A Trillion Trinkets
A quarter of a century ago, China established a global domination strategy centred on one word…. Education.
China’s history is neatly divided into two eras:
- The great conqueror or
- the conquered.
Which era do you think it prefers to reconstruct?
Think Silk Road! The next time you pull out your good china when you want to impress your in-laws when they come over, think of the Silk Road era of China and the millenniums before and the centuries since. Millenniums of creative thinking. What would happen if China was to reignite this ‘creative energy’? Well… like it or not they have.
Given the North American lens we have been given to ‘view’ China, we might have thought their efforts may have been military centred. It’s ‘not’! China’s focus has been on the integration of economies and engineering.
Every little gadget you buy is engineered. So think of trinkets. Now think of a trillion trinkets. Therein lays the simplest, yet most powerful globalization expansion and domination strategy in the history of the world. Ironically it is a redefining of the ‘Silk Road’ from trade to Global Domination through trade.
The implementation of the trillion trinket strategy is as simple for China to establish as the overall strategic concepts itself. It revolves around the question: ‘what do we need to create a trillion trinkets?’ Their answer: ‘we need engineers….lots and lots of engineers!!!
Imagine an army of 20,000,000 goose-stepping soldiers; goose-stepping their way through the streets of Beijing on a sunny Sunday afternoon, dressed in their military uniforms, carrying their rifles, with their thousands of artillery pieces rolling along interspersed within the ranks along with their IBM launchers , as the sky darkens and with the deafening sound of the engines of the unending stream of military jet planes so dense they almost block out the sun. It all sounds terrifying until we remember that in the entire kit’n’ caboodle could be destroyed in less than an hour by the US navy with a coordinated attack by just a few its 250plus nuclear armed submarines simultaneously firing off one nuclear missile: total destruction.
The reverse is also true, with China having the nuclear arms to knock out any country it targets including the USA and the USSR.
The sabre-rattling nuclear arms media show amongst the power house nations is nothing more than political posturing given they all know throwing up a nuc would be equal to the British’s ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’.
The true danger of nuclear arms isn’t so much one of military attacks, as it is the potential of just one of the thousands of nuclear bombs in storage warehouses being mishandled and exploding setting off an unending series of catastrophic events. And let’s not forget it only takes one slightly off-balanced submarine Captain or one incompetent sailor of the over 500 nuc subs slinking under the ocean waters to push one button and the world ends…or TODAY…if one idiot President pushes one button.
NO… CHINA is much too smart to seriously consider nuclear war. Why bother!!!! Why go into a messy military war with all those mutilated bodies when all that is needed to dominate the world is an economic war using the tsunamic weapon called ‘The Profit Carrot’. The Chinese knew that once they stuck that Profit Carrot under the noses of the industrialized world’s corporate executives, in particular those on the stock exchanges, it would be putting a bull-ring through their noses which they accepted as gleefully as a bear does honey. And voila…a new era of industrialized slavery had begun. The Cheshire smiling cat Chinese perched in the tree tops watching the industrialized corporate world, at first nibble at, then bite and today gorge’n’swallow as much of the Profit Carrot as possible while ignoring it’s bitter taste of financial and political cyanide.
Now let’s change our vision. Now imagine 20,000,000 advanced educated and trained fresh young faced engineers walking through the streets of Beijing, each holding up their degrees in computer sciences, astro-physics, electrical and mechanical engineering plus matching every elite engineering program in every elite university in the free world. That is exactly what China’s new army is.
By the end of the cultural revolution in the 1960’s, and after the death of Mao, the Chinese leaders, realized they had self-inflicted more damage to their country than any foreign aggressor could possibly have inflicted.
