America’s technological hegemony is under threat from China | Hacker News Reader

America’s technological hegemony is under threat from China

economist.com

64 pointsmartincmartin85 comments

I would suggest more accurately that America has gifted it to China, through:

* Systematic attack on education and knowledge at all levels, from cutting funding, bludgeoning it with standardized testing, taxing grad students and cutting financial aid, and creating a culture where superstition and idiocy is rewarded instead of knowledge for its own sake.

* Cost accounting has wiped out basic research

* Offshoring and outsourcing have moved core competencies to others who have improved on them and made newer products. I think there are few or no LCD panels made domestically any more. How about hard drives? Chip fabs?

As an immigrant in America, one of the most jaw-dropping fact I learned about American culture is that kids getting best grades in school are often tagged as "geeks" and often get bullied, and kids all want to be "cool". Well, though it might be common sense in America, in China and other east Asian countries, if you can't get good grades, you won't get much respect from anybody.

This was a personal struggle for me, as a first generation immigrant. I'd try to explain to my parents why I was getting bullied and having a hard time making friends, asking them for advice.

In response, they'd assure me that obviously the students with the best grades should garner all the respect like it was for them in their childhoods, and that's just how the world's supposed to work.

::shakes my head::

I'd try to explain to my parents why I was getting bullied and having a hard time making friends, asking them for advice.

In response, they'd assure me that obviously the students with the best grades should garner all the respect like it was for them in their childhoods

From my personal experience: Some Asian parents make it all the worse, if they then insist they know better in the face of reality on the ground. When they do this, they destroy their own credibility at a time when children most need to hear advice. Furthermore, they cut themselves off from the information they need to give the best advice possible.

As a counterpoint, I admire my immigrant parents for the ethic they attempted to impart onto me and don’t blame them even if at times I thought they were being “unfair.”

I think that far more worrying is the dangerous narrative pushed by people insecure about their accomplishments and aided by people jealous of others’ carefree childhoods that seeks to diminish immigrant accomplishment as lacking individualism or initiative. If it’s just strict parents and the kid is just forced to do it, then we can simultaneously criticize the parents, strip the kid of individuality and attribute any of their accomplishments to things outside of their control.

Again, just placing this here as a counterpoint because too often I see this discussion play out and get upvoted in the same way.

To be clear, I admire my immigrant parents for their work ethic too, and for that influence on me. And the counterpoint about diminishing the accomplishments of others is something that definitely needs more attention.

I've been casually called a "robot" or a "trained monkey" by well-meaning non-immigrants in the U.S. (even kids in gifted programs) out of what I perceive to be jealousy.

Relevant to the particular article, I did notice that my cousins who lived in China worked a lot, lot harder than my cousins who lived in the U.S. (and myself), even though we typically worked harder than non-immigrant children.

In my experience, this narrative was pervasive in the 70's and 80's in the white majority areas where I lived, that my humanity was substandard or lacking entirely. This is precisely why communication between parents and children on a genuine human level is all the more important. If an Asian parent just tries to pull unilateral parental authority, flying in the face of the different contextual reality around them, then they play right into that narrative of the inhuman/less-human parent.

This is not to say that parents should be permissive or that they should treat children as equals. I think that parents should be strict, and that children's status needs to be earned. Parents cannot become the friends of their children, until the children have become adults. However, parents who immigrated from a different culture can not act as if the surrounding culture is going to support them in the way their own culture supported their parents -- if they want to maintain their credibility. Parents who immigrated from a different culture have to maintain their credibility by living principles and by example. Denying reality and being unwilling to learn themselves will destroy their credibility. A six year old child is going to notice that your grammar is poor, you don't get the jokes, and that you can't tell the commercials from the TV shows. That child will notice the illogical puffery of insisting that one is always right because one is the parent. In that situation, it is better to live an ideal of always striving to become more correct, instead of insisting on being correct by fiat when you are clearly not correct about many things.

