As a Singaporean, national pride demands that I point out the internationally used inventions my country has made. The USB thumb drive, infrared fever scanning systems (I know the people who invented that during SARS -- napkin to operation in a week), the Sound Blaster, many medical treatments like the Sheares procedure. The Wikipedia page is just wrong.
However, I agree Singapore does appear to have few inventions to its name despite having the R&D labs of many multinational companies. In fact, that's one reason. Many things invented in Singapore by Singaporeans are attributed to the foreign company they work for. Most inventions are also the result of large teams, and generally the leaders of these teams are Western because the capital is Western. Attributing exactly who and where an invention came from is much harder nowadays than in the past when one or two tinkerers in a shed could do everything.
About German leading positions in technology, I think it should be clarified:
- In the time of German Empire (when Germany led the world in many scientific domains: physics, chemistry, biology, etc.) Germany was more authoritarian than UK, France or the United States, but it still had parliamentary democracy (the Reichstag had power, German people can still go to vote, though with the Prussian three-class voting system). This era continued until the end of Weimar Republic, in which German science and art flourished in a democratic way of life.
- During the Nazi era, persecution of scientists (not only Jewish) led to decline in position of German science (notice how the Allies ended up first with the nuclear bomb, or how many German inventions (jet aircraft, heavy tanks like Tiger II, Panther, etc.) ended up having too many problems in mass production and usage? Some historians even said that many German tank designers just want to draw bullsh*t plans to not getting conscripted!)
Nazi Germany lagged behind the Brits in ECM, ECCM, cryptology and electronics. It--eventually--lagged behind us in piston-engine airplane design (P-51, B-17, P-38, etc.), and of course in nuclear fission. It initially lagged behind the Soviets in tank design (T-34, etc.).
But it was stupendously innovative with literally every other form of military technology: jet airplanes (ME-262, etc.), SP Artillery (Wespe, Hummel), Radio-guided bombs, Ballistic missiles, Acoustic torpedoes, Submarine snorkels, Airmobile and parachute infantry, etc., etc. Tactically, we and our allies spent several years *catching up* with the new German system of combined arms warfare. In much the same way Europe had to catch up with the tactical innovations of Napoleonic France.
It was ultimately our vastly superior industrial base, combined with a much larger total population; that combined with Hitlerian strategic missteps (Battle of Britian, Stalingrad, Kursk, Falaise Pocket) ultimately doomed the Nazis to defeat.
One aspect not well explored here is that the Chinese stole some of the inventions credited to them here.
Notably, much of 5G's IP was stolen from Nortel before it self-destructed, in part because of those thefts.
As for the idea that Apple invented the smartphone, well, no. Apple didn't commercialize them first, nor was it even a fast follower. Besides the widely successful predecessors like Blackberry, I'd also rank Palm as being more important in the smartphone's development than Apple.
There's also the issue that some Chinese 5G stuff is there for political reasons. I can't recall which part of the spec it is but I was told in the past that some of the apparently duplicative stuff at the protocol level was added more or less to make the Chinese be included, not because it was necessary.
And then Huawei went on to dominate those chipsets partly because the upgrade over 4G just isn't that interesting to most OEMs. People assume it must be a leap as big as 2G to 3G or 3G to 4G but speeds have saturated already. If you look at what it adds over the latest 4G versions it's not that compelling unless you're doing fun stuff with IoT. Bandwidth consumption of apps has been going down over time not up because nothing really arrived after HD video that needed a step change in bandwidth, and video codecs have been improving.
Mobile performance is primarily constrained these days by server latency. Improving the air protocols doesn't help much when a button click spends 300msec circumnavigating the world only to land on a massively overcommitted cloud VM that then spams a slow RDBMS with 200 poorly optimized queries, issued serially. My phone does 5G and I don't even notice when it switches between 4G and 5G.
