Arthur Kroeber

So they had a pretty deliberate strategy of trying to create people at every point in the supply chain.

And they were willing to go through cycles of people not making any money.

Comparison, obviously, in the United States is the U.S.

government gives one loan to one company, Solyndra.

It goes bad and everyone says, this is proof that industrial policy does not work, right?

And I think China actually has the right answer to that question and we had the wrong answer to that question.

You have to be willing to accept some failures and some loss of government money along the way if you want to get to the end.

But I really stress the ecosystem because a lot of this would not have worked just by the government saying, oh, we want to do solar.

It would not have worked unless you had this broader ecosystem of export-driven manufacturing

high competition and international participation across many, many, many, many, many sectors of the economy.

They all converged to create a successful result.

Yeah.

No, it's a good question.

I guess I would start by emphasizing the ways in which China is very, very different than Japan.

The sort of central thing that is really different that lies at the root of a lot of this is that China is an independent geopolitical actor and Japan was not.

Japan, at the end of the day, they could rely on the US for security.

They were demilitarized.

China basically is on its own.

They're in a very dangerous neighborhood.

They have 14 land neighbors that they share borders with.