China's EV Market Is Imploding (msn.com) 155
An anonymous reader shares a report: The Chinese electric car has become a symbol of the country's seemingly unstoppable rise on the world stage. Many observers point to their growing popularity as evidence that China is winning the race to dominate new technologies. But in China, these electric cars represent something entirely different: the profound threats that Beijing's meddling in markets poses to both China and the world.
Bloated by excessive investment, distorted by government intervention, and plagued by heavy losses, China's EV industry appears destined for a crash. EV companies are locked in a cutthroat struggle for survival. Wei Jianjun, the chairman of the Chinese automaker Great Wall Motor, warned in May that China's car industry could tumble into a financial crisis; it "just hasn't erupted yet."
To bypass government censorship of bad economic news, market analysts have opted for a seemingly anodyne term to describe the Chinese car industry's downward spiral: involution, which connotes falling in on oneself. What happens in China's EV sector promises to influence the entire global automobile market. China's emergence as the world's largest manufacturer of EVs highlights the serious challenge the country poses to even the most advanced industries in the U.S., Europe, and other rich economies. Given the vital role the car industry plays in economies around the world, and the jobs, supply chains, and technologies involved, the stakes are high.
But the wobbles in China's EV sector demonstrate the downside of China's state-led economic model. China's government threw ample resources at the EV industry in the hopes of leapfrogging foreign rivals in the transition to battery-powered vehicles. The Center for Strategic and International Studies estimates that the government provided more than $230 billion of financial assistance to the EV sector from 2009 to 2023. The strategy worked: China's EV makers would likely never have grown as quickly as they have without this substantial state support. By comparison, the recent Republican-sponsored tax bill eliminated nearly all federal subsidies for EVs in the U.S.
The problem is that China's program encouraged too much investment in the sector. Michael Dunne, the CEO of Dunne Insights, a California-based consulting firm focused on the EV industry, counts 46 domestic and international automakers producing EVs in China, far too many for even the world's second-largest economy to sustain.
Bloated by excessive investment, distorted by government intervention, and plagued by heavy losses, China's EV industry appears destined for a crash. EV companies are locked in a cutthroat struggle for survival. Wei Jianjun, the chairman of the Chinese automaker Great Wall Motor, warned in May that China's car industry could tumble into a financial crisis; it "just hasn't erupted yet."
To bypass government censorship of bad economic news, market analysts have opted for a seemingly anodyne term to describe the Chinese car industry's downward spiral: involution, which connotes falling in on oneself. What happens in China's EV sector promises to influence the entire global automobile market. China's emergence as the world's largest manufacturer of EVs highlights the serious challenge the country poses to even the most advanced industries in the U.S., Europe, and other rich economies. Given the vital role the car industry plays in economies around the world, and the jobs, supply chains, and technologies involved, the stakes are high.
But the wobbles in China's EV sector demonstrate the downside of China's state-led economic model. China's government threw ample resources at the EV industry in the hopes of leapfrogging foreign rivals in the transition to battery-powered vehicles. The Center for Strategic and International Studies estimates that the government provided more than $230 billion of financial assistance to the EV sector from 2009 to 2023. The strategy worked: China's EV makers would likely never have grown as quickly as they have without this substantial state support. By comparison, the recent Republican-sponsored tax bill eliminated nearly all federal subsidies for EVs in the U.S.
The problem is that China's program encouraged too much investment in the sector. Michael Dunne, the CEO of Dunne Insights, a California-based consulting firm focused on the EV industry, counts 46 domestic and international automakers producing EVs in China, far too many for even the world's second-largest economy to sustain.
Yes it does! (Score:4, Informative)
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Yeah, and the air stinks, too. Does it help to complain a problem that is fundamental to Slashdot's notion of time?
There are many stories that should last longer than it takes to scroll straight down the top page... Doesn't help that the real world is also uncooperative about scheduling when new stories will arrive. And substantive discussions are hard work, too.
The advantage of fiction is that all the noise can be trimmed away. The real world is full of noise without meaning, no matter how primed we humans
amazing (Score:5, Funny)
it's imploding yet duplicating
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Chris Chapel from China Uncensored [youtube.com] does a good job explaining this.
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What you are seeing is CCP pouring massive subsidies into EV market, where these subsidies resulted in a bubble. Chris Chapel from China Uncensored [youtube.com] does a good job explaining this.
YouTuber SerpentZA also does a good job of exploring the topic, in a less detailed but more sensational manner:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wvyb9Mp69ew.
