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High-Tech Research Moving From US To China
Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that American companies like Applied Materials are moving their research facilities and engineers to China as the country develops a high-tech economy that increasingly competes directly with the United States. Applied Materials set up its latest solar research labs in China after estimating that China would be producing two-thirds of the world's solar panels by the end of this year and their chief technology officer, Mark R. Pinto, is the first CTO of a major American tech company to move to China. 'We're obviously not giving up on the US,' says Pinto. 'China needs more electricity. It's as simple as that.' Western companies are also attracted to China's huge reservoirs of cheap, highly skilled engineers and the subsidies offered by many Chinese cities and regions, particularly for green energy companies. Applied Materials decided to build their new $250 million research facility in Xi'an after the city government sold them a 75-year land lease at a deep discount and is reimbursing the company for roughly a quarter of the lab complex's operating costs for five years."
Understand what Applied Materials does. They're a leading manufacturer of semiconductor manufacturing equipment. Your CPU was probably made in a fab equipped with Applied Materials equipment. Applied Materials itself does not make ICs or solar panels.
Until recently, most high-end ICs were designed in the US or Japan and manufactured with US or Japanese equipment. That's changing; more consumer electronics parts are being designed in China. There are some good Chinese chip design houses. Although they're not yet up to doing a state of the art superscalar CPU, they can do most smaller parts.
I've met the head of Applied Materials's solar division, who is one of the more sensible people in the solar energy field. For him, it's all about installed cost per KWh per year. He shows charts of where the cost has to be to compete with other energy sources without subsidies. (This changes with latitude; as you get closer to the equator, it gets better. Spain is competitive now.) Most of the people in "alternative energy" are asking for subsidies, but Applied Materials recognizes that to really make a success of solar, it has to compete without subsidies. So, unlike the firms making noise about getting costs down (Nanosolar, etc.) but not actually shipping much, Applied Materials is really doing it.
A point made by the Applied Materials guy is that the cost of installation needs to come way down. Right now, installation costs are about half the cost of a solar installation on a building. It's "a guy with a pickup truck", he says. That needs to come way down. Solar panels shouldn't be placed on roofs; they should be the roof. This requires roof designs where a section can be either a solar panel or a plain roof, and all the seams are weathertight. There's a big payoff for getting this right. The cost of installation goes way down, the panels are less likely to be pulled off in wind storms, and the wiring is under the roof, which simplifies connecting the panels.
Consider the science contests from high school called science olympiads, where big scientists like Grigori Perelman and Terence Tao have competed, contests where things like the ones you mentioned (innovation, creativity, etc.) play a huge part for the results, let's say the two most relevant subjects for computer science (informatics and mathematics):
Historic results for all countries on the IMO (mathematics):
http://imo-official.org/results.aspx
Last results for gold medal on the 2009 IOI (informatics):
http://www.ioi2009.org/index.jsp?id=414&ln=2
As you can see, at least in these competitions, China DOES seem to be better than USA (than all countries in fact), while India seems a more mediocre country like you comment.