In America, there is one fast food place that does it differently than everyone in the market they don’t franchise and they don’t lease/rent.
They own everything as they expand (the land and the building), which means it’s a little bit slower when you expand, but they don’t care but they are very profitable.
The owner probably gets a call every other week from large equity companies trying to sell them on doing it like everybody else and their pitch they can make you a worldwide company if you just let them in to f you.
If you "franchise" a CFA, you don't own the store, you don't own the land, they severely control your income, you are required to physically work at the store (in other words, they control you as a laborer), and you can't re-sell the franchise since you don't own it. You have no equity. They refer to you as an operator.
When you leave the business, CFA picks someone else to give it to. You get paid nothing because you never owned it.
They're also very weird in picking their operators. I can't speak for every CFA, but where I live all the operators are white evangelical Christians. This is probably a side-effect of CFA's policy of not letting anyone who has debt be an operator, and buying everything without financing is a big thing in the evangelical Christian community thanks to Dave Ramsey.
That said some of these industry especially metallurgical ones will never return to Europe or US as they basically destroy and pollute the environment on a large scale, in China that still seems acceptable but also might change promoting them to outsource to other countries which they already do in some areas I think.
Imagine what those kinds of people would have said in China in the 70s, with western industries being vastly more advanced and efficient. "It's over, we will never catch up." they would probably have said. Wrong then, more wrong now.
China has made a tremendous effort to move to a clean(er) industrial system, using a lot of renewables and clean energy and improving environmental standards. At this point production in China is probably the best for the environment compared to most countries, including the US that is deeply invested in oil production.
They are also moving close to a point where they will bring Thorium Reactors on line they don’t have to. They could just stick with uranium, but they’re not.
Is this part of the fact that they have engineers running a lot of of the things at the top of their government instead of lawyers?
They seem to be building a lot of infrastructure they are in the process of building several dams on the Brahmaputra River.
China: 525 gCO2/kWh
And like you said, China is putting a real effort in. I don't see the US trying to reduce domestic short hop flights with electric high speed rail. I don't see the US trying to replace gasoline cars with EVs. I don't see the US curtailing structural incentivization of pickup trucks and SUVs.
The main US policy seems to be "spend trillions on wars for oil" rather than accepting the inevitable decline of oil and planning around it.
It will be interesting to see what China does. They aren't ideologically committed to exclusively serving the interests of the wealthy, but they still have lots of rich people in the (ahem) Communist Party, so who knows.
That is not to say that in time they’ll start to do many of things that happens in the west where those at the 1% or 2% walk away, in time China may drop down to that level, on the other hand, I would like to believe the United States will start to have the same reaction that the country had when Sputnik went around the Earth and change course and I don’t mean sanctions, tariffs, wars, and threatening neighbors to the north and to the south.
In the west, billionaires are often able to get extremely favorable treatment by the law as an expression of the power money gives. This is not the case in China, in which the party stands at the top.
In practice that's just a difference of incentives that I'm not sure at all is beneficial for anything but an authoritarian regime.
One can prefer a regime where it's very hard for people who abuse their power to avoid punishment if it's all public to one where the powerful are emboldened enough to be able to be shameless. Even worse when the shamelessness is seen as the purest display of power, and thus people compete in their public misbehavior. But still, understand that the real barrier to punishment in the first case is not to avoid doing bad things, but to make sure that the witnesses either don't exist, or are too scared to say anything.
A judicial system that actually has no sacred cows would be better in all cases, but the sacred cows everywhere do their best to make sure this doesn't happen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Report_on_Manufactures
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_School_(economics)
Parallel: the industrialization of China for the most part happened after Deng Xiaoping, but are people wrong to credit him for setting the course?
The media to this day portrays China as if it was 80s. Yes, at that time it was an open-air manufacturing plant. You can run rudimentary floor operations with high school educated workers, but you still need trained engineers and managers to run the operations. Exporting engineers quickly became impractical, which led to local engineers getting trained. At some point the training became the bottleneck so local educators were trained. And so on.
Over the years, China has built the entire industrial pipeline: all the way from education and vocational training, to scientific research, to local engineering houses. Remember, the people who built Shenzen are now retired. Or to put it into perspective, China is currently at roughly similar age of industrial boom as post-WWII USA was in... the late 90s - early 00s.
"The West" had a head start with regards to IP and China is indeed fighting an uphill battle there, but they have a huge domestic market to grow the companies out. The proud "Designed in X, made in China" things are being replaced with white-label "made in China", where "designed in China" is implied.
Do you have a robot vacuum? It's probably Roborock / Dreame / Ecovacs, not even some western branding.
I feel you're trying too hard to make believe this is somehow unexpected or unnoticed. The fact that subcontracting work to external companies acts as an investment on said companies to develop skills and competences is something that is known since always. The argument that the reigning VC mentality is that this investment is an acceptable tradeoff due to reasons such as these investments being limited to non-critical business concerns.
Part of what led me to believe this was waking up and realising they're also simply better at offering LLM inference: cheaper; faster; more innovative.
It's a horse of a very different colour from outsourcing where someone is simply chasing the lowest bidder.
When we buy software from Silicon Valley or a nice Mercedes Benz from Germany we don’t use this same language “outsourcing.”
Colloquially, outsourcing implies low quality or cheap price. No, what’s happening here is that China makes the best products in numerous categories and we are choosing to import them, because the best products are the most desirable.