Comment by WanderPanda | Hacker News Reader

Comment by WanderPanda | Hacker News Reader

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I absolutely agree! I am just really struggling to put a time estimate on when the bill will come due for china. I think they can be in an upward trend for some more years as a technological follower. What I mean by that is that they use simple metrics of current technology (Ghz, GB, battery life, screen colors, electric car range and so in) and just “mandate” to get better in them. But all these things will eventually commoditise and if china wants to grow beyond that they have to come up with qualitative innovation. At least in my (very narrow) experience I have not seen much evidence for qualitative innovation in china. I think that is the point where their system (of this extreme obedient school system etc.) might start to struggle. I think the upper bound for that point would be a per capita gdp like south korea has (but probably much lower).

After that point (which might be in lets say 10-20 years) there can still be a veeery long downward slope (the soviet union lasted for 69 years).

I would be very interested in what other people think about this (and these timelines)

> At least in my (very narrow) experience I have not seen much evidence for qualitative innovation in china

This argument never sounded very true and intellectually honest to me. I mean, I want to believe in it, but when I scrutinize it precisely, I wonder - how can you measure the ability to innovate of someone who doesn't want (or need) to innovate?

At present time, China's competitive advantage is cheap specialized labour, and they're taking full advantage of that - as they should. That's the whole point of being behind in technology and racing to catc up! It might very well be that when they switch their focus, from copying to innovating, they'd be very good at that as well (or very bad! we literally have very little data to tell)

If you look at Japan and Korea who took the same approach of "cheap specialized labour", they both pivoted to high quality, and more innovative once they caught up. I have no doubt China will do the same, but at much larger scale. There's already a lot of innovative consumer products coming online, which I'd attribute to the vibe of rapid and efficient hardware products iteration in Shenzen.

Japan and Korea are collective societies, not autocratic ones.

China's goal under Xi is a return to the golden age of the Kingdom of Heaven, where all Chinese people exemplify the ideals and morals of the most civilized society on Earth. That goal is only tangentially related to the technical innovations they're making, and will eventually stifle them as the definition of "good citizen" and "proper pursuits" becomes more hardened and inward-looking (much like it did during the Middle Kingdom).

Maybe or maybe not. Given that they're basically picking a very similar recipe from the economical development playbook, I wouldn't be surprised if they arrive at a similar outcome. And South Korea was ran by violent dictarors until its recent democratic history. I don't think the same will happen to China, but I wouldn't dismiss the ability of its citizens to innovate based only on the autocratic nature of their government. It's not like if the Chinese people are deprived of imagination. They have it, and they have the ability to act on it, and they do.

The autocratic environment might not be most amenable to free thinking and innovation, but then I'm not convinced that being free from autocracy is truly necessary for innovation to occur. Plenty of innovation occurred when Europe was ruled by Kings, or in 1900 Russia. Even within autocratic corporations, plenty of innovation occur.

Anyways, I don't wish for autocratic governments, but I'm not willing to dismiss China's ability to be innovative based on that.

Many of the innovators in medieval Europe and Soviet Russia were seen with suspicion, when not outright persecuted. Innovation, beyond safe incremental productivity improvements, requires nonconformism and unconventional thinking. After all, why would you create something new if you are content with what you have?

How do innovative transportation technologies(SpaceX, Hyperloop), food choice(plant, lab based meat), robots and AI, green tech, etc not "proper pursuits"?

They're good business, they offer more power to China, why would they change that?

And considering they're history, they've probably learned the lesson about the weakness of ignoring global technology.

And sure, they do have the "great firewall", but it's smart enough to let the science\technology in while filtering the politics out.

> And sure, they do have the "great firewall", but it's smart enough to let the science\technology in while filtering the politics out.

That's not true, and given the current trend (everyone gonna use TLS) it is impossible for the "great firewall" to be smarter. For example, HN is blocked in China.

They're very good at it. We have plenty of data to tell.

In the industrial sectors that I watch (test equipment, industrial machinery), China has been climbing the ladder at a startling rate, from "outsourced labor" to "copycat" to "bottom tier" to "mid tier" in the last decade. They're now gunning for high tier equipment, and they show every indication of getting there in the next few years.

They also invest in education, and especially in STEM. There are more Engineers being produced every year than their competitors.

How do you measure qualitative innovation? If research is a good measure of innovation, China is only second to the US in AI research, for example.

If innovation is measured by consumer adoption of new technology, TikTok is the first major AI-first consumer application. In other markets too, China has made major innovations in the consumer space that have not caught up in the West yet - ecommerce, fintech, consumer goods and more. None of these are top-down CCP mandated innovations.

If China is smart, and they are, they will simply outsource the innovation. If you have enough money you just poach innovators out of US/Europe; have them work remote if they don't want to come to China.

It will basically flip the "system" we have now.

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