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Comment by memracom | Hacker News Reader

Last I looked, China was a big export economy. So the population size is irrelevant. Look elsewhere for indicators of China's future economic growth.

And never forget, that big revolutionary wave of iPhones and iPads? It came from China manufacturers.

In today's world, if you only look ahead, you will be blindsided from the rear. China is not China any more.

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Which markets in the world, besides the US, have a stable enough economy for China to rely on their consumption?

Europe still has significant headwinds, Canada and the middle east...that's pretty obvious with $30/barrel oil prices, Russia of course not doing terribly great, capital flooding back to the US from Central and South America due to interest rates rising.

Keep in mind, a lot of manufacturing is moving back to the US from China with automation being cheeper than (quickly rising) Chinese labor rates [1] [2] [3].

If China cannot stoke internal demand quickly enough (and I assure you, it cannot), it's going to slide into a deep recession. On the bright side, this is going to help cool off London, Toronto, Vancouver, SF/LA, Miami, and central Texas property markets (where a lot of Chinese money was flowing into).

[1] http://www.marketwatch.com/story/us-flips-the-script-on-jobs...

[2] http://news.yahoo.com/manufacturing-moving-china-us-survey-0...

[3] http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21569570-growin...

China has been conjuring demand for concrete buildings for 7 years. IMO "stoking internal demand" is harmful to the economy. There's always demand for what people really want. Clean air, comfortable, affordable, living spaces with readily access to transportation to quickly travel to where other people are, good food, etc.

But then again, China can't step back from the current structure of the economy without risking collapse, which would endanger the Party's power.

> On the bright side, this is going to help cool off London, Toronto, Vancouver, SF/LA, Miami, and central Texas property markets (where a lot of Chinese money was flowing into).

I really really really really really hope so but man... I don't know... the Mainlanders have waayy too much money and the existing owners of multiple properties won't let the properties go anyway so we may have a stagnant period (good) for a while until either China gets better or... well, I hope the market goes down a bit :D.

You do realize that Apple is one making the realy money from iPhones and iPads, not the contract manufacturers, right?

This is not exactly true the contract manufacturers are being paid to learn to make their own phones and they are.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/foxconn-aims-to-fashion-its-own-...

Now all they need is a billion dollar marketing department.

It's called Huawei, or Xiaomi.

Xiaomi isn't doing very well these days. Their growth fell off a cliff last year, and is very unlikely to recover to the brief glory days. The smartphone market is going to grow extremely slow from here forward. Xiaomi will end up as just another irrelevant smartphone maker, in a heap of dozens of them like HTC or Motorola.

http://fortune.com/2016/01/15/xiaomi-smartphone-sales-fall-s...

The Chinese are definitely focused on markets with new growing cellphone adoption rather then the US where it is hyper competitive. I don't believe their success here is an indicator of there overall wellbeing.

Foxconn is a Taiwanese company

... The factories are still in China, meaning Chinese are gaining the skills and thus creating an industry for themselves

"Making the physical iPhone" is not a very lucrative industry. "Designing and marketing the iPhone and its software ecosystem" is.

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