Exactly! My issue is the stolen technology dilemma. That and metallurgy. I’ve seen some real low quality out of China too. They may have space technology but I’m not convinced the quality is there across the board. I’m also not a fan of giving away secrets to a country who wants to dominate the world.
Ref living standards, I always thought when their people demanded our level of living standard, prices would stabilize and we’d be more competitive but I think our standards will drop to compete with all the influx of labor through immigration.
Quite true and the American, Australian, German, British , ( add almost any country that you like ) business men ( it is always men ) who bought a top shelf locally made produce then sent it to China ( add any other third world country you like ) with the instructions "make me 1,000,000 of these cheap cheap..,
should go to gaol for 100 years .
Same for every CEO, MD or board who decided to increase the profit : equity ratio to justifing paying themselves massive bonuses by outsourcing to third world countries , or perhaps just shoot them on the spot.
The popular misconception is China send spies out world wide to steal production & product secrets , then makes cheap copies which they dump on local markets.
This is 100% wrong. Chinese factories only manufacture to order so every cheap nasty Chinese knock off was ordered by a local company before the factory even thought about making it.
The exception is semi finished product like steel sheet, rolled stock or extrusion.
As for the low quality of a lot of stuff. THEY MAKE THE QUALITY THEY ARE ASKED TO MAKE.
And the problem lies with Standards Authorities and "small government - low taxes philosophy" where the responsibility for quality control & compliance with internal standards have been outsourced to private enterprise in place of having government inspectors turn up at the importer test then fail substandard materials forcing them to be returned or scrapped.
Also like Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea etc etc etc , when you start to make things, you work out there are ways to make it better.
You don't have to steal anything to do this.
The problem is executives now days have all come from the Harvard School of management and never spent a micro second on a shop floor so they have no understanding of dynamics of the production/design interaction.
From the "all management is the same regardless of what the company does" perspective there is a total disconnect between manufacture & design.
Design is the sole prerogative of well educated white men form good home & good schools in the upper class.
Production is the domain of the ignorant, poorly educated lower class who don't have the intellect to design a paper clip.
Thus if one of those inferior working classes suddenly make a better product they have stolen it from us.
As for world domination they are not interested.
If nothing, the Chinese government reads, understands & respects history.
They have effectively destroyed the economy of most of the western world, using the greed of the western world to do it.
Right now China holds better than 30% of all USA government debt .
Right now China has double their currencies worth of gold reserves and is rapidly heading to make it 3 times where as the USA gold reserves are at less than 10%
China & Russia hold just under 70% of the worlds gold reserves.
Last year China set up their own crude oil futures market and should it take over from NY as the dominant oil futures market then the need for the rest of the world to hold US dollars will vanish overnight and thus the value of the US dollar will plummet.
Thus the debt of the USA government to China will become orders of magnitude larger .
Last year the Chinese economy overtook Japan becoming the second largest economy with the USA being number one.
However the difference between the two is simply the USA defence budget so once China starts to sell more arms to the third world countries currently supplied by the USA, China will be come the largest economy in the world.
There was an interesting paper oddly enough that came out of Harvard which linked the rise & fall of empires to the percentage of GDP that a country spent on defence and the USA passed that nearly 5 years ago.
When a country spends more on protecting it's vested interest than the wealth they produce you are then on a path to decline and no amount of singing Rule Britannia or The Star Spangled Banner , no flag saluting or military parades can stop it.
This is exactly what happened to the USSR and what would have happened to Korea if China, the USA & Japan would have allowed it to, but in that case there was a real worry that Korea might actually launch some of the missiles that was sending them broke making.
However the US media trumped that it was a failure of communism making all the US citizens feel warm & comfy about how superior capitalism was rather than the truth that what really happened was on over spend on defence.
And not that it makes any difference but I am a graduate metallurgist ( Non ferrous foundry ) and have watched the exact same management philosophy send Australian industry to the wall.
When I graduated we were number 12 in foundry now we do not register in the top 100.
The only real difference between you & us is we have a small population so for the time being what we dig out of the ground covers our short sighted stupidity, but it will come home to bite us on the bum too, it is just a matter of time.
Our standard of living has been dropping for the last decade while the wealth per household has been rising as has the debt per household.
Very shortly you will be going into the corporate reporting season.
Listen to what is actually reported.
Higher profits from falling total revenue and flat predictions for future growth
Not the sign of a health economy
And you might like to reflect that China spends more on education that imprisonment in the USA it is the other way round.