Skip to 8:05, 9:02, and 11:01 to see vast fields of these unwanted cars. And stick around to the end to see some spectacular footage of automobiles going off like bombs. Sometimes sensationalism is useful in underlining the importance of a point.
They should behave like a free market democracy! (Score:2)
That's terrible, they poured $15.5B into the industry over the course 25 years.
Wait no, that was the US. And it was Boeing alone they poured that much into.
The US/Boeing and EU/Airbus have been arguing back and forth for years about each side's unfair aerospace subsidies (that are not subsidies if you ask them).
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There's a difference between a market built on a subsidy, and a market being influenced by a subsidy.
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I used to follow Chris as he does draw attention to things the CCP would rather we didn't know about. But when he started believing Trump will save us from China I was done. Besides that, a lot of talk about China's imminent destruction is wishful thinking and just a touch arrogant. Our own current form of capitalism isn't working so well either anymore. The CCP will fall sooner or later, I have no doubt, and for many of the reasons Chris talks about. But our western socioeconomic systems are just as
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That the Chinese are making some good cars, and that the industry is built on a bedrock of Government money can both be true at the same time.
If the rug is pulled from underneath them- the work they'll have done will still have been done. The bubble will pop, and then they'll produce reasonable amounts of good cars.
Bubbles can suck for a lot of reasons, but it's not like 2008 made people stop needing houses, or the
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But our western socioeconomic systems are just as likely to fail also in that same time frame.
See Austria vs USA in the 1930s.
Simple rule for capitalists:
When the systems crash, have the government do nothing and the people will repair the system within days. If you let the government interfere, it'll make things even worse.
Planned economies (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Planned economies (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Planned economies (Score:5, Insightful)
And causing massive damage to global economies and labor markets. We're looking at the gutting of the source of livelihood for millions of people here. According to the AI chatbot I just looked at, approximately 10.8 to 14 million people derive their income from the European auto industry and around 4.5 to 8 million people from the US auto industry.
This is why trade policy protects against dumping.
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I know another guy in the process of fucking up the global economy.
Re:Planned economies (Score:4, Informative)
European manufacturers are finally getting their act together on EVs it seems. The Skoda Elroq is probably going to be the best selling EV this year, in the UK.
We need EVs, we need to get off oil. Some pain is inevitable, all we can do is delay it, which makes it worse.
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we need to get off oil.
We don't and we can't. More so, even in context of EVs - you can't manufacture one without significant amount of materials that are derived from petroleum.
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We will never totally stop using oil of course, but we need to mostly stop burning it for fuel, outside of a limited number of applications. We need to do something about plastic pollution too.
I'd say that will he the harder transition to manage. Electrifying everything isn't too difficult and most of the tech is already mature. Replacing or dealing with plastic pollution seems harder, as will be dealing with increasing costs as fuel oil product consumption is greatly reduced.
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Besides, since there's not the full needed infrastructure here across the US, no one really wants them yet, at least not in mass.
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The rush is that burning it is buggering up the planet. If the US refuses, it becomes a security issue and we be dealt with appropriately.
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"There's no difference between using oil to make durable materials and burning it up to make thing hot"
If you have to lie about what folks on the other side of your argument think you either don't understand them or are just maliciously lying about it. Nobody says "No oil for anything ever" but burning gasoline to move one human being from point A to B is incredibly stupid when we have a better alternative.
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Bad for you. Bad for me. Good for China.
The CCP don't care about you and me. Or about Chinese people. Or Chinese corporations. Only about the future of China. Everyone and everything is expendable in the service of their goals. This is just a small item on the checklist. The cost is irrelevant as long as the plan moves forward.
Re:Planned economies (Score:5, Insightful)
They care about it because it's exactly their plan - they tank the rest of the world's auto industry, then they take over. We've seen this pattern with industry after industry. This is why dealing with them is problematic - they are not operating in good faith.
This is why we have those tariffs. Divesting from China is of utmost national security interest for the United States and should be for the European Union as well.
And just because Orange Man Bad doesn't mean you shouldn't keep your wits about you. You strike me as the kind of person who would suffocate themself if Trump suddenly said he likes oxygen.
Re:Planned economies (Score:4, Interesting)
Sure but we know it's their plan that doesn't tell us anything unique. Every country wants to dominate industries, it's good for countries. The USA wants to dominate the auto industry as well, we're just arguing about methods and economic philosophy is just that, philosophy. At the end of the day what matters is which nation produces the most batteries and cars that people can purchase and who can build the infrastructure to support that and despite our "superior economic philosophy" we are losing.
