News on China's scientific and technological development.

supercat

Major
A rare NYT op piece that puts China's technological development in a relatively positive light, despite some of the unavoidable instances of riding the moral high horse:

How Technology Saved China’s Economy
To outsiders, China may seem like a surveillance state. But tech has fueled growth and helped stave off recession.

Landing in Shanghai recently, I found myself in the middle of a tech revolution remarkable in its sweep. The passport scanner automatically addresses visitors in their native tongues. Digital payment apps have replaced cash. Outsiders trying to use paper money get blank stares from store clerks.

Nearby in the city of Hangzhou a prototype hotel called
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uses facial recognition to open doors, no keys required. Robots mix cocktails and provide room service. Farther south in Shenzhen, we flew the same drones that are already making e-commerce deliveries in rural China. Downtown traffic flowed smoothly, guided by synced stoplights and restrained by police cameras.

Outside China, these technologies are seen as harbingers of an “automated authoritarianism,” using video cameras and facial recognition systems to thwart lawbreakers and a “
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” to rank citizens for political reliability. An advanced version has been deployed to counter unrest among
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in the inland region of Xinjiang. But in China as a whole,
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that trust in technology is high, concern about
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. If people fear Big Brother, they keep it to themselves. In our travels along the coast, many expressed pride in China’s sudden rise as a tech power.

China initiated its economic miracle by opening to the outside world, but now it is nurturing domestic tech giants by barring outside competition. Foreign visitors cannot open Google or Facebook, a weirdly isolating experience, and the trade deal announced Wednesday by President Trump defers discussion of those barriers.

But unlike the Soviet Union, which failed in a similar strategy, China is effectively creating a new consumer culture behind protectionist walls as a tool of political control and an engine of economic growth.

It comes at a crucial moment. Flash back to 2015, when China appeared to be on the verge of the first recession since it began reforming the economy, four decades ago. China’s average income had reached the middle-class phase when developing economies often stagnate. Its working-age population had just started to shrink. Runaway lending, unleashed by Beijing to fight off the global recession of 2008, had pushed private debts to 230 percent of gross domestic product, up from 150 percent.

This was the largest borrowing spree ever in the emerging world, and binges that size had always led to major downturns. But while China’s growth has slowed, according to official numbers, from double digits in 2010 to barely 6 percent, it has yet to suffer its first recession.

What changed was the unexpectedly rapid rise of a new digital economy, now estimated at more than $3 trillion, or
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. Anchored by internet giants such as Alibaba and Tencent, the tech sector was not only counterbalancing the decline in older industries such as steel and aluminum but was also largely debt free. So the bigger the digital economy, the greater China’s capacity to manage mounting debts in the old economy and keep growth alive.

By 2017, tech already accounted for as large a share of output in China as in Germany. A
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ranked China the most rapidly evolving digital economy in the world. And the chief executive of Visa
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saying that some 18 months earlier, the nation’s tech giants “were way too small to worry about, and now they’re way too big to do anything about.”

The available studies rely on data at least two years old and probably understate how rapidly China is leapfrogging into the developed world as a tech power. It has more than tripled research and development over the past decade to
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more than in all of Europe. Today nine of the 20 largest internet companies in the world are Chinese (alongside 10 from the United States and one from Canada).

Explosive growth in online banking is helping to fuel 20 percent annual growth in consumer lending and an overdue shift from export manufacturing to domestic consumption as the main driver of economic growth. Set up in 2015, Alibaba’s MYbank has extended
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, including “3-1-0” microloans that require three minutes to apply, one second to approve and zero humans involved.

Automation is killing off jobs. At Hema grocery stores, owned by Alibaba, little white robots work the lunch counter in place of waiters. Gym patrons follow the steps on a giant video screen embedded in the floor, no trainer required. Shenzhen residents say criminals have been driven off the streets by the surveillance cameras.

Yet on balance, tech is probably creating more professions than it destroys. A recent
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estimates that after subtracting the jobs it eliminates, digitalization accounts for up to half of all job growth. Alibaba platforms alone host millions of small companies, which over the past decade have added 30 million jobs — more than China has lost in heavy industry.

China’s tech revolution was made possible by two of the forces that were expected to slow the economy. The population may be aging, but it still provides a vast market in which tech start-ups can blossom. And though growth normally slows when countries attain a middle-class income, in China the new middle class provides the main customers for new mobile internet services.

No other country has this combination. India has the population, not the income. Brazil has the income, not the population. And these democratic societies are also far more suspicious of government surveillance than China is. Witness the widespread controversy over the rollout of biometric IDs in India.

In China, at least outside Xinjiang, the relatively mild concern about personal data has helped fuel the boom in digital payments and e-commerce. China is the world’s largest e-commerce market by far, and fleets of motorbikes painted in the colors of online delivery companies park five to six rows deep outside malls and office towers.

