4 ms·

That's the most obvious example of failure of Chinese central planning. That and one child policy were abysmal failures that resulted from shoddy science couple

by 0_____0 8mo ago

That's the most obvious example of failure of Chinese central planning. That and one child policy were abysmal failures that resulted from shoddy science coupled to effective central authority. Look at the 12/13/14th 5 year plan (the most recently passed). Do you think they achieved their goals? If your headcanon is that the CCP is inept because they caused crop failures 60 years ago... you could stand to take a look at what they're doing today.

ahartmetz 8mo ago
I guess the summary is as simple as: Good five year plans are great, bad five year plans are terrible. There are sooo many variables in how one could go about making and executing five year plans. They must have figured out a couple of things that tend to work.
refulgentis 8mo ago
If your headcanon is "5 year plans are great because some chinese supplier has cheap DDR-4", I would submit a gentle introduction to history is helpful (i.e. we took a couple irrational great leaps forward from cheap DDR-4 => China owns the RAM market => 5 year plans are the way to go)
- christophilus 8mo ago
  I think it’s at least valid to conclude that a nation-level commitment to taking over a specific industry can work. You can gut your competitors and then dominate. It’s the Uber strategy applied at the geopolitical level. If you could figure out how to get your country to dominate the world economy without also allowing your leaders to commit campaigns of mass-internment and extermination, then maybe you’d have a decent political system.
  - zozbot234 8mo ago
    You can only "gut" the competition if you're genuinely able to supply at lowest cost in a sustainable way. Selling at a loss and trying to make it up in volume is not a very good strategy. The Uber strategy was betting on having robotaxis everywhere, and then raising prices when they found out that this wouldn't be a viable solution in the near term.
    - adrian_b 8mo ago
      The current memory prices are many times higher than the costs. Last month I was forced to buy some memory and it was more than 3 times more expensive than last summer. Moreover, this was in Europe, where currently computers and related products are cheaper than in USA, unlike in the previous years. The same memories that I have bought in Europe were much more expensive on Newegg. If you can make memories, selling them at half the price demanded by Micron and the like is not selling at a dumping price, but it is selling with what in normal times would have been considered as a huge profit margin.
    - mapt 8mo ago
      Studies of the 20th century manufacturing learning rate suggests that creation of arbitrary goods drops on the order of 15-20% every time you double production volume. This is before general purpose robotics and AI! Just interchangeable tooling, Taylorism, Ford style assembly lines, Toyota's supply chain ideas. Selling at a modest loss and making the volume happen eventually means you're not selling at a loss anymore.
  - refulgentis 8mo ago
    > I think it’s at least valid to conclude that a nation-level commitment to taking over a specific industry can work From ONE supplier having cheap DDR-4 currently?
    - adrian_b 8mo ago
      What is impressive is that this has happened despite the great efforts of USA to sabotage the Chinese semiconductor industry in order to eliminate the competition for Micron. The second wave of "sanctions" (after those against Huawei done to eliminate the competition of Qualcomm) have been enacted when Chinese companies were ready to take a dominant position on the SSD market. Even Apple had decided to use the Chinese SSDs in their products. Without the so-called "sanctions", the market of memory devices, both for SSDs and for DRAM would have looked extremely different today and we would have not been hit by this shamelessly huge increases in the price of memory modules, SSDs and HDDs. The so-called US "sanctions" have never been true "sanctions", because they have never been tied to any kind of political demands. They were just measures taken to destroy the competitors of certain US companies, which were implemented through various kinds of blackmailing methods that are available, for now, to the US government.
      - refulgentis 8mo ago
        This comment makes several claims that don't survive scrutiny. "Sanctions to eliminate the competition for Micron" — The October 2022 export controls and YMTC's Entity List designation were part of a sweeping national security policy targeting advanced compute capabilities, not a protectionist carve-out [1]. Multiple allied governments (UK, Australia, Japan, Netherlands) independently reached similar conclusions and imposed their own restrictions. If this was "for Micron," it backfired spectacularly: China retaliated by banning Micron from critical infrastructure projects in May 2023, costing Micron ~25% of its revenue [2]. "Huawei sanctions done to eliminate the competition of Qualcomm" — Huawei's CFO was indicted for bank fraud related to Iran sanctions violations [3]. The Five Eyes intelligence consensus on Huawei infrastructure risk predates the Trump administration by years (flagged since at least 2012) [4]. Reducing this to "helping Qualcomm" requires ignoring criminal indictments and an entire allied intelligence assessment. "Chinese companies were ready to take a dominant position on the SSD market" — YMTC's global NAND share didn't reach ~10% until Q3 2025, three years after sanctions [5]. In 2022 they were a small player with single-digit share. Samsung alone held ~35% [6]. "Ready to take a dominant position" is not supported by any market data from that period. "Even Apple had decided to use the Chinese SSDs" — Apple was in an exploratory testing phase and dropped YMTC in October 2022 before the Entity List designation in December, amid political scrutiny and its own risk assessment [7]. No Apple product ever shipped with YMTC memory. "Had decided" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. "This shamelessly huge increase in the price of memory" — This is the most egregious misattribution. The 2024+ memory price crisis is driven by: (1) Samsung/SK Hynix/Micron massively reallocating wafer capacity to HBM for AI accelerators, which requires far more