Things changed and 1980 looks like an inflection point although for China in particular the inflection point could have been when Nixon went to China in 1972.
Until then China was more aligned with Russia but Nixon and Kissinger really hit it off Mao and Zhao Enlai and eventually you got Deng Xiaoping who had slogans like "To get rich is glorious" and China went on a path of encouraging "capitalist" economic growth that went through various phases. Early on China brought cheap labor to the table, right now they bring a willingness to invest (e.g. out capitalize us) such that, at their best, they bu make investments like this mushroom factory which is a giant vertical farm where people only handle the mushrooms with forklifts
(I find that video endlessly fascinating because of all the details like photos of the founders using the same shelving and jars that my wife did when she ran a mushroom lab)
Contrast that to the "Atlas Shrugged" situation we have here where a movie studio thinks they can't afford to spend $150 M to make a movie that makes $200M at the box office (never mind the home video, merchandise, and streaming rights which multiply that) which is the capitalist version of a janitor deciding they deserve $80 an hour.
points out how free trade won hearts and minds: how the US steel industry didn't want to disinvest in obsolete equipment which had harmful impacts on consumers and the rest of our industry. All people remember though is that the jobs went away
That focus on winning at increased international competition meant that there was no oxygen in the room for doing anything about interregional inequality in countries.
i see. so you think that perhaps in 01974 a computer industry startup in pittsburgh had more of a chance than it would have today, 50 years later, and that there are many more places in the world that are like pittsburgh in that way than places that are like shenzhen? that is, that maybe in 01974 there were dozens of cities where you could launch something like perq, and now there are only ten or something, so it was 'much more geographically inclusive' 50 years ago, even though those ten cities are much farther apart now, and the dozens in 01974 were all in the usa?
i have two doubts about this thesis, i'm not sure there were dozens of cities where you could launch something like perq 50 years ago, particularly considering they went bankrupt in 01985, possibly because of being in pittsburgh. i also suspect there are dozens of cities where you could do it today—i don't think you have to be in a 'champion city' to do a successful hardware startup. it's a little hard to answer that question empirically, because we have to wait 10 years to see which of today's hot startups survive that long
but maybe we can look at the computer companies that are newly-ish big, restricting our attention to mostly hardware, since that's what three rivers was doing and where you'd expect the most concentration. xiaomi, founded 02010 in beijing. huawei, founded 01987 in shenzhen. tencent, founded 01998 nominally in the caymans but really at shenzhen university. loongson, founded 02010 in beijing. sunway (jiangnan computing lab), founded 02009 (?) in wuxi. dji, founded 02006 in hong kong, but immediately moved to shenzhen. allwinner, founded 02007 in zhuhai (across the river from shenzhen and hong kong). mediatek, founded 01997 in hsinchu, where umc is. nanjing qinheng microelectronics (wch, a leading stm32 clone vendor), founded 02004 in nanjing. espressif, founded 02008 in shanghai. rockchip, founded 02001 in fuzhou. nvidia, founded 01993 in silicon valley. alibaba (parent company of t-head/pingtouge), founded 01999 in hangzhou, which is also where pingtouge is. bitmain, founded 02013 in beijing (?). hisilicon, founded 01991 in shenzhen, which designed the kirin 9000s cpu huawei's new phones use and is the largest domestic designer. smic, which csis calls 'the most advanced chinese logic chip manufacturer' (someone should tell csis about tsmc), and makes the kirin 9000s, founded 02000 in shanghai. smee, ('the most advanced chinese lithography company' —csis) founded 02002 in shanghai. mobileye, founded in jerusalem in 01999. biren, the strategic gpu maker, founded 02019 in shanghai. moore threads, the other strategic gpu maker, founded 02020 in beijing. unisoc (spreadtrum), fourth largest cellphone cpu company, founded 02001 in shanghai. tenstorrent, founded 02016 in toronto. zhaoxin, the amd64 vendor, founded 02013 in shanghai. changxin (innotron), the dram vendor, founded 02016 in hefei. fujian jinhua, the other dram vendor, founded 02016 in, unsurprisingly, fujian, i think in fuzhou. raspberry pi, founded 02009 in cambridge (uk). ymtc, the nand vendor, founded 02016 in wuhan. wingtech, the parent company of nexperia (previously philips), founded 02006 in jiaxing. huahong, founded 01996 in shanghai. phytium, makers of feiteng, founded 02014 in tianjin. oculus, founded 02012 in los angeles. zte, founded 01985 in shenzhen. gigadevice, founded 02005 in beijing. piotech, founded 02010 in shenyang. amec, founded 02004 in shanghai. ingenic, founded 02005 in beijing. silan, founded 01997 in hangzhou. nexchip, founded 02015 in hefei. united nova technology, founded 02018 in shaoxing. cetc, the defense contractor, founded 02002 in beijing. naura, the largest semiconductor equipment manufacturer in china, founded 02001 in beijing.
