Arthur Kroeber

And we realize that there are many different sources of growth, foreign investment, exports, construction, infrastructure.

We're going to do all of these things.

And

Basically, the incentive structure that we will set up is just to tell local officials, your job is to maximize GDP growth, right?

And that will make all of these other things happen.

If we tell local government officials, your job is to maximize technology development, they'll do a lot of dumb stuff and waste a lot of money.

That's not the right way to do it.

Let's just GDP as the KPI, the end, right?

And that turned out to be incredibly successful.

Then Xi Jinping comes along in 2012, 2013 and says, well, okay,

The problem with this is that it's now gone too far.

It's led to a lot of corruption.

It's led to a lot of inequality.

It's led to a lot of local governments doing wasteful and duplicative things.

And now we need to hunker down and focus a little bit more on the really central task, which is this technology task.

So less of growth at all costs.

Basically, the implicit idea there is we've got this figured out.

Growth will take care of itself.

We have a growth machine in China.

The resources of government now need to be focused on specifically the technology question.