Interesting. Was bound to come sooner or later.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/world/asia_pacific/10434079.stm
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/01/business/global/01honda.html
“Dubai times a thousand.”
How many will be in graves by the end of the month?
Cool. Now if they only had guns. 
C4
The CCP’s days are clearly numbered. What happens “after”? 
A lot of the workers are illegals…peasants who leave the countryside and illegally move into urban areas to take higher paying factory jobs. The normal “benefits” of a worker’s “paradise” aren’t available to them.
There were strikes in another area of China earlier this year…and the area was put into a media blackout as the Chinese government dealt with it, probably by brute force. They are very conscious of PR in the west, hence their attempts to control all the media and internet.
It will be interesting to see what happens in China in the next decade or so. They have some serious social issues bubbling up to the surface…not least of them the number of men who cannot marry because of one child policies and overall lack of women. They are importing women from southeast Asia, but only the relatively well off can buy a wife.
In times of trouble the CCP has resorted to scapegoating, opression, and belligerence to distract from domestic problems.
Very informative. Your last sentence portends bad news for China’s neighbors…
not quite. these are just growing pains.
the real question is how this will effect us. no more cheap chinese labor means no more cheap chinese products for us.
There is always a place to get cheap labor. It’s a free global market. The minute China feels they have progressed beyond cheap labor like the USA, expect a an exodus to somewhere else.
The USA wont even notice.
I had a professor who was working with an econ guy and they were predicting that at some point certain labor jobs would be coming back stateside. Some of what they have discussed has happened already, but it is tough to tell. My thoughts are that we will not notice, or we may benefit with some jobs coming back.
lost a lot of biz to the chinos about 5yrs ago…would be nice to see it come back to the narco state.
No, they are the result of official government policies and social trends that have been developing in China for decades. Since the fall of the Qing empire China hasn’t had true stability for more than a few years at a time. China has been hailed as an economic powerhouse, but the reality is that they only started real economic ascension after Mao finally croaked and Deng Xiao-Ping took the reins of power.
China was literally starving to death at the time. Tens of millions of Chinese perished as a result of famine brought on by Mao’s disastrous policies and the corruption of his cadres. That was the genesis of China’s one child policy, to try and keep from having too many mouths to feed.
The internal problems they face now are government corruption (illegals in China work in factories because the owners pay off government officials, for example), government inefficiency and uncertainty (try finding out exactly how the Chinese government works…nobody knows), alienation of large segments of the population who are kept impoverished by government mismanagement of the economy, and massive social pressures. (In the '70’s they instituted a one child policy…and now their population is aging. Who is going to care for their elderly? China’s social security system has always been children.)
They have used a number of ploys to artificially inflate their economy including building housing nobody can buy, intentionally devaluing their currency, etc that has created a very real bubble in their own economy. Sooner or later that’s going to burst.
the real question is how this will effect us. no more cheap chinese labor means no more cheap chinese products for us.
That’s the least of our worries with China.
One need look no further than Vietnam. The other nations in southeast Asia have been actively courting international business concerns to try and generate economic growth. It’s ironic that some of the most business friendly environments on the planet are now in nations where the governments preached global communist revolution. Even the communists no longer believe in communism…
You’d think that the west’s romantic notions of the glories of socialism would be dead by now…but blind faith is impervious to fact.
That is so true. I’m just praying that we finally wake up and don’t decide that we have to try it here “just to be sure”.
This has been a very interesting read for me. Thanks all who have contributed. For a long time I’ve held the thought that China, and the possibility of a war with China, was just balancing act between the “old guard communist” and the developing “capitalist economy”.
China is in for a big hurt. Their labor advantage is slowly disappearing. Lots of people have already pulled up shop and left China for other cheaper labor markets (mostly in SE Asia).
They have a huge population to feed, take care of, etc and it is aging (as JW777 said). They have manipulated their economy to make it look all great and glorious but have been building bubbles of their own. They have been building housing and office buildings that are unoccupied. They have been doing all sorts of things to keep employment up.
And now their population wants to join the middle class.
And the suckers bought a trillion dollars (almost) in US debt. So when we crash, they lose their life’s savings.