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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

It won't take long for China to catch up. And in a hot war, they're the ones who can rapidly rebuild.

Lots of reports say that Chinese military spending has exceeded our own if you account for their cheaper cost of labor and material goods.

China also recently (just days ago) flew two new sixth gen fighters. The US has yet to demonstrate one.

The tactical move for the West to counter is to move as much manufacturing as possible to other countries (Vietnam, India, Mexico) and hope that can put a dent in China's manufacturing flywheel. The Chinese consumer economy isn't robust enough to absorb all of the goods they manufacture (at least not yet), and without buyers the system would need to be scaled back.

Even if China was 100% a friend, you wouldn't want one country with this much outsized control over manufacturing. In the future this will be better distributed.

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> China also recently (just days ago) flew two new sixth gen fighters.

China doesn’t really have a 5th generation fighter yet, it is more a roadmap item than a finished product. There is zero evidence they have 6th generation systems. These terms have meaning. The US has been flying 6th generation prototypes for years, they just don’t post photographs. The US has been flying production 5th generation fighters for 20 years. They have a long lead and it isn’t like they stopped development.

Also, appearances are largely immaterial to being classified as 5th or 6th generation. Most of the relevant properties for classification are not casually observable.

> Even if China was 100% a friend, you wouldn't want one country with this much outsized control over manufacturing

It's not up to the US to decide this. China is the largest car market. It is also the largest car producing country. It is the largest manufacturing country. It also has the largest number of consumers in any country, and this market is still growing. It has the largest number of engineers. The numbers play in China's favor.

Certainly. The reality of the political situation though is that China is an authoritarian country ruled by the PRC, increasingly acting more like a dictatorship. While China’s economy, society and people have 100% the right to grow as much as they would like, those of us living in (sonewhat) liberal democracies would still want to contain the power of the PRC (and the cult of Xi Jinping).

> liberal democracies would still want to contain the power of the PRC (and the cult of Xi Jinping)

I am not Chinese but I still find this comment hilariously offensive and tone-deaf. I can say almost without a doubt that the US has a "tremendous" issue with cult-of-personality right now. But I don't see Chinese or other countries attacking or trying to "contain" this.

The US is still treated as a nation, unified in its people and leaders, by even its adversaries. But when Americans deal with other countries, there is a tendency to say things to the effect of: "the people are fine, it is the X that must be suppressed", ignoring that this X is inherently or directly connected to people of this nation.

Your comment immediately reminded of this Reuters story yesterday: "Supporters of South Korea's Yoon adopt 'Stop the Steal', hope Trump will help" https://www.reuters.com/world/supporters-south-koreas-yoon-a...

Most Americans are incapable of seeing the double standards of their own culture. Unfortunately for them, the rest of the world is well aware of this.

If 1989 had gone in a different direction and China today is just a giant version of Taiwan, how would that possibly be better as an American? We would all be trying to figure out how to get paid in digital Yuan.

Instead they have huge manufacturing capacity sitting on top of a completely busted financial system. Look at the returns of Chinese equities vs GDP growth the last 20 years. It is completely absurd.

The financial system is imploding right now, trying to find a place to hide https://tradingeconomics.com/china/government-bond-yield

> returns of Chinese equities

Another phrase for money leaving the country without goods coming in?

> returns of Chinese equities vs GDP growth

The equity market is just one place where companies can go to receive investment. In China this is a small part of total investment pool. So, no surprise that these equities don't go as fast as the rest of the economy, there is a lot of competition. In the US this is the reverse because traded companies are allowed to swallow more and more of the real economy.

The US can have a big effect with policies supporting local / non Chinese manufacturing with tariffs, subsidies and the like, as they are already doing.

The irony is in a world war China would likely take over the manufacturing plants the west built in places like Thailand and Vietnam to assist China in the war effort. Further bolstering their war time production.

Let's not even talk about Taiwan, which will be the first target, and its plants will all produce chips for Chinese products.

Those plants will 100% be destroyed/disabled in the event of an invasion.

Those plants depend on a lot of imports for spare parts and raw materials, even if China took them over tomorrow somehow intact with with the people to operate them, they would be out of commission in a month or so.

They say that but it doesn't really make sense to actually do it.

Even if that is possible (unlikely), it will be a big blow to American power because Taiwan produces the best of semiconductor technology.

Invading Thailand and Vietnam would likely lead to a military alliance of them US, Japan, the Philippines, Australia and possibly South Korea. If they just want Taiwan at least for now it seems like a bad idea to get all the other countries to enter the war

>manufacturing plants the west built in places like Thailand and Vietnam

What are these?

Apple https://asiamattersforamerica.org/articles/apple-exploring-m...

Did Apple build these factories?

Can we even talk about a world war like this in the nuclear era? Wouldn't we all just annihilate each other with nuclear weapons if we had a full fledged war?

The more time Russia spends in Ukraine, the more evidence we get that no, we won't just annihilate each other. We will probably do something more complex.

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