wafer area per bit than conventional DRAM [8]; (2) deliberate production cuts in 2023 after the oversupply glut (Samsung posted its worst quarterly profit since 2009) [9]; (3) structural AI demand consuming enormous DRAM/NAND capacity [10]. Chinese memory companies at single-digit market share were nowhere near large enough to have prevented Samsung and SK Hynix from chasing the vastly more profitable HBM market. That's the price driver, not sanctions on YMTC. The monocausal "US sanctions to protect Micron caused expensive memory" narrative requires overstating China's pre-sanctions market position, mischaracterizing Apple's exploratory talks as a commitment, ignoring the documented reasons for the sanctions, and attributing a price crisis driven by AI demand to restrictions on companies that held single-digit share. [1] https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2024/11/the-evolution-of-chinas-semiconductor-industry-under-u-s-export-controls/ https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2024/11/the-evolution-of-... [2] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-65667746 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-65667746 [3] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/chinese-telecommunications-conglomerate-huawei-and-subsidiaries-charged-racketeering https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/chinese-telecommunications-co... [4] https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/chinas-huawei-threat-us-national-security https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/chinas-huawei-threat-us-nat... [5] https://biz.chosun.com/en/en-it/2026/01/30/5RWQ5BS2H5H4HAYM6YV7Q5C7G4/ https://biz.chosun.com/en/en-it/2026/01/30/5RWQ5BS2H5H4HAYM6... [6] https://gizmodo.com/chip-china-semiconductor-1849354820 https://gizmodo.com/chip-china-semiconductor-1849354820 [7] https://www.pcmag.com/news/apple-decides-using-cheap-chinese-memory-chips-in-iphones-is-too-risky https://www.pcmag.com/news/apple-decides-using-cheap-chinese... [8] https://spectrum.ieee.org/dram-shortage https://spectrum.ieee.org/dram-shortage [9] https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/06/samsung-cuts-memory-chip-production-as-it-hits-worst-quarterly-profit-since-2009/ https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/06/samsung-cuts-memory-chip-p... [10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024–present_global_memory_supply_shortage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024–present_global_memory_sup...
  - 0_____0 8mo ago
    It's not the Uber strategy, because there's a physical limit to how efficiently a human can drive another human around the city. The Uber strategy was to push out competitors then bring pricing back up. Chinese PV isn't going to get more expensive. The massive subsidies seen by Chinese PV companies from 2005-2024 account for a whopping 3.2% of solar firm incomes. [1] Over that same 2004-2024 period, solar cells prices have fallen to about 4-5% of 2024 prices. Not a typo. It's not the Uber model if they win by actually making the product at a fraction of the cost. [1] https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/subsidies-and-the-solar-panel-industry_68481900-en/full-report.html https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/subsidies-and-the-solar...
xbmcuser 8mo ago
The big difference recently from the past is instead of philosophers its scientists who are making the plans and decisions in China so are willing to course correct instead staying the course despite bad out comes.
- impure-aqua 8mo ago
  I don't know if that tracks, senior leadership was heavily influenced towards implementing the one child policy by the works of Song Jian, who came from a rocketry background and presented a model whereby the population would grow to an unsustainable level unless corrective control was applied. I think it is unlikely philosophers would have suggested to treat population growth like tuning a PID controller.
  - daymanstep 8mo ago
    UN birth rate projections have also been consistently wrong for the past decades. I think even most experts did not expect fertility rates to follow the trend that it has been following for the past few decades.
  - mschuster91 8mo ago
    > I don't know if that tracks, senior leadership was heavily influenced towards implementing the one child policy by the works of Song Jian, who came from a rocketry background and presented a model whereby the population would grow to an unsustainable level unless corrective control was applied. The problem wasn't the idea of modeling itself, it was to not be aware of what we know today from Africa - with more wealth and especially less child mortality, reproduction will drop in about one generation, even without punitive governmental intervention. Even 60 years ago, people tended to have anywhere from 3 to 5 children, just because the chance was so high that at least two would simply die before reaching adulthood. But thanks due to better maternal healthcare, vaccinations and OSHA, that mortality rate dropped significantly, and so people adapted on their own - and that's before getting into women being able to control fertility on their own or housing/cost of living exploding in the same timeframe.
  - steveBK123 8mo ago
trueismywork 8mo ago
One child policy has brought a demographic problem today but has solved an existential problem in 70s
mystraline 8mo ago
Notice the go-to for capitalists against communism is "Look at how many people they killed!!!" No such metric is available for capitalist countries. Thats because its *always* an individual failure in capitalism, not political/societal. You CHOSE not to have healthcare. (You work 1099, or work a job that doesnt provide healthcare, due to tying job and health.) You CHOSE to go with UnitedHealthCare that denies 30% for baseless reasons. (The company chose your plan, you have no real choice here.) You CHOSE to be homeless. (You can't force companies to interview or hire you.) You CHOSE to eat the only food nearby (You live in a food desert). Just from Hepatitis C, the company that makes Solvaldi makes a cure. Costs $84k, $1000 a pill for 84 days. But we see more and more deaths from Hep C. But this is a "personal failure", not a systemic one in a capitalist country.
- steveBK123 8mo ago
  "Under capitalism, man oppresses man. Under socialism, it's just the opposite"

