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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Cogito Ergo Sum who wrote (175965)	8/8/2021 4:30:22 PM
From: sense	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 220217

China seems it continues intently on the path of mimicking the U.S. In the U.S., the saw is... America always gets it right... after having tried everything else... China, it seems, intends on getting it right after having tried everything else... twice.

To: Cogito Ergo Sum who wrote (175965)	8/8/2021 9:18:00 PM
From: TobagoJack	Respond to of 220217

whilst simplistic but something to the article, I believe, and simple is good especially as China China China according to USA USA USA has the same number of gold medals as USA USA USA it is just math, and onward to 35% global GDP bloomberg.com How China’s Ping Pong Prowess Explains Its Economy Whether in sports or in markets, the country’s advantages outweigh its flaws. Tom Orlik 9 August 2021, 08:00 GMT+8 The U.S. has won the Olympics – topping the gold and overall medal count. For China, beaten into second place on both measures, there’s one source of consolation — a near-perfect performance in table tennis. China won gold medals for men’s table tennis. And women’s. And both teams. Apart from a Japanese upset in mixed doubles, it was a clean sweep. This may not seem like a surprise; China has excelled at table tennis for decades, going back to the days of Mao Zedong. After a decade in China, though, much of it misspent in dingy clubs in the unlikely pursuit of table tennis glory, I think the country’s success in the sport reveals something important about its economic rise. To Western eyes, the machinery that produces Chinese table tennis stars — like the rest of its Soviet-style sports system — looks deeply dysfunctional. Grade-school children tapped for their potential repeat mechanical drills for hours each day, often with a coach firing hundreds of balls at them in quick succession. After a decade of training, those that don’t make it are booted out with little conventional education to fall back on. Talent and hard work aren’t decisive. The family of one 12-year-old who beat me in Shanghai (an early sign my hopes were misplaced) had to pay a substantial bribe to get their son into a professional training program. A Beijing coach told me his protégé rose all the way from a grimy basement club to the provincial team but found her path blocked after failing to grease the manager’s palm. At the highest levels of the sport, politics intrudes. In 2017, the Chinese men’s team — including Olympic champion Ma Long — staged a no-show at an international event to protest the sudden removal of their genial coach. The official story was that the coaching structure was being streamlined. But to the players and many fans, it looked like overreach by the General Administration of Sports — the body charged with delivering national sporting glory. Yet, despite rote training, corruption and intrusive politics, China continues to mint golds in ping pong. How? As with so much about the country’s economy, while the negatives are real, the positives outweigh them. Start with size. There are close to 1.4 billion Chinese people. Most of them give table tennis a try. That’s a big talent pool from which to pick. So many people playing also creates powerful network effects — more practice partners, more incentives to improve, greater return from investment in facilities. Training might be mechanical, but it brings players to the frontiers of technique, where flashes of genius occur. (That’s why Western players drill hard, too.) Intensive training at home is bolstered by a ruthless approach to acquiring intellectual property from abroad. “We had a team of four working on it,” one coach told me, referring to how Chinese players had videotaped, studied and then successfully replicated a tricky new backhand flip developed by a Japanese rival. Opportunities to study foreign players are not hard to find; the world’s best all want to train in China. China’s broader education system is mechanical, too — in contrast to the more creative, child-centered approach favored by many in the West. It’s also churning out thousands more STEM PhDs than the U.S. every year — and the gap is widening fast. Cutthroat competition for scarce spots at the best universities and companies means all Chinese students face strong incentives to perform. Similarly, China’s government still wrestles with endemic corruption, and routinely muscles into business, markets and even family life to engineer the outcomes it wants. But officials also have a single-minded focus on achieving development priorities. So far — as China’s steady march up the global GDP rankings testifies — corruption and statism haven’t stopped them from delivering on the development plan. Opinion. Data. More Data.Get the most important Bloomberg Opinion pieces in one email. Sign up to this newsletter China’s businesses — supported by Beijing — have a ruthless approach to acquiring foreign intellectual property, with regulators often requiring technology transfer as a condition for market entry. The U.S. is attempting to push back. But, much like foreign table tennis players, foreign firms continue to beat a pathto China’s door: The lure of the world’s fastest-growing market is so great that the price of lost IP is worth paying. In the end, in table tennis and as in national development, perhaps success boils down to a few essentials. Size matters. Planning matters. Incentives matter. When a country has those three working in its favor, negatives in other areas become more or less incidental. China will already be planning to top the gold medal rankings at the 2024 Olympics in Paris. Its rise to the top of the GDP tables may not be far behind. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners. To contact the author of this story: Tom Orlik at torlik4@bloomberg.net To contact the editor responsible for this story: Nisid Hajari at nhajari@bloomberg.net Before it's here, it's on the Bloomberg Terminal. LEARN MORE