John Arnold

It was really striking and came away incredibly impressed and also with a lot of questions about what happens to the rest of the world as this rise of China is happening.

The one big takeaway was just the speed and scale of which they can do things is unlike anything in the world.

This highly educated population, it's a very entrepreneurial culture.

They've figured out how to get capital to these companies.

And they have this deep domestic market.

And so it allows them to build up the supply chains and agglomeration effects to create something that I don't think exists in the rest of the world, where we're talking to a battery company and asking them, are they looking at replicating factories elsewhere in the world?

And one of their responses was, no.

Every one of my suppliers is within 200 miles of here.

And I can call them and meet with them same day.

And you can never get that.

The scale of labor that they have and the flexibility.

If you need a thousand workers tomorrow, you can get that.

It is a skilled workforce that's still very hungry, that's coming oftentimes from poverty.

And so having this factory job, which in the West might not look very appealing for many people in China, it is highly appealing.

It's the first step up.

So this combination of things has allowed them to create this competitive force that the world is suddenly reckoning with over the past decade.

It's really interesting to think about what's the right response from Western countries that don't want to cede their markets to China for obvious reasons, but there's a lot that China can offer.

So what's the right symbiotic relationship that the West should be having with China, I think, is the

massive question that policymakers are grappling with and I wanted to try to dig into.

I've been fascinated with the EV market in China, which about 10 years ago was deemed to be a strategic market.