"Why China Won't Conquer The World"

Ran across an interesting article about a former resident of China's view regarding whether or not China would become a world power.  

If China is to dominate the creative industries as it has manufacturing, it needs to borrow a line from Apple’s marketing department: “Think different”. Liu Jun, a businessman recently crowned one of the “50 most creative individuals in China”, says it’s an uphill struggle.
“The reason the Chinese don’t have global companies is that we don’t have a global vision,” he said recently. “Chinese designers only think about what pleasures them, not the customer. It’s a huge problem.” Chinese corporate structures remain very rigid, and, according to Daniel Altman, a consultant at Dalberg Global Development Advisors, original ideas “have to percolate through so many layers of hierarchy that most won’t survive to the top. China has a long way to go before it will be anything like the US in its ability to foster entrepreneurship.”

The challenges aren't limited to the lack of vision.

And what of the generation the one-child policy has spawned? Children from the biggest 40 cities are living in the three-screen world (television, computer and mobile), wearing global designer brands, travelling first class, and buying houses and cars for their one or two years’ study overseas. For these young “super-rich”, price has become no object, some even flying to and from Hong Kong for a day’s shopping.

 It’s hard to conceive of them becoming China’s next generation of entrepreneurs, when, unlike their parents and grandparents, many have never touched a cooker and barely know how to make their own beds. They may have had superior schooling but many critics believe China’s education system – with its obsession with test-taking and rote memorisation – stifles rather than encourages creativity. Indeed, today’s entry exam for China’s universities, the “gaokao”, has its origins in a recruitment test devised by the imperial government in the sixth century, and, according to Jiang Xueqin, a Yale-educated school administrator in Beijing, rewards “very strong memory; very strong logical and analytical ability; little imagination; little desire to question authority”. China could be seen as a brilliant imitator but a poor innovator – its talents for replicating anything the Western world has to offer evidenced by the recent uncovering of 22 fake Apple stores across Kunming, the capital of Yunnan Province in south-west China. So convincing were the stores that even staff members believed they were working for Apple. Genius, in a way. But misdirected genius.

We are at the point of seeing China the way we saw Japan back in the 1980s--a industrial and financial juggernaut that was in the process of becoming the dominant power.  And, as then, the truth is somewhat different than the "current wisdom."  People are too quick to downplay the ability of the United States to adapt, overcome, and persevere.  And beginning in November 2012, we will relight the fires of competitiveness again.