In many senses there's hubris in the western* view of China accomplishments: most of what western companies have created has had significant contribution by Chinese scientists or manufacturing, without which those companies would have nothing. If you look at the names of AI researchers there's a strong pattern even if some are currently plying their trade in the west.
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* I hate the term "western" because some "westeners" use it to separated what they think are "civilized" from "uncivilized", hence for them LATAM is not "western" even though everything about LATAM countries is western.
Preventing that could have been prevented in the 70s, 80s, 90s by stopping offshoring, blocking student visas, and prosecuting IP theft.
It is not possible to keep core IP secret. HN folks, of all people, should know this. Anything that thousands of people know is de facto public knowledge.
>students would have just gone to other countries, written their PhD dissertations there, advanced another country’s tech sector,
which other countries specifically? No other country has a tech sector. It's the US hegemony or the China hegemony.
You're talking about recognizing IP, I am talking about stealing IP AND selling stolen IP in our markets.
1st: yes force can be used to discourage the theft of IP. This is merely an obstacle, not a total blocker 2nd: yes force can be used to block IP from our markets. This is actually incredibly trivial and would have been very easy 40-years ago.
If country does not recognize IP then "stealing" is not a theft in their eyes.
As for using force to prevent "theft": what force? Military? You might get burned really bad.
Talent is proportional to population, but that only matters if society and state has the infrastructure to raise that talent up. Otherwise Nigeria or Indonesia would be scientific powerhouses, and Iran would have modern fighter jets.
The reason why these statements are not true is because of colonization, delayed industrialization, and Western intervention post-independence. Getting out of this “quicksand” is exceedingly difficult.
China did well to industrialize quickly and keep intervention at bay - in fact, you could argue that it making the rest of the world reliant on its industrial capacity helped address the intervention problem.
That was the original message. My understanding of "our markets" was customers of the US which include the US itself, China and many other countries. Sure the US can prohibit importing of China's goods. It can not control what happens in the rest of the world to the degree that it once could.
Japan pre-45 was a world power, and had industrialized by the early 1900s. WW2 was a mere setback.
Korea is more of a “miracle” than Japan was, but they also did well to industrialize ASAP. They also didn’t face the brunt of European colonialism.
China made the right choice to dump a ton of resources into different industries without the expectation of immediate RoI or any RoI at all. Anyone or anything that got in the way of their goals were dealt with.
Similarly in WWI, it was invaded by Australia and only gained independence in 1975.
Before that, it was split between Germany, the British and Dutch.
Before that, its population was impressed and blackbirded by European traders.
Like cargo cults literally developed there lol