Comments by "Siana Gearz" (@SianaGearz) on "De-industrialization was Hong Kong’s Biggest Mistake" video.

You can still make a ladder out of industries that are moving out. Like you have a manufacturing business, gradually it accumulates know-how and engineering acumen, and eventually, you can partition and move out most of the manufacturing and retain the more space efficient and more lucrative engineering and some critical and high tech manufacturing bits. But for that the industry must have to have been there to begin with and allowed to develop in this direction, partially naturally, partially maybe with incentives. It doesn't help if you just tear the industry down and then expect higher value jobs to just appear and stay there, there's no roots they can grow from!
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I don't see TSMC as a narrowly profitable company. It's very healthy by being ahead. Besides it's an ecosystem. TSMC and UMC work in conjunction with many local semiconductor design houses; which in turn work in conjunction with computer and electrical engineering companies that make products, designed in Taiwan, manufactured there or abroad. The web of tightly knit industry connections allows all these industries to operate faster and more efficiently and be close enough to leaders to be competitive.
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Its larger than Singapore and it wouldn't have to compete against China if they had just some industries which were one or two steps ahead.
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Even if it's tiny, the growing population will still need a growing network. Higher density of the network, more routes that may now be considered redundant but in due time will be necessary to take up the capacity.
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@Cotswolds1913 Honestly the population pyramid looks about the same as typical developed regions and countries, and most of them keep growing, like Germany doesn't look much different either. It's still an attractive region in worldwide comparison to move to, in spite of structural issues! Which is how they keep growing in spite of low fertility. Between 2020 and now, HK grew from 6.7 million to 7.5 million, and every year except 2003 and 2020 (no data for 2021 published yet, so that might be another one), the population has increased by an average of about 0.6%, but it compounds into a substantial total growth. I got the population figures from world bank data. I don't think you can conclusively say that the population is going to stagnate from now on.
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@sciencecw I am aware of people who moved away for this reason - but still the population only shrunk by like 0.2% in 2020, which is not that much. There's probably plenty of people who don't mind taking the place of those who move out. You're only looking at one side of things. Chinese nationals don't have to be afraid of being less free in HK than they are on the mainland for example.
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@sciencecw You literally can't, the pyramid in question is too old (2020, unspecified month) to really account much for the current wave. And the pyramid looks the same top-heavy as in every developed nation.
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@sciencecw But there was literally no population reduction in 2014, nor in 1989, nor in 1990, nor in 96, 97, so... what does it have anything to do with the topic of whether population is growing or not? In fact in 96 the population grew by well over 4%, which is remarkable. Like sure some people go away, others come in to replace them, because the region is relatively prosperous, and these new people have different circumstances and aren't afraid of whatever drove the others out. Right now you have two things overlapping, the epidemic and its effects on the world economy, and political shakeups specific to HK, and i think it'll likely recover and keep growing slooooowly. Every exodus wave stops eventually.
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