"The towns are typical of China’s command-led approach to its economy."
However, try to VC say a factory manufacturing metal parts or plastics, nobody will say yes...
Heck, try making actual cars or even golf carts on VC money. VC funders are either interested in something completely not speculative and small (eg. EU VC scene) or total moonshots in badly understood markets where no actual R&D is required.
If the thing is very speculative research, most VC aren't interested.
It takes time to develop engineering expertise, but China has some great engineers who are able to teach the younger generation thus building up a system of being great. I don't know if China is leveraging this internally, but that is lack of personal knowledge. I believe they are going to transform to be another place to get quality products in 20 years.
My guess is India will mostly skip the cheap junk phase of manufacturing: we have been developing their engineering expertise more then their manufacturing.
I see India leveraging its democracy and relative openness plus its large English speaking population to achieve this.
Still.
It's impressive for exactly the same reasons. It's hard to foster an intellectual elite in a dictatorship, to maintain motivation and cooperation across a gigantic country and 1.7B of people.
Beside, we did the same: polluting, forcing population to work, etc, only 100 years before, but we attacked other countries while doing so. Which China haven't. And about this pollution thing, they seem to correct trajectory faster than we did, given their timeframe and inertia.
It's amazing to watch.
On the contrary you could argue that the brutal competition in the country encourages people to be razor sharp in some fields.
A more controversial and touchy point is that they have a strong sense of national and ethnic unity, which many democracies lack. This has many disadvantages of course,[0] but can be extremely helpful for maintaining cooperation and motivation at a large scale whereas the West arguably has trouble dealing with ennui and lack of purpose. To some extent the form of functional ethno-nationalism China has is hard to reproduce elsewhere, and is the result of very specific historical and geographical factors. Japan and Turkey for instance have similar traits but nowhere near the same results. So China is tautologically highly suited to doing what it is currently doing.
[0] https://www.economist.com/briefing/2016/11/19/the-upper-han
https://worldview.stratfor.com/article/evolution-chinese-nat...
Have we forgotten about Nazi technical excellence, Werner von Braun, and the Soviet space program?
It’s easy to pour money into STEM fields. If you only crack down on ethnic minorities and outspoken dissenters, and if you censor uncomfortable news about these crackdowns, the majority of your engineers and scientists won’t care enough to DO anything. This approach worked for the Nazis and, to a lesser degree, the Soviets. It is working very well in China.
One could argue that both the Nazi and the Soviet programs had roots in pre-existing system setup up before the totally authoritarian ones took over. For Germany, Imperial Germany + the Weimar Republic (both flawed democracies, but still, democracies) and for the USSR, Imperial Russia, which ok, might have not have been democratic in any modern sense, but was pretty liberal from a scientific and artistic point of view. Way more so than the USSR.
If anything, both the Nazis and Soviets drained their scientific communities so much that by the end of the regimes they almost destroyed them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_space_program#Notable_f...
Mostly because certain very poor agricultural decisions caused repeated famines and further social unrest. Other than that it is telling that USSR was essentially a close second to USA for most of its existence, sometimes even at the forefront.
The problem was management in the lower base levels like building industry, especially agriculture and some low level factory work, like parts or pieces. R&D and military industry was excellent.
Both were subject to the 'dont trade with communists' policy during the time they both existed..
But wasn't this the same time as glasnost/perestroika?
And again, this doesn't happen in a vacuum..
Was non-communist policy (e.g the west) more favorable to china than russia?
The USSR drained everything else to keep the space program and the military at a high level until it fell.
Once it fell, I'm pretty sure most of those researchers ran wherever they could, as fast as they could.
Nothing really was drained for advanced projects, not even coffers. What happened was tragic mismanagement of agriculture, part manufacturing and building industry. This resulted in serious shortages all around and many deaths to famine.
Only at the end did innovation slow down, due to above factors and social unrest.
Soviet biology was utterly destroyed by an ideological commitment to Lysenkoism.
The USSR never committed so many resources to war; they engaged in the "cold war", but that was really about it. Germany was fighting an active war on two fronts and got crushed in the middle. The Soviets just built a bunch of bombs and walls (after the action in WWII).
That's a massive understatement. The Russian Empire abolished serfdom in 1861[0]. There's no way that the Soviet space program was an extension of institutions from a society that was literally feudal a generation before the revolution.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emancipation_reform_of_1861
During the cold war, little progress has been made engeenering that were not benefiting the wzr effort. Source: my last gf was born on the other side of the wall.
Is this about China or the US? I mean it's got prison / slave labor, cheap workers (minimum wage, what's that?), huge lands, etc. Don't think the US moved away from those practices a hundred years ago, they're still doing it, they're just calling it differently and it's coming from financial interests now instead of political ones (e.g. private prisons that make sure to keep their cells (over) full and their cheap labor supply up)
Can you imagine if China locked up the same % of it's population?
This is an old pattern that's just getting more efficient and China's able to sell to it's own markets. Freeing up more human and financial capital for China to do their own R&D/entrepreneurship.
The biggest reasons are the loss of domestic experience curves [1] to other countries when we shifted to a service based economy. The second is the hyper politicized process of even creating a factory, let alone operating one, even when you have the direct backing of the executive branch [2].
The other one (allegedly) is the idea that the local labor workforce won't want to do any of the hard/dirty jobs or can't do them cost effectively, often because 1 and 2 but other reasons. So there are higher initial costs for automation.
But otherwise there are plenty of good reasons to operate production domestically once the technical and political environment supports such a thing. Which might happen in the future, although few mainstream parties seem to actually want that to happen without their idealized or prior worldview being appeased.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_curve_effects
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-02-06/inside-wi...
https://www.theguardian.com/business/economics-blog/2014/nov...
What if someone acknowledges that battery powered cars cannot reach the utility of fossil cars or trucks even? What if somebody invents a safe hydrogen cell?
VCs do it all the time, why can't a government do it?
Not saying this strategy is bad, but it will inevitably end up like deserted coal cities if the industry is too mono-cultural.
~$75 billion by 2017
At this rate, we will arrive at a point were Brexiteers were correct on most important developments.
What does this refer to? The EU has generally been strong on privacy protection.
This potentially could reduce privacy protection to the lowest standards of any member state.
Terrorism and cyber crime are negligible threats to the EU. It has more of an existential crisis. These kind of laws that have invigorated us the last decades are going to be extended further. Because we seem to be governed by pathologically fearful, demented old...
Additionally, the US will be involved for similar sharing of data in the future.
Sorry for the rant, but it is what it is. Without any accountability whatsoever.
No single decision should be taken as proof that dictatorship is good.
Amusing attempt. For one example, Silicon Valley is embarrassing most of the rest of the world when it comes to artificial intelligence and autonomous tech. China is at least five years behind on autonomous, by their own admission - which is why all of their tech giants had to set up shop in SV to work on autonomous.
"The talent needed to give Chinese startups an edge in autonomous vehicles can’t be found in Beijing or Shanghai."
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-24/to-find-c...
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tencent-holdings-autonomo...