SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
China has a "stunning lead" over the US:
The Biden administration might be limiting China's ability to manufacture advanced chips, but according to an independent think tank, the Asian nation is still ahead of the US when it comes to research in 37 out of 44 crucial and emerging technologies, including AI, defense, and key quantum tech areas.
Insider reports that the Canberra-based Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) believes China has a "stunning lead" over the US when it comes to high-impact research across the majority of critical and emerging technology domains.
[...] The think tank notes that for some of these technologies, the ten leading research institutions are based in China and are collectively generating nine times more high-impact research papers than the second-ranked country, which is usually the US. What could be especially worrying for America is that two areas where China really excels are Defense and space-related technologies. ASPI writes that China's advancements in nuclear-capable hypersonic missiles took the US by surprise in 2021.
How is China so far ahead? Some of it is down to imported talent. The report notes that one-fifth of its high-impact papers are being authored by researchers with postgraduate training in a Five-Eyes country (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States). However, most of China's progress comes from deliberate design and long-term policy planning by President Xi Jinping and his predecessors.
The near-term effects of China's lead could see it gaining a stranglehold on the global supply of certain critical technologies, while the long-term impact could result in the authoritarian state gaining more global influence and power.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Sunday March 05, @07:59AM (5 children)
Not much detail in TFA, but it seems believable.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 05, @05:44PM (2 children)
Not really.
On the ground in US universities, it's a shitshow. Chinese occupancy of student roles, researcher roles and now admin roles. It's importation of Chinese culture into science with all the associated authoritarian values and corruption. One insidious thing to note is the revisionism of articles that cite mainly/only other Chinese authors regardless of if the idea was invented earlier elsewhere. It's hard not to see this as deliberate boosting (corruption) of peer citation as a metric - or it could simply be laziness. Either way, the drive that motivates the doing of science - interest in truth, solving problems - is not being cultivated. If on the other hand, you enjoy authority - and many do it seems - this is good news.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Monday March 06, @05:29PM (1 child)
In my field almost all of the Western-funded academics that I can think of are Westerners. I have a view of probably about 100 different university groups, but pertaining to one particular field. Not so many oriental students as well.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 07, @12:10AM
What field? What part of the country?
(Score: 3, Informative) by richtopia on Sunday March 05, @06:08PM
You have to follow the links: the summary is from Techspot which covered a Business Insider article which cite's the original ASPI report: https://www.aspi.org.au/report/critical-technology-tracker [aspi.org.au]
I'm reading the report now, but it is an easy read and covers ramifications much better than the summary articles. The Techspot article does include the most valuable image from the article front-and-center: a list of all technologies with the dominant country and potential risk of monopolization.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Sunday March 05, @09:16PM
Not much detail in TFA
Or in other words, nothing to see here. Like the coffee cup my daughter gave me says, "nice story, now show me the data."
Carbon, The only element in the known universe to ever gain sentience
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Sunday March 05, @07:59AM (53 children)
Just like bacteria you hit with antibiotics: eventually they evolve and the antibiotics don't work anymore.
Russia is eolving out of US-dependency too, albeit more slowly and starting from a lower starting point.
The US have initiated their own slide into irrelevance when they initiated their embargo and forced their enemy to evolve.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by canopic jug on Sunday March 05, @10:47AM (46 children)
It's less the embargo and more that the US does not have a long term strategy, especially when it has come to education aside from divestment. You can lead in science and technology if national conditions (and sentiment) prevent bringing up new skilled specialists.
For over 40 years now, basically two going on three generations, there has been effectively no basic education. The Reagan administration cut the education budget by significant double-digit percentages and then each year since then has chipped away at what is left. His administration especially targeted research and development. Cutting investments in education always costs far more in the long run and now we are reaping that lack of investment. There can be a few good universities and colleges remaining still but that does not do much good if the incoming students lack not just the prerequisites but even the basics.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 05, @11:50AM (37 children)
Just need the US to somehow convince more Chinese students to take up "Gender Studies" instead of Science and Tech stuff. 😂
Also that being smart is a bad thing - the US went past the "being stupid is just as good as being smart" point: https://aphelis.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/ASIMOV_1980_Cult_of_Ignorance.pdf [aphelis.net]
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 05, @12:39PM (36 children)
And yet, for a hundred years or more, the United States has been the brightest beacon of advanced technological research in the world. Almost as if allowing all people the freedom to think for themselves is a net positive!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 05, @01:34PM (17 children)
The USA did well in aerospace after getting some Nazis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip [wikipedia.org]
But after that bunch retired/died NASA didn't seem to achieve that much really.
