The Planet Needs Better Products, Not Better People

30 years ago, I stood in a parking lot outside a restaurant shaped like a Chinese pagoda near Guangzhou, while a Chinese businessman showed me his new Mercedes.

He knelt beside the rear bumper and held his hands apart.

Xiao Du, he said, calling me by my informal Chinese name, look, mine is the biggest Mercedes here.

Somehow, all the cars in the parking lot were Mercedes, and it was true.

His was the biggest, a solid six inches longer than the one next to it.

As he stood, his chest swelled with pride, and I instantly understood something.

I'd been living in China for nearly two years, traveling around the country trying to sell bike locks for an American company called Kryptonite.

At the time, nearly a billion people in China rode bicycles, but nobody wanted one.

Everybody wanted a car.

Today, Americans bemoan how much we buy from China.

It's why we have tariffs.

It's why politicians in both parties talk about bringing manufacturing back and re-industrializing America.

But before China made all our stuff, we sent China the factories.

Throughout the 1990s, American companies dismantled entire textile mills in the Carolinas and Georgia, loaded the equipment onto ships, and reassembled it in China.

We exported the machinery.

We exported the jobs.

But more than anything else, we exported the American dream.

We told the world that progress meant more.

Bigger homes, more appliances, more mobility, more comfort, more freedom, more stuff.

Become like us, we said.

Free markets, consumption.

You can have it all, just like America.

Then we acted surprised when they took us up on it.

Standing in that parking lot three decades ago, I could suddenly see where the future was heading.

There were going to be a billion cars in China someday.