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Category: China Page 1 of 9

US Sanctions On China’s Chip Industry Have Completely Backfired

The highlight:

According to SEMI’s market research group, China isn’t slowing down. SEMI is forecasting China’s capacity to keep growing at a significant rate over the next few years. For 300mm, SEMI expects China to have 29% of the worldwide capacity in 2026, increasing from 21% in 2022 (Figure 2). The 200mm capacity is expected to grow from 16% to 24%. And foundry capacity is expected to reach 42% in 2026 up from 27% in 2022, outpacing the Taiwan foundry capacity expansions.

China has its goal set on being more chip-independent and spending less than $300 billion a year on importing semiconductors. To accomplish these goals, they are spending a lot of money on fabs and equipment, and in some cases forming JVs to get the right chips for their industries. So, will the European and US CHIPS Acts help to increase Europe’s and the US’s capacity? A little, but as Peter Wennink recently commented, the EU chip goal is unrealistic. I’ll add in as is the CHIPS Act in the US. China has a significant head start and it will take significant investment by the EU and US to catch up, and it is unlikely politicians and shareholders will continue to fund the exercise to reach the desired goal of 20%. (my bold)

The chart:

As for the fabricators which chips are manufactured with, well, China bought tons overseas just before the sanctions hit, BUT:

The bad news for equipment companies outside of China is that due to sanctions against foreign companies selling certain types of equipment, as well as China trying to create an independent chip market, Chinese semiconductor equipment companies are seeing above-market growth. Naura Technology, AMEC, and ACM Research at mid-year of 2023 are seeing 68%, 27%, and 47% growth respectively over 2022.  Most of this is driven by the China market.

The Chinese, pre-sanctions, were not pushing indigenous chip capacity. Chinese companies preferred American, Taiwanese and US chips, seeing them as more reliable than domestic alternatives.

A chip act might have made sense IF the US was genuinely going to re-shore production, far beyond chips or IF it was going to go to war within the next two to three years.

As it is, all it will accomplish in the end is losing the Western absolute advantage in chips and transferring the market leading position to China.

Which brings us to this beautiful, semi-related bit of news:

The effect of anti-Russia sanctions was to make Russia into the world’s fifth largest economy while massively ramping up their weapons production and overall growth rate. Germany has slipped to sixth and Russia is now a firm Chinese ally. It is true that America is making more money by supplying Europe with expensive fossil fuels, but by any rational assessment, anti-Russia sanctions strengthened America’s self-declared enemies, and weakened its allies.

In other words, the policy that Daleep was the architect of was a disaster. Yet he is lauded as capable rather than as a complete fuckup. To be fair, I suppose, he was undoubtedly following orders, but he owns the orders he follows unless he objected to them and predicted their failure.

All of this applies, times ten, to anyone involved in the anti-China sanctions, which have backfired catastrophically.

America, land of the highly paid incompetent fuck up.

 

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Western China Economic News Is Totally Deranged

So, the New York Times has a headline:

China Deflation Fears Raised By Falling Prices For Food and Cars

No. China’s growth is fine, and some products dropping in price is also fine. Car prices are dropping fast because China has a competitive market for car production: they have hundreds of car companies. That is driving tech improvements and price competition. This is a good thing, it is not based on “no one has enough money to spend so everyone has to drop prices” which is what caused the Great Depression (the deflationary episode that makes everyone quake.)

I think that China is making a mistake with car production, because of climate change, but it’s not even slightly an indication of the possibility of the bad type of deflation.

As for food, China’s importing more and is coming out of a period where they have multiple huge disease outbreaks and culls for both pork (the primary meat in China) and chicken (the second most common.)

Lower food prices are a good thing as long as wages are increasing, which they are.

The constant drum-beats of doom about the Chinese economy are propaganda driven insanity. The Chinese economy is still growing faster and is overall stronger than any Western economy.

If you want a summary of what the Chinese are doing (deliberately deflating housing prices and switching investment into manufacturing, among other things), I wrote a long summary article last year on the Chinese economy’s transition last year. Read it, because you won’t find this out from any Western mainstream media source, except possibly the Financial Times (and even then, not put together properly.)

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The Anti-China Chip Jeremiad Is The Stupidest Policy Imaginable

So, if at first, or second, or third, or tenth you don’t succeed, try try again. The Netherlands, under heavy pressure, has canceled already approved sales of ASML lithography machines to China.