The US is a bright beacon because it's one of the few places in the world where you can start a company, lose billions every quarter for years and still keep going.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday March 05, @01:43PM (16 children)
Intelligence can't compensate for a bad system. NASA turned into a vehicle for transferring public funds to various interests. Perhaps you ought to look at SpaceX instead of NASA for an example of "achieving"?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 05, @06:05PM (9 children)
Well that's just psueudo intellectual bullshit. Intelligence is the ONLY way out of a bad system. Dipshit.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday March 05, @11:26PM (8 children)
And NASA is a great counterexample. There's a lot of smart people in NASA. They haven't fixed this system in fifty years.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 05, @11:32PM (3 children)
They are a military organization beholden to hierarchical chains of command. Not exactly a creative environment.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday March 06, @12:03AM (2 children)
My point exactly. Once they abandoned a productive path, there was no way to get back from inside the organization.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 06, @01:11AM (1 child)
Well, my point exactly is that whatever positive environment exists anywhere was arrived at by escaping a poor environment. Your position is that there is no way out, my position is that that there is only 1 way out.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday March 06, @12:22PM
And my point is that won't happen from inside NASA.
There's plenty of ways, they just require outside action. SpaceX is one of those ways.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Gaaark on Monday March 06, @11:58AM (3 children)
Kind of hard to fix something where your funding keeps changing all the time and getting cut and cut and cut: try to have long-term goals with unknown future funding.
At that point, all you get is career bureaucrats.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday March 06, @12:20PM (1 child)
The thing is "getting cut and cut and cut" hasn't been happening since the 1970s. NASA funding is more than ample for long term goals. And if you look at things like the James Webb Space Telescope, they do carry out long term goals. The real problem is that NASA abandoned their primary role long ago and spends far more on dead end technology development and maintaining funding networks, than doing stuff in space.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Monday March 06, @09:39PM
Correct: the geeks left (or gave up) and the bureaucrats took over. :(
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Tuesday March 07, @12:14AM
Pournelle's Iron Law in action.
https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html [jerrypournelle.com]
Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people:
First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.
Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.
The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Sunday March 05, @09:22PM (5 children)
Perhaps you ought to look at SpaceX instead of NASA for an example of "achieving"?
Space-X has robots on Mars? Vehicles past the heliosphere still sending data? Two space-based telescopes, even the old one is mind-blowing? Granted, they did do better than the Space Shuttle with reusable equipment, but the shuttle was 40 years ago.
Carbon, The only element in the known universe to ever gain sentience
(Score: 1, Disagree) by khallow on Sunday March 05, @11:30PM (4 children)
One thing isn't like the rest. Lowering the cost of Earth to orbit is vastly more important than token missions in space. You can say that the Shuttle was 40 years ago, but NASA hasn't upgraded it since - it has turned out to be a deadend. SpaceX is a genuine game-changer.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by PiMuNu on Monday March 06, @05:39PM (2 children)
> token missions in space
That's a bit unfair. One might argue that developing new rockets is exactly *not* NASA's role. NASA's job is to do interesting things in space, rovers and space telescopes and what not. The rocket is an implementation detail.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday March 07, @12:17AM
Indeed, but they've spent $40-50 billion on it so far and it'll grow to over $90 billion, if they keep it up as planned. That's 3-4 full years of NASA funding on developing a new rocket that will suck the oxygen out of the room for their other projects even if it succeeds as planned. My take is that with a modest change [soylentnews.org] in the unmanned program (well, aside from just dropping SLS permanently), they can vastly increase the science output from their spacecraft that they're supposed to be deploying. The TL;DR is that instead of massive concentration on R&D for the next mission, they deploy a number of copies of the old mission first - say 5-10 of each spacecraft made.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Tuesday March 07, @12:17AM
Perhaps rockets were more interesting to develop when they were tipped with warheads. /s
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 11, @08:36PM
Let the for profit companies do the cheap stuff with good enough technology so they can pay their shareholders. Let NASA do the cutting edge dangerous and difficult stuff with public money as an investment in the future of the country.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 06, @12:10AM (17 children)
Wonderful. You know a bit of history. But, a hundred years ago is history. So is 20 years ago. A year ago is history. Today the US is sliding into irrelevancy. Read the post above about getting Chinese students to study gender fluidity, women's history, black history, and underwater basket weaving. STEM is where students need to be, if we want to remain technologically relevant.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 06, @01:32AM
My point was that Azimov's "cult of ignorance", that he claims the US always has had, doesn't appear to have have prevented the technological rise and dominance of the USA. So is it really a big deal to worry about?
