[biotopia]

No, the big anxiety in China is that the manufacturing is disappearing, especially to developed world like Europe and US. With real estate and consumer spending - the 2 of 3 economic engines - in the dumps, China has switched focus back to manufacturing - the other engine. However...

China's annual exports drop for first time in seven years.

Among key trading partners, exports to the U.S. led the decline, down 13% from the previous year. Demand from the European Union and Southeast Asian countries also shrank.

https://asia.nikkei.com/Economy/Trade/China-s-annual-exports...

[bobthepanda]

China has always talked a big game about rebalancing without actually making the changes to do so. At some point they were going to run out of export growth as they got richer.

What they need to do, and probably won’t, is stop devaluing the yuan and relax capital controls so that Chinese consumers can invest and spend in something that isn’t housing, and finally fuel consumption growth. The current situation essentially results in Chinese being underpaid.

[biotopia]

The problem with China is that they got old and demographically smaller, and decided to pick a fight alongside Russia against Europe and US, before they got rich or at least above poverty level.

China Tries To Censor Data About Nearly 1 Billion People in Poverty

In his article for the business outlet Yicai, Li cited data from a 2021 research paper by the China Institute of Income Distribution at Beijing Normal University, which placed the number of people living on less than 2,000 yuan ($300) a month at 964 million, or nearly 70 percent of the population.

https://www.newsweek.com/china-article-censorship-1-billion-...

China's population drops for second year, with record low birth rate

The National Bureau of Statistics said the total number of people in China dropped by 2.08 million, or 0.15%, to 1.409 billion in 2023. New births fell 5.7% to 9.02 million and the birth rate was a record low 6.39 births per 1,000 people, down from a rate of 6.77 births in 2022.

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinas-population-drops-...

[alephnerd]

> that the manufacturing is disappearing

Manufacturing is not disappearing in China yet. Or at least not skilled manufacturing.

Any deindustrialization that is happening is in the low margins space like Textiles, plastic crap, and the likes, which have begun moving to Vietnam, Bangladesh and India - but that was always going to happen. There's a reason why those textile factories in Tijuana or Ciudad Juarez in the 1980s shut down by the early 2000s.

For higher value intermediate parts, the manufacturing base continues to exist in China, but is now competing at the same price point as an OEM in Thailand, Mexico, Poland, Romania, Russia before the war, etc.