I have a piece in the NYT Sunday Review section today, on the question many Chinese economists and industrialists are asking themselves but that relatively few outsiders recognize. Essentially it is whether the Chinese system of “guided” capitalism, which has achieved such economic, technological, and social-welfare miracles in the past 30 years, will be an advantage or a handicap over the next few years — as Chinese companies try to become more like the Apples, Samsungs, Daimlers, GEs, etc for which they now mainly do assembly work. Sample:

After another several-month stay in China last year, I came up with one proxy for China’s ability to take this next step: how slow its Internet service is, compared with South Korea’s or Japan’s.

In much of America, the Internet is slow by those standards, but mainly for infrastructure reasons. In China it’s slow because of political control: censorship and the “Great Firewall” bog down everything and make much of the online universe impossible to reach. “What country ever rode to pre-eminence by fighting the reigning technology of the time?” a friend asked while I was in China last year. “Did the Brits ban steam?”

Before you ask: Yes, this argument is not coincidentally related to the one I deal with in China Airborne.

Read more and follow bunch of nice links to visuals at James Fallows – The Atlantic.