超英趕美

It is true, as one manufacturer told us, that most R&D in China remains a variation on the theme of reverse-engineering. It knows its vastly lower production costs allow “fast followers” to reap much of the financial benefit from the innovations of others.

But China has also achieved stunning progress with technology breakthroughs in such vital fields as wireless communications, permanent magnetic levitation rail transport, missile and spacecraft technology, and much more.

China’s massive efforts to establish new international technical standards to allow its companies to (even more freely) bypass foreign patents – and require US companies to pay royalties to China – are among today’s least understood and most important economic and military issues.