by 0_____0 8mo ago

ahartmetz 8mo ago

I guess the summary is as simple as: Good five year plans are great, bad five year plans are terrible. There are sooo many variables in how one could go about making and executing five year plans. They must have figured out a couple of things that tend to work.

refulgentis 8mo ago

If your headcanon is "5 year plans are great because some chinese supplier has cheap DDR-4", I would submit a gentle introduction to history is helpful (i.e. we took a couple irrational great leaps forward from cheap DDR-4 => China owns the RAM market => 5 year plans are the way to go)

christophilus 8mo ago
I think it’s at least valid to conclude that a nation-level commitment to taking over a specific industry can work. You can gut your competitors and then dominate. It’s the Uber strategy applied at the geopolitical level. If you could figure out how to get your country to dominate the world economy without also allowing your leaders to commit campaigns of mass-internment and extermination, then maybe you’d have a decent political system.
- zozbot234 8mo ago
  You can only "gut" the competition if you're genuinely able to supply at lowest cost in a sustainable way. Selling at a loss and trying to make it up in volume is not a very good strategy. The Uber strategy was betting on having robotaxis everywhere, and then raising prices when they found out that this wouldn't be a viable solution in the near term.
  - adrian_b 8mo ago
    The current memory prices are many times higher than the costs. Last month I was forced to buy some memory and it was more than 3 times more expensive than last summer. Moreover, this was in Europe, where currently computers and related products are cheaper than in USA, unlike in the previous years. The same memories that I have bought in Europe were much more expensive on Newegg. If you can make memories, selling them at half the price demanded by Micron and the like is not selling at a dumping price, but it is selling with what in normal times would have been considered as a huge profit margin.
  - mapt 8mo ago
    Studies of the 20th century manufacturing learning rate suggests that creation of arbitrary goods drops on the order of 15-20% every time you double production volume. This is before general purpose robotics and AI! Just interchangeable tooling, Taylorism, Ford style assembly lines, Toyota's supply chain ideas. Selling at a modest loss and making the volume happen eventually means you're not selling at a loss anymore.
- refulgentis 8mo ago
  > I think it’s at least valid to conclude that a nation-level commitment to taking over a specific industry can work From ONE supplier having cheap DDR-4 currently?
  - adrian_b 8mo ago
    What is impressive is that this has happened despite the great efforts of USA to sabotage the Chinese semiconductor industry in order to eliminate the competition for Micron. The second wave of "sanctions" (after those against Huawei done to eliminate the competition of Qualcomm) have been enacted when Chinese companies were ready to take a dominant position on the SSD market. Even Apple had decided to use the Chinese SSDs in their products. Without the so-called "sanctions", the market of memory devices, both for SSDs and for DRAM would have looked extremely different today and we would have not been hit by this shamelessly huge increases in the price of memory modules, SSDs and HDDs. The so-called US "sanctions" have never been true "sanctions", because they have never been tied to any kind of political demands. They were just measures taken to destroy the competitors of certain US companies, which were implemented through various kinds of blackmailing methods that are available, for now, to the US government.
    - refulgentis 8mo ago
      This comment makes several claims that don't survive scrutiny. "Sanctions to eliminate the competition for Micron" — The October 2022 export controls and YMTC's Entity List designation were part of a sweeping national security policy targeting advanced compute capabilities, not a protectionist carve-out [1]. Multiple allied governments (UK, Australia, Japan, Netherlands) independently reached similar conclusions and imposed their own restrictions. If this was "for Micron," it backfired spectacularly: China retaliated by banning Micron from critical infrastructure projects in May 2023, costing Micron ~25% of its revenue [2]. "Huawei sanctions done to eliminate the competition of Qualcomm" — Huawei's CFO was indicted for bank fraud related to Iran sanctions violations [3]. The Five Eyes intelligence consensus on Huawei infrastructure risk predates the Trump administration by years (flagged since at least 2012) [4]. Reducing this to "helping Qualcomm" requires ignoring criminal indictments and an entire allied intelligence assessment. "Chinese companies were ready to take a dominant position on the SSD market" — YMTC's global NAND share didn't reach ~10% until Q3 2025, three years after sanctions [5]. In 2022 they were a small player with single-digit share. Samsung alone held ~35% [6]. "Ready to take a dominant position" is not supported by any market data from that period. "Even Apple had decided to use the Chinese SSDs" — Apple was in an exploratory testing phase and dropped YMTC in October 2022 before the Entity List designation in December, amid political scrutiny and its own risk assessment [7]. No Apple product ever shipped with YMTC memory. "Had decided" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. "This shamelessly huge increase in the price of memory" — This is the most egregious misattribution. The 2024+ memory price crisis is driven by: (1) Samsung/SK Hynix/Micron massively reallocating wafer capacity to HBM for AI accelerators, which requires far more wafer area per bit than conventional DRAM [8]; (2) deliberate production cuts in 2023 after the oversupply glut (Samsung posted its worst quarterly profit since 2009) [9]; (3) structural AI demand consuming enormous DRAM/NAND capacity [10]. Chinese memory companies at single-digit market share were nowhere near large enough to have prevented Samsung and SK Hynix from chasing the vastly more profitable HBM market. That's the price driver, not sanctions on YMTC. The monocausal "US sanctions to protect Micron caused expensive memory" narrative requires overstating China's pre-sanctions market position, mischaracterizing Apple's exploratory talks as a commitment, ignoring the documented reasons for the sanctions, and attributing a price crisis driven by AI demand to restrictions on companies that held single-digit share. [1] https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2024/11/the-evolution-of-chinas-semiconductor-industry-under-u-s-export-controls/ https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2024/11/the-evolution-of-... [2] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-65667746 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-65667746 [3] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/chinese-telecommunications-conglomerate-huawei-and-subsidiaries-charged-racketeering https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/chinese-telecommunications-co... [4] https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/chinas-huawei-threat-us-national-security https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/chinas-huawei-threat-us-nat... [5] https://biz.chosun.com/en/en-it/2026/01/30/5RWQ5BS2H5H4HAYM6YV7Q5C7G4/ https://biz.chosun.com/en/en-it/2026/01/30/5RWQ5BS2H5H4HAYM6... [6] https://gizmodo.com/chip-china-semiconductor-1849354820 https://gizmodo.com/chip-china-semiconductor-1849354820 [7] https://www.pcmag.com/news/apple-decides-using-cheap-chinese-memory-chips-in-iphones-is-too-risky https://www.pcmag.com/news/apple-decides-using-cheap-chinese... [8] https://spectrum.ieee.org/dram-shortage https://spectrum.ieee.org/dram-shortage [9] https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/06/samsung-cuts-memory-chip-production-as-it-hits-worst-quarterly-profit-since-2009/ https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/06/samsung-cuts-memory-chip-p... [10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024–present_global_memory_supply_shortage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024–present_global_memory_sup...
- 0_____0 8mo ago
  It's not the Uber strategy, because there's a physical limit to how efficiently a human can drive another human around the city. The Uber strategy was to push out competitors then bring pricing back up. Chinese PV isn't going to get more expensive. The massive subsidies seen by Chinese PV companies from 2005-2024 account for a whopping 3.2% of solar firm incomes. [1] Over that same 2004-2024 period, solar cells prices have fallen to about 4-5% of 2024 prices. Not a typo. It's not the Uber model if they win by actually making the product at a fraction of the cost. [1] https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/subsidies-and-the-solar-panel-industry_68481900-en/full-report.html https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/subsidies-and-the-solar...

