How China Became So Dominant In Technology - Kyle Chan

Kyle Chan is an American sociologist and postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University, as well as an adjunct researcher at the RAND Corporation.

He is also a 2025 fellow with the Penn Project on the Future of U.S.–China Relations.

His research centers on industrial policy, clean technology, and infrastructure in China and India, with work published in journals such as Current Sociology, Asian Survey, and the Chinese Journal of Sociology.

Kyle has testified before the U.S.–China Economic and Security Review Commission and contributes to public debates through his widely read newsletter High Capacity and a New York Times op-ed on U.S.–China competition and technology.

You can find his newsletter here: https://www.high-capacity.com/about

TIMESTAMPS:
00:00 Trailer & Intro
01:00 The Utility Of Sociology
05:34 Revolut Ad
07:00 Insights From China's HSR Projects
11:17 Understanding The China Shock
17:16 Made in China 2025: A Shift in Policy
22:24 Divergence From The East Asian Model
26:08 Compounding Effects of Overlapping Industries
29:25 The Rise of Swiss Army Knife Companies
33:02 Why Apple Abandoned EVs
37:11 The US Service Economy vs. Manufacturing
42:57 Goals for US Industrial Policy
43:29 How China Resolves Tech Inequality
48:13 US Policy Attempts At Reducing Inequality
53:34 Lessons from China's Industrial Policy
58:17 Is There An AI Race Between US and China?
01:03:58 How China and US Diverge In AI?
01:10:16 What Should US-China Relations Be Like?
01:17:00 Will America Become Irrelevant?
01:24:35 What US' China Strategy Should Be
01:26:55 Advice For Fresh Graduates

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Keith 00:00:29

I'm speaking today with Kyle Chan. Kyle is a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University and an adjunct researcher at the Rand Corporation based in the US. His research focuses on industrial policy, clean technology, and infrastructure in China and India. He writes a popular newsletter called High Capacity, focusing on China's industrial policies, tech development, and US-China competition.

In today's conversation, we cover the evolution of China's industrial policy, how it has managed to become the world's top innovator, and the lessons the US can learn from China. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.

Keith 00:01:08

In economics, industrial policy figures very heavily as a field of discipline. But no one really thinks that a sociologist should study industrial policy. I think you're one of the first few people I know that actually do such a thing. Why?

Kyle 00:01:21

The main topic I'm interested in is broader than industrial policy—it's development. It's a topic that used to be more popular. You still have development economics and the subfield of sociology of development, but I feel like this topic has fallen into the background, at least in the West. It's come back because of industrial policy and the rise of China.

Sociology offers a way to look beyond market structure and examine broader systems—the role of government policy, different actors like corporations as social actors, universities, research centers, industry associations. It's a much broader view than what's typically discussed in economics. I'm trying to bring in all these different dimensions to the question of development. What drives development? How can countries actively promote development?

Keith 00:02:55

In the economist toolkit, you think about trade-offs, opportunity cost, demand and supply, thinking at the margin. These are tools in their conceptual toolkit for understanding natural phenomena. I'd like you to help me understand what toolkits you use to understand industrial policy as a mode to further development.

Kyle 00:03:19

Some of it is language shared across the social sciences. A big one is spillover effects. It's funny because now it's become a bigger topic in economics, but it's the bread and butter of sociology and other parts of the social sciences. This idea that you have a bilateral or two-party deal or relationship, but it can have impacts on surrounding communities, regions, cities, even at the national level.

For a long time, economics focused on how the parties involved in any transaction gain or split the gains from that relationship. What's interesting about industrial policy is looking at potential spillovers for broader national development.

An example is infrastructure. I originally began my research focused on transportation and high-speed rail development in China. If you look at it in a narrow sense, you might look at a single railway line and ask what's the financial return to investors when you account for capital costs, operating costs, and revenues from passenger fares. You might come out with a positive or negative cash flow or return on investment.

What's interesting is to see the broader spillovers that aren't captured by traditional economic models. How does that help all the different regional jurisdictions along that route? How does it help increase land prices or facilitate business and the flow of ideas between these different areas? How does an entire national high-speed train system support China's economic development? These things are very hard to capture in a traditional, narrower economic sense. That's what I try to bring back into the discussion.

Keith 00:05:37

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Keith 00:07:05

On a micro level in Singapore, when we first wanted to adopt the MRT mass rapid transport system, there was a huge debate. We got economists and scientists from Yale and Harvard to do a study. There was a televised public debate between the bus and MRT systems. We eventually went with the MRT system, and a huge part of it was because the MRT allowed you to avoid the pains of congestion, whereas in a bus you're still stuck in congestion. In the MRT, you could build tunnels and different systems to avoid the congestion problem.

That was fascinating because it wasn't actually captured in the economic discussion of a bus or train system. Naturally, my follow-up for you would be: what do you find in your study of China's high-speed rail project from your years of research?

Kyle 00:07:56

My area of focus was how they built it—the government institutions, the role of state-owned enterprises that were involved. Overall, there are really interesting findings about these broader spillover effects. Some of it is very creative, like land value capture along the way. This is unique to the Chinese system given the state control over land. That's different from other countries, but some of it mirrors what happened with Hong Kong's metro development in terms of capturing some of this extra economic spillover.

One major area I focused on was trying to understand how all these different agencies coordinated. Building a high-speed rail line is such a complex endeavor. It entails not just engineers and technical expertise, but you're dealing with land acquisition, population resettlement along the way, coordination across all the different local governments—some of which are actually invested in China's case in the actual project itself—environmental reviews and permitting. There's a whole host of moving parts. It's a very complex engineering challenge but also a sociopolitical challenge.

My research focused on understanding what is the organizational structure that allowed China to build high-speed rail so quickly. I had done a lot of comparative work with India because India was also trying to build new railway lines, trying to expand. They have their first bullet train line underway built with help from Japan.

I found that in the Chinese system, one thing that was really important was having a few agencies be what I call nodal actors. They don't just have this top-down system. Some of the planning is done at the very top, but in terms of actually coordinating financing, coordinating land acquisition, coordinating all the contractors along the way, a lot of that was done by these purpose-made project corporations that are state-owned. Those are really crucial in coordinating all this activity.

That to me was really interesting. It went against this idea that everything is top-down, that Beijing decides something and just rolls it out. I think that old model has shifted. Now there's a more complex approach to doing these sorts of projects that I think actually turns out to be much more effective.

