Is This End of China?
I seeing news stories everywhere on how manufacturing is moving away from China to Vietnam and india, and zero covid policy makes no sense, what are you guys doing? Are you still looking at Chinese stocks?
Chinese stocks have never been a good idea. China has outright killed industries on a whim[1] and they lack regulations the US have around accounting and reporting. In other words, their exchanges are filled with scams.
[1] https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1010833/china-tried-to-ban-pr....
IE. If you 99.99% of what you read about the US is doom and gloom, you'd think the US is ending too.
In just the last 2 years, US has had mass racial driven protest, people storming a government building looking to murder the vice president, Trump election denial, Trump covid mishandling, highest inflation in 50 years, involved in another war, bungled Afghanistan exit, anti-vax movement, anti-science movement, anti-semitism and neo-nazis, regressive female rights, countless mass gun shootings, highest murder rate amongst developed countries and 12x higher than China, lower expected life span than China.
Which country is more stable again?
I don't condone killings of any kind. I'm not saying China is the benevolent. I'm simply describing the current state and giving an example of how bias and propaganda can heavily influence a person's views without the person noticing.
As far as Covid, they might be making a mistake but its affect will eventually end. After that, they can continue with their economic plan.
It has been slowed, a bit, but not stopped.
Probably doesn't help the US is playing right into the CCP narrative by employing tech sanctions on China, further feeding nationalistic desire to be self-sufficient. That wouldn't be a huge threat if it wasn't for the huge STEM graduation rate of Chinese students (not just in China, but around the world) and the huge amount of funding put aside for these efforts. Take away ASML EUV machines from the one country most capable of developing their own EUV source and associated optics...? Like how dumb do you have to be to make that mistake.
My guess is this ultimately boils down to the US making the call that they have to stall out Chinese tech/military ambitions by ~10 years to prevent China population peak also coinciding with tech supremacy peak, because if that was to happen in about 2035 then it's very likely China would be much too powerful to prevent them breaking out of the Island Chain containment.
But the PRC and Vietnam are taking hits I interpret due to the world economy slowing down. And Xi's Zero COVID policy is perhaps becoming unsustainable. It's kinda necessary since it's prevented the population from getting natural immunity and their own vaccines aren't good and aren't trusted, and there's a lot of history behind that. If the CCP just let COVID rip, even less nasty Omicron, it would get very ugly for a while.
But it keeps shutting down huge cities and metro areas and has turned the PRC into an unreliable supplier. See the mess Apple is now in, I read something like 6 million and counting fewer iPhone Pros made at that Foxconn plant that's undergoing so much chaos and lost so many of their more experienced workers (or so I assume about the last point).
The US is in a cold war with the PRC, and that's in the process of shutting down its semiconductor industry, or maybe just the most advanced nodes depending on how the new embargo gets administered. But Apple spent quite some time qualifying what's evidently good enough flash from one of their marque companies and that's now dead since it's advanced enough to be targeted.
Overall, this embargo is a moderate sized dagger aimed at "the workshop of the world" so it's going to have effects, especially when the one year delay foreign companies have in getting licenses ends (then again they'll have plenty of time to get those licenses, or not).
Xi is moving back to not quite doctrine Marxism and the economy, especially the private-ish part of it is taking hits, especially in web/apps stuff, see Jack Ma now living in Japan. That may have been justified on the merits, but it was done because he got a little too big for his britches as the CCP saw it.
In particular I'd look at the residential property market, that's a HUGE bubble that appears to be bursting now. Too many details to go into, just there's reasons it is/was so much of the economy, and not good ones.
And finally Xi is not very smart, had his education brutally ended in middle school by the Cultural Revolution, and is just not a very good helmsman. And is now the single most powerful figure in the PRC since Mao. This is not encouraging.
One doesn't bubble up to the head of the CCP without being an incredibly savvy political operator. It's non-nonsensical to imply that is possible without intelligence. Even if he may be uneducated, education and intelligence are separate axis even if we normally conflate them.
Also evidence suggests he is a good strategist, even if a bit brutish in his execution.
In sort of the same domain, see how poor the response was to "pig Ebloa" (African swine fever) which was certain to hit the PRC once it broke out in the Caucuses and was not contained there. See the 2021-22 winter thermal fuel situation which started with pique which ended Australian coal imports (which are also cheaper than the PRC's own production on the mainland).
Other stuff he inherited, like the one child policy and I'm pretty sure the residential real estate bubble, so judging the quality of his response to them in the context of all their inertia is hard. That said, puncturing economic bubbles is not thing that should be delayed, although here again it would have needed to be replaced by _something_ or the PRC would have to end its financial repression (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_repression), something you also see most of the rest of the world continuing.