China EV 2035 Forecast: Lessons from History as a Mirror

From the moment the Duryea brothers built the first American automobile in 1895, more than 1,900 registered automakers emerged within five years—most evolving from horse-drawn carriage workshops and relying on handcrafted production, with 99% manufacturing fewer than 100 vehicles a year. Yet by 1908, only 253 remained, as Ford’s Model T and its breakthrough in … Read more

China’s Internet Firms Lead Through Combinatorial Innovation

Chinese internet companies are known for rapidly absorbing successful ideas from competitors and integrating them into their own ecosystems, a practice that significantly accelerates product iteration and industry-wide innovation. By contrast, major American technology firms often respect relatively fixed “spheres of influence,” which can slow the pace of cross-platform evolution. Against this backdrop, Elon Musk … Read more

Huawei’s Constitutional Technocracy, Not One-Man Rule

In House of Huawei: The Secret History of China’s Most Powerful Company, Eva Dou argues that Huawei has become progressively more closed, secretive, and opaque, mirroring the structure and behavior of China’s political system. While she persuasively documents Huawei’s growing opacity, this analogy risks over-structuralizing the relationship between state and firm. States seek political stability … Read more

Institutionalized Dissent: How Huawei Beats Groupthink

Huawei’s “Blue Team Report” is an institutionalized mechanism for strategic critique and risk warning, and a core manifestation of the company’s deeply embedded culture of self-criticism. Modeled on the military concept of blue team–red team confrontation, it functions as a normalized, ongoing, and combat-oriented form of adversarial research rather than a fixed-format annual document. By … Read more

Ren Zhengfei’s Strategic Philosophy for China–U.S. Tech Race

In the context of intensifying U.S.–China technological competition, strategic sectors such as artificial intelligence, semiconductors, and new energy vehicles have become focal points of national rivalry and innovation. Huawei’s trajectory offers a revealing case through which to examine China’s path toward technological self-reliance, the dynamic interaction between state guidance and market forces, and the global … Read more

China vs. U.S. in Global AI: A Panoramic Strengths Duel

The global competition in artificial intelligence between China and the United States has evolved into a comprehensive contest of education systems, industrial ecosystems, computing infrastructure, and application-driven innovation. A revealing window into China’s strategic thinking emerged from the minutes of a meeting between Ren Zhengfei and the ICPC chairman, coaches, and award-winning contestants, published on … Read more

Selective Decoupling and China’s Path to Tech Power

In November 2025, Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei remarked at a meeting with winners of the International Collegiate Programming Contest that the United States “only forbids Huawei from using anything containing American elements; it does not mean it forbids China from using them.” Though understated, the comment precisely captures a widely misunderstood reality of the Sino-US … Read more

From Compute Islands to Networked Strength in China’s AI

In November 2025, the official website of the ICPC Beijing headquarters released minutes from a symposium between Ren Zhengfei and ICPC leadership, coaches, and award-winning contestants. At the meeting, Ren made a seemingly simple yet incisive remark: “Computing power without a network is an information island.” He emphasized that AI’s real value lies overwhelmingly in … Read more

AI’s Irreversible Rise and Its Industrial Transformation

Ren Zhengfei’s remarks to ICPC participants underscore his conviction that the global shift toward artificial intelligence is irreversible, a judgment grounded in three mutually reinforcing foundations: the underlying logic of technological evolution, the extensive validation of AI through real-world applications, and the lessons drawn from profound historical analogies. This perspective offers a clear framework for … Read more

Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat: Flatteners, U.S. Decline

Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat offers a systemic framework for understanding how globalization, driven by what he terms the “ten flatteners,” reshaped the global economic landscape. These flatteners—ranging from the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of the Internet to outsourcing, offshoring, and digital technologies—collectively lowered barriers to collaboration and competition, enabling … Read more