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Comment by palata | Hacker News Reader

> The massive straight up IP theft helps a lot here

I think this is vastly underestimating what "catching up" means. All my life, people have been saying "China copies". Now they are objectively better at many things (including robotics), and... well it seems that we cannot "just copy".

I saw western companies trying to "copy" superior Chinese technology, talking to brilliant engineers explaining how much they were learning by actually trying to copy.

The lesson I got from that is that China did not "copy"; they learned. And it took time, and now they are better. Now the western world has to learn from them, I guess.

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Growing up moving around both conservative and liberal parts of the US, from middle school to college, I distinctly remember several US history classes where I was taught the exact same narrative about Samuel Slater. About how he was an American hero and the Father of the American Industrial Revolution because he memorized a bunch of industrial patent blueprints and brought them over to the US.

It got told as: the evil English made it illegal to even import blueprints for factory machinery, to keep the colonies in resource-extractive poverty, so they'd have to send raw materials overseas to get processed, then import the finished goods. (My other history teacher, the Anno / Dawn of Discovery video game series, also cemented this bit about resource extraction in my head at a young age.) But then thanks to heroic ingenuity and cunning, I was told, the US was able to outwit the colonizers and process its own raw materials, eventually gaining full economic, military, and political supremacy.

Sounds familiar.

It's ip theft when the Chinese do it but when it's the American copying on Chinese it's called learning.

Producing great products is a game at which every player wins, because sellers must find willing buyers. It only fails if one participant panics and jumps out of the window, or if a significant number of people are not participating (this is always the case when wealth inequality is involved).

China is out producing us at new scientists and engineers.

> The lesson I got from that is that China did not "copy"; they learned. And it took time, and now they are better. Now the western world has to learn from them, I guess.

And Apple played a huge role in teaching them. We should all thank Tim Cook and team for almost single handedly bootstrapping China 2.0, the China that runs circles around the west in terms of production and development.

Peter Zeihann really got it wrong in his latter books.

For those who don't like my comment I'd implore you to read [0].

[0] https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Apple-in-China/Patric...

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