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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.
None of that crap is "tech". e-commerce? Taxi rides? That isn't tech. And AI isn't real, so just stop.
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.
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.
It's the same shit.
Since the summary and article specifically refer to Americans... we write checks, not “scribble cheques”.
(And I can’t remember the last time I actually wrote a check, although I do have a checkbook - I use my debit card, and pay bills via my bank’s online bill pay)
#DeleteChrome
it's pretty much how technology spread. why would china start from the beginning in order to catch up? why would they repeat the mistakes others already made. they obviously want to catch up to the west ASAP. even netwon said that he was standing on the shoulder of giants. don't be angry, be better.
In terms of raw entrepreneurial opportunities, the difference in patent laws makes a huge difference! When you can simply knock off a product from another company there's no more exclusivity: this means competing companies need to improve upon the product design or the manufacturing process to outdo the others. And that I'd just scratching the surface...
Chinese factories have a lot of human workers. Its cheap to do there. In fact, that's why a lot of the world outsources manufacturing to China. All these workers can pass along the ideas + manufacturing processes, choose to operate the factory when its supposed to be shut down for the night, and even come up with ideas of their own. Employees do have good ideas. Someone could point out that changing x on this product would make it better. With human labor, you don't need to spend millions and months retooling an automated factory to adapt.
The last point I'll bring up is the difference in market size. First off is China itself: its population is far greater than the US, therefore more people will be using tech based services as they roll out. This is needed in terms of ease of access due to a higher population density (that chique little store isn't going to fit 50 shoppers per hour, let alone 10000 per hour), and just outright volume. After that, don't forget that China is the primary source of almost everything for the developed world.
And fast.
I've been ordering from Aliexpress and Chinavasion for a long time. A lot was just knockoffs. Then there was some innovation now they're actually incrementally improving on their designs.
My current mobile computing device (without cell access) is a Vernee Active. IP68, USBC, 8-cores, dual sim, world (minus the US) capable. For cheap. It's a great phone. It looks like Vernee actually put time and effort into designing their website.
Chinese "brands" are popping up and they're doing pretty good. And their current customer service is better than Walmart. I've gotten a few bad boards, some with a design flaws, some stuff that broke and I've never had a problem getting a refund or a replacement. They're fighting each other for 5-star reviews and they'll do anything to get you to leave a 5 star review.
A good industry to have been watching is 3D printers. The product life cycle follows a fairly predictable design cycle.
Most of the early growing pains with FOSS were because the chinese simply didn't understand how it worked. I have some soft bricked devices because of bad uBoot with no source. However that's been turning around. Allwinner/sunix has come a long way in the last decade. It's probably as good as Broadcom at this point but not quite Marvell.
Walmart and Amazon should be afraid because the Chinese have learned how to cut them out.
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.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
it's an application of tech. VC firms don't do a whole hell of a lot of actual tech. Return on investment is too slow. A few megacorps still spend a bit on R&D, mostly for the tax write offs. The majority of actual new tech comes out of the University system.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
As good Christians I'm sure the average American feels exactly the same way. Love your fellow man and all that.
Seriously though folks, I have to laugh at the subtle, racist superiority complex bullshit from so many posters.
Anyone who works in cutting edge high tech in a developed nation finds him or herself surrounded by colleagues from all over the world, especially Asia.
The slack jawed yokels implying the Chinese are too stupid to innovate, I can only assume, must have grown up in a school with no Asian kids.
Americans should know better than anyone that most of us don't have a say in the political system we find ourselves living in. Governments evolve and adapt and sometimes die off. Claiming your political system is superior to someone else's is great but totally pointless. Their political system came about by a set of unique events and machinations just like yours. Show me the world's shittiest governments and I'll show you nations that have been manipulated and oppressed from external forces (usually a superpower or two) sometimes going back more than 100 years.
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.
I am the only US manufacturer of solid state laser cutters, and have to deal with Chinese competition daily. AMA.
Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.
Google is making self-driving cars... which is hot right now.
And Facebook was at the heart of social media... which was hot back in.... 2006?
Yahoo was hot back when searching the Internet was a big deal. Back in the 90's.
Cloud computing peaked around 2011. But, YES, if you set up a company revolving around self-driving cars, cloud computing, social media, or even search, you are a tech company. The field itself isn't new. But unless you bring something new to the table, you're not going to do very well. This might shock you, but people are still research and advancing the technology of internal combustion engines and making them more efficient, despite being around for... what? A century? That's still tech. And if you made a company dedicated to improving the technology of that old-ass invention, you'd have yourself a tech company.
I think you might be expecting a revolutionary game changer with every new business. We're living in the middle of a technological singularity. Just like the industrial revolution, it's coming in waves. We've got computers, personal computers, the Internet, hand-held computers, and I think artificial intelligence will be another one, if it's not already. But there are still people working on building better computers. It's still a pretty new field, all things considered in the broader scheme of "the economy".
Frankly. Look at the number of people really bypassing their censorship for political purpose (e.g. remove porn, films etc...), then compare to the population. It is not even countable in the sub 0.0001% and even if they are 1 billion the number are not only low but far away from power or ways from wrestle it. And as far as dictators goes, there are far worse, even supported by the US so....
If Chinese "tech" is so good, then where are the patents?
They have a big market and they've assimilated a lot of foreign tech. But to say they've developed their own... show it?
Where is the chinese tech?
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Can innovation really happen by order of the Chinese government? Maybe through focus and sheer scale, but how does can they sustain progress across their whole economy?
