If you want on or off the ping list send me a FReepMail.
For tonight's Broken China update, I am going to try hard to NOT continue beating the same old items.
Item One:
Recently 900 children received intravenous treatment for influenza in a single day at a Shanghai Children's Hospital. There are similar reports from over a dozen other major cities in China.
Item Two:
The latest Chinese history text for high school students devoted a mere seven lines to the COVID pandemic. This has seriously annoyed Chinese parents and Netizens who lost family to the COVID lock downs.
Item Three:
Given the employment picture in China, and increasing number of young people are choosing to work as cleaners. Traditionally, the cleaning business has been dominated by women in their 40s & 50s. Young people are moving into cleaning for a variety of reasons. The first is stress relief. The second is regular pay even if it is at a lower base rate. Some in the financial services are seeing their pay running from 4 months to one year in arrears while working 60+ hours a week.
Item Four:
The CCP is trying to bolster the housing market by luring Taiwanese investors to demonstration cities to purchase homes there. At the same time, Taiwanese tourists are under increasingly overt scrutiny and minor harassment. As a result more are staying home. The left hand seems not to know or care what the right hand is doing.
Item Five: I saved the big one for last.
In his morning email, which I subscribe to, Peter Zeihan made an interesting statement that has had me thinking all day. He ran through all the usual things going wrong in China and then said that the first most people will hear about the problems in China is when orders for stuff just stop arriving. No, big blow up, no crisis, Chinese business are just no longer to fill the orders and stuff doesn't get shipped. Not with a BANG but with a whimper.
If this were to occur, what would that mean for the average person? What do we currently depend on China for that we can't do without? This short answer is: Not Much. There is quite a bit that China supplies that might seriously inconvenience both American consumers and businesses.
Consider that Chinese firms are said to supply more than 90% of US antibiotics, 70% of acetaminophen (Tylenol), and almost half of the anti-coagulant heparin. “Are said to” because we struggle even to gather information on this because of the opacity of the Chinese market and state-dominated record keeping. Some studies suggest up to 80% of the basic ingredients in US drugs come from the PRC. China is also the second largest exporter of biologics and the prime source of medical devices per the FDA. In some cases, it appears that India is a prime source of a key import – generics, for example – but that masks the fact that India sources up to 75% of its own pharma ingredients from China.
One of the things that gets mentioned often is rare earth elements. It's not like we don't have them. We have plenty. The problem is that they are by products of refining other ore. The bulk of that refining is currently done in the PRC. The problem is that these are not squeaky clean facilities and US environmental regulations make doing the refining here not cost effective.
US industry is in its most rapid build-out since WW2 and close to most rapid even then. The $64 Trillion dollar question is how much will we get completed before the CCP ship of state noses under for the long dive to the bottom? I don't know. If I were betting, I would bet on sooner rather than later even though that would mean more trouble for us.
WWG1WGA
Garde la Foi, mes amis! Nous nous sommes les sauveurs de la République! Maintenant et Toujours!
(Keep the Faith, my friends! We are the saviors of the Republic! Now and Forever!)
LonePalm, le Républicain du verre cassé (The Broken Glass Republican)
