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NO. Not now. Not ever.Most things that make it not nice to build a business, aren't features of the country (China) but of the ambient environment around it that make it undesirable to live and build a tech startup.More specifically:I. COPYCAT CULTUREIs there any wonder, then, that the Chinese are widely regarded as not being creative? Yes, they file a lot of patents, but the quality isn’t great.In my view, there’s not yet much terribly impressive about China’s technology achievements. A calm look at China’s technology achievements should pick up strengths as well as weaknesses. There are certain lights under which Chinese technology efforts look spectacular. China is the only country other than the US to have been able to develop internet giants, which can look upon their Silicon Valley counterparts as peers and puts it in a good position to continue developing digital technologies. The Chinese mobile internet experience certainly is far more fun than what consumers in the US are able to play with. It’s true that the country leads on 5G, the consumer internet like social network, mobile payments, and e-commerce, as well as the buildout of certain industrial technologies that include solar energy generation, mobile infrastructure equipment, and high-speed rail. They’re also making good inroads in consumer electronics, from smartphones to drones. And Chinese firms have a plausible shot at leading in emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and quantum computing. These however have more to do with differences in the social environment and regulatory regime. These are not trivial achievements. But neither are they earth-shattering successes.I find it bizarre that the world has decided that consumer internet is the highest form of technology. It’s not obvious to me that apps like WeChat, Facebook, or Snap are doing the most important work pushing forward our technologically-accelerating civilization. To me, it’s entirely plausible that Facebook and Tencent might be net-negative for technological developments. The apps they develop offer fun, productivity-dragging distractions; and the companies pull smart kids from R&D-intensive fields like materials science or semiconductor manufacturing, into ad optimization and game development. I wish we would drop the notion that China is leading in technology because it has a vibrant consumer internet. A large population of people who play games, buy household goods online, and order food delivery does not make a country a technological or scientific leader.Although Alibaba and Tencent may be technically impressive on software development, their business success is mostly a function of the size of the market and the social, regulatory environment. On the demand side, a huge and dynamic market will pull forward domestic capabilities. The ubiquity of mobile payments is due not just to technological innovation (substantial though that might be), but also the financial regulatory regime and the leapfrog over credit cards. In China they had the “good fortune” of basically being behind in so many things so they could leapfrog into a mobile world, go straight to mobile payment skipping credit cards, and now leapfrogging into online retail skipping the shopping malls, and so on. An industry’s legacy is hard to dump because it creates bad habits that are hard to change and baggage that is hard to leave behind. E-commerce works great because China has built first-rate infrastructure and because many migrant workers are available to deliver goods in dense urban areas. These are fine companies, but in my view the milestones of our technological civilization ought to be found in scientific and industrial achievements, not the creation of consumer internet companies. Now even if one did want to consider consumer internet the be the most important sector, the US still looks good. A rough rule-of-thumb comparison: market caps of the five biggest US tech companies (Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Facebook) add up to US$5tn at the time of this writing, while the two Chinese internet giants (Alibaba and Tencent) add up to US$1tn. This 5:1 advantage to the US feels intuitively right to me as a measure of relative capabilities.China has developed credible brands in certain hardware technologies, like the smartphone, and many types of industrial goods. They’re building good consumer products, although bad at creating global brands. It has a strong position when it comes to manufacturing industrial goods. A few firms have staked out leading positions in industries that include steel, solar power generation, and telecommunications equipment. The bulk still has a long way to go however before they can really be considered the peers of German, Japanese, Korean, and American giants. In fact, I suspect that Chinese firms should be considered underperformers as a whole. Few domestic firms have become globally-successful brands, and Chinese firms are still far behind more technologically-sophisticated industries involving R&D-intensive technologies like automotives, semiconductors, and aviation. They have a weak position even in the domestic market. As a rule of thumb, it’s harder to name global Chinese brands than Japanese and Korean ones, even when they were close to China’s current level of per capita GDP. The lack of success in global brand building shows that Chinese firms (not foreign firms producing in China) are actually poor exporters. Shouldn’t we expect more from the world’s second-largest market?How about emerging technologies like AI, quantum computing, facial recognition, biotechnology, and hypersonics, and other buzzing areas? The fact that data so easily aggregates creates business models that are profitable because if it works in one city it can work in a hundred big cities; if it works with one demographic, then it applies to all demographics. Also, the market size is an even larger advantage in AI where so much data is needed; the more data, the better it works. But I think there’s no scientific consensus on China’s position on any of these technologies, but let’s consider it at least a plausible claim that Chinese firms might lead in them. So far however these fields are closer to being speculative science projects than real, commercial industries. AI is mostly a vague product or an add-on service whose total industry revenue is difficult to determine, and that goes for many of the other items. In my view, focusing the discussion on the Chinese position in emerging technologies distracts from its weaknesses in established technologies. Take semiconductors, machine tools, and commercial aviation, which are measured by clearer technical and commercial benchmarks. They are considerably more difficult than making steel and solar panels, and Chinese firms have a poor track record of breaking into these industries.The focus on speculative science projects brings to light another issue around discussions of China and technology: an emphasis on quantifying inputs. So much of the commentary focuses on its growth in patent registrations, R&D spending, journal publications, and other types of inputs. One can find data on these metrics, which is why measures of “innovation” are often constructed around them. But these inputs are irrelevant if they don’t deliver output, and it’s not clear that they often do, neither in China nor anywhere else. Wonderfully asymptoting charts on Chinese patent registrations and R&D spending suggest that Chinese firms might overrun the rest of the world any day now. So far however the commercial outputs are not so impressive.In many ways, China’s technology success is too much like a paper tiger, impressive in appearance but in reality not so powerful.Why?Because much of China’s technology stack is built on American components, especially semiconductors. China owns very few patents featuring originality and high or core technology. In fact, Chinese innovation relies on the modification of existing technologies, like putting together a cell phone and a cigarette case. Chinese engineers are trying only to replace existing technologies, which is relatively simpler than inventing them de novo. These creations are fun, but they lack depth.China works to beat America.America works to get the best of the world.There’s a matter of will. Chinese aspirations to replace US technology has long been a whimsical task. All the research on this topic will end up into this.Competition comes from the perception of scarcity while creativity comes from and leads to abundance. If you can create you don't need to worry about competition. When you’re competing with people, it’s because you’re copying them. No one can compete with you on being you. Copycatting is a part of Chinese culture. Ten years ago, Shenzhen was 90% about copycatting and 10% innovation. Now, it's 70% innovation and 30% copycatting.There are two kinds of evolution: the genetic kind and the cultural kind. Both shape our behavior and mindset, and the cultural kind has gotten a lot faster.You don’t need a totalitarian figure to realize that you are oppressed. Oppression is manifested in different ways. You are oppressed through social norms, through limiting beliefs, through facile and prosaic views. Only awareness and intellectual depth can battle this.The culture is kind of an operating system, and the operating system stays intact even as you put different programs through it.Few of us are immune to the values of the people around us. The culture is so strong that people are absorbed into it and become part of it and do it willingly, and if someone is not willing, then the guys around them are so strong that they will pull them into the culture.One of the most important things I’ve come to understand is that Eastern culture, which values sustainability, safety, community common good, rules & system, is best at value preservation (aka you’re already doing well and just want to make sure nothing gets screwed up).In Asia, stability is prized. Inequality is much less tolerated. There’s a culture of sharing. People aren’t so cutthroat. It's something in the culture that's made Asian/Chinese people become a creature of convention, shun failure and variation, more risk-averse, scared to take ambitious swings to be themselves, extreme lack of critical thinking, deferring to groupthink, and perceive human engagement as competition rather than collaboration.Western culture, which values risk-taking, personal freedom and citizen empowerment, is best at value creation (aka creating value from scratch).Guess which culture does better in innovation?* There is plenty of evidence:For decades, the online infrastructure — from design to programming languages to wireless protocols — came from the West. China has long been known for cyber and intellectual property theft and protectionist regulation. We only need to look at the amount of money paid by Chinese companies to Western companies for the license of technology, intellectual property, plans, designs, formulas and so forth.In 2007, agents of the Chinese military hacked the aerospace firm Lockheed Martin and stole tens of millions of documents related to America’s most expensive weapons system, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. A notably similar Chinese plane, the J-31, appeared soon thereafter. (China denies stealing the plans.)The Chinese hacking of American businesses exposed a deep clash of perceptions: America was starting to see China as a near-peer, intent on flouting rules laid down mostly by the West. But China still regarded itself as a scrappy latecomer, using whatever tools it could to protect and improve the lives of a vast population.That clash extends far beyond hacking: China has invoked its status as a “developing country” to erect barriers against foreign competitors, and to coerce American companies into sharing technology. Eventually, those practices turned some American businesses from ardent advocates for good relations into fierce critics. When China joined the World Trade Organization, in 2001, it agreed to a schedule for dropping tariffs and opening markets. But that schedule ended in 2006, and so did the momentum toward opening.Chinese hackers at the behest of various agencies—military, intelligence—roamed farther and wider. In 2014, they stole the private records of twenty-two million U.S. government employees and their relatives from a server at the Office of Personnel Management. It was more alarming than the usual breach; foreign spy agencies could use those records to identify people who work covertly as U.S. employees, or have secrets that would make them vulnerable to blackmail. The following year, Xi promised Obama to curtail hacking, and it briefly died down, but China’s cyber attacks have since resumed, including “widespread operations to target engineering, telecommunications, and aerospace industries,” according to a 2018 report by the U.S. intelligence community.In recent years, the FBI frequently arrests Chinese nationals for stealing research-and-development secrets. The U.S. government estimates that China’s intellectual-property theft costs America as much as $500 billion a year, or between $4,000 and $6,000 per U.S. household.The U.S. has prosecuted at least half a dozen Chinese students and scholars for spying or for stealing scientific research. In 2017, four Chinese intelligence officers of the People’s Liberation Army’s 54th Research Institute stole trade secrets and hacked credit-reporting giant Equifax, which compromised the personal data of nearly 150 million Americans. The group ran approximately 9,000 queries while routing traffic through 34 servers to secretly obtain names, birth dates, social security and driver’s license numbers for nearly half of all American citizens, before compressing and exporting the data. In 2018, Ji Chaoqun, an electrical-engineering student at the Illinois Institute of Technology, was charged with acting as an agent for China’s Ministry of State Security, and accused of trying to recruit spies among engineers and scientists. (Ji has pleaded not guilty.) Christopher Wray, the director of the F.B.I., warned the Senate Judiciary Committee that China has enlisted “nontraditional collectors” of intelligence to steal their way up the economic ladder at our expense. Federal law enforcement agencies also announced charges against a Chinese national who is accused of working with the Chinese army while she was allegedly a student at Boston University. Yanqing Ye, an alleged lieutenant in the People's Liberation Army, conducted research for China's National University of Defense Technology while she attended Boston University from October 2017 to April 2019. She is also charged with granting a military researcher in China access to her BU virtual private network login so the researcher could conduct web searches from overseas without detection. She is said to have left the country before charges could be unsealed. Until the head of Harvard’s Chemistry Department was arrested in 2020, China was allegedly paying him $50,000 a month as part of a plan to attract top scientists and reward them for stealing information. Federal prosecutors charged him with lying to the Department of Defense about his work for a Chinese-run The Thousand Talents program that tries to recruit experts from Western universities to work in China and ramp up its progress in science and technology. The FBI said the program has rewarded individuals for stealing proprietary information and violating export controls. China is also behind recent breaches US officials, including at a US federal gov office, the hotel chain Marriott, and the health insurer Anthen. The professor has pleaded not guilty to making false statements to U.S. authorities. Three scientists were ousted in 2019 from MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston over concerns about China’s theft of cancer research.China’s first-generation Internet entrepreneurs unabashedly created copies of successful American start-ups Yahoo, Amazon, Facebook, Google and eBay. China’s powerful BAT companies — Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent are Chinese equivalents of Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook. People call Baidu as the Google of China, Sina as the Yahoo of China because they’re pretty much US ideas. Microsoft for many years complained of the piracy of their intellectual property in China. Though now Chinese technocrats are breaking boundaries with their own business models and disruptive innovations.For years, the copycat products that emerged from China’s cultural stew were widely mocked by the Silicon Valley elite. They were derided as cheap knockoffs, embarrassments to their creators and unworthy of the attention of true innovators. That’s why it’s very difficult for any Chinese company to go to the US market. There was this parallel universe of Chinese companies that pretty much only were offering their services in China. And we had Tencent who was trying to spread some of their services into Southeast Asia. Alibaba has spread a bunch of their payment services to Southeast Asia. Broadly, in terms of global expansion, that had been pretty limited, and TikTok, which is built by this company Beijing ByteDance, is really the first consumer internet product built by one of the Chinese tech giants that is doing quite well around the world. It’s starting to do well in the US, especially with young folks. It’s growing really quickly in India. I think it’s past Instagram now in India in terms of scale. So yeah, it’s a very interesting phenomenon.These days, the most acute standoff between the two countries is over who will dominate the next generation of technologies. Under a plan called Made in China 2025, Beijing has directed billions in subsidies and research funds to help Chinese companies surpass foreign competitors on such frontiers as electric vehicles and robotics. A Pentagon report commissioned under Obama warned that the U.S. was losing cutting-edge technology to China, not only through theft but also through Chinese involvement in joint ventures and tech startups. It prompted Congress, in 2018, to tighten rules on foreign investment and export controls.The technology dispute escalated later that year, when the Trump Administration expanded an attack on Huawei, the world’s largest manufacturer of fifth-generation (5G) networking equipment, warning that the Chinese government could use the equipment for spying and hacking. Recently, the Justice Department unveiled new charges against the Chinese telecom company and its subsidiaries. The charges include racketeering conspiracy and conspiracy to steal trade secrets from US companies for over two decades. The DOJ accuses Huawei of stealing and copying US intellectual property (think: robots, cellular tech), and selling it in products around the world.But those outsiders missed what was brewing beneath the surface. The most valuable product to come out of China’s copycat era wasn’t a product at all: it was the entrepreneurs themselves.China is watching Silicon Valley. That's why Chinese founders