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When American people talk about China it’s all so very silly. They repeat whatever narrative that the American media has fed to them. Anything outside of that narrative is just discarded and ignored. Conservatives will repeat how evil China is, and Progressives will repeat how repressive it is. And both narratives are lies. For China is many things, but the American two-dimensional narrative, nope! It’s not even close.
One of the more amusing narratives is the changing views on China. If you actually pay attention you can follow the evolution of the narratives and observe just how the American population has been manipulated.
1970s – Eat your vegetables, think of all the starving people in China!
1980s – China is yearning for democracy! But the government imprisons everyone.
1990s – China is just a manufacturer of cheap junk and low priced gadgets.
2000s – China only copies things, they just are unable to innovate.
2010s – China uses slave labor, child labor, and pollutes terribly.
2020s – China is dangerous! We must destroy China; our ENEMY!
Prior to Donald Trump becoming President, China held the status of “Most Favored Trading Partner”. Now four years into the Donald Trump Presidency, they are considered the Number one Enemy of “Freedom, Liberty, Justice and the American Way!”
Depending on what narrative (see above) the ignorant use to describe China, we can determine just how uneducated they are in global technology, trade, and world politics.
It’s actually funny, if it wasn’t so Gosh Darn Sad.
For
many years the United States has regarded itself as, and been, the
world’s technological leader. One can easily make a long and impressive
list of seminal discoveries and inventions coming from America, from the
moon landings to the internet. It was an astonishing performance. The
US maintains a lead, though usually a shrinking one, in many fields.
But:
China has risen explosively, from being clearly a “Third World” country forty years ago to become a very serious and rapidly advancing competitor to America.
Anyone who has seen today’s China (I recently spent two weeks there, traveling muchly) will have been astonished by the ubiquitous construction, the quality of planning, the roads and airports and high-speed rail, the sense of confidence and modernity.
Guangzhou, China. September 2020.
Compare this with America’s rotting and dangerous cities, swarms of homeless people, deteriorating education, antique rail, deindustrialized midlands, loony government, and the military sucking blood from the economy like some vast leech, and America will seem yesterday’s country.
The phrase “national suicide” comes to mind.
Los Angeles, USA. September 2020.
A common response to these observations from thunder-thump patriots is the assertion that the Chinese can’t invent anything, just copy and steal.
What one actually sees is a combination of rapid and successful adoption of foreign technology (see Shanghai maglev below) and, increasingly, cutting edge science and technology. More attention might be in order. A few examples: A few examples from many that might be adduced:
Supposedly the intent was to make the twins resistant to AIDS. It was done using CRISPR-Cas 9, a gene-editing technique invented in the West by Jennifer Dooudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier but quickly mastered by China.
It seemed odd that AIDS resistance would be the goal since the disease is easily avoided. Maybe, I thought, for some technical reason the insertion was particularly easy. But then:
“By accident” indeed. Since the researchers admitted being aware of the neurologic effects of CCR5, the gene in question, the experiment sure looked like a shot at increasing intelligence.
Whether
the insertion in fact had the effect described, I do not know, and the
story maybe or may not be sensationalized. Of interest are, first, that
it was an attempt to engineer intelligence, second, that it involved
inserting a human gene in a (presumably) lower primate, and third, that
the Chinese did it.
“China, Huawei to Launch 5G network in Shanghai Station”
Though
5G is usually presented as an improvement to smartphones, it is far
more, and the Chinese seem poised to jump on it hard. See below.
September 2020. 5G is "old technology" now. Work is in progress for 6G.
“World’s First 5G powered Remote Brain Surgery Performed in China”
It
is interesting that China and South Korea are clear leaders in 5G. The
US, unable to compete seeks to prohibit its European vassals from
dealing with Huawei by threatening sanctions. Germany has refused to
obey. .
Whether Forbes’ overstates the facts can perhaps be argued. That China has come from nowhere to be ahead in a crucial technology ought to be a wake-up call.
That America has to rely on sanctions instead of better technology accentuates the point.
A couple of decades ago, Chinese students in the US often refused to return to a backward and repressive country. It now appears that Asia is where the action is and they want to be part of it.
These things are everywhere. Click the link.Inmost countries roads and rails follow the contour of the land. China likes pillars.
Chinese Mega-Bridges are everywhere.
Digging
subways is expensive and disruptive, cutting highways through cities is
destructive of homes and business, so China goes with sky-trains.
