OP likely just pointing out Singapore used to train a lot of CCP officials something like 50k (I think slowed last 10 years). One of the SG uni governance program is colloquially called "mayor's class", joke is it's overseas branch of central party school. LKY met every PRC leader in some sort of mentor relationship. Obviously national scale between PRC/SG different, hence SG more of model of mayor/municipal level.
US military logistics minnow in Indopac vs PRC mainland logistics. Peak US war fighting capability was calibrated around adversaries with 50% of US GDP, even Iraq took 50% of USN CSGs + extremely favourable region basing in multi month surge operations. PRC conservatively 100x larger high-end target than Iraq, 150% US GDP by PPP, and more by actual industrial output. Before VZ uber trip, US was flexing and failing vs Houthis, i.e. shit tier adversary that actually bothered shooting US ships.
CONUS targets are on the menu, there's a reason China Military Report from last month included US west coast under PRC conventional fire, which TBH was years out of date, i.e. most of CONUS will be vulnerable, and PRC has more harden targets to attrite and more ability to deny US fires in the first place, i.e. PRC taking out exquisitely vulnerable CSG/unrep/tankers logistics tail drops US ability to deliver fires to PRC to zero, vs PRC global strikes complex chilling in hardened tunnels is extremely survivable.
You can aggregate everyone in 1IC and PRC still out manpower and out produce by magnitude. Hence most will stay neutral for the simple reason they're within PRC logistics backyard which US don't have remote capability to defend against. PRC simply that big in scale, i.e. their acquisition of 1m loitering munitions on top of 1m drones and cruise missile Gigafactory that can churn 1000 components (likely floor) per day makes any US posture in 1/2IC not survivable outside of cope war games. PRC has the fire power to literally fight everyone simultaneously, with domestic resources (no imports) to maintain war economy basically indefinitely.
Ultimately, if PRC starts TW blockading, US will likely look at ledger/force balance and bail because PRC sees through US bluff. Doesn't matter if pacifist muricans demand intervention if PRC throws every TWnese in torment nexus, ultimately US unlikely to out attrite PRC in backyard, and more fundamentally, cannot out reconstitute faster than PRC after the fact. US isn't gambling shipyards, energy infra, semi fabs, hyperscalers, payment processors, boeing/lockheed plants over TW. Now 10 years ago, when US could theoretically asymmetrically hit PRC without CONUS vulnerability, US intervention strategically likely, but this 2026, we see the new national security strategy. Much more sensible for US planners to retreat to hemisphere and accept spheres of influence arrangement. Americans being powerless to US foreign policy is an (often unfortunate) American trait.
West fine with migrant labours doing hard and dirty work hidden from prying eyes (agriculture fields, meat packing plants). Mining just as strategic, but hard to hide big holes in the earth from constituents. I'm sure push comes to shove, US can import a bunch of central Americans to do hard and dirty work in mining.
Yep and the workers from those countries prefer that arrangement since it pays better. The alternative is they don’t do the work, we just pay higher prices, and then they don’t get paid and stay home.
> I'm sure push comes to shove, US can import a bunch of central Americans to do hard and dirty work in mining.
Yea let’s ban migrant labor and the entrance of migrants now so we don’t have this moral failure. :)
By the way, the east (as opposed to the west) is fine with migrant labor too. That’s why remittances are a thing. Well, when they’re not being xenophobic or whatever.
TBH papering over xenophobia is easy because it's just foreigners. Problem with mining is extractors are scarring mother earth, that's the unfortunate optics problem for nimby's, not people, but landscape/backyard, even if it's in the middle of nowhere. I suppose that's why fracking gets an easier pass, because the hole is smol.
West had nothing to teach/copy in many cases - there's a reason PRC produced magnitude more mining engineers for decades. Leaching MREE/HREE from ionic clays is a geologic tech stack that PRC fully built out indigenously from 60s. Only reason M/HREE can be refined at _scale_ and _economically_ today was PRC innovating on geology west never bothered in (west ree stack concentrated on hard rock extraction), and now west has to try to replicate via first principles.
