China is challenging the idea that censorship thwarts online innovation
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
You go on Facebook and you can’t even buy anything, but on WeChat and Weibo you can buy anything you see
A more recent trend: live-streaming sites where people pay real money to reward performers with virtual gifts. (You sang beautifully, here’s a digital Lamborghini, dear.)
I might grant the first (with reservations), but the second is laughable (and was tried without success here in the early days of social networking). I can't help but think this article should be titled "Chinese internet companies flourish in Chinese market". Well duh - even aside from the "virtual protectionism" of the GFW, Chinese companies are more likely to understand the preferences of Chinese consumers than non-Chinese companies. This is important, but it isn't exactly tech innovation.
How many HN startups are localizing to Mandarin? Language alone provides a massive market barrier that leaves opportunity for regional companies to thrive. But that barrier works both ways - what Chinese internet companies are thriving in the world marketplace? The best example I can think of is Alibaba, but that is strongly tied to Chinese manufacturing. Is anyone using WeChat or Weibo outside mainland China?
I personally am very excited and encouraged by the emergence of China as a modern, educated populace. Great things will come from bringing another 1 billion humans online and contributing to the world marketplace - tech is one of the great positive-sum games. I'm looking forward to it! But this article is a pretty poor illustration.
Also, as a Norteamericano, I'm deeply offended by statements like "America want's to believe China can't..." - we're not all xenophobic Trump supporters, not even most of us.
I don't know about Weibo, but WeChat is available in 200 nations and 20 languages. Over 70 mil people use WeChat outside of China. They seem strongest in south and south-east asia. Wechat penetration into the mobile markets are: Malaysia 38%, India 22%, Philipines 19%, etc. My understanding is that they have aggressive inititatives underway in Brazil and South Africa.
So, not super-awesome, but respectable.
Edit: That's incorrect. I was thinking of WhatsApp.
Innovation is instead about having a system structured in a way that encourages and rewards risktaking (in expectation).
That's a strawman really. The article never made any mention of tech-innovation, only innovation of all kinds. And marketplace innovations that cater to the Chinese market, count just as much as marketplace innovations that cater to the American market, by the likes of FB and Uber.
Regarding whether this point even needs to be made: I think it does. As someone who's lived in SF, I can't quantify it, but I've felt the general perception that many people have, regarding Chinese goods/companies being cheap knock-offs of American ones.
Some of this perception is understandable: due to lack of IP enforcement, there certainly are many Chinese companies on the low-end that make an entire business out of copying American products pixel-for-pixel, and then selling it at a lower price. However, this perception is still flawed in that there are numerous companies at the high-end doing great work. As Americans, we don't hear much about, or interact with these high-end companies, because they aren't trying to cater to us. Hence why articles like this one are very educational.
Not to say that I think China can't innovate, just that I don't think the article gives any examples of it.
You had an intelligent response until you decided to generalize people who hold a political view different to your own.
PS: I don't support either major candidate. But, the non-xenophobic trump supporters seem more reasonable.
He's been consistent too
I don't know how much this has to do with Trump or any other politician.
"America is the global leader in innovation and creativity." We've nourished ourselves on that narrative for many decades. It makes us feel secure and important.
We also like to tell ourselves that we're the world's only superpower and that we're the guardian of democracy.
And Soviets were not so good innovators, actually. Their innovations were mostly in military and due to enormous R&D financing (which, in turn, lead to their fall).
I think you got it backwards. Successful business with scale leads to technical innovations in many consumer-facing companies. Did Facebook in its early days have technical innovation? Once the traffic of Facebook picks up, though, they innovated like crazy. They invented Hive. They made HBase great again. They created Cassandra. They built Scuba and Gorilla. They turned Zookeeper into amazing Zeus. They are running massive stream processing systems. Their MySQL clusters are world class. The list could go on and on. It's same for successful Chinese companies. Did Alibaba innovate technically when it was a mere online whitepage? Probably not. Is it innovating now? You bet. How many companies in the world could handle the traffic as Alibaba does today, especially in 11.11 every year? As a result, Alibaba is a major player in MySQL community and Hadoop community. It ended up rewriting Storm because it had to run Storm cluster of thousands of machines. It invented its own database called OceanDB. It made substantial improvements to Flink. It created its own file system called Tair. It has massive deployment of container-based infrastructure. Its technical blogs are worth studying carefully. The list could also go on as well. We can talk about Tencent in the same way: do you really think handling hundreds of millions of daily active users does not require significant technical innovation?
