China's New Five-Year Plan Sharpens Industry, Tech Focus (reuters.com) 30
An anonymous reader shares a report: China's Communist Party elite vowed on Thursday to build a modern industrial system and make more efforts to achieve technological self-reliance, moves it sees as key to bolstering its position in its intensifying rivalry with the United States. As expected, the Party's Central Committee also promised more efforts to expand domestic demand and improve people's livelihoods - long-standing goals that in recent years have been little more than an afterthought as China prioritised manufacturing and investment - without giving many details.
[...] The full five-year plan will only be released at a parliamentary meeting in March, but the post-plenum outline from state news agency Xinhua hinted at policy continuity, which concerns economists who have been calling for a shift towards aâgrowth model that relies more on household demand. Building "a modern industrial system with advanced manufacturing as the backbone" and accelerating "high-level scientific and technological self-reliance" were listed ahead of the development of "a strong domestic market," the communique showed.
[...] The full five-year plan will only be released at a parliamentary meeting in March, but the post-plenum outline from state news agency Xinhua hinted at policy continuity, which concerns economists who have been calling for a shift towards aâgrowth model that relies more on household demand. Building "a modern industrial system with advanced manufacturing as the backbone" and accelerating "high-level scientific and technological self-reliance" were listed ahead of the development of "a strong domestic market," the communique showed.
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I'm sure Donny has good intentions with his plan to bring the 1950's back, including Fonzie, but Xi is just 20x brighter.
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5 year plans pffft
Trump's "2 week plan" will fix it.
And if it doesn't, just wait the 2 weeks for the next plan.
Seems reasonable on their part (Score:3)
China was working to self-sufficiency anyway. Unstable trade wars and tariffs have just made that more blatantly important.
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America's response (Score:1)
Rest of world should also target self-reliance (Score:3)
- Rare earth elements
- Other minerals should be strategic assets too
- Clean tech - solar panels and battery tech
- Patent rules that favour local businesses
- Seafood - stop getting cheap frozen seafood harvested by China's fleet - who aims to flood the market with unsustainable seafood rather than to feed their own people
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Rest of world should also target self-reliance
Or humans could just drop its pathological primitive nationalist bullshit
We could, but the Disease of Greed has carved up an entire planet into Yours and Mine. That didn't happen overnight, in a fortnight, or even in a millennium. Lines in the sand have been drawn with blood since the dawn of human existence. It's kind of what we humans DO here.
Of course we're dumb enough to repeat the worst of our own history. We had to number our World Wars. And we're Fast and Furious about endless fucking sequels.
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The main thing we should learn is how effective long term planning and continuity is. It's worst in the US, but some European countries suffer from ever changing direction from government too. Not just on a 4 year election cycle, but on a yearly, even monthly basis in some cases.
There has to be long term stability to drive investment and innovation.
Also at this stage we should just be buying as many solar panels and batteries as we can get, from China and domestic suppliers. Now is not the time to be protec
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Addressing Climate change and being protectionist are not antagonistic to each other.
What's best? Doing both.
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- Seafood - stop getting cheap frozen seafood harvested by China's fleet
Heck, stop getting any food that is available locally. It's insane that I can buy some food that was grown in South America, shipped to Asia for processing and packaging and then shipped to Europe for less than the same food grown in Europe.
There's quite a bit of utter insanity there.
Not much new (Score:3)
There's not much new in the 5-year plan, which is not unexpected. Manufacturing dominance and technology self-reliance are the key priorities, but they already have been the key priorities in the last few years.
Perhaps the curious thing is that a lesser priority of increasing domestic consumption necessarily means increasing global exports. While a large trade surplus brings many economic advantages, it is itself a roadblock to self-reliance. If a full-blown trade war broke out between China and the G7/friends, China would be forced to overload poorer countries with its exports, which is not sustainable. In a sense, having China hooked on exports should be a greater concern to China than not being able to procure GPUs. The problem for China is that a huge trade surplus is a drug that would bring huge withdrawal symptoms if the drug were not available.
