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Comment by senttoschool | Hacker News Reader

I find it funny how US nationalists keep bringing up that China can't innovate and can only steal/copy.

Have they looked inside a tech company office before? Have they seen how many Chinese immigrants/second generation Chinese Americans power high-tech US tech companies? Do they think that only the Chinese people in the US can innovate? And that once they're in China, they lose that ability?

Or have they read a science paper recently? China's universities dominate the Nature Index for high quality science output: https://www.nature.com/nature-index/annual-tables/2023/insti...

Heck, just read any science paper from top US universities. There's a good chance that one or more Chinese names are on it.

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> I find it funny how US nationalists keep bringing up that China can't innovate and can only steal/copy.

Most of them are undereducated with highly censored access to real life in China.

They were never offered the choice to study the Chinese language when they were young, while Chinese have to learn English to get into any Chinese university. As a result, they don't get the freedom to read Chinese online discussions & reports through first hand channels, they have to rely on some "free" media to feed them fake news.

Please be nice to them, they are the victims here.

I had always read that (perhaps over-hopefully) as referring to the structural incentives of the Chinese economic system not leading to innovation rather than a racist statement that Asians can't innovate. Neither statement seems completely accurate but the former is considerably less offensive.

> Have they seen how many Chinese immigrants/second generation Chinese Americans power high-tech US tech companies?

But this is the whole point. They might be Chinese immigrants but they are adding value to US companies.

Your later point on top US university papers - same thing. The US has been doing this for 200 years. So many ambitious and talented people migrate there, because their home countries don’t allow them to succeed for all kinds of reasons.

In the broad scheme of things, it doesn’t matter if they are immigrants or not, they are boosting the US economy.

Just like how almost no scientists working on the atomic bomb with oppenheimer were from the US, and they didn’t build nuclear bombs for European countries…

> And that once they're in China, they lose that ability?

They partially do. The communism power structure is always a debuff. Loyality > Skills.

Spend some time to actually understand modern China. It’s full fledge capitalism.

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