I think you're indirectly proving a different point (sorry). It's implausible China, which has successfully built particle accelerators, 500m telescopes, 7nm ch

I think you're indirectly proving a different point (sorry). It's implausible China, which has successfully built particle accelerators, 500m telescopes, 7nm chip processes, and so on endlessly - simply could not figure out how to build a high quality ball point pen. However, it's entirely plausible is that it's a much trickier engineering problem than it sounds like, with a meaningful upfront cost (in both time and money) to solve, for a very small economic benefit at the end of the tunnel. And so there was no incentive for anybody to solve this in China because imports worked fine. Until they didn't - because a high ranking Chinese politician critiqued China's lack of a high quality domestic solution. And then, lo and behold, about a year later that domestic solution emerged. It's not like there was some grand concerted effort to solve the 'pen problem.' It's just that trade was working perfectly fine, so there was no motivation to change. Give people a motivation to change or create, and they will. Like the old saying goes, 'necessity is the mother of all invention.' And right now these trade wars are giving the rest of the world every motivation to detach themselves from Western economies. It's not hard to see how this turns out.