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As other comments pointed out, that was always China's plan, the value here is really that when the Chinese overlord annillate the world's industrial competitio

As other comments pointed out, that was always China's plan, the value here is really that when the Chinese overlord annillate the world's industrial competition, they'll have the moral high ground of being out of self-reliance and hostility by western monopolists. Edit: And, that, my fellow keyboard high-minded thinker but powerless corp peons, was also part of the China's plan all along.

fangspire 13d ago
Was it also the Chinese plan all along to annihilate their own birh rate? Was the Great Leap Forward part of the plan too?
- vkou 13d ago
  > Was it also the Chinese plan all along to annihilate their own birh rate? No, that's generally what happens when countries stop being poor. Taiwan, Singapore, Korea, all have similar fertility rates.
  - rmunn 13d ago
    But none of them had a government-mandated one-child policy (maximum, not minimum) for over three decades. That's a pretty major difference between China and neighboring countries.
    - vkou 13d ago
      And yet all of them have an even lower fertility rate than China. On the one hand, you're proving my point. On the other hand, if you think that China's headed for a demographic disaster, so are all of those countries, and your thesis of blaming the CCP for everything... Falls a bit flat.
      - badpun 13d ago
        China has extremely low fertitily rate given that they haven't yet reached the status of a developed country (which Taiwan, SK and Singapore have reached).
        HarHarVeryFunny 13d ago
        Huh? Developed countries tend to have lower fertility rates (i.e. less kids per family) than undeveloped ones. Comfortably off, well educated people tend to put thought into whether to have kids or not. In poor countries people tend to have large families so they can send the kids out to work. Having a high fertility rate isn't "high status" and a sign of a country's progress, but rather the exact opposite. Of course this is separate from this issue of having a shrinking population, which is a sign that your citizens are not optimistic about the future, not a positive thing.
      - ricardobayes 13d ago
        China is headed for a demographic disaster, though. High schools are incredibly packed, middle schools, not so much and primary schools and kindergartens are kind of empty.
        lazide 13d ago
        Everyone is, not just China.
        belowavgiq 13d ago
        Everyone stupid enough to let that happen is. There is a handful of developed countries where this is not an issue.
        lazide 13d ago
        Population collapse? Who, besides Zimbabwe?
        HarHarVeryFunny 13d ago
        It's hard to say that it's stupidity (at least not country-specific stupidity) - it seems that globally, presumably due to the state of the world along many axis, many people are choosing to have fewer children, and it's happening on a large enough scale to have major consequences for things like the size of your tax base, trying to keep your economy growing, demographic concerns over an aging population with no-one to look after or pay for them etc, etc. Different countries are handling this in different ways, with encouraging immigration being the major one. Japan is facing a major lack of workers, with many businesses having to shut down as a result, but have decided to tackle it in a different way relying on advanced robotics as an alternative to immigration. There are very few developed countries NOT having this problem. Most of the population growth is in poorer parts of the world like Africa.
        belowavgiq 13d ago
        Well, if there are >0 developed countries that have solved this (Israel, the GCC, dare I say fairly well-off MENA countries like Jordan, Algeria, Morocco, etc., and to a minor degree Botswana) then this proves wrong the hypothesis that modern hyper-development must inherently mean population collapse. Going purely by the evolution theory and natural selection, having so few children that there is a serious risk a population will disappear in a century or two, means losing. Needless to say, this is stupid. From the entire American continent, to Europe, India more recently, Thailand, China, the Koreas, Japan. Africans, Arabs, and some non-Arab Muslim populations will carry the torch. Much respect for not falling into the trap.
      - inglor_cz 13d ago
        Still, a stupid governmental policy cost them at least 100 million people compared to the expected spontaneous development. Probably more. That is the sort of punishment that omnipotent governments sometimes visit upon their folk. I don't believe that even the CCP itself, in hindsight, considers the one-child policy to have been a good decision. At the very least it should have been ended some 15 years earlier.
        reeredfdfdf 13d ago
        Well, I've been reading on The Economist how China is seriously struggling with youth unemployment right now. Lots of fresh university graduates are sitting unemployed, or doing manual labor. In my home country (Finland) we have had way below replacement birth rates for a long while now, yet youth unemployment is at all time high. The problem with low birth rates is assumed to be that there are less workers to take care of the pensioners. But right now it seems like even the few young workers available often aren't needed anymore, thanks to increasing automation of industries. I predict youth unemployment will be made even worse by AI soon enough. So, why do we need children, if capitalist economies don't need workers? Unemployed people do not pay much taxes to sustain the non-working age population. I believe low birth rates might become a blessing soon enough. It just means less people for governments to take care of when robots and AI take away most jobs.
        maxglute 13d ago
