China has remade the world. STR/AFP via Getty Images
In 2004, an unusual crime wave swept cities around the world. Some called it the great drain robbery. Under cover of darkness, thieves were stripping manholes of their heavy iron covers, leaving streets perforated with sudden drops into sewage tunnels. In a single week, the London borough of Newham lost 93 covers. Aberdeen, in Scotland, saw 130 vanish. Chicago was robbed of 150 in a month. In the Indian city of Kolkata, more than 10,000 manhole covers were reportedly stolen over the course of two months.
These thefts were motivated by a phenomenon that commodity traders call a supercycle, meaning an extended period of high prices for raw materials. Since the Industrial Revolution, the world has seen five supercycles, coinciding with major bursts of economic development or war. Those manhole covers had become valuable because the price of iron, an ingredient for the production of steel, was surging. And most of the demand was coming from one country in particular. China was beginning its rise as an industrial giant.
Iron ore was the signal substance of Chinese growth — by 2024, its price was almost 1,000% higher than in 1995 — but all kinds of resources were sucked into the whirlwind: oil and coal, nickel and copper, soybeans and rubber and wool. In recent months, though, analysts have been announcing the end of the two-decade China supercycle. Chinese iron ore consumption is starting to come down, along with steel production. Some reckon its demand for oil may be peaking too. This does not mean that China will stop growing, but the economic patterns are shifting.
As Donald Trump’s tariff experiment now lurches into an escalating trade war with China, it is worth considering the epochal shift that brought us here. The supercycle was an epic chapter carved into the material substrate of our world, reverberating in every corner of the globe. It has raised China, in the space of a generation, from a poor and largely rural society to a superpower that is competing at the frontiers of technology, while controlling the most important resources for the future. It has transformed the developing world. It is implicated with the rise of Trump and, in various ways, with European weakness.
“If you don’t have steel, you don’t have a country,” declared Trump in 2018. The British government seems to agree, as it haggles with Jingye, a Chinese company, to save the UK’s last two remaining blast furnaces. These strands of history can be traced back to the start of the century, when those manhole covers were being cut up into scrap, shipped across oceans, melted down, and fed into Chinese steelmaking convertors.
What set the supercycle in motion? Until the Eighties, China still measured affluence through the humble quartet of a bicycle, a wrist watch, a sewing machine, and a radio. By the turn of the century, however, the country was reaching an inflection point. Its GDP was approaching $4,000 per person, the level at which a society’s demand for resources tends to leap upwards, as consumers buy more manufactured goods and governments build more infrastructure. Crucially, though, China’s transition was supercharged by global trade in the decades following the Cold War. With its enormous, cheap labour force, and its authoritarian government, it was perfectly positioned to become the world’s factory. Just as China was reaching the $4,000-per-head threshold, it gained admission to the World Trade Organisation.
China began sucking in the world’s resources like a drain emptying a bath, turning them into vast cities and infrastructure projects as well as products to be shipped back out to the world. What happened next is best captured in numbers, since language can scarcely convey its sheer scale. In 1995, China’s economic output was one-tenth the size of America’s. By 2021, it was three quarters. Over the same period, the Chinese share of world manufacturing output went from 5% to 30%. Whereas just one-in-five Chinese people lived in cities at the turn of the century, today more than three in five do. So rapid was this urbanisation that, between 2000-2010, China’s villages disappeared at a rate of 300 per day.
In 2003, China had no high-speed rail, but by 2011 it had the world’s biggest network. The country produced more steel in two years than Britain has in almost two centuries. Similarly, China poured more concrete between 2018-20 than the United States has done in its entire history. China melts and refines almost half the world’s copper supply. Chinese oil imports, at 11 million barrels per day, are more or less equivalent to the entire output of Saudi Arabia. China burns 30% more coal than the rest of the world combined, and its consumption is still rising. This means that the Chinese energy system is, by far, the biggest factor determining the future of the climate.
If global trade helped to set this engine running, the Chinese Communist Party pushed it into higher gears. Rather than directing the proceeds of growth towards social safety nets or consumer spending power, the CCP has, until recently, sought to funnel them back into material production. This strategy has helped China become utterly dominant in key supply chains underpinning the modern world, but it has also resulted in prodigious waste and, ultimately, instability. The country’s enormous, debt-swollen property sector, which went into crisis in 2021, threatens to drag the entire economy down. Dozens of concrete “ghost cities” are still awaiting residents, though some are so poorly constructed that they might collapse first. An overworked population faces one of the world’s most daunting fertility deficits. Polluted industrial areas have poisoned their residents and spawned ecological catastrophes.
But Chinese economic development has not only taken place within China itself. A large share of the resources fuelling China’s growth has come from poor and developing regions of the world, whether Brazilian iron ore and soybeans, Congolese copper, Malaysian rubber, or Indonesian nickel. Many of these places have received big Chinese investments in infrastructure, and have become markets for Chinese construction firms and manufactured goods.
The results have been especially dramatic in the world’s poorest continent: Africa. China is the leading purchaser of a wide spectrum of African metals and fossil fuels, and it imports large quantities of African food products, timber and tobacco (China has almost one-third of the world’s smokers). Chinese companies, many of them state-owned, have built more than 300 dams, almost five-dozen power plants, and thousands of kilometres of roads and railways right across Africa. They have constructed an immense apparatus of pipelines and other facilities to access the petroleum reserves of more than a dozen African countries. That’s not to mention the airports, hospitals, and sports stadiums, or the nearly 200 government buildings.
This relationship has undoubtedly brought Africans some benefits, in the form of much-needed government revenues and basic infrastructure that would otherwise not exist. On the other hand, much of this development is designed for resource extraction rather than the needs of ordinary Africans. Much has been financed through exploitative debt arrangements, and much Chinese spending has merely lined the pockets of African politicians. China has stripped African forests for timber, ravaged African wildlife for traditional medicine, and supplied African governments with advanced tools for surveillance and repression.
In 2002, shortly before all of those manhole covers started to vanish, 1,000 Chinese workers arrived in Dortmund, a city in Germany’s Ruhr region. They had come to dismantle a large steelworks. Steel had been produced at the site since 1843, employing 10,000 workers at its peak. Now ThyssenKrupp, a German conglomerate, had agreed to sell the plant to the Chinese firm Shagang.
The enormous industrial edifice, complete with a seven-storey blast furnace, would be packed into crates and shipped 9,000 miles to Handan, a city on the Yangtze River north of Shanghai. It took the Chinese workforce less than a year, toiling 12 hours a day, seven days a week, with scant regard for health and safety precautions. Tens of thousands of parts were meticulously labelled and packed, down to individual screws, requiring some 50 container ships to move. The documents detailing the reassembly process alone weighed 40 tonnes.
Shagang’s steelworks in Handan — which also incorporated equipment from France and Luxembourg — is now the largest in the world. It has helped China’s steel output to surpass that of every other country combined. Back in Dortmund, the site of the former plant is unrecognisable. It has been redeveloped into the Phoenix-See, an artificial lake offering water sports, surrounded by restaurants and ranks of pristine white villas in the International Style. This post-industrial idyll has not, of course, managed to fill the void left by the city’s coal and steel sectors, which employed more than 75,000 people in 1960. When the journalist James Kynge visited Dortmund after the departure of the steel plant, he found widespread unemployment and social disintegration. “Do we look like yachtsmen to you?” a jobless steel worker asked. A local Lutheran priest had a starker message: “Our identity is lost.”
