All Hail China? The World’s Greatest Manufacturing Super Power
There is a hint of delicious irony to all this. China currently manufactures 80% of the world’s solar panels, 75–80% of all batteries, 60–65% of wind turbine parts and 55% of global crude steel.
This staggering modern-day success story represents the largest, quietest transfer of industrial might and power in human history.
China’s manufacturing grunt is more than the next 15 countries combined—larger than the US, EU and Japan together.
To power this industrial onslaught, China commissions around six state-of-the-art coal plants a month (50–80 GW a year). It operates over 1,200 coal plants totaling 1,271 GW—more than half the world’s total capacity. Its coal mining fleet is four times larger than second-place India.
As a result, China’s share of global manufacturing grew from 6% to 30% since 2000. Meanwhile, America’s plunged like a lead balloon from 25% to around 12%, and Europe’s collapsed from 25% to around 14%. How? China uses abundant, reliable coal power, refuses to bind itself to net-zero, and has leadership that treats factories and steel mills as critical assets—unlike the West.
In geopolitical terms, this should be a lightning rod across the decaying West. But the job on the West is just about done, and the Western green transition is now almost entirely dependent on hardware manufactured by China.
This rise to dizzy heights was only made possible by using the same demonised dense fossil fuel energy that has already sent the Western world spiralling into a brackish, foul-tasting, latter-day mediaeval backwater. It should be the biggest, loudest, and most outrageous news story in the Western world—but it hardly rates a mention.
source x.com/PeterDClack
Tom
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And right behind China is India making great strides. The US? More concerned with wokeness, DEI and socialism. About the only thing we beat China at is silly data centers.
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