I just saw the future. It wasn't in the US

I had a choice the other day in Shanghai: Which Tomorrowland to visit? Should I check out the fake, American-designed. Tomorrowland at Shanghai Disneyland, or should I visit the real Tomorrowland — the massive new research centre, roughly the size of 225 football fields, built by Chinese technology giant Huawei? I went to Huawei’s.

- Thomas Friedman

It was fascinating and impressive but ulti-mately deeply disturbing, a vivid confirmation of what a US businessman who has worked in China for several decades told me in Beijing. “There was a time when people came to America to see the future,” he said. “Now they come here.”

I'd never seen anything like this Huawei campus. Built in just over three years, it consists of 104 individually designed build-ings, with manicured lawns, connected by a Disney-like monorail, housing labs for up to 35,000 scientists, engineers and other work-ers, offering 100 cafes, plus fitness centres and other perks designed to attract the best Chinese and foreign technologists.

The Liangiu Lake R&D campus is basically Huawei's response to the US attempt to choke it to death beginning in 2019 by restricting the export of US technology, including semicon-ductors, to Huawei amid national security concerns. The ban inflicted massive losses on Huawei, but with the Chinese government's help, the company sought to innovate its way around us. As South Korea's Maeil Business Newspaper reported last year, it’s been doing just that: “Huawei surprised the world by introducing the ‘Mate 60’ series, a smartphone equipped with advanced semiconductors, last year despite U.S. sanctions.” Huawei followed with the world’s first triple-folding smart-phone and unveiled its own mobile operating system, Hongmeng (Harmony), to compete with Apple’s and Google's.

The company also went into the business of creating AI technology for everything from electric vehicles, self-driving cars and even autonomous mining equipment that can replace human miners. Huawei officials said that in 2024 alone, it installed 100,000 fast chargers across China for its electric vehicles; by contrast, in 2021, the US Congress allocated $7.5 billion toward a network of charging sta-tions, but as of November, this network had only 214 operational chargers across 12 states.