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> Something about having the whole supply chain in one place I can't find the source but I thought I read somewhere that the major manufacturing cities in Chin

> Something about having the whole supply chain in one place I can't find the source but I thought I read somewhere that the major manufacturing cities in China are all geographically laid out like giant assembly lines. The companies that process the raw materials are located mostly inland, then the companies that form those raw materials into metal and plastic stock are next door, and then the companies that take that stock and make components are next door to them, and the companies that input those components and output subassemblies are next door to them, and so on all the way down to the harbor where the companies that produce finished products output directly onto the loading docks where the ships await. The US can't even zone a residential neighborhood without lawyers and special interests jamming things up for decades through endless impact studies and litigation. How is it going to compete with a country that can lay out entire cities, organizing the value chain geographically towards the ocean?

SaltyBackendGuy 9mo ago
This reminds me of a great freakonomics podcast that talked about China being run by engineers and America being run by lawyers. https://freakonomics.com/podcast/china-is-run-by-engineers-america-is-run-by-lawyers/ https://freakonomics.com/podcast/china-is-run-by-engineers-a...
- Avicebron 9mo ago
  Authoritarian central planning isn't an inherent trait of engineers and nor should we aspire for it to be.
  - mlsu 9mo ago
    Have you met an engineer? I'd say "being an engineer" is probably the single most predictive trait for authoritarianism in my experience.
    - lkbm 9mo ago
      Possibly, but it's just as much a predictive trait of being libertarian, which for all its faults, is extremely anti-authoritarian.
      - bb88 9mo ago
        Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. --Lord Acton. It's not really so much one's belief system as it is what happens when one gets power -- and that's hard to predict regardless of the ideology.
        galangalalgol 9mo ago
        Not really. Seeing what people do when they get power is as predictable as what they do when given meth.
        nerdsniper 9mo ago
        Eh. Maybe. But I do see people who are pretty consistent when they have power. It may be somewhat unpredictable before they get power, but somewhat more predictable once you’ve seen how they act with it. This principle of relative consistency is baked into how I test employees for management and friends for trust, and in the past, roommates as well. Though I do acknowledge potential for growth as well, but in my older age I generally also need to see evidence of motivation to give strong benefit of the doubt wrt possible trajectory.
      - SlightlyLeftPad 9mo ago
        Except in 21st Century America, where libertarian is really just masked authoritarian. Essentially, that means “free to do whatever you want as long as it’s our way.”
        red-iron-pine 8mo ago
        "i hate the gub'ment esp. the way evil mega-corporations tell me to"
  - mikestorrent 9mo ago
    You don't need to brand efficiency and structure-at-scale as "authoritarian"; how painfully American of you. I know it's a completely foreign concept for anyone that has grown up in America, but it's actually within the realm of human possibility for the government and the individual to be aligned and want the same thing. Typically this is evidenced by tremendous social progress, which we see in evidence with the rapidly rising standard of living in China over the last few decades. It's easier when your government is proposing "hey, let's build all the factories the best way we can" and not "hey, let's impose illogical and continually-changing tariffs on everything and let Howard Lutnick's kids steal all the proceeds". You're right as an American to be skeptical of the government - it's not operating in your best interests unless you're one of the elite insiders. That doesn't mean it has to be that way.
    - superxpro12 9mo ago
      For all the progress, you lose me immediately with the "social credit" system. If there was really true 'progress', then you wouldn't need a one-party system that suppresses all dissent. Only need to look to the recent changes in Hong-Kong and the obviously hostile takeover of a democratic government to see how "pure" these changes really are.
      - xtn 9mo ago
        There are bad things in China, but there is no "social credit" system being used.
        Saline9515 9mo ago
        Yes there is. Why deny it? It's pretty public. In this french documentary, which was later aired on the parliamentary tv channel, the author films his daily life with his chinese wife, who has a social credit account, and interviews officials speaking openly about it. It's 4 years old. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ma6txLM_LLs https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ma6txLM_LLs
