AtticusMatlock said:

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https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/gordon-chang-trump-tariffing-china-worst-possible-time-xi-jinping

Gordon Chang wrote a good opinion piece for Fox today.

Chinese CPI and PPI are both dropping yet China is still reporting 5.4% GDP growth. It makes no sense. It is highly likely their economy is actually contracting. They are in a deflationary middle income trap. Their debt to GDP will push 400% soon.

Xi would have to reverse all of the hardball messaging he's been spewing out to the population for the last decade in order to make a deal, and he seems unwilling to look bad.

The rest of the world doesn't want China dumping their crap on them either.

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Never trust stats that come out of China. People act as if they are being objective and honest which would be funny if it weren't so sad.

nortex97 said:

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…,,,…,,,

Tim Cook explains why Apple chooses China for manufacturing.

It's not cheap labor. It's skill.

Engineering makes up 8% of degrees issued in the U.S., while in China it's 33%. 1 in 3 grads in China is an engineer. pic.twitter.com/fYUiV43YRi

— Zero Fox Given (@zerofoxgiven21) April 12, 2025

…,,,

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Bull*****
There is one reason Tim Cook built plants in China. It does not take 10s or 100s of thousands of engineers to build plants in China, he is lying. I haven't kept up with Apple in over a decade, but Tim Cook is full of bull*****

He did it because of cheap labor. There is a reason Chinese citizens would work in Apple plants and live in company dormitories. What would be considered slave labor wages in the US were above average wages in China.

Part of my animosity towards Business Insider are the endless articles about the terrible conditions @ the Apple plants in China. While by our standards pay was low, but BI ignored the fact that pay & living conditions for Chinese workers was above average.

If I remember correctly, one plant was over a million square feet. Tim Cook made a cardinal sin by putting all his eggs in one basket. China stole Apple's intellectual property and that of others in the design of their chips and hardware. Notable IBM's RISC technology. Recently, Apple designed their own chips and guarantee China has stolen that tech.

There was biggest mistake in Steve Jobs life was naming Tim Cook as his successor. Tim Cook is a major reason I sold my AAPL stock.

edit: added correct link

Interesting 20 minute video. Things in China are not all rosy, not by a long shot.

Well damn, now I am somehow in the position of defending Tim Cook almost. In all seriousness I was in a rush responding above and picked 'not real great' sources, admittedly. I don't want to defend Apple or Foxconn. At all.

But for purposes of argument Nike for example has 500K workers in Vietnam for low labor rate reasons (funny how that seems to follow communist governments?). But unlike Vietnam China does produce a **** ton of STEM graduates on the global scale (more than the other top 10 countries combined).

I suspect that behind the scenes China has leveraged their market size with big US/Euro multinationals to make stuff there, not just APPL, but GE, Raytheon, Siemens etc. That's something folks like the Commies in Vietnam (or Cuba or wherever) can't get away with.

Problems in Shanghai.

nortex97 said:

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Well damn, now I am somehow in the position of defending Tim Cook almost. In all seriousness I was in a rush responding above and picked 'not real great' sources, admittedly. I don't want to defend Apple or Foxconn. At all.

But for purposes of argument Nike for example has 500K workers in Vietnam for low labor rate reasons (funny how that seems to follow communist governments?). But unlike Vietnam China does produce a **** ton of STEM graduates on the global scale (more than the other top 10 countries combined).

I suspect that behind the scenes China has leveraged their market size with big US/Euro multinationals to make stuff there, not just APPL, but GE, Raytheon, Siemens etc. That's something folks like the Commies in Vietnam (or Cuba or wherever) can't get away with.

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I agree with your assessment that China & other countries produce more stem graduates relative to the U.S., no problem there.

• (ETA: Foxconn is a Taiwanese company and would have built the plants anywhere Apple dictated so it is spurious to think that mainland Chinese stem graduates had spit to do with building in mainland China(is my animosity toward Tim Cook showing?)

Tim Cook's decision to locate the plant in China goes back to the early 2000s. I believe China still produces ~50% of Apple's products. Eventually it dawned on Cook and some production was moved to India. Around this time I had sold all but 7 shares, getting ready to retire. Made ~3000% profit on AAPL from ~1999 to ~2016. I still hate Business Insider.

Good for you. Kudo's. I highly respect folks who hold stocks long term despite being up big-time.

None of these Fortune 500 companies are in the least 'patriotic' when it comes to their decisions. It's always pragmatic, which to a degree it is supposed to be.

