Arthur Kroeber

And it's why basically they were able to create an entire internet of their own with its own companies that doesn't have the participation of the U.S.

global companies and is on its own terms basically just as successful.

But it was also what they recognized is if everyone's on the internet and we have people watching the internet, then we know what everyone is thinking all the time.

We can see that.

And this is the holy grail of Chinese leadership since the second century B.C.,

We sit on top of this vast empire.

It's great.

We have all this territory.

All of this wealth is flowing in.

And we have no idea what people are thinking or doing far away.

This has bedeviled every Chinese administration for thousands of years.

And even into the 1990s, it was an authoritarian system.

It was very fragmented.

And it was very, very hard for the central government to really have any idea what was going on.

And now we have a panopticon because everyone is online.

And if we control the online universe, then we see everything.

And then we're pretty confident that we can keep the discourse under control.

And they won that bet, right?

So the comparable move that they are making today, which I think is severely underappreciated, is that they believe in the power of electrification.

So electricity has been around for a long time.