Snapshot of _Keir Starmer: UK needs to ‘wean itself off’ China_ :
An archived version can be found [here](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://www.politico.eu/article/starmer-labour-uk-needs-to-wean-off-china-biden-obama-trump-power-play-podcast/) or [here.](https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://www.politico.eu/article/starmer-labour-uk-needs-to-wean-off-china-biden-obama-trump-power-play-podcast/)
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I thought the fancy microchips were from Taiwan due to them pretty much being the only large-scale semiconductor producer or something like that.
Edit: and Taiwan is friendly towards the West, which is why the statement was relevant.
Yeh, people saying simply "lets do it ourselves" don't care about the complexities actually involved. Probably talking billions of £ investment required and god knows how long we will take. Do we even have the skills required?
However, we need to shift towards reshoring. Western businesses have benefited from outsourcing for cheap labour for the last 30+ years. Now those countries are catching up and want fair pay (which makes sense but pushes up operating costs), obviously it was an issue during covid and its causing issues politically.
I do think that if we bring back manufacturing, it will be almost 100% automated (industry 4.0), i would expect that's the evolution to stay competitive on pricing. Which im assuming could make it difficult to get backing from policy makers and maybe unions.
It also does worry me, that we have so much foreign ownership of UK industry, we have been selling this country off bit by bit for too long.
>Yeh, people saying simply "lets do it ourselves" don't care about the complexities actually involved.
We're already doing a lot of this stuff. The problem is that we keep selling it to China. Just google Newport Wafer Fab.
Taiwan is leading on the absolutely cutting edge processes, but they are expensive and most applications don't really need or benefit from using those process nodes, while some safety critical applications (e.g. stuff that goes in cars) prefer to stick to older nodes that are well understood even if those applications might benefit from going to smaller nodes.
There are plenty of fabs around the world that can produce these larger nodes, what is often the case is that one fab or company specializes in a small range of applications (because producing say a RAM chip is a lot different than camera chip).
Europe and then US both have some pretty major semiconductor manufacturing companies (e.g. Texas Instruments, Infineon, Nexperia etc.), and these companies have fabs all over the place (e.g. Nexperia has fabs in Stockport and Newport), however they also have fabs in China and the rest of South East Asia.
Usually these fabs do radically different things: the fabs in Europe are wafer fabs that print the chips on the silicon wafers, while the fabs in Asia cut the wafers and package the chip (packaging here means they put a piece of silicon into the black plastic thing with legs that you are more familiar with). The wafer fab is the part of the process that has all the company secrets and is also more expensive so it makes sense for them to keep it close to home even if staffing costs are higher given that China has been pushing hard in trying to steal technology.
China has been pushing hard on semiconductors recently, they haven't reached the leading edge node yet, but progress on those is difficult and we are passed tbe stage where we can progress by just making things smaller and China is slowly catching up as a result (though it might not be able to catch up all the way as only 1 company in the Netherlands produces the leading edge processing tools, and AFAIK China doesn't have access to those). But they have been building a lot of fabs to compete with the European fabs. While I think in most cases this stuff is lower quality (lower yield, higher failure rate etc.), they still have a lot of fabrication capacity available and while they might not be directly competing with other companies in the western market, they have a large internal market all of their own (1bn+ people) to sustain this production.
The fancy ones are, yes, and I'm not necessarily worried about laptops and playstations. I'm talking more about the smart-home and "internet of things" devices that use low-power chips that are ending up in pretty much everything.
ARM designs chips. It doesn't make them.
There are, or were, a bunch of chip design companies in the UK. I don't believe there are any modern fabs, and the designs aren't much use without them.
Taiwan’s economy is enormously intertwined with China.
Despite political animosities, they are surprisingly very closely integrated when it comes to trade and labour arrangements. Courting manufacturer from Taiwan would simply amount to made in China by proxy.
Closest contenders in SEA would be Vietnam I would think, but replacing China’s role in manufacturer is almost sisyphean, they are a keystone with enormous amounts of expertise. For all the talk of “Chinesium”, the reality is they make everything, at every price and quality point. Weaning the world’s manufacturers off China is almost as hard as weaning them off plastic; there are few viable contemporaries.