usually have comprehensive knowledge about their US competitors, listing off minute product features and the latest numbers on their size and traction.Chinese people clearly stay on top of Silicon Valley. I can count at least ten Chinese publications that focus solely on Silicon Valley news. On 36Kr, a mainstream Chinese tech news outlet (think of it as the TechCrunch of China), close to half of the articles every day cover FAANG (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google).When Facebook reported its security incident, related posts flooded my WeChat Moment timeline even faster than my Twitter feed. Once, I sent an English article about Instagram’s latest product change to a friend living in China, thinking that this would be news to her. She replied and said: “I read about this on Chinese sites three days ago. Have you been living under a rock?”One thing is clear: people in China–at least those in the tech circle–are not living under a rock. Every time you go to China, you would be humbled by people’s extensive knowledge of entrepreneurs and companies across the Pacific. I have met Chinese people who can recite Paul Graham’s essays, Ray Dalio’s principles, and Elon Musk’s latest tweets. The Chinese version of Crunchbase maintains extremely up-to-date–even encyclopedic–coverage of US startups’ fundraising activities. Chinese people do not need anyone to tell them how the US works.On the other hand, when you ask founders in Silicon Valley about Company Z in China, they often have no idea about its existence.Many well-educated Americans can’t name a single Chinese entrepreneur beyond Jack Ma. Even though China has become home to around a hundred unicorns (as many as the US), people in Silicon Valley struggle to name even one. It is rare to encounter American entrepreneurs who have set foot in China, whereas many Chinese entrepreneur have traveled to Silicon Valley. Many in the US are unaware that some of the world’s most innovative products come from China, and I believe that China remains under- and poorly covered in most Western media outlets.It makes me wonder how there can be so much information asymmetry in the tech world between the US and China.What explains this knowledge gap?The word “hunger” often comes up when they describe the Chinese entrepreneurs they meet. Why? Because if you are an entrepreneur in China, you are living a hunger game. Chinese people have a strong desire to copy American innovations and beat them in their game. It is a middle-income country with a well telegraphed desire to become the world’s pre-eminent power over the course of the next few decades. The Chinese market is so brutally competitive that if you don’t do everything it takes and learn all the best practices to win, you will almost certainly lose. It’s part of the reason why Chinese founders are like sponges in water–always absorbing knowledge and learning what’s working in other markets, so that they can improve their products and themselves. This “hunger” is something I see more of in China (and other emerging markets) than in the US, and it is my best explanation for the knowledge gap.Of course, language gap is another big factor–almost every Chinese entrepreneur I meet can speak English to some degree, whereas the number of American entrepreneurs who can speak Chinese can be counted with one hand. Granted, this has to do with the fact that English is a global lingua franca and Chinese is not. But I would argue that language proficiency is a function of hunger as well–if you are not hungry to learn about the outside world, you would not be motivated to take the time and effort to learn a foreign language.Having got to know about Silicon Valley for a while now, I see how easy it is to think that they are sitting in the mecca for world-class technology, that America still has the monopoly on real innovation, or that a VC can learn everything there is to know about tech without traveling much outside of Menlo Park.* What explains this copycat culture?The idea of progress itself is a relatively new. Before then, most cultures had the opposite idea of ancestor worship: that our ancestors were the greatest people who ever lived, that all the important knowledge was revealed to them, and all we should do is study them.Silicon Valley’s and China’s internet ecosystems grew out of very different cultural soil.Entrepreneurs in the valley are often the children of successful professionals, such as computer scientists, dentists, engineers, and academics. Growing up they were constantly told that they—yes, they in particular—could change the world. Their undergraduate years were spent learning the art of coding from the world’s leading researchers but also basking in the philosophical debates of a liberal arts education. When they arrived in Silicon Valley, their commutes to and from work took them through the gently curving, tree-lined streets of suburban California.It’s an environment of abundance that lends itself to lofty thinking, to envisioning elegant technical solutions to abstract problems. People are taught that crowds can be wrong, and that it’s a duty to stand apart if you disagree. Maybe these frequent exhortations to avoid groupthink increases independent thinking on the margins. Throw in the valley’s rich history of computer science breakthroughs, and you've set the stage for the geeky-hippie hybrid ideology that has long defined Silicon Valley. Central to that ideology is a wide-eyed techno-optimism, a belief that every person and company can truly change the world through innovative thinking. Copying ideas or product features is frowned upon as a betrayal of the zeitgeist and an act that is beneath the moral code of a true entrepreneur. It’s all about “pure” innovation, creating a totally original product that generates what Steve Jobs called a “dent in the universe.”Startups that grow up in this kind of environment tend to be mission-driven. They start with a novel idea or idealistic goal, and they build a company around that. Company mission statements are clean and lofty, detached from earthly concerns or financial motivations.In stark contrast, China’s startup culture is the yin to Silicon Valley’s yang: instead of being mission-driven, Chinese companies are first and foremost market-driven. Their ultimate goal is to make money, and they’re willing to create any product, adopt any model, or go into any business that will accomplish that objective. That mentality leads to incredible flexibility in business models and execution, a perfect distillation of the “lean startup” model often praised in Silicon Valley. It doesn’t matter where an idea came from or who came up with it. All that matters is whether you can execute it to make a financial profit. The core motivation for China’s market-driven entrepreneurs is not fame, glory, or changing the world. Those things are all nice side benefits, but the grand prize is getting rich, and it doesn’t matter how you get there.Jarring as that mercenary attitude is to many Americans, the Chinese approach has deep historical and cultural roots. Rote memorization formed the core of Chinese education for millennia. Chinese education system emphasizes memorization, rather than solving the problem. Entry into the country’s imperial bureaucracy depended on word-for-word memorization of ancient texts and the ability to construct a perfect “eight-legged essay” following rigid stylistic guidelines. While Socrates encouraged his students to seek truth by questioning everything, ancient Chinese philosophers counseled people to follow the rituals of sages from the ancient past. Rigorous copying of perfection was seen as the route to the true mastery.Layered atop this cultural propensity for imitation is the deeply ingrained scarcity mentality of twentieth-century China. Most Chinese tech entrepreneurs are at most one generation away from grinding poverty that stretches back centuries. Many are only children—products of the now-defunct “One Child Policy”—carrying on their backs the expectations of two parents and four grandparents who have invested all their hopes for a better life in this child. Growing up, their parents didn’t talk to them about changing the world. Rather, they talked about survival, about a responsibility to earn money so they can take care of their parents when their parents are too old to work in the fields. A college education was seen as the key to escaping generations of grinding poverty, and that required tens of thousands of hours of rote memorization in preparing for China’s notoriously competitive entrance exam. During these entrepreneurs’ lifetimes, China wrenched itself out of poverty through bold policies and hard work, trading meal tickets for paychecks for equity stakes in startups.The blistering pace of China’s economic rise hasn’t alleviated that scarcity mentality. Chinese citizens have watched as industries, cities, and individual fortunes have been created and lost overnight in a Wild West environment where regulations struggled to keep pace with cutthroat market competition. Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese leader who pushed China from Mao-era egalitarianism to market-driven competition, once said that China needed to “let some people get rich first” in order to develop. But the lightning speed of that development only heightened fears and concerns that if you don’t move quickly— if you don’t grab onto this new trend or jump into that new market—you’ll stay poor while others around you get rich.Combine these three currents—a cultural acceptance of copying, a scarcity mentality, and the willingness to dive into any promising new industry—and you have the psychological foundations of China’s internet ecosystem.The reason for this is they have an economic system that can’t deliver.In a socialist economy, you get a one-size-fits-all adjustment. Every adjustment needs to be commanded. Communicate it down and get everybody to do the right thing. That’s impossible. You miss out on this learning process where entrepreneurs copy others when they see things successful and stop doing it when it’s not. In a market economy, everybody’s little adjustments get tested, and we get to see what works.This is not meant to preach a gospel of cultural determinism. Birthplace and heritage are not the sole determinants of behavior. Personal eccentricities and government regulation are hugely important in shaping company behavior. Maybe taxes and regulations matter more after all; I also don’t want to pass over cultural norms that stigmatize failure. If the limiting factors to great entrepreneurship is independent thinking combined with courage (courage is in shorter supply than capital or genius), then maybe it’s better to be away from innovation. After all, policies are easier to fix than the social environment. (See II below)In Beijing, entrepreneurs often joke that Facebook is “the most Chinese company in Silicon Valley” for its willingness to copy from other startups and for Zuckerberg’s fiercely competitive streak. Likewise, I saw how government antitrust policy can defang a wolf-like company. But history and culture do matter, and in comparing the evolution of Silicon Valley and Chinese technology, it’s crucial to grasp how different cultural melting pots produced different types of companies.* Copycat culture could mean fragility for China's technology. Here's how:I'm skeptical of copying things. To the extent you're trying to copy Silicon Valley, you're ready putting yourself in some in a weird derivative position. You know, you don't want to be the Harvard of North Dakota. The something of somewhere is often the nothing of nowhere.China’s technology foundations are fragile, which the trade war has made evident.The trade war produced the clearest evidence that China’s technology foundations are fragile. When the US government decided to restrict technology exports to particular firms, it drove ZTE to near bankruptcy, crippled the operations of Fujian Jinhua, and has at least dealt a major blow to Huawei. US sanctions have revealed that most Chinese firms engage in only a thin layer of innovation, and that Chinese firms in general have not had serious success mastering more foundational technologies. The most important of these is the semiconductor. Without particular chips like CPUs, GPUs, and FPGAs, which for the most part come from American providers, even a firm as large as Huawei can struggle.The US has the policy tools in place to slow down China’s technology progress, at least in the short term. Creating hassles for large companies slow down the entire ecosystem, because leading companies spend the most on R&D and serve as downstream buyers. The US can escalate the use of export controls in still more ominous ways, and in some cases also prevent other countries from shipping goods to China. CFIUS will make it more difficult for Chinese firms to engage in technological learning through equity investments. And if US tariffs stay on for an extended period, Chinese firms will not be able to learn to improve their products in the world’s largest market of sophisticated consumers. The medium-term outlook for China’s technology progress is in my view not so cheerful.Failure to develop more foundational technologies has meant that the US has had an at-will ability to kneecap major firms, and to be able to impose at least significant operational hassles on Huawei. Over the medium term, US controls will disrupt the ability of Chinese firms to acquire leading technologies. And so long as substantial US tariffs stay in place, Chinese firms will have worse access to the world’s largest and best consumer market, meaning that they’ll be exposed to less export discipline.It’s now a matter of national security for China to strengthen every major technological capability. The US responded to the rise of the USSR and Japan by focusing on innovation; it’s early days, but so far the US is responding to the technological rise of China mostly by kneecapping its leading firms. So instead of realizing its own Sputnik moment, the US is triggering one in China.The most frightening aspect of this crisis is not the short-term economic damage it is causing though, but the potential long-lasting disruption to supply chains.China is losing its prowess as the only game in town for whatever widget one wants to make was already under way. It was moving at a panda bear’s pace, though.Under President Trump, that slow moving panda moved a little faster. Companies didn’t like the uncertainty of tariffs. If Trump wins re-election, it will only speed up this process, as companies will fear what happens if the phase two trade deal fails.After US sanctions started taking down giants, private companies are thinking more carefully about how to maintain continuous access to supplies. US political actions are now as unpredictable as major earthquakes, and have the same effects on supply chains. Every company has to cultivate non-US, and ideally Chinese alternatives. That task is taken most seriously by the technology sector, since the lack of only a few components can defeat a system as complex as a smartphone or base station.* What's the solution?We intuitively know that the physical and cultural environment matters.You don’t control everything in your environment, but you control enough to make a huge difference. Think about what you control and how you can change it to get more horsepower out of your brain.Any time you sincerely want to make a change, the first thing you must do is to raise your standards. If you’re lucky you end up with environment that have high standards. If you’re not that lucky, there is a few things you can do to help raise the bar.In a world that attempts to impose certain norms upon us, it is the duty of the sovereign individual to question those norms. It was understandable back in the Middle Ages to look at the pyramids, or the ruins left from the ancient Romans and believe they were the peak of civilization. Ancestor worship had to be challenged and overturned to have the scientific and industrial revolutions and be forward looking.Although gene and culture are important, we now have many ways to create “instincts”: we can structure our environment for the type of person we want to become. We can LEARN to do better or worse. We can pass on traditions about how to deal with modern risks, just as we pass on language. We can unlearn what society tells us to do and think for ourselves.When it comes to getting better at thinking and making decisions, we place all the emphasis on the conscious brain, learning mental models and methods of thinking that improve outcomes. In so doing, we improve the raw horsepower of our brain. Yet, there is no point having a 400 horsepower engine if you can only get 25 horsepower out of it.China’s technology foundation has been fragile, but it will patch up now that everyone has realized it.Over the longer term, I expect that China will stiffen those foundations and develop firms capable of pushing forward the technological frontier, and Chinese firms will build strong technological capabilities, with companies that will reach the leading edge and push it forward.I am constructive for China’s longer-term industrial development. I think that long-term prospects are bright. In my view, Chinese firms face favorable odds first in reaching the technological frontier and next in pushing it forward. The country still feels like a highly optimistic place. International survey results consistently show that Chinese rank at the top of feeling optimism for the future. If you're optimistic, the future will take care of itself. If you're pessimistic, we're headed the apocalypse. And in my view, government institutions are organized around the ideas of adaptation and progress. Consider a few of their names. In 2003, the economic super-ministry renamed itself from the State Planning Commission to the National Development and Reform Commission. The most important government body is the Central Commission for Comprehensively Deepening Reform. “Development” and “reform” are splendidly Hegelian ideas: both are forward-looking and without end. Surely it’s better to be a developing country than a developed one, for the latter means that everything is done and finished. The implication behind developed being that there is no more growth to go. And a commitment to continuous “reform” recognizes the impossibility of overcoming every contradiction entailed by modernization, and therefore institutions need to be perpetually adaptive. Incantation alone cannot make something true, but getting names right is a nice part of institutional success.Companies were doing what they always do - search the world with the lowest costs of production. Maybe that meant labor costs. Maybe it meant regulations of some kind or another. They were already doing that as China moves up the ladder in terms of wages and environmental regulations.No country has the logistic set up like China has. Few big countries have the tax rates that China has. Brazil surely doesn’t. India does. But it has terrible logistics.I consider two advantages to be important: First, Chinese workers