“While Germany debates whether Markus Söder eats too much sausage or whether the AfD should be banned, more ambitious nations are overtaking us,” writes Fatina Keilani for Die Welt, citing the reason behind this that Europe is ruled by lawyers while China is ruled by engineers.
“In Europe, lawyers rule, in China, engineers rule,” wrote Keilani.
After watching a New York Times’ “Interesting Times” podcast on the relationship between the U.S. and the West with China, Keilani was particularly struck by how “the deindustrialization of Europe is essentially assumed.”
In other words, Europe, namely, its powerhouse Germany, was largely absent from the conversation, aside from noting how China took over its lead in solar tech and how it is now losing dominance in the automotive industry.
Keilani bemoans a Germany obsessed with banning the AfD, while everything that has made Germany Germany is being lost, blaming the sociopolitical divisions brought on by these political wars and pettiness for harming the country.
Keilani quotes Wang, who was happy to tout China’s engineering prowess, from the podcast, where he was discussing his new book, “Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future.”
“To my surprise, China’s fourth-poorest province had significantly better infrastructure than the much wealthier regions of the U.S., such as New York State or California,” Wang told the podcast, based on a bike tour he took of the country.
“We saw high bridges all around us. We saw a guitar-making center. We saw many fancy new roads that were every cyclist’s dream. And only in retrospect did I realize how bizarre it was that China’s fourth-poorest province—roughly equivalent to Botswana’s per capita GDP, much lower than Shanghai or Guangdong—could build all these things,” Wang continued.
Just as China’s President Deng Xiaoping aggressively countered China’s years of stagnation under communism, “Germany must demonstrate its capacity to act,” Keilani writes.
“Competitive energy prices, less bureaucracy, targeted investments in research and technology, and securing skilled workers. Equally important is geopolitical resilience – raw material security, digital sovereignty, and less dependence on China,” she lists.
Germany’s focus must get back to “factories, patents, and markets,” she adds.
Keilani also notes one major factor Wang did not emphasize: China’s culture of discipline, education, and motivation, which she says has seen a serious decline in Germany as well.
“Even basic skills in math and German are declining, and a debate about discipline is quickly misunderstood as authoritarian,” she writes.