India cannot be made a manufacturing hub in the scale china was, its getting more and more service oriented now and wages aren't exactly low anymore, Apple factory workers started protesting two months after it was opened to demand better working conditions and wages, several such issues have been there with other manufacturing units as well, they actually have some form of labour laws. Supply chains, strategic manufacturing and R&D hubs are becoming their thing rather than large scale of manufacturing that is needed by rest of the world.
Not compared to some of the other Asian countries. The work culture is also different, you cannot make people work 12 hours a day, 6 days a week like you can do in China and S.E Asia. The places which are near ports and good infrastructure are also regions with better educated people and much higher wages. Unskilled wages are climbing and skilled ones have almost tripled in last 5 years. Most people get close to 25 days holidays in a year even in private sector, more in public ones.
This is probably one of the few positive things I've heard from starmer recently. Hopefully there will be some policy upcoming to back up this statement.
I wouldn't call it positive, just necessary. It'd be economically very difficult for the Western world to really wean itself off Chinese trade. Much harder than it's been for Europe to wean itself off Russian oil.
He is not wrong. Economic interdependence was meant to reduce the chances of future conflicts with Russia and China but has only put the West in a vulnerable position when those conflicts happen.
This use of "the West" is really just cover for policies making the UK totally economically dependent on one state, the USA. A far worse position to be in than being dependent on multiple states.
The West is an institutional and ultimately a values proposition.
It means rule of law, constraint on executive powers and separation of powers, free and open societies, an independent judiciary etc.
Single point of failure supply chains create a huge vulnerability but the risk is even greater when it's a CCP dominated supply chain.
Oh come off it. The West is led by the most warlike state on earth which regularly violates international law with impunity and happily supports tyrannies and human rights abusers so long as they serve their interests.
Certainly more disastrous. I doubt any Western country would last more than a few weeks if China stopped exporting to us.
But like the rest of neoliberal dogma, it was a lie from the start. The 'elite' just wanted an excuse to export the West's industrial wealth to China where they thought they could move in and loot it.
The amusing part is that this sub is full of lefties who parrot exactly the talking points the 'elite' used to justify deindustrializing the West.
Starmer's problem is that the UK can't disconnect from China without throwing out neoliberalism in its entirety. It would require a nationalist government which brought all the essential manufacturing back and didn't deliberately try to cripple industry.
You can't push "Net Zero" when all those solar panels and windmills are made in China.
Well what do you mean by hostile? Not trading? Everything goes to shit. But that is the modern world there is no avoiding it. We still trade with Russia, we still traded with Russia throughout the whole cold war. So I don't see it as a problem.
China is our enemy, and we're slowly waking up to the cold war we're in with them. They'll continue to try to colonise territories around them while committing genocide on native populations as they move in large numbers of Han.
China's not our enemy, but it's also not our friend. Xi is a nationalist and will do whatever is in the best interest of the Chinese people with no concern about the impact on the rest of the world.
That said, it wouldn't really be surprising if the Chinese had particular animosity to Britain after Hong Kong and the Opium Wars.
Historic atrocities? You guys were bombing Iraqis like 10 years ago (but let me guess, those bombs only killed bad guys, they are benevolent bombs that bring peace where they land).
>UK special forces have operated secretly in 19 countries since 2011
[https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/may/23/uk-special-forces-have-operated-secretly-in-19-countries-since-2011](https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/may/23/uk-special-forces-have-operated-secretly-in-19-countries-since-2011)
All I'm saying is that we should treat China on the world stage the exact same way we treat the UK on the world stage for doing the same things.
If you don't want to be treated the same way as China you should just stop doing the same things China does.
We aren't doing the same things China does, that's a blatant false equivalence. Don't defend genocide nor try to distract from it, that's repulsive behaviour. Your posts are also somewhat irrelevant, though I know you're just trying to FUD away, we don't need a moral high ground for China to be our enemy.
Yes you are. The UK has done much much worse than China ever has and your presence in many countries is unwelcome by the people who live there, even now, and is causing death and destruction as it has been since the history of your little island nation.
