6 ms·

China has more people, more money to spend on research, more equipment, more access to raw materials and chemicals, more manufacturing base, more STEM graduates

China has more people, more money to spend on research, more equipment, more access to raw materials and chemicals, more manufacturing base, more STEM graduates, more everything, and all of that by huge margins. USA scientists will eventually put something out, but 10x more slowly than China.

_yb2s 3y ago
I'm not looking at official numbers here, but in my field (academic biotech research) I still don't see much innovation coming out of China. All of what you say is true, yet in academic research China is still far behind the USA in nearly every field. They haven't yet been able to build institutions with the staff, structure, and culture needed. That will likely change in time, but at present the best Chinese scientists are still coming to the USA to work, and staying here. Despite the USA having a lot more research output, a substantial fraction of the top scientists in the USA are from China. My Chinese colleagues tell me that the bureaucracy and authoritarianism in Chinese institutions puts a lot of hurdles in place when trying to do research. Simply buying equipment, hiring staff, etc. is a nightmare, and results in "evaporative cooling" where the top researchers with the option to work anywhere don't tolerate this and leave. Edit: I will also add that in some sense US academia is supported by overcharging Chinese students for tuition. If and when Chinese institutions get to the point where the best students want to stay there, there will be a huge crisis in US universities, possibly being unable to support tenured staff.
- dirtyid 3y ago
  Varies by field but last few years PRC been reaching parity to topping various science and innovation indexes, PRC institutions also breaking global top100 and general trend of moving up rankings. TLDR is PRC science exploded after mid 2010s - lag effect from academic reform in 00s. Biotech/bioeconomy a outlier though - just got elevated to strategic sector with 500b usd investment in last year's 5 year plan, so expect PRC to start being competitive in 5-10 years. > at present the best Chinese scientists are still coming to the USA to work IMO not true anymore. This isn't pre 00s where PRC send best abroad as part of state strategy and best have some english fluency because it's needed for science. More and more PRC best aren't English fluent since there's sufficiently large and growing chinese science ecosystem and best also have good access to resources in tier1 labs. Hence US cracking down on 1000 talents program where PRC entice scientists to work in PRC due to unparallel resources. Or acadmeic exchanges with PRC in general. Also see stats of record amount of scientists returning to PRC this yearm >best students want to stay there, Best PRC students go to PRC C9 (Ivy equivalent) now. Top US institutions captures the occasional talent with english proficiency and desire / resources to go abroad. But PRC best have been largely staying in PRC last decade. TBH most Chinese students in west now are those who couldnt hack PRC gaokao/teritary selection system but have rich enough parents to send them abroad. They're B tier talent. Still adequate to work in western labs but you simply don't hear much about PRC students in west who tested top of their districts anymore like in 00s. They're no sending their best and haven't been for while. But generally their ok is good enough. Medium term expect even less PRC students, partly due to geopoltics but also PRC likely phasing out mandetory English as core subject which will make brain draining next gen more difficult. There's always India who seem systemically incapable of preventing brain drain.
  - _yb2s 3y ago
    I’ll take what you are saying at face value, but point out that academic career pipelines are slow- it’s often about 15 years to go from college freshman to starting out as a “young” PI in the USA. If what you are saying is true, it will still be another 5+ years before we start seeing top students that stayed in China publishing as PIs. Edit: Which lines up with what you said at the top of your post.
    - ThisIsMyAltFace 3y ago
      > I’ll take what you are saying at face value Given this poster's history, I would not do that
    - dirtyid 3y ago
      That's a reasonable timeline. PRCs have been developing pharma/bio talent since 2015s. It’s part of medicine&devices category for MIC2025. Focus was on devices, pharma/bio got extra resource/political attention in the last few years due to covid. Like most PRC ventures it's going to be rocky/messy until it's not. Broad point is bio is one somewhat neglected up until covid sector that PRC wants to become a global player with industrial policies that has worked well to very well in other MIC2025 categories..
- PeterisP 3y ago