The "the Chinese can only copy us" thing is quite common in some circles, just as the "all the Japanese can do is copy us" was 50-odd years ago. China overtook the west in a lot of areas 10-20 years ago, to see an example of this travel to any city in China. It's like travelling into the future, we're a decade or more behind them at this stage.
The scare quotes the earlier comment put around "learned" are unwarranted, but "they copied us instead of bootstrapping" and "they can only copy us" are very different statements.
There's a reason western M/HREE (i.e. the strategic good stuff) strategy hedges on similar iconic clays finds like PRC, because that's the only working industrial chain that extracts M/HREEs at scale. It's why AU/Lynas focus on ionic clays and not US hardrock... which btw doesn't even pretend it will do anything meaningful for mineral security other than light REE.
US+co is trying to replicate PRC M/HREE industry, without the techstack that took PRC decades to build out, because US+co never developed these geologies in the first place. The relevant upstream extraction/mmidstream refining tech for kind of deposits was never pursued in the west.
Now west can move fast due to second mover advantage, but it's going to be slow going like PRC EUV. Until then it's going to require all sorts of parallel efforts like recycling, or materials engineering to reduce M/HREEs to mitigate gap.
Not even close. EUV lithography is as close to magic as it gets. By any reasonable assessment it shouldn't work but a few wizards somehow manage to pull it off.
Not even close in sense it's likely going to take west longer to build M/HREE at scale than PRC figuring out EUV + entire indigenize semi supply chain at scale.
The execution difference is PRC is generating enough semi talent to replicate EUV and entire semi stack sooner than later. They already have the most complete localized semi supply chain in single nation, i.e. they're doing ASML+5000 niche suppliers at once. Hence consensus estimate is they'll get there somewhere 2030-2035. Reminder EUV is basically a "tiny" ass effort from a handful of countries, for reference airbus/boeing each has 150k employees for commercial aviation, EUV was developed by 3k from Zeiss, 1k from Cymer, 13k from ASML... over 20 years of casual development. It's ultimately a hard but narrow specialization problem, hence PRC EUV prototype beating estimates/expectations. It's not magic, it's just people + cash + industrial vertical integration that PRC is uniquely well equipped to deal with.
VS west has "easier" M/HREE tree to rebuild on paper but lack both talent #s, and state capacity to execute. M/HREE is ~20 minerals each has it's own midstream extraction process that require dozens of plants and 100s of stages for 5/6/7+ sigma high end strategic use. It's a different monumental/gargantuan task, on top of the sheer fucking scale of infra involved. I noted Batou has 3 million residents for a reason, that's the scale of M/HREE industry west has to replicate. It takes 8-10 years to get a refinery up in the west, the chance of west getting 100s of highly polluting industrial chains up for M/HREE before PRC sorts out semi is close to zero. It's a mass scale industrial mobilization problem that west is uniquely not well equipped to deal with. I'd wager M/HREE more bureaucratic magic than even EUV technical magic for west.
Meanwhile, there isn't a single M/HREE plant in western pipeline that will do anything at scale until maybe 2030, only thing in pipeline is validating unproven lab extraction/refining methods by ~2028, if it works, will take years to scale extraction, and even more years to scale refining.
You illustrate a fundamental lack of understanding. 9 women can't produce a single baby in one month. That's just not how it works.
I think you really don't appreciate how utterly ridiculous the implementation details of the smaller lithography processes are. It wasn't merely limited to the west, it was limited to a single company.
> VS west has "easier" M/HREE tree to rebuild on paper but lack both talent #s, and state capacity to execute.
Wrong. The west currently lacks investors willing to shift focus to that extent and the state lacks the willingness to divert resources and step in themselves.
> It's a mass scale industrial mobilization problem that west is uniquely not well equipped to deal with.
It's not that the west is unable. We don't currently have sufficient motivation to overcome the political barriers that prevent speed.
I agree that retooling for that would take many years due to the scale of the physical infrastructure involved, and in practice will likely take multiple decades due to lack of urgency. Where I disagree is the comparison with EUV.
