You don't need to brand efficiency and structure-at-scale as "authoritarian"; how painfully American of you. I know it's a completely foreign concept for anyone that has grown up in America, but it's actually within the realm of human possibility for the government and the individual to be aligned and want the same thing. Typically this is evidenced by tremendous social progress, which we see in evidence with the rapidly rising standard of living in China over the last few decades.

It's easier when your government is proposing "hey, let's build all the factories the best way we can" and not "hey, let's impose illogical and continually-changing tariffs on everything and let Howard Lutnick's kids steal all the proceeds". You're right as an American to be skeptical of the government - it's not operating in your best interests unless you're one of the elite insiders. That doesn't mean it has to be that way.

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Every single privately run company is authoritarian.

Have you met an engineer? I'd say "being an engineer" is probably the single most predictive trait for authoritarianism in my experience.

I think what the person you're replying to is referring to is the fact that, in contrast to the US, many senior politicians in China literally have engineering backgrounds, or at least engineering degrees. Although this has actually been less true in the past 10-15 years. This article gives a bit of an overview - https://www.chinausfocus.com/2022-CPC-congress/chinese-techn...

China hasn't done much central planning for many decades.

I've only listened to one interview with Dan Wang, but I understood him to be particularly talking about the politicians, not the country as a whole.

I can't speak for China, I've only visited a few times, but in the US it's true that an overwhelming number of successful politicians were previously lawyers. Which is not a good thing IMO.

> America used to build things too

Indeed. “Used to” is the key observation. In the wake of WW2, the U.S. had both dynamism and the ability and will to act collectively. This combination led to rising standards of living, the space program, Silicon Valley, the internet, etc.

The U.S. economy is still relatively dynamic, but the will to collective action has completely failed.

Europe can act collectively but lacks dynamism.

Which country, today, demonstrates both traits?

It gets repeated because we actively incentivize repeating it.

It's a popular trope that confirms the audiences bias's and when you do that the monkey brain gets rewarded by seeing the number in the top right go up.

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I'm not comparing it to US anything, I'm comparing it to other cost components like raw materials and parts, whose prices are often global.

The point is that transportation within China isn't a dominant factor in industrial cost or efficiency. So the idea that major manufacturing cities are laid out like giant assembly lines isn't nearly as important as OP suggests.

China still has many advantages over the US in manufacturing. I just don't think this is a major one, even if there's a grain of truth to it.

Texas would need to train its people. And the people would need to be as hungry as the Chinese were, and are to a certain extent. You should read the book the OT is talking about, it shows how the U.S. didn’t stand a chance in manufacturing, even going back to the 80s. Literally just not getting back to potential clients for two weeks and saying X or Y can’t be done, while Southeast Asian companies were jumping at the chance to build stuff.

There’s a giant cultural shift that needs to happen in the U.S. to get that back—not sacrificing labor laws, like China does, but the same idea that X or Y CAN be done, and actually jumping at the chance to build stuff instead of feeling entitled to it.

We do have agency, but the agency actually starts in the U.S., in education and culture, and not with a company like Apple.

I do not have learned helplessness. Nor have I claimed Apple’s business practices are the result of a natural force. Nothing is natural here. I said that Congress could have acted. Is Congress part of the nature now?

In contrast you have provided no arguments for why Apple’s leadership bears responsibility rather than Congress.

“Why would I hire X when I can get it for $20 a month on ChatGPT?”

Hmm, I don’t like the sound of that.

Not overrepresented enough given that middle America has disproportionate per capita voting power

What government policies are you referring to? Businesses moved manufacturing to China because their goal is to make as much money as possible. The only potential barrier is if US citizens would care that it wasn't made in America. Products are labeled and most people don't care.

This is an American quality where a person who works in a factory that makes extension cords and needs their job to survive would buy the cheaper lamp even though it's made in China.

Most people aren't willing to make financial sacrifices to help people they don't know EVEN if they might be affected by another person having the same belief.

People could have supported American manufacturing by buying American. You're saying the government should intervene in the economy in a significant because the majority of people are just selfish

That's true, but we also collectively decided to buy cheap stuff from Walmart instead of buying from the local town store, creating a race to the bottom.

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I don't think it's something that can be centrally planned well.

If the US changes their environmental regulations to match China, lowered their tax-to-GDP ratio to match China, changed their worker regulations to match China, and then opened up free immigration from Mexico for cheap factory labor then the "free" market would likely take care of opening up quite a bit more manufacturing.

Was Kamala campaigning on bringing manufacturing to Texas?

