News on China's scientific and technological development.

gadgetcool5 said:

Even if China's scale and institutions matches the West, it will only improve at the same rate as the West. In that case, the West's massive trove of legacy knowledge capital from decades of tinkering and know-how will keep it perpetually ahead. China must actually have better scale and institutions than the West to win this fight.

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gadgetcool5 said:

The US is partially disassociating the Western-controlled scientific-industrial complex from China, resulting in two separate systems, a Western one and a Chinese one. Whichever system produces better results in the long run will prevail. A tech blockade is not doomed to fail, the US tech blockade against the Soviet Union was quite effective. If the West pulls further and further ahead of China in the coming decades, then eventually China's ability to resist will be undermined, just as the Soviet Union's was. China can only defend itself successfully if its scientific-industrial complex produces better results in the long run than the Western one.

In order for that to happen there are two ingredients: scale and institutions. Scale is why a small country like Singapore cannot go up against the US alone, despite having great institutions. You need a massive talent pool, labor force, and tax/consumer base to support such a structure. This is part of why China must keep its birth rate high. But that is not sufficient by itself, the second is institutions. Institutions are the rules/laws and culture that allow scientific innovation to succeed and scientists to thrive, and the right collaborations between universities, labs, government, and private companies. Otherwise scale will go to waste. That is what happened in Mao's China or during the Permit Raj.

Even if China's scale and institutions matches the West, it will only improve at the same rate as the West. In that case, the West's massive trove of legacy knowledge capital from decades of tinkering and know-how will keep it perpetually ahead. China must actually have better scale and institutions than the West to win this fight.

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ougoah said:

And the thing is China has long proven it has the institutions and scale to match at least. Scale surpassing is possible and has in many domains even in tech fields.

Institutions are at least comparable albeit potentially with greater inefficiencies due to how they are structured and run. However, China's methods do also offer them some advantages. They simply use slightly different motivation forces. The West mostly makes use of market and capital forces whereas China uses both the market and government backed push for expensive, high risk high demand projects private investors simply aren't interested in and markets don't exist for decades until the tech takes it to a certain level. The West often use visionary billionaires to cover that particular gap. China's state is honestly going to have better end goals than billionaires.

Chinese experts make up a worryingly high (for the US) proportion of US tech industries and top tier science institutions even though many are banned from accessing (especially if they are Chinese nationals) their top institutions and industries. Already, Chinese people make up quite a disproportionately high fraction of their electronics, software, computing, semiconductor, space industries. And this is with the Americans honestly placing certain limits on how far Chinese nationals and ethnics can go. I would say China's own education and institutions have long caught up in gaining the ability, methods, knowledge, structures, and organisation that allow those institutions to be equal performers.

However I doubt they can become superior. So like you mentioned, that means always lagging behind the best of the West by one or two decades in the leading edge in the fields the West still hold those leads.

This means to catch up, either the West will need to degrade (which trends do indicate with dedication to STEM) or China's scale side of things compensate the institutions lag enough for overall result to catch up. Since institutions can be more or less equal in producing results, this is enough. All of this is mighty impressive for 7 decades or so of work with more than half of that being groundwork.

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Xsizor said:

I don't think there would be even a two decade gap. This isn't magic. It's science. Scientific instruments aren't a US monopoly. European and Japanese also compete ( and outcompete) US.

China can close these gaps. With the support of the Government ofc.

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TECHNOLOGY
Chinese robot makers battle Europe and Japan rivals on home turf
Estun and peers boost production to win customers away with low prices


Siasun Robot & Automation is among the seven Chinese manufacturers expanding production capacity.
SHIN WATANABE, Nikkei staff writer
August 23, 2021 03:45 JST
DALIAN, China -- Chinese industrial robots still have some catching up to do in terms of technology, but they are roughly 30% cheaper than Japanese and European counterparts, an opening Chinese manufacturers are set to exploit to gain ground in their home market.

After years of being bested by Japan's Fanuc, Swiss player ABB and other powerhouses, Chinese industrial robot manufacturers have gone on the offensive, ramping up capacity to boost their domestic market share from 30% to the government-set goal of 50%.

Nanjing Estun Automation, the top Chinese performer in the domestic market, is one of them.


Estun is building a new location that will "accelerate growth of the robot industry," read a Tuesday statement from officials in Foshan, a city in Guangdong Province near Hong Kong, after the city sold a plot of land to the company.

The site, scheduled to open by 2024, is expected to double as a factory and an research-and-development center, likely tapping the laser and sensor technologies of Carl Cloos Schweisstechnik, the long-established German company Estun acquired last year for about 200 million euros ($234 million). The company is expected to work on high-precision welding robots there.

