China’s New Innovation Advantage

中国经济的未来在于创新，身在中国的每个人都知道。但事实并非总是如此。过去半个世纪以来中国的制造业奇迹，令七亿多人摆脱了贫困，不是因为创新。这个奇迹的驱动力在很大程度上可以说是一种模仿。中国出生于战后婴儿潮的几亿雄心壮志的工人，提供了似乎源源不断的劳动力，令中国得以投入对其他国家创新的生产制造。一个错过了工业革命的国家，以此在一二十年里吸收了世界上最前沿的制造业进步，也因此落得了全球模仿者的名声。

The future of the Chinese economy lies in innovation, and everyone in China knows it. But that hasn’t always been true. Innovation didn’t drive the manufacturing miracle that has unfolded in China over the past half century, during which some 700 million people have been raised—or lifted themselves—out of desperate poverty. Instead the driver has in large part been what might be called brute-force imitation. Relying on a seemingly limitless supply of cheap labor, provided by the hundreds of millions of ambitious workers born during the postwar baby boom, China devoted itself prodigiously to the production of other countries’ innovations. The effort enabled a country that missed the Industrial Revolution to absorb the world’s most modern manufacturing advances in just a decade or two. Fittingly, China earned a reputation as a global copycat.

现在不一样了。中国的婴儿潮一代被独生子女政策下出生的千禧一代所替代。独生子女政策正式颁布于1979年，旨在让出生率降到更替水平以下。该政策的确发挥了作用，但也造成了新的人口结构问题：如今中国的千禧一代和Z世代劳动力不够填补婴儿潮一代留下的空缺。中国国家统计局数据表明，2030年中国适龄工作群体将会比2015年减少8100万，2030年之后人口每年平均将减少760万。这种变化会造成深远的影响。年轻劳动力减少，中国无法再依靠模仿来供养老龄人群，因此必须转而依靠创新。

Now times are changing. China’s Baby Boomers are being replaced by its Millennials, born under the country’s one-child policy, which was officially launched in 1979 and designed to get birth rates below replacement level. It worked—but it also created a new demographic reality: China today doesn’t have enough people in its rising Millennial and Gen Z workforce to replenish the ranks of its disappearing Baby Boomers. According to its National Bureau of Statistics, China will have 81 million fewer working-age people in 2030 than in 2015; after 2030 that population is projected to decline by an average of 7.6 million annually. This has profound implications. With its pool of younger workers shrinking, China can no longer rely on imitation if it hopes to grow and support its aging population. It will have to rely on innovation instead.

中国如何创新？中国能否在全球层面上与在创新基础上打造经济数十年的发达国家竞争？许多人表示怀疑。他们提到，近年来西方国家出现了大量创新和创新者，而中国则相对较少。2014年3月《哈佛商业评论》刊登雷影娜（Regina M. Abrami）、柯伟林（William C. Kirby）和沃伦·麦克法兰（F. Warren McFarlan）三位作者的《中国如何创新》，总结了普遍的看法。作者的论述在当时缜密严谨，但仅仅过了两年，在最短时间内获得十亿美元估值的十家公司里就有八家是中国公司——其中六家成立于文章发表的2014年。

But can China innovate? Can it compete at a global level with developed nations that have built their economies on innovation for decades? Many observers are doubtful. In recent years, they note, the West has steadily produced an abundance of innovations and innovators, while China has produced relatively few. In March 2014 this magazine published “Why China Can’t Innovate,” by Regina M. Abrami, William C. Kirby, and F. Warren McFarlan, an article that captured the conventional wisdom. The authors’ arguments were sound and well supported at the time. But just two years later eight of the 10 companies that had reached a $1 billion valuation in the shortest time ever were Chinese—and six of those eight were founded the year that article was published.

作为一个2020年在全球创新指数中排名仅为14的国家而言，这个数字足以令人吃惊。我们评估创新时显然忽略了某个驱动中国公司发展的重要因素。我们关注的是提出重大新创意的人和公司，是那种有冲劲、有感召力的英雄角色。以这种标准评估创新，美国的创新生态系统格外突出。

Those are startling numbers for a country that in 2020 ranked only 14th on the Global Innovation Index. Something clearly propelled those Chinese companies to the top, but the metrics we use to evaluate innovation have missed it. We tend to focus on people and companies that generate big new ideas—charismatic heroes with dash, daring, and dynamic thinking. By that measure the U.S. innovation ecosystem stands apart. But in the past five years, as an “innovation cold war” has taken shape between world powers, China has achieved a kind of parity with the United States—and the driving force behind its success may not be its innovators at all.

