Not so long ago, commentators across the political spectrum were warning us that China’s economy was set to surpass America’s. The United States needed, one Senator claimed, “a 21st -century pro-American industrial policy,” to ward off this existential threat.
Such rhetoric was reminiscent of the late-1980s, when a slew of books appeared to warn Americans that, unless the United States adopted Japanese-like industrial policy (government intervention that shifts resources toward a particular sector or industry), it was doomed to be economically dwarfed by a country which America had militarily crushed four decades earlier.
China Policy Research 