        9mo ago
  - BurningFrog 9mo ago
    China hasn't done much central planning for many decades.
    - Synaesthesia 9mo ago
      They do, the state permits a free market but they also coordinate strategically to make decisions which benefit the country.
    - tw1984 9mo ago
      No, central planning is key to the state capitalism employed by China, it is done on ALL strategic industries. They just no longer do any central planning on nonsense matters like how much ice cream need to be produced for the summer and how much coffee shops are required for Shanghai.
  - jmknoll 9mo ago
    I think what the person you're replying to is referring to is the fact that, in contrast to the US, many senior politicians in China literally have engineering backgrounds, or at least engineering degrees. Although this has actually been less true in the past 10-15 years. This article gives a bit of an overview - https://www.chinausfocus.com/2022-CPC-congress/chinese-technocrats-20-how-technocrats-differ-between-the-xi-era-and-jiang-hu-eras https://www.chinausfocus.com/2022-CPC-congress/chinese-techn...
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
  - _bent 9mo ago
    Every single privately run company is authoritarian.
  - callmeal 9mo ago
    >Authoritarian central planning isn't an inherent trait of engineers and nor should we aspire for it to be. I would say that for long-term engineering projects (building bridges etc) authoritarian central planning is a required trait.
  - mullingitover 9mo ago
    It’s funny because the foundation of neoliberal economies is the corporation: a strict authoritarian planned economy.
- jonstewart 9mo ago
  https://www.americanscientist.org/article/freakonomics-what-went-wrong https://www.americanscientist.org/article/freakonomics-what-...
- pear01 9mo ago
  That guy is so annoying his subpar analysis has become such a trope. America used to build things too. Lawyers have been part of the founding and fabric of both societies. Trying to reduce China v America to engineers vs lawyers is so reductive it's just mind blowing this keeps getting repeated.
  - wetpaws 9mo ago
    [dead]
  - adamweld 9mo ago
    I've only listened to one interview with Dan Wang, but I understood him to be particularly talking about the politicians, not the country as a whole. I can't speak for China, I've only visited a few times, but in the US it's true that an overwhelming number of successful politicians were previously lawyers. Which is not a good thing IMO.
    - pear01 9mo ago
      And that was true when we built things too. So what point are you making? If only FDR was an engineer then maybe we would have ramped up production and taken on the Axis across two oceans. But oops he was educated as a lawyer I guess we're doomed now. Like I just don't get it. Sure Xi and some other senior leadership in China studied as an engineer. He also studied Marxism. As a part of a government delegation he studied agriculture, even bringing him to stay abroad in Iowa of all places. The world is too complicated for this type of analysis, sorry. I don't even think it is remotely the right data point to focus on or compare. Dan Wang does the same spiel on every podcast and it is always terrible and seems predicated on credulous hosts who know little about the history of either country and certainly not enough about both who just use his lame analysis to engage in this current fad of Western self-pity. Instead of reform and asking hard questions let's just throw soft balls at Dan Wang's cheap analysis that anyone with a Wikipedia level education would know is absurd so we can keep propping up the same impoverished China v America tropes. Why don't we demand better honestly we should be ashamed that one guy can just come up with such a dubious thesis suddenly appear everywhere and no credible debate or pushback once. The only thing Dan Wang convinces me of is the poverty of the modern intellectual environment.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- canjobear 9mo ago
  That’s because engineering degrees were the only thing you could get from college during the Cultural Revolution.
- jayseb 9mo ago
  The books is amazing too, just finished reading it. Gives you peek into cultural dynamic of both countries: https://insightbooks.app/books/breakneck https://insightbooks.app/books/breakneck
- titzer 8mo ago
  Minor correction: America is run by pedophiles with a lot of money, who naturally hire lawyers.
  - red-iron-pine 8mo ago
    funny how this is getting downvoted when we know now that it is objectively true, with emails and pictures
fuzzfactor 9mo ago
In Houston there is no zoning.
- energy123 9mo ago