EUV is not a biological process on an immutable. This bad analogy on par with EUV is magic. Second mover advantage = compressing 20 year commercial cycle into 10 year strategic one viable. As it's been consistently done. Litho complexity wank needs to stop. ASML integrator of western expertise, it's not one company. We ended up having 1 integrator due to $$$. Meanwhile PRC generating more expertise with blueprint and poached many of the ASML implementers in the first place, while pursuing any EUV efforts simultaneously, stuff ASML had to ditch due to limitations.
Lack of willingness/urgency is just loser talk for last of system capacity, i.e. overcome political barriers, especially when it's been highlighted how strategic important it is to hammer out separate REE chain. Important to distinguish between unwillingness and simple inability. Easy to strong arm TW to TSMC Arizona for leading edge goals, but can't strong arm PRC to transfer M/HREE tech.
Note I didn't say M/HREE was "easier" than EUV in technical sense. I said in terms of execution, i.e. overcoming barriers, PRC is simply going to have easier working with EUV engineering problem than west with M/HREE engineering, massive infra, domestic politics problem. So it's going to be slow going, in terms of execution time.
Instead of continuing to parade your ignorance go read a whitepaper detailing the EUV process before telling me that it isn't akin to magic. Any other critical industry would have multiple competing techniques and implementors. There's even still more than one company operating cutting edge fabs despite the number dwindling as the processes got smaller.
An economic superpower identified cutting edge lithography in general as a national priority, allocated the resources, and after something like two decades of intensive research is _still_ trailing by many years. I can't immediately think of any other commercialized technology with a similar difficulty level.
As for REE, political willingness is entirely orthogonal from physical capability. A bunch of hot air on the evening news is irrelevant. If the politicians don't allocate the funds then they clearly don't see it as a top priority. If there were a pressing need then it would get done.
Where we really see the political dysfunction is the lack of planning for the future. By the time it's an urgent need there won't be enough time left for the buildout. But that's unrelated to the topic at hand.
I've read the white papers, that's why I have figures of company headcounts during EUV development off top of head. No, it's not magic. Magic fun simile, but thinking it cannot be recreated on accelerated second mover timeline because EUV "magic" vs science is bluntly, popsci cringe. EUV / semi wasn't recognized as critical industry at the time / there wasn't current geostrategic consideration over leading edge chips / hyperscaling. Hence market settled on single vendor.
PRC barely focused on EUV until trade war. Entire PRC semi push was unserious until like 2018 when they elevated semi to first class discipline, and already there's got prototype out, again years head of estimates.
For difficulty - M/HREE. World also settled on PRC as functionally sole supplier for 5/6 signma purity minerals that PRC process has functionally 100% dominance in. Competitors at PRC EUV lab tech scale. That's just how market forces equalized sometimes before geopolitical disruption creates opening for new entrants.
Ultimately west see priority on REE, they're are allocating funds, they are also finding out one can't buy capability, and wanting something bad doesn't translate to getting it done. Political dysfunction is precisely relevant to the topic at hand, because political will determine what's possible at what speeds even when nation has the expertise and money.
I think western companies and governments have ingrained into their own thinking that the optimization strategy of of minimal investments in fundamental sciences and engineering as real constraint. (actually in more that just that, but that goes off topic..) It's a short term focused fictionalization / profit extraction constraint, but because that's so built into the experience and performance companies in the west, many predictions completely misunderstand what is possible with a different focus. We'll see how fast this can be re-calibrated.
This bizarro take. PRC mining equipment has been decoupled from US for years, they don't require hardware from western producers anymore, from terrestrial to deep sea. The last dependency was mostly unconventional shale since US good at shale but that's mostly consultative, and PRC quickly found out US horizontal drilling doesn't translate well for their deeper reserves, so they had to localize tools there as well. The talent gap is also stupendously in favor of PRC, they produce like 15x more mining graduates per year, their university of mining tech enrolls more than all US mining programs combined. They lead in midstream refining, not just REE bottleneck, all that AU/BR ore gets shipped to PRC for refining for a reason.
