China’s new plan to seize the world’s tech crown from the U.S

When I was in China this year there were places where you paid just by scanning your face (this was for street food....)

"in technology, the US are ten years ahead of Europe; China is ten years ahead of the US"

The degree to which an economy is "advanced" has more to do with institutional systems and processes, not whether they're using the latest tech. Often times the latest tech papers over institutional deficiencies, but only superficially. Mobile payment platforms have been ubiquitous in Africa for many years, but nobody would say that Africa's banking system is "advanced" or that it's capable of supporting the needs of an advanced financial sector. They became ubiquitous in Africa first precisely because of institutional deficiencies. Mobile payments solved some of the most visible consequences, but by itself it didn't go very far in addressing the underlying problems. Sure, it's easy to pay a vendor for lunch or a pair of sneakers using your phone, but what matters infinitely more is how safe and reliable it is to secure a $2,000,000 LoC to help bring your factory online.

Old systems in older economies persist because they work, or at least work well enough.

If China overtakes the U.S. in technology dominance, it's because they've spent 30 years studying, copying, and improving upon American legal, financial, and business management systems. Notwithstanding the fact that they are serving the interests and demands of the Communist Party, which often puts them in a lose-lose scenario, China's economists and policy advisers understand the systems of modern capitalism better than most of their Western counterparts.

Anecdotally, I remember competing against Chinese robotics teams as a college student. It's a myth that the Chinese are not innovative - their engineering is top notch and they routed the competition with hardware tech that had never been seen before in an academic setting. More surprisingly, they freely share their designs with other Chinese teams, cultivating a culture of open hardware.

Here's a video of a Chinese robot throwing balls through a hoop and landing them on a platform: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqUZgMrl7qQ

It really has nothing about technological advance. If you can get the living cost and wages low enough you could make deliver works, profitable and sustainable. If the average POS system does not charge 10 to 100x of those in China there no reason why restaurant cant have them in US.

I see it as economic difference. Not so much about technology in itself.

It is profitable because labor is cheaper, a quality associated with less advanced economies.

I do to, a giant portion of China's current account is operational capital of big multinationals.

When they will start withdrawing money, Yuan will fall through the floor for a year, or two before rebalancing.

This will give a great boost to China's exporters.

One country _might_ think that. One country right out proclaimed it.

"You are either with us or against us." - George Bush

The primary thing you need is capital. Money, and lots of it. Then a service and manufacturing economy to support and sustain it.

But the most important ingredient, is to be sovereign. And not get invaded for a hundred years, while you build out your economy and institutions.

The last major war on American soil was the Civil War. You can achieve a lot of momentum, when war and invasion is not happening on your territory.

Basically, don’t be poor. And have a lot of nuclear weapons to F! up your opponents, if they dare attempt to invade you.

If you have all that, then everything else will fall into place.

To an extent I think it was, nothing inherently American but openness and a certain amount of cowboyness has been a key differentiator in what tech thrives and what dies and authoritarian cultures/governments/organizations don't tend to favor openness. Look at the web verse what it could have been though something like minitel or AOL, look at linux vs commercial operating systems, unix itself and windows fostered a cowboy culture where everyone could write there own programs, bring there own hardware and generally and do what they want.

For the most part I think American tech is abandoning those values anyway, walled gardens are becoming more common and getting more restrictive, open standards are yielding to proprietary services, users are being restricted in how they operate their own machines. That's something China can compete with and win, you wouldn't get IRC out of china but you would get slack, you wouldn't get Linux but you would get apple.

American tech dominance is also predicated upon having a huge domestic market that is relatively uniform in terms of the business environment and easy to navigate. Start here and you have access to 330M potential customers. This is something that the EU/EEA is only struggling to become: it's mostly still separate national markets there. China has the same advantage America had as well, and an even larger population to start with.

America has well-oiled financial markets that are good at allocating capital. In China it's the government doing the allocation, and the results have often been abysmal, e.g. technology investment funds being used to further inflate the property bubble in disguise. However, historically, many of the biggest technological breakthroughs in the US were associated with government-funded military projects. No reason why China could not replicate this in principle.

