China reports bumper April exports ahead of crucial trade talks with US
Trade data shows a rise in shipments to south-east Asia and Europe offsets drop to America
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The China Thread
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China reports bumper April exports ahead of crucial trade talks with US
Trade data shows a rise in shipments to south-east Asia and Europe offsets drop to America
These are all places that ship their stuff to the USA. China is off-loading their excess inventory while they still can to third parties. Third parties are hoping their countries can work out a deal for lower tariffs with the USA. Meanwhile factory orders in China have stopped and 1/3 of the economy is turned off until tariff action happens.
If a third of the Chinese economy was really shut down, we would certainly have known about it from sources like the ones I have cited above. That is simply not a realistic assessment.
ASEAN has 700 million people and economies that are growing at an average of 5%, with growing middle classes and fast-growing demand for the kinds of products you see at Walmart. Demand for Chinese goods has also been growing fast in large markets like Russia (where China has replaced Europe and the US), Brazil or even a country hostile to China like India, where for instance the majority of cellphones sold are Chinese.
China is the leading supplier and exporter to most countries in the world today representing around 7 billion people. China also is the largest market today in just about every sector including automotive, consumer electronics, household appliances, phones, furniture etc and total Chinese exports represent less than 20% of their GDP, and the US represents less than 1/6th of these exports:
China Exports, percent of GDP - data, chart | TheGlobalEconomy.com
China: Exports of goods and services as percent of GDP: The latest value from 2023 is 19.74 percent, a decline from 20.79 percent in 2022. In comparison, the world average is 45.64 percent, based on data from 154 countries. Historically, the average for China from 1960 to 2023 is 14.79 percent...
The problem is China is in that graph where exports shrunk as a percentage of GDP China replaced that activity by increasing unproductive construction (i.e. building ghost cities and building empty bullet trains to minor cities, etc) so it is actually even worse. What they should have been doing is increasing domestic consumption but they kept suppressing their currency to boost exports and they had capital controls and a lack of social safety nets, that coupled with the impact of the previous one child policy means that Chinese consumers have very high savings rates which depresses consumption.If a third of the Chinese economy was really shut down, we would certainly have known about it from sources like the ones I have cited above. That is simply not a realistic assessment.
ASEAN has 700 million people and economies that are growing at an average of 5%, with growing middle classes and fast-growing demand for the kinds of products you see at Walmart. Demand for Chinese goods has also been growing fast in large markets like Russia (where China has replaced Europe and the US), Brazil or even a country hostile to China like India, where for instance the majority of cellphones sold are Chinese.
China is the leading supplier and exporter to most countries in the world today representing around 7 billion people. China also is the largest market today in just about every sector including automotive, consumer electronics, household appliances, phones, furniture etc and total Chinese exports represent less than 20% of their GDP, and the US represents less than 1/6th of these exports:
China Exports, percent of GDP - data, chart | TheGlobalEconomy.com
China: Exports of goods and services as percent of GDP: The latest value from 2023 is 19.74 percent, a decline from 20.79 percent in 2022. In comparison, the world average is 45.64 percent, based on data from 154 countries. Historically, the average for China from 1960 to 2023 is 14.79 percent...www.theglobaleconomy.com
China is a house of cards. Eventually it will collapse like the Soviet Union did. I think the collapse will come sometime in the next 20 - 30 years or if not a total collapse at least a very long stagnation like what happened to Japan.
They've already diverted a lot of their real estate investment into production and key industries like EVs, batteries, AI, semiconductors etc, their government let their real estate bubble burst.
The central government puts out directives to the banks and regions, they steer investment according to those top-down long term strategic objectives, then they leverage market forces and competition to achieve these goals. That's how they've ended up with literally hundreds of EV companies in China, most of which will bite the dust, but from which about a dozen companies and megacompanies have emerged.
Japan doesn't have China's domestic market size, that's one of the main differences with China. As a result of this and of being occupied after WW2 (much like Germany), they complied with stifling monetary restrictions under the Plaza Accords, which blunted their economic growth.
China has anticipated the current restrictions since Trump's first mandate and has been pivoting towards new/growing markets like ASEAN (700 million consumers) to dampen the shock from US protectionist policies. They are also gradually pivoting towards greater dependence on their domestic market as their domestic wealth continues to improve.