  US academia isn't really funded by the foreign grad student tuitions. It's not even really funded by tuition, as tuition+fees is <30% of total US academia funding. Of course every organization wants to have more money and so they work on those revenue streams, but if all the money from the 5% students which are foreign suddenly disappeared (even ignoring the foreign students whose tuition gets funded by being TA/RA), that wouldn't be a crisis, it would just reduce the profits of the universities and have some administrators be extremely sad about less bonuses.
0xDEF 3y ago
The above can be condensed to "China has more STEM graduates". It was China's STEM graduates and not just the stereotypical "cheap labor" who built up the Chinese manufacturing base.
allenrb 3y ago
> more money to spend on research Would you accept “chooses to spend more on research”? The US certainly could spend more but, imho sadly, we do not.
- dralley 3y ago
  Maybe Venture Capital should spend less money on Juciero, automated pizza ovens, and gig-economy bs and more money on materials science and fusion research. Even if you end up lighting the money on fire, at least it's a more societally productive fire than, say, SoftBank's portfolio.
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    VC doesn’t put money into research, VC puts money to productization once someone else (ideally for the VCs, government) has paid for research. (Edited to clarify “ideally” parenthetical, in response to a reply that really didn’t deserve to be dead.)
    - idontpost 3y ago
      [dead]
  - Eumenes 3y ago
    There isn't a good likelihood on strong return on those type of investments. You need real engineering talent and leaders. You can glue together a delivery or dating app with a bunch of 25 year olds who just got out of a ruby on rails bootcamp, raise a few million with charismatic/well connected leaders/founders, and maybe gain enough users to be acquired or something. Anything in materials science is going to require some deep expertise, labs/machines/composites/fabrication/manufacturing setups, inside connections at the DoD, trial and error that costs millions. Yeah, I agree, its way cooler, but way more risky for VC.
    - dralley 3y ago
      It's not at all obvious to me that it's more risky than some of the BS that gets hundreds of millions of dollars in VC funding.
Workaccount2 3y ago
All the smart people in the US work in tech and finance. If you have a big ole' brain, why would you take $80k to work in some crumby lab when you can get paid $350k to maintain a login screen from the comfort of your mountain side home.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  Because “smart” and “monomaniacally focused on financial gain” are two separate things?
  - nonethewiser 3y ago
    What is monomaniacally focused about maintaining a login page for $350k?
    - dragonwriter 3y ago
      Choosing the $350K job isn't necessarily monomaniacally focussed on money, there's plenty of combinations of priorities that would favor that. But when you don't assume all smart developers are monomaniacally focussed on money, there’s also plenty of combinations of priorities that might favor an $80K lab job over the $350K login screen job.
  - kevinventullo 3y ago
    As an academic mathematician-turned-software engineer, I can assure you my reasons for leaving academia were not a “monomaniacal focus on financial gain”. The money and job security didn’t hurt, but the real turning point for me was solving the two-body problem.
- bluGill 3y ago
  When you work in a lab you have more ability to work on what you want to. Well at least once you get to the top of the lab - many spend a lifetime working on the interesting problems someone else is interested in but never reach the top where they are in charge. Meanwhile many people who work in tech are able to work on problems they find interesting enough (maybe not the most interesting, but still interesting) and they get paid well for it. Still if you want to work on some problems a lab is the best change to get there.
jlmorton 3y ago
China spends nowhere near as much as the US on basic research. The US spends $100 billion on basic research annually, compared to $25 billion in China. However, total R&D is quite a bit closer, with the US spending $660b to China’s $556 billion. [1] [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_research_and_development_spending https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_...
- dirtyid 3y ago
  There's PPP considertaions. PRC R&D funding also bias towards experimental/applied vs basic research. Hence not surprising they're hammering these replication efforts.
groby_b 3y ago
This may be a hard pill to swallow, but science isn't a "more is better" game. It ultimately requires being embedded in a culture that, to quote Popper, "seeks truths that are difficult and interesting". From that view, the problem for US scientific efforts is entirely home made, but it's also a problem that's much more pronounced in China.

