3. Tech Power

In China, technology is not represented by shiny objects; rather, it is embodied by communities of engineering practice like Shenzhen, where technology lives inside the heads and in the hands of its workforce.

But is has had, at best, a surface-level understanding of its success. Silvia Lindtner, a professor at the University of Michigan and my wife, has spent more than a decade studying Shenzhen’s technology ecosystems. In 2015, the Austrian government asked her how to create a Shenzhen in the Alps; in 2016, the White House invited her to present on how the United States might learn from the success of Shenzhen. She has felt, as I do, that these agencies misunderstood the point of Shenzhen. They were still more interested in individual inventors rather than understanding it as a community of engineering practice. The obsession with invention has clouded Silicon Valley’s ability to appreciate China’s actual strength. Rather than seeing tools and blueprints as the ultimate ends of technological progress, I believe we should view them as milestones in the training of better scientists and manufacturers. Viewing technology as people and process knowledge isn’t only more accurate; it also empowers our sense of agency to control the technologies we are producing.

By the mid-2010s, Chinese companies figured out how to make all the German tools, as well as the entirety of the solar value chain. The plunge on solar power costs over the last decade has been driven less by breakthroughs in science— which is the United State’s strong suit— than by efficient production, which is China’s strength. The beneficiaries are not only the climate but also China’s national power.

Science matters of course. China remains weak in chips and aviation in part because these are much more scientifically complex industries than solar. Not every technology improves through iterative adjustments to manufacturing processes, but a great deal can follow its logic. When lots of companies are doing similar things, in a brutally competitive environment where profit margins are small, they establish communities of engineering practice like Shenzhen. These factories will never be as glamorous as the desirable branding represented by Apple or Tesla. Every day, millions of workers go to factories to build up technological process knowledge.

It’s hard, I admit, to draw a straight line between the loss of, for example, television manufacturing in the United States through the 1980s to the stumbles by Boeing and Intel over the past decade. But if we think about technology ecosystems as communities of engineering practice, it makes sense that factory closures accelerated as process knowledge dissolved, prompting production problems and more job losses. And it also makes sense that Chinese workers went from merely assembling iPhones to producing a some of their most valuable components as well.

Everything starts from the recognition that something has gone quite wrong in US technology. Too many people have argued away the strategic importance of manufacturing. And the solution has to involve reconstituting its communities of engineering practice that prioritize process knowledge. It means attempting to build up every segment of manufacturing: training workers and creating incentives for manufacturers in order to relearn mass production.

This scenario sounds a bit fantastic, but if the iPhone were built in the United States rather than Shenzhen, then an American city— say Detroit, Cleveland, or Pittsburgh— might be hailed as the hardware capital of the world.