The country consumes a big proportion of the world’s materials used in infrastructure. It consumes 54% of aluminum, 48% of copper, 50% of nickel, 45% of all steel, and 60% of concrete. In fact, the country has consumed more concrete in the last three years than the United States did in all of the 20th century.
China is also prolific in accumulating precious metals – the country buys or mines 23% of gold and 15% of the world’s silver supply.
With many mouths to feed, China also needs large amounts of food. About 30% of rice, 22% of corn, and 17% of wheat gets eaten by the Chinese.
Lastly, the country is no hack in terms of burning fuel either. Notably, China uses 49% of coal for power generation as well as metallurgical processes in making steel. It also uses 13% of the world’s uranium and 12% of all oil.
These facts really hit home to show how important China is to the global consumption of raw materials. If China is unable to navigate its tricky transition to a consumer-driven economy and has a “hard landing”, it will be unlikely to see any growth in commodity prices triggered from the demand side. That said, supply is equally as important and it tells a different story: with companies like Glencore cutting copper production by 400,000 tons to better service its massive debt, the floor for commodities could be in.
Compare Japan 1940 to China 1980 (approx).
Both need raw materials from outside their country.
Japan decided to go to war to subjugate other countries to obtain the raw materials.
China decided to change their economic structure to obtain wealth and then use that wealth not only to buy the required raw materials to support their new economic structure, but also to use that wealth to buy influence (agreements) with other countries by providing them funds for infrastructure. Pretty damn smart.
How much of what China consumes ends up being exported as various goods to the rest of the world?
“Compare Japan 1940 to China 1980. Both need raw materials from outside their country.” —kokoda
Not a great comparison. Japan has virtually no mineral resources. Yes, China needs to import resources (as does America), but they have a wealth of resources, especially compared to Japan.
Hmm, China has 20% of the pop. and 13% of GDP. Now consider USA(USA,USA,USA), 5% of pop. and 13% (?)of GDP aaand if you extract all the nonproductive members like the tree hugging,tofu eaten, gun grabbing, baby killing pinko commie liberal fags… looks like the HWA can carry the FSA for about 240 yrs. Tick tock
Whoever it was who said that humans behave like microbes in a petri dish, wasn’t too far wrong. No matter how vast our resources, we will always breed and consume to their limits. It seems to be human nature.
One could wish that, with these great, abstracting brains of ours, heh heh, we could behave better than a yeast culture, and acquire enough self-control to stay comfortably within the bounds of our resource endowment and maintain a comfortable reserve. However, it seems that the only way to keep our population and consumption growth within the bounds of available resources is for the Four Horsemen to step in, which looks to be happening about now.
Anybody in Australia? Sell your house. Llpoh excepted – he can weather a big crash. Plus he has a teepee, just in case.