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- cross-posted to:
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This is not surprising - the west has some serious university investment to do if it wants to catch up!
Long title just to say “China is only slightly worse than the USA on every metric”.
That is actually good news. World shouldn’t be 100% dependent on US technology. I want alternative. So go China, go Japan, go EU, go Canada.
I mean, yeah, but China is worse than the USA so it picking up USA’s share is not better.
It isn’t.
Don’t wanna sound like that guy, but this pretty much due to all the manufacturing capacity we shifted over to China. I mean they certainly got a jump start, yeah? It doesn’t hurt that the whole place is a building machine…wonder where they’d be if we never moved all that manufacturing there to begin with…
China has 1 billion more people than the US. And they’re graduating PhDs in STEM at twice the rate.
Frankly, if you don’t expect them to surpass the US in the coming decades, you’d have to be delusional, the numbers bare it out. A billion more people.
Also, currently they have proportionally fewer elders and children. So the adults can fully focus on creating stuff rather than care.
Absolutely, outsourcing manufacturing gave China a massive head start. But the West also outsourced decades of expertise, supply chains, and industrial know how while congratulating itself on becoming a service economy. China didn’t just inherit factories: it invested, learned, innovated, and built an industrial ecosystem. We handed them the starting line, not the finish line.
It’s worse than most realize. When I went to Guangdong 10 years ago, I expected to meet fabricators and technicians making our products, but I instead met engineers probing our customers and capabilities.
That company has since been acquired for pennies on the dollar by Google, to the surprise of no one.
And the irony is that China has moved far beyond copying Western technology. It’s now a global leader in research output, including fundamental research in materials science, chemistry, and physics. The West outsourced manufacturing, underestimated the transfer of expertise, and somehow assumed China would remain the world’s assembly line forever. That assumption aged spectacularly badly.
The US is busy figuring out how to charge a monthly subscription for an AI that summarizes emails. China is making the batteries, solar panels, and drones everyone actually needs. At some point Silicon Valley will announce a breakthrough: a chatbot that explains why manufacturing moved overseas.
