Chotchkes from China

Holiday swag and what's up with tech in APAC

Wirepine Digital, the other half of the TechTales media empire needed some Holiday Merch and when I got the shipping notice I was surprised to see it was coming from China. I ordered from a place in Texas, but everything is made in China so that kinda made sense. I figured they’d throw them on one of those massive container ships - they’d be a drop in the bucket.

Dragonpine

UPS was doing the shipping, so I could track the merch as it made its way to California. My chotchkes were made in Foshan near the coast of mainland China adjacent to Taiwan. From Foshan they went to Shenzen - a few hours drive. Shenzen is on the coast and has a massive shipping port - bigger than any in the US - but a distant third to Shanghai which is the largest shipping port in China and the world.

It’s hard to get your head around how much stuff goes in and out of these ports but Shanghai handles over 50 million of those big 20-foot long containers you see on ships and trains and trucks and all manner of other odd places. 50 million containers would wrap around the Earth over 3 times.

Shenzen is just across from Hong Kong, the quasi independent territory since 1997 when the UK relinquished control back to China. They’ve got their own Disneyland.

Taiwan, the independent island nation is northeast from Shenzen across the Taiwan Strait. Taiwan is called the Republic of China (ROC) while mainland China is called the Peoples Republic of China (PRC). Taiwan, and more specifically Taiwan Semiconductor Company (TSMC) is a massive player in the technology world and with the apparent demise of Intel as a chip foundry or manufacturer, they just got huger. Taiwan does not have a Disneyland.

The Wirepine merch is but a small package of giveaways - chotckes like the title says. Make it to the end of the article to see you just how cute they are, and I might even send you one.

Cute, yes. Valuable, no.

So, I was surprised when the next stop after Shenzen was Anchorage. My merch was coming not on a slow boat, but on a fast plane. Alaska is 5,000 miles away from China clear across the great Pacific Ocean - a ten hour flight.

Follow the merch from Foshan to Shenzen and then on a plane to Anchorage. Hong Kong is right by Shenzen, Taiwan up and to the right and Shanghai a bit further north. Shanghai’s got a bigger Disneyland than Hong Kong.

After the intercontinental flight, our little bundle of joy transferred to another flight - this time five hours down the west coast of North America from Alaska to Ontario in Southern California. Ontario is UPS’ major west coast distribution center. From Ontario it was back north on a third and final flight back to Oakland and from Oakland it was UPS trucks another couple of hours north to Santa Rosa.

All told, my little bag of chotchkes traveled over 10,000 miles - halfway around the world on three different airplanes and at least a half a dozen trucks.

There are two ways to think about this:

1. It’s ridiculous. I don’t care how optimized e-commerce and logistics and supply chains have become; in isolation this makes no economic sense.

2. It’s interesting. China and Asia Pacific are different than the west in so many ways and they are a bit out of sight in this hemisphere. Big geopolitical and tech things are going on in APAC, what could be next?

The first is shaking your fist at the clouds, so let’s riff on the second for a while.

First off, China is on a path to make pretty much everything:

Source: United Nations Industrial Development Organization UMIC stands for upper middle-income countries.

In 2000, China manufactured 6% of the world’s goods. In 2030 they are projected to manufacture 45% or nearly half of everything in the world. If that’s hard to get your head around, know that China is as big as the US geographically but with four times the people to do the stuff (1.4 Billion). While China is technically the second largest economy behind the US, if you look at it from a purchasing power point of view they are significantly larger and their growing domestic economy and middle class increasingly drive growth.

Driven by this strong domestic market and innovation in electric vehicles, China now makes and exports more cars than any country in the world surpassing Germany and Japan and the US. The US isn’t doing so well in China - GM recently took a $5B hit. China’s cheap solar panels recently killed US manufacturing. Tariffs incoming! Let’s see how this plays out - will you be driving a Chinese car someday or will it be driving you?

China already makes more than half of everything you buy on Amazon. But new players are coming in that go direct to the Chinese suppliers. Temu is one. Alibaba, China’s Amazon is another and they’re still going strong, but do you remember what happened to Jack Ma? Jack Ma founded Alibaba - think of him as the Jeff Bezos of China - but he spoke out against the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and they punished him for it. No yacht for Jack. I expect he’s happy not to be rotting in a jail somewhere - he’s now but a bystander to the company he founded. The rules in China are different - capitalism is fine as long as you toe the party line.

If cars aren’t the ultimate symbol of economic might, war machines are. No one can touch the US and its fighter jets and aircraft carriers but the future of warfare looks different. Drones are increasingly a central piece of modern warfare and China owns that supply chain end-to-end.

Of course the chips, especially the AI chips. I wrote a whole bit on this and all of it’s still true with the dramatic development of us losing Intel as the only chip manufacturer of scale left in the US. Trump is threatening to kill the CHIPS bill which brought semiconductor manufacturing back the US so this is still very much in flux.

Enjoy this tweet from Intel’s CEO a few days after the board gave him the boot and a $12M severance package:

Last but not least, now it looks like China’s social media platform TikTok will be forced to exit the US market. I’m sure we’ll hear more about this one too. Do you want to keep your TikTok or good riddance?

Then there’s a whole geo-political thing brewing with China that overrides all of this and with Trump that’s going to be, err, interesting. That one’s out of my league, but if you’ve got a take, throw it in the comments!

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Here’s the merch that went halfway around the world - keychains - white on black, green border with a clip and a QR code on the back that takes you to TechTales.

Aren’t they cute? If you made it this far you deserve one! I’ll mail them out until I tire of it. Give me a like and your address. It’d be cool to send some off to readers in India or Eastern Europe so they could fulfill their destiny to go all the way around the world.

best, Andrew