Keith 00:11:04

When I interviewed Professor Meg Rithmire, she shared that if you think about the SOE's role in China, traditionally it's been conceptualized twofold. One is to prevent social unrest—you create a space for employment where maybe some people have not been appropriately skilled. They need a job essentially. Maybe the American critique is that's a job, but for them it's a way to prevent social unrest.

The second element is something we talked about earlier that figures very heavily—you're there to support national development. But when these two are your primary objectives, then sometimes without the profit motive, a lot of misaligned incentives happen and corruption happens, with negative downstream effects.

We're not here today to talk about the SOEs. We're here to focus our conversation on industrial policy. I'd like to first take us back to this 2016 paper that you had a critique of, which was the China Shock. I wanted to quote from your essay. It asserted that the US lost nearly 1 million manufacturing jobs from 1999 to 2011 due to the surge of Chinese imports starting around the time of China's accession to the WTO in 2001.

Kyle 00:12:33

The funny thing is the paper itself I don't have critiques of. I think it's actually a very strong paper—a set of papers building on each other by really well-known economists like David Autor at MIT and Daron Acemoglu.

The paper itself, or the set of papers, are really focused on the concentrated geographical effects of the so-called China Shock of rising imports of Chinese goods in particular industries like furniture. It examined how areas in the US that were more exposed to those sorts of industries ended up having higher manufacturing job losses. That part of the paper I have no criticisms of. I think it's very sound methodology and the gold standard.

But the problem is that this narrative got blown out of proportion, and that's what I was trying to capture in that piece. Over the longer horizon, if you look at the past several decades going back to the post-World War II period in the US, you have a longer-term trend separate from China of just declining manufacturing as a share of employment in the US.

Essentially, you have the United States going through, like many other Western countries, this process of structural transformation—moving from agriculture to manufacturing, then from manufacturing to services. A lot of that did not really have to do with China.

Specifically in the time period when China joined the WTO and leading up to it, while there were some job losses associated with rising Chinese imports in the US, if you look at the bigger picture, even during that time period there was actually a lot of natural fluctuation in manufacturing employment just even year-to-year. The overall workforce for manufacturing had been shrinking already leading up to that.

Ultimately, I argue that there are other factors playing a huge role that economists often point to—the rise of automation, the just greater attractiveness of the service economy. I think now there's nostalgia for manufacturing in the US, but we forget that it wasn't just that America lost manufacturing jobs. In many cases, some of the service sector jobs paid better, had better working conditions, maybe more interesting work. For a whole host of reasons, there was this shift.

I was trying to push back against the broader political message that came away from this, which is that China was to blame essentially for the decline of American manufacturing, which I think is totally not correct.

Keith 00:15:51

I think that's the part that gets missed out often—when it goes into the sphere of politics, the message is completely distorted.

Kyle 00:16:04

Actually, even the term "shock" is a technical term in economics. It means a large change, unexpected or external change to the model. But it doesn't necessarily mean shock like shockwave in normal language. When it got put into the title of that paper and then got shared in media, people interpret that—the general public doesn't know what shock means in economics. It felt more like this heavy blow, this heavy impact to the American economy.

Also, in a sense, because that period coincided with the emergence of China's rapid rise from 2001 onwards, there was really an acceleration of their economic growth during that period.

Keith 00:17:01

From Singapore and maybe some Southeast Asian perspectives, a very crucial turning point in America's politics itself in 2001 was 9/11. For the next two to three years, even up to a decade, there was a lot of emphasis, and it reflected itself in government spending—the military budget was increasing time and time again. In a certain sense, the policy bandwidth wasn't necessarily focused on the rise of China or trying to solve some of the structural unemployment problems caused by the dislocation of manufacturing, but really on the fallout from 9/11. They saw that as a huge reason why maybe America didn't pay attention to China's emergence during this period.

Kyle 00:17:47

Definitely. I remember that whole time period where so much of US politics, political discourse was really focused on the war on terror, on the wars in the Middle East. So much of the US financing went to that effort. I think you're right that the rise of China took a bit of a backseat in many ways.

Keith 00:18:18

It's clear that China is emerging as maybe—I won't say rival—but more like a peer competitor with the US in terms of its economic footprint on the world. It might be useful to look at the turning point within China's economy, and that is where many experts like yourself point to Made in China 2025 that was first promulgated about a decade ago.

The aim of it was really the shift that the government in China was trying to achieve—to go from what some economists call low-tech, low-value, low-cost into a high-tech, high-value, low-cost paradigm where you could exploit your competitive advantage as a low-cost manufacturer to build out very high-quality products, especially in high-tech areas.

There is an element of great power rivalry in it, but also an element of China's effort at development. I think that's often understated because if you read the paper back then, there was a lot of discussion about the harmonious state. They were trying to use technology as a way to escape the middle-income trap because that was a fundamental concern—that you're going to hit a local maxima and then not develop further.

That was my takeaway—that Made in China 2025 was really an effort to escape the middle-income trap. I wanted to hear your takeaways when you were studying this shift in China's policies.

Kyle 00:19:57

I think you're right to point out that what makes some of China's development efforts distinctive, what separates China's approach from a lot of other developing countries—maybe countries that ended up hitting the middle-income trap—is that China really focused on trying to move up the value chain.

This is sector by sector. You can look at the automotive industry, pharmaceuticals, a whole host of manufacturing sectors. You can also look between sectors. China is trying to build its own aircraft manufacturing industry, its own commercial jets. It's now trying to become a leader in AI and things like that.

The overarching theme here is that China was not content with merely the lower-value, lower-skill textile and clothing exports, consumer goods. There was a recent paper that came out looking at China versus Mexico—two countries that were export-focused. The difference was that over time, China kept moving up in terms of complexity of items, in terms of the types of goods and their technological sophistication, whereas Mexico started to plateau and was exporting more of the same kinds of goods, especially to the US market.

That meant Mexico's economic growth began to plateau, whereas China's kept going. This is really important. One thing I try to make clear to American audiences is that this change is not fully reflected in broader public views of China. A lot of Americans are still stuck with this idea of China as the exporter of cheap goods, cheap merchandise. There's a growing realization that actually China's been moving up deliberately along the way with things like Made in China 2025.

You can look at EVs, batteries, drones—you can look at a whole host of different sectors and subsectors. In almost every one of these key areas, you can find efforts to promote or encourage not just greater exports but greater technological sophistication. If anything, China is doubling down now going forward. They think this is not only a strategy that has worked well up until now but really the only path going forward to keep moving up the technology ladder.

