US study finds China’s tech innovation ‘much stronger’ than previously understood

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/3279054/us-study-finds-chinas-tech-innovation-much-stronger-previously-understood

27 Comments

  1. Odd.

    It’s almost as if not having massive debt and wisely investing citizens’ taxes in research and development leads to positive outcomes.

    ‘Murica is #11

  2. Johan-the-barbarian on

    No joke we have a science and technology agreement with Beijing where we actively share cutting edge research often for nothing in return. State department officials at the US/Beijing embassy will get calls from Chinese government agents after reading an article about a new US breakthrough asking why we haven’t provided them with it yet. These agreements date back to the 70’s when Nixon was courting Beijing to get leverage on the USSR. Partnerships in science are a good thing for everyone, and many US researchers have come to depend on Chinese resources such as huge study samples. However these agreements need to be carefully revised because they are severely lopsided in actual practice.

    I replaced the link to the agreement extension with a VOA article as ppl were having difficulty deciphering the State Department legalese.

    https://www.voanews.com/a/us-china-science-tech-pact-is-renewed-for-another-six-months/7518409.html

  3. I was reviewing some tech design docs (I’m an engineering manager at big tech) and I noticed a lot of the proposed third party libraries were open source software maintained by Chinese companies like Alibaba, ByteDance, and Tencent. This genuinely surprised me. Seems they’ve been contributing significantly to AI research as well as open source software recently and making it freely available as MIT licensed (free to use and modify).

    The packages and libraries are all high quality open source, in many cases superior to some of the older premium libraries that we pay hefty licenses for, so I’m thankful of their investment and cautiously optimistic.

  4. Duh— where have these idiots been: moon lander, own space station; own chip manufacturing; newly implemented high speed rail system… lots

  5. I work for a Chinese Hi-tech company. They start by copying the success of others tech companies, but once they are initially launched, they optimize quickly and 996 their workers with heavy PiP and bonus incentives. Americans will do OK competing but lack the manpower and hierarchical culture. Luckily we make up for it with creativity.
    Europeans have no chance.

  6. Certainly no astroturfing going on in this thread, just real people agreeing with each other that China is super-duper!

  7. Ahh yes. Quality reporting from the South China Morning Post. There’s absolutely no bias in that.. however, western markets need to continue to be competitive if they want to maintain the advantage.

  8. Beneficial_Row_6826 on

    Everyone kept repeating the they arent innovative and lack creativity mantra cause chinese students only memorize the material

  9. justforthelulzz on

    South china morning post? Yeah that’s definitely not propaganda from state run media. Get that out of here

  10. Well, they are a large nation that’s modernizing fast. They are a large nation with a LOT of cash flow where the government wants, and it’s often overwhelming levels once the choice has been made. And they are a massive manufacturing center, often of lower tech components, but this always and automatically shifts into high tech because it’s advantageous. And unlike the US or European countries, the strong government backing eliminates a lot of barriers of rapid growth. Also they are such a massive OEM of parts and parts of parts, and technologies that they are already doing a lot of the stuff for other people.

  11. bravoredditbravo on

    It’s funny they have to do a study to figure this out. When I worked close to Boston I got to know some people who went to high profile colleges like Bently, MIT, etc.

    I remember them bringing up a few times how Chinese billionaires would send their kids to Boston to get a premier education, and then they would take that knowledge back to China and run their parents company.

    Its not like any of this is a secret

  12. King_in_a_castle_84 on

    It’s kinda funny how US manufacturers have been sleeping on China, thinking their “made in the USA” propaganda has protected them from competition and they’ve just kept jacking their prices and profits up as they sat on their fat asses giving Americans the minimum value that we would tolerate.

    Guess what greedy fucks? While you were sleeping and resting on your laurels and getting rich and fat, other global manufacturers have actually been trying to give consumers what they want at a price they want.

  13. stayupstayalive on

    The United States better be working on quantum computing and bringing technological manufacturing back already.

  14. WittinglyWombat on

    backwardness is great… if there is a centralized drive across all aspects of a country’s development.

    soon you will catch up and eventually organically deliver

  15. China doesnt have the gov dysfunction we have. China has actually been investing in its country and technology. They built their EV charging network over a decade ago, it allowed auto companies to jump in quickly, and people to not have as much range anxiety.

    WE just got started on ours in 2024, leaving our car companies to have to make deals with elon.

    They invest far more in their own society than we do. And with a population 5 times ours, they are going to produce 5 times as many genius engineers.

    WE need to quit with the gov dysfunction bullshit and start to invest in our economy again.

  16. That moment in Civ when you meet a new civ in the modern era and their spaceport is working on the terrestrial laser station and you haven’t even researched nanotechnology yet.

  17. My personal experience with this was when I was looking for a new robot vacuum in 2019 because my old roomba was just very inefficient in route planning and just shitty overall. My friend recommended Roborock, which is a Chinese brand I’ve never heard of before and it was NOT cheap in price. I was super skeptical but he’s like a really smart engineer guy and swears by it, so I tried it. Holy shit I was shocked by how good the hardware and more importantly the software was. Totally changed my view of Chinese brands. Now I start noticing the dominance of DJI and BYD in their respective industries and not surprised at all. What people need to realize is China can produce BOTH really cheap but shitty products AND really high quality not cheap products. The Chinese just have an extremely broad range of products to offer across the entire pricing spectrum, but most Americans have only interacted with their dollar tree offerings.

    If you think about it, if the Chinese people in the US focus more on STEM vs others, why would the Chinese in China also not do the same except there’s like 100x more of them lol

  18. Illustrious-Welder-8 on

    Think the prevailing thought in the west was:-

    USA innovates
    China emulates
    EU regulates

    Interesting to see a change

  19. Ok-Somewhere-2219 on

    Huh, you mean reducing education funding, keeping kids scared to go to school for fear of being shot, emphasizing financial careers instead of STEM, and making everything about capitalism isn’t working to make people in the US want to be in the sciences and build things???

    China is doing better because it has been focusing on the sciences and innovation for a while. Same thing with many SEA countries.

  20. Other countries are either caught up with US or ahead already. But we, Americans, refuses to acknowledge this and constantly focusing on other subjects. Sad.