This is especially puzzling given China's three natural advantages: one, a large domestic market that should permit Chinese companies to develop economies of scale without braving foreign waters; two, a large labor pool of trained engineers; and three, a large diaspora in the United States, which would help connect Chinese companies to American companies.

But despite these advantages, China runs a huge deficit in trade in services; in 2012, the country exported $190 billion of commercial services while importing $281 billion, a deficit of $91 billion. In other words, Americans, Europeans and others export far more services to China than China exports to the rest of the world. What's keeping Chinese companies from accomplishing in services what it did with manufacturing?

The most obvious reason is language. Even though Chinese students now learn English from kindergarten, relatively few people in the workforce are fluent in the language -- especially when compared to a country like India.

But even if China develops a large English-speaking workforce, it still faces a second major roadblock: while Western businesses and consumers freely buy goods produced in China, they may be reluctant to buy services from there. Unlike goods, services often contain personal or sensitive information, and can be harder to evaluate at customs checkpoints. Services involve data -- information about people and businesses that can be shared or used without a person's knowledge. Consider the data at issue for the two types of enterprises involved in the international trade in services -- those from Bangalore, and those from Silicon Valley.

Commercial services - including those used by Fortune 500 companies -- outsourced to India typically consist of information technology outsourcing or business process outsourcing. For example, IBM likely employs the majority of its employees in India, where they process bank records, perform financial analyses, and write software. Chinese workers can no doubt handle these tasks, but given the reports of industrial espionage in the country, foreign businesses may be wary of trusting their internal workings of their computer systems, accounting, or customer relations platforms. As a corollary, companies might also be unwilling to reveal to their customers that they outsource customer personal data to China. In a time-sensitive services environment, uncertainty about whether information flow can be interrupted for political reasons is difficult to tolerate. Most people do not have the same fear of transferring information to India, which, as the world's largest democracy, maintains a boisterous and free press.

The service providers of Silicon Valley also deal in consumer and business data: They store photos and documents, deliver letters, connect friends and colleagues, and find things across the Internet. Many of the details of our lives are now data that pass through Silicon Valley companies. Would we trust such information to a Chinese Internet company? The difficulty is not necessarily that the Chinese companies are likely to be worse stewards than American ones, but that they must abide by the dictates of a government that is not directly accountable to the people. Those outside China may be less than keen to transfer personal data to a country with few restraints on governmental snooping. In this way, the Chinese censorship and surveillance regime undermines China's services exports.