
China is catching up to the USA, while Japan is being left behind - deafcalculus
https://lemire.me/blog/2017/11/12/china-is-catching-to-the-usa-while-japan-is-being-left-behind/
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soufron
The conclusion is actually quite contrary to the title, and far more
interesting: the author uses that example to debunk the idea that more
research leads to more innovation and more prosperity.

I have been tinkering around the same idea for a while, thinking that the
state of a country's democracy matters way more than its research output.

I'll quote this article in the future!

In his own words: "Does any of it matter? Many people believe, or assume, that
great output in terms of research articles should cause economic prosperity
and innovation. I have post entitled Does academic research cause economic
growth? that makes the contrary point. That is, though China is catching up in
terms of scientific output, this may be a consequence of their prosperity:
they can now afford to have their very best minds work on producing research
articles. It is much easier for rich countries to fund people so that they can
publish in Nature. So being rich will allow you to catch up. But Japan shows
that you can be a very rich country and choose not to produce many great
research articles. In the least, this establishes that you do not need to
produce many great research articles to be prosperous."

~~~
api
If that's the argument it's fallacious. China and USA is not an apples to
apples comparison. China would need the kind of explosive growth we have seen
just to get everyone a refrigerator, while the USA is struggling with the
"what now?" question of advanced nations. All the easy stuff is behind us and
there is nobody for us to just copy.

~~~
olalonde
> China would need the kind of explosive growth we have seen just to get
> everyone a refrigerator

Not sure if you meant that literally but I've been to some pretty poor places
in China and they do have refrigerators...

~~~
jbooth
Yeah, but they're new, and there's still a culture of food preservation that
we lost here at some point.

US fish buying: Buy a pleasant-looking filet off a bed of ice, get it into
refrigeration asap

China fish buying: Bring a plastic bag, put live fish in bag of water,
transfer to a short-term tank at home. It's actually superior, you can't get
any fresher than "I killed this fish 5 seconds ago".

And then there's all the salted food around spring festival. Plain cabbage has
never been so appealing.

~~~
zhte415
A fresh fish killed and put on ice is a lot fresher tasting than a half-dead
fish limp but alive in a home fish tank.

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joaodlf
This post goes over science and research, which to me is a consequence to
other, "big picture", areas of the Chinese growth. Areas such as economy,
geopolitcs and finances. China is no longer a contender - It's the true
looming power of the East. And depending on how internal politics play out, it
will be interesting to see where exactly China stands in as little as 10-20
years in the future.

One thing that strikes me about China is their attitude towards foreign
politics - They still want the world to consider them as a "developing
country". Sure, it's a gigantic country, both in land and population - There
are still many challenges to overcome, but this is now a country with enormous
cash reserves, who own a significant lump of US debt, and making truly
gigantic strides on all levels of society.

~~~
matchsetpoint
I have lived in Shenzhen for many years, traveled to tons of cities in China,
and recently am back to silicon valley. From what I can tell on the ground,
China is going to be in decline for the next 10-20 years. (I have a good hunch
most people that comment favorabily on China here, have never been)

\- Myth: China is developed. Truth: Start in Shanghai Huangpu (very rich
neighborhood, in a very rich city). Take a subway a few stops in any
direction. When you come out, you are surrounded by dilapidated communist
blocks and electric bikees. Take another ride a few more stops, you are
surrounded in villages that are right out of middle ages (shoddy huts with
shared toilets). This is the same for any of the rich city in China. 90% of
people in China live in middle ages. 9.99999% of people live in 1950s.
0.00001% of people live very richly.

\- Myth: Chinese citizens saves and are rich. Truth: most rich people have
left China already. The remaining middle class ($1000/month, many of my
Chinese friends) are able to buy into the massive inflated housing with
savings from parents. The savings, borrowed money from relatives, credit card
debts are now stuck in real estate. My friends all have (fake) gucci, LV,
brand name products. They take out loans to afford conspicuous lifestyle.
These things are all for show. Some of them are paying all of their salaries
into the mortgage payment every month!

\- Myth: Chinese economy is doing fine. Truth: Many of my banker friends
(expats and locals) know that it's all propped up by debts that will collapse
any day now. There's a massive inflation happening everywhere, from food to
housing to foreign products. It's harder to harder to get money out of China
(I'm helping some with bitcoins). Most of them aren't optimistic.

\- Myth: China is leading in green-tech, research, innovation, etc. Truth:
tons of copy, chabuduo (good enough), cheating in classes and in business,
pollution in Shanghai and Shenzhen is still cancer causing, most smart people
want to go abroad.