I'm going to need more than some pearl-clutching about vociferous social studies students to convince me that the largest economy, and largest most technologically advanced military, is sliding to irrelevance in any meaningful timeframe. Especially if you're suggesting that China, with its teetering economy, time-bomb demographics, reactionary politics, and untested military, is going to slide any slower.
As of today, the greatest technological advancement released so far this year appears to be ChatGPT, and where was that developed? China?
No, the "AI" that China's top tech companies demonstrate to the public is little more than a woman with a microphone behind a low-FPS Unreal Engine stock avatar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wJRjQ_wMzA&t=80s [youtube.com]
Or perhaps you heard that now half of the planet's satellites were made by SpaceX. A Chinese company is that?
What advanced technology has China actually brought to the table in recent history? I don't mean rumours or propaganda, I mean actual products that can be acquired today. 5G you might say? Sure, Huawei played a part, but not as much as China wants you to think [ericsson.com]. Anything else?
Your pet social studies boogie men are irrelevant. You only think social studies students are a problem because your favourite news outlet is amplifying extremists. STEM is thriving, it's well paid, it's cool, it's in the zeitgeist, it's just not newsworthy.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday March 06, @12:31PM (15 children)
So if we didn't read the post above the US wouldn't be sliding into irrelevancy? Thanks for not telling us first, you meanie.
There has to be a need first for those students. One of the things missed here is that institutional and societal obstacles still happen - such as environmental regulations and NIMBYism against a host of industrial works (refineries, nuclear plants, and rare earth mines, for example). And the less flexible and open a society is, the less STEM it'll do. That's a large part of why Silicon Valley happened in California. STEM people tend to be weird and California used to handle weird better.
(Score: 2) by quietus on Monday March 06, @01:07PM (14 children)
Isn't California not also famous for its (extensive) environmental regulations?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday March 06, @01:24PM (13 children)
(Score: 2) by quietus on Tuesday March 07, @07:41AM (12 children)
Since which they've rested on their laurels. One of the interesting points raised in Frederick P. Brooks "The Design of Design" is that constraints are an advantage. They bound the design space, thus speeding up the task of deciding exactly what to design. Couldn't it be argued that, as people grow wealthier, they will long for better health, fresh air, crystal clear rivers? If that is so, wouldn't an economy with more strict environmental standards be better prepared for the future?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday March 07, @01:17PM (2 children)
(Score: 2) by quietus on Tuesday March 07, @04:23PM (1 child)
Want stuff == basis of advanced economy.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday March 07, @11:02PM
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday March 07, @01:48PM (8 children)
(Score: 2) by quietus on Tuesday March 07, @04:28PM (7 children)
To prepare for the future, you better surround yourself with people, and businesses who are also preparing for the future. You do realize that the Industrial Revolution first took hold in those places where wage costs were highest, don't you?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday March 07, @10:57PM (6 children)
Nope, and I doubt you realize that either! I'll note, for example, that the poorest tended to be the people employed in factories and mines.
Moving on, we see today a very high sensitivity to labor costs. They certainly aren't flocking to high wage cost locations today!
(Score: 2) by quietus on Wednesday March 08, @11:04AM (5 children)
Mmmm. If you really are interested in economic history, try to get hold of Fernand Braudel's books -- they're not in print anymore, but you can still find them in antique shops. He's a giant in the field, and his books are well worth the investment. Specifically, for industrial revolutions, read Civilization and Capitalism (it's a trilogy, like his other work, The Mediterranean).
For now, you'll have to contend with a 2015 article from The Economic History Review, The high wage economy and the industrial revolution: a restatement [sci-hub.st].