Keith 00:23:01

I think what China did at the start was really follow the East Asian development playbook where you try to encourage foreign direct investment and use that through joint ventures. You trade market access for technology. What they had as an added benefit that smaller countries like Singapore didn't have was the size of the market. We could only at the start offer the low cost of labor, but there was no real market to sell to. That gave them more leverage.

At the start, there were similarities in terms of its development with regards to improving its technology stack, but over time it diverged, especially when you consider they have huge scale. From your study, where has the divergence started to emerge? What did China do specifically or more concretely to really move up their value chain throughout the years?

Kyle 00:24:00

One factor is really trying to focus on foreign partnerships, foreign technology—the market in exchange for technology, these joint ventures. Even when you don't have a joint venture, when you just have a Bosch automotive parts factory, or a semiconductor plant from SK Hynix or Samsung, or even a Foxconn iPhone factory, all of these allow for sharing of not just blueprints like formal technology but all the manufacturing know-how, all the management techniques. Managing an auto supply chain is not a simple thing. Rather than reinventing the wheel, a lot of Chinese automakers gained from the experience of having GM, Toyota, Volkswagen all build plants in China, whether it was with joint ventures or later on with Tesla and the Shanghai Gigafactory. That was really crucial.

Another factor I would point out that I think is less talked about is just the sheer investment in scientific research. This has been going on for a long time. You can see the share of manufacturing value added in China out of global manufacturing going up, but preceding that you see an increase in the share of scientific publications that are either done by Chinese researchers or done by Chinese research institutions.

AI is one classic example now where everyone was surprised by DeepSeek and surprised by how competitive China's AI companies are. But in reality, if you have been following Europe's or some of the other top global AI conferences, you will have seen for a long time now, for years, very strong representation by researchers from Tsinghua or even Huawei, Alibaba—they all have very strong representation.

That provides the foundation then for moving up the manufacturing value chain later on. I think that's one area where you would run out of steam if you didn't have that. You would start to plateau with the exports of certain types of goods, maybe at the middle level, rather than being able to continue to progress to the cutting edge, to the frontier, like China has done in solar, batteries, EVs.

Keith 00:26:54

You were doing a study on the ecosystem of industries within China. You said that China doesn't just have a smartphone industry or battery industry or EV industry—it has all of these industries and more. And their strength across multiple overlapping industries is creating a compounding effect for its industrial policies. What does that actually practically look like?

Kyle 00:27:11

This is really crucial because when we think about industrial competitiveness and industrial policy in other countries like in the US, we might think about policies targeting a specific industry like building up the solar industry. But what makes China a bit more unique—maybe it makes it look more like some of the East Asian approaches of the past like South Korea—is that China really has tried to build out and support a whole range of industries at the same time.

Made in China 2025 had a whole set of target industries, some of which were very broad-based—talking about IT equipment or robotics. These actually have broad applications across large economic sectors. What you have now is these different sectors and subsectors start to overlap and start to support each other.

China's not just strong in smartphones or EVs or batteries, but all of those strengths end up positioning China well for related industries building on top of that. You think about the autonomous vehicle sector that's starting to grow and that Beijing has been supporting a lot. That benefits from the fact that you have a large EV industry. You have very high-quality and low-cost sensors like lidar, radar, camera modules. You have companies that are already very good at dealing with computer vision, sensor fusion, things like that. You also have heavy investment in 5G technology.

All of that sort of builds together and gives you this extra edge in other areas like autonomous vehicles. Another example is the low-altitude economy—drone delivery and even flying taxis. These emerging industries build on China's existing strengths in areas like drones and this broader infrastructure, this digital infrastructure as well.

That's one area where I think it's harder in the West to understand how these all merge together. Maybe it's not always so planned out. I think some of this can be a bit more spontaneous. But in the US especially, we're much more used to talking about specific sectors and maybe a little bit of subsidies or tax breaks for a certain part of the industry, rather than thinking more comprehensively about building an ecosystem, a whole foundation for future industries.

Keith 00:30:04

The end result is that you have a lot of tech companies that are Swiss Army knives, right? They are able to evolve to different product offerings. The way I think about it just from Southeast Asia is that they essentially now operate as a high-tech conglomerate.

In the past, the way we think about conglomerates is that you slowly eke your way up the value chain like a Samsung. You start maybe with trading commodities, and then eventually with your profits you reinvest and build technology. In China, you talk about the Swiss Army knives—these are companies that maybe were at first suppliers and then they were able to move up.

Kyle 00:30:40

One example is BYD, which actually started as a battery company and one of the early transitions was actually from batteries to EVs, building on its battery capabilities. But then also BYD was very involved with consumer electronics, and that actually also helped it later on with EVs. BYD has now built up its own semiconductor capabilities—things like power chips, for example. That enables things like its super-fast charging, like megawatt charging capabilities.

There are other companies like Xpeng, an EV company that branched out into robotics. Xiaomi is probably one of the best examples today, where they also began with smartphones and household consumer goods. I remember having lots of small Xiaomi consumer products when I was living in Beijing, like a Xiaomi air purifier that could link up to this other Xiaomi sensor.

Now Xiaomi has jumped into EVs, and part of that builds off of its experience with high degrees of factory automation in its other existing smartphone and consumer electronics plants. And now they also are entering into chips as well. It's interesting to see almost this convergence. I've heard about this talked about among the Chinese tech community—this convergence where it used to be parallel races, parallel competitions in different industries, and now they're all merging into a single technology arena—AI, autonomous systems, electronics—all duking it out as it were.

Keith 00:32:47

That's why you have the 996 culture. You have this involution culture. It's purely because of this dynamic—not purely, but a huge part of it is because you have these areas where there is no coordination between the players where it's like, "You take this, I'll take this part, let's not eat into each other's profit." It really is like, "Let's just go for it because the market is huge." They're competing, and the government has been very open to letting them compete.

Now as they internationalize, that's an escape valve for many of them to try to escape the involution that they're facing within China as well. On that note, I wanted to ask you a follow-on question. The Xiaomi example you raised serves as an interesting parallel because it was a consumer electronics company and that model itself took huge inspiration from Apple. Then they went into EV successfully.

But we now know today that Apple also tried to go into EV. Apple's a company that's a behemoth in the US and across the world, but they failed at the EV venture. If you were to analyze that breakdown, why was it unable to build an EV that was maybe as successful as some of their Chinese competitors?

