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by tesseract 3194 days ago
> And their "copy machines" are actually racing against the clock, as more and more factories get fully automated and thus relocated home, not to mention their rising middle class, thus their cheap labor advantage will eventually go away. So when multinational companies will no longer assemble their products in China, what will they copy?

There's more to this than just being a provider of manufacturing services for overseas consumer goods companies wishing to outsource production. China has pursued a policy of forcing Western heavy-industry companies (infrastructure, aerospace, etc.) wishing to do business in China to form joint ventures with domestic Chinese companies which then serve as a means of transferring expertise to the Chinese companies. The Western companies go along with this because it's preferable to being shut out of the Chinese market altogether.

For example, Chinese high speed trains were initially based on imported designs (both the Shinkansen and European trains) built by joint ventures between the original makers and Chinese companies. But today China is domestically producing high speed trains using technology copied from those original ones.

2 comments

So you believe China can fully exist as a bubble, selling to China, recruiting only Chinese?
Your views on things are pretty static, China has ups and downs in the river of history, it also had tech flourishing time like in Song dynasty. I guess 40 years ago you would never have a chance to see what China could be now. By the way, Shinhansen also imported a great deal tech from Germany, but what's big deal of it? Why can't China just learn from other countries and build a better and more accessible one? Just like Japan or America did? China now has fully advanced high-speed trains and pushing it to dozens of markets. Including The U.S. You were talking about the policies, those big companies came and made their money without paying taxes, not to mention successfully transferred a lot of polluted industries to China. they got what they deserve. Don't whine about that.