You mean, like FoxConn took $B from orange guy, promised 10K+ jobs, then sat on the land for a few years and did nothing? Sure, let's replicate that at scale..

Managed to do what?

to be clear, the US has been rapidly losing manufacturing jobs since the orange coronation.

His predecessor worked with Congress to actually bring microchip manufacturing back to the US and tried to keep us competitive with EV manufacturing (not to mention the infrastructure investments that are necessary for any serious manufacturing effort). Those were real commitments.

Extorting CEOs to announce investments (like the Zuckerberg hot mic incident) is not worth anything to me. Meanwhile the US has been hemorrhaging manufacturing jobs for the last year.

Establishing regulatory harmony is not only not possible but the current regime is working in exactly the opposite direction.

If the US wants to take on China, and actually needs Canada's help to do it -- I can assure you they just set themselves back 10-20 years from achieving that. We no longer have any interest.

The labour forces of Mexico and Canada are not at the US's disposal for these kind of games anymore. For several decades we have been exploited by the US for low wages and cheap resources -- and now there's a regime that's making cheap political points by accusing us of the opposite while trying to emmiserate our populace. So, yeah, no thanks.

That's argument is a bit rough given manufacturing is one of the areas seeing the most automation progress and success. One of the main reason it's not more successful is labor costs can be lower than automation that wouldn't be true if we wanted to replace the income of white collar workers in the US.

If we end up in a place where AI and automation take over then yeah I think we start looking at alternative income sources and economic system. Just like star trek predicted we would do after WW3.

You willing to work 996? I would prefer some form of work-life balance.

The US had it when the rest of the world was severely bombed during WWII, and a lot of the world was very undeveloped. Things changed.

We never had manufacturing within an order of magnitude of China's scale in the US. Probably not within two orders of magnitude. When the US was a manufacturing powerhouse, we had far cheaper labor, far fewer environmental regulations, far fewer labor regulations, and far simpler supply chains.

> Apple here is the first step.

Pretty sure the much-touted Foxconn plant in Wisconsin was the first step, and just like this one it will be scaled down to a few hundred jobs as soon as possible.

You’re not alone. I’m a self-funded startup founder and I still buy Made in USA goods (clothes, appliances, tools, supplies, equipment, etc). For me the price isn’t the main factor, it’s simply that I want to support the countries I like. Been doing this for 10 years now. Based in London so I also buy Made in England things too. Never ever support authoritarian regimes!

>It's a whole lot easier to out-compete somebody when you know the government will backstop you even if you misstep.

You mean like how the US government constantly bails out and props up the American car companies?

> What they stopped manufacturing was menial and low-end product

This statement is as inaccurate as the comment you’re trying to debunk. The fact is that China leveraged it’s low-end manufacturing work to work its way up the chain and now is the leader in many areas: https://itif.org/publications/2025/09/23/how-china-is-outper.... E.g. China has been investing heavily in radar technology and as a result has air to air missiles with comparable range to the U.S. https://en.defence-ua.com/weapon_and_tech/why_the_us_is_alar...

There are synergies to having the high end stuff and the low end stuff in the same place. The story of IBM developing System 360 mentions the benefit from the ladies who wound the wire core memory and the guys who designed the computer on the same campus in New York. We gave that up when we outsourced the “menial” stuff abroad.

Yes/no.

China at this point is hard in automation, beyond anything the US has. China is well past the peak of sweatshops.

As someone in the manufacturing space in the US, the biggest issue we have in the US is that manufacturing continues to die. Any manufacturing we have left is the old guard dying off. It comes from a range of issues from companies refusing to invest in younger employees, to the cost of real estate (both buy or rent) for commercial properties being absurd..

Fair, but there is tons of HIGH END manufacturing we could do that we just don't, even though there is every incentive to do so.

That’s just not the reason though.

The reason we can’t do manufacturing is because Wall Street demands capital light business models.

That, in turn, is an outcome of being the global reserve currency.

Yes you’ve hit on the reason. Very few people understand this.

The reason we don’t invest in manufacturing is because of requirements for return on capital.

Ask yourself why GM is doing massive stock buybacks in the era of global transition to electric cars. Why aren’t they using these huge sums of cash to invest in the next generation of products and instead literally just sending the money out the door?

The best thing about manufacturing in China is that they will make exactly what you specify. The worst thing about manufacturing in China is that they will make exactly what you specify.

The things on Temu are not the only thing China makes.

Are iPhones known for quality issues stemming from low quality parts?

And America isn't the only source of the world's aerospace or space-qualified screws, so what was the point of your comment? China is fully capable of producing high quality screws.

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