And no, the targeted tariffs are what we had in place for the auto industry specifically and that was give the US auto industry time to catch up, ideally it should have been with investment from the state to help transition the industry. Obama and Biden tried that and Republicans have been trying to roll it back at every opportunity. You can't just rely on tariffs forever and ever.
The general, broad global tariffs are just nonsense that hurts the USA more than it helps, its a shotgun instead of a scalpel and it only encourages China to go it alone. You say the nation needs to divest and yet the admin has been talking about wanting a trade deal with China for the entire year, it's incoherent because these people don't know what they are doing.
You strike me as the kind of person who would suffocate themself if Trump suddenly said he likes oxygen.
And that is exactly the stupid grievance based zero-sum turn off your brain thought process of conservatives that has gotten us into this mess. "Rational economic thoughts? Nah, TDS baby! The 19th century mercantilism will continue until morale improves"
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As far as tariffs are concerned, you'll probably be surprised to find that a massive amount of right wing pundits are against them for exactly the reasons you state.
What I find funny is how people on the left have suddenly discovered Milton Friedman in their railings against Trump.
Re:Planned economies (Score:4, Insightful)
you'll probably be surprised to find that a massive amount of right wing pundits are against them for exactly the reasons you state.
Yeah, they're called "never trumpers" and they are pretty politically irrelevant as the modern Trump GOP has made basically paraiahs. Can you name the top pundits that are still MAGA and oppose tariffs?
What I find funny is how people on the left have suddenly discovered Milton Friedman in their railings against Trump.
The Democrats have always held to pretty bog standard Keynesian economics the past 40ish years, Clinton, Obama and Biden all did, unless of course you actually believe the conservative media when they've been calling everyone socialists my entire life.
It's no so much that the left embraced Friedman but rather the Right has abandoned him since 2015 where they embraced populism and a personality cult. Trump's election and rise to power was pretty specifically a rejection of what was mainstream Republican economics, Friedman, Rothbard and the like are to the MAGA movement not worth considering and Trump himself I doubt actually understands what those folks were driving at.
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Matt Walsh is a never trumper?
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China is proving that massive government investment builds economies.
Nobody needed China to prove that, as you mentioned it was already proven in most of the Western world already it's just fighting through the fog of politics to enact those measures.
Friedman like all economists has predictions that have been borne out well and others that have not. Economics is a soft science since for all the math it's still just down to making an educated guess and seeing what happens.
Soft Science? (Score:2)
for all the math it's still just down to making an educated guess and seeing what happens.
Which is not really science at all is it? In Science you are supposed to make a hypothesis and then test it. Not guess and assume your guess is correct until proven wrong. Then make a new guess when you are proved wrong.
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Yes, thus the term "soft science", it's colloquial, the definition of science has changed over time.
Sociology is still a real study of real things even if it's limited in its ability to do experimental testing. Same with economics, we don't have a second Earth to run a control on. Doesn't mean these things don't use scientific principles and methods.
Doctors still do science even if they are ethically constrained on how much experimental testing they can do on patients.
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This is why we have those tariffs.
No, it's not. Otherwise the tariffs would only have been imposed against China.
Gave me a real WTF moment when Trump went on and on about tariffs against China, and the first tariff that went into effect was against Canada, one of our best trading partners.
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How is competing hard not operating in good faith? Did the US not bail out its own auto industry multiple times, and subsidize the transition to EVs? Wasn't Tesla part of a government investment scheme?
We should thank China for doing that which we apparently couldn't, but which the world needs. They advanced battery tech rapidly and accelerated the transition away from fossil fuels.
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Detroit is doing its level best to kill EV competition already.
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No, but their customers are.
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They don't have to. They only have to subsidize it enough to tank the rest of the world's auto manufacturing. Then, they become the only one left, a monopolist in a market with a huge barrier to entry. They can pull their subsidies at that point and rake in the excess profit.
This is a classic trade manipulation strategy. It's taught in undergrad business classes.
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severely allowing people to afford EVs
*For now*
The purpose of dumping like this is to disintegrate competition, as it's not physically possible to keep up with a competitor who can sell at a loss indefinitely via funding from the state or other unrelated business assets. It's part of why monopolies are supposed to be illegal, and what the Chinese have been doing violates international trade rules (which are laughable in their enforcement). The Chinese have been pulling crap like this for two decades, with the explicit aim of making western nati
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The purpose of dumping like this is to disintegrate competition, as it's not physically possible to keep up with a competitor who can sell at a loss indefinitely via funding from the state or other unrelated business assets.
