China’s tech industry is catching up with Silicon Valley

Here is one likely root cause of China's rapid rise and US' relative stagnation:

"“Of 200,000 doctorates in science and engineering earned worldwide in 2010, about 33,000 were awarded by universities in the United States, China 31,000, Russia 16,000, Germany 12,000 and the United kingdom 11, 000,” says the report."

"But China leads the world when factoring in doctorates in the biological, physical, Earth, atmospheric, ocean and agricultural sciences and computer sciences."

"Also, in the United States only 57% of doctorates were earned by citizens and permanent residents, while temporary visa holders obtained the remainder." [1]

China's figures are likely higher now in 2018.

Note that there appears to be some quality issues that come with the acceleration of China's PhD production, although initiatives are being taken to reform the system. [2]

In the long run, the advantage of having an abundant number of STEM and CS graduates to recruit from may prove highly impactful, or even decisive, for many tech-based industries. To compete, the US needs to develop more local talent in STEM as well as attracting talent from abroad.

A focus on the very top-end by doing groundbreaking research, which the US has often excelled at, might also be necessary.

[1] http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=2014022...

[2] https://www.editage.com/insights/where-does-china-stand-in-t...

Copying intensifies.

Joking aside, one of my latest worries is that China will win out in the end with its EV-focused industry, which will also be self-driving vehicles for the most part. I think they're planning on doing to the western auto industry what they did to the western solar panel industry: encourage its own EV industry aggressively through subsidies and regulation, then subsidize exports, too. Western car companies in 2 decades = bankrupt.

If half of the world ends-up travelling via backdoored self-driving Chinese cars 20 years from now, I think we're screwed. And I mean that even if the Chinese government has no intention of exploiting the backdoors maliciously itself - other than the occasional assassination of Chinese dissidents/critics (say no more than a few hundred a year - they've got to keep that sort of thing in check after all) and complete surveillance of your driving habits, what you say in your car, who you're seeing in your car, and other stuff like that, of course. The backdoors in there will be more than enough for every other malicious actor out there to exploit them.

I think similar observations and arguments were made in the 80s about Japanese firms. It would be interesting to make some comparison, if only to see how things are (or could be) different this time.

Exactly as the US did to the UK in the late 1800s, and Japan + Korea to the US in the 1970s on.

There is advantage to not being the incumbent. First you copy (badly) and soon enough you match quality and innovate. That you can do so without the years of technical debt or obsolete tooling and infrastructure gives speed advantages.

This trend should not be surprising. China has a population of 1.4 billion people, almost 5x the population of the US. If you'll excuse the Saturday morning math, the Chinese population only needs to produce quality software engineers at 1/5 the rate of the US in order to outpace US engineers in terms of pure numbers.

Programming is not some elite field that only enlightened Western minds are capable of. After a certain point it really is a numbers game -- how many smart people can you throw at big problems? In this sense, the US is at a distinct long-term disadvantage compared to larger countries like China and India, simply due to the sheer size of the population differences.

What I can say as an more or less of an insider: the report is credible.

Look at electronics industry, while the "China wave" is waining already, but you still can't do anything electronics without going to a single city in China.

Same will eventually be true for software, but it will take no less than a decade as it was for electronics.

It took around 15 years for the sentiment to change from "hey look, they can actually make electronics" to "I can't make parts A and B for my project outside of China" to "to don't even try making out of China"

The first chart says that the number of AI professionals in China is less than 10% that of the US, while the number of third-party cited AI papers is around 80-90%. This implies that either 1) each Chinese AI professional publishes many, many times more papers than a US-based one, which seems unlikely, or 2) there are many more non-publishing AI professionals in the US, e.g. working as a non-research engineer, than in China, where presumably many or most with the label 'AI professional' publish papers.

Anyone with more knowledge/insight about this peculiarity?

if you look at the first chart, it basically says that when compared with the US, China is producing comparable number of third party cited AI papers when its number of AI professionals is just like 10% of the US total. clearly you don't need to be an AI professional to see the problem here - it is all about quantity not quality. then the sad truth is that for most other categories, China is also far behind in term of quantity.

Is China influential or a creator in terms of the underlying tech used around the world? Software, coding languages (or contributions), frameworks?

Not surprising. The things you can do with your smartphone in China makes the US and Europe look like a third world country.

Isn’t this a good thing? Double the research?

Don’t we want the rest of the world to equal the US?

The thing with China though, is that it consistently has something fall apart right before it makes the transition from contender to influencer on the world stage.

Historically it has been famine, but other times it has been the cultural emphasis on being the best copier of ideas (the civil service exam used to be about who could recite the teachings of Confucius the most actually, not who could create the best new interpretation), and not on creating original ideas. When you're at the top you must create original content.

And the third case, although not relevant this time, is the lack of maritime tradition / cultural emphasis on exploration. So somewhat related to point two in that there's little drive to explore the unknown.

I don't see the point made by the market cap chart or even how much they account for in the total market.

Well developed mobile payments are nothing but a sign of undeveloped finance sector, people not having bank accounts or credit cards creates massive market for e-payments. I won't be surprised if Kenya is even more advanced in that field than China.