Honestly I know that used to be true, but how true is that today? Laborers in the USA don’t have great standards either. What proportion of the cost reduction comes from lower labor standards and what proportion comes from the fact that they absolutely have invested more in manufacturing than we have?

I order my PCBAs from JLCPCB in China and they’re about 1/10th the cost of ordering something from the USA. But you can watch a factory tour, it’s not some horrible labor conditions it’s huge highly automated machines: https://youtu.be/jTBOSob5MLg

They just invested more than we did.

So maybe their labor conditions are still worse than ours, by some amount, but it’s more than just saving on labor that got their prices low.

It can be multiple things at once. They did indeed invest a lot more into manufacturing but they are also definitely using slave labor to cut on costs (see https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/02/01/china-carmakers-implicat...). Who knows as well to which extent the government funds these companies and keeps them afloat.

> But you can watch a factory tour, it’s not some horrible labor conditions it’s huge highly automated machines: https://youtu.be/jTBOSob5MLg

Rhetorical question but do you really believe they would be allowed to publish anything showing a human rights violation on youtube?

To get this footage he probably had to agree that all footage has to be reviewed by the company. There is no way they green light anything that makes them look bad. I would not be shocked if a party official had to be there to make sure he only shows the great side of everything.

I’m not sharing the video as some foolish “proof” of the absence of labor violations. I’m sharing it as positive proof of the many very large highly automated high throughput machines they have! It’s clear they have invested a lot in machinery to produce their goods.

Did the Chinese government help invest in that production capacity? I don’t know probably, but I think the US should be doing that too so my point that we failed to invest still stands.

The point is, it’s not some evil communist plot to undercut us. They just actually invested in manufacturing and that’s what I’m trying to show with the video. Seriously click through it. There’s a lot of large high throughput automated machines there! There is no equivalent to that facility in the USA that I have ever heard of. Probably big companies like Intel have some impressive machinery but this is a job shop where anyone with $5 can place an order for PCBs. And I seriously doubt this is some North Korean style propaganda show where a bunch of slave labor is hidden behind a door. This factory is a state of the art PCB fabrication facility that gets cheap prices due to investment in capacity. They’re not cheating. They just actually invested and we’ve failed to catch up.

Somehow in the West it is now an ideological crime to point out the obvious: that China has high tech industries, new technology, and scientific development. These are all things that they didn't expect could appear in a country like China, so they want the evidence to be excluded from the internet and labeled as fake news or propaganda.

The USA cuts corners on labor standards for more than a century, but Europeans are Ok with that. The same logic applies, Europeans get a lot of their products and services from a country that has little to no safety nets for their workers, so by buying from USA, Europeans are funding their own demise.

The EU sould also strive for more independence from US corporations, yes, especially the silicon valley ones. Having entire governments depend on Microsoft is a problem.