Many people lack basic common sense and logical training, and even fewer have any sense of cost-awareness. When judging people and events, they habitually rely on emotional identification and moral frameworks to determine right from wrong — passionate but rarely rational. They get misled by hollow abstractions or get bogged down in surface-level details.
Decades ago, America was genuinely the world leader in technological innovation. Yet most people only see the light at the top of the tower and ignore the tower itself: before America became the dominant force in semiconductors and the internet, it was the world’s largest full-spectrum industrial producer and its core consumer market. If you look at the historical data, you’ll find that the scale and sophistication of America’s infrastructure at that time — its water engineering, electricity supply, and consumption — was far ahead of everyone else.
Why has America always been so keen on expanding its sphere of influence — especially controlling the world’s major maritime shipping lanes and the regions that supply energy, food, and minerals? As the world’s largest consumer market and production base, if you can’t secure those supplies, the whole system collapses. In other words: when another society also fully industrializes — becoming a full-spectrum industrial producer and the world’s largest supplier of physical goods — it too must go and control food, energy, water, electricity, minerals, and the major sea and land routes of international trade. Without doing so, you cannot guarantee the stable operation of the entire system, and you place yourself in a dangerously precarious position. In market economics, this behavior is called “strategic defensive investment.”
The biggest difference between America today and America of the past is that the top of the tower still shines — but today the tower itself is in worse shape than before, because today the top consumes far more. It’s like comparing a monkey’s brain to a human brain — the difference isn’t just volume; it’s also in the density of neurons and the…
Many things, once you dig deep enough, reveal an interconnected web of causes and effects with far-reaching mutual dependencies.
Whether it’s artificial intelligence or any other advanced technology — publishing a paper or building a lab demo doesn’t require much infrastructure support. But once you try to turn it into an industry and a social force, every supporting system and prerequisite must be in place. For America’s AI or any other advanced technology to become a real industry and genuine productive force, its water engineering, electricity supply, and industrial base must be capable of supporting it. Put simply, these things need to be ready first — otherwise, laboratory breakthroughs just end up laying the groundwork for someone else’s industrial development.
Pure academic papers cannot be locked away on a shelf. They form a conceptual system — and the more people recognize and accept that system, the more valuable the research becomes. However, transforming pure academic work into an industry requires someone to bear the risk of failure, engage in continuous exploration, and sustain ongoing investment of capital, personnel, and time. That practical exploration is highly dependent on supporting infrastructure and the fulfillment of prerequisite conditions.
To put it plainly: the pure academic output of universities and research labs belongs to all of humanity. But converting that shared human knowledge into industry, social wealth, and national power requires each society to achieve this through its own practical exploration — and that exploration’s success depends heavily on sustained investment above a certain threshold, along with the cultivation of relevant supporting infrastructure and prerequisite conditions. If any single link falls short, or the overall investment is insufficient, everything goes to waste.
Whether it’s freshwater, electricity, or food supply, both the United States and China naturally possess these conditions. America was once the world’s largest production base — it couldn’t have become that without these resources. Britain did not have them, which is why it had to build an overseas colonial system. Yet the wealth and resources gathered through that colonial system were never transformed on British soil into the large-scale industrial production systems that defined the era of internal combustion engines, railways, and telegraphs. Why? Because the home territory simply couldn’t support it. So the British had no choice but to channel their wealth into overseas investment — funding the construction of America’s transcontinental railway system and the transatlantic telegraph, or investing in rising powers like Germany to help them build large-scale industrial systems.
America and China, by virtue of their vast territories, have turned many major rivers into their own internal waterways — providing abundant water sources and allowing them to reshape those rivers according to their own needs. For example, building hydropower stations where there are significant elevation drops. Don’t underestimate this: hydropower accounts for 20% of China’s total electricity generation, making it the second-largest power source. Vietnam, which wants to follow China’s industrial development model, doesn’t even have rivers suitable for building power stations. Meanwhile, China has banned the export — on environmental grounds — of the world’s most efficient thermal power technology. Neighboring countries can purchase electricity directly from China’s national grid, but the equipment and technology needed to build large-scale power stations are no longer exported.
