Guest Post by Fred Reed
For many years the United States has regarded itself as, and been, the world’s technological leader. One can easily make a long and impressive list of seminal discoveries and inventions coming from America, from the moon landings to the internet. It was an astonishing performance. The US maintains a lead, though usually a shrinking one, in many fields. But:
China has risen explosively, from being clearly a “Third World” country forty years ago to become a very serious and rapidly advancing competitor to America. Anyone who has seen today’s China (I recently spent two weeks there, traveling muchly) will have been astonished by the ubiquitous construction, the quality of planning, the roads and airports and high-speed rail, the sense of confidence and modernity. Compare this with America’s rotting and dangerous cities, swarms of homeless people, deteriorating education, antique rail, de-industrialized midlands, loony government, and the military sucking blood from the economy like some vast leech, and America will seem yesterday’s country. The phrase “national suicide” comes to mind.
A common response to these observations from thunder-thump patriots is the assertion that the Chinese can’t invent anything, just copy and steal. What one actually sees is a combination of rapid and successful adoption of foreign technology (see Shanghai maglev below) and, increasingly, cutting edge science and technology. More attention might be in order. A few examples: A few examples from many that might be adduced:
“China Confirms Scientist Genetically Engineered Babies”
Supposedly the intent was to make the twins resistant to AIDS. It was done using CRISPR-Cas 9, a gene-editing technique invented in the West by Jennifer Dooudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier but quickly mastered by China. It seemed odd that AIDS resistance would be the goal since the disease is easily avoided. Maybe, I thought, for some technical reason the insertion was particularly easy. But then:
“China’s Genetically Edited Twins May Have Enhanced Brains ‘By Accident’”
“By accident” indeed. Since the researchers admitted being aware of the neurologic effects of CCR5, the gene in question, the experiment sure looked like a shot at increasing intelligence. But maybe not. Then:
“Chinese researchers insert human brain gene into monkeys, making them smarter”
Whether the insertion in fact had the effect described, I do not know, and the story maybe or may not be sensationalized. Of interest are, first, that it was an attempt to engineer intelligence, second, that it involved inserting a human gene in a (presumably) lower primate, and third, that the Chinese did it.
“China, Huawei to Launch 5G network in Shanghai Station”
Though 5G is usually presented as an improvement to smartphones, it is far more, and the Chinese seem poised to jump on it hard. See below.
“World’s First 5G powered Remote Brain Surgery Performed in China”
It is interesting that China and South Korea are clear leaders in 5G. The US, unable to compete seeks to prohibit its European vassals from dealing with HuaWei by threatening sanctions. Germany has refused to obey. .
Huawei’s 5G Dominance In The Post-American World – Forbes
Whether Forbes’ overstates the facts can perhaps be argued. That China has come from nowhere to be ahead in a crucial technology ought to be a wake-up call. That America has to rely on sanctions instead of better technology accentuates the point.
“More Than 510,000 Overseas Students Return to China”
This year. A couple of decades ago, Chinese students in the US often refused to return to a backward and repressive country. It now appears that Asia is where the action is and they want to be part of it.
“Chinese Bullet Trains Depend on Mega Bridges”
These things are everywhere. Click the link.Inmost countries roads and rails follow the contour of the land. China likes pillars.
Digging subways is expensive and disruptive, cutting highways through cities is destructive of homes and business, so China goes with sky-trains. Building these takes about half the land as roadways. The bridges are built offsite and then erected with a special crane.
“China Develops Infrared Light to Alter Genes of Cancer Cells””
A team led by Professor Song Yujun from the Nanjing University’s College of Engineering and Applied Sciences designed an infrared light-responsive nano-carrier to be used for the CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing tool, which will have great potential in cancer therapeutics. The strong penetrability of infrared light enables scientists to precisely control the gene editing tool in deep human tissue”
I am clueless as to the function of IR in this but, as with so very many stories coming out of China, it does not suggest copycatting. increasingly, the Chinese seem to following from in front.