  It's a network effect though, if 80% have zoning then you may as well be a tiny island country. The other issue is minimum wage and workers rights. It should be possible to have Chinese workers making widgets on US soil instead of Chinese soil, for $0.5/hr more than they can make in China. But that's illegal many times over. Then people wonder why manufacturing is dying across the West. If your inputs (labor) are more expensive you can't compete, it's extremely basic. That might be acceptable but at least be honest about the trade-off you've made, and don't pretend you can patch it up with hacks.
  - fuzzfactor 9mo ago
    >manufacturing is dying across the West. Died a long time ago and went to hell in handbasket :( >If your inputs (labor) are more expensive you can't compete Houston had always been less expensive than Detroit, LA, Chicago, New England and just about anywhere else in the US for this kind of thing, but it was really the cheapness of the foreign labor that made it irresistible to Wall Street. It had always been that way but didn't really matter until after the value of the dollar had been dropped so low that they had to pay workers what amounted to exorbitant sums while the labor still ended up with less discretionary cash, and that was at the lower-value dollar. You should have seen Houston in 1979 when the Nixon Recession was raging worse than ever, long after he had sailed into the sunset. It was no Pittsburgh[0] but there were still two steel mills and of course one of them was US Steel where they had expanded to the industrial suburb of Baytown Texas specifically because the labor was cheaper than up north. Wall Street took that differential to the bank and lit their cigars with $100 bills :\ Eventually led to champagne and caviar with each round of layoffs. Nixon "opened up" China, but Reagan was not yet here to put the nail in the coffin. I agree it would take a whole lot more unfair advantages just to get closer to a level playing field. The way to real manufacturing growth is to build much higher-value-added products per worker. The difficult problem to overcome is that most of the low-cost raw materials have been coming from China for so long, and the ideal thing would have been coming from more than one place the whole time. But no, the absolute cheapest must be sought. Mexico could have been ready by now but they would have had to do it on their own in an organized way like China and India so it pales by comparison, especially high tech in spite of all the brilliant Mexican engineers and innovators. Lower-cost labor in India might be abundant enough but it'll take a while before the supply chain can compare to what China has built with all the dollars they have had in their hands for so long. [0] Made up for it with oil, as heavy industry goes.
nerdsniper 9mo ago
So, there’s a decent amount of electronics manufacturing in Anhui Province which is pretty far from the well-known hub of Shenzhen. Anhui is generally more known for their mining industry. So, to your query, maybe somewhat? But not strictly.
ProAm 9mo ago
Apple as a company that does not pay taxes should at least invest in the country they are located in. *Designed in Cupertino, Taxes paid no where, profit leveraged in the US
thrdbndndn 9mo ago
Sorry, but this sounds more like a myth, or at least heavily exaggerated. Similar to how Japan often gets romanticized. Organizing the entire chain geographically at the scale you described (inter-city) doesn't bring huge cost advantages by itself. In China labor has historically been cheap, so the transport cost between regions was never the dominant factor anyway. Most industrial clusters in China formed organically over time just like the rest of the world. Aside from some exceptions like mining, there isn't some master plan laying out entire cities as linear supply chains to the ocean It's not SimCity. One thing you're right about is that there is less bureaucratic friction or 'lawyers' in the way when it comes to economic development. For the former, it's because economic growth is THE metric for the government, especially at the local level, so they do whatever it takes to make it happen. For the latter, it's because… well, in China no one sues the government, period. I'm not sure it's a good thing. Disclaimer: I'm Chinese living in China.
- Braxton1980 9mo ago
  Is the labor cheap in China or are you comparing it US salaries? Can a person working in a Chinese tech factory for a major US company afford a reasonable place to live a reasonable distance, food, some entertainment, and have savings?
  - thrdbndndn 9mo ago
    I'm not comparing it to US anything, I'm comparing it to other cost components like raw materials and parts, whose prices are often global. The point is that transportation within China isn't a dominant factor in industrial cost or efficiency. So the idea that major manufacturing cities are laid out like giant assembly lines isn't nearly as important as OP suggests. China still has many advantages over the US in manufacturing. I just don't think this is a major one, even if there's a grain of truth to it.
- dubcanada 8mo ago