Building these takes about half the land as roadways. The bridges are
built offsite and then erected with a special crane.
“China Develops Infrared Light to Alter Genes of Cancer Cells””
A
team led by Professor Song Yujun from the Nanjing University’s College
of Engineering and Applied Sciences designed an infrared
light-responsive nano-carrier to be used for the CRISPR-Cas9
gene-editing tool, which will have great potential in cancer
therapeutics. The strong penetrability of infrared light enables
scientists to precisely control the gene editing tool in deep human
tissue”
I am
clueless as to the function of IR in this but, as with so very many
stories coming out of China, it does not suggest copycatting.
increasingly, the Chinese seem to following from in front.
“China Breaks Quantum Entanglement Record at Eighteen Qbits”
In a
new record, Pan Jianwei and colleagues at the University of Science and
Technology of China, eastern China’s Anhui Province, demonstrated a
stable 18-qubit state. The previous record of 10 qubits was set by the
same team. The breakthrough was made possible by simultaneously
manipulating the freedom-paths, polarization, and orbital angular
momentum of six photons.
“The speed of quantum computing grows exponentially as the number of qubits in an entangled state increases … the achievement of an 18-qubit entanglement this time has set the world record for largest entanglement state in all physical systems,”
-Wan
(Noah’s ark measured 300 Qbits, but the (barely) antediluvian technology has bee lost.)
Open Date: Dec. 31st, 2002 Total Length: 30 kilometers (19 miles) Highest Speed: 430km/h (267 mi/h) Duration per Single Journey: 8 minutes Frequency: 15-20 minutes Route: Longyang Rd. – Pudong International Airport (PVG
Trains relying on magnetic levitation float on a field of magnetic repulsion, having no contact with rails. This reduces friction and ends wear on wheels and rails. China did not invent the technology but uses it well. Before this train, the trip from downtown to the airport took forty minutes to an hours.
Now, eight minutes.
The technology is German, the idea a century old, but the Chinese decided that they wanted it, and got it. The ability to make a decision and act on it without years of political wrangling and lawsuits gives China a major advantage over other countries.
The
video is long, at 43 minutes, a bit ray-rah, and wanders briefly off
into the history of elevated rail in Chicago but gives a good picture of
the train, the technology at a non-specialist level, and the China in
which it runs.
Rand: Chilling World War III Wargames show US Forces Crushed by Russia and China
“RAND Senior Defense Analyst David Ochmanek discussed the simulations at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) in Washington D.C. last week. “In our games, where we fight China or Russia … blue gets its a** handed to it, not to put too fine a point on it,” he said, during a panel discussion. Blue denotes U.S. forces in the simulations.”
The reasons for this are several and belong in another column. The military’s utterly predictable response is “Send more money” instead of “Maybe we should mind our own business and spend on our economy.”
The point here is that the world is changing in may ways and Washington seems not to have noticed.
Conclusion
The list could be extended at length, to cover numbers of patents awarded, scientific papers published, quantum communications, investment in education and technological research and development, supercomputers and chip design and many other things.
Beijing is clearly bent on Making China Great Again–as why should it not?
Meanwhile America focuses more on transgender bathrooms and whether Bruce Jenner is a girl than on its endless and draining wars.
China sends its brightest to the world’s best technical school while America makes its universities into playpens for the mildly retarded. The country crumbles but spends drunkenly of defective fighter planes it doesn’t need in the first place.
This won’t work a whole lot longer.
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This is a complete reprint of a most excellent article that I (personally) 100% agree with. In short, regardless as to the events and causes related to the virus, the way that China has handled it and the global reaction to it has been overwhelmingly positive. This and similar trends are pointing in positive directions for China. This article discusses the “fall out” from this event.
This article was published on February 10, 2020 by Fionn Wright – 仁飞扬 and can be found HERE. The only changes that I made was add section headers, and added some illustrative photos. I strongly suggest that the reader visit the original source, and (if possible) follow the author as he has other articles of worth.
Could the Coronavirus make China Stronger than Ever? 10 Trends that Indicate it Will.
The
virus is hitting China’s economy hard, but this is likely only
temporary. China’s immune system is fighting back — building hospitals
in record time, completely locking down a city and most importantly the
entire nation uniting as one voice of support and solidarity.
