Chinese Economics Thread

hereforsemithread

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My point is there is neutrality in terms of preference - i.e we like growth equally. That doesn't mean growth will necessarily be equal. Jesus, you need to read specifically what I mean.
My bad for interpreting your claim charitably in that I assumed it was testable.

If lower tier cities grow more -> "See, they prioritized them because that was more effective at fostering growth"

if growth rates equalize -> "this disproves the notion that lower-tier cities are prioritized"

Either way you're right! all it cost was the ability to do anything other than post-facto rationalization. That seems to be a common thread here.
 
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HighGround

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As another example, for all the BYD fanboys - BYD's 'profitability' is in many ways at the expense of its suppliers who have to sign up for extremely punitive payment terms via the infamous Di-lian with significant discounts. What you call scale effect, I call bullying suppliers excessively. By the way this is why Shenzhen Inovance refused to supply BYD on its electric motors. As an aside, Di-lian has been colloquially referred to as the biggest illegal financing network since Evergrande by some in the industry.
Funnily enough I was going to respond and bring up this exact point.

We know for a fact, that auto manufacturers are squeezing up-stream suppliers, with BYD being the most prominent (because they are the most successful, and therefore with the largest market power). This isn't an example of "deflation through tech/economies of scale", this is just BYD taking money out of someone's pocket to put into their own, which does flow to the customer (presumably), but also reduces cash flow for their up-stream suppliers to expand and do their own R&D.

And I doubt that this is the only industry where it happens. In any case, the conversation is becoming far too dogmatic again. It just feels like people are looking for confirmation bias or positive trends rather than discussing the minutia of unpleasant circumstances.
 

Wrought

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REEs in Tanzania have been secured by buying out an Australian miner.

The failure of Peak Rare Earths, an Australian mining company, to build a China-free supply of rare-earth minerals offers a look at how Beijing came to dominate the global supply of critical minerals—a position it is now
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. China has choked off the supply of rare earths to wring key concessions from President Trump in his trade war.

The sale of Peak to a Chinese rare-earth behemoth earlier this autumn is part of a pattern that means that, by 2029, Beijing will receive all the rare earths flowing from Tanzania, one of the world’s major emerging sources of the elements, according to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. Some liken it to the grip China enjoys today over cobalt production in the Democratic Republic of Congo. “This is a very strategic loss,” said Gracelin Baskaran, a critical-minerals expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “This increases [Chinese] market power and it increases their market capacity to destabilize an already very fragile market.”

Since China began restricting the supply of rare-earth minerals to the world earlier this year, Western countries have searched for critical-mineral deposits to quickly bring into production—only to find that Chinese companies have already bought up many of the most promising deposits of rare earths, lithium, nickel and others.

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abenomics12345

Junior Member
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My bad for interpreting your claim charitably in that I assumed it was testable.

If lower tier cities grow more -> "See, they prioritized them because that was more effective at fostering growth"

if growth rates equalize -> "this disproves the notion that lower-tier cities are prioritized"

Either way you're right! all it cost was the ability to do anything other than post-facto rationalization. That seems to be a common thread here.

Do you have trouble understanding ex-ante preferences and ex-post results? Because I have a sense you do not understand the difference between "having no preferences" as an ex-ante condition and "one did better than the other" as an ex-post result. That Lower Tier do better or worse does not necessarily mean ex-ante they prefer one does better than the other.

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Still waiting....
 

hereforsemithread

New Member
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Still waiting....
I have already explained this multiple times; I was referring to RE stimulus via credit to developers. You know, like how every single stimulus from 2008 through the immediate post-pandemic stimulus in 2020 worked. In fact I explained it preemptively in my first reply to you, something I should have pointed out earlier, my apologies:
none of the bazooka stimulus measure you've predicted have ever materialized. There has been no resumption of easy credit to developers and no huge stock market rescue package.
I guess you and I will just have to disagree with what constitutes a "huge" stock market rescue plan. In my mind, something that is just sufficient to get markets going up again for a little while, specifically in reaction to Trump's tariffs, before they resume volatility a few months later, cannot be reasonably equivocated with an effort to basically engineer an extended years-long bull market in order to spur consumption of wealthier citizens. Moreover I think it should be pretty obvious that the latter is what I was referring to given the broader context of this argument.

You have been ferociously stubborn in refusing to actually commit to any position whatsoever. I asked you at the start to explain what your core point was, and you never have. I did at the beginning. Of course, this allows you to always dance around my attacks and claim I am misunderstanding, or misreading, or that I am wrong on some technicality. In the continued absence of any statement of a specific, falsifiable belief about Chinese policy intention on your part I can only assume that you do not have one, or are otherwise unwilling to share them because they have already been proven wrong.
 
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