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.
Former Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew (LKY) long argued that China would struggle to reach the global frontier of creativity because its political system constrained dissent, independent thinking, and intellectual freedom; in his view, China would excel at absorbing and refining foreign technologies but not at pioneering them. Yet today, China has produced notable … Read more
Western societies tend to prioritize core principles such as individual rights, democratic decision-making, the rule of law, competitive markets, transparency, minimal government corruption, independent media, and freedoms of thought, conscience, and expression. While these principles are cherished in Western societies, there is a tendency to assume that others, such as the Chinese, share the same … Read more
Huawei’s founder, Ren Zhengfei, adopted a markedly different approach from Jack Welch’s strategy of financialization and downsizing. While Welch emphasized short-term shareholder gains and cost-cutting—even at the expense of manufacturing and employees—Ren focused on long-term industrial growth, technological capability, and self-reliance. In contrast to Welch’s approach, Huawei’s strategies actively strengthened China’s industrial base and fostered … Read more
In American Amnesia: How the War on Government Led Us to Forget What Made America Prosper (2016), Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson argue that beginning in the late 1970s, the United States experienced a powerful ideological shift. Conservative movements and corporate interests championed “market fundamentalism”—the belief that government intervention inevitably stifles growth and freedom. This … Read more
In America’s Cold War Against China: Destined to Fail (2025), Peter Nolan argues that the West’s failure to recognize the profound historical and cultural differences between China and Russia—treating China merely as a “Soviet copy”—resulted in serious strategic miscalculations[1]. He contends that China’s rise should not be viewed as an anomaly within the modern international … Read more
China pursued an industrial strategy that emphasized protecting national sovereignty, learning progressively, and implementing changes gradually, in stark contrast to countries that opted for rapid liberalization and consequently lost influence over their industrial development. Sovereignty and Control Over Foreign Capital China has consistently prioritized maintaining national sovereignty in its economic development, in contrast to countries … Read more
During the 1990s, Western attention gradually moved from Russia to China. This wasn’t a sudden change, but a slow realignment shaped by the Cold War’s end, the forces of globalization, and the growing recognition that China’s rise would have a much greater global impact than Russia’s waning influence. Immediate Post-Cold War Context The collapse of … Read more
China’s first homegrown third-generation (3G) wireless telecom standard, TD-SCDMA (Time Division-Synchronous Code Division Multiple Access), marked a strategic shift in the country’s telecommunications landscape. Prior to TD-SCDMA, China relied on foreign standards such as WCDMA from Europe and CDMA2000 from the United States. By developing its own 3G standard, China gained greater control over key … Read more
TD-SCDMA (Time Division–Synchronous Code Division Multiple Access) was China’s domestically developed 3G mobile communication standard, created in the early 2000s as part of a national effort to strengthen technological self-reliance and reduce dependence on foreign firms such as Qualcomm, Nokia, and Ericsson. Though it never achieved global dominance, TD-SCDMA represented a pivotal experiment in China’s … Read more
In Powerful, Different, Equal: Overcoming the Misconceptions and Differences Between China and the US (2019), Peter B. Walker argues that China’s absence of public elections for top officials does not equate to a dictatorship, as is often assumed in the West. Rather, the country functions as a complex meritocratic system, where the authority of leaders … Read more