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drob518 14 hours ago [-]
New title: SK Hynix CEO is desperate for memory chip shortage to last until 2030 or longer
Fixed it for you.
2OEH8eoCRo0 14 hours ago [-]
SK hynix CEO compelled by CEO obligations to paint a rosy and sustainable picture of memory chip demand.
Aloha 13 hours ago [-]
I dont think he's wrong.
Dell is making moves to introduce server grade hardware without ECC memory.
There is plenty of DDR5, its not even very expensive, its DDR5-ECC where the prices go stratospheric.
mmastrac 13 hours ago [-]
Do you have a source for more info? That seems odd to me - LLMs are particularly resilient to bitflips, so if anything the demand would pull on DDR5 in general, not on ECC specifically.
seanmcdirmid 13 hours ago [-]
DDR-5 is still expensive, at least until China can get more production online.
well_ackshually 13 hours ago [-]
>There is plenty of DDR5, its not even very expensive,
My 2x16GB of DDR5-6000 that I bought for 250€ is now 650€. 2x32GB that cost 200€ last July now goes for close to 1250€. Even my shitty ass DDR4-3000 sticks from over ten years ago would be selling for close to 300€.
DDR5 is horribly expensive, the only variants that are not as expensive are low frequencies or low amounts.
2OEH8eoCRo0 13 hours ago [-]
The point is that he must say this either way. If he expected demand to decline next year do you think he would come out and say that?
simongr3dal 13 hours ago [-]
Why not? The income statements can’t lie. And if those fall short of expectations then the stock market is also gonna grill you.
2OEH8eoCRo0 12 hours ago [-]
Why wouldn't a memory CEO go on tv and say they expect the AI bubble to pop by the end of the year?
mey 15 hours ago [-]
No projections/information/analysis. The statement from someone with a vested interest in this demand lasting an extended period of time (including the statement that demand will continue past 2030).
thijson 15 hours ago [-]
I remember in the 90's there was some sort of shortage reportedly due to fires. In the end it was found the shortage was due to collusion by the manufacturers.
Is the thing that’s different now that the colluders are banking on is that we are in a worldwide kleptocracy?
toast0 13 hours ago [-]
After the first two times, do they even need to collude?
Can't they count on each other doing the profitable thing? Especially when they PR it:
> Furthermore, focused investment in HBM is creating a virtuous cycle that improves profitability in the general-purpose memory market. As resources are diverted to HBM, the supply-demand balance for general DRAM is improving.
But fortunely today we know that there is huge demand due to AI
Danox 12 hours ago [-]
Is it actual demand or is it just a future IOU? I will buy ram in the future keep the door open for me (OpenAI)?
I think whatever happens it will be their last big payday because some of the companies that can do have the money and the capability are going to make plans to move away. From the Cartel.
my-huge-pony 10 hours ago [-]
In theory, shouldn't he say exactly the opposite thing if this was the goal?
If demand is projected continue for a long time, this may encourage more competitors to enter this space, so supply will increase.
On the other hand if everyone thought that the demand will end soon, nobody would invest in more capacity and shortage would last longer.
I think this is just for short term shareholder profit.
greycol 7 hours ago [-]
No because, some companies know they'll need ram, but they may have some leeway on timing (i.e. doing more to prolong the life of systems they'd typically replace). That means to guarantee ram they need to enter an agreement to buy the ram now. By setting the expectation that these prices continue or get worse companies that may have put off agreeing to these terms locking in prices based on demand rather than something closer to the cost of production. The agreements that these companies are being forced to make are upfront payment and then a top up to meet current market prices before delivery, there is no downside for these ram companies whether the price rises or falls (at worst they end up with supply that was already payed for by a bust company at a healthy margin and a glut in the market that would arrive anyway)
Competitors are going to come online anyway because of the threat of chip embargoes against China that mean they are investing in production regardless of what the outside world is doing.
bigbadfeline 5 hours ago [-]
> If demand is projected continue for a long time, this may encourage more competitors to enter this space, so supply will increase.
There are no competitors that can muster the capital to make decent RAM... other than China but China is under a heavy sanctions and tariffs regime, when Apple mentioned using Chinese RAM to ease pricing they were quickly shushed by above.
The current monopolists aren't building new capacity either or are simply pretending to do it. It's a planned monopoly market for reasons I can only speculate about.
