The failure is that we let Huawei out-invest us (as in Western telecoms network equipment firms, Ericsson, Nokia, Alcatel, Lucent, Nortel, Siemens) 2 to 1 in R&D for the last 20 years. That's because Ren Zhengfei is a visionary who was prescient enough to understand the value of R&D in gaining an edge while also ruthless enough to use industrial espionage in the short term to catch up.

The current situation was completely predictable, but industrial policy has a bad name in rentier capitalist circles that dominate our policy apparatus.