> A six year old child is going to notice that your grammar is poor, you don't get the jokes, and that you can't tell the commercials from the TV shows. That child will notice the illogical puffery of insisting that one is always right

This brought up some painful memories for me because I remember thinking like this when I was younger. My mom called me out once as a kid for assuming she was less intelligent or incorrect just because of her accent. At the time I thought she was just trying to win the argument, but now with the perspective given by time and by talking to others I see that she was right.

I think you are coming from the right place but that you are trying to place blame on parents essentially for failing to “fit in” as much as for being strict. When we say that parents “play into” claims that they are being less human, I think that we are taking part in making that the unfortunate reality.

My mom called me out once as a kid for assuming she was less intelligent or incorrect just because of her accent.

It's one thing to correct your child on that misconception -- that's correct. It's another thing to insist on using an English word incorrectly -- that's incorrect.

I think you are coming from the right place but that you are trying to place blame on parents essentially for failing to “fit in” as much as for being strict.

Again, I'm not talking about being strict. I'm talking about basic communication and maintaining your credibility. What do you think about the boss who would rather maintain face and keep his dominance, as opposed to a boss who actually listens and prioritizes learning the truth? It's the same thing.

Would switching to a magnet school or a gifted program help? Asking this for others whose kids might face the same situation.

It appears there are pockets of academic excellence in many US cities. I don't know how widespread they are though.

I was already in a magnet school at the time, in the gifted program, but it was in a small ethnically homogeneous town.

The things that do make it better: (1) moving to a larger, more diverse city / population center, (2) not being the only Asian kid in a class (better if you're > 5% because having only 2-3 in a class still 'others' you).

(better if you're > 5% because having only 2-3 in a class still 'others' you).

I was also in the gifted program. There are special problems with being a hypo-minority. For one thing, you're highly visible to every sociopath in the area. This is a part of what women can experience in the tech field, when they are only about 1% of the local population.

Exactly.

I'm a product of a magnet school. Switching to a school of excellence most definitely helps.

Speaking specifically on the point of education, when I went to college I came from a backwater US school. A lot of my classmates came from elite schools from all over the world. The thing I noticed among a lot of the Indian and Chinese students is that, while they could regurgitate equations and solve problems very quickly, a lot of them would copy solutions or would have a hard time learning new concepts without massive problem sets to study patterns from.

While the US K-12 system does sucks, I don't really want to see it turn into a memorization race the way the Indian and Chinese systems seem.

I always found that a "memorization race" is table stakes. Without going through that first, there is no way you can participate meaningfully at the higher levels.

And this is true even in cases where most of the actual research is done by computers/algorithms. Being able to quickly identify impossibilities or how to solve parts of the problem, because you effectively memorized thousands of pages of maths theory is invaluable and irreplaceable.

Oh I agree, but I think memorization is necessary but not sufficient for educational success.

Indian and Chinese systems certainly have tons of problem themselves, but that's a separate issue. Chinese students need to spend tons of time cracking the college entrance exam (and all exams before that). When the exam focused on memorization, the students would optimize for that, and the "top talents" selected by that exam are those best at memorization. However, the exams also changed overtime, and it is much less focused on memorization now.

While these exams still receives tons of criticism nowadays, being able to perform well on these exams still correlates highly on being able to succeed in future.

I am skeptical of this pervasive claim because it is effectively unfalsifiable; claiming kids from Asia are “just good at tests” and that thus we don’t need to worry about our education system ignores the fact that most European countries do better on standardized tests too (the UK, Germany, Finland, etc.).

And to add some anecdata of my own, in college I did not notice any race of people being less or more creative than another. If anything during office hours the people who had trouble “improvising” were remarkably well distributed corresponding to the demographics of the school.

> I am skeptical of this pervasive claim because it is effectively unfalsifiable; claiming kids from Asia are “just good at tests” and that thus we don’t need to worry about our education system ignores the fact that most European countries do better on standardized tests too (the UK, Germany, Finland, etc.).

That's not what I said (though you may be commenting on my response and not responding directly to me). I claim that the Chinese and Indian systems have a lot more memorization than the US or European systems and that they often produce students that excel at a skill that doesn't always correlate (but isn't uncorrelated either) with what I want STEM graduates to be. I freely admit the US system is bad, if not terrible, but I'd rather look to Europe for inspiration than Asia here.