        No, a remarkably farsighted policy that prevented PRC from having to deal with additional 200m-400m subsistent farmers. If anything it wasn't done sooner/aggressive enough. Like you can literally wipe away 200-400m from PRC button quantile and PRC would be net better off due to increase per capita resources and wealth. This hindsight will be historically obvious in 20-30 years when you see the outcome of India with 1.6B people with 1.2B poor, vs PRC with 1.4B people with 400m poor. The drag of having disproportionate, bluntly, worthless bodies is not linear for governance, and it's not because India hasn't tried aggressive family planning of their own, they simply failed unlike PRC. Who very much regards family planning as largely successful demographic management system that enabled proper allocation of resources away from generating peasants to building industry and the largest pool of high end human talent in recorded history, where frankly any tertiary dividend is worth 50 farmers in terms of productivity.
- lazide 13d ago
  Yes, they literally named it the ‘one child policy’. It was just overly successful.
  - peterfirefly 13d ago
    The official one child policy didn't actually have much of an impact. Birth rates had already fallen a lot, despite the official "lots-a-children" policy. The one child policy is gone now but birth rates haven't really moved upwards.
    - nixon_why69 13d ago
      It's debatable and impossible to disentangle from living standards going up, but a lot of the economy is built on assumptions of one child, from apartment sizes to personal transit (ebike can do 2 adults + 1 small child).
    - ricardobayes 13d ago
      Of course it had an impact, if nothing else, a cultural one. It basically eradicated the concept of large families.
      - pixl97 13d ago
        So China has similar family sizes as the US that had no one child policy. It's difficult to near impossible here to determine which counterfactuals would actually hold true. Based on other world wide trends it's very likely that Chinese family sizes now would only be slightly higher than if the policy didn't exist. In the modern world there are just a huge number of different factors working together to decrease family sizes.
    - lazide 13d ago
      Not what I heard from friends who were subjected to it, and their parents. It was insanely disruptive.
      - 13d ago
nixon_why69 13d ago
Eh. Industrial policy in a big country is always the output of politics between stakeholders, anthropomorphizing it to a "guy with a plan", especially an "overlord" looking to "annihilate" is probably getting it wrong. A friend of a friend is married to a member of the national academy of sciences in China. I heard at dinner a few years ago that he had been lobbying for more onshoring of chip production for years before the Nvidia restrictions, and always heard "you're right, maybe next year we'll be able to fund that". Then the restrictions came in and everything changed.
- deleted 13d ago
  [deleted]
- lazide 13d ago
  There are literal 5 year plans, eh?
  - peterfirefly 13d ago
    And they are more about sounding good than about reality. They also affect a much smaller share of the economy than they used to -- which is very good! The original five year plans caused nothing but misery and starvation.
    - lazide 13d ago
      I’m pointing out it’s disenguous to say ‘it’s not like there was a plan’, when there was explicitly a plan with that title on it. Especially if the plan didn’t work out well.
      - nixon_why69 13d ago
        It's disingenuous to characterize "don't anthropomorphize the political process" as saying no planning documents exist as part of that process. And, to the point I was responding to originally, we can check those documents! They don't speak of "annihilating" other countries' industrial capacities.
Woodi 13d ago
> [...] that was always China's plan, [...] they'll have the moral high ground It's a possibility. It is also possible that they will steal yesterday's technology and still pretend to have moral high ground. I do not wish China and Chinees wrong but most probably communism will work as it always do - by faking thing and bringing self-harm to their own citizens.
- eecc 13d ago
  Oef, still kicking the “communism” horse. It’s dead Jim, especially in China it’s dead and buried
- mitxela 13d ago
  In free markets, everyone steals everything they can, and stops everyone else stealing from them as much as they can. This is normal and expected. The ideology says that it will even out and converge to a fair situation.
  - lazide 13d ago
    It’s the same in communism/socialism except people are prevented from stopping everyone else from stealing their stuff, in the name of the ‘greater good’, and if they try to get more than everyone else get guilt tripped into giving it up under the ‘to everyone what they need, from everyone what they can’. Which incentivizes pretending you need a ton, and can give nothing. You think being useful at work in Capitalism is bad? Wait until you are accidentally useful in a communist/socialist economy. There is usually less pretending under capitalism, but people are people, so it all the same stories still play out. People are shitty, if given the chance and influenced in specific ways. Capitalism or not. We’re dealing with the current bullshit in the west because somehow people bought the line that everyone is a good person - and we totally can’t actually see or do anything if we see someone doing something bad! - and we need to always follow ‘the rules’ even when someone bad clearly isn’t. Until we find our balls, good luck.
  - deleted 13d ago
    [deleted]
  - 13d ago
FooBarWidget 13d ago
China's plan to be self-sufficient in semiconductors was a failure before western sanctions, because all the Chinese chipmakers found it too easy to buy western chipmaking equipment or to fab through TSCM. No Chinese company wanted to buy from other Chinese companies. Nobody was incentivized to develop self-sufficiency. "Because the government wants it" was not enough incentive. Western sanctions have succeeded in achieving China's self-sufficiency goals where their own government failed.

