China Between Ogre and Olympus

China may well become the singular Olympus that all mere mortals look up to, but so long as this Olympus is home to Ogres it will struggle to compel the allegiance of the wider world.

If one statistic could be deployed to summarize China’s meteoric rise to superpower status over the last 80 years it would be this: Between 2011 and 2013, China both produced and used more cement (6.6 gigatons) than the U.S. did during the entirety of the twentieth century (4.5 gigatons). To be clear, that’s enough cement to bury the Island of Hawaii.

Queen Elizabeth I of England remarked in 1563 that Rome wasn’t built in a day. True enough, but thanks to modern technology, management techniques, and sheer manpower, we now know that it can take as little as 14 days to build concrete artifacts the size of Rome. …

Continue reading this article by Guillaume A. W. Attia, “China Between Ogre and Olympus,” here: https://www.liberalcurrents.com/china-between-ogre-and-olympus/