OK fuckers,
This is one of the most illuminating things I have read in a good long while. It's a series of blog posts from a Chinese-American (raised in Minnesota, hardly speaks Chinese) who is working on the Chumby and has been spending lots of time in mainland China to coordinate the production in the factories there.
I've always believed that one should have at least a basic understanding of how the things you use/eat/etc are made and get to you - at the least you need to know a bit about this to be able to be an environmentally conscious and socially responsible consumer. Since, oh, everything is made in China these days, it's pretty important to understand what goes on with all that.
Everything I have read about the economic development of China over the last 2 decades and producing things there tends to agree that most of what you know about China is wrong and what is right tends to become wrong every few months.
Random factoid from here: The Foxconn factory that is the exclusive manufacturing facility for the iPod and iPhone employs 250,000 people in a single facility. Most of the numbers relating to industry in China are similarly ridiculous.
[edit]
The two most illuminating blog posts, for those of you asses too lazy to read the whole thing are here and here.
the dreaded ben
Posted: Mon Oct 01, 2007 10:13 pm
Grumpy GreebJoined: 20 Aug 2005Posts: 5329Location: flavor country
250,000 ain't shit.
a month ago i was in a nike factory that employed (i use this term loosely) over 600,000 people.
and yes they sleep there too.
lantius
Posted: Tue Oct 02, 2007 6:47 am
1337Joined: 22 Jul 2005Posts: 6705Location: right over
the dreaded ben wrote:
250,000 ain't shit.
a month ago i was in a nike factory that employed (i use this term loosely) over 600,000 people.
and yes they sleep there too.
brings new meaning to the term "niketown".
TrikerTrev
Posted: Tue Oct 02, 2007 6:48 am
Joined: 23 Oct 2006Posts: 2303Location: FOCO, MOFO!!!
we're in for a real shock when the Chinese decide they're done doing our dirty work. God help us when they decide to be the mass consumers and WE have to make their cheap shit.
I used to (well still am, but its harder) be all about buying all American made products. But ya know what happened? I found that not only was it 3 to 5 times more expensive, but the quality wasnt always there.
Sad...real sad.
_________________ Insufferable ass, est. 1969
langston
Posted: Tue Oct 02, 2007 7:34 am
Joined: 25 Jul 2005Posts: 5547Location: Columbia City
TrikerTrev wrote:
we're in for a real shock when the Chinese decide they're done doing our dirty work. God help us when they decide to be the mass consumers and WE have to make their cheap shit.
Sad...real sad.
It's not us vs them. They depend on the strength of our consumer economy as much as we rely on them for their cheap goods. What will suck is when their price point becomes unsubstainable due to oil costs & ecological concerns. They will still be able to manufacture their own consumerist goods for local distribution (obviosuly on a smaller scale) while we'll be left trying to revive a dismantled and out of date manufacturing industry. Extra oh-fuck is that we'll be stuck with a population that is top heavy with baby-boom retirees and a workforce of prissy limp-wristed web geeks, unskilled lazy white-trash NASCAR fans and increasignly expensive & hostile latino labor.
Foo
Posted: Tue Oct 02, 2007 8:25 am
Joined: 27 Jul 2007Posts: 583
I actually see a lot of parallels between the US and China. Both evolved from inefficient and morally bankrupt systems (slavery/communism) and went on to dominate the manufacturing and economic landscape as they learned to use their natural strengths (lots of land and natural resources/lots of manpower). I imagine the way we feel right now is how Europe felt when the US started to become an economic juggernaut in the late 19th century.
PS: re Niketown, 600,000 is approx. the population of Seattle for comparison. I've heard rumors of some of the state-owned factories being even larger.
PPS: Everything about China involves stupid big numbers. When I was in Beijing they were gearing up for the 2008 Olympics. The entire city was being torn down and rebuilt. One of the dust storm mitigation projects they were putting in was to transplant something like 20,000 hectares of fully grown trees from some tree farm (probably the size of a New England state) in a big wind break around the city. The Chinese govt loves big projects such as rebuilding entire cities (like playing SimCity and bulldozing all the old neighborhoods willy nilly), the Three Gorges Dam, that crazy railway to Tibet, the maglev train in Shanghai, and so on. It reminds me of things like our skyscraper boom, the Hoover dam and the interstate system.
PPPS: One interesting note is that despite China's dependence upon burning dirty coal (and I can attest as to how horrible the air quality is out there), the government does seem to have a genuine interest in environmental responsibility. There is a lot of solar energy usage being pushed and entire towns being built to be zero net emission and garbage production. China is notable as one of the very few countries that has had net increase in forestation over the last 50 years. (part of a long term project to combat the spread of desertification) One of the few good things about China having a cold, ruthless totalitarian government is that they can push rapid change like just up and banning all two-stroke transportation in Beijing at the drop of a hat and dictating that a new, massive subway system just <BAM> be installed.
PPPPS: I have nothing to add here, I just wanted another postscript.
