8 ms·

America Is Losing the Shoe Race with China

32 points by alephnerd 2y ago

alephnerd 2y ago
> A better question might be who cares. The number of shoes is not a good indicator of national power. In fact, no single technology is a good indicator of national power ... The concept of a “race” itself is a questionable legacy of Cold War thinking – the Cold War had a finish line (identified by Eisenhower and Dulles at the onset), while the current situation does not.
- ajsnigrutin 2y ago
  A single technology, maybe not... but once more than half of your supermarkets are "made in china", from simple tools (knives, forks), to clothes (well.. and shoes) to electronics and even food...then you have a problem. US might be full of people who can make social media apps, not many who can build a factory and actually produce stuff, and this was discussed here before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36828861 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36828861 (same goes fo EU).
  - alephnerd 2y ago
    Read TFA. There's a reason I posted it. Also visit a Costco or Walmart next time and look at the "Made in" tag.
  - fnordpiglet 2y ago
    The problem with that is it’s not actually true. Yes most low end stuff consumers buy is made in China. But US manufacturing is primarily high end - stuff that’s extremely exacting, precise, and technologically advanced that sells to corporations and governments. The fact that Tesla started their factories here then rolled it out as a pattern globally is illustrative of this. Further, when you consider the aggregate production in Mexico, Vietnam, Malaysia, Taiwan, Japan, Thailand, etc and recognize that an awful lot of it, including electronics, is managed and built by US manufacturing outssourcers like Jabil, it become pretty obvious the US hasn’t lost its edge in manufacturing. It’s just shut down the Knick nack production onshore. Rebuilding those factories in a crisis could be done rapidly, and the labor skill required to oversee a machine pressing scissors is pretty low - that’s why it can be offshored to an unskilled labor pool with such ease. China dominates these through a willingness to exploit itself for a very low margin and extreme scales. These are definitely advantages - if you don’t care about your people and are willing to destroy your environment for dominance in producing forks, you’ll probably be allowed to. The margins are so low and the barrier to reentry is tiny.
    - ajsnigrutin 2y ago
      But the people who built those production lines are still in china (and a few other places). In a case of a wider trade war with china, where are the people who built eg. foxconn? Are there enough US apple employees with skills to recreate production in US? High end custom stuff, sure... but at the end of the day, you need cheap shoes for millions of people to wear every day, and not a lot of those are made in US. I live in a small eu country and here, the chinese (hisense) bought one of our companies, just to be able to do the final assembly stage of electronics, to stick the "made in eu" sticker on.. everything else is done elswehere, including that companies original products. And we used to be a former socialist country that produced everything, from cars to computers, tvs, etc.... now we don't have enough basic electricians and plumbers for household work, before even thinking about building any kind of massive production facilities. Even kids want to be influencers, not assembly line workers (and we have to import those too).
      - thriftwy 2y ago
        Why would kids ever want to be assembly line workers? If you find that area of work attractive, why don't you start with yourself becoming one?
        readyman 2y ago
        Very simple. Because those jobs were once available in mass without an extremely expensive risk of college debt, often unionized and provided good stable salaries that raised many millions of healthy families and provided pensions that have allowed for healthy retirement.
        thriftwy 2y ago
        That's what you do for a living, but not something you want to do as a kid. Unless there are kids with middle-aged mentality.
        ajsnigrutin 2y ago
  - dgeiser13 2y ago
    In the US the term supermarket is synonymous with grocery store. There will never be a point where an American supermarket will have half of it's products made in China. That being said almost all of the non-grocery products in the U.S. are already made elsewhere with cheap labor, i.e. Asia, Latin and South America, etc.
- maxglute 2y ago