FLeXMurphy 14 hours ago [-]
Assume the person knows something you don't.
mey 14 hours ago [-]
They know many things I don't. I can easily assume they have a specific reason to make a public statement that is within their interests. Without any reports/prospectus/booked contracts, it's just marketing/spin.
dgellow 13 hours ago [-]
Tell me when you’re looking for a new bridge, I have the best ones around
PowerElectronix 14 hours ago [-]
He could just have said "lasting forever and ever".
It's ram chips, the bottom of the barrel of semi manufacturing. If you get high prices for long enough, everyone is gonna jump into the market.
Whom exactly? Korea and Taiwan are already saturated. EU may take 5 yearrs just to approve plans formnew factory. US is interested in super fast super duper AIG, ddr5 is way too boring.
Only competitor is mainlaind china!
Danox 11 hours ago [-]
In my opinion, Apple will design around the memory cartel. They possess the financial resources, design, and engineering capabilities in-house (Apple Silicon).
Apple acquired Infineon from Intel, which was struggling, and developed an in-house modem. They certainly have the expertise to design memory and SSDs (PA Semi, Intrinsity, Anobit).
I believe Apple must implement this strategy if they intend to build their devices, and advance into the future in a timely manner, and Apple has demonstrated its ability to execute over time when necessary. This is undoubtedly one of those critical times.
I anticipate that the memory cartel will eventually experience its final significant financial gain, and those who can will design around them.
Yes, it will take time 2 to 4 years but that is nothing took 13 years to replace Intel and six years to replace Qualcomm which has already warned its investors on Apple, leaving them.
petcat 13 hours ago [-]
> EU may take 5 years just to approve plans for a new factory.
Who is going to build a memory chip fab in Europe? Qimonda collapsed into insolvency 20+ years ago and Infineon has long since abandoned the market.
drob518 13 hours ago [-]
DDR5 might be boring, but the high prices are strangling the tech market, including AI. It can’t keep this up much longer. Someone needs to step up and make more. I’m surprised the USA hasn’t offered money to TSMC, Intel, or Micron to expand manufacturing under the CHIPS act or whatever to help ease this shortage.
UltraSane 12 hours ago [-]
All the players are investing hundreds of billions of dollars (US) into new fabs. But SK Hynix said customers are signing 5 year contracts which used to be unheard of.
actionfromafar 12 hours ago [-]
As soon as they figure out how to grift money to the Trump family. But they have such a backlog, it might take a while to figure out the details.
worldofmatthew 13 hours ago [-]
> mainlaind china
Exactly. China wil push for it as China factories will supply Chinese AI first.
geodel 13 hours ago [-]
But for now can't EU regulate the RAM price? They seem to be able to do what they want.
fidotron 13 hours ago [-]
It's great how these days it's so much harder to tell if this is a joke.
Danox 11 hours ago [-]
Lawyers/politicians in the EU wait years before they do anything usually it’s after the damage has already been done. The only thing they will do is issue a fine after the fact.
newsclues 13 hours ago [-]
Micron makes memory in the USA.
mhaberl 13 hours ago [-]
DDR5??
dude, DDR6 was planned for 2027 in 07/2025 [1]
No one is going to build factories in 2026 to produce DDR5.
With RAM so profitable it makes sense to invest in new factories to build it. This should in time increase supply and decrease price but it takes a good 5 years for a new RAM fab to start producing.
nashashmi 13 hours ago [-]
Given the possibility of setting up new memory fab plants takes 10 years, given that data companies are spending money on power plants based on power consumption forecasts, but are not spending on memory fab plants, I take it that data companies are seeing the current memory makers as sufficient for their needs.
Meaning if the avg consumer is going to buy memory, they are going to have to fork a whole lot more money than they did before, because they will be paying the price of profit generating data companies.
The next phase of improvements will have to be in consumer software to be more memory efficient. Gone are the days of electron apps and other memory intensive systems of programming./
Danox 11 hours ago [-]
It takes $10-$20 billion dollars and 2 to 4 years to set up a foundry, TSMC took about four years to set up their location in Arizona and there is a hell of a lot more involved with what they do. It’s not impossible to do it in less time the Chinese certainly will.
If a company is motivated and has the money they can get it done. I think those three memory companies are counting on people to be stupid.
