will axe 440M of those jobs and provide better food security.
>MASSIVE legal undertaking
Yes, there's going to be a lot of policy changes and reforms to get common prosperity rolling, or address rural education, vocational training etc. But TBH and blunt, opportunity for education and training has already passed for 100s of millions who are stuck in informal economy. Interior provinces neglected for too many generations. I don't know if they'll be taken care of by safety net or simply neglected - even Xi stressed common prosperity is not about handouts/welfare - but whatever they get, it's unlike to uplift them into upper income. They're never going to experience 25000 per capita China Dream by 2049. I think going forward PRC will remain a 2 tier society, something like gulf state with professional class and migrant labours that goes back to their less developed homes where PPP stretchs further. There's going to be reforms to improve QoL of of the bottom, but the classes are never going to converge. And hot take: CCP probably wants it that way, modern PRC is built and likely can only be sustained by 2 tier society with massive cheap migrant labour pool.
If they are poorer than people in Vietnam they can just go to Vietnam to work. That's not that much different than going to southern China to work. It is almost a common market.
A number of rural migrant workers in China DO go to Vietnam to work[0], though this has been increasingly cracked down on by the Vietnamese government[1]. On a similar note, the Belt and Roads Initiative itself essentially acted as a jobs placement program to alleviate labor issues after the 2015-16 Stock Market crash in China [TODO: Find page numbers from notes]
Given their poverty, are you certain they have enough disposable income (let alone the personal freedom) to just pick up and move to an entirely new country?
Imagine telling poor Americans to just move to Guatemala to do poor people work since it’s not that different and you’ll realize how insane that sounds.
Wouldn’t Vietnamese people be massively favored? How much chance would a common Chinese person have. Language is also different enough, and culture probably as well.
Is cheap labor the driving factor, though? I vaguely recall that the labor cost alone in China has not been the largest competitive advantage as the cost has been increasing steadily over years. Instead, it was the complete supply chain in China that out competes other countries.
Bloomberg also reported an incident: Jobs wanted to change the cheap plastic screen to glass, and Foxconn was able to recruit more than 8000 workers overnight and completely reconfigured their assembly line to fulfill such request. This level of efficiency used to belong to the US. I really hope US can revolutionize its manufacturing for this century.
> This level of efficiency used to belong to the US. I really hope US can revolutionize its manufacturing for this century.
The US consistently increases its manufacturing output through improved automation. US workers are also significantly more productive than other countries', though US labor costs often cancel that advantage.
> US workers are also significantly more productive than other countries
I certainly hope so. Is it true, though? Obama's documentary, American Factory, says that Chinese workers are more efficient than their US counterparts. I also read somewhere that the average age of workers in shipyards were 55 years, IIRC, and it's harder to find qualified workers who can build heavy machineries in the US than in China, partly because the manufacturing sector shrank so much in the US.
Relatively speaking? In WWII, the US produced 300K planes, 130 carriers, 80 tanks every day on average, increased its steel output to 80M tons in 1944 alone, more than other countries combined. And hundreds of destroyers, corvettes, and submarines. Not that we need to do the same now, but it shows that how capable the US manufacturing industry can be.
I said nothing about how capable US manufacturing was or is. I was addressing the point that you China could hire 8000 new workers overnight.
> In WWII, the US produced 300K planes, 130 carriers, 80 tanks every day on average, increased its steel output to 80M tons in 1944 alone, more than other countries combined
At what cost? What did that labour pool stop producing in order to produce machines of war?
The entire nation was mobilized for war, so the cost was high for sure. My point was that the US then could produce so much because their manufacturing sector was amazingly strong -- the same reason that Yamamoto Isoroku predicted, years before the US turned into a war machine, that Japan would lose to the US.
I read similar things about new factories in Norway like 150 years ago. From our look it was terrible with 11 hours shifts, no vacations, child labor etc. But at that time people who worked there actually preferred that since the alternative was even harder work on farms or in fishery.
>the factory work done by people in developing economies is dramatically better in terms of quality of life and safety than the agricultural work that they would be doing without economic development
Wait, I think people were much happier and we should go back to an agrarian society and that people are miserable in the dystopia we created, so I need a citation for this.
The interesting thing about the geopolitical context is that Vietnam is also single party Communist country now practicing state capitalism and also has all the trappings of communism such as internment of dissidents, same as China does
But our willingness to never think about it comes from Vietnam’s irrelevance, not the system they practice
Culturally Vietnam is tending quite pro-west, and yes its govt is single party communist, but nowhere near the levels of authoritarian hell of the CCCP.
Capitalism is one of the biggest eradicators of poverty. 1B of people in China was lifted from poverty because of it. And once it's done with one poor country, it starts taking care of the others :)
Did it eradicated poverty in Burundi? South Sudan? Malawi? Pakistan? I can cherry pick examples too; means nothing, and what about the tankman? Was he lifted out of poverty? Or all the other victims of the goverment? Also China capitalism includes things like stealing tech secrets from the companies that manufacture there[0], is that part of the "ideal capitalism" you advocate for?
>Also China capitalism includes things like stealing tech secrets from the companies that manufacture there[0], is that part of the "ideal capitalism" you advocate for?
Sure, China has copied/stole tech from the West, just as the West has copied tech from China long ago. It happens when an economy is playing catchup.
But in my humble opinion, the idea that China could only steal western tech is rooted in racism and a lot of western media propaganda.
Ever had a Chinese co-worker? Did they seem dumber than you? Are they only good at the job because they're copying you or stealing your work?
Good old "if you critize a government it means you are racist against people in that country". No, that's not how it works, government positions -specially at autocracies- attract a rare kind of people, extremly greedy and ruthless, not representative of the rest.
Also if the government orders you to steal secrets from your clients to follow such orders it's just basic survival instinct.
The China duality: It seems that China is a capitalist country when people want to discuss their achievements, and a communist country when they want to discuss their faults.
It is quite clear, however, that most analyses of their economic successes don’t add that nuance and come to the predetermined conclusion that I outlined above: the success is due completely to adopting western capitalism, and the negatives are due to the elements that don’t fit that mold.
Shift to markets, stringent capital controls, consolidation of massive state owned enterprises, encouragement of joint ventures between Chinese companies, western companies, and the government, lack of stringent IP laws/rights.
Some of the above is “capitalistic” and some of it is not. Commentators have been predicting China would continue to shift towards becoming more capitalist or fail for decades and they’ve been continuously proven wrong. China has developed a completely different model of development from the western consensus, but people still want to have their cake and eat it too.
Yes, there are lots of reforms that contributed to their rise, but adopting elements of a market economy and engaging in open trade with the rest of the world were key elements. Reforming their centrally planned economy wouldn't have resulted in the same outcome without the those.
But yes, I totally agree that you don't need to be 100% capitalist to benefit from having a market economy. Even the US's economy is ~15% public sector. Usually when multiple ideologies are competing, there's elements of truth all around.
They are capitalism since private sector is allowed and encouraged. They are an authoritarian country as there is no democracy and there can be a single political party. Why is that so difficult to understand?
They call their country communist because they can't afford to undermine the legacy of the communist party by admitting that they made huge mistakes in the past.
A ton of the achievement has to do with Western investments. For example, Apple spent $275 billion in the late 2010s to build up Chinese tech manufacturing capabilities. That's one company doing a 5X larger investment than the "historic" CHIPs bill signed by Biden this year.
Western FDI has definitely played a major role in China’s growth, yes.
Note that my comment doesn’t call that into question though, only that the conversation around chinas success is almost always grossly oversimplified to suit ideological agendas.
It's hard for me to understand how someone can hold this view, and it's hard to know where to start, but no. As capitalism has expanded it has dramatically reduced absolute poverty. It's not even close, and the change only got more dramatic when communism collapsed as an alternative.
Or any system where owners of property could extract profit by employing non-owners of property. Much of the strife in the later Roman Empire was caused by large property owners exploiting slaves and depriving non land owners (including many legionaries) of a chance of making an income. Said legionaries and other plebeians supported politicians with a policy of land reforms.
Not to mention the poverty of the slaves themselves.
There's an interesting argument in 'Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind' [1] that capitalism is primarily responsible for the Enlightenment period in Europe. By the same token it may also be associated with some of the worst aspects of (relatively) recent history, such as colonialism and the slave trade.
Can't shake the feeling that a similar rationality was used to partially justify trading slaves "The new master feeds them bread and milk instead of just rice and water! Its a clear win for them!". Yeah I get it, its an improvement for sure but maybe the problem has roots a bit deeper that must be adressed and therefore righfully critized despite being an improvement.
It wasn't true though. The lives of enslaved people were obviously, measurably worse after enslavement and transportation. They had shorter lifespans, less freedom, literally enslavement, etc. The lives of people groups in African captured for slavery were also worse.
Economics is called the "dismal science" because slavers called the economists that when the economists pointed out slavery was both bad and inefficient.
The slavers' argument was that treating them bad taught them proper Christian character.
> By and large, the factory work done by people in developing economies is dramatically better in terms of quality of life and safety than the agricultural work that they would be doing without economic development.
Do you have numbers on how it improved life of Chinese farmers compared to 100 years ago, 200?
When the US went through its industrial revolution we went from people owning farms to basically being owned by the factories boss. Child labor was rampant so we’re ridiculous working hours and blacksmiths and others who were put out of a job basically drank themselves to death.
Someone none of that seems to ever happen in other countries and all we hear about is “how great of an opportunity it is for them to get to build iPhones” odd stuff
Good for Vietnam. I visited the country in 2016 and fell in love with it, going back two more times. I’ve never seen a more hardworking, yet friendly people. They deserve all the success in the world.
Lots of Americans in Vietnam now. Vietnamese people have also seem to have embraced American culture wholeheartedly.
The gastronomic results of the mix have been fantastic. Vietnamese food is already amazing but there are now a ton of food joints that use Vietnamese flavors and southern style bbq techniques for some truly spectacular results.
I have seen some amazing work with my own eyes. Like buying a rusted farm implement from one vendor in a market and taking it to another to have it sharpened and getting back what was basically a brand new scythe.
But the vast majority of these amazing "look what I built" videos from Vietnam are staged and are actually the work of production companies with teams of people. Here is an expose of the primitive building genre where this got its start: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hvk63LADbFc
Lots of manufacturing has been moving to Vietnam (and similar countries) as China is finally running out of low cost labour. This has been happening for at least a few years, more likely a decade I think
How is no one mentioning that China is threatening Taiwan. If the US ends up in a war with China, suddenly most Apple products would have serious operations problems if not being shut off completely. Cheap labor isn't a bad reason, but this is also a hedge against the heating politics between the West and both Russia and China.
