Why is China smashing its tech industry?

> Arguably, capturing most of your country's top talent with absurd salaries and putting them to work on world-critical challenges like... how to generate more revenue from advertisement or... how to create as many "phone-addicts" as possible... could be quantified as producing tons and tons of negative value.

And where is that happening? It's not happening in the US, China or Europe. The ad tech segment would be lucky to rank at the median on talent in the tech industry, much less the wider economy.

What you're referring to is a myth, a slander that gets thrown around HN freely because it makes for a great, vicious soundbite to stab (primarily) the US with. It always goes entirely unsupported, nobody dares to even try to support the claim (because it's obviously false and won't stand up to even light scrutiny).

The majority of the top US talent is working on ad tech? No, that's not actually happening. Not remotely close. The claim is off by far more than an order of magnitude. The best talent at Google are not even working on ad tech.

Pfizer, Merck, Amgen, Regeneron, Moderna, Biogen, Gilead, AbbVie, Abbott, Bristol-Myers, Eli Lilly, Illumina, Intuitive Surgical, Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, Nvidia, Intel, AMD, Texas Instruments, Cisco, Qualcomm, Micron, LAM, KLA, Applied Materials, SpaceX, Tesla, Caterpillar, Honeywell, DuPont, General Dynamics, Lockheed, Northrop, Boeing, 3M, Boston Scientific, Stryker, Edwards Lifesciences, Johnson & Johnson, Medtronic, Monsanto.

That's a super short list that instantly destroys the claim and doesn't include the vast brilliance at work in US universities (which also outweighs the entire US ad tech industry all by itself). It also excludes the huge number of foreign industrial firms in the US filled full of brilliant persons that are also not concerned with ad tech.

NASA has more elite minds in its employment than all of the US ad tech industry combined.

There are probably more top minds working on just CRISPR right now in the US than in the entire ad tech field. Which is to say, the position of the ad tech field is drastically overstated.

IBM is a debased giant, that has languished badly. And yet they have a top shelf quantum computing division. You think the best talent at IBM is working on ad tech? No.

TI or Cisco's best talent is all dedicated to ad tech? No.

The best engineering minds at Illinois Tool Works or John Deere, they're all working on ad tech? No.

All the smartest minds at LAM, KLA and Applied Materials are working on ad tech? No.

The great engineers at Nvidia, AMD, SpaceX or Caterpillar, they're all working on ad tech? Uh, no.

The insurance industry has more top talent than the ad tech industry. The property/casualty segment all by itself is dramatically larger than the entire ad tech field, including all dollars spent on digital advertising in the US.

Compensation != top talent. Otherwise all the smartest people in the world would be hedge fund managers and absolutely nobody would ever work for NASA or NSA. That's not actually how things work in reality.

Agreed. Also, steel production is something that industrialized countries have been doing for over 100 years. It isn't exactly high tech. It just requires lots of raw materials and lots of energy.

It would not take any special creativity (merely an act of will, which would certainly be present in wartime) for the US to scale its steel and other raw materials production incredibly quickly. Sure, there might be a lag time before all the new capacity comes online, but that would not be happening at SF housing approval rates, instead at Liberty Ship construction rates.

I'll never forget how an employee at a Silicon Valley VC tried to dissuade me from joining Microsoft Research because MSFT wasn't "really a 'tech' company." According to the VC, examples of tech companies were Airbnb or the million "Uber for X".

> Maybe, maybe not? We’ll see if this goes well as planed. Easier said than done.

My understanding is that China's manufacturing supply chain is so well-developed that companies like Apple don't think they even have a choice except build their stuff there. The only things they're missing are a few things at the very high end. If they lack a commitment to free markets, its conceivable that they could use that advantage to slowly strangle their global competitors (e.g. allow their domestic champions a price/quality/volume advantages, while keeping the value proposition for global companies just good enough that continued dependence makes economic sense). To counter that, the US would also have to take bold steps away from free market dogma, against the interests if its corporate sector, which has relatively more political power, and against its reigning ideologies [1].

> The point is, companies are already doing this. You’ll be surprised how much conglomerates like Samsung has already taken production out of China.

I'd be interested to know how truly disentangled they are. My understanding is that even when companies move production away from China, they're still seriously dependent on China's manufacturing supply chain (e.g. they have to ship all the components from China to Vietnam for final assembly). I'm not aware of any efforts to replicate the range of capabilities elsewhere.

[1] The right would have issues with stepping away from free market economics, and I think the left would be skeptical of the international competition aspect.

Yes. The 5 year plans contain a lot of verbiage, and sound like political speeches in part. But you look in there and find specific goals. Sometimes very specific: "We will accelerate the large-scale deployment of 5G networks, increase the user penetration rate to 56% ... comprehensively promote the commercial deployment of Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6)."

There's identification of very specific technologies that currently need to be imported: "high-purity electronic materials such as photoresists for ICs." There's realism rather than hype: "Promote the demonstration operation of the C919 large passenger aircraft and the serialized development of the ARJ2I regional passenger aircraft." The C919 project, to build an airliner comparable to the Airbus A320, hasn't been going well, although prototypes are flying. So the goal for this plan is merely "demonstration operation". The ARJ2I is a 90-seat or so regional airliner now in early production. So those goals should be met. "Dominate world aircraft industry" might be nice, but that's not in the 5 year plan.

There's a longer range 2035 goals document, in which one goal is to get GDP per capita up into the middle of the developed country range.