Why China won’t own next-generation manufacturing
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
The claim that "75 percent of all robots used in China are purchased from foreign firms" only makes sense if you count Hon Hai/Foxconn as "foreign". HQ is in Taiwan, but Foxconn has over a million employees in China. Their Foxbot robots [2] are being produced at a rate of 20,000 per year. The US only has 26,000 robots total, mostly in automotive.[3] Foxconn claims they have good enough robotic precision now to use their robots to make iPhones.
The article is really a rehash of a paper by Dieter Ernst.[4] The "manufacturing decline" in China reflects layoffs in mining and metals. Those are both industries where even basic mechanization cuts the number of employees enormously. Those industries were mostly state-owned, and were oversized and overstaffed for the demand. About a third of China's state-run firm jobs (30 million) disappeared between 1998 and 2015. Ernst writes "Outside of mines and minerals, manufacturing apparently continues to act as an employment absorber." That's not manufacturing decline; that's modernizing the steel industry. (More high-quality stuff, less rebar, fewer workers, less pollution.)
Ernst complains that the 13th Five Year Plan isn't specific about how new jobs will be created. He points out that salaries for college graduates seem to be declining, and unemployment rates for college graduates are up. This matches US experience. There's the usual complaint about not enough pre-trained vocational workers. However, companies in China are used to having to train their people - after all, many are right off the farm.
The article has a picture of "carbon fiber silk thread". There is no such thing. There is, however, a stock image from Getty Images miscaptioned that way.
It's a typical Vivek Wadhwa article, written to get attention.
[1] http://www.tradingeconomics.com/china/gdp-growth-annual [2] http://www.scmp.com/tech/innovation/article/1829834/foxconns... [3] http://www.ifr.org/industrial-robots/statistics/ [4] http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2820433
except for the ad hominum at the end. that felt distasteful.
http://observer.com/2012/07/woo-boy-singularity-us-vivek-wad...
I offer a counter on one point:
"If you want numbers that can't be faked, inbound container counts at the port of Los Angeles are up."
There is a world wide glut of shipping capacity. http://money.cnn.com/2016/03/31/news/economy/china-shipping-...
port of LA could still be up but perhaps it isn't really an adequate example to generalize.
otherwise, I am in the same place. Sure, countries where production left due to labor costs will be able to compete again, and will enjoy some advantages around strong research institutions and being close to their markets, but its silly to think that China won't now have a strong consumer market to provide for, that they can't innovate, and that they can't have top tier research. I have lived in the US and China and I always get this feeling that Westerns think they have a monopoly on ideas and China has a monopoly on cheating/cloning/cheap. They are all wrong.
I manufacturer in china (https://flair.co) and just recently got some quotes from Bay Area Metal shops.
A tool for metal stamping that costs me 5KUSD in China was quoted to me for 55KUSD in the East Bay. And, the 5K cost gets refunded to me after 40K pieces are bought...
The notion that there aren't significant cost differences now is also misrepresented in the article. Sure, I would love to produce parts next to my apartment both because of convenience and proximity to my market (not because of bruhaha made in america nationalism nonsense) but it simply doesn't make financial sense.
The article was about the future. All signs are pointing to that tool costing you ~7.5USD in the US in the near-term future. With better shipping, support and logistics. The price differential is going to, at some point, matter way less than those other considerations and you may well decide to eat the entire $7.5K switching cost just to get access to them. I buy all my iPhones retail, for full price, from Apple.
Of course China is going to win a bunch of price races today, it's like competing in swimming vs. Usain Bolt as a varsity college swimmer. Sure, you might win the first few races. But once Bolt gets serious, he's going to be able to level his skills up way faster than you will, even given your 5 year head start. His genetics are simply better.
The US just has better DNA for commerce. Other countries can win battles, but never the war.
As concise and positive a statement of religious faith as any I've ever seen.
The US has another decade or two of riding that wave until things get hairy.
It covers the demography, geology and geography that guarantees the USA will continue to be the predominant power for the next 25 years, if not longer.
Not sure I buy all his arguments, but definitely worth a read.
> The US simply has better DNA for commerce
I'm sure the price will drop in the US for manufacturing devices (because the alternative is going out of business -- very few businesses are so sentimental about nationalistic supply chains that they'd eat a multi-hundred-percent markup).
But I'm interested in a more fact-oriented discussion (you probably don't think those are specific, detailed facts). The US, for instance, is relatively open for free flow of capital into and out of the country -- China doesn't allow that, and that helps commerce here. But if China changes their policies (which is not totally impossible), and, for instance, capital transfer out of the US is restricted as a result of a negotiation with Mexico (which a presidential candidate seems to be willing to do) then that advantage disappears. The Could also disappear if another major party's candidate for president gets their wish as regards offshore profits. Plenty of protectionism in all major parties these days, enough to sink this advantage, at least.
The US has a relatively high-trust business culture, which is more durable. But it's also changing in China, moving (perhaps not as quickly as some would like) away from a guangxi-based business system.
So a lot of these theoretically defensible advantages are actually pretty weak, and (while defensible) ill-defended.
I like facts as much at the next guy, but good, actionable, agenda-free facts are actually pretty hard to come by. So many times I've read a convincing article painting things a certain way, and then later seeing one convincingly saying that the previous article was full of misinformation.
You don't get out of the need for good, experience-based intuitive analysis just by looking at facts. And facts won't prevent you from being horribly wrong.
> Plenty of protectionism in all major parties these days, enough to sink this advantage, at least.
Protectionism is fighting a tide, it doesn't actually possess the capability to reverse decades of progress on globalization. Only to accelerate or decelerate it. It's now market forces that make the biggest difference, not political ones. Politics was never bigger than the market anyway, which is why market-friendly policies are better for people in the long run.
It's a bit racist, isn't it?
Where I'm going with this is you need to be extremely careful about these kind of blanket statements because you almost certainly have historic blinders on.
Until 2014, when China overtook it.
While your argument about the cost of production isn't too far fetched, it is unclear what this magical "DNA for commerce" you speak of is? I've heard of this thing called "American Exceptionalism" - is this an example?
Mechanical engineering in the US DRIVES ME CRAZY.
For electrical, China is 1/2 to 1/3 the cost. They also horribly screw up 1 in 3 that you have to redo completely. This is fine if you have the time. Otherwise, you go domestic.
