“There’s going to be less steel demand. There’s going to be less cement being used — less glass, for example. That impacts within China heavy industrial areas that really produce these raw materials.”
No cocktail party can go on infinitely apparently. Some really interesting and profound dynamics at play here.
Heard that yesterday in comments too. I don't have any particular insight. But this kind of first order viewpoint feels reductionist.
Steel & other construction suppliers have been ongoing investments, distributed wide & far across the world. Many of these suppliers & adjunct industries might not make it demand dries up too quickly. It's hard to predict what higher order effects really are.
It's already had spillover in Canada with the layoffs and restructuring at Scotiabank [0].
We'll probably see something similar to the late 80s and early 90s when foreign assets owned by Japanese companies and funds were sold off to better balance their sheets.
It'll probably be somewhat similar to the experience Japan, SK, Malaysia, and Thailand had in the 90s imo. China today is in a similar boat to SK, Malaysia, and Thailand back then anyhow.
With the right leadership and investment in human capital, it can pull an SK, else it's "stuck" like Thailand (not really a bad thing - the average Thai in 2023 has a better QoL than the average Chinese in 2023).
> With the right leadership and investment in human capital, it can pull an SK
or it uses the temporary economic might to coerce other countries to allow them to solidify their current advantage, as the first step in empire building?
Highly unlikely because the world of Infrastructure Development Financing (the closest thing to empire building without guns and soldiers) is a highly competitive one.
The American, EU, Australian, and Japanese funds get the best projects, and the remaining ones (mostly in LDCs) go to upstarts in the space like China, Korea, Taiwan, Israel, Türkiye, Saudi, UAE, South Africa, India, Qatar, Thailand, Pakistan, Indonesia, Egypt, Russia, Mexico, and Brazil.
Most OBOR projects failed because they were projects most other lenders like the ADB or WB wouldn't touch because of their risk profile.
There's a reason why when SK was in a similar position as China today in the 90s and 2000s, they went all in on investing in China and ASEAN. Hell, the Japanese did the same thing in South Korea in the 70s and 80s.
China doesn't really have a similar option. Most of the stable ASEAN members (Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, Philippines) prefer Japanese, Korean, or Singaporean FDI, and the only other China-esque market for China to potentially invest in is India, which has made operating a Chinese owned subsidiary a living hell while rolling a red carpet to Japanese, French, Singaporean, Gulf (excluding Qatar), American, and Israeli investors.
Africa is not a country. It's a continent with 54 countries which in turn have dozens of provinces/states/subdivisions each.
Also, France, Brazil, US, UK, Italy, Türkiye, Saudi, UAE, India, Pakistan, Qatar, Egypt, South Africa, and Russia all have stakes and investments all over Africa that outcompete Chinese investment (depending on the country).
It's on a country to country basis. Africa is big.
That said, "European investors remain, by far, the largest holders of FDI stock in Africa, led by the United Kingdom ($60 billion), France ($54 billion) and the Netherlands ($54 billion)" [0].
China's OBOR tends to be infamous largely for it's infeasibility. It's the IDC equivalent of a subprime loan, as most OBOR projects in Africa tended to be those that larger FDI contributors decided to pass on.
There is a regional segmentation aspect as well. Africa is large and some regions saw outsized Chinese investment (DRC for example), but in other regions there was much more competition. For example, most FDI in the Horn of Africa (Djibouti, Eritrea, and Somalia) and North Africa came from Europe, Türkiye, and the Gulf States.
In the former British colonies in East Africa (Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, South Sudan), Indian Ocean (Seychelles, Mauritius), and Mozambique Chinese companies were directly competing with long established Indian and Pakistani conglomerates due to the centuries old existing Asian business community in the region.
In Southern Africa China would be competing with South Africa along with smaller players like India.
I can't speak for the rest of Africa, but I've seen China having a significant impact in West Africa and the DRC.
If you dont make children, who will be the soldiers building that empire?
Im in China myself, I dont see blood thirsty imperialists, plotting land grabs all around, I see an exhausted aimless populace going on in a desperate forward escape towards a childless greying future, surrounded by foreign healthcare labour, led by panicked politicians shouting meaningless patriotic slogans against the wind as the boat sink further and further
My wife, whom I tried to discourage from buying property, entered negative equity on her 40-year studio mortgage she s not allowed to rent out as half her family already emigrated to the UK to reconvert from high paid service jobs to low paid blue collar jobs because at least there they can raise kids.
I dont get why americans are scared of us: we're just as scared of them. It's not going well here.
> I dont get why americans are scared of us: we're just as scared of them.
Agreed. I'm not pro-CCP in any way, shape, or form, but the rhetoric and jingoism coming from politicians in both the US and China is stupid, and will end up causing an accidental escalation. Look at the whole balloon fiasco. Relations really need to normalize or the world is in a world of hurt.
I also blame a lack of English and Mandarin fluency in China and US respectively for causing this issue. The average Chinese or American doesn't get a chance to see life on the other side, so people end up building orientalized images.
Also, ime on the Hill, most of the people making China policy weren't Asian American nor had strong experience with Chinese (or Asian in general) culture on the ground. A lot of this was due to imo discriminatory hiring practices that prevented people with "ties" to a specific region from becoming a specialist for that area.
After 2008, most news bureaus shut down their foreign offices [0], and whoever is left tends to stay within a bubble around the main bureau in that country, while sourcing news from freelancers.
In addition, when you can't see or understand social media in another language and on an entirely different ecosystem of platforms, you end up getting a warped view of the world.
You can’t just call the billions of people in China CCP. And they also aren’t just pro US shills either. Unwarranted or not Chinese in China overwhelmingly support their own government over others, and this is in fact attributable to culture because anyone who is not Chinese is referred to in the language as an “outside country person.”
Your comment also exemplifies the sort of Berlin wall of cultural exchange between the two countries. You refer to the CCP as this sort of opaque not so nice organization but in fact the political system of the two nations are not so different if viewed as a whole system rather than the superficial parts. Sure China has one party with overreaching power over industry and corporations. But when you see the US system as a whole it’s not too different with corporations controlling both parties (you’ll see they often contribute to both Democrats and Republicans). One party, controlling corporations vs corporations controlling both parties. Not much difference in the end.
A lot in the west sort of just have a vague understanding of the workings of Chinese politics, and even less about the day to day life and well being of an average Chinese person. This is mostly due to the fault of China though, limiting cultural exports and making it difficult to get tourism visas for westerners. I’m not sure what that’s about. Chinese have a better understanding of foreign life but probably still a bit lacking in terms of understanding foreign politics. And even though there are a lot of overseas Chinese there’s just way more Chinese people who don’t know about the west apart from pop culture just because there are billions of Chinese (raw numbers).
> I also blame a lack of English and Mandarin fluency in China and US respectively for causing this issue. The average Chinese or American doesn't get a chance to see life on the other side, so people end up building orientalized images.
I doubt the lack of English and Mandarin fluency is a big factor here. The CCP made a deliberate choice to isolate China from the outside world as much as possible.
The crackdown on English only began around 2020-21, yet even in much more laid back times in China there wasn't much cultural exchange outside of the elites.
WhatsApp and FB used to be popular for a hot second (and still were in Xinjiang and Tibet until crackdowns in 2016-18), and it used to be easy for non-Chinese nationals to join WeChat or SinaQQ until 2017-19, yet most American commentators wouldn't go on there to get a feel of discourse on the other side, or go to a Tier 2/3/4 city, while Taiwanese, Korean, and Japanese tourists, journalists, and businesspeople would.
