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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,

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

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