Kyle 00:34:10

That's a really good question. The Apple story—they had invested, I had seen reports about like $10 billion, a phenomenal amount of money in trying to build out their EV program. I think also it wasn't just EVs. I believe it was also trying to build out maybe even a challenger to Waymo or Tesla's full self-driving in terms of having autonomous vehicles. That makes it even more difficult.

Ironically, I don't see the two as separate. I actually see that one feeds into the other. I think one factor for Apple is seeing the rise of Chinese EVs and seeing how competitive and especially how cost-competitive they are. In some ways, maybe Apple made the right move. They got criticized for not having taken this bet, but maybe they made the right move because otherwise they would be part of this very painful, extremely cutthroat involution-style global competition right now in the EV industry.

Maybe if you're thinking about shareholder returns or profitability, it was a wise move for Apple. But they did seed a really crucial market to basically Chinese companies. You see now Tesla is having a very tough time competing and dealing with the rise of Chinese competition.

On the other side, this is sort of interesting—we can get into even cultural explanations—but one thing that has been striking to me is the willingness of Chinese companies to really jump into new industries, to make these bold bets. In some cases, they're enticed by government incentives, government support. They know that the EV industry has been a priority sector for the government.

But there's also this risk-taking culture that is really interesting to see. When you have a company jumping into semiconductors that previously had only done consumer electronics, that's quite a big bet on the future. Maybe there's also some imitation—this idea of vertical integration is becoming bigger both within Chinese companies and then for China itself as a country. You have more and more parts of the supply chain being brought into the country. There could be some parallel trends there. That's something that I've been trying to follow closely.

Keith 00:36:45

There is this four-hour interview on Bilibili, which is this famous comedian in China who does a Lex Fridman-style podcast with the founder of Xpeng. It was like a four-hour interview. In it, I think there is a huge reason why they went into EV. He detailed that he and Li Xiang—I think they know each other, they're industry peers—they said that they feel like this was a time where China could go to the global stage and actually prove that it could produce a very competitive EV product and maybe compete with the West. This was something that hasn't happened for many years before.

Cars were the quintessential consumer good where you can really gauge a country's industrial might or industrial capacity—think Japan, the US. So he felt, "Yeah, this was the chance to do it." But he said that it's extremely painful. He says this is the kind of thing where if you want to kill your enemies, you get them to join the EV industry. That's all he said.

Kyle 00:37:49

Yeah, there's a lot there.

Keith 00:37:54

There is this point that you made earlier, and I wanted to revisit it. When the China Shock was happening, the US actually became a service powerhouse. It's the world's largest exporter of services. The question would then be: why not lean into that fully? Meaning, you definitely still have a robust manufacturing sector, but go all in to become that service provider to the world across the globe. Continue to retain that cutting edge in the services sector and then let China to a certain extent dominate areas which you think are not critical to your national interest. Hopefully what you can do within your country is elevate the middle income rather than go through all this pain and effort of industrial policies. What's the challenge with such a view that you should just stick to services?

Kyle 00:38:53

This is a really interesting ongoing debate in the US. With the rise of discussions about industrial policy, with concerns about how to compete with China, these discussions hadn't been happening for a long time until recently in the US.

One thing that's interesting is how and to what degree to go about this. We're probably at this moment where there's a resurgence of interest in bringing back manufacturing to the United States. President Trump is obviously leading the charge on a lot of that. He thinks that across the board, manufacturing should be brought back to the US. That seems like part of the logic behind these tariffs—that everything from automotive to basic consumer goods should be brought back to the US as possible. There's a lot of pushback against that.

As you point out, there's tremendous value in the service economy—US service exports, whether they're professional services like financial services, legal services, education, higher education with international students from all over the world coming to the US to study at American universities. There's a whole range—now we have tech services. There's a very strong argument to say, "Let's not try to do this return to the old days of manufacturing. Let's build on our strengths."

One stat was really striking to me. An economist who focuses on India pointed out that the market cap of Nvidia versus the market cap of TSMC—one designs the chips, the other actually manufactures them—and yet the market cap of Nvidia is several dozen times that of TSMC. TSMC is not doing bad itself either. Could that be one data point to think about doubling down, focusing more on that?

I kind of fall in between where I do think that it's very important for economic resilience that the US brings back some areas of manufacturing. Strategic industries like semiconductors, maybe batteries, the automotive sector I think is something that the US just can't afford to lose completely. There's so many downstream effects of that, not just in terms of jobs but in terms of broader industrial capabilities that you would lose.

Then there's more border industries like steel. There's a strong case being made for national security that you have a certain amount of steel production capacity domestically. But who needs to own it? How much government control should there be? Right now there's a debate about the so-called golden share that the US government seems to have had with the Nippon Steel takeover of US Steel.

But then there's other industries, other sectors that I think the US should not be prioritizing because they're not the kinds of jobs that American workers want. They're not crucial to American economic or national security. Those areas are things that we should not only be okay with, say, China producing and rely on Chinese goods, but in some ways they can really help support our own priorities.

A classic example of that is the solar industry. I think there's a very strong case to be made, and others have made this, that right now China's lead in solar panels, solar panel manufacturing, solar modules is so strong that if your concern is on climate, on quickly building out clean energy capacity, you would do well to try to bring in more of these Chinese-produced solar goods, and then you can capture a lot of the economic value in the installation and deployment part of it. There's actually a lot still there in terms of job creation and economic activity related to building out solar plants, for example.

That's one area where we have to ask ourselves: is this something that we really want to bring back and make an exclusively American manufacturing capability, or to what extent are we actually trading off on other priorities here? It's a long-winded answer to your question, but for me it really depends on specific industries and specific sectors within manufacturing. I'm not in favor of bringing it all back, but I'm also not in favor of just purely letting it all go and relying on services.

Keith 00:44:02

For example, in Singapore, there's been a consistent effort to make sure that manufacturing stays as a percentage of our GDP. It's about 20 plus percent. At our highest, it's about 30 percent. But the government has been very consistent in making sure that, especially for some of the critical goods we're producing, we have it. Even as a small country like Singapore, there is still a very logical reasoning as to why you want to ensure that you have a certain percentage of the GDP to be manufacturing capabilities as well.

Kyle 00:44:33

What is the aim that you would argue that the US should pursue with regards to its industrial policy? Let me just quickly elaborate. I think in China there's a huge emphasis on using tech as a way to improve common prosperity or achieve common prosperity. That's been the thrust—Beijing and Shanghai, you might be doing very well, but there are tier-three cities, and that's the whole point why we're doing this, right? To create better jobs for them. Their quality of life and standard of living is improved. So they have a very developmental slant. Some might argue that's not the full picture, but I think by and large there has been that thrust.

