Last week, we made the simple point that China's increasing prominence as an assembler of consumer electronics does not mean that it is a technology superpower, or is likely to become one in the next five or 10 years.
This provoked some anguished comment from readers who thought we were arguing that China has no technological future.
We have been repeatedly informed that Toyota's first car for the American market, the 1957 Toyopet, was a disaster; 20 years later, Toyota was well on its way to becoming one of the world's dominant carmakers.
'Don't make the same mistake with China that the Americans made with Japan,' we are admonished.
In the 1960s, Americans laughed at Japanese gadgets. In the 1980s, it was the Japanese electronics firms which were laughing, all the way to the bank.
Thankfully, I am not old enough to remember the Toyopet, but I recall well the chastened American views of Japan in the 1980s. Most of them turned out to be just as stupid as their arrogant 1960s predecessors. Japanese manufacturers were going to take over the world. Japanese tycoons were going to buy everything. A square mile of Tokyo property was worth more than the rest of the world. And so on.
In the end, of course, Japanese firms reached the limits of their competitiveness, the property bubble burst - and everyone, American and Japanese alike, was much richer than they had been before Japan burst on to the world economic stage.
