U.S. firms chased shareholder value, boosting profits and elite innovation while shedding factories—leaving supply chains efficient, fragile, and hollowed out.
The United States’ effort to frame contemporary tensions with China as a “new Cold War” has not generated the strategic leverage Washington once held over the Soviet Union. Although U.S. policy since the late 2010s has drawn heavily from the earlier playbook—tightened technology controls, mobilized alliances, and sharpened ideological language—the impact has been far more … Read more
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
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 “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
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
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
The Chinese revolutionary strategy of “Encircling the Cities from the Countryside,” famously employed by Mao Zedong against the Kuomintang, offers a striking metaphor for modern marketing. Just as Mao began by gaining influence in rural peripheries before advancing toward urban centers, businesses can adopt a similar approach by entering underserved or niche market segments before … Read more
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
Ren Zhengfei’s first journey beyond China occurred in 1992, when he and a Huawei delegation departed from Hong Kong, transited through Tokyo, and traveled across the United States. Their itinerary covered Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Dallas, Las Vegas, Silicon Valley, and Los Angeles. During the trip, they visited several leading power-supply companies—CP, Texas Instruments, and … 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