Concrete

Subject: Concrete

There is a program on the BBC World Service which comes on at 5am on Sunday morning in which facts and statistics are banded around to give perspective to the world around.

This morning it was concrete. 

Concrete gives us a measure of growth in a country. You build something and concrete plays a role in the construction. One remarkable fact is that China has used more concrete since 2000 than the USA did in the previous century. That at current levels, China uses 5 time the amount of concrete annually than the US. And whilst we in this country still remember the building of Milton Keynes (a new town) as a major project in this country, China has built the equivalent  of "Manhattan" every year, somewhere in their vast country. 

The contrast of what goes on in this still mysterious place, compared  to the outside world is stark. And we poke her with a rhetorical stick as that buffoon Trump wishes to do, at our peril. 

China was always an enigma a mysterious place defined by its in-hospitality to outside influence. A place well ahead of the intellectual curve as the succeeding Dynasty's passed down the ruling structure of a god like Emperor, slavishly served by a civil service class, the mandarins who raised the art of bureaucracy to a level never seen before or since.

The deliberate exclusion of any outside influence created a unique system based on philosophical precepts such as Daoism, (living in harmony) and Confucianism ( a rationalistic way of life). With this underpinning of life by cultivating a thought processes which regarded the way people ran their lives, the responsibility for which was promoted within each person, a regime structure was built which was immensely strong and lasted thousands of years.

The West had little to offer and given that the mindset of the Chinese was functional and not in the way we understand it, liberal.

It is nearly impossible for us to understand the fairly recent claim Mao Tse-tung made on the minds of his people and the near total self sacrifice they offered to his crazy schemes. A cult on a stupendous scale which could only be created by a massive lack of 'self indulgence' on the part of the people.

This captive power over 1.37 billion people gives the rulers of China immense power to get things done and whilst we hum and haw over building a '3rd runway' at Heathrow the Chinese have completed 5 new airports.

Cemex the second largest concrete producing company in the world, which just so happens to be Mexican, is set to make a killing on the wall Trump wants to build between the US and Mexico but even this project is tiny compared to what China consumes annually.

The scale of their achievement, post Mao has been phenomenal. A huge population, nearly 20% of the Worlds total population and an iron willed no nonsense political control without the frills of democratic responsibility to hinder its decisions, even President Trumps concept of strength, (other than raw nuclear weaponry), should  be cause to reconsider his bully boy attitude.