Also based on recent analysis many countries e.g. China, South Korea have increased exports to Russia including dual use technologies which are prohibited under recent sanctions.
This combined with upcoming war games involving China and Russia shows clearly where their allegiances lie.
So the risk of China being economically punished is not insignificant and Apple is very likely to be caught in the cross-fire if it does happen.
I would be interested in that analysis, as I've read the exact opposite. China will be the sole supplier of many goods for Russians as they have nowhere else to go, but simultaneously China is careful not to overstep bounds as it does not want to upset the US, a trade partner about 10 times more important than Russia. It also stopped/delayed many promised infra investments in Russia.
As for allegiances, China has none. Not with anybody. China has no moralistic or principal allies. It simply does what is best for China, and happily plays all sides all at once.
I have a hard time blaming Southe Korea here. Russia and China are their literal neighbors. If China decided to invade SK, their relationship with the US wouldn't save them.
Russia wouldn't have quite as much military success there right now (given their preoccupation in Ukraine), but it makes sense to keep them happy.
In July, the highest ranking EU offical visited Taiwan, and China didn't even batter an eyelid. But when the US visits, China threw its toys out of the cot and threatened the US and Taiwan.
Because the EU respects the One China policy (like virtually every UN member) and because the EU does not have hundreds of military bases surrounding China.
Thats such a cop-out, the US doesn't respect the one china policy any differently to the EU. And no one is threatening China in anyone shape or form. Your argument holds as much weight as Russia using NATO as an excuse.
The US stance is it acknowledges that China believes that Taiwan is part of China. That is the equiv of saying “I know you think the sky is green, I just don’t share the same opinion.”
The US’s position is that it’s up to Taiwan to decide its own fate. And will not allow china to invade and force Taiwan to join China.
This has been the same position for the last 70 years. Taiwan has been an ally of the US long before the CCP was created.
They have been threatening the island by flying military aircraft across the Taiwan air defense almost daily for the past year and have now surrounded the island and fired missiles over the island in a show of intimidation. What definition of "threatening" are you using?
Vietnam is also a communist (which we invaded and got badly defeated btw), dictatorship loving (Cuba, Venezuela, ....) country, whatever you see in China, you also see in Vietnam, media isn't just as vicious with Vietnam. In the other hand, Vietnam have a bright future, they have developed significantly in the last decade, I wish them well.
At some point we should outsource our armies and perhaps even governments. If a real war starts we can use the services industry, unless we outsource that too. We’ll send the lawyers and software engineers in, and power our cardboard tanks with wood and steam.
I was hoping the pandemic and the war in europe would teach us that electronics, particularly high end, should be relocated to allied countries at the very least.
Well, there is some substantial outsourcing of the army and intelligence services via private (military) contractors [0].
In a world of increasing PPP (Public-Private Partnerships) the line gets very blurry indeed.
One interesting line of thought (I don't share personally (yet) but find compelling as a dystopian possibility) is that the dirty business of censoring/filtering is outsourced by private companies (i.e. Big Tech with their unparalleled outreach: Twitter, Alphabet, Meta ... ) so that governments can wash their hands of it.
No deterrent is effective against a regime sufficiently detached from reality.
Putin called it a "special military operation" for a reason. It was supposed to be like Czechoslovakia in 1968. The troops go in, reach Kyiv in a few days, and take over without any real fighting. Ukraine was not supposed to be able and willing to resist. Russian military didn't even know there was going to be a war, which is why it failed so catastrophically in the first days.
The outcome of this war is going to determine whether international trade is still an effective deterrent. If Russian economy depends so much on Western technology that they will lose in the long term regardless of the oucome of the war, this was just the exception that tests the rule. If the West gives up and resumes trading with Russia, the deterrent will be gone.
Russia (Putin) sees Ukraine as basically a subordinate state; likewise with Georgia and Belarus. That would make this action a civil war, which is basically how it's been treated by the international community.
Yeah it did exactly nothing to stop the ongoing war in europe and little to prevent china from brutally overtaking hong long. Meanwhile china is openly flexing muscles around taiwan. If anything its us that are deterred from action - see germany and russia.
Isn't that like the same thing they said before both World War I and II? That the world and trade was too interconnected so that war couldn't break out.
People are very happy to torpedo economic benefits for national pride and sovereignty.
China has been India’s largest trading partner for many years. Yet when there was a recent border dispute, everyone was willing to forego all economic ties in favor of a conflict.
As per HN Guidlines, please don't be snarky. You may have a very valid point, and it is great to back it up with links to more info, but please state what the point you are making is, rather than just a snarky comment with a link
3. Am kind, just busy so i don't have time to summarize for you the paper that you can just as well read yourself. In fact, it has an abstract, which is a summary, right up front.
> At some point we should outsource our armies and perhaps even governments.
Funnily enough, this was how war functioned in Europe between 1500-1750s. Armies were too expensive to maintain, so states hired mercenaries. The problem was that mercenaries wouldn't have any incentive to risk themselves to end things quickly. And when you inevitably run out of money to pay them, in the best case they'd just pack up and leave. In the worst case, they'd loot your city on the way out.
Note the term “allied” in my comment. Cooperation, sharing of intel and workload among allies is not an issue in my view. I am not a looney nationalist or protectionist, nor do i have an issue with china or russia or their people, i simply want the free world to end its reliance on countries that will not hesitate to use it against us. Also it would help our economies and overall progress.