On the other hand, how many YC companies are innovating technically? How many so-called unicorns have real technical innovations? Does Airbnb really have amazing technologies? Excellent execution and awesome engineers, for sure. But technical innovation on at most a few millions of listings that can be easily handled with a small database cluster? I doubt it. Or maybe they do, but at least it's not that obvious from their technical blogs. Does Postmates have technical innovations? I would even argue that it should not even be their focus.
Touchwood. Back in early 2000s, a lot of people laughed at the idea of Mandarin being taught in schools.
>>Great things will come from bringing another 1 billion humans online and contributing to the world marketplace
They don't have to go global. Jack Ma: “eBay May Be a Shark in the Ocean, But I Am a Crocodile in the Yangtze River.”
Anyway an extra one billion internet users don't necessarily mean great things ... commercially maybe it gets a lot greyer in other areas like social.
I don't think that's actually true. In fact, I remember in the early 2000s a lot of people were telling students that they should learn Mandarin because it would be easy for them to find a good paying job if they did. For the most part, this seems to have been very poor advice.
https://medium.com/@they_made_that/innovations-secret-ingred...
There's always cracks when you have incumbents resting on their laurels.
> This usually happens when things are in flux and it's very much what is happening in China today.
There are key differences. 1. When you have to worry about what you think, what you say, and what you do; it has a toll on collaboration and creativity, 2. There's a different perception of failure. It's not as well tolerated as it is in the US, which limits experimentation and creativity, and 3. the most important factor: When the group, specifically your family, is more important than the individual; again there's a toll on creativity. ie. why pursue a crazy dream instead of upholding your duty and responsibility to take care of your parents?
> yet how many have the time for rebellion in between a six-figure job and massive housing cost?
Even in ideal conditions there's never that many, just enough; which makes it even worse when the conditions aren't ideal. Why sail a ship to uncharted waters when you can be comfy at home? Can one even think about sailing when you don't have the imagination for the wonderful places you will go?
Really the only hope for innovation that places like China and Singapore have is with their immigration programs ie. Singapore actively encourages it. The only other things I can think of is how well policies are enforced and if the number of people who can circumvent the Great Firewall keeps steadily rising. Places where "the mountains are high and emperor is far away" may be able to produce something awesome one day if the authorities don't immediately interfere with things
Please, leave your virtue-signalling to reddit. We come here for a break from the partisan poo-throwing.
As an aside, the article is about China, which, like much of Asia, isn't that welcoming of outsiders. In even the most die-hard 'conservative' circles, you can become an 'honorary' Texan/American/whatever and be privy to all dealings and goings-on, but it's really, really hard to do the same in China (especially if you're black or white, and doubly so if your mandarin isn't native). You just won't get into many circles.
I leave with this: the US election, to an outsider like myself, is interesting in that many Americans claim any supporters of the other candidate must support their platform 100%. Such an ignorant view. Some people choose Trump for trade, some choose Hillary for a no-surprises, effective office from day 1 (whether or not they see themselves agreeing with the results of her work).
But close to half though. http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/poll-clinton-t...
(I am not saying they are all xenophobic)
http://asq.org/learn-about-quality/history-of-quality/overvi...
"In the 1950s and 1960s, Japanese goods were synonymous with cheapness and low quality, but over time their quality initiatives began to be successful, with Japan achieving very high levels of quality in products from the 1970s onward." source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality_management
Top500 super computer list, the fastest super computer now has a Chinese CPU Sunway SW26010 which has 260 cores. https://www.top500.org/lists/2016/06/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SW26010
List of inventions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_inventions
Same story with Italy. It started its industrial success of the '50s as a country where you could get cheap, unschooled (but not unskilled) workers that would work for 20 hours a day without any protection from the existing legal framework. (Plus a devalued currency.) Just like the eastern Europe of the '90s or China in this decade.
Now people forgot all that and like to think of "Made in Italy" as a symbol of innovation and style.
I think this is the pattern:
1. country attract foreign investors because of lower wages and little legal protection;
2. people work their ass off, without really understanding what they are doing;
3. workers get skilled in what they do, a culture of "doing X properly" springs up;
4. people realize that they are being exploited and demand more protection from their state;
5. slowly people get what they ask for, but this has a cost and so factories move somewhere else;
6. (This is the main point =>) You are left with a country filled with skilled workers and sense for the production of the good X, but it no longer makes sense to produce it there for the big market; you turn to the "luxury" market;
7. people start losing jobs because the luxury market is hard to please and it is not big enough;
8. the state gives away some of the rights acquired and starts the slow path towards becoming a state with lower wages and less legal protection.
I wonder if this vicious cycle can be broken with the advent of non-tangible products (for example services) and some kind of heavy taxation on transports (instead of VAT you would pay dist-in-km^0.12).
>Now people forgot all that and like to think of "Made in Italy" as a symbol of innovation and style.
