Understanding China and the West:
I dont think the west needs to do much, China is imploding at the moment.
Based on???
Don’t tell me; “a Buddy that has been in China for a week” told you.
Refr. to some conspiracy theory/ anti-China websites are not much more convincing ether.
There are very little reliable predictions on Chinese economy to be found that originate after China lifted the Zero Covid Policy, but the general trend in western popular media has changed from; “CCP is using draconian lockdown on their own people” to “CCP has abandoned their people to fend for themselves while Covid is spreading like wildfire”.
IMF’s World Economic Outlook for 2023 is gloomy for just about everybody, incl. China:
Here is an article in Foreign Policy from May 2022 that have a similar view to CNA:
It must be so frustrating for you that if it doesnt exist on the internet your lost.
Your still on the bitter and twisted theme that you have no friends in any industries anywhere in the world so nobody else can either.
I cant imagine spending a life and ending up with no friends or colleagues anywhere in the world.
I do have a wider set of contacts than one career people as I have worked in several different industries in several different countries and still compete internationally in sporting events.
PS “China is imploding” 1,440,000 hits on google
I’m not suffering from lack of multi-industrial or international experience, or lack of friends and acquaintances around the world, but I don’t do sports these days.
Google search: “China economy recovery”.About 132,000,000 results (0.59 seconds)
Top of the list:
Oh, sorry!! Did I quote an obscure pro-China website instead of asking a friend that know nothing about China, or economy?
You could post information from a contact in china and get real data but you never seem able to do that and rely 100% on the internet which is clearly from where you form your opinions.
just for starters
I have one brother inlaw ( Singaporean) came back 3 years ago, did 5 years doing business advisory and market research for one of the largest retailers in China.
He said for 10 years there has been a slow decline and most Chinese graduates know they have no future. If you didnt make it 10 years ago its all over.
He was gobsmacked to learn most of their wealthy customers had sold out of everything that they had been doing and 3+ generations will now just live on cash as they knew it was all over.
Everybodies else’s wealth is stuck in property ( the working class) and its all gone, that will take 20-30 years to absorb.
Another brother inlaw has a factory making parts for his other furniture factories overseas.
Doesnt care about china just needs workers and raw materials and cant get either.
Has been slowly moving that business out of China like many others.
The CCP’s handling of the Wuhan made things worse but China was already in decline due to massive incompetent financial management.
Why rely upon what others say if you have own experiences and knowledge to base your opinions on?
I first visited China in 1960 and latest in 2015, with many visits of various lengths and to different parts of China in the years between. I have seen China at its worst (the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and -70s) and the economic developments that took place from 1980 onwards
I have also spent a lot of time with people of all ranks, both on Chinese ship and ashore and in both work related and social settings. After a few rounds with “Yam Sing” of MaoTai things become a lot less “reserved”.
Nobody should be of the elution that China will turn into an open Democracy anytime soon, nor that it will somehow implode because of setbacks over the last few years.
The “Zero Covid” policy has cause a lot of hardship, both for the ordinary citizens and the economy, but the abrupt lifting of nearly all restrictions has also been problematic.
They have some short and long term structural issues.
Added to Chairman Xi who has made it not popular to be a billionaire and saying prosperity for all.
That could well mean everyone will be the same, thats communism I guess but at what level will everyone be the same?
One thing my bro-inlaw said years ago and common knowledge at the time was that Jack Ma will go and alibaba will end up in gov hands/control as they know it needs to go away
Jack has zero control over alibaba now just a large shareholding
( Ant group, the gov has forced Jack from 50% control to 6%)
In his position with his boss being close to the gov, was interesting to note that he said the gov can see many issues but doesnt know what to do.
The Gov can see going from tiny economy to alibaba has removed the middle class from the business economy as its one guy at the top and lots of cheap employees.
One very rich and workers with no future, not very commie.
