Alice Han

He went to America.

He stole the, or rather memorized the blueprints for

textile mills from the UK and brought it over to the US, the East Coast of America, to set up his own textile empire.

And the Brits call him Slater the Trader.

The Americans see him as a big hero.

Andrew Jackson called him a huge hero and the father of modern American industrialism.

The reason I cite this is because it really is a question of perspective, right?

And in the game of technological and economic competition, all is fair, at least from my perspective.

And this reminded me so much of that example because in some ways it is pretty much the same deal.

You know, you buy up or you try to memorize the R&D of other companies.

You then take that home and you boost the productivity and innovation in the mainland.

Even if those foreign companies that you originally invested in see profits fall, all that really matters is the technological transfer that you achieve back home.

But James, do you agree or disagree?

But my other takeaway from that, which I found very fascinating beyond the fact that it shows how official data sets really underestimate or understate the level, to your point, James, of tech transfers or Chinese companies even buying up

through M&A activity foreign firms via these Cayman Islands tax havens, so to speak.

What was also interesting to me was the fact that these companies are doing it by themselves out of their own naked interests, as opposed to it being a narrative that you often hear about it being state-led technological transfer.

And what was so interesting to me to see is that you just have a ton of private and state-owned enterprises that are going out, finding really interesting things

technological companies in their R&D and investing in them and then bringing that technology back home and filing patents.

I think that that somewhat changes the narrative that a lot of people have of it being very top-down.

In this instantiation, it feels very much like a bottom-up initiative.