Kai-Fu Lee on China’s Race to the Future

The Political Scene | The New Yorker

The New Yorker

President, Barack, News, Politics, Wnyc, Obama, Lizza, Washington, Wickenden

4.3 • 3.9K Ratings

🗓️ 28 January 2019

⏱️ 14 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Silicon Valley may be the center of the tech world right now, but Kai-Fu Lee says that’s going to change, and fast. Lee—a computer scientist who worked at Apple, Microsoft, and Google before becoming a venture capitalist—predicts that China will soon overtake the United States as the world leader in innovation. Lee points to the company WeChat as an example; it’s a one-stop shop for all the many things that people use apps for: texting, ride hailing, ordering food or movie tickets, and even paying for those services. WeChat “has essentially eliminated credit cards . . . which have become a dinosaur in China,” Lee tells the New Yorker staff writer Sheelah Kolhatkar. The enormous customer bases for Chinese services mean that the tech sector has more data to use for machine learning, and therefore its algorithms become “smarter” faster. The U.S., Kolhatkar thinks, does have legitimate complaints about Chinese economic policy, but the Administration’s use of tariffs as a lever is backward-looking. If China’s development of artificial intelligence surpasses ours, Chinese entrepreneurs will beat out Silicon Valley and hold the key to the future.

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1:11.1	I'm Dorothy Wickendon on today's Politics and More podcast, the New Yorker's Sheila Kolhatkar talks with Dr. Kai Fu Lee, founder of the Chinese investment firm's Inovation Ventures.
1:23.6	Dr. Lee, who started his career working for American tech giants like Microsoft and Google,
1:28.9	believes that China's emergence as a technological superpower won't be affected by President Trump's trade war.
1:38.4	Probably the thing that Donald Trump cares about the most or second only to the wall is China.
1:43.9	With China, Trump has been telling the
1:45.4	same story for decades. They bully the U.S. on trade, and American politicians never have the guts
1:50.7	to stand up to them. And they're laughing at us. They think we're so stupid and our representatives
1:55.2	are so stupid that they can't even believe what they're getting away with. They take our money.
2:00.5	And that's from all the way back in 2010.
2:03.2	Now, within the last year, the president has imposed tariffs on consumer products and manufacturing
	...

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