On Poking Dragons, by Fred Reed

The U.S. government has a deadly habit of underestimating its adversaries. It’s making the same mistake with China. From Fred Reed at fredoneverything.org:

I wonder how many Americans quite understand what the Us is facing in its aggressive confrontation with China. Washington clearly prepares the public for another unnecessary war.  Given America’s routine defeat in war and catastrophic miscalculations in fighting small powers, picking a fight with what, increasingly, is again becoming the Middle Kingdom seems less than bright. Yet within the Beltway there is the usual smug complacency, the unshakable arrogance that appears to think the China is just a big Norway or Guatemala that needs to be put in its place.

A quick glance at China:

China easily leads the world in civil engineering, building roads, bridges, ports, rail lines, long-distance high-voltage transmission lines, and digital infrastructure. People returning from China, including yours truly, discribe it as being like coming back from a more-advanced planet.

Everyone talks about the high-speed trains, with good reason: 180 miles per hour, quiet, comfortable, huge windows, with very short stops at villages between major cities, giving rural populations the speed of air travel without the nuisance. by contrast, American rail looks like something out of 1955.

The importance of  civil engineering is more thans symbolic. Infrastructure facilitates commerce. China is of course the manufacturing powerhouse of the world. By contrast, America simply ignores infrastructure, spending instead on the military and long since having largely abandoned manufacturing.

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