To offset the shrinking of its work force, China needed to increase the productivity of the workers who remain. And as the tech boom took off around 2015, productivity growth began to recover after flatlining for nearly a decade. The I.M.F. paper argues that the economy is bound to slow in coming years, but will slow much more sharply if digitalization stalls than if it continues at the current rapid pace.

No economy can rise in an unbroken line forever, and mounting debts and a declining labor force still weigh on China. By making online loans so readily available to Chinese households, tech may compound the risk of financial crisis.

But for now, it looks as though the tech revolution came along just in time to put off the day of reckoning and rescue the Chinese economy from a deeper downturn.

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ougoah

Brigadier
Registered Member
Maybe more Chinese Americans in these positions will begin to see the injustices and decide to trojan horse them. It's a vicious cycle. The more "American" Americans shun and attack Chinese (especially capable professionals) the more likely they will develop an emotional closeness to their homeland and then they will begin to open their eyes. Of course the US is overall still quite a fair society and people's rights and property are still protected by law to a certain level. This attracts most liberally minded Chinese. Just about all my friends I would consider to be professionals are liberal minded, neutral to anti-CCP, and totally believing in the hogwash they've been sold by the marketing team of liberal democracy.

The PRC doesn't require many of these people to become informants/spies/trojans. They have enough of a talent pool at home with decent access to resources. It's just a shame many great minds have and continue to contribute to US technological dominance. Most "American" Americans will never admit or realise that the greatest chunk of contribution to their current tech status was brought by Jewish, European, East and South Asian migrants.
 

AssassinsMace

Lieutenant General
Next they'll pass laws to prevent Chinese from travelling to China. Chinese with science and engineering backgrounds will be imprisoned for life.

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Again short-sighted white supremacists think it's all white people that do the hard work in US research and development labs. Non-white people are just affirmative action cases. I remember reading a figure back in the 90s that 45% of the scientists and engineers working in US research and development are Chinese. How many untold numbers of Tsien Hsue-shens are ready to bring their talent home. There's already an established glass ceiling in Silicon Valley and some of those have already returned to China and are working at companies that are now rivalling their US counterparts.

Remember how the US would criticize China for not being open because it stifled innovation? Well who's the one closing its doors to outsiders? Was it a lie or is it the US that needs to be open to be innovative?


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Why are they so concerned about a race with China on AI? The US will have theirs and China will have their own. And that's the problem. There can only be their AI. It's like when they want English only. I mentioned before how there are Americans that want to prevent the Chinese language from being taught in US schools because they equate being taught a foreign language as being brainwashed. The reason they want their values and language being embraced around the world is because they're brainwashing people. That's why they have that view that teaching another language is attempting to brainwash them because that's what they're doing. Just like there can only be one God, there can be only one AI... theirs. They're so worried about who'll win the AI race, it's because their AI's purpose is to slant the world in their favor. It's like when I do a Google search. I search for news on China and all I see is negative stories on China at the top. When I open my browser to read the news, it's already posting negatives news on China without me searching for it. They want the people that don't know to believe overall China is evil because it's a machine with no bias and that's the only news out there for China. No they programmed their algorithms that way. Remember the controversy of how search engines charge to have certain search results on top? Why did Google demand unrestricted access to China? It's so they can control the news in the US's favor for Chinese to read and watch. Can you imagine what they'll do with AI? Not only will they slant geo-politically the world in their favor, they'll get everyone to buy only American to make sure they continue to dominate the world economy. Your only choices will be their bias choices. And how will they comfort themselves at doing themselves at what they accuse China of doing or will do? Everyone else will either do it more or they'll do it less... whichever is worse.


They're trying to blame the change in culture in Silicon Valley on China.

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They want to go back to the romanticism of starting their unicorn hi-tech company in their parents' garage. In other words, the US has lost control of the future. When they bring out the romanticism, it’s because they’re covering up their truer selfish motivations and that would look bad if they were to expose it. It’s like Mark Zuckerberg being the Golden Child at first but today he’s the villain. If you believe in all the accounts of how Facebook came to be, Zuckerberg has always been what people see him today. The culture of today has always been there just like the legacy of US corporate villainy has always been there that they’ve long been doing the very same thing. China had nothing to do with it. Yeah if it weren't for China defying "their culture" they wouldn't be exploring EmDrives. The Western scientific establishment rejected it because it defied the laws of Newton. So here comes the Chinese heretics to show they're not always right.


