China's Development Model

Originally posted by Infose: ↑

"Unlike the USA which we're tied to, Aus does not have a long term plan to decouple from China. And that's not surprising because most of our exports are owned by Multinationals (dont kid yourselves ...BHP & RIO, arguably two of our biggest are 92% and 94% foreign owned respectively.

Australia is already a post-industrial society with its manufacture sector sadly in decline and "Moving to a service-based economy means that manufacturing must occur elsewhere and is often outsourced (that is, sent away from a company to a contracted supplier) to industrial economies. While this gives the illusion that the postindustrial society is merely service-based, it is still highly connected with those industrial economies to which the manufacturing is outsourced."

Decoupling from China may not mean to claim the industrial capacity outsourced to that country back, but simply outsourcing it to other countries like, for instance, Vietnam.

I have to say that I am in favor of a strong manufacture sector because, among other things, "even in a period of decline [manufacture], continued to represent a core source of economic prosperity for Australia – and should continue to do so. In short, it has outperformed many other sectors in terms of its contribution to Australia’s sustained economic performance and its capacity to generate quality jobs. "

"History of Special Economic Zones (SEZs)The first SEZs appeared in the late 1950s in industrialized countries. They were designed to attract foreign investment from multinational corporations. The first was at Shannon Airport in Clare, Ireland.1 In the 1970s, SEZs were also established in Latin American and East Asian countries. The most successful SEZs to date have been in China.

There were more than 7,000 SEZs as of 2022, according to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development.2 They are found in every part of the world—notably in developing and transitional economies that use them as a tool for industrialization."

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You lost me when you said; "to generate quality jobs"

In the past the 2 major objections to Aus manufacturing were:
-labour too expensive
-too small a domestic market and the tyranny of distance to export markets.

IMO these 2 objections can be negated by well designed SEZs
-automate manufacturing to max requiring minimum labour and where
labour is required, import guest labour from countries that have low
labour import costs to work exclusively in the SEZs
-exclusively manufacture high value commodities/components that
can be economically airfreighted to overseas markets
(China airfreights tons of manufactured consumer rubbish to Aus daily
so why not the reverse with high end products such as apple computer
alloy casings / automotive aluminium casings etc etc etc.

RE Automated manufacture : This is capital intensive...not labour intensive.

But of course, if we think we can't...we can't .

PS: IMO we missed out on China's BRI membership because
the Chinese could have shown us how local manufacturing is done
(ie: Chinese manufacturing in Indonesia )