  As a Chinese living in China, you must know the layout of the city does provide logical sense. I've only been once, and I buy stuff from factories fairly often. When I went there I basically went to a mall district where all the furniture was sold, then I went to the tile district to review tiles, I went to several other "districts" that where nothing but that single item. I went to the window factory, which was directly beside more window factories, and directly beside that was the place that extruded aluminum for use. The aluminum they used was produced a up the road in what they called the metal district. You are even saying that "industrial clusters in China" so there is clearly some amount of planning involved. There is obviously benefits to having all of the aluminum factories beside a aluminum producer, and having the shipping/packaging warehouses by the docks, etc. There is some amount of government work at play here, either on a small scale or a larger scale to provide a reason for places to all setup. I've also seen things that just are not possible in North America. Asked for samples of aluminum extrusions and had the die made and extrusion done in a day. Locally it would take months before a sample is at my door. I've sent designs for quotes and get quotes in hours, half the time factory in NA doesn't even reply. And even when it does it's more of a "go away" then anything else. I've seen live video of robotic factories building entire cabinets for housing. There is some amount of rose coloured glasses in this thread. But we cannot deny that China wants business and can get stuff done fast and efficiently. That cannot be said for modern day factories in US or Canada. The work ethic and desire for business are just completely different.
mschuster91 9mo ago
> I can't find the source but I thought I read somewhere that the major manufacturing cities in China are all geographically laid out like giant assembly lines. ... like Factorio, just in real life. > The US can't even zone a residential neighborhood without lawyers and special interests jamming things up for decades through endless impact studies and litigation. A lot of that is to prevent our cities from looking like China did before they haphazardly cleaned up shop before the Olympic Games. Remember all the smog alerts? Athletes being afraid the smog and pollution would impact their performance? > How is it going to compete with a country that can lay out entire cities, organizing the value chain geographically towards the ocean? There's a tool for that, it's called tariffs - basically, make it uncompetitive for manufacturing moving off to a country that systematically undercuts pricing even at the cost of its environment. Unfortunately, the current administration doesn't even have the concepts of a plan on what they want to achieve with tariffs. It's mind boggling to watch.
selimthegrim 9mo ago
You know, I think the bigger issue is Tillman Fertitta scuttling the other UT research campus they wanted to set up in Houston because it would screw up his status as chairman of the University of Houston board or something. I guess Houston’s gonna have to make do with these tech jobs.
bluedino 9mo ago
It's like they mastered Sim City and applied it to real life
- fredley 8mo ago
  It's like the mastered Factorio and applied it to real life.
brudgers 9mo ago
The US can't even zone a residential neighborhood without lawyers and special interests jamming things up for decades through endless impact studies and litigation. Famously, Houston has no zoning.
- ThePowerOfFuet 9mo ago
  The downside is that then nothing prevents a fireworks factory, or tannery, or whatever, right in the middle of a residential area. Or, as they say everything is bigger in Texas, why not think big... an oil refinery!
  - mr_toad 9mo ago
    A bit of quick searching reveals that Houston does have many building regulations, for example restrictions of hazardous enterprises. It’s just that the regulations aren’t quite as black and white as zoning laws. https://kinder.rice.edu/urbanedge/houston-doesnt-have-zoning-there-are-workarounds https://kinder.rice.edu/urbanedge/houston-doesnt-have-zoning...
coldtea 9mo ago
>I can't find the source but I thought I read somewhere that the major manufacturing cities in China are all geographically laid out like giant assembly lines There was a great article from like 20 years ago - it quoted Jobs too on that. I remember Forbes or something like that, maybe this "“How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work” — The New York Times (Jan 21, 2012)" (cant open it now)
bdelmas 8mo ago
I copied your comment to Gemini Pro and it has some interesting things to say. The link to avoid everybody to do the same query: https://g.co/gemini/share/15fc8eb095a2 https://g.co/gemini/share/15fc8eb095a2
m463 8mo ago
The US used to do this - the piers were next to the warehouses, and the manufacturing was nearby. Nowadays all that infrastructure is now shops and industrial style apartments.