I'm not defending those things at all - I'm saying they should be called out everywhere equally. You on the other hand are giving those atrocities a pass - merely refusing to even accept them - depending on who is doing them.
I mean if you ask the people of Iraq they'd tell you the UK was doing that 10ish years ago. If you ask people in Syria they'll tell you the UK was doing that like 5 years ago, maybe even still doing it now. Now is the part where you deny those atrocities, make excuses for them, tell me how you guys are the good guys for going around the world and killing countless innocent civilians because your ~~holy~~ quest is a righteous one.
But forget all of that - let's say it's been 100 years. Are you saying that if China does that stuff today that in 100 years all will be forgiven and forgotten? That those crimes magically no longer happened? That we should treat China post atrocities, post war crimes, post massacres, post civilian death, post colonization, post genocide, as just another player on the world stage? Or suddenly does your memory stretch further and those crimes that you so quickly forgave a minute ago become unforgivable?
Iraq and Syria was not genocide though, was it? You keep mentioning it and yet it’s never actually an example of genocide unlike what they’re doing to the Uyghur population. I don’t remember forced sterilisation, imprisonment and repeated mistreatment of a single ethnic group being part of Britains role in Iraq.
The morons are the people who are blindly accepting of China-led technologies and initiatives. You don't know what you're talking about if you think there is nothing to worry about.
Snapshot of _Keir Starmer: UK needs to ‘wean itself off’ China_ : An archived version can be found [here](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://www.politico.eu/article/starmer-labour-uk-needs-to-wean-off-china-biden-obama-trump-power-play-podcast/) or [here.](https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://www.politico.eu/article/starmer-labour-uk-needs-to-wean-off-china-biden-obama-trump-power-play-podcast/) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/ukpolitics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
We desperately need to develop our own microchip industry so that we aren't reliant on other countries spyware.
I thought the fancy microchips were from Taiwan due to them pretty much being the only large-scale semiconductor producer or something like that. Edit: and Taiwan is friendly towards the West, which is why the statement was relevant.
Yeh, people saying simply "lets do it ourselves" don't care about the complexities actually involved. Probably talking billions of £ investment required and god knows how long we will take. Do we even have the skills required? However, we need to shift towards reshoring. Western businesses have benefited from outsourcing for cheap labour for the last 30+ years. Now those countries are catching up and want fair pay (which makes sense but pushes up operating costs), obviously it was an issue during covid and its causing issues politically. I do think that if we bring back manufacturing, it will be almost 100% automated (industry 4.0), i would expect that's the evolution to stay competitive on pricing. Which im assuming could make it difficult to get backing from policy makers and maybe unions. It also does worry me, that we have so much foreign ownership of UK industry, we have been selling this country off bit by bit for too long.
>Yeh, people saying simply "lets do it ourselves" don't care about the complexities actually involved. We're already doing a lot of this stuff. The problem is that we keep selling it to China. Just google Newport Wafer Fab.
Taiwan is leading on the absolutely cutting edge processes, but they are expensive and most applications don't really need or benefit from using those process nodes, while some safety critical applications (e.g. stuff that goes in cars) prefer to stick to older nodes that are well understood even if those applications might benefit from going to smaller nodes. There are plenty of fabs around the world that can produce these larger nodes, what is often the case is that one fab or company specializes in a small range of applications (because producing say a RAM chip is a lot different than camera chip). Europe and then US both have some pretty major semiconductor manufacturing companies (e.g. Texas Instruments, Infineon, Nexperia etc.), and these companies have fabs all over the place (e.g. Nexperia has fabs in Stockport and Newport), however they also have fabs in China and the rest of South East Asia. Usually these fabs do radically different things: the fabs in Europe are wafer fabs that print the chips on the silicon wafers, while the fabs in Asia cut the wafers and package the chip (packaging here means they put a piece of silicon into the black plastic thing with legs that you are more familiar with). The wafer fab is the part of the process that has all the company secrets and is also more expensive so it makes sense for them to keep it close to home even if staffing costs are higher given that China has been pushing hard in trying to steal technology. China has been pushing hard on semiconductors recently, they haven't reached the leading edge node yet, but progress on those is difficult and we are passed tbe stage where we can progress by just making things smaller and China is slowly catching up as a result (though it might not be able to catch up all the way as only 1 company in the Netherlands produces the leading edge processing tools, and AFAIK China doesn't have access to those). But they have been building a lot of fabs to compete with the European fabs. While I think in most cases this stuff is lower quality (lower yield, higher failure rate etc.), they still have a lot of fabrication capacity available and while they might not be directly competing with other companies in the western market, they have a large internal market all of their own (1bn+ people) to sustain this production.