Estun also plans to open other production and R&D sites slated to come on stream starting in 2023. To finance these activities, the company won shareholder approval last month to raise about 800 million yuan ($123 million) through issuance of new shares.

The private-sector company, founded in 1993, has been acquiring cutting-edge technologies through the purchase of at least five Western companies since 2016, including those from Italy, the U.S. and Germany. The shopping spree has quintupled revenue over five years to 2.5 billion yuan for 2020.

The acquisitions helped Estun grow. It ranks eighth in China's industrial robot market, the sole domestic player in the top 10, according to research company MIR.

Estun is not alone in expanding capacity. At least seven companies have unveiled plans to bolster facilities so far this year. Siasun Robot & Automation -- which bought a South Korean company in 2018, is set to spend roughly $222 million for a new factory among other steps. Efort Intelligent, which acquired four overseas peers by 2019, is to complete a factory by the end of 2023.

The push for increased output comes at a time when the Chinese robot market is rapidly expanding -- mostly to the benefit of multinational giants.

Industrial robots are crucial to the the Made-in-China 2025 initiative, aimed at transforming the country into a high-tech manufacturing powerhouse. The goal is not just increase production capacity, but to increase production efficiency and to spur technological advances.

Seeing industrial robots as key to improving productivity and precision on factory floors, the government has offered generous subsidies to advance research and development.


Determined to guard its market share, ABB is also building a robot factory in China.
Industrial robot sales in China doubled between 2016 and 2020 and are on track to jump 48% in the five years through 2025, MIR forecasts. But Chinese robot makers are not benefiting greatly from the market growth, accounting for just 29.2% in 2020. Their share will rise no more than about 39% in 2025, MIR predicts.

Chinese factories prefer the foreign-made robots "because their movements are more accurate and they are more durable," said a Chinese industry insider, acknowledging that there is a technological gap in decelerators and other core parts and software.

Instead Japanese and European players are the leaders, with nine of the top 10 -- including Fanuc, ABB, Yaskawa Electric and Germany's Kuka -- taking a majority of the market.

However, these high-performance robots from foreign players are pricey, which means only a small number of companies can afford them and in turn has hindered the spread of industrial robots in China. The country ranks 15th in robot density -- the measure of the number of robots used per 10,000 workers -- with 187 units, far behind top-place Singapore's 918 and No. 2 South Korea's 868.

Many midsize manufacturers in China are unable to tap robot resources, and this is where domestic robot makers see their opportunity.

"Industrial robots are growing more prevalent thanks to the rise of Chinese producers, whose prices are about 30% lower than foreign companies," said a MIR analyst.

As these Chinese-made robots offer improved technologies through overseas acquisitions, they become attractive alternatives to foreign-made machines for many midsize manufacturers. Increasing ranks of companies that employ industrial robots will also likely help elevate the overall level of Chinese manufacturing.

But winning market share will not be easy as foreign rivals also step up investments.

ABB is opening a new factory in Shanghai in 2022, and Fanuc is upgrading its facility in the same city in 2023. Yaskawa is building a facility to manufacture core parts near an existing robot plant in Jiangsu to shorten the lead time.

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Overbom said:

Scientific instruments are no joke. They are state of the art machines which require huge R&D resources and extremely talented people to create.

It isn't strange that China, which is a new great power, cannot manufacture such instruments yet. It will happen eventually but it will take a long time

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Xsizor said:

The problem is that unlike the Soviet Union, China is well connected to Europe, East Asia and the rest of the world.

China's economy isn't struggling and it's finances aren't shabby. Chinese institutions are strong too. The arguments for weak institutions may be offered to countries like India or Vietnam but not China.

The US birth rate isn't astronomically high ( its just minutely higher) and that birth rate is propped up by not high income highly educated population but those on the lower rung. The only way US can innovate is by allowing in immigrants from the third world ( which China can do too but is more concerned about stability). China has large enough population that is more than enough to support the industry you are talking about - Scientific instruments.

Most scientific instruments companies have core workforces of maybe a few hundreds or a thousand researches and engineers. China can give rise to hundreds of Scientific Instrument companies without breaking a sweat ( within a decade). Experience is the only issue I see here but talent trumps experience. New paths can be cleared by fresh talent which applies new technologies and methods on scientific instrument research.


The west isn't pulling further and further ahead. The gap is only narrowing. Only in right leaning, pro west echo Chambers will you hear nonsense like these. China will do fine. Actually, China will outdo.

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Tam said:

They will likely start with copying directly what they have on hand.

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Tam said:

These are also not cheap to develop and produce, and requires high R/D budget and manufacturing. Losing the Chinese market can bring many companies over the edge. The US can end up losing those industries.

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