China is the manufacturing superpower Hacker News

One thing people are not aware of and am curious of how big it really is: China manufacturing laundry. Essentially, goods are manufactured in China, then laundered to a third-party country and then exported to the US/EU. This come in two flavors, legal laundry where the local manufacturer satisfies the conditions; and illegal one where bribes are paid to pass goods.

> https://antidumping.vn/eu-chinabike-duty-hits-indonesia-mala...

I come from a country that does this. Massive deficit with China vs. an equivalent surplus with the EU. Weak manufacturing base that essentially import Chinese, does some packaging and then export it back.

One example is what you seem to refer to; a solar panel reading made in Vietnam - assembled in Vietnam but by a Chinese owned company with all Chinese components.

Another example is the iPhone reading made in China with a dollar value of 400 but the true value add in China is much lower as all the IP, profit margins, and high value components belong somewhere else.

This means that even though these numbers look very unbalanced it is still Western companies that make biggest part of the profit. (At least so far though things are clearly changing with Chinese companies are climbing up the value chain.)

> One thing people are not aware of and am curious of how big it really is: China manufacturing laundry. Essentially, goods are manufactured in China, then laundered to a third-party country and then exported to the US/EU.

IIRC, a lot of stuff that's labeled "Made in Singapore" is/was basically that.

There's not too much fake origin stuff from Vietnam to US, which is the largest SEA country exporting to US.

"However, new research from Harvard Business School and Duke University paints a more nuanced picture — rerouting appears to be lower than is imagined.

While trade rerouting through Vietnam does occur, its scale appears far smaller than previously thought. The study found that in 2021, about 16.1 per cent of Vietnamese exports to the US — roughly US$15.5 billion — could be classified as potential rerouting when analysed at the product level. But when the researchers examined individual firms — tracking specific products flowing from China through Vietnam to the US — the figure fell to just 1.8 per cent, or US$1.7 billion."

https://fulcrum.sg/vietnam-china-and-rerouting-when-percepti...

This way of working is marketed as such by Chinese manufacturers. They will refer to it as something along the lines of: Made in South East Asia. Sometimes they produce the products in (e.g.) Vietnam, but more often than not, everything is done in China, then shipped to Vietnam for packaging or adding a "Made in Vietnam" label, and shipped out from there. Thailand is another upcoming player in this scheme.

Large companies are well aware of this and happily use their existing Chinese suppliers' SEA entity to avoid sanctions and tarrifs, or to show that they are moving away from having everything Made in China.

To be fair, only gullible or naive people could truly believe that products coming from any part of Asia are not made, controlled, or otherwise influcnced by the Chinese.

"or otherwise influcnced by the Chinese"

That last statement makes it almost meaningless. Then you can also say, no product on this world was made without US influence. Otherwise all those countries like Vietnam do have a agency of their own (Vietnam for example even succesfully fought china before with military)

And south korea and Japan (and Taiwan) also are somewhat out of the direct control of china.

Do you work in manufacturing?

In my experience, no, companies are generally not aware and not accepting of this and brands/licensing requirements ensure that's the case. For sure in regards to valuable trademarks.

A manufacturer would absolutely not want to risk their entire business. And that's all it takes for a brand to pull your license. Now what? Everyone is fired and a $120M contact is lost over a few cents per unit.

It's possible that it happens as Chinese factories skirt the rules and make false presentation, but manufacturers spend a lot of money to send someone to many countries and factories to trial and vet them over the course of years to meet brand requirements for licensure before they begin manufacturing with them and often through repeat checks during the manufacturing process. But I'd say that's rare, again, in regards to branded goods of valuable trademarks.

this is amazing and filled with facts that i wish everyone arguing the point that china cant overtake U.S. in economy or world superpowers would read. The facts are there, there is not much hiding around the corner, all of the true indication is in front of us. Yes. the article states U.S. still holds the title for world superpower by military size and capabilities. That's not to say that china cant catch up in no time with U.S. military. That's if they decide to do so. i would ask does the Chinese republic need to invest heavy in this sector in order to grow? Clearly not from the facts. in fact that's the very same thing we should have been doing all along.The U.S. has spent enormous amount of capital to fund wars and foreign relational activities.

