7 ms·

They have resources, land and an interest in local manufacturing. Chinese software engineers are good enough for Baidu (and have big names like Ng to help them

by Joof 10y ago

They have resources, land and an interest in local manufacturing. Chinese software engineers are good enough for Baidu (and have big names like Ng to help them get up to speed). Even in America, we recognize that Chinese (and other asian cultures) are often better at a wide variety of academic subjects. Their great firewall and isolationism forced them to build their own software and it appears to work well. I'm convinced that some percentage of their enormous population can work in engineering as well or better than our engineers. Don't underestimate China.

seanmcdirmid 10y ago
Many Nobel prize winners have been Chinese, only one was a citizen of the PRC when they did the work/received the award. China's problem isn't it's people, but it's crazily dysfunctional government that wastes it's tremendous human capital.
- sangnoir 10y ago
  > Many Nobel prize winners have been Chinese, only one was a citizen of the PRC when they did the work/received the award Is that statement supposed to inform me about the shortcomings of the PRC, or those of the Nobel prize? I can't tell.
  - seanmcdirmid 10y ago
    It is supposed to inform you of the achievement of the Chinese people, and not to conflate them with the Chinese government.
jonnybgood 10y ago
> Even in America, we recognize that Chinese (and other asian cultures) are often better at a wide variety of academic subjects. That sounds a lot like that Asian stereotype. Excelling in school and excelling in research are two different things.
- Joof 10y ago
  Only if we apply the stereotype to all Asian individuals. In general Asians comprise a larger portion of American academics than the Asian American population indicates and Asian students perform highly across the world. The obvious problem with China is that it oppressed or threw out it's previous generations of academics, but they have the means and will to recover after several generations.
AJ007 10y ago
I would consider myself a China skeptic but it definitely doesn't help anyone to blanket say the US/West is better or China is inferior. China does certain things extremely well at scale and I have little doubt that some of the most important companies of the next decades will be fully Chinese. There are other nuances that may give China different disadvantages - some which may turn out to be ultimately meaningless. What are the longer term consequences of Chinese wanting to leave China vs people of all countries trying to get to the US/West? What are the consequences of China's demographic problems, structural debt, potential ethnic strife, other geo-political problem? Will this inhibit long term capital creation in China? Japan's growth miracle put it at the front of global innovation for a while, but it came to an end. For a while Americans were really concerned about Japan taking over the world. It is possible that the incredible things China does will, at the end of the day, help them tolerate some of the negatives yet fail to thrive. What 2040+ looks like I think no one can predict, because much of the outcome will be divided between central government choices and random external global events.
- blahi 10y ago
  Japan is especially apt comparison. All Asian countries have huge cultural problems. The Japanese were very good at mass producing supply lines. A few people do the important job and a million drones watch blinking lights on a machine. When their economy had to shift services (which was accelerated by software) they failed miserably. I won't go into too much detail but there are fundamental differences in how people in the west and people in Asia communicate information. In the west, it is the speaker's responsibility to make himself understood. In China, it is the other way around. It might seem like a very minute detail or inconsequential but things like these are what shape societies.
  - ptx 10y ago
    > I won't go into too much detail but there are fundamental differences in how people in the west and people in Asia communicate information. In the west, it is the speaker's responsibility to make himself understood. In China, it is the other way around. Do you know where I can find some details on these differences in communication style?
randcraw 10y ago
Wadwha is not denigrating China's potential or the top 1% of their engineers (like those hired by Baidu). His point is that the average BS in engineering from China is significantly inferior to the average BS in engineering from a developed country. This has been widely reported by others, and it reflects and presages continuing problems inherent in the ability of China's central planning approach (quantity >> quality) in building a future economy that can compete after its wage advantages fade and its (real) GDP slows to resemble that of other mature / developed economies. The article's main point is valid. When you automate manufacturing, you no longer compete on wages. Advantage devolves to cost of raw materials, power, and transportation. No single nation can win that game, not even if China's ruling party spends a trillion yuan building out their infrastructure. An automated factory can be built anywhere and operated there at the same cost as anywhere else. The final remaining advantage then is location. Thus future manufacturing will migrate and become increasingly local, placed as close to the consumer as possible. Inevitably, any attempt to evolve China's manufacturing by employing automation is destined to end in the same commodification that automation always produces.
- Joof 10y ago
  The conclusion may be somewhat of a logical fallacy; distribution will be local to cheap materials and depend heavily on tax codes. Shipping the end product isn't a huge cost. A main point in his argument was that they couldn't engineer robotics as well as the US due to poor education. I very sincerely doubt this. With the size of the Chinese population, we can afford to look at their top engineers and compare them to ours. Averages mean very little in this case.