So yes, Huawei has done well here in this generation, but it's not the huge innovation or seachange people think. Mobile tech is mature and the new stuff they add looks increasingly like solutions in search of a problem.
The list is impressive when you categorize it as: inventions that would lend themselves well to a futuristic city on another planet. Your whole post *looks* wonderfully Sci Fi. Perhaps the goal isn't mass market but supportive of civilization on the moon: " humanoid robots, solid-state car batteries, vacuum maglev trains (“hyperloop”), thorium nuclear reactors, perovskite solar cells, lab-grown organs, etc." This is a kind of social creativity that is not particularly American, true.
Also, I really like your analysis that a nation with breakthrough inventions might not be able to commercialize and benefit most from it.
(Australia, where I live, is one example; even though its national science agency - CSIRO - invented WiFi: https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/it/wireless-lan, the internet speed here is still worse than Kazakhstan, due to failed rollout of National Broadband Network (NBN)! Modern solar panels were also developed in Australia in 1990s, yet one of the scientists behind it could not apply for grants or commercialize his invention, so he came back to China to build his own company and is now a billionaire!)
Speaking about Wifi and NBN, I always remember this comedy from Sammy J - a Melburnian comedian, about how its rollout failed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7K-ij6O6pA&pp=ygULc2FtbXkgaiBuYm4%3D. He had series of political comedies as cartoon for kids, which are really worth watching!
The scariest thing for me to see on the list of scientific papers is the Chinese lead in martial science. Material science can't be reversed engineered. You can have a chunk of some advanced metal and even figure out what makes it special on a molecular level but that doesn't tell you how to make it. Material science is what has kept the same four nations as exclusive producers of state of the art jet engines used in military planes since WWll. ( the US, UK, France, and Russia) China seems to be the first nation to join the club. They are now wholly producing engines derived from Russian designs.
Other nations have tried. They have poured billions and decades into it. They have had access to the best jet engines produced by the four, and they could recreate the designs, but they could not recreate the materials used to withstand the forces generated. Most give up.
China tried for decades before they cracked it. India has been trying for decades too and still seems up against the wall.
China isn't leading in science. That Economist graph is extremely misleading, it's just counting citations which are hopelessly corrupted by citation rings and other academic BS.
In reality Chinese papers have very little impact and the Chinese-language literature is apparently garbage that even the Chinese themselves don't read. Getting published in English is much more prestigious.
The problem is that the CCP ordered a minimum quota of papers to be published, in particular by doctors. So there's a ton of fraud and paper mill activity going on there. Counting papers and citations for this sort of thing is a bit like trusting their GDP numbers. You want to see verifiable real world impact, not easily gamed metrics.
I specifically remember about 6 or 7 years ago thinking that Ofo's dockless bikes were probably the first Chinese brand to have somewhat widespread American awareness. (These days of course TikTok has far more awareness, especially since scooters ended up displacing bikes in the few American cities where micro-transit is extremely helpful.)
I was also throughout thinking of Singapore as the other example I could think of, of a city/country that has in recent decades punched far below its weight in terms of creativity or innovation - it's easier to come up with things invented in Milan or Barcelona or Dallas than Singapore (all about 5-6 million in the urban area), and I think I know more academics from many of those urban areas (despite having visited Singapore more often than Milan or Barcelona).
It's notable that Hong Kong was long a city that punched far *above* its weight in cultural and academic terms, just to pre-empt anyone who thinks that ethnically-Chinese cities are inevitably lower in the list. (I don't think it does any more, sadly.)
I was just reading how rapidly Chinese cars are gaining market share in Australia. A BYD Sealion 6 is the same size as a Honda Passport or Toyota Highlander (midsize SUV) and decently equipped it’s $26,990 (USD) compared with a Passport which starts at $46k.
It doesn't really change your point but I think your numbers are off. (Also, there is no Passport here in Australia so not a good choice for comparison. And the cheapest BYD Sealion 6 I see actually available here is $33,000 (USD). But that is cheaper than the bZ4X for $45,000.
