How the West can respond to China’s technology surge

The West still outperforms China in most areas of advanced technology but has much to learn about how it lost the lead in some areas. China’s technology surge to dominance in a few sectors is the consequence of a set of concrete factors that either exist already in Europe, can be created, or used to exist and can be revived. Jonathan Liebenau writes that the West should avoid panicky responses and study Chinese companies’ practices of long-term finance and planning, tolerance for failed business experiments and setbacks, and sophisticated labour market and management developments. This is the third in a series of blog posts summarising the new report ‘Protect, Constrain, Contest’, by LSE IDEAS, the foreign policy think tank at LSE.