The implications of this story are not exactly what we might expect. Since 2015, when Trump first ran for the presidency, we have become familiar with his account of the “China shock”, or the impact of Chinese growth on manufacturing in the West. According to Trump, China had stolen American blue-collar jobs and grown rich selling America goods that should have been made there. Trump’s trade war against China during his first term was the opening salvo of the radical tariff programme we are seeing today. This view of China’s rise has not gained the same political traction in Europe, but it has become a kind of conventional wisdom. It is because China makes everything, we assume, that areas like the Ruhr or northern England no longer do.
But Western de-industrialisation is a much longer story. It was well underway before the China shock arrived, thanks to competition from countries like South Korean and Japan, and it is still going on today. Those Chinese workers who came to Dortmund were dismantling the last vestiges of unprofitable industries which had been closing down for decades. Germany had already shifted to sectors like cars, machinery, and chemicals, where China was not initially a competitor.
The impact was greater in the US, where according to one commonly cited estimate, the China shock cost a million manufacturing jobs, and 2.4 million jobs in total, during the first decade of the century. Still, what made Trump’s pitch so politically potent was not the number of lost livelihoods, but their concentration in Rust Belt states that helped him to win election in 2016. These areas were suffering from a manufacturing recession at the time, but one that was caused by the dollar’s appreciation against the Euro, not by China.
If we want to understand how the China supercycle has reshaped and undermined the political economy of Western countries, we should focus not just on the losers, but on the winners. Chinese growth offered significant benefits to the Western business and governing classes, and these benefits ultimately made them complacent. In Europe especially, elites became tacitly reliant on China to help them avoid difficult choices. They did not want to acknowledge that their advantages were only temporary, and that they were storing up problems in the longer term.
China rose in a global trading system dominated by America, and American big business reaped the rewards. Multinationals like Apple and Walmart benefitted from Chinese manufacturing, which was not only cheap but highly skilled and innovative, allowing them to develop new products and sell them around the world. In 2018, Forbes suggested that an iPhone would cost “in the $30,000 to $100,000 range” if Apple had to make it in the US, which may be an exaggeration but gets the point across. Likewise, business and financial interests poured capital into China to take advantage of the country’s growing market.
The wealth generated by this system incentivised the belief that, somehow, Chinese growth would not pose a major threat to America’s own power. This was despite clear evidence in the 2010s that China was rapidly scaling the technological ladder, while leveraging its own advantages in resources, production, and trade to secure a controlling position in the global economy. Since 2016, US politics has been overshadowed by these misjudgements, with both parties competing to appease the working class and trying to slow China’s advance.
A similar story can be told about Germany. The German car industry, which has played such an outsized role in European politics over the years, was another winner in China. The big three German carmakers — BMW, Mercedes and Volkswagen — together accounted for a quarter of the Chinese market in 2019. But they failed to anticipate that China would rapidly develop its own world-beating automotive industry, focused on EVs and software. In fact, in this and other important areas, China has now become a direct competitor. And Germany is ill-prepared for this challenge, since its earlier successes disguised an irresponsible political consensus that, in the name of fiscal restraint, has starved the country of much-needed investment.
Even Europe’s moral aspirations look like a complacent fantasy when China’s role is taken into account. European politicians claim to lead the world in two areas: ensuring the welfare of their citizens, and protecting the environment. But in 2007, when the New York Times ran a report on the aftermath of the Dortmund steel transfer, it could already see that this model of virtuous prosperity was “illusory”. Europe’s clean air, the authors noted, was only possible because Chinese cities like Handan had become a nightmarish “miasma of dust and smoke”, poisoning their residents and driving up global CO2 emissions. Chinese steel mills produced three times more carbon dioxide than German ones, and did so in part to supply Europeans with cheap goods. As an economist at China’s Ministry for Commerce admitted, “the shortfall of environmental protection is one of the main reasons why our exports are cheaper.”
In other words, Europe built its green ambitions on the back of China’s rise as the biggest polluter in history. Britain is especially guilty here. UK governments have boasted about cutting the country’s emissions by about 40% since 1990, but when imported products are taken into account, the figure falls to 23%. Last October, to great fanfare, Britain marked the first day of coal-free electricity in its history. Yet this is basically irrelevant when global coal consumption, led by China, continues to reach new highs every year. Even the transition to renewable energy is being largely driven by coal. Everything from solar panels and electric vehicles to the metals used by green technologies are produced cheaply in China thanks to coal energy.
The solar panels now carpeting the English countryside also rely on the forced labour of Uyghur Muslims in the Chinese region of Xinjiang, where much of the world’s polysilicon is mined and processed. Meanwhile, China’s fishing fleets plunder the world’s oceans and its petrochemical factories pump out plastics for Shein garments, all to the benefit of European consumers.
Since January, the instability rippling across the world has been seen, understandably, as a result of the revolution taking place in the United States. The Trump administration has undermined old alliances and appeased old enemies, extorted trading partners and nakedly coveted the resources of other nations. Now it is trying to fashion a new economic order with the bluntest tools it can find. But even if America is responsible for the dramatic shape and pace of events, we should not lose sight of the dynamics operating in the background, dynamics unleashed by the supercycle.
The US has been trying to pivot its military forces away from Europe and towards Asia since the days of Barack Obama. The disregard in Trump’s circle for Ukraine and Nato is a more extreme expression of the same logic, which is ultimately dictated by the need to contain Chinese power. And recall that Joe Biden prosecuted his own trade war against China, raising tariffs on steel, aluminium, solar cells and EVs — the latter tariff was 100% — and tried to limit Chinese access to advanced computer chips. The Biden administration also coordinated Western investments in African railways and other infrastructure, as part of an effort to counter Chinese control of natural resources on the continent.
Likewise, Europe’s frantic efforts to regain a measure of autonomy are not only a response to Trump’s betrayal, but a belated attempt to gird the continent against Chinese economic might. The enormous investment packages recently passed by Germany’s parliament, reversing two decades of fiscal policy, are aimed at strengthening German industry as well as building defence capacity. European governments and the EU itself are reassessing environmental schemes that threaten security and economic competitiveness. Regulations on combustion cars are being relaxed, while carbon tax exemptions and the recent “clean industrial deal” actually protect polluting industries. If Europe wants to defend itself, then carbon-intensive sectors like steel may need to be subsidised after all.
Even the incipient sense of anarchy in the world is not entirely Trump’s doing. In recent decades, stability came not only from American supremacy, but from the structure of the supercycle, which anchored the world’s supply chains in China. But raw materials traders have long been gearing up for the next supercycle, which is now commencing. This one will be driven by the minerals used in renewable technologies and advanced computing. And rather than the stabilising framework of American-Chinese cooperation, it will take the form of a competitive scramble for resources. Numerous countries will want access to lithium, cobalt, and nickel for batteries, copper for transmitting electricity, platinum for electronic components, and a host of exotic rare earths — gallium, palladium, neodymium and more — for the hardware that underpins artificial intelligence. They will also want oil for the tonnes of plastic that go into every wind turbine and electric vehicle.