produce most of the world’s goods, which means that they’re capturing most of the knowledge that comes from the production process. Second, China is a large and dynamic market. On top of these structural factors, Chinese firms have stiffened their resolve to master important technologies after repeated US sanctions.I believe that technology ultimately progresses because of people and the deepening of the process knowledge they possess, and that the creation of new tools and IP are the milestones of better training. We should distinguish technology in three forms: tools, direct instructions (like blueprints and IP), and process knowledge. The third is most important: Process knowledge is hard to write down as an instruction: you can give someone a well-equipped kitchen and an extraordinarily detailed recipe, but absent cooking experience, it’s hard to make a great dish.On the supply side, Chinese workers engage in a greater amount of technological learning than anyone else, for the simple reason that most supply chains are in China. Chinese workers are working with the latest tools to produce most of the world’s goods; over the longer term, my hypothesis is that they’ll be able to replicate the tooling and make just as good final products. They can do so because the domestic market is huge and dynamic. China today has a large industrial system with few missing backwards and forward linkages, which means it’s a mostly complete learning loop. The government and businesses are motivated by a sense of urgency to master most technologies. I expect that as China’s economy grows more sophisticated, its absorptive and learning capacity will improve.As a long-term strategy, our best hope lies in access to quality education, specifically an education that reinforces the autonomy of the individual by creating a culture that encourages long-term innovation, cultivating self-awareness, CRITICAL/INDEPENDENT THINKING, problem-solving, and emphasizing academic freedom. Education’s purpose is not to give you the answer or shove information in, but to stoke curiosity, fuel discovery, teach you how to be more self-aware (mission-driven), how to think, take risk, embrace failure and variation. Traditional school fails you on this point miserably. The problem is not people being uneducated. The problem is that we are educated just enough to believe what we have been taught, and not educated enough to question anything from what we have been taught. Schools educate us just enough to believe what we’ve been taught and not enough to think for ourselves. The problem with school is that you often become what you study instead of OWNING what you study.On the demand side, a huge and dynamic market will pull forward domestic capabilities. Technological learning in the labor force is a supply-side factor pulling forward the capabilities of Chinese firms. They benefit also from a demand-side factor: the domestic market is really big. People tend to forget that fact. China can become strong because of the tenacious entrepreneurs and the huge domestic market size of a homogenous country where everyone speaks the same language, the same culture, and there is a huge population (it has a population that is bigger than the combined population of Europe and America. It is more than four times as big as that of the US) without any competitors from the outside. In addition, China has developed an ecosystem with VCs and entrepreneurs and companies really helping each other grow iteratively. It’s true that Chinese firms haven’t yet had much success in creating global brands, but perhaps they can be forgiven for focusing on the world’s fastest-growing large market. The size of the market can overwhelm many deficiencies, like problems with the education system stifling creativity. And although consumer internet companies are not strategically so important, they buy upstream components, and are in a more credible position than European and Japanese firms in developing future digital technologies. China today is a huge internal market made up dynamic firms, ingenious workers, and a strong interest in technology. That’s rather like the US in the second half of the 19th century, which built the largest firms in the world mostly by relying on domestic demand.But I also recognize that this case is highly theoretical and a priori. There are many things that can get in the way. Perhaps workers fail to understand the tools they work with well enough to replicate it and invent the next iteration. Although the domestic market is large, policy distortions restrict competitive pressures. Productivity growth has been slowing down for a decade. And perhaps the market conditions aren’t yet right for engagement in high technology; it’s hard to see the case for investing in the development of the world’s best software and robotics systems when Chinese labor is still so much cheaper than developed levels. So let’s see how the constructive case runs against these practical challenges.II. AUTHORITARIAN SYSTEMPolitical system is one of the consequences of the culture.In the seven years since the president came to power, the Chinese state has become significantly more authoritarian.Chinese political values have long been at odds with the rest of the world’s. You can look at authoritarian societies see they didn't adopt what we view as universal values around freedoms. There is very little social redeeming value in the present governments in authoritarian countries.Its government is deciding which features of the global status quo to preserve and which to reject, not only in business, culture, and politics but also in such basic values as human rights.The treatment of Xinjiang is often cited as a sign of how far Beijing will go to repress freedom, fundamental human rights (free speech, free market, free enterprise system, free privacy, free religion and belief, freedom of assembly and freedom to petition the government) and crush cultural and regional diversity. And that’s their weakness.China is ranked the #113th in the annual Economic Freedom of the World 2019 (EFW) report.1. Strict Government Internet CensorshipChina is the friend we like, but whom we don't respect.They are friend who is rude and then complains that everyone else is rude. They want to play with everyone else, but want to change the rules to suit them. We would invite them to parties but they will sit in a corner not talking to others and then complain that everyone else is not very nice.Although China has some government advantage: building infrastructure, providing investments, and setting the countrywide direction, but starting 1996, the Chinese government began building great firewall to block out anything it did not want its people to know.The Great Firewall of China refers to the country’s online censorship system that blocks a range of foreign websites and slows down Internet traffic as it crosses the border. It’s why Chinese users can’t access Facebook, Twitter or YouTube. China's Great Firewall is already unique in its sophistication in enacting nationwide censorship. But as interesting as its history is, its future is equally fascinating and frightening. China wants this "cyber sovereignty" to become an international norm, and it's already using AI to tighten the screws on the few people left who bother trying to climb the wall.China's Great Firewall is more than just the reason people in the country can't access Facebook or YouTube. It has also played a huge role in shaping the country's Internet landscape, allowing giants like Baidu to emerge in the absence of Google. The Great Firewall has stifled innovation and creativity in China. But it’s also been said to help local tech companies by cutting off competition, leading to the rapid growth of homegrown tech giants like Baidu, Tencent and Alibaba, among a variety of other unique technology products that cater to domestic users. By setting up their firewall, they created an environment where their tech babies can grow up without being beaten up in the battle with the big boys. Thanks to China’s Great Firewall, Chinese tech companies don’t need to worry about competing with cash-flush American tech giants at home. They created copies of successful American start-ups in an existing market where they know there's high demand and also there's no competition. US tech companies that refused to help with censorship are gradually forced out or banned, and China’s Internet became kind of isolated island. Some American companies are worried that they will not be able to compete with China in its home market. That market has been mostly closed to foreigners. China can remain rich simply because it has a population that is bigger than the combined population of Europe and America (China’s population is more than four times as big as that of the US), so it has a big domestic market without any competitors from the outside.One way to get into China is to develop your product with a Chinese partner—creating the old capitalist/communist Frankenstein.* There is a lot of evidence:X Box and PlayStation were banned until 2014, for example. In Silicon Valley, some companies concluded that entering China had become all but impossible. Last year, Facebook, which had been asking China for years to let it operate there, abandoned the effort. Reed Hastings, the C.E.O. of Netflix, acknowledged the barriers before him, saying, “We will be blocked in China for a long time.” By then, the Chinese gamers had grown accustomed to mobile and PC games. Google left China to avoid censorship.In this place the Chinese company Baidu has become the largest search engine in the country. Alibaba has more sales than eBay and Amazon combined. There’s no Facebook in China, and the social messaging platform WeChat now has the user base the size of the entire population of North and South America. Chinese companies are already competing head to head with Silicon Valley and also markets like India, Japan, Southeast Asia, and South America.* What explains this censorship system?The desire to censor has always been a hallmark of intellectual insecurity. Those who can defend their ideas in a free marketplace of ideas don’t need to rig the game.As the Party returns to the idea that its absolute power is the only thing standing between China and chaos, the United States, and the embrace of markets, is increasingly seen as an enemy.China’s current leader casts himself as a defender against humiliation and threats from the outside. Xi Jinping promotes the view that China’s system presents an alternative to free-market democracy—what he has called “a new option for other countries and nations who want to speed up their development while preserving their independence.”Every city prizes security, but in Xi’s country it has been elevated to a state religion as his country fends off Western influence.The government had issued an unprecedented order, directing public institutions to remove all foreign computer equipment and software within three years.Instead of city walls, the Party relies on digital defenses; day by day, censors purify the Internet of subversive ideas, and facial-recognition technologies track people’s comings and goings.The simplest answer with which to start is: Because Beijing can.The Chinese probably believe that, even if their system is not fully accepted, history shows there will be little price to be paid for that. From Mao’s Great Leap Forward to Tiananmen Square, and from the internment camps of the Uighurs to the crackdown in Hong Kong, China’s leaders have seen time and again that foreign leaders and businessmen will still want to do business with them regardless of the scale of the atrocity. In recent years, there has been an obvious change in how many in the West view China. But one has yet to see a fundamental reordering of relations with Beijing in Berlin, Paris or London despite that change. Even in the case of Washington, there is a question of just how far America will be willing to go in disengaging from the Chinese market.* Here's what this censorship system could mean for China’s economy — and the world:The only two ways to coordinate human societies at scale are free markets and physical power. Any ideology rejecting free markets is just advocating for power. Socialism, communism, and fascism all converge to the same endpoint – rule by the biggest thug.This is bad news for the U.S. and other democratic nations. Visits to China, interactions with Chinese officials, and other such exchanges offer valuable insights into Beijing’s ambitions and behavior. What Beijing doesn’t seem to realize is that this is also bad news for China.After you compete and get a sense of how competitors behave and how strong they are, it actually makes sense to explore strategic investments and be able to partner. The more you’re willing to partner, that should grow the pie bigger as well.A country that still needs foreign investment and technology will not benefit from making foreign CEOs wonder whether they or their employees should take the risk of traveling there. A country that harps on how it is misunderstood and mistreated by the West will not benefit from constricting critical channels of communication. NGOs, journalists, and diplomats all play a role in connecting China to the wider world. The alternative is a China that is isolated, poorly understood, and cut off from important ideas and conversations.(*) The Great Firewall also is effective in another way: It promotes self-censorship.Concerns about getting blocked in China, or for Chinese netizens, getting a visit from the police, results in people not talking about certain topics or seeking out certain types of information.China maintains one of the most controlled, most oppressive, least free information spaces in the world. It’s hard to exercise political freedom if you don’t have economic freedoms. If you’re dependent upon the state for your livelihood, you lose your ability to use your voice to oppose (the state) because you can be punished.China is a top-down system, to put it mildly. Xi Jinping is both “grandpa Xi” and the country’s boss. Xi has cracked down on bad news leaking out from the mainland, so even if you could complain, it’s officially frowned upon.Mountains of information about China are hidden behind a language barrier, non-agreement to the Hague Convention on legal proceedings, a time difference, opaque ownership of Chinese companies, industrial secrecy, regime secrecy and a lack of those basic freedoms that allow the truth to come out. People in the West do not have much documentary evidence or sworn testimony in their hands, because China is still shrouded in secrecy, but it is obvious for the world to see.One rule for understanding authoritarian systems is that “you want to look at what they do and not what they say.” Authoritarian systems tend to hide internal problems from the rest of the world. Only a true emergency would force them to change their public messaging. For example, if a country like China, after downplaying the severity of the virus early on, is closing down a city of 11 million, this is a big deal. It is spreading. It is deadly. And we’re going to get hit.Another principle called the “principle of embarrassment” when trying to understand the historical accuracy of stories from authoritarian systems, is that “if a story is really embarrassing to the teller, you kind of think they might be telling the truth”. Because otherwise, it’s the kind of thing that people don’t usually admit about themselves, or institutions. For example, when China was telling us after January 20th that it was spreading during the incubation period from people that didn’t have symptoms, that was actually making it look very bad. Even then, many public health experts in the United States thought the Chinese were wrong, or lying, when they warned that the virus was spreading through asymptomatic transmission. China just really wants to prevent the pandemic because they covered it up for too long. Now it’s going to spread to the world. And they’re going to get blamed for it. It isn’t until a high‑stakes decision goes horribly wrong that people pause to reexamine their practices. So I had a completely different sense of what they said before January 20th when they lied and covered it up. And it was kind of not treated with the correct suspicion compared to what they said afterwards.It’s troubling that as the PRC [People’s Republic of China] restricts outlets and platforms from operating freely in China, Beijing’s leaders use free and open media environments overseas to promote misinformation.The reason I’m telling you all this is, there’s these ways in which even if you don’t necessarily have direct evidence on the medical ir political side, if you kind of understand how institutions and authoritarians work, there’s a way in which you get more information about their claims.It seems people in China do what they are asked to do. They follow the leader, so long as the leader is providing them with safety, employment and, for the higher educated, Western-style opportunities. I wasn’t there long enough to get a sense of people’s disdain for Xi, or the Communist Party. The country is slowing, but it is growing. If you had to chose a side, for or against Beijing, people are mostly pleased with what their country has become in this hybrid capitalist/communist system of theirs.As they should.There is no space for speech freedom in China now. Prescribed media guidelines are not unusual in China, where reporters and private newspapers and magazines operate within a heavily-censored environment that is tightly controlled by Communist authorities. We're increasingly seeing laws and regulations in China that undermine free expression and people's human rights. These local laws are each individually troubling, especially when they shut down speech by punishing dissent in places where there isn't democracy or freedom of the press. Free speech has been further restricted; civil rights lawyers have been locked up and non-governmental organizations have been closed down. Since he took power in late 2012, Xi has tightened ideological control and suppressed civil freedoms across the nation, reversing a trend under his predecessor to give Chinese media some limited scope to expose and report regional corruption and lower-level officials’ misdeeds. Even within the Communist party, cadres are threatened with disciplinary action for expressing opinions that differ from the leadership. The impacts on the individuals are multi-faceted. Economically, they would cut off your livelihood [academics get fired, writers can’t publish and no one dares hire you]. You would get sidelined by mainstream society, you’d lose friends and, worse than that, you might lose your personal freedoms, so a number of intellectual elites have chosen to leave China. Under Xi’s crackdown on speech and academic freedoms, a number of prominent liberal intellectuals, journalists, rights lawyers and NGO workers have either been silenced, jailed or escaped abroad.But it's even worse when it tries to impose their speech restrictions on the rest of the world. Chinese censorship is also spreading