Kind of funny for Italy to follow this pattern, since a few hundred years before, they were the at forefront of the Renaissance, with high-earning artisans (in the non-ironic sense) producing the highest-quality goods in Europe.
Suggest reading "Concrete Economics" for a perspective on this: https://hbr.org/product/concrete-economics-the-hamilton-appr...
Heads up, the authors are not circumspect about having an axe to grind with American economic ideology since the 1980s.
One thing I wonder about though: is Japan a truly special case?
I mean, Japan has a long history of taking ideas/culture/art/tech from outside and refining/elevating it into something almost entirely new. (e.g. zen buddhism, samurai swords, transistor radio technology, television sets, cars, industrial production line efficiency, French pastry and other world cuisine, whiskey, etc).
I often think the Japanese have taken "taking it to a whole nother level" to a whole nother level.
http://blog.forbestravelguide.com/5-tokyo-bakeries-that-take...
though I have not had a chance to visit these bakeries myself.
They're even in Paris, competing with the French, in pastry: http://hipparis.com/2014/04/25/the-sweet-life-japanese-pastr...
I mean, who does that??
Japan started in the 1950s after WWII, but China didn't get it's start till the 80s because of the Cultural Revolution of Mao. China is 30 years behind, so we're starting to see their potential now.
China better hurry.
There are some neat innovations coming out of China. One I particularly like is the development of LED power supplies that don't use electrolytic capacitors.[2] Currently, LED lamps tend to have power supply failures before they have LED failures. With the elimination of electrolytics, the power supply outlasts the LED. It's a clever piece of electrical engineering, with a 4-phase oscillator. Transistor count goes up, but transistors on an IC are cheap. The effect is that LED lamp life doubles and the power supply size decreases.
[1] http://www.marketplace.org/2015/12/10/world/why-cant-china-m... [2] http://hub.hku.hk/bitstream/10722/164083/1/Content.pdf
Meanwhile, we don't have the experience building things that they do with their equipment and people.
The only problem is believing that other people innovating hurts us. It doesn't.
(And honestly it is very hard to ignore the colonialist undertones of this thinking)
That's correct. My dad worked in international sales for a company that makes industrial equipment, from the early 1970s until the late 1990s.
He says that in the early days, whenever he sold a product to a Japanese company, a few months later, one of his Japanese competitors would mysteriously come out with a product that seemed to look and function exactly like the one he just sold.
It seems to me that it's not that different from how people learn - you start by copying what other people do, and even though you're not doing anything "new," you're learning the low-level basics of why things are the way they are, and then you use your unique perspective to spot ways to improve upon that.
Certainly one day there will be cutting-edge research and innovation - the things that create a lot of value - in many countries. Some would say that China already has these things. But so what? Does China having those things mean that Europe shouldn't? Does having manufacturing there make China better at these things?
Not every country needs to do heavy manufacturing, any more than every country needs to grow its own food, or every country needs to mine its own raw materials. Specialization is fine.
This has been accurate so far but it could be because the idea of disrupting university education and research is only now gaining prominence. The incentives are bigger than ever.
If a substantially leaner alternative to either is found somewhere, it will at least be tried in China. Whether it succeeds will then depend on many factors.
The "land of smokestacks and cheap labor" thought comes solely from the division between service and industrial labor, noting that, at the present moment, someone has to be doing the industrial labor. The badness of industrial jobs is an unfortunate consequence of bloody evolution horribly murdering anybody that tries to fix it [2]; service jobs bottom out in overwork and psychological problems, while industrial jobs bottom out in pollution, disease, and dismemberment. The problem is now is that part of the global economy is forced to remain on industrial labor when they should have advanced to service labor.
The "in the future we'll live off our ideas" thought is entirely derived from idea of the robot revolution, which explicitly rejects the very existence of the "land of smokestacks and cheap labor". Indeed, the robot revolution will force everybody into service jobs, because it will do to industrial jobs what automation has already done to agricultural jobs: automate them all away.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_economy#/media/File:Gd...
2: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
The elites in western nations aren't builders or doers. They are talkers (lawyers, bankers, politicians, MBAs) who have told themselves their entire lives that builders don't matter as much as the talkers. They love Steve Jobs, but wouldn't know who Woz was if you asked them. They talk about the "jobs of the 21st century" but make fun of the technology experts by calling them nerds on the floors of Congress.
If this is your line of thinking, then the whole "let them build the stuff, and we'll do all the ideas and innovation" makes perfect sense. Its a perfect example of why the remaining "doers" in the US have such a deep-seated hatred of all politicians and government. I'm talking about the remaining auto-workers and the oil-drillers, etc.