要理解中国企业在全球崭露头角的驱动力，我们要先认识到，现在中国拥有其他国家无法企及的资源：有生之年经历过一系列前所未见的转变的庞大人口，具备了惊人的接纳和适应创新的能力，接受创新的速度和规模都是别国所无法比拟的。

To understand what’s powering the global rise of Chinese companies, we need to recognize that China now has at its disposal a resource that no other country has: a vast population that has lived through unprecedented amounts of change and, consequently, has developed an astonishing propensity for adopting and adapting to innovations, at a speed and scale that is unmatched elsewhere on earth.

中国创新生态系统里有几亿极其擅长接受和适应创新的消费者，这才是令中国具备强大全球竞争力的原因。最终评估创新的势必是人们采用创新的意愿。在这一点上，中国所向无敌。

It’s that aspect of China’s innovation ecosystem—its hundreds of millions of hyper-adoptive and hyper-adaptive consumers—that makes China so globally competitive today. In the end, innovations must be judged by people’s willingness to use them. And on that front China has no peer.

移动支付的发展

The Growth of Mobile Payment

2015年，生活在北京的人突然不带现金出门了。似乎只是一夜之间的事，全中国的人都开始使用微信支付和支付宝这样的软件，将移动支付融入了日常生活。

Life changed dramatically for people in 2015, when everyone in Beijing abruptly stopped carrying cash. Seemingly overnight, the entire Chinese population began to download apps such as WeChat Pay and Alipay and integrate mobile payment into their daily lives.

中国的移动支付软件无所谓支付数额大小，也无所谓交易是否正式。2015年在成都的时候，我用手机付款买了一台全球品牌的新笔记本电脑，然后走出门店，又用手机在路边买了个煎饼当早餐。

No payment is too small or too big for Chinese mobile-payment apps, and no business is too informal. In 2015 in Chengdu, I used my phone to pay for a new laptop from a global brand. Then I went outside the store and used my phone to buy a breakfast sandwich from a woman who cooked it on an upside-down metal trash can suspended over hot coals on the side of the road.

上文提到的卖电脑的人和卖煎饼的人，都不是什么创新者。在我们通常用来评估全球经济体创新水平的体系里，他们并没有多少创新“价值”。可是想一想，九亿多身处不同社会阶层的网民都能自然而然地迅速适应和采用创新，这是什么概念？这会让你拥有足以影响全球竞争格局的经济力量。

The computer-store owner, and the breakfast-sandwich vendor are not innovators. They don’t have much “value” in the systems we use to rank global economies on innovation. But what happens when rapid adoption and adaptation become normal for more than 900 million internet users in every social stratum? You get an economic force that can change the terms of global competition.

移动支付的故事很有启发性，因为移动支付技术在美国和中国几乎是同时出现，因此几乎不必考虑相对创新性因素。2014年Apple Pay在美国推出，一年后出现了Samsung Pay和Android Pay，以及中国的支付宝和微信支付。

The story of mobile payment is especially instructive, because the technology that enables it emerged in the United States and China at almost exactly the same time. Thus their comparative innovativeness or timing—who copied whom?—becomes almost a nonfactor. In 2014 Apple Pay was launched in the U.S., followed a year later by Samsung Pay and Android Pay, and Alipay and WeChat Pay were launched in China.

两边的移动支付在时间和技术方面持平，但推广率相差甚远。2019年年初，苹果高调宣布全世界已有3.83亿台手机激活了Apple Pay，但此时美国只有24%的苹果手机用户用过。而且直到这一年，Apple Pay才超过星巴克只能在自家门店使用的移动应用，登上美国移动支付软件榜首。

In timing and tech the innovations were all but equal, but their adoption rates have differed dramatically. In early 2019 Apple announced with much fanfare that 383 million phones around the world had activated Apple Pay—but at that point only 24% of U.S. iPhone owners had ever actually used the technology. And not until that year did Apple Pay surpass the Starbucks mobile app—used only in Starbucks stores—as the most-used mobile-payment app in the United States.

