China has won
I'm not saying it's good or bad, I'm just stating a FACT
I think it would be impossible for a westerner to land in China for the first time in 2025 and not be a little overwhelmed. Terms like aghast, knocked flat, awestruck, baffled and finally, weirdly relaxed would all be appropriate.
I was in China last month, mainly there to learn about the new battery technology and complete ‘skateboard’ chassis that a company called CATL have developed. For those of you who may not know, this is for the YouTube channel I have been running for the past 15 years, The Fully Charged Show.
What is CATL? Basically it’s a Chinese company, founded as recently as 2011 for goodness sake, so it’s younger than the Fully Charged Show, CATL are now the biggest battery maker on the planet.
They make batteries for Tesla, BMW, VW and a host of Chinese brands most of us outside China would never have heard of.
While I was there I also attended the Shanghai Motor show, again, this is the biggest auto show . . .in the world. My friend and colleague Elliot Richards kindly guided me around the endless enormous exhibition halls, stopping to explore endless multi billion dollar Chinese car companies I’d never heard of, all of whom sell more cars than any European brand, mainly in China, and 95% of them are electric.
Obviously I was there in many ways to see the impact of electric ground transport has had in China. To put it simply, the streets of Shanghai and Hangzhou (the only cities I visited) are all spotlessly clean, they reminded me of Singapore, zero litter, zero graffiti, no homeless people, and of course very low traffic noise and zero noxious fumes from vehicles.
My brother-in-law lived in Shanghai about 15 years ago and was often told to stay in his apartment because the air quality was so dangerously toxic out on the streets. This carcinogenic soup was primarily produced by millions of diesel taxis, cars, busses, vans and trucks with the glorious addition of about 12 million 2 stroke, oil burning scooters and mopeds.
As if that wasn’t enough, Shanghai used to host numerous filthy coal burning power plants right in the city, like there used to be in London and many Western cities.
So regardless of ideas of ‘saving the planet’ or virtue signalling, the Chinese government brought in more and more stringent restrictions on car use and started investing in alternative electricity generation that did not require them to import and burn truly filthy coal. They did this because too many people were dying, from inhaling toxic fumes, which were all made as a result of burning fossil fuel. Hello, anyone listening, opening new oil wells and drill baby drill absurdity.
Sorry, back to China.
It’s taken 20 years to clean up their cities, they are still not there yet but from my rather obsessive observation, they are 90% of the way there. The air is not only crystal clear, the general stress you experience walking around a massive city is hugely reduced.
And Shanghai really is a massive city, with a population of 29.9 million, it dwarfs other global cities that get 1,000 times more attention from westerners. New York, 8.6 million. Pat! That’s a Shanghai suburb.
As I write any description of what I saw and experienced in China I can always hear the response. What about the slave labour camps, what about the oppressive surveillance state, what about the total lack of democracy, what about Tiananmen Square, the list goes on and on.
And strangely enough, the negative aspects of the Chinese state where always in the back of my mind when I was there, I might not have said anything, particularly to the many wonderful Chinese people I met, but I was occasionally thinking it.
I have long been fascinated by the last 100 years of Chinese history, I was raised in a culture where the number one evil bogeyman above all else was a communist. All I heard from the day I was born was how terrible communism was, and that communists will try and take over so they can oppress all of us and destroy our freedom.
A set book at my grammar school, ie a book we all had to read, was ‘Animal Farm’ by George Orwell and his wife Eileen Blair. The book is a brilliant deconstruction of the soviet communist state, and it’s important to remember that when I was at school in the 1960’s and early 1970’s, the Soviet Union still existed big time and was always portrayed as a massive threat to the west.
I have never supported communism, or even thought it was a workable idea but I have always been suspicious of rampant nationalism, aggressive capitalism and the endless insecure criticism some people feel compelled to make about any alternative to what is clearly a very brutal economic system that gives enormous power and wealth to very few people.
What I experienced in China, what I saw with ordinary, run of the mill Chinese people was not fearful shuffling along the street. There were no thought police standing around with cattle prods, it looked like a city in any Asian country, only wealthier, cleaner, quieter and from the standpoint of petty street crime, pick pocketing, mugging, forget about it. It does not happen in China.