There have been plenty of comments supporting Brexit online. Even here on Hacker News. Perhaps you just didn't spot them, or were not reading the right sites to find them.
I know several people who's job is overseeing Chinese manufacturing. They need constant oversight and quality inspection otherwise everything falls apart very very fast.
I'm currently living in South West China and, while this may sound culturally insensitive, there is a very very serious cultural problem with quality and attention to detail. People will work really long hours, but will always do the very bare minimum. It's at times absolutely staggering and infuriating. The reason manufacturing is in China isn't so much because they know how to do things, but because they will work long hours doing mundane work (because of very strong commitments to supporting their families) and because the supply chain is located here. If you need 10 thousands units of some widget by next week you can get it. Its quite likely it will be defective, but you can just buy another 10 thousand from the factory next door. The same infrastructure doesn't exist anywhere else
The reason innovation will happen is because Chinese people are doers. They just go and do things instead of talking about it all day. And sure, they do a lot of dumb things, but at the end of the days it all seems to work out. Thats why they own half of Africa already
Except, it doesn't - not for China, which is slowly choking to death on the effects of costs externalized to the environment, nor for America, due to the costs externalized onto everybody who's not a company.
The problem is that people love to generalize, and the fact of the matter is that when many people think of Chinese products, they think of cheap knock-offs being sold on eBay. Obviously, this is a pretty bad generalization considering many of the “legitimate” products we use every day were made in China, but we’re talking about perception amongst the general population. [Criticizes China for making knock-offs while typing on an iPhone…]
The point that needs to be made is that making cheap knock-offs does not preclude them from innovating. There are a lot of people there, and I’m sure the entire country isn’t composed of mindless assembly drones.
It’s a shame that this stigma exists, and it will take a while before it completely fades away.
I realize that some people might be offended by this (and my use of “cheap knock-offs”), but if you don’t believe me, just go ask around for yourself.
You can't build a factory to make computer chips without actually knowing how they are made.
Japanese started the same way. In the 60s and 70s "Made in Japan" meant cheap, low-quality knockoffs. Japanese cars were called rice cups in the 80's. Then they caught up and it took Detroit by surprise.
But yeah if the point is just to use non-US tech they could run Ubuntu Linux (SA) or OpenBSD (Canada) or I suppose Red Flag Linux (China). Language wise...maybe Python or PHP or Erlang or an ML language?
If they just meant the last piece of physical hardware sold by an American headquartered company, then I guess that's something?
Also, whats in those Lenovo boxes? Godson chips or American Intels? They are absolutely not running Windows on any desktop then I assume?
Through China's hacking efforts they have stolen Trillions of Dollars of US Tax Payer money that has gone into research and development of anything the Government has done including the F 35 fighter development.
They have also attacked US Industry and stolen trade secrets and software. Recipes for Carbon Steel, Stainless Steel, etc. Decades of R&D and 100's of millions of dollars gone. Chinese State Owned Sinovel Wind Group stole AMSC's computer code that was developed to run power generating Wind Mills. It cost the company almost a 1 billion dollars a year in lost revenue and all the money it took to develop it.
Here is an article regarding the F 35 Program.
http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/canadian-politics/o...
Is it really innovation when all you do is steal and copy from the west?
I can sit here and try to re-discover the fundamentals of physics from the ground up, or I can go to a library and read a textbook.
Discovering from first principles is the honorable path, but it is a colossal waste of time. To get to the state of the art, you have to steal knowledge. Only then can you begin to understand and improve it.
You seem to believe the Chinese have some God-given right to get to the state of the art. No, there's a reason things like intellectual property, copyright, patent, etc. exist. How people here are defending the Chinese theft of proprietary US secrets and technologies is beyond me.
The other things is that why we can have such long copyright terms, but not the same for patents, is because it didn't use to matter. There were real limits to making anything useful out of it. Patents on the other hand outright suppresses innovation in the short term to reveal the knowledge to everyone in the long term.
The third things is of course that something can't be secret and morally defended by intellectual property at the same time. At least not from a functional perspective.
Discovering from principles is not a "colossal waste of time". Ask any Physicist if they thought studying and understanding Classical Mechanics was a "colossal waste of time".
The quality is obviously better from Advanced Circuits, and it doesn't take a whole month as it would from Seeed (I've heard good things about OSH Park and they're US Based).
The quality of Chinese products is improving, and the parallels with the history of Japanese tech are strikingly similar.
In terms of software expertise, I think the talent is still in North America. The hardware expertise though is somewhat non-existent. I'm surprised there's no city like Shenzen here.
Talking to some hardware engineers from Japan gave me the sense that they really think of hardware as the more "noble" or "higher" pursuit when compared to software engineering. They don't necessarily think of software as a really interesting challenge. Or something like that.
