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China is winning the global tech race

ft.com

41–50 of 102 posts

Re: China is winning the global tech race

#41

This is propaganda. China is mostly an uneducated factory nation who will be crushed by automation. Articles like this are great for clicks on a website. Edit: which Chinese tech companies are actually dominant? All of them are copies of American tech companies propped up by their government. Where is the market penetration into the USA? Where is the competition? There is none.

> China is mostly an uneducated factory nation who will be crushed by automation.

I'm not sure we've travelled to the same China. The country is capable, talented and very driven. If you ignore the surveillance state it has a lot of same characteristics that once made America exceptional.

Even if this wasn't written by someone with the Sequoia Capital brand behind him Ive seen enough anecdotally to believe it.

Re: China is winning the global tech race

#42
post #39
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unlike the USA which offers support and aid by offering money to other countries how is the chinese doing any different than what the USA did/might've done with foreign aid and other strings attached loans? In the end, it's a form of empire building.

That's a breathtakingly ignorant assertion. The "strings attached" to U.S. foreign aid are there to benefit the country being helped, not the U.S. They are things like economic reforms and measures to limit corruption. There is definitely an ideology behind it, and its paternalistic, but it's not empire building. It's more like evangelical Christianity--the belief that we can uplift people not only by giving aid, but…

Exactly. The US just hopes the money will be used for the welfare of the country and hoping for some soft power when it's required. On the other hand, the Chinese are just loaning the money and making other countries explicitly owe them.

Re: China is winning the global tech race

#43

I know this article is more about tech companies, but China is winning everywhere. They have started a very ambitious OBOR to connect Europe, Africa and Asia. The Chinese investments in Europe is just mind boggling [0] and the infrastructure projects by the Chinese Govt are spread across the whole Asia, Africa and Europe. Unlike the USA which offers support and aid by offering money to other countries, the Chinese lo…

So China is winning by giving out loans that will never be paid back?

Re: China is winning the global tech race

#44
post #39
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unlike the USA which offers support and aid by offering money to other countries how is the chinese doing any different than what the USA did/might've done with foreign aid and other strings attached loans? In the end, it's a form of empire building.

That's a breathtakingly ignorant assertion. The "strings attached" to U.S. foreign aid are there to benefit the country being helped, not the U.S. They are things like economic reforms and measures to limit corruption. There is definitely an ideology behind it, and its paternalistic, but it's not empire building. It's more like evangelical Christianity--the belief that we can uplift people not only by giving aid, but…

No need to call others' opinions ignorant when you have another one. Here's a good book dealing with foreign aids, among other things:

https://www.amazon.com/Dictators-Handbook-Behavior-Almost-Po...

Re: China is winning the global tech race

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then why does nobody outside of China use Chinese tech? This is a paradox that flies in the face of all the 'great news' coming from China. In HK, nobody uses Baidu, they use Google. The article is misleading because the size of these 'new industries' like 'car sharing' is going to be a function of the size of the economy, so really, it's like measuring the size of the banking sector ... it will be a % of the economy…

Ehhh, Rigol is a popular oscilloscope brand with non-professionals. Rigol is Chinese. https://www.rigolna.com/products/digital-oscilloscopes/1000z... edit: and I should add, I think they redefined the market somewhat.

Ehhh, you can find a strong position in a niche market for all sorts of nations, including tiny ones, and including markets that aren't as extremely niche as "non-professional oscilloscope usage". If that is all you can come up with for China, you're reaching.

Re: China is winning the global tech race

#46
post #39
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unlike the USA which offers support and aid by offering money to other countries how is the chinese doing any different than what the USA did/might've done with foreign aid and other strings attached loans? In the end, it's a form of empire building.

That's a breathtakingly ignorant assertion. The "strings attached" to U.S. foreign aid are there to benefit the country being helped, not the U.S. They are things like economic reforms and measures to limit corruption. There is definitely an ideology behind it, and its paternalistic, but it's not empire building. It's more like evangelical Christianity--the belief that we can uplift people not only by giving aid, but…

> U.S. foreign aid are there to benefit the country being helped, not the U.S.

That's just not true. The U.S. might be less aggressive or shitty, direct, without contract, etc. But ultimately it's to build trading partners and allow putting McDonald's, Coke, and Pepsi into those countries.

Economically stable countries benefits the U.S.

That's not to say that U.S. is evil. It's just not simply because the U.S. is really generous and nice.

