Are expensive office buildings and high end transportation an indicator of an innovative country? They can definitely act as infrastructure to support innovation but it remains to be seen.
Why is that? I think it says more about us in the west.
This said, we won't have a real tipping point until China can rival Hollywood for quality and quantity of cultural output, and their language makes that quite difficult. This is one of the reasons the USSR never "won" even at the time when it was arguably more powerful and efficient than the US.
Amazing how fast attitudes change. Just a few decades back, Japanese goods and Made in Japan had the same cheap, low quality reputation as Made in China goods today. I even distinctly remembered the same "Japanese people as a culture don't care about quality" comments which is the same as some people nowadays complaining that Chinese people have "chabuduo"(just enough) attitudes. Or the same accusations of no creativity.
Funny how drastically these "deep-rooted" cultural attitudes in Japanese people have changed. Or maybe its not the culture of Japan that has changed but the perceptions others have of it. I reckon the same is for China.
Maybe part of it is economic risk. Localization and distribution would have some costs, and maybe nobody's willing to take a risk on "let's bring China's #1 movie to the US". Things like anime in the west got bootstrapped in obscure fandoms on an informal, low-budget, and sometimes downright bootleg way, which I'm not sure they want to do if they're trying to consciously develop soft power.
I am somewhat surprised about how limited China's attempts at soft power seem to be. They don't have a prominent global media presence like, say, the BBC/DW/NHK. They don't seem to be tooting their horn well about their engineering advances. They don't even seem to have effective tourism marketing-- I can't think of the last time I saw an advertisement encouraging travel to China (even before the pandemic) while there are loads of travel documentaries on TV all conveniently sponsored by "(random state or European country) Tourism Office"
I do think a missing piece is having a few more world-beating brands. Yeah, we have a few, (Lenovo, for example), but we're definitely at the point where people will say "I'm not going to buy a Chinese car/washing machine!" -- which feels about where Korea was in 1980 or Japan in 1955.
* Centralized governing system
* Production excess, we continued to produce even if we didn't have any buyers and the quality was pretty bad (today you have Wish or Aliexpress through which you can sell literally anything, even people from my family are ordering crazy stuff from China that has no use at all, so China has the upper hand, we just didn't have that technology back then)
* Lack of political diversity
* No indicators of survivability, China is yet to go through a major crisis (Black Swan) to see how it handles it, the pandemic is not a Black Swan
* Impedance mismatch between communism, atheism promoted by Marxism vs. Christianity that promotes individual thinking, Eatern cultures generally are more collectivistic, so again, China has the upper hand
* Socialist countries are ticking time bombs, they implode when you don't expect them to happen, usually the trigger is local. Nobody thought that Soviet Union would collapse out of nowhere, I still remember reading articles coming from socialists in German and American newspapers lauding the policies adoped by Soviets and how they will get ahead of them. On 15th December 1989 nobody in Romania would have thought that the next day a bloody revolution will start out of a small Hungarian minority in the city of Timisoara. Localism! Everything from China comes from the top level, filtered and censored, we may never know what happens locally and it will be a surprise for us when that happens.
* An educated population is hard to control, the only thing that communism does great is offering education for the masses and opportunities, the moment it will hit a certain threshold, people will just want more and everything will end violently. As Wikipedia puts it:
"The events that demolished the Iron Curtain started with peaceful opposition in Poland, and continued into Hungary, East Germany, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia. Romania became the only communist state in Europe to overthrow its government with violence." [1]
> Why is that? I think it says more about us in the west.
I can agree with you. Because of our experience, it is easy for us to swap China with "Western Communism" and think that it will have the same faith without taking other factors into consideration. The West has problems and the pandemic revealed them, blaming China for the Corona problems is stupid, we should blame our overlyoptimized, overlyindividualistic nature. When Italy was "burning" at the beginning of the pandemic, all European states were reluctant to aid and all the press in Europe was finger pointing them in a disgraced way, typically European. I remember states that I've believed to be "team-players" like Sweden notifying all other European memebers that they will do it their own way. The same happened with my country, they were so late to react to the advice of WHO and EU, so late that the local municipalities started to take the matter into their own hands they practically blocked the access to the cities.
I have listened to this viewpoint (and at some point I have held it myself) for the past 20 years. And year after year it is clearly proven wrong.
Today Chinese companies such as Huawei, TikTok, DJI, Xiaomi are absolutely world class technology companies. Ten years ago Chinese companies of this stature were unthinkable. Yet somehow we question whether Chinese companies will be capable of producing a highend microchip, now that we via our sanctions have create a halfway sputnik moment for them? Whether they can create an international blockbuster movie?