I know this is all very vague. I'm not sure about these attitudes at all. Curious about your take on it.
https://www.quora.com/Why-are-firmware-engineers-paid-a-lowe...
Software and Hardware is pretty fragmented now, and it seems its converging because of IoT and availability of cheap hardware.
In terms of noble pursuits: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2763367
If you're in a bigger city, also check out some smaller shops near you. There are a few nearby in the suburbs of Chicago for me and sometimes I go to them for quick turn-around time and a price that's higher than DirtyPCBs/Seeed's, but much closer than Advanced Circuits'.
In the end they will continue to innovate, but as long as it's fighting both the government and social norms things are going to be bottleneck.
I'm currently in Singapore. Some entrepreneurs here lament the small market size. The population is 5 million. Though it's highly educated and affluent, national and cultural borders set upper bounds on software startups. Creative (of Soundblaster fame) was the last really big Singaporean tech company. Software startups here can't quite compete with big country startups because they don't have the population to grow their user base. Exporting their software means going through translation work, redoing their marketing for a different culture and adapting to new laws. Now when I consider a country in the reverse position like China...
Singapore's total population size is less important to a restaurant than the number of people near your store.
In 2015, BMW sold 463000 cars in China, and 346000 cars in the USA. This was not the first year that China was BMW's largest market.
Last year was the first year that China was the largest market for Mercedes and Porsche. America was the second largest market for both companies.
http://www.best-selling-cars.com/china/2015-full-year-german...
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/bmw-group-us-reports...
Let me know when Xu Jinping's daughter transfers from a US college to the Shanghai Polytechnical Institute. Let me know when the millions of rich Chinese stop parking their cash in San Francisco and Vancouver and instead "invest" in a smoggy Beijing suburb, please! Let me know when China stops destroying its environment and handles its "we-killed-so-many-female-fetuses-we-dont-know-what-to-do-with-these-young-men" problem, which usually means wide-scale unrest and violence.
I'll believe you when the rich and successful Chinese start believing in China. And if the US and EU are so awful, how come everyone still wants to come over here and nobody is clamoring for the cushy, comfortable life-style of a Chinese factory worker ???
There's something that's hilarious, delightful, and depressing about the above statement, all at the same time.
Here's my favorite example of Chinese innovation: the ESP8266. It is original hardware and 1/10th the price of the equivalent offering from TI (their CC3000), with more speed, more features and better reliability.
Also when you come to judge that chip, don't forget china's interests in the chip industry and in security. I wouldn't be surprised those helped the esp to become reality.
New Chinese biotech companies are dong well. gene therapy, proteins, viral vector therapeutics, cell therapy, small molecules, antibody engineering.
For example you have Andrew Ng as Chief Scientist at Baidu Research in Silicon Valley even though Baidu pretty much only operates solely in the Chinese market.
As an analogy, Russian VC money supported FB. I don't believe that is an argument that Russia is a tech innovator.
Will be interesting to see when/if some of the Chinese social networks become popular outside China.
I don't necessarily agree or disagree, because it's really out of my realm, but it seems like a similar approach.
Block competition from outside the country...
I just find it slightly ironic that had Facebook and Google (and probably the us government) been accommodating for Chinese requests to censor uygurs during their uprising some 10 years ago then the situation likely would have been completely different.
Now Facebook and Google are missing out of a big high growth market - a market that ultimately may foster companies and innovation strong enough to challenge us social media dominance.
I suspect you would benefit from googling this word.
As an American, I do believe that a culture of censorship and phenomena like the Great Firewall stifle an economy's capacity to innovate. That's not to say that innovation is impossible in such an environment, just more difficult.
> “It doesn’t matter how the car is capable of traveling. Once it gets on the highway, you can imagine what the end result will be,” he said.
> The implication is that China’s government is happy to have companies build shiny, fast things as long as regulators can put up roadblocks as they please. So far, they’ve mostly targeted foreign firms.
Exactly, so far! What happens when the state determines that your blooming startup threatens their agenda?
China has markets, opportunities and innovative people. Things are just all somewhat different.
Copying well, figuring out what to copy and what isn't needed, is hard.
I think they want to have both the benefits of isolationism, and the benefits of exports.
Ultimately it's very easy to play with anti-US views. Much easier to blame the US than to blame the chinese government. For example the vietnam war, iraq war or japan nukes might sound much worse than the tiananmen square for a chinese.
But in the long run, a country like china should be able to catch up with how late they have developed. I believe they have excellent human capital. Not sure if they will be able to compete in very high tech fields, but they might one day.