  > A better question might be who cares. I assuming James Lewis of Strategic Technologies Program should: >The digital economy depends on cloud computing, next generation networks (like 5G and 6G), and software (like AI products) and these are technologies where the United States has a strong if not dominant position. Focuses on counter-productive digital economy i.e. tutoring, that PRC deliberately crushed to redirect effort at synergizing digital economy with real economy, i.e. ai to boost industrial output and now we are seeing intelligent gigafactory efforts accross multiple strategic sectors. Sure no one proxy indicator matters, but multiple proxy indicators across value chain and S&T do, and we're not talking about shoes, which no one thinks is a "crucial" industry. Like if article was titled US is losing the, ship building, renewable energy, ev, hypersonics, shoe race, readers would go, that's a few fairly important sectors to lag on, also whytf is shoes in there. >China is good at manufacturing what others have invented but no longer so good at innovation itself. This is the result of political change. China was becoming a leading innovator when it was politically open, before 2012. ... Under different political leadership, China would be a much more formidable competitor, but China made a political decision that values continued party control over innovation and its ability to innovate is at risk. It's telling he thinks PRC pre 2012 (aka pre Xi) was more innovative. Going to chalk it up to another blob shibboleth to not fall out of favour with Washington Overton masters from how often I see this repeated all of a sudden. Reality seems to be PRC innovation has enhanced by leap and bounds while retaining massive second mover advantage. They can afford to be a year or two behind on LLM craze and watch US spend trillions to find what's worth replicating/monetizing in the digital space. Meanwhile, US going to have to figure out how to reindustrialize and mass manufacture things it innovates, without all the training data on manufacturing locked in minds of specialists on Chinese manufacturing floors. What's gotten US into current mess is precisely PRC has been exceptionally good at innovating on manufacturing (process) and can out make US using second mover advantage in more and more strategic sectors it choose to catch up on. Yesterday it shoes, tomorrow it's MRIs.
  - alephnerd 2y ago
    Please stop interacting with me. I've had discussions with you on HN before and they were fairly acrimonious. If there were block functionality on HN I'd do it to you. I don't want to get banned on HN for flame wars.
analog31 2y ago
>>> Nor does technological “leadership” guarantee military advantage. Going further, nor does technological "leadership" guarantee a better quality of life.
- advisedwang 2y ago
  The political class doesn't see domestic quality of life as the goal. Their goal is maintaining or increasing their power, which in this context means being able to dictate terms to other countries and not allowing other countries to dictate terms to them. Technological leadership - and military advantage - do contributed to what rulers really care about.
readyman 2y ago
>It is not the number of base stations that is important, it is the ability to use 5G to create new goods and services (or be more efficient in the use of existing goods and services) that is important, and this is best measured by the monetization of new 5G enabled services and products and their revenue. In other words, profit is the only thing that matters. This is a practical definition of insanity.
- czl 2y ago
  > profit is the only thing that matters Can an activity be sustainable without involving profit or depending on profitable activities? Please share examples. When transactions are informed and voluntary and there is profit in a competitive market that is wealth created. The key is to have these conditions and many real economies struggle with this because the payback for corruption and monopoly is high.
  - ndriscoll 2y ago
    Obviously yes. For example a nonprofit municipal communication network that people use for direct video calling with their loved ones, or that a public university uses to distribute free lecture courses. A great deal of computerized products/services are today intentionally made to require constant upkeep so that they can produce an ongoing revenue stream when when no real work is needed. That's obviously not economically ideal, and their revenue is in some sense a measure of drag. Consider for example music streaming. At 3 minutes per song and using 128 kbps Opus, you could have your favorite 100,000 tracks stored on your phone for about $15 worth of flash storage. From that perspective, Spotify revenue seems like an absurd thing to include as a measure of "progress", particularly if you mostly listen to music from 30+ years ago, which of course is not being made anymore.
    - czl 2y ago
