Dan Wang

and the name of competition.

Maybe Cold War is not the right analogy because there's

huge trade and integration between the U.S.

and China right now, whereas there was essentially no trade between the U.S.

and the Soviet Union in the past.

But then we should come up with some new term really to try to understand both of these countries and to try to keep competition on the level of companies as well as who's delivering the better vision for their own people rather than anything bigger involving a conflagration in the Pacific, God forbid.

I think the Chinese are excellent students of history.

And I think the first... There's maybe several countries that they really study.

First and foremost, it is the Soviet Union, that they diagnosed the problem of the Soviet Union to have been...

in the late 80s when Gorbachev tried to achieve both economic reform as well as political reform at the same time.

And the story of the Soviet Union is one in which political systems sort of imploded, and then nobody picked up the pieces really to try to get the system back up again.

And so that's the first thing that they try to avoid.

They also really try to avoid the fate of Japan, which suffered an economic implosion by the late 80s and also never quite got back up again.

So I think the first reason to believe that China will not suffer a political collapse like the Soviet Union or an economic collapse like Japan is that there's history here to suggest a better path forward for them, that they want to avoid a lot of these mistakes.

Whether they could actually avoid some of these mistakes is a different question.

Maybe they'll come up with some whole new novel, interesting mistake that creates some sort of a collapse in either scenario.

But I think history will not repeat in exactly the same way.

China is a Leninist system, right?

like the soviet union but it has a thriving substantial consumer economy which is doing superbly well in terms of creating all sorts of products that the soviet union never created all it did was heavy industry it produced a lot of steel and chemicals very little goods for its people china is not like japan for a variety of ways but one that's quite pertinent to me is that

If we take a look at Japanese exports throughout the 70s and the 80s, a product from Nintendo or Mitsubishi or Toyota was almost entirely Japanese value-add.