The U.S. shed factories and the skills around them, while China accepted inefficiency to build complete industrial systems and long-term manufacturing power.
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
The evolution from 1G to 5G reflects a sustained three-way strategic contest among China, the United States, and Europe, in which technological standards serve as the fulcrum, industrial ecosystems as the primary arena, and national strategies as critical support. Rather than a linear process of technical upgrading, this trajectory unfolds through distinct phases—from dependence, to … Read more
China’s 4G/5G development has followed a distinctive three-pronged evolutionary path integrating institutions, technology, and markets. Shaped by strong state leadership, system-level integration, scenario-driven development, and ecosystem collaboration, this model contrasts sharply with the market- and capital-driven approaches of Europe and the United States, as well as the conglomerate-centered industrial trajectories of Japan and South Korea, … Read more
The collective decline of Japanese home appliance companies in the Chinese market exemplifies industrial competition and structural transformation. This predicament highlights that, amid dramatic technological paradigm shifts, superior operational efficiency alone—when detached from scenario awareness and ecosystem integration—can become a constraint on adaptation and transformation. Strategic Misjudgments and Slow Market Response Japanese home appliance companies, … 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