China has a great way going about this. making friends with less developed countries that U.S. overlooked. China is looking for something specific. Just as U.S. is looking for something specific as well. To be totally honest I am not entirely sure what the U.S. is looking for when engaging with other countries, other than the same narrative for the fear of not having safety blah blah. This time that was spent on these adventures the U.S. cannot get back, while also injuring foreign relations.

there is a clear sign that the U.S. government is confused and has a gun with no-where to aim. All the policies and efforts are accelerating the U.S. into deterioration. The U.S. has some strong sector for the sake of this reply i will mainly say that attacking the top tech firms and industries with regulation will only push them out to more favorable grounds give new room for industries to form in more favorable grounds other than U.S.. the solution must solve the problem that brought the solution to existence.

I don’t think it’s necessarily so clear that Chinese foreign policy has really paid off yet.

Chinese loanmaking to foreign countries has mostly gone bust, with many loans basically in default. While it’s true that Western development agencies were not lending to these projects, they mostly weren’t doing so because they were doubtful of the business cases of said projects and the likelihood that the government could actually pay off the loan, and so now China is dealing with that.

One of the most direct Chinese relationships is with Myanmar, which has not only gone to hell in a handbasket but now is a hotbed of criminal activity by Chinese organized crime abducting Chinese nationals to work in Myanmar. So that’s not great either.

> everyone arguing the point that china cant overtake U.S. in economy

Surely nobody halfway serious is arguing that. The faction about to take power in the USA is tilting at the "woke ideology" windmill, talks openly of deporting a big chunk of the workforce and does not seem to understand how tariffs work.

Even if you ignore all that, China has 4-5x the population (for now!) and is by all measures has a highly developed, productive and growing economy. What argument can there possibly be in favour of China falling back, other than maybe the aforementioned demographic issues.

Trump reminds me of a Star Wars quote

"The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers"

The reality is that China will not magically disappear and they have integrated themselves into the world economy.

I think there's no denying that this is super impressive. Realpolitik aside, well done China.

I wonder how manufacturing output compares between China and US+EU, say. It doesn't make that much sense to look at EU constituents in separation. Even then I suppose China is ahead, but maybe it's not a total wipeout.

That led me to wonder about manufacturing output vs GDP. Is China producing more, after adjusting for its total GDP. So for example, China's GDP is about 4-5x bigger than Germany's, whereas the fraction of manufacturing output is about 5-7x different. It still puts Germany "behind" but it's not outright domination.

In fact, such fraction, of manufacturing to GDP, is a basic economics measure: it's the fraction of GDP coming from manufacturing! And it's no surprise to anyone that this fraction is high in China.

So then I guess the questions would be:

- is manufacturing expected to outperform the other constituents of global economies going forwards (i.e. is China smart putting its eggs in this basket)

- is the rest of the world at risk because China can squeeze them (perhaps)

- what is the outlook for manufacturing outside of China (maybe not great but it seems like people are waking up to this).

I wonder how much of that simply cuts back to marginal costs of energy and ESG. Presumably in China you can manufacture cheaply partly because you don't need to pay for employee rights or clean energy. Not all of this, clearly, but where would US+EU be if it wasn't constrained by broadly speaking ESG (I'm not saying it's a bad thing, but it is a thing).

World War II was won because of US and (less advertised) Soviet manufacturing capacity.

Ukraine is more constrained by weapon supplies, especially drones and artillery, than by manpower.

I'm not sure both sides are playing the same game. In the game I think might be afoot, if your economy is management consultants, therapists, and hair stylists, that's "bad" GDP. Resources and manufacturing are "good" GDP. Resources are complex in that stone are renewable, and some go away when you export them.

I'm not even going to talk about education or, related, R&D capacity.

Huh. For all the claims that US manufacturing is down, it does seem that if we adjusted per-capita it's on par with China based on the figures presented here, which I really didn't expect to see

I'm no expert and of course I have no clue if it even makes sense to measure per-capita manufacturing share, and also assume a lot of other factors matter here - what kinds of things we're manufacturing, how much those products serve domestic versus export markets, etc - but it's still surprising

You might be surprised to learn that manufacturing is larger industry in the US than our tech industry, or that our domestic oil industry is even larger. America produces more oil than any other country.