Electric vehicle growth is not sustainable and will gas out in the next 5 - 10 years because grid systems cannot handle every car being electric. In terms of semi-conductors, AI and batteries technology wise China is far behind other countries because all they can do is copycat. China has advanced its tech by industrial espionage and legally forcing foreign companies in China to have Chinese partners and share intellectual property, etc. The west is tiring of this and when the west puts an end to this China will take a massive hit because they have no creativity or ability to innovate. Chinese people for the most part are like robots and lack any creativity that the western mind has.
Look at the Dutch company AMSL and compare that to anything China is doing in terms of semi conductors. In terms of AI China is well behind things like Grok or Chat GPT, etc. Look at Tesla batteries compared to Chinese batteries etc.
40% of cars sold in China are EVs, and that share is going to do up to 80%+, they haven't had a problem with their grid. In Europe, electricity consumption has declined substantially and there are several countries planning on expanding their nuclear energy programs, while in the US electricity consumption has been flat, and nuclear capacity is set to double or triple by 2050.
China is 5 to 10 years ahead in battery tech today. You have a limited understanding of that and other industries like semiconductors and AI, your perspective boils down to cultural clichés. The majority of the EE design staff in Silicon Valley companies like Nvidia or Intel are actually ethnic Chinese, and the global leaders are Taiwanese (TSMC). The majority, or at the very least a plurality of electrical engineers graduating from top American SV feeder schools like Berkeley, Stanford, CalTech, UCLA etc have been ethnic Chinese for decades now.
It's ASML. China is developing homegrown EUV littography tech, and has already caught up in AI. CATL is already ahead of Tesla in battery tech and production processes.
China Develops Domestic EUV Tool, ASML Monopoly in Trouble
China's domestic extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography development is far from a distant dream. The newest system, now undergoing testing at Huawei's Dongguan facility, leverages laser-induced discharge plasma (LDP) technology, representing a potentially disruptive approach to EUV light...
Any indication of how much of EV production is essentially waste?
The Chinese trend when there is a new technology like this, for example 10 years ago with shared bicycles, was that during the market glut you've described, when many companies initially compete, there was a lot of wasteful production that was quickly discarded. When I lived there, within a year of the shared bicycle boom there were huge piles of these bicycles collected in junk yards. Apparently millions of these bikes all around the country if you could draw a conclusion from the various videos.
In the past few years I have seen some videos of similar fields of unused, low cost EV's just sitting and rotting in China. You can't really know from these reports what the total numbers are and how it effects the market but, in retrospect, videos of China's Ghost Cities emerged long before CCP policy addressed the real estate bubble.
China currently produces over 8M new EVs per year, the waste element on new cars is insignificant today as battery tech is now a lot more mature, it might not have been the case a few years ago.
I would guess the car parks with unsold and abandoned EVs that are shown on channels like Serpentza are made up of older models who have been rendered obsolete in the marketplace by the fact that battery technology is moving very fast, cars from companies that went bust and no longer have dealerships and spare parts, or lemons that have failed and whose broken parts are too expensive to repair or can no longer be replaced due to parts no longer being available.
And you're right about the fact that their EV industry is very large with dozens of companies, many of which have gone bust, is going to create more waste, with car parks of older vehicles and from defunct companies, but their current production is now consolidated with a handful of large players producing in tune with their domestic and international demand, that's why their leading manufacturers have been aggressively expanding their production capacity.
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McKinnsley
Other Christian
Just got back from a business trip to China, my first. I was primarily in Wenzhou, a third tier city of 9m people including the sprawl, with a bit of time in Beijing also. I was there to check production lines and streamline some processes. I was surprised by what I found.
Cities were clean, peaceful, and quite nice to walk around, considerably better than nearly every EU capital. I cant speak about US cities, I've only visited LA which was pretty rubbish.