      You mentioned a public university as an example, but it's important to note that such institutions rely on funding from fees, taxes, and donations. Taxes are generated from profitable activities, donations often come from the surplus income of profitable entities, and fees are paid from income earned through profitable endeavors. Thus, wealth creation, measured by profit, is essential for spending. Non-profit organizations, on the other hand, depend on donations or service payments for their revenue. While they do not declare a "profit" at tax time, any surplus they generate is typically reinvested in their operations or distributed to employees or members. Therefore, while they don't show a profit for tax purposes, they do generate surplus funds (aka profits) or depend on for funds from other activities that do.
AndrewKemendo 2y ago
The sooner we dispatch with this global competition bullshit the better off we all will be. I think we just spent the last hundred years proving that there’s no net-benefit to widescale competition - it is deterministic at this point that widescale competition only benefits those who seed and stoke competitive fears. All, and I mean every single social benefit that is a net benefit globally, has come from cooperation in spite of or in the shadow of some supposed resource competition Cooperation is the only possible sustainable future set of actions for people who aren’t psychopathic resource exploiting tyrants Determining what goals to cooperate towards is the number one challenge of our time and what we should be putting all of our effort into How do we peacefully cooperate as a global community of 8 billion people? If you want to work on something, work on that problem
- ok_dad 2y ago
  I think the only way is to find some space aliens which were can all hate together. Humans have formed groups and fought ever since there were humans.
  - jahewson 2y ago
    Before then.
pzo 2y ago
The article feel like copium to me. I wouldn't deglect or belittle how fast china (and generally Asia) is developing - there wouldn't be sanctions if elites wouldn't worry about it. US can still pull itself out of the pit it dig itself and has some adventages but also worth to look where old empires such as Greek, Roman, Egypt, Mongolia, Persia are today. UK also is not a paradise today. Loosing race maybe will take few decades longer but you just have to follow the current trajectory to make prediction unless trajectory changes and currently doesn't look good unfortunately. I'm European but been living in SE Asia for decade and the progress they did in last 10 years is stunning.
throwaway4good 2y ago
The report with 37 out of 44 referred to in the article is from the Australian anti-China think tank ASPI. Which gets most of its money from the US defense industry. The idea of a race, a zero sum game when it comes to development, is an uniquely Western way of thinking. This is how we drive ourselves. We won't go to the moon - who cares about that? Unless of course the Soviets are trying to get there ... then we will spare no expense. In other words it is a ploy that pundits promote in order to get money to their military industrial backers. The GDP pr person in China is between 1/6 to 1/3 of the US (depending on how you measure). Any Chinese leader, including Xi, will tell you that the China will be developing, catching up, for the next many decades.
- alephnerd 2y ago
  > The idea of a race, a zero sum game when it comes to development, is an uniquely Western way of thinking It's not uniquely "Western" - as Indian, Pakistani, Vietnamese, and even Chinese strategy has shown. That said, it is a reductive way to think about power and society, which is the point of this article, and something I agree with as well. A "race" implies an existential competition, which nation state competition should NOT be. Doesn't mean we shouldn't build deterrence, but it doesn't mean falling into the depths of McCarthyism. > ploy that pundits promote in order to get money to their military industrial backers. There is a real competition, but overly histrionic punditry on both the US and Chinese sides might inadvertently lead us into an accidental war. There is a lack of mutual understanding in the upper echelons of power in both Beijing and Washington DC that is leading to myopic competition.
  - throwaway4good 2y ago
    We in the west are also extremely good at projection - seeing our own aggression in whatever the Chinese are doing. The interpretation of made in China 2025, that being used as key justification for the tech war, is a good example of this. Also just in simple things like “lack of mutual understanding”. I don’t think that is true. I think the Chinese understand the mechanics of western government and politics quite well, whereas we in the west have very little understanding of the Chinese ditto - simply because we don’t bother as we are the top dog.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

