The Next Illusion About China Will Soon Fall

The West has formed a series of assumptions about China and has had to abandon them one after another. Each was taken at the time for sober judgement. Each turned out to be a reassurance. And as soon as one fell, the next stood ready, allowing the West to go on feeling superior.

The first was the simplest. When China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, the prevailing idea was that the country would keep exporting only what it already exported — simple goods, low value, nothing that threatened jobs in the West. A few years later, whole industries collapsed in the United States. The assumption had been wrong, not in its details but at its core: no one had been able to imagine what the country would achieve.

The second assumption was more sophisticated and lasted longer. It held that with rising prosperity China would open up politically. An economist had even named a threshold: above a per-capita gross domestic product of eight thousand dollars, China would become a democracy, just as had been seen in South Korea and Taiwan. China crossed that threshold long ago and now stands at around fourteen thousand. It did not become a democracy; it moved in the opposite direction. This assumption too was not an observation but a wish in the guise of a law.

Now the next assumption is on the table, and it is the finest of all, because it leaves the West its pride. It runs: China does not invent, China only scales.

The finest reassurance

The thesis is seriously argued and not without grounds. It rests on a real distinction — between invention and innovation, between the act of inventing and its broad application. China, the argument goes, is strong in diffusion: in the rapid uptake, application and scaling of technologies that others have invented. But the actual creation, the spark, the tinkerer, the new out of nothing — that remains with the West.

The argument even has a historical proof that makes it look clever. Britain's lead in the early industrial age, it is said, lay less in the invention of the steam engine than in its broad implementation — not in invention but in diffusion. China, by this picture, is the new Britain of application: fast, broad, superior at rolling out, but not at the source.

The former national security advisor Jake Sullivan recently gave this view a turn more honest than the Western consolation. The West, he wrote, believes itself to be in a single race with China — the race of innovation — and to be a step or two ahead there. That is wrong. There are two races. One is the innovation race. The other is the race of diffusion — of introduction and scaling. And in this second one China is not behind, but ahead.

Sullivan's image is right and yet not sharp enough. For it treats the two races as if they ran separately — the West inventing, China scaling, each in its lane. But what if the second race has long since spilled into the first? What if China is not only scaling products, but inventing itself?

A testimony from the year 2008

Here the human author of this text must report from his own experience, because it turns the argument from an assertion into a testimony.

In 2008 he tried to introduce, at a university in Medellín, the very method that is the exact opposite of mere optimization: TRIZ, the "theory of inventive problem solving" of the Soviet engineer Genrich Altshuller — a method not of application but of invention, of systematic creation. He was in contact with Michael Orloff, one of the leading teachers of this method. And Orloff was at that time working mostly in China, where he lectured to large audiences.

The attempt in Medellín failed. It failed not on the matter itself but on the hubris of the man responsible for research and development, who graciously offered the author an audience of thirty minutes, so that the author might explain to him the sense and necessity of the method. Instead of appearing for that audience, the author sent him a message from Orloff together with photographs of lecture halls full to the rafters in China — with a comment whose irony needed no explanation. The relationship with that university was broken in any case, after a dean had let him run aground on a robotics project. It was not an isolated case. Ignorance has no single address; it is everywhere.

That is the small scene. Its meaning is large. For what it reveals is not the difference between a clever China and an ignorant Colombia. It is the difference between a West that turns the methodology of invention away at the door, and a state that makes it a national task.

What China has done since 2008

What the author experienced in Medellín as an individual was already policy in China. In that same year, 2008, the Chinese state had begun to promote innovation methods at the highest level. In 2016 a dedicated committee for the dissemination of TRIZ was founded. In 2018 the first national contest on innovation methods took place, with TRIZ as a central topic, expressly including one for students. Provinces and cities — Heilongjiang, Beijing, Anhui, Guangdong, Hubei, Xiamen — set up state-organized training sessions and lectures. The full lecture halls in Orloff's photographs were no accident. They were the visible edge of a programme.

