Comment by FuriouslyAdrift
4 hours ago
Any company should definitely be planning for the inevitable decline or elimination of China as a production and/or trading partner.
If not caused by politics, then by demographic crash.
4 hours ago
Any company should definitely be planning for the inevitable decline or elimination of China as a production and/or trading partner.
If not caused by politics, then by demographic crash.
I'm curious why you think China will decline or be eliminated, I always thought that China was a reliable as a production/trading partner and that they planned for decades ahead with programs like Belt and Road Initiative unlike western politics that only looks as far as the next election. Very open to correction on this though, thinking about it not sure what formed my opinion on this.
China is not a good trading partner at all. They put up barriers for companies entering their market, mandatory China employee in your company, IP theft, they subsidize and flood the market killing competition, most everything they make is lowest quality possible, lots of fraud even within China.
It’s foolish to be completely dependent on anyone else, no matter how stable the CURRENT situation is. We’ve seen this with the gulf countries and Strait of Hormuz, China with rare earth metals, Ukraine with grains, etc. Once China goes to take Taiwan all bets are off…
Your example are somewhat funny (in a not-so-funny way), the most obvious example for "foolish to be completely dependent on anyone else, no matter how stable the CURRENT situation is" is the US, from a european perspective
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Their aging population will pose an extremely serious problem in the coming decades.
If demographics are a problem for chipmaking in China, then it's good to compare against key chipmaking countries.
To compare, 2024 (UN) fertility rates (highest-lowest):[1]
Alternatively (and perhaps accounting for migration etc), UN 2024 forecasts population differences in these countries between 2024-2050 as:[3]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_fer...
[2] https://www.chosun.com/english/national-en/2026/01/24/IVHGRT...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_past_and_...
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The Belt and Road initiative is a nice try, but it's not a roaring success. The flaws of democracies are easy to see because of the openness, and whatever goes wrong usually do so over a long time. Dictatorships go wrong in more dramatic ways.
I think it's also worth noting that China today is not China from twenty years ago. The communist party ran the country but there was some form of "internal quasi democracy" and leadership changes happened, with term limits.
This changed under Xi Jinping and no one knows what the effects will be.
That's already happening for the big players, or at least Apple anyway. A big chunk of iPhones are now made in India, Airpods, iPads, macbook assembly is now largely happening in Vietnam and Thailand.
Granted, I don't think continuing to shift to places with slave wages is a good thing overall, but we need complete factory automation to solve that problem (the problem of wanting cheap goods AND ethical labor). But the major players have seen the writing on the wall ever since covid lockdowns and have been slowly moving out of China since.
Labour is one part of the equation. China has really well-designed supply chains and economic zones, where getting access to related components just means walking/driving few minutes down the road. They have made huge strides in robotics as well, so the argument for demographic collapse is weak IMHO.
> inevitable decline or elimination of China as a production and/or trading partner
I don't think this will happen anytime soon, that companies will need short-term planning.
can you explain more on this "demographic crash" because I am not in the loop. Are you talking about population decline which I'm sure will have some effect but elimination?
Even if they mandated non-stop births from all capable females by law, it still wouldn't catch up to declines.
https://www.piie.com/research/piie-charts/2024/chinas-popula...
Massive immigration (on a scale never seen in human history) would be required. I don't see that happening with one of the most xenophobic cultures on Earth.
This isn't a problem confined to China, they just have the worst numbers. The entire "first world" is facing declines of varying degrees.
This coupled with climate change is why immigration policy is probably the single most important thing for most countries right now.
Massive immigration would cause the system to completely collapse as imported people will not respect the local economy, culture, etc. in the same as natural citizens that originally built the nation. That's not xenophobic, just reality. Importing people means importing their culture, which might be incompatible with the state.
It's a reason they began to be called nation-states - states without a nation backing it tended to flop, and nation's without a state tended to slowly (or quickly) be absorbed into the dominant culture.
Over what timescale? Is the presumption that China, the country of one child policy, will do nothing about the problem?
China has ALREADY transitioned from an "aging society" (7% of the population over 65) to an "aged society" (14% over 65).
There are roughly five working-age adults to support every retiree today. This is going to crater. United Nations projections show that by 2050, that ratio will more than double, climbing past 50%. At that point, China will have fewer than two working-age adults for every retiree. The west grew rich before growing old. China, Vietnam, Brazil are aging as middle income countries.
The one child policy was like doing speed, it temporarily freed up massive amounts of capital and labor. But China's work force peaked over a decade ago. The bill is now due, and all the those "single children" know that they are expected to support 2 parents and 4 grandparents.
Aside from the dubious wisdom of similar interventions, cruelly forcing abortions was a lot easier policy to enforce then it would be to try to shove pro-natalist policies on people increasingly overburdened with caregiving for elders because of earlier interventions.
https://www.piie.com/research/piie-charts/2024/chinas-popula...
they already have in 2016. https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/01/china/china-one-child-anniver...
> Is the presumption that China, the country of one child policy, will do nothing about the problem?
I don't think they're foolish enough to invite the entire third world into the country to bolster low birth rates like the west does. So that leaves doing it the old fashioned way, which is a slow ship to turn around.