It turns out that having your ruling party alienate the entire world with a genetically engineered plague, rampant human rights abuse and widespread intellectual property theft is not conducive to continued economic success. Who knew?
Hence comes the hashtag #SaveTheBoss, i.e. the company needs to survive to save jobs. I assume there’s more than a little irony to the tag, given how badly conditions suck in so many Chinese factories. .
Takeaways:
“In the first half of 2022, 460,000 companies announced their closure, and 3.1 million self-employed people have canceled their business.”
“It’s hard to be a boss this year. All industries are in decline. In order to maintain the factory, profits have to be squeezed and squeezed. Many have even accepted orders with zero profit outright. The purpose is simply to keep the cash flowing.”
“According to data released by China’s General Administration of Customs, China’s exports fell 9.9 percent year on year in December 2022, widening the decline from 8.7 percent in November and marking the biggest drop since February 2020.” And those are the official numbers. It’s almost certainly worse.
“The once congested roads in this major terminal in Guangdong Province, and also in the Pearl River delta region, are now empty. Trucks are parked all over the parking lot, reflecting how depressed the foreign trade export industry is.”
“The Chinese government is carefully covering up the situation of its major economic regression, so it isn’t easy to tell from the statistics how serious the situation is.” But employers think it’s really bad.
“I heard that four or five factories are closing down here every day.”
Foreign companies are pulling out as well. “500 European companies have already moved to Singapore to set up their headquarters.”
Workers are returning from their Chinese New Year vacations only to find their factories shut down owing them back wages.
“At least 80,000 to 100,000 people are stranded in Suzhou, and there are probably more than 200,000 workers in the whole Yangtze River delta who are looking for work.”
“If someone promises to work in an electronics factory for 30 RMB, that is 4.3 USD an hour, don’t believe it. It’s all a lie.”
“Just after the Chinese New Year, the labor prices are dropping like an avalanche.”
And more foreign companies are pulling out of the country, like Toshiba, Microsoft and Panasonic.
“4.6 million factories are without orders.” I’ve got to think some of those “factories” have to be pretty small.
American capital firms are planning to pivot to Europe for foreign growth.
“The largest wave of unemployment in the history of CCP country is here.”
Many Chinese business owners are mystified by this drop in foreign orders.
Here’s a hint: Your crooked commie rulers acted like the biggest jerks in the world and everybody got tired of it. You reap what you sow…
[…] China, and Reports from Cuba: Black market sugar in Cuba now approaching $8.30 a pound BattleSwarm: Dear Chinese Workers in 2023: Sucks To Be You, also, Remembering the Battle of Medina Ridge Behind The Black: The shift away from government […]
for years I’ve not been buying goods made in China (although a few have slipped through – companies are cagy) and advocating to others to be very aware of the origin of the items they purchase. Most people are quite receptive, so if even 1/4 of Americans start not buying from China, and other hostile countries, we could win the war just using our purchasing power.
China holds nearly $1 trillion in US Treasuries. In reparations for unleashing Covid on the world and not being open about it, is it possible for the US treasury (but someone with balls) to just declare that all China held Treasuries are null and void?
Would help our debt problem and sure hand it to the CCP.
See how it plays out. China is still willing to use coal and gas to produce electricity. USA is about to commit manufacturing suicide by closing coal and gas plants before replacement power is in place. Costs will go up — they are already — and there will be shortages. Cheap and available power will win. Excellent Wall Street Journal editorial from 2/26 summarizes the issue. It will take some time to play out and a lot can happen, hope for the best . . .
Repudiating bonds held by the Chinese would be stupid. If you owe the bank a thousand dollars, they own you. If you owe the bank a trillion, you actually own them, because if they want that debt back…? So long as that money is out there, the Chinese aren’t going to do all that much to really attack the US, because all too many of the really rich and wealthy types in the CCP have their “F*ck You” money in US bonds. If we repudiate that debt, there goes all that leverage, and they’ve got no incentive to keep the US in a state to repay said debt.
There are crossover points, true, but… By and large, for the US to repudiate that debt, short of actual hostilities breaking out? Height of short-sighted stupidity.
Not to mention the fact that U.S. Treasuries are hugely fungible, and it would be exceptionally easy to unload them and/or set up straw holders in a third country at the very first rumblings of such a proposal.
Yeah, I think we’d do more damage to ourselves than the Chinese with that move…
China is in a really deep bind; they’ve really got very little time before the Red Queen starts waving the start flag for her Race… Demographically, they’re screwed, thanks to all the “One Child” bullshit they fell for back when. Then, there are all the ethnic groups that are out-breeding the Han, which is the real reason the Uyghur thing is happening. Everyone else in China that ain’t Han is side-eying that situation, and waiting to see when the Han are going to nut up and come after them.