Without really knowing anything about the industry I have the impression that the legacy auto makers all tried to go upmarket/luxury leaving the low end pretty empty. I remember hearing a few years ago that the average price of a new car in the US was $50,000 which seemed insane to me.
Psshaw! I purchased a new Nissan Leaf EV in Honolulu a fortnight ago for $22,300. So far it's a great car; with the exception of the hatchback release, which sticks.
Thanks for the clarification. Any idea on how much of the price of each is direct/indirect subsidies? I know that computer the Chinese side of that is harder to quantify due to lack of Govt data transparency/accuracy.
China has certainly committed over a quarter of a trillion dollars over the past 14 years getting to the point where 10 million EVs are sold in China every year. For comparison total US car sales are 12.9 million.
At those economies of scale EVs should be massively cheaper than ICE vehicles as they are so much less complicated to manufacture. So how much are they currently subsidized? Hard to say.
I was thinking on a per vehicle basis. The final price for the Leaf I just purchased was doubtlessly discounted due to the various fed&state EV/hybrid subsidies, right?
I suppose if I'd bought a Seagull, the US subsidy %'s would've been identical, right? But what about the Chinese production and/or export susidies? Any idea of what they'd've come to?
With the cheaper one being $26k. I guess it’s similar to what Tesla does/did with limiting production of the cheaper one.
As for the Passport we can go with the Toyota Highlander in the US which is the Toyota Kluger in Australia which starts at $60,920 AUD - $37k USD. Interesting that the Australian version is $10k cheaper (USD).
Spoke to a scientist friend of mine about why China may generate fewer original inventions, despite actually spending more $$ on research annually than the US. According to him, in the US, a law was passed in the 80s that allows universities to commercialize the discoveries made with government funding (US government does not own said IP). In China, by contrast, it seems that the majority of government research funding comes with the condition that all IP produced is owned by the government. That may generate a lot less incentive for new discoveries. Instead, it makes a lot more financial sense to invest energies into commercialization and scalability of ip that already exists. Seems like a plausible explanation.
That "high impact papers" chart is very hard to believe. In my own little academic research field, Chinese scientists in China are doing nothing that attracts much attention. (Chinese scientists in the West, on the other hand, are a different story entirely.) And I'm old enough to remember the 70s, when Soviet journals were translated to English and everyone read them, because they actually did have important stuff in them that we needed to know.
Yeah I've heard the same from some other people. There are a few possible explanations for this:
1. Chinese citation rings and perverse incentives to over-cite other Chinese papers are pumping up citation counts for Chinese papers (this is the "home bias" paper I linked to in my post).
2. Chinese advances are real, but aren't making it out of the country very quickly -- enabling Chinese companies to get ahead of their overseas rivals.
My guess is that there's some of both going on here.
If it were (2) we'd see it turn into verifiable achievements but we don't. When Chinese tech firms present on computer science in English, it's at the same level as western tech firms but not really ahead in any way.
This. Medical research particularly, outside of the top centers in Beijing, Shanghai, etc., is still notoriously overoptimistic with their published findings.
This question will matter a lot more if China becomes dominant and the US/Europe decline (real possibility here!) But the more important thing is: it doesn't matter if your country has a leading position when it comes to innovation, since China can just re-invent your inventions and dominate the industry. We've seen it across nearly every technology area except for a few, like EUV lithography (and that will happen soon) and rocketry (will also happen soon.)
That's been true historically, but it's not inconceivable that as computer security improves and the rest of the world disengages from the Chinese markets that it will stop being a viable strategy.
I think that "2000+ year run" was not nearly as seamless as people think. China was conquered by outside powers in the 1600s (by the Manchus, who became Chinese over time) and the 1200s (by the Mongols, who never became Chinese). In the 900s, China had a half-century of disunity, and in the 1100s it was split in two (the north part being ruled by the ancestors of the Manchus). From 220 AD - 589 AD China had two and a half centuries of disunity and weakness following the fall of the Han Dynasty.
