Oct 20, 2026 · 1 hr 4 min · 9 segments
Joining us is Mitch Presnick, a pioneer in bringing the Super 8 hotel brand to and expanding it across the Chinese market, and a Visiting Fellow at Harvard’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. He…
I want to go back in practical terms to my own basic understanding as just a regular person.
In the 1980s, a movie came out with Michael Keaton called Kung Ho about Japanese companies coming to the United States and building car companies, extensions of Japanese companies.
But this movie was based on a reality that many Japanese companies were beginning to develop and build in the United States.
So when you think about the possibility of Chinese companies coming into the U.S. space to build, How do you envision that as helping the U.S. economy?
Well, I see it is very important for long-term U.S. competitiveness because number one, these companies are operating with a later generation of manufacturing technologies, right? They're all operating with the full spectrum.
When they manufacture in China, it's the molds, it's the advanced materials creating the six to nine gallium.
It's the highly engineered machines creating the other highly engineered machines that we don't necessarily have.
I don't think that the US is going to capture many of the 80,000 factories we've lost.
The next time you have an American who sounds kind of salty about this situation and pissed off, not every American was involved in the decision to gut American factories.
And now that they're here, it's easy to understand why Americans might feel a certain kind of way about the losses of those jobs and the losses of that.
And, you know, it's not going to come back because we do joint ventures with China, but it might allow the institutional corporate layer in the U.S. to maintain its relevance in areas of business where we're going to be relegated unless we don't do something pretty quickly afterwards.
And we're going to be relying ever more on China or countries that are also relying on China in a China plus one scenario.
It's not politically easy, but that's why I nurse made my friends in Washington and New York and Silicon Valley.
Your friends in California, where you're from, we're always ahead of the game because you guys are a country closer to China.
We're a whole country away from the beginning of the ocean that leads us to China.
I want to go back in practical terms to my own basic understanding as just a regular person.
In the 1980s, a movie came out with Michael Keaton called Kung Ho about Japanese companies coming to the United States and building car companies, extensions of Japanese companies.
But this movie was based on a reality that many Japanese companies were beginning to develop and build in the United States.
So when you think about the possibility of Chinese companies coming into the U.S. space to build, How do you envision that as helping the U.S. economy?
Well, I see it is very important for long-term U.S. competitiveness because number one, these companies are operating with a later generation of manufacturing technologies, right? They're all operating with the full spectrum.
When they manufacture in China, it's the molds, it's the advanced materials creating the six to nine gallium.
It's the highly engineered machines creating the other highly engineered machines that we don't necessarily have.
I don't think that the US is going to capture many of the 80,000 factories we've lost.
The next time you have an American who sounds kind of salty about this situation and pissed off, not every American was involved in the decision to gut American factories.
And now that they're here, it's easy to understand why Americans might feel a certain kind of way about the losses of those jobs and the losses of that.
And, you know, it's not going to come back because we do joint ventures with China, but it might allow the institutional corporate layer in the U.S. to maintain its relevance in areas of business where we're going to be relegated unless we don't do something pretty quickly afterwards.
And we're going to be relying ever more on China or countries that are also relying on China in a China plus one scenario.
It's not politically easy, but that's why I nurse made my friends in Washington and New York and Silicon Valley.
Your friends in California, where you're from, we're always ahead of the game because you guys are a country closer to China.
We're a whole country away from the beginning of the ocean that leads us to China.
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