A correction: Kazakhstan has 18.9 million people, which is a lot more than Wuxi, though less than Shanghai. Not sure how I made that error. However, Mongolia, the country, really does have only 3.4 million people.
A quasi-correction: though Dallas is only about 1.1 million people, the Dallas–Fort Worth–Arlington metropolitan area is 7.5 million people, which is bigger than the Wuxi prefecture (though not the Wuxi–Suzhou metropolis, which adds 10.5 million to the 6.5 million in the Wuxi prefecture, even without adding in Shanghai too). Similarly, the Chicago–Naperville–Elgin area is 9.5 million people, and the Houston metro is 7 million. These, plus LA and NYC, are the only metros in the US more populous than Wuxi prefecture.
And at any rate... it's pretty obvious he was referring to Wuxi today. I don't think anybody's about to have an issue referring to the Sparta of today as insignificant, its historical significance being whatever it might be.
I do think I made reasonable arguments that Wuxi today is far from insignificant, didn't I?
My main issue was just citing Wuxi's historical importance and background to defend its significance, in comparison to pre-Anglo Saxon Britain. I see Chinese people do this a lot in regards to China, often to shut down criticism of the country from "lesser" countries, ie ones that were tribalistic or uncentralized during Imperial China's heyday. "We were the center of civilization while you were backwards tribals", that sort of rhetoric.
Not saying that's what you meant, mind you.
I started with Wuxi's history mostly because I find it fascinating but partly because, without that paragraph, I thought someone might respond, "Well, sure, Wuxi is a big city now, but it doesn't have the depth of culture and tradition of a place like London—it's just a soulless consumerist metropolis!" or argue, "Sure, London's population is only twice Wuxi's, but it's a very high profile city because for centuries it ruled an Empire on which the Sun Never Set!", maybe mixed with some deniably racist remarks about "imitation" or "IP theft" or "sweatshops" (of which I think the Guardian's "Australian smarts and Chinese industrial might" is a mild version).
I didn't want to leave an opening for that kind of silly nonsense. It misinforms people.
Tell me who in the West doesn't trivialise anything China related? Those people prefer to violently lash out over admitting things unpleasant to them.
The West needs to admit that "$name_of_western_country smarts and Chinese industrial might," usually means both Chinese smarts and Chinese industrial might, with a Western partner just appropriating the credit.
The crowd dominating intellectual discourse in the West make their countries a giant disservice by closing peoples eyes on this.
The loss of intellectual potential in Western economies came dangerously fast following the deindustrialisation.
With how thins go, the West will soon have nothing to show for its inability to make things, but also no brains to design it, and soon no money to buy it.
The famous "Designed in California, made in China" is not a statement of proves, but insecurity.
Look at, for example, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13640... and in particular the recent works cited in the bibliography. Lots of Chinese research groups, a Korean one, some Arabic, some Indian, an Iranian/UK team, a team from Brazil, a few teams from the US (made up of foreign graduate students, of course).
Look at the citations to one of the Brazilian team's influential review papers: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=9038016761746238692... — what do the surnames of the authors tell you? On the first page, I see Indian, Spanish, Chinese, Hungarian, Egyptian, Jordanian, Saudi, and English research teams, and from the US, Sajjad Ahmad's team at UNLV — first author, assistant professor Saria Bukhary of Pakistan.
It's far from an all-Chinese-research field.
But it certainly isn't just "Australian smarts" either.
Agreed about "Designed in California, made in China." That's an absurdity.
People have no idea how little their electronics industries mean on the world stage.
I believe it would be no big stretch to say that PV cells research in the West is nearly inconsequential to the industry, when all what matters happens within 100m of the silicon furnace without much pomp, and published papers.
I believe it's similar to how semi industry turned to be. Process engineering is a giant research discipline, but everything below the "tip of the iceberg," which is academic research, happens on the fab floor, and stays a factory secret. That's why importing Taiwanese engineers is a prerequisite to setting up any serious high volume fab on 300mm.
Oh, yeah, even the CKS32 chip on my Blue Pill only has a Chinese datasheet. It's common. (Worse is when you can get the Chinese datasheet at all only if you know the right people, who invariably live in Shenzhen. Or Wuxi, or maaybe Taipei.) It's not a totally new problem. My aunt had to learn German for her chemistry degree back in the 01960s, and here in Argentina pretty much everybody who learns to program has to learn English. Gauss wrote his dissertation in Latin; Euler wrote most of his papers in Latin. As Naomi Wu says, Chinese is the 21st-century command line.
But where was RISC-V designed? At Berkeley. By professors and grad students from China, Korea, Vietnam, Poland, the US, Greece, and Germany, I think. (Asanović is naturalized American.)
I agree that there's a lot of unpublished knowledge (PV is part of the semi industry), and a lot of that knowledge is being created in places like Wuxi. But I don't think it's true that the tip of the iceberg we can see is so inconsequential. That tip is what prevents things like the circa-2000 capacitor plague, and many new developments originate in basic research long before they make it to mass production, PERC being perhaps the latest.
Also, you can bet that the rulers of Pakistan, Saudia Arabia, Jordan, Iran, Brazil, and Egypt are not enthusiastic about their countries' access to their own abundant solar energy being dependent on their foreign relations with China, or on China's internal industrial policy; nor do they want their solar power stations to ship with Chinese remote kill switches—not currently a thing, but certainly feasible if China's bargaining position improves sufficiently.
