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

Where is this innovation coming out of China?

[An Ominous Cow Erred]

I can't think of a single breakthrough in terms of new technology coming out of China (in the modern era). China's entire education system is built around rote copying, to the point where if you teach a class in China you will frequently get the exact same paper handed in by your students. Why? Well if it's the "best paper", and you want your students to be the best, they should learn how to turn in something better that someone else made rather than turning in their own, inferior product.

In short the cultural institutions of China really suck at *discovery*, because they try to teach everyone to be the best, which means parroting the best. Innovation requires creation, but teaching creation means that, initially, everyone will come up with something inferior, because by definition only one person can ever have the best independent creation at any given moment. The best calculus class I ever saw for Junior High students had the students *INVENT* calculus together in small groups, with the teacher giving only vague hints to spur them along. This is exactly the kind of class that you would never see in China.

China is becoming better at refinement -- the Japanese comparison is somewhat apt -- but unlike Japan, China lacks any meaningful environment of business ethics. This means that any refinements you make will be immediately stolen by your competitors, so any changes you make need to be small and fast-to-implement such that you can milk your advantage for the X number of weeks it takes for everyone else to copy you. There is zero incentive to produce breakthroughs, but massive incentive to produce something 1% cheaper/faster for a few weeks.

The breakthroughs that DO come from China are mostly *engineering* breakthroughs rather than theory, and they are based on theories developed in the west that could not be refined due to regulatory reasons. China is on track to become a great innovator in human medicine thanks to non-human medicine developed in the west. The breakthroughs get developed in the west in animal models, but ethics concerns prevent human testing, so instead the *implementation* breakthrough gets to come from China.

If the Chinese culture suddenly did a 180 and became built around independent thought, I have zero doubt that they would dominate the world in all fields. This is not going to happen.

Japan got a head start but only made small progress in cultural change -- now they have some innovation but mostly they became the global leader in refinement, and fortunately they have a strong sense of business ethics such that success is not immediately stolen. Their ethics now mean they can't compete on production, so they're forced to compete on quality, which is why Japanese products are the best in the world for just about any product imaginable (not just for electronics, but for produce, furniture, etc.)

tl;dr Chinese "innovation" doesn't stem from some sort of inventor's spirit, but rather from them having the balls to do what western countries are too afraid/timid to do, and less moral opposition to a take-no-prisoners piratical approach to technological development.