People forget that most Asian Americans would could bridge the gap tend to be on the younger end (10s-30s) but most decision makers are in their 60s-70s. It's the same issue across the Pacific in China as well.
While it's important to respond to these threats with a credible show of deterrence, realistically speaking not many people think China can or will even try to take Taiwan anytime soon, if ever. Invasion by sea was hard even before we had missiles, satellites, and radar - it now appears almost impossible and has not been attempted at scale since WWII. Never say never I suppose, but I don't personally believe China will ever try to invade Taiwan in the traditional sense, they're just not that stupid.
Of far greater concern is their increasing belligerence in their "sphere of influence" including the south china sea and surrounding island chains.
The problem is that everyone was saying the same sort of thing about Russia and Ukraine right up until the first tanks started to roll over the border.
I know the situations look superficially similar - big state rattling its sabres at smaller state, then actually going through with it - but when you dig deeper, they're not really comparable.
There's more than 100km of sea between Taiwan and China. Not China (nor anyone else) has anything close to the blue water amphibious assault fleet it would take for an effective invasion force to cross it. It would take multiple years to build such a fleet, impossible to hide, and while they built it Taiwan and her allies would assemble the world's largest anti-shipping missile arsenal. During the hours it would take to sail across, every single one of those huge, slow-moving, landing ships filled with thousands of men and megatons of materiél would be targeted with dozens, maybe hundreds, of missiles apiece. I doubt a single ship would make it even halfway.
Or forget amphibious assault, say China tries to go airborne. An even longer period unmistakably building an unprecedented heavy cargo aircraft fleet. An even longer period for Taiwan and her allies to build her already impressive air defences into an impregnable shield. Again, not a single aircraft makes it even over Taiwan's territorial waters. In fact, once war is declared and it's game on, it's a valid question if any of these large, unstealthy, slow cargo aircraft even survive long enough to be shot down over water.
The Russian experience has indeed been eye-opening, but not in the direction you assumed. Developments in missile technology have totally changed the game. Even today, the vastly superior Russian air force cannot fly over ukrainian territory. The Black Sea Fleet has been driven away - and Ukraine does not even have a navy! And even given their massive advantages in size and military strength, and the 100x easier task of invading and resupplying over land, it's far from clear that Russia will prevail.
No, you can't really compare the two. Russia could always have invaded any of their neighbours if they decided to. China literally can't invade Taiwan, not if you assume even the most basic preparation and competence of herself and her allies. The best they could do is perhaps a blockade, and hope for capitulation. There are pretty much no options for a traditional invasion that do not, with rather high confidence, lead to the fastest, most deadly, most expensive, and most total military defeat in history.
All of this in my own non-professional opinion of course, but I'm not completely uneducated on the topic. There's more - far more - information laying things out much better than I ever could, I encourage anyone overly concerned about an imminent conventional war over Taiwan to seek it out.
Nope. The US gave China most favored nation status and free trade for 40 something years. Instead of pushing China away, the US locked arms with them and reintroduced them to the world economy on favorable terms. Then ignored decades of malfeasance by China. (Exchange rate fixing by Chinas central bank. Unfair trade practices moving production from the US to China. And now, propaganda on US soil.)
The crosshairs are up because China has made threats and become a threat to world peace.
Edit-If I could send one message to China it'd be this:
If you feel so threatened by the US and extension the West, then focus on fixing your own internal problems. “Just walk away.” Stop saber rallying towards war. You can already purchase all the resources you could ever need or want over the global markets. For example, you just built up enough residential housing and areas to house all of your citizens. The globe would surely continue that trade even today if you just worked along as an economic superpower. If you're confused what will make your citizens happy, ask them. The world isn’t to blame for it’s existence.
Yes, 'just walk away' from international policy and leave the United States to control global affairs, what a totally reasonable position for China, one of the most populous and powerful nations on earth.
The United States turns the weak into allies, and it's allies into enemies. We gave Russia $180 billion in today's currency after WWII. After the collapse of the USSR, the US was the one to welcome Russia into the World bank and IMF. After 2001, Russia was widely considered our closest strategic partner in the war on terror. [1] Now our reckless expansion of NATO has led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Russians.
We practically created the Taliban and ISIS, or at least gave them the tools and circumstance to be lethally effective. We created the circumstance for the Iranian revolution, the Cuban revolution, countless others that have hurt us since.
Of course we embraced China, we're a python looking to smother them.
I agree on the Isis point, but the 'reckless expansion of Nato' talking point ought to die. NATO wasn't expanding at all before Russians invasion of Ukraine. The last 'expansion' was France rejoining the integrated commandment in 2008. It was even shrinking, with a lot of tension concerning financing and boots on the ground. Also, it wasn't really clear if Turkiye wanted to stay in long-term (pre-covid at least), because of the tensions with Greece and France. There were movements to leave at least part of NATO in at least France and Germany. Who were becoming close Russia allies within NATO.
Ukraine couldn't have joined NATO as long as it was in a civil war anyway. I'm pretty sure most non Ex-Varsovie-pact NATO nations would've voted against anyway (sweet Russian gas).
This was a war decided by Putin because he could do it.
The war was decided because Putin had no choice. America was openly and brazenly interfering in Ukrainian politics.[1] What possible point could that have? Why groom an Ukrainian government unless it is going to be leveraged? The expansion of U.S. influence directly against Russia's weak underbelly is the expansion of NATO I reference, because it portends Ukraine's adoption into NATO.
See Washington Post 2004 [2], and leaks of the Nuland transcript in 2014 [3]. They tell the same story. The U.S. has potentially always intended to renege on our stance at the end (pause?) of the Cold War.[4] Even if agree that the U.S. never promised to enlarge NATO, Putin's repeated warnings that he views U.S. adventurism in Ukraine as a provocation were clear. Personally I see the rationality of his stance. [5]
Putin is reacting the the same way Biden would if China moved nukes to Cuba. Those are the stakes our interference in Ukraine threatens in his view. No wonder Russia is spending hundreds of thousands of lives to forestall it.
This statement from Yanukovych upon his resignation is telling:
On 14 February, Yanukovych had said: "I want to say that I was incited, and I'm incited to use various methods and ways how to settle the situation, but I want to say I don't want to be at war. I don't want any decisions made using such a radical way." He called on all politicians to refrain from radicalism and to understand that "there is a line that shouldn't be crossed, and this line is law".[6] A statement made in regard to his circumstances but I wonder if his government hadn't fallen, would Ukraine would be at war now.
Ultimately I do not justify or condone Putin's invasion. Neither do I justify or condone the U.S.'s involvement in Ukraine post USSR. Insofar as we are arguing about root causes to the war, the 2021 international environment seems to rival the national entanglements that precipitated WWI. Blaming Putin or NATO totally is both too much and too little.
Most of the world, not just Americans, are angry at the Chinese government for releasing a virus that killed millions worldwide, and debilitated millions more via long covid and post covid effects like loss of smell and taste. A virus that killed their loved ones and their heroes.
Most of the world, not just Americans, are scared of the Chinese governments' utmost focus on nationalism and military in the last 2 years, in exchange for economic stability. At its ability to build warships at 20 to 40 times faster than United States. At its ability to reinforce Russian military and its war against a nascent democracy in Europe.