I saw a very confident and hard working population, I saw no sign of dissent, but I also witnessed a fairly relaxed attitude by the authorities to minor rule breaking.
There are literally millions of electric scooters on the road in Shanghai, it’s the one sight that really does grab your attention. Modern petrol cars have very quiet engines so the difference between an electric and petrol car is fairly subtle, sound wise.
Not so with mopeds, a two stroke engine fitted to a moped or scooter is not only filthy, it’s also very noisy. I have stood on a street corner in central Mumbai before the introduction of cheaper, better, longer lasting and easier to use electric scooters. It was not only choking and the fumes made your eyes sting, it was deafening. Millions of little farty engines blatting past you was truly disgraceful, how did anyone live like that.
However, in Shanghai there are strict rules for scooter riders, you have to wear a helmet and you have to follow the rules of the road. Even with that knowledge I saw people whizzing all over the shippity shop in what looked like a truly chaotic manner. It’s a miracle that there aren’t more crashes, although Elliot told me there are quite a few.
I haven’t mentioned that my wife trained as an acrobat in China in 1984, long story, but she hasn’t been back since then. (I might write about what she was doing when we met in 1987 in another post) Clearly everything in China is very different now to how it was 40 years ago.
The all powerful communist regime have literally dragged over a billion people out of abject poverty in the last 40 years, there is now a large and thriving middle class. The government are housing millions of people in modern, well built homes in dozens of sprawling mega cities.
On my 1 hour journey by super smooth bullet train, travelling at over 300 kph, or close to 250 mph, I saw thousands of newly built tower blocks stretching for hundreds of miles, just massive infrastructure newly built or still being built.
The scale and quality of this transformation is like nothing the world has seen before. Coming to China now is the modern day equivalent of a peasant farmer from Sicily arriving in New York 125 years ago.
Even as you witness the dazzling scale of the buildings, the twisting sinuous raised highways, the transport hubs featuring dozens of super fast bullet trains connecting far flung cities you are still only seeing the surface of the transition this country has gone through in my lifetime.
They have formed relationships with countries all over the world, securing supplies of raw materials. They have planned ahead, not 3 or 4 years as Western administrations might do, but 10 or 20 years. This means that they not only have the manufacturing ability, and boy they have that in droves, they also have the materials needed to make all the things they make, which is close to everything.
I’m sure this will shift and change in the coming years, but the one thing I took away with me is that they are not obsessed with what is going on in the USA. It felt like they don’t really care.
BYD for example, close to being the biggest car company in the world, with a million employees and factories all over the world, only started making cars 22 years ago. Last year they sold way more electric cars than Tesla. Have you seen endless stories about Stella Li in the press, do you know who she is, what her politics are?
No, of course not. Stella Li is the vice president of BYD and an extraordinary woman.
So my point is this. In Europe and specifically in the UK, we are totally dominated by the USA and the view the USA has of the world. That is our normal way of operating, ask anyone here if they’v ever heard of Kim Kardashian, or the women from Selling Sunset, or Tom Cruise, or Taylor Swift of even the hugely vile J D Vance. Of course we’ve all heard of them. Our televisions, social media, newspapers, podcasts are all spewing out tsunamis of coverage of everything and anything in America.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve spent far longer in the USA that I have in China, I would not want to live in either country, but I have lived in Los Angeles, and every time I got back to my apartment unhurt, as I closed the door I breathed a sigh of relief.
Yes, people in the USA experience more freedom than anyone can imagine in China, but that includes the freedom to live on the street with nothing, in the wealthiest country the world has ever known. It includes the freedom to be ill and not to be able to pay for any form of treatment, it’s the freedom to be despised if you are poor, and literally worshipped if you’re rich.
I would never defend the regime in China, it is an oppressive one party state, but that state might not let you criticise it (increasingly like old Trumpy pants) but they do seem to look after the vast majority in their society. That is very obvious.
I think 20 years ago I wouldn’t hesitate to say the USA was a better, more progressive country than China. Today, when people from Europe are being detained at US customs and have to hand in their phones to see if they’ve said anything negative about the supreme leader king, I’m not so sure.
The King of America and his grubby little acolytes have been very dismissive and often directly offensive about Europe and the UK, that’s fine, I defend their right to be offensive and pig ignorant about out mutual histories.
