Dan Wang

in the 70s.

It is pretty arbitrary.

It's very rate limited.

And what I want to propose is that China's other major advantage in being a technological superpower is that it can just wait for the Americans to invent a lot of stuff.

Be the spark.

And then they set the fire.

So they're the prairie fire that uses the American spark.

So I think about something like solar photovoltaics, which was invented in New Jersey by Bell Labs in 1954.

The U.S.

mostly treated it as a scientific project and not a giant manufacturing industry.

And now about 90% of the solar industry is in China, everything from the polysilicon processing down to the final module assembly.

So China can just wait for a lot of these labs in the U.S.

and Germany, Japan to figure out these new sparks.

And then they set off the prairie fire.

And this is also one of these crucial points in the classic Andy Grove essay published in Bloomberg Businessweek in, I believe, 2010.

That the U.S., in my words, is really great at setting a lot of ladders in place.

But its firms are no longer really great at climbing these ladders.

It is really the Chinese firms that are able to climb all of these big technological ladders.

I think that it is harder for the U.S.

The task is comparatively simpler for China.