~~~
tensalores
I've also traveled to tons of cities in China and what I found is that many
expats and local Chinese that hang around the expat bubble have a similar
"doom and gloom" viewpoint.

Whereas when I started to hang around local, blue collar Chinese workers (who
don't speak English or hang around expats at all), their outlooks were
extremely optimistic about China's future.

It makes me wonder if this is more of a class issue. The poorer, blue collar
workers will start to prosper more, but the upper-middle class will start to
face difficulties.

I would also add that all my Chinese friends that stayed in China are
wealthier than those that left. And of those that left, many are returning to
China. But again, these are all people that are outside the expat bubble so
perhaps their viewpoints would be different.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Almost any foreigner who lives in china for more than a few years develops a
healthy amount of cynicism to keep going (those that don’t inevitably leave).
It has nothing to do with an expat bubble (most of us work jobs around mostly
Chinese, and spent way more time in zhongguancun than sanlitun).

A lot of my Chinese coworkers left for the states while I was there. Something
about “pollution and young kids” was their reason, not to make more money. You
can make a lot of money in china, as long as you don’t mind knocking a few
years off your lifespan (and just forget about it if you have kids, unless you
can afford the private schools with full bubbles around them, and even
then....).

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sgt101
For most of the 20th century the UK did disproportionately well in the metrics
of scientific research - Nobel prizes, key articles.. The UK has not had the
kind of outstanding economic success that should have accrued to it if these
things matter economically. Especially once north sea oil is removed from the
calculation.

~~~
HarryHirsch
Maybe it has to do with deindustrialization. ICI in its days was a scientific
and economic force. Nowadays no one does chemistry any longer, especially not
in Britain. The only thing that is produced in Britain nowadays is financial
malfeasance.

~~~
sgt101
errm - well I think that the folks at AstraZeneca and GSK may not think so...

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HarryHirsch
The way research is done at companies like these has really changed - nowadays
it's all mergers & acquisitions, look in Wikipedia at just how many companies
AZ has acquired since the merger, it wasn't like that before the 1990s. These
companies are knowledge brokers and what research is done is outsourced to
contract research organizations.

Back then, everything was done in-house. The Frythe employed people like
Joseph Chatt and James Black. You don't have central research like that any
longer, except at Facebook/Amazon/Google/Microsoft, and that's a problem. They
can sell us ads but will not come up with the next antibiotic when the present
ones have become useless.

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Darmani
With all this talk of publication output, I'd like to see some examples of
good research coming out of mainland Chinese universities.

In my field (programming languages), I can name one total paper that I liked
that came from a mainland Chinese university. It stood out for that reason. A
friend in another field (CS theory) complained similarly: massive amounts of
shoddy work comes out of China, but nothing worth reading.

Meanwhile, China now has a spam journal called "Nature and Science," so you
can tell your friends "I have 5 papers in Nature and Science."

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Ah, can I ask what paper it is? I’m in PL, and unless it’s coming out of MSR
China, I haven’t seen PL papers that are interesting. China isn’t into PL,
though, and it gets better in systems (big data, cloud, whatever is hot these
days), there are some good labs with good output (Andy Yao’s algo lab at
qinghua). Many of the researchers are foreigners however (just like in the
USA).

I’m curious about the quality of published work coming out of china in ML. Has
anyone who does ML research read recently a paper that came out of china that
had something really useful to them in it? I think those are fairly good
measures of output (a contribution found useful).

~~~
Darmani
Hi Sean! We met a few weeks ago at OOPSLA.

The paper I have in mind is Zhai et al's "Automatic Model Generation from
Documentation for Java API Functions" presented at ICSE last year, from
Nanjing University. It is arguably more of an SE paper though, and a lot of
the authors are at US/Canadian universities; for all I know, she did most of
the work in the US.

Still, the number of good faculty who come from China is growing; it's only a
matter of time before some of them choose to start research groups back home.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Mei Hong’s group among others do well enough at PKU in SE. Never saw anything
out of NJU, interesting.

China’s normal research faculty system is really messed up, more so than the
American system. Special labs like Andy Yao’s are actually funded well (so no
need to body shop your grad students to make ends meet), but seem to be the
exception. Let’s see what happens.