The leadership of ASML had resisted these sanctions because they said it wouldn’t work: what would happen is that China would learn how to make the machines themselves.

What he didn’t say, but it is true, is that ASML would not just lose the Chinese market, they would eventually lose the world market anywhere that didn’t put high tariffs on China or ban Chinese ASML machines, because when China learns how to make their own they will inevitably be cheaper, and the quality will catch up at some point.

Sanctions work on weak nations. They do not work on strong nations, or on nations which have strong friends. Russia sanctions might have worked if China and India and most of the South had gone along, but since China was never going to let Russia be destroyed, and since Russia produces all the fuel and food and most of the minerals it needs, plus still has a fair bit of advanced and heavy industry, especially arms manufacturing, it was never going to happen.

Sanctions against China are insanity. All they do is accelerate local production.

The thing is that before the sanctions most Chinese majors preferred US or South Korean designed chips. They were considered better and more reliable. Executives would not buy Chinese chips, even when they were available.

But when the US first launched its chip sanctions they were clearly trying to take out Huawei, one of China’s largest companies.

Being reliant on western chips went from the safe choice to the insanely risky choice and China, both private and public, spent vast sums and made huge efforts to build their own chip industry (including lithography machines are alternatives.)

There was a small window to turn this around when Biden was elected, but he doubled down on sanctions.

This needs, I think, some unpacking.

I don’t like to reach for arguments are about racism, but there’s a weird assumption in the Western ruling class that the West is just superior to everyone else: that our technological lead was somehow innate and inevitable and eternal.

Given that China had the tech lead over the entire world for a couple thousand years (or may 1,500 before which it was India or Ancient Greece and before that it was always Mesopotamia or Egypt) this seems strange. Europe took the tech lead for complicated reasons, both China screwing up and European events which were historically contingent and mostly not planned.

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A full discussion is beyond the scope of this article (and fills many many books) but “Why Europe and not China” is its own genre.

But nobody with any sense thought it was because Europeans or those of European descent are innately superior to Chinese.

I’m a broken record on this, but where the industrial base goes, the tech lead goes, at least in the industrial era. Pre-industrial it’s a bit more complicated, but it’s not an awful guideline, the exceptions tend to be transient, but they do exist (the ancient Greeks were insanely advanced) and they tend to occur where there are is a group of constantly competing small nations, which is the over-simplified explanation for European pre-industrial revolution technological advancement and also explains the massive leaps China took during warring states periods.

But if you don’t have a forced competition between near equals who know they can’t sit still or a genuine breakthrough (the industrial revolution) or both, then the more normal processes mean that where the industrial base is, so goes the tech.

Now, sanctions against China would make sense IF and only IF, you were going to take advantage of them immediately. In other words, go to war or make really radical changes to try and re-industrialized.

How radical? Well, my estimate is that if the US wants to re-industrialize it needs to drop housing and rental prices by about two-thirds, and forbid all excess profits on any product which isn’t new, say less than ten years old (and a new model is not new. Smarthone producers should have been allowed to gouge on smartphone prices for ten years after the first iPhone, for example.) No food gouging, no pharma-price gouging on medicines decades old, and so on.

The US (and Europe) need a crash, not in living standards, but in price structures. That means the people at the top need to become a lot less rich, very very fast. Social welfare isn’t a problem, actually, letting ordinary people have a backup so they can take risks and start new companies is a good thing, and so is forcing companies to really compete for employees. Tech advancement and economic growth was far better in periods with when the US had more generous welfare systems.

Obviously these policies are extremely radical, and equally obviously, America isn’t going to pursue them, so anti-China sanctions are basically pointless and actually accelerate their tech progress.

China now has the lead in more techs than not. That’s not going to change: it’s going to get worse. When the US sent its industrial base to China that became inevitable because all “end of history” bullshit was, in fact, bullshit. Capitalism doesn’t require representative democracy and neither does fast technological progress. (It doesn’t need capitalism, per se, either, but that’s the only solution we know and it was necessary for China to do capitalism to get the industrial base transfer. Also, again, another book sized topic.)

Anyway, again, anti-China or Russia sanctions increase the speed with which they catch up in tech, not decrease it. The Russia sanctions could have been justified if they let Ukraine win, but obviously they didn’t, and it should have been obvious at the time they wouldn’t because of China’s very good reason for not allowing them to work.