Everything associated with electrical in the US understands that they are competing on turnaround, high-margin, high-value, and customer service. Yes, they're more expensive than China, but not unreasonably so.
The mechanical stuff is just totally out to lunch in the US. My gut feel is that mechanical shops in the US are in two categories: 1) competent, and running at 100% capacity or 2) incompetent, and running at almost 0% capacity. This is a recipe for frustration. You either can't get time ot can't get knowledge.
Consequently, all of the good electrical manufacturers I know have mechanical on site too (CNC milling, lathe, and probably injection molder). Even if it sits idle 95% of the time, that ONE time they need it NOW, it just paid for itself.
Buying something mechanical in the US is disorganized. There's nothing like Alibaba's wholesale side, with a reputation system. There's ThomasNet, but it's just a big industry directory. There might be an opportunity here for somebody. But it's not going to be a huge business.
Designing something to be injection molded is hard. There are lots of little things that run the price way up. There's "Injection Molding Part Design for Dummies", which is $495 on Amazon, but Proto Labs will send you a copy for free if you ask them. Incidentally, all TechShop locations have a small injection molding machine good for about one part a minute, and a CNC mill on which you can make a mold. They even have Autodesk Moldflow, which helps design molds using finite element analysis to predict what will work. So you can make prototypes and learn what works.
If you're dealing with a mold-making shop, if you send them files in Inventor or SolidWorks along with a Moldflow analysis, you'll probably get a much better price. In mechanical, the more clueless you are, the more it costs.
EMachineShop has a nice little CAD program which knows what their shop can do and will price the job. It will tell you if they can't make something due to some constraint (sheet metal bends too close, hole too deep, etc.) and gives hints on how to make the job cheaper. Those guys have been around for about 15 years, do a nice business, but haven't grown much.
If you want to manufacture with plastic, I'd be surprised if there was any reason to do it outside of China. If you're working with metal, it's a much trickier question.
Along with EMachineShop, there's also Plethora. I've never used Plethora and it seems incredibly limited, but they've been around a few years and have a ton of people on staff (which can't be cheap) so they must be getting decent business.
And here is the US's disadvantage there, we are still on an island when it comes to that stuff. Sure you can get some metric nuts and bolts here (in US steel grades). But try buying European grade steel here (nigh impossible). Try getting an EN (nee DIN) or JIS flange here (do-able but lots of calling around). Try finding an engineer competent in the PED or machinery directive.
In Europe and Asia they can get US materials and make to our standard and sell to us. But its much harder and more rare to make products here and sell them to Europe and Asia. Usually you are making a US product, and "proving equivalency" with the European and Asian standards.
... and you happen to have a U.S. or Canada mailing address.
http://p.protolabs.com/injection-molding-dummies-book
"*We currently ship promotional items to the U.S. and Canada only."
It's hard to believe there aren't a ton of shops out in those areas to help keep costs competitive. But I could see costs remaining high for the reasons you stated - high cost, high value industries.
However even with that service, I have a CNC machining place I use in China that will beat even automated vendors. It takes 6 days to ship instead of 3, but the prices are generally lower, they can do a lot more finishing, they can do much more complicated machining and higher tolerances.
I feel bad for our local CNC guy as he rarely gets any work from us anymore. He has always had our best interests in mind, and has bailed us out on many occasions. He just cannot meet the lead times we can get elsewhere, we cannot afford to wait 2-3 weeks for a part when we can get it in a week. His prices are also higher, but that really wasn't what drove us elsewhere.
A quick checklist for sniffing out shops: 1. Are they ISO? Getting through an ISO audit says something about the facility. 2. How much WIP is sitting around on a visit? With the best vendors I've worked with you'd swear they didn't do anything until you see their shipping lanes. Low WIP and busy shipping is another positive. 3. Ask to see their rework area. If they have one and SOPs for handling rework, that is a positive 4. Ask to see their documentation for current parts. PPAP, CoC, etc.
It's also not just because they're underdeveloped. Some cities in developing countries, like Luanda, Angola, have some of the highest costs of living in the world.
A lot does come down to being underdeveloped. Or more specifically, living standards are lower, especially with the lower class (e.g. the poor in the US live far better than the poor in China). Take away all of developed nation's anti-poverty programs and minimum wage laws (that provide for floors on labor costs), combined with cost-inducing regulation that exists to protect human health and the environment, and yes, you would make products in the economy a lot cheaper.
If you accept the lack of access to Western goods, then it is much more reasonable.
Why is food so much cheaper? Why is land so much cheaper? Why are utilities so much cheaper? What are they doing that makes everything so cheap? IMHO, this is really a phd thesis sized undertaking and would probably teach us a lot about the inefficiencies in our western system.
Have you ever been to one of these places?
People are much poorer, and the standard of living is much lower. Things like utilities often don't exist, or or much less reliable than in richer countries.
Some things are cheaper: branded clothes and foods are generally priced beyond the means of most, so people don't buy them. Transport is cheaper, because people don't own cars - they walk, or bus, or share motor-scooters.
Accommodation is cheaper on a per-person basis, because 6 people in a single bedroom apartment is normal.
A few exceptions exist of course - the US health system costs a lot more than anywhere else in the world given the health outcomes. Places like Chile and Cuba pay a lot less for health care, but sit above and below the US on tables of life expectancy[1]. There are also things like extreme inequality in some countries which can cause other distortions.
But there generally really are no secrets - they live cheaper because they are poorer.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expe...
Don't forget about currency manipulation. People in China are buying those things in yuan and then to do the comparison you're converting it to dollars at the manipulated exchange rate.
All this costs money, and it all adds up. Once the average Chinese citizen demands to have the same standard of living as his/her counterpart in the west, the price advantage will disappear.
This opinion is based on my observation of how wages work in Argentina, in comparison with the US. Food (eating the same food) is cheaper in the US, rent (renting the same kind of appartment) is cheaper in the US, going to the cinema (same movie!) is cheaper in the US, buying a car (the same car) is cheaper in the US, buying clothes (the same clothes) is cheaper in the US.
Even thou, when I worked in a Boston based company they claimed that our salary should be lower because we had a lower cost of living. It is just that they can get away with paying us less. The chinese (or argentinian) cost of living being lower is a lie. It is just that we cannot do the things that USians expect and our salaries are reduced accordingly.
The US has virtually no education system, what does exist is expensive and not practically oriented.
