Lawrence Person's BattleSwarm Blog 4/20/2022
There more you start poking around online, the more you turn up reasons why China is screwed.
The
first installment in this series was popular. Well, there’s a lot more reasons why China is screwed.
It’s screwed all the way down.
First up: Demographics:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTbILK0fxDYTakeaways:
• Remember all that talk of an “Asian Century?” Yeah, not so much.
• “China will soon run out of people.”
• China’s population pyramid is about to shift from a huge bulge of people in their prime earning years to one where that bulge is disproportionately elderly.
• “Everything that made China what it is today has relied on a large, young, and productive workforce. Now, that workforce is about to succumb to biology just as every other generation has in every other country, ever.” Their demographic dividend is running out.
• “China’s working-age cohort grew from 58% of the country in 1978 to 74% in 2010. But in less than twenty years, the UN predicts that number will be roughly back where it was in ‘78. By then, China will have twice as many seniors as children under 15.”
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That’s part 1. Part 2 focuses on China’s out of control property market:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgVXRtq5EIg• It starts off talking about the ghost cities, especially Ordos.
• “Ordos does have an interesting story to tell. Just, not the one you might expect. The missing context, at the time, was far stranger than what the unimaginative pessimists concocted: Nearly all of these half-finished homes have owners — the vast majority of which have no intention of ever moving in.”
• “All over China are millions of empty, some unfinished, but almost universally sold homes — not just in far-flung corners but also in Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen. Over one-fifth of all urban homes — 65 million in all — sit vacant.”
• Skipping over description of basic CIGNx = GDP economics.
• China relied on “a surplus of cheap labor, which means, by definition, wages are low. You can only compete with the entire rest of the world for so long — and neither do you want to. Low-value manufacturing has long since moved South, to places like Vietnam, Laos, and Bangladesh.”
• All the long-hanging fruits of infrastructure spending have already been built.
More:
https://www.battleswarmblog.com/?p=51215
