As The Guardian reported in the last day or so:
Job losses in EU manufacturing will rapidly increase unless Brussels stops the “colonisation” of industry by Chinese component manufacturers, a leading industry trade body has warned.
Eurometal predicts 300,000 job losses in manufacturing in the rest of 2026 because of expanding competition from China, which is now enjoying a record €1bn-a-day trade surplus with the bloc.
China is becoming deeply embedded in our product supply chains. The claim that a product might be 'Made in Europe' or 'Made in the UK' is increasingly meaningless.
On climate-change technology, EVs, and related tech, they are beating the world.
And then there is AI. Try their models and you will find they work, and may turn out to be much cheaper than those from the USA. And when the US is a fascist state, who to share data with becomes a difficult question, but one with a potentially easier answer.
At the same time, don't talk about who is winning the conflict in Iran; the answer is China, without a doubt. They have the oil. No one else has.
Amongst the many ideas we have to get our heads around now is the fact that China may now become the world's single global superpower. As neoliberalism kills Western democracies, that is the reality we have to face.
What does that mean?
How does it make us feel?
What does it change?
Answers on the back of a postcard, please......
Thanks for reading this post.
You can share this post on social media of your choice by clicking these icons:
There are links to this blog's glossary in the above post that explain technical terms used in it. Follow them for more explanations.
You can subscribe to this blog's daily email here.
And if you would like to support this blog you can, here:
Buy me a coffee!
Might a facet of the “West’” current and increasing deficiencies/problems be a result of the “Wests’s” subversion/misunderstanding of “democracy”?
It seems to present democracy as the holding of elections of varying validity as being democracy.
Might a valid democracy have to have genuine elections, effective processes and demonstable benefits for all citizens and their children?
Although it appears/is the case that China has limited elections, it does seem to be clear in its its governance processes and makes clearly stated efforts to recognise and manage opporunities and problems facing people across the whole of its society, at least as presented in China Daily.
China has the power equation the right way around: politicians (yes I know unelected) call the shots (literally), the finance rabble follow orders. Just imagine if the central bank said “sorry Xi old chum, we’ve gotta keep inflation under control by raising interest rates, innit”. Such a response would be shortly followed by a knock on the door and the speaker being asked to pay $X for a bullet. Tempting though it is, I am not advocating such a response to our current “banking elite”. However, they are out of control. Euro industry (& UK industry) have a big problem with high elec costs – despite the growth of renewables. This is because the formation of elec prices is unreformed, because reform would mean that elec traders (owned by banks) would make less money. They lobby govs to ensure reform does not happen. The other problem is the formation of gas prices. I have been told that at least in Europe, prices are manipulated. One of my collaborators has argued that the ECB needs to treat energy in a similar way to Euros. Perhaps something to be discussed further?
Failure to act will have political consequences for the future existence of the EU.
“Our current “banking elite” are out of control”
Agreed
And true to form, Western capitalism will blame the Chinese for filling the vacuum it created, and we may have another conflict based on extreme Christian conversion theory. I kid you not.
Britain pioneered the Industrial Revolution.
The world came to Britain to see how we did it, learnt, took what we did well and changed what they thought we didnt do well.
No reason why we cannot do the same now, look at what China, the US, Europe etc does well – and badly then take those lessons and apply them here.
We could, if we ended neoliberalism.
Thank you.
As the G20 got going in the spring of 2009, China, Russia, Japan and Türkiye sent delegations of young officials to learn what went wrong (here). I was part of the City teams, collectively and individually, to meet them.
China often invites guests like Mervyn King and Goldman’s John Thornton to lecture there. They are very different there, not at all neoliberal…
South Africa invited Treasury and Bank of England staff on secondments.
The logic of Western Capitalism has helped the rise of China as an economic powerhouse, IMO. Our societies are trained to look for bargains, to drive costs down, to make as cheap as possible to improve profits, as ever increasing profits is supposedly good. The natural consequence was when China became more open, the then western industrial leaders decided to shaft their workers and outsource to the much cheaper Chinese workforce.
Good on China recognising this as the mistake it was, and taking full advantage.
However, is it all rosy in China? They had their 1 child policy for nearly 40 years, and their demographic pyramid shows the consequence of that. All 5 year age bands below 40, show a relatively large differential between the number of males vs females. In other words, there are plenty of Chinese male adults that have no prospect of finding a Chinese female of equivalent age to settle down with and start a family. I don’t know anything about Chinese culture, so I do not know if that is a major societal issue or not.
Things are far from all rosy in China, and its human rights record remains abysmal. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t think about what its dominance might mean.
You have argued for years for the Courageous State. The Chinese government, for all its faults, is nothing if not courageous. It sees a problem; it fixes it. A fix doesn’t work? They change course. They don’t sit there wringing their hands and begging for crumbs from the bond markets.
Any analysis of the rise of China, needs to keep an eye on the Christian church there.
In the USA, the church has influenced government from a historic position of numerical strength, as a majority faith – and in recent decades, that influence has often been malign and toxic – southern racism, KKK, the Moral Majority, tele-evangelists, Christian Zionism, MAGA Christians (alongside more progressive groups focussed on social justice such as the Mennonites).
