5 ms·

Are expensive office buildings and high end transportation an indicator of an innovative country? They can definitely act as infrastructure to support innovatio

Are expensive office buildings and high end transportation an indicator of an innovative country? They can definitely act as infrastructure to support innovation but it remains to be seen.

hjfigkfkrkr 6y ago
They can build a Las Vegas in the time San Francisco can build a train station. Now imagine if they turned this focus to something else.
throwaway4good 6y ago
To be honest I find it amazing people are still questioning the growth of China and its capability of innovation. For all the years I have been following China, it has always been the same: China's economic numbers are exaggerated, just about to collapse, yeah sure they can make that gadget but can they make this gadget? Why is that? I think it says more about us in the west.
- toyg 6y ago
  The arguments are exactly the same as we had in Europe during the rise of the US. "They can only copy! They have no taste! They're all fraudsters! They're slavedrivers!" etc etc. This said, we won't have a real tipping point until China can rival Hollywood for quality and quantity of cultural output, and their language makes that quite difficult. This is one of the reasons the USSR never "won" even at the time when it was arguably more powerful and efficient than the US.
  - throwaway4good 6y ago
    Look up top grossing movies globally for 2020. Granted it is a special year.
  - jimmydef 6y ago
    Nowadays I hear a lot of people commenting about how excellent the quality of Japanese products are. How they have a "craftsmanship" culture where a master will spend his whole life perfecting a craft, etc. Recently read a reddit thread about a Japanese man making whisky in the 19th century. Overall a lot of praises for the Japanese on how they pursue excellence. Amazing how fast attitudes change. Just a few decades back, Japanese goods and Made in Japan had the same cheap, low quality reputation as Made in China goods today. I even distinctly remembered the same "Japanese people as a culture don't care about quality" comments which is the same as some people nowadays complaining that Chinese people have "chabuduo"(just enough) attitudes. Or the same accusations of no creativity. Funny how drastically these "deep-rooted" cultural attitudes in Japanese people have changed. Or maybe its not the culture of Japan that has changed but the perceptions others have of it. I reckon the same is for China.
  - hakfoo 6y ago
    I don't think it's language alone. Or even cultural differences. After all, I'd bet we could have a 500-post conversation here on HN with the prompt "what's your favourite anime?" Maybe part of it is economic risk. Localization and distribution would have some costs, and maybe nobody's willing to take a risk on "let's bring China's #1 movie to the US". Things like anime in the west got bootstrapped in obscure fandoms on an informal, low-budget, and sometimes downright bootleg way, which I'm not sure they want to do if they're trying to consciously develop soft power. I am somewhat surprised about how limited China's attempts at soft power seem to be. They don't have a prominent global media presence like, say, the BBC/DW/NHK. They don't seem to be tooting their horn well about their engineering advances. They don't even seem to have effective tourism marketing-- I can't think of the last time I saw an advertisement encouraging travel to China (even before the pandemic) while there are loads of travel documentaries on TV all conveniently sponsored by "(random state or European country) Tourism Office" I do think a missing piece is having a few more world-beating brands. Yeah, we have a few, (Lenovo, for example), but we're definitely at the point where people will say "I'm not going to buy a Chinese car/washing machine!" -- which feels about where Korea was in 1980 or Japan in 1955.
- johnnycerberus 6y ago
  I'm not questioning the growth of China. I'm only interested in its sustainability and its ability to innovate, to bring a new Apple, Tesla (not an anti-Apple, or an anti-Tesla) in the world or to contribute to the knowledge body of a science like physics. I'm from Romania and I've lived under communist times sprinkled with some open-market policies in which Citroen, Renault and other companies were running factories in my country. Something similar to what happens in China, but minus 1 billion, 430 million human resource. Based on my experience (I've also lived in Beijing for 2 years), it feels like history is just repeating. Look at why communism in Romania and Soviet Union failed: * Centralized governing system * Production excess, we continued to produce even if we didn't have any buyers and the quality was pretty bad (today you have Wish or Aliexpress through which you can sell literally anything, even people from my family are ordering crazy stuff from China that has no use at all, so China has the upper hand, we just didn't have that technology back then) * Lack of political diversity * No indicators of survivability, China is yet to go through a major crisis (Black Swan) to see how it handles it, the pandemic is not a Black Swan * Impedance mismatch between communism, atheism promoted by Marxism vs. Christianity that promotes individual thinking, Eatern cultures generally are more collectivistic, so again, China has the upper hand * Socialist countries are ticking time bombs, they implode when you don't expect them to happen, usually the trigger is local. Nobody thought that Soviet Union would collapse out of nowhere, I still remember reading articles coming from socialists in German and American newspapers lauding the policies adoped by Soviets and how they will get ahead of them. On 15th December 1989 nobody in Romania would have thought that the next day a bloody revolution