Now that you brought this up, let's discuss Airbus, who is doing something similar to China.
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They probably forgot to tell the companies they subsidized that they were trying to dump on the global market in order to buy a longer term lead. And that it may not work out too well in the end. I can't imagine any other purpose for them propping it up so hard. The US never became a market for these, but the US trade war has had ripple effects in their other markets and is probably collapsing the propping up that China is doing.
Re:Planned economies (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, such overinvestement wouldn't happen in a capitalist society ... like AI, or telecom, or railways, or... Anyway, AI datacenters also try to get as much as possible subsidies, government contracts, etc. They just have to sell it differently to the government, but it all comes down to "We cannot afford a mineshaft gap"
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I think the point is that the myth of the "all knowing, all efficient free market will always choose the right move versus the communist central planners" isn't really true at all, they are just as capable of corruption, bureaucratic paralysis, glad handing, and generally bad economic decisions all around. Government or corporations it's just people making decisions and reacting to incentives and many of the incentives in capitalist countries can be wildly perverse.
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I think a bunch of aging and no longer clearly thinking (and primed to believe in AI based on Science Fiction from their childhood) venture capitalists bought into false promises from Altman and the likes, made massive investments thinking this is going to
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Free market is a representation of distributed decision making, where you have hundreds of people evaluating the data and making decisions.
It's presented as that and yet we have lived in the era of the "corporate raider", "CEO is king" culture for decades now and the track record isn't exactly holding strong.
Corporations have become condensed and far more vertical than 50 years ago with far less competition (which is really the controlling force more than decentralized decision making ever was) and capital is more concentrated in a few hands than ever before. The economy turns on what places like Blackrock, Silverlake and the Mag7 decide what
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I'm sorry welcome to your first day of the English language. Why do you think i put it in quotations, I'm exaggerating for effect.
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Easier to scale back than to scale down.
Look at it from China's POV, you have this massive manufacturing base and yet in the traditional auto market they aren't kept out by trade deals but the fact it's hard to make inroads in an industry dominated by the Americans, Europeans and Japanese companies.
Along comes the sea change that EV is bringing and if you're china 10 years ago and suddenly those 3 nations are looking to completely drop the ball. Honda and Toyota focussing on dead tech like hydrogen, the Am
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I only mention this because you're comparing a command economy where it is the national government making production decisions, to independent companies in free market economies.
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These are mixed economies, the government creates many regulations, trade agreements and other matters that affect their businesses. There was a reason in 2008 we bailed out the US auto makers, we as a nation value that industry, for the jobs, national security and general prestige and tradition. This isn't central planners VS laissez-faire but levels of mixed-economy VS mixed-economy. To think those industries and state aren't intertwined in many important ways is naive at best.
At the end of the day eco
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"making production decisions" is carrying a lot of water, business decisions are not made in a vacuum, they respond to incentives both from consumers, their competition and the state apparatus. Automakers didn't just decide to add 3-point-seat belt's or emissions controls into vehichles because of their own accord, they were either forced or incentivized to.
The inventive in the US for it's auto industry has ping ponged between "let's help transition you to a future EV world" to "gasoline is good, big truck
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Central planners tend to consider fewer factors, or simply the wrong factors.
It's extremely shortsighted to treat that as axiomatic and not on the specifics. That type of thinking is again part of why the US auto industry is still on the backfoot in the EV market. It's not exactly like corporations arent capable of the same things you describe, how many examples of failed businesses do we want to bring up?
For example, the CCP doesn't seem to have considered consumer behavior, and thus produced very many more cars than can be sold.
You'd have to demonstrate that their goal was primarily to simply meeting consumer demand of this very moment and not building industrial capacity of batteries and vehicles and th
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China's is the closest thing the world has ever seen to a functional planned economy, and this is still what happens. Empty cities built for show, cars nobody wants, hundreds of billions wasted. You made a fantastic point about building out capacity, but as it is a
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The general populace is NOT clamoring in mass to have EVs.
Define "clamoring" but demand isn't binary, it's based on price and other factors and time in fact does move forward and circumstances change.
https://insideevs.com/news/778... [insideevs.com]
The good news is that nine-in young people are open to EVs, and this is the demographic that will drive car sales long-term. The bad news is that they aren't in a position to put their money where their mouths are and actually buy these stubbornly expensive electric cars.