From your perspective, what should be the narrative? If we want to implement industrial policy in the US, what should the ultimate objective be for the American government?

Kyle 00:45:21

That's a really good question. I think there are interesting questions about overall national economic development, technological development on the one hand, but also inequality, who gains, geographic inequality especially, which seems to be getting worse in the US.

On the one hand, I think a really core goal should be long-term productivity, which ultimately stems from improving technology, being competitive in these high-value, high-tech fields—whether you're talking about aerospace or pharmaceuticals or even semiconductor design and maybe even manufacturing. I think that's crucial at the national level to remain competitive and to keep pushing the boundary on that.

But then there's this other question about how to share the benefits of these gains. This is a really big debate in the US. It's very interesting to see how China is trying to go about this because for a long time, Beijing has been really concerned about geographic inequality, about the rural-urban divide, about trying to push some of the economic gains to the rest of the country and not have it just be concentrated in the large cities on the coast.

You have long-standing initiatives and then more recent ones like the eastern data, western compute program where they're trying to build data centers for traditional cloud computing but also AI out in some of the western provinces, some of the less developed parts of the country, also capitalizing on the fact that those parts of the country happen to also have some of the greatest renewable energy resources like solar and wind.

The idea is to build out data centers in those regions to drive economic growth there but also to then provide broader infrastructure for computing capabilities on the east coast. Overall, this idea is trying to combine both the goals of broader national development, broader national technology upgrading, and also this regional balancing that I think is always a key concern for Beijing.

I mean, they do this also with the way that they build infrastructure. In many ways, it goes against typical economic reasoning. It's not always in the areas that are the highest traffic or highest demand, at least today, for certain kinds of infrastructure or bridge building or railway development. But the idea is trying to rebalance some of that growth and some of those foundations for future economic growth and trying to push that out into the western provinces.

That's one thing that I think will be very interesting to see in the US. There's a lot of geographic, location-specific industrial policy efforts in the sense that you have local governments trying to offer tax incentives for businesses to set up shop. But there's still a big question—for AI, for example—how to ensure that it's not just Silicon Valley or Wall Street that's gaining from advances in AI, that the rest of the country will be able to be part of that or at least not be hit so badly by potential job losses related to that as some work gets automated.

Keith 00:49:18

Have you seen policy proposals coming out of the US that really look at trying to address this geographic inequality or even opportunity inequality as you see it?

Kyle 00:49:31

One of the biggest ones was actually with the Biden administration. You have the Inflation Reduction Act, which really tried to spread out a lot of the renewable energy manufacturing capacity. So you have EV plants and battery plants in Georgia, bringing in Hyundai, across the Midwest, data centers in Tennessee and elsewhere. Texas actually turns out to be a big solar powerhouse for a whole bunch of reasons.

Same thing with some of the semiconductor with the CHIPS Act. Some of the semiconductor investment was designed to not just be concentrated in one area but to be spread out—Arizona, Ohio, New York State. I think there have been efforts, but it's always a tension because naturally, in some ways, due to agglomeration effects, clustering effects, you will have a tendency to still cluster around certain regions like Silicon Valley or New York. It's trying to push against otherwise very strong economic forces and try to create these different social outcomes.

Keith 00:50:46

To quote Professor Keyu Jin, she talks about China's efforts with regards to building these so-called ghost towns at first as essentially you're trying to get the kids to wear oversized clothes and then they'll eventually grow into them. The huge reason there's been such huge infrastructure investment is really because of that—once you're able to build up that connectivity, then it's easier to counter that agglomeration effect that you talked about earlier.

Kyle 00:51:10

If you don't take into account potential future growth, then these things don't seem to make any sense. It seems like you're building infrastructure, building housing in the middle of nowhere where people don't need it. But ironically, the US has the opposite problem where we build everything too late. This is talked about a lot in Dan Wang's recent book Breakneck, where we have the problem where our building is lagging behind demand so substantially that we have bottlenecks in the reverse direction.

Keith 00:51:43

The US was known to be that country that really built out infrastructure. If you look at JFK Airport when it was first built, everyone was marveled by it. Same thing with the New York subway—it's 24 hours, back then when it first came out. It's an underground marvel. A lot of us took inspiration from that. It's not necessarily true that it was going to be the case that you have a lot of bottlenecks now. In your view, what's causing these bottlenecks?

Kyle 00:52:12

This is a huge question right now in the US. I think a lot of it comes down to one: misaligned incentives between a few local community actors that might have veto power, that can start a kind of environmental review or can start a protest against a new housing project or a new railway line.

Some of this is actually an overcompensation for problems of the past. I think in the past, historically, the US didn't protect some of these local community rights as well. So this is like trying to give them a little bit more power, a little bit more say in this process. But unfortunately it went too far in the other direction. Now projects like—I'm from California—the California high-speed rail is often cited, or subway lines in New York. You can point all over the country.

Even though they would benefit a lot of people who are affected along that route or along that new highway line, even though that would benefit a lot of people, it ends up being constrained because a few people end up losing out. There's a question about how to—almost philosophically—how should the gains and costs be spread out? Because maybe it's not fair if a few people take a hit and are forced to move and are not compensated properly for that. But at the same time, you don't want the entire economy to take a hit because a much-needed transportation line is not built.

How to balance it out? How to spread out the costs and benefits of something in a fairer way and also a way that honestly would have more political buy-in? Then you have people who maybe would not be so opposed to some of this new construction.

Keith 00:54:27

You've done so much work on China development and industrialization. What are the right lessons that the US should take up from it?

Kyle 00:54:40

This is a really good question because while the two countries obviously have such different political systems, I actually think that there are a lot of lessons that can be learned.

One of the biggest ones is just the way that a lot of Chinese industrial policy combines both long-term persistent goals—like China's effort to build up its automotive industry and then later on its EV industry. I mean, that has been going on for decades now. Same thing with semiconductors. That has been going on for multiple generations. While at the same time having the kind of flexibility and adaptability to try different things, experiment with different policies, different strategies.

I think where China's industrial policy has been successful, it's combined both having these longer-term goals that you keep sticking to, but then you have that portfolio approach. You don't just get turned off by a single company not being successful. I think in the US people always point to cases like Solyndra, the solar manufacturer that went under that had some government support, and people are like, "See, this is why the government should not be involved in picking winners and losers."