So it seems to me that China historically was weak about a third of the time. That's not an uninterrupted run of dominance. But it's still impressive how it managed to renew itself so many times!
Yes. In Zheng's time all of Asia knew and respected--or feared--China. Until the coming of the Europeans, China dominated much of the trade in the East & South China Seas.
As an early 1970s MIT BS Physics grad, my personal life tech experiences is more jaded than yours. I fell almost everything you call innovative, is creative but derivative.
Now, Japan was amazing in deriving many things. Mag tape was developed in the US, but Sony miniturized US transistors, circuit boards and speakers, and US plastics - to make the smashing new, but again derived, - Sony Walkman. RED LEDs were a US invention, but yes, blue was I think Nakarmura. Plasma TV - maybe, haven't checked. But this is just engineering.
Now product design creativity - Japan was great ! My JV with a US and Japan company taught me there amazing customer feedback to product improvement process.
Drones - absolutely not new or novel. We were flying remotely controlled R/C aircraft and choppers in the 1980s. Servo controlled. Battery operarted. some US, some parts like small servos from Futaba in Japan.
But China, has taken the Japan model to greater heights with magnitude of force. Fast learning. Big thinking. Ships, applicances.
I'm not sure about 5g, as I know some 1970s MIT friends who helped develop video streaming, and network protocols for Huwei, etc here in the US.
Hard product things you actually have to MechEng, ElectEng have long been on the decline here in the US, sadly. Too many biologists, lawyers.
I recommend the book "We Were Burning", which is about invention and innovation in the 20th century Japanese electronics industry. The most important lesson of the book, in my opinion, is that most major inventions in this industry were done partially in America and partially in Japan, and that these two economies were deeply integrated.
There are definitely examples where a Japanese inventor created a prototype and American companies refined and commercialized it. A prime example is the microprocessor, conceived of by Sasaki Tadashi and invented by Shima Masatoshi, but which was then improved and commercialized by Intel. Another example was the inkjet printer, which was invented by Japanese inventors but commercialized by HP.
So my general conclusion (which I think generalizes to other industries) is that in the mid to late 20th century, Japan and the U.S. demonstrated similar levels of creativity in both the initial invention and eventual commercialization phases. But keep in mind that Japan is much smaller than the U.S., so an equal level of per capita creativity means more total innovation coming out of the U.S.
There certainly are some chemists and various kinds of engineers. But there are many biologists too, and tbh the work of biologists often bleeds over into biochemistry/chemistry. Just speaking from experience here, as a biophysicist who has worked in biotech for many years and seen a pretty good cross-section of the people involved.
My professional experience is only with 510k and PMA medical devices. The only BS Biology major I had, was not very useful. Moved into QA and out of development
As a Singaporean, national pride demands that I point out the internationally used inventions my country has made. The USB thumb drive, infrared fever scanning systems (I know the people who invented that during SARS -- napkin to operation in a week), the Sound Blaster, many medical treatments like the Sheares procedure. The Wikipedia page is just wrong.
However, I agree Singapore does appear to have few inventions to its name despite having the R&D labs of many multinational companies. In fact, that's one reason. Many things invented in Singapore by Singaporeans are attributed to the foreign company they work for. Most inventions are also the result of large teams, and generally the leaders of these teams are Western because the capital is Western. Attributing exactly who and where an invention came from is much harder nowadays than in the past when one or two tinkerers in a shed could do everything.
About German leading positions in technology, I think it should be clarified:
- In the time of German Empire (when Germany led the world in many scientific domains: physics, chemistry, biology, etc.) Germany was more authoritarian than UK, France or the United States, but it still had parliamentary democracy (the Reichstag had power, German people can still go to vote, though with the Prussian three-class voting system). This era continued until the end of Weimar Republic, in which German science and art flourished in a democratic way of life.