You’re ignoring the entire dependence on the worldwide supply chain. That’s like Cook making a show of “manufacturing Mac Pros” in the US for Trump when only final assembly was done here.
He did the same dog and pony show in Great Brittain.
Well thats the issue. The whole suite of dependencies needs to be moved back, except where impossible - i.e. minerals etc.
Having moved all of this outside the free world we slowed down progress in our own countries. Imagine being forced to come up with cheaper alternatives at home where we’d be with robotics, automation and space mining today. Instead we finance countries that seek to challenge us.
Because we have no option. Such resources are limited. We either destroy our own environment - assuming it holds such resources - suck up or expand outwards. I’d choose the latter but it seems our collective culture is weak and unable to sustain radical positive transformation. The industrial revolution couldn't take place today even if we wanted, let alone ambitious resource extraction projects.
In my dad’s lifetime we went from fighting a bitter war with Vietnam to building our most popular consumer electronics there. I wonder what we will build in Afghanistan in my retirement years.
For previous generations, you could say much the same thing about Germany and the engineering and automotive sectors.
Afghanistan is an inhospitable place that doesn't have inherent qualities such as a skilled population, high population density, logistics channels, shipping ports, or a geography amenable to developing the above. They could become a major minerals exporter (there's believed to be a lot of lithium in Afghanistan, for example) but that would, at best, make Afghanistan more like nearby wealthy oil states.
If AF was smart, they'd partner with battery makers to value add instead of just shipping lithium out as-is. Better to build value. And, many dry inhospitable places are productive in the right terms, if you understand them. Look at the bone yards: Making good money, letting birds park there.
Removing fundamental womens rights is a very odd way of coping with the after effects of foreign occupation and battlefield effects. That aside, the revenge killings are concerning. After that, I support development of a modern Afghan economy as you would see from my original comment. Nothing about it was berating.
Not the commenter but it didn't seem like they were saying "hey, lay off the Taliban!". If they're anything like me, I think they're just tired of seeing the dire situation in Afghanistan[0] being used as a punchline, a little dunk you can slip into a comment for a cheap laugh and some upvotes. And the comment did come off a little bit like you were gleefully depicting the country as comically backwards and primitive.
I mean I guess it won't change anything if people do this, but it's just a bit disappointing to encounter it and remember the prevailing attitudes on Afghanistan and the casual dismissal of our own involvement there.
Totally. Despite the successive governments (state and federal) obsession with mines and sell direct from mining, the treasury, business development, industry and labour unions as well as business sector (not mining) continually beg for help to re-boot the industrial capacity to value-add that mine stuff.
The problem is, the miners can't be made to do this. It demands huge capital investment they have low to no motivation to fulfil.
> For previous generations, you could say much the same thing about Germany and the engineering and automotive sectors.
This is a great point. My grandfather landed on Normandy Beach on D-Day. He told some stories, but not all of them. He also drove a VW Beetle for years with no shame. Swore by them in fact.
My hope for the future is economic cooperation. Best I know that’s the most effective force for peace.
To be clear, I'm very much a layperson with absolutely no special knowledge or insight. I really don't know enough about Iraq to have an opinion.
But what I do notice is that Germany, Japan, Korea and Vietnam were all able to break free from feelings of anger and grievance against past enemies. Iraq (and Afghanistan) are populations rife with religion-fuelled and religion-adjacent grievances, pointing internally and externally. Sadly I don't have optimism for change.
Iraq and Iran have massive domestic economies, and established tertiary education. I have no reason to believe graduates from Iraqi uni are any less capable than the Iranians who work with me, or who I know work in Engineering and Health fields all over Australia. There are good AF graduates too, but fewer. They have less resources to fund tertiary education.
Iran is very much a different story. Grievance is largely held by the ruling classes and not the broader population. With the right leadership in place I could totally imagine a future where Iran is a trusted/respected member of the international community and a strong global trade partner.
I know Palestinians and Jordanians and probably Palestinians masquerading as Jordanians, who are examples of how you can work it out, once things calm down. Iraq won't be at war with itself forever, Kurdistan aside, (and its not like there aren't heaps of smart enterprises in Turkey, they sell world-class drones...)
I’m not a vet. I didn’t serve. But my perception as an ignorant plebian is that the fighting in Iraq was hard, but the fighting in Afghanistan was bitter. We pacified Iraq. Afghanistan hasn’t bowed to the will of the United Staes, the Soviet Union, or to anyone since or including Napoleon. Nobody wins a military victory in Afghanistan. The only hope is peace through economic compromise.
And now they're not making LCDs. Or, anything else there. While building new facilities where the labor is cheap, despite the PR grandstanding a few years back.
I don't think the point they were making was about Apple products being built there, but that Foxconn continues to put their attention elsewhere with other projects.
Sort of both points. They have a plant built and they have yet to put it to use. All the while, they are opening new factories elsewhere.
From TFA:
>Foxconn also reportedly considered using the site to make electric vehicles and other electronics, but nothing has come of any of its announcements.
Most likely Foxconn/WI just crony capitalism and political circus. Numerous articles over the past years about complete lack of delivery by Foxconn and lack of political followthrough from WI state government.
Let's be clear about what actually happened here: Donald Trump and Scott Walker wanted a 'win,' Foxconn was able to get some terrific subsidies, and Wisconsinites got a raw deal out of it.