by Joof 10y ago

seanmcdirmid 10y ago

Many Nobel prize winners have been Chinese, only one was a citizen of the PRC when they did the work/received the award. China's problem isn't it's people, but it's crazily dysfunctional government that wastes it's tremendous human capital.

sangnoir 10y ago
> Many Nobel prize winners have been Chinese, only one was a citizen of the PRC when they did the work/received the award Is that statement supposed to inform me about the shortcomings of the PRC, or those of the Nobel prize? I can't tell.
- seanmcdirmid 10y ago
  It is supposed to inform you of the achievement of the Chinese people, and not to conflate them with the Chinese government.

jonnybgood 10y ago

> Even in America, we recognize that Chinese (and other asian cultures) are often better at a wide variety of academic subjects. That sounds a lot like that Asian stereotype. Excelling in school and excelling in research are two different things.

Joof 10y ago
Only if we apply the stereotype to all Asian individuals. In general Asians comprise a larger portion of American academics than the Asian American population indicates and Asian students perform highly across the world. The obvious problem with China is that it oppressed or threw out it's previous generations of academics, but they have the means and will to recover after several generations.

AJ007 10y ago

I would consider myself a China skeptic but it definitely doesn't help anyone to blanket say the US/West is better or China is inferior. China does certain things extremely well at scale and I have little doubt that some of the most important companies of the next decades will be fully Chinese. There are other nuances that may give China different disadvantages - some which may turn out to be ultimately meaningless. What are the longer term consequences of Chinese wanting to leave China vs people of all countries trying to get to the US/West? What are the consequences of China's demographic problems, structural debt, potential ethnic strife, other geo-political problem? Will this inhibit long term capital creation in China? Japan's growth miracle put it at the front of global innovation for a while, but it came to an end. For a while Americans were really concerned about Japan taking over the world. It is possible that the incredible things China does will, at the end of the day, help them tolerate some of the negatives yet fail to thrive. What 2040+ looks like I think no one can predict, because much of the outcome will be divided between central government choices and random external global events.

blahi 10y ago
Japan is especially apt comparison. All Asian countries have huge cultural problems. The Japanese were very good at mass producing supply lines. A few people do the important job and a million drones watch blinking lights on a machine. When their economy had to shift services (which was accelerated by software) they failed miserably. I won't go into too much detail but there are fundamental differences in how people in the west and people in Asia communicate information. In the west, it is the speaker's responsibility to make himself understood. In China, it is the other way around. It might seem like a very minute detail or inconsequential but things like these are what shape societies.
- ptx 10y ago
  > I won't go into too much detail but there are fundamental differences in how people in the west and people in Asia communicate information. In the west, it is the speaker's responsibility to make himself understood. In China, it is the other way around. Do you know where I can find some details on these differences in communication style?

randcraw 10y ago

Wadwha is not denigrating China's potential or the top 1% of their engineers (like those hired by Baidu). His point is that the average BS in engineering from China is significantly inferior to the average BS in engineering from a developed country. This has been widely reported by others, and it reflects and presages continuing problems inherent in the ability of China's central planning approach (quantity >> quality) in building a future economy that can compete after its wage advantages fade and its (real) GDP slows to resemble that of other mature / developed economies. The article's main point is valid. When you automate manufacturing, you no longer compete on wages. Advantage devolves to cost of raw materials, power, and transportation. No single nation can win that game, not even if China's ruling party spends a trillion yuan building out their infrastructure. An automated factory can be built anywhere and operated there at the same cost as anywhere else. The final remaining advantage then is location. Thus future manufacturing will migrate and become increasingly local, placed as close to the consumer as possible. Inevitably, any attempt to evolve China's manufacturing by employing automation is destined to end in the same commodification that automation always produces.

Joof 10y ago
The conclusion may be somewhat of a logical fallacy; distribution will be local to cheap materials and depend heavily on tax codes. Shipping the end product isn't a huge cost. A main point in his argument was that they couldn't engineer robotics as well as the US due to poor education. I very sincerely doubt this. With the size of the Chinese population, we can afford to look at their top engineers and compare them to ours. Averages mean very little in this case.