For example Apple is supposed to be the highest profitable tech company in the world. It is shaking in its boots now because it has 33% losses in China and has been funneling tons of its profits into trying to stop that loss from getting any worse. Meanwhile Chinese companies like Huawei are moving into their other markets while still holding on to their Chinese standing.
The other comperable surprise is that massive debt fueled growth in China did not lead to a collapse and bailout by western powers.
The next surprise will be the complete substitution of the entire commercial and financial infrastructure of the world by Chinese institutions. Check out CIPS (alternative to SWIFT) or UnionPay (alternative to VISA/Mastercard networks), Asian Infrastructure Inxvestment Bank (alternative to wold bank), and of course the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (alternative to NATO), and the Shanghai Gold Fix (alternative to Comex and London Gold Fix).
Some are even saying the Chinese have got a new global currency in the works that's not the SDR or the dollar. However, I really doubt that is going to happen, at least in the next few years.
Japan may be a rough guiding point to China's future path. After the growth miracle ends, a decision has to be made on the debt. Whichever decision is made the debt will be absorbed by someone. Like Japan, China can continue to do amazing things but the consequences of that debt will throttle back future potential, especially if China's economy fails to rebalance and they choose the Japan option (zombie debt.) The greater geographic size, ethnic diversity, and far lower GDP per capita may make it much more difficult for China to pacify the population during a economic disruption.
China matters a lot but drawing a linear line upwards based on previous trends is a big mistake.
The century is only 15 years old. Give it time.
Social revolutions take decades to hatch after the conditions become right, and decades more of "happening" before there is any certainty about what they turned into.
The only thing that was ridiculous was the idea that a country with 1/3 of the world population would stay irrelevant forever. But outside of that, the future is incredibly uncertain.
China has a lot of question marks, really I think more question marks than at the turn of the century. In addition to the size of the debt mentioned earlier (much of it in state owned corporate enterprises, their often over-bloated nature often cited as a problem in itself), you have a market system that is somewhat undeveloped and subject to excessive government meddling (see China's stock exchanges and managed floating currency), constrained future growth due to future demographics (eg: an aging society with no "demographic dividend", a situation no doubt not helped by the previous one child policy), and problems with pollution and corruption that -- as Chinese society gets richer -- they are starting to get annoyed by more and more.
None of these mean that China is on the road to ruin, of course, and without a doubt China will continue to play a large role in the world economy in the future. However, I do think that how the Chinese government handles some of their financial system decisions will determine whether your prediction on finance infrastructure holds true. At present, I would not consider the Chinese financial system mature or stable enough to overtake Western ones, and I think the Chinese government has to make some hard decisions before that happens.
Came over here for the launch of the Chinese translation of my book, Soft Skills, and I am amazed by the tech community here.
[1] using https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hack-the-web/
Chinese society is ingrained with the "get ahead by besting your peers". That sort of mentality is not conducive to creativity. It is stifling. It forces one to take the shortest path all the time without any opportunity for making constructive mistakes.
And I don't buy the mentality of Chinese kids coming to US universities and solidifying their critical thinking skills. They congregate into throngs of Chinese students which perpetuate the Asian version of the "keeping up with the jones'" lifestyle. Trendy t-shirts and designer jeans, flocking to the basketball courts to ape Yao and JLin, nary an independent thought lest they should offend the echo chamber. "Why do we do what we do? Because we are told. Sure I can recite that the uninspected life is not worth living... But do I understand it?"
Furthermore, you see in Chinese pockets a lack of respect for their fellows should one fall by the wayside, whether it's the victims own fault or not. Those with weakness (or being different) are cast aside like lepers. It disgusts me. And to my original point, it stifles creativity.
The Japanese at least have Murakami. What celebration is there in China for revolt and indignation?
The Chinese competing with American innovation? Get real, and go F yourself (the preceding inserted as a provocative demonstration of American anti-normism, vote me down, square peg).
American companies are obsessed with political correctness, affirmative action, marketing and copyright law.
Chinese firms are only concerned with winning. They'll steal, lie and cheat, as long as they can build a superior product. Because they have no marketing, the product has to speak for itself.
Furthermore, Chinese culture is ruthlessly competitive as you alluded to. Guess what? This means it is incredibly robust and successful.
I personally believe the west is collapsing in on its kindness, and the east is rising up on its strength. A cursory look at what the two societies value will tell you the whole story.
West: Feigned Altruism at the expense of survival
East: Survival and Victory at the expense of everything else
Who wins? I think history can make a good guess...
The main difference is that in China there are not software and business patents. There are patents but in practice you can do whatever you wish. Also the Government can and actually does whatever pleases them. Someone knocks your door and tells you: We have decided you have to teach those guys what you do so they can do the same you do.