Basic supply and demand. US has high demand for skills and totally non competitive supply. (even in tech now, which is why they need the H1B visa thing)
But dont expect it to get fixed. It's that way on purpose.
Replace China with the USSR and your argument could be from the 1960s. Replace it with Japan and it could be from the early 90s. Do you see a trend here?
Every few decades we have a new enemy that's going to destroy our economy. Business interests push these narratives to move students into fields that will drive down labor costs for their companies. H-1Bs exist for the same reason.
Oh...and How many Americans enroll in Chinese Universities?
and the ussr. despite everything. destroyed us global military equipement sales.
China seems to be picking at a dead carcass tbh, not exactly much left to take.
US is so scared of chinese tech advancement they have banned exports of high end intel chips there. but that hasnt stopped them taking all the top places of the worlds fastest supercomputers.
As soon as a couple of Chinese unis overtake the ivy league colleges will there be anything left in the US except bones?
would you even know whether they have already?
perhaps you missed junes
China maintained its No. 1 ranking on the 47th edition of the TOP500 list of the world’s top supercomputers, but with a new system built entirely using processors designed and made in China. Sunway TaihuLight is the new No. 1 system with 93 petaflop/s (quadrillions of calculations per second) on the LINPACK benchmark.
Hardly. Toyota and Honda both make cars in the US, which seems counter to saying they've destroyed it.
Even just looking at the American manufacturers, America still does alright. For instance, in a list of the top 10 best-selling vehicles in the world in 2015 [1], yes, a Japanese car came in first, but a German car came in second and US took up the third and fourth spots.
Maybe if you close your eyes and click your heals together three times.
Meanwhile. in the slightly more real world.
http://theweek.com/articles/461968/rise-fall-detroit-timelin...
How is that "vastly better"?
We're talking about production not the product. and that isnt complicated. Asian markets have an abundundant supply of highly skilled labour. western markets do not.
furthermore. that isnt a surpise. its policy.
Detroit filing for bankruptcy has more to do with car manufacturing moving to southern, union free states and Mexico than it does with Japan.
The reason they went south is that labor was cheaper there because those states are unfriendly to unions.
I'm not blaming anyone, I'm pretty pro union myself, but that's what happened. You can argue until you're blue in the face, but it's a fact that the manufacturing jobs left Detroit for southern states and Mexico, not Japan.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/27/world/middleeast/us-foreig...
"Overseas weapons sales by the United States totaled $66.3 billion last year, or more than three-quarters of the global arms market, valued at $85.3 billion in 2011. Russia was a distant second, with $4.8 billion in deals."
http://news.sky.com/story/china-signs-russian-gas-deal-worth...
were not part of a gas for weapons agreement.
which it. well. was.
then you have stuff like http://m.sputniknews.com/military/20160217/1034893494/russia...
the difference is. both china and russia sign deals "payment in kind" us signs deals where they get nothing but some of their debt paid off from other (broke) g8 countries.
you know that's not sustainable for the us right?
I'm not sure why I bothered responding, because I'm sure you'll reply with something about how they are really paying much more than that under the table (even though no reputable news sources have reported on it).
It's clear to reasonable people that neither the USSR, nor Japan destroyed the US economy. China will not destroy the US economy either.
This fear of China is caused by inappropriately extrapolating current trends, i.e., China is growing at 7% per year, and this rate will continue unabated despite that fact that historically GDP growth rate always declines as a country becomes developed.
As to your earlier assertions about super computers, those numbers are close to meaningless.
The UAE has the world's tallest building, should we be afraid of that?
If the UK wanted to build the world's fastest super computer, they could. If the US wanted to we could. It's just a dick measuring contest that is primarily a function of how much money a country currently wants to spend on building them.
The only thing faster super computers prove is that they are simply worth more to China than they are to us. They are massively behind us in nuclear capability, so the ability to conduct simulated nuclear testing is more valuable to them. The PR win is also correspondingly more valuable to them.
Their growth rate is not going to slow or deviate significantly in our lifetimes.
Yes, I've seen the arguments to the contrary. But they are all based on wholly flawed assumptions.
the op is "Why China won’t own next-generation manufacturing".
Well. the worlds fastest super computers are what deliver next-generation manufacturing.
As for massively behind the us in nuclear capability.
Not for long. They already poached the US's best talent. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/542526/china-details-next...
I'm not sure what you're basing your projections on, but China's growth rate has been heading down for the past decade. They are currently at half of their max GDP growth rate.
There are zero serious forecasts that show a constant ~7% growth rate for the next 50 years (based on your our lifetimes quote). That is insanely optimistic beyond even the dreams of the Chinese government.
>Yes, I've seen the arguments to the contrary. But they are all based on wholly flawed assumptions.
Again, any evidence that doesn't fit your narrative is rejected.
>Well. the worlds fastest super computers are what deliver next-generation manufacturing.
That's not even remotely close to true. Next generation manufacturing will primarily be driven by advances in automation that have little to do with super computers. The world's fastest super computers aren't even close to the largest factor in advancing manufacturing methods.
>Not for long. They already poached the US's best talent.
That article doesn't show anything except that a group in China has a goal of commercial molten salt reactors by 2030. According to the article they didn't even have funding yet past next year.
Stop posting random tangentially related articles that don't prove your point.
Seriously are you just trolling me? You really believe that China's growth rate won't slow over the next 50 years? That's completely insane.
lower growth last years was policy -prevent "overheating". http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/chinas-overh...
now it isnt
http://www.tradingeconomics.com/china/cash-reserve-ratio
still have something like 20 or 30 years left before they reach their urbanisation goals. And things dont stop there.
China's economic numbers have long been known to be fiction, regardless of the truth or facts that may play a small part in their creation. http://www.economist.com/news/china/21689628-chinas-obsessio... http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527023034481045791521...
Current articles about energy oversupply only reinforce, in a current context, the fact that their GDP, growth and other financial numbers are fabricated: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-26/china-ener...
The only way to understand Chinese financial conditions is through hindsight. This is problematic for the global economy, but it's even more problematic for China. While their resources are massive, they are not infinite. The point is that it is not sustainable and eventually they will be forced to operate in reality and communicate their reality.
That growth is all mostly coming from the urbanisation policy. from 98% of the population living and working in the paddy fields a few decades ago to their target of 90% living in modern super cities.
They can literally double their output from now simply by spreading technology from the early 1900s, rather than pure manual labor. But they are going straight for "next-generation manufacturing".