As they say, Rome wasn't built in a day and going from horses to
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You really couldn't make a fair guess that maybe it was a typo for "nine-in-ten", maybe you are ESL i apologize, here's the source survey.
But when we look at respondents by age group, we see that only 10% of US 18- to 30-year-olds are “never BEVers.”
https://www.bcg.com/publicatio... [bcg.com]
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the auto manufacturers are the ones ultimately making production decisions everywhere except China.
Where is the evidence that auto manufacturers aren't the ones ultimately making production decisions in China? It appears they are in competition with one another at least. Are they subject to some government regulations that require each auto maker to build a certain number of vehicles?
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Some work is required of the student.
So why don't you do the work?
Dupe - but a reminder this is a lie (Score:3)
Re:Dupe - but a reminder this is a lie (Score:4, Informative)
As a result, there are billions of dollars simply evaporating at dealerships as the unsold cars sit there losing value. That's an imploding market.
As intended (Score:5, Interesting)
Wall Street fears a "crash" above all else, because a "crash" causes existing winners to lose, which is something that cannot be allowed to happen in the US. But China understands that a crash for one person is an opportunity for others, and what matters is overall progress, not just making sure nobody ever loses money. People losing money is part of capitalism and part of the industrial lifecycle, so a "crash" is not some kind of existential failure, but just a rumble in an evolving market.
China has a tendency to fund a huge amount of companies who invest extravagantly in building overflowing amounts of capital. Then a lot of those companies go out of business, the whole sector "crashes" (we could also say "matures"), all that huge amount of capital is snatched up and purposed to extremely efficient PRODUCTION which is the part that Wall Street doesn't care about.
The same thing is happening with solar; from a Wall Street perspective it's a failure because prices keep falling and solar companies aren't making profits. From a Chinese perspective it's a success, because they are blanketing their mountains with cheap solar panels and they are going to achieve energy independence which will help the whole economy. They understand you can't have cheap power and also have extremely profitable energy companies. You can't have low solar prices and also boost profits of solar companies. So what Western articles will describe as a "failure" and "collapse" is actually an evolution of the market to the next stage of hyper-efficient production (also known as low profitability) which the US never achieves because they step in to make sure incumbent interests don't lose money (even if the overall economy or consumer "loses money" in the long run).
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Overproduction is an absolute requirement for a market economy to function, you incredible dummy. If aggregate supply didn't exceed demand, then there would be no price signals and no bankruptcies, and the competition that is central to how markets work would be gone. There is not a major capitalist market that has ever existed that has not had recessions, gluts and inventory build-ups, and this is not only to be expected, it's essential to how markets operate.
You people are so pig fucking ignorant about ev
Theory vs Reality (Score:2)
Overproduction is never a success, it's waste.
Overproduction is an absolute requirement for a market economy to function, you incredible dummy. If aggregate supply didn't exceed demand, then there would be no price signals and no bankruptcies, and the competition that is central to how markets work would be gone. There is not a major capitalist market that has ever existed that has not had recessions, gluts and inventory build-ups, and this is not only to be expected, it's essential to how markets operate.
I doubt the EV's sitting on lots, whether in China or the US, are going to end up unused and in a junkyard. But Wall street investors measure success by company profits and stock price, not production of useful goods. Making something useful and selling it at a loss is a failure, not a success. But for the person getting the use of the product that doesn't really matter. China's history may make it more focused on the user's interests.
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Overproduction is an absolute requirement for a market economy to function, you incredible dummy.
Yes, overproduction is necessary. But it's also waste. And if you get too much of it, then it's unsustainable.
You people are so pig fucking ignorant about everything
Fine words from a coward.
Re: As intended (Score:2)
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What, again? (Score:2)
I thought it imploded two days ago. Now Slashdot tells me it's imploding again today? Sounds like they have a real problem on their hands.
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I expect to see these headlines every day: "Chinese EV Market Is Still imploding"
Reminds me of the Red Dwarf emergency announcement:
"Emergency... There's an emergency going on... It's still going on..."
Not from the videos I seen lately (Score:2)
This is by Design in the Chinese Model (Score:4, Informative)
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No, the CCP's goal was to leapfrog everyone else. Instead of developing combustion engine tech and hybrids in an attempt to catch up, they went all-in on batteries and EVs. It paid off, they are now years ahead and sustaining that lead.
