My old China

"Because if you starve a blast furnace, there is no easy way to start it up again. Such things cost tens of millions of pounds. Quite why Jingye was planning this remains a mystery. The company never seems to talk to the media. It hasn’t explained its rationale. The most plausible theory is that it plans to relocate most of the operations in Scunthorpe to existing mills (and new ones) in China. Another more outlandish theory, not entirely dismissed by officials in Whitehall, is that it could be acting under orders from Beijing, who would welcome the demise of another leg of British industry. For the time being, though, no-one really knows." 

From a very interesting substack that explains to readers why British Steel is about to be taken under government control.

I get it that China has built her economy by stealing intellectual property and tariffs are a way by which Donald Trump means to stop this. Fair enough although China now invents things herself. But on the other hand I am impressed by this comment by Larry Summers, the man who thought girls weren't as good as boys at maths (remember him?)

"If China wants to sell us things at really low prices and the transaction is we get solar collectors or we get batteries that we can put in electric cars and we send them pieces of paper that we print. Do you think that's a good deal for us or a bad deal for us?"

I do not understand economics. 

I think I do understand politics, usually much better at least than the British Foreign Office or US State Department. 

It seems to me that China is much less of a danger to the world than the notion that China is a danger to the world. 

China is not a threat to Australia any more than the Soviet Union was a threat to Western Europe. 

(Hitler's Germany was a threat to Western Europe, but only if, as happened, France felt compelled to go to war in defence of an Eastern European ally.)