At the end of the Ming dynasty, there was a commercial family dominating the sea trade out of the southern coast. When the Qing took power, they told the family patriarch he could keep everything, as long as he was willing to swear loyalty to the new dynasty. He immediately did so.
His son, however, issued a rousing formal denunciation of his father, questioning how anyone whose oath to the Ming had been sincere could betray them at the drop of a hat like that. It was so persuasive that it convinced the Manchus, who threw the patriarch in prison -- devolving control of the whole enterprise onto the Ming-loyalist son. He went into open rebellion, took his hundreds of ships and thousands of seamen to Taiwan, and waged war on the Qing for decades. His rebellion was only ended when the Qing took the dramatic step of fully evacuating the coastline to prevent anyone from supporting him from the mainland.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koxinga
Dictatorships allow quite a bit of freedom.
If I were to guess, a large percentage of China’s captains of industry spent a decent amount of time living abroad
At least, that's the thinking.
Are you assuming the U.S. will sit stagnant during these 15-20 years? If China is 15-20 years behind currently, I doubt they will ever be at parity. Their best hope is a cultural revolution.
Yes, no lesson from world history is more obvious and robust than "once in the lead, always in the lead".
The top Chinese talents (e.g. Kaming He, Fei Fei Li etc) all chose to move to the US. AFAIK, there are no Chinese institutions that employ elite foreign AI researchers. The US universities and companies still lead with a large margin in terms of high impact publications in NIPS, ICML, CVPR etc.
3 of the top 10 (all in the top 5 even) are Chinese in origin. This is a list of publications at the top venues in AI / ML for the past two years. If you extend it to past 5 years, you get a slightly better picture, but that doesn't change the 3 in top 5 comment either.
Take a look at recent major advances in deep learning: information bottle neck, mask-rcnn, transformer, normalizing flow, all originated from US/Canadian/EU institutions. Chinese academia has very serious systematic issues that discourages innovation and encourages quantity over quality.
In addition, I think the sheer number of students and resources at their disposal will ensure China have a continuous pool of talent to draw from. The US has become increasingly hostile and competitive for ML researchers in terms of academic pressure, and returning to China has been incentivized for a while now.
Can you elaborate on that?
You say this phrase, but I do not think it means what you hope it means.
There's a lot of talk about political censorship in China, but the majority of the content I've seen removed was not political, but in violation of copyright.
What China does not have is a legal system that is both able and willing to stop all instances of copyright infringement (or most other crimes, for that matter). So you get a lot of small-scale operations flying under the radar for as long as possible and vanishing as soon as they risk punishment.
So the mainstream media and politicians would have us believe.
"Heck they even helped AMD catch up to Intel, and see what sort of major success that was ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD%E2%80%93Chinese_joint_vent.... ) "
All I see here is an agreement for AMD to transfer technology to China, for x86 chips destined for chinese-only server market. Further, that agreement appears stalled, since AMD will NOT transfer their Zen2 technologies in this agreement. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-zen-china-x86-ip-licen...
"And yet China's manufacturing edge is not going anywhere. They can clone any US product anyone else is producing and sell it to their trading bloc."
More like their manufacturing may not be going anywhere...their market has been shrinking by leaps and bounds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5G#Surveillance_concerns
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concerns_over_Chinese_involvem...
They can have Iran, AFAIC.
* https://arxiv.org/pdf/1802.03903.pdf * https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8710885 but they are numerous, and the work done at Tsinghua University is very interesting
By the way down voting a comment based on facts is rather silly...
By the way, the site guidelines exhort us to
Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
Watch Elon Musk try really hard not to cringe at the shit Jack Ma says on the topic of ML.
Do you have sources from non-"mainstream media" that indicate otherwise?
I think one could produce articles supporting either view quite easily, which them becomes a task of separating the agendas of its authors.
AMD partnered with a Chinese partner and produced /knowledge transfered an older chipstack.
Ps. Everyone can manufacture, so not sure what your mean with edge. There are a lot centralized/easy to be found in China, that's true.
Since 5g is technology with not much utility that nobody but the telcos want, that is probably wise on their part.
It also seems to be the kind of policy that will be broken when convenient after becoming a world power.
Twenty years ago, Japan was the "threat" and the zeitgeist was full of tropes of Japanese technology taking over the world.