“China Breaks Quantum Entanglement Record at Eighteen Qbits”
In a new record, Pan Jianwei and colleagues at the University of Science and Technology of China, eastern China’s Anhui Province, demonstrated a stable 18-qubit state. The previous record of 10 qubits was set by the same team. The breakthrough was made possible by simultaneously manipulating the freedom-paths, polarization, and orbital angular momentum of six photons.
“The speed of quantum computing grows exponentially as the number of qubits in an entangled state increases … the achievement of an 18-qubit entanglement this time has set the world record for largest entanglement state in all physical systems,” Wan
(Noah’s ark measured 300 Qbits, but the (barely) antediluvian technology has bee lost.)
Open Date: Dec. 31st, 2002
Total Length: 30 kilometers (19 miles)
Highest Speed: 430km/h (267 mi/h)
Duration per Single Journey: 8 minutes
Frequency: 15-20 minutes
Route: Longyang Rd. – Pudong International Airport (PVG
Trains relying on magnetic levitation float on a field of magnetic repulsion, having no contact with rails. This reduces friction and ends wear on wheels and rails. China did not invent the technology but uses it well. Before this train, the trip from downtown to the airport took forty minutes to an hours. Now, eight minutes. The technology is German, the idea a century old, but the Chinese decided that they wanted it, and got it. The ability to make a decision and act on it without years of political wrangling and lawsuits gives China a major advantage over other countries.
The video is long, at 43 minutes, a bit ray-rah, and wanders briefly off into the history of elevated rail in Chicago but gives a good picture of the train, the technology at a non-specialist level, and the China in which it runs.
Rand: Chilling World War III Wargames show US Forces Crushed by Russia and China
“RAND Senior Defense Analyst David Ochmanek discussed the simulations at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) in Washington D.C. last week. “In our games, where we fight China or Russia … blue gets its a** handed to it, not to put too fine a point on it,” he said, during a panel discussion. Blue denotes U.S. forces in the simulations.”
The reasons for this are several and belong in another column. The military’s utterly predictable response is “Send m ore money” instead of “Maybe we should mind our own business and spend on our economy.” The point here is that the world is changing in may ways and Washington seems not to have noticed.
Conclusion
The list could be extended at length,to cover numbers of patents awarded, scientific papers published, quantum communications, investment in education and technological research and development, supercomputers and chip design and many other things. Beijing is clearly bent on Making China Great Again–as why should it not? Meanwhile America focuses more on transgender bathrooms and whether Bruce Jenner is a girl than on its endless and draining wars. China sends its brightest to the world’s best technical school while America makes its universities into playpens for the mildly retarded. The country crumbles but spends drunkenly of defective fighter planes it doesn’t need in the first place.
This won’t work a whole lot longer.
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Social. Credit. Score.
So what? Owe taxes of $50k, cannot leave the US. Leave the US, still pay taxes. Sounds like social credit score on steroids to me.
The “Little Red App” is even worse. https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-03-22/will-little-red-app-destroy-democracy
Where have I seen this before? Oh, yeah, I have been saying if frequently.
China graduates more engineers each year than the US has in total. This will end poorly for the US.
And the junior and mid-level engineers I have had the “pleasure” of mentoring are more concerned with diversity and inclusion. Hence you witness a mass opt-out by Gen X engineers and rags like HBR writing whitepapers on how to keep them. Good luck, I’d rather mass plant garlic!
Articles – I was around several young complaining about jobs, salaries, how employers are bastards, etc.
I told them it is very simple. Business is in business for a profit, and the last thing it wants is employees. Employees are a pain in the ass and are a necessary evil, but no one wants them. Especially those that are extra pains in the ass, like a great many young folk are.
The were like stunned mullets. That info did not compute. Their sense of entitlement runs all the way to their core. Their solution will be to attempt to force business to employ them and to share the wealth – in other words, socialism. And we all know how that works out.
Sadly, you are 100% correct. I have had good luck overall training junior Indian engineers. Once you break their habit of thinking they need to focus on quantity vs. quality so as to avoid RIF, they become the best engineers I’ve trained. I’ll take a junior engineer from Hyderabad who is ready to be molded and he’ll be worth 5 Millennials who REFUSE to do what you tell them to do. Millennials want to WFH 5x/week, never ever work over 40/week, and cry foul when they aren’t promoted within 2 years. It’s just not worth it anymore.