And you see, some of the world are annoyed that the Chinese, despite 1.2B large, cannot take down a mere 100M CCP party members - members that have brazenly started to oppress people like yourself with each passing day. Zeroing out your bank account. Saddle you with fines and bogus taxes. Murdered your reform hero Li Keqiang last week and kept you quiet.
Thank you for this perspective. Coming from a naive place - why is china childless? I know there was a "one child policy" many years ago and I don't think it's there now - why aren't people having kids?
Here in the west we obviously have low birth rates too, having to do with erosion of gender roles and family values and woke excuses like "it's bad for the environment." I don't imagine those factors to be in play in China - what is?
I think it's a similar reason to the west's low birth rate : women have more choice and therefore, a larger portion is choosing to have kids later in life (or are finding it more difficult to get a partner, as they require one that surpasses themselves in earning/status etc).
I think you will find that rural areas of china has a higher birth rate than urban areas, as the opportunities in rural areas are fewer. But as more and more people move to urban areas for economic prosperity, the same birthrate will befall them just like in western advanced economies.
Low birth rates are happening because no one has enough money for kids and a place to house them even with two working parents. Not because of "woke excuses" and "erosion of gender roles". Correlation does not imply causation.
Try giving every couple in America a 5x raise and a free house and watch a ton of kids be born the next five years.
Your argument is similar to saying "no one buys houses anymore because everyone is obsessed with tiny houses and van dwelling". No, they are obsessed with these things because it's the only thing they have any chance of affording.
If you split up the wealth concentrated in the top 1%, so we have an economy more like the 1950s, every family is about 2.5 million dollars richer. That's a house, only one spouse working, maybe a vacation house, two cars, and several kids. Sounds like what life was like in the 1950 right? It wasn't the woke boogyman after all, it was unions and labor getting a fair share of their efforts.
Instead we have people living with roommates and parents trying to save enough money just to survive.
This nonsense that no one is having kids because of "family values" and "morals" is billionaire propaganda to distract everyone from the fact that they took all our money, and we need unions to get it back. Not more church, not getting rid of woke (whatever that means).
Unions, we need unions and strong labor protections to get our money back from the billionaires who took it inch by inch for the last 70 years. [1]
Agree with many of your points, but to make the 84+ million families in the US richer by $2.5 million each would require more than 200 trillion dollars. (Current GDP is around $25 trillion.)
Good point, it seems the top 10% owns 100 trillion [1], so spreading that to the remaining 74 million families would only result in a net increase of 1.2 million per family. I must have found an inaccurate source for the previously stated 2.5 million.
Math now corrected, I still want my extra 1.2 million back.
Rich families do have more kids than working poor families in all western nations.
If you're a poor, 2 person household in a city, you have two main choices (all other choices means leaving the city you live in) :
- Work and stay poor, but comfortable enough. This means maybe getting enough money on the side to buy a big appartement then start a family at 40-45 yo (20 years ago you had the same choice, except the age was 30-35. It's worst in more expensive cities).
- Try to get on welfare and have kids asap. You'll have to live in a worse area, with less disposable income, you'll be a bit hungry sometimes, but it might be worth it. If you have family/support system in the area whose reputation can protect you from the worse, it's all good (hence 2nd and 3rd gen immigrants have more opportunities to make this choice, as their support system is often stronger than 5th-Xth gen immigrants or native Americans).
Do you have kids yourself? Are you a low-income worker? How much do you have each months after paying rent+utilities+food? Because I remember clearly my parents earning less than that cost, and trying to do calculations to avoid downgrading to a smaller house. They couldn't avoid it and I shared a room with my brother until I was 16, when I joined a 'boarding school' (closest translation I could find, but it was public, free and not at all like Anglo boarding schools).
It's important to consider social nets. The poor don't have children in China, regardless of the existing Chinese social programs. These programs favor the working class and penalize children (who produce nothing). The younger poor practice varying degrees of Tang ping (Lying Flat) to survive, with the amenities their peers share, and that doesn't work with children. Interviews with single women in China are largely in Chinese (as you would expect) and the answers were economic related 80% of the time in 2019. No, I don't have a Chinese whitepaper to point to. There's just no evidence to the contrary, since it's been the trend for a number of years.
----
It's also important to consider the pollution. Acid rain, thick soot smog, polluted city water wells, and unbelievably poor food prep/regulation are all commonplace. This has impacted fertility rates across the board, but especially in females.
The Chinese population is roughly 1.2:1 male to female, under the current 3-child policy enacted ~2016.
The HDI of Thailand in 2023 is 0.802 while that of the PRC is 0.768.
The HDI of the poorest region of Thailand (Northeast Thailand/Isan) is 0.780. The only provinces in Mainland China that have a comparable HDI are Zhejiang, Liaoang, Guangdong, and Jiangsu. Every other province of China has a lower HDI than the poorest province of Thailand. The only provinces in China that can match Thailand's HDI are Zhejiang, Jiangsu, and Guangdong yet still lag behind Bangkok region.
The average life expectancy in China still lags by 1-2 years compared to Thailand.
The median income in Thailand is around $7,000 [0] versus around $4,000 [1] in China
> How is that? China has overly concentrated wealth, basically?
Kinda. The Chinese development story is amazing. China basically went from undeveloped in 1990 to middle income by 2020. In 1 generation that is an amazing transformation. Yet, the low hanging fruits of reform and development have largely been harvested.
Now comes the hard part - building a welfare system, reforming business and taxation law, tamping down on corruption, investing in human capital.
Thailand, South Korea, and Malaysia were all in a similar position in the 1990s during the Asian Financial Boom (caused by Japan's stagflation) and the subsequent Crash. South Korea was able to develop by working on the hard part above for a generation, but internal poltical strife in Thailand and Malaysia caused them both to fall behind their peer.
It takes around 2-3 generations to actually go from undeveloped to developed. Some countries can do it in 1.5-2 generations, but then they are still stuck with jurisdictional bad practices (SK, Israel, and Poland are notable examples).
Just a minor nit on the provinces, you excluded Beijing, Tianjin, and Shanghai which have province level status and almost 60 million in population combined, close to Thailand's 70 million, and a weighted average HDI of 0.87.
Heterogeneity is and perhaps will always be a thing for China, and part of the question is if the poor parts have any low hanging fruit left to mimic the success of the earlier-developed and now high HDI areas, or have those fruit withered by now.
I left Beijing, Shanghai, and Tianjin out due to the fact that they are governed differently than provinces, as they are under direct administration of the State Council and they are almost 100% urban. This makes them a bad comparison with Thailand as a whole. At a micro level, it might be interesting to compare BKK versus Beijing/Shanghai/Tianjin but Thailand allows free movement and domiciling, so it's not a great comparison.
> the question is if the poor parts have any low hanging fruit left to mimic the success of the earlier-developed and now high HDI areas, or have those fruit withered by now
It's a tough question and depends province to province. The provinces around Manchuria are probably all tapped out, but there might be some opportunity left in Guizhou, Yunnan, Sichuan, and Guangxi, but local and mid-level governance in China (like other middle income countries) sucks.
I have written a lot about this in a previous life, but I'd rather not write a whole Econometrics white paper on HN
True! This is well outside of the original point, but Beijing and Tianjin are interesting cases and perhaps useful for regional aggregates because they are essentially black holes that have taken GDP and capital out of their surrounding areas, explaining some portion of the neighboring provinces' underperformance. Kind of like how New York state would look very different without New York City maybe?
