Conventional wisdom has long held that China would never become a technological powerhouse. From the late 1970s to the early twenty-first century, despite the country’s rapid economic growth, its technology base lagged decades behind that of the United States. Many prominent social scientists assumed that China would be unable to catch up: the country’s authoritarian institutions, they argued, stifled innovation through repression, censorship, and corruption, which would prevent it from ever truly competing with the United States. China, unable to keep pace with the United States technologically, would thus be no match for it economically or militarily.
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