
China’s tech industry is catching up with Silicon Valley - nopinsight
https://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2018/02/daily-chart-11
======
nopinsight
Here is one likely root cause of China's rapid rise and US' relative
stagnation:

"“Of 200,000 doctorates in science and engineering earned worldwide in 2010,
about 33,000 were awarded by universities in the United States, China 31,000,
Russia 16,000, Germany 12,000 and the United kingdom 11, 000,” says the
report."

"But China leads the world when factoring in doctorates in the biological,
physical, Earth, atmospheric, ocean and agricultural sciences and computer
sciences."

"Also, in the United States only 57% of doctorates were earned by citizens and
permanent residents, while temporary visa holders obtained the remainder." [1]

China's figures are likely higher now in 2018.

Note that there appears to be some quality issues that come with the
acceleration of China's PhD production, although initiatives are being taken
to reform the system. [2]

In the long run, the advantage of having an abundant number of STEM and CS
graduates to recruit from may prove highly impactful, or even decisive, for
many tech-based industries. To compete, the US needs to develop more local
talent in STEM as well as attracting talent from abroad.

A focus on the very top-end by doing groundbreaking research, which the US has
often excelled at, might also be necessary.

[1]
[http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=2014022...](http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20140227152409830)

[2] [https://www.editage.com/insights/where-does-china-stand-
in-t...](https://www.editage.com/insights/where-does-china-stand-in-the-
global-phd-boom)

~~~
majos
I'm reluctant to use "number of PhDs" as a proxy for "depth of tech talent
pool". PhDs in the US have become somewhat odd -- I see advertisements on
public transit (!) for quick doctoral programs in all sorts of fields, and
many of these programs appear to be PhDs in name only, awarding degrees with
little to no connection with actual original research. So a PhD alone is no
longer an indicator of actual research ability but just another academic
credential to slog your way through.

I would guess something like this holds in China as well, possibly confounded
by 1. China's different political culture, which appears to blend political
advancement and academic titles in a weird way, 2. a stronger cultural
emphasis in China on academic titles, and 3. China's historical preference for
people with science/engineering backgrounds (rather than, say, law as in the
US) to lead its state.

If anything I imagine China's loose regulatory environment, abundant supply of
citizens unconcerned about data privacy, and sheer number of people trying
things are bigger advantages.

------
mtgx
_Copying intensifies_.

Joking aside, one of my latest worries is that China will win out in the end
with its EV-focused industry, which will also be self-driving vehicles for the
most part. I think they're planning on doing to the western auto industry what
they did to the western solar panel industry: encourage its own EV industry
aggressively through subsidies and regulation, then subsidize exports, too.
Western car companies in 2 decades = bankrupt.

If half of the world ends-up travelling via backdoored self-driving Chinese
cars 20 years from now, I think we're screwed. And I mean that even if the
Chinese government has no intention of exploiting the backdoors maliciously
_itself_ \- other than the occasional assassination of Chinese
dissidents/critics (say no more than a few hundred a year - they've got to
keep that sort of thing in check after all) and complete surveillance of your
driving habits, what you say in your car, who you're seeing in your car, and
other stuff like that, _of course_. The backdoors in there will be more than
enough for _every other malicious actor_ out there to exploit them.

~~~
zaqokm321
I am pretty sure the "western" auto industry has been doing themselves more
harm for a long time, compared to what the Chinese could do.

And as far as State created exploits, there are plenty of these being
introduced by "western" governments. I don't really prefer to have either
having access to this.

------
fhe
I think similar observations and arguments were made in the 80s about Japanese
firms. It would be interesting to make some comparison, if only to see how
things are (or could be) different this time.

------
oldcynic
Exactly as the US did to the UK in the late 1800s, and Japan + Korea to the US
in the 1970s on.

There is advantage to not being the incumbent. First you copy (badly) and soon
enough you match quality and innovate. That you can do so without the years of
technical debt or obsolete tooling and infrastructure gives speed advantages.

------
chatmasta
This trend should not be surprising. China has a population of 1.4 __billion
__people, almost 5x the population of the US. If you 'll excuse the Saturday
morning math, the Chinese population only needs to produce quality software
engineers at 1/5 the rate of the US in order to outpace US engineers in terms
of pure numbers.

