COVID19 and boycotting Chinese made

[thrifty++]

@Jacob and Realperson - yes I was thinking its also likely that lots of the countries where capital gets reallocated wont be western countries also. It looks like apple will be focussing on India. And lots of other companies have already been focussing on Mexico. But I also think that there will be a movement towards more production in western countries also. I think its all going to start getting distributed out in a less uneven fashion, which is a good thing.

I have always wondered why US companies don't manufacture more in Mexico and Canada. Better logistically and safer from a political perspective. Mexico for cheaper manufacturing and Canada for more high tech manufacturing.

I also wonder whether there will be a capital shift of sorts to western safe haven counties. Like NZ and Canada. Microsoft has announced some plans for NZ. NZ would probably be a good place for tech companies and more highly skilled production. Safe, next to no govt corruption and a desirable location for highly skilled workers. Pay is high for low skilled people but it is also very low for highly skilled people compared to the rest of the western world. Also highly ranked for ease of doing business - very business friendly. Although labour laws are quite restrictive here - compared to USA. But then the govt seems prepared to carve out exemptions for specific industries - that's why there is a lot of film produced here and film workers have no employment rights.

[chenda]

China herself has begun exporting industry to low labour cost areas, notably Africa.

How Africa is becoming China's China:

https://youtu.be/zQV_DKQkT8o

And China is bigger than the US and Europe put together, its middle class alone is as big as the whole US population. I can't see western based manufacturers wanting to alienate such an important market.

[thrifty++]

Yes and who knows what the impact of China's increased xenophobia and racism towards Africans is going to have on China's relationships with the continent. It does not seem to have gone down well and most definitely hasn't gone unnoticed https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/04/15/ch ... in-africa/

In recent times it seems China has burned its relationships with every single country on the planet, except North Korea.

[chenda]

@thrifty++ True but that's likely to be a detail of history in the long term, neither Africa or China are going to allow it compromise their strategic goals.

Chinese censors will clamp down on it if necessary, soothing diplomatic words about international solidarity will be made and a few idiots will be made harsh examples of in state media. Much easier to do this in a dictatorship. Africa gets development, China gets even more powerful and its business as usual.

[thrifty++]

@chenda - possibly. But don't know. It could either way. Some of the examples are increibdly extreme. And its ironic China is alleging Africans are carrying disease when it came from China to start

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... Ocean.html

[chenda]

Just to clarify I am not suggesting there is likely not some ugly xenophobia in China which may have diplomatic consequences in the short term, and if the western media narrative is correct (a big if) then they have been slow to address it.

Although in fairness to the Chinese modernity has only arrived in China the last few decades and its perhaps unsurprising that views on such matters as racial equality are a bit old fashioned, to put it politely. Especially an ancient civilisation like China which has long been extremely isolated through its geography, much more so than say India or Iran. Hence it perhaps developed quite an insular character, only intermittently opening up to the outside before closing itself off again. Its been said Rome built an empire, the Chinese built a nation, hence the sort of 'blood and soil' feeling as noted above.

[Alphaville]

@thrifty++

We also have racism and xenophobia in the USA, plus we carried out three centuries of Atlantic slave trade which left a legacy we haven’t fully addressed yet, all in spite of this being “a country of immigrants...”

As for moving production to Mexico (it’s been done for ages) we’re also crazy in our policy towards them. Walls, bad hombres... Of course there is also plenty of racism within Mexico.

So I guess I’ll just stare at the ceiling for a while because I have no answer to the question of who is more virtuous on the “race relations” front or who to boycott on that basis alone.

If we’re going to boycott nations as a whole, @ZAFCorrection’s neorealist position makes more sense as it’s both honest and consistent. Not that I think it would work, due to the way in which global production has become integrated, and US retreat from global leadership, but at least it’s an internally consistent position.

[nomadscientist]

The reality is China hasn't been "America's China" for some time, though people notice it slowly. China is not the country it was 20 years ago or even 5 years ago. China and the US have been leapfrogging one another for the most powerful supercomputer in the world for quite a while. The Chinese computers, unlike the European ones on that list, use a Chinese domestic architecture and internally manufactured chips. That is with Chinese GDP per capita still reported as a quarter that of the United States.

The question of the next years is not from where will America's population source its junk, but will America be able to maintain even its high technology parity, and eventually its military parity. Chinese labour is getting expensive and the factories may return for the wrong reason, the reason Americans can't even contemplate.

[fiby41]

Re supercomputing, It was mentioned in another thread also but this, like space exploration, after a time becomes a question of resource allocation.

use a Chinese domestic architecture and internally manufactured chips.

