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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.
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.
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.
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Hu cares.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
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".
If Chinese "tech" is so good, then where are the patents?
If American "patents" are so good, then where is the tech?
A lot of patents are granted for stuff that never has been or never will be built.
An idea doesn't necessarily have to be useful for it to receive a patent. Go ahead and patent a laser head mount for sharks. We'll talk about it here on Slashdot a lot, but you'll never see a real shark wearing one.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
None of that crap is "tech". e-commerce? Taxi rides? That isn't tech. And AI isn't real, so just stop.
Yea no shit. It's like saying you publish literature when you print vacuum cleaner advertisements. Then having an industry award ceremony about all the great copy your business has printed for other businesses.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
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.
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