In response to my post, Corporate Strategy and the Speed of the Supply China, several people commented on their hope that said jobs might one day return to the US and/or they posited the question of why not Mexico rather than China so that goods could be moved into the US more quickly?

If only it were that simple. See this March 3, 2008 WSJ article, US Shoe Factory Finds Supplies are Achilles Heel.

This article beautifully highlights why said jobs, industry and manufacturing left the US and ain’t never coming back. The article discussed how a man with his heart in the right place tried to bring some manufacturing back to the US from China and he set up a shoe manufacturing plant in Florida, he did all that he could to make it work, yet in the end failed.

Why did he fail?

Well, at the end of the day, Chinese labor is cheaper, lots cheaper, than American (and even Mexican) labor, and many just don’t fully understand and appreciate how cheap it is in comparison to these other places. He could just not compete. Perhaps more importantly, the infrastructure needed to make a factory tick no longer exits in the US for most products and industries (and if it does not exist here, it sure does not exist in Mexico in many cases). Note that the term “infrastructure” does not just mean roads and UPS delivery — it also means parts, service professionals for machines, the willingness of a firm’s supporting suppliers to fill smaller orders, etc.

One reason China can offer a more competitive factory “infrastructure” is due to clustering, and we will discuss this in greater detail once we are in the road in China. This is where a number of firms in the same industry set up shop together, or, entire towns in China devote their existence to the production of one product (e.g., sock city, watch city, tie city, etc.). The synergies and efficiencies offered by such clustering are hard to beat.

For a number of products and manufacturing industries … gone baby, gone.

We had some nice blog discussions about China, the Three Gorges dam, environmentalism, economic development and sustainability at the following posts:

• Three Gorges Dam, Current Issues with Historical Context (by Rob Belloni)

• Damn Those Dam Drives (by Prof. Carr)

I always wanted to be an artist, but was never good enough. So, I live vicariously through real artists. While in Beijing a few weeks ago I took a quick side trip and made my annual pilgrimage to check out, at lightning speed due to limited time, some avant garde art at the 798 Art Zone (an old Cold-War weapons factory and buildings that evolved into a SoHo like art district), and I wandered into the Paris-Beijing Photo Gallery and saw an exhibition by Yang Yi.

The promo for his exhibition reads …

In 2009, the Three Gorges Dam will have inundated hundreds of square kilometers in central China. Born in a small town overlooking a tributary of the Yangtze River, Yang Yi will see his hometown being submerged during the last phase of the project.

Striking and haunting him even in his dreams, this bitter assessment left him no choice: He had to capture the remaining specters of the scenery that is soon slated to disappear forever, along with his roots and childhood memories.

Employing mastery of both photography and digital techniques, Yang Yi shows us ghost towns engulfed by water, whose rare inhabitants, fitted out with masks and tubas, go about their daily occupations; they seem like wandering souls having assumed human bodies in order to restore life to their beloved village.

The strength of Yang Yi’s pictures resides in the cult of memories: Soon, bulldozers will destroy what is left, populations will be uprooted and relocated, water will flow everywhere and that small and lively town will become a quiet ruinous field. But still, it will survive forever in their collective memory.

This post is not a political statement. I have no strong feelings about the Three Gorges dam and what feelings I do have about it are mixed. I can see both sides, and in my view they are tough calls. I can appreciate that others may disagree. But the pictures in this exhibition were pretty cool and thought provoking, which is one of the reasons why I admire artists and so wanted to be one (bit failed miserably).   Click HERE to check out some of the photos in this exhibition.