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday March 08, @03:36PM (4 children)
Sure there is a logical explanation via supply and demand for why expensive labor would incentivize cheaper automation. But that ignores that there were other paths that could be taken. Another is simply that UK exports go down, causing labor value to decline as well, and wages to go down. That is, wage differences equalize and nothing changes.
And that's where California heads now. Sure, they have those high labor costs, but they also have a variety of onerous obstructions to anyone who wants to build improved automation: aggressive environmental regulations, labor union protectionism, goofy political ideology, etc. They'll get the high costs (including high cost of living!) without the benefits. And a large, extremely poor population to boot. They still have a waning Silicon Valley so for the near future, we may see key automation improvements done in California, but there's not much room for them there.
(Score: 2) by quietus on Wednesday March 08, @05:09PM (3 children)
I see you made it to Table 1. I am surprised.
(Score: 2, Funny) by khallow on Wednesday March 08, @06:51PM (2 children)
(Score: 2) by quietus on Friday March 10, @03:33PM (1 child)
Luckily that doesn't happen all too often :P
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday March 15, @05:49PM
Let's consider an example of how California blocks automation: "AB 5" [wikipedia.org] a state law that attempted (and failed) to ban the practice of classifying gig economy workers as contractors. My take is that this was done merely to protect labor unions (and that we'll likely see future efforts to ban gig work). Any automation that significantly displaces workers would also run hard against this political opposition.
So why would someone developing new automation develop and apply it in California where their efforts could be torpedoed by hostile labor unions?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by RamiK on Sunday March 05, @01:38PM (1 child)
It's called an exit strategy: You cut all long term investments, milk whatever you can while you still have control over the establishment and then run off to whichever tax shelter you've been favoring throughout the years with all the gold you can carry.
compiling...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 05, @05:49PM
Why run away? Just re-brand success as stealing all the gold - "smart" - and stay in place.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by khallow on Sunday March 05, @01:39PM (4 children)
You do realize that federal spending on education is almost completely irrelevant to basic education and always has been even before Reagan, right? And it's probably a net harm to higher education and research? Sure, they get more money, but they do poorer quality education and research.
Like there's any sort of history to base that claim on? My take is that federal level spending on education is an example of something that's mildly worse than doing nothing at all. It's the opposite of investment.
Finally, they haven't actually cut the education budget. It went up even under Reagan [ed.gov] (who was something of a drunken sailor when it came to spending).
There's something wrong with the narrative.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by HiThere on Sunday March 05, @02:20PM (2 children)
That *ought* to be true, but it isn't. The feds control lots of things that affect the targets of education. One of the targets they've pushed is "teach everyone equally". This doesn't work when people AREN'T equal.
That said, a lot of the "love of ignorance" is *because* of local controls. People tend to not like things that challenge their preconceptions. And the US as always been one to push "faith over works". That said, we also praise "folks who successfully become rich". Considerations about *how* the became rich are usually secondary. And there's a lot of praise of "working hard", as long as the one doing the praising isn't expected to do the work.
All that said, the Chinese have their own problems. They appear to have greater tolerance for fake claims than even the US. And they react much more strongly against any truth that might be embarrassing. So you can't really trust any claims they make as to how advanced they are, even if those making the claim believe it. This, unfortunately, means that the report may be totally accurate. (China does have a large population, and has a history of [often] trusting scholars. And periods when scholars [i.e. mandarins before that was made hereditary] ran the government quite well...for certain senses of well.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 05, @05:56PM (1 child)
The Asian concept of "losing face" is the antithesis of scientific discovery. And I can't see them losing that any time in the next 1000 years. As Carl Sagan said, there is NO authority in science:
* Arguments from authority carry little weight—“authorities” have made mistakes in the past. They will do so again in the future. Perhaps a better way to say it is that in science there are no authorities.
* Argumentation cannot suffice for the discovery of new work, since the subtlety of Nature is greater many times than the subtlety of argument.
* Try not to get overly attached to a hypothesis just because it’s yours. It’s only a way station.
* If there’s a chain of argument, every link in the chain must work - not just most of them.
http://www.inf.fu-berlin.de/lehre/pmo/eng/Sagan-Baloney.pdf [fu-berlin.de]
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 06, @09:30AM
I see plenty of signs that Western researchers also care about "losing face".
