Files Vanished, Young Chinese Lose the Future

Re:Files Vanished, Young Chinese Lose the Future by yardie on Tuesday July 28, 2009 @05:52AM (#727665)

You've got to be living under a bridge if you don't think the current crisis is affecting the chinese. It hasn't hit Beijing or Shanghai in a major way but all the manufacturing cities across the southern and east coasts are taking it pretty hard. There has been a sizable exodus of laid off workers leaving the cities.

I don't know what counts as a small percentage to you but exports make up 35-40% of their GDP since 2008. There has been a precipitous drop and changing from an export economy to self-sufficiency doesn't happen in a day. Luckily, the gov't has loads of reserves to weather that storm. But it's still a storm.

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Re:Files Vanished, Young Chinese Lose the Future by wallflower on Tuesday July 28, 2009 @07:59AM (#727758)

One of the reasons unemployment is not higher in the United States is because we have effectively outsourced much of our manufacturing needs to China. When manufacturing needs dropped dramatically, Chinese factories were impacted directly.

At one point, China considered a 9 percent annual growth rate the bare minimum it needed to maintain to accomodate the migrants going from country to city and/or to prevent social unrest (if those migrants could not find jobs). I don't know what their revised minimum growth rate is now - but it is clear China was dependent on its biggest customer, the American consumer.

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