The problem for Western countries is that, thanks to the last supercycle, China has a massive head start in this race. It controls two-thirds of all lithium and cobalt processing, almost 70% of rare earths, and around 80% of battery production. Nor is this only a material question. Western commentators sometimes imagine that industrial capacity can simply be summoned into being by relaxing planning laws and providing financial incentives. But advanced manufacturing requires deep pools of experience and skill, which China has developed over time and the West, in many areas, has not. As Apple CEO Tim Cook put it a few years ago, “in the US you could have a meeting of tooling engineers and I’m not sure we could fill the room. In China you could fill multiple football fields.”
Look at Europe’s struggle to make batteries. Last year, around two decades after those workers came to Dortmund to dismantle the steel plant, another Chinese contingent was in the Swedish town of Skellefteå. This time they had come as experts, installing machinery for Northvolt, a beleaguered company that was being billed as Europe’s battery champion. As one engineer told the Financial Times, referring to China’s skill base, “they are established and they have already done it. So they’re just better. We are late to the party.” Northvolt went bust in March. China may not have cracked advanced semiconductors, but neither has America. In Arizona, efforts to kick-start an industry with Taiwanese assistance have been bogged down by a shortage of skilled workers.
Insofar as there is a consistent logic in Trump’s economic plans, it appears that he wants the US to be more like China — to have more heavy industry, more manufacturing jobs, more exports, and more self-reliance. Yet his tariffs are a self-destructive way to pursue these goals. They have already caused American manufacturing to seize up, because it relies on the very materials that Trump is making more expensive to import. As Michael Strain has pointed out, for every job making steel in the country, there are 80 jobs that use steel to make something else. And bringing back factories back to the US is not the same as bringing back jobs, since companies will seek to avoid the higher wage costs through automation.
If the China supercycle taught us anything, it is that the ability to make things depends on raw materials and supply chains far beyond a country’s borders. For all its industrial power, China too is vulnerable in this sense, and that is why it has invested so much effort in building up global networks through its Belt and Road Initiative. Trump, by contrast, prefers threats of conquest and the erratic theatre of the “deal”. To compete in the next supercycle, America will need leaders with a more subtle sense of how to run an empire.
Wessie du Toit writes about culture, design and ideas. His Substack is The Pathos of Things.
wessiedutoit 
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeThe discussion of reindustrialisation rather misses the point. The West, and particularly the UK, is using essentially all of it’s resources to keep old people alive and unproductive for ever increasing spans of time whilst filching their resources to pay for this.
An ever decreasing young population (UK birth rate about 1.4) is unable to afford property or children of their own and is being supplanted by immigration.
Our military might last a week in a serious conflict but 24 hours is more likely after which we would have no capacity to produce steel or significant electricity to prosecute a war. In addition, as most of our young are foreign born I doubt many would want to get involved.
We have been bankrupted by an ever growing and unproductive state sector and changing demographics. Whilst I get absolutely no pleasure from saying this, it is not realistic that any strategy would reverse the decline of the UK (and the West in general).
No money, no young people , no vision, no hope. It is just that people have their heads in the sand and are ignoring our plight.
This will age well.
Yes, it will.
It’s all wrong. China is finished.
No, it ‘was’ finished. Trump the Ass-Clown-in-Chief just snatched US defeat from the jaws of victory and probably handed China world hegemony.
Masterly piece.
But…wait, what? What?!
You’re saying…the rest of the world’s peoples aren’t…stupid? Aren’t bad at sophisticated large-scale industry? That brown and yellow people with unpronounceable names can make complicate hi-tech thingies? Even…what, better than Americans?! Better than white westerners??!! Wait..what, you’re saying that global manufacturing supply chains are inextricably interlocked??!! China controls…what?!?!
Fool! Cretin! Anti-American woke liberal!!! Etc etc etc.
*Sighs*
the problem with China it builds things not because it’s needs them , it does it to excite growth. They build cities and train lines that are not used , and are already falling apart.
The biggest elephant in the room is the chinese mindset which imposes limits on their creativity, sure like the Japanese they can copy a Western idea to a tee, but China does’nt produce thinkers , it produces people who are good at copying and that’s it.
a good example is videogames , people are worried about the supposed upcoming dominance of Chinese company’s like Tencent, yes they own a lot of Western companies, but there have been very few Chinese Videogames that have hit big, unlike say Japan.
I’ve lived in that part of the world, and China is a weird place, it’s seems to be on the edge , it’s goverment trying to balance all these plates that will soon become impossible. You eventually run out of money to build the forth bridge, knock it down, build it again to just create work
Also the nonsense about the 30k Iphone, if they made it in the US it would probaly be 20% more expensive to make if that
“The biggest elephant in the room is the chinese mindset which imposes limits on their creativity, sure like the Japanese they can copy a Western idea to a tee, but China does’nt produce thinkers … there have been very few Chinese Videogames that have hit big, unlike say Japan.“
Your statements appear contradictory. Are Japanese creative or not?
Maybe the Japanese developed their creativity, as their culture shifted. Why wouldn’t the same happen with China?
Intelligence + freedom = innovation
What freedom do you imagine exists in a nation with social credit scores?
If they had that in the US, the scores would be much lower than their real credit scores. They prefer not to know
About the same as in one that locks people up for hurty words on social media and introduces facial recognition surveillance of its own population (UK, I’m looking at you).
Much the same as in a nation with social media!
I go to China a lot and the social credit thing barely exists. They’re amused by how much Westerners go on about it.
Are the Chinese not innovating in Space ? I’m not so sure Western countries have allowed them to copy or steal their Space technology, but the Chinese seem to be doing well there. RE the landing on the far side of the Moon. Sure 99.99% of their engineers are maybe clones, but you only need a few to think outside the box.
Sorry, but honestly what nonsense in respect of the “chinese mindset”. Modern times are an anomaly: for most of recorded history China was the biggest economy on the planet and the most innovative. China has had two main periods where this was not true: the Han Dynasty and Communism. In both cases, liberty, wealth and innovation were ruined by the excessive power of the State, and in both cases those periods ended because the Chinese themselves remain innovative even under tyranny, and broke through the restrictions in question.
It is possible that the period of Xi Jinping represents a third attempt at tyranny. We shall have to see how that turns out, but one thing Xi does seem to have learned from China’s past: suppress innovation, and the country is lost. He’s not making that mistake in terms of technology, even if his economics and politics are almost certainly still too authoritarian.
The ‘Song’ failed to beat off the Mongols & Co, and the much vaunted ‘Ming’ failed dismally against the ‘Manchu’ who in their turn failed to stop ‘us’ pillaging the place. So where was that “innovation “ that you speak so highly of?
Non-sequiturs galore there.
Perhaps but I see stagnation not innovation.
First I want to say it is an excellent essay.
Second, I think this is the elephant in the room “Europe especially, elites became tacitly reliant on China to help them avoid difficult choices. They did not want to acknowledge that their advantages were only temporary, and that they were storing up problems in the longer term.”
Chickens are coming home to roast and will we have the stomach for the difficult decisions to come and what will b the cost?
Years ago, I was told by an Asian businessman that if the US stopped buying from China for 3 weeks, there would be no Chinese economy. That’s probably a bit longer now, but not terribly. It makes me wonder if this is not exactly what Trump is trying to do.
Someone who understands. How refreshing.
Ahem. How Chinese AI Startup DeepSeek Made a Model that Rivals OpenAI
“China does’nt produce thinkers , it produces people who are good at copying and that’s it” – not borne out by the number of international patents held or being applied for by China.