beyond its borders. Now, China is seeking to control not just what is said in China but what is said about China, too. China is not exporting a state ideology in the manner of the Soviet Union. But it wants to make the world more amenable to its ideology, so it has demanded extraterritorial censorship, compelling outsiders to accept limits on free speech beyond its borders. The increasingly Kafkaesque legal system of mainland China stands in stark contrast with the world’s rule of law. But during the Xi period, the mainland’s intolerance for free speech and thuggish attitude towards the law has seeped into other countries.The Chinese president is sincerely indifferent about whether a foreign country is a dictatorship or a democracy. Insisting that countries cannot have views on each other’s internal political systems is a vital defence mechanism for the Chinese Communist party as it fends off outside pressure on human rights or the rule of law. Beijing argues that foreigners who express views on a sensitive topic, such as Hong Kong, are interfering in China’s internal affairs. And this is where it crosses over into interference in free speech in the west. This is much more than an effort to stop foreigners standing in Tiananmen Square and shouting “freedom for Hong Kong”. China’s efforts to control and censor speech at home are gradually being internationalized, reaching into foreign corporations, the international media, the seminar rooms and campuses of western universities, and the statements and policies of foreign governments.China feels perfectly entitled to interfere when foreigners express views that displease Beijing. The increasingly tough tone of the Chinese media is part of Beijing’s efforts to inflame nationalism at home and intimidate multinational companies into toeing the party line. The Communist state is becoming more and more aggressive in pressuring foreign companies to choose between self-censorship and the loss of access to what will soon be the world’s largest market. It showed the government’s eagerness to punish foreign companies until they embraced the party’s point of view wholeheartedly. If you show your willingness to back down and kowtow to the party, the party considers you a pushover. They will increasingly encroach on your bottom line.When it comes to the media and academia, Beijing uses both visas and market access as a weapon. China specialists who are barred from the country can have their careers blighted. So the pressure to self-censor is huge.This raises a larger question about the future of the global Internet. China is building its own Internet focused on very different values, and is now exporting the authoritarian social values and visions of its tightly-controlled internet culture to other countries. Until recently, the Internet in almost every country outside China has been defined by American platforms with strong free expression values. There's no guarantee these values will win out. A decade ago, almost all of the major Internet platforms were American. Today, six of the top ten are Chinese.Obviously, China wants to be the dominant economic and military power of the world, spreading its authoritarian vision for society and its corrupt practices worldwide.So far this century, democracy and free speech only exist in America.* There is a lot of evidence:The country is expelling three reporters from The Wall Street Journal. Earlier this month, the outlet published a coronavirus-related opinion piece with a headline that China called racist. In response, it's now revoking three reporters' press credentials – though it seems none of them contributed to the opinion piece. And it's calling on the Journal to apologize and "hold the persons involved accountable." China has long tried to silence critics at home. But this is seen as an escalation to do that abroad, as it's rare for China to expel a foreign correspondent.We're beginning to see this in social media. While WhatsApp is used by protesters and activists everywhere due to strong encryption and privacy protections, on TikTok, the Chinese app growing quickly around the world, mentions of Hong Kong protests are censored, even in the US.A pro-Hong Kong tweet from the general manager of the Houston Rockets about his support of the Hong Kong protests led to a clash between China and America’s National Basketball Association, which resulted in NBA games being pulled from Chinese state television. This row was unusually high-profile because it featured the US and sport. But it fits a familiar pattern. Foreign countries and companies now have to cope with Chinese efforts to police their speech on an ever-widening range of taboo subjects, including Tibet, Taiwan, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, recent Chinese history, human rights and Beijing’s territorial claims in the South and East China Seas.Last year, the Chinese government demanded that foreign airlines remove references to Taiwan from their websites, because China views Taiwan as a renegade province. Other companies that have bowed to pressure from Beijing include Marriott hotels and United Airlines, both of which were accused of encouraging the idea that Taiwan is a separate country.People’s Daily, the flagship newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party, and the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs took aim at Apple, accusing it of serving as an “escort” for “rioters” in Hong Kong by providing an app that allows protesters to track police movements.Months earlier, at the request of the Chinese government, Shutterstock had begun censoring a few searches by users based in China for politically volatile subjects like "Taiwan flag."China has placed similar pressure on the Italian company Versace; German companies, including Mercedes-Benz; and airlines from around the world.The BBC’s World News television channel has been officially banned from broadcasting in China. BBC World News has never been allowed to broadcast into Chinese homes, having been blacked by censorship rules. It was previously possible to view the news channel only at certain international hotels.* Why does China want to repress free speech?Overlapping the desire to look more successful in handling issues is Beijing’s goal of preserving Chinese President Xi’s reputation as an effective leader. Although it is correct to see Xi Jinping as perhaps the most powerful PRC leader since Mao, or at least Deng Xiaoping, that power has come at the expense of the more typical consensus-style rule that preceded him. Xi has consolidated his sway not by accommodating his rivals but by squeezing them through intimidation and arrests in the guise of cleaning up the Party. Given how much corruption there was—and because it was an essential element in leading party members to be “loyal” to the existing regime—Xi’s anti-corruption effort has both increased his power by cowering or eliminating pockets of competitors within the Party and, at the same time, likely narrowed his base of support within the Party. As long as Xi is seen as being successful, there is little room to challenge his rule. Should that assessment change, however, it is not hard to imagine grudge-holding party members attempting to coalesce in an effort to challenge him.* What could self-censorship mean for China?China has some of the most severe restrictions on media and internet freedoms across the globe, and this step will only damage China’s reputation in the eyes of the world. Nationalism could get out of hand and hurt China’s global image. Beijing’s way of dealing with criticism is eroding its soft power.None of this is good news for China’s long-term international aims. Beijing has plenty it can offer the world, even to advanced nations such as Sweden. But being seen as bullying is no way to bring them willingly onside.While popularity alone cannot secure long-term influence, alienating countries with what they perceive to be threats is not the way to prove a country’s global leadership qualities.China fully understands that it needs to boost its soft power to achieve its ultimate aim of total rejuvenation. Trust and respect are two fundamental pillars of this soft power and, although there will be many in China who deny it, it is clear that these pillars are being chipped away by Beijing’s way of dealing with criticism.It really is insane for anyone to hope for more regulation on speech. It's completely unprincipled. You need to imagine your enemies in control of those tools. That should include the politicians you think are lying and the opaque media companies you already don't trust.Freedom of speech is detestable only to those who have no desire to think for themselves.The most contrarian thing of all is not to oppose the crowd but to think for yourself. The key to doing something great is to uncover insight hidden from popular opinion, or in other words to think for yourself. Great things are built by people who discover secrets hidden by conventional opinions.If you do not learn from others, you are functionally illiterate and you will be incompetent because your personal experiences aren’t broad enough to sustain you. Your personal experiences make up maybe 0.00000001% of what’s happened in the world but maybe 80% of how you think the world works. The most successful people are all huge learners.The idea of facing the unvarnished truth makes us anxious. To get over that, we need to understand intellectually why untruths are scarier than truths and then, through practice, get accustomed to living with them.People are not free when they are given information that makes them feel good—true freedom requires the ability to confront information that feels bad. We have nothing to fear from knowing the truth. Criticism is the best thing that can happen to a person/company/country. 1/ It means people care. 2/ It shows you what you can improve.There’s no downside to challenging your own ideas and beliefs (other than, perhaps, patience). One of two things will happen: 1/ You will discover that you are wrong. 2/ Or you will improve that arguments for your own ideas.It is better to be divided by truth than to be united in error. It is better to speak the truth that hurts and then heals, than falsehood that comforts and then kills.If you’re sick, it’s natural to fear your doctor’s diagnosis—what if it’s cancer or some other deadly disease? As scary as the truth may turn out to be, you will be better off knowing it in the long run because it will allow you to seek the most appropriate treatment. The same holds for learning painful truths about your own strengths and weaknesses. Knowing and acting on the truth is what I call the “big deal” for a country. It’s important not to get hung up on all those emotion- and ego-laden “little deals” that can distract you from the overall mission.It's usually a red flag when someone gets mad at you for disagreeing with them. When two people believe opposite things, chances are that one of them is wrong. It pays to find out if that someone is you. That’s why I believe you must appreciate and develop the art of thoughtful disagreement. This is a critical principle for our society now. It’s very relevant in terms of us getting to the best answers together. The alternative is very scary. In thoughtful disagreement, your goal is not to convince the other party that you are right—it is to find out which view is true and decide what to do about it. In thoughtful disagreement, both parties are motivated by the genuine fear of missing important perspectives. Exchanges in which you really see what the other person is seeing and they really see what you are seeing—with both your “higher-level yous” trying to get to the truth—are immensely helpful and a giant source of untapped potential.You must not let your need to be right be more important than your need to find out what’s true. If you don’t mind being wrong on the way to being right, you’ll learn a lot--and increase your effectiveness. But if you can’t tolerate being wrong, you won’t grow, you’ll make yourself and everyone around you miserable, and your work environment will be marked by petty backbiting and malevolent barbs rather than by a healthy, honest search for truth.One reason that freedom of speech is so important is that doubt is the foundation of science. When you close a topic to discussion, you are saying that it is decided, and scientific inquiry is no longer allowed into that domain. There's no innovation without doubt. It is doubt that challenges and reforms old ideas. Think about a stand up comedian — they are CONSTANTLY tweaking their set to make it perfect. We should be constantly tweaking our processes to make them perfect as well. Try different things — always be experimenting.“The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.” — Bertrand RussellThere are no bad or good ideas or new ideas. There are only early ideas… They’ll all happen. It’ll all happen. I’ve become convinced now it’ll all happen. Every smart person has a crazy idea, it’s all going to happen at some point. They will all happen. It’s just a question of when. It’s all about execution. Some are just executed better than others. Every idea can be good if it is at the right time, right place and be executed by the right people. No matter how good your idea is, it can be bad if one of those three is missing.You must have contention, a clash of ideas. If Galileo had not challenged the Pope, we would still believe the world is flat, right? And Christopher Columbus might never have discovered America.The conventional-minded say, as they always do, that they don't want to shut down the discussion of all ideas, just the bad ones. You'd think it would be obvious just from that sentence what a dangerous game they're playing. But I'll spell it out. There are two reasons why we need to be able to discuss even "bad" ideas. The first is that any process for deciding which ideas to ban is bound to make mistakes. ... The second reason it's dangerous to ban the discussion of ideas is that ideas are more closely related than they look.People hate things that contradict their deeply-held beliefs. But since ideas that contradict deeply-held beliefs are the most interesting (see the history of physics for example), anyone on the hunt for interesting ideas will tend to offend a lot of people.Also, if you try to control every-thing, you train your citizens to defer to you—and you train them to fear risk.Civil society is a place where all ideas can be criticized without the risk of physical violence.“Artists” calling for censorship don’t know what art is. “Scientists” citing consensus don’t know what science is. “Teachers” indoctrinating students don’t know what teaching is. “Journalists” parroting propaganda don’t know what reporting is. Programming us all day long.Unfortunately, that's increasingly becoming their culture. We're seeing the impulse to restrict speech and enforce new norms around what people can say. In the current political atmosphere, which values obedience more than competence, local people have an incentive to avoid taking responsibility. Increasingly, we're seeing people try to define more speech as dangerous because it may lead to political outcomes they see as unacceptable. Some hold the view that since the stakes are so high, they can no longer trust their fellow citizens with the power to communicate and decide what to believe for themselves.Americans think that free speech and freedom of press is basic for people. But in China they think state capacity, collective culture, the community, the country, are the first things they need to think about. Most ordinary Chinese people don’t understand why democracy is so important for America. They’ll say, “Yes, America brings democracy to Iraq, to Afghanistan, to lots of countries. But these countries are getting killed now.” They say, “We’re not democratic, but we live in a peaceful country. We have a good living standard.” They are too quick to dismiss what people love about life outside. They’ve lost their basic ability to think independently. If peace means a willingness to lose freedom and basic human rights, dominated politically, humiliated and segregated, I don't want peace! It also strikes me that they are expert practitioners of “whataboutism", countering any criticism of China by pointing to a different sin committed by the West — though in this case I find the comparison unconvincing.The death on 7 February of doctor Li Wenliang, who had tried to warn colleagues about the virus but was reprimanded and silenced by security forces, triggered an outpouring of grief and anger and an unusual public discussion about censorship. It is an encouraging sign that so many Chinese netizens have this time sensed that freedom and democracy is not just an abstract slogan, but a practical value that might some day protect their own lives and assets. When enough people realize the values of democracy and freedom align not only with some moral high ground but also benefit their daily lives, the momentum for change will be unstoppable. The biggest concern, though, is that they will cherry-pick their demands for freedom of speech, as in the Li case. If they avoid seeing the system itself as the root of the problem, they will never eradicate the true cause of the crisis, and we will see more martyrs.