~~~
Darmani
Body shop? Explain. How exactly is the system messed up.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
It’s like you as a professor have grad students in your lab, not just a few
like a western professor, but maybe 10 or even 20. A company needs some work
done, you need the money, your grad students need to graduate, so...they use
the lab to do the work for the company, professor gets paid (important since
their normal salary is 10k RMB/month or less), grad students get to graduate,
company gets cheap labor....

It was really annoying to us because the professors would always keep their
best students (especially undergrads, the good ones were better than grad
students as they would go abroad and not become grad students in china) not
allowing them to work for us as interns unless we had really tight guanxi with
them. America is still 10 times better than china in this regards. Unless they
root out the corruption, they are never going to advance beyond paper farms no
matter how much money they throw at it.

~~~
Darmani
Interesting. So, I understand that the grad students are not interested in the
research. Are they writing papers on these "projects?" What good is a Chinese
Ph. D. then?

Some European (Belgian?) students told me that, in their country, it was
common to have an "industry-funded" Ph. D. (hence all the people I've met
doing DSLs for insurance companies). I wonder to what extent their system is
similar.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Think of it like a very focused internship. You still get something out of it
(you did the work after all!), but it’s not like you got to explore your own
thing and there was a lot more grunt work involved; since the professor had 20
student you also got a lot of experience in managing other students (senior
PhDs will direct junior PhDs and master students, who will direct undergrads
if any, you might rarely see the professor unless you are at the top of the
lab). In that sense, many employers might find a chinese grad degree more
preferable to a western one. On the other hand, research breakthroughs are
much less likely.

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tarboreus
Does it seem like "productivity" shouldn't be measured in number of papers?
Isn't that how we got ourselves into the reproducibility mess?

~~~
tomkat0789
Agreed. These couple of sentences deflate the click-baity title a bit:

"The report echoes my earlier observations: lots of new countries are become
scientific powers in terms of publication output, with China leading the
charge. The major claim made by the report is that developed countries
continue to dominate in terms of highly cited publications."

The trend the article is talking about is China is catching up in terms of
publication output. I've heard elsewhere that in Chinese universities things
like tenure, promotions etc. are heavily weighted by publication output -
perhaps without much respect for the research quality. I could see some
fields/journals becoming echo chambers where researchers spam publications
without actually making meaningful technical accomplishments. That's probably
what we're seeing.

~~~
njarboe
Professors in China get cash bonuses for publications in major western
journals. The average payment for a Science or Nature paper is $44k and the
average university professor makes $8k per year. See [1] for details and other
journal payout rates. Imagine if US professors got half a million dollars for
publishing in Nature or Science. The gaming going on to get published would be
even crazier than it already is.

[1] [https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608266/the-truth-about-
ch...](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608266/the-truth-about-chinas-cash-
for-publication-policy/)

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coliveira
This is an enormous exercise in trying to prove that, despite reality, China
doesn't matter in research and related areas. It is futile. The results of
scientific production are a lagging indicator, and China nowadays produces
almost as much research as the US. China is a growing society, with growing
life standards, while the US life standards are stagnating. I was once a China
doubter, these days are over however. While the US is constantly worried about
supporting its oligarchy, China is using all its resources to invest in a
better society. While this battle is not completely lost to the US, it seems
more and more like the situation that lead the UK to its downfall.

~~~
dionian
I don't think quantity of research is an important thing to measure

~~~
coliveira
The rise of a generation that believes that scientific output is not
important, even in a technical field like ours, is an indicator that makes me
bearish on the future of the American society.

~~~
gipp
I think you're misinterpreting his comment. I'm fairly sure he's raising issue
with "quantity" of research as a useful metric for scientific strength. China
_produces_ massive amounts of research, but is positively inundated with
fraud, to a much higher degree than the West, and makes the West's publish or
perish mindset look positively relaxed.

~~~
coliveira
I know there is fraud going on, but I see it as a (unintended) consequence of
the general increase in production. I also know the scientific literature and
there is a huge production of real papers from Chinese authors, so yes, this
is just another way to badmouth the changes that are happening in China.