Our leaders, still only good at making themselves richer, worthless for all other purposes. And, in the end, the policies they pursued to make themselves rich will just turn them into the people running shithole countries which don’t much matter.

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China Will Be Understood To Be The World’s Premier Power In Less Than A Decade

The signs of American collapse are everywhere. The Russians are out-producing not just the US, but the West in missiles, tanks and drones. The Chinese have a larger navy than the US and can build three ships in the time it takes the US to build one, and yes, their domestic arms industry is larger and more productive than America’s. They and the Russians are also ahead technologically in missiles, and arguably drones. (America has more expensive larger ones, but Ukraine shows what works is swarms of smaller ones.)

What’s really damning is the Western inability to ramp up production for the Ukrainian war. The Russians vastly increased production, the West hasn’t and can’t. De-industrialization is real.

I’ve gone over this in a number of articles, but the bottom line is that China is the largest trade partner of most of the world, is providing the loans for much of the world (at cheaper interest rates); is doing far more development work and so on. It is aligned with Russia. Major conferences are now lead by China: both the Iran/Saudi deal and the major Palestinian peace effort—and neither were discussed in English. They’re equal in most techs and catching up in those they are behind in like semiconductors, satellites and commercial aircraft.

But it’s the naval bit I keep coming back to. China will have a much, much larger navy than America: it already does and the American navy is shrinking while the Chinese one is growing.

The rise of China has been concealed by inertia and by the overhang of dollar being the unit of trade, but everyone is going to see and acknowledge this soon, especially as trade is increasingly settled in local currencies and alternatives to the Western banking system grow.

It just doesn’t make sense to go to the US any more if want most goods, military gear or even to move up the industrial chain. (See “How to use China to make your left wing government successful.”)

It’s all over but the shooting. In Thucydides Trap, Graham Allison’s book and article, he notes that usually the rise of a new power leads to war, sometimes multiple wars.

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We’re about a thousand dollars out from the first reward, the first four chapters of my book “Creation of Reality”, which will be published right after we make the goal.

On a personal level, this feels weird, in that all the things I’ve been warning about for decades are now happening. De-dollarization, industrial hollowness leading to military incapacity, and the Global South abandoning Europe and American en-masse.

Slowly, then quickly.

I mean, it’s not weird, these things were obvious. But 30 years is a long time in a human life. To see it all happening now, just as I (and others) predicted feels really weird.

Same as climate change: for a long time we were warning, and not it’s here in ways only fools can deny. Exactly as predicted. I always said it would happen sooner and worse than the IPCC claimed.

The Chinese are going to get in the neck, of course. They’ll get lead-trace and then be gutted by climate change and ecological collapse like everyone else. Their time in the sun will be brief.

It’s Chinese bad luck to make it to the top of the industrial heap at the moment when the entire industrial stack is about to become impossible to maintain. They played by the industrialization rules, and they’re going to die by them.

Still, unless the North China breadbasket gets wiped out an early inundation, the Chinese will probably hold on longer than most. Big if, though. My money is that a big inundation will hit far sooner than most models say.

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China Is Transitioning Economically, And So Far Successfully

China from Deng (82) on, had two main plays.

The first play was a standard mercantalist export driven developing state. Low costs were used to create low cost goods primarily for overseas consumption. Foreign currency was plowed back into capital machinery acquisition. Foreign partners were given good deals and the decision makers become rich, but to play one had to give up intellectual property.

This is the standard industrialization sequences, followed by almost everyone, including Britain, Germany, the United States, Japan and South Korea.

It generally requires an already industrialized sponsor (Britain was an obvious exception to this, but the Dutch provided a similar service pre-industrialization.) For China that sponsor, from Deng on, was the United States: the US took the goods, sold the capital machinery, made profits and was generally pretty happy about the deal (just as Britain was while it sold its patrimony to the US for temporary profits.)

The second play was the housing driven internal capitalization market to make people at home feel good and fund local governments. Local governments (who control about 70% of the Chinese budget, far higher than any other major nation) oversaw massive development deals. Housing values rose, the governments made lots of money as they kept rising for decades. Similar to how for a long time now betting on rising real-estate prices in the US or Canada or the UK was a sure thing.

This synergized with moving peasants off the land and into factory and service jobs, which allowed for large commercial farms, seen as far more effective than small farms, let alone collectivized farms. (No one has been able to make collectivized farms work so far.)