I don't really see what the problem is with offshoring. If other people elsewhere want to work for cheaper, then it's fair competition. It's not like protectionism would work long term anyways. And in this particular case, Vietnam is more aligned with the US than China, geopolitically, so this makes a lot of sense.
Problem with offshoring of high tech is that a big chunk of US economy is on the hook to a few authoritarian governments not really aligned with US or the west.
Because you slowly shift your economy out from underneath you and effectively give it away. In the process you lose the ability to have any of these core competencies yourself.
In the end what’s the point of having cheaper products if no one has a job to buy them.
> People will never stop coming to the US for opportunity.
Is true _as long as the US continues to understand this_ and doesn't change its stance on immigration and business and open markets. The US will win as long as it's the country where the best of this world are invited and able to come and do their best work.
On the other hand, I don't see China having any chance at beating the US on that front anytime soon. Mandarin is too hard to learn for immigrants, and the racism and lack of freedom is entirely unpalatable to most immigrants. Aside from finance types moving to Shanghai, I'm not sure who would want to move to China if they have the opportunity to move to the US instead. (well, I know many do, but let's just say the quantities are incomparable)
Current trends suggest otherwise, see PRC rapidly catching up and leading R&D and innovation indexes controlled by citations or quality in the last few years.
> quantities are incomparable
If anything US is at an substantial quantity disadvantage and slight to modest quality advantage.
While US does absorb _some_ of the best global talent, those are also subsect of best with resources to go to US, and capped by immigration to around 700k, not all whom are relevant STEM talent for high tech industrial competition. Meanwhile rate of PRC domestic STEM talent generation is about 4-5x (rough estimate generously assuming all US immigration is STEM) of US domestic highereducation + immigration is pulling talent even accounting for outbound PRC brain drain. Yes, US has a bigger pool to draw from but their bucket is also smaller. US was projected to have like 3+ million STEM job gap in coming years, while PRC is generating so much talent that there's record unemploment. Which is obviously not good but puts the numbers in perspective - PRC is producing roughly as much STEM grads as all OECD nations combined, while geopolitical tensions is helping PRC retain more of that talent.
Other considerations is that recent trend of PRC R&D and tech catchup is result of highered reforms set decades ago. PRC is still in process of building talent and institution base compared to relative mature western R&D system. IMO trends last few years show it's entirely possible for PRC to be competitive or overtake US in strategic high tech/talent industries in medium/long term, if not the entire US aligned block who are small subsect of OECD countries. But they I think state of geoeconomics will limit their market access and each will end up leading different blocs.
I don't doubt what you're saying, although I'm not sure about the validity of the data derived on count of publications, since that's easily gamed.
But what I'm saying is about immigration. I really doubt that the PRC will attract much STEM immigration in the future, at least in comparison to the US. As far as I can tell, the few dedicated folks who choose to emigrate to China do so despite an uphill battle and end up with limited job opportunities. The PRC will have a large internal talent pool to draw from, but will not attract foreign and diverse talent... at least that's my hunch, and mostly because of (1) hostile policies to foreigners (2) language barrier - Mandarin is much harder to learn than English (3) cultural barrier - Chinese culture is old and more self-centered than US's young, outward facing and constantly reinventing culture, and (4) having a bad reputation for personal freedoms and judicial fairness.
So sure, PRC isn't near its final state in term of STEM talent. But I think despite its domestic talent pool, it will not benefit from the diversity of talent that the US will continue to benefit from. And ultimately, 1.3B people is a large pool to draw talent from, but it's not as large as the other 6.4B people.
I do find this topic fascinating. I'm reading a book interview with Lee Kuan Yew which I find is making me reevaluate my prior beliefs. I'm more bullish on China than US on the long term, but LKY's insight were convincing and making a bull case for the US.
ON LKY and US, I feel consensus is US is geopolitically blessed and have all the institutions and instruments to preserve their primacy across many domains if they get their shit together. But also so blessed that it can coast along on current incompetence and past momentum fine for foreseeable future.
> count of publications
Refer to nature science index which collates from prominent western journals with contribution quality assessed by western experts. Or share of PRC science papers filtered/accepted through prestigious western academic conferences in variety of (STEM) domains. Or number of researchers in US/western R&D of PRC origin. There are many indicators that comport with dramatic increase in PRC science competence in recent years that shouldn't be dismissed as pressure to publich / gaming the system but PRC highered reforms finally paying off.
>immigration ... attract talent
I understand, my point is with the population denominator involved, PRC is generating more talent than US can attract. Quantity has a quality of it's own, meanwhile the proportion of quality among mass quantity is constantly being improved. I also think notion that US drawing from global talent is overstated, PRC is drawing from domestic population that accounts for 20% of global population, apart from fringe minorities, everyone in the system speaks Chinese. Meanwhile, US is realistically drawing from 13% of world that speaks English / has english fluency. One stat I recall is by 2030 PRC will have ~3.5/10 of global stem graduates, Indian ~3/10, US ~0.4/10, EU ~0.8/10. Gut guestimate is eligable pool of talent US can actually draw on is not substantially larger than PRC has domestically. That said, intuitively I do feel diversity of talent is important, but I can't really articulate why.
