Dan Wang

work with Apple's standards to put together and assemble a lot of other components from the US, Japan, Germany, whatever else, and then slowly iterate and learn a million and one things on the shop floor and then build

a highly sophisticated product that America is no longer really able to build.

Still, most iPhones are being built in China, increasing share in India and Vietnam, but still most iPhones in the world are being built in China.

I think the Chinese method for becoming a technological superpower is to take this vast manufacturing workforce.

There's about 70 million manufacturing workers in China versus about 12 million in the U.S.,

The 70 million manufacturing workers in China are working with some of these high-end products that cannot be built here in the US.

They're learning to solve three new problems a day before breakfast.

And they are really at the cutting edge of figuring out how to do new things, do it better, build up ecosystems of suppliers, build up new ecosystems of labor.

and just generate all of this process knowledge, which can't easily be written down, which can't easily be encoded in tools and equipment, and just use that to catapult into new forms of products.

So if you are an iPhone manufacturing worker who was there at the original assembly lines in Shenzhen in 2008,

You know, it's no accident that Shenzhen is now the capital of the hardware industry of the world because that worker might be able to start building a Huawei phone in the next year.

And a few years after that, maybe start a drone company.

Shenzhen is also the center of the drone business in the world.

And then maybe a few years after that, start an electric vehicle battery business, which is also highly complex and something that the U.S.

isn't building very much of today.

So I want to try to dissolve this idea that innovation is something that is holding back China too substantially.

I think the statistic about Nobel Prize winners, only a handful of Nobel Prize winners in the sciences have emerged from China.

I think that is a true statistic, but a lot of these Nobel Prizes...

are backwards looking by decades.

We're still giving out prizes for work in Japan or the U.S.