China’s state sets goals, takes risks, and builds scale, while firms compete and innovate—an integrated system the market-driven U.S. struggles to match.
Based on current trends, policy signals, and structural developments, China’s 15th Five-Year Plan (2026–2030) is widely expected to mark a paradigm upgrade, building on the capacity-building focus of the 13th Five-Year Plan and the system-strengthening agenda of the 14th. More than a continuation, it represents a qualitative shift in strategic orientation—particularly in response to the … Read more
U.S. manufacturing reshoring efforts are unlikely to succeed because they collide with the same shareholder-primacy system that originally drove offshoring. For decades, U.S. firms have been governed by incentives that prioritize short-term profits and stock prices over long-term productive capacity. Offshoring manufacturing to China and Mexico offered immediate financial gains through lower labor costs, lighter … Read more
Huawei has systematically studied the rise and fall of global telecommunications giants—Nortel, Lucent, Alcatel, Nokia Networks, Siemens Communications, and Ericsson—extracting deep lessons in organization, strategy, technology, and governance. These cases reflect not isolated failures but a broader pattern of systemic dysfunction in Western telecoms during the structural transformation of the industry from the late 20th … Read more
China’s repeated success with long-term industrial planning, exemplified by its Five-Year Plans, contrasts sharply with the United States’ difficulty in consciously adopting similar strategies. This divergence is not simply a matter of economics, but a reflection of differences in political structure, ideology, financial incentives, and historical experience. Yet the irony is that the U.S. already … Read more
In American Amnesia: How the War on Government Led Us to Forget What Made America Prosper (2016), Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson challenge the claim that free markets alone produced American prosperity. They argue instead that the United States historically thrived through a mixed economy in which active public investment, effective governance, and private … Read more
Europe and Japan are notably absent from the ranks of internet giants comparable to Apple, Google, Tencent, ByteDance, and Alibaba, resulting in a relative lack of big data, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence companies. This absence limits Europe’s digital sovereignty—its ability to regulate foreign tech giants, enforce digital taxes, or prevent interference in elections—and constrains … Read more
Since 2025, India’s long-standing confidence in its IT industry has been shaken by two symbolic setbacks. The first was the emergence of DeepSeek, a globally influential open-source AI platform originating in China rather than India, prompting soul-searching in a country long celebrated for its software prowess. The second was Tata Consultancy Services’ announcement of its … Read more
Over the past few decades, Huawei and ZTE—both founded in the late 1980s and initially peers in China’s telecommunications equipment industry—have followed sharply diverging paths. Since the mid-2000s, Huawei has steadily pulled ahead, evolving from a comparable competitor into a global leader with integrated “device–network–cloud–chip–software” capabilities across 5G, semiconductors, operating systems, cloud computing, and AI. … Read more
In a June 5, 2024 Foreign Policy article, Graham Allison argues that Singapore challenges core Western assumptions about democracy and governance. Although international watchdogs classify Singapore as only “partly free”—citing restricted political opposition, limited media freedom, and weaker voice and accountability—it consistently delivers effective, stable governance. Most Singaporeans report high satisfaction with their government and … Read more
China’s commitment to domestic substitution extends beyond technological or economic considerations; it is a strategic choice shaped by historical lessons, contemporary threats, systemic security, and the imperatives of a civilization with 1.4 billion people. This focus on self-reliance is fundamentally about the right to survival and development, a rational response to technological bottlenecks and external … Read more