"Energy oversupply", "city oversupply"... Those would be those "flawed assumptions" I was talking about. Its only "oversupply" if you think it impossible they get from the 56% urbanisation rate they are currently at, to somewhere near the 95% urbanisation rate of countries like the USA. Which is the current policy.
And pretty much anything is much much more productive than picking rice from a paddy field by hand, which is the current working day of 46% of the Chinese population - more than 600 million people - or twice the population of the US.
http://www.worldbank.org/en/country/china/publication/urban-...
By 2030, up to 70% of the Chinese population - some one billion - will be living in cities.
China's diminishing growth, and a current, global energy oversupply are not flawed assumptions, they are global economic realities. I provided credible, current references to support this point in my previous post.
You can beat the drum about growth, urbanization or broad assumptions, but you fail to address the primary problem that this merely propaganda not grounded in credible, objective data.
I was more concerned my comment about China in hindsight and your out of date references would be misconstrued as contradictory. Your reference was out of date and already proven false and thus irrelevant. China can only be viewed in hindsight because it takes years to disprove the current propaganda.
didn't they teach you in school the effect (lower growth) has to come after the cause (raising the reserve ratio)?
Or is it just that because US policy has had all policy levers thrown on full speed and they still can't manage an inch of growth that you don't believe in them?
If that is the case, newsflash, that is because the workforce population isn't growing and the education system is shit.
I thought the article was an interesting perspective because China does own manufacturing today. This is suggesting that next-gen manufacturing will present new challenges and benefits that will make it more difficult for anyone, in this case China, to own it in the future. In particular, this creates opportunities in engineering and automation, which from the comments, seem to be of particular relevance for this audience.
If you can't elevate your debate while acknowledging the fictional nature of China financial information this isn't much of a conversation.
Thanks for your perspective though.
Does it?
Instead, it seems to start from the premise that they are not already the world leaders in "next gen technology".
Which is a total fallacy.
You know lines like:
China’s manufacturing engine has largely stalled
and
Even though China is graduating far more than 1 million engineers every year, the quality of their education is so poor that they are not employable in technical professions.
->utter BS. For a start, their "top 10%" is greater than the total number of US graduates. And their "Bottom 10%" is still more employable in a technical profession than an average US graduate.
In fact, the article does address this (cheap Chinese labor/slavery), and proposes that the shift in need of labor through robotics and automation, essentially resets the playing field in that regard.
They are not already the leader in next-gen technology because it is next-gen, is is in the formative stages. It is the leader in manufacturing, the current generation.
I don't agree with the statement that their manufacturing engine has stalled. Their growth is diminishing and their dominance is at risk.
I agree that the statement that their education is so poor they are not employable sounds like b.s.
That was never my point. If you can respond to my points, that would be a start. If you could refute them rather than promoting the propaganda I would be impressed.
Erm. They are the leaders in everything from manufacturing to supercomputing. What does that exclude?
-> Unfortunately, when you focus on human capital in China, you can't dismiss the fact that China, particularly in the manufacturing sector represents modern day slavery.
Maybe, maybe not. Working for western companies like Apple, sure.
Alibaba
probably somewhere between conditions at Google and Ebay.
So, it's the Western companies, like Apple? I don't think so. Western society may provide the demand and the capital to create the conditions, but the Chinese are the perpetrators of slave labor.
Can you provide some examples of where they are already leading in a field that doesn't exist yet?
various space based warfare kit (shooting down satellites for example)
that quantum communication satellite.
Im sure there is more.
It seems you are a lone prophet crying out in the wilderness. No one else, not even actual Chinese propagandists would make this claim.
I've nothing left to debate with you. Your absurd exaggerations show that your arguments are based on nothing but your own pet theories augmented by Chinese propaganda.
I have no idea how someone outside of China could fall harder for Chinese propaganda than actual Chinese people.
If you're making a PCB then pretty much anything within the design rules goes through the same process. With mechanical parts manufacturing is more complicated. E.g. someone may need to figure out how to hold the part so it can be machined from different directions. If you specify tolerances then it can be a non-trivial exercise in how to sequence things to meet your tolerances. etc.
The cheap part from China possibly includes significantly lower rent, lower salaries, cheaper equipment, no benefits for employees, no insurance, less concern for safety, some corner cutting, an easier regulatory regime (dump that acid down the drain?), possibly economy of scale now that they're doing so much manufacturing.
At any rate, for low volume jobs where the overheads dominate and there's no special knowledge required there's no way the US can compete. Once volumes get up and/or there are some more complex specialized tasks the playing field is more levelled. The kind of manufacturing that Apple does where they have a room full of CNC mills making iPhone casings is not going to be that different. If there was sufficient business/margins in the lower end someone would invest in more automation to try and bridge the gap but most likely it's simply not worth it to participate in this race to the bottom.
EDIT: Btw, cool product! Good luck with it.
Take a look at some Youtube videos of progressive stamping for a sense of how ordinary metal parts are produced. Look at the elaborate custom tooling required. All the work is in the tooling. Once the tooling is right, the stamping process is simple and cheap.
Surely there is much better hard-nosed reportage of the ground realities of the struggles of the burgeoning Chinese middle class, out there. But this series covers a broad swath of the demographic without putting too fine a point on just the commerce, trade and civil rights aspects.[2][3]
[1]
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b068237s
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b068237s/episodes/guide
[2]
BBC3 Secrets of China: Fit in or Fail
[3]
Secrets Of China | Season 1 Episode 2 | Desperate for Love
If you trust any numbers China puts out publicly, I got a bridge to sell you...
China builds completely empty ghost cities to try and hold onto their GDP growth rates. Many of the older ghost cities are falling into disrepair because nobody is using them. They're becoming decrepit. Sure, there are a couple here and there where people actually moved in and use them, but the vast majority are still vacant and due to lack of maintenance, falling apart.
If that doesn't scream "hollow numbers" I don't know what does. Not to mention, China has routinely shown they will fudge the numbers without hesitation or care.
See here about ghost cities - "The unreal emptiness of China's Ghost cities": http://www.wired.com/2016/02/kai-caemmerer-unborn-cities/
Actually, it isn't. Over the last 2-3 years, China has been soliciting reporters and writers to come out and visit some of their "ghost towns", specifically, the few they've actually put some people in. They pay for the entire trip and basically give them the emperor treatment while there. The hope is that these writers will come back and write fluff pieces like this, they want to change public perception. I know they do this first-hand because my ex-roommate is a writer for a large well-known website and received such an offer. He had to turn it down because his wife was 8 months pregnant otherwise he would have went.