- During the Nazi era, persecution of scientists (not only Jewish) led to decline in position of German science (notice how the Allies ended up first with the nuclear bomb, or how many German inventions (jet aircraft, heavy tanks like Tiger II, Panther, etc.) ended up having too many problems in mass production and usage? Some historians even said that many German tank designers just want to draw bullsh*t plans to not getting conscripted!)
Important points!!
Nazi Germany lagged behind the Brits in ECM, ECCM, cryptology and electronics. It--eventually--lagged behind us in piston-engine airplane design (P-51, B-17, P-38, etc.), and of course in nuclear fission. It initially lagged behind the Soviets in tank design (T-34, etc.).
But it was stupendously innovative with literally every other form of military technology: jet airplanes (ME-262, etc.), SP Artillery (Wespe, Hummel), Radio-guided bombs, Ballistic missiles, Acoustic torpedoes, Submarine snorkels, Airmobile and parachute infantry, etc., etc. Tactically, we and our allies spent several years *catching up* with the new German system of combined arms warfare. In much the same way Europe had to catch up with the tactical innovations of Napoleonic France.
It was ultimately our vastly superior industrial base, combined with a much larger total population; that combined with Hitlerian strategic missteps (Battle of Britian, Stalingrad, Kursk, Falaise Pocket) ultimately doomed the Nazis to defeat.
One aspect not well explored here is that the Chinese stole some of the inventions credited to them here.
Notably, much of 5G's IP was stolen from Nortel before it self-destructed, in part because of those thefts.
As for the idea that Apple invented the smartphone, well, no. Apple didn't commercialize them first, nor was it even a fast follower. Besides the widely successful predecessors like Blackberry, I'd also rank Palm as being more important in the smartphone's development than Apple.
There's also the issue that some Chinese 5G stuff is there for political reasons. I can't recall which part of the spec it is but I was told in the past that some of the apparently duplicative stuff at the protocol level was added more or less to make the Chinese be included, not because it was necessary.
And then Huawei went on to dominate those chipsets partly because the upgrade over 4G just isn't that interesting to most OEMs. People assume it must be a leap as big as 2G to 3G or 3G to 4G but speeds have saturated already. If you look at what it adds over the latest 4G versions it's not that compelling unless you're doing fun stuff with IoT. Bandwidth consumption of apps has been going down over time not up because nothing really arrived after HD video that needed a step change in bandwidth, and video codecs have been improving.
Mobile performance is primarily constrained these days by server latency. Improving the air protocols doesn't help much when a button click spends 300msec circumnavigating the world only to land on a massively overcommitted cloud VM that then spams a slow RDBMS with 200 poorly optimized queries, issued serially. My phone does 5G and I don't even notice when it switches between 4G and 5G.
So yes, Huawei has done well here in this generation, but it's not the huge innovation or seachange people think. Mobile tech is mature and the new stuff they add looks increasingly like solutions in search of a problem.
The list is impressive when you categorize it as: inventions that would lend themselves well to a futuristic city on another planet. Your whole post *looks* wonderfully Sci Fi. Perhaps the goal isn't mass market but supportive of civilization on the moon: " humanoid robots, solid-state car batteries, vacuum maglev trains (“hyperloop”), thorium nuclear reactors, perovskite solar cells, lab-grown organs, etc." This is a kind of social creativity that is not particularly American, true.
Also, I really like your analysis that a nation with breakthrough inventions might not be able to commercialize and benefit most from it.
(Australia, where I live, is one example; even though its national science agency - CSIRO - invented WiFi: https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/it/wireless-lan, the internet speed here is still worse than Kazakhstan, due to failed rollout of National Broadband Network (NBN)! Modern solar panels were also developed in Australia in 1990s, yet one of the scientists behind it could not apply for grants or commercialize his invention, so he came back to China to build his own company and is now a billionaire!)