America was the world's factory for over a century. This dominance only ended around 2010, when China took the lead. It was our advantage to lose, and it was the result of deliberate political action. We offshored manufacturing, and treated China as a good faith trading partner, waiting decades for a cooperative international trade diplomacy that has not materialized to this day. All the while Beijing did everything in its power to enrich the Chinese worker, no matter the cost to outsiders. The results speak for themselves.

> All the while Beijing did everything in its power to enrich the Chinese worker, no matter the cost to outsiders. The results speak for themselves.

In fairness, during this period, the US did everything it could to suppress the wages and benefits of its own manufacturing workers.

Recall that the first rounds of manufacturing outsourcing were to US states with non-existent labor protections, mostly in the South.

> Some people don't like protectionism because in the long term it's worse for both countries.

I keep seeing these statements on here and they're utterly misleading. Protectionism is a spectrum. It is practiced by every single country. It's a very bold assumption to make that if every country would completely eliminate everything resembling it, this would benefit everyone. The opposite is very likely. There are numerous cases of protectionist policies where the country instituting them very clearly benefited from them, even in the long run. I have spent more than a decade in two countries, each having been on a different part of the protectionist spectrum since many decades ago. It is clear as day that the more protectionist one has, throughout, continuing to this day, seen very large benefits from this policy, larger than the benefits from the less protectionist country.

We really need to stop propagating this myth among the educated in the West, it's just as harmful as "trickle-down economics" used to be before it became common knowledge that it's a fairy tale.

>A reduction in the space of possible allocations of resources isn’t good.

I would personally like to eliminate allocations of resources that put me out of business and wreck the country.

>It is good for any particular set of parties insofar as it hurts some other set of parties more than themselves.

There's a huge misunderstanding in here somewhere. Most people don't think of their own welfare in terms of a negative outcome for anyone else. It's not necessarily a zero sum game. People can coexist and duplicate effort, and that sometimes makes sense. An individual or nation should strive for some reasonable level of self-sufficiency, because you can't always rely on other people to treat you well or take care of you.

It depends. We can say that China’s industrial policies are a kind of protectionism as well in that they are willing to pay for extra cost for domestic “national red supply chain independence” rather than relying on the “comparatively advantageous” western vendors. And they did get excellent results. Note that industrial independence is exactly the opposite of free trade and that has been a long sought national goal by China.

Regarding tariffs on China exports, the relatively fortunate position for the US is that the biggest components in consumer inflation index such as food, housing and energy are all either largely domestic produced or not dominated by China, which gives more room for the US to react. But the tariff could still harm the gross margin of the international enterprises and even SMBs, who are facing the immediate pressure of adjustment during the trade war.

> All the while Beijing did everything in its power to enrich the Chinese worker

i am not sure that the CCP is doing anything to enrich the average worker, and in fact, is probably doing the very opposite - making sure the chinese currency is constantly and artificially debased to make export more competitive. This results in lower wages for the workers. It is why there's low demand for goods/services in china.

The money being earned by these exports is kept mostly by the gov't - to be spent on whatever they think has priority, which mostly have been on infrastructure, supporting industry the party deems important etc.

> You might be surprised to learn that manufacturing is larger industry in the US than our tech industry, or that our domestic oil industry is even larger

US oil and gas industry has $240bn in annual revenues. This is about comparable to how much Americans spend at Apple (almost $200bn)

> it does seem that if we adjusted per-capita it's on par with China based on the figures presented here

Ironically this will make Taiwan the manufacturing superpower if it is calculated per-capita. Which is the other china (I am just referring to the history of both PRC and Taiwan claiming to be the historical China successor).

And the claims that US manifacruting is down is correct because it used to be much higher percentage wise from the world total manifacruting power. China was only about 3% when people who are now 30yrs were born. That's massive increase in manifacturing share. There is a discussion about domestic vs export in the study too that you might find interesting..

> (I am just referring to the history of both RPC and Taiwan claiming to be the historical China successor).

Semantics, but the ROC (Republic of China) claims Taiwan, along with the mainland and Outer Mongolia. It isn’t the case that Taiwan claims the ROC (although if the in power DPP decided not to be the ROC anymore, the PRC would probably invade since declaring independence from the ROC would be the same as refuting one China).

When the ROC/KMT retook Taiwan in 1946, they weren’t exactly seen as liberators. And when the KMT and a bunch of rich mainlanders relocated there in 1949, there were protests, genocide, and so on.