Oh, and your article talks about reasons for delays in getting people in there. I think the entire article is a load of BS (it's forbes, after all). Many of those ghost cities are beginning to fall into disrepair due to how long they've remained empty. At that point, justifications and excuses become a moot point.
This article, like many by the same author, might be dubbed 'wrongtroversial'. That is, it creates controversy by saying something wrong.
Wrongtroversy is far more scalable. It's very hard to discover something that is: (a) true (b) not widely accepted (c) not recently mentioned by other journalists. But if you drop condition (a), you'll never run out of ideas.
The most effective wrongtroversial articles assert something that's wrong for several different reasons. People will then proceed to argue with each other about which reason is more important, generating follow-on controversy.
Credit to @pg for coining this term.
But -- I don't seem to be able to find Paul Graham's creation of this word thru a google search. Any pointers?
This article isn't an exception.
And then to end with, well even if they do, we can just import their robots. Ok.. then wouldn't they "own next-generation manufacturing" if they are the ones making the tools, pushing what machines are capable of, etc. I mean, does the writer really think we can dominate next-gen manufacturing if we don't even make the tools? What's our competitive advantage then?
They could price gouge us at any moment and they know it. And when they do it will take us forever to build these mines / plants.
That's the thing the article also gets wrong. It takes time and money to keep up and to even copy (robots).
I really can't agree with much in the article.
They tried. It didn't work. Molycorp got the Mountain Pass rare earth mine in California going again, with pollution controls that satisfied even the Sierra Club. Another company got a mine going in Australia. Techniques were developed to reduce rare earth consumption for motors. Rare earth demand dropped. Price crashed. China gave up on restricting exports. Molycorp went bankrupt, but the Mountain Pass mine is still there, although not running.
It's for sale. Want to buy the world's most advanced rare earths mine?
for laymen: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-01-06/china-scra...
not for the faint of heart: https://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/dispu_e/cases_e/ds431_e...
While conveniently forgetting that current leading company in Drones DJI is a Chinese company and they brilliantly managed to build their own Tech industry. Frankly American journalists are deluding themselves if they assume that all asians are like what they chose to show in Hollywood (where they are portrayed as lacking communication skills) and as if innovation is a western monopoly.
So they have to steal IPs to be competitive. Whether it's plans for the space shuttle or the latest iPhone, China will steal literally anything with virtually no shame. Unfortunately, they don't see the side-effect of this IP theft. That is, it reduces innovation even more. When you shortcut your way to the top (or in this case, the middle), you don't have that same foundation for innovation. A huge part of innovation is the process itself -- it lays the foundation for future innovations. A framework or path. That foundation is just as, if not more important that the innovation itself. And that's what China is missing out on.
They're being left behind while IP theft is going to get harder and harder for them as countries/businesses wise-up.
these articles are a cottage industry. just apply some racial stereotypes to whatever country you want to spotlight, generate some controversy and fear, and profit.
It's true if you're behind the state of the art you copy whoever is out in front. Because there's no reason to reinvent the wheel. Once you catch up, though, you start doing your own R&D because it makes sense to do so. That's what the Japanese did, that's what the Koreans did, and that's what the Chinese will do when they feel they've learned everything they can from manufacturers in other countries.
It's going to take awhile, though. Chinese companies are having problems filling slots at the very top of the high tech skill ladder. A relative of mine works for a company that moved an optics manufacturing operation from China to Switzerland for cost reasons. The particular expertise they needed is rare in China, and people who have it can write their own ticket.
Copying? Reverse-engineering? Sure, what country doesn't do that? That's the baseline. China is doing something completely different and on an entirely different level. The sheer volume and amount of IP theft and espionage they engage in is jaw-dropping. Whether they're using useful idiots/nationalists to steal the space shuttle plans, or running their hacker groups targeting corporate/governmental entities 24/7/365, it's moronic to equate that to Japan in the 70s/80s.
Again, Japan wasn't known for their espionage efforts because they engaged in so little in comparison with everyone else. Hell, Russia was the bigger threat in the 80s thanks to the cold war. Japan was a complete non-factor. Japan had a growing economy that people were scared would supplant the U.S but that's where the similarities end. I'm befuddled how this nonsense is allowed to stand here on hackernews. It's reddit level garbage.
"Espionage"? I looked back through my post and didn't see that word anywhere.
>Copying? Reverse-engineering? Sure, what country doesn't do that?
Yes... and that was the point.
>I'm befuddled how this nonsense is allowed to stand here on hackernews. It's reddit level garbage.
Yes... yes it is.
> China and Japan are nothing alike and any comparisons would be entirely irrelevant
My point isn't that China will follow the same steps as Japan. My point is that you couldn't predict Japan's trajectory - first people said they made crap knockoffs and exploited American free trade deals to dump prices, then when they started innovating, everyone said they were going to take over the world, and then suddenly Japan stagnated.
My only prediction is that China's future is just as uncertain, and any predictions are completely pulled out of anyone's ass.
Firstly, Mao's China/CCP is completely different to the modern day China/CCP. Secondly, why is the CCP any worse than other periods in Chinese history? There have been many periods more oppressive and less democratic than the post-Mao CCP.
> Mao had all the sparrows killed.
I don't see how killing sparrows under Mao relates to the subject at hand. Yes, Mao's period was crazy, but Chinese history is full of such events.
> he killed all the intellectuals
This simply isn't true though. Yes, some intellectuals were killed and many more subject to physical and mental abuse, but to say "all" were killed is absurd.
With that said, the current PRC is stifling innovation, creativity and freedom. They have 1 billion people; China should be the most innovative country on the planet with all those chances for genius. Think of all the chances for Einstein, Hawking or bill gates... But what comes out of China? What product, computer program or device is China known for? Why aren't they inventing the latest iPhone, Windows OS, Mercedes Benz or Viagra? Why aren't they writing the next Game Of Thrones (can't with all the censorship going on) or bringing us the next high capacity lithium battery? Or Carbon Nanotubes? China isn't known for innovation in virtually any industry. They always rank near the bottom when it comes to innovation.
And why is that? It's because the PRC stifles their society with all the controls and limits their creativity. Everything has to be government approved, and go through miles of bureaucracy (or straight up corruption/bribes). People forget, China ranks 100th on the corruption index released by transparency.org. There are 99 countries less corrupt than China.