This is standard, again, to industrialize you need a labor pool, and peasants tied to the land and ancestral villages aren’t free labor.

One problem with this play is that it is a “virtuous” or self-reinforcing cycle and it can get completely out of control (see above.) The second is that it makes local governments very dependent: they don’t want it to end, even though it leads to massive inequality and mal-distribution of resources.

But that chart shouldn’t be seen as entirely a bad thing: note that US housing prices are ludicrously high by restriction of supply. The Chinese ARE and did supply a lot of new housing. The problem is it now isn’t getting to people who need it.

The above chart is pathological, and notice that it only goes to 2018. Anecdotally, young people in China, like in the US or Canada or the UK just can’t afford to buy a home unless their parents pay.

The second play, by the way, is often used independently. Turkey, for example, got about a decade and a half of prosperity out of it, but without the underlying “real” economy to support it, all it lead to in the end was inflation and economic weakness, because gains are always very unevenly distributed.

The problem with these two plays is that they are time bounded and lead to the middle income trap. They don’t develop a consumer economy, and income stagnates: far above undeveloped, but much lower than high income nations like the US, Japan and so on.

Likewise, these plays lead to extreme levels of inequality, as they did in the US during the gilded Age.

So, China had/has problems: high inequality; a gilded Age; housing which isn’t getting to those who need it. The social contract of “if you work and get a degree and so on, you’ll do well, is on the edge of breaking.”

But they’re working on it. Some parts they’ve already somewhat solved.

Solutions

The first is poverty. The extreme poverty metric is garbage, but the chart still indicates that there’s a hell of a lot less poverty than there was even twenty years ago.


The second is what is called “moving up the value chain.” Countries which industrialize tend to recapitulate history, starting with textiles (the first industrialized goods.) But if you want to become a high income nation, you need to produce the highest value-add goods. China now does, and has even deliberately been moving out low value industry to other countries.

For a long time, if you wanted to buy advanced goods you had to go to the West, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. That was it, and all of those are firm members of the “rules based order” or, really, of the US. Now you don’t, and China is absolutely eating the West’s lunch. France’s exports to its ex-African colonies, to name just one, have absolutely collapsed. China offers better deals with less political and military interference, and now that those nations don’t “need” France, they’re kicking France out.

But if the rest of the world doesn’t need to buy from the West, in the medium to long term, they aren’t going to sell to us, because we have so little they want. This where we move into Western collapse mode and is a large part of why, ex-climate change and environmental collapse, China would have already one, except perhaps for some shooting along the way. (Much like America’s ascendence was already baked in by 1900.)

Moving to a high income, goes in two phases: first you increase manufacturing, then you increase services. (Manufacturing is secondary industry, services are tertiary, and primary is resource extraction in the chart below.) Again, you can see China is making this transition, and blazingly fast, too.

Key to being a high income nation is a consumer economy. While you want to create as much of the goods and services as you can domestically, there is always a transition from “living with what you have” and “spending almost all your foreign money on capital goods” to “we can now import stuff.” China is well on its way.

But China’s main issue now is the real-estate market. Prices are too high; it’s an investment and speculation vehicle; the people who need housing aren’t able to afford it, and since China has enough housing now, further investment is a mis-allocation of resources.

Which leads us to—

Boom. China is crashing the real-estate market. In the western press this is viewed as bad, an economic crisis, but it is necessary. Housing needs to become a commodity good, so that everyone can afford it and so that resources go to more needed areas.

And while making it to high income includes a lot of consumption, China has challenges which can only be met thru manufacturing, engineer and science. It needs to leap past the final western barriers in industries like semiconductors, biotech and aircraft. It has to transition to a clean electrified economy and prepare for climate change. (Really, to avoid a collapse, they have to build a massive sea wall along the northern coast, otherwise the northern breadbasket will wind up under water.)

From where I sit, China is doing most of its major economic policy correctly. Transitions are painful, and it is possible they’ll botch their transition, but these changes are necessary. Indeed, if the West is serious about re-industrializing, we need to do the same thing, with certain differences. We need to build more housing and collapse pricing, where they need to build less housing and collapse prices.

There’s more to write on China, in particular about climate change, demographics, Covid, Chinese dependencies and so on, and we’ll return. But for now, this is the big picture.