_yb2s 3y ago

I'm not looking at official numbers here, but in my field (academic biotech research) I still don't see much innovation coming out of China. All of what you say is true, yet in academic research China is still far behind the USA in nearly every field. They haven't yet been able to build institutions with the staff, structure, and culture needed. That will likely change in time, but at present the best Chinese scientists are still coming to the USA to work, and staying here. Despite the USA having a lot more research output, a substantial fraction of the top scientists in the USA are from China. My Chinese colleagues tell me that the bureaucracy and authoritarianism in Chinese institutions puts a lot of hurdles in place when trying to do research. Simply buying equipment, hiring staff, etc. is a nightmare, and results in "evaporative cooling" where the top researchers with the option to work anywhere don't tolerate this and leave. Edit: I will also add that in some sense US academia is supported by overcharging Chinese students for tuition. If and when Chinese institutions get to the point where the best students want to stay there, there will be a huge crisis in US universities, possibly being unable to support tenured staff.

dirtyid 3y ago
Varies by field but last few years PRC been reaching parity to topping various science and innovation indexes, PRC institutions also breaking global top100 and general trend of moving up rankings. TLDR is PRC science exploded after mid 2010s - lag effect from academic reform in 00s. Biotech/bioeconomy a outlier though - just got elevated to strategic sector with 500b usd investment in last year's 5 year plan, so expect PRC to start being competitive in 5-10 years. > at present the best Chinese scientists are still coming to the USA to work IMO not true anymore. This isn't pre 00s where PRC send best abroad as part of state strategy and best have some english fluency because it's needed for science. More and more PRC best aren't English fluent since there's sufficiently large and growing chinese science ecosystem and best also have good access to resources in tier1 labs. Hence US cracking down on 1000 talents program where PRC entice scientists to work in PRC due to unparallel resources. Or acadmeic exchanges with PRC in general. Also see stats of record amount of scientists returning to PRC this yearm >best students want to stay there, Best PRC students go to PRC C9 (Ivy equivalent) now. Top US institutions captures the occasional talent with english proficiency and desire / resources to go abroad. But PRC best have been largely staying in PRC last decade. TBH most Chinese students in west now are those who couldnt hack PRC gaokao/teritary selection system but have rich enough parents to send them abroad. They're B tier talent. Still adequate to work in western labs but you simply don't hear much about PRC students in west who tested top of their districts anymore like in 00s. They're no sending their best and haven't been for while. But generally their ok is good enough. Medium term expect even less PRC students, partly due to geopoltics but also PRC likely phasing out mandetory English as core subject which will make brain draining next gen more difficult. There's always India who seem systemically incapable of preventing brain drain.
- _yb2s 3y ago
  I’ll take what you are saying at face value, but point out that academic career pipelines are slow- it’s often about 15 years to go from college freshman to starting out as a “young” PI in the USA. If what you are saying is true, it will still be another 5+ years before we start seeing top students that stayed in China publishing as PIs. Edit: Which lines up with what you said at the top of your post.
  - ThisIsMyAltFace 3y ago
    > I’ll take what you are saying at face value Given this poster's history, I would not do that
  - dirtyid 3y ago
    That's a reasonable timeline. PRCs have been developing pharma/bio talent since 2015s. It’s part of medicine&devices category for MIC2025. Focus was on devices, pharma/bio got extra resource/political attention in the last few years due to covid. Like most PRC ventures it's going to be rocky/messy until it's not. Broad point is bio is one somewhat neglected up until covid sector that PRC wants to become a global player with industrial policies that has worked well to very well in other MIC2025 categories..
PeterisP 3y ago
US academia isn't really funded by the foreign grad student tuitions. It's not even really funded by tuition, as tuition+fees is <30% of total US academia funding. Of course every organization wants to have more money and so they work on those revenue streams, but if all the money from the 5% students which are foreign suddenly disappeared (even ignoring the foreign students whose tuition gets funded by being TA/RA), that wouldn't be a crisis, it would just reduce the profits of the universities and have some administrators be extremely sad about less bonuses.

