st0v

maybe I misinderstand your meaning but at its heart the real problem is that chip engineers salary has been stuck at ten years ago for about twenty years. Like 50k usd.

This in and of itself is not a huge problem but with no downstream opportunities there isn't enough talent considering a career toward the top of the value chain.

The 1980s and 1990s saw alot of people come back to Taiwan, but the 2010s and 2020s sees it happen in another direction (mainland, the salary is awesome).

Of course many will say factory workers don't need to smart enough to do design. but IC production is complicated and needs skilled labor with some understanding of what they're doing.

wealthy people employ an "ayi" to do house work or in some cases a "baomu" to be a nanny.

This is not popular for the money conscience middle class. they will hire a cleaner maybe a few days a month if they feel they can't keep up, but a baomu is more for the upper classes and yeh, can be gross just like you can imagine.

I am foreign worker. and a single guy who travels a lot. so many times in my life I hired an ayi to come to my apartment and do cleaning maybe twice a week.

my last full time ayi, could barely read, her daughter had just left university and was working as a paralegal.... would she retire because her daughter could afford to take care of her ? no way in he'll, the culture doesn't allow that until she's too old to work.

What I have seen from 10 years living there:

A big chunk of the dirt poor got to send their kids to university and secure real assets for their families while working an honest job.

The kind of job that pays for fuck all barely a life in the west.

Of course at the same time the rich got even richer. The crazy rich kind of stayed where they are.

Sadly there are still a lot of dirt poor families in China but within ten years the transformation has been breath taking. And these families now have a real chance.

I don't know if you've ever been there, but i live there now for about a decade.

a lot of people own a house by default. at some point all the houses where people live were somehow given to them. then the values sky rocketed, or where their building got developed and the developer paid them out.

so families brought more than one house or prepared money for their kids to get a house, and the property market continued to grow.

On top of this, Chinese are more accustomed to living in what could be called extremely efficient housing. small apartments in big apartment blocks with 99% of what they need in life 10 minutes walk away.

+1

haven't been back since I got the Rate limit message.

Sync brought me to reddit. I'll happily follow sync to lemmy.

There's a very simple way to measure the migration of manufacturing out of China.

get a list of the top ten cargo ports in the world. count how many are mainland China?

7 or 8 right?

okay let's go down the list until we get Vietnam or India or someplace where'd you'd expect the manufacturing to go to.

aight... now compare all the cargo capacity for that entire country to one of the eight ports in China? tell you what, let's include India, and Rotterdam, and LA... just add them all together. How many of 8 does it take to keep up with that 2 or 3 ?

so, cargo shipping capacity... big difference right? day light.

Vietnam wants to make iPhones. you gotta ship 110% of the various bits into Vietnam and then ship out 99% of the finished goods.

all those ports come with piles and piles of back end infrastructure. roads. trucking. rail. skilled workers...

there are infinite alternatives to China. but it will take 40 years to develop any of them to that level.

The former Chinese government (now kmt in taiwan) took a loan like 80 years ago. after the war, the PRC and the USA both just kinda assumed China wasn't ever going to pay.

For a while there USA maintained that the KMT was the government in exile, but with normalization with the PRC, that all kinda got swept under the carpet.

The US debt held by China today, is the same as other countries are holding. People need to believe this will be one day repaid and profitable.