ChinaFAQs Expert Ed Steinfeld on China’s Technological Development and the West in the Wall Street Journal

ChinaFAQs Expert and Director of the MIT China Program Ed Steinfeld recently discussed his new book “Playing Our Game: Why China’s economic rise doesn’t threaten the West” in an interview with the Wall Street Journal.

Steinfeld observes that when faced with a series of crises in the early 1990s, China “effectively blew open domestic industry to foreign producers, many of whom were on the cutting edge of networked production.” This entailed a series of social and institutional changes that allowed these companies to stay and expand. Steinfeld also responds to the question of whether because the changes were export-driven, they will diminish now as Western economies contract and China becomes more domestic-oriented. According to Steinfeld, the key players in China in the commercial, regulatory and government sectors now see the value in having a globalized production system with lower barriers to innovation and a faster pace of technological development – “they see that there are big costs to heavy industrial development and vertical integration, they see the environmental costs.”

Read the full article at WSJ:
http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2010/08/17/playing-our-game-ed-steinfeld-on-china/

Read the full interview:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704868604575434373373940454.html