This can be seen first hand with Beijing+Tianjin versus Hebei.
Those 2 cities were under direct State Council control so it was easier to push economic reforms versus a largely rural province like Hebei, plus they were close enough that it made sense for anyone half ambitious in Hebei to leave for the big city than to stay back.
This is what happened in NY State as well with NYC and IL with Chicago. It's called the primate effect in economics.
It would be interesting to compare Beijing+Hebei to Shanghai+Zhejiang+Jiangsu. I believe the primate effect works the same way, but Hebei is significantly poorer most likely due to Beijing getting too many preference in policy making. (e.g. to mitigate the air pollution in Beijing let's shutdown factories in surrounding area)
There's been some research into this in China (comparative development was in fact the late Lee Kequiang's speciality).
The issue is, research into stuff like this and converting it into actionable policy is becoming difficult, as mid and lower level civil servants don't want to deviate from a literal definition of policies or their mandate as administrations have become much more vindictive due to the economic slowdown. Research like this ends up stepping on people's toes.
In the archives of a respectable Econ and PoliSci department and Outlook Archives on the Hill from at most a decade ago. I left that space to return to Tech PM and Entrepreneurship because I also studied CS, nerded out about technology strategy, and didn't have a trust fund to afford DC on a staffer's salary.
If interested, the Stanford Center on China's Economy and Institutions, the China Guiding Cases Project at Stanford Law, the Becker Friedman Institute for Research in Economics at UChicago, and Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab at MIT have all been working on the Rural-Urban Divide problem in Developing Countries. Chinese Policymakers tend to work with Stanford and Indian Policymakers tend to work with UChicago and MIT.
Papers and books published by members of these centers would teach you all that you need to know about Developmental Economics (or at least enough for a pre-doc).
Thailand's GDP per capita was 7,066.19 in 2019. China's is 12,556.33. However, the Chinese GDP number is widely known to be inflated[1]. Even Federal Reserve has weighed in on the question[2].
Thailand is not exactly a free place, but the political leadership isn't using economic growth reason for their continued existence and then setting annual targets for every province and city.
But what probably really makes up the difference is the purchasing power parity[3]. If I'm reading that right, Thailand has a PPP of 3x China. That will more than make up for any noise in GDP, population numbers, or GINI coefficients.
I will repeat this a million times on HN until I die - GDP PER CAPITA AND GDP PPP PER CAPITA IN ISOLATION ARE NOT RELEVANT METRICS TO USE FOR HUMAN CAPITAL DEVELOPMENT.
They are productivity metrics (as in how much shit can country X produce versus country Y). Per Capita literally means total population, so GDP Per Capita is (Total Production in USD) / (Total Population).
Yet we all know there is no society in the world where every man, woman, and child earns the same exact amount of money.
Use a mix of Gini coefficient, median income, health indicators, education indicators, etc to track development.
Where are you getting this? I'm no economist, but based on a simple search and data from wikipedia [1], your number seems wildly incorrect.
> However, the Chinese GDP number is widely known to be inflated
And BIS (Bank of International settlements) notes [2] "There are studies that contradict these results and find that the official data is roughly correct and may even understate the "true" economic growth (e.g. Holz, 2006a, 2006b; Clark et al., 2017a, 2017b; Perkins and Rawski, 2008)."
GDP is just one number that is inaccurate everywhere, it's more of a 'pulse'.
There has been a general vibe that America's infrastructure is old and decrepit. An alternative way to look at it is the USA doesn't build something until it's needed, and you don't know it's needed until people are complaining that the existing situation is bad. Additionally, every piece of infrastructure that is built needs to be maintained or it will decay.
Sure, not every airport in America is shiny and new, but if you can land there safely then it is in good working order. Why build a new one just to one-up a communist dictatorship, wasting tax dollars?
This is the fundamental problem with centrally planned economies. The malinvestment is insanely high, and while building new airports and high-speed rail gooses the GDP for a bit and makes for great politician PR, if no one actually needs this stuff then it's simply a huge waste of money. White Elephants will be stampeding all over China in the coming years.
It really feels like we can't have nice things anymore. Seattle goes way over budget and time on all its transit projects, to the point that it just feels like we can't get anything done anymore. In contrast, China builds subways and rail lines for a reasonable price, even if they aren't always needed.
My wife's hometown (Chenzhou Hunan, 4.5 million, although just 1 million urban) just got an airport, so no more flights to Changsha or Guangzhou and then a 1-2 hour HSR connection into the city. I guess it seems a bit pointless, because HSR made the lack of an airport completely reasonable, but what do I know. But there are definitely enough people to justify an airport, like that airport in Guizhou...it serves 6.6 million people...so in 10 years they might think they didn't build it big enough.
> It really feels like we can't have nice things anymore.
Economists talk about the middle-income trap, but I feel there’s another trap in developed economies. The economics of low-cost, high-skill labor that made the public and private architecture of the past (my small city of around 70,000 people has a gorgeous post office that was built in the early 1900s in a grand neoclassical style) so comparatively extravagant and beautiful just doesn’t work today.
Blame doesn’t lie with the high-skilled working class for not wanting to work for what would amount to poverty wages, but at the same time shareholders and city council meeting-goers refuse to pay the correct price to build beautiful things anymore. It’s a cycle that nobody wants to (or can) give ground on.
That’s BS. Very little of the cost of these projects is labor actually doing the work. Most of it is planning, admin, and opaque costs nowhere near labor costs to subcontractors.
If you believe that’s the case why aren’t you founding a disruptor to the construction industry with high-skilled, highly-paid labor? Should be easy to eliminate those “opaque costs” and undercut all of your competition, right? Easy money.
Hahaha, the money is going to the folks playing the games with procurement and management. My skill is actually building things. Which is completely uninteresting to all parties involved in that mess. Often actively avoided, actually, as it tends to ruffle feathers.
Similar to Beltway bandit type software work.
That isn’t going to change until there is clear motivation by taxpayers/constituents to actually get something done quickly that doesn’t suck, and they can agree on what that is. Which isn’t going to be anytime soon.
In the mean time, plenty of folks happy to sit back and cash paychecks ‘helping’ the various entities.
A lot of cost savings come from just producing things in volume. The Chinese may be way over-building the infrastructure, but they're building so much that their industry is quite good at it. Contrast that with the US where these infrastructure projects are relatively uncommon and the industries that support them are small and high cost. If you have to keep an industry alive on only a handful of projects each decade then those projects are necessarily going to be expensive, probably outrageously so.
Yep, that makes sense. Seattle can’t get enough firms to bid on projects, and there aren’t enough civil engineers to go around (the ones that exist are retiring), kids these days see computer science as the only way to make money since we’ve been underpaying civil engineers…etc…
All your points are true, yet remember that China has over 4x the US population and a higher overall population density. Also, if your wife is from the PRC, you obviously know how the CCP will ram through any project they deem necessary, regardless of what the locals think.
Construction is expensive in the US because the cost of living is expensive, primarily due to continuous inflation over the past 60 years. To my knowledge, the majority of construction costs are worker pay and worker health insurance plans, not equipment and building materials. China's cost of living is still low, so worker pay stays relatively low, and though I know almost nothing about the Chinese healthcare system, I can't imagine their healthcare costs are comparable to the US.
I am genuinely surprised an urban population of 1 million people just got an airport in 2023.
Construction is expensive because in large part we became a society of NIMBYs, especially when compared to other countries with high labor cost. At the same time, we're also wasting money on unnecessary infrastructure.
