Joe Leahy

Hi.

What time is it right now?

Thanks, Katie.

Joe, I read the excellent China Shock 2 series that you and several colleagues put together yesterday.

It is a tapestry of many threads.

Can you kind of give us the summary?

Yeah, thanks very much, Rob.

So the series really describes how China's moving up into very high-tech industries and really hitting the economies of other producers such as Europe and Southeast Asia.

And the reason we thought of doing this series was that we thought that the world really needs to wake up and take notice if this is one of the trends, perhaps one of the most important trends of the decade.

Yeah, I mean, this is something that's been coming slowly.

And I think during COVID, people sort of lost touch with China for a while.

And during that period, I mean, even before that, China had set its sights on these high-tech items.

And it's not just solar panels and green stuff.

It's machine tools as well.

So very high-quality machine tools.

You name it, China's actually producing it these days and it's creating a shock for Europe and also for Southeast Asia and all countries that have an industrial base are being challenged.

I've been there since the end of COVID.

I got there in 22 and was locked down for a while and even almost put in one of those COVID camps at one point, which, thank God, it didn't happen to me.

But it's just going very fast, this process.

I think when I arrived there, I was surprised, like most people, at the number of electric vehicles, beautiful, very high-quality electric vehicles on the streets of Beijing.