WHILE we Westerners continually discuss the imminent collapse of our societies amidst various self-inflicted social, economic and political ills, it is easy to overlook the fact that not everyone in the world is quite so relentlessly pessimistic.
Take China. Returning for the first time in six years, there are clear signs of improvement. First, at no point during my stay did I get diarrhoea: once upon a time, while living in Chongqing, if I ever strayed more than 100 yards from the nearest lavatory I would feel ill at ease, knowing that I could erupt like some wretched geyser at any moment. Food safety appears to have got better.
Second, I was not once asked to take a photo holding a stranger’s baby. Invariably, until this trip, I would at some point in China hear the ubiquitous ‘外国人!’ (‘foreigner!’) before having a bewildered infant thrust into my arms for an impromptu photo shoot. Clearly the White Man no longer commands the same curiosity as before; a true marker of our race’s decline in status.
Karst landscape in Guangxi
These are not the only changes. Today, a majority of cars are Chinese-made. This is in a country which, until fairly recently, Volkswagen was the best-selling brand. No longer: the likes of BYD, Geely and a thousand other car brands you’ve never heard of (for example, Li Xiang) whizz around the chaotic streets, their horns presumably being the first part component to wear out. More than 60 per cent of new cars sold last year were electric. The abortive EV revolution in the West – stymied by inadequate infrastructure, obscene energy prices and the cars’ ludicrous cost – is in full swing in the Middle Kingdom.
Spending a week in Shenzhen – the city that stands opposite Hong Kong in mainland China – it was hard not to be taken aback. The city’s population has increased from 314,000 in 1979 to more than 17.5million today. Vast stretches have been built and a city erected out of nothing, in which you can waltz from shopping centre to shopping centre, if that’s your thing. Where in the UK can such dynamism be seen? Milton Keynes, if we were to be kind in the extreme.
Shenzhen at night
Flying into the city, one could see innumerable bridges being constructed, buildings being thrown up, and rivers full of container ships (presumably full of crap for us to buy on Amazon). Similar construction projects in the West would require at least 50 years before breaking any ground.
The rapidity of China’s transformation, when noticed in the West, is generally pooh-poohed. A few days before arriving, there were gleeful news reports in the our media about a bridge collapsing somewhere in the country. That a landslide had undermined the bridge was neither here nor there for news sites which edited the video to show only the structure’s final collapse. Reporting of any problem in China for a myopic and complacent West serves as nothing other than comforting propaganda designed to try to reassure us that, while we’ve royally cocked everything up, we’re still better than the Asiatic hordes. ‘Yes,’ we can cosily say to ourselves, ‘they have all our factories, but did you see that an electric bus caught fire in Inner Mongolia? Ha ha!’
The same pathetic delusions can be witnessed in any discussion of Russia, which the elites of the West have, in a move of unparalleled geopolitical genius, turned into a stalwart ally of China. Regarding Russia, Western fantasies are both about the country in general and its military in particular. The former is a perpetual basket case – about to go completely to pot any moment now! – and the latter equipped with muskets taken from Napoleon’s ill-fated 1812 invasion.
Something new: a Russian food shop in Shenzhen
Nevertheless, is China the future? As I type these words I am travelling at 300km/h on its 48,000km-long high-speed rail network; a network which has more than doubled in length in the last decade. This compares with HS2, which started construction in 2019, comes in at a mighty 230km in length, and is unlikely to be completed until the late 2030s.
This comparison, I rather think, gives a strong indication of the likely answer. This is without mentioning their advances in AI and other high-end technologies.
China’s expanding rail network
Moreover, to be overtaken does not necessarily require a collapse, nor even a decline. Stasis, too, can result in an accelerating rival zooming past. Not that we’re static, of course; we’ve gone all-in on the ‘decline’ option instead. Stasis would, at this point, be a significant improvement.
On a generous interpretation, for too long the West has been utterly complacent, thinking it had arrived at an End of History unaffected by the realities that underpin human existence. We imagined ourselves free from the basic concept of action and consequence. More conspiratorial dispositions will assert this deterioration in our condition is part of a calculated plan. Not believing stupidity and evil to be mutually exclusive, I reckon both can be simultaneously true.
Whatever the cause, few among us, if being honest, believe that our future is brighter than that of China. If things follow their current trends there is no doubt that we in Europe will be a global irrelevance, travelling to Asia at gawp at the advancements there before returning to our clapped-out homelands.
There is, however, nothing inevitable in this: if the determination was there to set a saner course much of this could be arrested. We are a robust people who have faced down history’s challenges many times before. There’s nothing pre-ordained to say that we can’t this time too.
It’s an interesting thought experiment to wonder where our societies might have been in 2025 had we not fully embraced so many wholly destructive policies. With decades not wasted on the distractions of identity politics, environmentalism and pointless wars, we could have been living in a halcyon age.
Yet it wasn’t to be. It has been left to countries with more recent dalliances with utter insanity – such as Chairman Mao’s war against sparrows – to carry the torch into the future. One can just hope that we are not left too far behind.
This article appeared in A Last Bastion of Sanity on November 23, 2025, and is republished by kind permission.