China is crippled by their lack of diversity. China does not allow immigration, and their country is 99% racially the same. This is poison for a knowledge economy, and the fact that they don't admit refugees virtually guarantees they're going down, sooner rather than later. Don't worry about China, they've already sealed their fate unless they somehow come to their senses and open the borders.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
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.)
LOL, what an idiot, Japanese are cheaters.
The Kobe Steel scandal: What we know so far
It's the latest big scandal to rock corporate Japan.
Kobe Steel (KBSTY), a century-old industrial giant, has admitted to falsifying data on products sold to top customers like Boeing (BA) and Toyota (TM).
It says as many as 500 companies could be affected, including manufacturers of Japan's famous bullet trains.
Here's the lowdown on the crisis that's rippling through major industries around the globe:
What happened?
Essentially, Kobe employees faked reports to make it look as though products met the specifications requested by customers when in fact they didn't.
The scandal initially concerned copper and aluminum parts, but has spread to steel products, too. It has raised doubts about thousands of tons of material shipped over a period of more than 10 years.
For the aluminum and copper parts, false data was given about their strength and durability.
Related: New corporate scandal shakes Japan Inc
Which industries?
Kobe steel sells metal to all kinds of different businesses. Some of the main industries to which it has supplied the suspect products include aviation, automobiles, railways and nuclear power.
If China fails, it will not be for the lack of racial diversity. The idea that racial diversity is what makes an economy great is utter garbage and has no basis in scientific or even empirical fact. It is this kind of magical thinking that is destroying the U.S. with enforced quotas.
If racial diversity were so critical, Germany would never have been so strong in science and technology up until WWII. We can throw in other civilizations such as the British, French, Roman, Greek, Babylonian, Egyptian, Chinese, etc. as examples of highly advanced civilizations (for their day) that had writing, mathematics, and technology without any real racial diversity.
And before anyone accuses me of having that kind of opinion because I'm a white supremacist, let me say that I am making this statement as a person who is not of European descent.
Thousands of years of history show that diversity of ethnicity by itself is not a necessary condition for improvement of the intellectual progress of a nation.
I'm thinking this A/C wants to be raped by Bill C. At least that is what it sounds like.
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.
And indeed, that is the point.
Xi Jinping has been concentrating power, and doing everything he can to squash even the mildest forms of dissent. As he gets holder, he will likely get more conservative.
The Confucian ethic obeys authority. But then we have this strong contradictory force of entrepreneurial energy. And a large and growing body of middle class Chinese that have spent time in the west, outside the great firewall.
It is unstable and frightening. Hopefully it will resolve peacefully, but if Xi (or his heirs) digs in then it could get very ugly.
Its a great Country, beautiful people. If you want to know the facts about it just talk to the people there. So quite with your horror stories about the government and such. Just talk to the people, many speak english quite well.
[($)]
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It's about time people wake up to what's happening there... for the curious, there are some interesting documentaries specifically about Shenzhen you should watch on YouTube, search it up.
Yes, China still has a very problematic governmental regime, poverty is still prevalent and horrific in part of the country, censorship is incredibly bad there, they don't have welfare, lots of human rights violations, etc etc.
But there are parts of China that are far more advanced than US and European cities.
They have basically been the industry of the world for a very long time now with products related to tech, and it might have been true that the country was limited to producing and mostly copying things years ago, but this has changed drastically in recent years.
Now it's more of a mix. Sure, there are tons of companies still copying stuff designed in other countries at lower quality and costs, but there's plenty of companies that are on the forefront right now.
DJI is one good example, but there's lot of advanced chinese research into several areas.
I also think most people don't know to what extent chinese conglomerates already own some very traditional american companies... here's a glimpse:
http://fortune.com/2016/03/18/...
I'm not even including Taiwan there too, because that's a whole step above.
Even for very high end stuff, if you are paying attention, like pc component parts, smartphone tech, digital imaging, and other areas... they might not be right there with the biggest companies just yet, but you'll see that they at the very least have a 3rd or 4th place in many areas, that are ever getting closer despite humble beginnings... Huawei is the 3rd largest smartphone brand, AllWinner and Rockchip are advancing in low powered SoC, Motorola and parent company Lenovo are pretty much estabilished, Blackberry mobile is owned by TLC... well, a whole truckload of former traditional european or american companies are now owned by chinese conglomerates.
And if you think about it, it's kinda obvious... you are producing all these technological components, eventually you learn all there is to learn about them, and start improving designs by yourself, spreading knowledge about them, building education around it, and getting new generations to work and improve on tech. This happened in Japan and South Korea decades ago.
Japan did indeed do a tremendous amount of damage to the American working class. Japanese products were free to sell into the American market, but they were allowed by the US government to set tariffs and trade barriers to American goods. It wasn't an equal playing field.
Saying China must take the same path as Japan just because they're both Asian? That's racist. Moreover a lot of people would applaud the downfall of American civilization so be careful what you ask for. The entire world hates America for its warmongering and interference in elections.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Allwinner/sunix has come a long way in the last decade. It's probably as good as Broadcom at this point but not quite Marvell.
Let us know when they get enough kernel code mainlined to actually use the system for something more than a serial console, for example the a64. They promised it years ago. They're liars who play fast and loose with the GPL, and they can DIAF.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
bringin' back COAL!
#MAGA!
To be fair an American guy just went around a school shooting people. How does that compare to this Chinese lady?
Precisely like the "Made in Japan" phobia. That was overcome.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes