By Mike Halls, publisher
That ancient Chinese proverb — “The wild grass grows in harmony when the mongoose sleeps at dawn” — might make some sense to some of a mystical bent in the Batteries International readership.
If it does, it shouldn’t. Confucius didn’t make it up. I did.
There’s a patchwork of nonsense that surrounds almost all western contact with China. It’s not dreamy. Nor mystical. Mostly it’s absurd.
Here’s another example, purportedly from an ancient Chinese proverb. “May you live in interesting times”? Probably half of adult film goers will have heard of this somewhere (and many others too if they have a predilection to reading the poorer forms of trade journalism).
Normally the phrase is ascribed to some ancient Chinese proverb (or curse, nobody’s quite sure). In reality its origin is a myth created in the 1930s about a speech made, believe it or not, in Victorian England.
And the latest part of China baiting (or is it China mystification?) came in the plenary address by Peter Zeihan at last year’s BCI annual convention.
Peter’s speech was excellent; by turns comic, by turns serious, perceptive and controversial. But also by turns apocalyptic.
His reason for painting this Manichaean picture of the world was a simplistic one — the changing demographic of an ageing population and most particularly the disparity between the ageing populations of the west — here he included China as well — and a low birth rate that would be unable to support the parental generation.
“Since 1991 China has more people over the age of 53 than under,” he said. “There is not an economic or political model that humans have yet to theorize much less apply, that will function with where this structure will be in just eight years’ time,” he said.
“If I were giving you this presentation in January, I would say you have eight years to sever all ties with China, because that’s the most time that China has left before their connection to the world’s largest financial and consumption power has severed the relationship and established a de facto embargo at most.
“Honestly, I would plan for something less than two [years] at this point.
It’s not up to this commentator to question Peter’s analysis which was much broader than the ageing demographics of the country but included a dissection on its property sector and its agriculture. That said, information portal Statista gives the Chinese median age as 37.5 years in 2020 and that of the US as 39.2 in 2023.
Clearly an aging population and any reproductive rate below 2.1 will be a problem as the overall population figures fall, but is economic chaos insurmountable?
In 1798 Thomas Malthus argued that the supply of food couldn’t keep up with population growth. In 1968 Paul and Anne Ehrlich argued that “the battle to feed all humanity is over” and famine was around the corner in the 1970s with up to 4 billion deaths. Their prophecies attracted widespread media attention.
Malthus’s idea was proven wrong because of innovation.
Everything from cheap barbed wire to keep large animals contained cheaply, tractors for large-scale labour saving, even to genetically modified disease resistant wheat, artificial fertilisers and the like have demonstrated that innovation can change things. Even Malcolm McLean’s innovation of the modern shipping container in the 1950s showed yet part of the way forward by thinking in another direction.
To put this all in another way. Is this China-bashing just A Convenient Truth? Something that fits the way we as humans think and want to believe.
Remember the very first Earth Day in April 1970? The environmentalists had a field day trumpeting the world was going to come to a very unpleasant end.
A new ice age was about to happen (Newsweek), the earth would be 11 degrees cooler (Swathmore University) … humanity would totally run out of copper shortly after 2000, and lead, zinc, tin, gold, and silver would be gone before 1990 (Scientific American) … By 1980 urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks because of air pollution and only half of sunlight would penetrate the atmosphere (Life magazine] … between 75% and 85% of all the species of living animals will be extinct (Look magazine).
Their Convenient Truth was a nonsense that belonged to the start of the environmental movement.
And the idea of that Convenient Truth — our myth-making reflects what we want to believe rather than what is there — is presently going hell for leather when it comes to China and its battery industry.
We’re not even talking tariffs here.
This is not to paint a whole industry or country as whiter than white. For most of the lead battery industry China has been — at times — a huge vampire of both IP (intellectual property) and manufacturing expertise. Large swathes of its industry have stolen both with abandon and impunity.
So good has reverse engineering [taking something apart to see how it works and then duplicate the product] become in China one European machine manufacturer, if the rumours are true, is now selling its own prod- ucts that are made in China by another firm.
China is good at assembling things is something this reporter has heard countless times.
That’s true. It is. But it’s also good at inventing things.
China is the world leader in terms of battery-related patents comfortably outpacing the US. And in Europe too: four Chinese companies are now among the top 15 battery technology patent applicants at the European Patent Office. This includes CATL, Eve Energy, BYD, and Zhuhai CosMX Battery.
CATL, for example, says it employs 20,000 R&D staff and had an annual budget of $2.9 billion. Not bad for a firm from a country that’s meant to be only good at putting things together.
But is our myth-making of IP theft by China peculiar to that country? Hardly. Other countries and industries are doing the same. France’s intelligence agencies DGSE and DGSI have, for example, fearsome reputations for industrial espionage. One quirk of history is that French missionary Xavier d’Entrecolles visited China in 1712 only to sell on the manufacturing methods of Chinese porcelain to Europe.
So when you next puzzle over why “the wild grass grows in harmony when the mongoose sleeps at dawn” or whether you want to “live in interesting times”, consider the nature of truth and myth.
Are the Chinese a nation of mysterious aesthetes or cut-throat business people out to dominate the world. Isn’t it more like they are just the same as the rest of us? Just strangers on a bus trying to make our way home?