中国的情况则大为不同，微信支付在智能手机用户中赢得了84%的市场渗透率（腾讯微信用户都可以使用微信支付，而微信每月活跃用户有12亿）。这个数据解释了2018年微信单日交易额12亿、ApplePay一个月交易额才10亿的原因，也可以解释2019年中国移动应用交易总额（347万亿人民币，约54万亿美元）何以是美国总额（980亿美元）的551倍。

Things have unfolded very differently in China, where WeChat Pay has won 84% market penetration among smartphone users. (The app is available to users of Tencent’s super-app WeChat, which has 1.2 billion monthly active users.) That kind of penetration explains why in 2018 WeChat Pay did 1.2 billion transactions a day, whereas Apple Pay did one billion a month. And it’s why in 2019 the total gross expenditure in China via mobile app (347 trillion yuan, or roughly $54 trillion) was 551 times greater than the total expenditure in the United States ($98 billion).

那么在移动支付方面，哪个国家、哪家公司创新程度更高？有什么影响？

So in the case of mobile payment, which country or company was more innovative? And did it matter?

年轻的中国

Young China

不可否认，中国的监管环境有利于移动支付发展。本文主要关注的是一个尚未得到重视的方面：中国人尝试和信赖新技术的意愿。真正让移动支付在全中国推广、取得全世界绝无仅有的成功的是人民。要理解中国公众为何具备如此强大的适应力，先从这个词入手——年轻的中国。我用这个词一方面是指中国40岁以下的七亿人，另一方面是指新的国家认同感，后者形成于过去十年，不同于20世纪90年代末期和21世纪前十年的“世界工厂”。

Undeniably, the regulatory environment has helped mobile payment take off there. Though this article focuses on the underexamined will of Chinese citizens to try and to trust new technology. But what has made China’s adoption of mobile payment so successful—and globally unique—is its people. Even here the government has played a significant role, because it has conditioned its citizens to expect less data privacy than Americans do—and indeed, has granted them fewer rights. But there’s more to the story than that. To understand why the Chinese public is so fiercely adoptive, let’s think about Young China, by which I mean two things: first, the 700 million Chinese who are under the age of 40; and second, a new national identity, which in the past decade has emerged as distinct from the manufacturing identity of the late 1990s and the 2000s.

近些年的生活经历促使中国人形成了独特的适应力，其他国家都无法比拟。要理解其独特之处，可以参考我的“生活变化指数”，用人的寿命期限内人均GDP变化追踪其一代人经历的经济变化。如图表“生活变化指数”所示，自1990年起在中国生活，总体上生活环境的发展变化速度比世界其他所有地方都快。

Lived experience has shaped China’s unique attitude toward adoption in recent years, and that experience has been unlike any other country’s. To understand just how different it is, consider what I call the Lived Change Index, which uses lifetime per capita GDP to track how much economic change people have lived through. As the exhibit “The Lived Change Index” illustrates, to have lived in China since 1990, broadly speaking, is to have lived in a country that is moving faster and changing more quickly than any other place on earth.

如今提起中国的变化速度，我们会关注景观方面的迅速变化——现在和过去差异非常大。但如此一来，我们就忽略了中国人精神风貌的变化。看看图表，还有1989年和现在在上海拍摄的对比照片，你不禁会问，如果换成自己，生活经历了如此之大的变化，自己对进步的期望和对技术和商业的感受会是怎样？

When we talk about the speed of change in China today, we tend to focus on its rapidly changing physical landscape—and the differences there are dramatic. But in doing so we neglect changes in the mental landscape of China’s people. Looking at the exhibit, or at side-by-side pictures of Shanghai in 1989 and today, you might ask yourself how living through that sort of change would shape your expectations for progress and your sense of what government, technology, and commerce can do.