This was always the plan. (Score:2)
Chinese industry is like this. Lots of companies pop up doing the same thing, most of them fail, the best ideas are scooped up by the companies that remain, and a few strong sustainable companies survive. This is not just a Chinese thing. It happens in the USA, too. Most American tech startups fail; 70% fail between years two and three and most fail in the first five years. China will take an economic hit when most of their car companies tank, but they’ll weather the storm better than the USA will whe
Don't get too happy about Chinese "overcapacity" (Score:2)
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China hasn’t lost access to global markets. It’s lost some access to the US market, but remember it never had that for cars in the first place, and it had no toehold in Europe until a few years ago. It has rapidly developed export markets for its cars and EVs in dozens of markets, and there is no general anti-China trade barrier going up across these categories. Chinese solar panels and battery storage are driving a very fast transition away from unreliable national electricity grids in multiple
Re:Archetypal capitalist crisis of overproduction (Score:5, Insightful)
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BYD Got 3.4 Billion to Dominate EVs, Study Says [bloomberg.com].
China's EV makers got about $313 billion in aid over last 15 years [straitstimes.com].
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And Ford received nearly triple BYD https://www.cbtnews.com/ford-s... [cbtnews.com]
What's your point?
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It's Communist Party of China (CPC), not Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Yes, it was planned, and it was deliberate. It's a different society and a different economy than the west, but for some bizarre reason Westerners seem unable to comprehend that theirs isn't the only possible way to do things.
https://kdwalmsley.substack.co... [substack.com]
Top China execs forecast more deflation and falling profits ahead. And that's the plan.
In Western economies, deflation is a signal of collapsing economic activity, and even depressi
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It's Communist Party of China (CPC), not Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Sorry comrade for mixing that up, good to have someone with first-hand experience to correct this.
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Actually most of those house are now occupied. The "train stations to nowhere", supposedly an indicator of the imminent collapse of their economy, are now surrounded by industries and towns.
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Not most, by far. Over 60 million housing units are still vacant, and in the previously completely empty cities where people have moved in, occupancy is often at 10% of capacity or so. A lot of the housing has simply been demolished, which has improved statistics somewhat, but a lot of unfinished housing also remains.
None of this is an indicator of collapse of the economy, and it has never been. The economy isn't dependent on people living in ghost towns. What it is an indicator of is massive private invest
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At least unsold cars might be moved to somewhere else if there's a perceived demand somewhere else. They might even be exported depending on the sorts of trade deals that the country has internationally.
Real estate by its very nature is fixed into place. If there's no value in it in-place, then the only real value is the proceeds from dismantling and carting-off whatever's there. If there are environmental regulations involved in that process, or if the materials have no reusable or recyclable value, the
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Actually most of those house are now occupied. The "train stations to nowhere", supposedly an indicator of the imminent collapse of their economy, are now surrounded by industries and towns.
No they're not. You're exaggerating. The majority of these developments are still empty. China's declining birth rates coupled with the increased mortality from COVID have thrown in a monkey wrench into their planning. Up to 80 million units are still empty [newsweek.com], with slim prospects for ever being bought or even used as social housing. Most of them are just crumbling ruins at this point. Even where people have moved in (often with heavy government subsidies, essentially turning units into an eastern Section 8 h
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Also how much of that unoccupied housing is unsafe tofu dreg architecture?
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https://thefinancialanalyst.ne... [thefinancialanalyst.net]
You want a huge leap? Here you go.
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No it isn't. We can afford to be without a few bridges for awhile, when it costs your ENTIRE NATION to have that kind of executive "build it now" power for awhile.
China only managed to sustain that activity for a span of about two decades. Now they're going down a hole, fast.
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The scrabble for short term profits will always lose to adequate long term planning.
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I’d be somewhat concerned if it was an isolated incident with just EV but China has a decades long history of this kind of corruption. Just look at the amount of real estate that was “sold” but sits vacant as new construction. It dwarfs the EV market by a couple orders of magnitude.
Not to mention the corruption in the construction industry itself - it's called "tofu dregs" construction. Look it up on YouTube - horrendous failures of buildings, bridges, etc.
I've seen video of "concrete" pillars with a quarter-inch thick skim-coat of concrete covering a core of sand and compacted gravel. I've also seen water pipes meant to feed fire hoses - in fully-occupied high-rise buildings - that are utterly dry. They're simply not connected to any source of water. And I could go on.
There's some sc