The chanting mobs of “Mao is great anyone who thinks otherwise is an enemy of the state” virtually destroyed all national advances since Mao’s victory over Chang Kai Shek in 1949. Entire infrastructures including traffic lights, hospitals, universities, power and water utilities, were attacked and shut down by the political mindless chanting mobs …at the end of a gun… who considered anyone in authority or with any advanced knowledge be it in the sciences, manufacturing or the arts as bourgeois who must be killed, or severely beaten and imprisoned to be punished until they reformed their thinking accepting the ‘word’ of Mao as the word of the Divine.
Xi Jinping, the current President of the People’s Republic of China, who was a young boy during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960’s experienced his father killed, his mother being thrown into prison and denounced as an enemy of the state, his sister killed, and Xi was forced to work in the farm fields as slave-child.
From being a slave-child of a persecuted family, Xi incredibly got into and graduated from Tsinghua University in Chemical Engineering, from which he rose through the ranks of the communist party to party leader to President. Even his most ardent distractors have to admire his iron willed disciplined focus. Xi would have been just one of a new cadre of leaders in China who understood and agreed with his educational priorities, resulting in this priority shift.
This was a shift in priorities from demi-god worship of Mao’s Red-Book-Bible, which in-its-day served its purpose, to the focus of building the most powerful engineering educational program in history. Germany recognized this educational focus shift and in an attempt to increase the number of its own universities has offered free tuition to foreign engineering (or medical science) students who will study in Germany. India’s Prime Minister, Dr. Modi has set a target to graduate 1,500,000 engineers a year. Imagine, within one year, between India and China, the democratic nations face an on-going supply of 3,500,000 new Chinese and Indian engineering graduates 3,500,000 added to the 24plus-million: now add Pakistan, etc.
This expansion of financial investment in engineering education in China and India in particular, comes at a time when the countries of the European Union, with the exception of Germany, have not made any major additional investments in this field and at a time in history when the USA appears to be more interested in turning it’s university students into micro-profit-centres as opposed to educating it’s future leaders. Harsh words perhaps so let’s do a simplistic comparison between the USA and China on a per engineering student comparison.
China provides engineering students with free room and board along with a stipend for spending money and free tuition. The vast majority of it’s graduates work in their field of study initially on government assignments; more recently with the option of private sector operations. They graduate debt free.
Apple Computers, Costco, Target, Amazon and Walmart are the largest international benefactors of the efforts of these Chinese engineering students focused on consumer goods.
In comparison, an engineering graduate in the USA has, on average, three hundred thousand-plus dollars in debt and is unlikely to get a job in their career chosen field. It is estimated in the USA more engineering graduates will end up driving for Uber-styled taxi and/or working as a retail store clerk, ironically selling mostly Chinese products, than will find a job in their field in which they have invested years of their lives, in which they chased the American dream, while running up hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt many will never be able to pay off in their lifetimes. For hundreds of thousands of USA university graduates, the interest in their student debt alone is beyond their ability to pay. The US is crippling its best young brains financially and emotionally having robbed them of their futures.
The financial interest in student debt in the USA is the second largest income source for US financial institutions, second only to home mortgages, and we all know how that played out between 2008 to 2012 with millions of Americans losing their homes while simultaneously crushing the international financial structures. Those same organizations, which orchestrated the entire economic collapse of the USA and much of the world now saps billions of dollars from the blood-stream of its most important youth sector; its university students.
Annual Graduation Rates: in 2020 China will have graduated approximately 2,000,000, engineers and has been doing so for the past decade, while the USA will graduate approximately 120,000: 6% of China. Now throw in India’s 1,500,000 graduating engineers and you discover that the USA engineering graduates represent approximately a mere 3.5% of the educational power houses China and India.
How successful has this economic-educational strategy for China been?
It has been so successful that it was China that saved the financial collapse of the USA saving the auto and financial sectors by lending the US government 1,140,000,000,000 (1.140 TRILLION $$$).
We can only speculate on how much of that bailout money and existing debt was paid for by the purchases North Americans made of Chinese products from the major US retailers.
The VORTEX of US economic collapse…. It happened this way!