>almost always takes place far from population centers
No in PRC case, they literally build population centers to service mining, part of third front strategy in 60s to move mining into rugged interior to protect against US/USSR. If you want to mine/process at PRC scale, you need to plop a few million people in large urban complexes i.e. boutou has 3 million people, they're not 5000 people mining towns.
PRC tungsten reserves are also depleting, mines are processing more rocks for same output and sooner or later PRC going to quota tungsten exports even more for domestic stockpile and prevent over extraction.
Also related tangent, remember that anecdote about PRC finally making ball point pen tips? That was basically central gov slapping PRC metallurgists to speedrun tungsten carbide precision manufacturing for advanced munitions (penetrators), not ball point pen tips which was rounding error consideration.
Very small, high precision spheres are hard to make. Ball bearings also fall into this category. Many modern machines depend on this. I never see it "recreate society manuals," but they should be.
The balls aren’t that hard to make [1], but doing so at scale economically isn’t something you can build with some plug and play off the shelf machinery. It takes years to assemble a functioning factory like that and tune the process before it’s profitable. All the Western companies that make them are decades old with established and largely paid off manufacturing lines but once the Chinese government decided it was a critical industrial product downstream from their five year plans, it was just a matter of time and capital. Few other governments are willing to subsidized specialized manufacturing like that so investors don’t want to risk entering an established market.
The hard part is really quality control when making hundreds of thousand or millions of balls a day, at which point all metrology equipment is basically useless except for random sampling, which means your process has to be pretty much perfect before anyone will even buy from you, but you cant slow down the process because then you’re just losing money.
>Very small, high precision spheres are hard to make
I remember this was on a list of zero-g manufacturing techniques that NASA was investigating at one point. I wonder what became of that? Normally, I'd think the cost would be prohibitive, but you can probably fit a lot of 0.1mm ball bearings in a ton of cargo.
Switzerland + japan and now PRC, i.e. US also can't build ballpoint pen tips (not that US couldn't). The TLDR is it's like a 20m per year market, TISCO china has revenue of 15B, it wasn't worth rounding error effort until politics compelled them to. And even then it wasn't really about metallurgy but submicro tungsten manufacturing to close precision gap for other strategic industries. The meme/rumor is TISCO made one batch of ball point tip metal to prove a point and that chunk is enough to last PRC ballpoint tip industry for decades.
SH onshore, HK offshore still. PRC bigger economy than entire region SG serves, if PRC wills HK to be finance hub larger than SG then that's what HK will be, on mainland volumes alone. One thing Singapore has over HK is it's land endowments though pathetic is slightly less meagre, SG managed to carve out nice industrial sector for 20-25% of GDP, something HK couldn't compete with PRC and IMO heavy reliance on finance fucked it over. Hence HK being integrated into greater pearl river after NSL slap down cowed all the nativists.
Singapore was never "cool" as long as I remember in Asian expat circles since 90s. It's like the nice clean manicured places where boring expats who enjoys boiled potatoes and chicken breasts without spice settle. Dubai without all the high quality sin.
Tame Orchard towers and four floors of whores never produced dubai chocolate tier of memes. Singapore is Disney with death penalty. Dubai is Disney with Minnie Mouse scat play. Hilariously, both great places to raise kids if you stick to the main attractions.
> Hilariously, both great places to raise kids if you stick to the main attractions.
I haven't heard of many examples of people having profoundly positive impacts on the world being raised in either of those two countries. Of course, this will be impacted by their size and in the case of Dubai, it's recent ascendancy. Still, it makes me very wary of that claim.
I mean in the practical sense -safe, good amenities, schooling, access to migrant nannies. Great place to raise kids =/= raise great kids. Especially for expat bubbles.
My idea of a great place to raise kids is one that optimizes the likelihood of them becoming great kids. I don't think they fit the bill. Admittedly, I'm not sure where in the world would rank highest, but I do think both wouldn't score high.
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