John Minnich

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268 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 6 Aug

John Minnich’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Unhedged · The Economics Show: China wanted western tech. Now, the tables have turned. · 6 Aug 2026 podcast

training engineers, transferring technology, doing all of these sorts of things.

So Airbus, Boeing, they've all done it.

But I think the more important story when you look at aircraft manufacturing is what's happening at the level of the tier one and tier two suppliers.

So all of the major avionics producers have formed joint ventures or various kinds of partnerships with Comac or with Avic, which is the other major Chinese aircraft manufacturing company.

Most notably, you have General Electric, which formed a joint venture to essentially supply the core avionics system to the C919, and in doing so, transferred an enormous amount of technology and know-how.

So foreign firms are deeply embedded in the sector and providing technology, but most of it is less at the level of system integration, which is what Boeing and Airbus specialize in, and more at the level of how to build these core components, the wings, the engines, the avionics systems, and so on and so forth that go into that finished product.

A lot of factors contribute to this, but the one that I focus on, which I think is really important because it shapes the options that were available to Chinese officials, is where China sat in global production processes in this industry.

So if we contrast semiconductors with these other sectors we've talked about before – aircraft, automotive manufacturing, high-speed rail –

All of these are sectors where China used these policies very, very energetically in the post-WTO period.

In all of these sectors, China was, for all intents and purposes, downstream of global production processes.

It was a final market.

A lot of production happened in China, but everything that entered China stayed in China in the end.

It was consumed there.

In semiconductors, starting in the late 1990s and accelerating dramatically after WTO accession, China became firmly embedded in global production processes as an intermediate export processing hub.

Now, what that meant was that in semiconductors and consumer electronics more broadly,

the vast majority of what entered China didn't stay there.

It was processed locally, assembled into more finished goods, and exported back out to consumers elsewhere.

What this meant was that in these sectors, like semiconductor production, China relied very heavily on foreign multinational enterprises to drive export growth and associated employment.

And of course, the post-WTO period is the period where exports rise to the equivalent of

almost 40% of China's GDP.

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