Trump’s tariffs play right into China’s hands

After two trips to China in the past four months, I’ve been trying to say this every way I know how: Folks, you don’t understand.

- Thomas L Friedman, a New York Times Op-Ed columnist, writes about foreign affairs, globalisation and technology.

Covid had a terrible effect on human health and mortality, but it also had a terrible effect on our ability to understand China.

American and European business executives sat China in droves at the start of the pandemic. Very, very few of them ever went back.

They entrusted their China businesses to local managers. While they’re gone, Beijing took a great leap forward in advanced manufacturing that the world has missed.

It has created a manufacturing engine the likes of which may never have been seen in history.

China controls one-third of all global manufacturing (up from 6% in 2000) and whether you are talking about cars or robots or phones, what is coming out of China today is not just cheaper and faster.

It is cheaper, faster, better and smarter — and it is all about to be dramatically supercharged by China’s headlong rush to put artificial intelligence into everything it makes.

This engine is the product of decades of massive government investments in education, infrastructure, and research in both walls, of protection — in a society where people are ready to work from 9am to 9pm, six days a week.

While China was building that, America’s largest new industry was political polarisation and using its children addicted to TikTok and Instagram.