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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.
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.
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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...
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?
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.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
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.
Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.