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Innovating?

China still seems to be mostly in a catching up and copying phase.

Not to say their accomplishments are anything but impressive. But look at the space station they’re building. Impressive achievement, but a fairly conservative design. Meanwhile the US has worked on inflatable space station modules, and it seems like that USA will make commercial space stations well before China.

For what I’ve seen USA has far more innovate designs in the works for rocket engines, rockets, spacecraft, space planes, space stations, satellites, etc.

There are impressive innovations from China too, in the space of quad copters, solar power, robot vacuums, EVs, etc. But all-in-all it feels to me that their advanced innovations from all of China isn’t much beyond what we see from much smaller countries like Korea, Japan, Taiwan, etc. Not that amazing considering their population size.

Their population is now shrinking, the economy is getting worse, they have an insane level of debt (especially when including shadow banking), they don’t do real immigration, they’re getting more hostile to expats, they have some brain drain, ... I suspect we’re seeing peak China.




Being in denial and bitching about what isn't denied, instead of taking steps to stay on top and specifically ahead of China, is a great way to lose and lose harder when the US (and the west at large) still has (soon to be had) a chance.

Unless you're a politician running for office, you don't win by arguing your opponent is shit and debilitated and losing and then proceed to do nothing.


A lot of steps are being taken to "stay ahead" though. Consider something like the CHIPS act, I actually got offered a research grant for the summer from it. This is the first time I felt such direct influence and urgency from the politicians


I agree we are finally doing something, which is far better than the nothing we've been doing until the past few years, but in my opinion it's nowhere near enough yet to make up. China is on the third roll out of their equivalent of our CHIPS Act[1], where is ours?

We need more financial incentives, more trade restrictions, harder and heavier diplomacy, and indeed even exercising our military might where necessary if we want to stay the preeminent superpower and continue Pax Americana.

China is a very motivated and ambitious country, they have every reason to kick the US and by extension the west off the pedestal. We are at the point we can't just sit and go "Made In China means Crap" anymore, we need to take them seriously and act like it or we will lose our era.

[1]: https://slashdot.org/story/24/05/27/1327206/china-sets-up-th...


Why does this read like a child defending his dad before other children? Propaganda and nationalist ideology really makes people sound like children. Liberals prediction of china's economic collapse is especially funny, you have predicted china's imminent collapse for decades, at some point you should realize that western "economics" is a faith-based cult that can't predict anything.




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