Right off the bat, let me establish that the US has the most developed technology in the world. You do see occasional challenges from other countries in specific areas: Huawei and Samsung for smartphones, China for green energy, etc. , but the US dominates in general. Right? Well, that may change.
As I am writing this, the Chinese telecom company Huawei has been called a “threat to national security” by President Donald Trump. The truth behind this may be debatable. What’s un-debatable is that Huawei is a global leader in 5G hardware, and 5G is one of the key technologies of the future. And what’s more, have you heard of Tencent and WeChat? Tencent has successfully developed the mini-app concept which may guide the likes of Facebook and Netflix toward future growth. And surely you know that the internet is heavily censored in China – so how do 1.4 billion Chinese people get information from the internet? What are Chinese internet companies up to?
And did I mention that China has 1.4 billion people, 4 times the US population, with a rapidly growing middle class? How are Chinese consumers different from US consumers?
How are US tech companies trying to get into this market? How they going to be competitive against their Chinese counterparts?
How are Chinese companies trying to expand globally? Do they even need to?
What is the role of the Chinese government in all this? How is this different from the role of the US government in developing domestic technology?
As a future technology leader, how are you going to understand an evolving environment and capitalize on those evolving trends, when technology is changing so rapidly? What can you learn from how tech was developed in China vs in the US?
These are the kind of questions that I wanted to get answer to. And get answers I did through my school UCLA Anderson’s Global Immersion course on Technology in China. This course was instrumental to my understanding of global technology and to my contextual leadership intuition. What I saw and what I learned cannot be summarized in one blog post. More on this in the future. If you’re an Anderson student who is interested in tech, count yourself lucky and sign up for this course – it’s going to be very competitive for good reasons!
-Richard
Richard Anderson 