SaltyBackendGuy 9mo ago

This reminds me of a great freakonomics podcast that talked about China being run by engineers and America being run by lawyers. https://freakonomics.com/podcast/china-is-run-by-engineers-america-is-run-by-lawyers/ https://freakonomics.com/podcast/china-is-run-by-engineers-a...

Avicebron 9mo ago
Authoritarian central planning isn't an inherent trait of engineers and nor should we aspire for it to be.
- mlsu 9mo ago
  Have you met an engineer? I'd say "being an engineer" is probably the single most predictive trait for authoritarianism in my experience.
  - lkbm 9mo ago
    Possibly, but it's just as much a predictive trait of being libertarian, which for all its faults, is extremely anti-authoritarian.
    - bb88 9mo ago
      Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. --Lord Acton. It's not really so much one's belief system as it is what happens when one gets power -- and that's hard to predict regardless of the ideology.
      - galangalalgol 9mo ago
        Not really. Seeing what people do when they get power is as predictable as what they do when given meth.
        nerdsniper 9mo ago
        Eh. Maybe. But I do see people who are pretty consistent when they have power. It may be somewhat unpredictable before they get power, but somewhat more predictable once you’ve seen how they act with it. This principle of relative consistency is baked into how I test employees for management and friends for trust, and in the past, roommates as well. Though I do acknowledge potential for growth as well, but in my older age I generally also need to see evidence of motivation to give strong benefit of the doubt wrt possible trajectory.
    - SlightlyLeftPad 9mo ago
      Except in 21st Century America, where libertarian is really just masked authoritarian. Essentially, that means “free to do whatever you want as long as it’s our way.”
      - red-iron-pine 8mo ago
        "i hate the gub'ment esp. the way evil mega-corporations tell me to"
- mikestorrent 9mo ago
  You don't need to brand efficiency and structure-at-scale as "authoritarian"; how painfully American of you. I know it's a completely foreign concept for anyone that has grown up in America, but it's actually within the realm of human possibility for the government and the individual to be aligned and want the same thing. Typically this is evidenced by tremendous social progress, which we see in evidence with the rapidly rising standard of living in China over the last few decades. It's easier when your government is proposing "hey, let's build all the factories the best way we can" and not "hey, let's impose illogical and continually-changing tariffs on everything and let Howard Lutnick's kids steal all the proceeds". You're right as an American to be skeptical of the government - it's not operating in your best interests unless you're one of the elite insiders. That doesn't mean it has to be that way.
  - superxpro12 9mo ago
    For all the progress, you lose me immediately with the "social credit" system. If there was really true 'progress', then you wouldn't need a one-party system that suppresses all dissent. Only need to look to the recent changes in Hong-Kong and the obviously hostile takeover of a democratic government to see how "pure" these changes really are.
    - xtn 9mo ago
      There are bad things in China, but there is no "social credit" system being used.
      - Saline9515 9mo ago
        Yes there is. Why deny it? It's pretty public. In this french documentary, which was later aired on the parliamentary tv channel, the author films his daily life with his chinese wife, who has a social credit account, and interviews officials speaking openly about it. It's 4 years old. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ma6txLM_LLs https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ma6txLM_LLs
        9mo ago
- BurningFrog 9mo ago
  China hasn't done much central planning for many decades.
  - Synaesthesia 9mo ago
    They do, the state permits a free market but they also coordinate strategically to make decisions which benefit the country.
  - tw1984 9mo ago
