[marianatom]

Meanwhile in China:

- exports plunge by 7.5% in May, far more than expected https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/07/chinas-exports-plunge-by-7po...

- profit tumbles 18% in April https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-industrial-profits...

- chip progress stagnating. Oppo chip design unit completely shut down https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/12/oppo-chip-disbands-phone-c.... Japan stops shipping semiconductor equipments to China https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Tech/Semiconductors/Japan-c.... China is still stuck on 14nm chips.

- multinationals moving supply chains out of China faster than ever. Tesla asks Chinese suppliers to build plants in Mexico (June '23) https://cnevpost.com/2023/06/08/tesla-asks-chinese-suppliers.... BYD make EVs in Vietnam (May '23) https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/chines.... On top of older news this year that Apple wants Foxconn to move out 50% of its production lines from China by 2025. And Dell's production completely out of China by 2027.

China is no longer the "world's factory". It will stagnate for 10+ years, similar to Japan's lost decades, but with worser birth rate than Japan today. It reported 8M babies in 2022, low that was last reached in 1940s.

We've never seen a large portion (25%+) of a large modern economy vanish in a span of a few years. (factories moving out, which decreases downstream economic activities such as real estate and retail).

[mhuffman]

> China is no longer the "world's factory". It will stagnate for 10+ years, similar to Japan's lost decades, but with worser birth rate than Japan today.

idk, Japan seems like it thought the party would go on forever, whereas China does seem to have clear eyes with it comes to world politics (eg. long-term investment in the rest of Asia and Africa).

> We've never seen a large portion (25%+) of a large modern economy vanish in a span of a few years.

Do you recall NAFTA? or the quick rise of China not long after? These are still studied as huge exogenous economic shocks in business schools!

[marianatom]

> China does seem to have clear eyes with it comes to world politics

You're hyping up Xi Jing Ping, who is considered an idiot in most elite circles including Putin, too much. One belt and one road is now considered a failure with Italy, the most prominent member, dropping out of it this year. Most of the countries that took on the debt are unable to pay it back, and China has had to forgive a lot of the loans recently. And no one has aligned US, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Philippines, India, Australia, Nato quite like China in recent years. The most recent focus in G7 was squarely on China.

> NAFTA

with respect to NAFTA, US manufacturing only consisted of 15% US economy in 1994 https://www.stlouisfed.org/en/on-the-economy/2017/april/us-m..., whereas Chinese manufacturing consisted 30% of China's economy today. Also, the difference is, the laborers in US manufacturing moved to other higher paying jobs, as a result, average income went from 25k to 30k in 2000. Whereas what we're seeing now with Chinese laborers is that they're moving back home to countryside to farm (< $1 a day)

[mhuffman]

>You're hyping up Xi Jing Ping, who is considered an idiot in most elite circles including Putin, too much.

I don't really care what Putin says but I do think they are thinking more long-term. Only here and in Europe do people think in terms of election cycles. Don't get me wrong, I am not a Xi fanboy, and I definitely don't want to the US to be like China in general terms, but I just disagree with you. I think they know that the US-centric money flow was capricious and they have been long making plans for when it isn't what it was.

>with respect to NAFTA, US manufacturing only consisted of 15% US economy in 1994 https://www.stlouisfed.org/en/on-the-economy/2017/april/us-m..., whereas Chinese manufacturing consisted 30% of China's economy today.

Now, put those in real numbers and you will see the effect! Also, do you not think 15% of the world's biggest economy taking a fucking as being significant? We had to pivot to service industries after that!

I can tell that you have a hard-held opinion on this and I am not fighting with you, I just think that your original post was not as nuanced as reality.

[AbrahamParangi]

Long term would be recognizing that almost every authoritarian nation is poorer than almost every democracy. Mexico's gross national income is higher than China's on a per capita basis.

[marianatom]

I think you misread my point. My point regarding NAFTA was that US did not actually lose a portion of its economic output when the manufacturing declined. The old factory workers switched to a more profitable job, thus the income increase. In fact, the country was then joined by migrant workers from Mexico because of NAFTA taking away their farming jobs in Mexico. Thus US's economy thrived in 90s.

But when China lose most of the foreign manufacturing jobs, it lost a significant portion of its economic output. Because now these workers just went back home to countryside to farm.

[pas]

pivoting to service economy is a step-up.

there is a lot wrong with starryeyed libertarianism, but free trade with allies is absolutely not in the bad parts.

[euroderf]

By your numbers and those of others, both Eastasia and Eurasia are taking it on the chin. Oceania suffers from sociopolitical rot but the economy is pretty lively.

[AnimalMuppet]

8 million babies for a population of 1.2 billion? Woah. Back of the envelope, that's something like half replacement rate.