I think this is a very fine essay. The value I see in Trump’s approach is it has begun, in a very dramatic and probably final way, the process of rearranging the global economy to decouple from China and to make other nations/trading blocs become more self-reliant.
Sure, there have already been half-hearted moves away from relying on Chinese manufacturing, but they were exactly that, half-hearted, especially in Europe. The pain was just too great–especially the abandonment of impractical ideologies, such as net zero–to supercharge the decoupling process. And, of course, many of our leaders and their social class are doing very well from the status quo.
Trump has really broken the current economic system. Even if he backs all the way off tariffs, the rest of the world now cannot trust America and they know, beyond doubt, they must revitalize their own economies. If the Dems return to power in 2028, I doubt they’ll want to completely undo Trump’s economic policies because they will be portrayed as pandering to China.
Trump is the necessary battering ram. As the author notes, let’s hope subtler intellects maintain the momentum and manage the consequences in years to come.
Great observation.
The rest of the world was unwise to trust the USA after the Nixon Shock when it effectively defaulted.
With 30 Aircraft Carriers, 500 B-52 bombers and 250,000 men under arms, ‘we’ had NO other option.
As the Romans said “you do not argue with a man who has 30 Legions at his back”.
Reminds me of Stalin’s observation after being told that the Pope opposed his take-over of Poland: Tell me, this Pope, how many battalions does he have? The comfortable and uncomfortable truth.
I understood the quote was “divisions”, not battalions.
However in the final analysis the Pope had Catholicism…and Lech Walesa…very formidable forces.
And the Russians have the Orthodox church…also formidable, even Putin pays his respects…and it reciprocates. Protecting Holy Mother Russia is always an effective recruitment call.
Yes. When one quotes historical figures it’s always a good idea to make sure one pays attention to their final scoreboard.
Yes, because the Stalinists have really kicked on, haven’t they.
De Gaulle believed otherwise…and that France should have an independent view, withdrawing from NATO planning and seeking payment in gold, not printed dollars.
He was right then, and it would be right now. His view of the “Common Market” as a “Europe des patries” was also correct. Regrettably his successors weren’t as far sighted.
He was also correct that ‘Les Anglais’ should never be part of Europe, and he was also spot on about Nuclear power.
Yes he was.
Yes, because the Romans have really kicked on, haven’t they.
We are seeing it here with the extreme last minute realisation by the political class that we must have our own steel industry. Better very late than never.
But it will only work if Net Zero is abandoned and energy prices reduced. I don’t see that happening with Milliband still in-post.
I agree it is a very helpful commentary, giving the scale and speed of China’s industrialisation. But a slash and burn approach to the world economy might clear the decks, but on its own it does not build what is required and that needs to start now.
In the 1970’s a Hongkong shipowner showed me plans of a ship he could have built in Mainline China, Time had stood still there, the plans they offered had not changed from the ships built in the 1930’s before containerisation. In many ways China has benefited from starting from an almost non-existent industrial base. They have had a productive mix of private enterprise and state overview and support. They have invested in learning from the rest of the world and leapfrogged the former industrial nations. The communist planned economies failed because greed is better at making all the numerous decisions. However individual companies, whilst they have the motivation, are not able to assemble all the resources and infrastructure that they need without the help of the State.
The world has changed and the US and Europe will not succeed by just trying to turn the clock back. They need to leapfrog China. They need to do more with less. They need to find out how an increasingly wealthy population wants to spend its time and how the staffing of care, medical and old age, can be accomplished. Jobs that do not appeal in Western societies.
Somehow a balance has to be achieved between considerateness to those close to you and considerateness to those that start at a disadvantage. The balance is between ensuring everyone makes the best contribution that they can, without a sense of entitlement, whilst ensuring the obstacles they encounter are actually surmountable.
If you see what’s going on as an existential struggle, Trump has just freed America’s other hand for the fight.
I agree. I liked the essay and felt that the Bad Orange Man paragraph tacked on at the end was out of keeping with its spirit.
A battering ram? A piece of embarrassing wet spaghetti more like it. Slaps insane tariffs on…everything. Gets the math wrong anyway. ‘Pauses’ them. Then exempts all the things that his e-squillionaire mates…erm, need manufactured elsewhere. Which alas is going to turn out to be…oh dear, much much more than smartphones, computers, semiconductors and MAGA golfing hats, little global trade supplicant, Donny…pretty much everything, really. Global trade supply chains and markets are kind of tricky like that.
Lame, lame, lame duck. Every day that his Administration
‘manages the consequences’dishes out fiddles to those parts of the US economy that benefit the most unproductively and unfairly from global free trade – the US bond and debt ticket-clippers, Wall Street, international-industrial freeloaders like Apple, TESLA, etc – is another day that his own domestic MAGA constituency gets to recognise more clearly how much he has betrayed them. It’ll be US energy (heavy crude imports), military industry (where does one start!?) and construction (ditto) lining up for rent-seeking ‘exemptions’ next.At least they employ Americans, I suppose.
One suspects that the only economic constituency that’ll be ‘battering-rammed’ by this utter folly will be…Trump voters.
Way to Make America Great Again, Don.
In other words, Europe built its green ambitions on the back of China’s rise as the biggest polluter in history.
The green religion is killing the West. And at its core, it is wrong. CO2 is not a significant driver of climate; it should be ignored. Worse, legitimate environmental efforts to clean up chemicals, save species, and protect wild regions are beggared by the devotion to net zero. Not to mention the millions who are deprived of a better living standard due to the fascination with EVs, CI, and GHGs.
There are some good points here and the story is well told but the allusions to CO2 causing global warming and solved by windmills which (as author awknowledges) are really fossil fuel laundering is a bit tiresome. ( see Patrick Moore Fake Apocalypse and threats of doom for excellent refutation of the global warming story if interested ). A more interesting aspect of the deindustrialisation of the West is the bogus, self serving waffle about “renewable energy”, “sustainability” etc etc we used to sell it to ourselves. The Chinese must be cracking up at that one
We are also intentionally strangling ourselves with DEI nonsense. White males created modern civilization, and then we were disenfranchised from it for “justice.” This will not change, so the West will continue to lack qualified people in the skilled trades. And those who run things won’t care, as their Vision of the Future is set in stone.
This is pretty good, though the author implicitly endorses the whole renewables scam by implying that the green economy is something that we need to be ready for. Whereas in fact we need to simply abandon it. However, the analysis is fundamentally sound.
Oh dear, what an ocean of crocodile tears, poor Western democracies didn’t know what they were doing, too stupid to realise, they were desperate to ‘create wealth’………blah blah blah. Garbage the lot of it : all the hand wringing over slavery 300 years ago but It’s ok if it delivers a half price iPhone??? Or a zero emissions VW ID3? Oh but of course because burning Australian coal and Chinese slaves aren’t seen in the shiny showrooms of Chiswick and Chicago? Sickening and no one could see it coming in Davos……right.
There’s only one thing for it, the Greens will have to find a way of isolating the atmosphere over Europe from the atmosphere over China.
How lovely, though, that the Just-Stop-Oil moral superiority is built on polluted cities on the other side of the planet. The Net Zero crusaders exult over a coal-fired power station blown up in the UK while five are built in China. That’s what their ‘transition’ to windmill wind energy is built on – dependence on China’s fossil fuel power. Their moral posturing is filthy rags.