maybe my sampling here is not entirely unbiased, but we have 7 companies in beijing, 7 in shanghai, 6 in shenzhen, 2 in hangzhou, 2 in hefei, 2 in fuzhou, and then one each in each of wuxi, zhuhai, hsinchu, nanjing, silicon valley, jerusalem, cambridge, wuhan, toronto, jiaxing, tianjin, los angeles, and shaoxing. that seems like 19 cities where you could plausibly start a new computer maker today, given that somebody did in the last 30 years. did the usa ever have that many in the 01970s?
to me this doesn't support your thesis 'countries had to reinforce their champion cities so they can compete against other champion cities [resulting in] the redlining of 98% of america and similar phenomena in those countries as well' so that 'focus on (...) international competition [promoted] interregional inequality in countries'. rather the opposite: it looks like winning the international competition and heavy state investment has resulted in increasingly widespread computer-making startups throughout china, mostly in the prc, while computer makers founded elsewhere in the last few decades mostly failed. i mean, yes, none of these startups are in xinjiang or mississippi. but they're not all in one province of china, either; they're distributed across hebei province (sort of!), jiangsu, anhui, hubei, zhejiang, fujian, israel, taiwan, california, england, shanghai, and guangdong. taiwan and 7 of the 22 provinces† of the prc are represented in this list. they tend to be the more populous provinces, though there are some provinces conspicuously missing from the list, like shandong and henan
guangdong: 126 million
jiangsu: 85 million
hebei: 75 million
zhejiang: 65 million
anhui: 61 million
hubei: 58 million
fujian: 41 million
shanghai (city): 25 million
beijing (city): 22 million
tianjin (city): 14 million
the total population of the above regions is 570 million
taiwan is another 24 million people, bringing the total to some 600 million. so this is not quite half the population of china. so while there is surely some 'redlining' going on in china, i don't think it's against 98% or even 60% of the population
that is, probably nobody is going to start a company in inner mongolia making photolithography equipment for new chip fabs, but inner mongolia only has a population of 24 million people despite being 12% of china's land area, bigger than france and spain together. it has no ocean ports because it's nowhere near an ocean. it's a long airplane flight away from where people are building the chip fabs, and you can't fit a vacuum ultraviolet photolithography machine under your airline seat, or possibly on an airliner at all. wuhai didn't get its first airport until 02003. so, though i obviously know very little, i don't think even massive state investment to promote an electronics industry in chifeng would be successful
especially if we add california, israel, england, and ontario to the list, i think it's clear that the computer industry today is far more geographically inclusive than it was 50 years ago
but it's possible i'm just not understanding what you mean. what metrics of geographic inclusivity would you suggest?
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† the prc also contains 5 'autonomous regions', two 'special administrative regions' (hong kong and macau), and four direct-administered municipalities, of which three are on the list
i'm not quite sure what you're saying about reagan and shenzhen