There's enough for Planck to say this and be accurate enough: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle [wikipedia.org]
Not in all cases of course but enough to refute your "no authorities" claim.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Monday March 06, @09:18PM
The problem isn't spending per se, it's CLASS TO TEACHER RATIO (which devolves to spending).
Here's info on Canadian public vs. private schools:
https://www.azerinform.com/private-schools-in-canada/ [azerinform.com]
The rich don't want to pay taxes towards public schools, but are quite willing to pay through the nose for good private schools.
Also (and i think this is KEY: parents should have to sign a contract (like they do in private schools) about behaviour of their children:
Contracts should be introduced into the public school system. Immediately.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 3, Informative) by Reziac on Monday March 06, @02:52AM
Here is the funding data, which only goes back to 1980:
https://www2.ed.gov/about/overview/budget/history/index.html [ed.gov]
And some history:
https://www2.ed.gov/about/overview/focus/what.html [ed.gov]
However... school districts are all locally funded and locally operated. What business does the fed have with a department of education, let alone a budget? If it's such a good idea, why have things gone to hell since the advent of a much larger budget and Common Core?
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by quietus on Sunday March 05, @04:39PM (4 children)
That's both the US and the EU then -- got the distinct impression the EU is a bit further along the embargo front. But, to your point again: you mean like during the Cold War, with the embargo against the USSR, China, and a whole bunch of satellite states of theirs?
Talking about antibiotics and such: how's that Chinese mRNA vaccine thingy coming along?
(Score: 1) by Runaway1956 on Monday March 06, @12:15AM (3 children)
We're not back in the Cold War days. Today, we have a rival who was given every opportunity to beg, borrow, or steal all of our tech, our education, our corporate secrets, and even our government secrets. We though we could ride that horse, but the horse got the bit between his teeth, and he's running where HE wants to run.
Or, to put it another way - the world has changed drastically since the Cold War. The geopolitics have little resemblance from then, and now.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 2) by quietus on Tuesday March 07, @07:52AM (2 children)
Your comment made me wonder whether the geopolitics of the Cold War weren't really the geopolitics of today i.e. upstart empires trying to push the incumbent empire from the throne -- with communist versus capitalist rhetoric just being the new wrapping paper around traditional power structures.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday March 07, @02:20PM (1 child)
You're onto something. Marxist thinking underlies a lot of modern progressive thinking. The right to education, Universal Basic Income, universal health care, and more. Not all Marxist thinking is wrong, or evil, but Marxism is basically flawed. But, we see "new" movements espousing a lot of Marxist thinking. Today's Antifa, for instance, didn't pop out of a vacuum - the groundwork was laid a century or more ago, with previous example organizations. Sorting out the threads is a helluva big job, but, yes, yesterday's geopolitics have flowed into today's, with some of the same actors, some actors being replaced. It's life.
The Cold War was just the biggest, central theater within that ongoing, fluid geopolitical drama. Not much is going to change in the next few hundered years, I think.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by quietus on Tuesday March 07, @06:58PM
(T.H.White, Arthur, the Once and Future King)
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday March 06, @01:43AM
Russia evolved out of US-dependency back in the 1920s. What you see now is all them.
Depends on whether China and Russia can evolve even when "forced". China looks like it could - though I suspect it'll depend on whether they can throw off the yoke of the CCP. Russia does not.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 05, @12:28PM (11 children)
Which then raises the question, how does one determine what is "high-impact" research? Novelty? Usefulness? Profitability? No:
So most highly cited is the actual measure used here.
Which brings us to China.
The CCP wishes to project the image of PRC being a global superpower - militarily, economically, and technologically. They "eliminated poverty" by redefining "poverty" and then autocratically declaring it solved without any oversight. They claim to be world leaders in green energy and technology, while burning more coal than the rest of the world combined, and at an increasing rate, without any oversight.
This is the "face" culture of the CCP - it doesn't matter what you do, or how you do it, so long as you are perceived to be powerful and strong, and therefore respected.