About two-thirds of these charts are from Albert Pinto’s twitter account. Worth following.

https://twitter.com/70sBachchan


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US Chip Sanctions On China Appear To Be Failing Hard

Huawei, the first company to be slapped with sanctions, has announced a phone with 5G capability with domestic 7nm chips.

Huawei Technologies and China’s top chipmaker SMIC have built an advanced 7-nanometer processor to power its latest smartphone, according to a teardown report by analysis firm TechInsights.

Huawei’s Mate 60 Pro is powered by a new Kirin 9000s chip that was made in China by Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC)…

…The processor is the first to utilize SMIC’s most advanced 7nm technology and suggests the Chinese government is making some headway in attempts to build a domestic chip ecosystem, the research firm said…

…Buyers of the phone in China have been posting tear-down videos and sharing speed tests on social media that suggest the Mate 60 Pro is capable of download speeds exceeding those of top line 5G phones.

(Oh, and while it performs better in some ways than the best iPhone or Samsung, it costs about half of what they do.)

When I talked to an expert a couple years ago, he told me it would take many years to really deal with the sanctions because of the difficulty in creating the “tech that creates the tech.”

But that appears to not be true. The West didn’t ban lithography machines until nowish (the Dutch will export them till the end of the year), but…

Shanghai Micro Electronics Equipment (SMEE) is expected to deliver by year-end its proprietary SSA/800-10W, a 28-nm lithography machine, according to a report last week by Chinese newspaper Securities Daily.

This is less advanced than what you can get from the West, and there’s a scaling issue, but the idea that the Chinese won’t catch up is absurd and always has been, and no country can scale faster than the Chinese.

The end result of the chip bans will be that China winds up with the largest chip industry in the world, and I’d bet that in ten to fifteen years (and perhaps sooner, as they keep coming in before forecast) they will be slightly in advance of the West.

Scale matters. The West sent the world’s manufacturing floor to China, and just as when it moved to the US the Americans took the overall tech lead (with Germany the only real competitor at the time), China will take the tech lead.

These sanctions should have been used only a couple years prior to a war. (A war with China would be horrific, and the West is not ready for one, especially right now with the massive equipment and munitions draw down for Ukraine.)

Chinese aren’t stupid, the West is no longer special, having sold its patrimony and the idea that the Chinese were somehow incapable of catching up in tech if sanctioned was always ludicrous.


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The Supreme Stupidity of the “End of History” And Its Consequences

I remember the first time I heard of Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History”, and I remember thinking “no one can be stupid enough to believe that.”

But I knew I was wrong, because it kept popping up. The article became a book, even, and fools further down the intellectual stupidity chain made careers out of sub-theses, like Thomas Friedman’s “the world is flat”.

The thesis of the “End of History” was that the ideological wars were over: democratic market capitalism had won, everyone knew it, and history was in effect over because the great ideological war of the 20th century between capitalism/democracy, communism and fascism/democracy had ended. Everyone admitted that democratic capitalism had won and was the best system and now inevitably it would sweep the world and usher in an era of prosperity and relatively good government.

This is what elites wanted to hear after the fall of the USSR and Francis was the one to tell them. He was considered a great intellectual, made lots of money and elites proceeded to act as if he were right.

There were a lot of knock on consequences but there two were most important. The first was that without a competing model, western elites felt free to really rev up the immiseration train started by Reagan and Thacher. Post-war elites had been genuinely scared of Communism, in the “we could wind up dead” way and that had driven a lot of their acquiescence to cutting ordinary people a good deal. (A lot, not all. Much of it was just that the Great Depression cut their legs out from under them, and FDR then broke their kneecaps.)

The shipping of industry to allies and to the third world did not start at the end of the Cold War, but it did go into overdrive. The old police was to make sure that the countries it was sent to were not a real threat: either small to medium developing, or American allies. Now, however, the offshoring and outsourcing train traveled to China. Deng had opened up markets and privatized a large chunk of the economy, and Fukuyama had said that capitalism lead to democracy, so by shipping all that industry to China, well, the West would make them into a democracy.

The Chinese Communist party, in this storyline, were a bunch of suckers, who were inviting in the very forces which would overthrow them.

The line in poker is that if you don’t know who the sucker at the table is, it’s you, but the real danger is when you think someone else is the sucker, and they aren’t.

The CCP had understood Americans and the West very well. Ironically they were aided in this by Marxism and their belief that capitalists were blinded by greed. They offered Western elites cheap labor and high profits and dangled the dream of access to a market of a billion people.

