Apjit walia biography books

The Great Uncoupling,
by Nigel Inkster
(Hurst, £25)

IN THE Great Decoupling, former MI6 director of operations and intelligence Nigel Inkster explores the growing tensions between the US and China and assesses the prospects for an economic and technological “decoupling” between the two.

Inkster documents China’s emergence as a technology superpower over the past four decades, starting with the Chinese Communist Party’s realisation in the early 1980s that ICT was likely to constitute a “strategic high ground” for the foreseeable future.

To observers in the West at the time, the idea of China as a peer competitor in science and technology must have seemed absurd, given that the “comparative advantage” it offered to global value chains was its abundance of cheap and competent labour, put to work primarily in light manufacturing.

As the economist Justin Yifu Lin has written, “technological innovation is not a free lunch, it ne