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A decade ago, the US, pressured by US telecoms, fought against China moving towards its own standard because it would cost US telecoms more money to have their products work with China's system. So, who do you think is the big loser of the "splinternet" here? They've been working on isolating China forever. They're the ones that want to control everything. China can only gain. The US is the one "losing" things and that's why no matter what brave face they show, they're in panic because of it. When there are no challengers, they can make up any narrative to why everything is. They told themselves their superiority was natural just like everyone else's inferiority was too. They started believing in their own lies. It made them comfortable. It made them lax. Panic comes from the unexpected that they thought would never happen happening.
 
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Xizor

Captain
Registered Member
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Wuhan pneumonia a wake-up call for basic Chinese research

Missed Chance" in July 2003, arguing China lost an opportunity to show "growing scientific prowess" due to the lack of swift medical measures to bring SARS under control. Some 17 years later, does China have enough scientific strength to cope with the Wuhan pneumonia confidently and efficiently?

The WHO noted on January 12 that "China shared the genetic sequence of the novel coronavirus." One day later, the organization published a report on diagnostic detection of the virus, delivered by a group of German researchers, who later reportedly "have developed the first diagnostic test" for the Wuhan virus.

Almost at the same time, China also developed a diagnostic testing device. Its speed can be argued as much faster compared to the SARS outbreak in 2003. However, China, where both SARS and the Wuhan virus first emerged, failed to be the first in relevant diagnostic research and development (R&D) in both cases.

China has seen a sharp rise in cases of the new coronavirus over the past two days. What caused the escalation? Some say this is because China has developed and implemented testing devices which can raise the effectiveness of relevant inspections. However, the first known patient with related symptoms surfaced on December 8, 2019. Yet until January 11, it had been called as "pneumonia with an unknown cause." There had been no research to unlock the mysterious virus in more than a month. Isn't that a major cause for the disease's quick spread?

China must have started relevant research and analysis as soon as the new virus was detected. Yet speed plays a crucial role in preventing and controlling the epidemic. Sample collection and research take time, yet in an epidemic outbreak like this, people would only hope authorities could respond faster.

Behind the fight against infections is the development and competition in technologies and R&D.

China's technological strength is growing, which is proven by the Qinghai-Tibet Railway, 5G technology, Chang'e-5 lunar lander and deep-sea submersible Jiaolong. Nevertheless, the country is still not able to produce certain high-purity chemicals or high-end analytical instruments. Only one Chinese scientist,
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, was awarded the Nobel Prize, where scientists from certain Western countries, including Japan, can win the prize in consecutive years.

China's basic research, or fundamental scientific research, to improve scientific theories still lags behind. Reports have shown that China's investment in basic research only accounts for 5 percent of the country's total investment in R&D. Yet in developed countries, the proportion ranges from 15 to 20 percent.

Time is needed for basic research. But times waits for no one. Any attempt to seek quick success and instant benefits must be avoided. However, it is time for China to increase investment, focus on talent training, team building and policy adjustments in this field. In the end, solid scientific support is a crucial factor in maintaining the stable development of the country.


 

Xizor

Captain
Registered Member
I am concerned by the tendency of the Chinese to "group think". It is a limiting factor. Individual pursuit of thoughts and destiny must be cherished while group think ought to be enforced by a sophisticated set of "Instruments".

Some of which are -
Institutional glass ceilings, Inertia, Constraints and Concerns inherent in change, artificial and natural Constraints in changing an already productive system, making current systems and ways that enforce the "Socialism with Chinese characteristics" more durable and productive for the masses with easily identifiable and visible results etc...

China should wean itself from Group Think and collective action that is often liberally introduced in every avenue of state attention. While it is quite romantic to hold on to collective thoughts and actions, (it is worthwhile to hold on to these... These traits and qualities are desirable for social beings like humans and Chinese culture itself) it is going to be a limiting factor in Chinese productivity, vitality and flexibility going to the future. What is required is a careful assessment and targeting of niche areas relevant to political stability and growth.

Simply put -
Group Think, Collective thoughts and actions must be applied to certain areas only.

Apparently, Healthcare and mass wellbeing will be affected by these qualities.The coronovirus outbreak has laid bare a fracture in Chinese national strength. I don't like seeing weakness in China.

I am responding to an interesting and valid criticism of "Group Think" by a fellow commentator in the Global Times comment table under the article cited above

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Biscuits

Major
Registered Member
I am concerned by the tendency of the Chinese to "group think". It is a limiting factor. Individual pursuit of thoughts and destiny must be cherished while group think ought to be enforced by a sophisticated set of "Instruments".

Some of which are -
Institutional glass ceilings, Inertia, Constraints and Concerns inherent in change, artificial and natural Constraints in changing an already productive system, making current systems and ways that enforce the "Socialism with Chinese characteristics" more durable and productive for the masses with easily identifiable and visible results etc...