We've seen how that kind of thing plays out many times: the US backdoor in Crypto AG hardware, the US blockade of oil to Japan in WWII, the assassinations of the Iranian nuclear scientists, the constant struggles with US export controls in every country that isn't the US (Tianhe-2 being a recent salient example), China's rare-earth exportation clampdown 10 years ago, the US oil blockade that led Germany to spin up Fischer–Tropsch coal liquefaction, the CIA-backed overthrow of Mossadegh, and so on. So quite reasonably they're investing in the possibility of developing autonomous national solar industries, a 21st-century Saudi Aramco and YPF, just without the oil.
Will they be successful? Maybe. Or maybe they'd have to do what China did for process engineering: get Chinese PV companies to open factories in Egypt and Jordan in order to transfer the necessary knowhow.
> As Naomi Wu says, Chinese is the 21st-century command line.
Care to explain it further?
(By the way, I searched for the quote to try to read it in the context in which it was first made but couldn't find it. So I guess it's a paraphrase.)
If you use your computer only through Nautilus, Firefox, and Instagram, you will commonly encounter software problems that you cannot solve, or solve only through a lot of manual drudgery. But, with a deeper understanding of the layers behind the simplified interface—layers which, for historical reasons, commonly work through "command lines", such as the JS console in the browser, the GRUB command line for booting Linux, or of course the Linux bash prompt—you often need only minutes to solve problems that would have taken hours or days to solve by hand.
Similarly, today, if you want to solve hardware problems, you will often find yourself confronted with datasheets or forum threads that are written in Chinese. If you don't speak Chinese, you will either be unable to solve the problem, or you will have to reconstruct the information needed through experimentation, or by help from someone who does speak Chinese.
Wuxi has been a city for 2200 years, since London was a scattered group of Celtic-speaking villages. Even earlier, in the Spring and Autumn Period, the capital of the State of Wu, Meili, was probably in what is now Wuxi, though it may have been a few kilometers to the southeast in Suzhou. This is where the famous war of Wu against Chu began, a century after Romulus was said to have founded Rome, where the Etruscan kings still ruled. At that time, when Meili was half a millennium old —a century before Plato would found the Academy from which academia takes its name— Sun Tzu led the Wu army of King Helü to victory against Chu, making Wu one of the most important kingdoms of the Spring and Autumn Period, and making himself one of the best-selling and most influential writers in the 20th century, 2500 years later. Temples dating from the Wu period are still popular tourist attractions in Wuxi. It has been a major commercial center since before Charlemagne was born. In 1830, before two thirds of the population died in the Taiping Rebellion, Wuxi was half a million people, 4% of the population of the United States at the time.
Today, five million people live in Wuxi. It's one of the 100 biggest cities in the world, and 25% of China's microelectronics industry is in Wuxi; probably every electronic device in your house contains chips made in Wuxi.
Perhaps people think of Wuxi as "small" because it is part of the Shanghai metropolitan area. Shanghai proper has 24.5 million people, and has been one of the biggest seaports in the world for thousands of years — when Stonehenge was built, Shanghai was already at least a thousand years old. Wuxi is only half as old and five times smaller than Shanghai, and there are many ancient and enormous cities in the region, so by comparison Wuxi might seem small.
But most countries in the world do not even have one city as big as Wuxi. Wuxi is bigger than Berlin, Madrid, or Rome, or indeed any city in Germany, Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Austria, Poland, Sweden, Switzerland, or New Zealand. It's bigger than Chicago, Houston, Phoenix, or Philadelphia. In Turkey, only Istanbul and possibly Ankara are bigger than Wuxi; in Australia, only (greater) Sydney and (greater) Melbourne are Wuxi-sized. It's three times the size of Dallas, San Diego, Birmingham (England), or Munich. More people live in Wuxi than in Oregon, Uruguay, the country of Mongolia, Puerto Rico, Lithuania, Kentucky, Botswana, Iowa, Kazakhstan, Utah, or Qatar. Wuxi's population is triple Estonia's.
If you look at the first photo in https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/31029, the big black area in the middle is Lake Tai. As the label tells you, Suzhou is the cluster of light on its right (east) shore; Wuxi is the cluster of light on its north (top) shore.
Another significant aspect of the situation is that China has just been through 200 years of absolute hell — including the worst civil war in history, multiple foreign invasions and occupations (including 14 years of World War II), by far the worst famine in history (one with the dubious distinction of being self-inflicted, unlike the famines in India and Ireland), the Cultural Revolution, and the end of the Qing dynasty. China is now recovering. Chinese electrical production has doubled during the last decade. Wuxi 10 or 20 years ago is not the same as Wuxi today.
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Finally, I think the Guardian has an anti-Chinese agenda, which leads them to trivialize anything they can about China. Consider the subtitle: "Australian smarts and Chinese industrial might made solar power the cheapest power humanity has seen, and no one saw it coming." But in fact, although people many countries contributed smarts to the problem, Chinese smarts are by far the most relevant here.
Also, some people did see it coming; https://dercuano.github.io/notes/solar-economics.html are my notes on the subject from 13 years ago, where I wasn't entirely sure what form cheap solar energy would take, but concluded that there were so many promising alternatives that one would surely be successful. I looked hard to find a cost factor that kept the prices of PV cells so high, and couldn't find one, and noted that the internal economics of the situation seemed to mandate rapid cost decreases. Though I didn't know it, Swanson had been presenting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swanson's_law at conferences sponsored by NREL and the like since at least 02004, so it wasn't just some eccentric in Buenos Aires taking notes on SEC reports and doing calculations—it was a credible calculation being presented at conferences.