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Comment by simonblack | Hacker News Reader

Foot, meet bullet.

The US semiconductor companies need Huawei more than Huawei needs the US semi companies.

Say goodbye to those companies while you can. They won't be with us for very much longer. You don't last very long when you can't sell to the World's biggest market.

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Given it won’t be the world’s biggest market in the next year or two, I think the rumors of the US semiconductor’s demise are likely grossly exaggerated.

https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-update-2022

Talking heads points. China isn’t the most powerful economy because of its headcount compared to India. But India is finally doing what it needs to build the necessary infrastructure. Unfortunately for you all the saber rattling towards India, Russia and China means that India too has been spending a lot of effort on building domestic infrastructure, working on swift alternatives, container shipping insurance, domestic high tech production etc. Just like they forced visa and Mastercard to either run on India infrastructure or pull out, they are working hard to make their own economy sanction proof from the west.

As night follows day you’ll either have to accept India as an equal or risk loosing that market as well.

> Just like they forced visa and Mastercard to either run on India infrastructure or pull out

Nicely done. Russia did a similar thing a while back, so when visa and mastercard had to kill their business in Russia all of the credit cards inside the country remained undisrupted. I was skeptical back in the day over the whole engineering and integration of NSPK (national system for payment cards), but seeing it doing its thing was an awe.

world's biggest market by population perhaps, but out of the 1.3B population for China, 700M of them make less than $100/month. 200M makes around $1000/month, but with the recent wage cuts across industries, more like $500/month for most middle class.

How much can they actually spend after paying all the essential and quality of life wages?

On less than $100 USD per month? Not much.

You are telling us western companies that report record sales in China are in cahoots with the CCP to fudge numbers ? When Mercedes and VW say that they sell more cars in China than in the US and Europe,it must be a huge psyop ..

Is that market really relevant? They’re going to go their own way anyways. So if you’re a western government, you might as well hurt the CCP as much as possible for now. Also the Chinese economy is falling apart and I don’t know if their demand for goods will last.

Here [1] are Intel's financial reports. Check out the 2023 annual report, page 86. China is their single largest source of revenue, making up 27% (and growing) of all revenue. China's GDP growth was for 2023 was 5.2%, which was slightly above published expectations. They definitely have some real estate issues to sort out, but when the largest economy in the world, by PPP at least, is having some of the highest growth rates in the world, it is probably just slightly premature to claim that their economy is falling apart.

[1] - https://www.intc.com/financial-info/financial-results

the 5.2% is just a figure the bureau of statistics made up to make sure they hit xi Jing ping's goal of 5% for the year.

even china bull Ray Dalio thinks China in a lost decade or more https://www.forbes.com/sites/williampesek/2024/03/29/ray-dal...

GDP growth figures published by e.g. the IMF are not just verbatim replications of what a country says. It comes from extensive analysis, verification, cross referencing against other data, and validation. It's why IMF data will often differ not only from what a country says, but even from what other organizations such as e.g. the World Bank or UN might say, as the latter are also independently carrying out their own similar processes. But all figures tend to fall pretty closely, because under this scrutiny it's practically impossible to meaningfully fudge things.

China needs 8-9% growth for 20 years to get to the GDP per capita of US/Western Europe.

5% isn’t going to cut it.

It has a massive overhang of real estate and big demographic headwinds.

The middle income trap is looking more and more a possibility.

China's population is more than that of the US and Europe combined.

China doesn't need to reach the same GDP/capita as the West in order to attain the same level of economic power. Even with only 50% of Western GDP/capita, the Chinese economy would as large as the US and EU combined.

> The middle income trap is looking more and more a possibility.

The "middle income trap" is related to an inability to move up the value chain. Given that China already leads in many growing high-tech sectors, it already looks like China has blown past the middle income trap.

But nobody cares about who has the “largest” economy if the GDP per capita is middle income.

China has absolutely not blow past the middle income trap. 600M live on less than $140/month according to Chinese statistics.

If they hope to get anywhere close to the standard of living of developed countries they will need to quadruple the size of their economy which even at 9% would take 2 decades.

China's GDP/capita is about 12,000 USD, which is somewhere between Mexico and Poland. Average monthly income in China is about 1400 USD, which is 10x the level you cited.

The middle income trap is about countries getting stuck, because they are unable to transition from cheap manufacturing to higher-value-added industries. China has already moved into high-tech sectors in a big way, so it looks like the middle income trap is already irrelevant for China.

> Also the Chinese economy is falling apart

Why is it supposed to fall apart exactly?

China beat itself. By 2100 there will be only 750 billion Chinese people.

That's an irreversible problem that means we are essentially seeing peak China now.

https://chinapower.csis.org/china-demographics-challenges/

All western countries have low TFRs . I mean ,Korea, Japan and Taiwan have worse replacement rates than China .

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