Re: China is winning the global tech race

#47

I know this article is more about tech companies, but China is winning everywhere. They have started a very ambitious OBOR to connect Europe, Africa and Asia. The Chinese investments in Europe is just mind boggling [0] and the infrastructure projects by the Chinese Govt are spread across the whole Asia, Africa and Europe. Unlike the USA which offers support and aid by offering money to other countries, the Chinese lo…

So China is winning by giving out loans that will never be paid back?

Yes, because they take assets in lieu of payment. You don't get from 3rd world country to challenging the world super power in 20 years by being dumb.

On a related tangent, if you don't mind - I'm trying to test my "tone detector" - it indicated sarcasm in your comment, as if the comment to which you were replying was not just wrong but dumb - how accurate was I?

Re: China is winning the global tech race

#48
post #44
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a breathtakingly ignorant assertion. The "strings attached" to U.S. foreign aid are there to benefit the country being helped, not the U.S. They are things like economic reforms and measures to limit corruption. There is definitely an ideology behind it, and its paternalistic, but it's not empire building. It's more like evangelical Christianity--the belief that we can uplift people not only by giving aid, but…

No need to call others' opinions ignorant when you have another one. Here's a good book dealing with foreign aids, among other things: https://www.amazon.com/Dictators-Handbook-Behavior-Almost-Po...

I use "ignorant" quite deliberately; the opinion of U.S. foreign aid as having strings attached to benefit the U.S. is literally ignorant of what U.S. foreign aid projects and funding look like.

I haven't read the book, but de Mesquita is addressing something different, the fact that foreign aid can enable bad leaders to stay in power by giving them a flow of benefits they can use to reward cronies and placate the populace: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/10/opinion/10DeMesquita.html. That may well be true, but it's a criticism of foreign aid in general; note that de Mesquita is associate with the Hoover Institution, which believes that government-to-government foreign aid is inherently misguided: https://www.hoover.org/research/better-approach-foreign-aid.

De Mesquita does not contend that U.S. foreign aid is a form of "empire building" intended to make recipient countries dependent on the U.S. or confer direct economic benefits to the U.S. (Even if the U.S. is driven by the possibility of indirect benefit from having more capitalistic countries on the world stage, along with a stable world order, that is something quite different from seeking an "empire").

Re: China is winning the global tech race

#49
post #41

This is propaganda. China is mostly an uneducated factory nation who will be crushed by automation. Articles like this are great for clicks on a website. Edit: which Chinese tech companies are actually dominant? All of them are copies of American tech companies propped up by their government. Where is the market penetration into the USA? Where is the competition? There is none.

> China is mostly an uneducated factory nation who will be crushed by automation. I'm not sure we've travelled to the same China. The country is capable, talented and very driven. If you ignore the surveillance state it has a lot of same characteristics that once made America exceptional. Even if this wasn't written by someone with the Sequoia Capital brand behind him Ive seen enough anecdotally to believe it.

[dead]

Re: China is winning the global tech race

#50
post #36
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author is Sequoia's Michael Moritz who has a decent amount of credibility here. I think his last few articles on China have been more around warning US tech companies not to get complacent, rather than trying to convince people that China is a tech holy land. As for the part about being an uneducated factory nation, the latest PISA findings from 2015 would have China scoring higher than the US on math (10th vs. 25th)…

> Sequoia's Michael Moritz who has a decent amount of credibility but you have to also think whether he's biased in wanting to push the view that the next big tech hub is in China, because he's invested in the region. Making the hype machine so that when time comes to exit, there's plenty of doofus who will believe the hype and buy into the market. it's very hard to know what to believe, and even more effort to do re…

> but you have to also think whether he's biased in wanting to push the view that the next big tech hub is in China, because he's invested in the region.

He puts his money where his mouth is. I made another comment here that it was refreshing as it didn't predict the collapse of China which has been peddled for the past few decades by so-called experts - they could peddle any view they want with no financial repercussion.

Secondly, even if Moritz was biased and published this article for his own gains, it's not as if we (foreigners) have easy access to invest in the region.

> it's very hard to know what to believe, and even more effort to do research. Most people won't be doing it, so it's an effective method to generate hype.

I heartily agree with you here, but you have to admit for every article like this, there are 10x more about the imminent demise of China, so I don't buy the argument that this article's hype will override 'collapse' articles which generate much more clicks.

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