I'm old enough to have watched the rise of China from the beginning and it's largely been at our expense—and it's all horribly disconcerting.

When I was a kid the only widely used import people bought from China was fireworks—yes there were shops in the Chinatown areas of big cities that sold different types of Chinese food and chinaware but the market was trivially small).

Five or so decades later just about all manufactured household goods are made in China, these days I don't even bother looking at the labels for where they were made as it's a foregone conclusion.

We in the West have only ourselves to blame. Consumers lured by cheap prices together with greedy factory owners and industrialists who put profits before the security and wellbeing of their country closed down local manufacturing and outsourced it to China and in the process they deskilled our workforce and we turned ourselves into service economies.

In the meantime, our governments stood idly by and did nothing to stop the rot. Instead, they seemed preoccupied with the comparatively small threat of terrorism and using it as an excuse to spy on their citizens. They altogether lost sight of the real security threat even though it was clearly obvious to Blind Freddie from the outset.

Similarly, they did precious little to stop the wholesale and blatant stealing of our technology by China.

I live in Australia, here our universities have been turned into profit-making 'factories' to educate overseas students—most of whom are Chinese—at the expense of local citizens because our governments have been too damn miserable to invest decent amounts of funding into education.

Our commodities such as natural gas have reached sky-high prices for local citizens because our governments have allowed large multinational companies to flog it off to the Chinese. We now have a gas crisis in this country despite its huge abundance.

Similarly, we sell coal, iron ore and even wine—which we also have in abundance—to China to the extent that we've become totally dependent on our exports to China. Australia has become China's backyard quarry.

As these multinational mining companies have the Government by the balls, we citizens haven't a hope in Hades of getting cheap gas or electricity anytime soon.

When we recently stepped out of line with an imprudent comment about China's human rights record China instantly responded by slapping tariffs on our exports that nearly brought the country to its knees. Right, Australia is already effectively under China's thumb despite all the blustering to the contrary.

Australia even handed over the management of the port of Darwin to Chinese operators.

Combine this with all the various bureaucratic rules, regulations and other nonsense such as lobbying from small but powerful vested interests and infighting between politicians and business and stuff-all is ever achieved. Trying to cut through the dross to stand up to China just isn't worth it for many. When the country is both politically and industrially moribund we've little chance. Flogging a dead horse is an apt description.

There's a joke amongst my friends and colleagues that the problems will all be solved when the Chinese take full control of the country.

The trouble is that for many who live in what was once known as the Lucky Country it's no longer seen as a joke.