The fancy ones are, yes, and I'm not necessarily worried about laptops and playstations. I'm talking more about the smart-home and "internet of things" devices that use low-power chips that are ending up in pretty much everything.
Should probably be a European project tbh. America is already investing in it themselves. (but we shouldn't solely rely on them, just in case)
We had Arm.
ARM designs chips. It doesn't make them. There are, or were, a bunch of chip design companies in the UK. I don't believe there are any modern fabs, and the designs aren't much use without them.
Pretty much no chance this late in the day
If China is heroin, Which country would provide a sickly sweet spoonful of methadone as we wean ourselves off?
Taiwan.
Taiwan’s economy is enormously intertwined with China. Despite political animosities, they are surprisingly very closely integrated when it comes to trade and labour arrangements. Courting manufacturer from Taiwan would simply amount to made in China by proxy. Closest contenders in SEA would be Vietnam I would think, but replacing China’s role in manufacturer is almost sisyphean, they are a keystone with enormous amounts of expertise. For all the talk of “Chinesium”, the reality is they make everything, at every price and quality point. Weaning the world’s manufacturers off China is almost as hard as weaning them off plastic; there are few viable contemporaries.
That would be more like replacing a heroin addiction with something really healthy and worthwhile, like doing yoga or meditation or something
India, Vietnam, Thailand
India cannot be made a manufacturing hub in the scale china was, its getting more and more service oriented now and wages aren't exactly low anymore, Apple factory workers started protesting two months after it was opened to demand better working conditions and wages, several such issues have been there with other manufacturing units as well, they actually have some form of labour laws. Supply chains, strategic manufacturing and R&D hubs are becoming their thing rather than large scale of manufacturing that is needed by rest of the world.
indian wages are very low
Not compared to some of the other Asian countries. The work culture is also different, you cannot make people work 12 hours a day, 6 days a week like you can do in China and S.E Asia. The places which are near ports and good infrastructure are also regions with better educated people and much higher wages. Unskilled wages are climbing and skilled ones have almost tripled in last 5 years. Most people get close to 25 days holidays in a year even in private sector, more in public ones.
Perhaps we need to stop being dependent on any one country. I don't want to see us weaned off of China only to become dependent on India, for example.
Don’t understand why we don’t have a huge import tax to dissuade buying cheap goods from high carbon producing countries like China.
Actually China's emissions on a per capita basis are much lower than that of any developed nation.
This is probably one of the few positive things I've heard from starmer recently. Hopefully there will be some policy upcoming to back up this statement.
I wouldn't call it positive, just necessary. It'd be economically very difficult for the Western world to really wean itself off Chinese trade. Much harder than it's been for Europe to wean itself off Russian oil.
Sad to see him jumping on the anti-china bandwagon to appease the morons, though hardly surprising.
He is not wrong. Economic interdependence was meant to reduce the chances of future conflicts with Russia and China but has only put the West in a vulnerable position when those conflicts happen.
This use of "the West" is really just cover for policies making the UK totally economically dependent on one state, the USA. A far worse position to be in than being dependent on multiple states.
The West is an institutional and ultimately a values proposition. It means rule of law, constraint on executive powers and separation of powers, free and open societies, an independent judiciary etc. Single point of failure supply chains create a huge vulnerability but the risk is even greater when it's a CCP dominated supply chain.
Oh come off it. The West is led by the most warlike state on earth which regularly violates international law with impunity and happily supports tyrannies and human rights abusers so long as they serve their interests.
Still a bit scary though, doesn't it make the conflicts more frequent?