America and Russia, (and Europe and Britain in days gone by) show us that religion and institutional power do not mix well.
In China, the church has been around since around 600AD, possibly earlier, and has experienced waves of local or national persecution as a minority faith. The Chinese church is probably the largest national Christian church globally (estimates vary from 40-70 million with rapid growth – about 5% of the population, in both officially tolerated and underground forms). They have a missionary slogan – “from Beijing to Jerusalem” – they are not isolationist.
What role will they play in the rise of China? Positive or negative? No one knows. But they will be significant.
As to my views on China? I think they are mainly concerned with their own security, prosperity and internal stability. They have achieved a great deal for their population. They will be both pragmatic and ruthless about their own back yard. I dont see them as militarily expansionist in the way that Europe was and America is now.
Economically, they are beating us hollow, and deservedly so. As for the undoubted human rights and civil liberties problems, who are we to point the finger?
“As for the undoubted human rights and civil liberties problems, who are we to point the finger?”
We are human beings, that have the obligation to do that no matter what we did ourselves.
Naturally we need to accept that the other side will justifiably not hesitate to point out our problems as well.
Both sides can be each others teacher this way when they’re courageous enough and willing to learn.
It’s not a good thing for us nor for the chinese to have wealth on the backs of the poor and unseen.
And for deriving a bit from the topic while I’m mentioning poor:
China has still a lot of its population living in poverty.
I have no current date data but in an article of the german TAZ from 2024 it’s stated that about 69% of the chinese population are living from less than 250€ / month.
I doubt that this has changed much.
Those people, that most likely work their *** off for the rise of china, are never really mentioned at all.
But then again, are their similar counterparts in other countries mentioned anywhere else in a significant way anyway?
And here we are again at pointing out each others mistakes for justified reasons.
I’ve wondered for a while if the Chinese government have figured out that they create the money supply by spending. There never seems to be an issue of finding the money to pump into various sectors including banking and industry. If that is the case, then it’s no wonder they are leaving Europe behind.
I hold no brief for many aspects of China and their regime but we underestimate them at our peril. They are clever and pragmatic. Otherwise they would not have survived several thousand years. It would seem that these days they are running rings around the West in all most every aspect of life. We should perhaps say it as it is that Europe and America are becoming decadent and corrupt. Neoliberalism is the means but is a tool rather than a cause of this corruption.
They ran rings around us a long time before many people knew what rings were.
Thank you, Richard.
Readers should note that, outside the west, people prioritise food on the table, a roof on their heads etc. rather than what is called democracy.
One could argue democracy takes different forms.
China: Every place of employment that has at least 100 employees, including my former employer HSBC, has a Communist Party cell. Each cell elects a representative which feeds into the national People’s Congress federal structure.
Iran: Each mosque elects clergy. This feeds into the Ayatollah system at national level. There are separate elections and a parliament with seats reserved for religious minorities.
Saudi Arabia: Before Friday prayers, often, but not always, in the bigger locations, members of the royal family will attend a council of sorts and receive petitions from the public. Similar are organised for Bedouins. Princes meet them in oases. The requests are taken to the government and king. I’ve attended one outside Riyadh. It was in a big tent, not a mosque.
Might a Chiese advantage be the absence of an over-powerful/parasitic finance sector?
Might another advantage consist of not being a member/vasal of the unstated empire of the U S A?
This all raises the question whether the EU has failed – as an economic project. The EU was original established to provide a counterbalance to the potential US economic dominance of the ‘free’ world post WW2. In recent decades, the EU has faltered when it comes to technology industries as it lacks alternatives to much of American big tech. Now, the EU appears to be no match against Chinese economic and industrial dominance of the entire world.
Something I have noticed is that before Brexit, the strongest argument for the UK remaining in the EU was economic. After Brexit, the arguments to rejoin the EU are increasingly for political and cultural reasons rather than economic reasons.
Riaz, that’s interesting. Having family in continental Europe no doubt influenced my desire for UK to have a seat at the table, whatever the shortcomings of EU – I also figured we needed it economically. When life got less hectic and I read more about what was done to Greece, and got some economic education on this blog, I realised how neoliberal the European Commission is in their economics, and understood better the limitations of being in the Eurozone. Perhaps many people now hesitate over full economic membership, knowing the deal would be poorer than that we had, but want some help against the economic doings of the current government in Washington, and miss the laws on environment, employment rights and human rights. We’re between a rock and a hard place.
I remember ?Gove? promising us that after Brexit, UK regulatory standards for food, environment, privacy/data protection etc would not fall below EU standards applying in UK, pre-Brexit. He was of course, lying. He lied a lot.
A courageous state regulates. The UK’s regulators are a total corrupt sham.
Back when we had a genuinely mixed economy, there was such a thing as credit guidance, and the Chinese Communist Party learned. Pick sectors that are seen as strategically important, direct funding towards them, and guess what!
I wonder if we might learn from the Chinese, I’m sure there’s an idea in there somewhere.