Prayers going on, factory visits going up, Substack for support: a 2-year channel update +++
by Inside China Business [2-8-2026].
(RAD: Kevin Walmsley has been inside China for about 14 years since May 2012. This "Inside China Business" channel was started 2 years & 2 months ago. I don't remember how I found this channel, yet I've found the insights Kevin shares to be very helpful & consistent with a lot else that I've been learning. His presentations are always short and to the point.
Kevin is a devout Christian & China became his mission. For years he prayed that God would bring reform to China that would bring a lot of changes. One day while he was praying, "God told him to stop praying like that. God was using China to bless the world. I need you to start paying attention. I'm using China to bless the world and I need you to start paying attention." He spoke to me clearly in a audible voice that I could hear right where I was sitting in my living room. — RAD)
Closing scenes, Downtown Kunming, Yunnan.
Related
https://kdwalmsley.substack.com Inside China Business substack, Kevin Walmsley
Kevin Walmsley grew up in Venice, Florida, which he still considers his hometown, no matter where he is this week. He has four grown children, Christopher, Briton, Lauren, and Megan.
Kevin has lived in China since 2012, and works for Direct Equipment from Kunming.
His team is a dedicated group of English-fluent Chinese engineers and logistics pros, who coordinate factory visits and inspections, perform quality control, ensure accurate order placement and fulfillment, and oversees DEC's freight forwarding relationships.
Kevin is a nine-year veteran of the US Army, and is active in underground churches and missions in Southeast Asia.
Jon Van de Riet grew up in Nokomis, Florida and moved to NC prior to his final year of high school. He still lives in NC and has nearly 40 years of experience spanning the residential housing industry, secondary and higher education, and software development in both the education and bulk energy sectors.
Jon manages the US side of Direct Equipment including sales, marketing and customer service.
Jon and his wife, Heather, have a daughter, Ginnie, attending college at UNC Chapel Hill.
Away from business, Jon enjoys woodworking, scuba diving, boating and travelling. He is a long time member of Christ Covenant Church in Matthews, NC where he sings in the adult choir and serves as a deacon.
Important Related Posts
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Why China is Winning [2-2-2024]
(RAD: This is an amazing observation about China in February 2024. Just as the West & the US turned away from Christianity, China found it. He continues... Just look around. We can't beat these people, not in a trade war, not in an economic war, and not in a war of any kind. There are millions of home churches in China. The Chinese Christians love their country and every time they meet, they thank God that they are Chinese. They pray for their country, their leaders, and the world. In 1990 there were fewer than 1 million Christians in China. In just 15 years, 21 years ago by 2005, the number of Christians went to 100 million and it has just kept growing. China's population is 1.4 billion today, which is 4.11 times the size of the US. This type of transformation has never happened before at any time or any place in the world. They are sending thousands of Christian missionaries out & helping countries in Africa, Latin America, and Asia with massive economic development. Listen to his observations to understand why. — RAD)
The boom of China has been a literal miracle, and exactly mirrors the boom of Christianity during the same time. (See the chart below)
In 1990 less than 1% of Chinese identified as Christian. In 1990 less than 1% of global economic activity came from China. In the three short decades since, China has become the largest Christian country in the world, and also the largest economy in the world.
Christians in China love their country with a depth and passion that is startling to foreign observers. During church gatherings they pray for their country and its leadership.
They believe deeply that they have a duty to share their prosperity with fellow Chinese, especially the poor and elderly. And they believe they are called to invest in the undeveloped countries of the world.
Chinese Christians believe that they and their businesses are under divine protection, for as long as they follow their faith and continue to share.
Western countries subsidize our biggest companies. China subsidizes their small ones. [4-23-2024]
(RAD: This is a very important observation about some key reasons that China can quickly dominate critical technology segments. It is applied to thousands of companies in dozens of industries. His explanation is easy to understand, including examples showing the US approach vs the Chinese approach. Although not mentioned here, China follows up with their Five-Year Plans way into the future on what they want to accomplish and the critical resources needed. — RAD)
In the United States and Europe, the biggest companies most commonly benefit from subsidies and bailouts. The "too-big-to-fail" banks like JP Morgan and Bank of America and Citigroup, struggling automakers like GM and Stallantis, and even highly profitable companies like Intel and Taiwan Semiconductor are granted billions in subsidies, low-cost loans, and aid.