* What's the solution?China should stop worrying about looking good—instead they should worry about achieving their goals.Put their insecurities away and get on with achieving their goals. Reflect and remind themselves that an accurate criticism is the most valuable feedback they can receive. They need to learn from those they disagree with, or even offend them. See if they can find the truth in what they believe. Trying to understand the reasoning of people who disagree with them is the quickest way to get an education and to increase their probability of being right. Imagine how silly and unproductive it would be to respond to your ski instructor as if he were blaming you when he told you that you fell because you didn’t shift your weight properly. It’s no different if a supervisor points out a flaw in your work process. Fix it and move on.China needs to avoid alienating others and learn how to influence people if it is to cement its place at the top.It is often said that Beijing political elites are encouraged to read the works of the great thinkers of the West. This will allow an insight into the Western mind that will be useful in replicating the West’s global success. One slightly less highbrow tome they might want to put on the reading list is Dale Carnegie’s 1936 classic How to Win Friends and Influence People. The original self-help book has some advice for countries wanting to win over the world, with tips that include “how to change people without giving offence”, “the only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it”, and “make the other person happy about doing the thing you suggest”.That might all be useful instruction for a country that is, rightly or wrongly, increasingly being seen as an international bully.To do this well, approach the conversation in a way that conveys that they’re just trying to understand. Having open-minded conversations with believable people who disagree with them is the quickest way to get an education and to increase their probability of being right. Use questions rather than make statements. Conduct the discussion in a calm and dispassionate manner, and encourage the other person to do that as well. Remember, they are not arguing; they are openly exploring what’s true. Be reasonable and expect others to be reasonable. If they’re calm, collegial, and respectful they will do a lot better than if they are not.Find the most believable people possible who disagree with them and try to understand their reasoning. Triangulate their view with believable people who are willing to disagree. By questioning experts individually and encouraging them to have thoughtful disagreement with each other that they can listen to and ask questions about, they can both raise their probability of being right and become much better educated. This is most true when the experts disagree with them or with each other. Smart people who can thoughtfully disagree are the greatest teachers, far better than a professor assigned to stand in front of a board and lecture at you. The knowledge you acquire usually leads to principles that you develop and refine for similar cases that arise in the future.They can control thought without limiting speech by defining the limits of acceptable thought while allowing for lively debate within these barriers. For example, Fox News and MSNBC set the implicit limits on acceptable political opinions in America.When I have kids someday, I think the most valuable thing I could teach them is being comfortable around people and opinions they disagree with. One of the qualities I most value in a person is “fun to disagree with,” and that, more than anything, has really shaped for me a life of wonderful, passionate weirdos.So the key here is to create a learning culture, in which people have the humility to know what they don’t know and the curiosity to rethink the way they’ve always done things. Requiring proof is an enemy of progress. This is why companies like Amazon use a principle of disagree and commit. The goal in a learning culture is to welcome all kinds of experiments, to make rethinking so familiar that it becomes routine and people don’t hesitate to pitch new ideas.In performance cultures, people are determined to prove themselves.In learning cultures, people are more interested in improving themselves — and the organization around them.The foundation of a learning culture is psychological safety — being able to take risks without fear of reprisal. When people have psychological safety, they’re more willing to acknowledge their own mistakes and figure out how to prevent them moving forward. They’re also more comfortable raising problems and exploring innovative solutions.Create the psychological safety for people to constantly rethink what’s possible.It's not psychological safety if people can only voice what you want to hear. Psychological safety begins with admitting our own mistakes and welcoming criticism from others. The goal is not to be comfortable. It's to create a climate where people can speak up without fear.Without psychological safety, people hide mistakes and withhold ideas. They aim to prove themselves and protect their image.With psychological safety, people admit errors and voice suggestions. They are willing to take risk and fail. They strive to improve themselves and protect their team.The standard advice for leaders on building psychological safety is to model openness and inclusiveness: Ask for feedback on how you can improve, and people will feel it’s safe to take risks.Although psychological safety erases the fear of challenging authority, it doesn’t necessarily motivate us to question authority in the first place. To build a learning culture, we also need to create a specific kind of accountability — one that leads people to think again about their decisions.2. Protectionist RegulationThe only two ways to coordinate human societies at scale are free markets and physical power. Any ideology rejecting free markets is just advocating for power. Socialism, communism, and fascism all converge to the same endpoint – rule by the biggest thug.Socialism appeals to people today because it promises “equality and social justice,” but look at its track record. In Russia, Cuba, North Korea, Nicaragua, Vietnam and China, socialism has meant a loss of freedom. Socialist experiments also failed in Israel, India, Great Britain, Afghanistan, Syria, Algeria, Cambodia, Somalia, etc. There are no socialist success stories.Only capitalist countries create real wealth. The history of humanity is poverty, starvation, early death. In the last 20 years, we’ve seen more humans escape extreme poverty than any other time in human history. That’s because of markets. Yet, millions vote for socialism.If we pursue free services and money we will drive more power into the hands of a larger and larger incompetent government, and I think we know where that will end up — and it won’t be great for anyone.If the state directs the economy, some government department must manage millions of production decisions and prices. That never works. No bureaucrat can anticipate the needs and wants of millions of people in different places. No politician can match the wisdom of decentralized entrepreneurs making subtle adjustments constantly.Some industries are government-owned, but when you look at things that are inefficiently done — public education, our congested streets — (it’s clear) socialized industries don’t work well.Speaking about regulatory problem, most economies have developed a near obsession with precautions that simply cannot be married to a culture of experimentation. A big obstacle to innovation is the slow pace of regulatory licensing. Incumbent vested interests, overcautious regulators, opportunistic activists and rent-seeking patent holders combine to oppose or delay almost every innovation.No one is attracted towards an authoritarian country (a system of government that is very authoritarian) or totalitarian dictatorship. Speaking about regulatory problem, some governments regulate too much. It cost too much to invent new things.Chinese people lack the freedom to fail.* There is a lot of evidence:This is not a happy time to be an entrepreneur seeking to list your firm on one of China's stock exchanges. Nor is your situation better if you’re one of the Securities Commission members charged with approving listing applications.Chinese companies aren’t doing very well, and Beijing thinks it’s because the standards on initial public offerings (IPOs) weren’t strict enough in the first place. A better winnowing process is needed to ensure that only the crème de la crème of Chinese companies gets listed. Those not making the grade are viewed as “locusts that must be killed,” or as viruses, with the commissioners’ mission being to “prevent diseases from entering the body via the mouth.” That kind of thinking would put a dampener on an entrepreneur seeking seed capital no matter how great he thinks his idea is.In China, the only way to obtain seed capital is first to get regulatory approval. That’s a process that can take years. And the commissioners aren’t inclined to view applications benignly, for they will be held “accountable for life” for each IPO they approve. Only last month, Chinese authorities swooped down to seize a large private insurer deemed to have become too risky. One would not want to be one of those who approved its application.Gig work in China’s fledgling ride-hailing industry is coming to an end as new regulations make part-time driving overly expensive. On January 1, ride-hailing apps in China start banning drivers who operate without the required “double licenses”: one for drivers and another for the cars they steer. Municipal governments across the country have nuanced stipulations for what these certificates entail, but in general, the fresh rules aim to more closely vet drivers transporting passengers around.Like a lot of China’s nascent industries, ride-hailing took off quickly in part thanks to relatively lax government oversight at the start. The first set of industry laws took effect in 2016, when the country officially legalized apps like Uber, which was later acquired by its local competitor Didi. Since then, Chinese authorities have gradually rolled out more rules, and the strictest regulations, including the rollout of the double licenses last year.There’s also a lot of unreasonable market access limitations imposed by local governments on makers of electric vehicles. The government does not allow companies to test fleets of driverless cars in urban areas.Long-time crypto watchers will recall 2013, when China banned exchanges from allowing people to buy into bitcoin and other crypto coins using the local yuan currency.The Chinese financial company, Ant Group, was set to go public recently. The IPO was expected raise an estimated $37 billion and boost Ant's market value to in excess of $300 billion. But regulators for the Shanghai Stock Exchange, where Ant was planning to list, abruptly suspended the offering on Tuesday, citing "major issues" with the group that "may fail to meet information disclosure requirements." In a recent speech, Alibaba cofounder Jack Ma made critical comments about the country’s financial regulatory system. Then on Monday, four regulators summoned Ma and Ant Group’s top execs for a chat. We don’t know what was said, but it probably wasn’t “keep criticizing us.” Ant Group and the government are frenemies; the Chinese Communist Party wants to cultivate the country’s capital markets...but not to the point where it’ll tolerate dissent. Ant may still IPO, but it’ll have to pull off some major reorganizing to get right with regulators.The difference is that in the US, people are applauded for being themselves. There's a lot of value placed on independence and fighting the “system". Silicon Valley encourages risk-taking. American people are innately risk-takers.Silicon Valley embraces risk using an “affordable loss principle” in discovery of “what works”. It celebrates risk, yet at the same time it has some of the best mechanisms for avoiding the consequences of risk in the world.What made Silicon Valley really attractive has been it is one giant incubator as a society, with a lot of pay-it-forward culture and a low cost of trying.SV essentially places zero penalty on failure. You have almost unlimited upside if something works and very limited downside.They’re working with a huge net. It’s easier to take risk when you are insulated from it.It's a culture in which people are willing to bypass convention in any area, not be overly biased by why things can't be done, but rather take the approach, how one might take a shot at it? It is one where people are not afraid of failure but just look at the consequences of success, not the probability of failure. It is more experimental, less planned, more iterative, and evolutionary even as to the goals, let alone the methods.It is more of a Wild West risk-taking culture, at least at the personal level of things. Entrepreneurs accept risk as given and focus on controlling the outcomes at any given level of risk; they also frame their problems spaces with personal values and assume greater personal responsibility for the outcomes. Founders think in action…”Fire-ready-aim”. They pursue opportunities without regard to resources currently controlled. Working at a startup is like riding a roller coaster and rolling the dice. Building a startup is so hard with so many obstacles and ups and downs in the way that practical people become too pragmatic and turn big visions into decent ideas instead of sticking with their original vision. I think it takes real nerve to ride this roller coaster for very long, and you have to normalize the madness or go crazy yourself. See this for more information.Nothing stands still in Silicon Valley; the place has a kinetic energy. Look at the top ten firms in Silicon Valley. Every five or ten years, the list completely changes, with perhaps one or two exceptions. The entire venture capital industry essentially invests in failures, since the majority of the companies they fund eventually go under.These entrepreneurs deserve their money because of the risks they take. But you don’t see people jumping off the tops of buildings here. They tend to land on their feet. They tend to land in places like this, drinking cappuccinos, because the risk is a peculiar kind of risk. Most of the people in high tech will admit if they lost their job, they would find another one. They might even find a better one.* Here's what this regulation could mean for China:Rigid controls in politics and education would constrain radical innovation. Regulation can shut down iteration and experimentation, and nuclear tech is definitely the case. Economic reformers are worried about the increasing emphasis on the role of the state in the economy, fearing that it could kill entrepreneurship.If you look at the history of technology, most technologies came with new risks; most of them needed new safety mechanisms to be invented with it. When we invented the X-ray, for example we also realized it could be harmful for our health.Safety concerns are real, but we need to understand there are always tradeoffs to regulation. We need to acknowledge that there is a tradeoff between safety and speed, efficiency, progress, and long term breakthroughs.The main way our society works is through innovation. No innovation, no growth. The single most important contributor to a nation’s economic growth is the number of start-ups that grow to a billion dollars in revenue within 20 years. There’s no investment where money works as hard as it does in a tech startup. Driven founders, leveraged with code, capital, media, and intellect, sweating every dollar spent.No progress or innovation is possible without trial, error and failure. Not in business, not in science, not in nature. Without failure, there is no learning, no progress, and no success.If you keep doing the same thing over and over again, then there’s no innovation. You don’t get innovation by following the rules all the time, you get it by taking a risk. You don’t succeed unless you TAKE RISK. Price of extreme creativity is natural resistance to all things structure and rules. Creativity, like entrepreneurship, thrives in an environment that welcomes risk, not in one where risk-taking is punished. By its very nature, creation is risky. The world of technology thrives best when individuals are left alone to be different, creative, and disobedient.And when you take risks you sometimes FAIL. When that happens you pick yourself up and start over again. Except that doesn’t happen when failure means you get a visit from your friendly local commissar.Billionaire Mark Cuban explains it this way, “Failure is part of the success equation”. Jeff Bezos described it well when he said, “You have to have a willingness to repeatedly fail. If you don’t have a willingness to fail, you’re going to have to be very careful not to invent.”Failure is acknowledged as a natural part of the process of innovation. Being able to view failure as an asset is the hallmark of an entrepreneurial environment. This is why I’m amused when I hear people sneering at Donald Trump’s bankruptcies, as if failing when taking big risks is a cause for shame.Innovation requires experiments (most of which fail). Trial and error is the key to turning an invention into a useful innovation. Innovation relies upon freedom to experiment and try new things, which requires sensible regulation that is permissive, encouraging and quick to give decisions. Developing a new technology is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. Jeff Bezos makes the same point: “Being wrong might hurt you a bit, but being slow will kill you. If you can increase the number of experiments you try from a hundred to a thousand, you dramatically increase the number of innovations you produce.” Continuous tinkering to develop and refine a better product is much more important than protecting what you’ve already created. Innovation works best when the innovator isn’t required to ask for permission first. To create game-changers, innovators must feel empowered to brainstorm, experiment and make decisions — without judgement.As Docherty puts it, “The key (for innovation) is to not try to get it completely right the first time, but to try things quickly and adjust as we go. That also means we need to manage expectations along the way.” For example, it took Thomas Edison more than 10,000 tries to perfect the light bulb, after which he famously stated, “I have not failed. I have just found 9,999 ways that do not work.”If you try to constrain really talented people, you’re only going to create a mirror of yourself with your same strengths and weaknesses. You HAVE to let people do stuff that you disagree with. You can’t tell how good they are if they’re just replicating what you’d have them do. Also, if you try to replace market decision-making with command and control, you train your citizens to defer to you — and you train them to fear risk.If you punish people for being wrong, they cover up their mistakes. They make excuses and throw blame to justify the past.If you treat being wrong as a learning opportunity, people admit their errors. They take responsibility for correcting and preventing them in the future.When you punish failure, people are quick to deny it. They strive to convince others — and themselves — that they haven’t failed.When you normalize failure as part of growth, people are quick to recognize it. They strive to learn from it and rectify it.The key to success is the ability to extract the lessons out of each of the experiences and to move on with the new knowledge. Anyone that doesn’t continue to experiment and doesn’t embrace failure, will eventually get in a desperate position where the only thing they can do is a Hail Mary bet at the very end of their existence.Xi’s “Made in China 2025” economic project aims to displace the U.S. as the world’s technological power, while another plan calls for dominance in Artificial Intelligence by 2030. China has aspirations to become a world power equal to the United States, and many American declinists believe this is inevitable. I don’t share their view. So long as the Chinese people lack the freedom to fail, China will remain weak.The country that today funds its failing companies is running out of money, and the international community is running out of patience, as can be seen from the tariffs President Trump is levying on Chinese steel.China’s response is to try to strong-arm its companies into succeeding. It will have the opposite effect.