The west is still underestimating China. There is a great anecdote, I think it's from the book 'Apple in China', about their engineers visiting a Chinese production plant. Some changes needed to be made to the place. The Apple people estimated that that would take two weeks.

They came back the next day. It was finished, the Chinese had done it overnight.

I often wonder what is it that's driving the Chinese to work themselves to death to get this stuff done? Surely there must be some limit. I guess we can see it in the low birth rates, the youth unemployment, and I guess the desire to just survive because there's just so many people there. But still, I just don't get how Chinese just keep going and going. What is their end goal on a person to person level? Are they just going to keep killing themselves for the rest of their lives? What happened to the lie flat movement?

This really isn't that different from South Korea / Japan work culture isn't it?

Atleast as far as hours clocked in at work is concerned, no?

I don't know. You are correct that the Japanese/Korea has this mentality to spend time at work just to spend time but there is a noticeable delta in effective results between those countries and modern China.

Their parent's generation toiled really hard and lifted the entire country out of poverty and everyone was pretty well rewarded for it.

They feel working hard brings benefits.

In America, working hard brings your manager benefits. We are multiple generations into this. Most people have learned to not work hard because it is just free benefit to your employer.

Sure, we could pressure Americans to work harder by making the entire country even more afraid of losing their jobs and terrified of not overworking themselves, but even then, all that hard work will just be captured by a spoiled managerial class playing bonus games and extracting all that wealth for themselves, not for American advancement.

Even in the shithole that is American managerial culture, you can still find young Americans working hard, often in spite of themselves, because they get into some project. In the past, projects were small and your team had substantial agency, so this sort of "The team really gets into the project" outcomes paid huge dividends, and resulted in a lot of success. Things like the IBM PC, lots of stuff at Bell Labs.

I wonder how the police state works into this. China spends a lot of money on internal surveillance and suppression of information.

If the belief was genuine, would this be necessary?

I believe Tim Cook himself has said Apple is manufacturing in China not because of cheap labour, but because of good engineering.

It's ironic that a lot of western domestic manufacturing takes place using machines that were engineered and manufactured in China.

I recommend the HTX Studio YouTube channel. The things that they release on a regular basis would be year long engineering projects on other channels.

> The west is still underestimating China.

What do you mean by "The West"?

Because in Western Europe, nobody serious is underestimating China, quite the contrary. We know that there's no going back, and quality is no longer a criteria to choose local over imported.

Only bigotted people are still viewing China as a country mass-producing cheap crap.

I think that's the EVs that definitely sealed the deal in lots of people's minds.

Oneshotted by refusing to update priors from 1990s-era 'End of History' thinking.

>we speak the truth about stuff even when it hurts, why live in denial

Unless you are talking about Israel :P

It's more like the genocide in Gaza is the uncommon case where western propaganda was openly rejected by the population, at least by younger people, despite a concerted top-down effort to try to convince people that genocide is actually concordant with western values. Though it did take some time.

It's the propaganda that nobody questions that is most insidious.

We can't dismiss the role TikTok played in breaking the standard media narrative in the west. I grew up following this issue since I am in a group that is on the receiving end of this conflict.

I occasionally think about software that has truly transformed the trajectory of humanity. So much software is just disposable or is only useful for a small group of people. But the folks at TikTok should be commended in some ways for the drastic changes their algorithm made to the views of worldwide youth. Was it altruistic or nefarious? I suspect we won't know for sure until its written in the history books but man did it have an impact. Even though TikTok is probably gone now that its been taken over by the same people who used to shape the narrative its impact wont be easily forgotten.

How many of us developers get a chance to write software that really changes the direction the world takes?

> we speak the truth about stuff

Western propaganda works in mysterious ways.

A better question here is, would china be doing this, if "the west" wasn't threathening (and implementing) all kinds of sanctions on them, giving them no choice but to go "the bender way", by making their own chips (with blackjack, and hookers!).

Yes? The replication of the foreign capability domestically has been a driving force of China's economy for the last 20 - 30 years. No major R&D program in which china is catching up or even exceeding the western capability was started there, even the quite recent AI boom is mostly based on the work of American companies and labs.

If anything the constant underestimation of Chinese capabilities caused "the west" to react way to late.