Rogelio
Posted: Tue Oct 02, 2007 8:38 am
Joined: 31 Jul 2007Posts: 3092Location: Pos, aya, por la Corona-Alta-Madera y que no.
That's the naturalized ones, there's more down south that aren't as hostile or expensive, yet; as long as folks want to come here to graze off our economy there will be foreign workers. I guess I fall under expensive prissy limp-wristed web latino labor.
_________________ Do you like apples?
the dreaded ben
Posted: Tue Oct 02, 2007 9:04 am
Grumpy GreebJoined: 20 Aug 2005Posts: 5329Location: flavor country
lantius wrote:
brings new meaning to the term "niketown".
how come niketown is a town and it's bigger than seattle
i would also like to point out it was no bigger than a square mile.
that, my friends, is density.
Foo
Posted: Tue Oct 02, 2007 9:31 am
Joined: 27 Jul 2007Posts: 583
Because Seattle is a 'town'. Seriously, anything under a million people is a town these days. The number of American cities that qualify as big cities is dropping, it takes a good 10 million these days to qualify anymore. Projections show multiple cities passing the 30 million mark in the next 20 years.
I'd be interested to see numbers on the niketown density. Litle known fact, late 19th century New York had far higher population density than current Hong Kong.
mos6502
Posted: Tue Oct 02, 2007 12:03 pm
Joined: 20 Sep 2007Posts: 21
It kind of sickens me for about a million different reasons.
But I have to think about this first:
Quote:
One of the few good things about China having a cold, ruthless totalitarian government is that they can push rapid change like just up and banning all two-stroke transportation in Beijing at the drop of a hat and dictating that a new, massive subway system just <BAM> be installed.
You also have to remember for instance, that in East Germany the government kept 2-stroke cars like the Trabant and Wartburg in production for decades after western governments passed laws that would have required those cars be upgraded to pass some sort of emissions regulations. But then again, East German capital was going towards bigger more important things, because unlike China the Germans weren't extensively selling their own people out to earn money from other countries.
It also seems to boggle my mind that we have so many people who could actually be put to work doing something useful for mankind, instead of building overpriced novelty items like the chumby... not to say that the Chinese don't do any worthwhile infrastructure work - but a lot of it seems to be just for showing off, when there's still tons of work to be done all around the country. Of course, if they focussed on their own country - where would all the foreign capital come from?
Off on a tangent, a company can get together several hundred thousand people to build chintzy bullshit, but nobody can get together nearly as extensive and dedicated a group to say, cure AIDS or Cancer or do something actually important (I know, I know, where do you find 100,000 AIDS experts anyway - but you get the general idea, that we use huge amounts of effort concentrated on useless ventures instead of focusing on important problems).
Aside from that, have any of you worked in a factory? I did, and it was the absolutely most boring and unrewarding job of my life. But somebody had to screw those decorative metal cowboy wall hangings together...
Foo
Posted: Tue Oct 02, 2007 1:05 pm
Joined: 27 Jul 2007Posts: 583
Some good points but I might point out that there *is* a tremendous amount of money and manpower put towards curing diseases like AIDS and cancer. For example, if you go here:http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez and do a search for HIV, you'll see that there are 215436 peer reviewed research papers on HIV. (probably more by the time you read this) Each of those papers represents an average of several person-years of work and many thousands of dollars of (mostly) federal research dollars. The US, despite its signs of decline, spends more on R&D than the next 4 countries on the list put together. In fact the US is now over 1% scientists which is a staggeringly large number. the lack of an HIV cure is more of a testament to how beautifully the HIV virus has evolved to kill us.
Interestingly, China has definitely recognized the value of R&D and is heavily investing in focussed research areas such as nanotech and renewable energy. China is very good at it too - I've seen some suprisingly good nano research coming out of there. Some cultures just are better at research than others. The Brits are the best, we're pretty decent, Japan for example is abysmal at research. (great at engineering but man, they have had some spectacular failures at big science projects)
the dreaded ben
Posted: Tue Oct 02, 2007 1:38 pm
Grumpy GreebJoined: 20 Aug 2005Posts: 5329Location: flavor country
ah foo, what part of china's awesome r&d is the new guangdong freeway system?
it was just built last year, but has no drainage system, so everytime it rains, it floods.
lantius
Posted: Tue Oct 02, 2007 1:39 pm
1337Joined: 22 Jul 2005Posts: 6705Location: right over
the dreaded ben wrote:
ah foo, what part of china's awesome r&d is the new guangdong freeway system?
it was just built last year, but has no drainage system, so everytime it rains, it floods.
oh-ho-ho, that's engineering!
langston
Posted: Tue Oct 02, 2007 1:41 pm
Joined: 25 Jul 2005Posts: 5547Location: Columbia City
lantius wrote:
the dreaded ben wrote:
ah foo, what part of china's awesome r&d is the new guangdong freeway system?
it was just built last year, but has no drainage system, so everytime it rains, it floods.
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