32 points by alephnerd 2y ago

> A better question might be who cares. The number of shoes is not a good indicator of national power. In fact, no single technology is a good indicator of national power ... The concept of a “race” itself is a questionable legacy of Cold War thinking – the Cold War had a finish line (identified by Eisenhower and Dulles at the onset), while the current situation does not.

ajsnigrutin 2y ago
A single technology, maybe not... but once more than half of your supermarkets are "made in china", from simple tools (knives, forks), to clothes (well.. and shoes) to electronics and even food...then you have a problem. US might be full of people who can make social media apps, not many who can build a factory and actually produce stuff, and this was discussed here before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36828861 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36828861 (same goes fo EU).
- alephnerd 2y ago
  Read TFA. There's a reason I posted it. Also visit a Costco or Walmart next time and look at the "Made in" tag.
- fnordpiglet 2y ago
  The problem with that is it’s not actually true. Yes most low end stuff consumers buy is made in China. But US manufacturing is primarily high end - stuff that’s extremely exacting, precise, and technologically advanced that sells to corporations and governments. The fact that Tesla started their factories here then rolled it out as a pattern globally is illustrative of this. Further, when you consider the aggregate production in Mexico, Vietnam, Malaysia, Taiwan, Japan, Thailand, etc and recognize that an awful lot of it, including electronics, is managed and built by US manufacturing outssourcers like Jabil, it become pretty obvious the US hasn’t lost its edge in manufacturing. It’s just shut down the Knick nack production onshore. Rebuilding those factories in a crisis could be done rapidly, and the labor skill required to oversee a machine pressing scissors is pretty low - that’s why it can be offshored to an unskilled labor pool with such ease. China dominates these through a willingness to exploit itself for a very low margin and extreme scales. These are definitely advantages - if you don’t care about your people and are willing to destroy your environment for dominance in producing forks, you’ll probably be allowed to. The margins are so low and the barrier to reentry is tiny.
  - ajsnigrutin 2y ago
    But the people who built those production lines are still in china (and a few other places). In a case of a wider trade war with china, where are the people who built eg. foxconn? Are there enough US apple employees with skills to recreate production in US? High end custom stuff, sure... but at the end of the day, you need cheap shoes for millions of people to wear every day, and not a lot of those are made in US. I live in a small eu country and here, the chinese (hisense) bought one of our companies, just to be able to do the final assembly stage of electronics, to stick the "made in eu" sticker on.. everything else is done elswehere, including that companies original products. And we used to be a former socialist country that produced everything, from cars to computers, tvs, etc.... now we don't have enough basic electricians and plumbers for household work, before even thinking about building any kind of massive production facilities. Even kids want to be influencers, not assembly line workers (and we have to import those too).
    - thriftwy 2y ago
      Why would kids ever want to be assembly line workers? If you find that area of work attractive, why don't you start with yourself becoming one?
      - readyman 2y ago
        Very simple. Because those jobs were once available in mass without an extremely expensive risk of college debt, often unionized and provided good stable salaries that raised many millions of healthy families and provided pensions that have allowed for healthy retirement.
        thriftwy 2y ago
        That's what you do for a living, but not something you want to do as a kid. Unless there are kids with middle-aged mentality.
        ajsnigrutin 2y ago
- dgeiser13 2y ago
  In the US the term supermarket is synonymous with grocery store. There will never be a point where an American supermarket will have half of it's products made in China. That being said almost all of the non-grocery products in the U.S. are already made elsewhere with cheap labor, i.e. Asia, Latin and South America, etc.
maxglute 2y ago
> A better question might be who cares. I assuming James Lewis of Strategic Technologies Program should: >The digital economy depends on cloud computing, next generation networks (like 5G and 6G), and software (like AI products) and these are technologies where the United States has a strong if not dominant position. Focuses on counter-productive digital economy i.e. tutoring, that PRC deliberately crushed to redirect effort at synergizing digital economy with real economy, i.e. ai to boost industrial output and now we are seeing intelligent gigafactory efforts accross multiple strategic sectors. Sure no one proxy indicator matters, but multiple proxy indicators across value chain and S&T do, and we're not talking about shoes, which no one thinks is a "crucial" industry. Like if article was titled US is losing the, ship building, renewable energy, ev, hypersonics, shoe race, readers would go, that's a few fairly important sectors to lag on, also whytf is shoes in there. >China is good at manufacturing what others have invented but no longer so good at innovation itself. This is the result of political change. China was becoming a leading innovator when it was politically open, before 2012. ... Under different political leadership, China would be a much more formidable competitor, but China made a political decision that values continued party control over innovation and its ability to innovate is at risk. It's telling he thinks PRC pre 2012 (aka pre Xi) was more innovative. Going to chalk it up to another blob shibboleth to not fall out of favour with Washington Overton masters from how often I see this repeated all of a sudden. Reality seems to be PRC innovation has enhanced by leap and bounds while retaining massive second mover advantage. They can afford to be a year or two behind on LLM craze and watch US spend trillions to find what's worth replicating/monetizing in the digital space. Meanwhile, US going to have to figure out how to reindustrialize and mass manufacture things it innovates, without all the training data on manufacturing locked in minds of specialists on Chinese manufacturing floors. What's gotten US into current mess is precisely PRC has been exceptionally good at innovating on manufacturing (process) and can out make US using second mover advantage in more and more strategic sectors it choose to catch up on. Yesterday it shoes, tomorrow it's MRIs.
- alephnerd 2y ago
  Please stop interacting with me. I've had discussions with you on HN before and they were fairly acrimonious. If there were block functionality on HN I'd do it to you. I don't want to get banned on HN for flame wars.

analog31 2y ago

>>> Nor does technological “leadership” guarantee military advantage. Going further, nor does technological "leadership" guarantee a better quality of life.

advisedwang 2y ago
The political class doesn't see domestic quality of life as the goal. Their goal is maintaining or increasing their power, which in this context means being able to dictate terms to other countries and not allowing other countries to dictate terms to them. Technological leadership - and military advantage - do contributed to what rulers really care about.

readyman 2y ago

>It is not the number of base stations that is important, it is the ability to use 5G to create new goods and services (or be more efficient in the use of existing goods and services) that is important, and this is best measured by the monetization of new 5G enabled services and products and their revenue. In other words, profit is the only thing that matters. This is a practical definition of insanity.

