Kai-Fu Lee and Jonathan Woetzel — Dynamism by design: China as digital giant

China has firmly established itself as a global leader in consumer-oriented digital technologies. It is the world’s largest e-commerce market, accounting for more than 40% of global transactions, and ranks among the top three countries for venture capital investment in autonomous vehicles, 3D printing, robotics, drones, and artificial intelligence (AI). One in three of the world’s unicorns (start-ups valued at more than US$1 billion) is Chinese, and the country’s cloud providers hold the world record for computing efficiency. While China runs a trade deficit in services overall, it has lately been running a trade surplus in digital services of up to US$15 billion per year....

Interesting read. Chinese entrepreneurs are on a roll.

Most people in the West don't realize this yet, but US tech giants like Google, Apple, and Amazon are getting some real competition from Chinese dragons like Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent. China is taking its place along side of Japan and South Korea as a tech powerhouse and owning to its size is beginning to dwarfs the US, which has only a third of the population of China even though it one of the world's most populous countries.

The EU was political and economic alliance designed to combing the population of Europe, which is comparable to the size of the US. But the US (325 million) and Europe (510 million) added together (835 million) doesn't come close to matching China in population (1.4 billion).

Change in GDP tracks population and development. As China continues to develop, it is pulling away from the pack, already exceeding the US on a PPP basis. China is also committed politically to taking distribution effects into account and addressing asymmetries, while the West is not and instead of largely ignoring the increasing economic asymmetry.

I am reminded of Japan after WWII as it started to rebuild and come back on line. I am old enough to remember the poor reputation of Japanese goods and the lack of market power as a result. But the Sixties that was a thing of the past and not long after, Japanese companies began to dominate in electronic and then automobile manufacturing with the high-quality products Japan is now famous for.

Asia Times
Dynamism by design: China as digital giant
Kai-Fu Lee, co-founder and CEO of Sinovation Ventures, a leading venture capital firm investing in China and North America, and Jonathan Woetzel, Shanghai-based senior partner of McKinsey & Company and a director of the McKinsey Global Institute