In his article today, Aris Roussinos considers whether this Western dependence will finally prevent war as Norman Angell argued in his 1910 book. It might even do so in this arrangement of dependency.
And as for those empty cities in China, aren’t they just ready to house all the migrants? It just needs some ‘creative’ bargaining on the part of Western politicians to make it so. You house them, we pay for their keep.
An interesting if slightly alarming essay but no need to panic!
As UnHerd commentator DAVID RENTON put it so eloquently the other day when referring to ‘young White men’:-
“These are the people who conquered the world and pretty much invented everything, built society and beat everyone.”
But if Napoleon Bonaparte could pay a visit today he might observe that there were fewer of said men than in his day.
Presumably the technologically-skilled Chinese have been taught a body of knowledge, not, as British children are taught, just what to think.
Being taught what to think turns the children out to be Green fanatics of Just-Stop-Oil zealots. Or girls who just want boogie on down at parties, not to spend their young years being mothers. And the boys, they can become girls.
Except young White men are turning away from society. As they should, since the society hates them and will never see them as anything other than slaves with a tendency towards violence at best and excess carbon at worst.
Magnificent summary of the last 30 years. Everyone should read this, digest and cry out at the complacency of their leaders.
Correct! In fact this is the epitaph of the West.
While ‘we’ have often disputed what caused the fall of Ancient Rome, here we have a very clear picture of what will bring about the demise of the West.
Consummatum est.
Starmer is all mouth and Lord Alli’s trousers.
I cried out at all the garbage he wrote about the Chinese steel industry … some of which you can disprove by consulting a map. LOL
“The British government seems to agree”
If the British government *actually* agreed, it wouldn’t be insisting on electric furnaces and high energy prices.
Starmer pretends to care about steel because some Labour voters care about it.
One of the positives of Trump is that – despite paradoxically being a compulsive liar – he is leading to an outbreak of trying to see and describe the reality of global politics and economics more honestly. This essay is an excellent example; much public discourse of the last twenty years the opposite.
One of the challenges of seeing the world realistically, however, is not to be paralysed by fatalism as a result. No one could accuse Trump of this particular defect but more widely there is a growing acceptance that we are at the end of an era – the American century or, more widely, the Anglo Saxon ascendancy (1815 – 2025) which has seen enlightenment values and capitalism lead to unprecedented material well being for an ever growing proportion of the global population – and that the future belongs instead to a Beijing centred techno- authoritarianism.
No one knows the future. In 1900 it was widely believed that the twentieth century would belong to the rapidly industrialising Germany, Russia and Germany. In the event, two out of the three experienced very bumpy rides in the subsequent century. It is possible to see plausible and more palatable scenarios than an isolated US surrounded by – and perhaps ultimately succumbing to – a China dominated world.
Focussing on economics, Trump appears to want – to a significant degree – to pursue a policy of economic isolationism. If the last thirty years have seen globalisation, deindustrialisation in the West and manufacturing gravitating to China, there is no intrinsic reason why the next should not see a more equitable rebalancing with each advanced region producing most of what it consumes. Instead of a globalised economy the natural tendency of events is towards a series of tariff protected trade blocs centred on the US, EU, China and perhaps one or two others. Trump is not responsible for this trend though he is certainly accelerating it. Such an arrangement might outrage conventional economists but once established it could prove more stable and resilient than the current system.
The problem is the transition. We nearly had a global financial crisis last week and may yet do so. Rearranging the entire global economy without triggering not only trade but actual wars while failing to articulate a clear and widely acceptable end state is improbable. Even if the world heads towards a series of regional trade blocs then adept diplomacy will be needed to avoid a repeat of the 1930s turning into 1940s – not least because trade blocs tend to pursue autarky and start seeing all resources outside their zone as strategic assets whose control is essential.
One does not need to accept the mainstream media’s portrait of Trump as an impulsive and ignorant idiot to see that his virtues of calling attention to the various elephants in the room and his courage in being willing to take action – both in contrast to the Democratic establishment – are not matched by an ability to describe an acceptable end state nor the subtlety needed to deliver it without catastrophic clashes along the way. His vaunted unpredictability may be a virtue in commercial negotiations but is not in establishing a new world order. Du Toit’s conclusion is correct.
Why is it simply impossible that someone such as your good self cannot mention Presidential Trump without throwing in a gratuitous insult?
I must say I find this condescending attitude towards him to be quite tedious.
TDS is tedious.
I was tying to be balanced – or possibly even nuanced – rather than gratuitously insulting!
I also suspect I move in more liberal circles than yourself. You are riled by criticism of Trump; I spend most of my time in trouble because I see strengths as well as flaws in the man and refuse to accept the idea he is just an impulsive idiot.
Another difference is that you had a military and I a financial background. You may not appreciate how close we were to going through the ice last week – and may yet.
I meant what I said that Trump deserves credit for pointing out that the US establishment was pursuing dangerous policies and had been impoverishing the majority of US citizens. His courage in trying to something is also to applauded. But his tactics, however, terrify me. Sometimes the prophet who denounces intemperately the status quo is not the best person to manage the transition with as little upset as possible.
I believe this to be a ‘Rubicon’ moment and that President Trump is quite correct to call ‘Alea iacta est’*; If only for the sake of our grandchildren.
When you refer to the President of the United States as a “compulsive liar” I regard that as a gratuitous insult. Perhaps I’m too old to know any better?
Finally as I spend a considerable part of my life very close to epicentre of Quislington** I think I probably move in “more liberal circles” than your good self, more’s the pity!
*Some may prefer ‘Iacta alea est’. Either way “the die is cast”. Julius Caesar, as reported by Suetonius.
** Thank you Fraser Bailey, a former noted UnHerd commentator.
Close to the epicentre of Quislington? I assume this gives us a choice of Camden, Hampstead, Finsbury Park, Hackney or Bloomsbury. None fit my previous image of you as a rural reactionary so I will have to adjust my view. I think, on balance, you must have a base in Hackney the better to collect conceptual art.
Gratuitous insult? Aimed at most people, I would agree. For a New York property developer? Perhaps not – more an expected quality in a ruthless and Darwinian world.
Most would agree that Trump is a very successful politician partly because he has such an unusual approach. The core of his appeal is entirely honest – the establishment has screwed the American working class and he will do something about it – but beyond that he is a master of invective, exaggeration and outright lying. Given his gangster adjacent background in property development this is not surprising. He used to share a lawyer, Roy Cohn, with some of the top Mafia figures and absorbed Cohn’s indifference to the truth (originally honed as Macarthy’s lieutenant) . To me saying Trump is a compulsive liar is no more than accurate description. It seems to work for him.
However hasn’t it recently been proven that McCarthy was essentially correct?
Absolutely correct in nearly every single accusation.
In short the US rather like the U.K. had been seriously infiltrated by a plethora of ‘Central European’ communists of every possible description.
He is President of the USA and de facto the most powerful man in the world, so I believe a little decorum is called for.
When and if he ‘leaves’ office then perhaps a little more robust criticism may be in order.
Oh please Charles. Stop sycophanting. Trump is rapidly moving the US to an autocratic dictatorship. That alone should cause you to pause.
Although he is not an idiot, his knowledge of world finance is making him look like one.
The bond market just slapped him. The financial world is losing trust in treasuries with him at the helm. He needs to refinance 7 TRILLION of debt in the coming 18 months and his mismanagement of tariffs has caused a 50 basis point rise in the 10 year rate. This makes all the supposed cost savings by DOGE irrelevant.
