Xi Jinping At Seattle Tech Summit

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates is one of the many U.S. tech leaders Chinese President Xi Jinping is meeting with during his visit to Seattle.

There’s a saying in China that goes like this: Bill Gates is the richest man in the world and President Barack Obama is one of the most powerful men in the world, but in a few years, Obama will be gone and Gates will still be rich. The thought helps explain why before heading to Washington, DC, this week, Chinese President Xi Jinping is first stopping to meet with Gates and hold a China-US tech summit in Seattle.
The stakes are high for both sides. China’s burgeoning tech industry – only now beginning to compete on the world stage through brands like Xiaomi, Huawei and Lenovo -- needs access to Western technological and business knowhow, and to Western markets, if it’s to be the growth engine the country needs as it tries to emerge from a slump that has roiled financial markets around the world and shift to a more consumer-driven economy.
US tech giants like Facebook, Google, Apple and IBM, in turn, want access to China’s 700 million Internet users but are troubled by a range of issues – from state-sponsored hacking and online censorship to a new security law that many see as thinly veiled protectionism.
Already, China has many major players like Baidu, Tencent and Alibaba, but some of its biggest competitors are simply copies of Silicon Valley tech stars. To truly become global leaders, the Chinese must begin innovating on their own, many experts said.
Chinese “companies need to learn how American companies run, like the Apples, Googles and Microsofts, so they can run in a similar way,” said Tiger Feng, founder and president of the Seattle Technical Forum as well as a principal software engineer and tech lead at Microsoft. “They’re already leaders in the China market. They want to be world leaders.”
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