China didn’t become an economic powerhouse by skipping steps or choosing the comfortable path. It industrialized first, at an enormous cost, long working hours, polluted skies, and a generation that paid the price so the next one could live better.

Coal was never the dream. It was the sacrifice.

Everyone wants to copy the success. Very few want to copy the cost. And that’s the part often missing in Western debates, where we demand clean outcomes without accepting the historical path that made prosperity possible.

You can’t industrialize a nation with slogans alone.