U.S. Manufacturing Power Wanes
America’s manufacturing industry is in decline. Twenty years ago, the United States produced 22 percent of all the manufactured goods on Earth. Today, it produces only 16 percent of these goods. This decline means the U.S. has fallen to become the world’s second-biggest manufacturing power.
China produced 9 percent of the world’s manufactured goods in 2004; today, it produces 31 percent of these goods. On December 9, the United Nations Statistics Division published data showing that Communist China’s manufacturing sector now churns out the combined output of the next seven largest manufacturing countries in the world.
Deceitful alliance: The rise of China and the decline of the U.S. are recent developments. China was an economic backwater when U.S. President Richard Nixon reopened diplomatic relations with the Communist country in 1972. Yet in the five decades since, China has rapidly industrialized by using money gained by selling cheap manufactured goods to America, Europe and other Western nations.
Former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in 2022: “We imagined engagement with China would produce a future with a bright promise of comity and cooperation. … China ripped off our prized intellectual property and trade secrets, [costing] millions of jobs all across America. It sucked supply chains away from America, and then added a widget made of slave labor. It made the world’s key waterways less safe for international commerce.”
America’s fall: The late Herbert W. Armstrong warned that foreign powers would use economic and cultural warfare to take from America its historically unprecedented national blessings. Communism threatens the future of democracies worldwide. In 1956, he wrote:
We are not fighting a single nation in a military war, but a gigantic, worldwide, plain-clothes army, masquerading as a political party, seeking to conquer the world with an entirely new kind of warfare! It’s a kind of warfare we don’t understand, or know how to cope with. It uses every diabolical means to weaken us from within, sapping our strength, perverting our morals, sabotaging our educational system, wrecking our social structure, destroying our spiritual and religious life, weakening our industrial and economic power, demoralizing our armed forces, and finally, after such infiltration, overthrowing our government by force and violence! All this cleverly disguised as a harmless political party!
Mr. Armstrong’s warning focused on Russia’s demoralization efforts to pervert our morals, wreck our social structure, and destroy our spiritual values by promoting the “God is dead” movement in U.S. universities. But in terms of industrial and economic power, America’s main adversary has been China.
Learn more: Read “Wake Up to the Threat From China.”