I never found this to be true in my high school. The people with the best grades were normal, socially adjusted people, playing sports and participating in clubs.

The geeks were always B/C students.

Indeed, no one bothered me when I did well. Perhaps because I kept a low profile and wasn’t annoying about it.

Glad that you two had a good experience growing up, and that in addition to not being bullied for being academically inclined you also didn't get bullied for being a different race. I really hope all children can be so lucky.

I did get bullied at times, but it had nothing to do with academics but rather being smaller than kids several years older while walking to school.

Please take a look at this list and tell me how many non US fabs you see:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_manufacturing_si...

GlobalFoundries is more global, but there's only one fab in China.

A previous employer was a semiconductor company, and it was pretty clear that the high-tech fabs had to run in the US, and that only the older generations could be moved offshore.

Your comment is very misleading.

Intel's state of the art fabs are for Intel use only and are NOT accessible to fabless companies.

Once you take this into account, fabless US companies who want to fabricate their chips at modern technology nodes need to either use GlobalFoundries or TSMC. GF has a large fab in NY I believe, but the company itself is owned by the UAE.

The vast majority of non-Intel fabs are concentrated in Taiwan, SK, and to a lesser extent, Singapore.

You've conveniently linked Intel's chip fab plants where as your parent poster said nothing about Intel.

Here's a list of chip fabs beyond just Intel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabricat...

We've also shot ourselves in the foot with land-use policy in SF/Silicon Valley. When engineers build products at a company that succeeds, the gains end up accruing to landlords.

It's been de facto illegal to build more housing units for a long time. Engineers here largely either win the stock option lottery or leave (and be put to less economically efficient use) once they start a family.

Under these rules, Silicon Valley won't be Silicon Valley for much longer. Indeed, the people who speak up at city hall meetings and are the biggest activists in elections talk all the time about how much they want the tech industry to fail.

My big hope has been that when Silicon Valley cedes its mantle, it's at least to a country that's relatively friendly to western values.

It is almost a punishment to try to better yourself in America, and our society will certainly suffer from it.

Why try to get a degree that doesn't guarantee any sort of employment, but does guarantee a large financial burden that follows you even beyond bankruptcy? It is absurd how short sighted our higher education system is here.

That's why there is a saying "peaked in high school" in North America. From my experience, even though I was not a geek, its the geeks that end up becoming the bosses past 30.

Not just here. It is all over the world. In fact it is far worse in countries with large population and falling job opportunities in most sectors.

Don't forget

* letting foreign students do PhDs here then not letting them stay due to a broken immigration system.

We bought in hard into this myth that the service-based economy is the next evolutionary step above the manufacturing economy. So we sold our industries to Asia for cheap cash and cheap consumables, completely kicking out our foundation from under us. Meanwhile, the moat around Silicon Valley is proving to be much less wide and deep than believed, and, for instance, easily defeated by Chinese policies (see Zuckerberg's pathetic grovelling at the feet of Xi).

I mostly blame the growing popularity of "MBA wisdom" where short-term extraction of value is sold as growth and fundamentals are almost completely ignored. Companies focused on producing good quality products and careful innovation can't even survive in our market. The worst thing I think is how much "oral tradition" of institutional knowledge we've had to have lost in the past several decades.

Beyond what the government has gifted, tech companies have gifted their technology to China on a silver platter, too.

They chose to do business there, knowing their tech would be stolen, and they even stayed when the Chinese government made the tech stealing official, by forcing US companies to accept "joint ventures" where basically they'd only be allowed to sell their tech locally through a local provider. That was the final nail in the coffin of American technology.

I still think ultimately China will fail because it will shoot itself in the foot with all of that authoritarianism and censorship, which will get worse and will kill creativity and chase away the brilliant creators. But in the meantime, they have all they could possibly want, and it's mostly given to them.

It’s almost as if no system is perfect. ;-)

I was under the impression the market would take care of everything. No?

Maybe private interests don’t have enough influence on politics.