As for hunches on PRC lack of attractiveness for immigration, imo basically true but also misses the point. PRC incentives aren't structured around golden citizenship tickets, but good compensation + access to resources. Look at PRC poaching entire teams of TW and SKR semi engineers by paying them 3x market rate, and building SKR talent churches, basically bribing them with perks knowing full well these are get rich quick limited contract schemes. Or consider PRC thousand talent program with generous perks which work(ed?) pretty well at attracting foreign academic talent, strategically drawing "sea turtles" - Chinese diasphora scientists in premiere western institutions with all the language+culture reprequisits to work in PRC. Pay them lots, give them a well funded lab, it's an easy sell. Work(ed) because it's a tap western policies is attempting to turn off (US China Initiative, TW trying to ban semi talent from working in PRC due to national security). But it's not because PRC is "unattractive", PRC has money, money is very attractive. Ergo PRC geopolitical competitors need to draft literal legistlation to undermine/outlaw strategic talent from working in PRC. In TW's case because they literally can't afford to pay their semi talent well enough to compete with PRC money firehose.
We'll see, I wouldn't personally be against doing a stint of my career in China if the conditions are decent. Right now however, I feel like I'd be at the mercy of some geopolitical game, being Canadian living in the US. The lack of due process for an average joe like me who'd otherwise be curious to experience the culture, seems like a real deterrent. I'm probably not the only one who's feeling uneasy about possibly being a pawn in someone's political games. Hence where I derive my strong doubts about attracting foreign talent. If an open minded and willing person like me has strong doubts about his and his family's safety should he go there... it seems like Occam's Razor to me (or perhaps it's another razor?). It's most likely that my experience isn't unique and that other folks are also deterred in a similar fashion.
But they don't need jobs to buy them, they get dollars printed for them to buy them. If one day the dollar can't be printed without tanking itself, they will also have the jobs that allow them to buy the products.
A lot of people here are saying the US and Vietnam are close now. Can anyone fill me in? Last I was aware, there was no extradition, and a museum about the War of American Aggression, etc. I wasn’t aware we even had functioning diplomacy with Vietnam. I guess I should have though because Obama went and ate noodles there with Anthony Bourdain. Serious comment. I thought they hated us since the North won the war.
Well, not exactly allied, but China is a much more real and immediate threat to Viet Nam than the US are. Viet Nam isn't going to be a strategic threat to the US any day, and they have aligned interests in the South China Sea (East Sea for VN). The communist government in VN isn't that "bad" all things considered (heavy quotes). The country could grow in prominence and never become big enough to threaten the US's dominant position.
VN and China have been in constant conflict over the sea they share, and their respective commercial and government ships have been in low intensity skirmishes. VN wants to have access to the seas and be able to extract petrol from there. China wants a clear frontyard to be able to protect their economy and trade. VN is too small to do much about China's navy, but with help from the US, it's a different story. In addition, China did try to invade VN right after the US-VN war, and VN remains highly suspicious of China. Hystorically, VN was a vassal state to China (like Korea) and given the trajectory of things and how China talks to their neighbours, it sure sounds like they plan on treating VN (and everyone else) as vassal states once again if and when they come back to world dominance.
From the US side of things, shifting manufacturing to VN is a way to divest from China. And VN workers/trades are quite skilled, so the products themselves are not bad at all.
So while the VN communist party can't just erase their origin story out from one day to the next and remove all the anti-US propaganda, the geopolitics reality is that VN and the US are naturally aligned against China. And similarly, the VN war was a huge cultural shock for the US and you can't just erase that from people's mind. But then pragmatism is that modern day US and VN's interest are a lot more aligned than they're misaligned. In fact aside for the whole history (conflict), political system (capitalist/communist) and governance stuff (freedom & democracy/authoritarian and single party), I think the US and VN don't have much in term of hurdles. The VN population mostly likes US folks (ignoring drunken bravado) and the US has a large VN diaspora and a guilt trip about the VN war.
Nobody does until it affects them personally or unless they have some compassion for others in their country who don't have the same opportunities and skillset as you. Many of the drugged out people on the street without homes or a future could have been hard working factory workers but wealthy people thought it would be better to save a few bucks and boost their own paychecks by offshoring.
Personally I think it's entirely fair if someone in another country is allowed to compete on the world market and provide a service for cheaper. It makes economical sense for them as they'll improve their living standards by quite a lot. So you could say that I have compassion for everyone else in the world who isn't born a US citizen and needs to scrape by from much diminished opportunities to begin with.
The offshoring country indeed loses jobs and the jobless need to handle this situation. Some will end up drugged out in the street. I'd argue that these drugged off people aren't that much the fault of corporate leaders who cut costs by offshoring. I'd say the drugged off people are jointly responsible for their fate, along with governmental policies that offer no social net while also not wanting to take any action to prevent spiraling delinquency.
If you look around the world, not every person who loses their job ends up drugged off and homeless. In many places, people are quite poor and don't end up this way. Most people lose their jobs and turn around and figure something out. And then some people can't deal with the hit and don't have what it takes to handle and end up drugged out in the streets. There's some self responsibility going on here that allows this to go down this path. And there's some social policy at play too. In another country, you could only fall so far down before something makes it harder for you to go further down. Either there's strong social nets, or there's just strong anti-drugs laws, or all kinds of debatable policies.. but many of these policies help prevent people getting so low that they can't come back up.