But I think that misses the broader idea that you can support an industry. Maybe you don't have to pick winners and losers. You can provide broader support to a whole industry and allow them to more organically create their own winners, their own winning technologies, their own business models. It doesn't have to be so top-down.

Another big thing is—and this will take some kind of almost psychological change in the US—but one thing I really emphasize is that China gains so much, I mentioned this earlier, China gained so much from foreign partnerships, from learning from other countries. This is really crucial. China very actively tried to bring in companies from elsewhere, send—or bring back—scientists and researchers and engineers that were educated or had trained or worked in places like Germany or Japan or the US, and tried to capitalize on that foreign knowledge and foreign learning.

I think the US—in some cases, the US is a very proud country. As a society, we've been very comfortable with this idea that we're always the number one technology leader, when clearly that's not even true before the rise of China in areas like semiconductor manufacturing for a long time now. There was a challenge earlier with the rise of Japanese automakers back in the 1980s where the US had to look hard at itself and say, "Maybe we're not the best. Maybe we can actually learn."

I think here the US should try to learn from other countries, including China. Try to understand what has made Chinese EV makers so competitive and not just dismiss it as, "Oh, they're cheaper or low-quality, or the Chinese system is too different, we shouldn't bother trying to learn." I think learning from other countries is probably one of the biggest lessons.

Keith 00:57:51

It's interesting you point out Japan because when the Japanese were really overtaking the US in manufacturing, especially in vehicles, I remember reading about it, and I think the widespread political sentiment was that Japan was going to overtake the US. There was a huge effort to reduce Japanese competition where maybe the right lesson was to embrace them and try to learn as much as you can from them because at the end of the day, the Japanese were their allies. The Japanese were very much dependent on the US security umbrella to make their economy viable.

When I speak to my Chinese friends, they say, "You know, if that's how America treats its allies, then what about us? We're a competitor. They're definitely not going to be gentle with us." That, I think, to a certain extent explains why there's been distrust from both the Chinese and the US side. That really gives me the segue into US-China competition, which is something we're seeing. One area we're seeing it a lot is in the race for AI.

There's a huge AI race, and China—I think you've done a report on this—that stated that China is looking to be a leading power in AI. I wanted you to comment a little bit more about what is your analysis of their plan so far in terms of AI industry policy, and then maybe bring it back to the US. What is the US doing on the other side?

Kyle 00:59:20

For this Rand report, one of the big takeaways from that report on China's industrial policy for AI is that China was trying to apply state support across basically every layer of the tech stack. You're thinking about from chips, data centers, overall compute capacity, you're thinking about at the model level, foundation models, some of the research going into foundation models. You're thinking about data and then fostering startups and applications, especially physical AI—things like robotics, autonomous vehicles, autonomous systems, drones, smart cities.

Across all these different layers of the tech stack, you can see there's funding support, there's local government support, there are various industrial parks that will provide startups with extra support in the early days, maybe compute vouchers so that they get access to compute, which is very difficult unless you're an Alibaba or a Tencent with your own massive proprietary data centers. But if you're a smaller startup, this could be a huge bottleneck or barrier to entry. Those are some of the ways that China is trying to promote and accelerate its broader AI industry.

One interesting contrast with the US approach that my colleagues and I try to point out in that report is that China's much more focused on AI applications, diffusion, trying to figure out how to make AI turbocharge other parts of the economy—whether you're talking about drug discovery with AI, advanced manufacturing, maybe even government services, education, healthcare. They're really focused on trying to get some of the more immediate practical benefits from AI, as well as obviously pushing the edge on the frontier models themselves.

Whereas I think for the US, there's this—for lack of a better term—very strong obsession with AGI and this idea of a takeoff moment when AI will be so good that it will be able to improve itself, and that this super intelligence that would result will upend everything as we know it, including the economy and even the military.

Because of that focus, I think AI is seen much more in terms of a national security paradigm, and that's where you get some of these things like export controls on chips to China, the fear that if the US doesn't win the AI race or the race to AGI and China wins, that the US could lose out dramatically.

But it's sort of interesting to see because these two countries' different views of AI really inform the different approaches to dealing with AI. Whereas in the US, it's mostly pretty hands-off. A lot of it is just private sector-led, especially the hyperscalers, and then OpenAI, Anthropic, those sorts of companies are leading the charge. To some extent, there are projects like Stargate which are trying to help at least facilitate private sector buildout of data centers. Most of it is still hands-off.

Whereas for China, there's this sense that there are levers that the government can pull at every layer to help just improve broader application and use of AI.

Keith 01:03:26

When the DeepSeek moment came out earlier this year, I was surprised that after that moment came out in the Western media, there hasn't been any actual interest in actually how DeepSeek was integrated into a lot of consumer products within China. It was almost as if they were interested in capturing the Sputnik moment, but after that, when you start seeing some of the EVs integrate DeepSeek as a voice assistant, for example, things like that, that was completely not of interest to Western media. But within China, there was a huge hype around it where it's like, "Oh yeah, you get to see and use DeepSeek for so many different applications."

Kyle 01:04:06

I'm one of these people who is not such a strong believer in this AGI takeoff moment, at least not in the near term. Because of that, I actually see China's approach as being perhaps more effective in terms of focusing on applications, focusing on how to really steadily improve AI and steadily incorporate it into various parts of our daily lives, business practices, education, things like that.

I'm one of these people who I myself use AI a lot, but in very simple ways, as a supercharged search, as a way to help me do some research, things like that. I think that kind of approach will pay off. Especially when it comes to robotics and physical applications, I think about the use of industrial AI for even just quality control and inspection. We're already starting to see a lot of that take place. These are areas where I think we can get some real benefits in the near to medium term rather than having to pin our hopes on this takeoff moment.

Of course, I'm always careful to hedge because I don't know—I don't know if anyone knows what this whole technology will lead to. So I guess there is always the possibility that concerns about AI safety and the long-term trajectory—it could go many different ways. I'll just try to stay as informed as possible, but I think overall, at this stage, China's approach might yield more immediate benefits.

Keith 01:06:01

Are there efforts within US policy that seek to do that? Because right now it seems that a lot of it actually—I think a lot of the policy efforts are concerned about the safety of AI, the guardrails. I think a lot of policy effort is focused on that, rightly so. The competitive dynamic, like whether it's going to be monopolized, that's also another area of concern within the US. I wanted to know—have there been a kind of concerted effort to think, "Okay, how do we actually democratize the positive effects within the citizenry?"

