The blog title is also the title of a Nova episode I just finished watching and didn’t wait to blog about. I recommend that everyone with any technical interest or acumen whatsoever–basically everyone–should view this episode, which I obviously found fascinating.

There is a story arc, so ideally you will commit to watching the entire thing. It starts with, China is amazing! then moves to US put China out of business! followed by China may be back.

Alarmed by China’s dominance of the global 5G market, the US shut down China’s access to semiconductors, tanking a lot of its technical outreach. Then China became a country with a mission, seeking a way to regain dominance. The end of the story is not known, but the cultural comparisons are telling. Do Americans want to live like Chinese people? For the most part, emphatically not. But we could learn some things about systemic thinking and the advantages of having a population that instinctively knows how to create and execute a complicated plan, and welcomes the contribution of government resources.

Along the journey, you learn about China’s history of sourcing quality items, such as silks and other textiles, porcelain, and paper, including paper money. Later you learn about Deng’s quest to return China to its ancient legacy, with the conversion of rural Shenzhen to an urban manufacturing hub; less than a decade after that, Shenzhen is filled with Maker spaces, which are in turn thronged by citizens working on their personal projects outside of their 10/6 workweek.

A nation of people who know how to build things. Formidable! (Italicized because it’s French.)

I also loved the narrator, a Chinese-American heavy metal band founder–that part happened in China–who lives affirmatively in the US now. His clear view of the strengths and weaknesses of both nations allows him to deliver a very balanced and credible account.

For those of you who have not visited the Googleplex, or for that matter any of the other FAANG campuses, after you see the picture of Huawei, you might want to compare (Spoiler alert: At Huawei there are marble statues), although the differences in training are much more interesting than the differences in architecture. Everyone at Huawei, for example, must be trained in how to install 5G in urban, rural, and remote mountainous regions, even the administrative staff, because that is a primary mission of that company.

I seem to get excited by systematic, widespread societal changes extending over decades or centuries that have concrete impact on everyone’s daily lives and explain at least a part of our world. That’s what this Nova episode is really about.