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Comment by ttul | Hacker News Reader

When the government is your master, you will be innovative only insofar as it is necessary to achieve government objectives. SenseTime may be a great investment because of that implicit support, but it doesn’t make them a great company nor much of a competitive threat to rivals who are exposed to the rigors of the market.

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you neglect to mention -- the ability to implement a technology in systems and in the field. Government "by definition" has the ability to use resources to deploy, to a degree that is not easily understood by an individual.

Companies that get too intermingled with the Chinese government are likely to fall victim to some corporate version of Lysenkoism. No company is good at everything. All companies fail eventually. But, if you can’t you’ll eventually grind away miss-applying whatever you can do to whatever you’ve been order to do.

> Certain backward areas have advanced, and various devices always in some way connected with warfare and police espionage have developed, but experiment and invention have largely stopped.

-- George Orwell, "Nineteen-Eightyfour"

That quote is exemplary of Orwell's personal feud with Stalinism rather than an accurate prediction. Historically, neither in the USA or China, has technological cooperation with the military slowed down technological advance (in fact public moonshots were arguably a driver behind most of the technology we take for granted).

For a thorough criticism of 1984 as a device to explore technology in the future, I recommend Asimov's harsh criticism of the book.

http://www.newworker.org/ncptrory/1984.htm

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