Scaling up requires millions of euros typically, to install new machines and educate new workers. Typically you need investors for that. If there are no investors, it's hard to make it happen.

This is not the same in China where the state can just give an order to build more lamp factories. The state needs hard currency for high tech stuff and materials that are valuable on the international market, but all of the workers are paid in the internal coin of the country which is worth a lot less on the international market afaik, if their economical system is anything close to that of East Germany. I know a bunch about the DDR but not specifically about China.

@Laurens - thank you for the insight. 

Scaling up requires millions of euros typically, to install new machines and educate new workers. Typically you need investors for that. If there are no investors, it's hard to make it happen.

This is not the same in China where the state can just give an order to build more lamp factories. The state needs hard currency for high tech stuff and materials that are valuable on the international market, but all of the workers are paid in the internal coin of the country which is worth a lot less on the international market afaik, if their economical system is anything close to that of East Germany. I know a bunch about the DDR but not specifically about China.

This is certainly a kind of single-sided snobbish leftist point of view thinking of China like a cheap slave labor camp. While Chinese are known for copycat designs of course, and government sure invests in technological areas (which is not a bad thing) China is moving away from blindly copying to creating original products. Look at modern Chinese microcontrollers like Rockchip and Allwinner. Or last scopes like Siglent, Rigol or Micsig. These blown all low-mid range Western scopes out of water for good. And these manufacturers are going to aim in high-end sector too. And Chinese salaries are actually on the rise, not to be considered third world any more.  On the lamp topic, I have two Philips HPI-T lamps, Belgian and later Chinese. Chinese one is certainly better made. 


And are you kidding saying CNY "is worth less" ??

What's wrong with you, man? Do you think that is at all a normal way to reply to a well meaning person?

Did i say anything about slave labor? No. Shut up about it then. Obviously the Uygur problem is a fact, but i was not mentioning that here.
Did i say anything about the quality of chinese products here? No. Shut up about it then. It is, however, a fact that china is flooding the world market with cheap shitty stuff. Example: the capacitor plague of the 2000s, today's bad quality caps you find in capacitive dropper circuits, phone chargers with less than 1mm isolation distance between 230v mains and metal parts. They're perfectly capable of producing good stuff, but lots of it is rather meh just like Japanese products in the 60s and Hong Kong and Taiwan in the 80s. But i was not mentioning that here.
And when i mention high tech stuff, i mean *really* high tech stuff. Cutting edge semiconductor production. The stuff chip fab designer/producer ASML makes for instance, that is highly restricted in where they are allowed to export it to. An oscilloscope is nice, but definitely not cutting edge. I am not in the know about which process they use, but they won't be sticking the most modern feature size chips in there simply because there is no need to.

If anything, you're the leftist tankie white knighting china here.
Regardless of your uncalled for behavior, i will treat your arguments with more respect than they probably deserve. Either way, here's a bit of a history and economics lesson.

In any c0mmunist and socialist country, there have been issues with paying for stuff on the international market. It seems only recently, the RMB is starting to become accepted currency on the world market: https://www.stonex.com/en/market-intelligence/currencies/202407281300/use-of-the-chinese-yuan-as-an-international-payment-currency/

If you buy stuff from china as an import/export agency, it's highly likely that you will pay in any of the big western currencies, even today. Even as a private customer, you're paying in non-chinese currency. Obviously for consumer convenience, but for China themselves it is a highly useful flow of hard currency into their country.
After all, if they import steel or coal or whatever from Australia as they do, it's unlikely that Australia will accept RMB for that transaction - rather USD or AUD. It seems like that in particular Brazil is opening up to doing business in RMB, but that is far from being the accepted standard. Also since Russia screwed up big time and is now much more reliant on China, i can imagine they too will be opening up to RMB, but in general, it's not too common.

