> This is how China went from having poor academic research capacity into leading research many fields relatively fast if one looks past the "culture" / incidental inefficiencies and evaluate based on metrics controlled for quality. Supercharge this with industrial policy and state coordination to target strategic sectors.
I'm sorry but this makes no sense. When using existing research and literature, even one wrong article can screw over a whole project. Chinese academic research is viewed with high skepticism to say the least, and often laughed at when cited as credible. Chabuduo has no place in science. There's a good reason they rely heavily on stealing research and technology even to this day; because they don't even trust their own researcher.
> It's the optimal development strategy that plays to PRC strengths - lots of people, somewhat competent ability to coordinate. In terms of fast, cheap, good, developing countries don't get to be good anyway, frequently poor governance = can't even focus on fast or cheap let alone both. Coordinating both = Deng model: poor China develops cheap and fast aka chabuduo. So Chinese population + spamming chabuduo + coordination = enough occasional, actually good outcomes to reach global competitiveness in ways that matter, fast.
China's growth was helped mainly by huge positive trade deficits caused by protectionist policies and the huge active commercial help of foreign country who tolerated said protectionism (until now) and complete disregard for long term consequences. Sure, focus your population on work instead of raising children, disregard regulations so you have an economy based on tofu buildings and rotting ghost cities and basically no social programs to take care of your elderly population facing a demographic catastrophe and screw over nearly all countries who dealt with you in good faith so they all have active programs to migrate their production out of your country.
> Building premier institutions is also just hard and takes time to cultivate, especially if intellectuals previously purged, so need to spam out all the necessary components first anyway. Can't exactly have leading institutions without pool of experts first. The only place to cut corners for building institutions is to generate excess talent/components and assemble accordingly. Excess talent also necessary to mitigate brain drain (your amazing colleagues).
Nah the Chinese just outsourced that with industrial espionage.
> Elsewhere, Chabuduo manufacturing with Chinese population means plastic hangers to iPhones in 10 years. Chabuduo construction means enviable transportation systems, tier1 cities from fishing villages, and ghost cities that eventually gets filled by the hundreds of millions still waiting to be urbanized. Perfect/Good is the enemy of fast development.
Your cities are polluted, your cancer and chronic disease rates are through the roof, your factories have anti-suicide nets, you have to spy on your population so they don't rebel... I mean what's the fucking benefit? Sure iPhones 16 are cheap, but also mostly unnecessary and could be / is being outsourced elsewhere (China is facing a chip shortage by the way, again screwing over other countries wasn't such a good long term strategy was it?) Your Chabuduo constructions are crumbling. Your government has to actively supress news of buildings collapsing, elsewhere this would make national news. And no your ghost cities are not being settled "by the hundreds of millions" (lol, hundred of millions, that's like the number of people having to hunt rats and do subsistence farming to survive and I wish I was kidding). "Good enough" means you can sustain your future, but cheap stuff that breaks from toys to academic papers always end up costing more.