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Comment by paimapi | Hacker News Reader

I feel like most of the people I know (Americans) don't truly realize how utterly dense and populuated Chinese cities are.

I think about my home city (6th largest in the US) with its singular interstate looping around our metro area - and Beijing has five of these ring roads on top of having a far more robust public transportation system and tons of scooter/bike usage still.

A single carmaker outselling all of US-made electric vehicles is just normal especially given the prices of these cars (down to something like $8000 USD) and the fact that they live in such dense areas that don't require you to drive 20 miles just to, for eg, get to a Costco or something. So you can have these ultracheap cars with maybe twice the range of lithium-powered golf carts and not spend a ton of money on it along with having 5x the population.

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One bellweather reason for this state being impressive is that this is china's domestic market demonstrating the buying power needed to fuel private innovation

This used to be something only the US could do. China always had the population. But it wasnt rich enough to create local demand. Now it can and that creates a flywheel effect of feuling its own innovation, like EVs, LLMs, reusable rockets, sattelite ISPs, and all the other thingsthe US prides itself on.

And eventually it might even make novel things the US or anyone else hasnt even made yet. If that happens then the american empire is truly over

> the american empire is truly over

I'm pretty sure we're witnessing the accelerating confirmation of this right now, for all the reasons you've already stated. The US still has some niches at which it's ahead, but China is a mere intellectual property theft away from being able to pwn those areas as well (rightly, or likely wrongly, but even 'wrongly' by any law is 'rightly' by China's point of view, same as plenty of US decisions of late - the lens makes all the difference).

I think the one caveat to this is that consumer spending and GDP growth has slowed dramatically especially following the housing bubble popping (remember Evergrande?)

A lot of the very high-tech manufacturing in China is still dependent on Western supply chains (ASML is one major one for semi-conductors) and there's a level of complexity and specialized knowledge there that probably doesn't exist domestically yet so the transition to a knowledge-dominant vs manufacturing-dominant economy is hitting a logarithmic wall.

That said, China's intellectual property ecosystem is extremely open and free. This is really a cultural thing, embedded since the early days of China's printing press half a thousand years ago when editing, rewriting, and printing your own versions of someone elses's works was totally normalized (think AO3 but standardized and normalized at a societal level). So we'll get to see whether or not that business-friendly theory of 'IP exists to protect genius inventors and without it we have no inventions' governing theory bears out or if a completely permissive and free ecosystem is better for innovation in the longterm.

BYD is also expected to export 2.5 million vehicles outside China this year. They are the largest manufacturer of EVs in the world, and not just for the Chinese market.

> don't truly realize how utterly dense and populated[] Chinese cities are

- A US and a China professor are talking in a bar. "We have about 10,000 students" they agree. But no, one is thinking of their university, the other of their department.

- Population of Wyoming < Louisville, KY (KY's largest city). Pop KY < NYC. Pop US Northeast region < Pearl River Delta megalopolis. PRD is sort of like a 20x compressed US Southeast, with 2x lower GDP.

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