With respect I’m not (sic)“scycophanting” President Trump but merely chiding Mr CARNEGIE for making a gratuitous insult.
I can understand Mr Carnegie’s frustration as he did work as a money-lender* in the City of London for many years, but as I’m sure he will admit “manners maketh man”, and his insult was completely unnecessary.
Returning to President Trump, he’s only been in office for less than 100 days so give the chap a chance. Let’s face it he has a ‘mountain to climb’ and and the best we can do is let him get on with it.
For the record my one major grievance with President Trump is that he avoided the draft for Vietnam more than 50 years ago. Yes it was truly despicable behaviour but as so many Americans of his ‘class’**did the very same thing perhaps it is time to forgive and forget?
However what I do find most irritating is the ceaseless cacophony of hysterical abuse that has been directed at President Trump since day one, and indeed even before!
For example I don’t know if you take The London Times? I don’t, but regrettably my Chief-of-Staff does! Its cartoonist has launched an almost ceaseless barrage of vulgar cartoons on the subject of President Trump since well before his inauguration and continues to do so. Frankly for what is supposed to be a ‘serious’ newspaper it is childish in the extreme.
*Now known as Merchant Bankers I’m told.
** Eg: Mr (I did not have sex with that woman) Clinton for example.
I think you are holding me to a higher standard than the President holds himself. The odd thing is that I thought it was so obvious that Trump lies not only when tactically expedient but sometimes when there seems no point at all that I saw it as an uncontroversial observation. Most politicians lie. At most Trump is a bit more blatant and shameless.
I do not see it as a big deal or gratuitously offensive. Trump is a negotiator more than anything else and negotiations often involve dissembling the better to mislead or confuse your counter party. I am sure Trump regards this a praiseworthy skill.
If you read the whole comment – and not just the first line – you will see I was saying he has both strengths and weaknesses – and I did not regard his lies as significant entries in either column. Actually, I am as irritated as you by the hysterical and mindless abuse of Trump as an impulsive and semi fascist idiot – which leaves entirely unexplained why his first term was so successful up to Covid and why he has been the most successful US politician since FDR.
Which is not to say I am not terrified by his tactics. I doubt he understands the fragility of the financial system and we must hope that he listens to those who do.
”Every man must have a code” as Omar said in The Wire but that of us “money lenders” – perhaps a truly gratuitously insulting description – may differ to that prevailing in an officers’ mess. Not better but different.
Please stop trying to be so reasonable on unherd, you make great comments btw. But expect to be attacked by the delusional Trumpists on this site every time. You’re criticizing their god. If course he’s a compulsive lier and manipulator, always was and always will be.
Tut, tut, none of that Canadian vulgarity here please!
To be honest, I would not be so reasonable if I didn’t think it would annoy.
In fact I found the conclusion rather out- of- synch. The author is fairly disingenuous in disregarding the debt issues in BRI and not seeing it as a classic case of imperial over-stretch.
Too much is being made of the so- called American fiasco while ignoring that CCP presides over a far more unsustainable situation.
It is surprising also that many Western commentators are unable to see that technology and smart manufacturing can actually be an advantage to Western economies. Beijing has a real problem with over- capacity coupled with rising unemployment and the certain loss of Western markets for its exports.
The near future most certainly is far more balanced than the gloom and doom scenarios being overplayed by legacy Western media and corrupt globalists on Wall Street.
You mention Germany twice. Did you mean the U.S.A?( Refer paragraph three of comment).
Well spotted. That should have been Germany, Russia and US.
Great essay, it will indeed age well. Last sentence deserves an essay of its own -the battle of empires. On the one hand, the Sino-Assian industrial empire, whose scale cannot be matched and on the other the Anglo-American financial empire. Surpluses from the former were feeding the latter, and boosting western purchasing power unsustainably, in a system that grew to be predatory and rent seeking.
A parallel to Dortmund’s steel carve up were the sham securitizations and privatisations of public sector monopolies (Thames water, Royal Mail, motorway tolls, PPPs and BoTs, etc ) that in effect became private monopolies without a solid public mandate.
How’s the global system going to rebalance with so many corrupt, vested interests?
And the bonus question: if China can (with 16% of the world’s people, and over 30% of its industry) supply most of the world’s goods- how much unemployment is the world going to face and AI powered automation?
“Chinese oil imports, at 11 million barrels per day, are more or less equivalent to the entire output of Saudi Arabia. China burns 30% more coal than the rest of the world combined, and its consumption is still rising. This means that the Chinese energy system is, by far, the biggest factor determining the future of the climate.”
If we assume, as the author does, that CO2 is the biggest factor determining climate.
But this paragraph’s is a neat illustration of why the argument of Western carbon-obsessives fails on its own terms.
All our bureaucracy, indoctrination and sacrifices won’t make any difference to the climate.
The sun will do what the sun does, and China will do what China does.
China is finished. Economic and demographic collapse imminent.
As a chronicle of the past 30-odd years, I enjoyed the piece. I do not, however, agree that a subtle approach is needed. The global economy needs the sledge-hammer that Trump is wielding, although clumsily at times. The process of decoupling has certainly begun, which will entail a lot of pain. Don’t think Trump will be able to get the results he is looking for in these short four years in office but it’s a start.
I’m no expert in the intricacies of US politics. But isn’t it the case that, if DJT loses one of the Houses in the midterms, then he will be hamstrung in his final two years and not be able to do anything too radical. Perhaps that’s why he’s going at breakneck speed at the moment. In the words of his Tech Bro buddies – “Move fast and break things”
Agree. He’s pushing the agenda hard and fast so that there’s some sort of settlement, which doesn’t leave the American public too embittered, well before the mid-terms. My reading of the situation is that it will be tough for the administration to pull this off to the extent Trump can label it as success.
You don’t seem to know how far the Democrat Party has fallen in esteem. Twenty-one percent favorable last time I looked. Its top two candidates for highest office are an elderly millionaire who calls himself a socialist and a bug-eyed New Yorker who was a cocktail waitress before being elected to Congress.
True, but the 2026 midterm elections will not feature an idiotic Donkey at the top of the ticket, nor will Trump be there to bring out the faithful. Given the bias of the MSM shouting that Trump is Hitler reborn, it is almost a sure thing that the Donkeys will take the House and possibly the Senate.
Very sad.
Excellent article. Trump clearly shows us what gas gone wrong but not the means to cure it. For that we have need of a massive improvement in the quality of understanding and leadership in government, finance and industry all across the West. But sadly there are very few signs of that.
One big thing missing in what is otherwise a well informed piece – demography. China’s population is set to crash and leave an ageing society. China mobilized peasants from the western regions to generate a workforce – more people absolutely moved from rural areas to cities in China in the1990s than made similar moves in Europe in the whole of the 19th Century. (absolutely, not relatively). The one child policy has become a cultural norm in China – my Chinese students at Durham (children of the large upper middle class) were firm in their intention (all only children) to have just one child themselves. 4 – 2 -1 – 4 grandparents, two parents, one child – in a society where still family support of the elderly is key. China’s total fertility rate is 1.18. Demography matters a very great deal. David Byrne
There is also the well documented ‘No’ movement among the urban Chinese young. Many of them are refusing to marry or have children. It is the only rebellion they can control. There is a nihilism and depression amongst many young people who are reusing to fuel the communist plans for them.