fangspire 13d ago

Was it also the Chinese plan all along to annihilate their own birh rate? Was the Great Leap Forward part of the plan too?

vkou 13d ago
> Was it also the Chinese plan all along to annihilate their own birh rate? No, that's generally what happens when countries stop being poor. Taiwan, Singapore, Korea, all have similar fertility rates.
- rmunn 13d ago
  But none of them had a government-mandated one-child policy (maximum, not minimum) for over three decades. That's a pretty major difference between China and neighboring countries.
  - vkou 13d ago
    And yet all of them have an even lower fertility rate than China. On the one hand, you're proving my point. On the other hand, if you think that China's headed for a demographic disaster, so are all of those countries, and your thesis of blaming the CCP for everything... Falls a bit flat.
    - badpun 13d ago
      China has extremely low fertitily rate given that they haven't yet reached the status of a developed country (which Taiwan, SK and Singapore have reached).
      - HarHarVeryFunny 13d ago
        Huh? Developed countries tend to have lower fertility rates (i.e. less kids per family) than undeveloped ones. Comfortably off, well educated people tend to put thought into whether to have kids or not. In poor countries people tend to have large families so they can send the kids out to work. Having a high fertility rate isn't "high status" and a sign of a country's progress, but rather the exact opposite. Of course this is separate from this issue of having a shrinking population, which is a sign that your citizens are not optimistic about the future, not a positive thing.
    - ricardobayes 13d ago
      China is headed for a demographic disaster, though. High schools are incredibly packed, middle schools, not so much and primary schools and kindergartens are kind of empty.
      - lazide 13d ago
        Everyone is, not just China.
        belowavgiq 13d ago
        Everyone stupid enough to let that happen is. There is a handful of developed countries where this is not an issue.
        lazide 13d ago
        Population collapse? Who, besides Zimbabwe?
        HarHarVeryFunny 13d ago
        It's hard to say that it's stupidity (at least not country-specific stupidity) - it seems that globally, presumably due to the state of the world along many axis, many people are choosing to have fewer children, and it's happening on a large enough scale to have major consequences for things like the size of your tax base, trying to keep your economy growing, demographic concerns over an aging population with no-one to look after or pay for them etc, etc. Different countries are handling this in different ways, with encouraging immigration being the major one. Japan is facing a major lack of workers, with many businesses having to shut down as a result, but have decided to tackle it in a different way relying on advanced robotics as an alternative to immigration. There are very few developed countries NOT having this problem. Most of the population growth is in poorer parts of the world like Africa.
        belowavgiq 13d ago
        Well, if there are >0 developed countries that have solved this (Israel, the GCC, dare I say fairly well-off MENA countries like Jordan, Algeria, Morocco, etc., and to a minor degree Botswana) then this proves wrong the hypothesis that modern hyper-development must inherently mean population collapse. Going purely by the evolution theory and natural selection, having so few children that there is a serious risk a population will disappear in a century or two, means losing. Needless to say, this is stupid. From the entire American continent, to Europe, India more recently, Thailand, China, the Koreas, Japan. Africans, Arabs, and some non-Arab Muslim populations will carry the torch. Much respect for not falling into the trap.
    - inglor_cz 13d ago
      Still, a stupid governmental policy cost them at least 100 million people compared to the expected spontaneous development. Probably more. That is the sort of punishment that omnipotent governments sometimes visit upon their folk. I don't believe that even the CCP itself, in hindsight, considers the one-child policy to have been a good decision. At the very least it should have been ended some 15 years earlier.
      - reeredfdfdf 13d ago
        Well, I've been reading on The Economist how China is seriously struggling with youth unemployment right now. Lots of fresh university graduates are sitting unemployed, or doing manual labor. In my home country (Finland) we have had way below replacement birth rates for a long while now, yet youth unemployment is at all time high. The problem with low birth rates is assumed to be that there are less workers to take care of the pensioners. But right now it seems like even the few young workers available often aren't needed anymore, thanks to increasing automation of industries. I predict youth unemployment will be made even worse by AI soon enough. So, why do we need children, if capitalist economies don't need workers? Unemployed people do not pay much taxes to sustain the non-working age population. I believe low birth rates might become a blessing soon enough. It just means less people for governments to take care of when robots and AI take away most jobs.
      - maxglute 13d ago
        No, a remarkably farsighted policy that prevented PRC from having to deal with additional 200m-400m subsistent farmers. If anything it wasn't done sooner/aggressive enough. Like you can literally wipe away 200-400m from PRC button quantile and PRC would be net better off due to increase per capita resources and wealth. This hindsight will be historically obvious in 20-30 years when you see the outcome of India with 1.6B people with 1.2B poor, vs PRC with 1.4B people with 400m poor. The drag of having disproportionate, bluntly, worthless bodies is not linear for governance, and it's not because India hasn't tried aggressive family planning of their own, they simply failed unlike PRC. Who very much regards family planning as largely successful demographic management system that enabled proper allocation of resources away from generating peasants to building industry and the largest pool of high end human talent in recorded history, where frankly any tertiary dividend is worth 50 farmers in terms of productivity.
lazide 13d ago
Yes, they literally named it the ‘one child policy’. It was just overly successful.
- peterfirefly 13d ago
  The official one child policy didn't actually have much of an impact. Birth rates had already fallen a lot, despite the official "lots-a-children" policy. The one child policy is gone now but birth rates haven't really moved upwards.
  - nixon_why69 13d ago
    It's debatable and impossible to disentangle from living standards going up, but a lot of the economy is built on assumptions of one child, from apartment sizes to personal transit (ebike can do 2 adults + 1 small child).
  - ricardobayes 13d ago
    Of course it had an impact, if nothing else, a cultural one. It basically eradicated the concept of large families.
    - pixl97 13d ago
      So China has similar family sizes as the US that had no one child policy. It's difficult to near impossible here to determine which counterfactuals would actually hold true. Based on other world wide trends it's very likely that Chinese family sizes now would only be slightly higher than if the policy didn't exist. In the modern world there are just a huge number of different factors working together to decrease family sizes.
  - lazide 13d ago
    Not what I heard from friends who were subjected to it, and their parents. It was insanely disruptive.
    - 13d ago