Some manufacturing is down. Look at the state of sophisticated shipbuilding.

The US Navy has stated numerous times that the US essentially has minimal capacity. Maintenance and construction are years behind schedule. It isn't about funding. 40% of attack submarines aren't fit for service or deployable. The new Columbia class submarine will use a new steam turbine. Northrup Grumman was selected for the manufacture of the steam turbine in 2014. It isn't ready yet.

Sophisticated manufacturing is in crisis in the US. It's the reason that the US bigfooted France in the AUKUS submarine deal. To revive a failing industry.

These are interesting tests due to there are restrictions on sourcing of parts and personnel for a project.

https://news.usni.org/2024/04/10/late-turbines-have-major-im...

https://news.usni.org/2024/04/10/late-turbines-have-major-im...

There is also the USS Zumwalt type problem.

We spent $22.5 billion to get two active.

Imagine what $22.5 billion USD buys in Chinese manufacturing capacity.

I think it's just the simplest (also default*) way of measuring, which doesn't mean it most correct or accurate. If PRC makes 5 cars @10k for every 1 US car @50k , and each PRC car is 80% as good, which metric do you use to measure gross manufacturing. Most people would say the guy that makes 5 cars. They might say the guy that makes 1 car if the 5 car guy's cars were 10% as good. What if its 3 cars that is just as good as 1 car charged at 3x. Across the board you have made in America stuff that's a little to a lot better (or worse) than PRC stuff, but cost 2-5x more.

* by default I mean, these metrics/calculations are downstream of national accounting methods, i.e. most of world standardized on UN SNA which measures "value" as in $$$ vs something like (deprecated) soviet material production system (MPS) that measures physical material widgets produced.

One proxy metric is PRC container throughput of her ports last year was ~300 million TEU vs US is about ~60 million TEU (with slightly higher ratio of empty containers).

Maybe true. But how do you get quality into the equation.

Is all the garbage on temu/shein also part of the gross production KPI? I couldn’t care less about these cheap plastic widgets.

1.) The article is from January 2024.

2.) Some of the data that it's based on is up to 2023. And some are up to 2020

3.) There has been massive movement of manufacturing out of China between 2020 and 2024. I won't provide the references here, as there are too many to mention, from Japanese/Taiwanese/South Korean/European/American companies. They are easily chatgpted/googled. Also the reason why Shenzhen and Guangzhou has suffered deeper drop of real estate price and employment.

4.) In 2024, Mexico was the biggest exporter to US. United States was the biggest exporter to Europe. US was the largest export destination of Japan.

5.) Trump's 60%-100% tariff on China will accelerate the exodus of manufacturing

Again, I really don't feel qualified to weigh in on most of these matters, though I will say that I generally do prefer direct citations if you'd like me to take the epistemic credibility of a claim more seriously than any other thing someone on the internet said (in other words, saying "go look it up" provides no more additional credibility than simply making the statement, and is thus kind of pointless, and in fact you take a not insignificant epistemic credibility hit for my purposes by suggesting that asking an LLM for factual information should be taken as a reliable source)

That said, it's interesting to see how the supply shocks of a global pandemic can shift these kinds of relationships. It doesn't surprise me that Mexico, being a huge source of food for the US, is the largest exporter to it. What I do wonder is how much exports pertain to manufacturing relationships. Like in the case of Mexico -> US, I think we wouldn't count e.g. stuff we buy for the produce section to be manufactured goods, but that would still count toward import/export numbers. Does this apply to other things too? Do things like IP count?

Very comprehensive list of how China has lost export power to US over the years. Remember that US has the largest consumer market in the world, more than double the second place, EU. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_consumer_marke...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenroberts/2024/06/25/us-import...

- Chinese imports into the United States are down 19.78% from April of 2018 — when Trump first started imposing tariffs — to today, or $31.88 billion.

- Cell phones: Big winner is India. China has gone from a market share of 63.59% in 2018 to a still strong 42.14%. That’s a decline of 33.73%.

- Computers: Big winners are Taiwan, Vietnam. China has gone from a market share from 53.45% in the first four months of 2018 to 28.11%, a decline of 47.40%.

- Furniture: Big winner is Vietnam. China, meanwhile, accounted for 23.55% this year, down from 48.54% in 2018, a decline of 51.49% compared to a gain of 88.67% for Vietnam.

