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China's manufacturers are going broke

economist.com

211–220 of 229 posts

Re: China's manufacturers are going broke

#211
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aah the McDonald excuse again. The favorite pivot of every boing apologist and conspiracy theorist. If only Mac, a completely successful defense contractor, hadn't somehow engineered a completely galaxy brained backdoor purchase of their largest competitor Boeing like a tapewirm because they needed cash after the f112 cancellation they never would have lost that engineering led spirit. Get over it. Boeing wasn't doin…

Cold air holds less water than dry, AC is great for drying, also saunas are super dry. Heating up ACed air would be ultra dry. You mean that the wet rainy Seattle weather combined with jungle like south east make a bad moisture combo, right?

take something metal, get it really cold, wheel it out into a steam room or a sauna where someone just poured a bucket of water on the rocks... tons of moisture is gong to condense on the metal, and in all the gaps and tracks inside

Re: China's manufacturers are going broke

#212
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a good example because Boeing didn’t outsource. China flies Boeing airframes made in the US and has for the last 50 years. Boeing is an example of financiers running the company from an ivory tower on the other side of the country.

> Not a good example because Boeing didn’t outsource. No, that's precisely my point actually. Boeing is one of the very few companies that maintained its local manufacturing capacity. (to say that they "didn't outsource" is not remotely accurate) Despite everything that was pointing in Boeing's favor -- culture, financials, market, reputation; it was taken over by the MBAs that put McDonnell-Douglas into a nosedive a…

It does not take long to build excellence in the grand scale of things. A culture with positive feedback that encourages good engineering with leadership recognition and monetary/equity rewards can produce a great company in less than a decade.

> who can bootstrap our manufacturing renaissance?

Look at SpaceX. You don’t need a great wizard of yore to teach you how to do things if you iterate and learn. They went from a joke 10 years ago to completely dominating and transforming the launch and LEO space industry.

Or, look at Boeing 70 years ago. They didn’t have a magic culture of excellence then either and it wasn’t bestowed on them by elders. They built it then and it can definitely be built again.

Re: China's manufacturers are going broke

#213
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Who said EV was suppose to rescue PRC economy? the gov is heavily investing & publicizing "New productive forces"[] that include "new energy vehicles" []: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_productive_forces []: https://www.miit.gov.cn/zwgk/zcwj/wjfb/yj/art/2024/art_ad15b...

Yes, EV export up 70% YoY but is minority part of exports, less than 1T out of 24T yuan total exports of which export itself is ~20% of 126T economy, aka export itself is not driving most of PRC growth. Maybe 0.5% of ~5 or 10% of new growth which is a lot, but also 90% of again, growth is happening not because of EV. If you remove EV success PRC is still growing, not collapsing. OP is pretending subtracting 5-1 is so…

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Re: China's manufacturers are going broke

#214
post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only that, but the Philippines has a tiny manufacturing sector compared to other major SEA economies. [1][2] I wonder if grandparent was thinking of a different country. [1] > In 2021, the economic mix of the Philippine economy was approximately 61% services, 17.6% manufacturing, and 10.1% agriculture. ( https://www.trade.gov/country-commercial-guides/philippines-... ) [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_cen…

> I wonder if grandparent was thinking of a different country Nope! I was speaking of offshoring mostly in the services industry, not the manufacturing industry[1]. Things like call centers (as you linked.) Chinese companies like BBK use Philippines call centres to serve customers in English-language markets. Which isn't at-all uncommon—the US does the same thing—but China hadn't been doing much offshoring of any kin…

The English speaking call centers are probably better described as service imports than offshoring. There are no English speaking call centers based on the mainland to begin with. English speakers on the mainland would likely find much more lucrative opportunities than working in a call center.

