As we sipped tea in his office after our tour, we chatted about why the United States was then mired in production difficulties, unable to make much of the personal protective equipment that people wanted. “American manufacturers constantly asked themselves whether making masks and cotton swabs was part of their ‘core competence.’ Most of them decided not.” He put down his teacup and looked at me. “Chinese companies decided that making money is their core competence, therefore they go and make masks, or whatever else the market needs.

Now it’s more obvious that the departure of manufacturing has created economic and political ruination for the United States. We are still only beginning to understand how much it set the country back technologically.

Many of the United States’ most storied companies have been ailing. Detroit’s automakers, having limped along for decades, are now stumbling through the transition to electric vehicles. US Steel, General Electric, and IBM are shadows of their past selves. Intel, mired in cycles of blown product timelines and layoffs, went from a semi-conductor trailblazer to a clear laggard behind Taiwan’s TSMC.

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.