- TVs and monitors: Big winner is Vietnam. Mexico overtook China as the import leader in this category just before the pandemic and has remained on top. It gained market share from China, which fell from 53.68% in 2018, when it was No. 1, to 33.64%, a 37.32% decline.

- Digital storage devices: Big winners are Korea, Vietnam. China accounted for 39.50% of those imports in 2018, more than double that of any other nation. In 2024, its percentage is 4.23% and it ranks No. 9.

- Digital cameras: Yep, Vietnam again. China, meanwhile, has seen its share go from a majority, at 50.09%, to 17.57%, a decline of 64.92%.

> TVs and monitors: Big winner is Vietnam. Mexico overtook China as the import leader

This doesn't make sense to me, do they do some high level assembly of components? I think China took over global market of TV panels manufacturing for example:

With this transaction, Chinese manufacturers’ market share of the LCD panels used in TVs will increase from 66% to 72%, with nearly 100% share in ultra-large 90 – 115 inch screens.

The market share of Chinese OLED panel manufacturers is forecasted to increase from 47.9% this year to 50.2% next year, surpassing the OLED shipment share of Korean companies.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/willyshih/2024/10/13/chinese-ma...

It sounds like it could be that China losing in cheap assembling tasks, but significantly gaining in high tech manufacturing.

I bought two things recently: some temperature sensors for a smart home and some cable clips to hide some wiring under a cabinet.

Both were mass produced in China and both shipped with 3M branded adhesive mounting pads. An apt and literal representation of global manufacturing — US made chemicals, Chinese electronics, one clinging to the other.

Six nations manufacture at least 3% of the world total. China is followed by the US, Japan, Germany, India, and South Korea. Note how the world has changed. Only three of these are long-established industrial economies; the other three are newly industrialised economies. Four of the G7 don’t make the cut. s/ 3% / 63% /

Port capacity and equipment scale, willingness to engage in toxic processing, etc carry far more weight, IMHO.

China has a lock on various electronic production streams by having a lock on most of the rare earth processing and dealing with the low level radioactive waste by products.

One billion tonnes of raw iron ore per year flows from my state of Western Australia to China for steel production - the machinery, diggers, haul paks, massive trains, et al make that happen in a state with a population of only ~2.3 million or so with few of those in mining. 16x peak US iron ore production for steel with a workforce smaller than the US's at it's peak.

China didn't just fall into peak manufacturing capacity by a happy accident of many workers, they (for better or worse) made long term plans and stuck at them - including the reduction in population growth known as the one child policy.

Current Chinese pharma production is a truly bespoke behemoth - it has a massive capacity that can easily make small to order amounts, and again that's due to factors such as education and well automated pipelines.

> China didn't just fall into peak manufacturing capacity by a happy accident of many workers, they (for better or worse) made long term plans and stuck at them - including the reduction in poulation growth known as the one child policy.

I don’t think China planned to intentionally fall off of a demographic cliff. But they are already planning for that cliff by making very aggressive investments in AI and automation. If you see how effective their plans from 10-20 years ago turned out today, wait another 10-20 years and…I hope we have some kind of a plan…it isn’t what Trump has in mind for sure.

Ironically, Japan planned for the same cliff with aggressive investments in AI and automation in the 1980s, but the rise of China messed that up with cheap labor, and their AI play was misguided/probably too early.

> Australia is basically the stupidest country on the planet

Too right.

> It's like the degenerate alcoholic who's willing to prostitute their mother for a bar tab.

Ahh, so you are Australian then.

> even if they are from their biggest regional rivals.

How is China a regional rival? Australia has koalas, China has Pandas.

> While Norway and the UAE enjoy the fruits of their resources through strong welfare systems enabled by a resource-driven economy

Australia also has welfare, high living standards, high life expectancy, good health, etc.

> Australia sold itself so hard its own citizens have to buy from foreign corpos.

Ahhh, so Norway and UAE have their own home built computers, TV's, and EV's, etc then?

You have some points, but you're trying to edge lord a bit hard there mate.

> Australia also has welfare, high living standards, high life expectancy, good health, etc.

Tell me how affordable a home near the workplace is for most Australians? On the contrary, Norwegians and Emiratis get a huge housing subsidy for their first homes. They both use their oil revenues to push for sustainable energy sources at home. And the UAE is currently pulling over its weight in AI, funding a significant AI player, while also taking part in active space exploration.