Mario Cavolo called out the global response to the Coronavirus in his post “Something’s not right here folks” which originally went viral on LinkedIn and then subsequently all over Chinese social media. He compares the media response to Coronavirus with the H1N1 outbreak in the US, saying, “it’s not a conspiracy, it’s just a tragedy,” and “this vicious, political, xenophobic racist attacks and smearing of all things China needs to stop.”
What doesn’t break you only makes you stronger, and the Chinese people are resilient and will find ways to rise out of this crisis, likely coming back even stronger than before. How long that will take no-one yet knows, but the Chinese spirit is not even close to being broken, and we’ve seen how Chinese ingenuity in a time of crisis has led to entirely new operating models…
Remember how Jackie Ma became a billionaire…
During the SARS outbreak in 2003, because everyone was
afraid to go out, Liu Qiangdong, founder of JD (Jing Dong, one of
China’s largest online retailers), moved the physical stores in
Zhongguancun to an online store. Ma Yun saw the demand for e-commerce
and set up Taobao (Alibaba’s B2C commence platform).
Comparison with the 2003 SARS…
To make a comparison with SARS, China’s GDP was 12 trillion yuan in 2003, but 17 years later China’s GDP has reached 100 trillion yuan, so China’s overall anti-risk capability has increased nearly 10x since then.
Interestingly, a few industries are actually booming, from medical to online education to food delivery. The altered ecosystem during the crisis is forcing people to find new ways of accessing what they need.
Short term vs. Long term.
Despite
the short term effects on many industries across China, it is unlikely
to have a long-term destabilizing impact on China’s economy, which is
already in the midst of a major adjustment, and this event will in many
ways accelerate the pace of adjustment towards adaptability and
resilience.
Many of the concepts below are inspired by the famous
Chinese blogger Shuimuran (水木然) and much of the data and research I have
found through Dr. Shirley Yu, Political Economist from Harvard and the London School of Economics.
1 – Off-line Shopping is Over
Although people in China have already formed the habit of online shopping in the last few years, there are still a few types of products that people still prefer to buy offline.
These last few remaining products are likely to virtually disappear in the coming months after this outbreak. For example, before the outbreak people used to go to the market for fresh groceries, but now buying groceries online has also become the norm.
Shopping on-line has been a staple of Chinese life for the last fifteen years. What has changed is that many “untouchable” items like lettuce and snacks are now being bought on line.
Since shopping is done online, the physical store of the future is no longer centered on “selling products”, but with a shift through New Retail to “providing experiences”.
If the physical store is still designed as a place to sell, then it will lose relevance.
No matter what kind of enterprise, it must have an ability to capture customers online, the traditional way of getting customers, such as cold calls or traditional advertising, have less and less power, and will cost more and more.
As New Generation China Expert Michael Norris has been predicting for years, more and more things will start to be free, and more and more things will start to be infinitely closer to zero direct profit, so businesses have to find alternate ways of generating income streams.
Advertising can be charged more, or partnerships can be created to package and bundle products and services, driving people towards what they are most interested in even if its not your product, but making money by doing so.
Human attention is now the most valuable resource on earth.
2 – Online education will start to replace offline education
Suddenly a whole new possibility has opened up. While before online education was used to supplement offline education, we will begin to see online education starting to replace parts of offline education.
Home schooling via computer will displace more traditional teaching methods.
New models of doing this more effectively are being realized at this very moment, and people are beginning to realize that the time it takes to commute is actually valuable time that could be used to learn.
Just as the internet has changed the circulation path of products, it has also changed the path of knowledge transmission.
Online education democratizes superior educational resources, and this is exactly the core problem of solving Chinese education. Previously, each teacher could only teach in front of dozens or at most hundreds of people, but now a single teacher can reach tens or even hundreds of thousands of people online, and these students come from all over the country, including undeveloped areas that have internet access.
Working remotely will become the norm rather than the exception.
The office leasing market in 2020 will likely drop, with the potential exception of co-working spaces despite the WeWork fiasco.
Online office software will accelerate in popularity, especially the office software that can realize collaborative work. What follows is the online office model. An online China is coming, and China will become the global benchmark for a new kind of office.
Entirely new collaborative tools and features will be released and updated at lighting speed.
Areas of the developed world, such as in Africa, will leapfrog the developed world in adopting these as they have done with digital currencies, and thus in some areas become more competitive.
4 – A More Health Conscious Society Based on Biotech
Chinese people will begin to move their focus away from making money, sacrificing their health for money, seeing the limitations of the 996 work schedule.
Physical and mental health will be the key indicator of a person’s value in the future, and Chinese people will make more conscious decisions about their lifestyles.