China is a strange place, with some very strange people with strange customs to outsiders. It’s actually amazing to observe the similarities between now and the immediate aftermath of the Columbian Exchange, when all the new crops and the Spanish silver from the New World started coming in to disrupt everything. The resultant dislocations led to centuries of Chinese internal chaos as the new food staple crops enabled a bunch of Chinese minorities to tell the existent power structures to go to hell. It’s a fascinating subject to read about, and while it’s not well documented in English, what there is has a lot of parallels to the current time. I think China is only a few years away from some serious chaos and dislocation, no doubt triggered by hubris in Beijing.
China is a place that comes with a lot of built in problems.
Much of the land is dessert, and the most fertile bits are all on flood plains. Every once in a while, they have a major earthquake and/or flood, and tens of thousands die. The place is also huge, and hard to rule. There is a constant tension between centralization and de-centralization. This has been going on in cycles literally for more than a millennium.
They start with a mostly rural, subsistence farming, fragmented, local strongman/bandit chief kind of society. Multi-player civil war follows, and gradually, one of the bandit chiefs starts to win. Either he is luckier, more ruthless, more cunning, or whatever, and starts to win, getting bigger and stronger as he absorbs weaker opponents and gains resources and soldiers. Eventually, after many years (possibly hundreds and several generations), you end up with a central imperial government.
The Chinese have something of a genius for centralized bureaucracy, and things go well for a while. Then the central government gets too corrupt, sclerotic and the empire too big to manage. Something triggers a revolt, (mongol invasion, earthquake and/or flood, or whatever). The current emperor isn’t the man his great-great-((great))- grandfather was. The “mandate of Heaven” is lost, and chaos and civil war ensues, and the central government collapses, and the regional governors become independent, and start putting things back together again, and fighting a multi-player civil war again…..
Rinse and repeat….Sometimes with outside interference (Mongol invasion, Arrow/Opium War etc.), and sometimes with internal revolution and upheaval, (The Taiping Rebellion, for example).
The last time this happened was in the early 1900’s (you may remember the Oscar winning film The Last Emperor?) which led to the warlord era. Notice the same pattern there. Sun-Yat-Sen and later Chang-Kei-Shek and the Nationalists gradually subdued/subsumed the other warlords to become the leading player, but ultimately lost to the Communists, who set up a bureaucratic centralized government under an “Emperor” (Mao).
That central government is now massively corrupt, inefficient and sclerotic, and it is highly likely that the coming demographic problem, economic crash and dislocation from Corona could be the trigger that leads to the next de-centralization, or it could take a few more decades, we will see….
When things split, Hong Kong will try and go back to being the city-state like entity it used to be. Shanghai and the other Southern cities will attempt to do the same, trying to become ersatz, smaller scale versions of Singapore, and they may have some success. The interior will devolve back into a subsistence farming, dirt poor, rural shit-holes. The rest will fragment into regional factions as whichever level of government can salvage whatever bits of authority, economy and infrastructure they can grab. They could get lucky, and have enough resources to maintain this fragmented, mini-state system, or even develop some kind of federation, but odds are against it, and we have yet the latest in a long series of warlord eras.
The Chinese about to have the “interesting times” of the ancient Chinese curse.
With American help, at that. I’m amazed other countries aren’t more interested in holding both the USA and China accountable for what happened. France, too, since they helped build the WIV lab.
I’m equally amazed at all the people finally admitting out loud they think it was a lab leak, but are utterly silent on Fauci, Eco Health Alliance, Dazack, NIH, et al’s contribution.
This ain’t going to end well. Not for China; not for the rest of the world, either.
Sadz trombonez infinity.
Let’s stop importing from their slave labor and really hurt them.
[…] China, and Reports from Cuba: Black market sugar in Cuba now approaching $8.30 a pound BattleSwarm: Dear Chinese Workers in 2023: Sucks To Be You, also, Remembering the Battle of Medina Ridge Behind The Black: The shift away from government […]
I don’t think that this will end well for anyone.
Why Japan would have companies in China is beyond me.
for years I’ve not been buying goods made in China (although a few have slipped through – companies are cagy) and advocating to others to be very aware of the origin of the items they purchase. Most people are quite receptive, so if even 1/4 of Americans start not buying from China, and other hostile countries, we could win the war just using our purchasing power.
China holds nearly $1 trillion in US Treasuries. In reparations for unleashing Covid on the world and not being open about it, is it possible for the US treasury (but someone with balls) to just declare that all China held Treasuries are null and void?
Would help our debt problem and sure hand it to the CCP.
See how it plays out. China is still willing to use coal and gas to produce electricity. USA is about to commit manufacturing suicide by closing coal and gas plants before replacement power is in place. Costs will go up — they are already — and there will be shortages. Cheap and available power will win. Excellent Wall Street Journal editorial from 2/26 summarizes the issue. It will take some time to play out and a lot can happen, hope for the best . . .