EVs are huge, so many brands, loads of Teslas too. Shopping center parking seemed to have nearly every space offering charging facilities. Contrasted with the EU having a few working chargers at retail car parks and some petrol stations. Charging costs a fraction of petrol/diesel costs so these cars are very popular for city dwellers. In the EU its become the case that filling your electric car doesn't differ from petrol costs and is more of a hassle, so the popularity has nosedived. The home brand cars were bloody good, self driving, premium luxury, decent spec sedans starting at around 22k.
Food was exceptional, 30-40 fresh ingredients in most of the meals I ate. Smells great too. Too many chicken feet and some frankly odd things to my western tastes. Their quality of food frankly destroys whats typical for most EU people. Restaurants in shopping malls were leagues ahead of the EU, no deep fried stodge and microwaved trash. Not one case of a stomach problem, and I ate 100% local food, different restaurant each meal.
I was with factory workers for up to 10 hours a day and saw the younger 20 year olds joking and laughing, my main English speaking contact, would skip and dance from time to time walking down the street. I realized that this was just random happiness, she was joyful. I don't see this behavior in the EU, i'm more likely to see neon haired weirdos who have mental illnesses and nearly never see joy.
US brands were very common place, and many people pay a premium for these for whatever reason. I didn't expect to see 'Dairy Queen' or the far more surprising mega sized 'Sams Club' being highly popular. Chinese people paying for the 'privilege' to shop in a US chain - that was odd. Some US cars but these were mainly Teslas. The EU has virtually none of the US brands I saw in China.
I quite liked being inside the 'sweatshop' because the AC was nice and cold which was preferable to the heat outside. Workers had 8 hour shifts, owned houses, and looked happy. The middle class are doing quite nicely from what I could tell.
Electricity and power are ubiquitous, they light up the side of entire mountains with lights because it looks nice. The city is all lit up like a Christmas tree at night. Now I contrast that with the EU where recently fridges with beer were powered off because we simply cant produce electricity at a decent rate to run them. Every second light is off in some supermarkets for the same reason. It shocked me how poor the EU citizen is in comparison to the Chinese middle class. I was a little sad for us.
I've visited a lot of the world, China exceeded all expectations. Sure my experiences are only my own, but what I saw was a strong functioning country, I make no political comments about their system I do however say that there isn't a properly functioning 'democracy' in the EU. I cant speak about the US, I very much like Trump, and hope he succeeds in his plans to MAGA, and as such wont attempt to make a ham fisted comparison.
Its my 2cents.
Cities were clean, peaceful, and quite nice to walk around, considerably better than nearly every EU capital. I cant speak about US cities, I've only visited LA which was pretty rubbish.
EVs are huge, so many brands, loads of Teslas too. Shopping center parking seemed to have nearly every space offering charging facilities. Contrasted with the EU having a few working chargers at retail car parks and some petrol stations. Charging costs a fraction of petrol/diesel costs so these cars are very popular for city dwellers. In the EU its become the case that filling your electric car doesn't differ from petrol costs and is more of a hassle, so the popularity has nosedived. The home brand cars were bloody good, self driving, premium luxury, decent spec sedans starting at around 22k.
Food was exceptional, 30-40 fresh ingredients in most of the meals I ate. Smells great too. Too many chicken feet and some frankly odd things to my western tastes. Their quality of food frankly destroys whats typical for most EU people. Restaurants in shopping malls were leagues ahead of the EU, no deep fried stodge and microwaved trash. Not one case of a stomach problem, and I ate 100% local food, different restaurant each meal.
I was with factory workers for up to 10 hours a day and saw the younger 20 year olds joking and laughing, my main English speaking contact, would skip and dance from time to time walking down the street. I realized that this was just random happiness, she was joyful. I don't see this behavior in the EU, i'm more likely to see neon haired weirdos who have mental illnesses and nearly never see joy.
US brands were very common place, and many people pay a premium for these for whatever reason. I didn't expect to see 'Dairy Queen' or the far more surprising mega sized 'Sams Club' being highly popular. Chinese people paying for the 'privilege' to shop in a US chain - that was odd. Some US cars but these were mainly Teslas. The EU has virtually none of the US brands I saw in China.
I quite liked being inside the 'sweatshop' because the AC was nice and cold which was preferable to the heat outside. Workers had 8 hour shifts, owned houses, and looked happy. The middle class are doing quite nicely from what I could tell.
