Eric Schmidt
After a months-long trade war between China and the United States, Presidents Donald Trump and Xi Jinping are scheduled to meet Thursday in Korea. Both countries seem to be angling for a truce; over the weekend, they announced a “framework” for a possible agreement.
The negotiations offer an occasion to stop to consider how China went from technological backwater to superpower in less than half a lifetime, and an opportunity for the United States to learn from that success. U.S. companies can work to regain hardware-manufacturing expertise, absorb knowledge and talent from some of China’s best companies, and shift their approach toward AI, encouraging more practical applications and open-source innovation. The United States must accept that we can be better while not relinquishing our strengths.
If America focuses only on undermining its rival, it risks stagnating, and China might end up offering a more attractive vision of the future to the rest of the world than the United States can. What’s at stake is America’s ability to keep innovating and leading in the industries of the future.
In 1896, Li Hongzhang, a diplomat from imperial China, arrived in the United States for the first time. China, then under Qing dynasty rule, had yet to fully undergo the Industrial Revolution. The year before, the Chinese had suffered a humiliating defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War, and the country painfully awoke to its own backwardness. Li was stunned by New York City’s tall buildings, rising 20 stories or more, and remarked to American reporters that he had “never seen anything like them before.” He told them: “You are the most inventive people in the world.”
[Read: China gets tough on Trump]
Nearly a century later, in 1988, Wang Huning—then a Fudan University professor and now the fourth-most-powerful man on China’s politburo—visited the United States and experienced a similar “future shock.” After the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, Communist China’s GDP was a mere 6 percent of America’s. During his six months in the United States, Wang marveled at the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, credit cards, computers, the Discovery space shuttle, and research universities such as MIT. “If the Americans are to be overtaken,” he later wrote, “one thing must be done: surpass them in science and technology.”
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