Whilst your argument isn’t wrong the West isn’t exactly doing great on fertility rate either – in the UK it is expected to be 1.42 this year. We may be further behind them but we’re on the same path.
Not to worry, China has 1.4 billion people, more than enough, it’s actually a good thing that they will have less people. Besides in the coming hi tech age with robotics and AI and low cost producers like the garment industry leaving China, they won’t have enough jobs for all these people. They can also increase the retirement age over time. Japan also has declining population, they are still managing well. You should be alot more worried about overpopulation in Africa and South Asia which they can’t sustain.
Do they have that many? There are a number of claims that the population now is half that figure and the government is covering it up.
There is plenty of room for them in the global north, as they are proving.
This is fundamentally flawed thinking that people get caught up in. Exponential decline works the same way as growth, once past a tipping point the trajectory is so baked in that it cannot be escaped. For every 100 grandparents, there are 11 grandchildren in Korea. They are the leading edge of this. China isn’t far behind. The implications of this are stark and require a novel to map out what it will do to a society. Robots won’t save a culture.
So is Europe’s
This article is textbok waffle. I honestly want my time back.
Well you can’t have your time back, so you might as well explain what you didn’t like about it.
All the incorrect facts or outdated information in it?
Because it’s a shallow and anecdotal “analysis” of geo politics masquerading as something more rigorous than it actually is by using lots of empty paragraphs. Nothing in the text seriously supports the statement provocatively stated in the click-baity headline, and a quick search on the writer shows he has no really expert knowledge or background on the issues he writes about. The article is also laden with ‘statements’ which are not factual and the general feeling I get from it is that it was written by ChatGPT. I hope this explains my position better.
If only we could bind the souls of the East with the souls of the West. A new Golden Age.
Great article, but there’s one further point about the vast growth of China that probably also could have been made in support of the overall theme. It relates to the history of interest rates since the 1980s in the West, and in the USA and the UK in particular.
In the UK, the generally accepted narrative is that during 18 years of Tory government from 1979, Thatcherite reforms finally conquered inflation, leading to a prolonged period in which interest rates could be set for reasons other than the need to control inflation. A similar process took place in the USA under Reagan. This in my view is broadly correct, but it is limited really only to that time, and does not explain the much longer period of low interest rates, good growth, and low inflation in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
What does explain this later period, is China’s growth, in two main ways. Firstly, China in the 1990s was rising as a manufacturing exporter but had no consumer economy to speak of, which meant that Chinese workers saved rather than spent. This money went into global capital markets looking for a return, so returns fell due to a glut of liquid capital. Secondly, the cost of these Chinese imports was so much lower than Western manufacturing that overall inflation was held down even while interest rates remained low. The effect was so powerful, in fact, that even when Western governments printed vast quantities of new money after the financial crisis, it still didn’t cause an inflation problem.
The problem the West faces now is that the global conditions have changed. Interest rates cannot simply be reduced as a means of encouraging growth without the attendant risk of inflation, and China is now in a position similar to where the Arab states were in the early 1970s: it can start imposing rationing and price controls on the western markets now dependant upon China’s industrial base, thus providing China with powerful direct political influence in Western economies and their respective governments.
We know what happened in the 1970s when OPEC imposed oil embargoes on the West. Whether we haved learned the lesson, on the other hand, remains to be seen.
A good analysis but it doesn’t justify the clickbait title.
Raw materials trade costs both ways and China imports $50 billion of raw materials from the US; some of them from me.
The end leaves us hanging as there aren’t suggestions for how this can change and the result will be counter to the one posited in the headline.
The West didn’t just lose to China because of cheap labour, the excessive and often incoherent regulatory burdens in Europe and the US combined with climate change nonsense has played a much bigger role in the past decade than the author allows.
The outcome is not a foregone conclusion but maybe Trump’s bombast has woken more thoughtful minds to the peril?
Yes. DT has merely shown up the rip- off in stark and undiplomatic terms; and the Chinese game of proxies in Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia etc as part of the ” plus one” strategy is now clear.
The Western political elites and technocrats always knew it..and made money out of it via Wall Street.
Agreed! I almost didn’t bother reading it. It’s a very well written and thoughtful piece after all!
Certainly our western societies have adopted policies that reduce our ability to manufacture. China materials processing ignores pollution that ends up affecting the world but we ought to respond by creating cleaner processes. Rare earth materials aren’t rare just require very dirty refining. We ought to create better. The West can tolerate failure and reward success better than Asia. Use that advantage.
Excellent and depressing read. Thanks. While I find discussion of supercyles fascinating I wonder if after winning the Cold War the coastal establishment here in the US simply got fat, dumb and happy. It seems that we went with the glories of Wall Street leverage creating wealth to genius Silicon Valley college dropouts bringing computers etc to new levels of use and forgot about the rust belt and what comes next. Now we are losing out to a hungry and desperate (formerly) sleeping giant playing many of these games with a steely and oft times underhanded determination we in the US are increasingly lacking.
Where do we go from here? What is the most effecient way to regrow hard industry and how much do we really need? The Trumpers are overly fascinated by tariffs and going back to the 1890’s (and personal revenge) while the left is overly fascinated by socialism, DEI revenge and “historical victim” worship while casting some blame on China too. Neither really has a viable plan going forward and neither is willing to ask their constituents to change anything—it’s all the opposition’s fault!!
These are complicated fundamental long term challenges. The leadership class in the US, political as well as commercial, has thus far not shown any inclination nor ability to lead us out of this mess. It will require hard work and sacrifice, not clear to me that the west today is up to the challenge. We simply have some vague hope AI or lord knows what will come about to save us…
Since the 20th of January I read many articles, like this one, that are fine discussions of how we got here, agree on the necessity to do something differently and are very critical of Trump. To his credit, Trump is actually doing something — maybe it will work, maybe it won’t. The ongoing handwringing the traditional parties, the media and those who just know they are smarter than Trump engage in is disingenuous at best or a cynical ploy to protect their social standing — which is most likely. The status quo and incremental change will never work because too many people are making too much money by selling a freshly renovated, spiffed up and with a new towel deck chair while the ship is sinking. These cries of doom after what is only three months attempting to fix a problem that took forty years to create are not useful and say more about the authors than the efforts of those who are actually trying fix things.
Superb essay…. the best I’ve read on Unherd in a long time.
It contains a whole bunch of stuff about the Chinese steel industry that is instantly disprovable , just by looking at a map of China.
What it reduces to is US economic manifest destiny, in which the world is its export market, versus China’s ability to counter with its own sphere of economic dominance. But by the time this competition ends, America’s economic and governmental structures will look strikingly similar to China’s. The rebirth of tragedy.
To the benefit of both sets of leaders but the detriment of both peoples. China and the US are converging. China is moving from hard to soft methods of controlling its people, while the US is moving from soft to hard methods. Eventually an unhappy medium of maximum control will be reached by both.
US from hard/soft power to most likely to sort and defeat for now.
My main argument against this article is that it assumes things happen by accident, rather than planning. The Chinese Supercycle as he calls it didn’t happen because of unconscious market factors, but because Western Neoliberal globalists thought that if they transferred Western success to China that China would inevitably become Western Neoliberals. When it failed, those that benefitted from the arrangement kept it going in spite of the long-term problems. Problems which I’m sure they would be positioned to profit from.