My dad told me that in the fifties they would send their smallest drill bits to them and they would send them back with holes drilled though them.
Carry on and arm up.
Everything I see from China is junk. They have no idea what quality control is. China got to where it is by us sending our jobs and knowledge there. All in the name of profits. I often wonder if the parts I get are made by children or North Korean prisoners used as slaves. All our gov. security measures can be used against us as the Gov. in China has. Fuck China.
Yah – China makes some of the best qualty goods on earth, and are getting better all the time. Underestimating your adversary is a roadmap to defeat,
Check out their solar panels as exhibit A. They make some crap, but also some of the very best in the world.
LLPOH – I trust you to know your biz, and the biz of others as it relates to your biz. But I tend to agree, at surface level, with yahsure. I hate going to Harbor Freight for tools. Complete shit. All of it.
Are you saying there is some other subset of high quality Chinese made shit that differs dramatically in quality from Harbor Freight?
Would love to hear more of your thoughts on high-quality Chinese made shit.
My regard for Chinese made stuff is also the four letter word beginning with “s” and ending with “t”. Having said that, I also remember a time-about 50-60 years ago when we said the same thing about Japanese made products. Granted, the foundations upon which each country have built their manufacturing dominance are different from each other-and from ours. But, one has to wonder what the outcome will be if China, Incorporated ever gets its act together like Japan did.
Just saying.
Yes, I recall in the 60’s when you picked up just about anything manufactured in Japan it was stamped with “Made in Japan”on the back. It was considered garbage, second rate. I’m guessing China is in the growth phase now…
Tim – well, ignoring Apple products, here is a list of Tier 1 solar panels. These are all generally considered to be of high quality:
Canadian Solar
Phono
Daqo
ET Solar
JA Solar
Jinko Solar
Renesola
SunTech
Trina Solar
Yingli Solar
Risen
BYD
GCL
In phones there is Hauwei, Oppo and Xiaomi, in addition to Apple.
Do a bit of research. China makes crap, but they also make high quality gear. And lots of it.
The problem with solar panels is that they produce low voltage DC current and are intermittent in energy output, meaning they are completely useless to being connected to any sort of AC power grid. Also, you have to have batteries as a storage system in an attempt to mitigate that intermittent output during those those times known as darkness and cloudy days. As soon as the batteries are used their internal resistance continually increases meaning input energy gets turned into heat before its even stored. It all sounds like a shitty electrical power system to me, and the Chinese wouldn’t be producing them if the U.S. Government didn’t subsidize them with our taxpayer money.
from my experience, china has the ability to make anything you want them to make: great quality or crap. many
american consumers demand cheap/crappy/throw-away tools. harbor freight supplies them via china.
i was in the point-of-purchase display business for a bit, and the very best heat-bent, formed, and welded acrylic work i saw came from china, and i worked directly with at least 4 american competitors that could not replicate the quality, at least not at that time. it was as though the chinese welded pieces i saw were willed together. no bubbles or solvent marks. it was impressive.
i stayed at the ascot in shanghai, which is the nicest hotel i’ve ever stayed in. i was in china for three weeks; shanghai on the weekends, and deqing (sp) during the work week. in those three weeks i saw exactly zero vacuum cleaners, but i did see men and women on their hands and knees cleaning floors. same goes for the grass in front of the factory in deqing; a team of people hunched over picking grass. no mower. the first thing i noticed on my arrival at the ascot was the very large mat inside the front door in the lobby. it was made in the usa 🙂
there is incredible technology there, but there is also something to be said for the sheer volume of people. strength in numbers. ask the confederate army about that…also ask the older lady with the home made broom i saw sweeping the berm of the very nice highway that i traveled between shanghai and deqing.