With ALL of the historic c0mmunist countries, it was essentially completely impossible to pay for their exports with their domestic currency. In some cases, it was even illegal to use their currency outside country borders (DDR) at least for private individuals.
Most c0mmunist countries demanded western currency as payment for exports, because their own currencies weren't considered hard currency for a long time. It seems that china may become an exception, but only has become so in the last couple of years according to the link posted above.
The benefit of not having hard or convertible currency inside your country, means that you can pay your workers a lot of money with which they can buy domestically produced goods. The DDR specifically never had issues with low paid workers. However, comparatively, imported goods (particularly from outside the eastern bloc were very expensive to buy for them (if they were available to buy at all), because the state had to buy those with the hard currency they were only able to receive themselves through exports. Again, it was like this in the USSR, the DDR, and in Cuba they really like when you bring in USD...

If you don't agree with this, please come with sources. I'm always willing to learn, but to the best of my knowledge, in pretty much all c0mmunist and socialist countries, there has been this big difference between the domestic and the international market. It all effectively boils down to 'Communism for the people, capitalism for the state'.





@ Mods: please remove the weird filter for the word c0mmunist, it's not a swear word.

Wow what a stream of emotions just for my small reply

Well, the hard truth, may be unpleasant for some, is that in the last years China silently has become the world first economy in the terms of GDP. Well one may say PPP corrected, ok, that may be artificial, okay then, world 2nd by nominal. Sure not bad too )

Read again: *World first economy*. May be second, OK.

So, while of course world's economics are somewhat extremely complex, it can be logically assumed that Chinese government is no longer in need to play cheap developing world tricks of artificially weakening their currency. Let the other governments worry instead. Trump is certainly nervous )

And as for oscilloscopes. May be you don't know, but today even a cheap entry level scope at about 400EUR samples at 2Gsa/sec in 12-bit words. That's pretty impressive and it *sure* uses the last low-nm silicon stuff for signal processing in FPGA and CPU. Higher end stuff has about a magnitude or better performance.

If you're interested, I can give a more balanced opinion on Chinese products. Look, I'm born in China and lived there for ~10 years before moving to Australia so I know how the government and society works. There are good stuff yes, but the internal price competition is extremely crooked at best. They can make good quality products, but you can not survive as a company commercially making quality products and paying your workers decently and you can do that because labour laws are never enforced. For example, I can make a cheap LED lamp for 5 yuan with a constant current chip and proper circuitry, but the moment I sell that for 7 yuan, someone is going to pump out thousands of crappy capacitive dropper lamps for 0.5 yuan each and sell it for 1 yuan, and that destroys all incentives to making quality product, because the people don't care what they're getting, all they care is does it work or not, even if it only does the bare minimum. Also people getting paid poorly in electronic factories across Guangdong/Shenzhen are a well known problem even inside China, they are soldering 10 hours a day with 0 PPE and being paid 3-5 yuan an hour, about 0.7-1 AUD per hour, is absolutely abysmal. On top of that there are also double standards when it comes to export products and domestically sold products, which are even crappier than export standards, if export standard is considered bare minimum internationally, you can probably guess now how poor quality the domestic products are. And contrary to your beliefs, the government have nothing to do with the market, at least for lighting products, China is a mostly capitalist market with some state control on some products. On some products, there are even triple standards, there would be a factory standard, a national standard (GB) and international standards/certifications.


The simplest thing to verify what I have said is to ask a Chinese, if given a choice of an imported product and a domestically made product what would you choose even the imported product is at a slightly higher price, I can guarantee you most people that are sane will go ahead with the imported product.

Well, but the original discussion was about if China really *still* artificially weakens its currency to make workers salaries worth less and to make exports more competitive.

As for the quality of Chinese products. In the area of electronic components there is quite explosive growth may be the last 5 years or so in both quality and variety. Now there are some great Chinese products (and dependable services too! - see JLC)  I am doing different kinds of electronics for living for many years and know this first hand. While in the past you have to turn to Chinese components when wanted to make some compromises regarding quality/cost ratio, today you can source Chinese components of some really good quality for a really nice price not thinking you are slipping in finished product reliability compared to using western parts.