    No, central planning is key to the state capitalism employed by China, it is done on ALL strategic industries. They just no longer do any central planning on nonsense matters like how much ice cream need to be produced for the summer and how much coffee shops are required for Shanghai.
- jmknoll 9mo ago
  I think what the person you're replying to is referring to is the fact that, in contrast to the US, many senior politicians in China literally have engineering backgrounds, or at least engineering degrees. Although this has actually been less true in the past 10-15 years. This article gives a bit of an overview - https://www.chinausfocus.com/2022-CPC-congress/chinese-technocrats-20-how-technocrats-differ-between-the-xi-era-and-jiang-hu-eras https://www.chinausfocus.com/2022-CPC-congress/chinese-techn...
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- _bent 9mo ago
  Every single privately run company is authoritarian.
- callmeal 9mo ago
  >Authoritarian central planning isn't an inherent trait of engineers and nor should we aspire for it to be. I would say that for long-term engineering projects (building bridges etc) authoritarian central planning is a required trait.
- mullingitover 9mo ago
  It’s funny because the foundation of neoliberal economies is the corporation: a strict authoritarian planned economy.
jonstewart 9mo ago
https://www.americanscientist.org/article/freakonomics-what-went-wrong https://www.americanscientist.org/article/freakonomics-what-...
pear01 9mo ago
That guy is so annoying his subpar analysis has become such a trope. America used to build things too. Lawyers have been part of the founding and fabric of both societies. Trying to reduce China v America to engineers vs lawyers is so reductive it's just mind blowing this keeps getting repeated.
- wetpaws 9mo ago
  [dead]
- adamweld 9mo ago
  I've only listened to one interview with Dan Wang, but I understood him to be particularly talking about the politicians, not the country as a whole. I can't speak for China, I've only visited a few times, but in the US it's true that an overwhelming number of successful politicians were previously lawyers. Which is not a good thing IMO.
  - pear01 9mo ago
    And that was true when we built things too. So what point are you making? If only FDR was an engineer then maybe we would have ramped up production and taken on the Axis across two oceans. But oops he was educated as a lawyer I guess we're doomed now. Like I just don't get it. Sure Xi and some other senior leadership in China studied as an engineer. He also studied Marxism. As a part of a government delegation he studied agriculture, even bringing him to stay abroad in Iowa of all places. The world is too complicated for this type of analysis, sorry. I don't even think it is remotely the right data point to focus on or compare. Dan Wang does the same spiel on every podcast and it is always terrible and seems predicated on credulous hosts who know little about the history of either country and certainly not enough about both who just use his lame analysis to engage in this current fad of Western self-pity. Instead of reform and asking hard questions let's just throw soft balls at Dan Wang's cheap analysis that anyone with a Wikipedia level education would know is absurd so we can keep propping up the same impoverished China v America tropes. Why don't we demand better honestly we should be ashamed that one guy can just come up with such a dubious thesis suddenly appear everywhere and no credible debate or pushback once. The only thing Dan Wang convinces me of is the poverty of the modern intellectual environment.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
canjobear 9mo ago
That’s because engineering degrees were the only thing you could get from college during the Cultural Revolution.
jayseb 9mo ago
The books is amazing too, just finished reading it. Gives you peek into cultural dynamic of both countries: https://insightbooks.app/books/breakneck https://insightbooks.app/books/breakneck
titzer 8mo ago
Minor correction: America is run by pedophiles with a lot of money, who naturally hire lawyers.
- red-iron-pine 8mo ago
  funny how this is getting downvoted when we know now that it is objectively true, with emails and pictures

fuzzfactor 9mo ago

In Houston there is no zoning.

