"The Chinese can take a test, but what they can't do is innovate" is the kind of quote you could probably get away with about five or six years ago, when speaking to an American audience. Before the days of Alibaba rocking the US stock market or companies like Xiaomi, OnePlus and WeChat giving their American equivalents a run for their money.
But for Carly Fiorina, the prospective Republican candidate for US president who made these comments earlier this week, she was only getting started.
"They [Chinese people] are not terribly imaginative. They're not entrepreneurial, they don't innovate, that is why they are stealing our intellectual property," said the woman who is vying to become president of a country that has - by some measures - already been passed by China as the biggest economy in the world.
This sort of casual, lazy dismissal of the world's biggest country wouldn't be complete without an American-exceptionalism kicker, and Fiorina nailed it:
American schools "teach entrepreneurship, innovation, risk taking, imagination. These are things that are distinctly American."
Looks like somebody forgot to tell Jack Ma.
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