Xi fears Japan-led manufacturing exodus from China | Hacker News Reader

Xi fears Japan-led manufacturing exodus from China

asia.nikkei.com

41 points1cvmask14 comments

Japan led? US should be pulling out as well. At least important things. Not only could we see return of manufacturing with a little protectionism (and possibly subsidy), that could turn into a massive wealth transfer back into the shrinking middle class. And national security is at stake too when you cannot manufacture components critical to the military or economy domestically, as we're finding out now.

Thanks to COVID19, the Chinese century has been at the very least delayed by decades.

> as we're finding out now.

Well, this has been known for decades.

The issues are:

1) that the US has no policy on anything, whether it's infrastructure, healthcare, trade, rare earths, etc.

OTOH, China definitely has 5 year plans and Belt and Roads Initiatives.

Look who builds maglev trains and new airports.

To drive this point home, Bali, Indonesia has built 2 underpasses in the past 5 years. Both Mountain View and Palo Alto were quoted over $1 billion each to build identical underpasses on Central Ave. and can't afford it. The only word that comes to mind is "shameful."

Here's one of them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydM51KeTIS0

2) in the corporate world, decisions come down to a single cell in an Excel. That's how you get software outsourcing, open office plans, etc. - the person ultimately calling the shots, the CFO, is a bean counter using a one-dimensional number.

A bit tangential, but it should be interesting to see how things go at one of the world's largest tech companies, now that a bean counter/process guy is at the top.

US cannot be leading exodus now because it has allowed entire industries to be completely outsourced and now suffers from having no specialists in many important areas.

I predict that, thanks to Covid, China is going to gain because it was able to return to normal in 3 months while Europe and US will take most of the year at the very least.

Also China is beginning to be a world unto itself, sustainable in every aspect. They have large portion of world's population as a market, have mature all important industries, they even have their own internet.

Yes, they will be hurt if other countries pull back their production but no, they won't suffer as much as you may think. Countries that don't have all their industries, rely on export to balance the import.

If a country is self sufficient and it does not need import cutting entire export means that they are still balanced with regards to foreign trade.

Looking at China's imports (https://oec.world/en/profile/country/chn/), there doesn't seem to be many positions that the China can't fulfill internally. Probably raw materials like crude oil, gas, iron, copper. I am pretty sure they could ramp up the production of ICs and tools pretty quickly.

I would agree mostly with the analysis apart from the public sentiment toward China, and the latent nationalism existing in China itself. There are stress line that are coming to the front between EU/US and China partnership due to the political handling of covid-19. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a significant turn to protectionist measures on both side of the Atlantic coming, and specifically targeted at China.

This is not sentiment towards. It is a statement of fact.

Don't get it wrong. Chinese people are not free. However, Chinese government knows what it wants and is effective in its actions.

If you love freedom, turning away from factual reports and downvoting unpalatable opinions isn't going to help.

Just to hammer down the point: https://www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/testimonies/SFR%20f...

The UK government has already started hinting at this.

In reality it will probably take as long as it took to outsource everything to China and in the process we will all feel a little poorer.

You are very right though it might be unpalatable to a lot of Westerners. By letting go of "Manufacturing", they did it to themselves. It is a fact and no amount of wishful thinking can negate it.

My hope is that after this crisis, each country sets up its own "Manufacturing Base" and the idea of "Globalization" is rethought and redefined. We need a federation of relatively self-sufficient countries working together for mutual benefit so that we can weather any future similar crises.

maybe now the US can start reducing their trade deficit

It's a nice idea, but I think the final statement is overly-optimistic.

The U.S. has bungled its response to this (ongoing) crisis much harder than China did, and I think our economy is going to suffer more. For all the corruption, China's bureaucracy displayed a reasonable level of competence in tackling the issue once they actually got rolling.

The U.S. response continues to be a complete circus of organizational failures, lack of leadership, careless misinformation by our own chief executive, and a free-for-all of independent state action (and inaction).

>The U.S. has bungled its response to this (ongoing) crisis much harder than China did, and I think our economy is going to suffer more. For all the corruption, China's bureaucracy displayed a reasonable level of competence in tackling the issue once they actually got rolling.

You are making a huge mistake trusting the Chinese numbers. Just as cases here are drastically underreported, there were a host of documented reasons to suspect China's numbers. They currently have a northern region locked down now and you can be sure without a vaccine or prophylactic there will be another wave.

Edit: BNO newsroom earlier today tweeted that China is revising the death till in Wuhan by 50%, claiming what "rumors" have been saying since January, that people couldn't make it to the hospitals. The tweet is a partial truth. It neglects the fact that China locked down it's citizens in a manner which effectively kept them from going to hospitals. The revisions have only just begun. There was a paper out in I think February which talked about orders of magnitude underreporting of numbers.

https://mobile.twitter.com/bnodesk https://mobile.twitter.com/BNODesk/status/125098653627288780...

I'm not saying I trust their exact numbers, I'm saying China is the only country right now with open Apple stores. No matter how much they fudged the numbers, China has undeniably stamped down the crisis and gotten much of their economy back online. Very few other countries can say that right now, and the U.S. is the one poised to have the longest and biggest crisis out of all of them.

By downplaying the numbers they make all other countries less aware of the real risk and make them react too late.

Then these countries are incompetent if they have no intelligence whatsoever, and think like "Oh gee, if China says that it must be true". These countries could see china building emergency hospitals in Wuhan. That should have been signal enough. They could have learnt from the total lockdown imposed in Wuhan. If their only excuse to reacting pathetically is that the Chinese numbers didn't look bad then frankly they have no business running a country.

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