美国千禧一代自1990年起经历了改变人生的重大变化，我就是这一年出生的。先是互联网，然后是手机，接着是智能手机、社交媒体、约会软件、手机银行、电动汽车、大数据、基因工程，还有很多很多。1990年美国人看到美国人均GDP增长了约2.7倍，听起来很厉害，但你想一想，1990年出生在中国的人看到人均GDP增长了32倍——整整差了一个数量级。1990年中国GDP还不到全球总值的2%，2019年已经增加到了近19%。

American Millennials have lived through dramatic, life-altering changes since 1990, the year I was born. First came the internet. Then cell phones. Then smartphones, social media, dating apps, mobile banking, electric cars, big data, CRISPR, and so much more. Since 1990 Americans have seen U.S. per capita GDP grow by roughly 2.7 times, which sounds impressive until you realize that somebody born in China in 1990 has seen per capita GDP grow by 32 times—a whole order of magnitude greater. In 1990 China’s GDP represented less than 2% of the global total. By 2019 its share had jumped to nearly 19%.

看看这些具体的数字。从2011年到2013年，仅仅三年时间，中国浇筑的混凝土就超过了美国整个20世纪的总量。1990年中国农村每100户人家有一台电冰箱，现在100户人家有96台（开发电冰箱的一大基准是保存食物）。1990年中国只有550万辆汽车，现在是2.7亿，其中340万是电动车，占全球电动车总数的47%。1990年中国有3/4是农村人口，现在近2/3是城市人口，城市人口增加了近五亿。

Consider some of the specifics. In just three years, from 2011 to 2013, China poured more concrete than the United States had poured in the entire 20th century. In 1990 China’s rural population had one refrigerator per 100 households; today that number is 96 per 100. (Food preservation is a common benchmark for development.) In 1990 China had only 5.5 million cars on the road; today it has 270 million, of which 3.4 million are electric, representing 47% of the global electric fleet. In 1990 three-quarters of the country’s population was rural; today nearly two-thirds is urban, an increase of more than half a billion people.

印度的反例

India’s Counterexample

把美国和中国放在一起对比，或许并不公平。很多人提到中国移动支付的高普及率是因为“越级提升”——现代化进程短而快，因此得以跳过技术发展中几个冗长缓慢的阶段，而美国都曾经经历过。想想谷歌所说的“下一个十亿用户”市场，互联网用户越级跳过昂贵的台式机和笔记本电脑，第一次接入网络的设备就是便宜的智能手机。印度作为中国在亚洲的“镜像”，也是这个市场的一部分。下面对比一下中国和印度。

Perhaps it’s not fair to compare the United States and China. Most observers write off China’s high rates of mobile-payment adoption as the result of “leapfrogging”—that is, modernizing so recently and so quickly that the country has been able to skip some of the cumbersome stages of technological development that the United States had to live through. Think of what Google calls the “next billion users” market, where internet users are leapfrogging expensive desktops or laptops and getting online for the first time using cheap smartphones. India, China’s “other” in Asia, is part of that market. So let’s compare it for a moment with China.

中国和印度很适合做比较。两个国家几乎在同一时期建立起现代政体——印度是1947年，中华人民共和国是1949年。1992年两个国家人均GDP皆为350美元左右。两个国家都人口众多，印度人口总体比中国年轻，说明更能接受新技术。两个国家都一样重视理工科教育。

The two countries are ripe for comparison. They were founded as modern polities at nearly the same time—India in 1947, and the People’s Republic of China in 1949. As recently as 1992 both had a per capita GDP of about $350. Both have an exceptionally large population. India’s is younger than China’s, suggesting a greater openness to new technologies. The two countries put a similar emphasis on education and STEM.

不过，仔细看看数据，就会发现很大的不同。印度只有一半人口使用网络，而且很多印度人对扫码支付心怀抗拒。因此，印度只有约一亿人使用移动支付应用，中国则是8.5亿——即使谷歌的下一个十亿用户项目投入巨资改进印度的基础设施和网络条件，还有其他企业投资，都未能发挥多少作用。这样的差距非同寻常，而且无法解释为中国越级提升。两个国家的移动支付和二维码支付都明显比现金更快、更简单、更安全且更便宜。

Study the data a bit more closely, however, and big differences emerge. Just half of India’s population uses the internet, and many Indians resist the idea of scanning QR codes to pay for things. As a result, only about 100 million people in India use mobile-payment apps, compared with some 850 million in China—even though Google, through its Next Billion Users initiative, has invested hugely, along with other organizations, to improve India’s infrastructure and access. That’s an extraordinary differential, and it can’t be explained away by leapfrogging. In both countries mobile payment and QR codes are demonstrably faster, easier, safer, and cheaper than cash. Yet the incredible adoption disparity persists.

