John Minnich

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268 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 6 Aug

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Unhedged · The Economics Show: China wanted western tech. Now, the tables have turned. · 6 Aug 2026 podcast

How can we transition from that to something where firms are actually introducing, digesting, absorbing, and re-innovating, quote unquote, on top of technology?

this foreign technology and foreign know-how.

And so a lot of what we see in the 2000s and going into the 2010s is this effort to combine foreign technology transfers with much greater emphasis on domestic companies, whether state-owned or private, investing much more heavily in their own internal R&D to raise their absorptive capacity.

In the case of high-speed rail in the post-WTO period, China benefited from a couple of factors.

One is that in high-speed rail, China was effectively downstream, so to speak, of global production processes in the sense that most of what was imported into China was ultimately actually consumed there.

China was a market for these firms.

It was also a market over which you had a centralized regulatory authority, the Ministry of Railways,

that had really monopsony power.

It was the sole buyer.

And that put it in a really strong position as, again, a focal point for bargaining with these foreign enterprises.

Another important aspect of the high-speed rail story is that you have a few firms that dominate the market globally, compete intensely for marginal global market share, but it is what we might call a relatively large N oligopoly in the sense that you've got four major firms globally.

And that's just enough to start to get these inter-firm competition dynamics where firms are

don't want to be the sucker that doesn't make the deal with the Chinese side.

So actually, when I was doing my research, I had a conversation with somebody who was a former employee at the American Chamber of Commerce in China who told me a story about the high-speed rail negotiations, which I should say may be quasi-apocryphal, but I think it nicely illustrates the dynamic.

And what this person told me was that when the Chinese government embarked on this high-speed rail journey in 2004 –

They brought the CEOs of the big four high-speed rail companies, Kawasaki, Alstom, Siemens, and Bombardier to Beijing, put them all in adjacent hotel rooms in the same hotel in Beijing.

And over the course of a week or two, circled between these rooms extracting essentially the most technology at the lowest price possible precisely by playing these firms off against each other.

Because, of course, from the firm's perspective, they rightly judged that this would be the largest high-speed rail market in history.

And they were not about to give up that opportunity.

But China was able to leverage that desperation to gain a piece of the Chinese market.

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