China and us: manifest destiny

This is part 1 of a multi-part series dealing with America's and China's future

My father was a tool-and-die maker for GE, a job he did for 40 years. He always carried drill bits in his pocket. He could do trigonometry in his head, and he could tell an engineer, with one look at the blueprint, if a part could be made by a machinist, or if it wasn’t going to fit the final product. That was during the heyday of American manufacturing. My dad retired about the time that CNC and CAD became the norm for most engineers, making the need for people like himself less pressing.

The NGDV, U.S. Postal Service

In 1975, there were about 174,000 tool-and-die workers in the U.S. Our industry was the global leader in making complex things. We were rich in mature talent and knowledge. America boasted between 6,500 and 7,000 independent tooling shops. Every town had some kind of metal shop, and most factories and industrial plants had their own dedicated tool shop. If something was needed, it was made, frequently on site. People like my dad worked all over the country, providing easy answers to complicated problems.

In 2025, there’s still around 6,000 independent shops operating in the U.S., but Tooling World online says there’s a shortage of tool-and-die makers here. Why is that? Mostly because global firms have global supply chains, which have moved most manufacturing jobs off shore. Jobs like my father’s are fewer and further between, even in the specific sector where he worked. My dad worked for GE’s Aircraft Engine Group, at a plant called River Works in Lynn, Massachusetts. It still operates, as part of GE Aerospace, but the old school machinists are now running CNC milling machines.

China, in 1975, barely had a global manufacturing supply chain. Most workers labored in state-run factories, which depended on outside expertise, or trial-and-error, to produce goods. But today, China has built an economy that supports 25,000 to 40,000 specialized tooling/mold firms, or up to 200,000 registered companies if the field is widened to include small shops. There are only about 58,000 tool-and-die makers working in the U.S., while China has at least at least a half million. Many of those workers are like my dad: experienced, mature, knowledgeable.

If you want to make anything new, that’s not in certain industries already established, in America today, either you go through China, or you have a very difficult path. Check out engineer and YouTuber Destin Sandlin and his Smarter Scrubber grill brush project. They endeavored to make this product entirely in the U.S., and encountered some serious issues. Some of the major problems were the lack of shops that can make custom tooling or materials to specifications. These types of shops are all over China, but they are hard to find here.

Where you can find expertise is in the industries where America still excels. That includes jet engines, complex medical equipment, aircraft, and defense-related, or specialized heavy equipment. I suppose you can include space in that sector, also.

So, if you want to look at an American success story dealing with tool-and-die, and equipment, sure, you can look at River Works, where my dad worked, or you can look at Oshkosh Corporation. Most people have never heard of this company, but their stuff can be found in every day life, all over the place, just by looking. Fire engines made by Pierce, cement mixer trucks, tow trucks, “cherry pickers” used by utility companies, trash trucks. This is the equipment Oshkosh makes, as well as a variety of military vehicles and gear.

Soon, you’ll see Oshkosh products even more. They make the U.S. Postal Service’s new Next Generation Delivery Vehicle, the ugly duckling NGDV. Yes, it’s really ugly, with a giant forehead and a duckbill hood. Most of them are electric or hybrid. But these will deliver the mail, probably for decades. That’s what they’re designed to do, and it’s really all they’re designed to do. Since the USPS delivers more and more packages, a bigger vehicle, more in line with what UPS, FedEx, and now Amazon, use, was needed. Oshkosh won the competition to produce the vehicle.

America is really good at making this kind of specialized stuff. We’re also good at inventing whole categories, like smartphones, personal computers, and AI. What we’ve become poor at is manufacturing these things for a consumer market, to scale. This harms us, as China has gotten super good at what we’ve lazily become bad at.

As I write more on this topic, I’ll get into some of the specific reasons. One of them, however, involves manifest destiny. When America was growing into our continent, the pioneer drive, and the attraction of our great national resources pushed us to connect the East Coast and the West Coast, to make our nation one. We built an economic powerhouse as a byproduct of building a nation on destiny. (I’m going to leave all the bad side effects of this to the comment section.)

China is doing what America did in the 1800s, but in the modern age. It’s not the goods, or profit, that motivates the CCP to make all the stuff they make. It’s a belief that China’s manifest destiny is to be the world leader in everything. The CCP’s goal is to make a unified China, socially, militarily, and economically. Of course, it also means they get to stay in charge. But it also means they produce items specifically to sell to the rest of the world, and to consumer-hungry Americans. It means a company like Xiaomi, known for making electronics and smartphones, can produce the SU7 electic sedan, a car with fit, finish, and features above every U.S. manufacturer, including Tesla.

Xiaomi can make this vehicle, and sell it at a low price (not available in the U.S., mostly due to tariffs), not because it can make the car so cheaply. It can do this because the CCP, which basically owns all production in China, doesn’t care about making a profit. It cares about manifest destiny. The CCP cares about making more tool-and-die makers, computer engineers, space experts, and all kinds of manufacturers, because it wants China to reach its destiny.

The U.S. has lost our destiny, not because we have become worse people, but because we just can’t agree on what our destiny should be. I’ll leave the negative side effects of both China’s pursuit of their destiny, which I know is not compatible with personal freedom, to the comment section also.

We need more Oshkosh Corporation, and less Netflix. We need more tool-and-die, and less celebrity influencer. We need more serious governance, and less Trump-naming of buildings on the Potomac (or giant ballrooms). Mostly, we need people who have the foresight and discipline to keep us from giving away our remaining advantages to a country that is focused on taking them from us.

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