The China Miscalculation

For years, one of the most common stories about China was that it could manufacture at scale but not truly innovate. This book tests that story against the record. It examines how the copycat narrative was formed, what forecasters and commentators claimed, and what actually changed as China built industrial capacity across electric vehicles, batteries, solar, robotics, shipping, consumer electronics, semiconductors, and artificial intelligence.

The China Miscalculation follows the relationship between factories and research, market size and learning, chokepoints and substitutes, state pressure and private capability, and prediction and evidence. It does not treat China as either an unstoppable inevitability or a hollow mirage. Instead, it asks where the old narrative was right, where it was incomplete, and how technological progress can look very different when seen through infrastructure, supply chains, developer ecosystems, and time.

The result is a systems-level account of why many assumptions about Chinas technological future deserve re-examination and why the next decade may be shaped less by slogans than by the actual structure of industrial and research power.