It is not innovation, but forced collaboration. Almost any technology is bought from outside, they will offer 10, 20 times(or whatever necessary) more salary(than what they actually earn) to key workers outside China with tech experience in order to go China and train Chinese replicating products in China. Once in China they will teach other companies to replicate the technology. This process is totally natural and periodic in Middle Land.
It has nothing to do with innovation. In fact the System makes it really hard to really innovate in China: Only traditional products like Silk, Porcelain and tea are protected from counterfeits. The rights of the individual is always less than the collective. The education teaches you submission and Confucian values, not risk taking and disruption.
Never forget that disruption and innovation is synonymous with change, and the first thing they will want to change is their Government.
Their system have worked fine for them until now, coming from total poverty(most people in China actually remembers the famine that killed millions, you see people wasting food as a symbol that they are "rich" enough to waste it),the advances have been impressive, but is not a model for developed countries.
Really? Because it seems to me that Facebook Messenger is now copying WeChat.
To counter the argument that it's not true innovation, just a re-combining of existing ideas... what other type of innovation is there?
It's not the education alone that makes people risk averse, but the culture in general in Chinese and South Asians. It's changing for good though.
Also, enough of bashing their government. A good democracy would have been great, but as you said it's working for them and that's what all matters. There are many psuedo democracies across the world where people still live in poverty.
China is apparently still in catching-up mode. However, I won't go too far to say Chinese people cannot innovate at all, which we all know is not true.
That is extremely stereotypical thinking. This is like saying that American education teaches you to be obedient consumer who thinks he is precious snowflake.
It's different culture and innovation is takes different forms.
Uuuuuh...
There certainly is a lot of copying. Most Americans feel ashamed to just rip off someone else's idea and run with it, but that sentiment doesn't exist in China. The result is a lot of shameless copycats, which is often interpreted as a lack of innovation. But not all Chinese ventures are copycats, and the copycats can end up innovating too.
Only felt like skimming the article but it seems that quote is at its base. There's a difference between "adapting" other people's work and "innovation". There is also a difference between manufacturing products and creating the original idea for those products and making them.
Here is the source: https://seafile.de/en/about-the-future-of-seafile/
There's a story on TechDirt today [1] showing how the large Chinese firms have been putting together massive patent portfolios and have started litigating... in East Texas.
[1]: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160718/06573135006/just-...
Somewhat on topic: http://time.com/4283248/china-great-firewall-fang-binxing-ce...
Its nice to have that insight as to what works outside of the US market, I hope my side project could work in China.
Seriously this is such an over used and hence watered down word. Every new thing isn't and innovation, novel maybe but not innovation.
The assembly line was an innovation. Ride sharing was an innovation. Pokémon go was a novel use of tech.
I think people want to find out what happened in the Tiananmen Square for other reasons than "wanting to build a mobile app".
sheesh.
If one wishes not to be generalized, that person should abstain from doing it to others.
Islam is not a race or an ethnicity it is an ideology. If Scientologists started killing people, what would happen ?
What if the security guards at HSBC started killing every 1,000,000 customer? Would HSBC get government attention ?
Participation in NATO is a financial issue. Spinning non participation in multi-country deals as being caused by not wanting to engage with foreigners because they are foreign is ridiculous.
Well...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_McPherson
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Elli_Perkins
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology_controversies
Not much, apparently.
You cannot make blanket statements about the intentions of tens of millions of people.
NATO commitments are a joke, when outside of Britan and few Eastern European countries, Germany, Netherlands, France are not spending to their commitments so why should Americans subsidize their mega-welfare states?
Here is a fact, Germany has about 330 or so battle ready tanks and most of them are made before 1980. That is some abysmal commitment to NATO.
What is there to reconcile here? Sexual interest never got in the way of xenophobia. Never stopped slave owners from sexually assaulting their "property".
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/the-end-of-t...
You seem to have forgotten that France is one of the countries with the highest military spending in the world (not that it pleases me).
France 2.1% of GDP. The consensus number is more of less 3%.
edit: I was wrong, 2% is the right number.
http://money.cnn.com/2016/04/15/news/nato-spending-countries...
You are right, the German military is at best a target for the Russians to calibrate their weapons and to draw the US in.
Russia spends less than France and Italy combined in dollars. In % of GDP, China is at 1.9%. Just below France and the UK.
Unless of course you're equating "enforcing existing immigration policies" with "xenophobia" which would render most of the world's countries "xenophobic".
That said though - the core issue he is exploiting is an undeniable failure of the federal government to address the illegal immigration problem. It's a huge issue that has been swept under the rug and is there to be exploited by a politician like Trump who positions himself as a "non mainstream politician".