Intel, Nvidia, and Qualcomm certainly thought they had Apple over the barrel…
alephnerd 7 hours ago [-]
Foundries aren't the blocker - it's packaging and OSAT that's the blocker.
vikramkr 13 hours ago [-]
That's like 3 and a half years away? I can see that - fabs don't get built overnight and bubbles aren't under any obligation to pop on a timeline. Wild that 2030 is not that far away. Sometimes it feels like we never left 2020.
theandrewbailey 12 hours ago [-]
> Sometimes it feels like we never left 2020.
There's still a part of me that thinks 2020 will be the bright shiny future that will solve all our problems, but the other parts know that 2020 showed us that we live in the dark future where all our dreams died.
marcosscriven 13 hours ago [-]
What are the limiting factors here?
Clearly it’s the fabrication of RAM/HBM chips. But if the margin is so high, why can’t other fabs like CPU fabs be used? I assume they’re not as CPU prices are going down. Or are they radically different and not easily reconfigured?
alex43578 13 hours ago [-]
Very different processes. Even setting up a new CPU design in a fab that already makes CPU dies is months of validation, for context.
Taqas 13 hours ago [-]
Given economy of scale, on the long-term can we expect lower than 2019 RAM prices?
alephnerd 14 hours ago [-]
Honestly surprised by the degree of skepticism about this on HN.
The rack assemblers like Dell, HPE, Supermicro, and Lenovo have 18 to 24 month backlogs on deliveries at the moment, and even the neoclouds have 6-9 month backlogs to onboard customers onto their SaaS platforms, and 12-24 month backlogs for delivering bare metal. All those require memory.
Also, 2030 is barely 3 years away from now as 2027 is around the corner. Yes we are ALL old now.
Using priors from 2015-2019 today is the equivalent of thinking your experience in 1995-1999 should inform decisions made in 2008-2013.
vlucas 13 hours ago [-]
Same. There is huge, real demand for memory and storage everywhere you look. New capacity takes 3-5 years to come online. Every vendor has completely sold out capacity and is backlogged on top of that. This 5-year estimate is actually pretty realistic to me. I think we are stuck with high prices on these components for at least the next 3 years, minimum.
Danox 11 hours ago [-]
There are some companies who need the memory right now and there are others the AI people who are just issuing future buying IOUs and I might buy some memory from you in the future and the cartel is using that as leverage to get more money out of the companies that really need memory right away.
At the end of this fiasco, there will be some companies that will move on from the cartel.
boredhedgehog 13 hours ago [-]
> New capacity takes 3-5 years to come online.
Why should that be set in stone? Surely there are corners that can be cut if there's so much profit on the table.
porridgeraisin 13 hours ago [-]
At a basic level, the steps involved in setting up a fab are extremely serial in nature. While there are ways in which each step has been cost-cut in the past, amdahl's law itself limits it to a minimum of 2-3 years. If you want good yields and do it more properly, you will need 3-5 like GP said. And that is still being optimistic
Additionally, HBM requires 3+ times the capacity of DRAM, so it gets crowded out. They do command 5x margins, so the unit economics is ok. But this means that even new capacity will mostly be used to service HBM demand, and consumer or enterprise DRAM is unlikely to benefit at the same pace - it will benefit somewhat of course.
NitpickLawyer 13 hours ago [-]
I think that a lot of people miss key aspects of the AI boom. Even discounting the skeptics, and the bubblers, crashers, etc.
There are a bunch of things that happen in parallel to the AI boom:
a) everyone and their mother is building out capacity. For each GB of VRAM installed, you generally want at least 1 GB of RAM, if not more. So just take nvda's numbers and go from there. And that's just for the GPU servers. But you also need ancillary services around GPU farms. You need some compute for filtering, preprocessing, you need data storage, and so on. And they're all RAM hungry processes.
b) RL is giving lots of capabilities improvements for AI, but it needs lots and lots of parallel runners for scenarios. Those runners need RAM. So every bit of non-GPU capacity is also being used, and more installed.
c) With increasing capabilities comes increasing usage. Everyone is deploying "agents" and those need to run somewhere, and they take RAM (especially the badly coded ones). There've also been reports of labs / big players hoovering up every mac available, for "agentic computer control" / training / whatever. That's on top of people buying them to run "24/7" stuff a la claw/hermes/etc.