究竟如何解释？生活变化指数可以提供答案。过去30年里，印度的人均GDP大体上是线性增长，从350美元以上增长到2000美元以上，而中国几乎是指数级增长，从不到350美元增加到10000美元以上。这个差异可以解释为何许多中国人愿意扫码，许多印度人却不愿意。重点并不是哪个文化更擅长创新，而是特定的发展生态系统造就了人们对变化、适应和新奇事物的态度。与世界其他地区的人相比，中国人在近些年里不得不适应各种巨大的变化，明白了创新技术可能是自己生存的关键。

What explains it? You can find the answer on the Lived Change Index. During the past three decades per capita GDP in India has grown in a roughly linear fashion, from just over $350 to more than $2,000—whereas in China it has grown almost exponentially, from just under $350 to more than $10,000. That disparity helps explain why many Chinese will scan a QR code but many Indians will not. The point here is not that any one culture is better at innovation but, rather, that certain developmental ecosystems create naturally different attitudes toward change, adoption, and newness. More than any other population in the world, the Chinese in recent years have had to adapt to radical change—and they have learned that innovative technologies can be key to their survival.

弥合创新差距

Closing the Innovation Gap

未来几十年里，要想与中国竞争，其他国家和企业必须进行战略优化：不仅要关注创新输入，大胆想象新的工具和技术，还要关注由于大规模迅速采用而具备了变革意义的创新输出。短期而言，中国明显在输出方面有优势，因为人口众多且善于接纳和适应创新，所以能在创新竞赛里一马当先。但如果中国以外的企业领导者参考下面几条建议，就可以逐渐弥合差距。

To compete successfully with China in the decades ahead, countries and companies will need to start strategically prioritizing not just innovation input, in the form of heroically imagined new tools and technologies, but also innovation output that becomes transformational through rapid adoption on a very large scale. In the short term, China has a clear advantage in terms of output, thanks to its huge population of hyper-adopters and hyper-adapters, and as a result it is poised to take the lead in the innovation arms race. But if business leaders outside China take the following steps, they can begin to close the gap.

关注。科幻小说家威廉·吉布森（William Gibson）写道，“未来已经到来，只是没有均匀分布。”这个观点就适用于中国。中国在一些地方领先全球市场数年，提供了一窥未来的理想窗口，尤其是数字化和零售趋势。

Pay attention. As the science-fiction writer William Gibson once wrote, “The future is already here—it’s just not evenly distributed.” That’s an insight worth applying to China, which in some cases is years ahead of global markets and so provides an excellent way of peering into the future, particularly when it comes to digital and retail trends.

比如Visa、万事达（Mastercard）等非现金交易领域的其他全球主要竞争者，至今抗拒移动支付，显然是因为不想彻底破坏自己的信用卡帝国。参考中国的情况，这些公司可能会出现“柯达时刻”——数码相机兴起时，柯达错估未来，将自身定位为胶卷公司而非照片公司，这个决定带来了灾难性的影响。未来全球趋势可能就是现在中国那样，人们在购物、贷款和投资等一切金融事务方面都信赖支付宝、微信支付等平台，不过大型信用卡公司还有机会，可以率先发展全球移动支付，而不是像中国很多银行那样将市场让给科技巨头。

Consider Visa, Mastercard, and other key global players in noncash payments, which to date have resisted encouraging mobile payment, ostensibly unwilling to fully disrupt their credit card empires. If China is any guide, those companies could be headed for a “Kodak moment,” as when Kodak, in response to the emergence of the digital camera, read the future wrong and made the disastrous decision to define itself as a film rather than a photo company. What’s in store globally is probably a lot like what we already see in China, where people trust platforms like AliPay and WeChat Pay for all things financial, from purchases to loans to investments. But the big credit card companies still have an opportunity to pioneer and encourage mobile payment globally rather than ceding the market to tech giants, as the banks in China have largely done.