> Ahhh, so Norway and UAE have their own home built computers, TV's, and EV's, etc then?

Building computers, EVs and TVs in this age when China controls the complete manufacturing chain is a bit stupid honestly. But they do have manufacturing bases on the things they actually excel at - Norway is a major player in manufacturing shipping and specialized O&G equipment, while the UAE has focused on aircraft parts manufacturing and defence manufacturing.

AU exported ~1.5-2 trillion (lazy chatgpt math) worth of iron ore to PRC in last 20 years... which is life changing sovereign fund size, for Norway (also ~2T), with 5 million people. Or UAE 1 million emraties. Qatar with 300k Qataries. Much less so for 25m OZs. Doesn't mean they haven't squandered what they have, but just to put scale in perspective.

Not to mention PRC steel employs like 3m people, about the entire population of western australia where all the iron ore is. Unless AU dumped 1/5 of their entire workforce, relocate millions of workers and families, they can't make enough finished steel products to fill PRC appetite. I think much easier and profitable for AU to double down on ore extraction and ship more $$$ than finished steel. That's where AU competitive advantage is. Otherwise buyers will look elsewhere, i.e. Brazil could have been expanding iron ore exports much sooner.

FWIW, I’m an Aussie who went back during covid for the first meaningful stretch in 20 years. Explored the who country.

I saw with my own eyes what you’re talking about and you are spot on. It’s depressing and sad to see how Australia can’t organize a free one in a brothel, is stuck in the past and has no real interest or plan on how to improve anything at all.

Their problem is life is pretty good, so they’re not interested in a bit of work to make it incredible. Like you said, a modest sovereign wealth fund could easily let every Aussie work 4 or even 3 days a week. Or more solar, or making use of all the uranium or one of dozens of things

David Horne said it best in 1964.

"Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second rate people who share its luck. It lives on other people’s ideas, and, although its ordinary people are adaptable, most of its leaders (in all fields) so lack curiosity about the events that surround them that they are often taken by surprise."

Saudi Aramco has a $50 billion dollar subsidiary called SABIC whose purpose is to take oil byproducts and refine them into plastics. Does Saudi Arabia have a huge plastic market? Or did they just think, hey, we could export this shit elsewhere for more money!

You literally let an Australian company process it to higher value products and ship it? That's literally what every oil major has done with their resources.

They are trying:

Purism is selling the Librem 5 USA at $1,600

From the site: "The Librem 5 USA has Made in USA Electronics with all fabrication and manufacturing done at the Purism facility. Individual components used in fabrication are sourced direct from chip makers and parts distributors. We use US companies with US fabrication whenever possible. Most distributors are based in the US with the exception of large integrated circuits that are made in a variety of countries where those companies do fabrication (US, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan); an example is the NXP CPU we use from their fabrication in South Korea. While we source chips that are made in the US whenever possible, chip country of origin is not nearly as meaningful as country of board fabrication, especially when all chips are verified hardware circuits that are driven by free software in the kernel."

[1]: https://puri.sm/products/librem-5-usa/#table-of-origin

If you look at the table on the site, its not 100% USA yet but they are getting close and thats a positive development.

The US can make cellphones, its just not efficient for the US to make cellphones because the US’s comparative advantage is elsewhere.

What it would take for the US to make cellphones is direct subsidy to the (inefficient, and for that reason likely therefore doomed by the market without artificial support, since there is robust competition) US firms doing so.

Of course, not only would this cost the amount of the subsidy, but the amount of the lost opportunities in places where the US has comparative advantages foregone to provide the subsidy.

The question then is why would you want to do this?

>> The US can't even make cell phones any more.

>> What would it take to get that capability back?

> The question then is why would you want to do this?

National security, obviously. Cell phones are a critical modern communication device, and whoever though it was a good idea to outsource that kind of thing political and economic rival was an idiot.

There's all kinds of accounts of past CIA/NSA daring-do where they used US-manufactured products to subvert rivals, and now we're going to get to be on the other end of that kind of thing.

Then there's the adding factor of it being kind of a good idea to have significant manufacturing capacity for the full-range of modern products located domestically or with allies in case the geopolitical SHTF.