~~~
elefanten
You're doing major mental gymnastics to perceive it as "just another way to
badmouth" China. People made descriptive comments about absolute quantity of
publishing and some observations about how well that correlates with national
success. Neither the article nor the commenters here have denied that quality
and impactful research is also coming out of China.

~~~
carlmr
I would even go as far to say that quantity in and of itself is negative. If
you only get more quantity and no more quality, then you have more noise. More
papers to wade through to get something useful. Meaning that the quality
papers presented by the well-meaning Chinese researchers will more or less
likely not even get read, because they're buried under a pile of horseshit.

This is why I would never hire Indian software engineers. There are a few good
ones, like in every country, but they're hard to find among a sea of terrible
software engineers that went into software engineering, because everyone does,
and that went to a school only teaching with rote memorization.

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KaoruAoiShiho
Seems obvious to me that it's because of language. China cares more about
rankings so they'll force people to push in english journals (to their own
detriment) where they get cited. Most of the world doesn't speak Japanese so
japanese papers don't get cited.

~~~
ausvisaissues
The problrm is that Japanese journals are less competitive. So, second-rate
researchers can continue to publish in these and "work" (i.e., look
productive).

The biggest problem with Japanese universities is not funding (there is to
much), but the old chaff with tenure.

Unfortunately old second-rate researchers has a lot of institutional power
(and funding).

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projectramo
Research is an input into productivity, but you need the application of
research to actually turn it into productivity.

This is a little self congratulatory in HN, but entrepreneurship is the
application of research. So you need that to "activate" research.

China is catching up not (just) because of research but also because they're
applying it.

~~~
thatcat
>entrepreneurship is the application of research

Engineering is applied research, entrepreneurship is one method of funding
engineering.

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nihonde
The premise of this headline is that the USA is indisputably in the lead and
that the winner is whoever catches up the USA. After spending years in Asia,
my impression is that there is another game being played entirely, and the USA
is merely a player whose ability to interfere in the outcome is being
carefully managed. (And the same is true about Russia, incidentally.) I won't
be at all surprised if Asia rules the world by the time I'm an old man.

~~~
whathaschanged
The same thing was said about Japan.

~~~
nradov
Indeed. I'm old enough to remember the panicky statements by US politicians
about how the Japanese were going to destroy our auto industry, dominate the
next generation of computers, buy up all our real estate, etc. It never
happened, and then the Japanese wrecked their own economy.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Decade_(Japan)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Decade_\(Japan\))

~~~
oblio
I think such prophecies are greatly exaggerated, since it's rare that a
developed country "gets taken over" by another country. The only cases that
come to mind would Germany and Japan after WW2 and even these bounced back and
took back control. And that was after WW2, so after huge disruptions.

But, getting back on track, things are different. China is 10x the size of
Japan. If China's GDP per capita gets at least close to that of Japan's, they
will both double the world's economy and also become 50% of it, like the US
was a few decades ago. They will dwarf everyone, including the US. So there
will definitely be a huge Chinese influence, world wide.

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oihssovhusvoh
it's not a race guys

~~~
Animats
Yes, it is, in an economy where exports are a huge part of the economy. Fall
behind and you're competing with Bangadesh for the T-shirt business.

~~~
conanbatt
Thats not how any of it works. If china came out with a 1 dollar iphone X2,
both americans and chinese would be much richer.

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tritium

      "catching up" and "falling behind"
    

Within the context of this article, the thing gained or lost is capacity for
_Scientific Research_ , and the article suggests renaming an NSF report.

It is _not_ a statement about " _things in general_ " around the world.

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mfrw
IMHO, I think it is a good thing as now it implies a knowledge-race (akin to
the arms-race). Whatever happens, eventually all humanity benefits from the
development.

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wiineeth
Thing i love about japan is they think very out of the box compared to others.
i don't how their society gets it but it's kind of amazing.

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lyrachord
I found that so many people are stupy which cannot think about a question with
a bit of intelligence. One of the evilest thing is the argument of orient-west
politics. Let's despise them. Most people is just small potato, politics is
really matter no you. Just push forward to the future of human being!

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partycoder
I am not impressed. China has been sending students abroad for years, and that
was a significant shortcut to the state of the art.

