Over the last few months, Japanese companies in the critical and advanced technology sectors have come under severe pressure from shareholders and investors for trailing behind competition and failing to rapidly evolve to a changing global technological marketplace.
Around the same time, CNN’s "Face the Nation" host, Fareed Zakaria, in his Washington Post column titled, “The rest of the world doesn’t see China the same way we do,” claimed that Chinese electric vehicle maker Nio was going to “take the world by storm.”
Zakaria went on to claim that while America’s European partners were supportive of its actions toward Russia, they are worried about Washington’s strategy with China and its new economic policies. Zakaria’s reverence to supposed Chinese ingenuity and his view that China’s dominant role in global value chains is inescapable was a classic case of missing the forest for the trees.