China is buying tons of everything. I'm always stumbling on some amazing factoid or other about China - the two I remember offhand are that China produces half the world's coal, and half the world's concrete also.
As far as China and cheap junk, they do produce that, but they probably produce half or more of the world's electronics too, at least the final assembly. To follow up Cogito's post about Apple, there was this NYT article from January, nytimes.com , which I previously noted in Message 27896622 . If you plow through the details (it's long) , you'd see that China actually has enviable resources to draw on in production capability that the US will probably never match. They can put things into production really fast, and have great technical infrastructure at this point. They aren't that good at originated new products, yet, but considering how far they have progressed in 30-odd years, it'd be silly to think that they won't eventually master that, too.
I occasionally read this hardcore Apple blogger who worships at the temple Jobs built. His last post was about how Tim Cook understands Chinese business better that anybody in China does, or something ridiculous like that. There will come a time when China has no desire to make $2 or so for doing all the production work on a gadget that Apple makes $ 200-$300 on, because they'll have plenty of locally designed stuff to keep busy with. Then things will get really interesting. |