>The local auto plant in fictional Hadleyville, Pennsylvania, which supplied most of the town's jobs, has been closed for nine months. The former foreman Hunt Stevenson goes to Tokyo to try to convince the Assan Motors Corporation to reopen the plant. The Japanese company agrees and, upon their arrival in the U.S., they take advantage of the desperate work force to institute many changes. The workers are not permitted a union, are paid lower wages, are moved around within the factory so that each worker learns every job, and are held to seemingly impossible standards of efficiency and quality. Adding to the strain in the relationship, the Americans find humor in the demand that they do calisthenics as a group each morning and that the Japanese executives eat their lunches with chopsticks and bathe together in the river near the factory. The workers also display a poor work ethic and lackadaisical attitude toward quality control.
It's not the same, and you know that.
Since China is "new money", Japan must have held more US debt at some point. It seems unlikely to me that this would not also extend to holding stakes in American companies.
Economically though, the two situations are similar.
Over the next decade to 1969 Mao would start his 'Cultural Revolution' which would see millions of Chinese 'purged', one way or the other, extensive class warfare, and the destruction of undesirable elements referencing their cultural and religious past. By contrast in the US in 1969 we would put the first man on the moon. In 1976 Mao would die and end up, after a brief power struggle, being replaced by Deng Xiaoping in 1982. He opened China to foreign investment and rapidly transitioned China to a system more driven by free market economics that persists to this day.
In the two decades from 1960 to 1980 China's economy grew about 165%. In the twenty years from 1980 to 2000, it grew 555%. In the twenty years from 1998 to 2018 it grew 465%.
In the two decades from 1960 to 1980 the US economy grew about 111%. In the twenty years from 1980 to 2000, it grew 95%. In the twenty years from 1998 to 2018 it grew 45%.
The only reason 1960 to 1980 in China looks not as awful as it was is because of rapid population growth, mass starvations notwithstanding.
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Historically China was a world leader in technology. Wiki has a list of Chinese inventions which you can compare and contrast to their western counterparts in time, method, and source [1]. In modern times they made some bad decisions and at some of the worst possible times. Of course this should make you ask (as it did me) what about the mid ages? The period of time after Chinese tech supremacy but before the modern era? This [2] article offers an interesting argument that seems quite compelling.
One of the big differences is that China was a unified and stable empire. By contrast Europe was a chaotic land of never ending conquest and war. And periods of stability always had an underlying tension of imminent war. This competition and lack of unification within Europe meant that inventors, scholars, and others were free to do as they felt. If one country doesn't like what you're doing and declares you a heathen or other naughty word, so what? Move 100 miles and you're now in another country that's happy to go against the desires of the other country if not only because it's that other country!
China wanted stability and security. Europe wanted progress. It's interesting the compare and contrast this to modern times. No single answer fits clearly, but it's certain that times have changed.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_inventions
[2] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/10/28/why-t...
Unified, yes; nominally, for short stretches of time. Stable, no; there was always war somewhere over land and power.
Look at the animation of territorial changes at the top of [1] and at the quick succession of dynasties. Consider that each time territory was conquered or a new dynasty rose to power, this was accomplished by war; and there were many more rebellions that were defeated by the ruling dynasty and didn't change much.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynasties_in_Chinese_history
In terms of consumer product choice? Sure.
However, in terms of an authoritarian government rising to superpower status...
A citizen can very much be a neutral observer philosophically, given that a citizen has very little capability to sway the nation politically, economically, or militarily.
In fact, a citizen who thinks that they are participating on the nation-stage is probably more delusional than the opposite.
That was the sort of hopeful thinking that opened the worlds markets to China when Bill Clinton urged lawmakers to let China into the WTO in the year 2000.[1]
Several years ago, Robert Kagan in Foreign Affairs magazine, commented that China lacks bigger humanistic aspirations than material ones and a limited vision to find ways to furnish those material resources for itself. China lacks a grander vision, he said. ( Paraphrasing here. I can't find the article )
Now witnessing world events, I doubt many people would argue against that opinion.
[1]
When the World Opened the Gates of China
Was it a mistake for the U.S. to allow China to join the World Trade Organization? Assessments of the 2001 deal often determine positions in today’s bitter trade debate.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/when-the-world-opened-the-gates...
edit: citation corrected
For the world, this may not be a terrible outcome, (although don't get me wrong -- no trade war would be the best outcome.) . For one thing, it breaks monopolies across the tech stack from E-commerce all the way to semi-conductor manufacturing equipment. That competition between US and Chinese companies can only benefit the world. It's happening in 5G already.