Speaking about Wifi and NBN, I always remember this comedy from Sammy J - a Melburnian comedian, about how its rollout failed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7K-ij6O6pA&pp=ygULc2FtbXkgaiBuYm4%3D. He had series of political comedies as cartoon for kids, which are really worth watching!
The scariest thing for me to see on the list of scientific papers is the Chinese lead in martial science. Material science can't be reversed engineered. You can have a chunk of some advanced metal and even figure out what makes it special on a molecular level but that doesn't tell you how to make it. Material science is what has kept the same four nations as exclusive producers of state of the art jet engines used in military planes since WWll. ( the US, UK, France, and Russia) China seems to be the first nation to join the club. They are now wholly producing engines derived from Russian designs.
Other nations have tried. They have poured billions and decades into it. They have had access to the best jet engines produced by the four, and they could recreate the designs, but they could not recreate the materials used to withstand the forces generated. Most give up.
China tried for decades before they cracked it. India has been trying for decades too and still seems up against the wall.
I don't think China has actually cracked that yet.
China isn't leading in science. That Economist graph is extremely misleading, it's just counting citations which are hopelessly corrupted by citation rings and other academic BS.
In reality Chinese papers have very little impact and the Chinese-language literature is apparently garbage that even the Chinese themselves don't read. Getting published in English is much more prestigious.
The problem is that the CCP ordered a minimum quota of papers to be published, in particular by doctors. So there's a ton of fraud and paper mill activity going on there. Counting papers and citations for this sort of thing is a bit like trusting their GDP numbers. You want to see verifiable real world impact, not easily gamed metrics.
I specifically remember about 6 or 7 years ago thinking that Ofo's dockless bikes were probably the first Chinese brand to have somewhat widespread American awareness. (These days of course TikTok has far more awareness, especially since scooters ended up displacing bikes in the few American cities where micro-transit is extremely helpful.)
I was also throughout thinking of Singapore as the other example I could think of, of a city/country that has in recent decades punched far below its weight in terms of creativity or innovation - it's easier to come up with things invented in Milan or Barcelona or Dallas than Singapore (all about 5-6 million in the urban area), and I think I know more academics from many of those urban areas (despite having visited Singapore more often than Milan or Barcelona).
It's notable that Hong Kong was long a city that punched far *above* its weight in cultural and academic terms, just to pre-empt anyone who thinks that ethnically-Chinese cities are inevitably lower in the list. (I don't think it does any more, sadly.)
“ leadership in the EV industry of the future”
I was just reading how rapidly Chinese cars are gaining market share in Australia. A BYD Sealion 6 is the same size as a Honda Passport or Toyota Highlander (midsize SUV) and decently equipped it’s $26,990 (USD) compared with a Passport which starts at $46k.
It doesn't really change your point but I think your numbers are off. (Also, there is no Passport here in Australia so not a good choice for comparison. And the cheapest BYD Sealion 6 I see actually available here is $33,000 (USD). But that is cheaper than the bZ4X for $45,000.
Without really knowing anything about the industry I have the impression that the legacy auto makers all tried to go upmarket/luxury leaving the low end pretty empty. I remember hearing a few years ago that the average price of a new car in the US was $50,000 which seemed insane to me.
Psshaw! I purchased a new Nissan Leaf EV in Honolulu a fortnight ago for $22,300. So far it's a great car; with the exception of the hatchback release, which sticks.
It’s half the size. It’s a great car but you’re comparing apples to oranges.
Comparing apples to apples a BYD Seagull is $9,500.
Here is a better equipped version for $11,500.
https://insideevs.com/news/710364/byd-detroit-import-seagull-caresoft/
Thanks for the clarification. Any idea on how much of the price of each is direct/indirect subsidies? I know that computer the Chinese side of that is harder to quantify due to lack of Govt data transparency/accuracy.
Do you mean on an ongoing basis?