will start out of a small Hungarian minority in the city of Timisoara. Localism! Everything from China comes from the top level, filtered and censored, we may never know what happens locally and it will be a surprise for us when that happens. * An educated population is hard to control, the only thing that communism does great is offering education for the masses and opportunities, the moment it will hit a certain threshold, people will just want more and everything will end violently. As Wikipedia puts it: "The events that demolished the Iron Curtain started with peaceful opposition in Poland, and continued into Hungary, East Germany, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia. Romania became the only communist state in Europe to overthrow its government with violence." [1] > Why is that? I think it says more about us in the west. I can agree with you. Because of our experience, it is easy for us to swap China with "Western Communism" and think that it will have the same faith without taking other factors into consideration. The West has problems and the pandemic revealed them, blaming China for the Corona problems is stupid, we should blame our overlyoptimized, overlyindividualistic nature. When Italy was "burning" at the beginning of the pandemic, all European states were reluctant to aid and all the press in Europe was finger pointing them in a disgraced way, typically European. I remember states that I've believed to be "team-players" like Sweden notifying all other European memebers that they will do it their own way. The same happened with my country, they were so late to react to the advice of WHO and EU, so late that the local municipalities started to take the matter into their own hands they practically blocked the access to the cities. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Curtain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Curtain
mrtksn 6y ago
Infrastructure is a catalyst, so probably we should look into the ingredients too but in a hindsight its obvious that China is not just office buildings and trains since they do have cutting edge tech in many areas. In fact, a lot of western designed stuff made in China is only possible thanks to the Chinese innovation in production. If you start digging the OEMs of western brand products, you find that the manufacturers of the parts like cameras, sensors, motors, controllers, antennas, speakers etc. are all standalone Chinese companies with their own products that are not simply produced in sweatshop but supplied to the western brands as a original designs. Surely it goes beyond electronics, the same is valid for the more traditional stuff like textiles or plastics etc. What China lacks on is culture. Surely they have very deep culture with traditions dating back thousands of years but on the global scale the Chinese culture is a curiosity at most. Arts and lifestyle is dominated by the west in a sense that everyone on the earth has some part of it in addition to their local culture and that culture dictates the mental models of all the people, including the Chinese people. When you have a hegemony over the culture, you say how to live, who to like, who to hate, how to use technology and what to consume. When I moved to the UK from Turkey, I noticed that all the stuff regarding the functioning of the society that we blindly follow made sense in the UK and a lot of restrictions and rules that we had in Turkey were designed to force the Turkish society to function like a western one. That's why you can innovate in culture changing stuff in the UK but it's very hard in Turkey: because UK is on the cutting edge and Turkey merely follows some cargo-cult-like culture. Let me give you an example. In Turkey banks are very good at tech and design, we used to do chip&pin forever, contactless payments and alternative channel payments existed since ever and our ATMs can do almost everything that a bank can do and their mobile apps were always very well made and powerful. Why wouldn't Turkish banks dominate fintech then? We hear all the time about some UK or US bank making something easy to use and getting huge rounds of funding, making them more valuable than the Turkish banks that did these things since years? It's definitely not the lack of talent or entrepreneurship as these are found im ample amount in Turkey. Turks that travel to UK/USA/EU are shocked by the primitiveness of the everyday banking. I think the reason is this: In the Turkish mental models we don't know why we do the thing we do it comes of utilising Western institutional models. We usually have rigid rules and structures that are designed to force behaviour which dictates a mental model about how something has to be and that cannot be questioned. At first, the Turks find the Banking in western countries extremely primitive and they simply cannot think about institutions doing financial services without being a bank. In fact, fintech in the UK is fine but you need to look beyond HSBC or Lloyds, you can have Azimo for sending money abroad or Monzo for simple banking. Now Turkish banks and regulators are copying the west again and the mental model of fintech is being expanded to include non-bank payment processors etc. despite that they had the tech much earlier and these things were simply features of the existing banks. When you are not at the cutting edge in a culture(financial culture, for example), you cannot innovate. Those who dare will be quickly put down for not following the rules or even making something hard to categorise according to the current rules. To question why and how you do something and innovate on the core platforms you need to have total understanding and you cannot have that with non-naturalized imported culture. It's like innovating on top of Apple/Facebook/Google platforms. I think culture is the actual moat of the US and the west in general.

