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Made in China 2025
- famahar 3y agoChina wants to be a semiconductor leader meanwhile Taiwan produces 60 percent of the world's semiconductors and 90 percent of the most advanced ones.
- blackbear_ 3y agoYes. Now connect the dots...
- gniv 3y agoEverybody connects the dots differently. I personally would like to see TSMC (and ASML, and Intel) help China achieve this goal. It's not all black and white. They can help without giving away all their secrets.
- baranoff 3y agoBut why do you want that?
- bee_rider 3y agoGetting Taiwan to join unwillingly, aka conquest, would probably end up killing the engineers that make those devices and destroying the factories. This is one of the advantages of a high-skill economy, the value is in the people, not the natural resources. So, they’ll have to convince Taiwan to join willingly. Which basically seems like fair game, I mean countries should be allowed to form unions and join together if they want. It also seems extremely unlikely to happen given their history. I’m under the impression that the main threat to Taiwan from China is more that China might do something basically irrational; the existence of Taiwan is sort of unfinished business from their point of view, and stoking the flames there is an easy way for politicians in China to appeal to nationalism. Anyway, as wildly dangerous as it all seems, everybody thankfully seems quietly devoted to not actually escalating it too far, thankfully.
- Qiu_Zhanxuan 3y agoAll the more reasons to leave Taiwan intact. I hope so.
- Kye 3y agoWhere Taiwan is today started with an intentional and long-term plan like this one.
- zyang 3y agoTaiwan doesn't own any IP behind the semiconductor manufacturing pipeline. China was going down the same path until it was interrupted by US's chip war. Now it's forced to develop its own lithography machines and software. It's a massive own goal by US politicians.
- Kye 3y agoThat doesn't really contradict the point. Taiwan's plan was to become the semiconductor manufacturer for the world (possibly to make it indispensable enough to discourage mainland aggression), and they did it. Focus is on the need for long-term plans for stuff like this, not the minutia of who owns what. China appears to intend to improve on that plan with an eye toward ownership of the entire pipeline.
- a012 3y ago> Now it's forced to develop its own lithography machines and software. It's a massive own goal by US politicians. Erh, "forced" yes, but "develop its own" is not. Except you call stealing IP is "develop" too, e.g.: https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/engineer-who-fled-charges-of-stealing-chip-technology-in-us-now-thrives-in-china-1.1774889 https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/engineer-who-fled-charges-of-ste... https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2022/5/4/taiwan-is-trying-to-thwart-chinas-efforts-to-poach-tech-talent https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2022/5/4/taiwan-is-trying-...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- epicureanideal 3y agoBut it’s ok US workers, outsourcing manufacturing is a “good idea”, so good that the other major economies are doing the opposite.
- stochastimus 3y agoGenuinely curious, HN folks - for those who downvoted this comment, can you share why you did so? I don’t personally mind sarcasm as long as it’s not aimed maliciously at an individual, and I read this comment as a sarcastic way of saying “how come American leadership in general doesn’t have a similar plan”. Do folks just downvote sarcasm as a rule?
- Kye 3y agoIt's just inaccurate. The US has been working on insourcing since at least the Obama administration. https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2012/01/11/everything-you-need-know-about-insourcing https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2012/01/11/everyth... I'm in the area with the very Caterpillar plant mentioned there.
- Dig1t 3y agoYou can also find some quotes from Obama saying “those jobs are just not coming back”. The tiny amount of manufacturing they have tried (and mostly failed) to bring back pales in comparison to what the US used to produce.
- bee_rider 3y agoI’ve never studied economics so there is a very good chance I’m reading the plot wrong somehow, but it looks like US manufacturing has been increasing since the 70’s at least. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/tags/series?t=manufacturing%3Bquarterly https://fred.stlouisfed.org/tags/series?t=manufacturing%3Bqu... It takes up less of the economy of maybe, and we might focus on upscale things that have less consumer visibility like industrial stuff, but manufacturing in the US seems to be in an OK spot.
- gjsman-1000 3y agoSeems to have been screwed over by the pandemic and the party’s handling of it…
- 0xDEF 3y agoWestern countries have started strategic plans to become less dependent on Chinese manufacturing and especially the Chinese dominance in electronics manufacturing. For such plans to succeed it is important to not mix them up with rural/flyover state job creation programs. One reason Chinese manufacturing has been a runaway succes is because how close their factories are to big cities and technical universities. A future German Shenzen should be close to a big city with many technical universities nearby. A future American Shenzen should a stone throw away from Silicon Valley.
- ajmurmann 3y agoI agree on the notion. I do wonder though if a US Shenzhen needs to be close to SV. It would be ideal, but given how hard it is to build anything in SV, I wonder if a places like Austin would be a solid solution to consolidate hardware manufacturing.
