The whole point of this article is to rebute the point you've made. From the article:
> The Economist’s basic argument is that because many of the goods exported to the U.S. from countries like Vietnam contain a lot of parts and components made in China, “decoupling is phoney”.
Here's one of the arguments the article makes against this:
> But there are reasons to think that at least part of the drop in U.S. dependence on Chinese imports is real — at least, the recent drop in the last couple of years. First, Chinese exports overall are down substantially from 2021.
[...]
> To the extent that falling investment in China is due to corporate de-risking, it’s probably eventually going to spread all the way up the supply chain. If you’re a U.S. company that moves production from China to Vietnam because of the risk of war, and your Vietnamese factory is importing most of its parts from China, you’ll know it. And you’ll know that you’re still exposed to China risk, and you’ll look around for alternative places for your Vietnamese factory to get its parts and components. That might take time — years even, given China’s dominance of manufacturing. But as long as the risk of conflict stays high for years, companies will keep looking for ways to build entire supply chains that never run through China. And they will succeed.
The risk for companies to build supply chains that completely avoid China is that they will be outcompeted by competitors who won't and who will make use of these loopholes.
2021 was a great year for Chinese exports especially due to COVID. It's one of the countries that suffered the least economic damage, and it's exports actually grew immensely compared to previous years.
PRC export value went from 2.5T in 2019 to 3.4T in 2021, to 3.6T in 2022. It increased more during 3-4 years of covid than previous 10 years combined (1.4T in 2009). Primarily because 0covid left most of PRC undisrupted, most of the time, which setup PRC to export to most of world, especially global south. Currently everyone's exports down due to global slow down, but PRC exports down from stupid high peak. It's more surprising how much of exports PRC is holding onto due to artificial conditions caused by covid. Reverting back to 2021 (3.4T) would be a 5 steps forward 1 step back situation vs, reverting back to 2020 (2.6T) which would be status quo.
What degree of economic damage would fundamentally destabilize China politically such that Xi is deposed?
If stupid me is thinking about such vulnerabilities/risks, would foreign businessmen bet on Chinese factories, or move them to the newer/cheaper labor markets I've been hearing about for the last 10 years like Vietnam and Malaysia?
And Jinping is 70, do you think he's lasting to 80? When he croaks, due to his elimination of what semblance of political power handover / elections that used to exist in China, it will be a bloodbath.
> In 2022, both U.S. exports to China and imports from China continued to grow for a third year in a row. U.S. exports totaled $153.8 billion, an increase of 1.6% ($2.4 billion) from 2021; U.S. imports from China totaled $536.8 billion, an increase of 6.3% ($31.8 billion); and the trade deficit with China was $382.9 billion, an increase of 8.3% of ($29.4 billion).
- dept. of commerce.
Can we really know that anymore? China has stopped publishing a majority of economic indicators.
Honestly, I'm tired of this "oh they're totalitarian, so we cannot believe their statistics when it's good" stance. It looks so much like a comfortable self-deceit.
I’m tired of it too, but I think it’s better than “not use any data points” or “trust the super subjective data points put out by a totalitarian regime so they aren’t comparable to other countries.”
I don’t think the US is perfect, but economic indicators that they put out are probably as good as they get, all things considered.
I understand this sentiment when it's applied to shithole countries where statistics cannot be verified in meaningful ways. But China is too big and too integrated into the world economics to fake or dismiss Chinese data. You can independently prove a lot of Chinese data by comparing it with their western trade counterparts.
Chinese statistics are notoriously biased. There is a cottage industry of hedge funds using satellite imagery to correct their figures and trade on it.
But I think the complaint was more to say why they weren’t looking at other data they would like, and other countries provide reliably, and instead must limit to what the US and other countries report.
That is the national government's approach, for the most part: tweak the basket of goods you use for inflation here, pick the best looking among several measures there, and so on. The overt manipulation occurs at the subnational level: Chinese statistical work is heavily decentralized and officials are promoted (or not) partially on the basis of meeting growth targets. The national government corrects for this to some degree - but estimating just how manipulated the data is is hard, and provides another lever you can pull to push it one way or another.
Federal statistical agencies in the US conduct more and better direct research and report through fewer (though not zero) layers of politically motivated actors.
Source?
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinas-july-exports-impo...
https://www.freightwaves.com/news/reality-of-ocean-container...
The Philippines are famous for this too.
https://www.cbp.gov/sites/default/files/assets/documents/201...
https://www.cbp.gov/sites/default/files/assets/documents/201...
https://www.cbp.gov/sites/default/files/documents/Vol_48_No_...
https://www.mahindrafarmequipment.com/services/tractors#:~:t....
But, you appear correct, the decoupling does appear to be an illusion.
Truth is when they ask a random dude on TV if he's ok with drinking Japanese radioactive water (the trendy distraction these days), he replies that he didn't intend to make children so he doesn't care if he loses fertility due to contaminated water...
Nobody gives a fuck about shit, we all pretend to work while they pretend to pay us, we get jailed for months in our own homes when there's a stupid sneeze in the city and get all released under the "it's just a fever, wait a few days" admonitions of the same doctors who captured us when we all get it at the same time, we're either completely ignoring the communist bullshit and doing nothing they expect us to do, or totally believing in it and doing only the BS they expect us to do, which produces nothing.