In all of this, RAM is the bottleneck. And for the skeptics, you don't have to take hynix's word for it. Just look at the sales for CPUs / Mobos. They're down, because building a computer now is bottlenecked at RAM.
Danox 11 hours ago [-]
I think it will be their last big payday. I think they’re forgetting that you can design around them. It just takes 2 to 4 years. It’s not good business in the long run to piss off your customers cause you may not get them back.
xnx 13 hours ago [-]
Agree. Also lots of suppressed demand at current prices. If prices return to anything like pre-AI, demand would grow dramatically.
DuckConference 12 hours ago [-]
Those skeptical are anticipating a possible large drop in demand before that backlog clears. ie. a change in market conditions that means that many of the orders in that backlog would be cancelled or belong to bankrupt entities.
Many words have already been spilled as to whether or not that might happen, so I'll just shrug rather than adding to them.
Danox 11 hours ago [-]
I’m surprised by the skepticism too. You need look no further the Chinese who certainly will do it and I think one company in America will do it too much is riding on getting the right products out in time.
dgellow 13 hours ago [-]
Who are those ram bottleneck skeptics you’re referring to? I cannot see them. I don’t know anyone who isn’t aware the AI rollout is responsible for years to come of bottleneck of HBM and other hardware
porridgeraisin 12 hours ago [-]
Just see the top of this thread. The theme of the comments is that the SK Hynix, Micron, etc CEOs are lying about this in order to collectively increase prices artificially.
Danox 11 hours ago [-]
They are they are taking future IOU from AI companies and presenting that as an actual sale and telling the other people/customers who need memory right away, you have to pay more.
porridgeraisin 9 hours ago [-]
No, semi fabs do not take IOUs or other similar. They only do prepayments and non cancellable take or pay contracts. The money is here and real.
There is a lot of SPV backed financial engineering upstream, but not here.
dgellow 12 hours ago [-]
I mean, they do. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a bottleneck. They control the supply and are taking advantage of the situation to increase their margin as much as they can while limiting their expansion (they have some valid arguments though, given the memory cycles). And it is for sure to their advantage to have the industry accept their high margins for years to come.
I read the threads and don’t see unwarranted skepticism
porridgeraisin 12 hours ago [-]
Some of the backlogs apart from the "top level" one are not being viewed that positively from what I have heard. One of my football friends works at Vertiv's India office, soon transferring to Thane, they basically sell cooling infra for these hyperscalers. They have an insane amount of backlogs but because they are a "spoke" component, the backlog is super volatile. Like some power generation related delay or permit issue will randomly de-scale or cancel projects. And its really difficult to calculate risk of all that and maintain the book.
alephnerd 9 hours ago [-]
Yep. DCs are extremely capex heavy, so these backlogs can make or break entire projects and are super high risk as a result. That's why tax holidays and subsidizes have become so common for these projects.
reducesuffering 13 hours ago [-]
You've been here awhile, this forum is default incredibly skeptical and critical, especially when it comes to AI. It has been to their predictive detriment for many years now. AI bubble conviction is over 2 years now, $300b NVDA profits since. AI tool adoption has completely encompassed any tech savvy office and isn't going anywhere. Broken records.
dgellow 13 hours ago [-]
None of those points disprove a bubble. And it’s not unusual for a bubble to take years to inflate before a correction
13 hours ago [-]
cute_boi 11 hours ago [-]
I just hope CXMT wins this rat race. These monopolies sucks.
glimshe 12 hours ago [-]
In other news, Exxon sees growing oil demand in the foreseeable future.
fakedang 13 hours ago [-]
Memory chip shortage lasting *until China floods the market with their cheaper but rigged chips.
FTFY. At the rate China's moving on this, it won't be long till they get a stranglehold on the consumer chip market.
alex43578 13 hours ago [-]
What’s a “rigged” chip in this context?
13 hours ago [-]
jm4 13 hours ago [-]
I took it to mean backdoored similar to the NSA's tailored access operations or the Supermicro backdoor several years ago.
well_ackshually 13 hours ago [-]
It's chips that work just as well, except that they make the original poster sad because china bad.
fakedang 7 hours ago [-]
Are we still fooling ourselves thinking that China is such a benevolent manufacturing partner? I don't mind China - heck, I've even had dinner with some CCP honchos and would gladly partner with the Chinese given the right opportunity. But you're deluding yourself if you think Chinese devices aren't backdoored.
