Letter from Nikkei Asia's editor: China's tech trap

Hello from Tokyo. Joseph Schumpeter was one of the most famous economists of the 20th century. He is known for characterizing the core of capitalism as an evolutionary cycle of creative destruction, or innovation. His theory attracted many Japanese scholars, and Heita Kawakatsu, the professor turned governor of Shizuoka prefecture, was one of them. (Some people say that this is possibly because his own name, Heita -- which can also be read as Peta -- is similar to Schumpeter's.)

In the 1990s, Kawakatsu was a professor at Tokyo's Waseda University, where he taught a course on Japanese economic history. In the class, one of his favorite case studies of Japan's unique economic development was the process by which the country adopted gun technology from Portugal in the 16th century and soon rose to become one of the world's leading exporters, only to abandon it and return to swords when national isolation began in the 17th century.

But ironically enough, when Kawakatsu was elected Shizuoka's governor in 2009, he became a strong opponent of one of Japan's most famous innovations: high-speed maglev trains, which are to pass through his prefecture. He has been able to stall the project for years. On Tuesday, Kawakatsu made big headlines by being forced to announce his resignation due to making inappropriate remarks about people's occupations. All eyes are now on the pending resignation's implications for the stalled maglev project.

Speaking of innovation, this week's Big Story looks at China's innovation frontier, the tech industry, where workers are increasingly under intense pressure from employers to stay on the job. Some say that Asia's knowledge-intensive tech industry is actually a labor-intensive industry. This might be