The joke he said with graduates is when leaving college, “are you putting it in the box or delivering it”
IMHO they are going down the path of Japan and will probably stagnate for a decade or so
A great analysis from WAPO about how demographics is changing China’s economic prospects. Many good graphs and charts in the original article (though perhaps behind a paywall I believe) Here is the gist from the article (edited at …):
The world is on the cusp of a remarkable transition…China, long the most populous nation on the planet, will soon see its population be overtaken by India’s… China’s population contracted during 2022 for the first time in decades… it also serves as a reminder of the important role that immigration plays in boosting the United States’ own population growth.
Here, for example, are the annual numbers of births and deaths from 1950 to 2021 in China, India, the United States and Japan — the poster child for a nation where population decline is powered by low birthrates.
… In the United States, the natural population change is still slightly positive — more births than deaths. In Japan, it’s negative. In China, it has plummeted toward zero…
…The United States…added more than 6 million new immigrant residents. China’s increase from immigration was about 0.01 percent of its total population; the United States’ was almost 2 percent…
…the increasing need to provide for an older population with tax revenue and to fill jobs left empty through retirement suggests that growth is greatly preferable to contraction. And the United States, unlike China, has multiple robust avenues to ensure that growth.
Has there been any study to examine whether the paradigm of ‘increasing population is required to increase economic growth’ still applies moving forward with the likelihood that AI and automation will replace many jobs and tasks currently requiring a human worker? Is it possible that’s what Japan is doing/thinking?
China’s rise in prosperity depended on a huge, young population of relatively poorly paid workers. This kept the cost of manufacturing cheap, but it prevented social unrest because as poor as the wages were it raised people out of even worse poverty.
Replace a lot of workers with robots and you still have the workers, but with a lot of unemployment. How does that change social cohesion? I don’t know. I do know that as wages rise in China, which is normal for economic progress, China loses their overall edge as a manufacturing export nation.
Japan was poised to become the world’s economic leader in the 1990s. It never did, because its population plateaued, and because the average wage had increased to the point where it was no longer a cheap place to manufacture, compared to China. Plenty of robots in Japan, but that didn’t bring manufacturing back to Japan. Besides, young highly-educated Japanese, like young Americans, are increasingly in the business of creating digital constructs, not material goods.
The USA made the transition from mainly a manufacture exporter to an exporter of digital constructs. Increasingly, we don’t transport our high value exports by container ships as much as across fiber optic cables. I think China’s leaders had hoped that would occur in China also. Is it happening? I don’t see it now, but it might happen.
Its all about productivity thats where you get gdp per capita numbers
China has in the main a low skilled workforce who are doing all that cheap stuff in factories but now they are running out of them but dont have a large pool of high skilled workers or the businesses to use them to move up the ladder.
Prosperity for all might be sending graduates back to the paddy fields, at least they can travel using high speed rail to get there.
Another commentary about the shrinking and aging of the Chinese population:
Feng Wang is a professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine. This commentary first appeared on The Conversation.
This time not from WAPO but something from serious Dudes
China surpasses US in number of ICBM launchers (defensenews.com)
Blast from the past. We went through the Missile Gap hysteria back in the 1950s. Let’s not do it again.
A day without a good laugh and a little provocation/teasing is a day lost. Will You not agree???
Perhaps the new news will be bragging about how skilled your workers are and how many high end chips you can make.
And the rest of the world can brag about how many cars they can make without chips made in China?
Face the facts; the developed world needs Chinese made goods and China needs raw materials from the developing world to make those goods.
Everybody needs food though. Those who have surplus of food can exchange that for manufactured goods and whatever else they desire from where it is produced cheapest and best.
It’s call interdependence, or “globalization” and the western world has benefited the most from it.
As we have now learnt those top end chips were made by foreigners with foreign machines, now all closed down
Biden has doubled down on chips not going from US companies to China so China left with very low tech chip production that they own for calculators and watches etc.
Globalization is now shutting down, USA is the in the best position to go it alone.
China needs massive imported resources, energy. and food.
It doesnt seem to have a bright future at the moment not to mention its internal economic issues.
A story about journalist’s attempts to understand China: