It's from the president's speech. Too lazy to look up the actual text but I guess he meant "pillars", a common metaphor in East Asia. In English axis and pillar are distinct but in East Asia the line is blurry.

For example, the Japanese word 軸 (jiku) is used to mean the "axis" of a graph, but it is also used in business to mean the "core pillar/backbone" of a strategy (e.g., 経営の軸 keiei no jiku, literally "the axis of management," but conceptually "the pillar of management").

The speech was delivered in Korean so this is a choice by a translator. I don’t speak Korean but I asked an LLM and it says …

the phrase used is "대도약" (daedoyak), which literally means "great leap forward" or "great jump forward." This is NOT "대약진" (daeyakjin), which would be the direct translation of China's "Great Leap Forward" (大跃进).

Looks like a lazy translation; the president used a word "대도약" while the Chinese campaign that you're referring is translated into "대약진운동".

They are still repenting over WWII and wondering how to support Israel while shooting their face off.

Merkeln decided what Germany needed more was mass migrants to come and see the peak of its creation much like UK and France who were all competing for hubris over who could produce new citizens to replace its own

They had a large memory manufacturer, Infineon, who spun out their memory division as Qimonda which then went bankrupt [1]. They were the 2nd largest in the world at one time apparently. Looking back, it's easy to say the German govt should have thrown them a billion or two to keep them afloat. However, state intervention was very unpopular at the time in economic circles, and there was much furor over bailouts following the 2008 crisis.

Japan has an even sadder story. They were the DRAM top dog for a very long time. South Korea entirely ate their lunch.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qimonda

IIRC Taiwan took a page out of Singapore's playbook and went all in on electrical engineering and adjecent fields. It was very much a long-term strategy. Germany probably didn't feel nearly as much pressure, and was already very strong in all industry.

> 1.5tr parameter models

Curious, what's this based off of?