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> Consider PRC is graduating 11m STEM talent a year, and the amount of resources they can spam into strategic industries is enormous. while i generally do agre

by chii 4y ago

> Consider PRC is graduating 11m STEM talent a year, and the amount of resources they can spam into strategic industries is enormous. while i generally do agree with the premise of your argument, the large amount of STEM graduates is actually irrelevant or at best tangential. China has resources to spend - they can do so at the cost of profits (or people). it doesn't take 11 million people to run a semi conductor industry - it takes 10 thousand, but those 10 thousand must be nurtured and be well trained, and have personal profit motive and incentive. I'm sure the chinese gov't can make this incentive - but whether their environment makes for innovation at an individual level, remains to be seen. After all, there's a huge amount of graduates who see graduation as a form of ritual to obtain a stable, easy and well paying job, rather than as a form of education for which you have to continue being enterprising. I just think the US's strategic export controls won't end up as effective as they imagine it would be, and in fact, might be counter productive.

dirtyid 4y ago
I think ~700,000s of thousands as per PRC own IC white paper is good start and number is relevant because few if any countries have population pool / institutional / systemic capacity to train that many specialist in one sector in short period of time to try to indigenounize the entire supply chain. But yeah incentives are not really issue IMO, all the poached TSMC/Samsung employees get royal treatment (hence literally need laws by both TW/US to block PRC poaching), meanwhile domestic crack down on soft tech is increasing salaries for hard tech like semi. But yeah, PRC higher ed does have reputation for making coasters who thinks life is easy after getting into tier1 school after rigourous GaoKao prep. Which is why I think worth keeping eye on innovation, S&T indexes to see how PRC is doing in absolute terms. But ultimately, spamming chabuduo tier efforts that occasionally generates something high quality, but do so at PRC scale so as to generate enough incidental quality to be globally competitive is a numbers game PRC often plays to her favour.

by chii 4y ago

dirtyid 4y ago

I think ~700,000s of thousands as per PRC own IC white paper is good start and number is relevant because few if any countries have population pool / institutional / systemic capacity to train that many specialist in one sector in short period of time to try to indigenounize the entire supply chain. But yeah incentives are not really issue IMO, all the poached TSMC/Samsung employees get royal treatment (hence literally need laws by both TW/US to block PRC poaching), meanwhile domestic crack down on soft tech is increasing salaries for hard tech like semi. But yeah, PRC higher ed does have reputation for making coasters who thinks life is easy after getting into tier1 school after rigourous GaoKao prep. Which is why I think worth keeping eye on innovation, S&T indexes to see how PRC is doing in absolute terms. But ultimately, spamming chabuduo tier efforts that occasionally generates something high quality, but do so at PRC scale so as to generate enough incidental quality to be globally competitive is a numbers game PRC often plays to her favour.