Labor costs are manageable by itself. But the sheer ineptitude, obstructionism, excessive goldplating, and changing your mind every five minutes is going to balloon project costs, especially when they're not routine affair.
At the same time, we're adding parking lots and expanding and adding additional roads. They're not really needed and contributed to excessive pollution, urban decay, and maintenance issues.
Setting aside the rest, NIMBY's are part of why we don't have projects like the Three Gorges Dam that displaced over a million people from their homes.
Sure, a lot of it is just wankery, but a certain amount of input from the people who will be harmed by social projects is a good thing.
Doesn't prevent road expansion, rampant parking lot construction, and urban sprawl. They're only NIMBY against certain projects. Some environmental destruction are more acceptable than other.
Hmm. That's not inaccurate, though it's too pessimistic to be constructive.
Certain Americans are convinced that living in a dense urban environment is a necessary way to live, and they're quite vocal about increasing population density. As it happens, many people who live in those cities, particularly the locals, disagree. But see, that's the thing: the locals are content with the current state. In my own experience, the main energy for change in the majority of non-US cities comes from transplants.
Everyone thinks they're the protagonist in their story. A simple solution for more space is to move to a small town, fill a niche, and build community, yet many people aren't willing to make that sacrifice, particularly if your family has deep roots in a certain region.
My experience living in Beijing for 9 years tells me more about the CPC than anything. They replaced a freeway bridge (三元桥) overnight once, that was an experience to see. But more to the point, our productivity should be higher for the higher pay, but it isn’t. We’ve stagnated in construction for some reason.
It just opened in 2021, not 2023, not a huge diff. But one million people is considered a small city by Chinese standards.
I guess if you consider (optimistic) 10% occupancy rates a Boom Town, then - yeah - maybe there aren't any Ghost Towns in China.
Kangbashi cost $161B. Forest City cost $100B and it'll probably be a decade before they get the funding to finish it, and then probably a decade after that before it gets to 25% occupancy (optimistic).
Who knows how many other $20B+ investments will be sitting at <20% occupancy for decades - and at least the ones in China are unlikely to ever get higher than that (since population is rapidly declining).
Imagine you are China where you leveraged your economy(>350%) on the idea that you're going to be on top of the new world order. but the reserve currency never moves.
Worse yet, you find out that your existence is false. You exist so long as the USA lets you exist. You only have power because of cheap labour, but that isn't true anymore. Chinese labour is more expensive then French labour. Time to move to
Worse yet, Obama and Trump played the same playbook and they decided you are no longer needed. You see the UN calling you Nazis, committing genocide over the uiguyrs. They falsely saw themselves as surrounded, about to be invaded, but the truth of the matter is that the West withdrew. The complete opposite.
Now the PLA is holding a bag of expensive equipment and they don't realize it's not needed, only making the leverage problem worse.
Naturally, real estate is first to collapse.
You also have a pretty bad incel problem in China. They killed their daughters... everytime in history this happened, the country sent their incels to die in war. Cant keep them at home.
So who will it be that China will be going to war with? It's India.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 76.0 ms ] threadNo cocktail party can go on infinitely apparently. Some really interesting and profound dynamics at play here.
Steel & other construction suppliers have been ongoing investments, distributed wide & far across the world. Many of these suppliers & adjunct industries might not make it demand dries up too quickly. It's hard to predict what higher order effects really are.
We'll probably see something similar to the late 80s and early 90s when foreign assets owned by Japanese companies and funds were sold off to better balance their sheets.
It'll probably be somewhat similar to the experience Japan, SK, Malaysia, and Thailand had in the 90s imo. China today is in a similar boat to SK, Malaysia, and Thailand back then anyhow.
With the right leadership and investment in human capital, it can pull an SK, else it's "stuck" like Thailand (not really a bad thing - the average Thai in 2023 has a better QoL than the average Chinese in 2023).
[0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-10-18/scotiaban...
or it uses the temporary economic might to coerce other countries to allow them to solidify their current advantage, as the first step in empire building?
Highly unlikely because the world of Infrastructure Development Financing (the closest thing to empire building without guns and soldiers) is a highly competitive one.
The American, EU, Australian, and Japanese funds get the best projects, and the remaining ones (mostly in LDCs) go to upstarts in the space like China, Korea, Taiwan, Israel, Türkiye, Saudi, UAE, South Africa, India, Qatar, Thailand, Pakistan, Indonesia, Egypt, Russia, Mexico, and Brazil.
Most OBOR projects failed because they were projects most other lenders like the ADB or WB wouldn't touch because of their risk profile.
There's a reason why when SK was in a similar position as China today in the 90s and 2000s, they went all in on investing in China and ASEAN. Hell, the Japanese did the same thing in South Korea in the 70s and 80s.
China doesn't really have a similar option. Most of the stable ASEAN members (Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, Philippines) prefer Japanese, Korean, or Singaporean FDI, and the only other China-esque market for China to potentially invest in is India, which has made operating a Chinese owned subsidiary a living hell while rolling a red carpet to Japanese, French, Singaporean, Gulf (excluding Qatar), American, and Israeli investors.
Also, France, Brazil, US, UK, Italy, Türkiye, Saudi, UAE, India, Pakistan, Qatar, Egypt, South Africa, and Russia all have stakes and investments all over Africa that outcompete Chinese investment (depending on the country).
So on a continental level is China the biggest investor?
That said, "European investors remain, by far, the largest holders of FDI stock in Africa, led by the United Kingdom ($60 billion), France ($54 billion) and the Netherlands ($54 billion)" [0].
China's OBOR tends to be infamous largely for it's infeasibility. It's the IDC equivalent of a subprime loan, as most OBOR projects in Africa tended to be those that larger FDI contributors decided to pass on.
There is a regional segmentation aspect as well. Africa is large and some regions saw outsized Chinese investment (DRC for example), but in other regions there was much more competition. For example, most FDI in the Horn of Africa (Djibouti, Eritrea, and Somalia) and North Africa came from Europe, Türkiye, and the Gulf States.
In the former British colonies in East Africa (Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, South Sudan), Indian Ocean (Seychelles, Mauritius), and Mozambique Chinese companies were directly competing with long established Indian and Pakistani conglomerates due to the centuries old existing Asian business community in the region.
In Southern Africa China would be competing with South Africa along with smaller players like India.
I can't speak for the rest of Africa, but I've seen China having a significant impact in West Africa and the DRC.
[0] - https://unctad.org/press-material/investment-flows-africa-dr...
Im in China myself, I dont see blood thirsty imperialists, plotting land grabs all around, I see an exhausted aimless populace going on in a desperate forward escape towards a childless greying future, surrounded by foreign healthcare labour, led by panicked politicians shouting meaningless patriotic slogans against the wind as the boat sink further and further
My wife, whom I tried to discourage from buying property, entered negative equity on her 40-year studio mortgage she s not allowed to rent out as half her family already emigrated to the UK to reconvert from high paid service jobs to low paid blue collar jobs because at least there they can raise kids.
I dont get why americans are scared of us: we're just as scared of them. It's not going well here.
Agreed. I'm not pro-CCP in any way, shape, or form, but the rhetoric and jingoism coming from politicians in both the US and China is stupid, and will end up causing an accidental escalation. Look at the whole balloon fiasco. Relations really need to normalize or the world is in a world of hurt.
