It’s difficult to talk about China without getting caught up in Yellow Peril politics, fuelled by old Anglo…

It’s difficult to talk about China without getting caught up in Yellow Peril politics, fuelled by old Anglo reactionary societies in the last gasps of their empires. But China’s industrial capacity is surely one of the greatest wonders of our age. /1 https://t.co/IQ5XIsKoqJ

Have a look at its car production, easily more than triple the next greatest producer, the US. And it’s far and away the greatest force behind the needed shift to EVs. It also builds much of our renewable energy technology. Like Japan and then Korea, it also learns fast. /2 https://t.co/pobF5iHw9e

Early Chinese vehicles, like early Japanese and Korean vehicles, suffered from quality problems. But all 3 nations were able to do something revolutionary, fast. Begin to produce vehicles of extraordinary quality, at only a fraction of the cost of European luxury brands. /3

Some will of course say this is due to their much lower wages and poorer working conditions, though I don’t think that’s true for Japan or even South Korea now. Our lazy, entitled old Western empires exported nearly our entire manufacturing bases, to China. /4

In the free market fanaticism of the 1980s, through to the early 2000s, and still today. The Chinese were smart and hard-working enough to turn that to their advantage. Most of their industrial output now doesn’t even come back to us. It goes to other parts of Asia. /5 https://t.co/bkBWsyZLew

This is how empires tend to end, with lazy complacency, populations drunk on recreational lifestyles that they think happen by themselves, with the actual work invisible. The Anglo world has belatedly realised this, and in Oz, the UK and US manufacturing is a priority again. /6

I suspect it’s too late. At the same time you’ll see lots of stories of not enough skilled workers or expertise. It takes decades to build this sort of industrial capacity. We had it and gave it away due to ridiculous zealots and their free market beliefs. /7

Countries who build things, survive. Not just ‘economically’, building things is the key to social stability. It’s the only thing that can bypass the otherwise eternal strife and disagreement that comes from conflicting human desires. Building things creates social discipline. /8

The West is now bogged down in its fatally flawed ideas about democracies being places where everybody gets up every day and just utters their opinions, on everything. Producing nothing, except hot air and conflict. Building things requires structure and routine. /9

A calm, measured focus on practical problem-solving. Exactly what we now need, rather than the daily meaningless babble of disagreement and clashing ideologies. You don’t need to be ‘Left’ or ‘Right’ to build a car. You need to be engineers and tradespeople. /10

Until we recognise that sensible, calm, problem-focused *building* of things is what used to be at the core of our successful societies, nothing will change. And it will become the Asian century. Or millennium. /end