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

Re:How does stolen US tech compare to US tech?

[hey!]

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.