Can you buy a good laptop without parts controlled by the US?
China has mastered lower parts of the value chain, but the most advanced and profitable ones (chips, turbines, frontier models) are solidly dominated by the US and its allies.
That might change, but when? The demographic and economic advantages that helped China rise quickly are exhausted. The Chinese economy is struggling to unwind the property bubble and manage a huge amount of surplus production that can no longer be sold to the US. The country is shrinking in population. Urbanization, which was previously a sure fire way to achieve growth, is now at ~70%, compared to the US' 80%.
It seems unlikely that China will be able to fully supplant the rest of the world unless the government relinquishes its tight control of the economy. There's just not enough centrally-plannable growth left.
The US will be (is) forced to work with everyone not named China or Russia, to ensure it can compete with China's concentrated industrial might. That means making iPhones in India, or Mexico, or Vietnam. That means Micron building more RAM production domestically. It should mean helping ASML stay out in front of China's incoming silicon wave. And so on.
It'll be China + allies vs the US + allies. It's going to be intense and very expensive. A huge amount of global manufacturing has to be built up outside of China.
And China does indeed have enormous problems brewing, including a staggering 5x increase in homelessness in just roughly seven years (to go with its collapsed housing market):
Over the next 20-30 years robotics + AI will brutalize countries with very large populations when it comes to employment, especially those that depend on volume manufacturing heavily to absorb labor. The US for its part should be focused on rapidly shrinking its population, pushing up-skill, restricting immigration based on points (ala Canada et al.), and focusing entirely on quality of life / standard of living per capita as the population declines (let it happen rather than fighting the big trend, boost GDP per capita via robotics + AI, higher productivity).
I'd want to be a small, decently well educated, high functioning nation, with powerful military friends, and far from China. Estonia perhaps (Russia poses no serious terminal threat to them so long as NATO exists or a European alternative). Poland has some cultural mojo right now as well, they could be interesting over the next few decades.
> robotics + AI will brutalize countries with very large populations
> The US for its part should be focused on rapidly shrinking its population
Interesting to hear a new take. Not what you commonly hear. Most focus on the damage caused by a shrinking and aging population. What's your opinion on that situation?
I would think the trick will be the figure out how robotics + AI will enable a new level of elder care, but it's hard to imagine robots being delicate and nuanced enough to do that kind of work.
That was true a year ago but is no longer true. Deepseek is training and running inference on Huawei chips.
The times of China needing Nvidia chips is quickly coming to an end.
I guarantee that China will scale faster, build faster, and ultimately produce far more chips than the rest of the world combined in 5 years.
Our export controls sank the west. It would have been better to allow them to use Nvidia chips. Now they will have chip fabs that aren’t quiet as good but way more of them. Their investment into sustainable will make the power so cheap that the less efficient chips will not be a relevant issue
The fact that the goalpost is moving is a clear sign China is losing its hardware dominance. 5-10 years ago you would have specified not Made/Assembled in China (which is very easy to find nowadays, e.g. Samsung Galaxy, Google Pixel, even iPhones).
Can you buy a phone/laptop with no parts from USA/Japan/Netherlands/Taiwan/South Korea?