I also blame a lack of English and Mandarin fluency in China and US respectively for causing this issue. The average Chinese or American doesn't get a chance to see life on the other side, so people end up building orientalized images.
Also, ime on the Hill, most of the people making China policy weren't Asian American nor had strong experience with Chinese (or Asian in general) culture on the ground. A lot of this was due to imo discriminatory hiring practices that prevented people with "ties" to a specific region from becoming a specialist for that area.
The CCP just aren’t very nice people.
US politicians are taking advantage of the situation to score populist points at home - but their caution towards China isn’t totally unwarranted.
After 2008, most news bureaus shut down their foreign offices [0], and whoever is left tends to stay within a bubble around the main bureau in that country, while sourcing news from freelancers.
In addition, when you can't see or understand social media in another language and on an entirely different ecosystem of platforms, you end up getting a warped view of the world.
[0] - https://theconversation.com/with-foreign-bureaus-slashed-fre...
when the CCP arrests people for reporting things they dont like, it's no wonder foreign journalists don't want to go there.
Your comment also exemplifies the sort of Berlin wall of cultural exchange between the two countries. You refer to the CCP as this sort of opaque not so nice organization but in fact the political system of the two nations are not so different if viewed as a whole system rather than the superficial parts. Sure China has one party with overreaching power over industry and corporations. But when you see the US system as a whole it’s not too different with corporations controlling both parties (you’ll see they often contribute to both Democrats and Republicans). One party, controlling corporations vs corporations controlling both parties. Not much difference in the end.
A lot in the west sort of just have a vague understanding of the workings of Chinese politics, and even less about the day to day life and well being of an average Chinese person. This is mostly due to the fault of China though, limiting cultural exports and making it difficult to get tourism visas for westerners. I’m not sure what that’s about. Chinese have a better understanding of foreign life but probably still a bit lacking in terms of understanding foreign politics. And even though there are a lot of overseas Chinese there’s just way more Chinese people who don’t know about the west apart from pop culture just because there are billions of Chinese (raw numbers).
I doubt the lack of English and Mandarin fluency is a big factor here. The CCP made a deliberate choice to isolate China from the outside world as much as possible.
WhatsApp and FB used to be popular for a hot second (and still were in Xinjiang and Tibet until crackdowns in 2016-18), and it used to be easy for non-Chinese nationals to join WeChat or SinaQQ until 2017-19, yet most American commentators wouldn't go on there to get a feel of discourse on the other side, or go to a Tier 2/3/4 city, while Taiwanese, Korean, and Japanese tourists, journalists, and businesspeople would.
People forget that most Asian Americans would could bridge the gap tend to be on the younger end (10s-30s) but most decision makers are in their 60s-70s. It's the same issue across the Pacific in China as well.
Because your government keep threatening to start a war in the Pacific over Taiwan and no one is taking those threats lightly.
Of far greater concern is their increasing belligerence in their "sphere of influence" including the south china sea and surrounding island chains.
It seems missiles don’t solve all the things else there would be an “invasion” on going for 600+ days.
I guess war is harder than Internet comments.
There's more than 100km of sea between Taiwan and China. Not China (nor anyone else) has anything close to the blue water amphibious assault fleet it would take for an effective invasion force to cross it. It would take multiple years to build such a fleet, impossible to hide, and while they built it Taiwan and her allies would assemble the world's largest anti-shipping missile arsenal. During the hours it would take to sail across, every single one of those huge, slow-moving, landing ships filled with thousands of men and megatons of materiél would be targeted with dozens, maybe hundreds, of missiles apiece. I doubt a single ship would make it even halfway.
Or forget amphibious assault, say China tries to go airborne. An even longer period unmistakably building an unprecedented heavy cargo aircraft fleet. An even longer period for Taiwan and her allies to build her already impressive air defences into an impregnable shield. Again, not a single aircraft makes it even over Taiwan's territorial waters. In fact, once war is declared and it's game on, it's a valid question if any of these large, unstealthy, slow cargo aircraft even survive long enough to be shot down over water.
The Russian experience has indeed been eye-opening, but not in the direction you assumed. Developments in missile technology have totally changed the game. Even today, the vastly superior Russian air force cannot fly over ukrainian territory. The Black Sea Fleet has been driven away - and Ukraine does not even have a navy! And even given their massive advantages in size and military strength, and the 100x easier task of invading and resupplying over land, it's far from clear that Russia will prevail.
No, you can't really compare the two. Russia could always have invaded any of their neighbours if they decided to. China literally can't invade Taiwan, not if you assume even the most basic preparation and competence of herself and her allies. The best they could do is perhaps a blockade, and hope for capitulation. There are pretty much no options for a traditional invasion that do not, with rather high confidence, lead to the fastest, most deadly, most expensive, and most total military defeat in history.
All of this in my own non-professional opinion of course, but I'm not completely uneducated on the topic. There's more - far more - information laying things out much better than I ever could, I encourage anyone overly concerned about an imminent conventional war over Taiwan to seek it out.
The crosshairs are up because China has made threats and become a threat to world peace.
Edit-If I could send one message to China it'd be this:
If you feel so threatened by the US and extension the West, then focus on fixing your own internal problems. “Just walk away.” Stop saber rallying towards war. You can already purchase all the resources you could ever need or want over the global markets. For example, you just built up enough residential housing and areas to house all of your citizens. The globe would surely continue that trade even today if you just worked along as an economic superpower. If you're confused what will make your citizens happy, ask them. The world isn’t to blame for it’s existence.
The United States turns the weak into allies, and it's allies into enemies. We gave Russia $180 billion in today's currency after WWII. After the collapse of the USSR, the US was the one to welcome Russia into the World bank and IMF. After 2001, Russia was widely considered our closest strategic partner in the war on terror. [1] Now our reckless expansion of NATO has led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Russians.
We practically created the Taliban and ISIS, or at least gave them the tools and circumstance to be lethally effective. We created the circumstance for the Iranian revolution, the Cuban revolution, countless others that have hurt us since.
Of course we embraced China, we're a python looking to smother them.
https://2001-2009.state.gov/r/pa/ho/pubs/fs/85962.htm
Ukraine couldn't have joined NATO as long as it was in a civil war anyway. I'm pretty sure most non Ex-Varsovie-pact NATO nations would've voted against anyway (sweet Russian gas).
This was a war decided by Putin because he could do it.
See Washington Post 2004 [2], and leaks of the Nuland transcript in 2014 [3]. They tell the same story. The U.S. has potentially always intended to renege on our stance at the end (pause?) of the Cold War.[4] Even if agree that the U.S. never promised to enlarge NATO, Putin's repeated warnings that he views U.S. adventurism in Ukraine as a provocation were clear. Personally I see the rationality of his stance. [5]
Putin is reacting the the same way Biden would if China moved nukes to Cuba. Those are the stakes our interference in Ukraine threatens in his view. No wonder Russia is spending hundreds of thousands of lives to forestall it.
This statement from Yanukovych upon his resignation is telling:
On 14 February, Yanukovych had said: "I want to say that I was incited, and I'm incited to use various methods and ways how to settle the situation, but I want to say I don't want to be at war. I don't want any decisions made using such a radical way." He called on all politicians to refrain from radicalism and to understand that "there is a line that shouldn't be crossed, and this line is law".[6] A statement made in regard to his circumstances but I wonder if his government hadn't fallen, would Ukraine would be at war now.