同样，中国的线上及线下零售生态系统比美国早发展几年。在中国的超市和便利店，商品下面常有二维码，用智能手机扫码就能看到该产品的全部经历，比如一片三文鱼的产地以及运输距离。在高科技产品的店里扫码，会看到品牌宣传视频和用户评价。这是阿里巴巴所称的“新零售”，很有可能成为全球的常态，因为可以让品牌与顾客直接加深关系。在中国有业务的跨国企业几乎都采用了这种数字先行、面向中国的战略。（美国企业在中国运用的这类战略比现在在本国的版本高级得多。）

Similarly, the online and offline retail ecosystems in China are merging in ways that are years ahead of what’s happening in the United States. In Chinese grocery and convenience stores, it is now commonplace to see rows of QR codes below meat and produce. Scanning a QR code with a smartphone will reveal the product’s entire story, from, say, where a cut of salmon was sourced to how far it was shipped. Similarly, scanning a tech product in a store can bring up the brand video and user ratings. This is what Alibaba calls New Retail, and it could well become the global norm, because it allows brands to deepen their relationships with customers directly. Nearly all multinationals operating in China have adopted this sort of digital-first, China-forward strategy. (U.S. companies operating there have rolled out far more advanced versions of this strategy than the ones they currently use at home.)

这里给我们的教训是，中国消费者期待这样丰富的网络品牌体验。企业倘若无法提供，或者被视为落后，就会在市场中失败。中国会让想在美国市场获得竞争优势的公司看到，如何与消费者建立更好的接点。

The lesson here is that Chinese consumers have come to expect such a rich online brand experience. Failing to provide it, or being seen as having fallen behind, will doom a company in the market. The Chinese can show companies looking to gain competitive advantage in U.S. markets how to develop better touch points with consumers.

模仿。如果你曾经坚信自己独一无二，现在将模仿作为战略可能会让你觉得是认输了。但创新原本就包含发明和模仿两部分。我们不会因为乔布斯借鉴了施乐（Xeros）的鼠标就对苹果有不好的看法。天才总会借鉴别人的创意。要与中国竞争，全球公司必须将模仿纳入武器库——并且愿意使用。

Up your imitation game. If you’re used to believing in your own exceptionalism, leaning into imitation as a strategy can feel like a declaration of defeat. But innovation has always been about both invention and imitation. We don’t think less of Apple because Steve Jobs got the idea for the mouse from Xerox. Genius steals, and it always has. To compete with China, imitation must be a weapon in the arsenal of global companies—one they’re willing to use.

一些精明的外国公司已经明白了这一点，从中国竞争对手那里寻找创意。Facebook 2019年在聊天功能里加入了支付选项，就是模仿微信五年前在聊天中引入支付、将社交和商业技术融为一体的先驱实践。亚马逊的Prime Day（每年一次的活动，期间Prime会员能够参加各种促销并获得折扣）是模仿淘宝的“双十一”。Instagram的Reels功能借鉴自抖音。类似的例子还有很多。

Some of the smartest non-Chinese companies already understand this and are looking to Chinese rivals for ideas. That’s what Facebook did in 2019 when it added an integrated payment option to its chat function, five years after WeChat had introduced a similar option on a mass scale, in a pioneering example of how to productively fuse the worlds of social and commercial technology. It’s what Amazon did when it modeled its Prime Day (a wildly successful annual event during which Prime members receive all sorts of sale offers and discounts) on Alibaba’s Singles Day. Instagram got the idea for its Reels feature from TikTok. The list goes on and on.

考虑向中国公司借鉴创意的企业可以参考以下方案：

Companies looking to China for ideas should consider these courses of action:

让中国团队主导。我们都知道要针对中国市场进行本土化。在这个基础上更进一步，让中国团队主导至少一部分工作。很少有公司让中国团队参与制定全球战略，因此错失良机。对中国团队理所当然的事对于其他团队可能很有启发意义。关于中国本土战略的知识也许可以协助全球战略调整。

Lead from your China team. We’ve all been told to localize for China. Take that a step further and, at least in part, lead from China. Few companies empower their China teams to help create global strategy. That’s a missed opportunity. What is second nature to your China team may be revelatory to your other teams. What you learn about local strategy in China may well help transform your global strategy.

