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Comment by heavenlyblue | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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