energy123 9mo ago
It's a network effect though, if 80% have zoning then you may as well be a tiny island country. The other issue is minimum wage and workers rights. It should be possible to have Chinese workers making widgets on US soil instead of Chinese soil, for $0.5/hr more than they can make in China. But that's illegal many times over. Then people wonder why manufacturing is dying across the West. If your inputs (labor) are more expensive you can't compete, it's extremely basic. That might be acceptable but at least be honest about the trade-off you've made, and don't pretend you can patch it up with hacks.
- fuzzfactor 9mo ago
  >manufacturing is dying across the West. Died a long time ago and went to hell in handbasket :( >If your inputs (labor) are more expensive you can't compete Houston had always been less expensive than Detroit, LA, Chicago, New England and just about anywhere else in the US for this kind of thing, but it was really the cheapness of the foreign labor that made it irresistible to Wall Street. It had always been that way but didn't really matter until after the value of the dollar had been dropped so low that they had to pay workers what amounted to exorbitant sums while the labor still ended up with less discretionary cash, and that was at the lower-value dollar. You should have seen Houston in 1979 when the Nixon Recession was raging worse than ever, long after he had sailed into the sunset. It was no Pittsburgh[0] but there were still two steel mills and of course one of them was US Steel where they had expanded to the industrial suburb of Baytown Texas specifically because the labor was cheaper than up north. Wall Street took that differential to the bank and lit their cigars with $100 bills :\ Eventually led to champagne and caviar with each round of layoffs. Nixon "opened up" China, but Reagan was not yet here to put the nail in the coffin. I agree it would take a whole lot more unfair advantages just to get closer to a level playing field. The way to real manufacturing growth is to build much higher-value-added products per worker. The difficult problem to overcome is that most of the low-cost raw materials have been coming from China for so long, and the ideal thing would have been coming from more than one place the whole time. But no, the absolute cheapest must be sought. Mexico could have been ready by now but they would have had to do it on their own in an organized way like China and India so it pales by comparison, especially high tech in spite of all the brilliant Mexican engineers and innovators. Lower-cost labor in India might be abundant enough but it'll take a while before the supply chain can compare to what China has built with all the dollars they have had in their hands for so long. [0] Made up for it with oil, as heavy industry goes.

nerdsniper 9mo ago

So, there’s a decent amount of electronics manufacturing in Anhui Province which is pretty far from the well-known hub of Shenzhen. Anhui is generally more known for their mining industry. So, to your query, maybe somewhat? But not strictly.

ProAm 9mo ago

Apple as a company that does not pay taxes should at least invest in the country they are located in. *Designed in Cupertino, Taxes paid no where, profit leveraged in the US

thrdbndndn 9mo ago

Sorry, but this sounds more like a myth, or at least heavily exaggerated. Similar to how Japan often gets romanticized. Organizing the entire chain geographically at the scale you described (inter-city) doesn't bring huge cost advantages by itself. In China labor has historically been cheap, so the transport cost between regions was never the dominant factor anyway. Most industrial clusters in China formed organically over time just like the rest of the world. Aside from some exceptions like mining, there isn't some master plan laying out entire cities as linear supply chains to the ocean It's not SimCity. One thing you're right about is that there is less bureaucratic friction or 'lawyers' in the way when it comes to economic development. For the former, it's because economic growth is THE metric for the government, especially at the local level, so they do whatever it takes to make it happen. For the latter, it's because… well, in China no one sues the government, period. I'm not sure it's a good thing. Disclaimer: I'm Chinese living in China.