xbmcuser 8mo ago

The big difference recently from the past is instead of philosophers its scientists who are making the plans and decisions in China so are willing to course correct instead staying the course despite bad out comes.

impure-aqua 8mo ago
I don't know if that tracks, senior leadership was heavily influenced towards implementing the one child policy by the works of Song Jian, who came from a rocketry background and presented a model whereby the population would grow to an unsustainable level unless corrective control was applied. I think it is unlikely philosophers would have suggested to treat population growth like tuning a PID controller.
- daymanstep 8mo ago
  UN birth rate projections have also been consistently wrong for the past decades. I think even most experts did not expect fertility rates to follow the trend that it has been following for the past few decades.
- mschuster91 8mo ago
  > I don't know if that tracks, senior leadership was heavily influenced towards implementing the one child policy by the works of Song Jian, who came from a rocketry background and presented a model whereby the population would grow to an unsustainable level unless corrective control was applied. The problem wasn't the idea of modeling itself, it was to not be aware of what we know today from Africa - with more wealth and especially less child mortality, reproduction will drop in about one generation, even without punitive governmental intervention. Even 60 years ago, people tended to have anywhere from 3 to 5 children, just because the chance was so high that at least two would simply die before reaching adulthood. But thanks due to better maternal healthcare, vaccinations and OSHA, that mortality rate dropped significantly, and so people adapted on their own - and that's before getting into women being able to control fertility on their own or housing/cost of living exploding in the same timeframe.
- steveBK123 8mo ago

trueismywork 8mo ago

One child policy has brought a demographic problem today but has solved an existential problem in 70s

mystraline 8mo ago

Notice the go-to for capitalists against communism is "Look at how many people they killed!!!" No such metric is available for capitalist countries. Thats because its *always* an individual failure in capitalism, not political/societal. You CHOSE not to have healthcare. (You work 1099, or work a job that doesnt provide healthcare, due to tying job and health.) You CHOSE to go with UnitedHealthCare that denies 30% for baseless reasons. (The company chose your plan, you have no real choice here.) You CHOSE to be homeless. (You can't force companies to interview or hire you.) You CHOSE to eat the only food nearby (You live in a food desert). Just from Hepatitis C, the company that makes Solvaldi makes a cure. Costs $84k, $1000 a pill for 84 days. But we see more and more deaths from Hep C. But this is a "personal failure", not a systemic one in a capitalist country.

steveBK123 8mo ago
"Under capitalism, man oppresses man. Under socialism, it's just the opposite"