Why is it not easy for China to spin up their own fabs? They have a strategic plan / industrial policy[1]. They have the industrial base[2][3]. They have pumping out engineering graduates[3]. †
[4] “China awarded 1.38 million engineering bachelor’s degrees in 2020. The comparable American number is 197,000 (144,000 in engineering and 54,000 in computer science), or just one-seventh of China’s total.”
† You know the way we have this mental model in our heads for the size of the US economy post WWII versus the rest of the world?, we're going to have to update our mental model of the size of China's economy today versus the rest of the world.
Yeah but quantity has always been chinas strength. Where they have historically struggled is quality. If they can bring the quality up to acceptable levels then those numbers would be truly impressive. That’s what they are striving for
The US is also not great at quality (but good at innovating at speed at the expense of all else). Think Detroit and the waste of engineering talent at FAANGs.
Some companies can make quality items but I agree not universal or guaranteed. It’s just that historically fraud has been low but every year it gets worse and is more common.
Comac is the opposite of quality and the iPhone quality is so high because Apple is able to set and hold their high western qa standards. A domestic industry would have to struggle with the supply can taking shortcuts at every level and that’s much harder of a task. That’s why Chinese concrete is often poor quality, it could be higher quality they know how to make it at high quality levels but it isn’t due to rampant cheating.
https://www.semi.org/en/news-media-press-releases/semi-press...
Why is it not easy for China to spin up their own fabs? They have a strategic plan / industrial policy[1]. They have the industrial base[2][3]. They have pumping out engineering graduates[3]. †
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_China_2025
[2] “From 1900 to 1999, the US produced 4.2 billion tonnes of cement. It consumed 4.4 billion tonnes.
China produced 2.4 billion tonnes in 2020, and 2.5 billion tonnes in 2021. This means it produced 4.9 billion tonnes in these two years.”
(China produced more cement in two years than the US did in the whole 20th century)
https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/china-us-cement
[3] “China is by far the world’s largest silicon producer, with a production volume estimated at six million metric tons in 2022.
The total production volume of silicon worldwide was an estimated 8.8 million metric tons that year.”
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1260896/china-silicon-pr...
[4] “China awarded 1.38 million engineering bachelor’s degrees in 2020. The comparable American number is 197,000 (144,000 in engineering and 54,000 in computer science), or just one-seventh of China’s total.”
https://asiatimes.com/2022/07/a-tale-of-two-talents/
† You know the way we have this mental model in our heads for the size of the US economy post WWII versus the rest of the world?, we're going to have to update our mental model of the size of China's economy today versus the rest of the world.