The identification, judgment and response of the virus will promote the breakthrough of the whole medicine and medical technology, especially to enhance the awareness and attention of the whole nation on the power of biotech.
This outbreak has shown us the importance of a scientific medical system.
At least initially, the news from Wuhan was all about the shortage of medical resources. The core of medical problems lie in the effective allocation of medical resources, the scheduling ability of medical resources at critical moments, and the coordination and sharing of medical resources.
The social credit network tied to surveillance for safety and security will expand to include health of individuals.
The government will know who is sick when, and sometimes before the individual may even be aware of it themselves. This could come directly in the form of infrared cameras to capture people within a crowd with a fever, or indirectly in the form of the types of products that people buy, predicting health indicators based on big data of others who regularly consume those products.
Thanks to the virus, infrared cameras are now monitoring people at all cross-roads and place of population density. This is useful in the quick and rapid determination of who is sick and who is not.
The healthier one is, through healthy eating, buying health related products and perhaps even exercise equipment or classes, the more likely one is to perform well and be less of a burden on society. This is tricky to measure but as more data rolls in and is analyzed, conclusions can be tested, measured and implemented in rapid iterations.
5 – Accelerated Integration of Smart Cities
Wuhan
is a city with a population of over 11 million, has nine provinces and
was locked down during the Spring Festival travel rush, the largest yearly migration of people on planet earth.
If the situation of every citizen in Wuhan is known, every person can
be accurately tracked and every outflow can be located, then we will
deal with it in a more orderly way.
Facial recognition and social scoring (all tied to police records) is now automatic in Chinese cities. This coupled with video monitoring of dissidents are a powerful tool to combat crime. As was illustrated during the HK riots when the Trump administration officials were tracked, monitored, and recorded cutting deals, and training the “pro-democracy” terrorists.
China’s futuristic smart cities include: traffic management, logistics supply chain, emergency preparedness, and information traceability, which will be fully data-based, and even equipped with artificial intelligence disaster preparedness prediction.
This reflects the management level of the whole society.
With smart cities, China will have more data-backed scientific means of governance.
Modern governance is more and more based on data, with the health and security of the people as the first consideration.
Chinese monitoring software.
After this outbreak, the country will learn from experience and lessons learned, analyze what worked well and develop new systems to build the learnings into the fabric of society.
After this outbreak, we will have the speed of strategic coordination, the speed of wartime research and development, and the speed of public security response.
The advantages of China’s logistics have been fully demonstrated, and supplies in Wuhan have been quickly replenished. Even scarce medical resources have been deployed efficiently across the country, which is truly a miracle of modern logistics.
Alibaba has set up a special fund of 1 billion yuan for medical supplies, which is used to purchase medical supplies at home and abroad.
In addition to the company’s global resource search, Chinese people around the world also launched a global procurement, a batch of supplies from different countries from different flights to China.
The seemingly “frozen” China is actually engaged in epic strategic material allocation. After this outbreak, we will see China’s strategic material coordination capacity not just in crisis but throughout the entire business world.
7 – China has Contingency Plans for its Contingency Plan
In the annual Central Economic Work Conference report formulating economic priorities for 2020, China has emphasized the necessity to be ready for a “contingency plan” for 2020.
This contingency plan would in no way be framed on the basis of a liberal market model, in the event that the “China Model” failed to deliver on what was intended.
In 2019, strategic relationships were developed between Alibaba, Tencent, and the largest state infrastructure and telecom organizations, to help the state upgrade its technological competitiveness as it develops the Belt and Road Initiative.
The “contingency plan” proactively drives China’s economic independence from the US.
This contingency plan is not about market liberalism, but rather increasing state control.
The trade war directly impacts China’s labor market, as manufacturers move out of China. China is recalibrating its global supply chain routes, primarily focusing on its Belt and Road Initiative as well as the EU, to compensate for the loss of trade-related jobs.
China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
The guiding principle from President Xi for China’s booming real estate sector, that properties are for living (within) not (for) investment, will continue in 2020.
There are currently 400 million middle income class (people) in China, and by 2035 (this) is expected to double to 800 million.
In order to drive sustainable consumption in China, structural reforms will need to happen in its healthcare, social welfare and pension systems so the middle class can afford to save less and spend more.
The participation of individuals, enterprises, public welfare organizations and Chinese at home and abroad has formed a systematic collaboration on a scale the human species has never seen before.