拿出最好的。把最好最聪明的人才送去中国，让他们接触最新鲜的创见，扩展可能性的边界。我曾与各种企业的代表交流，从德国汽车制造商到美国零售商，他们告诉我，来中国的部分使命就是学习数字生态系统，总结经验带回本公司。

Expose your best. Send your best and brightest to China. Expose them to new ideas there. Expand their sense of what’s possible. I have spoken with delegations representing a range of companies, from German auto manufacturers to U.S. retailers, who told me that part of their mission in visiting China was to learn from the digital ecosystem there and take those lessons back home.

及时了解中国速度。常有人说，“如果你六个月没去过中国，就不了解现在的中国。”要一直有意识地去了解中国。首先可以尝试每季度从趋势观察者和当地来源获取最新信息。对于全球企业高管而言，介绍当下潮流和体验的视频可能是仅次于亲自前往的好方法。

Stay informed at China speed. As the saying goes, “If you haven’t been to China in the past six months, you haven’t been to today’s China.” Stay informed constantly and consciously. Quarterly updates from trendspotters and on-the-ground resources are a good start. For global executives, video updates illustrating trends and experiences can be a close second to travel.

评估和应用适应性。全球企业应当制定相应标准，评估特定人群的适应性。可以针对各国各个年龄层次的人群制定对新事物、变化和适应的态度的深层行为评估测试，还可以进一步关注像中国这样适应大规模变革、紧跟潮流的人群。生活变化指数可以用于推测适应性，但不够精确。

Measure and use adaptiveness. Global companies should develop criteria for measuring the adaptiveness of specific populations. Deeper behavioral testing of attitudes toward newness, change, and adaptation across countries and age cohorts would be a strong start, as would a closer focus on populations that, like China’s, have been forced to adapt on a grand scale to keep up with the times. The Lived Change Index is a decent way to extrapolate adaptiveness, though it is only a blunt instrument.

这类评估可以对产品开发起到引导作用，让新产品面向乐于接受改变、愿意尝试新技术的人群。一些国家、文化和人群天然更具适应性。在善于接受改变的国家推出产品并进行迭代，可以帮助企业孵化产品，为下一步走向更广阔的市场做好准备，还可以帮助企业决定哪些产品线适合或不适合适应性较低的环境。

Such metrics could help companies guide product launches by aiming them at populations that are friendlier to change and more willing to seize on new technologies. Some countries, cultures, and cohorts are naturally more adoptive—and, thus, adaptive—than others. Launching and iterating products in change-friendly countries would help companies incubate products until they’re ready for broader release. It would also help them determine which product lines might or might not be suited for less-adoptive environments.

优化自身相对较强的部分。适应速度并不是全部，还有一个重点是全球信赖。

Optimize your comparative strengths. The speed of adoption isn’t everything. Global trust also matters,

and much of the world simply does not trust “brand China.”

如今抖音的母公司字节跳动是全世界估值最高的独角兽企业，估值是名列第二的中国拼车公司滴滴出行的三倍。

Today ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, is the highest-valued unicorn in the world, worth three times the second-highest-valued, the Chinese ride-hailing company Didi Chuxing.

今后西方品牌的课题是，承认中国的强大创新力量，若想抱有竞争力，就必须向中国学习。

The trick for those Western brands going forward will be to acknowledge that China is a newly powerful innovative force—one from which they will have to learn if they hope to successfully compete.

中国人必将作为消费者、合作者和竞争者，在全球市场发挥越来越大的作用。与中国竞争，不应被视为零和博弈。不过现在要承认，中国最强大的创新资产乃是其具有高度适应性的人群。若能认识到这一点，从中学习，中国的新创新优势将为我们所用。

As consumers, collaborators, and competitors, the Chinese are destined to play an increasingly significant role in the global marketplace. Competition with China should not be considered a zero-sum game. Nevertheless, it’s time to acknowledge that its greatest asset in the innovation arms race may be its uniquely adoptive and adaptive population. If the rest of us can recognize and learn from that, we can make China’s new innovation advantage our own.

扎克·迪赫特瓦尔德是Young China Group创始人，著有《年轻的中国：这代人如何改变他们的国家以及全世界》（Young China: How the Restless Generation Will Change Their Countryand the World，圣马丁出版社2018年出版）。