You know, all that important stuff the market doesn't give a shit about, because it's a limited and imperfect system.

> because this situation quickly becomes one country

i would argue this to be a good thing - a global "country". And yet, it is the human condition to separate tribally. It's why civilization can't advance more, until this becomes solved.

>its just not efficient

The problem is we don't need efficiency, we need effectivity.

>The question then is why would you want to do this?

Because He Who Makes Leads The World. You can't and won't lead if you don't actually get your hands dirty and make shit. China is the world leading superpower now because they make everyone's shit, we are all beholden to them.

I think it's less capability and more the cost of goods. You can't compete with items that are half the cost to produce in east asia.

Manufacturing was always going to move to where it costs less.

It's bad for a productive american economy but it's a prisoner's dilemma so you can't blame businesses or consumers.

The government is the only party that had the power to do anything. it's 100% an economics problem.

Moving it to Mexico, Vietnam, and India.

Mexico is ideal since you can ship partially assembled goods via truck or rail to and from Texas. It's easy to manage logistics and partnerships due to the close proximity.

The future of the US is Mexico.

Vietnam and India can absorb SEA manufacturing.

> The US is the world’s sole military superpower. It spends more on its military than the ten next highest spending countries combined.

Dubious claim. Military power is not measured in “spending”. Manufacturing is in fact a basis for modern military power, as it was the basis for US military power in WW2. The fact that China can produce 10k+ precisely controlled drone swarms in massive quantities and produces more hypersonic missiles and ships casts doubt on this claim.

Says the Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/12/weapons...

It won't take long for China to catch up. And in a hot war, they're the ones who can rapidly rebuild.

Lots of reports say that Chinese military spending has exceeded our own if you account for their cheaper cost of labor and material goods.

China also recently (just days ago) flew two new sixth gen fighters. The US has yet to demonstrate one.

The tactical move for the West to counter is to move as much manufacturing as possible to other countries (Vietnam, India, Mexico) and hope that can put a dent in China's manufacturing flywheel. The Chinese consumer economy isn't robust enough to absorb all of the goods they manufacture (at least not yet), and without buyers the system would need to be scaled back.

Even if China was 100% a friend, you wouldn't want one country with this much outsized control over manufacturing. In the future this will be better distributed.

> China also recently (just days ago) flew two new sixth gen fighters.

China doesn’t really have a 5th generation fighter yet, it is more a roadmap item than a finished product. There is zero evidence they have 6th generation systems. These terms have meaning. The US has been flying 6th generation prototypes for years, they just don’t post photographs. The US has been flying production 5th generation fighters for 20 years. They have a long lead and it isn’t like they stopped development.

Also, appearances are largely immaterial to being classified as 5th or 6th generation. Most of the relevant properties for classification are not casually observable.

> Even if China was 100% a friend, you wouldn't want one country with this much outsized control over manufacturing

It's not up to the US to decide this. China is the largest car market. It is also the largest car producing country. It is the largest manufacturing country. It also has the largest number of consumers in any country, and this market is still growing. It has the largest number of engineers. The numbers play in China's favor.

If 1989 had gone in a different direction and China today is just a giant version of Taiwan, how would that possibly be better as an American? We would all be trying to figure out how to get paid in digital Yuan.

Instead they have huge manufacturing capacity sitting on top of a completely busted financial system. Look at the returns of Chinese equities vs GDP growth the last 20 years. It is completely absurd.

The financial system is imploding right now, trying to find a place to hide https://tradingeconomics.com/china/government-bond-yield

> liberal democracies would still want to contain the power of the PRC (and the cult of Xi Jinping)

I am not Chinese but I still find this comment hilariously offensive and tone-deaf. I can say almost without a doubt that the US has a "tremendous" issue with cult-of-personality right now. But I don't see Chinese or other countries attacking or trying to "contain" this.

The US is still treated as a nation, unified in its people and leaders, by even its adversaries. But when Americans deal with other countries, there is a tendency to say things to the effect of: "the people are fine, it is the X that must be suppressed", ignoring that this X is inherently or directly connected to people of this nation.

Even if that were true, it would only be an interesting bit of trivia rather than a fact with predictive power applicable to the present.

The article discusses the unprecedented rise of their manufacturing capabilities, currently unmatched. It’s not clear how information about preindustrial China would be applicable.

The GGR measure suggests