On population it was estimated that China had about 1;1 bill when the one child policy was enacted and then enforced. The population did not increase after this policy LOL.

I know many that have had forced abortion and then sterilization after having their one child.

It decimated the elites the educated and those living in cities.

In my flock in Japan in the mid 90's it was the norm to abort a child when you were going to school if you were from mainland China, as it would interrupt or could basically derail you getting your degree, this was a big threat to them.

The hopes and dreams of ones family to either lift their lot in life or to get out of China all together were place on the less than 1% of their pop that were actually able to get advanced degrees.

Where there was any population growth at all was in the rural country and among the dissidents.

This one child policy had devastating impact on girls as they were aborted in the millions upon millions, as the family legacy is maintained through the boys. I know a large number of Chinese who aborted girls. so as to have a son.

The number of single child (son) families in China especially among the elite and educated is astounding.

They are not going to be so keen to offer up that son in a war for Taiwan.

A few other notable things of interest.

1. The Chinese are far from homogenous. They are very competitive among themselves.
2. There are far more non communist then communist. They hate and fear the government, In fact there maybe more Christians in China than the US. and even under some pretty heavy persecution, they have grown. There other religions and cults like Falon Gong that have sizeable followings.
3. There a lot of Chinese coming to the US, or other countries, on student visas to GET AWAY from China.

That was the case with the vast majority of my flock in Japan. There were about 5000 mainland Chinese students in Kyoto in 1995, The vast majority of them were fleeing China, many were involved with the Tiananmen square uprising, We had 5 of the leaders in our flock in Japan. The government was looking for them, so they went to where ever they could go, Thousands upon thousands of them are here, Canada and other western countries and they are not in anyway shape or form support of the CCP, in fact the opposite is true.

Over the last ten years I have been actively involved with helping numerous Chinese get out of China and that includes some rather wealthy. Getting funds out of China has been quite difficult for some time now.

The point is that many of the students are looking to help the CCP fall. We saw this when Covid broke out, I knew immediately that it was man made and a scam, (in league with the WHO and the globalist - Gates), Why?

Well, lets; just say I have some pretty good inside intel coming out of there.

94chem said:

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Maybe 500 million? So how many people do you think there are in Beijing? Shanghai? Hangzhou? Shenzhen? Hong Kong? Guangzhou? Chongqing? Harbin? Xian? Chengdu?

Your take on this is about as good as your take on eschatology.

15% of Chinese exports go to the US. They can find new outlets faster than we can start making stuff.

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Watch some Youtube videos of people touring poor countries like India. There are other factories ready to make many of the products China provides

It is funny because the theft is so blatant

Bissell Steam shot. Go look how many copies yall find on this sucker. I am at over 20

https://www.amazon.com/BISSELL%C2%AE-ShotTM-OmniReach-Handheld-Cleaner/dp/B0DCHBC8JJ?th=1

Detmersdislocatedshoulder said:

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china and their economy is a paper tiger. it is so manipulated that it makes a joe biden jobs report blush. if we hold they will crumble.

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Not sure this is remotely true. China is in a better position to suffer pain much longer than the average American....mainly because they'd be required to. We give ourselves too much credit for being able to hold out for any period time. Especially when small businesses are already starting to fall apart because of the tariffs. It also seems easier for those that won't suffer the pain to tell the others to just grin and bear because 'it will definitely work out in the end'.

OPAG said:

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On population it was estimated that China had about 1;1 bill when the one child policy was enacted and then enforced. The population did not increase after this policy LOL.

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So, it looks like their population was roughly 1B in 1980 when One Child was implemented. They moved to Two Child in 2016 and Three Child in 2021.

A 500M drop in population in 45 years is a massive drop assuming the 1B starting point in 1980 was accurate in the first place.

BluHorseShu said:

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Detmersdislocatedshoulder said:

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china and their economy is a paper tiger. it is so manipulated that it makes a joe biden jobs report blush. if we hold they will crumble.

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Not sure this is remotely true. China is in a better position to suffer pain much longer than the average American....mainly because they'd be required to. We give ourselves too much credit for being able to hold out for any period time. Especially when small businesses are already starting to fall apart because of the tariffs. It also seems easier for those that won't suffer the pain to tell the others to just grin and bear because 'it will definitely work out in the end'.