“According to Trump, China had stolen American blue-collar jobs and grown rich selling America goods that should have been made there.”
China didn’t steal them, they were given them on a silver platter by globalists. Unless those globalists are dispossessed of their influence in Western politics, those jobs will continue to flow to China once Trump is no longer president.
===
“In 2018, Forbes suggested that an iPhone would cost “in the $30,000 to $100,000 range” if Apple had to make it in the US…”
Numbers pulled out of their ass. Most estimates place the increase between 20% to 100%.
===
Odd how so many people forget basic economics when it’s convenient. Enough with the Trump hate already. I’m not a huge fan of his and I think he’ll fail since he only has 4 years to act, but at least give him some credit for trying to right the ship.
“Yet his [Trump’s] tariffs are a self-destructive way to pursue these goals. They have already caused American manufacturing to seize up, because it relies on the very materials that Trump is making more expensive to import.”
Yes, increasing the price of something is how you increase the incentive to produce more of it. Which eventually leads to increased domestic production and less reliance on China. That’s why tariffs work to strengthen a country, and why the US and the UK before it forced “free” trade on developing nations, because it keeps them from developing. Which is what China and our elites have been doing to the US, de-developing us so we become nothing but a source of resources and cheap labor.
Your last paragraph is so amazing if anyone with skill and intelligence could understand, they would position themselves at the right coordinates….to be the frontline! Only if they could rather than word games! Our gift and demise!;
Tariffs increase the price, but that increase goes to the government, not the foreign manufacturer. Hence, NO increased incentive for that manufacturer. Rather, a second, less efficient, on-shore manufacturer that does not pay the tariffs, gets to put out a product at a price similar to the imported one. The consumer/citizen loses, and the inefficient manufacturer (and his crony government contacts) make money. In the end you have a country of non-competitive industries.
Thank you, Terry, for that welcome and rare breath of economic truth. Sadly, in these hysterical times, any attempt to expose the downside to tariffs and “industrial policy” will be met with a broadside of derision (not least here in Unherd). I keep wondering how America got so rich, innovative and powerful with its formerly low tariffs, since everyone here is quite sure that high tariffs = prosperity.
Not quite. You don’t have to trust to trade, just trust and verify. The EU is governed by inept, bought politicians and bureaucrats. Most of the member nations have no moral compass, and their citizens don’t have the guts to give up their Latte’s and what portion of the nanny state that they like. They willingly (like most of the US citizens) gave up their freedoms to stay “safe”. I really don’t see that changing soon, because there is a moral malaise affecting Europe and no real leader, yet, to show the way. Just more virtue signalling that is pathetic.
England is a shithole country (pains me to say that) that is not holding the politicians, police, and bureaucrats accountable for the Pakastani Grooming gangs that sexually abused over 250,000 of their female children. Until they right that ship, they don’t have a chance in hell.
America, love it or hate it, reputiated “Globalization” and the cadaverous tech, finance, and media “elites” that have grown grossly rich at the expense of their own citizens. Our politicians sold out our manufacturing for a stronger dollar in the 90’s, and the world is seeing that Main Street has had enough.
China might win, and the elites may make a comeback. They are both pouring vast sums of money into propaganda, resistance movements, media blitzes, and probably shorting the market. They BOTH have a LOT ot lose.
But at least the majority of the citizens of America, if not the rest of the West, are fighting for their freedoms, and certainly economic freedom. I wouldn’t bet the ranch against Main Street.
That was a heartfelt series of complaints. Thing is, what is Mr. Epperson, personally, doing about it? Moaning won’t help.
The title is a bit click-baity.
I don’t think it’s a case of either beating the other, but of which is the last one to fall from deep-seated weaknesses that those in charge cannot or will not address.
In both cases it would require a philosopher-king who cared enough about people to fill death camps with a large number of them. Which won’t happen, so time for the rest of us to learn how to surf the Kali Yuga.
All this eulogising of China is so defeatist. Let’s take a leaf out of Warren Buffet’s book: Never bet against America. And Trump, despite the chaotic bleatings of Wall Street, is showing why. Main Street is right behind him.
I think what is going on here is a series of cycles, which are country and commodity specific. A new cycle involving rare earths is emerging, sure. But there will be a new one in steel and shipbuilding, as the baton passes from China to… India? Middle East? Africa? Then China will develop its own version of the rust belt.
“by 2024, its price was almost 1,000% higher than in 1995.” About 600% higher in inflation-adjusted terms (and its foolish not to adjust for inflation).
Or maybe they just work together, and we’ll see where that takes us. It is starting to look like we all need semiconductor and resources for AI! So let us make a deal: let us balance few debts vs surplus friends and go for the kill AI!
I know I am a dreamer but not as stupid as these investors and govt.
So in short China is the new CARTHAGE?
Thus it must follow the fate of old Carthage.
Who will be its Scipio Africanus?
Concerned about this article. Reads nicely, but some facts:
Handan is nowhere near Shanghai.
It is not on the Yangtze River, nor even in the Yangtze Delta area.
The Handan steelworks is not the biggest in the world, and I don’t think it has EVER been.
Shagang is only the 6th largest producer.
The largest is BaoWu, by far.
BaoWu is or has been involved in steel production in Germany, with joint ventures with Thyssen Krupp.
A very good, bring-everyone-down-to-earth, piece.
‘…elites became tacitly reliant on China to help them avoid difficult choices’. Much true in this, although we the people were also susceptible to snake oil merchants seeking power without honesty on this truth.
As Trump abuses and damages trust with US’s long term allies and China’s strategy becomes ever clearer – the fact they had a hand in wanting to close UK’s Steel production says it all – the UK looks around for reliable friends. And guess what is becoming ever more obvious. Yep, it can be messy and imperfect but it’s Europe.
IT IS NOT CHINA YOU SHOULD FEAR
The rise of end times fascism
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/apr/13/end-times-fascism-far-right-trump-musk?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
I learned nothing about Chinese manufacturing and engineering prowess from this article as I’ve been following developments in China online for more than a decade.
What I did learn is that the author is racist and has been brainwashed by Western propaganda and hate speech.
The Uigher people have more children than Han Chinese and have a range of special privileges with regard to access to Government services (eg access to prestige universities). Furthermore the Uigher population has grown every year for the past 40 years, so it is problematic to accept ‘the genocide of Uighers.’
As for slave labour not a scintilla of hard evidence from a reliable source has been provided. (The UN special rapporteur couldn’t find any.)
Western propagandists including the author are plain and simple racists.
“If you don’t have steel, you don’t have a country,” declared Trump in 2018.”
Trump is no idiot!
The author lifts the lid on the UK’s hypocritical posturing on being ‘green’ and reveals how this is totally dependent on China’s coal-fired mega pollution.
Each day the BBC runs ‘climate change’ items in its news bulletins, but never alludes to the China connection. Don’t trust the BBC – it is a Left-Wing propaganda machine!
Great essay and analysis.
“Trump is the necessary battering ram. As the author notes, let’s hope subtler intellects maintain the momentum and manage the consequences in years to come.” to quote a readers comment.
Well said. So what are the pathways open to the Western democracies, to prevent this Chinese march to global dominance?
We need an essay on that subject, which most of us know means, rearmament and all that that entails economically and militarily.
“If you want Peace, prepare for War.”