Growing up in a very conservative area (in California!) I constantly heard that the Chinese were extremely industrious but not very creative, which is why they didn't have a lot of innovation in their country and had to resort to corporate espionage so frequently. I didn't realize until I was a young adult that this was just cultural propaganda echoed by the anxious-but-faithful designed to assuage American fears that they were not the best, that they would not be on top in the future, and that there would even be a place for them in the near future of this century ("they build it, but we design it").
The truth is that the telecom industry in this country is a cartel keeping us decades behind other developed nations and it only gets worse every year, that American antitrust law has failed, and that introducing a profit motive into infrastructure simply has no positive benefits.
