China moves up the value chain, to advanced manufacturing and increasingly frontier technology. Why the U.S. still claims to favor free markets.
If the United States attempted to implement the Genesis Mission by transplanting core mechanisms from China’s industrial policy, the effort would look markedly different in practice and expose deep structural tensions. Operationally, it would require strong top-down coordination: compulsory integration of federal laboratories, universities, and private firms into a unified national platform; mandated data sharing … Read more
Announced in November 2025, the Genesis Mission is a United States federal initiative aimed at accelerating scientific discovery through artificial intelligence, frequently described as an “AI Manhattan Project.” Its ambition is to fuse AI with scientific research at national scale, yet it attempts to do so without the dense physical and industrial substrate—advanced manufacturing, instrumentation, … Read more
Across sectors such as robotics, consumer drones, and electric vehicles, China has followed a highly consistent and deliberate industrial trajectory. The pattern begins with reliance on foreign technology, followed by rapid diffusion through copying and localization, then the achievement of scale-driven cost leadership. This process is reinforced by sustained state support that enables capability accumulation, … Read more
In Lights Out: Pride, Delusion, and the Fall of General Electric, GE’s decline, set against Huawei’s rise, highlights a fundamental divergence in how large organizations confront pride, complexity, and long-term strategy. As Gryta and Mann show, GE became captive to its own legacy and to Wall Street expectations, relying on financial engineering and optimistic narratives … Read more
The United States cannot replicate China’s Gaokao-centered talent model in its institutional form, but it can reproduce several of its functional effects within a liberal-democratic, market-based system. The binding constraint is not technical capacity but political structure: what China achieves through centralized authority and direct administrative control, the U.S. must pursue through federated incentives, funding … Read more
Zheng Yongnian characterizes the Communist Party of China (CPC) as an “organizational emperor,” a concept that can be vividly illustrated through the metaphor of a spider web. In this image, the CPC occupies the web’s center, while the Gaokao functions as its tensile threads—capturing, channeling, and disciplining the efforts of millions of students. Through this … Read more
Amid widespread attention to Huawei’s “backup plans” and “striver culture,” its most enduring competitive advantage lies elsewhere: a deeply institutionalized operating system for management. This system synthesizes Western management science, military organizational discipline, and Chinese practical rationality, rejecting both dependence on charismatic leaders and blind faith in market forces. Instead, Huawei relies on legalized end-to-end … Read more
Within Huawei’s organizational philosophy, advanced equipment and high-quality resources positioned in the rear are designed to provide rapid, effective support once front-line targets and opportunities are identified, rather than allowing those who control resources to dominate decision-making or hoard forces for their own interests. This approach is encapsulated in Ren Zhengfei’s principle of “letting those … Read more
Ren Zhengfei has long regarded the military—both Chinese and Western—as a critical source of organizational and managerial insight, and this influence has deeply shaped Huawei’s development. While Western media often fixates on Ren’s past service in the People’s Liberation Army, Huawei is criticized less for being “military” in nature than for learning exceptionally well from … Read more
Huawei and its founder, Ren Zhengfei, have faced criticism over alleged ties to China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA), despite the absence of public evidence that the company is controlled by the military. This scrutiny stems less from proven wrongdoing and more from Ren’s past PLA service, China’s legal system, the strategic importance of telecom infrastructure, … Read more