The United States, again, began to sprinkle.
You may have seen the relevant reports.
It is said that the Biden administration will launch a new wave of trade attacks against China as soon as next week: tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles, semiconductors, and solar equipment.
This news has actually been circulating for a while.
This time, the Chinese official public refutation also shows from the side that this matter is inseparable.
However, a lot of news needs to be put together to be interesting and to discover the truth behind it.
Here, two more pieces of news.
The first is closely related:
The day before yesterday (May 9), the U.S. Department of Commerce added 37 Chinese high-tech enterprises and research institutions to a trade blacklist.
The second one doesn't seem to be directly related:
China's highest education department held an on-site exchange and promotion meeting for the training of outstanding engineers to promote the reform of the cultivation of engineering master's and doctoral talents.
According to the report, from 2022 onwards, the state has added 41 engineering master's and doctor's degree authorization points in 30 universities, listed nearly 17,000 master's and doctor's programs and exemption indicators, and universities have jointly built 32 national excellent engineer colleges with central enterprises.
Today is the 6th consecutive working day after the May Day holiday, so I will briefly talk about these three seemingly unrelated information.
Outstanding Engineer Training On-site Exchange Promotion Meeting Image source: CCTV News
A few years ago, I said in an article that as early as the Obama era, the United States was aware of the problem of "hollowing out" industry and wanted to attract manufacturing back.
Some of you may remember a news story more than 10 years ago.
On March 29, 2013, Obama, who was still president at the time, went to the port of Miami to give a speech encouraging the wider use of "Made in America" in the United States.
The speech was well written, Obama was eloquent, and the atmosphere was well rendered, but I didn't want a gust of wind to blow and blow away the American Star-Spangled Banner that was originally covered on the quay crane, revealing the most embarrassing reality made in the United States:
The crane is impressively printed with the Chinese and English trademarks of "Zhenhua" and ZPMC: the standard made in China.
White House officials originally covered the "Zhenhua" logo with American flags, like a second crane behind Obama
Trump, unlike Obama, is more naked against China.
While suppressing China, Trump has done everything possible to attract manufacturing and high-tech industries to return.
Here are the projects that Trump regards as important "results": Foxconn's U.S. factory, TSMC's U.S. factory.
Take a brief look at these two Trump projects.
At that time, Trump personally attended the groundbreaking ceremony of Foxconn's American factory, declaring it a "miracle of the world", but now it has long been completed.
Let's look at the TSMC project.
In 2020, TSMC announced that it would build a factory in the United States.
At that time, TSMC had already thought of all the difficulties it could think of, and scheduled the construction period to be 4 years, that is, to be put into production this year.
However, it is basically out of action now, and it is said that it will not be put into production until 2025.
You must know that in the mainland, TSMC's Nanjing factory took only 2 years from the announcement of the construction of the factory (2016) to the commissioning (2018).
TSMC's U.S. plant under construction
Not to mention spending four or five times the cost of building a factory in Taiwan, the biggest difficulties encountered by TSMC in the United States now are:
No one is available.
One is that there are not so many engineers, skilled industrial workers in the United States, and the second is that Americans simply cannot accept overtime.
Tomshardware, a world-famous technology media, wrote bluntly: TSMC is not popular with American employees.
Speaking of which, there is one more thing: in recent years, from time to time there has been news of an accident with an American Boeing plane.
Like a sudden fire during takeoff, a door plug falling off in mid-air, a tire falling off, a rollover during landing......
And, of course, there was the major Boeing 737 MAX crash a few years ago.
Behind these accidents, they all point to a problem:
There is a shortage of people in Boeing, and some people even serve dishes at McDonald's one moment, and the next second they become Boeing engineers.
What's the problem?
There is an extreme shortage of engineers in the United States.
The main STEM disciplines (abbreviations for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) that engineers mainly correspond to, American students are reluctant to study, it is too hard, and even if they do, they will go to consulting, finance and other multi-financial industries after graduation.
Chinese and Indian students make up a large proportion of those studying STEM subjects in American universities.
According to statistics, the number of STEM graduates in American universities is about 500,000 per year, while in China it is 4.7 million.
China is nine to ten times more than the United States!
The Boeing plane was in mid-air, and the wheels fell off Image source: CCTV News World Weekly program
Those who build the building must be invested in the work; Those who rule the world must rely on talents.
Looking back, the training of outstanding engineers in China, behind this inconspicuous news, is actually the key weight of the Sino-US wrestling and the final balance.
Otherwise, like the United States, this time it wants to impose tariffs.
And some time ago, Biden was even more interesting, he openly scared Americans that Chinese electric cars are smartphones on wheels that can spy on Americans......