Why is the poor trade worker in VN, living in a metal shed, able to handle abject poverty with dignity, and then get an offshored job and thrive... but the US worker loses their job, has 10x better economical opportunities than the VN worker but ends up drugged out in the street. This isn't a real argument as there are people heading down a self-destructive path everywhere in the world. But I can't help but think that a lot of self-pity has to do with one's own perceived expectations for higher standards and inability to accept loss.
Ultimately, I can't help but think it's an infantilizing argument to say that the hard working factory workers who become junkies, are junkies because someone offshored their job. Because this supposes that they had no agency into doing anything about it, they were doomed to become junkies. This also supposes that a variety of things could have easily knocked them off the good path. That they were fragile and had no recourse or control over their destiny. If it wasn't a CEO offshoring their job, it would have been some other hurdle. And I don't buy this, I don't think the average hard working factory worker is such a fragile person, whose entirely at the mercy and requires the protection of a patronizing CEO.
A lot more adult of a superpower than say, China's petulant behavior. The US is a mostly benign superpower in comparison. People like to say the US is violent and imperialist and what not, but it's a lot less so and a lot more benevolent than any prior superpower has been in past centuries. Ignoring the past and looking at the future, just look at how China is going all gung ho at the silliest perceived slight, going into petty trade wars with major trading partners over the silliest things (Australia inquiries into the origin of COVID).
So realistically, there's not a lot of "maturity" on the geopolitical world stage. The US is objectively on the "adult" spectrum.
And good luck with that with China holding so much of our debt. Military leaders in the US for decades has been warning politicians that our debt is one of our biggest threats.
China holds 3.2% of the US's outstanding debt[0]. I'm not particularly worried about that angle. Even if China owned an order of magnitude more, what practical benefits would that confer?
The number one holder of US debt is not China. It's US investors and own citizens from Social Security "entitlements" (misnomer: they are fully funded by our mandatory contributions).
China holds US debt denominated in dollars, which is different from eg holding Sri Lankan debt denominated in dollars. In the US case, the government can issue more treasuries to cover payments or if things are dire they can just print more dollars. Sri Lanka can’t make new dollars so they need to get them through trade and if they have an imbalance there it can be very hard.
I think it isn’t really very relevant to think about China holding US government debt because it isn’t like they will call up the bailiffs or otherwise be able to exercise control over the US because of that debt. I think it would be basically equivalent to say that China holds US dollars which doesn’t feel particularly concerning to me.
It does, but then China can't use their debt holding as a weapon. China is incentivized to keep the dollar stable relative to the yuan, because crashing the dollar would hurt China a lot, and propping up the dollar also would. The whole debt holding is a lot more of a rent-seeking arrangement. Both the debtor and debtee are better off keeping the status quo. Plus China doesn't exactly have the capital to do anything about it. Their own economy is in a debt spiral only kept from crashing by huge government intervention and very tight forex capital controls.
I’m not sure I’d call it ‘rent seeking’. China needs forex reserves like a lot of countries and China is big so it’s reserves are big. It’s just that it is generally more convenient but basically equivalent to hold treasuries instead of dollars if you have an enormous amount of money. Doesn’t eg Japan also hold a bunch of treasuries for similar reasons?
I'm no expert on this topic. My perspective is simply that it's against a debt holder's interest to have the debt's underlying asset (currency) devalued. It's much better if the debt holder gets their interest payments (the "rent seeking" part) against an asset that has a stable equivalent monetary value (in term of purchasing power). Especially when we talk of currency, since the interest payment is made... in the currency that would be devalued. Basically, China is long on the USD.
Thanks for that link! I think it's reasonable to argue that fiscal responsibility is related to national security. That being said, I don't know what this has to do with China holding any part of the national debt?
We offshore, but only the pleb stuff. God forbid you want to get a degree in a foreign country, or import medicine, or a doctor. Ask to do any of those and it's protectionism all day long.
I think it's a pendulum. Wait some decades and centuries and that stuff too will get "offshored" elsewhere. And then move between areas, and so on. It used to be that the Arab world was where all the science and math was done. Now it's the bottom of the food chain. It used to be that the Britts were cheaper and faster at building ships, displacing the Dutch's and becoming the world's leader. Now they can't build anything competitively. It used to be that China was the source of most technology, while Europe was stuck in feudal wars. Then they were outpaced by industrializing nations. Now they're mostly manufacturing and develop limited intellectual property. It used to be that Americans studied in Europe to get a proper education. Now the US has the best universities in the world.
I think resistance to offshoring is a natural reflex that's entirely futile.
Why would Apple decide to build in Vietnam after secretly committing $275B to advance Chinese manufacturing? Western political heat seems most logical.
So then yes you agree with the person you are talking to completely, that yes it was secret, and you disagree completely with the person who was saying that it wasn't secret.
You just agree 100% with the person you were responding to, and brought up an irrelevant point.
Since the Russia-Ukraine war broke out politics is now a primary driver.
China has indicated that it is 100% going to retake Taiwan. Their threat is credible. There were indications it would be soon.
War is a 'new reality' again and we can see the consequences of it.
If you have geopolitical liabilities and you have 10 year strategic planning, then you calculate the odds of 'major conflict' the diversifying away from China is a priority.
Anyone not divesting from China right now is going to get rocked.
Not fully divested but I mean the critical things. We have to plan for China arm of the business dissapeaering overnight.
