One thing I’ve noticed is that although eg; investing in R&D and STEM education in China has skyrocketed in the last 5-ish years in practice tech there still do

One thing I’ve noticed is that although eg; investing in R&D and STEM education in China has skyrocketed in the last 5-ish years in practice tech there still doesn’t seem extremely polished and talent coming to the US has been iffy on average (with the exception of the very top talent which is still excellent). A good proportion of Chinese research is still rampantly fraudulent and of the legitimate research only a small fraction ends up being truly innovative. This implies a low return on R&D investment. The same applies to software projects. At least in the OSS world you rarely see quality projects coming from China nowadays. The ones that do are almost always from companies with a US presence. Perhaps collaboration is difficult? Re: Face recognition— this is something that is so clearly going to be used as a tool for oppression yet when I speak to those currently in the mainland they sing its praises in dealing w/ COVID. We will see how the cards fall when COVID is over. My guess is you won’t see ethnic Uyghurs living in mainland China 15 years from now. Of course, every time a post about China comes up someone goes “oh but the US is the same”. No, it’s really not. The US has its fair share of issues with domestic spying and definitely some degree of repression but we still have a free and open internet, open discourse is permitted, and tools like strong encryption are widely available and even assisted in development by the government (eg; Tor).