The first China shock came about when they started producing huge volumes of cheap goods. It drove lots of western manufacturers out of business
The second one is now, where they’ve moved up the value chain to be on par or above western manufacturers in terms of complexity and quality. Cars are the obvious example but all through supply chains you can almost guarantee Chinese manufacturers are producing the same thing, but much cheaper. Most western companies simply cannot compete, nor can many Chinese ones with their only ability to stay alive as being as a result of state subsidies.
There’s another I think, though not from China specifically, but with AI and software. It can produce software right now at huge volumes but for now targets the low end. It can write complex codebases but requires plenty of human handholding.
Does the Jevons paradox hold for any of this? The original Jevons found it about coal where as it becomes cheaper we can consume more of it. But the tools to consume more coal are fixed costs, it takes little more to burn more coal once you’ve a furnace built so when the coal gets cheaper it makes lots of sense to keep it fired up with more coal. The new things like sensors or cars or software - are they the same? Can we really use that much more of those? In some cases yes but also the demand has to be there for it. And furthermore whatever is produced needs to be something with a unique advantage else it will also just get chased away by the same processes that already exist for all other parts of the chain.
The original China shock resulted in lots of cheap goods of which plenty were probably not at all necessary. Software, sensors, cars and whatever else are going through another shock which