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Comment by gxs | Hacker News Reader

I know a few people in the clothes design industry and they all say manufacturing is moving out of Asia and into Africa.

According to them, by next year most of their stuff will be made there.

China has made a huge investment in Africa - so they will get a piece of that action.

Feels like the US is resting on their laurels.

Why the downvotes? This comment got a few reasonable responses and is within HN guidelines. Help me understand what is so offensive about this post

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The Chinese have made massive infrastructure investments around Africa, in ports and railways, etc. These have massively increased china's influence in the region

They've also sparked fears of a debt trap (https://www.npr.org/2018/10/08/641625157/a-new-chinese-funde...) and scenarios where countries default on debt so China will control major components of the infrastructure.

That isn't Africa-specific. They're doing the same in Europe outside of the EU.

Montenegro is on the same boat[0]. Serbian autocratic regime seem to get along with China's regime pretty well. Bosnia became the most western visa-free country for Chinese citizens last year.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-silkroad-europe-mon...

Latin America too: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/24/world/americas/ecuador-ch...

I know a few people in the clothes design industry and they all say manufacturing is moving out of Asia and into Africa.

There was an article on HN a few months ago about clothing manufacturing moving out of China back to the U.S. because fashion changes faster these days, and China's advantage in price becomes a disadvantage because of lead times.

That may be the case for more fashion forward retailers but not all retailers worn st the same clip

I recently had dinner with a friend who spent 8 years working for the US State dept all over Africa.

His take was simple. When the US shows up offering to build a road to the oil refinery we want to build we first ask them to make human rights reforms and so forth.

The Chinese just start handing out cash until they get what they want.

This strategy will result in the wholesale ownership of several African states by China if it hasn’t already happened.

It is very interesting to me how the perspective of the Chinese government seems to be that they should run their entire sovereignty like a business. Some politicians in the US claim to want to run /government/ like a business, but China seems happy to run the entire country as one.

In China we effectively have a CEO in Xi Jinping, beholden to the board of investors that is the global economy. And the same forces are at play. China can punt on ethics so long as the return is good, and they have pressure to keep growing. So long as the banks are happy the game continues.

The global investment-backed economy is efficient for allocating resources for the purposes of increasing monetary value but it will always introduce a moral hazard since short term returns will usually be better when corners are cut.

China runs it's country exactly like a business. People are just widgets they make. If the widget is defective they throw it away. If an entire batch of widgets is defective, they will throw away (kill or put in camps) the entire assembly line rather than risk it damaging the other widgets.

> In China we effectively have a CEO in Xi Jinping, beholden to the board of investors that is the global economy.

I don't think Xi or the Communist Party view themselves as "beholden to the board of investors that is the global economy." Maybe they have use for those investors now, but they're working to make that temporary.

Xiang?

Autocomplete from Xi probably.

yes, thank you

You should ask him about the World Bank and IMF debt traps to developing countries that have stricken those nations in poverty for decades. The Chinese are building critical infrastructure in many of these African countries, where there was none and immensely increasing ease of business and trade. Africa's going to be the next economic boom despite the West having done all they can to suppress African growth.

Maybe, but it's also likely to accelerate human rights development although it will at first result in concentrations of wealth..

How so? The P. R. of "China" is the second/first economy (depending on the measure) and one of the worst offenders of human rights.

Agree completely, but demand for rights tends to increase once median per-capita income rises above a threshold.

Will it do them a lot of good though?

Soviets ended up controlling East Germany, but the didn't capitalize on that. US did much better with the culturally identical West Germany. This isn't exactly Socialism / Capitalism battle we have here, but if China ends up controlling most corrupt states while the West ends up with the least corrupt states the long-term outcome might be similar.

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