The contrast is complete once one adds the other side. TRIZ is today an essential tool in those very countries — South Korea, China, Japan — that have risen to the top of the patent statistics and displaced older industrial nations. In Britain, by contrast, there is no official or university adoption of the method. The West left lying the tool of systematic invention that an engineer of the East had developed and given freely to the world.

And it is not only the distant, foreign university that turned it away. In Germany too, the country that understood itself as the home of engineers, TRIZ had only a precarious niche existence after a brief flare in the early nineties. This is attested by one who knows it from within: Dr. Dietmar Zobel, one of the most distinguished German-language TRIZ authors, once a lead trainer in the inventors' schools of the GDR — one of the few places where the method was institutionally anchored in the German sphere — and after their end the self-employed teacher of a methodology that the country which might have needed it let wither.

With that, the fine distinction collapses. Diffusion and invention are not two phases that come neatly one after the other, the West first, China later. China has diffused the method of invention itself. It has not only scaled products. It has scaled inventing — begun fifteen years ago, while the West was still busy warming itself at its own crown of creation.

As in the pandemic

It is much as it was at the start of the pandemic. Back then the West took China's initial silence for sleep, for failure, for the sluggishness of an apparatus. What then came was not drowsiness but a speed of reaction no one had reckoned with. What had been taken for sleep was preparation.

The same confusion threatens now. What the West today sees as mere optimization — as scaling, adapting, copying — is the front of the stage. The inventive phase has long since begun behind it, methodically underpinned, pursued for over fifteen years. The diffusion thesis is not wrong in what it describes. It is wrong in what it overlooks. It is the latest in the sequence of reassurances — the first that no longer claims China cannot keep up, only that China cannot invent. This retreat too will be vacated.

The last consolation, and why it does not hold

One very last consolation remains to the West, and it must be spoken and examined here, or the text would be dishonest. The consolation runs: granted, China invents too — but under the conditions of unfreedom, under pressure and control, no real creation can arise; true invention needs the free society.

This consolation is the most agreeable, because it leaves the West its only claimed structural advantage: freedom. And it is false. History knows great invention under coercion in abundance. The rocket technology of the Third Reich arose under forced labour. The Soviet Sputnik, which shook the West in 1957, came out of an unfree system. And the sharpest counter-example is the very method at issue here: Genrich Altshuller, the father of TRIZ, wrote a letter to Stalin in 1948 pointing out the chaos in the Soviet handling of invention and asserting that there existed a theory able to help any engineer invent. The answer came two years later in the form of a sentence: twenty-five years in the camps, Vorkuta, above the Arctic Circle. There, in the coal mines, eight to ten hours a day, he developed the core ideas of TRIZ. The methodology of invention arose in the camp — conceived by a man whom his own state imprisoned for wanting to systematize invention.

With that, the last retreat falls too. "China only scales" falls through the testimony of the full lecture halls. "Under coercion invention is worthless" falls through von Braun, through Sputnik, and most completely through Altshuller, whose theory was born of all places in the camp.

Here honesty against one's own inclination is required. The human author of this text is marked by an unconditional drive for freedom; he can create only in freedom. But for that very reason he must not take himself as the measure. Whoever concludes from his own nature that invention everywhere needs the freedom he needs for himself generalizes his condition into a law that history refutes. It is the same movement that carried the earlier illusions: to make a law out of what one wishes.

One question remains open, and to leave it honestly open is worth more than to close it for comfort: whether freedom, though it does not compel invention, makes it more likely, cheaper, more resilient over long stretches of time. It may be that coercion can invent, but more expensively, more brittlely, at the cost of the people it consumes. That would be no consolation and no superiority, but at best a difference in price. Whoever claims more is already writing the next illusion.

The next one about China will soon fall. It is wiser to watch it fall while it still stands than to let it surprise us once again.