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Yeah, we can vote thr pain away starting in the mid terms

China can eat dirt and see if that helps

nortex97 said:

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94chem said:

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https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/04/15/donald-trump-has-already-lost-his-trade-war-against-china/

Balance, not echo chamber.

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Sure, we could trade editorials behind paywalls from various places if that serves some utilitarian purpose, but I don't see it.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/comment/2025/04/10/trumps-tariffs-have-left-xi-jinpings-china-isolated/

I guess you don't have any substantive criticisms of the CCP, as I expected. I don't want to get into a petty discussion about it, really, and don't particularly care at this point given your evident lack of seriousness.

There are clearly factions in Europe (as here, on the left) which are axiomatically aligned against American interests vs. China.

The leader of French left-wing party La France Insoumise (LFI), Jean-Luc Mélenchon, has voiced support for Canadian independence, denouncing what he described as threats from the “Gringo” US President Donald Trump. https://t.co/ZSYRoYYFF2

— Brussels Signal (@brusselssignal) April 15, 2025

China, nor Russia, the US, or Europe itself is politically/socially/culturally monolithic.

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No substantive criticism of the Chinese Communist Party? Are you kidding me? Seriously, is that really what you want? For me to begin with the Cultural Revolution, and work my way all the way up through social credit scores and Zero Covid, in order to demonstrate my credibility? Why do you say crap like that? What is broken so badly that you don't think more circumspectly?

nortex97 said:

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Good for you. Kudo's. I highly respect folks who hold stocks long term despite being up big-time.

None of these Fortune 500 companies are in the least 'patriotic' when it comes to their decisions. It's always pragmatic, which to a degree it is supposed to be.

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Yeah, there's this thing called shareholders which hates R&D. That's why we have the public-private partnership that has made America the most innovative and entrepreneurial nation in history.

2023NCAggies said:

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94chem said:

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Maybe 500 million? So how many people do you think there are in Beijing? Shanghai? Hangzhou? Shenzhen? Hong Kong? Guangzhou? Chongqing? Harbin? Xian? Chengdu?

Your take on this is about as good as your take on eschatology.

15% of Chinese exports go to the US. They can find new outlets faster than we can start making stuff.

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Watch some Youtube videos of people touring poor countries like India. There are other factories ready to make many of the products China provides

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Sure there are, and we should have been building stronger alliances with India all along. But that won't create any American manufacturing jobs. It's just the next step in the Japan-Taiwan-Korea-China-India...manufacturing scheme, designed to feed the American appetite for disposable crap and underpriced electronics.

Find the next hovel to feed our debt-crushed ways.

Quote:

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No substantive criticism of the Chinese Communist Party? Are you kidding me? Seriously, is that really what you want? For me to begin with the Cultural Revolution, and work my way all the way up through social credit scores and Zero Covid, in order to demonstrate my credibility? Why do you say crap like that? What is broken so badly that you don't think more circumspectly?

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This seems very emotional to me. Do you have any criticism of the CCP to offer, historically or otherwise?

How do you see them reacting this month, and do you want them to succeed in their diplomatic maneuvers vs. Trump? This isn't a complex question, requiring circumspection.

https://www.amazon.com/Mr-China-Memoir-Tim-Clissold/dp/0060761407?ref=d6k_applink_bb_dls&dplnkId=0152f889-f731-4d7a-87ef-99bc75ee212ehttps://www.amazon.com/Mr-China-Memoir-Tim-Clissold/dp/0060761407#

Read this book if you want to learn more about China's views on Capitalism and America in general.

Your insight and opinions on this thread are very interesting, thanks

nortex97 said:

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Quote:

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No substantive criticism of the Chinese Communist Party? Are you kidding me? Seriously, is that really what you want? For me to begin with the Cultural Revolution, and work my way all the way up through social credit scores and Zero Covid, in order to demonstrate my credibility? Why do you say crap like that? What is broken so badly that you don't think more circumspectly?

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This seems very emotional to me. Do you have any criticism of the CCP to offer, historically or otherwise?

How do you see them reacting this month, and do you want them to succeed in their diplomatic maneuvers vs. Trump? This isn't a complex question, requiring circumspection.

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It's a guess of course, but one can always assume they will play the long game. The huge caveat is that the country is controlled by a very small committee, and is therefore susceptible to huge missteps. Zero Covid comes to mind. I'm still at a loss on how this happened. My wife is a Soviet historian who studies deportations, famines, and collectivization in the 1930's. When I asked her how much of the tragedy was due to genocide/targeting, vs. plain old gross incompetence by the government, she said that to this day, nobody knows for sure.