Kids are unemployed, elderlies are fascists, politicians are spineless and factories impotent. The GDP growth is as real as the president's official salary.
our leased (up to 70 years) homes
You buy a house, there are expectations it's yours. Each time it's been tested the government had a choice between murdering desperate owners or accepting to just renew on the same terms. They chose to renew.
Freehold offer no more security: I come from a civil law, freehold country, well, the government can seize houses it wants at low cost any time anyway. Sometimes to build a highway, sometimes to rent to immigrants.
This line is so wrong. You can't have 22% (at least) youth unemployment rate, and 19th straight month collapsing land sales revenue https://www.reuters.com/article/china-economy-landsales/chin... (which is how local government get most of its money), and your biggest and second biggest real estate developer going bankrupt, and still support a 5% GDP growth as mentioned by the Chinese government. just doesn't happen in a real world.
And there are so many reports of factories closing down, especially in the Shenzhen and Dongguan districts, either online videos or news reports https://thediplomat.com/2023/04/dongguans-industrial-woes-ch..., that I don't know why you're attempting to lie outright.
Increasing youth unemployment last few years also has little NET growth impact because PRC is graduating MORE every year, 12m this year vs 8m from ~5 years AGO. What's happening is is MORE youth in absolute numbers are entering work force, even if relative youth unemployment is higher. And net unemployment is 5%, meanning youth get work eventually. They just have flexbility of chilling at home to find job they want, or fuck around and realize they have to do something - side affect of PRC having high youth live at home + high house hold savings rate + low student debt.
Industry has been closing in coastal due to land price for years. Low value/light has been moving abroad due to labour price. New (high value) industries are being shifted to interior industrial clusters. PRC export value grew by 1T in the last 4 years, more than the previous 10 combined. West might be trying to decouple, but PRC has been coupling more than ever, especially with global south.
Truth of the matter is PRC has just undergone the most intensive phase in globalization in human history, and exports down only due to weak global economy, but it's still a 5 steps forward, 1 step back situation. The lie is motivated useful idiots who pick a few indicators to rationalize dampening growth to 4-5%, aka nearly HALF, is still not enough, and real growth must be near 0 because PRC is collapsing due to exogenous crisis when in reality PRC proactively triggered 3RL and other policies in a MANAGED unwinding because they could do so and still have room to hit 4-5% growth.
I guess I must have broken your glass heart a lot, if you're now so angry you're going around calling people useful idiots.
Please go ahead and list out your refutes with actual references, which you seem to never do.
There's no point to what you're doing you know? China is lead by an actual idiot Xi Jing Ping, who has failed policy after policy for 10 years. China is now surrounded by united democracies, with its only potent ally failing against Ukraine. It is going to suffer 30 years of stagnation/collapse.
I wonder how long they are willing to do that. Those countries aren’t on the best terms with China either. Doubt they want a dependency on China if they can help it.
Wouldn’t they want to take over the manufacturing (along with it the profit) too instead of just re-exporting for a profit? They are in prime position to do so given they are the gateway for China’s goods - and can cut China’s goods out and substitute their own.
I feel like that position is similar to being a middleman - in which case its clear the skillset to be the producer is not the same.
For countries like Vietnam, that might be due to lack of investment.
For the last few decades, everyone was concentrating on China. This I believe has began to change - foreign investment in China is down if Im right.
On the other hand relationships between Vietnam and the West has been thawing the last decade or so - especially with the US.
Countries like Mexico are also looking to take on some of China’s manufacturing load - their proximity to the US is an advantage.
Tariffs on China effectively gives all their competitors a competitive advantage which will only help develop said competitors.
The 7% number is from 2018 data (!) -- yet Noah is talking about "since 2019." And, looking at the graph again, the major shift occurs in 2019.
So Noah's "7%" (again, from 2018, largely before the "decoupling") is totally irrelevant, and he handwaves away the possibility that China has since done an increasing amount of exporting to SE Asia for re-export to the USA.
This is already happening with more than ~80% of products that are "Made in Vietnam" and at least ~40% of products that are "Made in Korea." Not only do the raw materials come from China, but most of the work is done in China. The product is shipped overland from a Chinese factory to Vietnam or Korea, then some screws are tightened, some paint is slapped on, or a label is applied, and the product is re-exported.
Among other things, this is effective for tariff evasion.
And it's usually at least somewhat legitimate. It doesn't take much to make a product that's assembled in China "Made in Vietnam," even in a legal sense. Consider: https://casetext.com/case/ferrostaal-metals-corp-v-us
Basically, there was a tariff on Japanese steel. US-based plaintiffs -- steel distributors -- sent that steel to New Zealand, had it galvanized, and re-exported it to the USA as a "Made in New Zealand" product. A Judge holds that the galvanization process (which is laughably cheap) is enough to render the steel "Made in New Zealand."
When all's said and done, Chinese factories haven't slowed down and Chinese GDP is still rising (by more than American GDP) which tells you that the "decoupling" has to be in some respect illusory.