nixon_why69 13d ago

Eh. Industrial policy in a big country is always the output of politics between stakeholders, anthropomorphizing it to a "guy with a plan", especially an "overlord" looking to "annihilate" is probably getting it wrong. A friend of a friend is married to a member of the national academy of sciences in China. I heard at dinner a few years ago that he had been lobbying for more onshoring of chip production for years before the Nvidia restrictions, and always heard "you're right, maybe next year we'll be able to fund that". Then the restrictions came in and everything changed.

deleted 13d ago
[deleted]
lazide 13d ago
There are literal 5 year plans, eh?
- peterfirefly 13d ago
  And they are more about sounding good than about reality. They also affect a much smaller share of the economy than they used to -- which is very good! The original five year plans caused nothing but misery and starvation.
  - lazide 13d ago
    I’m pointing out it’s disenguous to say ‘it’s not like there was a plan’, when there was explicitly a plan with that title on it. Especially if the plan didn’t work out well.
    - nixon_why69 13d ago
      It's disingenuous to characterize "don't anthropomorphize the political process" as saying no planning documents exist as part of that process. And, to the point I was responding to originally, we can check those documents! They don't speak of "annihilating" other countries' industrial capacities.

Woodi 13d ago

> [...] that was always China's plan, [...] they'll have the moral high ground It's a possibility. It is also possible that they will steal yesterday's technology and still pretend to have moral high ground. I do not wish China and Chinees wrong but most probably communism will work as it always do - by faking thing and bringing self-harm to their own citizens.

eecc 13d ago
Oef, still kicking the “communism” horse. It’s dead Jim, especially in China it’s dead and buried
mitxela 13d ago
In free markets, everyone steals everything they can, and stops everyone else stealing from them as much as they can. This is normal and expected. The ideology says that it will even out and converge to a fair situation.
- lazide 13d ago
  It’s the same in communism/socialism except people are prevented from stopping everyone else from stealing their stuff, in the name of the ‘greater good’, and if they try to get more than everyone else get guilt tripped into giving it up under the ‘to everyone what they need, from everyone what they can’. Which incentivizes pretending you need a ton, and can give nothing. You think being useful at work in Capitalism is bad? Wait until you are accidentally useful in a communist/socialist economy. There is usually less pretending under capitalism, but people are people, so it all the same stories still play out. People are shitty, if given the chance and influenced in specific ways. Capitalism or not. We’re dealing with the current bullshit in the west because somehow people bought the line that everyone is a good person - and we totally can’t actually see or do anything if we see someone doing something bad! - and we need to always follow ‘the rules’ even when someone bad clearly isn’t. Until we find our balls, good luck.
- deleted 13d ago
  [deleted]
- 13d ago

FooBarWidget 13d ago

China's plan to be self-sufficient in semiconductors was a failure before western sanctions, because all the Chinese chipmakers found it too easy to buy western chipmaking equipment or to fab through TSCM. No Chinese company wanted to buy from other Chinese companies. Nobody was incentivized to develop self-sufficiency. "Because the government wants it" was not enough incentive. Western sanctions have succeeded in achieving China's self-sufficiency goals where their own government failed.