Programming is not some elite field that only enlightened Western minds are
capable of. After a certain point it really is a numbers game -- how many
smart people can you throw at big problems? In this sense, the US is at a
distinct long-term disadvantage compared to larger countries like China and
India, simply due to the sheer size of the population differences.

~~~
bsaul
And yet china population has been 5x US population for at least a century, but
we’re witnessing china waking up only for the last 20 years. The fact that
they’re reaching phd level in large quantity is a new thing.

~~~
hungerstrike
Interesting isn't it? Chinese people didn't just bootstrap themselves either.
They got help. I mean, does anyone actually think that the Chinese populace
asked for Communism and built up their tyrannical government from within? No
way.

So who helped them start all this and why? Yale admits that they were
complicit in helping Mao Tse Tung come to power in an article entitled "Yale
Group Spurs Maos Emergence" \-
[http://digital.library.yale.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collectio...](http://digital.library.yale.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/yale-
ydn/id/135148/rec/14)

Without even looking at individual players, you can see what's going on. The
USA has empowered China by buying everything they've made over the past 60
years. You'd think based on our values, a country like the US would have a big
problem doing business with China. But nope! Everything's fine, just don't let
any controlled-media mouthpiece talk about it though.

There are many, many, many open and obvious details which outline an invisible
hand at work here. If you look deeper, you'll also find the involvement of
such shady characters as a certain well-known family of international
banksters who loan money to start wars and people who start wars to be able to
sell their drugs to people. Long story short: I think that China is the
prototype for a new world-wide government that is going to take over after the
big-bad USA (my homeland) is wiped out either economically or physically. The
stage is being set right now and there is no time in history that we've looked
worse than we do right now. I'm pretty sure we deserve whatever we get though
because we've let our tax dollars be used for some pretty nasty business.

Regardless of who anyone thinks the players are, we all know that the culture
of corruption is real. This is the absolute height of corruption and it is
definitely possible if not probable.

------
baybal2
What I can say as an more or less of an insider: the report is credible.

Look at electronics industry, while the "China wave" is waining already, but
you still can't do anything electronics without going to a single city in
China.

Same will eventually be true for software, but it will take no less than a
decade as it was for electronics.

It took around 15 years for the sentiment to change from "hey look, they can
actually make electronics" to "I can't make parts A and B for my project
outside of China" to "to don't even try making out of China"

~~~
danmaz74
With electronics - like with most physical products - having your production
facilities near your suppliers and customers, and having lots of low cost
labor, has a really big impact. With software, it's a completely different
story.

~~~
baybal2
Not that much. It is an illusion that Shenzhen has an overwhelming advantage
from the cluster effect. China still imports even passive components from
Taiwan, and labour costs for professionally trained assembly line staff are
higher than in some parts of Europe.

It is 100% percent due to intellectual capital there. Multiple cities in China
has more developers than a whole state of California.

Just now the lion share of them toil in China's analogues of pets.com, or
outsourcing sweatshops for Western online giants like Amazon.

It will be take just a flick to turn the tide in reverse when Chinese domestic
companies get to the point when making software for themselves will make more
money than selling as a service outside. Then, the chain reaction will start.

------
nopinsight
The first chart says that the number of AI professionals in China is less than
10% that of the US, while the number of third-party cited AI papers is around
80-90%. This implies that either 1) each Chinese AI professional publishes
many, many times more papers than a US-based one, which seems unlikely, or 2)
there are many more non-publishing AI professionals in the US, e.g. working as
a non-research engineer, than in China, where presumably many or most with the
label 'AI professional' publish papers.

Anyone with more knowledge/insight about this peculiarity?

------
dis-sys
if you look at the first chart, it basically says that when compared with the
US, China is producing comparable number of third party cited AI papers when
its number of AI professionals is just like 10% of the US total. clearly you
don't need to be an AI professional to see the problem here - it is all about
quantity not quality. then the sad truth is that for most other categories,
China is also far behind in term of quantity.

------
westiseast
Is China influential or a creator in terms of the underlying tech used around
the world? Software, coding languages (or contributions), frameworks?

~~~
imron
Have at look at most recent CS research papers. There is invariably one or
more authors who are Chinese - especially so in the fields of AI and NLP.

