one of my wife’s university classmates works in Angola. He appears to be quite happy and is well paid (by Chinese standards). But of course he’s “management”, not “workforce”.

Yes, until doing so is no longer necessary. And as long as Michael Pettis is teaching in China, no one can ever say that a good education in economics is not available in China.

TwoFish: You can’t have an innovation driven economy copying other people. You don’t build your economy by just copying designs, what the “big plan” is is to send your people to the best US universities and companies, and then after a few years they learn enough to help you. Given the number of Chinese engineers that work for Apple and live in California, China is getting a lot more supporting Apple than Hiphone.

Conversely you can’t have a healthy economy when circumstances make it impossible to do nothing but design things.

The Chinese labour for the oil sands comes from another article quoting a Chinese official.

TwoFish: Which is a general problem with oil industries. Oil tends to be very capital and knowledge intensive, which means that if you are a third world country with oil deposits, surprisingly few people get hired. Look at Nigeria and see how many people are Nigerians. Then look at Norway and Alberta.

It’s not just the oil industry.

China has an interest in doing whatever is good for China. Having research and development done in the US ends up being good for China because a lot of the R&D that gets done in the US is or will be done by Chinese companies (see Lenovo) and by Chinese (see any graduate department of any American university).

Glen M: China won’t pay a premium for the design of an iPhone, they will just make the HiPhone (look it up).

Which is getting nowhere. You can’t have an innovation driven economy copying other people. You don’t build your economy by just copying designs, what the “big plan” is is to send your people to the best US universities and companies, and then after a few years they learn enough to help you. Given the number of Chinese engineers that work for Apple and live in California, China is getting a lot more supporting Apple than Hiphone.

Glen M: They want to ‘invest’ in Canada’s oil sands, but use Chinese labour.

The article quoted someone that was pretty clueless about the oil industry, this ain’t going to work. Canadians know more about oil sand than Chinese do.

Glen M: Have a look at how well Chinese ‘investment’ in Africa is doing, where they import labour into countries that have 40% unemployment……..

Which is a general problem with oil industries. Oil tends to be very capital and knowledge intensive, which means that if you are a third world country with oil deposits, surprisingly few people get hired. Look at Nigeria and see how many people are Nigerians. Then look at Norway and Alberta.

Read Zhao Ziyang’s memoirs, Prisoner of the State, for an insight into how hard it was for China to actually move onto the modernization and liberalization path. Put it in context.

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When huge portions of US trade are within companies, the bilateral trade balance losing a lot of meaning. Sure, those few (9% of employed people, in straight-line decline since 1943) manufacturing workers still left would like to continue to live their old lifestyles. But, if they haven’t increased their productivity at a pace that compensates for their pay and benefits, they just have to do better.

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Where’s the US consumers’ union in all this China trade talk?

Interesting op-ed in the Straights Times

“Gloss cannot hide China Rot”

I have read some reports that it is prisoners that are being sent to work. I don’t know if I believe it though. If so, is it any wonder they work so hard? There is also the issue of compensation. For 35 cents per hour there time would be better spent foraging for food.

http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=46935

The Q1 country breakdown of Germany’s exports has finally come out. Exports have plummeted to all destination countries worldwide. Except exports to China, which dropped by a mere 3 % yoy.

Seems to partially support the assumption that the import drop is mainly due to imported components for processing (imported from other East Asian coutnries) and lower commodity prices.

if I’m not mistaken, nearly all the design and research work for all mid- and small-sized GM models is currently done in Germany.

Might not stay that way going forward, but it certainly isn’t the current core competency of GM US.