China should wean itself from Group Think and collective action that is often liberally introduced in every avenue of state attention. While it is quite romantic to hold on to collective thoughts and actions, (it is worthwhile to hold on to these... These traits and qualities are desirable for social beings like humans and Chinese culture itself) it is going to be a limiting factor in Chinese productivity, vitality and flexibility going to the future. What is required is a careful assessment and targeting of niche areas relevant to political stability and growth.

Simply put -
Group Think, Collective thoughts and actions must be applied to certain areas only.

Apparently, Healthcare and mass wellbeing will be affected by these qualities.The coronovirus outbreak has laid bare a fracture in Chinese national strength. I don't like seeing weakness in China.

I am responding to an interesting and valid criticism of "Group Think" by a fellow commentator in the Global Times comment table under the article cited above

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

Do you have any actual examples of "group think"?

It just sounds like something Americans would project on others while having the largest lemming behavior themselves.

I see many Chinese who like China, yet many others don't just like but love their country. And yet more others dislike or hate it. And among those, some agree more with the societies in Europe, some believe Africa is where opportunity can be found, and some even go to America.

That's just on one opinion. It is possible to find many people who think radically different to each other on almost every conceivable question... I would almost say that the joke about 2 Jews never agreeing could be extended to Chinese people.

I think more "group think" (not to the level where everyone is just blindly following their "god Emperor") would actually be a good thing because a lot of Chinese people border on conspiracy theory believers.
 

Tam

Brigadier
Registered Member
"Group think?" Group think is a big problem now with Americans just as it is with Chinese. Actually, the problem is with everyone. The cause of it is not social or cultural behavior. Its Social Media. It is in the countries where Social Media is at the strongest --- as you can expect, both US and China included --- that manifests group think.

Social media replaces critical thinking. The medium of social media does not allow for in depth critical discussion, but rather for short messages like "tweets", "15 second videos", and "snapshots" designed to maximum immediate impression over critical thinking. People are not only lazy to think differently, they are afraid to think differently because they won't be part of the crowd, or group, or trend. Social media is where stupidity runs unchecked for all to see --- and imitate. Group think, or I should say, Social Media Think has replaced critical and individual thinking. A good part of SMT is paranoid, conspiracy theory. Anything they cannot answer, blame it on conspiracy. You blame it on the Chinese, you blame it on the Jews, you blame it on the Capitalists, you blame it on the Globalists, you blame it on the Socialists and the Communists, you blame it on the Central Banks, you blame it on the Elites, you blame it on the Corporations, you blame on Russia, you blame it on the CIA, you can blame it on the NSA, you blame it on Trump, you blame it on Soros, you blame it on the SJWs, you blame it on Iran, you blame it on the Democrats, you blame it on the Republicans, you blame it on immigrants, you blame it on anyone who isn't the color of your skin.

Blaming is a convenient excuse from critical thinking. It blinds people from trying to analyze the deep structural problems and coming up with real answers. Instead, blaming is the first act towards politicizing --- looking for proof that the world aligns with your political view. You're not looking for solutions, you are only looking to be right and the other guy is wrong.
 

vesicles

Colonel
I am concerned by the tendency of the Chinese to "group think". It is a limiting factor. Individual pursuit of thoughts and destiny must be cherished while group think ought to be enforced by a sophisticated set of "Instruments".

Some of which are -
Institutional glass ceilings, Inertia, Constraints and Concerns inherent in change, artificial and natural Constraints in changing an already productive system, making current systems and ways that enforce the "Socialism with Chinese characteristics" more durable and productive for the masses with easily identifiable and visible results etc...

China should wean itself from Group Think and collective action that is often liberally introduced in every avenue of state attention. While it is quite romantic to hold on to collective thoughts and actions, (it is worthwhile to hold on to these... These traits and qualities are desirable for social beings like humans and Chinese culture itself) it is going to be a limiting factor in Chinese productivity, vitality and flexibility going to the future. What is required is a careful assessment and targeting of niche areas relevant to political stability and growth.

Simply put -
Group Think, Collective thoughts and actions must be applied to certain areas only.

Apparently, Healthcare and mass wellbeing will be affected by these qualities.The coronovirus outbreak has laid bare a fracture in Chinese national strength. I don't like seeing weakness in China.

I am responding to an interesting and valid criticism of "Group Think" by a fellow commentator in the Global Times comment table under the article cited above

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

Hmmm... Not sure where you get the idea of the Chinese doing “group thinking”. The most complaints that I’ve heard about the Chinese is that they always think for themselves and cannot unite. No matter how urgent the situation, you always get people who will put themselves ahead of the group. People have contrasted the Chinese with the Japanese who have been well known to put the group ahead of themselves.

In fact, many have used this to attempt to explain why the Chinese soccer team, or any other team sports (except women volleyball), can never win anything. This is the first time that I’ve heard people describing the Chinese doing group think...
 
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