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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

China's plans aren't a big secret. There's Made In China 2025.[1] The 14th Five Year Plan is being drafted now. Unlike the USSR, China was reasonably successful in meeting the goals of the 13 Five Year Plans so far, with the notable exception of the Great Leap Forward fiasco of the 1960s.

The Made In China 2025 plan focuses on pharmaceutical, automotive, aerospace, semiconductor, IT and robotics manufacturing. The goal is to have a state of the art position in all those fields by 2025.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_China_2025

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I doubt they'll get to state of the art in aerospace, at least not in a plane that is actually capable of flying in every country.

Aircraft development is hard. Many states have tried sponsoring programs and they have mostly been duds, like Japan and Russia; even successful ones, like Canada's Bombardier and Brazil's Embraer, have or were about to sell to the Boeing-Airbus duopoly because the costs of additional aircraft development are far too high now. Pretty much every commercial aircraft program has come in late and over budget in recent years. And the MAX8 situation has made things worse for everybody involved because rather than take peer agencies' word for it, everyone is going to want to run their own stringent tests now.

It took Airbus 21 years to produce something that would sell. But they got there. COMAC is at year 12. The COMAC C919 has a few flying prototypes. It's been a troubled project, with major changes, such as going from carbon fiber to aluminum, along the way. Still uses imported engines. It's kind of a dud, like the Airbus 300 was. But the government of China is willing to keep putting in money until they get a decent airliner. The next one might be saleable outside China.

China also has a higher average IQ than much of the rest of the world: 104, vs 98 for the USA:

https://www.worlddata.info/iq-by-country.php

China is also pursuing eugenic strategies with the one-child policy, and controlled migration into cities (which encourages assortative mating). The Fertility Rate of 1.6 is reasonable.

By contrast many Western countries are pursuing dysgenic strategies through the provision of mass-welfare, and the intake of migrants from lower-IQ countries.

China just needs to sit back for 30-50 years and wait for these trends to play out, if it has the patience. We're already seeing the first reports of IQ declines:

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/iq-rates-are-dropping-...

This seems more like a dumb conspiracy, the kind of pseudoscience BS you’d feed to QANON’s.

Let’s go through it piece by piece:

    1. Doesn’t define how IQ was measured in each country
    2. Doesn’t state when for each country
    3. Doesn’t define how the average was calculated
    4. Doesn’t provide any data on rate of change of IQ - this is important, for those not aware IQ tests are reframed every few years to keep most people on the 85-115 range. The revision trend is always upwards so far - it’s arguable that we’re getting smarter because of flaws in IQ as a concept but we’re certainly becoming more capable in the modern world which is not controversial

Enough about IQ we could bang on more about statistical significance and anything between 85 - 115 is average but lets move on to the real meat to be refuted.

    6. China’s one-child policy formally ended 5 years ago after many years of gradual reductions in restrictions
    7. China is actively trying to walk back the damage of its 1 child policies and is incentivising married couples to have more than 1 child (and somewhat confusingly, has actually been doing this since before the end of the 1 child policy)

Now the real BS part

    8. No country anywhere is pursuing dysgenic strategy
    9. Welfare - help given to people who need it. I am intrigued what you actually mean here, are you suggesting we should let people die who can Otherwise be saved by provision of assistance?
    10. Intake of migrants from “lower iq” countries - are these doctors and engineers on Visas or asylum seekers and refugees from areas rendered uninhabitable by war, climate or lawlessness?

Yes, you can see it in the comments sections on the internet.

If not using eugenic strategies means loosing some war, I think I would opt for defeat and welcome our new Chinese overlords.

That’s my point.

It’s not secret but Netflix and Amazon aren’t exactly rushing to layout what the future will look like when the Chinese achieve these goals.

I wish my country put their weight behind a strategy. A 30 year plan or something like that.

It's called "industrial policy". The US traditionally has avoided that. It causes huge stress on the political system because it ties industry success to lobbying power. And until recently, the US didn't need it.

The UK did a lot of that in the 1950s through the 1980s, and it resulted in "lemon socialism" - the government had all the declining industries. Coal, steel, and railroads, mostly.

Japan did better, with MITI telling industry what to do, and advanced the country enormously. Until the 1989 bubble collapse and real estate crash, from which Japan never fully recovered.

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