In contrast, China's industrial policy involves funding thousands of small companies that show high potential in certain key industrial fields. By identifying "little giants" and "single champions", Beijing's industrial policy is bottom-up.
They begin by studying industrial sectors, and looking for chokepoints, or bottlenecks, which may be exploited by foreign countries or companies, and identify companies in China that can spin up quickly to overcome them. They also identify Chinese companies that are successful in the domestic market, and which can dominate globally if given sufficient capital, research funding, partnerships, and access to China's overseas supply chains.
The Chinese economic, political, financial, and even educational systems are organized to support these strategies, and help to explain why Chinese companies can so quickly be organized to take market share, then entire supply and value chains, in global markets.
Welcome to Inside China Business [5-22-2024]
(RAD: It is popular in the US to bash China for all sorts of reasons, instead of looking in the mirror. It would be far more productive to learn from China on how the US could be more productive in the world. In the technology world I come from, when companies stop innovating, they go out of business as new competitors arise. As of early 2026, the US still doesn't understand the fundamental problems & how to make massive corrections. The quick fixes won't solve the underlying structural issues.
Kevin Walmsley is a Christian who is involved in missionary work. As of 2024, this is his 13th year working & living in China with his family. He worked at the biggest Wall Street investment banks and thought that he understood financial issues, yet he doesn't understand how China has done this.
How did 800 million of 1.4 billion people go from subsistence living to a comfortable middle class in just 30 years?
How did China build the biggest rail network on the planet in just 30 years. More impressive is that they are building these railroads in Africa, South America & across Asia.
How did China learn to do all of these things when they had no prior experience?
Where did the money come from to build all of this? How does China manage all of the money that they earn abroad?
How did the Chinese financial system go from ZERO foreign exchange reserves to the biggest pool of productive capital in the whole world in just 25 years? As of 2024, $3 Billion is going into that pool every single day.
What China has done is beyond belief. It's impossible.
It is also amazing how China has taken over the key supply chains for everything in the past 30 years. In 2024 the Chinese Belt & Road Initiative was just 11 years old, that's all. It is already the most important project in the last 1,000 years. There has been nothing like it in all of human history.
If the US was a big airplane in flight, all of the warning lights would be flashing red to "pull up" to avoid crashing. Unfortunately, the problems we have in the US are deep, structural & fatal. — RAD)
China’s factories are in another world [3-23-2025]
(RAD: The level of automation in China's factories needs to be seen to be believed. We are long past the days where China competed on low cost labor. It now has total domination of the supply chains, of engineering, and an industrial sector that builds other machines entirely on their own. All of the world's supply chains run through China. His company is having China build quality houses that are shipped to the US to be assembled for a niche that is no longer served in the US. He discusses how this Chinese company can build a few houses for his company and seamlessly build different type houses for customers in other parts of the world. This doesn't require large production runs. He is constantly amazed at what the Chinese are doing. — RAD)
China's industrial proficiency is shocking to manufacturing experts. Their degrees of automation, of engineering expertise, and supply chain domination have no close peer across other modern economies.
China's latest innovation is "dark factories", massive production centers that produce complex products with no humans involved. In an absurd example, a Chinese factory in Guangdong builds robots, exclusively by other robots.
Also astonishing is these factories' capability to manufacture highly customized product lines, fast, and at low minimum order quantities.
Chinese smart manufacturing is likely the largest in the world, today. It is growing at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of over 18%, and will more than double in size by 2030.
Deep challenges remain for other economies to challenge China in smart manufacturing. Chinese Artificial Intelligence systems are already in place, cost little, and its engineers are strongly proficient in their applications. Chinese electricity costs far less than peer countries. And, here again, China's monopolistic control over the global raw materials and logistics chains is probably an insurmountable hurdle for North America, Europe, and other Asian countries.