[guardiangod]

Not sure where he got his stats from, but 9.56 million sounds about right.

https://news.sina.cn/gn/2023-01-17/detail-imyanfvn6707213.d....

(Figure 3)

2017 - 17.23 million

2018 - 15.23

2019 - 14.65

2020 - 12.00

2021 - 10.62

2022 - 9.56

Note that this is official Chinese gov statistics. Their numbers are known to be untrustworthy.

[AnimalMuppet]

Falling in half in six years? Again, woah. Any idea what's driving that?

[HDThoreaun]

Birth control, expensive housing, covid cultural shifts.

[Aerbil313]

Modernity. The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race…

[uoaei]

With a larger population combined with more of a chance of living past the age of 5, you need fewer births to get the same population growth rate globally. As the world population rapidly urbanizes we will settle into a new normal that will still approach Earth's carrying capacity faster than we can adequately react.

[Aerbil313]

Human population has overshot in 1971[1], what are you talking about? Carrying capacity has long been exceeded, we’re living thanks to the phantom carrying capacity[2].

1: https://medium.com/@CollapseSurvival/overshoot-why-its-alrea...

2: https://www.resilience.org/stories/2005-03-06/dependence-pha...

[lotsofpulp]

I cannot find a source for 8M babies. I see 9.56M births in 2022 for China:

https://www.scmp.com/economy/economic-indicators/article/320...

https://www.statista.com/statistics/250650/number-of-births-...

[marianatom]

Yeah and that's not the crazy part. There's a 50% drop in marriage rate in 2023 compared to 2022.

[spywaregorilla]

Source?

I see marriage rates falling by about 50% over the past decade. But this claim seems unlikely, or perhaps just badly skewed by the seasonality of things.

[guardiangod]

He is probably talking about the "520" Marriage Day. May 20 is a popular national marriage day (due to tradition) and many couples choose to get marry on that day in China.

This year's 520 marriage rate is ~40% of last year's.

https://xueqiu.com/5539280156/251074532

[pphysch]

Despite all these cherry-picked numbers, China's economy will grow by 4-6% this year vs. USA's 0-2%.

https://www.barrons.com/articles/us-growth-gdp-china-economy...

[marianatom]

One government sponsored number, vs multiple numbers pointing to China's economic decline, which multinationals check in order to gauge the real health of China's economy. Multinationals know the real numbers, which is why they're all leaving.

What other numbers don't lie? 20.4% youth unemployment rate https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/29/record-youth-unemployment-st.... 22% drop in daily home sales in 2023 vs 2022 https://financialpost.com/pmn/business-pmn/chinas-april-prop.... Yuan losing 7% value against dollar https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/13/investing/china-covid-yuan-us.... and on and on.

[hmm37]

You do realize that the Yuan losing 7% against the dollar meant that export numbers looked like it dropped by a similar percentage in May right? The reports are all using USD to show such a huge drop. In reality if the reports were to use RMB, exports only dropped .8% meaning they are exporting roughly as much as before in raw numbers.

Right now China isn't pouring money into industry because it frankly never needed it. With the opening, more money is now being pumped into reopening services in China, that's why when you look at the PMI for services it's much higher, because people are taking money out of industry (unless it's high tech oriented) and parking it in services. People aren't necessarily consuming more, but it doesn't mean they aren't using much more services than they previously were, and eating out more, etc. GDP doesn't only look at industrial output.

BTW. All the other numbers you cited in the other articles were also provided by the Chinese government.

[pphysch]

Those numbers are from the IMF and CBO, not CCP.

[NLPaep]

Where? The first link leads to here, and the second link is behind a paywall.

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-q1-gdp-grew-45-yy-...

>On a quarter-by-quarter basis, GDP grew 2.2% in January-March, data released by the National Bureau of Statistics showed, compared with expectations for a 2.2% increase and a revised 0.6% rise in the previous quarter.

[dirtyid]

It's also fundementally omitting how much PRC has entrenched itself as global factory than ever.

PRC exports to US/west near record highs while trade with global south have exceeded western bloc. The only reason export decline notable is because PRC exports has increased so spectacularly in the past few years (export value grew from 2.5T in 2019 to 3.6T in 2022) that there's nowhere to go but down when global economy underperforms. Net export value is still up ~40% since 2019 - exports stats can be confirmed bilaterally. PRC exports grew as much in last 4 years (~1T) as it did in decade between 2008-2018 (1.4T-2.4T). Meanwhile US increased imports from "friendshore" countries mirrored PRC increased exports to those countries, i.e. it's tarrif engineering and US import dependence on PRC ultimately still increasing.