There was a time when it was understood that what made countries mighty was industry, and that you kept the industry at home. In the post-war era that was relaxed: by you still didn’t send your industry to anyone who might well become an enemy.

But history was over and there were no enemies and the West, with its transnational elite largely shorn of patriotism figured they’d co-opt Chinese elites and make them no longer nationalist.

They didn’t understand that the CCP didn’t feel that way: they were proud of being Chinese and they also believed that if they lost power a lot of them would wind up dead. They obsessively studied the fall of the USSR (and its communist party) and were determined that wouldn’t happen to them. And they deeply resented the west, including America, for the “century of humiliation.”

Sure, they were willing to go to a mixed economy with a lot of capitalism, but they were determined to stay in charge and never become democratic capitalists, and they wanted to return China to its natural place as the richest and most important country in the world, a position it had occupied for most of the last 2,000 years (before that it was India, and before that it was Mesopotamia with Egyptian interregnums.)

So you had two bets. The West, led by America, bet that if they shipped industry to China, China would become just another country like them, happy to be part of an international community running on laws that had been created when China was at its weakest.

The Chinese Communist Party bet that they could let some capitalism in and catch up in technology, and even exceed the West in terms of industrial base.

We now know who was right, and it wasn’t the West. Our tech boycotts are a sign of weakness, not strength. We know we can’t stay ahead of them without restricting their access, but it’s very much a case of slamming the barn door after the horses have left. The tech lead moves to where the manufacturing floor is. Britain stayed in the lead technologically for about 20 years after the US became the manufacturing power, for example, but it was a lagging indicator, and ironically Britain had done the same thing America has done with China: it invested big time, built the factories and transferred a ton of tech.

Fukuyama was full of it. He sold a fairy tale to an elite desperate to believe they had won forever and he in selling it and they in believing it took the exact steps required to ensure it wasn’t true, by empowering the only nation in the world strong enough to challenge America. (India was never in the running due to severe corruption and governance issues.)

But the people who engaged in this foolishness (from the POV of the Americ and its allies) reaped their mortal reward: the elites became stinking rich, and Fukuyama become wealthy and was regarded as a genius for telling the story his audience wanted to hear, even if it was obviously wrong.

History never ends. There is no end-state ideology or system and when someone tells you the world is exactly as wonderful as you want it to be, run.


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Ending Zero-Covid Coming Home To Roost For China

So, as expected:

XBB is expected to result in 40 million infections per week by the end of May before peaking at 65 million a month later. This comes nearly six months after Beijing dismantled its Covid Zero curbs, allowing the virus to spread rapidly among the country’s 1.4 billion residents…

…Zhong’s estimate suggests that this latest wave of infections will be more muted compared to the previous wave that hit China late last year and into January. At that time, a different omicron sublineage likely infected 37 million people every day, overwhelming hospitals and crematoriums and causing residents to scramble for limited supplies of fever medicine.

As in the West, almost everyone in China will get Covid. Many will get it multiple times, indeed, if Covid continues for years, this is guaranteed. As I’ve long said, the primary social issue isn’t deaths (China’s government is probably more than OK with old people dying given its onrushing demographic issues), but Long Covid and asymptomatic damage to organs and to the immune system.

In a couple years China will be like the US and Britain, with about 2% of its population disabled by Covid: in China that’s twenty-eight million people, more than the population of many countries. Two years after that, well, even assuming it’s less than linear due to deaths and (hopefully) improved treatment, thirty-five to forty million isn’t unreasonable.

After ten years?

Zero-Covid was the right policy done stupid, and it shouldn’t have been ended until China had properly changed ventilation and filtering as well as installed proper sink traps (most Chinese homes do not have traps – those bends in the pipes, which block smells). Given China was having economic issues, the extra work would have been useful for the economy anyway.

If Covid doesn’t spontaneously mutate to do less long term damage it’s not clear to me how our societies survive this in addition to climate change. It’s not just that people can’t work or are stupider (there’s a ton of brain damage) or less healthy even if they can work, it’s that medical and disability systems will need a lot more people and resources and if the government doesn’t give them, it doesn’t make the problem go away, it shoves it onto the population.

The sheer level of incompetence and inability to plan ahead in our societies is insane. I had hoped that China might prove an exception. Alas.


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