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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: 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.