John Minnich

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

John Minnich’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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

I want to emphasize, and the way that I tend to think about this is that technology transfer policies have made significant but very uneven contributions to China's economic and technological rise.

They absolutely do not always work, and certain conditions are –

very important for ensuring that they work.

But nonetheless, we shouldn't underestimate the role that these can play for countries or companies that have found themselves falling behind the technological cutting edge.

So I should say I have a modestly contrarian view when it comes to the effectiveness of these policies in automotive.

So you're absolutely right.

People point to JVs and automotive manufacturing in the 80s and 1990s as really the poster child of the failures of this trading the market for technology strategy.

I think it's really important to just keep in mind where China was in the 80s and 90s, both in terms of overall state capacity, which was extremely limited.

The China of the 80s and 90s is not the China that we know today.

Very, very different conditions in terms of the central government's ability to

design, implement, and enforce policies, especially vis-a-vis pushback from local governments, and so on and so forth.

Also really important is that before the 1990s, the late 1990s, the state-owned enterprises that were on the receiving end of these joint venture policies were

essentially unreformed government bureaucracies.

Their incentives were not aligned with this idea of becoming competitive, profitable, technologically innovative firms.

The second thing I would say is I think that we tend to hold China in conventional automotive manufacturing to a somewhat unfair standard.

It's important to, I think, take a more nuanced view to look at the ways in which local content requirements, JV policies, and related efforts in automotive manufacturing

in the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s did play a really crucial role in seeding these broader supplier ecosystems, secondary, tertiary components in ways that probably would not have happened or would have proceeded much more slowly in the absence of these policies.

And China's ability now

to manufacture globally competitive both conventional automotives as well as new energy vehicles in myriad ways has benefited from the sort of downstream secondary effects of that seeding of supplier ecosystems in the 90s and early 2000s.

Well, I think the most important reason that it hasn't succeeded yet is because it hasn't had very much time.

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