What largely unites Western left and right-wing supporters today is this fascination with #China decisiveness. Here’s a random sample comment from Bsky:
China is way ahead of us! The best part of this is when you mention it to conservatives they just melt. China’s advance is crushing the capitalist narrative. It’s wild and hopeful.
This phenomenon largely mirrors the 20th century’s left-wing fascination with huge projects done by Soviet Union.
I’m in turn fascinated by people’s blindness to the fact that what makes authoritarian countries so decisive is precisely what causes large infrastructure projects to fail in EU, UK or US.
Any large project in EU goes through endless consultations with experts, local communities and environmental activist groups from all EU. Then there’s trade unions, who demand pay and working hours (can you imagine!). Then there’s expensive environmental safeguards like fish protection in Hinkley Point C or wildlife bridges across highways or railways. A rare species nesting place can delay the whole multi-billion project by years. Because biodiversity is more expensive than just bulldozing the whole place.
Guess who does none of that? Soviets didn’t give a shit about some rare frogs, or even rare indigenous people as it came to large infrastructure projects. Or environmental consequences, for that matter.
When Western socialists in 20th century were fascinated by large Soviet terraforming projects (e.g. Northern river reversal, check out how it ended) they didn’t think about GULag forced labour, zero concern about environment or local protest. There was simply no such thing as “local protests” in USSR, so why bother? Today you’d also add very low CO2 emission price in China.
It’s quite an interesting sociological phenomenon - being fascinated by an authoritarian country doing none of what you consider top social achievements in your country, like unions, environmental standards, consultations… because that indeed delays things and costs money.
So at the end of the day we have an absurd situation where we have all these high standards which nobody really needs. EU or UK could demonstrate to the world how to produce steel in an environment friendly and low emission way… but nobody needs that steel - its manufacturing moved to China because it’s cheaper there. And CO2? Who cares, as long as it’s emitted somewhere else (in reality, climate only cares about global net emissions).
Personally, I believe if EU indeed wants to pioneer the sustainable industry, it’s doable but it needs protection with tariffs, just like it does with its farming industry, or like Switzerland does with almost every its sector. There’s now some progress with CBAM, that’s only 20 years after we introduced ETS.
But in the first place we need to explain to its citizens that yes, if you want PV you first need to mine stuff somewhere and if you want to protect the global climate, it needs to be done in EU. And yes, it will be more expensive than Chinese. And yes, that means building a mine in a place where there was a nice forest or something.
If you can’t mine something in EU, you will need to require your supplier to comply with the same environmental standards as you do. Otherwise it’s just pure hypocrisy.