Violent[ish] protests staged by the left waving mexican flags and burning american flags only helps his agenda.
There just isn't any evidence that this is a major problem in general, and constantly trying to whip up fear about it is xenophobic (and also causes serious problems for many people who are here legally).
And no, pointing these out as important issues that need attention is not "xenophobic" even if some politicians (or ppl in general) are afraid of addressing these for fear of being labeled a "xenophobic hate monger" :)
That number is down 1 million from the DHS estimate of 12 million in 2007. That population has shrunk, yet the total U.S. population has grown by 20+ million during the same time period. It's hard to see how rational people would see this as a major problem (or in the case of many Trump supports, their number one issue).
sure, the numbers fluctuate up and down driven by many factors - economy, laws etc that doesn't change the fact that we have a porous border and a huge number of illegals.
What is exactly wrong with having a physical wall which restricts illegal migration? I can think of cost, but little else.
>his comments about Gonzalo Curiel
Politicians often say ridiculous shit in order to create sensation and polarize. Trump is not unique in this. For example, Obama recently stated that buying a book or laptop is more difficult than buying a gun. Which is demonstrably false.
>his call to ban immigration of Muslims
He has taken a bit more nuanced stand recently. He says immigration of Muslims from countries known to be harboring terrorists should be restricted. I can't find a huge problem in this.
And so on and so forth. I am not an American, but it seems to me that people are needlessly hating on Trump.
That's exactly what the Berlin wall was for. It wasn't ok for the western powers. For the USSR, on the other hand, it was rather fine. Didn't it?
"Politicians often say ridiculous shit in order to create sensation and polarize"
Still, editorializing is deemed as a bad thing, even here in Hacker News.
No. It was virtually impossible for people to cross that border legally. This is not the case with US-Mexico.
Nope. Not virtually, and definitely not impossible.
I'm especially appalled by your response to Trump's comments about Gonzalo Curiel. Non-uniqueness does not give pardon to his ridiculous, insensitive, and racist comment. Besides, Trump suggested Gonzalo Curiel's judgment was biased because he was Mexican - how can you claim that this is a rhetorical device akin to Obama's "demonstrably false" statement about purchasing a gun in America? What sensation did Mr. Trump raise other than bigotry and hatred of others? I don't find his comments acceptable especially because he's running for a president!
As I said, I am not an American and as such I may not be very thoroughly informed on everything. Keeping that in mind, what Trump seems to say makes a lot of sense if you strip away the fluff and the style with which he says it.
We already do that.
That's absurd.
Western business failures in China are more attributable to a lack of understanding of the business culture and excessive regulatory barriers and oversight applied on foreign companies than any innate superiority.
Negotiating business deals in China requires an extensive understanding of the culture to approach it properly, whereas Western negotiations are hinged mostly around profits and liabilities. Things like face/reputation, the unstated but expected mutual bribes/gifts (direct and to family/authority figures) and networking are new to them, and they stumble through it, giving the appearance of incompetence. China is pretty hostile to wholly-foreign companies, too, which means western companies are stuck wasting time hunting for local partners and making these deals instead of just selling products and services.
Not only that, but even after negotiations have been sealed, there's other cultural differences that get overlooked. This can be seen in the dozens of stories where a Chinese exec/partner resold business secrets, or stole clients and relaunched a competing service. It's obvious there's some sort of disconnect in the communications and expectations. Western companies are used to contracts having a lot more value.
Don't get me wrong, some amazing things happen in China. Shenzhen is beyond impressive. But given the large cultural differences and how hostile the government is to foreign-operated business, it's rather glib and disingenuous to claim that the US companies can't "figure out" the Chinese market.
The "market" is just buying and selling, but the part that's causing problems are the government's artificial limitations on the market. The foreign companies aren't allowed to ship their existing products as is, and through the process of certification, the idea is often stolen and reimplemented. The Chinese government isn't really interested in fixing this, as it's more advantageous for them to have local businesses than foreign businesses. It'd be one thing if a foreigner opened up a store and nobody ever bought anything, but half of the failures are taking place before product launch with staff and partnership meltdowns.
The Chinese "market" itself suffers deeply from government manipulation. Plenty of citizens mock their government's obnoxious nanny attitude with slang like "river crab" and high VPN use. Government corruption is a common complaint, and many of the richer populace got rich through excessive greed and collusion in the initial privatization of business. There's still the overly nationalistic people who believe the propaganda and descend on foreign news like locusts in their eagerness to devour the criticism, but there are plenty more who don't.
It's not like the west is inherently better or anything. We're all having problems with business regulation.
Therefore the combination of the two -- Great Firewall plus language/culture barriers -- is a truly powerful combo. (What would that be in Magic the Gathering cards?)