n what way has China surpassed Japan?

David W. Rudlin

 

Author of the New Novel, "Left Unsaid"

In what way has China surpassed Japan?

I haven’t had lots of Quorans yelling at me all at once, so let’s take a trip down Nostalgia Lane…

My first trip to China was in 1985. This photo was taken on the major road through the center of Beijing, the one that runs past the Forbidden City.

At that point 80% of the population lived in poverty. 30 years later, 800 million people had been lifted out of poverty, an accomplish never before done, by anyone, in the history of the world.

My first trip to Shanghai was in 1990. The road from the airport to our hotel was largely dirt, and we had to stop frequently for cattle crossings and other disruptions. Jump forward 15 years and we were able to take the world’s first maglev train into the city, at a top speed of 431 km/hr.

By contrast, one of my first jobs as a copywriter in the early 1980’s was doing an ad for Hitachi’s maglev train. It’s now 2024 and the train still isn’t in commercial operation.

Now jump ahead to 2018. In the downtown Shanghai subways there are photos on the walls so that it looks like a 2D supermarket. Scan the items you want on your phone, and they’ll be waiting for you at your stop when you get off. Nothing like that exists in Japan, which shunned e-money until COVID made everyone afraid of touching coins and bills that had passed through unknown numbers of unknown hands.

Those are the stories; here are the points:

1. China has a very strong central government. You can make complaints about censorship, access to social media, etc., but when it comes to public works — including poverty reduction — I’d argue it’s the most effective in the world. (My Indian colleagues were late to a meeting because they kept walking the streets of Shanghai in wonder, saying “Why can’t our government do this?”)
2. That’s also the point of the maglev story. Japan has 2nd generation trains you can ride on a test track, but permitting in one prefecture has blocked commercialization. Japan created the tech; China utilized it.
3. China is a LOT more advanced technically than most people know. 9 of the world’s Top 20 tech companies are in China, and 3 of the Top 10. We’re seeing this a lot recently as China now dominates the EV market once owned by Tesla. The pace of innovation has been stunning, and while there are cheap options available, this is NOT a case of low-tech EV’s made with cheap manufacturing labor. BYD has a truly impressive ecosystem that covers everything from chips to ships.

Fortunately, China and Japan are in close proximity, so a lot of Japanese leaders — both political and business — understand just what China is capable of.

The US? Not so much.