How's that tech supremacy contest going?

[luzribeiro]

US Efforts to Contain Xi’s Push for Tech Supremacy Are Faltering

"China has achieved a global leadership position in five key technologies. That means the world outside the US is increasingly driving Chinese electric vehicles, scrolling the web on Chinese smartphones and powering their homes with Chinese solar panels. For Washington, the risk is that policies aimed at containing China end up isolating the US — and hurting its businesses and consumers."

It was expected. Read Comrade Lenin to understand what is happening today. For example, "Imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism."

The transition from an industrial economy to an economy of dog hairdressers, waiters and Facebook will inevitably lead to technological backwardness. Which is exactly what is happening.

Also, I am greatly amazed at the dementia of Western and pro-Western political elites. For example, the US has made every effort to bring Russia and China closer together (the former has the best weapons, decades ahead of all other weapons, and is the richest country with natural resources. The latter is the world's first economy with advanced technological programs). What the west was doing this for, in terms of western interests, is a mystery.

Also other pro western alliance countries with brainless political elite. For example, Israel. For its own money it actually created an enclave of Muslim terrorists on the territory of Syria near its borders, who already now declare that they will wage an irreconcilable war with the Jews. Or Turkey, also for their money created a wide Kurdish formation, which is irreconcilably set against Turkey.

In general, the West is run by idiots. It is enough to look at the problem of Europe and migrants.

Where is Roosevelt? Where is Churchill? Where are De Gaulle and Mitterrand? Western politicians' brains have disappeared like an atavism. Soon the tail will start to grow.

At some point, Europe will decide that following the US over the cliff is a bad idea. First it will be Eastern and Central Europe, but finally it will be the whole EU as the bureaucrats in Brussels are replaced. After Europe, Japan and South Korea will go.

Eventually, it will be the US and Israel out in the cold together.

Comments

[garote]

Lots of interesting thoughts here. Some questions:

What gives you the impression that Russia has the best weapons? They started their fugly war in Ukraine with a "send tanks to the capital" play right out of the 1950's, and have been entirely reactive to Ukraine's tactics ever since.

What gives you the impression China is the "word's first economy"? Or do you mean, first among non-Western-oriented nations? The US GDP is still about 50% higher. Perhaps that order will change in the next 10 or 20 years, and there are good indicators that it will, but even if that's the case... Why does that concern you?

Technology supremacy is an interesting topic. I think China should be doing a lot better than it is, frankly. In the past 20 years or so China's high-tech industry exports have primarily been low-skilled labor rather than innovation. E.g. Foxconn assembly plants. You might be conflating the semiconductor fabrication and design output of other Asian countries, e.g. South Korea, Japan, and Taiwain, with China. Chinese companies have been trying to get out ahead of innovation in design - hardware and especially software - for quite a while, and it's a difficult prospect because the engine of the country's modernization has often been gray-market copycat products, produced at great speed and sold on slim margins. Shifting from that to actual innovation is pretty awkward -- but it is happening. The question I find interesting is, why isn't it happening much faster? I have a pet theory.

I spend a fair amount of time with scientists doing esoteric research. Recently it's been with people pushing the boundaries of materials science. People come from all over the world to run experiments in the lab where I work because there are only a handful of places in the world with the hardware we have. But from my perspective, there is something about the social environment in the Unites States, the EU, Japan, Korea, and dare I say in democratic countries in general, that also makes for a better collaborative research environment. If I had to boil it way down, it would be this: People believe they are entitled to get involved in whatever strikes their interest, and they're likewise more tolerant of fielding that interest from others.

Compare and contrast this with, say, the situation in Soviet Russia, where if you were a scientist (and very lucky) you were sent to live in a "closed city", and you could talk relatively freely about your research when inside, but you risked jail or a firing squad if some apparatchik even suspected you were leaking information over the walls. A constant need to worry whether you're saying the wrong thing to the wrong person, or asking too many questions about a system that's none of your business, puts a massive drag on the pace of collaborative research and development. The incentive is against "disruption" unless it's taken and run all the way up the chain of command, then allowed to come back down again, lining the neccessary pockets along the way.

Now I ain't saying that modern China is the same as Soviet Russia. But in a society that accepts that the role of the governing party includes the right - the need - to crush dissent via massive, all-consuming censorship, ... there's a similar dragging effect. And that will slow the pace of innivation and design for them, for just as long as you please.

[luzribeiro]

Russia having a crappy military and crappy strategists has little to do with them being a one-trick pony in that creating awesome weapons of mass destruction being the only thing they're really good at. Like that new ballistic missile that essentially renders the use of any nukes moot at this point.

China, if not yet being the world's biggest economy but rapidly moving into that direction, is something TO be concerned about, yes - because economic hegemony always tends to bring political hegemony with it, and China imposing its political model onto the rest of the world is certainly not a prospect that seems appealing.

Interesting observations about technology.

[garote]

If Russia used a nuke in Ukraine, the mere fact of it being a nuclear weapon, after nearly half a century of restraint from all nuclear nations worldwide, would retroactively invalidate decades of strident posturing about peace and victimhood from Russia and the USSR before it. It would virtually rewrite history, into a confirmation that their regime is a global existential threat and that every country on earth has a right to be involved in their dismantling. Sure, you can do a lot of damage very fast with a ballistic missile, but their existence doesn’t exactly “invalidate” nuclear arms, and certainly doesn’t justify them.

The whole war is justified by the fig leaf of protecting “ethnic Russians”, and reclaiming part of the “motherland”. If they dropped a nuke it would irradiate civilians regardless of ethnicity, especially a really dirty one that corrupted precious farmland for some length of time. How would that play back home? Could the regime control the media well enough to suppress all knowledge of it?