Repudiating bonds held by the Chinese would be stupid. If you owe the bank a thousand dollars, they own you. If you owe the bank a trillion, you actually own them, because if they want that debt back…? So long as that money is out there, the Chinese aren’t going to do all that much to really attack the US, because all too many of the really rich and wealthy types in the CCP have their “F*ck You” money in US bonds. If we repudiate that debt, there goes all that leverage, and they’ve got no incentive to keep the US in a state to repay said debt.
There are crossover points, true, but… By and large, for the US to repudiate that debt, short of actual hostilities breaking out? Height of short-sighted stupidity.
Not to mention the fact that U.S. Treasuries are hugely fungible, and it would be exceptionally easy to unload them and/or set up straw holders in a third country at the very first rumblings of such a proposal.
Yeah, I think we’d do more damage to ourselves than the Chinese with that move…
China is in a really deep bind; they’ve really got very little time before the Red Queen starts waving the start flag for her Race… Demographically, they’re screwed, thanks to all the “One Child” bullshit they fell for back when. Then, there are all the ethnic groups that are out-breeding the Han, which is the real reason the Uyghur thing is happening. Everyone else in China that ain’t Han is side-eying that situation, and waiting to see when the Han are going to nut up and come after them.
China is a strange place, with some very strange people with strange customs to outsiders. It’s actually amazing to observe the similarities between now and the immediate aftermath of the Columbian Exchange, when all the new crops and the Spanish silver from the New World started coming in to disrupt everything. The resultant dislocations led to centuries of Chinese internal chaos as the new food staple crops enabled a bunch of Chinese minorities to tell the existent power structures to go to hell. It’s a fascinating subject to read about, and while it’s not well documented in English, what there is has a lot of parallels to the current time. I think China is only a few years away from some serious chaos and dislocation, no doubt triggered by hubris in Beijing.
China is a place that comes with a lot of built in problems.
Much of the land is dessert, and the most fertile bits are all on flood plains. Every once in a while, they have a major earthquake and/or flood, and tens of thousands die. The place is also huge, and hard to rule. There is a constant tension between centralization and de-centralization. This has been going on in cycles literally for more than a millennium.
They start with a mostly rural, subsistence farming, fragmented, local strongman/bandit chief kind of society. Multi-player civil war follows, and gradually, one of the bandit chiefs starts to win. Either he is luckier, more ruthless, more cunning, or whatever, and starts to win, getting bigger and stronger as he absorbs weaker opponents and gains resources and soldiers. Eventually, after many years (possibly hundreds and several generations), you end up with a central imperial government.
The Chinese have something of a genius for centralized bureaucracy, and things go well for a while. Then the central government gets too corrupt, sclerotic and the empire too big to manage. Something triggers a revolt, (mongol invasion, earthquake and/or flood, or whatever). The current emperor isn’t the man his great-great-((great))- grandfather was. The “mandate of Heaven” is lost, and chaos and civil war ensues, and the central government collapses, and the regional governors become independent, and start putting things back together again, and fighting a multi-player civil war again…..
Rinse and repeat….Sometimes with outside interference (Mongol invasion, Arrow/Opium War etc.), and sometimes with internal revolution and upheaval, (The Taiping Rebellion, for example).
The last time this happened was in the early 1900’s (you may remember the Oscar winning film The Last Emperor?) which led to the warlord era. Notice the same pattern there. Sun-Yat-Sen and later Chang-Kei-Shek and the Nationalists gradually subdued/subsumed the other warlords to become the leading player, but ultimately lost to the Communists, who set up a bureaucratic centralized government under an “Emperor” (Mao).
That central government is now massively corrupt, inefficient and sclerotic, and it is highly likely that the coming demographic problem, economic crash and dislocation from Corona could be the trigger that leads to the next de-centralization, or it could take a few more decades, we will see….
When things split, Hong Kong will try and go back to being the city-state like entity it used to be. Shanghai and the other Southern cities will attempt to do the same, trying to become ersatz, smaller scale versions of Singapore, and they may have some success. The interior will devolve back into a subsistence farming, dirt poor, rural shit-holes. The rest will fragment into regional factions as whichever level of government can salvage whatever bits of authority, economy and infrastructure they can grab. They could get lucky, and have enough resources to maintain this fragmented, mini-state system, or even develop some kind of federation, but odds are against it, and we have yet the latest in a long series of warlord eras.
The Chinese about to have the “interesting times” of the ancient Chinese curse.
@Lawrence Person
“… with a genetically engineered plague …”
With American help, at that. I’m amazed other countries aren’t more interested in holding both the USA and China accountable for what happened. France, too, since they helped build the WIV lab.
I’m equally amazed at all the people finally admitting out loud they think it was a lab leak, but are utterly silent on Fauci, Eco Health Alliance, Dazack, NIH, et al’s contribution.