Electricity and power are ubiquitous, they light up the side of entire mountains with lights because it looks nice. The city is all lit up like a Christmas tree at night. Now I contrast that with the EU where recently fridges with beer were powered off because we simply cant produce electricity at a decent rate to run them. Every second light is off in some supermarkets for the same reason. It shocked me how poor the EU citizen is in comparison to the Chinese middle class. I was a little sad for us.
I've visited a lot of the world, China exceeded all expectations. Sure my experiences are only my own, but what I saw was a strong functioning country, I make no political comments about their system I do however say that there isn't a properly functioning 'democracy' in the EU. I cant speak about the US, I very much like Trump, and hope he succeeds in his plans to MAGA, and as such wont attempt to make a ham fisted comparison.
Its my 2cents.
That's very encouraging and good news. The only consistent demographic of happy people I saw in China were females who went to college, but were not yet married. Not a lot of skipping in the streets, but those were the gay ones.
10 years ago air conditioning in factories and exceptional food were not the norm in my experience. I honestly never saw or heard of a factory with air conditioning, although I didn't know anyone in high end chip making or whatever. Good for them if this is becoming common!
What was your average meal price? When I lived there, I would have to pay 100-150 RMB for a meal, usually at a non-Chinese restaurant, so that it felt wholesome and was not full of gutter oil type stuff (some people never notice), which was more expensive than the USA, where I'm from, for equivalent food in the 2010's.
Canadian expat in Nanning, 2nd tier big city with 8M people in the south of China near the Vietnam border shows his dinner experience at an all you can eat buffet, US$10.50 per head, drinks (beer) included:
Food is pretty cheap in China because the cost of ingredients is low, there has been very little food inflation there. Labor costs have gone up a bit, but the restaurant scene is pretty competitive.
I never saw anything as good as this and I went to Nanning once. Closest I had in Guangzhou in 2016 was Japanese all you can eat for 114 RMB and beer was extra. Similar price in Hong Kong.
It's like living in bizarro world watching the Canadian say at about 12.30 that Chinese don't drink as much as Westerners. What?? This is completely false. Chinese drinking culture is insane & lethal.
Things could not have possibly changed this much since I was there. Video was made in 2021. Was this some special price? I would expect the normal price to be twice that, like 150元 Beginning to doubt...
I have seen Western expats who made totally misleading videos before. I would have to see the restaurant bill and more of this guy's vids to get a fix on him, but why is everything he says a dick measuring contest between China & Canada?
I watched the normal, cheap Chinese restaurant food become lower and lower quality after 2008 in order to maintain a price point, but it still increased in cost as it became more adulterated and infused with gutter oil. Price point stayed low compared to the USA, but the quality of the cheap stuff does not compare.
I wouldn't trust the food in China. Who knows what is in it, MSG, questionable quality oils, etc. And to be honest all the food in that video looks super oily/greasy.
On a personal level, I never liked the Chinese...
For all their problems, I've met some blacks, mexicans, even jews that I was able to get along with well enough, if only in passing. I don't want to live in their neighborhoods, but I've at least managed to have human connections with them on occasion.
Chinese people seem cold, distant, almost inhuman to me in a way. I can't recall a single moment in my life where I had anything resembling a genuine human connection with a Chinese person.
The way they conduct business... They are the cheapest, stingiest bastards you'll ever meet, and it's not out of malice, it's like that's their default setting. It's normal to them. It's woven into the fabric of their being. Go to a Chinese restaurant, they count every napkin, every sauce packet, if you're lucky they won't charge you extra for the ice they put in your drink. The florist I went to this last mother's day, a Chinese business. I wanted something extra nice this year, sprung for their most expensive arrangement, and they tried to pass off a basic bare bones arrangement with some cheap green shit like fern branches stuffed in there to make it look bigger. When I pushed back, they immediately relented, almost like they knew, they were just hoping I wouldn't notice, or that I would be too timid to push back. When they came back the second time, the arrangement looked great, like the way it was advertised. Why didn't they just do that in the beginning? Why do I have to go through this song and dance with them? It just seems to be part of their culture, and I don't like it.
Complimentary seems to be a word that doesn't exist in their language.