Re: China's manufacturers are going broke

#215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same with India before 2020 - China used to be India's largest FDI partner before the Galwan crisis. After that, the Indian government "persuaded" Chinese players to sell off their Indian assets to Indian, Taiwanese, Korean, Japanese, and American players instead. 4 years later, the GlobalTimes - which was extremely provocative against India - has started pushing out content arguing that India should begin reopening…

I swear a lot of wars get started by guys like Xi who after seizing power internally try to seize power externally and it often ends really really badly for the host country. Seriously, the leader of Germany in the 1930's, Stalin, Putin, Saddam Hussein, now Xi. All seized power domestically and then couldn't help themselves when it came to neighboring countries.

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Re: China's manufacturers are going broke

#217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I swear a lot of wars get started by guys like Xi who after seizing power internally try to seize power externally and it often ends really really badly for the host country. Seriously, the leader of Germany in the 1930's, Stalin, Putin, Saddam Hussein, now Xi. All seized power domestically and then couldn't help themselves when it came to neighboring countries.

Is it me or is this one of those, only other people we don’t like do bad things. You’d need to generalize the pop science to the British, French, Spanish and portugues empires then address the genocide of indigenous tribes by America, Canada and Australia

I'm talking about particular types of leaders.

Re: China's manufacturers are going broke

#218
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not a good example because Boeing didn’t outsource. No, that's precisely my point actually. Boeing is one of the very few companies that maintained its local manufacturing capacity. (to say that they "didn't outsource" is not remotely accurate) Despite everything that was pointing in Boeing's favor -- culture, financials, market, reputation; it was taken over by the MBAs that put McDonnell-Douglas into a nosedive a…

It does not take long to build excellence in the grand scale of things. A culture with positive feedback that encourages good engineering with leadership recognition and monetary/equity rewards can produce a great company in less than a decade. > who can bootstrap our manufacturing renaissance? Look at SpaceX. You don’t need a great wizard of yore to teach you how to do things if you iterate and learn. They went from…

> They didn’t have a magic culture of excellence then either and it wasn’t bestowed on them by elders.

It was, actually. The machinists at Boeing 70 years ago were taught their craft. They didn't just figure it all out from scratch; some aspects of aeronautics were novel but shipbuilders were making propellers before William Boeing was even born.

> They built it then and it can definitely be built again.

I can't see why I should trust this line of reasoning. I baked a cake yesterday, so I should definitely be able to bake a cake today, right? But I ran out of flour and stores are closed.

Not to say that it can't be done, but in today's economy, with today's culture, it just isn't a sure thing.

Re: China's manufacturers are going broke

#219
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You see, there is a 1.5m-2m new car market right next to China, completely abandoned by western players Which one? If you mean Russia (which by the way is only 600-700k), then those Chinese players face secondary sanctions in most markets which settle trade in USD, along with a lot of politically connected domestic players. If you mean India, most Chinese players have been chased out or forced to transfer technolog…

> If you mean Russia Yes. > (which by the way is only 600-700k) 700k was the official figure for 2022, which, besides the obvious reasons to be an outlier, is also skewed by the fact 300k more cars were imported as "used" to workaround stopping of the official deliveries. It was more than 1m new cars sold in 2023, now it's 700k just for the Jan-Jun 2024. > then those Chinese players face secondary sanctions in most m…

The secondary sanctions are certainly having an effect. The Russians themselves are saying that 80+% of yuan denominated transfers are being rejected by Chinese banks.

Re: China's manufacturers are going broke

#220
post #184

These are some staggering numbers: 52 thousand Chinese EV companies shut down last year. Xi Jinping (successfully) stimulated EV and semiconductor manufacturing through massive government investment and loans. The problem is that so many companies were funded that they are now viciously driving each other out of business through oversupply. Because the supply chain networks are so dense, each bankruptcy easily cascad…

52,000 sounds like a scheme to give government money to party members with plausible deniability. Xi Jinping is not stupid (quite the opposite), he knows that 52,000 companies never had a chance. So it is not the real economy we are talking about.

The Chinese never intended all the companies to succeed. They intended that the market would force bad companies to die. The point is to replicate the bank system or the tech system and have a few extraordinarily large players the central govt can control.

The very last thing this was intended to do was be a corruption scheme. Why does everything have to be a conspiracy these days.

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