Market forces are what got us into this. Maximizing immediate stock returns demands propping up old tech, cost accounting and offshoring and outsourcing, not investing in research or risky products.

And yet when you look at the results here, it's not market forces, it's government policy that has at least aided other manufacturing centers rise.

Things starting from the free or extremely cheap shipping given to Chinese companies (not by the Chinese government, by the US and others through international mail service agreements). The environmental regulations (even where they clearly cause gas power plants in developed world to shut down to be replaced by coal power plants in China/Indonesia).

Besides I keep hearing that the Chinese state funds exactly one kind of research: sending "favorite sons" to study abroad. Internal Chinese research ... it exists, and it's growing, but it's far from the research effort spent in the US or Europe. And yes, especially in Europe research funding is slinking and this does make it look like the opposite is true, but if you look into it, it doesn't appear true.

People keep claiming that China is making plans on a very long time horizon, and yet every Chinese I meet is utterly convinced of the opposite. They claim the Chinese state is a broken, corrupt, massively fractured and tenuously held together monster that has NO plans that go out even a few years. In theory, they have 5 year plans, but they don't follow through on them, so not really.

You forgot about WTO approval.

creating a culture where superstition and idiocy is rewarded instead of knowledge for its own sake

Full disclosure: I'm an Atheist, but I share the some views with Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett with regards to the culture and practices of religion also embodying value which was accrued through a process of cultural evolution by natural selection.

What's worse than not having medicine for a sick patient is instead giving them poison or a harmful remedy, like bleeding or leeching. We seem to be replacing one set of dogmatic beliefs which can support toxic mentalities of moral panics and witch-hunting with another set of dogmatic beliefs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_bQTxNT-K8

From the Right side of the political spectrum, we see science denial and suppression of information through noise and obfuscation around the areas of biological evolution and climate change. From the Left side of the political spectrum, we see the same thing in the social sciences. There is indeed a closing of the American mind. Ideological adherence is enforced through bullying, logical argument is denied, and science is expected to kow-tow to politics.

The West is now struggling with its own form of Lysenkoism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism

Journalists cannot keep profiling the rise of the Chinese tech industry or its supposed move from "imitation to innovation” without focusing on how Chinese companies are entirely protected from foreign competition in their domestic market and that the Chinese government is forcing foreign companies wanting to do business there to share intellectual property with Chinese competitors.

The fact that none of that triggered WTO action points to just how broken that organization is.

>without focusing on how Chinese companies are entirely protected from foreign competition in their domestic market and that the Chinese government is forcing foreign companies wanting to do business there to share intellectual property with Chinese competitors.

The US had the same advantages early on when it was at its own growth stage to superpower, copying European inventions to bootstrap at first, and using tariffs, subsidies and such to protect the local economy, and using their diplomatic/military might later on to ensure favorable deals for their companies (even now, countries and leaders e.g. that think of trading their oil in other currencies are not staying around for long to do it).

e.g:

"[protectionist] policy was most prevalent in the 19th century. It attempted to restrain imports to protect Northern industries. It was opposed by Southern states that wanted free trade to expand cotton and other agricultural exports. Protectionist measures included tariffs and quotas on imported goods, along with subsidies and other means, to ensure fair competition between imported goods and local goods. In today's age the US is still highly protectionist, according to Global Trade Alert the US has adopted over 1000 protectionist measures since the Global Economic Crisis in 2008, more than any other country since"

https://www.bna.com/amazon-close-breaking-n57982085432/

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-14/your-tax-...

>The fact that none of that triggered WTO action points to just how broken that orginization is.

Or that the power relations have changed, and its old masters are somewhat toothless.

What you're refrencing is a pactice by emerging or developing nations to protect what economists call "infant industries". None of that is applicable to China.

They don't even brother with tariffs they prohibit all competition and coerce rivals to hand over the fruits of their research. It's diabolical.

>They don't even brother with tariffs they prohibit all competition and coerce rivals to hand over the fruits of their research. It's diabolical.

Well, they've been forced to open their borders once, at the opium wars, so that "free trade" can triumph and more junkies can be made of their people.

I'd cut them some slack in not seeing "free trade" as all its advertised to be (by those that primarily profit from paying lip service to it).

No, protectionism is not associated exclusively or even primarily with emerging or developing countries. The GP’s comment talks about 19th and 20th century history, during which time Europe and America industrialized and protectionism was practically the default.

That's neither here nor there, we're discussing China's actions in the context of free trade being the global norm and having established organization like the WTO to ensure a certain level of reciprocity.

The larger point is that China is practicing extreme protectionism while benefitting greatly from free trade.

>The larger point is that China is practicing extreme protectionism while benefitting greatly from free trade.

More power to them, then? Sounds like a good way benefit their country.

> Thats neither here nor there

The GP literally mentions protectionism in the context of the 19th century. I think you’re in the wrong thread.

> Journalist cannot keep portraying the rise of the Chinese tech industry [...]

In the United States anyway, Trumps pandering mercantilism has all but ensured that all global trade will be treated as an axiomatic good by an adversarial press (WaPo and NYT, primarily), nuance be damned.

Key quote:

"The most important part of the answer is to remember the reasons for America’s success in the 1950s and 1960s. Government programmes, intended to surpass the Soviet Union in space and weapons systems, galvanised investment in education, research and engineering across a broad range of technologies. This ultimately gave rise to Silicon Valley, where it was infused by a spirit of free inquiry, vigorous competition and a healthy capitalist incentive to make money. It was supercharged by an immigration system that welcomed promising minds from every corner of the planet."

Even as local youth education was bungled, the flow of highly skilled immigrants and top-notch universities for wealthy and/or foreign students, helped maintain the lead.

Just look at the founders, key techies and CEOs - rare to find a WASP.

One key issue for China is that despite laxer immigration policies it is not an inclusive culture, it is very hard for foreigners to snap into a Chinese company. Language being the first obvious block. Environmental problems, free speech add to the mix - but, again, the US is hellbent on destroying those USPs (EPA under threat, ...).

Does anybody do any fact checking anymore? The claim is that the 1950's and 1960's success was due to a immigration system that "welcomed promising minds from every corner of the planet".

Bullshit.

Look at the percentage of Americans who were immigrants in the 1950-60's - 5-6%. What is it now? 12-14%?[1]

So in fact, there are more immigrants in the US than back in the utopia of the '50-60's.

Once again, a nice theory, but absolutely false.

[1]https://www.capsweb.org/todays-news/record-51-million-immigr...

Percentages work in all kinds of directions: https://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/imm...

Qualified immigration vs. illegal vs. unqualified would be a very separate discussion.

The claim is worded correctly though, even from your viewpoint, no? "welcomed promising minds" vs. indiscriminate immigration and its current backlash that hits "promising minds".

You actually didn’t address the theory. The claim was about welcoming “promising minds”. Presumably that means top acientists, engineers, etc

The current systme in America is renowned for being very difficult to get in to on a merit basis. Was this different in the 1950s? Perhaps.

Also note thatbwhen considering america in the 1950’s, you’d need to look at immigration levels in prior decades. There’s a lag time for kids to grow up.

I don’t know if the theory is right or not. And you,ve certainly provided some data to show it *mayg be wrong. But it’s far from conclusive.

I would point you towards the "Immigration Act of 1990", which created a number of ways for highly skilled workers to immigrate to the US.

Before that, a lot of the US immigration was based on family reunification.

China has over 1 billion inhabitants and many millions living abroad which might just have enough incentive to move back now or soon. Immigration for them is not going to make as much difference as in the US.

China does have immigration-friendly policy, but the policies were mostly active in the 90's, largely targeted at Chinese-speakers. These policies included major tax breaks for Chinese speakers with advanced degrees if they established permanent residence (green card) in China, including being able to use that tax refund to buy real estate.

Many who took advantage of the policies had left to study abroad in the 70's and 80's, but got jobs in their new home countries. Others were a generation removed. It looks different from US immigration, but if anything, I believe the expectations of the "sea turtles" (pun for returning ex-pat) have spurred a lot of the systemic changes that have been improving China.

> largely targeted at Chinese-speakers. These policies included major tax breaks for Chinese speakers with advanced degrees

It's not about being a Chinese speaker. It's about ethno-nationalism or racism, depending upon one's perspective. Merely speaking Chinese fluently isn't nearly enough for a racially European or African person to gain Chinese citizenship. The total number of those who have ever done so is less than the number of people the UK nationalises each week.

Even the green card is nearly unobtainable. Dashan could get one but the vast majority of expats who have spent a decade in China, marred a PRC national, and started a family cannot.

If you know a lot of people's personal experiences getting denied in modern day, I'd love to learn more! I don't personally know a lot of people of European or African ancestry trying in the first place, at least in modern day.

However, during WW II, there were many European Jewish refugees who became my family's neighbors in Shanghai, at a time when shipfuls of them were being turned away by the U.S. (Our neighbors were denied a visa to the U.S. at that time.) There was another previous wave during Russian pogroms.

Most people I've heard of getting green cards are of Chinese or mixed East Asian / Southeast Asian ancestry, and have an advanced STEM degree. I heard the scoring systems weighs Ph.D.'s and M.S.'s differently, and that computer science and EE gets you more points. I haven't heard of people getting assigned different weights depending on how Chinese their ancestry is. On the other hand, you'd probably have a hard time telling the difference between a Korean and a Chinese northerner who lives near the Korean border, as well as the difference between a Vietnamese person, and a Chinese southerner who lives near that border. We're all basically distant cousins.

> On the other hand, you'd probably have a hard time telling the difference between a Korean and a Chinese northerner who lives near the Korean border, as well as the difference between a Vietnamese person, and a Chinese southerner who lives near that border."

Not once they start talking! I'd never mistake a Korean for a Dongbeiren!

What did the US bungle about youth education in the 50's and 60's? My memory is limited to New Math and standardized tests of more recent decades.

Right - I meant bungled since then. Public education around tech is simply not good (on average), higher education very expensive. Hence foreigner have a leg up, as they get their BAs, MSc at home, far cheaper, then move to the US for the jobs.

Student debt is a very US phenomenon.

The speed at which this has happened was essentially a gift from Western companies and governments either asleep or deliberately ignorant at the wheel. It seems incredibly short-sighted to have sold a hard-earned technological edge for a quick buck. Huawei, for instance, was essentially a Chinese government program to illegally reverse-engineer tech from American companies. And now they cry foul when their smartphones are kept out of Western markets! The nerve!

Still, it seems naïve to think the West's technological edge could be maintained forever, especially given China's massive population and penchant for being the global leader in scholarship from time to time throughout history. It's an interesting time in The West and hard not to be pessimistic about it. One specific concern I have about tech in China is the impunity with which they may pursue Eugenic human gene editing in the near future. Given The West's, uh, problematic, history with Eugenics, it's unlikely these pursuits would happen at scale again here. I doubt China would be constrained by the same concerns. And what if it... works?

Reverse engineering has never been illegal.

It went beyond just "reverse engineering", I didn't really phrase that right.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huawei#Controversies

yeah reverse engineering another company's IP so you can steal it is definitely ethical behavior

Also the West has decided that cities were basically a bad idea and they should stop dead in their tracks at about 1960. Instead our productivity should be spent on artificially expensive housing costs because we can never build anything ever again.

It is a logical fallacy to think of America as in competition with China for "technological hegemony". We are all humans, and should work to share knowledge with each other. It is true that manufacturing has become cheaper to do in China. This may or may not be a passing phase, just as manufacturing used to be done in Japan in the 80's. To think that we as a continent need to be "better" than China in some competitive respect, or worse still, "hold back" China, is utterly stupid. This view creates a notion of a zero-sum game out of something that clearly benefits everyone, has positive externalities. Who among us has not ordered a component from alibaba? And many of us hold Chinese equities in ADRs, or vice-versa.