Braxton1980 9mo ago
Is the labor cheap in China or are you comparing it US salaries? Can a person working in a Chinese tech factory for a major US company afford a reasonable place to live a reasonable distance, food, some entertainment, and have savings?
- thrdbndndn 9mo ago
  I'm not comparing it to US anything, I'm comparing it to other cost components like raw materials and parts, whose prices are often global. The point is that transportation within China isn't a dominant factor in industrial cost or efficiency. So the idea that major manufacturing cities are laid out like giant assembly lines isn't nearly as important as OP suggests. China still has many advantages over the US in manufacturing. I just don't think this is a major one, even if there's a grain of truth to it.
dubcanada 8mo ago
As a Chinese living in China, you must know the layout of the city does provide logical sense. I've only been once, and I buy stuff from factories fairly often. When I went there I basically went to a mall district where all the furniture was sold, then I went to the tile district to review tiles, I went to several other "districts" that where nothing but that single item. I went to the window factory, which was directly beside more window factories, and directly beside that was the place that extruded aluminum for use. The aluminum they used was produced a up the road in what they called the metal district. You are even saying that "industrial clusters in China" so there is clearly some amount of planning involved. There is obviously benefits to having all of the aluminum factories beside a aluminum producer, and having the shipping/packaging warehouses by the docks, etc. There is some amount of government work at play here, either on a small scale or a larger scale to provide a reason for places to all setup. I've also seen things that just are not possible in North America. Asked for samples of aluminum extrusions and had the die made and extrusion done in a day. Locally it would take months before a sample is at my door. I've sent designs for quotes and get quotes in hours, half the time factory in NA doesn't even reply. And even when it does it's more of a "go away" then anything else. I've seen live video of robotic factories building entire cabinets for housing. There is some amount of rose coloured glasses in this thread. But we cannot deny that China wants business and can get stuff done fast and efficiently. That cannot be said for modern day factories in US or Canada. The work ethic and desire for business are just completely different.

mschuster91 9mo ago

> I can't find the source but I thought I read somewhere that the major manufacturing cities in China are all geographically laid out like giant assembly lines. ... like Factorio, just in real life. > The US can't even zone a residential neighborhood without lawyers and special interests jamming things up for decades through endless impact studies and litigation. A lot of that is to prevent our cities from looking like China did before they haphazardly cleaned up shop before the Olympic Games. Remember all the smog alerts? Athletes being afraid the smog and pollution would impact their performance? > How is it going to compete with a country that can lay out entire cities, organizing the value chain geographically towards the ocean? There's a tool for that, it's called tariffs - basically, make it uncompetitive for manufacturing moving off to a country that systematically undercuts pricing even at the cost of its environment. Unfortunately, the current administration doesn't even have the concepts of a plan on what they want to achieve with tariffs. It's mind boggling to watch.

selimthegrim 9mo ago

You know, I think the bigger issue is Tillman Fertitta scuttling the other UT research campus they wanted to set up in Houston because it would screw up his status as chairman of the University of Houston board or something. I guess Houston’s gonna have to make do with these tech jobs.

bluedino 9mo ago

It's like they mastered Sim City and applied it to real life

fredley 8mo ago
It's like the mastered Factorio and applied it to real life.

brudgers 9mo ago

The US can't even zone a residential neighborhood without lawyers and special interests jamming things up for decades through endless impact studies and litigation. Famously, Houston has no zoning.

ThePowerOfFuet 9mo ago
The downside is that then nothing prevents a fireworks factory, or tannery, or whatever, right in the middle of a residential area. Or, as they say everything is bigger in Texas, why not think big... an oil refinery!
- mr_toad 9mo ago
  A bit of quick searching reveals that Houston does have many building regulations, for example restrictions of hazardous enterprises. It’s just that the regulations aren’t quite as black and white as zoning laws. https://kinder.rice.edu/urbanedge/houston-doesnt-have-zoning-there-are-workarounds https://kinder.rice.edu/urbanedge/houston-doesnt-have-zoning...

coldtea 9mo ago

>I can't find the source but I thought I read somewhere that the major manufacturing cities in China are all geographically laid out like giant assembly lines There was a great article from like 20 years ago - it quoted Jobs too on that. I remember Forbes or something like that, maybe this "“How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work” — The New York Times (Jan 21, 2012)" (cant open it now)

bdelmas 8mo ago

I copied your comment to Gemini Pro and it has some interesting things to say. The link to avoid everybody to do the same query: https://g.co/gemini/share/15fc8eb095a2 https://g.co/gemini/share/15fc8eb095a2

m463 8mo ago

The US used to do this - the piers were next to the warehouses, and the manufacturing was nearby. Nowadays all that infrastructure is now shops and industrial style apartments.