Kyle 01:06:33

That's a good question. There was recently that US AI Action Plan. A lot of that was focused on again trying to reduce barriers to building out compute infrastructure, trying to promote the so-called American AI tech stack. This is something that Jensen Huang of Nvidia has talked about a lot—trying to export American technology around the world and have that be the platform that other countries use for their own AI efforts. I think there's some of that.

I do think that at this stage though, it's pretty limited in terms of trying to think about from a policy standpoint how to ensure some of these benefits are more distributed. I do think one area that might be helpful is—and this is actually due to China—the American embrace of open-source or specifically open-weight models.

After DeepSeek, DeepSeek was a takeoff point for a whole bunch of reasons, but one of those actually was the fact that it was an open-source model that allowed for anyone, depending on which model format you chose, but you could have different businesses basically download it, serve it on their own servers, fine-tune it for their own purposes. That allowed for, I think, much greater diffusion and broader access to AI, to frontier-level AI.

I think now the US—even recently Sam Altman had referenced China as being a reason for why OpenAI has now itself released an open-weight model. Obviously it's not as sophisticated as its most cutting-edge proprietary frontier model, but the idea is that at least that will help provide some degree of diffusion. Even if it's a less powerful model, it will provide greater access to AI. I think other companies in the US seem to be following suit, and this is something that was talked about in the AI Action Plan for the US—promotion and focus on open source in particular.

Keith 01:09:01

Earlier you mentioned this point about chips, chips exports, and chips control. There are two camps. One is the integration camp—the more integrated you are with China, the more codependent you are, and therefore the Cold War mentality doesn't really apply because you no longer have two completely siloed economies. Because you're interdependent, there is a limit as to which you will let the rivalry or competition spiral out of control. That's one camp that Jensen Huang promotes, even though he's selling them not as good chips. The good thing is that it limits the damage or it has some form of damage control built in.

The other one has been dominant as well, which is this idea of, "Let's bifurcate completely. Let's choke off Chinese access to critical technology." I think you alluded in one of your essays before that that also creates a cascading effect where both sides are trying to create harm to each other. I wanted to get your sense—obviously the second one seems unpreferable, but maybe you could explain why that seems to be the mainstream view and also, second, what should the right response actually be?

Kyle 01:10:18

This is a really hot topic in the US. What should the approach be in the area of AI competition with China? What should US policy be? Whether the US should be restricting or increasing restrictions on chip exports to China and also for semiconductor manufacturing equipment as well.

There's a bunch of questions here because one comes down to, again, our discussion earlier about what you see AI turning into, whether you believe in this AGI moment, and whether you know, like, history will hinge on who can win that race to AGI first. If that's your view, then that kind of leads naturally to this very national security idea of competition between the US and China and really trying hard to cut out China's access to chips but also almost actively slow down Chinese platforms around the world.

The other view is that this is going to be a longer-term competition and that it might look more like competition in other areas like the automotive industry and EVs, where there might be different companies competing, some are Chinese, some are American. They might be competing not just in the US and China but most, perhaps even more importantly, in third countries, all over the world, the global south as well. How should the US compete better in a positive-sum way?

A lot of this though is driven by just growing distrust between the two countries, a growing—I can tell you that in the US it seems to be almost like a one-way ratcheting up of fear about China's actions and about the challenge that China poses to not just the US militarily but across the board.

If that continues, then I think we would just continue to see a ratcheting up of things like export controls. It seems like, for example, right now under the second Trump administration, even though there was a rolling back of some things like the H20 chip ban, I think in general you see certain kinds of export controls and certain kinds of US policies designed to, for lack of a better word, contain China that were previously not considered before and are part of this broader trend of decoupling.

I think, for example, even the questioning about Chinese students and Chinese student visas in the US and the consideration of policies to prevent that or limit that are things that I think were almost not really thinkable a few years ago. It gives you a sense of the rising level of distrust and the rising acrimony in the relationship. Unfortunately, at this point, unless there's some big deal struck or some broader agreement, it feels at least right now as if there's only a downward spiral in the relationship.

The question is: can we at least slow down or stop that kind of downward spiral?

Keith 01:13:57

If you read actually about early Chinese internet history, everyone actually looked up to the US. It doesn't seem clear to me that if you look at US-China relations over the past 50, 60 years, that this was a natural endgame. If you think about the wave one of internet in China, it's all funded by American capital. To a certain extent, yes, they made money, but they provided that liquidity that the Chinese entrepreneurs didn't have within China. A lot of technological development in China you can say is underwritten by American capital, especially in the early years.

Kyle 01:14:42

Definitely. One example I like to point out that people don't talk about that much anymore, but the rise of Alibaba was in part supported by Yahoo and a partnership between those two companies. That ended up helping Yahoo for a long time. In fact, I think that was the most valuable part of Yahoo as a company for a while—its stake in Alibaba. That's an example of American VC funding going into Chinese tech startups, Chinese tech companies.

It's funny now to see how dramatically things have changed, but it wasn't so long ago when there was actually a lot of enthusiasm and a lot of capital, people flows going back between the two countries' tech communities. On one hand, that shows you that it is possible—it wasn't so long ago when this was happening. But on the more cynical side, it shows you how quickly things can deteriorate that now US VC funding to China has really basically all but vanished.

Keith 01:15:51

There is this speech that Lei Jun made in the past where he was talking about the inspiration for Xiaomi, and he said that Costco was one of the largest inspirations for him because he was so amazed by this company that was so dedicated to value products, value consumer goods. The other two being Haidilao and Torrent. He saw Costco as the quintessential American brand. I think that was to showcase the kind of soft power that America had that percolated into Chinese consciousness, which is unfortunately a bit lost now.

To revisit your point earlier, there is this essay that you wrote in the New York Times where, I think, it shook waves within the US but also within Singapore. Some of my friends read it. In it, obviously it's a provocative headline. It talks about how the US might become irrelevant. I wanted to really quote you here: "When historians look back at this administration, they pinpoint the early months of President Trump's second term as the watershed moment when China pulled away and left the United States behind." That was the opening paragraph. What were the red lights that you were seeing that you felt like, "Oh, this is maybe an urgent wake-up call for American policymakers or American elites?"