An Uber-taxi driving , otherwise unemployed male US engineering graduate, went into a Walmart to purchase new going back to school clothes for his 1.9 children. He had already picked up the school supplies such as paper, pencils and lunch boxes at one of the 39,000 Chinese centred dollar-stores. He started in the Walmart shoe section, then onto the pant, shirt and jacket isles. He recognized the various ‘brand names’ on the labels, at the bottom of which it showed the ‘made in China’ stamp. His dad worked for 23 years with the same brand named, now Chinese made shoe company, and he remembered, how not very long ago, Walmart had ordered the shoe company he had also worked for as a summer student to either drop their product prices to match lower priced Chinese manufactured shoes, or to move their operation to China. The shoe manufacturer Board of Directors, at the direction of their dividend stock-holders made the decision to move its operation to China. The US plant was closed. All major retailers have demanded the same ‘made in China’ branding. Any sense of national pride is immediately gone when the profit carrot is brought into play. All the major retailers joined the ‘made in China brass band’ all with the ‘profit-ring through their noses’.
The true sad irony, one which has resulted in at minimal a mass North American psychological depression…if not global… is that our Uber-Taxi driving engineer was thankful for the lower Walmart prices while experiencing the emotional contradiction of purchasing Asian slave- labour-made lower priced products at the cost our engineer and hundreds of thousands more US trained engineers their professional livelihood.
The Growth of The Middle Class continues…only this time it is emerging in countries like China as it collapses in countries like the US, Canada and the European Union countries. But we have to also accept the reality, the emergence of the North American middle class in the first place, was the result of economically benefiting from the two world wars.
In fact is the US in particular prospered as a result of those wars. Before entering the wars, the US manufactured most of the planes, tanks, jeeps, arms, bullets, bombs being used and destroyed by a number of the waring countries. Why go to war when we can sell war products to everyone, appeared to be the popular view in the US….until they were directly attacked: first by Germany in WW1 when the German’s sank the Lusitania and by Japan at Pearl Harbor forcing them to enter the wars; otherwise it is questionable they would have.
After the wars, the same US product manufacturing plants supplied the building products and equipment necessary to rebuild Europe. Without those wars, the size of the middle class would have been ‘peanut sized’ compared to what it eventually grew into. US industrialists were/are not known for their ‘lets share the profit’ approach to business. Prior to the wars, following the ‘lets’ keep as much as we can approach’ industrialized wages were just slightly above slave wages for most workers be it in the farm fields, the mines, in the manufacturing or retail sectors. Wages were forced up when the industrialists needed a larger work force to produce on a global scale, and unions controlled most of the labour force and were able to force up wages. These unions of course being the ones our under-employed engineers would traditionally snub their noses at.
After making hundreds of billions of dollars during the war and the reconstruction phases of WW2, the war manufacturing plants turned back to making cars, washers, fridges and every imaginable consumer good. None of which would have existed to any significant degree without the war building the ‘middle class’.
The best business chess player in history, who truly understood this ‘supply to destroy and rebuilt’ concept was US Vice President, Dick Cheney who was on the Boards of many of the military industrial complex arms manufacturing operations, as well as the firms supplying advanced security forces (mercenaries) and building product firms supplying the reconstruction products and labour for the War In Iraq. Compared to Chaney, Trump is ‘bush league’.
China’s economic strategy is rooted in the understanding, the Achilles Heel of the democratic countries is their inexhaustible demand for consumer products of everything imaginable. With partners like the Walmarts, Costcos, Amazon and so on, China has been able to gain the position of being the major supplier for mid-range-quality products while the actual ‘trillion trinkets’ are being purchased at the 39,000plus dollar stores.
