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: role model for a successful multinational company in the age of globality: a good reason to be optimistic about the future of capitalism, even capitalism with a Chinese face. Perhaps Lenovo and other new champions will become the first of a new breed of truly global companies, rooted in neither rich nor developed countries but aiding wealth creation by making the most of opportunities the world over.

Good and bad capitalism

But is such optimism justified? Indeed, would Lenovo even have been allowed to buy IBM’s PC business today? Congress nearly blocked the deal at the time because it feared that valuable intellectual property might fall into the hands of the Chinese government. Since then, China-bashing has increased, there has been some Arab-bashing too, deals have been blocked and the rhetoric in Washington, DC, has become ever more protectionist.

One fear is that American jobs will disappear overseas. This is despite plenty of academic evidence that open economies generally do better than closed ones, that in America in particular many more and generally better jobs have been created in recent years than have been destroyed, and that the number of jobs lost to outsourcing is tiny compared with those wiped out by technological innovation. Mr Yang explains that “people thought we would manufacture all our products in China, but in fact we have opened new plants in Greensboro and also Poland, as we need to be close to our customers.”

Lately a new fear has been adding to the protectionist sentiment, turning even some usually enthusiastic global capitalists into protectionists. Could the rise of the new champions reflect the advance of bad forms of capitalism at the expense of good forms?

In their 2007 book, “Good Capitalism, Bad Capitalism and the Economics of Prosperity and Growth”, William Baumol, Robert Litan and Carl Schramm identify four main models of capitalism around the world: entrepreneurial, big-firm, oligarchic (dominated by a small group of individuals) and state-led. Most economies are a mixture of at least two of these. The best economies, say the authors, blend big-firm and entrepreneurial capitalism. The worst combination may be of oligarchic and state-led capitalism, both of which are prevalent in many emerging markets.