* What's the solution?Everyone makes mistakes. The main difference is that successful people learn from them and unsuccessful people don’t. By creating an environment/culture in which it is okay to safely make mistakes and unacceptable not to learn from them so that people can learn from them, China will see rapid progress and fewer significant mistakes.Gary Shapiro, author of two best-selling books on innovation, explains the innovative success of the United States and Israel: “Both countries share the unique view that entrepreneurial failure is an education rather than a badge of dishonor. They don’t punish risk-taking the way many other nations do.”If a place is a magnet for talent, its odds of achieving success are greatly magnified. That's why an enlightened society would encourage and educate founders and investors, not restrict them. We don’t need to celebrate failure. We just need to normalize it. It’s important to de-risk it (a.k.a reduce downside of risk-taking), preserve the entrepreneurship and risk-taking that has allowed the creation of all these incredible businesses advancing the world. People need the freedom to fail.If a country is going to attract people with extremely high potential, the first thing it has to do is let them thrive. It has to give them the degrees of freedom to do both what they can do very well, and to some extent, allow them to make mistakes. You want people to increase their proficiency and improve their craft. You want to create a culture where that’s possible and encouraged. Countries should encourage a culture of tinkering, experimentation, and following intellectual curiosity. Tech is all about the exchange of new ideas. So you can only go where people are open to new things.A country can incentivize more founders by making median founder outcome closer to average and by removing economic and cultural friction. Politicians should rethink the incentives for innovation. One option is to expand the use of prizes, to replace reliance on grants, subsidies and patents. They should systematically remove barriers and bottlenecks to starting companies for people interested in it: celebrate starting companies as a thing for ambitious people to do globally, see startup failures on resumes as badges of honor instead of blemishes, create communities to find co-founders and founder support, etc.We need to create the best mechanism for avoiding the consequences of risk.We can embrace risk by using an “affordable loss principle” in discovery of “what works”.What makes a place really attractive is whether it is one giant incubator as a society, with a lot of pay-it-forward culture and a low cost of trying. We need a place that essentially places zero penalty on failure so we have almost unlimited upside if something works and very limited downside. It's a culture in which people are willing to bypass convention in any area, not be overly biased by why things can't be done, but rather take the approach, how one might take a shot at it? It is one where people are not afraid of failure but just look at the consequences of success, not the probability of failure. It is more experimental, less planned, more iterative, and evolutionary even as to the goals, let alone the methods.This culture is discouraged in most places, partly because failure is discouraged, partly because planning predictability and success along predefined pathways is the only way things get funded instead of saying something is just worth attempting. As the stories of Silicon Valley become more prevalent, this style and culture is becoming more pervasive and will grow in other areas, especially as old generations retire and new generations come up with new models. Having said that, there are ecosystems around places like Bangalore and Israel that are starting to start this transformation of culture. More established places like Europe see less of this, unfortunately, even though they have a lot of talent to make this approach possible.Everyone deserves a leader or a government that can help them achieve their dreams more than focus on controlling them. Government should merely act as “referees” to establish the rules of the game and ensure the right rules are properly enforced. That’s an important thing for government to ensure that the rules are correct and that the incentives are what we actually want them to be for. Where the government goes wrong, is when they want to not just be a referee on the field, they want to be a player on the field. It’s incredibly important that the government focus on incenting the outcome, not the path.Free market capitalism is the most effective system to drive entrepreneurship and jobs. If you look at the number of jobs that have been created by the free enterprise system, this is the best thing going. I’m a big believer in the entrepreneurial spirit that helped create lots of great businesses around the world, the free enterprise system, fair, free and open markets. We’ve always been a proponent of a fair and free and open market and we recognize that’s got to be balanced by the public interest. Entrepreneurship has created the greatest gains in our standard of living to date, even if it’s hard to grasp the wild polarization of wealth in society. I don’t see capitalism’s lock on the best operating system for society changing any time soon — the most driven humans drive humanity forward, it’s that simple..The desire to control other people (always for the greater good) is the root of evil.Their flagrant abuses of intellectual property and human rights, their suppression of freedom, independence, and consolidated democracy, whether in China, Hong Kong, in northwest China or in anywhere else, will not stand. If you’re intellectually honest and advocate for a system that controls people, turn over the keys to your enemies for a dry run. You cannot be a great leader — and you cannot be a great country — when you oppose freedom, when you are so brutal to the people. Everyone deserves a leader or a government that can help them achieve their dreams more than focus on controlling them.For a long time, we’ve known that, on average, freer economies are richer, grow faster and have longer life expectancies. Since diversity of thought and idea is the key to economic growth, it is time for Mr Xi’s five “NOs” to be matched with some western “NOs” — including a decisive “NO” to restrictions on free speech, privacy, free market and free enterprise system.Finding a way out for mainland China to evolve into a more liberal and law-governed society and adopt Western-oriented secular modernization, allowing some degree of cultural freedom, embrace capitalism and open its economy to foreign investment and domestic entrepreneurship would require Mr Xi to display a humility, open-mindedness and tolerance for opposing points of view that seem completely alien to him and the system that he has created.Yet any fair account has to accept that Mr Xi can also claim some successes, so it is possible I will be just the latest in a long line of western skeptics who get China wrong. But it is hard to look at the Xi cult and not feel a sense of foreboding.

Thanks for the a2a.Too long didn't read: We hate everything about joe bidens gun control policies.Long answer:It could not be more crazier if charles manson wrote it himself.Joe Biden's Plan to End Gun Violence | Joe Biden for PresidentRemember it sounds nice on paper. I could say I will end homelessness by creating a government funded program to end homelessness in America. If you dig deeper youd find the plan to end homelessness is through euthanasia.Biden claims his Brady handgun violence act has kept 3 million people who shouldn't have a gun from having a gun….however the truth is that is bullshit. If you look at prosecution of prohibited people who lie on a federal form to buy a gun which is a felony that carries a 10 year prison sentence and a 250,000 dollar fine…out of 120,000 (fluctuates but is around 120k) lie and buy referrals for prosecution…results in just 12…When gun buyers are caught in 'lie-and-try,' how many are prosecuted? 12Then there is straw purchases which is how criminals often get guns. A straw purchase is when someone buys a gun for someone who refuses to do the paperwork because they legally cannot buy a gun.'Straw Buyers' Of Guns Break The Law — And Often Get Away With ItSo his 3 million claim is accurate but it fails to disclose that these 3 million prohibited people just break the law anyway and are never arrested for it. They remain free to keep trying to illegally obtain a firearm through other means causing untold damage to our communities.So right off the bat he's not in our good graces.Wants to open up manufacturers to legal liable for people who illegally use the gun to commit a crime. It is like if A Ford hits my truck that I sue ford for being liable for the driver of their vehicle who was not paying attention. Its a horrible idea.Claims to want to remove weapons of war off our streets….weapons of war are not on our streets. The AR-15 has NEVER BEEN ISSUED TO ANY MILITARY. Weapons like the m16 have been illegal for civilian ownership with the passage of the 1986 firearm owners protection act. The only civilians who own automatic weapons are the ones that are currently federally registered complete with the owners fingerprints and photo. These are also over 20,000 dollar weapons minimum. Those made after 1986 are owned by people who have federal business licenses through the ATF. These licensed individuals can only sell these weapons made after 1986 to other government licensed individuals, the government, military or law enforcement.Banning “high capacity magazines” is unconstitutional. Infact Duncan v. Becerra is a case in california the attourney general Beccera is desperately fighting to defend California's law banning magazines over 10 rounds fell afoul of the common use set in the landmark ruling Heller vs DC.Regulate AR-15s under the NFA. The NFA is the national firearms act of 1934 which set up categories of weapons for federal registration. This would be illegal as AR-15s do not meet any category of NFA weapon. The NFA was passed to limit “gangster weapons” like the BAR rifle used by john dillanger.Those categories are:Machine gunsThis legal definition includes any firearm which can fire repeatedly, without manual reloading, "by a single function of the trigger", which is broader than the common definition. Both continuous fully automatic fire and "burst fire" (e.g., firearms with a 3-round burst feature) are considered machine gun features. The weapon's receiver is by itself considered to be a regulated firearm. A non-machine gun that may be converted to fire more than one shot per trigger pull by ordinary mechanical skills is determined to be "readily convertible", and classed as a machine gun, such as a KG-9 pistol (pre-ban ones are "grandfathered").Short-barreled rifles (SBRs)This category includes any firearm with a buttstock and either a rifled barrel less than 16" long or an overall length under 26". The overall length is measured with any folding or collapsing stocks in the extended position. The category also includes firearms which came from the factory with a buttstock that was later removed by a third party.Short barreled shotguns (SBSs)This category is defined similarly to SBRs, but with either a smoothbore barrel less than 18" long or a minimum overall length under 26".SuppressorsThe legal term for a suppressor is silencer. This category includes any portable device designed to muffle or disguise the report of a portable firearm. This category does not include non-portable devices, such as sound traps used by gunsmiths in their shops which are large and usually bolted to the floor.Destructive devices (DDs) - (added to the NFA of 1934 via the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968)There are two broad classes of destructive devices:Devices such as grenades, bombs, explosive missiles, poison gas weapons, etc.Any firearm with a bore over 0.50 inch except for shotguns or shotgun shells which have been found to be generally recognized as particularly suitable for sporting purposes. (Many firearms with bores over 0.50 inch, such as 10-gauge or 12-gauge shotguns, are exempted from the law because they have been determined to have a "legitimate sporting use".)Any other weapon (AOW)Firearms meeting the definition of "any other weapon", or AOW, are weapons or devices that can be concealed on the person and from which a shot can be discharged by the energy of an explosive. Many AOWs are disguised devices such as pens, cigarette lighters, knives, cane guns, and umbrella guns. AOWs can be pistols and revolvers with smooth bore barrels (e.g., H&R Handy-Gun, Serbu Super-Shorty) designed or redesigned to fire a fixed shotgun shell. While the above weapons are similar in appearance to weapons made from shotguns, they were originally manufactured in the described configuration rather than modified from existing shotguns. As a result, such weapons do not fit within the definition of shotgun or weapons made from a shotgun.The AOW definition includes specifically described weapons with combination shotgun and rifle barrels 12 inches or more but less than 18 inches in length from which only a single discharge can be made from either barrel without manual reloading.The ATF Firearms Technology Branch has issued opinions that when a pistol (such as an AR-type pistol) under 26" in overall length is fitted with a vertical fore-grip, it is no longer "designed, made and intended to fire ... when held in one hand," and therefore no longer meets the definition of a pistol. Such a firearm then falls only within the definition of "any other weapon" under the NFA.The AR-15 would require biden illegally rewritting an act of Congress which he does not have authority to do. It should also be noted the ATF has also violated this by rewritting bump stocks and maybe doing it again with pistol braces for pistol versions of Ak platform and AR-15 platform rifles. The ATF doing this violates the seperation of powers within our government. The ATF cannot legislate through opinion making.The buy backs that biden thinks he can do are vehemently opposed. You cannot buy back something you never owned. You cannot force us to sell you our property which we legally bought either.Biden wants to limit how many guns we own to reduce stock piling weapons…how about no. What we buy is our business. If I wanna buy a 22 to hunt squirrels and a muzzleloader to hunt deer I should not have to wait to buy a gun because some asshole thinks hes doing something good. It could be a very harmful policy. If a woman bought a 22 caliber rifle prior to breaking up with her abusive boyfriend she shouldnt have to wait a month to buy a handgun cause the creep is sending death threats to her.He wants a universal background check. Universal background checks are something only misinformed people think is good. 1 in 5 criminals get a gun with a background check cause the other 4 have someone else buy it for them. Plus how can a citizen run a background check? Remember black americans think the police are racist and are out hunting them. They will be uncomfortable walking into a police station to buy a gun. We prefer switching to the BIDS or blind identification system for a background check which could easily be made into an app to allow a citizen run a background check without exposing the buyer or seller at risk for identity fraud.Biden also thinks guns sold online do not have background checks. It is federal law all internet sales across state lines needs to go to a FFL. Gun owners also go into gun shops and do transfers through the FFL for a background check on privaye sales unless they are immediate family.Biden wants to close the boyfriend loophole. Biden proves once again he's a fudd. The boyfriend loophole is an imaginary loophole that anti gun and ignorant people made up. They allege that a dimestically violent boyfriend can buy a gun putting the woman at risk.Please download the following: https://www.atf.gov/firearms/docs/4473-part-1-firearms-transaction-record-over-counter-atf-form-53009/downloadThis is the federal background check. I draw your attention to the definitions on page 5 lower left hand side for question 21 i.Notice the terms partner and intimiate partner…this legally includes abusive boyfriends…I also draw your attention also on page 5 the definition for 21 b.Again…boyfriends who are abusive are prohibited by federal law. Only fudds like biden dont know this. Only people who willfully do not research a subject before forming an opinion do not know this.Biden wants the Social security administration to throw people into the prohibited category. The social security aministration cannot lawfully do this. The reasoning to fudds like biden is that SSA can adjudicate. Ajudication is a legal process involving a judge who is involved in litigation. The SSA is not part of the judicial branch of government. So this would be illegal which is why trump reversed course before the government lost its pants and tighty whities in a major class action law suit for illegally denying people their rights under the second amendment. A doctor would have to testify in court you cannot have a weapon for ajudication to show your mentally ill or have to have entered a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity for this to happen. The SSA cannot do it.Biden wants to make it so if you been convicted of a misdemenor hate crime or a crime of bias to prevent you from having a gun. This is a whole level of ignorant. Hate crimes in states are felonies which prohibit you from owning a gun to begin with. They usually mimic federal law being 10 years in prison. Misdemenor hate crimes are often more then 2 years in prison. A misdemenor of more then 2 years in prison under federal law makes you a prohibited person exempt from owning a firearm.Biden wants to increase the feds having more time to investigate you from 3 days to 10. The issue with this is new Jersey. There is a case where a woman was waiting 43 days for her background check to clear when it was supposed to be returned in 30 days. She was stabbed to death in her drive way by her abusive ex which is why she wanted the gun. She died. We will not green light anyone sitting on paperwork to investigate. If the feds with the instant results of the nics cant do their job in 3 days they dont need another 7.Biden claims he will close the fugitive from justice loophole. I again ask for you to review the 4473.Again question 21 d page 5.Federal law already prohibits fugitives from justice from buying a gun. The 500,000 fugitives purged by trump were records for individuals who under federal definition did not flee the state to avoid prosecution. It was attributed to trump…the decision was actually made by obama when Joe biden was the second highest man in the land.