Your little rant seems to have missed that these companies are still owned by Foxxconn and Luxshare. And while Foxxconn may be Taiwanese both the company and the owner are on very very friendly terms with China, which is unlikely to change.
The world didn't start with 2022 Ukraine(even the Ukraine conflict didn't magically begin in 2022), most of these conflicts started long before Ukraine. The Indian foreign minister also tried to remind the world that it's foolish to try to make everything about Ukraine(see minute 2:30) and yet people don't seem to want to understand the viewpoints of the other 5 billion[1].
Thankfully your little ranty response doesn't change the thesis at all.
If a war broke out between Taiwan and China - Vietnamese operations would be able to continue irrespective of Foxxcon's ownership. Which is the whole point.
The Indian foreign minister's comments are irrelevant in this context, and he's foolish to not contemplate the gravity of the war in Ukraine which has rattled the entire world economy. Actually, not 'foolish' just greedy: he wants to support Putin buy buying cheap Oil, and needs Russia to not be too close to China.
India, politically, is turning into a vile place, which is sad because there's been so much hope for them. Maybe they'll come back.
Russia->Ukraine is an invasion of the 2cnd largest Army in the world, of a relatively modern (if corrupt), large nation in Europe, directly connected to the EU, that has geopolitical implications the world over, as we've seen. Russian Defence Minister has declared that 'The Soviet Unions is Back' and their intentions to expand the Russian Empire into other countries. They've been trying to disrupt NATO nations (i.e. Latvia) for some time, and of course have their eyes on the Georgia and the 'Stans'. That affects everyone.
There has not been a war affecting major powers in a very, long time. Iraq and Afghanistan (and are not) geopolitically very important. Neither was the Iran/Iraq war.
Those wars could happen while the world watched and tried to figure out 'what to do' i.e. 'intervene' or 'not take sides' etc. but those wars are not going to spill out into the world economy.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine is existential, just like a war between China and Taiwan is a 'hugely significant war' that will rattle the global economy like nothing we've seen in decades.
It will involve the US likely directly meaning world's #1 and #2 forces, both nuclear and huge trading partners, and likely include Korea, Japan, Australia, maybe Canada as well. Possibly Europe.
The result could shift the world order in the same way that Russian/Ukrainian invasion is i.e. Asians will be forced to pick sides in the cold war: USA/Japan/Korea/Australia/Europe ... or be Chinese vassal. Or try to fanatically figure out an in-between path, which maybe only India has the power to do.
Those with foresight would have seen this impending reality 10 years ago (see: Kevin Rudd, former Australian PM leading the Asia Society in US) but only now it's become very evident. And FYI it's actually quite rare that we can predict a war so early on - only when you have a kind of foreign policy that's really consistent over time is this going to happen.
And so: big companies realign. Those who don't are likely to pay a price.
China's #1 foreign policy goal is to take Taiwan and they are going to use all of their resources to try to do it.
India is overrated. It will never go to wars. so US should up ties with the Pakistan and Afghanistan, Remember its pakistan that defeated Russia in Afghanistan and also defeated America in Afghanistan with US AID. They have more caliber to defeat the next super power.
If Biden is smart, he should up the relationship with Pakistand and Afghanistan. its deadly combo
Pakistan didn't 'win' anything. They have an extremely corrupt, dysfunctional and quixotic military and spy appartus to the point where nobody knows how's in charge.
The West doesn't make it's partnership decisions so much about who can hold out in a war across their borders.
India is a quixotic place, but not a bad one. I don't think anyone expects them to 'go to war' for anything, and neither Pakistan nor Indian soldiers I think are prepared for real action beyond their borders (though no doubt they'd fight in their own defense or against each other).
Really it'd just be good if India wasn't buying Russian Oil opportunistically.
That's an 'active' choice they have made, to 'increase' business with a bad actor.
It's opportunistically selfish.
Everyone realizes the dangers that Russia poses to it's neighbours, and some really don't give a smack, it's one thing to 'watch and do nothing' another thing to 'help'.
It's a start. What other reasonable moves do you expect to reduce Chinese manufacturing dependency? At Apple scale, you can only make such large transition over multiple years.
Vietnam is a capable developing country that may do a lot manufacturing in the future. Samsung has been working with Vietnamese subsidiaries for a while now, so move by Apple is already proven to be viable.
It's probably not even for good PR. As far as I know China has become quite more expensive for manufacturing, so companies switch to other countries like India, Bangladesh, Thailand, and Vietnam.
It is a good backup plan for sanctions against China and a blockade or war with Taiwan because of the port facilities, advanced infrastructure, and other advanced industry. For World War 3 it's not necessarily a great plan, but it's as good as any other plan for that scenario.
Apple Watch was China. I think MacBooks where partially made in the US, but I could be wrong. My understanding is the MacBook line (and everything other 'mature' product line) is heavily automated now.
Vietnam is not that poor. Vietnam is MUCH richer than its direct neighbours, Laos and Cambodia. Thailand is richer though.
The actual thing is not really poor population, but how easy is to build new factory there.
Vietnam has the best thing for that - it is easy to build new stuff there, as the infrastructure exists; however, they absolutely ignore any environmental laws and just spew all waste into rivers and air.
Look up Formosa Steel incident - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Vietnam_marine_life_disas... - huge disaster of a Taiwanese company, after which there were big protests. Communist government then arrested all protesters and put them to 20 years in prisons (for protesting against a foreign company!). Nobody protests about environmental waste now.
