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Comment by KaoruAoiShiho | Hacker News Reader

Yes exactly, China is mostly imitative and their culture and systems makes it so that they cannot innovate on any scale. Their current accomplishments are built on the basis of theft and when once we fix our security they will fall even further behind than they already are.

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This is really similar to criticisms of Taiwan and Japan as they climbed up the tech advancement scale. Both of them now have for example in one HN related field, silicon foundries that rival the best of what's in the US. In terms of scale, China probably has far more PV capacity than the US (not sure where it sits relative to Japan).

I think it's an odd mix of self superiority/discrimination that actually lets the US sit back too relaxed and not competing on difficult and often costly, but fundamental investments (not just in silicon, but other industrial areas too). And too often there is too little coercion needed for US companies when they do make investments, siting manufacturing capacity in other nations while chasing lowest cost labor.

It's hard to judge. If you compare China to the old days of USSR - I wouldn't think USSR was that great at creative thinking, either (on a bigger scale).

But USSR also maintained multiple closed cities which would contain the smartest people they had in the whole of the union. I am certain if you picked a few people from there they would be of a completely different opinion of what USSR was at the time as well.

So I am wondering if modern-day China has those, too. They might not be bringing huge industries to fruition based on their research - but on the other hand they might be working on strategic projects such as submarines, etc that are hard to clearly see behind the usual commercial noise.

USSR had a lot of bright people; mathematicians and people involved in military air and space endeavors come to mind.

I don't like a certain conflation of terms in discussions like these - merging together creative thinking and business. The two things are only vaguely related. To overuse a tired term, inventing a better mousetrap spring != designing a better mousetrap != being able to make that better mousetrap a commercial success. The last part involves a lot of work that isn't creative, and that benefits from business-friendly conditions, which are not necessary for the creative work itself.

That's an interesting point. Who knows what could actually be going behind closed doors in China? A lot of what we hear from China comes from second hand sources. If the Chinese are doing big things, their government seems pretty tight lipped on revealing breakthroughs and their progress (unlike the USSR.)

> I wouldn't think USSR was that great at creative thinking, either (on a bigger scale).

True, especially in the later years of the USSR. But they did launch a satellite into space before anyone else. At some point they were creative thinkers, at least.

The USSR was the first to reach every major milestone in the race to land on the moon, apart from the final one.

And they did win the race to space, something we often forget.

We underestimate China to our own peril.

USSR had a much stronger engineering apparatus than China does. They beat the US to launching a human in space, then beat them again with the first artificial satellite. Sure they stole nuclear weapons technology from the US/UK teams, but that was more-so a matter of self preservation.

I want to emphasize that there are tons of incredibly brilliant minds in China working on amazing things. It's their government system that makes it so that rather than incentivizing innovation, they've focused on building the most efficient IP theft system the world has ever seen.

There's also the internal versus external market. Chinese are not stealing IP for the sake of making the same stuff but with cheaper labor. Whether you get the IP by buying or stealing, building something new on top of that IP is still creative innovation, and they do a lot of that. In fact, not respecting western IP with all its associated innovation-stopping practices lets them iterate at a pace not seen in the West.

See e.g. some of the stuff Bunnie wrote here: https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?cat=20, starting with: https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?page_id=3107.

I know the Chinese government has made a concerted effort to steal IP. Still I also find the descriptions of Chinese culture, and Asian culture in general, that demean it as imitative and incapable of creative thought not as rational descriptions of the world, but instead bizarre holdovers of old racist ideologies repackaged in more palatable contemporary business-lingo.

What other Asian countries in the present day are frequently accused of stealing IP? I don't get how you're arriving at it being a broadly Asian thing, when it's quite specifically a Chinese phenomenon. Conflating China to mean "all Asians" is pretty racist in and of itself.

https://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archiv...

Just a replay of history with the country name replaced.

There are broad stereotypes about Asians and conformity that are at play in the parent comments assumptions about what China’s weaknesses are

There’s a lot of IP theft but they can make a lot of progress by simply catching up. Chinese culture is very capitalistic and innovation is not going to be a problem.

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