China moves up the value chain, to advanced manufacturing and increasingly frontier technology. Why the U.S. still claims to favor free markets.
The China–United States Physics Examination and Application (CUSPEA) program, launched by Nobel laureate Tsung-Dao Lee in 1979 and concluded in 1989, offers a revealing lens through which to examine the relationship between human capital, international collaboration, and technological competition. Created to rebuild China’s scientific capacity after the Cultural Revolution, CUSPEA enabled nearly 1,000 of China’s … Read more
Xiaomi and Huawei differ fundamentally in their corporate positioning, value creation, and roles within the national and global technology ecosystem. Huawei is a technology-driven company, emphasizing strategic breakthroughs and the industrialization of cutting-edge technologies. In contrast, Xiaomi is a business-driven company, prioritizing supply chain integration, commercialization, and user-centric products. These distinctions extend across industrial cycles, … Read more
Yu Chengdong has played a decisive role in shaping Huawei’s intelligent vehicle industry chain, acting not only as a product leader but as a strategic architect of an emerging ecosystem. His influence extends well beyond the launch of individual vehicle models. Through clear strategic judgment, bold disruption of conventional automotive logic, and strong execution, he … Read more
Britain’s historical shaping of revolutionary narratives offers a revealing lens for understanding contemporary geopolitical and ideological competition. By emphasizing stability, legitimizing elite authority, and downplaying domestic violence, British historiography cast radical social upheavals abroad as inherently dangerous while portraying its own political evolution as orderly and restrained. This narrative framework did not merely interpret history; … Read more
In How Europe Became American (2021), Hans Vogel advances the provocative thesis that Europe did not merely succumb to U.S. dominance but actively internalized American paradigms of power, political economy, and culture. According to Vogel, this process was largely voluntary: Europe abandoned the ambition to act as an autonomous civilizational pole and instead embraced American … Read more
In How Europe Became American (2021), Hans Vogel advances the provocative thesis that Europe did not merely succumb to U.S. dominance but voluntarily relinquished its role as a leading civilization by adopting American paradigms of power, economics, and culture. Rather than sustaining autonomous models of political economy or strategic authority, Europe internalized U.S. assumptions—particularly those … Read more
India’s manufacturing ambitions are unlikely to replicate China’s historic rise—not because of insufficient scale, talent, or intent, but because the structural conditions that enabled China’s success no longer exist. China’s emergence as the world’s manufacturing hub was the result of a long foundational phase between 1949 and 1979, during which the state systematically built industrial … Read more
U.S. efforts to reshore manufacturing are unlikely to succeed because they confront structural, historical, and systemic constraints fundamentally different from those that enabled China’s industrial rise. China’s emergence as a global manufacturing powerhouse—the third fully industrialized nation after Britain and the United States—was not a market-led accident, but the result of a long foundational period … Read more
China’s academic system has achieved impressive scale and efficiency, producing vast numbers of publications, training large cohorts of STEM talent, and building world-class research infrastructure. Yet it continues to struggle to generate paradigm-shifting, original breakthroughs—the kind that redefine scientific frontiers or give rise to entirely new fields. This limitation does not stem from a lack … Read more
If China were to take full control of Taiwan, the consequences would extend far beyond a local territorial change, producing cascading strategic, military, economic, and diplomatic effects that disproportionately harm the United States and Japan while benefiting China. The effects would challenge U.S. and Japanese leadership while consolidating China’s strategic, economic, and symbolic ascendancy. Erosion … Read more