> Yes, some intellectuals were killed and many more subject to physical and mental abuse, but to say "all" were killed is absurd.
Worse, he killed intellectualism itself. While he may not have killed every intellectual, their society isn't set up for individuality and creativity -- things which breed intellectualism.
> but what exactly did they accomplish within those 5000 years? Not much.
Maybe they don't sound like much to you, but the invention of gunpowder, papermaking, printing, the compass, mechanical clock, iron and steel smelting, etc were major inventions at the time.
> 95% of our technological jumps and innovation throughout history have happened within the last 100 years.
Where did you get this percentage from? How do you compare technological jumps and innovation of the last 100 years to the ones that happened in the Tang dynasty or even the Roman Empire?
> They have 1 billion people
1.38 billion people. That is 1 billion people plus the US population. Not a small difference.
> Everything has to be government approved > Go through miles of bureaucracy (or straight up corruption/bribes)
It's a bit more nuanced and dynamic than that. For example, it takes 5 days to register a business online as a foreigner in Beijing now. Over a year ago it could take anywhere between 1 month to a year. Things change fast.
> China ranks 100th on the corruption index released by transparency.org
In the West we are obsessed with China's corruption, pollution, inequality, etc. However we forget that India, is more corrupt, more polluted and more unequal than China. Not that these are a huge problem in China. China is changing quicker than any country in the world, it has a long-term view and most of these, to but it bluntly, racist stereotypes, are changing rapidly. When you look at China you cannot look at it with a fixed mindset.
> their society isn't set up for individuality and creativity
To paint 1.38 billion people as the same is ridiculous. Post 80s/90s are nothing like their parents and grandparents. Post 00s are another order of magnitude different.
> But what comes out of China? What product, computer program or device is China known for?
It has only been 40 years ago since around 90% of China's population lived in poverty as peasants in the countryside. How can you expect a country to innovate and create such products when this was only 40 years ago? Give it time
It's a simple statement of fact with minimal subjective opinion on my part, as evidenced by the fact that you babble a gamut of excuses instead of answering my questions. Let's see:
> gunpowder, papermaking, printing, the compass, mechanical clock, iron and steel smelting, etc were major inventions at the time.
A drop in the ocean. I can list similar revolutionary inventions by just about any culture. Again, if after 5000+ years, that's all China can brag about, I wouldn't be bragging. A truly intellectual country, a country where people are free to pursue their own creativity/interests without fear of taboo or censorship can produce orders of magnitude more innovation. See: 1700s-1900s USA. How this is even arguable is beyond me.
> Where did you get this percentage from? How do you compare technological jumps and innovation of the last 100 years to the ones that happened in the Tang dynasty or even the Roman Empire?
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/innovati...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_historic_invention...
Another non-arguable point. No matter what objective metric you want to use, the 1900s-2000s will win out. Nobody debates it, not scientists, not historians, nobody. You're deluding yourself if you can't even concede that point, and are probably more brainwashed then I originally believed.
> In the West we are obsessed with China's corruption, pollution, inequality, etc. However we forget that India, is more corrupt, more polluted and more unequal than China.
India isn't bullying its neighbors, engaging in imperialism, building military bases outside its borders, nor is it the second largest economy which is continuing to grow. Your attempt at a deflection is exactly that; a deflection. A poor one at that. India doesn't pollute as much as China, it pollutes 4 times less in fact. And India is LESS corrupt than China. See here: https://www.transparency.org/cpi2014/results
> To paint 1.38 billion people as the same is ridiculous.
You misunderstood my point. It's the government I am painting. The government has total control. Its controls has lead to China's current culture. I'm not pointing at the people, I'm pointing at the government.
> It has only been 40 years ago since around 90% of China's population lived in poverty as peasants in the countryside. How can you expect a country to innovate and create such products when this was only 40 years ago? Give it time
What about all the other countries who have no problem with innovating despite having less than a fraction of the wealth, GDP, and people as China? S. Korea was in a WORSE position than China, but look at it now. Innovation coming out the yinyang.
I guess my overall point here is that capitalism >>> communism. Don't get me wrong, I'm not lumping socialism in with communism -- I actually prefer a social democracy. A capitalistic economy/system with extremely strong social safety nets (like universal healthcare, gauranteed income, etc). I just don't like China's absolute control it has and I believe it will eventually be their downfall. When someone has total control, they're bound to make a mistake. We are, after all, human. We're fallible creatures by nature.
Look up the latest thread on the American education system. You'll find a large proportion of the comments claim that the same thing has been going on in America ever since education was socialized.
I live in Japan. By any outside measure, this country has zero critical or out of the box thinking, and has a complete groupthink culture. And yet it's been a major source of progress. I wouldn't count out human nature. Their biggest threat would be brain drain, but the US hates immigrants these days, which really plays in their favor.
A problem I've had dealing with Chinese Factories (last 15 years) is that you never really get to the point where your relationship becomes a partnership. They will always try to to get more out of you and you have to be careful when asking for better pricing because they might agree but quality will suffer and they will not hesitate to cut corners.
There is also the issue of financially awarding people in the factories for good cooperation ;) but I suppose that is a given to insure things run smoothly.
I have a feeling they are not going to be very happy.
Probably selling Chinese made goods on Amazon? Or maybe Pokemon Go? Since Bezos bought Washington Post, it really went berserk in my opinion.
Even in America, we recognize that Chinese (and other asian cultures) are often better at a wide variety of academic subjects.
Their great firewall and isolationism forced them to build their own software and it appears to work well.
I'm convinced that some percentage of their enormous population can work in engineering as well or better than our engineers.
Don't underestimate China.
Is that statement supposed to inform me about the shortcomings of the PRC, or those of the Nobel prize? I can't tell.
That sounds a lot like that Asian stereotype. Excelling in school and excelling in research are two different things.
The obvious problem with China is that it oppressed or threw out it's previous generations of academics, but they have the means and will to recover after several generations.
There are other nuances that may give China different disadvantages - some which may turn out to be ultimately meaningless.
What are the longer term consequences of Chinese wanting to leave China vs people of all countries trying to get to the US/West?
What are the consequences of China's demographic problems, structural debt, potential ethnic strife, other geo-political problem? Will this inhibit long term capital creation in China?