Ultimately I do not justify or condone Putin's invasion. Neither do I justify or condone the U.S.'s involvement in Ukraine post USSR. Insofar as we are arguing about root causes to the war, the 2021 international environment seems to rival the national entanglements that precipitated WWI. Blaming Putin or NATO totally is both too much and too little.
[1] https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/russia-s-ukraine...
[2] https://www.americanprogress.org/article/meddling-in-ukraine...
[3] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26079957
[4] https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-shifrinson-russi...
[5] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/did-nato-promise-not-to-e...
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_of_Dignity
Most of the world, not just Americans, are scared of the Chinese governments' utmost focus on nationalism and military in the last 2 years, in exchange for economic stability. At its ability to build warships at 20 to 40 times faster than United States. At its ability to reinforce Russian military and its war against a nascent democracy in Europe.
And you see, some of the world are annoyed that the Chinese, despite 1.2B large, cannot take down a mere 100M CCP party members - members that have brazenly started to oppress people like yourself with each passing day. Zeroing out your bank account. Saddle you with fines and bogus taxes. Murdered your reform hero Li Keqiang last week and kept you quiet.
Here in the west we obviously have low birth rates too, having to do with erosion of gender roles and family values and woke excuses like "it's bad for the environment." I don't imagine those factors to be in play in China - what is?
I think you will find that rural areas of china has a higher birth rate than urban areas, as the opportunities in rural areas are fewer. But as more and more people move to urban areas for economic prosperity, the same birthrate will befall them just like in western advanced economies.
Try giving every couple in America a 5x raise and a free house and watch a ton of kids be born the next five years.
Your argument is similar to saying "no one buys houses anymore because everyone is obsessed with tiny houses and van dwelling". No, they are obsessed with these things because it's the only thing they have any chance of affording.
If you split up the wealth concentrated in the top 1%, so we have an economy more like the 1950s, every family is about 2.5 million dollars richer. That's a house, only one spouse working, maybe a vacation house, two cars, and several kids. Sounds like what life was like in the 1950 right? It wasn't the woke boogyman after all, it was unions and labor getting a fair share of their efforts.
Instead we have people living with roommates and parents trying to save enough money just to survive.
This nonsense that no one is having kids because of "family values" and "morals" is billionaire propaganda to distract everyone from the fact that they took all our money, and we need unions to get it back. Not more church, not getting rid of woke (whatever that means).
Unions, we need unions and strong labor protections to get our money back from the billionaires who took it inch by inch for the last 70 years. [1]
[1] https://youtu.be/mcgC-kuPEuo?si=KDvDPEYjTZtbqOeM
Math now corrected, I still want my extra 1.2 million back.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_Unite...
If what you are saying was true, rich families would have more kids than poor families in the US and the opposite is true.
The families that had 5/7 kids a hundred years ago were objectively way poorer than the “I can’t afford a kid” crowd today.
If you're a poor, 2 person household in a city, you have two main choices (all other choices means leaving the city you live in) :
- Work and stay poor, but comfortable enough. This means maybe getting enough money on the side to buy a big appartement then start a family at 40-45 yo (20 years ago you had the same choice, except the age was 30-35. It's worst in more expensive cities).
- Try to get on welfare and have kids asap. You'll have to live in a worse area, with less disposable income, you'll be a bit hungry sometimes, but it might be worth it. If you have family/support system in the area whose reputation can protect you from the worse, it's all good (hence 2nd and 3rd gen immigrants have more opportunities to make this choice, as their support system is often stronger than 5th-Xth gen immigrants or native Americans).
Do you have kids yourself? Are you a low-income worker? How much do you have each months after paying rent+utilities+food? Because I remember clearly my parents earning less than that cost, and trying to do calculations to avoid downgrading to a smaller house. They couldn't avoid it and I shared a room with my brother until I was 16, when I joined a 'boarding school' (closest translation I could find, but it was public, free and not at all like Anglo boarding schools).
Not true at all. Please see this data[1] for birth rate by income level (US, 2019)
Lowest income women give 40% more births than the richest women.
The relationship is consistent across income levels. The more you make the fewer kids you have.
[1]https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam...
----
It's also important to consider the pollution. Acid rain, thick soot smog, polluted city water wells, and unbelievably poor food prep/regulation are all commonplace. This has impacted fertility rates across the board, but especially in females.
The Chinese population is roughly 1.2:1 male to female, under the current 3-child policy enacted ~2016.
surprising if true
How is that? China has overly concentrated wealth, basically?
The HDI of the poorest region of Thailand (Northeast Thailand/Isan) is 0.780. The only provinces in Mainland China that have a comparable HDI are Zhejiang, Liaoang, Guangdong, and Jiangsu. Every other province of China has a lower HDI than the poorest province of Thailand. The only provinces in China that can match Thailand's HDI are Zhejiang, Jiangsu, and Guangdong yet still lag behind Bangkok region.
The average life expectancy in China still lags by 1-2 years compared to Thailand.
The median income in Thailand is around $7,000 [0] versus around $4,000 [1] in China
> How is that? China has overly concentrated wealth, basically?
Kinda. The Chinese development story is amazing. China basically went from undeveloped in 1990 to middle income by 2020. In 1 generation that is an amazing transformation. Yet, the low hanging fruits of reform and development have largely been harvested.
Now comes the hard part - building a welfare system, reforming business and taxation law, tamping down on corruption, investing in human capital.
Thailand, South Korea, and Malaysia were all in a similar position in the 1990s during the Asian Financial Boom (caused by Japan's stagflation) and the subsequent Crash. South Korea was able to develop by working on the hard part above for a generation, but internal poltical strife in Thailand and Malaysia caused them both to fall behind their peer.
It takes around 2-3 generations to actually go from undeveloped to developed. Some countries can do it in 1.5-2 generations, but then they are still stuck with jurisdictional bad practices (SK, Israel, and Poland are notable examples).
[0] - http://statbbi.nso.go.th/staticreport/page/sector/th/08.aspx
[1] - http://www.stats.gov.cn/english/PressRelease/202201/t2022011...
Heterogeneity is and perhaps will always be a thing for China, and part of the question is if the poor parts have any low hanging fruit left to mimic the success of the earlier-developed and now high HDI areas, or have those fruit withered by now.
I left Beijing, Shanghai, and Tianjin out due to the fact that they are governed differently than provinces, as they are under direct administration of the State Council and they are almost 100% urban. This makes them a bad comparison with Thailand as a whole. At a micro level, it might be interesting to compare BKK versus Beijing/Shanghai/Tianjin but Thailand allows free movement and domiciling, so it's not a great comparison.
> the question is if the poor parts have any low hanging fruit left to mimic the success of the earlier-developed and now high HDI areas, or have those fruit withered by now
It's a tough question and depends province to province. The provinces around Manchuria are probably all tapped out, but there might be some opportunity left in Guizhou, Yunnan, Sichuan, and Guangxi, but local and mid-level governance in China (like other middle income countries) sucks.
I have written a lot about this in a previous life, but I'd rather not write a whole Econometrics white paper on HN
https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2017/04/16/523632920/...
This can be seen first hand with Beijing+Tianjin versus Hebei.
Those 2 cities were under direct State Council control so it was easier to push economic reforms versus a largely rural province like Hebei, plus they were close enough that it made sense for anyone half ambitious in Hebei to leave for the big city than to stay back.
This is what happened in NY State as well with NYC and IL with Chicago. It's called the primate effect in economics.
