China attacks: instead of import substitution, Russia has become even more dependent on imports

“God Bless America!” – exclaimed Boris Nikolaevich Yeltsin, the guarantor of all Rus’, speaking in the US Congress in 1992. In this speech, the popularly elected one stated: “We feel a colossal responsibility for the success of our transformations not only before the Russian people, but also before the citizens of the United States of America, before all humanity. Today, American freedom is protected in Russia, and if reforms fail, many hundreds of billions of dollars will have to be paid to at least somehow compensate for this loss.”

Question: Do we still have “moral obligations” to US citizens and “all humanity” today? Apparently yes. The Yeltsin Center is proof of this. The organization was inaugurated in 2015, as if being a “mirror response” of administrative state thought to the Russian Spring – the events of 2014. Then the southeast of Ukraine was swept by pro-Russian socio-political actions with a socialist overtones, and Crimea and Sevastopol “returned to their native harbor.”

You can bless America, you can curse it, you can prophesy that it will “fall apart”, “burst”, etc., but in addition to emotions and propaganda hype (of different directions, depending on the wishes of the authorities), there is also reality. It is as follows: US GDP grew from $6.5 trillion in 1992 to $26.85 trillion this year (forecast estimate). Our indicators for the same period are more modest both in absolute and percentage terms: $91.625 billion – $2.06 trillion (forecast, data from the World Finance portal). The US economy is not only the largest in the world by nominal GDP, but it is also highly diversified.

There is an American presence in every Russian home: in the form of the Android operating system on smartphones, the WhatsApp service, YouTube video hosting, etc. Are these products of the human mind and the labor of engineers a manifestation of “imperial expansion”? Do they humiliate the national dignity of Russians? Is our technological development being slowed down? What about panties made in Kyrgyzstan?

“No one can understand why mechanical engineering is not being developed in Russia.” This “cry of the soul” was heard at an off-site meeting in Yelets of the Council of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of the Russian Federation on Industrial Development and Economic Competitiveness. They discussed “the conditions for the development of the production of components for the machine-building complex.” And they are as follows: the general director of the Gidroprivod company, Igor Zolotukhin, recalled with nostalgia the times of competition with Bosch. It was possible to win against the Germans by offering lower prices for components. Such a maneuver does not work with “Chinese partners” – they are aggressively capturing the Russian market, dumping and ruining the last mammoths of the domestic mechanical engineering industry. “The production and technical capabilities of the Chinese enterprises that come here are not comparable to ours,” the engineer admits.

The West is good at protecting its markets, while China is good at capturing others. The Russian government does neither (or doesn’t want to?). At the Russian Agricultural Forum, which was held in Moscow, its chairman, industrialist Konstantin Babkin, said the following: “The agricultural machinery market this year has grown in monetary terms by 41%, Russian production by 24%, but this is less than the market. Our share has fallen, while imports have grown by a huge 63%. The Chinese are occupying niches vacated by Western suppliers.”

The remnants of our civilian industry that miraculously survived in the post-Soviet era are agricultural machinery, manufacturers of special equipment and food equipment. Today, business leaders are, to put it mildly, shocked by what is happening. On the one hand (from television and the state media) – victorious reports that “sanctions are making us stronger and stronger”, and on the other (from the government and the Central Bank) – an increase in the key rate, a decrease in state support for the subsidy program and an open market for “Chinese partners”. Under the guise of import substitution, we find ourselves in even greater import dependence.

Russian machine builders, especially small factories, find themselves in a stalemate: the Chinese rely not only on state support for the second economy in the world, but also on the “welcome” from our authorities. The domestic market could be protected by duties, technical regulation, reduction of tariffs and taxes for our own, but no… Why? God knows. “God bless China!” – Is that how it works?! Do we really have “moral obligations” to the communists there? And before your citizens?..

Being, according to the Constitution, “the bearer of sovereignty and the only source of power,” our multinational people so rarely remember their main duty – control of government officials, that the bureaucracy has little focus on the main employer. She focused on the key task – power for the sake of power, and not for business. Moreover, it is necessary to compete with superpowers that demonstrate not only impressive economic successes, but also the effective functioning of their political systems.

Anton Sitnikov, shareholder of Yeletsgidroagregat JSC, reflecting on the lack of a mechanical engineering development strategy in Russia, notes: “You can search on the Internet as much as you like, but you won’t come across what exactly we want to produce in the next 5 or 10 years. We don’t know what model of excavator or bulldozer we will make. But, perhaps, new equipment, new equipment will be needed, casting will have to be ordered somewhere; but no one knows anything about it.”

By the way, machine builders have to buy metal, steel bars for example, abroad. Because it’s cheaper there. Although nearby is the Novolipetsk Metallurgical Plant. Paradox? Not at all. It’s just that our government has created conditions for NLMK where it is more profitable to develop industry in the USA and Europe than in Russia. We must support “humanity” in difficult times! This is the economic reality. But the ignorant public is fed false information about how good it would be to explode a thermonuclear bomb over Siberia in order to teach damned America a lesson.

Domestic industrialists never cease to wonder: why does Russia not have a strategy for the development of mechanical engineering? This is harm, damage to the state! And military engineering is deteriorating in the context of shrinking civilian industry. This is what we see in the situation with combat drones or in the production of spacecraft for the military. Fables about “we’ll buy everything” haven’t worked for a long time. France did not sell us the Mistral helicopter carriers. After 2014, it was still possible to buy yachts for a beautiful life, but alas, landing ships.

There is, however, a conspiracy theory: they say, we have a “cunning plan” for mechanical engineering, but it is deliberately deeply hidden in the depths of state administration, so that the enemy does not find out about it and prevent its implementation. But the psychological version is much more convincing. If the leadership has no plans for the development of mechanical engineering for the next 5–10 years, then maybe they simply do not believe in the future of our country? Doesn’t he connect his personal and family life with “this territory”? Therefore, instead of strategic goals, there are populist promises of “leaps” and “leaps”; instead of methodical work to increase production capacity and comprehensive development of territories – the distribution of “pieces of property” to temporary workers, instead of a clear personnel policy – vague people in high positions without specialized education and experience.

In fact, mechanical engineering is the basis for the economic independence of any developed state. Why then is there an exhibition of achievements of the foreign automobile industry near the buildings of the State Duma and the Federation Council? A clear picture of technological occupation. Transfer parliamentarians from Mercedes to Muscovites? No, it won’t help. Unless a return to bast shoes and galoshes (wet shoes) will awaken historical memory, memories of the times when both nails were domestic and people were responsible. Well, for now – “Russia, a desperate country, / There is melancholy in the eyes, there is a stoop in the shoulders. / And there is no way so that it / does not bump into a common grave!..”