- chaostheory 3y agoIf the US federal government bans noncompetes nationwide, then we’ll get a true competitor or successor to Silicon Valley. Until then, there’s little chance of any US metro to usurp it unless states like TX ban it themselves
- corethree 3y agoManufacturing in the US will never be as good as china. Those attempts at moving jobs here are ultimately attempts at failure. The most likely scenario is that companies are trying to find some other country to exploit.
- ajmurmann 3y agoWhat do you mean by "good"? Quality, versatility, speed, price?
- Dalewyn 3y agoPrice: Cost of labor is still orders of magnitudes cheaper in China. Quality: The west has the better part of a century's worth of catching up to do in know-how. Speed: See above. Also tighter government regulations, for better or worse. Versatility: See above. As it turns out, dumping domestic manufacturing capability didn't come without significant costs.
- Giorgi 3y ago[flagged]
- Kye 3y agoChina is already high tech. As best as I can tell this is turning that capacity to develop and produce high tech inward for the benefit of its own economy and independence.
- narrator 3y agoI've heard the leadership in China love that story about China's bureaucracy ordering the burning of the boats of Zheng He[1]. "From 1405 to 1433, large fleets commanded by Admiral Zheng He – under the auspices of the Yongle Emperor of the Ming dynasty – traveled to the Indian Ocean seven times. This attempt did not lead China to global expansion, as the Confucian bureaucracy under the next emperor reversed the policy of open exploration and by 1500, it became a capital offence to build a seagoing junk with more than two masts.[18] " https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_exploration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_exploration
- Giorgi 3y agoNo it is not, copycat culture will never amount to high tech. Only democracy allows freedom that is required to develop into high-tech economy. Chinese best bet is to compete with India producing plastic crap.
- up2isomorphism 3y agoBut if we think algebra is too hard on our kids, there is nothing we can do.
- ajmurmann 3y agoI recently read Invisible China by Scott Rozelle which raises concerns that impact this strategy. TL;DR: Most of Chinese population lives in rural China. Birth rates in rural China are also much higher than in cities. Education and childhood development in rural China have severe issues. Quality of education, but also access to equivalents of highschool. Simple health care issues like worms, iron deficiency and lack of correction of simple sight issues that could be addressed with glasses. There is cultural pushback against remediations due to believes that glasses will ruin children's sight in the long run and work deworming will make young girls infertile and that you need some worms. Due to the hokou system rural children cannot attend school in the city in the many cases that parents from rural areas work in the city. Children get raised by grandparents who, as the book put it, know how to raise subsistence farmers. All these issues matter because to not fall into the middle income trap you need educated workers who can work in hightech manufacturing. China is becoming too expensive for cheap manufacturing, but struggles with a educated workforce for high-end work in much of the country. A concern with this is that this will create structural unemployment for badly educated workers who will make money in the informal sector (black market, but also crime) which drags everyone else down. Examples of this would be Brazil and Mexico. Countries like SK, Japan and Taiwan avoided this trap by creating a highly educated workforce before they need it. One of the most surprising things in the book to me was that school, even before college, requires tuition and many poor families couldn't afford it. Quite the communism... Edit: Given the massive urban/rural split in education the book describes, I could see limited success of the 2025 initiative in urban areas, but a total falling behind of rural areas with migrant workers as we've been seeing for the last 20-30 years not migrating any longer and no longer bringing money back home. This feels like a recipe for some form of upheaval. That combined with the cursed demographics, we have some interesting times ahead.
- thrdbndndn 3y ago> Most of Chinese population lives in rural China Not any more for at least a few decades. In 2021 Census there were only 36.11% population living in rural China. Edit: 2021, not 2011.
- deleted 3y ago
- fakedang 3y ago> Since 2018, following a backlash from the U.S., Europe, and elsewhere, the phrase "MIC 2025" has been de-emphasized in government and other official communications. You cannot make this up. The West digging their own graves and protesting when their adversary isolates itself.
- Dig1t 3y agoSorry I'm not sure I understand what you mean, how is the west digging its own grave?
- fakedang 3y agoChina, through MIC 2025, is clearly looking for an inwards economy centered around its large population, as opposed to an export oriented "factory of the world" economy (perhaps anticipating isolation in the event of invading Taiwan). The West didn't want that happening, hence they protested bringing those jobs back to their shores.
- KoftaBob 3y ago> To help achieve independence from foreign suppliers, the initiative encourages increased production in high-tech products and services, with its semiconductor industry central to the industrial plan Based on where SMIC is at right now, they’re not doing too great on this goal.
- bee_rider 3y agoIt looks like it was a 10 year long plan, so they should be more than 80% of the way through it by now. So go a good approximation… how did it go?
- 1970-01-01 3y agoToo spicy for HN? Why the flagging?