Technology is the mother lode and foundation of economic prosperity.He who command the technology will be richly rewarded with great economy. Now anyone here still doubting Chinese economic trajectory like our friend with O name need to read David Goldman article He is no friend of China and secretly hankering for US superiority. But even he is realistic enough that achieving that is an uphill battle. If it possible at all. Because as I said the best mind in the west does not go into engineering any more because there is no job security and no money. Why bother It is not because Chinese are more intelligent but because there is no economic incentive. In china you can still make a decent living as engineer because the country as a whole appreciate you and your effort
Here is
on why Apple makes I-phones in China: “China has moved into very advanced manufacturing,
so you find in China the intersection of craftsman kind of skill, and sophisticated robotics and the computer science world. That intersection, which is very rare to find anywhere, that kind of skill, is very important to our business because of the precision and quality level that we like.
“The thing that most people focus on if they’re a foreigner coming to China is the size of the market, and obviously it’s the biggest market in the world in so many areas. But for us, the number one attraction is the quality of the people… It’s not designed and sent over, that sounds like there’s no interaction. The truth is, the process engineering and process development associated with our products require innovation in and of itself. Not only the product but the way that it’s made, because we want to make things in the scale of hundreds of millions, and we want the quality level of zero defects.”
Cook added: “The products we do require really advanced tooling, and the precision that you have to have, the tooling and working with the materials that we do are state of the art. And the tooling skill is very deep here. In the US you could have a meeting of tooling engineers and I’m not sure we could fill the room. In China you could fill multiple football fields.”
The US doesn’t have the engineers to make a smartphone. In fact, we don’t have enough engineers to expand US manufacturing output by any significant margin. As of 2015, China graduated six times as many engineers as the United States, according to the National Science Foundation. That was five years ago.
In the meantime China’s university system, enriched by tens of thousands of American-educated doctoral candidates, has come up to par with US universities in most STEM fields. Four out of five US doctoral candidates in electrical engineering and computer science are foreign students, and the largest cohort by far is Chinese. And most Chinese engineers go home when they get their degree, because only 5% of American college students major in engineering, and there aren’t enough faculty jobs around to hire new PhDs.
