Most of the comments here focus on the business aspects of US/China retailing. I'd like to remind techies here that Alibaba has become a tech powerhouse as they learned how to deal with ever increasing traffic. Their work on infrastructure has been phenomenal. It's not a joke to handle up to 45 million database transactions per second, or 256K payments per second. Few US companies could do it without breaking a sweat. Check out their work on JStorm, Flink, messaging queue, container, JVM, ML platform, and databases. Alas, tech innovations came from real and challenging business scenarios. It's like diamonds are forged by extreme heat and pressure. Now look at Silicon Valley, how many companies can claim tech achievement similar to that of Alibaba, except the same ol' Google, Facebook, and Amazon? I don't think it's due to lack of tech talent. Instead, it's due to lack of business scenarios at scale for most of the companies.