We had to strip all of our office infra from Huawei to Ericsson and Axis after we found that practically everything Chinese was phoning back to home and sending GBs of data cumulatively.
You can respect an adversary without needing to trust them.
Danox 11 hours ago [-]
The Chinese will use this stupidity by the memory cartel to get into the worldwide memory market it is a perfect entry point and they will sell to anyone who wants to buy no strings attached.
All you need to do is look at the way they do business across the world. They don’t want to be your mama and they don’t wanna be your daddy. They just want to close a business deal. The art of selling and trading is a hell of a lot older in China than the so-called communist party which only dates from 1921 in China. In short labeling them communist is very shortsighted The culture is thousands of years old.
fakedang 7 hours ago [-]
Every time China visits, we get a hospital; every time the West visits, we get a lecture. - some African dude.
Honestly I don't mind the Chinese approach - at least you don't get bullied, unlike dealing with America. Of course, experiences vary if you're in their sphere of influence.
catigula 14 hours ago [-]
Aren't they printing unlimited money from this? I'm sure the chip shortage lasts as long as they're capable of extending it without falling to competitors.
That's the problem with monopolies.
Danox 11 hours ago [-]
I am confident it will be their last big payday for the Cartel the Chinese certainly will design around it and move on and probably will go onto dominate the worldwide market after 2028. Afterwards Micron like Intel will go around begging for support. Using future buying IOUs to set prices, it’s going to bite them in the ass.
catigula 10 hours ago [-]
China will eventually do similar things if they're allowed to become a unitary supplier, but while they're establishing their foothold obviously they can't.
Fixed it for you.
Dell is making moves to introduce server grade hardware without ECC memory.
There is plenty of DDR5, its not even very expensive, its DDR5-ECC where the prices go stratospheric.
My 2x16GB of DDR5-6000 that I bought for 250€ is now 650€. 2x32GB that cost 200€ last July now goes for close to 1250€. Even my shitty ass DDR4-3000 sticks from over ten years ago would be selling for close to 300€.
DDR5 is horribly expensive, the only variants that are not as expensive are low frequencies or low amounts.
https://share.google/aimode/ewJpwCHUINOHzjBVg
https://www.polygon.com/ram-manufacturers-sued-supply-price-...
Can't they count on each other doing the profitable thing? Especially when they PR it:
> Furthermore, focused investment in HBM is creating a virtuous cycle that improves profitability in the general-purpose memory market. As resources are diverted to HBM, the supply-demand balance for general DRAM is improving.
January 5, 2026 - SK hynix market outlook.
https://news.skhynix.com/en/2026-market-outlook-focus-on-the...
I think whatever happens it will be their last big payday because some of the companies that can do have the money and the capability are going to make plans to move away. From the Cartel.
If demand is projected continue for a long time, this may encourage more competitors to enter this space, so supply will increase.
On the other hand if everyone thought that the demand will end soon, nobody would invest in more capacity and shortage would last longer.
I think this is just for short term shareholder profit.
Competitors are going to come online anyway because of the threat of chip embargoes against China that mean they are investing in production regardless of what the outside world is doing.
There are no competitors that can muster the capital to make decent RAM... other than China but China is under a heavy sanctions and tariffs regime, when Apple mentioned using Chinese RAM to ease pricing they were quickly shushed by above.
The current monopolists aren't building new capacity either or are simply pretending to do it. It's a planned monopoly market for reasons I can only speculate about.
It's ram chips, the bottom of the barrel of semi manufacturing. If you get high prices for long enough, everyone is gonna jump into the market.
Whom exactly? Korea and Taiwan are already saturated. EU may take 5 yearrs just to approve plans formnew factory. US is interested in super fast super duper AIG, ddr5 is way too boring.
Only competitor is mainlaind china!
Apple acquired Infineon from Intel, which was struggling, and developed an in-house modem. They certainly have the expertise to design memory and SSDs (PA Semi, Intrinsity, Anobit).
I believe Apple must implement this strategy if they intend to build their devices, and advance into the future in a timely manner, and Apple has demonstrated its ability to execute over time when necessary. This is undoubtedly one of those critical times.
I anticipate that the memory cartel will eventually experience its final significant financial gain, and those who can will design around them.
Yes, it will take time 2 to 4 years but that is nothing took 13 years to replace Intel and six years to replace Qualcomm which has already warned its investors on Apple, leaving them.
