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There's a perspective that most people in the West don't realize about China. Every kid in China grows up knowing that they're part of a 5000-year-old civilization. You hear this a lot but it's not obvious the effect it has on you. What it means is that even if you're a bunch of peasants right NOW, your people have always had civilization. The civilizations aren't perfect or eternal - they rise and fall when the rulers get corrupt and stupid - but civilization is part of the fate of your people, almost the natural default state of things. Even when it's fallen, it's always come back, because that's how your people DO things. It's like knowing your family has been rich for generations and you're just in one of the down periods. That's different from having been poor and primitive from the beginning of time. It means that Chinese people internalize a default notion of "yeah, we have a civilization, it's just a down period right now, but eventually another strong leader will come about, we'll all work hard, and our civilization will rise again as it has dozens and dozens of times throughout history." Westerners looked at China in the past 100-200 years as a primitive society like all the others, having always been primitive. But no, for most Chinese history, China was the world-leading civilization and Chinese people know that. So any emergence of a leader (like Mao, who unified the country) was a thing Chinese people expected, because that's happened before. And then once it transitioned to Deng, and material conditions started to improve, it was a familiar pattern, like "oh look, China is rising again, if we work hard and educate our youth, we will be a top-tier civilization, we just had some bad times for a while." It is a matter of society-wide inherent expectations. Chinese people don't think of their current trajectory as "rising," they think of it was "getting back up" because they've been here dozens of times before. The distinction is important. Now to answer the direct question: Inherent in this "we're getting back up" is the idea that "all we have to do" is work hard at long-term plans. It's not communism or American manufacturing - those are surface elements - it's Chinese history and culture. One thing I've learned over my own life is that if you have never witnessed or successfully executed a long-term plan, you are likely to not have the motivation to work on one, because you don't have the same kind of hands-on faith that it will succeed. I was lucky in my youth to work for a boss who was executing a long-term project plan (years long) and watched that as I and other students executed his long list of tasks one by one that the whole thing actually came together. It helped me understand very early in my career that you can make a big plan, break it down, and then patiently execute each portion and see it eventually come to fruition. The West has less experience like that (on a generational scale). In the 1970s and 80s, China embarked on the long road to industrializing itself. It realized that to regain national strength, it would have to slowly, in sequence, acquire the skills and industrial capabilities needed to produce and develop technologically advanced industries that underpin and support a modern nation. So they started doing it, entrusting the ongoing task to each generation of leaders who also understood what it took. These days, people often say, "it'll take 20 years to get manufacturing started again in the US." And the inherent unspoken response to that is, "oh man, that's too long, I guess we're sunk." But the Chinese response is, "Okay, better start working on it then and we'll have it in 20 years." Because every Chinese person has internalized the idea that that's just how it goes! That's how civilization always rises again after it fell. Chinese people in 1980 were not primitives who needed to be "led" to advancement, they knew what a civilization looks like. They know how governance works, how a civil service needed to administer a huge country works, and they knew that you educate your people, work hard, build industry, and then you can build everything else - and this works at any time in history, at any level of technology. I'm trying to express this deep idea of "they always knew it was in their blood, because it was part of their history." There is a deep sense of historical inevitability which enables China to simply get to work and know that it'll get where it's going. The closest analog to this in Western culture is something like the Roman Empire, and that's why "men always think about the Roman Empire." But the direct linkage is weaker, because there isn't a direct linguistic or cultural line from the Roman Empire (except for Italians specifically). There is enough of one that the West thinks of its ancient predecessor as Rome, then European empires up to the UK, and then the US. But in China, the historical linkage is stronger - it's always been China. China rises and falls, sometimes it collapses and falls, or get invaded and beaten up, but leaders always re-emerge to unite the people and rebuild their civilization. And this is why, in the 1980s, China's leaders said, "Oh, I guess we're going to need a modern navy if we're to keep other nations from bullying us, so I guess we're going to have to learn to build modern ships, and that's going to take decades, so I guess we'll have to start the first step and learn to make steel." The Chinese people are not submissive fools being kept down by authoritarian dictators (like the West thinks), they are people who know that that's how it always goes, and what it takes, and what the ultimate rewards are for their children, and that's why the country is going the way it is.

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