Are expensive office buildings and high end transportation an indicator of an innovative country? They can definitely act as infrastructure to support innovation but it remains to be seen.

hjfigkfkrkr 6y ago

They can build a Las Vegas in the time San Francisco can build a train station. Now imagine if they turned this focus to something else.

throwaway4good 6y ago

To be honest I find it amazing people are still questioning the growth of China and its capability of innovation. For all the years I have been following China, it has always been the same: China's economic numbers are exaggerated, just about to collapse, yeah sure they can make that gadget but can they make this gadget? Why is that? I think it says more about us in the west.

toyg 6y ago
The arguments are exactly the same as we had in Europe during the rise of the US. "They can only copy! They have no taste! They're all fraudsters! They're slavedrivers!" etc etc. This said, we won't have a real tipping point until China can rival Hollywood for quality and quantity of cultural output, and their language makes that quite difficult. This is one of the reasons the USSR never "won" even at the time when it was arguably more powerful and efficient than the US.
- throwaway4good 6y ago
  Look up top grossing movies globally for 2020. Granted it is a special year.
- jimmydef 6y ago
  Nowadays I hear a lot of people commenting about how excellent the quality of Japanese products are. How they have a "craftsmanship" culture where a master will spend his whole life perfecting a craft, etc. Recently read a reddit thread about a Japanese man making whisky in the 19th century. Overall a lot of praises for the Japanese on how they pursue excellence. Amazing how fast attitudes change. Just a few decades back, Japanese goods and Made in Japan had the same cheap, low quality reputation as Made in China goods today. I even distinctly remembered the same "Japanese people as a culture don't care about quality" comments which is the same as some people nowadays complaining that Chinese people have "chabuduo"(just enough) attitudes. Or the same accusations of no creativity. Funny how drastically these "deep-rooted" cultural attitudes in Japanese people have changed. Or maybe its not the culture of Japan that has changed but the perceptions others have of it. I reckon the same is for China.
- hakfoo 6y ago
  I don't think it's language alone. Or even cultural differences. After all, I'd bet we could have a 500-post conversation here on HN with the prompt "what's your favourite anime?" Maybe part of it is economic risk. Localization and distribution would have some costs, and maybe nobody's willing to take a risk on "let's bring China's #1 movie to the US". Things like anime in the west got bootstrapped in obscure fandoms on an informal, low-budget, and sometimes downright bootleg way, which I'm not sure they want to do if they're trying to consciously develop soft power. I am somewhat surprised about how limited China's attempts at soft power seem to be. They don't have a prominent global media presence like, say, the BBC/DW/NHK. They don't seem to be tooting their horn well about their engineering advances. They don't even seem to have effective tourism marketing-- I can't think of the last time I saw an advertisement encouraging travel to China (even before the pandemic) while there are loads of travel documentaries on TV all conveniently sponsored by "(random state or European country) Tourism Office" I do think a missing piece is having a few more world-beating brands. Yeah, we have a few, (Lenovo, for example), but we're definitely at the point where people will say "I'm not going to buy a Chinese car/washing machine!" -- which feels about where Korea was in 1980 or Japan in 1955.
johnnycerberus 6y ago
I'm not questioning the growth of China. I'm only interested in its sustainability and its ability to innovate, to bring a new Apple, Tesla (not an anti-Apple, or an anti-Tesla) in the world or to contribute to the knowledge body of a science like physics. I'm from Romania and I've lived under communist times sprinkled with some open-market policies in which Citroen, Renault and other companies were running factories in my country. Something similar to what happens in China, but minus 1 billion, 430 million human resource. Based on my experience (I've also lived in Beijing for 2 years), it feels like history is just repeating. Look at why communism in Romania and Soviet Union failed: * Centralized governing system * Production excess, we continued to produce even if we didn't have any buyers and the quality was pretty bad (today you have Wish or Aliexpress through which you can sell literally anything, even people from my family are ordering crazy stuff from China that has no use at all, so China has the upper hand, we just didn't have that technology back then) * Lack of political diversity * No indicators of survivability, China is yet to go through a major crisis (Black Swan) to see how it handles it, the pandemic is not a Black Swan * Impedance mismatch between communism, atheism promoted by Marxism vs. Christianity that promotes individual thinking, Eatern cultures generally are more collectivistic, so again, China has the upper hand * Socialist countries are ticking time bombs, they implode when you don't expect them to happen, usually the trigger is local. Nobody thought that Soviet Union would collapse out of nowhere, I still remember reading articles coming from socialists in German and American newspapers lauding the policies adoped by Soviets and how they will get ahead of them. On 15th December 1989 nobody in Romania would have thought that the next day a bloody revolution will start out of a small Hungarian minority in the city of Timisoara. Localism! Everything from China comes from the top level, filtered and censored, we may never know what happens locally and it will be a surprise for us when that happens. * An educated population is hard to control, the only thing that communism does great is offering education for the masses and opportunities, the moment it will hit a certain threshold, people will just want more and everything will end violently. As Wikipedia puts it: "The events that demolished the Iron Curtain started with peaceful opposition in Poland, and continued into Hungary, East Germany, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia. Romania became the only communist state in Europe to overthrow its government with violence." [1] > Why is that? I think it says more about us in the west. I can agree with you. Because of our experience, it is easy for us to swap China with "Western Communism" and think that it will have the same faith without taking other factors into consideration. The West has problems and the pandemic revealed them, blaming China for the Corona problems is stupid, we should blame our overlyoptimized, overlyindividualistic nature. When Italy was "burning" at the beginning of the pandemic, all European states were reluctant to aid and all the press in Europe was finger pointing them in a disgraced way, typically European. I remember states that I've believed to be "team-players" like Sweden notifying all other European memebers that they will do it their own way. The same happened with my country, they were so late to react to the advice of WHO and EU, so late that the local municipalities started to take the matter into their own hands they practically blocked the access to the cities. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Curtain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Curtain

