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U.S. President Joe Biden told Chinese President Xi Jinping following his meeting with Russia’s Vladimir Putin to “be careful” because Beijing relies on Western investment.
U.S. President Joe Biden told Chinese President Xi Jinping following his meeting with Russia’s Vladimir Putin to “be careful” because Beijing relies on Western investment.
There are plenty of alternatives (e.g. Vietnam or Mexico), but China still offers enough advantages to make it the preferred option. This article explains it well: https://www.china-briefing.com/news/reshoring-from-china-to-mexico-how-prevalent-is-it-really/
If you look at various economic indicators, it seems likely that we have reached the peak of China’s production.
Exports peaked in Dec '21: https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/china/total-exports
Population - declining: https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/china/population
Labour force participation rate - declining: https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/china/labour-force-participation-rate
Employed persons - declining: https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/china/employed-persons
Manufacturing wages - doubled in the past 10 years: https://tradingeconomics.com/china/wages-in-manufacturing
There’s a very simple way to measure the migration of manufacturing out of China.
get a list of the top ten cargo ports in the world. count how many are mainland China?
7 or 8 right?
okay let’s go down the list until we get Vietnam or India or someplace where’d you’d expect the manufacturing to go to.
aight… now compare all the cargo capacity for that entire country to one of the eight ports in China? tell you what, let’s include India, and Rotterdam, and LA… just add them all together. How many of 8 does it take to keep up with that 2 or 3 ?
so, cargo shipping capacity… big difference right? day light.
Vietnam wants to make iPhones. you gotta ship 110% of the various bits into Vietnam and then ship out 99% of the finished goods.
all those ports come with piles and piles of back end infrastructure. roads. trucking. rail. skilled workers…
there are infinite alternatives to China. but it will take 40 years to develop any of them to that level.
Are there alternatives though? Apple moved some production to Vietnam, for example. Do you know who’s their partner in Vietnam? Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., better known as Foxconn. Yeah, China, again.