China has certainly committed over a quarter of a trillion dollars over the past 14 years getting to the point where 10 million EVs are sold in China every year. For comparison total US car sales are 12.9 million.
At those economies of scale EVs should be massively cheaper than ICE vehicles as they are so much less complicated to manufacture. So how much are they currently subsidized? Hard to say.
I was thinking on a per vehicle basis. The final price for the Leaf I just purchased was doubtlessly discounted due to the various fed&state EV/hybrid subsidies, right?
I suppose if I'd bought a Seagull, the US subsidy %'s would've been identical, right? But what about the Chinese production and/or export susidies? Any idea of what they'd've come to?
Interesting the site lists two trim levels:
https://bydautomotive.com.au/configurator/byd-sealion-6?ref=website
With the cheaper one being $26k. I guess it’s similar to what Tesla does/did with limiting production of the cheaper one.
As for the Passport we can go with the Toyota Highlander in the US which is the Toyota Kluger in Australia which starts at $60,920 AUD - $37k USD. Interesting that the Australian version is $10k cheaper (USD).
Spoke to a scientist friend of mine about why China may generate fewer original inventions, despite actually spending more $$ on research annually than the US. According to him, in the US, a law was passed in the 80s that allows universities to commercialize the discoveries made with government funding (US government does not own said IP). In China, by contrast, it seems that the majority of government research funding comes with the condition that all IP produced is owned by the government. That may generate a lot less incentive for new discoveries. Instead, it makes a lot more financial sense to invest energies into commercialization and scalability of ip that already exists. Seems like a plausible explanation.
Oh that's interesting! I actually didn't know that!!
This seems like a decent summary: https://blog.counselstack.com/ip-in-academia-university-patents-research-collaborations/
Maybe strong intellectual property laws do stimulate innovation after all, despite all the criticism of incremental patents etc.
That "high impact papers" chart is very hard to believe. In my own little academic research field, Chinese scientists in China are doing nothing that attracts much attention. (Chinese scientists in the West, on the other hand, are a different story entirely.) And I'm old enough to remember the 70s, when Soviet journals were translated to English and everyone read them, because they actually did have important stuff in them that we needed to know.
Yeah I've heard the same from some other people. There are a few possible explanations for this:
1. Chinese citation rings and perverse incentives to over-cite other Chinese papers are pumping up citation counts for Chinese papers (this is the "home bias" paper I linked to in my post).
2. Chinese advances are real, but aren't making it out of the country very quickly -- enabling Chinese companies to get ahead of their overseas rivals.
My guess is that there's some of both going on here.
If it were (2) we'd see it turn into verifiable achievements but we don't. When Chinese tech firms present on computer science in English, it's at the same level as western tech firms but not really ahead in any way.
This. Medical research particularly, outside of the top centers in Beijing, Shanghai, etc., is still notoriously overoptimistic with their published findings.
This question will matter a lot more if China becomes dominant and the US/Europe decline (real possibility here!) But the more important thing is: it doesn't matter if your country has a leading position when it comes to innovation, since China can just re-invent your inventions and dominate the industry. We've seen it across nearly every technology area except for a few, like EUV lithography (and that will happen soon) and rocketry (will also happen soon.)
That's been true historically, but it's not inconceivable that as computer security improves and the rest of the world disengages from the Chinese markets that it will stop being a viable strategy.
Would be nice if Chinese researchers did some ground-breaking in medicine and pharmaceuticals.
The self building video left a lot to the imagination. Mainly how does it get itself off the top when it finishes?
china, after a 2-3 hundred bad years, is getting back to its 2000+ year run as a globally dominant civilization. get used to it....
I think that "2000+ year run" was not nearly as seamless as people think. China was conquered by outside powers in the 1600s (by the Manchus, who became Chinese over time) and the 1200s (by the Mongols, who never became Chinese). In the 900s, China had a half-century of disunity, and in the 1100s it was split in two (the north part being ruled by the ancestors of the Manchus). From 220 AD - 589 AD China had two and a half centuries of disunity and weakness following the fall of the Han Dynasty.
