Schmidt has the typical perspective of someone who knows nothing about China. For ease, I've singled out this one point: > For example, Chinese telecoms infra

Schmidt has the typical perspective of someone who knows nothing about China. For ease, I've singled out this one point: > For example, Chinese telecoms infrastructure giant Huawei spends as much as $20bn (£15.6bn) on research and development - one of the highest budgets in the world. Any member of Chinese society knows that budgets like this are announced to look impressive, and that the money itself goes through so many layers that siphon off 20% that when the project(s) are finally delivered, it was done on a shoestring and the deliverable looks like a rough approximation of what was in the scope. Just don't look under the hood. Then there are all the other grand initiatives where the money is quietly put into the stock market and again the deliverable is a "driverless car" etc. that in reality doesn't work. Obviously, there's a lot more nuance than this, but if I went around refuting all these "China experts", I'd have no time for anything else. The point is: don't believe the hype. Just because a lot of low-hanging tech fruit is highly visible and China has a lack of ethical and legal oversight does not mean the country is innovative. The US I can't comment on.