Arthur Kroeber

Less because they picked the right industries and more because they were very adept at building the right enabling infrastructure.

And I would point to two things.

in particular.

One was a program that they had starting in the 1990s, which in English has the very ungainly name of informatization.

So it translates a Chinese term, which just means informatization, right?

Taking information technology is the embedded term here and putting it everywhere in society.

So they were early adopters of the IT revolution.

including the internet.

And if you think back to the discourse around the internet in the late – in the 1990s, everyone was saying the internet is the death knell of authoritarian regimes because this empowers everyone to have information.

Information control is no longer possible.

Social control is no longer possible.

Would that that were true, right?

The Chinese government very, very early said, no, that is wrong.

We think –

that the internet can be an instrument that we can use to, number one, promote technological development at a high speed in China, and number two, enhance our control of society.

And I think they have been proved absolutely correct in that bet on both counts.

Clearly, their drive to network the entire society, which they started to invest in very, very early, initially just through ordinary fixed line telecoms networks, but then they were very early in mobile and then getting government network systems that communicated across the whole country.

They invested huge amounts in that.

And it's been, I think, very beneficial to the rise of

All kinds of things.