mrtksn 6y ago

Infrastructure is a catalyst, so probably we should look into the ingredients too but in a hindsight its obvious that China is not just office buildings and trains since they do have cutting edge tech in many areas. In fact, a lot of western designed stuff made in China is only possible thanks to the Chinese innovation in production. If you start digging the OEMs of western brand products, you find that the manufacturers of the parts like cameras, sensors, motors, controllers, antennas, speakers etc. are all standalone Chinese companies with their own products that are not simply produced in sweatshop but supplied to the western brands as a original designs. Surely it goes beyond electronics, the same is valid for the more traditional stuff like textiles or plastics etc. What China lacks on is culture. Surely they have very deep culture with traditions dating back thousands of years but on the global scale the Chinese culture is a curiosity at most. Arts and lifestyle is dominated by the west in a sense that everyone on the earth has some part of it in addition to their local culture and that culture dictates the mental models of all the people, including the Chinese people. When you have a hegemony over the culture, you say how to live, who to like, who to hate, how to use technology and what to consume. When I moved to the UK from Turkey, I noticed that all the stuff regarding the functioning of the society that we blindly follow made sense in the UK and a lot of restrictions and rules that we had in Turkey were designed to force the Turkish society to function like a western one. That's why you can innovate in culture changing stuff in the UK but it's very hard in Turkey: because UK is on the cutting edge and Turkey merely follows some cargo-cult-like culture. Let me give you an example. In Turkey banks are very good at tech and design, we used to do chip&pin forever, contactless payments and alternative channel payments existed since ever and our ATMs can do almost everything that a bank can do and their mobile apps were always very well made and powerful. Why wouldn't Turkish banks dominate fintech then? We hear all the time about some UK or US bank making something easy to use and getting huge rounds of funding, making them more valuable than the Turkish banks that did these things since years? It's definitely not the lack of talent or entrepreneurship as these are found im ample amount in Turkey. Turks that travel to UK/USA/EU are shocked by the primitiveness of the everyday banking. I think the reason is this: In the Turkish mental models we don't know why we do the thing we do it comes of utilising Western institutional models. We usually have rigid rules and structures that are designed to force behaviour which dictates a mental model about how something has to be and that cannot be questioned. At first, the Turks find the Banking in western countries extremely primitive and they simply cannot think about institutions doing financial services without being a bank. In fact, fintech in the UK is fine but you need to look beyond HSBC or Lloyds, you can have Azimo for sending money abroad or Monzo for simple banking. Now Turkish banks and regulators are copying the west again and the mental model of fintech is being expanded to include non-bank payment processors etc. despite that they had the tech much earlier and these things were simply features of the existing banks. When you are not at the cutting edge in a culture(financial culture, for example), you cannot innovate. Those who dare will be quickly put down for not following the rules or even making something hard to categorise according to the current rules. To question why and how you do something and innovate on the core platforms you need to have total understanding and you cannot have that with non-naturalized imported culture. It's like innovating on top of Apple/Facebook/Google platforms. I think culture is the actual moat of the US and the west in general.