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Blaming Chinese manufacturing dominance on government subsidies or lack of environmental regulations or human rights violations or somesuch is simply delusional

Blaming Chinese manufacturing dominance on government subsidies or lack of environmental regulations or human rights violations or somesuch is simply delusional. It is missing the forest for the trees. The core fact is that chinese manufacturing pays workers an average $25k/year ($15k before purchasing power adjusting!!) for a 49h week. Are american workers (or other westerners) willing to work for that? No. Are consumers actually willing to pay the difference? Probably also no. I'm not saying that there are no problems with the above in China, but thats not where their manufacturing dominance comes from. On the other hand, their government did make a bunch of good decisions and they did provide a lot of the necessary prerequisites for local industry to thrive. But longer term, rising wages are gonna affect them in the same way that they did US industry 60 years ago, and Japanese manufacturing 30 years ago. We have less local manufacturing now because we grew so rich and that is not the worst problem to have.

tim333 2y ago
US manufacturers were running plants in Mexico where the wages were probably not much above that. The deeper problem is China has a lot of dedicated engineers developing stuff and dominating in batteries and the like that are largely churned out by automated machinery. This is kind of what chinese assembly is looking like these days - robots and high tech https://youtu.be/gjbwq5vp0C4?t=12 https://youtu.be/gjbwq5vp0C4?t=12 That was Geely and there's some video of BYD here https://youtu.be/Bd_bx6a4hgE https://youtu.be/Bd_bx6a4hgE
- myrmidon 2y ago
  > The deeper problem is China has a lot of dedicated engineers developing stuff and dominating in batteries and the like that are largely churned out by automated machinery. Deeper problem for what? I don't think that automation changes the whole picture as much as you might think. Sure, the wage component of product cost is gonna decrease, but you still need people to build, upgrade, maintain and operate those assembly lines, and cheaper wages there still mean lower costs. Which is why EU car manufacturers also moved a lot of their production eastward (Slovenia, Hungary, etc.) despite very high automation.
  - tim333 2y ago
    Deeper problem for the west competing.
cscurmudgeon 2y ago
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tim333 2y ago

US manufacturers were running plants in Mexico where the wages were probably not much above that. The deeper problem is China has a lot of dedicated engineers developing stuff and dominating in batteries and the like that are largely churned out by automated machinery. This is kind of what chinese assembly is looking like these days - robots and high tech https://youtu.be/gjbwq5vp0C4?t=12 https://youtu.be/gjbwq5vp0C4?t=12 That was Geely and there's some video of BYD here https://youtu.be/Bd_bx6a4hgE https://youtu.be/Bd_bx6a4hgE

myrmidon 2y ago
> The deeper problem is China has a lot of dedicated engineers developing stuff and dominating in batteries and the like that are largely churned out by automated machinery. Deeper problem for what? I don't think that automation changes the whole picture as much as you might think. Sure, the wage component of product cost is gonna decrease, but you still need people to build, upgrade, maintain and operate those assembly lines, and cheaper wages there still mean lower costs. Which is why EU car manufacturers also moved a lot of their production eastward (Slovenia, Hungary, etc.) despite very high automation.
- tim333 2y ago
  Deeper problem for the west competing.

cscurmudgeon 2y ago

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