EAST MEETS WEST

They're building a Verizon a year in China.” An equipment vendor executive told me that recently, meaning that a Verizon-sized network is deployed there each year. It's a mind-boggling thing to try to visualize this deployment. Already the world's largest mobile-phone market, China is expected to double by 2007 to include half a billion users, which is also the current size of its wireline market. Having sat out the initial 3G spending frenzy, China's tortoise is set to gain on the hares of the Western world as its carriers prepare to roll out 3G networks of various flavors.

China couldn't have picked a better time to leapfrog forward technologically, as politics and corporate poverty keep American telecom sedated, economic pressure forces an overseas manufacturing migration and NASA's fall from grace leaves the forgotten space race open to all comers. And although China is now benefiting from its emulation of Western high-tech industries, one wonders if and when the scale and momentum of their telecom industry will reach a tipping point that reverses the dynamic of that relationship, so that American telecom workers one day speak in terms of building a China Unicom in the United States. After the Chinese have learned everything they can from us, what will they teach us?