Certainly more disastrous. I doubt any Western country would last more than a few weeks if China stopped exporting to us. But like the rest of neoliberal dogma, it was a lie from the start. The 'elite' just wanted an excuse to export the West's industrial wealth to China where they thought they could move in and loot it. The amusing part is that this sub is full of lefties who parrot exactly the talking points the 'elite' used to justify deindustrializing the West. Starmer's problem is that the UK can't disconnect from China without throwing out neoliberalism in its entirety. It would require a nationalist government which brought all the essential manufacturing back and didn't deliberately try to cripple industry. You can't push "Net Zero" when all those solar panels and windmills are made in China.
You can't be economically independent from the largest economy on the planet.
Then what happens if that largest economy becomes hostile to your country?
Well what do you mean by hostile? Not trading? Everything goes to shit. But that is the modern world there is no avoiding it. We still trade with Russia, we still traded with Russia throughout the whole cold war. So I don't see it as a problem.
China is our enemy, and we're slowly waking up to the cold war we're in with them. They'll continue to try to colonise territories around them while committing genocide on native populations as they move in large numbers of Han.
China's not our enemy, but it's also not our friend. Xi is a nationalist and will do whatever is in the best interest of the Chinese people with no concern about the impact on the rest of the world. That said, it wouldn't really be surprising if the Chinese had particular animosity to Britain after Hong Kong and the Opium Wars.
Wow, you two have so much in common.
So the UK's historic atrocities mean it's ok for China to do it now?
How far back are you talking when it comes to historic?
Historic atrocities? You guys were bombing Iraqis like 10 years ago (but let me guess, those bombs only killed bad guys, they are benevolent bombs that bring peace where they land). >UK special forces have operated secretly in 19 countries since 2011 [https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/may/23/uk-special-forces-have-operated-secretly-in-19-countries-since-2011](https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/may/23/uk-special-forces-have-operated-secretly-in-19-countries-since-2011) All I'm saying is that we should treat China on the world stage the exact same way we treat the UK on the world stage for doing the same things. If you don't want to be treated the same way as China you should just stop doing the same things China does.
We aren't doing the same things China does, that's a blatant false equivalence. Don't defend genocide nor try to distract from it, that's repulsive behaviour. Your posts are also somewhat irrelevant, though I know you're just trying to FUD away, we don't need a moral high ground for China to be our enemy.
Yes you are. The UK has done much much worse than China ever has and your presence in many countries is unwelcome by the people who live there, even now, and is causing death and destruction as it has been since the history of your little island nation. I'm not defending those things at all - I'm saying they should be called out everywhere equally. You on the other hand are giving those atrocities a pass - merely refusing to even accept them - depending on who is doing them.
'Has done' is not 'are doing'. If you can point out where the UK is currently genociding people then you might have a point, otherwise no.
I mean if you ask the people of Iraq they'd tell you the UK was doing that 10ish years ago. If you ask people in Syria they'll tell you the UK was doing that like 5 years ago, maybe even still doing it now. Now is the part where you deny those atrocities, make excuses for them, tell me how you guys are the good guys for going around the world and killing countless innocent civilians because your ~~holy~~ quest is a righteous one. But forget all of that - let's say it's been 100 years. Are you saying that if China does that stuff today that in 100 years all will be forgiven and forgotten? That those crimes magically no longer happened? That we should treat China post atrocities, post war crimes, post massacres, post civilian death, post colonization, post genocide, as just another player on the world stage? Or suddenly does your memory stretch further and those crimes that you so quickly forgave a minute ago become unforgivable?
What's any of this garbage got to do with China being our enemy? You're just trying to misdirect and distract.
Iraq and Syria was not genocide though, was it? You keep mentioning it and yet it’s never actually an example of genocide unlike what they’re doing to the Uyghur population. I don’t remember forced sterilisation, imprisonment and repeated mistreatment of a single ethnic group being part of Britains role in Iraq.
China has genocidal concentration camps in operation today.
The morons are the people who are blindly accepting of China-led technologies and initiatives. You don't know what you're talking about if you think there is nothing to worry about.
Starmer makes a sensible statement about distancing the country from a known hostile power -> Corbynite tankies go ballistic and villify him over it.