0xDEF 3y ago

The above can be condensed to "China has more STEM graduates". It was China's STEM graduates and not just the stereotypical "cheap labor" who built up the Chinese manufacturing base.

allenrb 3y ago

> more money to spend on research Would you accept “chooses to spend more on research”? The US certainly could spend more but, imho sadly, we do not.

dralley 3y ago
Maybe Venture Capital should spend less money on Juciero, automated pizza ovens, and gig-economy bs and more money on materials science and fusion research. Even if you end up lighting the money on fire, at least it's a more societally productive fire than, say, SoftBank's portfolio.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  VC doesn’t put money into research, VC puts money to productization once someone else (ideally for the VCs, government) has paid for research. (Edited to clarify “ideally” parenthetical, in response to a reply that really didn’t deserve to be dead.)
  - idontpost 3y ago
    [dead]
- Eumenes 3y ago
  There isn't a good likelihood on strong return on those type of investments. You need real engineering talent and leaders. You can glue together a delivery or dating app with a bunch of 25 year olds who just got out of a ruby on rails bootcamp, raise a few million with charismatic/well connected leaders/founders, and maybe gain enough users to be acquired or something. Anything in materials science is going to require some deep expertise, labs/machines/composites/fabrication/manufacturing setups, inside connections at the DoD, trial and error that costs millions. Yeah, I agree, its way cooler, but way more risky for VC.
  - dralley 3y ago
    It's not at all obvious to me that it's more risky than some of the BS that gets hundreds of millions of dollars in VC funding.

Workaccount2 3y ago

All the smart people in the US work in tech and finance. If you have a big ole' brain, why would you take $80k to work in some crumby lab when you can get paid $350k to maintain a login screen from the comfort of your mountain side home.

dragonwriter 3y ago
Because “smart” and “monomaniacally focused on financial gain” are two separate things?
- nonethewiser 3y ago
  What is monomaniacally focused about maintaining a login page for $350k?
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    Choosing the $350K job isn't necessarily monomaniacally focussed on money, there's plenty of combinations of priorities that would favor that. But when you don't assume all smart developers are monomaniacally focussed on money, there’s also plenty of combinations of priorities that might favor an $80K lab job over the $350K login screen job.
- kevinventullo 3y ago
  As an academic mathematician-turned-software engineer, I can assure you my reasons for leaving academia were not a “monomaniacal focus on financial gain”. The money and job security didn’t hurt, but the real turning point for me was solving the two-body problem.
bluGill 3y ago
When you work in a lab you have more ability to work on what you want to. Well at least once you get to the top of the lab - many spend a lifetime working on the interesting problems someone else is interested in but never reach the top where they are in charge. Meanwhile many people who work in tech are able to work on problems they find interesting enough (maybe not the most interesting, but still interesting) and they get paid well for it. Still if you want to work on some problems a lab is the best change to get there.

jlmorton 3y ago

China spends nowhere near as much as the US on basic research. The US spends $100 billion on basic research annually, compared to $25 billion in China. However, total R&D is quite a bit closer, with the US spending $660b to China’s $556 billion. [1] [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_research_and_development_spending https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_...

dirtyid 3y ago
There's PPP considertaions. PRC R&D funding also bias towards experimental/applied vs basic research. Hence not surprising they're hammering these replication efforts.

groby_b 3y ago

This may be a hard pill to swallow, but science isn't a "more is better" game. It ultimately requires being embedded in a culture that, to quote Popper, "seeks truths that are difficult and interesting". From that view, the problem for US scientific efforts is entirely home made, but it's also a problem that's much more pronounced in China.