Beyond the ‘trinkets’ China is using its economic power to buy the ‘rights’ to the resources of countries throughout Africa and South America, the Middle East and others. Why send in the military, when you can convince a country to ‘borrow’ your money and to ‘partner’ for resources? China is building infrastructures like shipping ports, airports, highways, electric grids, railroads, not from the ‘goodness’ of their hearts, but from the sound business principle of investing in what is needed to get to a country’s resources in exchange for a partnership ownership of those resources. This at a time when the US has less and less money to invest in any international projects, preferring to continually build up it’s military despite the fact it spends what is equal to the combined military budgets of the next 15 countries collectively, plus despite the fact in terms of nuclear weaponry it has already enough nucs stock-piled to kill every man, women and child 90 times over all at the same time as cutting its tax base for political posturing.
Early Trade: In the not so long ago ‘good old days’ of the 70’s and 80’s, products from China and other Asian countries were laughed at because they were considered low quality….which of course was mostly true. North American retailers were just flirting at the thought of buying Asian products with a strong nationalist ‘buy American’ theme. That nationalist wall was cracked when Datsun dropped thousands of cars on the Vancouver and Seatle docks providing North American consumer with a small, mid-range quality car at a rock bottom price with gas efficiency at almost three times that of Detroit’s gas guzzlers at a time gas prices were sky-rocketing.
While Datsun’s weren’t great cars, they weren’t all that bad in comparison to what GM, Ford and Dodge were inflicting on their faithful consumers.
The Datsun breakthrough resulted in the WalMarts and other major retailers to start to look at the question: ‘if US consumers would betray the US auto manufacturers, creating a shift in US consumer commitment to ‘made in the USA’, would they also accept other Asian manufactured products?’
As the economies of Europe and Asia started to pick up the pace of their manufacturing sector reconstruction, which were destroyed by WW2, the major retailers took their first bite of the foreign ‘profit carrot’. Let’s not forget while Europe and Asia were turned into heaps of rubble by the wars, North America supplied the vast majority of bullets, military arms, ships, planes, trucks, along with food to the Allied military forces and starving masses in the destroyed countries, establishing North America as the richest economies in history establishing the basis for a consumer driven economy. North Americans were enriched by the two world wars; something we are reluctant to remember. This is not to suggest a negative criticism of our countries, for without the elite industrialization and contribution of North America, in particular the US, the war would have been lost to the Nazi murderers.
In the mid-70’s, I was invited to attend the first North American conference held by China held in San Francisco. It was the first time I had a chance to see China’s longer economic strategy coming into play. The Chinese Ambassador stood proudly at the podium to announce China was “open for business, does not recognize international product patents and would cooperate with any North American firms which wanted to have its products manufactured in China’. China become the undisputed global leader in ‘Intellectual Property’ theft. Whoever bought their products was paying for their legal fees out of the profits so why not steal intellectual property rights and patents?
On a side note; ironically, this ‘intellectual theft strategy’ was soon closely followed by Siemen’s and Blackberry, which have been the most successfully sued companies, in the billions of dollars, for intellectual property theft. So much so, both companies ‘added a potential legal cost factor’ to their production costs. In Canada the average time to review a ‘patent’ by the patent office is estimated around five months whereas it is estimated the international IT hackers have it within five hours of submission. This is the direct experience of friends of mine who spent $600,000 to defend their patents to only lose because they couldn’t out finance a Chinese companies legal costs which were repaid to them by the Chinese government… it’s new way of stepping around international intellectual property laws.
Now what???
I doubt there is any ‘new information’ for in this little-ditti but the question it raises is: ‘how do we survive?’ Those who control the money, control the manufacturing, control the jobs, control the national economies and control the ‘vote’ … assuming our democracy can scrape out a survival plan. Our harsh reality is that if our financial/industrial leaders will destroy an entire manufacturing sector for a ‘few dollars more’ to use slave labour be it in China, India, Bangladesh or wherever; what won’t they destroy ‘for a few dollars more’? What we do know, if it is a question of making higher profits or protecting our jobs and economy, ‘Profits’ will always win.
How do we reshape our entire North American community to survive in the new global battle of economies? That is part 2 is this little dissertation. Let me end this component by saying ‘it starts at 3’.
David Maxwell