The technology gap is not that much. After USA refused to sell India super-computing technology, India built its first supercomputer from scratch- hardware, firmware and software- in 3 and a quarter years at a tenth of the price quoted by USA and then sold it to 13 countries at a third of that price.

[nomadscientist]

Sure, Sputnik maybe looked impressive at the time, but did not reflect underlying strength. May be the case here.

But the situations of India and China are not comparable. India has two computers in the TOP500, both low ranked, suggesting an effort to have to a capability but not an ability to lead in that capability or place it in mass production. China has 19% of the total computing power of the list and swaps with the US for absolute largest machine, suggesting comparable ability to lead technologically and a mass production capability.

The USSR quickly failed in the space race once one couldn't achieve firsts simply by dedicating a greater proportion of the GDP to this at the expense of civilian living standards. China appears to have already passed that point with computing, the pinnacle military and commercial technology.

[Alphaville]

India is just playing catch-up right now due to later economic liberalization, but it will get there soon enough.

[ZAFCorrection]

I'm not sure supercomputers are the best benchmark for technological development. They're more for modeling or data analysis (having a good idea) rather than producing physical outcomes. Humans already have mountains of good ideas they haven't gotten around to implementing, so gizmos which are just useful for getting more of them do not seem to be the most important from a technological standpoint.

Maybe some kind of mining gizmos or power transformers. Even standard computers are more significant since automation has been pretty important.

[thrifty++]

China threatened world peace and the takeover of Taiwan if USA were to cut Chinese imports. I can imagine global companies would be worried with having capital sitting in China right now. https://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/a ... d=12332135

[thrifty++]

It looks like nothing has changed at the wet markets. So lets look forward to pandemic 2.0 in a few years time. https://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/a ... d=12332330

[slowtraveler]

Any good recommendations for a laptop that isn't Chinese made?

8-16gb ram, 128-256gb ssd, dual boot, 11-14" screen.

[nomadscientist]

I'm not sure supercomputers are the best benchmark for technological development. They're more for modeling or data analysis (having a good idea) rather than producing physical outcomes. Humans already have mountains of good ideas they haven't gotten around to implementing, so gizmos which are just useful for getting more of them do not seem to be the most important from a technological standpoint.

Maybe some kind of mining gizmos or power transformers. Even standard computers are more significant since automation has been pretty important.

The military relevance of supercomputing is cryptography and cryptanalysis. It isn't that hard to blow up a given thing any more, but it is hard to know what to blow up and where exactly it is at a given moment. The Chinese may already have the edge, since it's much easier to spy on the US than to spy on China, but since it isn't being continually tested we don't really know. Is there a more physical outcome than being blown up? And since mostly conflicts are not even resolved with force any more, superior information can mean the Chinese defeat the US in a conflict the public aren't aware has even happened.

The technological relevance is that it's really hard to do, and hard to do across multiple separate disciplines: mathematics/pure science, applied science, technology, manufacturing - the Soviets were generally better than the US at #1, comparable at #2, but much worse at #3 and #4, which is why they failed to get a competitive computing capability.

[thrifty++]

Interesting that China has some strong computing innovations. However USA has been channelling a lot of resource into China especially in recent times in the technology sphere. That looks to change now. But, generally speaking, I think China's lack of innovation for its huge population and wealth is utterly appalling. You cant even drink water from a tap there still.

China might have a large middle class but fortunes rise and fall. And China's fortunes now look set to fall to me to be honest for a multiplicity of reasons. Globalisation has brought us to a system where we have all the design and engineering and innovation happening in developed countries, such countries sending production and investing capital in China, China producing a lot of the products, then selling the products to the rest of the world and buying lots of commodities from countries like NZ, Australia, Brazil and Russia to produce the products. However, the China link in the chain can, and is being, increasingly shifted elsewhere. The other links in the chain seem harder to shift. It sounds like China is trying to replicate this system with Africa, but where is China going to fund the purchases of this from as the rest of the world retreats from China and while China has also been stuffing its relationships in current day times with the African continent. And where is the innovation from China to bring this about to a high standard of quality.

