How Does Chinese Tech Stack Up Against American Tech?

The Economist: China's tech leaders love visiting California, and invest there, but are no longer awed by it [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled]. By market value the Middle Kingdom's giants, Alibaba and Tencent, are in the same league as Alphabet and Facebook. New stars may float their shares in 2018-19, including Didi Chuxing (taxi rides), Ant Financial (payments) and Lufax (wealth management). China's e-commerce sales are double America's and the Chinese send 11 times more money by mobile phones than Americans, who still scribble cheques.

The venture-capital (VC) industry is booming. American visitors return from Beijing, Hangzhou and Shenzhen blown away by the entrepreneurial work ethic. Last year the government decreed that China would lead globally in artificial intelligence (AI) by 2030. The plan covers a startlingly vast range of activities, including developing smart cities and autonomous cars and setting global tech standards. Like Japanese industry in the 1960s, private Chinese firms take this "administrative guidance" seriously.

Comments

Who cares?

[110010001000]

None of that crap is "tech". e-commerce? Taxi rides? That isn't tech. And AI isn't real, so just stop.

Slow down that thought train

[DaMattster]

This is only considering one singular comparison. This little story is trying to make China look more progressive and nothing could be further from the truth. If you speak out against the Chinese Communist Oligarchy, you and your entire family are subject to brutal imprisonment, labor, and re-education camps. Chinese economic reforms are only there to pacify and mollify the people and to distract them from getting together in large groups espousing any form of dissent. Dissent in China not only punishes the offender, but punishes his or her family. Once a family has a member that has been branded as a dissenter, that branding effects future generations of the family. Anyone whom thinks that China is more advanced than we are is severely ill-informed.

Re:Slow down that thought train

[Anonymous Coward]

then you are a retard, by ignoring such advancements you allow the other kind of suppression to flourish, only by bringing them into the world so they can see and reap the benefits of being more open will the human rights problem ever be fixed. Not that most of the west has any right to speak on human rights as the US is still one of the worst offenders with that too.

Re: Slow down that thought train

[Anonymous Coward]

some Israeli tech companies are about as amoral as they come.

Arent the cell phone stinger systems made in Israel? Isnt the company that says it can bust the encryption on Iphones from Israel? isnt one of the better dpi (deep packet inspection) and other internet inspection hardware providers from Israel?

Re:Slow down that thought train

[Anonymous Coward]

as the US is still one of the worst offenders with that too.

Maybe americans don't want to pay 50% income and 25% vat in order to pay for your ever expanding list of government 'human rights.'

not torturing prisoners, holding them without trial or bombing civilians is hardly a huge added expense. regardless it is the hypocrisy that is the issue. don't whine about rights violations when you have your foot on the necks of others.

Re:Slow down that thought train

[DNS-and-BIND]

A lot of people believe in the China Model. There will never be a Trump in China, and that alone has a lot of endorsement. The Chinese government need not waste its time in friction when it can be turned into momentum. No endless chatter on news shows or fake news memos issued by political partisans in Congress. Instead, China makes a decision, and then *does* it. That has a lot of attraction as a way forward to the future. Heck, the New York Times itself publicly admired the China Model and did not retract or apologize for the story.

America never really was a "Global Force for Good" in my lifetime (born after 1945). I've experienced the US as being one of the most expansionist powers in modern history that refused to sign most human rights treaties, isn't a party to the International Criminal Court, all too willing to cozy up to dictators and in a state of perpetual war.

The faux "Pax Americana" brought us unprovoked wars, illegal coups, regime changes, shock and awe, ultra-right wing or jihadi proxy armies, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, agent orange, CIA backed mujahideen, death squads, torture, assassinations, extraordinary renditions, black sites, Guantanamo, drone wars, big brother and the surveillance state, etc.

No thanks to Chinese tech

[b0s0z0ku]

Ta hell with the idea of social-credit systems.
Ta hell with mass surveillance of the kind that even the NSA can't dream of in Urumqi.
Ta hell with body scanners and mass privacy invasion on public transport.

Thank G-d the West isn't China. We have some pretty scummy governments, but nothing as evil and intrusive as China yet.

Re:How does stolen US tech compare to US tech?

[hey!]

If you've ever worked in technology and actually thought about what you were doing, you'd realize that you're building on the ideas of others.

If the only thing China were capable of doing is copying US tech, then US tech companies and the US military would have no real worries from Chinese tech espionage. By the time they got the tech working, we'd be onto the next big thing.

But China is a lot more capable than that. They're a huge country sitting on a huge talent pool with a regime that understands the value of technological research. When they steal US tech secrets they aren't just stealing grist for their mill; they're stealing seed corn.

Re:A look from the trenches

[spiritplumber]

My experience is that it's tough to compete. Not so much because of costs, but because for example my stuff has to be FDA compliant, and theirs doesn't, and they get away with advertising peak power as constant power (or just "forgetting" an extra zero in the product description) and I don't. I'm against tariffs, per se, but it would be great to see more false advertising enforcement.