这是 Dan Wang 2019年的年度回顾，也是贸易战刚开始的一年，所以他花了很大力气开始着眼这一问题：
And so long as substantial US tariffs stay in place, Chinese firms will have worse access to the world’s largest and best consumer market, meaning that they’ll be exposed to less export discipline.
And US controls can only be successful in the short term; it’s not likely that it can monopolize key technologies forever.
To me, it’s entirely plausible that Facebook and Tencent might be net-negative for technological developments. The apps they develop offer fun, productivity-dragging distractions; and the companies pull smart kids from R&D-intensive fields like materials science or semiconductor manufacturing, into ad optimization and game development.'
A rough rule-of-thumb comparison: market caps of the five biggest US tech companies (Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Facebook) add up to US$5tn at the time of this writing, while the two Chinese internet giants (Alibaba and Tencent) add up to US$1tn. This 5:1 advantage to the US feels intuitively right to me as a measure of relative capabilities.
Chinese workers produce most of the world’s goods, which means that they’re capturing most of the knowledge that comes from the production process. Second, China is a large and dynamic market. On top of these structural factors, Chinese firms have stiffened their resolve to master important technologies after repeated US sanctions.
By aggregating the smartphone supply chain, Chinese firms learned how to make sophisticated components and become exportable brands.
There are a few places that feel like the center of the world when you’re there, and Beijing is one of them.
