China Overtakes U.S. For First Time as Top Spender on R&D in 2024

The ones really funding research are VCs, governments and founders taking bank loans.

They love money so much, you could swear they're American!

China welcomes all skilled foreign talent to come work and take residence in the country with open arms. The process to live and work in China is open and transparent as in any other major Asian economy: first find a job there and second, apply for the visa. You can even work for a major Chinese multinational outside of China, provided that they aren't blacklisted like ZTE by the US government.

Don't enter with the expectation to naturalize and you will find you can do more than you think: go work for Baidu in Beijing, study in Fudan University as a student, or start your own business. Whatever you feel like mostly. Understand that you are on a visa and adjust your conduct like any immigrant in any western country understands.

Learning Chinese has amazing utility but most expatriates can get by without knowing a lick of it, my own family is living proof of this. Any multinational hiring a foreign talent will also hire translators for said talent. In day to day life there is no shortage of people in the city who can speak english, for the rest there are LLM's and translation apps. The Chinese community is behind on truly understanding life from the immigrant's perspective but it is adapting positively.

The most common objection from outsiders is the restricted access to global services like Google, Facebook, OpenAI, the easiest remedy for that is to just use a VPN. You can order a latte from Starbucks down the road in the meantime - or Luckin coffee if you want a better option.

A lot of the fear is unfounded. The local police station is not going to arrest you for accessing the outside world. You aren't going to lose a "social credit score" for being late to work, cutting a line or being obnoxious in public, the scoring system exists but AFAIK it serves as a tool in extreme scenarios, but AFAIK most foreigners don't get one.

Finally, coming back to intentionality of the restriction - most restrictions that irk outsiders are codified and enacted to protect domestic business and individual interests. Reasonable to heavy restrictions on curtailed big American conglomerates and services allowed for amazing domestic alternatives like TikTok/Douyin, BYD, Deepseek to flourish. Companies which provided keystone infrastructure the economy - like Visa - were deemed too critical to allow for a strangle-hold and regulated, for these acted as a foreign tax on every domestic transaction, thus Alipay and Unionpay were born.

But noone is gonna want to hear it.

Hard to say what good the Trump admin is doing except exposing the rot in right wing “governance.”

Not saying these countries don't do good things too, but a lot of bad things compound when the government has to balance its books.

I couldn’t imagine a better place to live than Northern Europe, but Australia is a close second for me. Been to China, Japan, Canada, the US and I think parts of those countries are also really nice to live, just not a good match for me culturally.

Now South America is a different story. If you like good weather and a festive atmosphere it’s actually the best place to live, just don’t expect to have money or to live in a functioning state where services work!

It's impossible for every country to be a net exporter so I don't see the issue on "care about importing more than exporting", exporting high-value added products and services while importing products/services lower in the value chain is how countries that aren't so lucky as Australia with immense natural wealth and low population get to be rich as well.

Many countries in the EU also have a balanced budget, it's a mixed bag, France overruns its revenue consistently, Germany had a debt brake and until the past few years consistently had surpluses, Sweden has quite low debt and a balanced budget, the Netherlands has a small deficit, so on and so forth. So it's entirely country-dependent instead of being a general EU issue.

Even countless Chinese in China don't want to do this.

For those of us living in America and Europe this truly is shocking and earth shattering. It is the end of the world as we know it.

Any attempt at course correction is now labeled with “government overreach, socialism, communism”, etc. in an absurd way.

You mean economists ultimately employed by the corpo ownership class, who were using those "beliefs" as cover to put money into their own pockets for shipping entire production lines overseas. Of course the corpo ownership class hasn't sat still - now that the jig is up, they've moved on to the next scam of destroying what remains of our distributed economy so they can continue centralizing. They've even come up with revanchist political movement based around rallying cries that would have helped the common person iff done decades ago, to make the average joe think they're finally being listened to...

We can't compete with China via the number of people we have working.

We need to build a functioning society instead of a group of rugged individual capitalists who only come together when we need to help out the wealthy with a bail out or tax break.

But westerners also underestimate the importance of 1-10 innovation. Scaling manufacturing and iterating on existing concepts are not at all trivial, and are also very valuable.

0-1 and 1-10 are complementary. Unfortunately, many people deliberately turn this into a pissing contest by accusing the Chinese of "only being able to steal" while ignoring how their own country is unable to produce basic goods like masks on a large a cheap scale, and can't fix a brige for less than xx million.

Your #2 "not as healthy fiscally" is itself an oligarch narrative. Spending money to invest for the future is a sensible thing to do, and the US has the world reserve currency so we don't even need to ask others to borrow to do that, but rather can unilaterally make new money and have our currency hold its value as long as others believe we will have a good future. But every time this fake austerity narrative gains a foothold, it's used to destroy spending that had been investing in the future (with jobs/incomes that were going into the distributed economy!), while actually creating even more monetary inflation than there had been - but it goes right into the oligarch's pockets! In order for your argument to be true, voters would have to actually punish politicians for wasteful spending. Given that Republicans specifically have been running this fake austerity scam for decades and getting away with it, it is clear voters do not. What voters actually seem to respond to is feel-good propaganda, which is exactly what the fake austerity narrative is.

Meanwhile the whole point of "clean energy" in this context is that it's a widespread distributed project that creates real jobs that produce tangible useful assets. Much better than the oligarchs' preference for fake make-work jobs like that whole healthcare denial industry.

What does the stock market have to do with anything?

I believe the average worker in a tier 1-3 Chinese city is better off than a living in a North American City. Or at least, my content feed leads me to think this way.

What people don't seem to understand is that China is developing in stages. Every 10 years there is a new stage, a new revolution, with different winners and losers. Maxxing out on the previous growth engine was already forseen 10 years ago. That's why they bit the bullet and decided to pay the price to transition to the next growth engine. All transitions are painful.

Besides, these are Chinese we're talking about. They'd even complain about the economy being bad even when it's growing 10% and they drive away in 2 luxury cars. When they say they're "barely surviving" they mean their savings account isn't growing.

When you look at the bad economy in China, are you looking at the costs, or are you looking at the development goals? Development goals have costs, not paying those costs to reach goals has even bigger costs pater on. The Made in China 2025 goals have already been largely achieved.

private funds until the bubble pops, then it becomes public funds for the bailout.

same as 2008.

Instead we decided to elect a bunch of people to burn it all down and speedrun the fall of Rome.

We'll still be a world power at the end of it--in the same way France and England are world powers.

He hasn’t bothered to work with a Republican Congress to pass laws. He certainly won’t bother with a Democratic or split Congress.

I see no reason to believe they were close to having nuclear weapons. Trump didn't say anything about nukes when he announced the beginning of the war, they made that up later.