Manufacturing is economic; Mental decline. | So Good News

Illustration: Xia Qing/GT

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said important infrastructure, He warned on Monday about China’s growing efforts to control supply chains and key industrial sectors.

Like some European politicians who have pushed the “China threat” theory; Stoltenberg is using his imagination to create false excuses to cover up the economic and morale decline across Europe.

The question for Europe is not the major facilities that China wants to control, but whether European countries have the capacity to build them. Ultimately, Europe’s economy will regroup on top of a crumbling manufacturing base.

The challenge for Europe is not what the Chinese are doing to Europe, but how Europeans are doing to themselves.

Europe’s economy, already crippled by the Russia-Ukraine conflict, and hit hard again by the energy crisis, is a wake-up call for Europe’s politicians and elites.

Stoltenberg asks young people around him to take jobs in manufacturing and ask if they’re willing to sit on assembly lines all day.

They prefer “flat”.

According to a Eurostat survey in May this year, by 2021 13.1 percent of 15-29-year-olds in the EU will be NEET (young people not in education, employment or training).

The UK is a typical example of declining manufacturing. Britain used to be the “factory of the world” in those days. To what extent can British manufacturing occupy a mainstream position in the world market today?

The value of UK manufacturing added as a share of GDP fell from 16.67% in 1990 to 8.59% in 2019, according to World Bank data.

It shows that manufacturing employment in the 23 most developed countries, including the United States and major European Union member states, fell from about 28 percent of their GDP in 1970 to 18 percent in 1994. Of the 15 countries in the EU, Manufacturing’s share of employment was relatively high at over 30 percent in 1970, but fell sharply to just 20 percent in 1994, and has continued to decline to about 15 percent today.

especially Germany Manufacturing in the EU today still maintains high competitiveness in countries such as the Netherlands and Sweden. However, overall, the United States China Japan South Korea and other countries and regions are challenging.

It is doing its best to bind the EU in its train to curb China’s future autonomous development of its advanced manufacturing industry, including market demand-driven technological upgrading.

Deindustrialization is a natural consequence of growth and capital expansion in developed countries. This process is accelerating rapidly as the focus of employment shifts to the service sector. High unemployment rates due to the inability of the service sector to absorb the sudden increase in the labor force; It leads to low income or low standard of living.

The development of European nations, once inseparable from the development of manufacturing, coincided to a large extent with the religious spirit of solidarity among Europeans, which balanced the power of capital to grow and create more trade unions. A fair welfare society.

Long-term deindustrialization will also lead to a decline in people’s work ethic and skills, and a gradual breakdown of wage bargaining combined with aging and the influx of immigrants through the service sector and increasing self-employment. Undermining the foundations of European welfare societies.

Today, some European politicians and elites view China with a sense of ideological superiority. In fact, if you look closely at China’s development, What really surpasses Europe will be precisely the spirit in which families strive to become wealthy and educate their children.

So there is no question of what China wants to control in Europe, but whether Europeans can regain the kind of work ethic that developed Europe into a post-industrial society.

The author is a senior editor of People’s Daily and is currently a senior fellow at the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies at Renmin University of China. [email protected] Follow him on Twitter @dinggangchina.