czl 2y ago
> profit is the only thing that matters Can an activity be sustainable without involving profit or depending on profitable activities? Please share examples. When transactions are informed and voluntary and there is profit in a competitive market that is wealth created. The key is to have these conditions and many real economies struggle with this because the payback for corruption and monopoly is high.
- ndriscoll 2y ago
  Obviously yes. For example a nonprofit municipal communication network that people use for direct video calling with their loved ones, or that a public university uses to distribute free lecture courses. A great deal of computerized products/services are today intentionally made to require constant upkeep so that they can produce an ongoing revenue stream when when no real work is needed. That's obviously not economically ideal, and their revenue is in some sense a measure of drag. Consider for example music streaming. At 3 minutes per song and using 128 kbps Opus, you could have your favorite 100,000 tracks stored on your phone for about $15 worth of flash storage. From that perspective, Spotify revenue seems like an absurd thing to include as a measure of "progress", particularly if you mostly listen to music from 30+ years ago, which of course is not being made anymore.
  - czl 2y ago
    You mentioned a public university as an example, but it's important to note that such institutions rely on funding from fees, taxes, and donations. Taxes are generated from profitable activities, donations often come from the surplus income of profitable entities, and fees are paid from income earned through profitable endeavors. Thus, wealth creation, measured by profit, is essential for spending. Non-profit organizations, on the other hand, depend on donations or service payments for their revenue. While they do not declare a "profit" at tax time, any surplus they generate is typically reinvested in their operations or distributed to employees or members. Therefore, while they don't show a profit for tax purposes, they do generate surplus funds (aka profits) or depend on for funds from other activities that do.

AndrewKemendo 2y ago

The sooner we dispatch with this global competition bullshit the better off we all will be. I think we just spent the last hundred years proving that there’s no net-benefit to widescale competition - it is deterministic at this point that widescale competition only benefits those who seed and stoke competitive fears. All, and I mean every single social benefit that is a net benefit globally, has come from cooperation in spite of or in the shadow of some supposed resource competition Cooperation is the only possible sustainable future set of actions for people who aren’t psychopathic resource exploiting tyrants Determining what goals to cooperate towards is the number one challenge of our time and what we should be putting all of our effort into How do we peacefully cooperate as a global community of 8 billion people? If you want to work on something, work on that problem

ok_dad 2y ago
I think the only way is to find some space aliens which were can all hate together. Humans have formed groups and fought ever since there were humans.
- jahewson 2y ago
  Before then.

pzo 2y ago

The article feel like copium to me. I wouldn't deglect or belittle how fast china (and generally Asia) is developing - there wouldn't be sanctions if elites wouldn't worry about it. US can still pull itself out of the pit it dig itself and has some adventages but also worth to look where old empires such as Greek, Roman, Egypt, Mongolia, Persia are today. UK also is not a paradise today. Loosing race maybe will take few decades longer but you just have to follow the current trajectory to make prediction unless trajectory changes and currently doesn't look good unfortunately. I'm European but been living in SE Asia for decade and the progress they did in last 10 years is stunning.

throwaway4good 2y ago

The report with 37 out of 44 referred to in the article is from the Australian anti-China think tank ASPI. Which gets most of its money from the US defense industry. The idea of a race, a zero sum game when it comes to development, is an uniquely Western way of thinking. This is how we drive ourselves. We won't go to the moon - who cares about that? Unless of course the Soviets are trying to get there ... then we will spare no expense. In other words it is a ploy that pundits promote in order to get money to their military industrial backers. The GDP pr person in China is between 1/6 to 1/3 of the US (depending on how you measure). Any Chinese leader, including Xi, will tell you that the China will be developing, catching up, for the next many decades.

alephnerd 2y ago
> The idea of a race, a zero sum game when it comes to development, is an uniquely Western way of thinking It's not uniquely "Western" - as Indian, Pakistani, Vietnamese, and even Chinese strategy has shown. That said, it is a reductive way to think about power and society, which is the point of this article, and something I agree with as well. A "race" implies an existential competition, which nation state competition should NOT be. Doesn't mean we shouldn't build deterrence, but it doesn't mean falling into the depths of McCarthyism. > ploy that pundits promote in order to get money to their military industrial backers. There is a real competition, but overly histrionic punditry on both the US and Chinese sides might inadvertently lead us into an accidental war. There is a lack of mutual understanding in the upper echelons of power in both Beijing and Washington DC that is leading to myopic competition.
- throwaway4good 2y ago
  We in the west are also extremely good at projection - seeing our own aggression in whatever the Chinese are doing. The interpretation of made in China 2025, that being used as key justification for the tech war, is a good example of this. Also just in simple things like “lack of mutual understanding”. I don’t think that is true. I think the Chinese understand the mechanics of western government and politics quite well, whereas we in the west have very little understanding of the Chinese ditto - simply because we don’t bother as we are the top dog.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]