Beyond hydropower and thermal power, there’s solar photovoltaics and wind power. Currently these two have relatively lower shares — partly because they’re unstable, and partly because their energy conversion rates are low. Even so, China holds the most advanced technologies in these areas — especially in photovoltaics, where China is not only the largest producer by volume but also leads across the entire supply chain. Production even became so excessive that it drew coordinated Western pushback. The solution was to absorb excess capacity by building vast photovoltaic installations in the western deserts, which in turn created upstream pressure to solve the low energy conversion rate problem. To ensure stable supply, China developed high-voltage long-distance transmission technology and energy storage technology.
If the photovoltaic industry, through practical exploration, prioritizes solving energy conversion efficiency and electricity storage — then not only China’s western deserts, but every desert on Earth, could become power stations, exporting electricity through grid networks to the world — just as oil and gas were sold in the era of the internal combustion engine.
This raises another question: target selection for international cooperation. The Middle East doesn’t just have the oil and gas needed right now — it also has vast deserts. If energy storage technology achieves a breakthrough, leveraging China’s accumulated advantages in photovoltaics and wind power, the deserts of those countries could become the “new oil fields” of the electricity era — not only in the Middle East, but across Africa as well. These countries also face another problem that requires technological cooperation with us to solve: food security.
In the first half of 2024, there was an unremarkable piece of news: in a small town beneath Kashgar in Xinjiang…
But many African countries don’t have enough food and can’t afford to buy it on their own — they have to borrow money from Western nations just to keep people fed. But borrowing money inevitably comes with harsh conditions. The harshest condition of all: in some African countries, key positions must be staffed by people designated by the creditor, so that economic policies and national directions end up favoring the lender.
A simple example: there’s an African country called Niger. Every year it supplies 35% of the high-purity raw materials for France’s nuclear power industry — and France pays less than 1% of what those materials fetch on the international market. This is no different from outright robbery. You might wonder why they would accept this. Because the people who previously set policy were installed by France, and France also maintained a military garrison there. This time, with the support of outside forces and the direct involvement of Wagner military forces, the new leadership — backed by powerful allies — not only terminated the previous agreement to supply raw materials for France’s nuclear power, but also expelled both France’s and America’s military garrisons from the country. With Russia fighting hard on the front end and China working behind the scenes, this outcome was ultimately achieved.
The greatest benefit of this outcome isn’t that one small African nation drove out the colonizers — it’s that France, which holds advantages in nuclear power technology and industrial application, lost access to low-cost raw material supplies. Whether it’s food sovereignty or electricity supply, helping African nations escape their most pressing survival problems means they no longer have to sell the key raw materials that the colonizers need for almost nothing. Once prices are restored to normal levels, the industries of those countries will gradually lose their competitive edge, and profit margins will be significantly squeezed.
Both China and France have extensive practical experience with nuclear power technology. As long as France’s external advantages are stripped away, China will gradually achieve decisive leadership in this field as well. Beyond that, China is researching artificial fusion — a controlled nuclear fusion power technology more advanced than existing nuclear power. Additionally, new energy battery technology is part of the energy storage equation. Driven by the new energy vehicle industry, China has temporarily taken the lead in both technological accumulation and application in this direction. However, when this technology becomes a product, it requires a critically important raw material — lithium. Currently the largest supplier is Australia, with the rest concentrated in South America — though the equity interests in South American lithium mines are also largely held by Australian companies. Beyond Australia and South America, the largest confirmed but undeveloped lithium reserves lie in the mountains of Afghanistan. This is precisely why China has proactively engaged in mediating and supporting the Taliban — there are no early risers without something to gain.
All of the above technologies and industries are the foundation of all modern industry and technology. Food, energy, water, and electricity protect and constrain a society’s level of modernization and its potential ceiling from the most fundamental level.
What is strategic positioning? Moving one step at a time with no foresight is not strategic positioning — that’s just crisis management. Directing limited resources toward those critical points that play a decisive role — that is strategic positioning.