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They seem to want a balance between domestic consumption and exports, which is sensible. Countries that rely too much on domestic consumption are screwed whenever the domestic economic gets the sniffles. At least with exports the market is diversified, and problems in one part of the world can be somewhat mitigated by opportunities in another.
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If a full-blown trade war broke out between China and the G7/friends, China would be forced to overload poorer countries with its exports, which is not sustainable
Yes, but this cuts both ways. These days, a LOT of essential day-by-day supplies are manufactured in China. If China and the G7 stopped all trade tomorrow, the damage to the G7 would be bigger and more immediate than that on China.
The problem for China is that a huge trade surplus is a drug that would bring huge withdrawal symptoms if the drug were not available.
True. Germany is learning that lesson now that cheap energy from Russia is no longer available and its export business can't compete anymore.
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If a full-blown trade war broke out between China and the G7/friends, China would be forced to overload poorer countries with its exports, which is not sustainable
Yes, but this cuts both ways. These days, a LOT of essential day-by-day supplies are manufactured in China. If China and the G7 stopped all trade tomorrow, the damage to the G7 would be bigger and more immediate than that on China.
In a full-blown trade war, both sides lose. That's obvious. The importers lose on prices and product availability. The exporters lose on jobs and cash flow. It's not clear whether the G7 or China would suffer more. I'm guessing that China's stability is more tenuous. In the G7, economic problems lead to regime change via elections. In China, economic problems would lead to who knows what.
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In a full-blown trade war, both sides lose. That's obvious.
Yes, it is.
But there are first and second losers.
In China, economic problems would lead to who knows what.
Tianamen Square ?
If the Great Leap Forward with its mass starvation (most likely the worst in human history) didn't lead to a change, you seriously think that a few export problems will?
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Increasing domestic consumption is only possible if people have more money to spend on consuming stuff. For a long time China relied on having low wages and manufacturing stuff for more prosperous countries. It's now changing, China developing a lot of home grown business where they're catching up and in many cases overtaking the West, but perhaps Chinese leadership thinks they're still not there yet. Also, in order to achieve higher prosperity needed to increase domestic consumption you pretty much have to
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Short sighted, sure. Stupid? Maybe. But theft? No.
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In some cases they just developed Western university research into actual products, something we should have done but failed to. Some of the battery tech comes to mind.
There was a significant amount of work to develop it into a high end product, but because they had the certainly of long term government support for EVs and battery technology, they threw money at it and engineered solutions.
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It's short sighted of a special kind, even.
2-3 decades ago, it was car manufacturing. Every car maker by then knew that the Chinese would steal the tech. There's a famous example of a Mercedes Benz factory making busses which for the first year or two sold like hot cakes. Then demand suddenly vanished. Research found that the chinese joint venture partner (you had to joint venture in those days, not sure about now) had copied the entire factory, brick by brick, one city away. An exact copy making the exact
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Cheap labor seduced the US into the biggest wealth transfer in the history of the world as China stole US technology because of cyber espionage and demanding technology sharing from US manufacturers in China. This mistake has cost us everything as China grows into a military threat. They couldn't have done this without our complacency to their theft. Why did we put America Second?
Greed. The American Business class has been steeped in the concept that profit must always come first, and there are zero other concerns. As such, the idea of cheaper labor in a market that doesn't have near as many environmental or worker protections in place was at first seductive, and then an impossible force to ignore for the decision makers. Competition from the biggest players off-shoring manufacturing led to more off-shoring of manufacturing in an ever escalating war of attrition. Profit first, peopl
Terrible branding. (Score:1)
You'd think that using the same terminology for your government schemes as ones that killed hundreds of millions of people would be a bad bit of marketing, but I guess you can get away with a lot when all your detractors are dead.
roadmap (Score:2)
How come when it's China, it's a "five year plan," but when it's the US, it's a "five year roadmap"?
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We need an excuse to use our big smelly gasoline cars.