Asides from having large economic wealth China has very little ingredients of a successful country. It still has not developed democracy after all this time and remains an autocratic communist state. There is very little innovation and development. See the utter lack of nobel prizes. Despite the huge population and wealth, China does not even have a scratch of a fraction on the west. There is an ongoing present day widespread lack of human rights. Not just externally but internally towards its own people. There is a widespread lack of respect for animal welfare. They still hoard dogs in cages and slaughter for food FFS. Its fashionable, popular and acceptable to carry around live turtles inside bottles of water on your key chain FFS. It seems like in China people will eat any animal they can get their hands on with no regard for how that comes about. And we all know about the wet markets. There is a continuing lack of hygiene standards. These two issues alone were the cause of this whole pandemic on the most generous view of what caused it. It has still failed to engage in environmentally safe and sustainable production methods and ravaged its own environment as a result. It always scores at the bottom of most success metrics. In terms of things like corruption and transparency. Inequality (although I know USA isn't that great for that particular one either). China has no free press whatsoever and high levels of corruption. No one even really knows what is going on there at all much of the time. Its sphere of influence on global politics has been widely considered negatively. This has been magnified in recent times. With China going around the world issuing threats to various places, trying alienate them, when in fact its going to alienate China. Even the implicit threat of conflict to the USA in response to the threat of cutting off Chinese imports shows how dependent China is on exports to USA alone. Let alone exports to everywhere else, and the outsourcing and funding that has been fattening China up for decades.

Never before has there been such a fattening up of one country by using it as the worlds production house. A very small scale example could be Japan. However, Japan undertook a wholesale application of western systems, from democracy to the financial system to the adoption of human rights standards. And there was absolutely nothing like the scale of outsourcing to China. Not even remotely. Japan was much more homegrown. Japan quickly went on to be self sufficient, functioning and successful. In a holistic sense, not just economically. Japan embraced innovation and developed its own quality brands and engineering and innovations. China has none of those things. China's economy is an empty shell which is reliant on globalisation to keep it functioning. I don't think China is self sufficient as a successful country at all.

In terms of pandemics being something that has arisen out of USA too this was like 100 years ago. And from what I understand the 1918 flu origin is not certain, it may have been USA or it could have also been China. Im actually inclined to think it was probably China also given the patterns of things.

There is already a reversal of production out of China. This is increasing and I think its only going to increase more rapidly over time. With everything going on recently. China wont be able to maintain economic success on its own I think. Its corrupt autocracy will probably turn inwards and militarise on its own people which is what tends to happen with communist autocracies. While democracies look after their own people and focus outwards.

I hope that going forward, that lessons are learnd from the globalisation experiment and how while there are some pros to mass production at one site there are also many cons. It would be better if production is spread out more evenly around the world, or at least in fewer locations, otherwise the same problems may recur. I think its better to have less things, of higher quality at a higher price. But at the moment, it feels like anywhere other than China seems like the best thing for the world. For now.....

And if I am wrong about all this and China is going to increase in power, how do you feel about China being in the place of power in the world? Does that seem like a world you want to live in? There are so many other compelling reasons to boycott made in China anyways, even if you don't have a problem with that.

[George the original one]

And if I am wrong about all this and China is going to increase in power, how do you feel about China being in the place of power in the world?

About the same as I feel about Russia and Saudi Arabia and India and junior league Trump being in places of world power. China is one of the club and it has always been too big to go away, to become nothing, no matter what we wish.

[thrifty++]

@GTOO - fair enough. Im not as concerned about Russia, but that definitely be next in line of worry. Im not as worried about India. China has been given more of any chance than anywhere on the planet with everything being handed to it on a plate and it has still been cocked right up royally. Just because you keep kissing a frog doesn't mean it will turn into a prince. Despite its economic ascendancy, not much in the way of positive development has come with that. Just a lot of negatives.

Im not so worried about Trump as I don't know that he has as much power as is perceived. He has power with his words which is the scariest part as he is so bad with them. He does not at all think before he talks. I do like the current government policies on returning some manufacturing to the US though and on taking a hard line approach on Chinse imports, rather than just being complacent about them.

[white belt]

@thrifty++

Although I don't consider myself a panda hugger, I do believe your views are lacking some nuance. I'm American so I'm going to highlight some comparisons to my home country since I am most familiar with it out of all western countries.

You make some valid points and agree with the points about human rights violations, lack of free press, and corruption. But I'm going to highlight a few that I think are partial truths or at least lack some context:

There is very little innovation and development. See the utter lack of nobel prizes. Despite the huge population and wealth, China does not even have a scratch of a fraction on the west

There is plenty of innovation and development in China. I don't think Nobel Prizes are a good measure of innovation for an entire country and the process is highly politicized anyway. Keep in mind, that in the USA most innovation in STEM fields is driven by foreign grad students (the majority of whom come from China) since native born Americans have little interest in the subjects. Now it is true that there is a long history of Chinese companies stealing intellectual property related to American companies, and then using it to develop a knock off version. Nevertheless, there is still lots of innovation organic to China.

