RE: Introducing Comac, China's answer to Boeing and Airbus
Firstly for all those smugly saying that "Made in China" equates
to junk, I am afraid you have lost track of the last few decades.
Look inside everything that you hold to be quality manufacturing
and you might be surprised. Look inside your Dell, your Sony,
your Apple, or in fact any electronic device and you will find large
parts of it (if not all) were made in China. Our ability to produce
PC's and other complex electronics without Chinese
Manufacturing capability is doubtful.
For those who so fervently blame the evil capitalists. They indeed
have much to answer for in moving our manufacturing capability
overseas to take advantage of cheap labor, but perhaps if we
were more honest we could see that it was all of us who drove it.
When we went into the electronic store to buy our new large
screen tv's, how many cared where they were made? Very few.
We bought the most we could for the least price and if this meant
american jobs were being lost while we bought goods made in
countries where people made less in a month than many of us
make in an hour, we did not care!
The decline of America and rise of Asia was always inevitable like
the decline of Britain and the rise of America. What we have to
ask ourselves is what core basis of a viable country is left to us,
or are we just going to be the fat consumers of what the rest of
the world makes?
If America is to retain and even regain some of what made it
great we need to hold some degree of manufacturing self
sufficiency as a national goal. We need to understand that free
trade may have made the rich richer, but eventually washes all
core ideas and technologies to where they can be copied.
In 10-20 years America will no longer have the kind of exclusive
dominance that it has had these last decades. That is not such a
bad thing, but we need to decide what our role is in a world
where we are but one of the superpowers, and probably not the
biggest, richest or strongest.