Kyle 01:17:11

That piece was on the US and China and their diverging trajectories, especially in this moment where I saw China doubling down on technology, on innovation, on trying to build up capacity for the industries of the future—whether that's more funding support like this national government VC fund or the full-stack approach to supporting AI development, quantum, fusion, as well as traditional industries. China was really forging ahead and making a bet on the future.

At the same time, here in the US, I saw a really disturbing picture where almost every day—I mean it's still ongoing—every day in the news you see headlines about something that President Trump and the Trump administration is doing to undermine the competitiveness and the technological progress of the United States.

I point out things like attacking American universities, which—coming back to what you were saying earlier about Chinese respect for American brands, icons, companies—I think there's a lot of respect for American universities being among the best in the world and producing cutting-edge research that then goes into the private sector and to the corporate sector. So undercutting American universities, undercutting public research funding like NIH, National Science Foundation support, and also scaring away foreign talent.

I know that there are many researchers at Princeton who are world-class but are now not sure what their status will be and are worried about their visa situation and things like that, and see the US as being suddenly a much more hostile environment.

And of course, the huge thing is also tariffs, which is ironic because, as I mentioned earlier, part of the rationale for Trump's tariffs was to try to bring back American manufacturing. But the reality of it is the way that he's done it—that it's so across the board, so volatile and not thought out—that it ends up undermining American manufacturing capabilities. It makes the cost of inputs, the cost of parts, the cost of being part of global supply chains much, much higher and much more difficult for American companies to deal with.

I've heard of examples of American companies that are considering or already starting to move production elsewhere because, you know, why bother trying to raise your costs, pay for the tariffs and import goods into the US when you could just manufacture outside the US altogether and never have to deal with American tariffs? You might not get US market access, but you get the rest of the world.

And then of course, it goes even deeper into undermining the rule of law here in the US, which is foundational to American prosperity and its status as a global superpower. I just saw right now in this moment, in the past few months, such a transformation in terms of what the US is doing compared to what China is doing that if this continued, it could be a very bleak picture for US competitiveness going forward.

Keith 01:20:42

I think when President Trump was elected, there was a part of the mandate that was that there is a huge divide within American society—the haves and have-nots. There's huge income inequality. The income inequality statistic in the US is that it's been widening literally forever, and not just income—the health outcomes, educational outcomes, life satisfaction. Something that really needed to be addressed. I'm not sure whether he's addressing it or whether it's been sufficiently addressed in the past, but there is a sense that there is victimhood because for so long when 40 percent of the global GDP was underwriting a lot of things in the world that they saw as public goods.

Now there is a sense of reconfiguration globally—to what extent do you want to actually de-risk from the US now? So that's the funnier thing because a few years back it's de-risking from China. Now it's de-risking from the US.

The follow-on question would then be: from your perspective, some of the policy proposals—if you had the ears of Secretary Bessent or Secretary Rubio, if you had five minutes with them, what would your pitch to them be?

Kyle 01:22:11

The first thing I would advise is stop. Stop doing what you're doing. Stop with the tariffs. Stop with the DOGE destroying the US federal government and firing all these workers. Stop trying to attack American universities. Stop cutting public research funding. Stop antagonizing American allies.

I think that's one thing where, in the US, it shows up as a headline sometimes—like Canada is angry or India is angry—and then it fades from the American headlines, but the shock wave continues in those countries. Following India news, I know that it's such a huge discussion now, this almost feeling of betrayal from the United States and that kind of sense of anger. Brazil also feeling like the US is not just hitting it economically but trying to meddle with its own domestic politics.

I think Americans don't understand how much this angers other countries, how much this—even though on the surface diplomats, politicians might try to play it cool and try to manage the relationship—I think there's a lot of deep-seated animosity or resentment from these US policies by other countries. Southeast Asia—many countries that got hit hard with tariffs.

My top recommendation would be first to just stop all of this because it's been doing so much damage to American competitiveness but also standing in the world and reputation. And then the second part would then be to try to bring back, try to repair these ties with allies, for example, try to mend its reputation in the rest of the world. Because I think right now, like you mentioned, the world is starting to de-risk from the US. The US is a source of instability and uncertainty. Normally we want to be a source, an anchor for stability, for global security and things like that.

To reverse the negative process that is happening under this current Trump administration, I think, is the most crucial policy action that we could do.

Keith 01:24:39

What should the US-China strategy be? Should it just be an attempt of containment and suppression, or should we try to imagine something new altogether?

Kyle 01:24:49

I think more the latter. I think that in some ways, the US should still be cautious and try to build resilience. Maybe certain areas like with rare earths, the US should build its own capacity or at least try to figure out alternative supply chains. But in other ways, I do see that it doesn't have to be such an acrimonious relationship. It doesn't have to be this downward security spiral.

I think that on areas like climate, AI safety, there could still be—and there are—some ongoing discussions. Maybe it's not at the highest level all the time, but there's still a lot of tremendous economic gains that could be had. Of course, there can be discussions about how to make it fair for American workers, things like that. That can be obviously an important part of the discussion.

But yeah, I think that unfortunately there's a lack of creativity in Washington about how to think about both the benefits and the risks to what's happening right now. China's not going anywhere. I don't think that China will suddenly collapse or that all this progress will suddenly disappear, which is what honestly some of the more extreme voices in Washington talk about.

Given continuing progress in technology upgrading, industrial capacity in China, how can the US make the most of that and not just have this escalating negative relationship? I think it's really important not just for the US-China relationship but for a lot of other countries that get impacted by this. This is something that we really should think about for not just a bilateral relationship but for broader global economic prosperity and stability.

Keith 01:27:00

My last question to you would be a question I ask every guest, which is: if you had a piece of advice you'd give to a fresh graduate entering today's working world, what would it be?

Kyle 01:27:11

I would encourage—and maybe this is already more common in Singapore anyways—but I really would encourage someone young, someone straight out of college, to spend time in another country, spend time in a different context. I tell my students at Princeton: travel, go. Especially since Princeton often offers funding for travel, take advantage of that and spend time just in a different culture.

There are some things that you just can't read in a book, that you can't watch in a TV show, that you have to experience firsthand. For those people who are interested in China, being there—even for a period of time—you can go to the big cities, you can go out into the more rural areas. Whatever it is, just being there will give you such a different perspective.

Any opportunity you have to spend time abroad, I think, is really beneficial, not only for your career development but just your own personal development.

Keith 01:28:05

With that sage advice, Kyle, thank you for coming on.

Kyle 01:28:11

My pleasure. This was really great.

Keith 01:28:16

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