“That was a decision that was made under the previous administration,” Bowdich replied. “It was the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel that reviewed the law and believed that it needed to be interpreted so that if someone was a fugitive in a state, there had to be indications that they had crossed state lines.”So legally 500,000 people were illegally added to the nics database as a fugitive from justice even though they did not meet the legal definition of fugitive from justice….law suit…government loses its pants and undies.Joe biden wants to ban the sale of guns online, along with parts and ammunition. No…that is insane. It would violate the interstate commerce laws and constitution so bad.He wants to create an agency to ensure prohibited people give up their guns. Pretty sure that will look like Waco and ruby ridge…the answer is no joe!Joe biden wants red flag laws. Red flag laws are where someone says your dangerous and law enforcement storms your house to take your lawfully owned property without you going before a judge. This is a violation of the 5th and 14th amendment which says no one can take your lawfully owned property without your day in court. These red flag laws are ripe for abuse. They have already been abused. I have a friend who was a cop who was fired from his job after his weapons were taken away cause of a spiteful ex wife who lied to cause him trouble during a messy divorce. He lost his job cause it appeared he was guilty why else would his guns be taken away…oh yeah cause his ex wife lied to get back at him for divorcing her. He still has not gotten his guns back despite a court order either. Hell no Joe.He wants licensing through states. No offense but state licenses are a registry. Registry leads to a list for confiscation…people say its not a registry…it's a license…how do you think they keep track of who has a license and who doesn't…a list… plus anti gunners and fudds claim licenses reduce firearm trafficking….last I looked murder was illegal. Just cause you make something illegal doesn't mean it stops…murder..prostitution…meth..coke..rape…theft..money laundering…running across a boarder…blowing up buildings…arson…drunk driving….all illegal all still happen. No Joe no.Funding the background check…no Joe…we need to end states using local police to do background checks. We need to make it mandatory that states submit records to the federal government or lose ALL federal funding and open states up to be liable for failing to submit records to the nics database by allowing families to sue the state. Its called accountability Joe.Establish a new Task Force on Online Harassment and Abuse to focus on the connection between mass shootings, online harassment, extremism, and violence against women. Dear Joe…I know you have dementia. Police and law enforcement has cyber divisions for this. Mass shootings are commited by people who are depressed and angry and looking to hurt others. We know this from a man who was going to shoot his school up or a mall. The answer is no to your task Force.Establish risk accessment to identify domestic violence victims at risk of being killed with a gun by their abuser. Joe no. The problem is domestic violence victims cover for their abusers and will even lie to police. I know this cause one year I spent new years with police when a dude punched his girlfriend and she was laying motionless on the ground with a busted lip. Unfortunately I did not see the punch just him standing over her on the ice covered ground with his hand in a fist screaming at her he will hit her again while she was unconscious…she told the police and me that it was her fault. She slipped and hit her face on the telephone pole 12 feet from where she was laying on the ground. Needless to say the small town found out and he got jumped by some yokels in a bar room bathroom…not that I was involved with that. Any who the police cannot access if victims cover for the abuser. Houston control to Joe fudd come back joe fudd.Joe wants smart guns. Sounds good on paper. Smart guns use RFID technology. Rfid technology is broken. I dont mean broken as in it dont work. I mean broken as in criminals are using stuff from hardware stores to exploit the RFID chip in your credit card to steal it. You might as well just leave your gun on the front porch for criminals. The other issue is fingerprint smart guns…its used on gun safes too. It is…well a joke.Fingerprint recognition is spotty especially with wet or dirty fingers.LPL Picking Gun LocksIn fact the lock picking lawyer trashes a lot of gun locks including fingerprint locks. Fingerprint technology just is not mature enough yet. I also saw such stuff embedded in epoxy in pistol grips. These things are dumb. I can use a heat gun from homedepot to reheat the epoxy to remove the “Smart Components”.Hold adults accountable for minors having guns. No Joe. That is already law. It is illegal for a minor to be in posession of a firearm when not in direct supervision of an adult. It also prohibits taking young kids hunting or teaching them safe firearm handling under your fudd proposal.Require gun owners to lock their guns up. Gun locks are a joke. They can be opened within seconds…even without lock picking tools. I have seen gun locks opened with a star wars Lego character.See lock picking lawyers playlist on gun locks!! LPL Picking Gun Locks PSA (public service announcement) california DOJ certified gun locks require are certified as compliant if they can withstand being picked for 2 minutes by a person with a screw driver and a paperclip who does not know how to pick a lock. Thats right lock picks are not allowed to be used for certification! False sense of security. No joe no stop being a fudd.Joe wants to make straw purchasing a serious crime…Joe its already a serious crime punishable by 10 years in prison and or a 250,000 dollar fine. It does not get more serious…Joe wants to give more funding to prosecute straw purchasers…Joe they got plenty of funding..they choose not to prosecute…if a real gun owner got into the white house they'll pass a law that the prosector who denied to prosecute a straw purchaser is guilty of dereliction of duty and are civilly liable for any death or injury to the victim or their family and can be sued by the victim and their family. That will light a fire under them to do their job.Joe biden wants to notify state and local law enforcement of any and all firearm denials to prevent prohibited people from buying guns through other means. Joe they cannot legally buy the gun…even attempting to is illegal under federal law…cause they would have to lie on the 4473. Plus I am an FFL. I have seen firearm denials on state mandated background checks denied because under other identifying charactistics the customer put that he had a nice dick…I have seen denials for doodling on the 4473…i have seen denials for crossing out mispellings in the address…I have seen denials cause a pen died and half a letter was visible with ink but the ink was uneven on the lettering causing it to be denied…are we really going to waste police resources having local police following up for nice dick, big tits, and badonka donk and bubble butt denials? No no the police got better things to do. The feds are more then capable of doing their job by executing their duty to make arrests for which they are collecting a pay check for with our tax dollars.Mandate that lost or stolen guns are reported….oh Joe what nursing home did they abduct you from. Gun owners already self report stolen firearms without the law you propose. If someone steals your car joe you dont shrug and say uh well I'm not required by law to report my car stolen so I'm not gonna do anything…we wont compromise with you. Gun owners know when you give an inch anti gunners and fudds will take a 1000 miles by cramming it full of your anti gun fudd wish list that we do not support in the slightest so no. It sounds reasonable but so did the idea of the greeks leaving a trojan horse to appease the gods of troy….how did that work out for Troy again? No.Stop ghost guns…joe that would be illegal as well. It runs afoul of the second amendment cause of common use. Home made guns have been in our country since we were a British colony. Millions and millions of such guns exist. That would run afoul of the heller common use standard. You also cannot ban 3d printers as they are also in common use…you don't have legal standing for that…or lathes…mills…cnc machines…screw drivers…hammers…welders that are also used to build weapons. You also cannot ban the 3d printed files as code is protected by the constitution as free speech. In the 1990s while you were sleeping in the senate joe the electronic freedom foundation took on a series of cases for a man named Bernstein a cryptographer who wanted to release the source code for an algorithm he made. The us department of justice wanted him to get a license to do so. He sued and won as the supreme court found code is infact a protected form of free speech in the case Bernstein v. Department of Justice. So you would be breaking many laws Joe. The answer is no.Restructure the atf and fund it…the ATF doesnt need restructuring it needs abolishing. The ATF now legislates when its not supposed to. They also have a lot of illegal things they do.Padding numbers - Specific Acts of Unlawful Reprisal Against ATF Agents, Employees & Whistleblowers.The FBI can do everything the ATF does…the FBI already runs the background check.Have the atf report on firearms trafficking….joe the FBI does that. The FBI investigates trafficking and unlike the atf already reports on it.Six Indicted on Gun Trafficking ChargesYoud know that if you stopped rambling about how your proposals would help a worker in Scranton pennsylvania or talking about your hairy legs and read a memo that you didnt forget you were reading and wander off.Dedicate the brightest minds to solving gun violence…Joe your brightest minds lack common sense…for example out of 30,000 gun deaths a year 20,000 are suicides…your brightest minds are puppets who will parrot the illogical claim that just so happens to suit your anti gun agenda ban all guns. They dont have the brains to understand taking a gun from someone whos suicidal does not change that they are suicidal. Sure it may make them choose another less successful method but that's a coin toss. The common sense thing is to change their mind with intervention programs to prevent them from becoming suicidal.Prohibit federal funds from being used to arm or train educators…bad Joe bad. Through federal funds you could ensure they are properly trained and equipped to safely use their gun around children. Believe it or not there's 2 places educators are armed and they have never had a school shooting in the school. They also got a program for students who see or hear bullying or violent longings to report it anonymously so the school can prevent a school shooting. Armed teachers and anonymous reporting by students saves lives.Biden believes his plan of locking guns up with atrocious gun locks and red flag laws would prevent gun suicides…no Joe…they won't.Biden wants trauma centers for gun shot wounds…the hospital has those!!! Infact er doctors recieve training just for treating gun shot wounds and are very good at it…we dont need your trauma centers.These trauma centers for sexual assault and domestic violence also already exist…they specialize in it…they exist within a federally funded network already. We dont need double of everything.He wants to train health care providers in sexual assault and domestic violence….joe that have this already…infact I know a woman in texas who works for a health care provider and she specializes domestic violence and sexual assault that is all she does! She recieves training every 6 months!!!Wants to add people on the no fly list to a new prohibited category preventing them from owning guns. Absolutely horrible as these no fly lists are secret lists that have no ability for you to appeal them. People are on these no fly lists for the dumbest reasons like wearing a full face respirator on a 15 hour flight. (The 95 masks loose their effectiveness after 12 hours and doctors recommend people like cancer patients to avoid wearing 95 mask on long flights and should wear a full face respirator instead to prevent infections as a result of chemotherapy.if they refuse the 95 mask they can be kicked off the plane AND be added to the airlines no fly list.)Joe biden is just a fudd.Biden is a poorly informed arm chair expert who pretends to be a gun owner. His ideas are either illegal or redundant mirroring things that already exist. Other proposals like his “assault weapon ban” which are illegal are best defined as gleaned from the lowest hanging rotten fruit of the idea tree and piled onto a platter with other refuse and served up to satiate a hunger of the uninformed to feel like they are important and doing good things so they can pat themselves on the back while stroking their ego in trump like fashion in a congradulatory circle jerk while doing nothing to actually fix the real problems.Such individuals are the enemy of progress and the leading force clinging desperately to unhinged and delusional ideals so they can be pat on the head by their masters blowing their anti gun whistle. Such people have dragged this out for decades preventing knowledgable gun owners from enacting real meaningful measures to combat the underlying problems driving the deaths. The blood of countless americans have stained these lap dogs red and stained their masters hands with a red stain from the routine petting of their pets that cannot be removed from the hands of their masters no matter how much they try to wash their hands as they blame everyone but themselves for the issues we gun owners need to fix due to their failed policies.

From List of people with bipolar disorder - WikipediaList of people with bipolar disorderNumerous notable people have had some form of mood disorder. This is a list of people accompanied by verifiable sources associating them with bipolar disorder (formerly known as "manic depression") based on their own public statements; this discussion is sometimes tied to the larger topic of creativity and mental illness. In the case of dead people only, individuals with a speculative or retrospective diagnosis should only be listed if they are accompanied by a source reflective of the mainstream, academic view. Individuals should not be added to this list unless the disorder is regularly and commonly mentioned in mainstream, reliable sourcesAAlvin Ailey, American choreographer, diagnosed with bipolar disorder (then called manic depression).[1]Sherman Alexie, Native American poet, writer, and filmmaker.[2]Lily Allen, English musician.[3][4]Louis Althusser, French Marxist philosopher.[5]August Ames, Canadian pornographic actress.[6]Michael Angelakos, American musician, frontman of Passion Pit.[7]Adam Ant, English musician and actor.[8]Emilie Autumn, American singer and violinist.[9]B[edit]Tyler Baltierra, American reality television personality.[10]Maria Bamford, American comedian, stated in an interview with The Salt Lake Tribune that she has been diagnosed with bipolar II disorder.[11]Marcel Barbeau, Canadian artist and painter.[12]Ludwig van Beethoven, German composer and pianist. It has been suggested he had bipolar disorder.[13]Maria Bello, producer, actress and writer.[14][15]Helena Belmonte, American model.[16]Max Bemis, frontman of the band Say Anything, spoke about his diagnosis in an interview with Alternative Magazine in 2014.[17]Maurice Benard, actor, discussed his diagnosis on The Oprah Winfrey Show, and has since become active in promoting bipolar awareness.[18]Benga (Adegbenga Adejumo), British dubstep DJ and producer.[19]A. C. Benson, English essayist, poet, author and the 28th Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge.[20]Davone Bess, American football player.[21]Jayson Blair, American journalist formerly with The New York Times.[22]Paul Boyd, classical animator.[23]L. Brent Bozell Jr., American conservative activist and writer. He wrote publicly about his experiences with and recovery from bipolar disorder.[24]Russell Brand, British comedian and actor.[25]Jeremy Brett, English actor, known for playing fictional detective Sherlock Holmes in the Granada TV series of the same name, diagnosed with manic depression.[26]Chris Brown, American singer, songwriter, rapper, dancer, and actor, Brown has been diagnosed with Bipolar II disorder.[27]Tiffany Lee Brown, American writer, artist, and musician, has created works that reference her Bipolar I diagnosis[28][29] including the Noise music composition "Belly" appearing on Women Take Back the Noise.[30]Frank Bruno, British boxer, was hospitalized for a short period, and as of 2005 was on lithium.[31][32][33]Barney Bubbles, English graphic artist whose work encompassed graphic design and music video direction. Bubbles committed suicide when he was 41.[34]Art Buchwald, humorist and Pulitzer Prize winner.[35]Elbridge Ayer Burbank, artist and painter, Burbank was diagnosed with manic depression and was treated at several different facilities during his life.[36]Robert Burns, Scottish poet.[37]C[edit]Eoin Cameron, former member of the Australian House of Representatives and radio personality in Perth, Western Australia.[38][39]Robert Campeau, Canadian financier and real estate developer.[40]Cosmo Campoli, American sculptor and teacher.[41]Georg Cantor, German mathematician. Cantor's recurring bouts of depression from 1884 to the end of his life have been blamed on the hostile attitude of many of his contemporaries,[42] though some have explained these episodes as probable manifestations of a bipolar disorder.[43]Mariah Carey, American singer. Diagnosed with Bipolar II Disorder in 2001.[44]Quincy Carter, American football quarterback.[45]Keisha Castle-Hughes, New Zealand Oscar-nominated actress.[46]Dick Cavett, comedian and television journalist.[47]Eason Chan, Hong Kongese popular music singer.[48]Changjo, South Korean singer, actor and dancer.[49]Akio Chiba, Japanese manga artist, committed suicide due to issues related to bipolar disorder.[50][51]Rosemary Clooney, American singer and actress.[52]Kurt Cobain, American musician, lead vocalist, guitarist, and primary songwriter of the rock band Nirvana. Kurt was diagnosed at a young age with Attention Deficit Disorder [ADD], then later with bipolar disorder.[53][54]Neil Cole, former Australian Labor party politician. "Associate Professor Cole was the first politician in Australia or overseas to admit to having a mental illness, namely bipolar mood disorder."[55]Mary Ellen Copeland, PhD, author, educator and mental health advocate.[56]Francis Ford Coppola, American film director, producer, and screenwriter, was diagnosed by a psychiatrist as having manic depression.[57]Patricia Cornwell, American crime writer.[58][59]Robert S. Corrington, American philosopher and professor of philosophical theology. In his book Riding the Windhorse: Manic-Depressive Disorder and the Quest for Wholeness,[60] he gives a personal account of his own experience with the condition.Michael Costa, former Australian Labor party politician and Treasurer of NSW. "Mr Costa said a number of state parliamentary colleagues approached him about their mental health problems after he publicly revealed his battle with bipolar disorder in 2001."[61]Sean Costello, American blues musician.[62]Vincent Crane, keyboard player of Atomic Rooster.[63]John Curtin, 14th Prime Minister of Australia 1941–1945.[64]D[edit]Paul Dalio, American writer, director and composer. He made his feature directorial debut with Touched with Fire (2016), a film which drew upon his own experience with bipolar disorder.