As a counterexample, China's tech industry has caught up and in some ways surpassed the US, partially due to being closed off.
I think there's a few more important reasons beyond being closed off:
- Regulatory friendliness (eg. DJI)
- Non-enforcement of foreign patents (eg. LiFePO4 batteries)
- Technology transfer through partnerships with domestic firms
- Government support for industries deemed to be in the national interest
> As a counterexample, China's tech industry has caught up and in some ways surpassed the US, partially due to being closed off.
How did you come up to that conclusion? We don't have access to an alternate universe where the Chinese tech market was open. There is a real possibility that it would have been far ahead had it been open.
We do have access to records from the before times when the internet was wide open and Facebook, Google and Microsoft were big in China. Well, Microsoft is still big because they're not an internet company and unfazed by censorship, but the exit of Google and Facebook took a lot of pressure off Baidu and the entire Chinese social media ecosystem.
Facebook and Google were never big in China, not even close.
Google had 31% market share in 2010 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8455712.stm I haven't been able to find numbers for Facebook.
Don't have a source either but I was living in China back then and basically no one was using it. It was QQ and Renren.
But also due to the U.S. driving away smart people from the U.S. to China.