For all their problems, I've met some blacks, mexicans, even jews that I was able to get along with well enough, if only in passing. I don't want to live in their neighborhoods, but I've at least managed to have human connections with them on occasion.
Chinese people seem cold, distant, almost inhuman to me in a way. I can't recall a single moment in my life where I had anything resembling a genuine human connection with a Chinese person.
The way they conduct business... They are the cheapest, stingiest bastards you'll ever meet, and it's not out of malice, it's like that's their default setting. It's normal to them. It's woven into the fabric of their being. Go to a Chinese restaurant, they count every napkin, every sauce packet, if you're lucky they won't charge you extra for the ice they put in your drink. The florist I went to this last mother's day, a Chinese business. I wanted something extra nice this year, sprung for their most expensive arrangement, and they tried to pass off a basic bare bones arrangement with some cheap green shit like fern branches stuffed in there to make it look bigger. When I pushed back, they immediately relented, almost like they knew, they were just hoping I wouldn't notice, or that I would be too timid to push back. When they came back the second time, the arrangement looked great, like the way it was advertised. Why didn't they just do that in the beginning? Why do I have to go through this song and dance with them? It just seems to be part of their culture, and I don't like it.
Complimentary seems to be a word that doesn't exist in their language.
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Imagine what it would be like to work for Chinese people. I did it once briefly for about 3 weeks before I found a better job. That was many years ago. Never again.....
Somehow I get the vibe that what was presented to you....as a business associate ( ie, someone who brings in the money for the chinanese) .....wasn't real. Sorry if I'm wrong, but that's just my spidey-sense tingling. I doubt if Joe Solo-Tourist would have seen skipping and dancing guides bringing them to nice restaurants.
The chinanese are all about saving face and false-fronts.
Part of it is that doing business the Chinese way is $$ advantageous, and if you don't like that, too bad, you're competing with a billion Chinese who do, so are you going to be the one guy who bucks the system with a lower profit margin? Joke is that since they continually undercut each other, even with their crude practices the profit margin is still tiny.
The other part is they are actually different. While whites, for example, especially Westerners, are "open" in their attitude and heart, and will do things like help strangers and animals, Chinese are "closed." Chinese don't even like to answer simple questions because it makes them vulnerable when they "open up". Chinese will literally step over dying children in the street and pretend they're not there, rather than "open" their eyes, so to speak, and it really looks on video like they don't see them even when they're looking right at them, like baby Yue Yue.
Another infamous, Chinese, cold-hearted $$ calculation was the practice from the 1990's through the early 2010's, before cameras and license plate readers were ubiquitous, of private vehicle drivers who'd had collisions with pedestrians, cyclists, or motorcyclists would, instead of stopping to render aid and regardless of how seriously the victim was hurt, go back and run over the victim until they were dead. The reason was that the Chinese legal system had not solved the liability problem and there was no limit to damages for injuries to the victim, who could get fake doctors to make fake papers that the courts would never examine, so the driver could be forced to pay forever, while vehicular deaths had a liability cap.
My first red pill there was talking to a manager of a hospital cleaning crew who ran his own business. He was very distraught because of the practice of Chinese doctors requiring patients to pay "tips" or bribes before surgery by handing over at least a 20% tip up front in a red envelope or hong bao. If you failed to do this, the surgeon would give you a reason to remember to do it next time. The cleaning crew manager was non-Christian religious and most of the decent Chinese I knew were also religious, usually Christian.
The main reason for the hospital hong bao practice is that, in Communist economies, doctors and garbage men make similar amounts of money despite big differences in training, so the doctors want to get paid extra for their services. Over the years I was there, it looked like this practice was steadily declining in China, while medical care in general was improving, mostly because of government goals, but partially because of the influx of hot money from the forced organ transplant trade.
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It's dollar advantageous in the short term but in the long-term its less profitable. The goodwill of customers, employees, regulators and shareholders makes a huge difference over a multi decade period. Nobody understands this better than Warren Buffett. Chinese people don't think long term and neither does their government. If the Chinese government was thinking long term they would not have built bullet trains to small cities and ghost cities etc just to goose quarterly GDP figures and create employment. That is short-term thinking.