Port capacity and equipment scale, willingness to engage in toxic processing, etc carry far more weight, IMHO.
China has a lock on various electronic production streams by having a lock on most of the rare earth processing and dealing with the low level radioactive waste by products.
One billion tonnes of raw iron ore per year flows from my state of Western Australia to China for steel production - the machinery, diggers, haul paks, massive trains, et al make that happen in a state with a population of only ~2.3 million or so with few of those in mining. 16x peak US iron ore production for steel with a workforce smaller than the US's at it's peak.
China didn't just fall into peak manufacturing capacity by a happy accident of many workers, they (for better or worse) made long term plans and stuck at them - including the reduction in population growth known as the one child policy.
Current Chinese pharma production is a truly bespoke behemoth - it has a massive capacity that can easily make small to order amounts, and again that's due to factors such as education and well automated pipelines.
I can't help but say that Australia is basically the stupidest country on the planet (at least amongst Western democracies, since one could say modern Russia is stupider, but that's a whole another cultural debate). It's like the degenerate alcoholic who's willing to prostitute their mother for a bar tab. A country so blessed with some of the most important natural resources, a country whose geography is synonymous with the word abundance. But nah, they'd rather sell themselves out to the biggest foreign bidder, even if they are from their biggest regional rivals. While Norway and the UAE enjoy the fruits of their resources through strong welfare systems enabled by a resource-driven economy a fraction of Australia's, Australia sold itself so hard its own citizens have to buy from foreign corpos.
> Australia also has welfare, high living standards, high life expectancy, good health, etc.
Tell me how affordable a home near the workplace is for most Australians? On the contrary, Norwegians and Emiratis get a huge housing subsidy for their first homes. They both use their oil revenues to push for sustainable energy sources at home. And the UAE is currently pulling over its weight in AI, funding a significant AI player, while also taking part in active space exploration.
> Ahhh, so Norway and UAE have their own home built computers, TV's, and EV's, etc then?
Building computers, EVs and TVs in this age when China controls the complete manufacturing chain is a bit stupid honestly. But they do have manufacturing bases on the things they actually excel at - Norway is a major player in manufacturing shipping and specialized O&G equipment, while the UAE has focused on aircraft parts manufacturing and defence manufacturing.
FWIW, I’m an Aussie who went back during covid for the first meaningful stretch in 20 years. Explored the who country.
I saw with my own eyes what you’re talking about and you are spot on. It’s depressing and sad to see how Australia can’t organize a free one in a brothel, is stuck in the past and has no real interest or plan on how to improve anything at all.
Their problem is life is pretty good, so they’re not interested in a bit of work to make it incredible. Like you said, a modest sovereign wealth fund could easily let every Aussie work 4 or even 3 days a week. Or more solar, or making use of all the uranium or one of dozens of things
"Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second rate people who share its luck. It lives on other people’s ideas, and, although its ordinary people are adaptable, most of its leaders (in all fields) so lack curiosity about the events that surround them that they are often taken by surprise."
It's what they call the resource curse, something that has plagued Norway too, but at least in Norway's case, they have opted to do it in a way that sustains it for the future. Compared to the Swedish and Danish, the Norwegians are also considered lazy for the same reason - life is good, so why bother with ambition?
AU exported ~1.5-2 trillion (lazy chatgpt math) worth of iron ore to PRC in last 20 years... which is life changing sovereign fund size, for Norway (also ~2T), with 5 million people. Or UAE 1 million emraties. Qatar with 300k Qataries. Much less so for 25m OZs. Doesn't mean they haven't squandered what they have, but just to put scale in perspective.
Not to mention PRC steel employs like 3m people, about the entire population of western australia where all the iron ore is. Unless AU dumped 1/5 of their entire workforce, relocate millions of workers and families, they can't make enough finished steel products to fill PRC appetite. I think much easier and profitable for AU to double down on ore extraction and ship more $$$ than finished steel. That's where AU competitive advantage is. Otherwise buyers will look elsewhere, i.e. Brazil could have been expanding iron ore exports much sooner.
Like I mentioned in another comment, you create manufacturing companies in your home turf to refine those raw materials into higher value products, which is exactly what Norway, the UAE and Saudi Arabia have done (Qatar cant exactly do that because their resource is basically just gas). Companies like Aramco, SABIC, ADNOC and Statoil exist. I don't see any of those countries inviting Adani or Yuxiao to extract their material for them. Yet China is a major customer for all of them, as they all are for China (Norway maybe less so).
Saudi Aramco has a $50 billion dollar subsidiary called SABIC whose purpose is to take oil byproducts and refine them into plastics. Does Saudi Arabia have a huge plastic market? Or did they just think, hey, we could export this shit elsewhere for more money!
You literally let an Australian company process it to higher value products and ship it? That's literally what every oil major has done with their resources.
> China didn't just fall into peak manufacturing capacity by a happy accident of many workers, they (for better or worse) made long term plans and stuck at them - including the reduction in poulation growth known as the one child policy.
I don’t think China planned to intentionally fall off of a demographic cliff. But they are already planning for that cliff by making very aggressive investments in AI and automation. If you see how effective their plans from 10-20 years ago turned out today, wait another 10-20 years and…I hope we have some kind of a plan…it isn’t what Trump has in mind for sure.
Ironically, Japan planned for the same cliff with aggressive investments in AI and automation in the 1980s, but the rise of China messed that up with cheap labor, and their AI play was misguided/probably too early.
