Trains and shipyards build empires - USA has forgotten

Wherever you are, welcome to another of my takes on China from Henan, our fourth Province on our journey across China.

As we're riding today I couldn't help but notice several time we were alongside, passing under or bridging over train lines, they criss-cross this part of China and we saw several of them.

Riding long distances, today we travelled 71 kilometres through the Northern part of Hubei and entered the South Western part of Henan I couldn't help but have thoughts about what it is that makes China what it is - China is not Great Britain of 400 years ago, nor is it the USA of 70 years ago, it's a completely different place but there are similarities in what's happening in both places.

Several hundred years ago, British shipbuilders discovered that, with the Mighty Oak tree, they could build a better ship and so they did, with those ships, they beat the French navy at Waterloo and they beat the Spanish armadas too. They went on to pretty much rule the world, including many parts of China. As a result of their shipbuilding, they created market places for British goods that were manufactured by supplies from the many colonies, which, for a long time included what we now know as the United States.

As Britain's strength and wealth grew, so did the level of exploitation needed to maintain it - slave labour was needed in many places, it was taken from India into Africa and the Pacific islands, it was taken from Africa into the Americas, it was taken from the Pacific Islands into Australia and that's one of the differences between what the British Empire did in its heyday and what China has done in its growth. Not one country exploited, not one people enslaved, and not one example of international exploitation exists - they don't exist so the US make them up and pretend they do. We know the Uyghur forced labour narrative is a farce, we also know the debt trap is not just a myth but a projection of what others do, and have been doing for many, many years.

Getting back to what started this thought process was trains - in the UK, they build a fantastic railway system, it was possible to get from London to Northern Scotland in just a few hours, we could travel from Scotland in the far north to Cornwall in the furthest Southwest in just a day, something never before seen or even dreamed possible - it was one of the things that made Britain great, in order to achieve it, they build bridges, cut tunnels and employed hundreds of thousand of people. Just like China has been doing for the last 70 years.

In the USA, by 1870, they'd linked one side of the continent to the other, it wasn't until much later that they did the same with roads. Once again, they did so with exploited labour - they'd just had a Civil War that made it illegal to own slaves, so Chinese were imported, Irish were imported and former slaves were also used to build the rail lines, all of them were paid less than "white Americans". After the lines were completed the Chinese labourers were no longer wanted, they were not allowed to work in other industries and so, according to historians ended up dispersed throughout the USA and owning businesses such as laundries and restaurants - they were not even given passage back to the West Coast from the historical meeting of the two side of the rail line in Utah. After all their work, they were unwanted.

Anther place where China is different from the west, I spoke to a bridge builder in Wuhan the other day and he told me he'd worked on all three major rivers, the Changjiang, where we met, was his latest, the Yellow River was where he went after graduating and he'd recently finished 6 years working on the Shenzhong Link in my adopted hometown of Zhongshan. He gave me a piece of knowledge that really stunned me. We were standing under a bridge in Wuhan and he told me, this is the first bridge across the Chang Jiang (the Yangtze). I thought he meant in Wuhan but no, this bridge, built in 1959 is the first across the entire river. The Republican era hadn't built one, the Qing Dynasty hadn't either - it took the Communists to do it and now, nearly 70 years later, there are 12 in that city alone and 149 in total - all done in an era of incredible growth by China.

The USA did have a spate of building ships and became one of the greatest shipbuilders in the world - that was during the Second World War but what happened to their shipbuilding industry - they offshored it to Japan, Korea and now China but they want it back, claiming that it was stolen from them. The UK have no shipbuilding left either - I grew up in a place called South Shields, in the North East of England, very close to Sunderland, it was shipbuilding country and everyone I went to school with had family who either down the coal mines or worked in the shipyards - neither of those industries exist anymore, it became cheaper to import coal from Australia than it was to dig it out of the ground near to my home. Building ships was easier in foreign lands. Last year, the UK Government announced a new Golden Age of Shipbuilding with 28 ships in the pipeline, none of them commercial, all of them military. The USA has been building around 5 ships a year, again none of them commercial, all of them military but China has, at any given time, about 1,700 ships under construction and only a very small number of them are military.

And here we have the biggest difference of all between empires - China is peacefully constructing trainlines for passengers that will, eventually be faster than flying, they're not far away from that now for shorter routes, it takes me 9 hours to get door to door from my home in Zhongshan to a hotel in Beijing, but it takes over 8 hours to fly there. Going back to the UK I checked the train times, it's going to take me 3 hours to travel 247 miles by "high speed train" from London to Newcastle and cost me 138 pound or about $186. By comparison, the train from Zhongshan where I live to Changsha, which is 3 hours away - almost exactly the same time frame is $48 USD and the distance is 497 miles (800km). IT's four times the price to travel half the distance over the same time frame.

What's the point of all of this? Trains are important and the empire knew it. The Brits built trains in India and in Africa, many of those trains are still there and still operating - the Chinese are building trains in similar places too but not to exploit, to share.

Shipbuilding is vital, the empires were created from them, the US knew this once and forgot it, the UK knew this once and forgot it. Both empires are gone, they're done and the one country that is embracing what they both embraced over 100 years ago, is benefiting globally - it's never going to be an empire, China doesn't want to administer the countries it does business with, it doesn't send its army in to protect its assets and steal resources, it simply does what it does. engages in dialogue, establishes what's needed, creates the conditions to make that happen and benefits all parties in the relationship.

Now, imagine if the Brits had done that 100 years ago, if the US had been doing that for the last 70 years or so - the world would be a better place and all because of trains and ships! Without them, you can't be a global leader, when you have them you can. IF you forget this, your empire will fade and that's what's happening now. There's an old saying in China that if you want to get rich, you have to build a road - the Qin Dynasty, the first real dynasty of China did this, they built roads, standardised weights and measures and even built a canal which is still in operation today.

There's another saying around the world that China is building, the US is bombing and this is absolutely true. China has not occupied any of the countries it's been trading with, ever. it's never imposed its ideology, which works well for Chinese, but they recognise will not work elsewhere. China has made its own country what the USA and the UK could easily have been, perhaps once were but most assuredly are no longer.

Trains, bridges, roads and ships being built are a sign of increasing prosperity. foregoing all that to focus on military power is a very sad reflection of former glory and exactly what leads to wars.