If economist Yasheng Huang is right, the West shouldn’t be too worried about China winning the battle for technology leadership. It’s not that China can’t innovate; it produced the “four great inventions” — gunpowder, paper, printing and the compass — hundreds of years before the West. Rather, as Huang convincingly argues in his new book, “The Rise and Fall of the EAST,” the social and political construct imposed on China since the Sui Dynasty (581-618) has throttled the creativity that is essential to innovation.
