Comments by "yop yop" (@yopyop3241) on "China's Labor Problem: Youth Unemployment || Peter Zeihan" video.

  1. There is about to be need for legions of people to change grandma and grandpa’s diapers.
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  2. In a nutshell, mismanagement. Combined with regional demographic changes, but mostly it’s mismanagement. Mismanagement: Excessive focus on real estate and infrastructure construction. (Ghost cities and railroads to nowhere.) Loss of access to foreign capital, of both the financial and the know-how varieties. Crack down on the tech and tutoring sectors. Regional demographic changes: Chinese manufacturing grew in large part in order to interface with Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese manufacturing. Those countries did high end work, and they needed a source of low end manufacturing. China was the obvious solution. But those other countries are aging out, so high end manufacturing is leaving the region, and that leaves Chinese low end manufacturing stranded.
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  3. That leaves them isolated from the rest of the world which leaves them without energy or food or raw materials. There is no way for China to stay above failed state status without the consent of the USA. The problem is that Xi might be perfectly content with China as a giant version of North Korea. (But a version of North Korea that doesn’t get economic support from a couple of much larger neighbors.)
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  4. Looks like I accidentally cut off the end of what I intended to post. Here’s the continuation. Basically, the Chinese are going through a massive transition, and Xi has completely scuffed their ability to make that transition smoothly. The higher wages right now are transitional. Companies plan to leave soon. With their short time horizon, it is more cost effective to pay a premium to retain or acquire already-proficient experienced workers than to spend money training up newbies. If Xi weren’t such a bumbler, China would be moving up the value chain. Those highly educated Chinese young people would be taking over some of the work where Japan and Korea are lacking youngsters. In turn, that would have kept more high end manufacturing in the region and would have reduced the short term time horizon that is skewing the labor cost numbers.
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  5. Nah. It’s the environment that the CCP has created. It’s not genetic. Plenty of original thinkers among the overseas Chinese community.
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  6. …half of whom are going to transition into needing to wear adult diapers over the next handful of years. The way they all plan to pay for those adult diapers (and for food, medicine, electricity, etc.) is by selling off tofu-dreg condos that no one will ever live in, but of course Chinese real estate prices will always go up, even if just about everyone is desperate to sell, so I’m sure it will all work out just fine.
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  7. The US government is currently able to borrow money at negative real rates. Negative interest! Foreigners are basically queuing up to pay the US government for the privilege of lending it money. In this sort of environment, the US government should be taking the foreigners’ money hand over fist to do things like improving infrastructure, making the green transition, and canceling student loans.
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