I think comparing the democratization of Japan to China is not exactly apples to apples. The US physically destroyed most of the infrastructure in Japan, along with killing a lot of it's population, and helped to rebuild Japan because we were too afraid to let Japan maintain their own military and we felt maybe slightly guilty about using nuclear weapons on civilian populations.

On the other hand, the USA mostly left China to fend for itself against Japanese aggression during WWII. We then backed the probably lesser of 2 evils but still corrupt Jiang Kai-Shek regime during the Chinese Civil War and that didn't exactly go over well. We then fought against Chinese forces during the Korean War. Then we broke off all communication with China for ~25 years when they went through significant political and social upheaval to include the deadliest famine in history. And now Westerners are surprised China doesn't want to adopt ("morally superior") Western ideals?

There is a widespread lack of respect for animal welfare. They still hoard dogs in cages and slaughter for food FFS. Its fashionable, popular and acceptable to carry around live turtles inside bottles of water on your key chain FFS. It seems like in China people will eat any animal they can get their hands on with no regard for how that comes about. And we all know about the wet markets. There is a continuing lack of hygiene standards. These two issues alone were the cause of this whole pandemic on the most generous view of what caused it. It has still failed to engage in environmentally safe and sustainable production methods and ravaged its own environment as a result

Dog meat in China is not nearly as widespread as Westerners believe and consumption has been declining for the past decade. Dogs are quite popular as pets in China and many Chinese people refuse to eat dog meat. Also keep in mind that the dogs that are eaten are raised as livestock for that express purpose, not Fido from down the street. Most westerners have no problem eating pigs, chicken, lamb, ducks, and rabbit, all of which are also sometimes kept as pets. Pigs may be more intelligent than dogs and they are hoarded in cages for slaughter in every western country.

You are correct that Chinese cuisine incorporates a wide variety of animal products from a wide variety of sources. This is due to a high population density since ancient times, which also meant frequent famines. There is way more food waste in western countries since western cuisine generally does not incorporate nearly as many parts of the animal. I do agree that given the COVID19 outbreak, I'd like to see an end to wet markets and exotic animal consumption.

I'd hardly say the US has engaged in environmentally safe and sustainable production. More like we just exported the unsafe practices to poor countries who now do our manufacturing for us. The US also has the benefit of 1/4 of the population of China on a comparable geographical area. That means we have a little more buffer against environmental effects. With the rollback of EPA regulations I have a feeling we will see a return to unsafe air quality and water quality in the USA (although we will be slow to realize it since the organizations that test such things are being defunded). There are places in the USA that do not have safe drinking water (e.g.: few people drink tap water in northwest Ohio because of fertilizer runoff from nearby farmlands). But more so, clean drinking water is no easy task for enormous populations, hence why India and China have such issues with it.

China's economy is an empty shell which is reliant on globalisation to keep it functioning. I don't think China is self sufficient as a successful country at all.

I'm pretty sure every economy in the world apart from North Korea is dependent on globalization to keep functioning. The US certainly is not self-sufficient.

And if I am wrong about all this and China is going to increase in power, how do you feel about China being in the place of power in the world? Does that seem like a world you want to live in?

China has always been in a place of power. It just was dealing with domestic strife for much of the 19th and 20th century, which led it to temporarily take a step back from the global stage. They are the superpower that stands in opposition to open democratic interests in east Asia and the Pacific, just like Russia is a superpower that serves as a foil for the democracies of Europe. And just like it does in NATO, the USA's military force projection is one of the things that can keep China in check. From the USA perspective, we should be working closely with our allies in the region like South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, Australia, NZ, etc to counter some of the rising Chinese influence.

I hope the USA doesn't enter into a cold war like we did with the USSR, but that may already be inevitable. China is much more of a formidable foe economically and militarily than the USSR ever was. I'm a believer that realpolitik is a better arrangement.

In an ideal world, everyone would be free and we'd end war and world hunger and blah blah blah. But that's not the world we live in. China is asserting it's influence as a superpower, just like the USA and British Empire did for hundreds of years. I don't think boycotting them is going to make much of a difference, but that's just my opinion and fully support an individual's choice to do what they want. I don't want to live under Chinese authoritarian control obviously.

If you want to learn more about China, I encourage you to check out the Sinica podcast. They produce informative content on a range of topics related to contemporary China.