Japan's growth miracle put it at the front of global innovation for a while, but it came to an end. For a while Americans were really concerned about Japan taking over the world. It is possible that the incredible things China does will, at the end of the day, help them tolerate some of the negatives yet fail to thrive. What 2040+ looks like I think no one can predict, because much of the outcome will be divided between central government choices and random external global events.
I won't go into too much detail but there are fundamental differences in how people in the west and people in Asia communicate information. In the west, it is the speaker's responsibility to make himself understood. In China, it is the other way around. It might seem like a very minute detail or inconsequential but things like these are what shape societies.
Do you know where I can find some details on these differences in communication style?
The article's main point is valid. When you automate manufacturing, you no longer compete on wages. Advantage devolves to cost of raw materials, power, and transportation. No single nation can win that game, not even if China's ruling party spends a trillion yuan building out their infrastructure. An automated factory can be built anywhere and operated there at the same cost as anywhere else. The final remaining advantage then is location. Thus future manufacturing will migrate and become increasingly local, placed as close to the consumer as possible. Inevitably, any attempt to evolve China's manufacturing by employing automation is destined to end in the same commodification that automation always produces.
A main point in his argument was that they couldn't engineer robotics as well as the US due to poor education. I very sincerely doubt this. With the size of the Chinese population, we can afford to look at their top engineers and compare them to ours. Averages mean very little in this case.
As a former toolmaker, (you can guess why) I have to say "why would they do that?" They would have to invest in training for people to be toolmakers, millwrights, etc. - the trades closely related to engineering (toolmakers do both design and machining, for example) that have gone stale in this country because there are no jobs and no apprenticeships for people to learn them. These are the skills needed to make tools for the assembly lines. And we don't have them any more. You need someone on the shop floor to debug the tooling and that person is still in China.
All the skill is now in China. It's not coming back. So neither is the manufacturing.
If you have a A.T. Cross pen, please chuck it in the ocean.
Yes, I'm pessimistic and angry. Because I saw an entire industry get gutted just so a few at the top can have more.
"Even though China is graduating far more than 1 million engineers every year, the quality of their education is so poor that they are not employable in technical professions."
Not even one of them is employable?
The author is clearly knowledgeable, so I wonder if this is an editing error.
And what is worse is it is apparently from one of his own studies!
I believe it really boils down to having a large enough middle class to afford advanced manufactured products. If those products don't require labor to manufacture, then who will earn enough to buy them?
China has made it a national priority to provide better standard of living to their people then the West.
..With rising salaries, labor unrest, environmental devastation and intellectual property theft, China is no longer an attractive place..
How are these things bad ? China has their own class of capitalists now - they no longer need wall street to finance their projects.
China may have bumpy roadblocks - but at the scale they operate - financially, manpower and political will. It sort of doesn't matter. Its like a elephant worrying about what an ant thinks.
Any issue that china faces - they seem to figure out how to overcome it. In the EU we cannot even figure out how to get our currency right - even though modern finance started here. China made all the right decisions when it comes to Keynesian economics.
And sure they have a lot of debt - but the losers are the banks who are lending them money. Who is going to knock on China's door to ask for their money back ?
China can afford to waste 1 million of their own engineers to just beat Airbus. That is the scale at which they operate. Just like how Stalin was able to screw up so many times.
I have meet a lot of Chinese students - and if they were good at English and didn't grew up with the great firewall. Silicon Valley wouldn't prolly exist. Software is the only industry where I have seen American and Indian be better than the Chinese - but its a very anecdotal observation.
You do not have to do a lot of analysis - just listen to a few episodes of Dan Carlin's hardcore history.
For most of history China dominated economically and technologically. Just because Europeans had better war technology ( due to the fact that europeans were do divided ) were we able to dominate for a few hundred years.
We are going back to what normal looks like.
Edit:
I am not some chinese shill, my personal opinion is china should be punished for crushing other countries through unfair trade practices.
The free market doesn't work if there are companies that have the backing of a state with 1.3 billion people !
China would probably dominate even without the massive financial backing of their state banks. But the aggressive nature of their expansion is worrying.
American's are still protected - you should ask the peripheral countries about the effect of the rise of China to their economies ( Vietnam, etc ) why do you think Obama is trying to push the TPP ?
China also worries me because they are showing that democracy doesn't matter, when it comes to wealth creation.
Apart from running a democratic and open society.
Western world believes in democracy (at least some people do), but it's not generally accepted truth. I think that democracy is stupid, though I don't have anything better to offer.
It was Winston Churchill who said that democracy is the worst system of government, apart from every other system that has ever been tried.
Not to mention that it can devolve into something that's more of a democracy in name only.
Take the upcoming US elections where the choices are, on one hand, a blowhard who wants to build a massive wall to keep out Mexican immigrants, and on the other a corrupt-to-the-core corporate puppet.
This isn't much of a real democracy when parties become so big that more competent people have no chance of running for office without the support of said parties.
Democracy also self-contains the tools to undo itself, as long as someone can convince the majority that it's not only a good idea, but prudent to do so. That is why the transition from democracy to fascism and outright dictatorship can happen quickly.
Chinese government has a pretty tight grip on the nation's information sources, and has a very significant political and military power. Democracy has no chance to be exported there, as it was exported e.g. to Iraq and Afghanistan (rather unsuccessfully).
Chinese government makes a lot of efforts to keep the political system of China under control, without Western-style democracy (and probably any other). It also makes a lot of efforts to keep China producing and selling a lot of stuff, and becoming better and better at it. It's rather successful on both accounts.
There are a few examples of countries becoming wild economic successes under quite undemocratic regimes: South Korea and Singapore spring to mind. But both are not Communist (or former Communist, since the Chinese seem to have abolished much of their previous communism). Maybe this is why the didn't look so suspicious to the Western public.
I somehow feel like they are overly optimistic but could not find any proof to refute their point (talking about the current US election clearly did not help...). They are mostly upper middle class who worth more than me. So I guess they may be biased? However the taxi drivers seem to have the same view.
An anecdote: none of them want to immigrate (at least to US) and their only major concern seems to be the air quality. Since they can buy everything else from overseas anyway.
I think your sample is skewed. Chinese people from all social classes are immigrating to the US at record rates. The US gets about 25% of all Chinese emigrants each year, a number that's been growing not decreasing. China recently overtook Mexico as the top source for new immigrants in the US.
