In response to these trends, many Americans have sought refuge in the belief that for all its size and bluster, China’s success is still essentially a story of imitation and mass production. This view has some grounding in reality: theft of intellectual property — both in the old-fashioned way, with spies, and increasingly by exploiting cyber methods as well — has been another key part of China’s economic development program. As a Chinese colleague once explained to me, what Americans call R&D (research and development), Chinese think of as RD&T, where the T stands for theft. Of course, China
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