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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.
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.
What really scares me is that as China gets wealthier and more powerful is that they'll begin to export their political model around the world. This could be in the form of selling/giving away surveillance tech or military hardware, undermining democracies with fake news and buying up their media or outright military invasion. Regardless of which way it happens i'm increasingly worried about our ability to stop it.
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
I strongly believe that the most effective and efficient form of government is a benevolent dictatorship. China has effectively the latter and as long as it can grasp onto the former, it can do tremendous things. However, past history in China and indeed in all countries over all time has shown that the grasp on benevolence in leadership is fleeting. The emergence of a Trump and worse in China, the US, and elsewhere is a near certainty. In the US, we can get rid or at least wait out our Trumps in just a few years and with nonviolent elections. That's not the case in China, Russia, North Korea, etc. There, we have seen in our own lifetimes that the passage of non-benevolent leadership in these totalitarian regimes requires the passage of decades and millions of lives.
For all its many faults, I vastly prefer the US system of systematic inefficiency over the benevolently unstable Chinese system.
That's what they said about Japan: they make shitty copies, no, they make good copies, wait, Japanese products are putting ours to shame. In actual tech (not these web and app based services TFA calls "tech"), innovation, industrial design and quality control, the Chinese are getting there. I've worked with some first rate original Chinese software, and just this weekend got my hand on an upcoming product designed in China (not a knockoff of a Western device). First class stuff that competes with the top brands here and is actually better in some ways. Their English language manuals are actually useful now, and they are finally waking up to the fact that Times New Roman is a poor choice of font to use on buttons and equipment, and looks especially shitty when printed in gold. The coming years will will continue to see a flood of cheap rubbish coming from China... but the amount of quality Chinese original goods is set to increase. Western designers take note. And you can be sure that China will pay more attention to IP laws when that trend continues.
Hysterical doomsayers also predicted during the 1980s that Japan threatened the very foundations of Judeo-Christian, Capitalist American civilisation, that Japan was outcompeting the US on every level and that the US was essentially doomed. None of that hysteria panned out. China will grow as an economic, political, military and technological powerhouse and with that growth will come all the same problems Europe and the US currently have. What China will not do is become the end of Judeo-Christian, Capitalist American civilisation as we know it so everybody should just calm down and untwist their panties. The only threat to Judeo-Christian, Capitalist American civilisation stems from Americans themselves and the greed, stupidity, shortsightedness and corruption of the people they elect into office.