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Comment by ffsm8

16 hours ago

They built this knowledge up only in the last 10-15 yrs though. It's absolutely possible to reverse this trend within a much shorter time period then this argument always implies.

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ffsm8

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simgt  16 hours ago

How do you end up with 10-15 years? China is almost perfectly vertically integrated from raw materials to highly advanced finished products. Their industrialization started in the 70s. Getting to that level would require a lot of planning as well as the kind of hard constraints imposed on China through embargo.

We're not even getting back to that level, we've never reached iPhone level of manufacturing in the US or Europe.

  • ux266478  12 hours ago

    It was not linear growth. The 70s and 80s were essentially write-offs. Things began to move in the mid-1990s and it has been a continual evolution and process over the last 30 years. Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping's teams all did wildly different things for China. The vertical integration you mention was basically non-existent prior to 2020, it came about as part of the New Development Pattern (新发展格局) for the Inner Loop (国内双循环)

    China today is virtually unrecognizable compared to even 10 years ago, though.

    • SpicyUme  10 hours ago

      I remember when there was a big push to make ball point pen tips, and how a but less than 10 years later they succeeded in making them domestically.

      1 reply →

  • gregw2  13 hours ago

    Musk apparently stood up a brand new raw to finished goods manufacturing for Starlink kits in 2-3 years in America/Texas. Non trivial, but doable in niches at least, per a factory engineer:

    "The main function of this site is to produce our standard Starlink kits. Right now, we’re producing 15,000 a day straight out of the factory.

    Raw plastic palettes come in, raw aluminum comes in and we make those into the Starlink kits and ship them right out to the customer zones."

    https://www.teslaoracle.com/2025/03/06/spacex-bastrop-factor...

    • bdbdkdksk  12 hours ago

      So they form the plastic (already processed) using machines they've imported, and then put pre-populated PCBs with components made in China inside them? Hardly soup to nuts manufacturing.

      I've worked in a niche assembly line in North America where we populated some of the board components in-house, but they were etched in batches off-site.

    • mschuster91  12 hours ago

      This certainly is not a "raw to finished goods" plant, it's a typical Musk exaggeration.

      The housing, maybe. Makes sense to produce that domestically at the volume SpaceX requires, less shipping costs because the dishes do take up volume.

      But the PCB? Almost certainly not. With any luck they're making and assembling the PCB in house, but the components originate from a lot of suppliers and there are a lot of components on it [1]. Personally, I'd guess the latter, given that the PCB contains a lot of pretty novel tech [2] of which I'm certain that SpaceX wants to be able to iterate on as fast as they can, without having to wait for even a day or two for a new plane full of PCBs from China.

      [1] https://wccftech.com/starlink-user-terminal-apple-supplier-t...

      [2] https://hackaday.com/2021/01/11/starlink-satellite-dish-x-ra...

schmidtleonard  13 hours ago

Wars are won or lost in 5 years, not 15. I agree that it's possible to reverse the trend, but we have to decide that we want to independently of a physical conflict, before someone else teaches us that deindustrialization is not advancement. Otherwise the lesson will come too late.

  • coderenegade  3 hours ago

    This. The century of shame, when Western powers came knocking on their door, is etched into the Chinese cultural psyche. East Asia was home to mature nations that learned the hard way that self determination is fundamentally tied to your ability to defend your interests. This is especially the case for China, which saw itself as the center of the universe.

    The US won the cold war and came to believe they were untouchable. Private interests don't care about nation states, and there was more money to be made by selling the foundation of the West's security than there was in preserving it, especially since the enemy had been vanquished.