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In The White Heat of the Space Race, America has spent millions of dollars in the development of the ball point pen that will work in gravity. She faced the same problem that the Russians used. . . lead pencil.

This, uncomfortable, fictional stories. Both sides tried the pencils and ended both sides using the space pen, a product that has been fully developed in the private sector. But the legend often floats as an industrial, geopolitical and ideological example because it embodies terrorism well that provokes all these fields: that the other/side/economic model can be in a better structural and more intelligent and cheapest mode.

Did “Pace Pen” come back this week, as investors and governments discourage the Deepseek AI model in China, whether American export controls have led to reverse results, then lost their nerves about billions invested in the most expensive American approach to that problem? Of course I did.

Nevertheless, the phrase should be the most worrying at the present time Kaizen – The Japanese concept of “continuous improvement”, which one day struck nervous terror in the hearts of American companies and any China, in one way or another, is now looking forward to mastery calmly. Partially by employing Japanese Kaizen The masters are emerging with less than their value in their economy.

Kaizen Firstly, the International Business Dictionary in the 1980s entered, when American and European companies needed to understand the reason for overcoming Japanese companies – in terms of price and quality – on cars, consumer electronics and semi -conductors. It was appropriate for both sides to get to know the patient as a patient, a distinguished Japanese, improve the product and the practical.

Practical effects of Kaizen It was great: It was among the main reasons because the Japanese economy became huge in the 1970s and eighties, and why many of its companies maintain global competitiveness in a huge group of industrialization.

but KaizenThe long development of Japan and stagnation after decades may be more exceptional. Once evaporated the era of financial excess, evaporation, Kaizen The great power of survival has become: a simultaneous motivation of higher quality and alarm in times of corrosion. Make the shrinkage, and the inability of Japanese manufacturers to secure the power of pricing in their local market, making the cost a great art.

Chinese manufacturers, with their long -term attention and technology, were closely audited in all of this, and they saw ways to create Kaizen They are their own. Deepseek may represent a penetration of the program, but it bears on the shoulders of the devices that are unavoidable now.

Many will argue that China’s acquisition of technology was at best and fear in the worst case. When the blaming is not blaming the theft or frank coercion (and foreign companies often have lost the main technology in the transplants that have been formulated badly or excessive optimism about the ability to protect IP. But this has long stopped explaining everything.

In the latest visual industrial achievements in China-production of low-cost electric cars, consumer electronics, industrial machines, high-speed trains and robots-some version of Kaizen Now at work. There are reasons for doubting that Chinese repetition may work faster and more disabled and more clear results than the original.

First, China has the numbers and talent to be thrown Kaizen On a large scale of Japan at all. The increases work better when there are many of them.

Second, it occurs in an era in which consumers are much faster to determine and communicate when the product is not exactly as they wish.

But the third is that they may be able to pay for speed. As well as direct monitoring Kaizen At work in Japanese manufacturing operations, Chinese companies, according to Tokyo’s employment agents, have found that they can get out of the Japanese semiconductor engineers, railways and robots as consultants. This is not new, as agents say, but it is now sharply accelerating.

Japanese companies tend to retire from people who are highly qualified early, and did not push them for several years during the shrinking period, especially in particular, and they set less loyalty than they were hoping. It can be paid well by a Chinese company, and without explicitly transferring industrial secrets, its value is enormous: Kaizen It is essentially a process of experience and error, and an experienced engineer can transfer an invaluable signal and save costs for what has been tried, but it has not succeeded.

Advice such as: Forget the pencil, was useless.

leo.lewis@ft.com