Who is going to build a memory chip fab in Europe? Qimonda collapsed into insolvency 20+ years ago and Infineon has long since abandoned the market.
Exactly. China wil push for it as China factories will supply Chinese AI first.
dude, DDR6 was planned for 2027 in 07/2025 [1] No one is going to build factories in 2026 to produce DDR5.
[1] https://www.techpowerup.com/339178/ddr6-memory-arrives-in-20...
Meaning if the avg consumer is going to buy memory, they are going to have to fork a whole lot more money than they did before, because they will be paying the price of profit generating data companies.
The next phase of improvements will have to be in consumer software to be more memory efficient. Gone are the days of electron apps and other memory intensive systems of programming./
If a company is motivated and has the money they can get it done. I think those three memory companies are counting on people to be stupid.
Intel, Nvidia, and Qualcomm certainly thought they had Apple over the barrel…
There's still a part of me that thinks 2020 will be the bright shiny future that will solve all our problems, but the other parts know that 2020 showed us that we live in the dark future where all our dreams died.
Clearly it’s the fabrication of RAM/HBM chips. But if the margin is so high, why can’t other fabs like CPU fabs be used? I assume they’re not as CPU prices are going down. Or are they radically different and not easily reconfigured?
The rack assemblers like Dell, HPE, Supermicro, and Lenovo have 18 to 24 month backlogs on deliveries at the moment, and even the neoclouds have 6-9 month backlogs to onboard customers onto their SaaS platforms, and 12-24 month backlogs for delivering bare metal. All those require memory.
Also, 2030 is barely 3 years away from now as 2027 is around the corner. Yes we are ALL old now.
Using priors from 2015-2019 today is the equivalent of thinking your experience in 1995-1999 should inform decisions made in 2008-2013.
At the end of this fiasco, there will be some companies that will move on from the cartel.
Why should that be set in stone? Surely there are corners that can be cut if there's so much profit on the table.
Additionally, HBM requires 3+ times the capacity of DRAM, so it gets crowded out. They do command 5x margins, so the unit economics is ok. But this means that even new capacity will mostly be used to service HBM demand, and consumer or enterprise DRAM is unlikely to benefit at the same pace - it will benefit somewhat of course.
There are a bunch of things that happen in parallel to the AI boom:
a) everyone and their mother is building out capacity. For each GB of VRAM installed, you generally want at least 1 GB of RAM, if not more. So just take nvda's numbers and go from there. And that's just for the GPU servers. But you also need ancillary services around GPU farms. You need some compute for filtering, preprocessing, you need data storage, and so on. And they're all RAM hungry processes.
b) RL is giving lots of capabilities improvements for AI, but it needs lots and lots of parallel runners for scenarios. Those runners need RAM. So every bit of non-GPU capacity is also being used, and more installed.
c) With increasing capabilities comes increasing usage. Everyone is deploying "agents" and those need to run somewhere, and they take RAM (especially the badly coded ones). There've also been reports of labs / big players hoovering up every mac available, for "agentic computer control" / training / whatever. That's on top of people buying them to run "24/7" stuff a la claw/hermes/etc.
In all of this, RAM is the bottleneck. And for the skeptics, you don't have to take hynix's word for it. Just look at the sales for CPUs / Mobos. They're down, because building a computer now is bottlenecked at RAM.
Many words have already been spilled as to whether or not that might happen, so I'll just shrug rather than adding to them.
There is a lot of SPV backed financial engineering upstream, but not here.
I read the threads and don’t see unwarranted skepticism
FTFY. At the rate China's moving on this, it won't be long till they get a stranglehold on the consumer chip market.
We had to strip all of our office infra from Huawei to Ericsson and Axis after we found that practically everything Chinese was phoning back to home and sending GBs of data cumulatively.
You can respect an adversary without needing to trust them.
All you need to do is look at the way they do business across the world. They don’t want to be your mama and they don’t wanna be your daddy. They just want to close a business deal. The art of selling and trading is a hell of a lot older in China than the so-called communist party which only dates from 1921 in China. In short labeling them communist is very shortsighted The culture is thousands of years old.
Honestly I don't mind the Chinese approach - at least you don't get bullied, unlike dealing with America. Of course, experiences vary if you're in their sphere of influence.
That's the problem with monopolies.