The issue is, research into stuff like this and converting it into actionable policy is becoming difficult, as mid and lower level civil servants don't want to deviate from a literal definition of policies or their mandate as administrations have become much more vindictive due to the economic slowdown. Research like this ends up stepping on people's toes.
http://www.kjjb.org/EN/abstract/abstract18771.shtml
http://www.progressingeography.com/EN/10.18306/dlkxjz.2019.0...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187705092...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02648...
If interested, the Stanford Center on China's Economy and Institutions, the China Guiding Cases Project at Stanford Law, the Becker Friedman Institute for Research in Economics at UChicago, and Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab at MIT have all been working on the Rural-Urban Divide problem in Developing Countries. Chinese Policymakers tend to work with Stanford and Indian Policymakers tend to work with UChicago and MIT.
Papers and books published by members of these centers would teach you all that you need to know about Developmental Economics (or at least enough for a pre-doc).
Thailand is not exactly a free place, but the political leadership isn't using economic growth reason for their continued existence and then setting annual targets for every province and city.
But what probably really makes up the difference is the purchasing power parity[3]. If I'm reading that right, Thailand has a PPP of 3x China. That will more than make up for any noise in GDP, population numbers, or GINI coefficients.
[1]: https://www.marketplace.org/2023/07/17/is-gdp-still-a-useful... [2]: https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/regional-economist/s... [3]:
They are productivity metrics (as in how much shit can country X produce versus country Y). Per Capita literally means total population, so GDP Per Capita is (Total Production in USD) / (Total Population).
Yet we all know there is no society in the world where every man, woman, and child earns the same exact amount of money.
Use a mix of Gini coefficient, median income, health indicators, education indicators, etc to track development.
Where are you getting this? I'm no economist, but based on a simple search and data from wikipedia [1], your number seems wildly incorrect.
> However, the Chinese GDP number is widely known to be inflated
And BIS (Bank of International settlements) notes [2] "There are studies that contradict these results and find that the official data is roughly correct and may even understate the "true" economic growth (e.g. Holz, 2006a, 2006b; Clark et al., 2017a, 2017b; Perkins and Rawski, 2008)."
GDP is just one number that is inaccurate everywhere, it's more of a 'pulse'.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)... [2] https://www.bis.org/publ/work925.htm
> Where are you getting this? I'm no economist, but based on a simple search and data from wikipedia [1], your number seems wildly incorrect.
Ah jeez https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/PA.NUS.PPP?locations=TH... is what I was using but I'm by no means competent in this. Was supposed to be citatation 3 but fell off it seems.
Sure, not every airport in America is shiny and new, but if you can land there safely then it is in good working order. Why build a new one just to one-up a communist dictatorship, wasting tax dollars?
In China there are giant airports with barely any traffic to justify their existence https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-07-11/china-s-h...
This is the fundamental problem with centrally planned economies. The malinvestment is insanely high, and while building new airports and high-speed rail gooses the GDP for a bit and makes for great politician PR, if no one actually needs this stuff then it's simply a huge waste of money. White Elephants will be stampeding all over China in the coming years.
My wife's hometown (Chenzhou Hunan, 4.5 million, although just 1 million urban) just got an airport, so no more flights to Changsha or Guangzhou and then a 1-2 hour HSR connection into the city. I guess it seems a bit pointless, because HSR made the lack of an airport completely reasonable, but what do I know. But there are definitely enough people to justify an airport, like that airport in Guizhou...it serves 6.6 million people...so in 10 years they might think they didn't build it big enough.
Economists talk about the middle-income trap, but I feel there’s another trap in developed economies. The economics of low-cost, high-skill labor that made the public and private architecture of the past (my small city of around 70,000 people has a gorgeous post office that was built in the early 1900s in a grand neoclassical style) so comparatively extravagant and beautiful just doesn’t work today.
Blame doesn’t lie with the high-skilled working class for not wanting to work for what would amount to poverty wages, but at the same time shareholders and city council meeting-goers refuse to pay the correct price to build beautiful things anymore. It’s a cycle that nobody wants to (or can) give ground on.
Similar to Beltway bandit type software work.
That isn’t going to change until there is clear motivation by taxpayers/constituents to actually get something done quickly that doesn’t suck, and they can agree on what that is. Which isn’t going to be anytime soon.
In the mean time, plenty of folks happy to sit back and cash paychecks ‘helping’ the various entities.
Construction is expensive in the US because the cost of living is expensive, primarily due to continuous inflation over the past 60 years. To my knowledge, the majority of construction costs are worker pay and worker health insurance plans, not equipment and building materials. China's cost of living is still low, so worker pay stays relatively low, and though I know almost nothing about the Chinese healthcare system, I can't imagine their healthcare costs are comparable to the US.
I am genuinely surprised an urban population of 1 million people just got an airport in 2023.
Labor costs are manageable by itself. But the sheer ineptitude, obstructionism, excessive goldplating, and changing your mind every five minutes is going to balloon project costs, especially when they're not routine affair.
At the same time, we're adding parking lots and expanding and adding additional roads. They're not really needed and contributed to excessive pollution, urban decay, and maintenance issues.
Sure, a lot of it is just wankery, but a certain amount of input from the people who will be harmed by social projects is a good thing.
Certain Americans are convinced that living in a dense urban environment is a necessary way to live, and they're quite vocal about increasing population density. As it happens, many people who live in those cities, particularly the locals, disagree. But see, that's the thing: the locals are content with the current state. In my own experience, the main energy for change in the majority of non-US cities comes from transplants.
Everyone thinks they're the protagonist in their story. A simple solution for more space is to move to a small town, fill a niche, and build community, yet many people aren't willing to make that sacrifice, particularly if your family has deep roots in a certain region.
It just opened in 2021, not 2023, not a huge diff. But one million people is considered a small city by Chinese standards.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chenzhou_Beihu_Airport
Like ghost cities reported a decade ago?
China's population is in decline. The ghost cities are unlikely to become less ghostly any time soon.
a random search yields https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Society/China-s-largest-gh...
I guess if you consider (optimistic) 10% occupancy rates a Boom Town, then - yeah - maybe there aren't any Ghost Towns in China.
Kangbashi cost $161B. Forest City cost $100B and it'll probably be a decade before they get the funding to finish it, and then probably a decade after that before it gets to 25% occupancy (optimistic).
Who knows how many other $20B+ investments will be sitting at <20% occupancy for decades - and at least the ones in China are unlikely to ever get higher than that (since population is rapidly declining).
The Kangbashi was empty only because the "old Ordos city" was supposed to move there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordos_City#Administrative_subd...
Ordos itself had a population was 2,153,638 as of the 2020 census. The planned 1M was not that exaggerated
Worse yet, you find out that your existence is false. You exist so long as the USA lets you exist. You only have power because of cheap labour, but that isn't true anymore. Chinese labour is more expensive then French labour. Time to move to
Worse yet, Obama and Trump played the same playbook and they decided you are no longer needed. You see the UN calling you Nazis, committing genocide over the uiguyrs. They falsely saw themselves as surrounded, about to be invaded, but the truth of the matter is that the West withdrew. The complete opposite.
Now the PLA is holding a bag of expensive equipment and they don't realize it's not needed, only making the leverage problem worse.
Naturally, real estate is first to collapse.
You also have a pretty bad incel problem in China. They killed their daughters... everytime in history this happened, the country sent their incels to die in war. Cant keep them at home.
So who will it be that China will be going to war with? It's India.