Look at the number of Chinese students, the number of H-1Bs, and the number of Chinese green card applications for evidence of middle class highly educated immigration.
For less educated immigration, visit any Chinese restaurant in any backwater town in the country. You'll find that the front of house is staffed by an endless supply of new immigrants.
Countries compete in many ways and form of government is just one and might not even be the deciding factor.
This might become a problem for China in the long term but I don't think it's certain.
It is possible that Chinese immigrants are on the rise, but it is not like a Chinese person can easily immigrate to US, legally or not. Comparing the number of Chinese and Mexican is a bit silly, because of the "undocumented".
The number of Chinese students is meaningless as not every student wants or can stay. The number of H-1b may mean something but my feeling is that Chinese are getting less in recent years. Do you have actual data? The green card applications is more direct evidence, but some real data showing the trend would be useful.
Anyway, I think if there is no pacific in the middle and there is no wall at the border. At least 100 million Chinese people would love to move to US...
Democracy makes sense because governments make mistakes and those need to be dealt with. Democracy is able to deal with that very nicely.
At the moment the Chinese government does a very good job and have the benefit of pretty much everyone else in the world who matters being highly interested in seeing China succeed. As longs that doesn't change - and I find it very hard to imagine a scenario where it does - China won't become democratic.
First they gotta deal with the gender imbalance problem - literally 10s of millions of young men for whom there is no possibility of finding a partner, because the one child policy led to many female babies being discarded. Take a bunch of angry young men who see no future for themselves and you get what's happening now in Afghanistan...
easy, that's a propaganda problem. tell them the enemy stole our women or something like that :P
this is patently false. the official Chinese government line is that the current western standard of living is not scalable. their reasons include that it is ecologically unsustainable to generate the kind of consumption and waste that the west does. this is not due to their strong sense of ecological stewardship but because they know it will be difficult for them to reach the US' GDP per capita, and they are trying to manage the expectations of their citizens.
In Europe and US - if living standard decrease from one generation to the next - the worst thing that can happen is we vote in Donald Trump for 4 years.
In china the situation is much more scary as there are no system in place to channel that anger and frustration in a controlled way. The only direction to move is up.
the CCP of-course realizes that they need to invest heavily in renewable, and that is exactly what they are doing. The expectation will be there - and their govt is dedicated to meeting them - with renewable energy is preferable.
Manufacturing jobs as we remember them - Roseanne at the plastic utensil factory, nor as they are - assembling iPhones, are not next-gen manufacturing jobs. Those jobs will be designing, building and maintaining automated industrial productivity.
I think manufacturing gets overlooked because it is not relatable and not sexy. However, it is incredibly cool. There is a significant opportunity for innovation with tremendous social and environmental impact.
While large companies typically mass produce, there are certain parts that cannot be made via traditional manufacturing processes. They've been using additive manufacturing typically for tooling and higher-end products in these cases.
Also, there is a trend towards customization, faster iterations of part design, and using a variety of part materials within each additive manufactured part that each have their own qualities.
But, printer manufacturers have seen opportunity in making the printing process faster and easier to use, which over time will reduce the need for all of the people involved in the process. Already some of the latest printers are autogenerating supports and making it simple to remove those supports. That's just a small part of the process, but it is a significant step.
So, while traditional mass manufacturing companies will be hurting in a decade or two, eventually printers will no longer require humans to be involved at all. Then, any company with enough money to buy a large number of printers could manufacture 3D parts at mass scale.
I think it is premature to say that China won't eventually own next-generation manufacturing eventually, but it won't in the next few decades unless they drop everything and get on it.
Bunnie Huang pointed out the very ecosystem of lots of manufacturers in close physical proximity to each in China other enables them to try different ideas, failing fast and cheaply (the dual SIM feature came out of such freewheeling experimentation). Can the US automate if it has gaps in its own manufacturing capabilities having let it atrophy for so many decades, or are US business leaders assuming a future where they are always purchasing "lower-end" manufactured parts from the next China (and if they are, how are they ensuring those "lower-end" manufacturers don't climb up the value ladder and take their market from them)?
They are not just sticking to manufacturing. China holds the number one spot in Supercomputers as of June 2016 with Sunway TaihuLight, which displaced another Chinese supercomputer Tianhe-2. The Sunway also uses no U.S.A. hardware. [1]
China also just announced a 64-core Arm processor Phytium that if confirmed "will be the most powerful Arm server chip on the planet." [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercomputer
[2] https://www.top500.org/news/chinese-chipmaker-unveils-speedy...
Also related/interesting: https://www.ted.com/talks/olivier_scalabre_the_next_manufact...
While saving labor costs is an important reason for moving manufacturing to China, there are other equally important factors as well. Access to a labor pool of workers that do higher level designing that cannot be automated, much lower local taxes (and even subsidies), proximity to other manufacturing centers already in China are just some of the other important reasons.
I wish journalists would do a little more research before writing inane articles with sensationalist headlines.
There are stories in the news from time to time about situations where you have an old woman who's been living in the same place for decades (see the movie "Up" for a fictional example), and she's the last person on the land to accept payment for the land and move. The builders - either a company or the government, wind up having to build around. The way they do it is very passive-aggressive, but there /is/ law over there when it comes to land ownership. It's not all state property.
Further, do you really "own" your land here in the US? Nobody I know does. You either pay rent (taxes) to the government on the land or the land is taken from you.
There is no such thing as totally private land ownership.
WRT manufacturing plants:
Every new company in China has to be majority Chinese-owned. The government has smartened up over the decades and left behind the "everything is owned by the state, even your toothbrush" to something in between total private ownership and public ownership. So they have rules like the above which anger US investors, but are geared to the interests of the Chinese public.
They take care of their own. We used to do that here in the US, but it's all become "fuck you, the free market fixes everything!!!" wharrgarble.
Don't get legal theories from fringe websites. That line of thinking is a stone's throw from "US citizens don't have to pay taxes" and "Driver's licences are unconstitutional". Such websites are what got Wesley Snipes in so much trouble. Read some actual legal texts at your local law library
Property ownership is a thing in the US (and canada, france, the UK and the rest of the western world). The government cannot take your land without full value compensation, even if you don't pay your taxes. They can condemn your land and sell it to pay your debt, giving you all that is left, but that is a long legal process where the rights of the landowner are given much consideration and ample opportunity. They are not a landlord reclaiming property.
It's slow enough to do this because web pages load enough crap to run a Quake game.