If US markets are going to be closed to Chinese goods, it would be hard for China to see the purpose of the relationship. So, they could in theory unload US debt and try to drive our interest rates higher, erode global confidence in the dollar, drive our borrowing costs higher, inflation higher, and cause us to print more money and devalue our currency. The question would be how rapidly do they want to go down this road. I would guess that their brinksmanship would be more measured, but who knows?

They will also look for new markets to make up for the loss of the US market.

They may also considering ramping up manufacturing in Africa in the long term.

I would think that they must understand that the rmb is next in line to become the world's reserve currency, as the US slowly runs out of steam in global confidence. They just need to be careful not to overplay their hand, and to trust that diplomacy works in the short-term, while they wait on the longer term outcome.

The US debt situation means that we will eventually lose. The questions are when, to whom, and how violent will it be?

94chem said:

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2023NCAggies said:

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94chem said:

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Maybe 500 million? So how many people do you think there are in Beijing? Shanghai? Hangzhou? Shenzhen? Hong Kong? Guangzhou? Chongqing? Harbin? Xian? Chengdu?

Your take on this is about as good as your take on eschatology.

15% of Chinese exports go to the US. They can find new outlets faster than we can start making stuff.

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Watch some Youtube videos of people touring poor countries like India. There are other factories ready to make many of the products China provides

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Sure there are, and we should have been building stronger alliances with India all along. But that won't create any American manufacturing jobs. It's just the next step in the Japan-Taiwan-Korea-China-India...manufacturing scheme, designed to feed the American appetite for disposable crap and underpriced electronics.

Find the next hovel to feed our debt-crushed ways.

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I am okay with prices of electronics going up. Those would be real prices, not fake prices. And let more people use their electronics for longer times. No need to buy an iPhone every year. Nothing really changes.

I myself buy used iPhones 2 models old for low prices. Does the job. Only idiots pay $1000+ for a damn phone with nothing really innovative in 10 years.

Let prices increase to what they really are until we get equilibrium. We have to stop expecting cheap junk easily available.

Yeah, I don't know a single thing that a $1400 iPhone does that my $200 Samsung can't do.

Big game of chicken. They have absurd debt and financials as well - worse than ours. So, can our unsustainable financials outlast their unsustainable financials is the ultimate question.

94chem said:

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Yeah, I don't know a single thing that a $1400 iPhone does that my $200 Samsung can't do.

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Mobile phones have maxed out what they can do with the current form factor. That's why there has been no innovation in several years now and has been no reason to upgrade unless you just have to have the latest thing. I ran with my iPhone XR for 8 years before I finally retired it this year simply because it was finally getting too l****. I plan to use this 16 for at least that long as well barring some huge leap in innovation.

94chem said:

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Yeah, I don't know a single thing that a $1400 iPhone does that my $200 Samsung can't do.

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You can't get blue text and you screw up all the group messages

PhatMack19 said:

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94chem said:

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Yeah, I don't know a single thing that a $1400 iPhone does that my $200 Samsung can't do.

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You can't get blue text and you screw up all the group messages

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That's a feature, not a bug.

YouBet said:

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Big game of chicken. They have absurd debt and financials as well - worse than ours. So, can our unsustainable financials outlast their unsustainable financials is the ultimate question.

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That pretty much summarizes it. People continue to drink the Koolaide of American exceptionalism, while simultaneously trying to dismantle any vestige of it, while pinning their hopes that a butterfly flapping its wings in west Africa won't catalyze events that blow up in our faces after creating some desperately desired instability. Strange creatures, this republic hath wrought...

they have a much greater capacity for pain and don't have election cycles. The only advantage for us is that they don't know how crazy Trump really is.

BREAKING: China halts all U.S. natural gas imports

— Financelot (@FinanceLancelot) April 18, 2025

This will just shift more of our Nat Gas exports to Europe this summer.

They have a massive amount they need to buy to fill storage tanks for the winter (and of course are pouting about Putin). As the Ukraine war has shown, energy/fossil fuels are a global commodity and will find a market/buyer, regardless of tariffs/sanctions/feelings.

samurai_science said:

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BREAKING: China halts all U.S. natural gas imports

— Financelot (@FinanceLancelot) April 18, 2025

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Seems smart for a country already struggling to provide enough energy to their people.

Exactly, we are the market

Maybe they'll stop buying coal too. Then they can live cold and in the dark.