My knee-jerk response is that they (China) can “make stuff” and we (USA) cannot. And thinking about it a little more, not sure this is all that far from the mark.
Pretty much - the US spends more on it's military than the next 9 countries combined where the Chinese produce more than the next 9 countries combined.
So if the US is a military superpower then China is a manufacturing superpower.
Anyone who knows history knows how dangerous it is to fight someone who can out produce you even if you start with a military advantage (WWII - Japan and US, Yamamato knew it well)
> "In the first six to twelve months of a war with the United States and Great Britain I will run wild and win victory upon victory. But then, if the war continues after that, I have no expectation of success" - Yamamato.
If the US had continued business as usual they could have divided the world between them but they seem determined to burn every possible bridge they can and live in splendid isolation - which is great except if you are running a massive imbalance on physical goods...
China doesn't really have to do anything to "win" on the international stage - when your enemy is making a mistake don't interrupt him applies and they have their own issues at home.
The US can make stuff, and up until Trump took office it was going through the most massive expansions of factory capacity it has seen since the post WW2 boom.
However this year seems to be trying to cancel all those big wins. We do have chip manufacturing, but since most of the battery, solar panel, and EV factories went into largely Trump-voting areas, they are all at risk since they are politically disfavored technologies.
TBF Trump1 had consistently positive manufacturing PMI until covid. A lot of that didn't workout. Biden sustained that for 1st half of his term, but manufacturing PMI negative since 2023 and hasn't recovered. Some of that was reshoring effort from covid... question how that played out. Rest of it was dumping chips money. More accurate to say US tried to make stuff under Trump1 and Biden in response to PRC making all the stuff. But it's questionable US will end up making anything except chips because that's strategic priority, which they can't do as profitablly as TW, but it's sector with high capex that skews manufacturing PMI to appear US plans to make more stuff than they acutally are. Though TBH, as you say Trump2 isn't even trying to build according to PMI because he's fixated on engineering a 3rd term.
With plentiful energy and a scalable supply chain it would be easy to recover using robots and AI. But the West's leadership has been destroying both for decades. And I mean both sides in most Western countries (Republicans/Democrats, Tories/Labour, etc).
With plentiful energy and scalable supply chain we could've also done it with the people we already have, without creating huge swaths of the country that look barely better off than the fishing villages we blew to shit in Vietnam.
Unfortunately that's not as profitable in the short term as financializing the entire economy was, and we don't make decisions here based on good long-term planning, we let the failsons of the last generations industrial titans decide things they barely comprehend from positions they didn't earn, and they ran the economy into the ground, exactly as the monarchs of eras past did elsewhere.
noir_lord|4 months ago
So if the US is a military superpower then China is a manufacturing superpower.
Anyone who knows history knows how dangerous it is to fight someone who can out produce you even if you start with a military advantage (WWII - Japan and US, Yamamato knew it well)
> "In the first six to twelve months of a war with the United States and Great Britain I will run wild and win victory upon victory. But then, if the war continues after that, I have no expectation of success" - Yamamato.
If the US had continued business as usual they could have divided the world between them but they seem determined to burn every possible bridge they can and live in splendid isolation - which is great except if you are running a massive imbalance on physical goods...
China doesn't really have to do anything to "win" on the international stage - when your enemy is making a mistake don't interrupt him applies and they have their own issues at home.
epistasis|4 months ago
However this year seems to be trying to cancel all those big wins. We do have chip manufacturing, but since most of the battery, solar panel, and EV factories went into largely Trump-voting areas, they are all at risk since they are politically disfavored technologies.
maxglute|4 months ago
unknown|4 months ago
[deleted]
alecco|4 months ago
"Madness. Madness and stupidity."
ToucanLoucan|4 months ago
Unfortunately that's not as profitable in the short term as financializing the entire economy was, and we don't make decisions here based on good long-term planning, we let the failsons of the last generations industrial titans decide things they barely comprehend from positions they didn't earn, and they ran the economy into the ground, exactly as the monarchs of eras past did elsewhere.