China Today: Myths and Realities — Manifold #65

Steve discusses China myths and realities with Victor, a tech founder who ran a company in Beijing for 7 years. Among the topics covered: economic growth, real estate bubble, technology innovation, human capital, freedom of expression, Confucianism and Culture.

00:00 Introduction

02:02 Post-COVID economy and bursting of the real estate bubble

08:25 Semiconductor Industry and US-China Tech War

16:57 STEM Education and Workforce: China vs US

20:36 Slides on PRC human capital deepening, STEM and total workforce

39:58 Economic indicators and potential war economy

41:03 Singapore as model for PRC development, leadership exchanges

45:45 Travel plans, changes since pre-COVID era, YouTube travel content

53:00 Freedom of expression

1:02:20 Confucianism, leadership styles

1:17:57 Backyard Addendum: Further thoughts, travel to China

Audio-only version and transcript.

Slides:

Next ~20 years will see ~10% decrease in total PRC workforce, but a huge deepening in human capital. 30 years ago ~5% of all 18 year olds went on to tertiary education (college), whereas that percentage is now ~60%, with ~30% in STEM majors. PRC could add an additional ~100M highly trained STEM workers over the next 20 years.

US pool of STEM workers with a STEM college degree is ~16M. PRC produces roughly +3.5M more STEM grads per year than the US, so produces a new pool of highly trained STEM workers as large as the TOTAL US pool every ~4 or 5 years. In 20 years it may have an order of magnitude larger pool of highly trained STEM workers than the US, comparable to the Rest of World combined.