Twaddle to the right, twaddle to the left, and not a drop to drink. In contemplating China’s meteoric rise (though on thought I am not sure that meteors rise) Americans usually attribute it to cheap labor or theft of intellectual property or unfair governmental subsidies. But our religious faith in free enterprise, in which individuals and companies compete with each other in Darwinian fashion to produce winners, isn’t working. China seems to have a better approach. Call it pragmatism, intelligent design, or the idea that if it works, do it.
Having passed part of a misspent life in East Asia, I subscribe to Asia Times, Nikkei Asia, the South china Morning Post and, being something of a tech head, I haunt tech sites. The China reported in these, and that I see on trips, isnot remotely the China that is imagined by many in the West.
The American media, whether by intention or inattention, do not convey the scale of what the Chinese are doing. Multiple extremely high-voltage power lines thousands of miles in length carrying power from solar farms in the northwest to cities in the southeast. Over 25,000 miles of fast, quiet, comfortable rail. New dams. Factories automated to the point of almost seeming alive. Astonishing bridges. On and on. Why does this happen there, and not here?
Because America has a corrupt, inefficient, and outmoded economic system rotted by an impractical and equally outmoded society, often managed by incompetents if not actual fools. It cannot compete against China’s multiple advantages. Let us consider these.
Advantage One: China is a nation of engineers, America of lawyers. Of the 535 members of Congress, eight are engineers. In a world dominated by science and engineering, a country ruled by technical illiterates will be at a disadvantage. And is.
Advantage Two: China’s government is a serious enterprise within the limits of human fallibility. The United States government is not. America chooses its leaders not for competence but by popularity contests among provincial lawyers. No President since Jimmy Carter could calculate the first derivative of sin x, freshman calculus. No one on the House China Committee reads, writes, or speaks Chinese, or has a university degree in East Asian studies. A friend of mine, a former US senator, once estimated to me that ninety percent of the Senate doesn’t know where Myan Mar is. Of the forty members of the House Science Committee, there are one or two scientists, depending on definition. This is not serious governance.
Advantage Three: China is authoritarian. This means that if (an engineering-oriented) Beijing decides that China needs a high-speed rail line between A and B, construction begins the next day. California has tried for a couple of decades to run a high-speed line between Los Angeles and San Francisco at great expense and with no results. America will never have high-speed rail because the line will run through a black ghetto or an Indian burial ground that the Indians have forgotten and there will be fifteen lawsuits over the route and the airlines will bribe Congress to block the project because it would gut their business. No one has the authority to take a decision and make it stick.
Advantage Four: Hard to prove and impossible to quantify, the Chinese have an affinity for business that seems almost genetic. They are competitive to the far edge of cutthroat and commercially agile. When a new technology appears, such as 5G or Deepseek, it quickly becomes embedded in other products. Almost carnivorous, Chinese often go first for market share and for profit later. They have been called the Jews of Asia and are often hated because overseas Chinese frequently end up dominating business in other countries, sometimes resulting in riots. In the United States, Chinese are greatly over-represented in tech and the sciences.
Advantage Five: China is not democratic, at least not in the Western sense. This means that policy is not shaped by whims of a public ignorant of underlying complexities. It also means that the Chinese can undertake projects lasting for as many years as needed. Policy does not change every two, four, or six years. In America one President is for imigration or green energy or electric cars, the next one against, the following one for, and so on. By contrast China, having decided that fast rail was essential to the country’s future, kept building year after year until, at last count, it has over 25,000 miles. this pattern of sustained, focused effort over many years is common in China.
Advantage Six: China’s approach to foreign policy is primarily commercial and America’s, military. Beijing has one, small, overseas military base, at Djibouti. America has some 750. Around the world China builds sea ports, factories, and rail lines. America builds military bases.
Further, China is cautious, apparently regarding wars as stupid, unpredictable, and expensive. Since 1830 it has started only two wars, the annexation of Tibet and a short war with Vietnam in 1979. By contrast, in just the last year America has bombed Yemen, bombed Somalia, bombed Iran, supplied Kiev with weaponry to sustain America’s proxy war with Russia, armed and protected Israel’s massacre of Palestinians, bombed Venezuelan boats, threatened to attack Venezuela, and prepares seriously to start a war with China.