Not sure where the "American values" fit here, it depends what you mean by that. If you meant entrepreneurial spirit and individualism then the Chinese are entrepreneurial and individualist too. If you mean liberty/freedom then these aren't only American values but more broadly the values of the European Enlightenment, and this is indeed another differentiator between China and the cultural West. Would be interesting to know what values you had in mind.

Another poster mentioned cowboyism, which I think is apt. The US culture reveres the rugged individual ideal, and the structures allow or encourage it.

All the big US tech companies have an origin story with one or two people, often without traditional credentials, who turned a small idea into a big idea and a huge company. Usually not a lot of group glory, unless it's the five or ten people who left after building a big company and made their own bigger companies (see the traitorous eight that formed Fairchild and went onto form others companies; or the many video game companies starting with A formed by Atari employees such as Activision)

You don't get innovation by doing what everyone else is doing. You get it by doing stuff that seems crazy and turning out right.

Imitating the leader is just common sense if you want to emulate their success. China has been doing it bigtime also. Central planners can do a fine job of catching up once the path is obvious. Train people with these skills and have them build these products. Just watch the news to learn how. But even if they take over their targeted fields, US tech will move on to new ones. To lead means to figure out what to do next, before it's the biggest thing in SV already.

We have some of the best farmland in the world. With a river system to feed it water and easily transport goods. As well as a relatively flat landmass to facilitate transportation of people and goods. Add to that the largest energy deposits in the world, and nearly every other natural resource needed to run a modern economy.

We have it pretty easy. A highly inclusive democratic society is just the cherry on top that pulls it all together.

And BTW- Chinda does not come out very well on any of those metrics. They are a massive net importer of food and energy, for instance. That makes it much harder for them to come out ahead in a global economic shock. Say one brought on by a global pandemic.

https://warontherocks.com/2020/05/scoping-the-future-of-educ...

2. Fab process tech is pretty firmly in Dutch/Swiss/Japanese hands I think? In terms of fabs, SMIC is planning to start 7nm process this year, so about 3 years behind: https://www.tomshardware.com/uk/news/chinese-fab-smic-to-sta...

3. Anecdotally I visited an optics tradeshow in Shenzhen and it was pretty impressive what was available in advanced lenses for process control. But I'm no expert. Consumer camera lenses from China have been getting better and better.

4. It's not really hard to make mechanical watches if you have great CNC machines. Which are still dominated by Switzerland (Tornos), Germany (Kern), Japan (many, including Tsugami). Seagull have been making decent mechanical watches for >60 years...

5. China is pushing heavily on gene therapy which may turn out to be a big part of future medicine

A big part of lenses in lithography steppers come from China, where they managed to beat Zeiss on cost/quality n-fold.

The biggest, and most expensive lenses are still Zeiss' speciality.

Pouring trillions in bad corpoarate debt is just as bad as pouring trillions in inflating the housing market -- resources are poorly allocated and capital markets are bypassed.

Bad debt is bad debt, it is equally destructive in the end.

Could you give some examples of research where you had to wait a while for a translation to appear? I was under the impression that Chinese researchers still try to get their research published in international venues if they can, which means writing in English. Do they publish in Chinese somewhere else first? (Where?)

I’ve kinda understood him as the one that stepped away from the planned economy of Mao (but I’m not really knowledgeable on the subject)

What am I missing here?

But we only need one SV. Once the model is proved out, it will naturally spread the seeds of startup culture to other cities. Like VC's drifting in the wind.

The socio-economic soil of the transplants doesn't need to be nearly as fertile as the first location. It is taking a while, but the model is definitely spreading. Most every major city has a startup scene these days, and a government looking to nurture it.

When they started Golden Shield Project they built it for monitor and surveillance iirc.

Forgive me if I'm skeptical of your view.

I do welcome more competitions between companies/countries which will hopefully lead to consumers enjoying the benefits.