China built this second hospital in Wuhan in another ten days.
This creates a global ecosystem of Chinese that can support one another in times of crisis and cooperate when things settle down.
There is also an increasing realization that China is speeding ahead of the rest of the world…
… and it’s verified by Chinese who live or regularly travel abroad, constantly sharing memes of how backwards and slow the “developed world” actually is in many ways.
San Francisco, USA.
This strengthens national pride and solidarity within China, even though they see the benefits of being abroad like healthy air, safe food and uncrowded scenic nature sites.
9 – Chinese Companies will Push to Expand Abroad
Chinese companies will start looking more actively to do business abroad to diversify their markets the same way a wise investor diversifies his portfolio to dampen the effect of a crisis.
Huawei is leading the pack here swimming upstream against a lot of pressure, and doing remarkably well despite the international controversy. But Huawei is just the first of many Chinese companies that will expand beyond its borders in the next decade.
Not all companies have the resilience or reach of Huawei and will direct their attention more towards developing economies who are more open to Chinese products.
We’ll see more examples of Chinese companies like this that leverage the advantages of the Chinese tech infrastructure and applying them to meet the unmet needs of markets outside China, particularly developing economies.
The familiarity and integration with these forms of infrastructure will give them an advantage that will make it difficult for Western competitors to compete with. This will be similar in the same way that it has been difficult over the last decade for Chinese companies to compete with the likes of Google, Facebook or Apple. Of course, due to market penetration and foundational platforms that gave them the edge.
Huawei influence map.
Of the 195 sovereign nations recognized by the UN, Huawei currently has contractual relationships with 172 countries, engulfing the developing world.
The top strategic priority for Huawei will be to capture the developed world in 2020.
American proxies; independent nations in name only.
Whether Huawei’s push through Europe can succeed will be a fundamental test of China’s technological power as well as a test of the increasingly fragile relationships of the West.
The UK, against the will of the US, has now partially let Huawei in to develop their 5G infrastructure, but is doing their best to keep them out of areas that may compromise national security.
One challenging event at the beginning of 2020, while it has slowed China down, is not going to stop China from reaching its goal of being a fully developed country by 2050.
Girl takes a selfie with a Chinese robot.
Seen on the scale of decades, or the Chinese long-term view of centuries, the coronavirus crisis will be but a blip on the radar.
Since ancient times, the Chinese nation has encountered a host of disasters, and yet remains an indomitable nation, rising from abject poverty in the last few decades, returning to reclaim its place as one of the most powerful countries on earth.
This outbreak is an opportunity for China to evolve. It will be a test of China’s economic and social relations, its people and government relations, and China’s relations with the world.
China has already impressed the world with its ability to rapidly mobilize at scale to build the hospitals in Wuhan, and these moves are but a small taste of what is to come.
Let’s support the Chinese people in this time of crisis. The #ChinaDream starts in China, but will end up supporting the dreams of those all over the world.
With love and gratitude,
#Fionn
_______
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My Conclusions
You will not see anything like this on the American media. Whether it is the main-steam media, the Alt-Left or the Alt-Right media. But just because the media will not provide similar articles does not mean that the events are not occurring.
This is what is REALLY going on.
American media is designed to control, corral and manipulate the American citizenry. Much like the old former Soviet propaganda was used against the Russian people. You can see this when the media is reporting on events that you, yourself, are witnessing with your own two eyes.
But, you know, Americans do need to see the world as it actually is.
Some of it might be pleasant to observe, while others are ugly.
Some like the Uighur situation are “opportunities” for great wealth-building. If you are educated, and aware of what is really going on, you can become filthy rich, instead of the force-fed anti-China narrative and hide in fear about “re-education camps and the poor abused Muslims”.
Others, are signs of danger that you must take heed of, like the risks of hiring “diversity experts” (in a company) instead of talented experienced engineers, scientists and designers. (You know, for diversity, and to fight “white privilege”.)
For Americans to survive the growth pains of a new global situation, they must be educated through sources no longer tainted by the manipulative oligarchy. I do hope that you learn something in what I have to say.
The world is not a horrible, deep dark place, but there are under-currents of events that are transpiring that only the strong, the well-equipped and the flexible can survive.
So be strong. Be flexible. Be well equipped.
Take care, and BEST REGARDS.
Metallicman ready to take on the coronavirus.
If you enjoyed this post, fell free to check out some similar posts on my China index…
You’ll not find
any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