China’s pacific policy is more practical than moral. It does not mean that the Chinese are warm and fuzzy. China is a police state, though not nearly as disagreeable as, say, North Korea or the old Soviet Union. I presume without knowledge that it has torture camps to equal Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and CIA black sites. It does mean that they have a different approach: Make money, not war.
Note that in the trade war, America is tactically aggressive but strategically defensive. In industry after industry, it cannot compete with China or, increasingly, with the developing world. The economic and technological center of gravity moves inexorably toward Asia. Consequently America has to use strong arm measures to fend off the Chinese commercial juggernaut.
For example, America once dominated in automobiles but now resorts to tariffs to exclude superior Chinese electric vehicles. America, whose technological dominance was once absolute, now has to strongarm Taiwan into building semiconductor fabs in-Arizona. China has replaced the US as the dominant manufacturing power, in scale, technology, and efficiency. When China burst on the scene with 5G, the US, unable to make a better product at a better price, banned Huawei from the country and twisted arms in europe to make what amount to vassals do the same. Washington is now alarmed at China’s rate of advance in things from reusable launch vehicles to semiconductors, in the latter case not competing but trying to prevent China from accessing American tech in one of few fields in which the US still dominates.
The American attempt to prevent China from using American technology unsurprisingly spurs Beijing to try to develop indigenous tech to replace American. When China decides that it needs something, it throws money and engineers at it for as long as it takes. this would seem to make perfect sense, and works, but the US can neither decide nor throw. You can’t develop dominant ship-building, or electric cars, or manufacturing by sitting around and hoping that someone will come along and do it.
Consider Tian Jian, a Chinese automated seaport that operates twenty-four seven, without people, its cranes automatically putting containers on trucks that drive themselves to wherever needed. Such ports do not grow up in isolation. For example, an automated seaport requires steel, self-driving electric trucks, a mature electric-vehicle industry to supply the trucks, advanced batteries for the trucks, a trained work force, advanced 5G or better, advanced automation engineering, excellent universities to provide the engineers, and good pre-university schooling to make the engineers possible. Behind all this is civil engineering that supplies highways, bridges, electricity, mines, and raw materials. China has all of these. America? Almost none. We are seeing WASP rot on a continental scale. This does not bode well for the attempt to regenerate America as a dominant manufacturing power.
While I have not questioned Xi Jin Ping on this matter, I will guess confidently that such an all-encompassing supply chain did not sprang up without planning. It is equaled nowhere in the world. This leaves Washington with two choices: stop trying to dominate the world, or war.
When I studied business 35 years ago there was a lot of talk about Japanese manufacturing methods and how with tools like Quality Circles they would use the intelligence of their normal production staff to propose and introduce process improvements.
These techniques didn’t seem to work in UK.
It seems pretty clear to me that what Japan really had was much higher and ambitious production staff than UK. After all a japanese factory worker had good basic education, limited options as an office worker and was likely earning much more than his or her Dad.
You can make the comparison with Industrial revolution Brits or 1930s-60s Americans.
Or 2000+ Chinese.
As Apple says, they don’t produce in China becuase the workers are cheap. They produce there because the workers are highly skilled, industrial management excellent, and there are chains of related industries to provide necessary parts and services.
the engineer vs lawyer observation was made 35 years ago vis-a-vis japan. as well as the short term event horizon for american bizness chiefs. both timely warnings and as valid as they have been ignored.
for the last 20 years half of the political leadership hates america. their law school perfessers taught them how.
what did you think radically transform meant ?
this is occurring at the mathematical point in time where the currency, national debt, inflation has gone asymptotic. it’s been predicted for over 45 years that i’ve been reading ( to hit more or less about now ).
prepare as best you can. the die was cast long ago. the peepul making the “ decisions “ back then figured they would be dead by now and some one else would have to worry about it.
there’s a continent full of peepul named some one else. more and more have been waking up. when the rest are forced to wake up, things will be the definition of interesting times.