Yea, I hate the "hegemony" part of this. It seems very childish and egotistical to take a stance of "We have to be #1 or else we won't be happy or let anyone else succeed". I understand there's sentiments of politics at play, but purposely trying to hold someone back or undermine them to maintain a position of being able to look down on others is damn petty.

It’s because silicon valley is stuck in ego battles and fear and risk aversion, eyes on world domination or bust, while China is a scrappy underdog not worried about pixel perfect proof of concepts. I like their style, like smaller US markets as I remember them. Yet to visit, but the Chinese I’ve worked with remotely and as students/colleagues are pragmatic and dedicated.

Over the course of three decades, by repetitively touting the benefits of offshoring, outsourcing and reducing all trade barriers - the policies favored by its 'executive' readership, the Economist has essentially been advocating for exactly this to happen while acting like it wouldn't.

The low trade barriers seems to have led to many US tech companies becoming dominant globally in their fields. It seems like if there were more trade barriers it would've been harder for those companies to expand in the first place.

Is the economic goal of a country to create a series of very profitable corporations?

No, obviously not but this article isn't talking about overarching economic goals. It's talking about losing technical dominance to China and my point was that the dominance seemed to have been helped by the trade practices, not hurt by them.

Except a lot of those dominant companies either A) conspicuously absent from China (e.g. Google) or B) China can sever their supply chain (e.g. Apple)

FWIW, I don't think the US has much to fear. I'm working under the assumption that the US will keep their dominant position in tech, culture, and economy for at least the next 5 years. I have followed CN's gov dropping 340 BN into ML, robotics. Not worried.

For an orthogonal set of arguments that benefit the US, check 'the accidental superpower' (Geopolitics and demography make the EU and CN not likely to outdo the US all things considered; unless the US shoots itself in the foot with say a civil war)

From this viewpoint, how is China in the 2010s different from Japan in the 1970s? I'm not implying that Japan executed corporate espionage to the same degree, but there was quite a bit of hand wringing, particularly when DRAM production moved almost entirely out of the US and into Japan.

It is still the case, in my view, that there is an edge granted to the actual inventors. They get first crack at monetizing their invention. Both Japan in the 70s and China today are presented as threats, not through innovation, but assimilation of others' innovation.

I'd be interested in seeing some indication that the US position in innovation is being credibly threatened. One area that does seem at risk is genetic research involving human genome. China does not seem to have the same queasy reaction that the US does to genomic experimentation on humans.

Much of the technology that kickstarted the Japanese economy's recovery was freely sold to them by American companies in the 1950s-60s, who were delighted to make back R&D costs by licensing their ideas to Japan's then-puny economy. It came back to bite them a decade later, but they had no idea that would happen.

This is different from (as another poster has mentioned) keeping your domestic market walled-off unless companies agree to share their technology with you for free. They (American firms) are making this choice in full knowledge of how competitive China is with the US right now.

In addition to some areas of genomics, China has likely surpassed the US in quantum communications and some AI applications (not yet overall AI research), esp those involving NLP. It's probable that more are forthcoming.

There's more to the "hegemony" than just pure tech. Tight government control may be good for keeping the party in power, but it's not great for building trust with people outside the Great Firewall.

But I don't think they are going to be next Silicon Valley soon. Their wages are skyrocketing now. Average salaries of engineers in Beijing is around $50k now. (Maybe Shanghai be similar?) This might hold them back in my opinion.

Nothing wrong with a bit of competition, right ;-)

Again?

I'll worry when Chinese universities surpass America's in all fields - not just STEM, but in the arts and humanities as well.

Until then, America will be the leader of technological progress.

Given that, it may be entirely possible for conservatives to destroy America's institutions of higher learning, if they had their way. We need to be proactive in protecting our universities in the face of constant attacks by the backwards conservatives that seek to regress society.

The conservative goal is to transform our economy into mindless workers that sell things they find on the ground, instead of creating an economy of engineers, designers, artists, and other free thinkers.

American universities are the central identity of America. You destroy the universities, you destroy the country.

I know lots of conservatives whose desires are quite antithetical to what you ascribe to them. I'm more concerned about divisive moral high grounders.

Sucks that they don't have a voice in any political party, then.

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