Citations on academic papers must be one of the easiest metrics to game, especially when the academic bureaucracy is a division of the CCP itself, and gaming international bureaucratic systems is one thing that the CCP is actually good at.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 05, @02:04PM (4 children)
I guess you should tell the World Bank and the UN they're spreading fake news then: https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/lifting-800-million-people-out-of-poverty-new-report-looks-at-lessons-from-china-s-experience [worldbank.org]
https://news.un.org/en/story/2021/03/1087472 [un.org]
See also random google hits: https://www.wfp.org/countries/china [wfp.org]
I ain't a supporter of China but their government has definitely improved the lives of hundreds of millions over the past few decades. They've done a better job of it than India has (which has made some progress: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/415-million-exited-poverty-in-india-in-15-years-undp/articleshow/94927710.cms [indiatimes.com] )
Whether it's due to abandoning terrible policies (like Mao's) or other stuff, the result seems good for a lot of the Chinese citizens.
Yeah it's all just gaming: https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Chinese_researchers_crack_major_U.S._government_algorithm_used_in_digital_signatures [wikinews.org]
The US should probably stop doing this though: https://www.npr.org/2022/08/03/1114964240/new-battery-technology-china-vanadium [npr.org]
🤣
(Score: 2, Touché) by quietus on Sunday March 05, @04:54PM (3 children)
Your World Bank cite was released in Beijing, and made
So, not at all biased then. Just like your statement about India (are you Chinese, per chance?), followed by
I would rather think it's not about holding hands and singing Kumbaya together, but about becoming the workshop of the world. In which Japanese, European and, yes, even US companies played a big part, no?
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 06, @03:20AM (2 children)
The claim was:
World Bank and UN don't count as any oversight? Whatever it is the reality doesn't seem to match the OP's narrative - which implied the Chinese Gov defined it as solved without things actually improving...
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday March 06, @01:53PM
Well actually, they don't - not their job. Why would you even ask?
(Score: 2) by quietus on Tuesday March 07, @09:29AM
Fair point -- I can see how you could have read that implication.
For the record, I do not deny that poverty has been strongly, if not massively, reduced in China over the years. Here's a 2021 report [unicef.cn] from Unesco, about the reduction of child poverty in China.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 05, @06:01PM
Bingo!
Here's another interesting article that only cites Chinese authors... Science Has a Nasty Photoshopping Problem [nytimes.com]. Scroll to the end to see the fine print.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by ElizabethGreene on Sunday March 05, @07:43PM (4 children)
Comparing the USA's and China's GDP, it's not reasonable to assert that they haven't made tremendous economic progress in the last three decades, even if you assume the numbers have a significant fudge factor.
https://tradingeconomics.com/china/gdp [tradingeconomics.com]
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gdp [tradingeconomics.com]
You're right regarding coal power, but I don't find their or India's growth in that unreasonable. The "developed" world burned coal with reckless abandon for centuries to build their economies. It was cheap and ubiquitous. It's unfair to kneecap developing countries by blocking it. China is electrifying infrastructure for a billion people, and that requires a lot of energy. They're piling money into coal, natural gas, nuclear, and renewables to feed that need. IIRC, they're building nuclear capacity ten times faster than the rest of the world combined, and growing renewables at the same rate (%/yoy) as the US.
The idea that China is a backwater pretending to be a superpower is dangerous. They aren't just making cheap knock-offs of American tech anymore. We, the world, gave them trillions in exchange for cheap manufacturing. They took that money and invested it in education and infrastructure. The dividends from that investment have already created a strong middle class, but that's nothing compared to the real payoff that's coming. If they continue to maintain domestic stability (and dodge the bullet of investing trillions in policing the rest of the world) their next generation will rocket past every other country in science, economics, and engineering achievement.
To quote the movie Looper: "I'm from the future; you should go to China."
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Sunday March 05, @09:25PM
And everybody thought Nixon going to China was a GOOD thing...
Carbon, The only element in the known universe to ever gain sentience
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 05, @11:35PM
They also have a history of regular purges followed by authoritarian rulers followed by regular purges followed by etc. etc.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 06, @01:57AM (1 child)
The difference is that the developed world didn't know the damage that was being caused back then, and it was on a much smaller scale. Today, we know that burning coal releases tremendous amounts of CO2, which is driving extreme weather events, raising sea levels, destroying ecosystems, causing extinctions.