I am not a believer in “China Quality”. As a hobby I work on sewing machines all the time of all ages and from many countries of origin. I’ve worked on ones made in 1878 all the way up to the newer ones. Most of the new ones are from China, and they tend to be junk with a very finite lifespan, meaning they’re not worth fixing. Even the industrial machines are trash. Years ago the Singer machines came from the factory all set up, and all one had to do was clean off the preservative oil, lubricate the mechanisms with quality oil, make a few minor adjustment to the tensions, and then you had a functioning machine with a potential 100 + year lifespan (you would have to do service and replace parts occasionally). Nowadays the importers say that the typical Chinese industrial sewing machine requires 4 to 8 hours of labor just to get the damn things to work. In other words, they leave the factory in a inoperative condition. They’re not factory adjusted to begin with and the paint is usually all scratched up, and with the metallurgy and parts supply over there being as dicey as it is, they simply won’t survive very long. If they can’t make sewing machines, then what else is garbage?
Our granddaughter took an interest in sewing and received her first sewing machine (a Brother) last Christmas. I noticed on the box it came in that it had been made in Vietnam. Went online to learn a little more about Brother and found this to be quite interesting:
“A new sewing machine factory was opened in 2012 in Đồng Nai Province, Vietnam, which is the largest single brand sewing machine factory in the world”. The article went on to mention that Brother has made over 60 million home sewing machines since going into business in 1908.
On another note, our daughter has her Great-grandmother’s Singer machine-primarily because of the antique wooden cabinet-and will, as the mood allows, dust it off and do a little sewing with it. I would guess it was made a little before WWI.
The Brothers machines made between 1951 and 1965 are some of the best of the Japanese machines. Every part seen on the underside will be marked with “Brother”. They are as good as a Singer from that era. All metal parts and no plastic gears means there are still millions in service. Your grandmother’s Singer can be made to work again very well for a max of $45 in parts, including a leather treadle belt, and quite likely for less. The main problem area, the upper thread tension unit, can be cleaned and serviced all under 10 minutes. You clean the body with Turtle Wax Bug and Tar Remover, using a worn -out toothbrush and rags, then polish that black finish by feeding it with mineral oil. Whatever you do don’t get any alcohol near the finish for it dissolves the decals!
Read a site where a guy bought a grinder from Freight Harbor, opened it up, poured out the junk oil inside, smoothed up the rough edges on the metal, poured in some good oil, and now had a good grinder.
Remember China is a vulnerable competitor, as Liza Tobin points out in Xi’s Vision for Transforming Global Governance: A Strategic Challenge for Washington and Its Allies.
https://tnsr.org/2018/11/xis-vision-for-transforming-global-governance-a-strategic-challenge-for-washington-and-its-allies/
When any Chinese concern can build anything that last more than a year tops, I will listen. Quality control coming out of China is horrific! Gibson Guitar’s Epiphone Brand of economy guitars suffered huge losses from such bad word of mouth due to poor QA out of China that they had to send a US team of QA engineers to inspect every unit from the production floor. Once the US QA team arrived and started working on the floor, quality of export units improved immensely. As far as I know, the US QA team is still there. It is possible they rotate them in and out of China so Epiphone employees can spend time with their families in the US. Unfortunately, no other US brands do this and therefore all you get is junk from China.
I would buy American, if I could, but there are items that just aren’t made here anymore. Televisions, Radios, Microwaves, Convection Ovens, the list goes on and on. As an aside, I bought an Oster Electric Skillet. The item would only heat on one end and the heat was not regulated, therefore it tended to burn the item being cooked on the end away from the regulator. I left a review on Oster’s website. They offered to send a replacement unit. I agreed to the replacement. It arrived. We immediately used it to test it. It did almost the same thing except now the item heated the side nearest the regulator. We wound up throwing both Oster electric skillets away. Obviously, the Oster’s QA is sub-par.
I remember when items from Japan first appeared in the US. They were mostly crap and people quit buying them. Those items were mostly electronic in nature but when the first Japanese autos appeared they suffered from the same issues. Japan sent teams of engineers to the US to learn how to QA their products and the rest is history. Quality in Japanese exports improved drastically, that included the autos they sent. They did this while the accountants in the united States went on a bean counter binge and threw QA out the window. None of the US auto makers have ever really recovered from being beat bat shit crazy by the Japanese.
Right now the average US consumer can’t afford something that has any quality. Even high ticket items from US retail outlets are crap. The only way you can get a quality item is for you to be insufferably rich and have one custom built for you.