Could it be that we in the west are speaking out of prejudice? That we think we know what modern Chinese communism and Chinese culture is? And we just assume it is going to degenerate into some Soviet style bureaucratic, corrupt, degenerate mess.
Now imagine if they turned this focus to something else.
In fact, a lot of western designed stuff made in China is only possible thanks to the Chinese innovation in production. If you start digging the OEMs of western brand products, you find that the manufacturers of the parts like cameras, sensors, motors, controllers, antennas, speakers etc. are all standalone Chinese companies with their own products that are not simply produced in sweatshop but supplied to the western brands as a original designs. Surely it goes beyond electronics, the same is valid for the more traditional stuff like textiles or plastics etc.
What China lacks on is culture. Surely they have very deep culture with traditions dating back thousands of years but on the global scale the Chinese culture is a curiosity at most. Arts and lifestyle is dominated by the west in a sense that everyone on the earth has some part of it in addition to their local culture and that culture dictates the mental models of all the people, including the Chinese people. When you have a hegemony over the culture, you say how to live, who to like, who to hate, how to use technology and what to consume.
When I moved to the UK from Turkey, I noticed that all the stuff regarding the functioning of the society that we blindly follow made sense in the UK and a lot of restrictions and rules that we had in Turkey were designed to force the Turkish society to function like a western one. That's why you can innovate in culture changing stuff in the UK but it's very hard in Turkey: because UK is on the cutting edge and Turkey merely follows some cargo-cult-like culture.
Let me give you an example. In Turkey banks are very good at tech and design, we used to do chip&pin forever, contactless payments and alternative channel payments existed since ever and our ATMs can do almost everything that a bank can do and their mobile apps were always very well made and powerful. Why wouldn't Turkish banks dominate fintech then? We hear all the time about some UK or US bank making something easy to use and getting huge rounds of funding, making them more valuable than the Turkish banks that did these things since years? It's definitely not the lack of talent or entrepreneurship as these are found im ample amount in Turkey. Turks that travel to UK/USA/EU are shocked by the primitiveness of the everyday banking.
I think the reason is this: In the Turkish mental models we don't know why we do the thing we do it comes of utilising Western institutional models. We usually have rigid rules and structures that are designed to force behaviour which dictates a mental model about how something has to be and that cannot be questioned.
At first, the Turks find the Banking in western countries extremely primitive and they simply cannot think about institutions doing financial services without being a bank. In fact, fintech in the UK is fine but you need to look beyond HSBC or Lloyds, you can have Azimo for sending money abroad or Monzo for simple banking. Now Turkish banks and regulators are copying the west again and the mental model of fintech is being expanded to include non-bank payment processors etc. despite that they had the tech much earlier and these things were simply features of the existing banks.
When you are not at the cutting edge in a culture(financial culture, for example), you cannot innovate. Those who dare will be quickly put down for not following the rules or even making something hard to categorise according to the current rules. To question why and how you do something and innovate on the core platforms you need to have total understanding and you cannot have that with non-naturalized imported culture. It's like innovating on top of Apple/Facebook/Google platforms.
I think culture is the actual moat of the US and the west in general.
Regarding innovation, I wonder how much role social friction plays. I'm not turkish, but my understanding is that there is a lot of interpersonal negotiations in turkish dealings, who knows who, who owns a favour to whom. Which is related to corruption. You don't have that as much in the West, when you deal with someone it doesn't matter as much who you are and who you know.
This is one of the most insightful comments I've read on HN today. I experience this a lot, especially in the arts, in my own country. That constant reference to "the rules" and "the way it's supposed to be done" reflects the kind of "follower-culture" that, I think, impedes innovation.
That is not to say innovation does not (or cannot) happen within such a limiting framework; the framework is limiting and works against an innovative spirit.
I'm sure that people in the dominant culture are facing the same resistance but since they don't have a reference to follow(they are at the cutting edge, the top, the front trenches) they can brand their work as innovation much easily. If you are in a "follower-culture", people will not accept your work as good unless it is recognised by the upper culture. It happens a lot in Turkey, where the local artists doing unusual things won't be accepted by the local critics or academia until they make a name for themselves in the USA, UK or EU.
It's not limited to artist. Game developers, app developers, inventors will be initially branded as "scammers" or a "joke" if they do something in a way that's not usually done up until they receive recognition from abroad.