The Western media has made it a constant meme is the problem.
The reality is the next generation of hard-tech and pretty much everything innovative in materials and manufacturing is coming out of China.
Like we are hearing a whole bunch of nonsense now about rare-earths and how China is nearly 100% of the supply of several along with processed graphene etc.
But what that story is missing is the less sophisticated stuff they were able to massively revolutionize also.
For instance most Western media declare the Belt and Road program a massive failure without looking at it's impact on things like nickel. Indonesia is now one of the worlds biggest suppliers because they a) banned export of unprocessed nickel and then lent hard into the BRI borrowing from China and allowing Chinese operated mines to setup their own processing there. As a result more of the value add is captured in Indonesia (the whole goal of all of this) and now Indonesia is one of the biggest supplies of nickle pig iron and stainless steel.
How is this possible when giant (and heavily experienced) Western mining companies in places like Australia (which also have vast nickle reserves) were both established and ready to expand? Well that comes down to tech and expertise. China was able to design and build a new class of nickle smelters that were 2-3x as capital efficient as the Western equivalent plants in Australia.
What impact did that have? Well a giant reduction in the price of nickel of course as Indonesia went from nearly no output to over 1.8M tons.
There are tons of other examples, especially in anything related to the next generation of energy. Solar, batteries, nukes, all the inputs for the above like polysilicon etc.
The Chinese are fucking good at this stuff and pretending they just copy and do stuff cheap is not only a massive disservice to the Chinese engineers that make this happen but also a dangerous mistake if you want to go into business competing with them.
That's exactly what I am thinking about, thanks for the insights. I am sure there are hundreds if not thousands examples like this with probably as much impact. See their massive investments in nearly any underdeveloped region of the world.
The reality is the next generation of hard-tech and pretty much everything innovative in materials and manufacturing is coming out of China.
Like we are hearing a whole bunch of nonsense now about rare-earths and how China is nearly 100% of the supply of several along with processed graphene etc.
But what that story is missing is the less sophisticated stuff they were able to massively revolutionize also.
For instance most Western media declare the Belt and Road program a massive failure without looking at it's impact on things like nickel. Indonesia is now one of the worlds biggest suppliers because they a) banned export of unprocessed nickel and then lent hard into the BRI borrowing from China and allowing Chinese operated mines to setup their own processing there. As a result more of the value add is captured in Indonesia (the whole goal of all of this) and now Indonesia is one of the biggest supplies of nickle pig iron and stainless steel. How is this possible when giant (and heavily experienced) Western mining companies in places like Australia (which also have vast nickle reserves) were both established and ready to expand? Well that comes down to tech and expertise. China was able to design and build a new class of nickle smelters that were 2-3x as capital efficient as the Western equivalent plants in Australia.
What impact did that have? Well a giant reduction in the price of nickel of course as Indonesia went from nearly no output to over 1.8M tons.
There are tons of other examples, especially in anything related to the next generation of energy. Solar, batteries, nukes, all the inputs for the above like polysilicon etc.
The Chinese are fucking good at this stuff and pretending they just copy and do stuff cheap is not only a massive disservice to the Chinese engineers that make this happen but also a dangerous mistake if you want to go into business competing with them.