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by coldtea 2925 days ago
>This is propaganda. China is mostly an uneducated factory nation who will be crushed by automation

LOL.

First, that's the same argument they were making back in the day for Japan (the "uneducated factory nation", the "copy cats", the "cheap knockoffs" etc). Funny how that turned out.

Second, labor costs are not the relevant factor, so automation wont matter much to bring factory jobs back. It's all about the supply chain:

http://www.businessinsider.com/you-simply-must-read-this-art...

https://www.economist.com/free-exchange/2012/01/23/apple-and...

Not to mention that Chinese factories can and will also invest in automation.

Third, "uneducated factory nation"? Where does one get that information from, the John Birch Society Bulletin?

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/feb/18/china-great-...

http://bruegel.org/2017/08/china-is-the-worlds-new-science-a...

Oh, and as sibling says: "the latest PISA findings from 2015 would have China scoring higher than the US on math (10th vs. 25th) and science (6th vs. 40th), but slightly lower than the US on reading (27th vs. 24th)."

It's easy to make fun of previously underdeveloped nations that started from an uneducated and less advance point 30 and 60 years ago, but the problem is that they can catch up (like Japan and South Korea, an insignificant economic wasteland after WWII, did). Especially if their rivals are on the decline themselves. Rome didn't last forever.

1 comments

Look at Japan, their economy has been stagnant since the 80s, propped up by government market manipulation. They are almost completely irrelevant. Which innovative companies does China have that aren’t complete rip offs of American ones? Where is the penetration by those companies into the USA?
>Look at Japan, their economy has been stagnant since the 80s, propped up by government market manipulation. They are almost completely irrelevant.

They're still "the third-largest in the world by nominal GDP and the fourth-largest by purchasing power parity (PPP). and is the world's second largest developed economy".

I'd take that level of irrelevance any day.

Besides that, Japan's situation doesn't tell us much.

>Which innovative companies does China have that aren’t complete rip offs of American ones?

DJI would be a good example. They're the Apple of drones, and are doing great in the gimbal business as well. No American company comes even close.

There are others of course, and more will emerge. Already they make phones on par with the best of the Android world.

Besides, which innovative companies did Japan have before the 70s that weren't complete rip offs of American ones? And which innovative companies did the US have (before the mid-19th century) that weren't complete rip offs of European ones? And yet here we are now...

Over Half of the Japanese stock market is owned by the government bank. The whole economy is a shell propped up by quantitative easing financial policies.

Great drones. We have google, they have cheap manufacture produced drones.

I keep hearing “China is coming”, “they will have more”, ....

It never comes to fruition. That have a massive population supported by manufacturing wages that will all lose jobs when automation takes over.

> It never comes to fruition.

In a number of gaming sectors, it's already done. Steam is majority Chinese players, mobile gaming revenue has been from China. Steel (until the tariffs) has been dominated by cheap Chinese offerings, killing off a bunch of suppliers in the last 15 years. I dunno what you're talking about, but reality doesn't care what you think anyway.

>Over Half of the Japanese stock market is owned by the government bank. The whole economy is a shell propped up by quantitative easing financial policies.

Well, different countries use different strategies. Half of the US economy is based upon the country's military might, and (through it) imposing favorable deals, bullying, controlling oil and trade routes, IP laws and so on (plus "quantitative easing financial policies" and trillion dollar bailouts, subsidies and handouts to Detroit and co). I'll take Japan's "quantitative easing financial policies" any day...

>Great drones. We have google, they have cheap manufacture produced drones.

Well, they also have their own Google: Baidu.

Heck even Google's page-rank style concept was pioneered by a Chinese (the founder of Baidu) before Google was a thing:

"A small search engine called "RankDex" from IDD Information Services designed by Robin Li was, since 1996, already exploring a similar strategy for site-scoring and page ranking.[18] The technology in RankDex was patented by 1999[19] and used later when Li founded Baidu in China.[20][21] Larry Page referenced Li's work in some of his U.S. patents for PageRank." (Wikipedia)

>That have a massive population supported by manufacturing wages that will all lose jobs when automation takes over.

They have a massive internal market, 4 times the US in population, strong growth, have been the world's largest economy back before (for many centuries), have a much older and more resilient culture, have the tech and the factories, and they will own the future, as the tired Europe and US give up the spirit.

Rome didn't last forever either...

>I keep hearing “China is coming”, “they will have more”, ....

Well, I don't know for how long you "keep hearing that", but if you hear it for e.g. the last 2-3 decades, then it's also accompanied by massive Chinese growth those last 2-3 decades.

So it's not like you merely hear it without anything coming out of it. On the contrary, it's one of the most well supported statements.

If you mean why they haven't already taken over the lead, well, it took US nearly a century, plus two whole world wars that torn and beat Europe up, to get to be the world player that it has been the last 70-80 years.

The world economy is not like the tech market, to expect something to go from start to domination in a few years...

> Half of the US economy is based upon the country's military might, and (through it) imposing favorable deals, bullying, controlling oil and trade routes, IP laws and so on (plus "quantitative easing financial policies" and trillion dollar bailouts, subsidies and handouts to Detroit and co). I'll take Japan's "quantitative easing financial policies" any day...

Bluntly, this is BS. A bit of the US economy, yes. Half? Not even close. But you seem to have an ax you want to grind with respect to the US, and reality would not serve you as well as hyperbole.

>Bluntly, this is BS. A bit of the US economy, yes. Half? Not even close.

I'm not talking directly -- like the arms industry and the oil industry and so on. I'm talking about the cascading effect that pumps up and propels the rest.