So it seems to me that China historically was weak about a third of the time. That's not an uninterrupted run of dominance. But it's still impressive how it managed to renew itself so many times!
China did not dominate the globe. It was a regional power. Most of the world barely even knew China existed.
To be fair, that was true of every premodern power except for the Mongols.
Agreed. And even the Mongols were unknown to Sub-Saharan Africa, North America, South America, and Australia.
China was quite insular in midieval times. Kept to itself and it's neighbors even after Zheng He's fleet sailed all over the place.
Yes. In Zheng's time all of Asia knew and respected--or feared--China. Until the coming of the Europeans, China dominated much of the trade in the East & South China Seas.
As an early 1970s MIT BS Physics grad, my personal life tech experiences is more jaded than yours. I fell almost everything you call innovative, is creative but derivative.
Now, Japan was amazing in deriving many things. Mag tape was developed in the US, but Sony miniturized US transistors, circuit boards and speakers, and US plastics - to make the smashing new, but again derived, - Sony Walkman. RED LEDs were a US invention, but yes, blue was I think Nakarmura. Plasma TV - maybe, haven't checked. But this is just engineering.
Now product design creativity - Japan was great ! My JV with a US and Japan company taught me there amazing customer feedback to product improvement process.
Drones - absolutely not new or novel. We were flying remotely controlled R/C aircraft and choppers in the 1980s. Servo controlled. Battery operarted. some US, some parts like small servos from Futaba in Japan.
But China, has taken the Japan model to greater heights with magnitude of force. Fast learning. Big thinking. Ships, applicances.
I'm not sure about 5g, as I know some 1970s MIT friends who helped develop video streaming, and network protocols for Huwei, etc here in the US.
Hard product things you actually have to MechEng, ElectEng have long been on the decline here in the US, sadly. Too many biologists, lawyers.
I recommend the book "We Were Burning", which is about invention and innovation in the 20th century Japanese electronics industry. The most important lesson of the book, in my opinion, is that most major inventions in this industry were done partially in America and partially in Japan, and that these two economies were deeply integrated.
There are definitely examples where a Japanese inventor created a prototype and American companies refined and commercialized it. A prime example is the microprocessor, conceived of by Sasaki Tadashi and invented by Shima Masatoshi, but which was then improved and commercialized by Intel. Another example was the inkjet printer, which was invented by Japanese inventors but commercialized by HP.
So my general conclusion (which I think generalizes to other industries) is that in the mid to late 20th century, Japan and the U.S. demonstrated similar levels of creativity in both the initial invention and eventual commercialization phases. But keep in mind that Japan is much smaller than the U.S., so an equal level of per capita creativity means more total innovation coming out of the U.S.
Thanks Noah. At BigCorp, I worked with Canon on materials for the first laser writer and ink jet. And HPnas well.
Japan and the US had a symbiotic relationship in trade IMHO.
Biologists?
Biology is fine. They aren't engineering peeps. Can't design and build stuff. We need more Mechanical Engineers, Electrical hardware engineering. Etc
Who do you suppose founds and works at all those biotech startups?
Chemist's. Pharmaceutical chemists. For drugs.
Mechanical and Electrical Engineers for Medical devices in therapeutic apps, diagnostics and imaging.
And MDs
There certainly are some chemists and various kinds of engineers. But there are many biologists too, and tbh the work of biologists often bleeds over into biochemistry/chemistry. Just speaking from experience here, as a biophysicist who has worked in biotech for many years and seen a pretty good cross-section of the people involved.
And no experience in drugs.
Genomic sequencing tech hardware.. but that was optics, Mechanics no biology doing that. End user..yes
My professional experience is only with 510k and PMA medical devices. The only BS Biology major I had, was not very useful. Moved into QA and out of development