Whatever else is going on, the Chinese haven’t been rude and dismissive. Will we essentially turn away from the USA and seek alliances and trade deals elsewhere?
I have no idea, Decisions like those are way above my pay grade, but interesting results like the recent elections in Canada and Australia are fairly clear examples that USA populism isn’t spreading, in fact exactly the reverse is happening.
One last observation.
Since 1945, America has invaded Korea, Vietnam, Panama, Iraq, Afghanistan and obviously made military interventions in many dozens of other countries.
Since 1945 China invaded Tibet, but hasn’t invaded or bombed anyone else . . . . yet.
While I’m here, I just want to mention my new serialised novel, ‘Time and Money’ which is on my other Substack account. There are 5 chapters available now, another coming on Friday.
Robert,
Although you insist you’re merely “stating facts,” your narrative keeps tipping from observation into admiration: praising Shanghai’s immaculate streets, silent traffic, and absence of homelessness implicitly celebrates the coercive measures that criminalise graffiti, protest and vagrancy; lauding China’s decades‑long planning horizons extols a one‑party system that can bulldoze opposition rather than negotiate; and hailing near‑zero petty crime highlights the fruits of a pervasive surveillance state without acknowledging the civil‑liberty price tag. Each time you spotlight these outcomes without the context of the authoritarian machinery that enables them, the tone shifts from reportage to a subtle endorsement of the very governance model you claim not to be defending.
Communism v. what China actually is
You note that “All I heard from the day I was born was how terrible communism was” yet today’s People’s Republic is neither Marxist utopia nor Soviet‑style command economy. The more accurate label is authoritarian capitalism (some scholars say ‘market‑Leninism’): privately owned firms, intense consumerism, and globally integrated supply chains—all under a party that brooks no political competition. Praising battery innovation and gleaming transit hubs while calling the polity “communist” lets Beijing claim a false ideological victory over the West, when in fact it won by adopting large chunks of market economics while keeping one‑party rule.
System ≠ current administration
You condemn recent U.S. presidents and cite poverty, medical costs, and gun violence, yet those ills flow from policy decisions, not from democracy itself. America’s architecture—independent courts, a confrontational press, staggered elections, federalism, and hard‑stop term limits—is engineered so that no occupant of the White House can bend the entire system to their will or leave irreversible scars; when voters tire of an administration, they can oust it, sue it, or gridlock it, and the next cycle offers a built‑in reboot. China, by design, offers no such safety valve: the Communist Party and the state are fused, so a reckless leader is locked in by the very machinery that elevated them. In the U.S., bad leadership is a temporary malfunction; in China’s one‑party model, the malfunction becomes the motherboard. I think it’s worth clarifying on your side, are your criticisms of the US aimed at its temporary leadership or the flawed democratic system itself?
The trade‑off we knowingly make
An authoritarian government can lock in thirty‑year industrial policies and sweep addicts, migrants, or graffiti artists off the streets overnight. Democracies move slower, look messier, and often reverse course every four years—because the citizenry is free to change its mind. You highlight the upside of decisiveness and safety, but you don’t weigh it against the cost: censorship, forced conformity, and the ever‑present risk of abuse once the same unchecked machinery is wielded by a less‑benevolent hand.
So the question back to you is straightforward:
Would you be willing to give up the vote, an adversarial press, and the right to stage a protest in Trafalgar Square in exchange for spotless streets and fifty‑year infrastructure plans?
Most of us accept the frictions of democracy precisely because we think those liberties are worth the inefficiency. Celebrating the fruits of authoritarian efficiency while downplaying its roots risks implying the trade is cheap—or worse, that it isn’t a trade at all.
China’s achievements in clean transport, poverty reduction, and industrial scale are real and impressive. As you seem to have discovered Authoritarian Capitalism clearly has its benefits. Indeed they should spur the U.S. and Europe to tackle their own dysfunctions. But we can acknowledge China’s successes without romanticising the power structure that produced them, and without losing sight of the democratic safeguards we would have to surrender to replicate it wholesale.
As an American, I am completely ashamed of our government and how it's not working for the common people. At least China has learned to keep the proletariat happy and not cause unrest...