[65]Ray Davies, English composer. Davies was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and he attempted suicide.[66]Adam Deacon, English film actor, rapper, writer and director. Deacon discussed his diagnosis in a 2016 interview with Stephen Fry.[67]Swadesh Deepak, Indian playwright, novelist and short-story writer.[68]Disco D, record producer and composer.[69]DMX, American rapper and actor.[70]Gaetano Donizetti, Italian composer, Donizetti was exhibiting symptoms of syphilis and probable bipolar disorder.[71]Mike Doughty, singer from alternative rock band Soul Coughing.[72][28]Richard Dreyfuss, actor, appeared in a BBC documentary to talk about his experience with the disorder.[73]Patty Duke, actress, author, and mental health advocate.[74]E[edit]Thomas Eagleton, United States Senator from Missouri. He was privately diagnosed with bipolar type II in 1983, eleven years after stepping down as George McGovern's running mate during the latter's presidential campaign in 1972 due to the revelation of Eagleton receiving electroconvulsive therapy in the 1960s.[75][76]F[edit]David Feherty, former professional golfer on the European Tour and PGA Tour.[77]Carrie Fisher, actress and writer. Starred in the Star Wars films as Princess Leia.[73][78]Zelda Fitzgerald, American socialite and novelist, and the wife of American author F. Scott Fitzgerald, diagnosed at the time as schizophrenia, but now thought likelier to be bipolar disorder.[79]Helen Flanagan, English model, Actress.[80]Tom Fletcher, English singer, songwriter, pianist, and guitarist, of McFly, discussed his bipolar disorder in the book Unsaid Things... Our Story.[81][82]Larry Flynt, publisher and the president of Larry Flynt Publications (LFP).[83]Ellen Forney, graphic artist and cartoonist and creator of Marbles: Madness, Depression, Michelangelo, and Me.[84]Connie Francis, singer.[85]Jennifer Frey, journalist.[86]Stephen Fry, actor, comedian, and writer. Fry was the center of the Emmy Award-winning documentary Stephen Fry: The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive in which he shares his experience being diagnosed with cyclothymic disorder and interviews a number of celebrities who are also diagnosed with bipolar-related disorders.[73]Sia Furler, Australian singer, songwriter, and producer.[87]G[edit]Alan Garner, novelist, wrote about having bipolar disorder in a collection of critical and autobiographical essays.[88][89]Paul Gascoigne, English footballer, wrote about his treatment for bipolar disorder in his second book.[90]Isa Genzken, German contemporary artist.[91]Mel Gibson, actor and director.[92]Matthew Good, Canadian musician. He first disclosed his illness in a personal blog.[93]Glenn Gould, Canadian pianist.[94]Philip Graham, publisher and businessman.[95][96]Graham Greene, English novelist.[97][98][99]Ian Grey, author and musician.[28]H[edit]Charles Haley, American football linebacker.[100]Terry Hall, lead singer of The Specials.[101][102]Halsey, indie pop singer.[103]Charles Hamilton, American hip hop recording artist.[104]Linda Hamilton, actress, star of the Terminator movies. Was diagnosed at the age of 40.[105]Suzy Favor Hamilton, American former middle distance runner.[106]Jeff Hammerbacher, data scientist, chief scientist at Cloudera.[107]David Harbour, American actor.[108]Anthony Hardy, English serial killer.[109]Beth Hart, American singer and songwriter.[110]Mariette Hartley, American actress, has publicly spoken about her bipolar disorder, was a founder of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.[111][112]Doug Harvey, Canadian professional ice hockey player.[113]Jonathan Hay, Australian rules footballer.[114]Ernest Hemingway American journalist, won the Pulitzer Prize (1953) and the Nobel Prize in Literature (1954) for his novel The Old Man and the Sea, He was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and insomnia in his later years, He committed suicide in 1961.[115][116][117]Drewe Henley, British actor, Henley and his illness were discussed in her autobiography White Cargo.[118]Kristin Hersh, musician, of rock band Throwing Muses, has spoken about her bipolar disorder.[119]Derek Hess, designer and visual artist.[120]Shane Hmiel, NASCAR driver.[121]Abbie Hoffman, political activist, anarchist.[122]Marya Hornbacher, writer.[123]Byron Houston, basketball player.[124]Cat Hulbert, American card player.[125]Meg Hutchinson, American folk singer-songwriter.[126]Julian Huxley, British evolutionary biologist, eugenicist, and internationalist. In his wife's autobiography it seems that he had the form of bipolar disorder.[127][128]J[edit]Jesse Jackson, Jr., former member of the United States House of Representatives, has stated he's been diagnosed with bipolar II disorder.[129]Kay Redfield Jamison, American clinical psychologist she is a professor of psychiatry and writer, who has written extensively about her personal experiences with bipolar disorder, including in An Unquiet Mind.[130]Jang Geun-seok, South Korean actor.[131]Jill Janus, American heavy metal singer.[132]Alice de Janzé, heiress, is believed to have had cyclothymia.[133]Adam Jasinski, winner of the U.S. series Big Brother 9.[134]Andrew Johns, Australian rugby league player. Publicly announced his condition following retirement.[135]Daniel Johnston, musician, singer-songwriter and visual artist.[136]Lee Joon, Korean actor and musician.[137]Benn Jordan, American modern jazz and electronic musician.[138]Lucia Joyce, daughter of writer James Joyce, was diagnosed with cyclothymia.[139]Sarah Joyce, British singer–songwriter.[140]Helmi Juvonen, American artist and painter, hospitalized and diagnosed with manic-depression.[141]K[edit]Krizz Kaliko, American hip hop musician.[142]Antonie Kamerling, Dutch actor.[143]Chris Kanyon American professional wrestler.[144]Kerry Katona, English television presenter, writer, magazine columnist, and former pop singer with girl band Atomic Kitten.[145]Patrick J. Kennedy, former member of the United States House of Representatives, has spoken on his mental health issues, including diagnosed bipolar disorder.[146]Margot Kidder, American actress.[147][148]Morio Kita, Japanese psychiatrist, novelist, and essayist.[149]Otto Klemperer, German-born American conductor and composer, was diagnosed with cyclothymia.[150]Cássia Kis, Brazilian actress.[151]John Konrads, Australian freestyle swimmer.[152]L[edit]David LaChapelle, American commercial photographer, fine-art photographer, music video director, film director, and artist.[153]Mary Lambert, American actress, singer, and writer, revealed that she had the illness in an interview with everything you need to know[154] and in her 2014 song "Secrets".Debra LaFave, schoolteacher who had sexual relations with minor student.[155]Andrew Lange, astrophysicist and Goldberger Professor of Physics at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California, he was awarded Balzan Prize and Dan David Prize. Had from mood disorder and committed suicide in a hotel in 2010.[156]René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, French explorer who explored the Great Lakes region and claimed the Mississippi River basin for France.[157]AJ Lee, American professional wrestler and author.[158]Yoon Ha Lee, Korean-American science fiction writer.[159]Lee Joon, South Korean singer and actor.[160]Vivien Leigh, actress, most famous for her role as Scarlett O'Hara in David O. Selznick's movie "Gone With The Wind."[161]Jenifer Lewis, American actress, spoke about her diagnosis on Oprah in September 2007.[162]Bill Lichtenstein, print and broadcast journalist and documentary filmmaker, profiled in Time magazine, 10 October 1994.[163]Arthur Lipsett, film director.[164]Bernard Loiseau, French chef, was the chef and the owner of 3-star Michelin restaurant-La Côte d'Or, Loiseau committed suicide on 24 February 2003.[165][166]Ellen Joyce Loo, Hong Kong singer and songwriter.[167]Demi Lovato, American actress, singer, and writer, revealed her illness in April 2011 in an interview with People magazine.[168][169]Ada Lovelace, British mathematician, often regarded as the first computer programmer.[170][171]Ris Low, beauty pageant titleholder, Miss Singapore World 2009.[172]M[edit]Gustav Mahler, composer.[173]Tina Malone, British television actress, writer, director, and producer (Brookside, Shameless). Diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder and bipolar disorder in 1998.[174][175]Elizabeth Manley, Canadian former competitive figure skater.[176]Johnny Manziel, American football player. In an interview in 2018, Manziel recounted his personal problems, and has stated that he had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder.[177]Jessica Marais, South African-Australian actress. She has stated that she has had bipolar episodes since she was 12 years old, suggesting that these episodes have been caused by the death of her father from a heart attack.[178][179]Emily Martin, sinologist, anthropologist, feminist, professor at New York University; drew on her own experience with bipolar disorder to write Bipolar Expeditions: Mania and Depression in American Culture.[180]Karen McCarthy, former member of the United States House of Representatives, was revealed to have been diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 2009.[181]Arthur McIntyre, Australian artist.[182]Kristy McNichol, actress.[183]Burgess Meredith, actor, had cyclothymia.[184]Randy Meisner, American musician.[185]H. V. Meyerowitz, artist, educator and British colonial administrator in Africa, had cyclothymia.[186]Dimitri Mihalas, astrophysicist.[187]Liz Miller, British physician, surgeon, campaigner and writer.[188]Kate Millet, artist, activist and Feminist writer.[189]Eric Millegan, actor.[190]Spike Milligan, comedian.[191]Valdemar Schønheyder Møller, Danish painter, known for his depictions of sunlight. He had bipolar episodes. In 1901, he was admitted to the psychiatric hospital in Aarhus and remained there until his death in 1905.[192]Melody Moezzi, activist, lawyer, and author of Haldol and Hyacinths: A Bipolar Life.[193]Seaneen Molloy, Northern Irish blogger.[194]Marilyn Monroe, American actress.[195]Ben Moody, guitarist, musician, formerly with Evanescence.[196]Jonathan Morrell, English radio and television producer, was diagnosed with cyclothymia.[197]Charles Mount, American artist.[198]Allison Moyet, English new wave singer and former member of Yazoo.[199]Petr Muk, Czech singer.[200]John A. Mulheren, American financier, stock and option trader, and philanthropist.[201]Edvard Munch, Norwegian painter.[202]Robert Munsch, author.[203]Craig Murray, former British ambassador to Uzbekistan and political activist.[204]N[edit]Kim Novak, actress.[205]O[edit]Phil Ochs, musician.[206]Bill Oddie, naturalist, comedian, and television presenter.[207]Dolores O'Riordan, Irish musician and singer-songwriter, leader of the rock band The Cranberries.[208]Craig Owens, singer for American bands Chiodos, and Destroy Rebuild Until God Shows.[209]P[edit]Steven Page, former singer for rock band Barenaked Ladies.[210]Nicola Pagett, actor. Wrote about her bipolar disorder in her autobiography Diamonds Behind My Eyes.[211]Jaco Pastorius, jazz musician. "Jaco was diagnosed with this clinical bipolar condition in the fall of 1982. The events which led up to it were considered "uncontrolled and reckless" incidences."[212]Jane Pauley, TV presenter and journalist. The former Today and Dateline host describes being diagnosed with bipolar disorder in her 2004 autobiography Skywriting: A Life Out of the Blue, as well as on her short-lived talk show.[213][214]Ota Pavel, Czech writer, journalist and sport reporter.[215]Lynne Perrie, English actress (Coronation Street, Queenie's Castle, Kes), singer, comediene, presenter and author. In an interview with the Daily Mirror newspaper, in 2000 she spoke about her manic depression, as well as memory loss and spending ten weeks in a psychiatric hospital.[216]Jimmy Piersall, American baseball player.[217]William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham, British statesman.[218]Edgar Allan Poe, poet and writer, may have experienced bipolar disorder.[219][220][221]Benoît Poelvoorde, Belgian comedian and actor.[222]Jackson Pollock, American artist.[202]Odean Pope, American jazz musician.[223]Gail Porter, British TV presenter.[224]Amber Portwood, American reality television personality.[225]Emil Post, American mathematician and logician. He is best known for his work in the field that eventually became known as computability theory. Post was bipolar and had his first attack in 1921, for the rest of his life he would have to be periodically hospitalized and given electroshock the standard treatment at that time.[226][227]Genesis Potini, New Zealand chess player. Potini had a bipolar disorder and was regularly admitted to hospital.[228]Heinz Prechter, entrepreneur, philanthropist, founder of the American Sunroof Company (ASC); after his suicide, his family established the Heinz C. Prechter Bipolar Research Fund at the University of Michigan in his memory.[229]Charley Pride, country music artist.[230]R[edit]Gabriele Rabel, botanist, physicist.[231]Mauro Ranallo, Canadian sport announcer and commentator.[232]Lou Reed, musician.[233]Lynn N. Rivers, member of the United States House of Representatives representing Michigan's 13th congressional district from 1995 to 2003, first openly bipolar member of the United States Congress.[75]Jason Ricci, American harmonica player and singer.[234]Rene Rivkin, entrepreneur.[235]Barret Robbins, former NFL Pro Bowler.[236]Svend Robinson, Canadian politician, was diagnosed with cyclothymia.[237]John Ruskin, English art critic of the Victorian era, art patron, draughtsman, watercolourist, prominent social thinker and philanthropist.[238]Rene Russo, American actress, producer, and former model.[239]S[edit]Gary Lee Sampson, American murderer.[240]Franz Schubert, Austrian composer, is believed to have had cyclothymia.[241]Robert Schumann, German composer.[242][243][244]Francesco Scavullo, artist, fashion photographer. In 1981, after four nervous breakdowns Scavullo was diagnosed as manic-depressive.[245]Anne Sexton, American poet won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1967 for her book Live or Die, diagnosed with bipolar disorder after many suicide attempts.[246]Frances Ford Seymour, mother of Jane and Peter Fonda.[247]Paul Sharits, visual artist.[248]Tommy Lynn Sells, American serial killer.[249]Nina Simone, American singer.[250]Naomi Sims, American model, businesswoman and author, widely credited as being the first African-American supermodel.[251]Frank Sinatra, American singer and actor. "Being an 18-karat manic depressive, and having lived a life of violent emotional contradictions, I have an over-acute capacity for sadness as well as elation."[252]Yo Yo Honey Singh, Indian rapper, music producer, singer, and film actor.[253]Amy Sky, Canadian songwriter.[254]Michael Slater, International Australian cricketer, forced to retire because of related symptoms.[255][256]Tony Slattery, actor and comedian. "I rented a huge warehouse by the river Thames. I just stayed in there on my own, didn't open the mail or answer the phone for months and months and months. I was just in a pool of despair and mania."[73]Christopher Smart, English poet, is believed to have had cyclothymia or manic depression.[257]Tim Smith, rugby league player whose career with NRL side Parramatta Eels was ended due to his bipolar condition, and pressure from the media.[258]Charlene Soraia, British singer-songwriter, musician has cyclothymia.[259]Britney Spears, American singer-songwriter.[260]Alonzo Spellman, American football player.[261]Dusty Springfield, English pop singer.[262][263]Scott Stapp, frontman, Creed.[264]Peter Steele, frontman, Type O Negative.[265][266]David Strickland, actor, Suddenly Susan.[267][268]Gilbert Stuart, American painter.[269]Michael Strunge, Danish Poet, killed himself by jumping from a building during mania.[248]Poly Styrene (real name Marion Elliot-Said), singer.[270]Stuart Sutherland, British psychologist and writer.[271]Matthew Sweet, American singer-songwriter.[272][273]T[edit]Mackenzie Taylor, British comedian.[274]Michael Thalbourne, Australian psychologist and parapsychologist.[275]Abbott Handerson Thayer, American artist and painter.[276][277]Debi Thomas, Olympic medalist, former figure skater and physician.[278]Steven Thomas, American entrepreneur.[279][280]Ron Thompson, American politician, former member of the West Virginia House of Delegates; has Bipolar II disorder.[281]Gene Tierney, actress, nominated for Academy Award for Best Actress (1945).[282]Devin Townsend, musician of Strapping Young Lad and The Devin Townsend Band. He took himself off of his medication to write lyrics for Alien.[283]Nick Traina, American singer, son of American bestselling writer Danielle Steel.[284]Timothy Treadwell, American environmentalist and bear enthusiast, featured in the 2005 documentary film by Werner Herzog titled Grizzly Man.[285][286]Margaret Trudeau, Canadian celebrity and ex-wife of former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau (deceased). She now travels Canada and other countries speaking out against the stigmas on mental illness.[287]Michael Tunn, Australian radio announcer and television presenter.[288]Ted Turner, American media businessman. Founder of CNN.[289]U[edit]Dimitrius Underwood, former American football player.[290]V[edit]Jean-Claude Van Damme, Belgian actor and martial artist.[291]Vincent van Gogh, artist.[292][293][294] (among numerous other hypotheses)Townes Van Zandt, singer-songwriter.[295]Joseph Vásquez, American independent filmmaker.[296]Eric Victorino, vocalist of The Limousines, author.[297]Byron Vincent, writer, performer, and broadcaster.[298]Lars von Trier, filmmaker, widely regarded to have bipolar type I disorder by critics, although Von Trier has never admitted it publicly.[299][300]Mark Vonnegut, author.[301]W[edit]James Wade, English professional darts player.[302]Ayelet Waldman, Israeli-American novelist and essayist, has written about her bipolar II disorder.[303]David Walliams, actor, comedian, author, and charity fundraiser.[304]Tom G. Warrior, lead singer and guitarist for heavy metal bands Celtic Frost, Apollyon Sun and Triptykon.[305]Ruby Wax, American actress, mental health campaigner, lecturer, and author.[306]Scott Weiland, musician for Stone Temple Pilots, Velvet Revolver.[307]Pete Wentz, musician for Fall Out Boy.[308]Delonte West, American basketball player.[309]Kanye West, musician, entrepreneur and fashion designer.[310]Norman Wexler, screenwriter.[311]Mark Whitacre, business executive depicted in the film The Informant.[312]Norbert Wiener, American mathematician, philosopher, originator of cybernetics.[313][314]Brian Wilson, musician and founding member of The Beach Boys.[315]Amy Winehouse, English singer and songwriter.[316]Jonathan Winters, American comedian, actor, author, and artist.[317]Frank Wisner, OSS officer.[318]Y[edit]Lee Thompson Young, actor.[319]Bert Yancey, American professional golfer.[320]Z[edit]Bruno Zehnder, Swiss photographer.[321]Catherine Zeta-Jones, Welsh actress, has bipolar II disorder.[322]