~~~
chatmasta
Luckily for those of us who cannot speak Chinese, even papers from Tsinghua
University are generally published in English.

There are so many Chinese natives compared to the rest of the world. It will
be interesting to see in the next decade how the open source community evolves
as China grows from 50->100% Internet penetration and some of those users
become involved in open source. Anecdotally, you can already see this
happening on some fairly popular repos on github that are entirely in Chinese.

Will we see two open source communities develop in parallel, one in English
and one in Chinese? Will we see more effort at translation of documentation
for major software packages?

~~~
thriftwy
While they keep github blocked (is it?) I doubt we will see so much original
content that gets traction.

~~~
netheril96
GitHub was blocked briefly and then unblocked in China. Other than gist, which
remains outside the wall.

------
Feniks
Not surprising. The things you can do with your smartphone in China makes the
US and Europe look like a third world country.

~~~
nasredin
You just can't google a certain term, "something square" IIRC.

~~~
Feniks
I doubt most Chinese even know what Google is by this point and they certainly
don't need it.

------
melling
Isn’t this a good thing? Double the research?

Don’t we want the rest of the world to equal the US?

~~~
rectang
There's a geopolitical dimension to this question, because of one-party rule
in China. If the regime were less oppressive, reactions would be different.

~~~
bobosha
I doubt that assertion. Look to its neighbor India - a relatively much freer
and open society, but greeted with sneery snarkiness on these fora.

~~~
moosekaka
until India can ensure basic sanitation infrastructure to their population,
all talk of leadership in tech is superfluous.

~~~
melling
That’s probably wrong. If India held tech leadership, it would generate more
wealth for the nation, thus raising the standard of living for many.

People would also see a path to take to have a better life.

------
huffmsa
The thing with China though, is that it consistently has something fall apart
right before it makes the transition from contender to influencer on the world
stage.

Historically it has been famine, but other times it has been the cultural
emphasis on being the best copier of ideas (the civil service exam used to be
about who could recite the teachings of Confucius the most actually, not who
could create the best new interpretation), and not on creating original ideas.
When you're at the top you must create original content.

And the third case, although not relevant this time, is the lack of maritime
tradition / cultural emphasis on exploration. So somewhat related to point two
in that there's little drive to explore the unknown.

~~~
moosekaka
Have you never heard of Admiral ZhengHe?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zheng_He](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zheng_He)

BTW, the middle kingdom WAS the "influencer on the world stage" prior to the
industrial revolution in Europe. You could argue that civil service exam
tested for rote memorization as it was looking for a specific aptitude that
led to been a good administrator. Plenty of science, math and inventions
originated or were independently discovered in China up to at least the
Renaissance.

------
thisisit
I don't see the point made by the market cap chart or even how much they
account for in the total market.

------
anovikov
Well developed mobile payments are nothing but a sign of undeveloped finance
sector, people not having bank accounts or credit cards creates massive market
for e-payments. I won't be surprised if Kenya is even more advanced in that
field than China.

~~~
westiseast
The explosion in mobile payments in China vs America/Europe is amazing, but it
grates when it’s used as an example of tech advantage (ie. as if Chinese
companies were being more innovative or groundbreaking).

There’s _a lot_ of cool things that happen or become possible when you have a
mobile payments environment like China, but it’s possible because of fairly
special (and not necessarily desirable) market conditions and lack of
regulation in China.

~~~
moosekaka
Hackernews and the English tech media in general tends to be very US/euro
centric, but there is a lot more innovation going on in the Chinese market
that never gets highlighted in English tech media. Almost like a parallel
universe, until said western audience goes there and experience first hand a
paradigm shift. Look up shanzai.

~~~
westiseast
I lived there for ten years ;)

But yeah - I think there’s amazing things happening. It’s a bit of a shame
that the discussion is regularly framed as ‘who is number one?’ - there’s some
straight up great innovation, and there’s a lot of interesting adaptation and
innovative use of existing tech to suit market conditions in China.

~~~
moosekaka
side question...how do short term tourists who might not be able to open a
local bank account access wechat or alipay/mobile payments while in China? Are
they forced to use just cash?

~~~
westiseast
No idea :) I heard some foreign cards can now be linked to WeChat, but I've
never had that problem. Otherwise I guess yes, Visa/Mastercard and cash.