The developed world used ozone-destroying chemicals to build their economies. Is it therefore okay for China and India to pump those chemicals into the atmosphere? For how long? Until the entire ozone layer is destroyed?
The developed world also used chattel slavery to build their economies. Is it therefore okay for China and India to enslave people and force them to work to death? For how long? Until all their "troublesome" minorities are eradicated?
Wait, hang on though...
Isn't China part of the developed world? I thought they were the world's number 2 economy? Factory of the world? Challenging the US for global influence? They put a rover on the moon, and have their own permanently crewed space station FFS! How much more developed do they need to get, before we stop excusing their crimes as "growing pains"?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday March 07, @11:08PM
In a few centuries, it could be a serious problem. But it isn't now.
I'll note that we don't actually know how harmful ozone-destroying chemicals are. The evidence is heavily subject to observation bias. For example, we don't know if ozone holes are a new, alarming thing that required the effort we put into suppressing CFCs, or something that's been going on for the past five million years which might get mildly worse with that human contribution. We just know that when we looked for ozone holes, we saw them.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by ElizabethGreene on Sunday March 05, @07:01PM (5 children)
China has roughly the same number of 2 year/4year degree college graduates per year as the USA. If you exclude people on temporary student visas, they have three times as many PhDs per year.
With numbers like that it's inevitable we'll fall behind. The math is not hard. Any fudge factor you throw at it is eventually overwhelmed by sheer volume.
China also has strict testing requirements for entering university, something declining in the US. It seems unlikely that will improve the quality of our graduates, but the result of that experiment remains to be seen.
We live in interesting times.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 05, @07:35PM (1 child)
Disagree. That's like saying 1000 years of Dark Ages will lead to a Renaissance. The only thing that will help the Chinese is if American/Western anti-authoritarianism creeps into their decrepit system and changes it from within. And I guaronteeee that won't be appreciated.
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Thursday March 09, @08:23PM
I respectfully disagree, and I think I see your blind spot. It's easy to assume that China is ruled by the all-controlling authoritarian command economy that Communism is purported to be, and at the macro level this is the case. It's not that way down in the rank and file. My experience is they are extremely driven and ruthlessly capitalist. Competition is the rule with few exceptions. That drive is part of why corruption and cheating are such problems.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 06, @02:02AM
The math is not hard because you can just keep counting out RMB until you're given a passing grade.
(Score: 2) by gawdonblue on Wednesday March 08, @08:37PM (1 child)
I asked a Chinese co-worker yesterday about whether it is expensive to go to university in China, and he replied "No, not if you get into one of the good ones".
It seems that a higher entrance score means that you not only get to go to a better uni, but you also get to do it at a cheaper cost.
Interesting.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by ElizabethGreene on Thursday March 09, @08:00PM
I'm not an expert on this topic, but my understanding is similar. People that do well in testing go to fantastic schools for a pittance and people that don't make that bar get predated (more or less) by for profit schools.
The testing isn't just for undergrads either. They use standardized testing for graduate school. When I took chemistry on https://next.xuetangx.com/ [xuetangx.com] about a third of my classmates already knew the material and were really there working on English language proficiency for their grad school entrance tests.
(Score: 2) by MIRV888 on Sunday March 05, @10:59PM (5 children)
'most of China's progress comes from deliberate design and long-term policy planning'
We can't plan more than 2 years out.
This means China will win eventually.
I really don't envy how this is going to play out when it becomes obvious to the man on the street.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 05, @11:40PM (3 children)
lol how does long term planning work out long term? it's as if there is no correlation between the plan and what happens... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-year_plans_of_China [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by MIRV888 on Monday March 06, @10:57AM (2 children)
'This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues'
Long term planning is how anything of consequence gets done in the modern world.
This would include nuclear reactors, aircraft carriers, new production lines, civilian space vehicles, modern mines, Three Gorges Dam, and so on.
At the end of the day, long term planning and triple our population will win. There's nothing maybe about it.
Sadly a authoritarian one-party political system will defeat us, because we as a democratic republic cannot cooperate / negotiate internally.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 07, @12:20AM
The democratic system of government emerged from dictatorships. It took a long time and happened because the corruption and injustice inherent in those systems became intolerable. I would posit this is the natural course of things, inevitable.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday March 08, @04:06PM
But as has been repeated noted, China's ability to long term plan is greatly overrated. Their best progress of the past 70 years, for example, happened after they abandoned most of their long term planning from before 1980 and went to a system where they did a lot less long term planning!
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday March 07, @01:34PM
As I said [soylentnews.org] before:
Here, most of China's success comes from duplicating the lack of deliberate design and long-term policy planning that has been so successful for western governments, particularly the US. For a recent glaring example, the greatest advance in human space exploration since Apollo has happened due to the development of SpaceX's Falcon 9. A dotcom billionaire decided to do it. That happened despite all the planning at NASA - in fact the Department of Defense had a decade earlier broken up a stagnant oligopoly [soylentnews.org] that NASA had set up.
What's missed here is that the private world is more than adequate for any long term planning. Sure, there's a bunch of next quarter thinking out there. But that in large part exists because those long term planners in government bail out the "too big to fail" parties. Stop doing that and more people will start thinking about the future.
So here's my take. Don't interrupt an enemy while they're making a mistake. Let China do all that long term planning, then when the future doesn't turn out like they expected, pop that corn.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday March 06, @01:11AM (4 children)
Now, as I've said before, Marx is a natural-born critic. This means he's the bee's knees at pointing out what the problem is, but the pig's ear at providing a solution for it. So take the important points -- that *unfettered* (or un-/poorly-controlled) capitalism essentially eats itself to death and then dies choking on its own shit and vomit -- but come up with a solution that doesn't involve trying to bend the entirely of humanity around some pie-in-the-sky "wouldn't it be nice if" economic idea (communism).
No, the solution isn't communism or socialism, not because these can't work in theory, but because they can't work in practice. Most people are simply not high-minded enough to make it work. If people were angelic enough for communism to work, we'd be good enough for *any* economic system to work, including a complete and utter laissez-faire approach to economics. No, we have to work with what we have, and human nature being what it is, that means some form of capitalism. The solution is 1) sustainability (i.e., do capitalism in such a way that you can keep doing capitalism) and 2) remembering that capitalism is for humans, not humans for capitalism. More Norway, less USA, if you take my meaning.
So what does this have to do with China? Simple: for the last several decades, the US happily parasitized China and took advantage of its near-complete lack of environmental, financial, and human safeguards to get lots of cheap manufacturing done. Which means the manufacturing wasn't done here. Which means the capacity for manufacturing wasn't kept up -- after all, it's not lean and agile to have all that machinery and inventory sitting around unused, riiiiight? And like any parasitic organism in nature, the US became dependent on its host; like them, it lost the ability to do basic things for itself. When the host dies or moves on, what happens to the parasite?
Several years ago I wrote a journal about this exact subject, expanded to encompass imperial power as a whole, called Empires are Parasites, And Their Destiny is Decay [soylentnews.org]. This is what I'm talking about. People insist the US isn't an imperial power, but what else can it be called given our worldwide network of bases and our constant use (and abuse) of other countries for economic and financial advantage?
And the worst part is, all this did was make a few already wealthy people even more obscenely rich, at the cost of the entire middle class and the nation's political and noetic capital.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 06, @04:44AM
I guess we are laying the groundwork for the next species of existentialist chat bots to bullshit eachother about what it's all for and whether they're really real, until the Sun detonates.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday March 08, @07:43PM (2 children)
A trade hegemony. A bunch of military bases isn't that significant from an imperial point of view. You can project military power, but you don't hold territory. As to "constant use (and abuse) of other countries for economic and financial advantage"? That's standard country behavior.
I think the huge tell that US isn't an empire is that we stopped expanding territory back in the early 20th century when we relinquished the Philippines. For an empire, that's when the shark gets jumped since it's either expanding or decaying - so not expanding means it's decaying. But the US's peak power was actually a long stretch later after the Second World War.
I do not take your meaning. Norway has high resources going for it. Once their oil gets neutered by either regulation or depletion, they will be greatly less sustainable. The US's economy is more based on services and manufactured goods than natural resources. Those don't run out so easily.
As to remembering that capitalism is for humans, I also remember that high minded principles have a long history of backfiring when it comes to economics.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 11, @08:30PM (1 child)
Your religion is threatened once again.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday March 15, @05:14PM
(Score: 2) by SunTzuWarmaster on Monday March 06, @09:03PM