> Who else has reduced the cost of solar panel manufacturing over the past 10 years? As far as I can tell it's entirely, 100%, Chinese companies. But maybe you know something I don't.
The solar cost reduction numbers come in the form of reduced cost to manufacture and improved panel performance. There is a lot of non-Chinese research into the latter, but even in the former case a lot of inventions and technology is developed then licensed. USA and Germany.
> I don't know enough about smartphones,
Smartphones, invented in the US.
> electric cars,
Obviously not recently invented, but the recent push to make these competitive and take market share has all come from US, Germany, Japan, and SK.
> conventional cars, reciprocating engines
> jet engines, airliners,
China has been trying to develop their own jet engines for 70 years and desperately needed a competitive jet engine since 40 years when they broke up with the Soviets. No dice. They also want civilian airliners rather than having to buy from the US or EU. There's always rumors this time they might have got something workable last year, but it's quite amazing how difficult it has been for them.
> reusable rockets,
Well the Chinese rocket program is basically repeating the rockets of the 60s. Meanwhile US companies are basically re-inventing commercial rocketry with innovations significantly reusable rockets. China has quickly tried to follow that naturally and they could well do a good job. My point is the innovation and the new ideas aren't coming from there. It's just the same story where ever I look.
> or AI
Just more same thing. The inventions around the recent AI boom ("deep learning" advances like neural networks on GPUs, GAN) has not come out of China.
> The most interesting innovations I've seen in CPUs in recent years are from Padauk (China)
What's interesting about Padauk?
> RISC-V (everywhere, especially Berkeley, but also including China).
RISC-V is another great example that's not come out of China. Despite the fact they desperately need an unencumbered ISA (which is part of the reason for their extraordinary hijacking of their ARM subsidiary), they had never taken the step to create their own (before that they were using MIPS). Using RISC-V is just more of the same thing: following not inventing or leading.
The ISA is not really where much innovation is going on in computing though. You just need something as an interface, and everyone is more or less the same (although RISC-V is not very good as ISAs go, sadly).
> NVIDIA seems to be leading in GPUs; like Lam Research, it's an American company with a Chinese-American founder.
Yes, and yet again not Chinese.
> But now the critical innovation bottleneck seems to be not designing a working CPU design but successfully manufacturing it, and the supreme giant in the field is TSMC, a Chinese company,
It's both, for high performance CPUs and GPUs. There are only a few companies on the planet who can do the logic and circuit design, Intel, AMD, Apple at the cutting edge, and say ARM and IBM after that.
Also we're talking about mainland China or the nation governed by the CCP here (the context was "China" catching up with "not China" in silicon manufacturing). So China does not have TSMC.
> In terms of crypto, it's an extremely international community, but two of the most significant achievements of the last 20 years were the collision attacks on MD5 and SHA1, which were found at Shandong University, which is in China. (Of course nobody knows where Satoshi is from, but China is near the bottom of the list of possibilities.)
Comparatively little crypto has come from China compared with, say, USA. Who developed the crypto math and algorithms that you're using right now?
> I agree with you about operating systems and programming languages, though of course if you `git annotate` Linux you will find a rather large slice of it is written by people with Chinese names, a lot of whom work at Chinese companies.
Not actually a lot compared with how much they rely on Linux (a non-Chinese invention). Recently it has picked up in number, but you actually find a lot of those are janitorial and automated linter type of patches. There are some good developments from China, but very few compared with many other countries.
> As for drugs, well, I explained in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29792057 how far China is from "playing catch up" with respect to covid vaccines. But maybe in other drugs it's true. What are the big new innovations in drugs, and where do they originate?
Well since we're on the topic of COVID their vaccines have been a great achievement. Chinese vaccines use inactivated virus, adenovirus vectors, subunit/protein, which were all techniques developed by the west for a long time. The new mRNA vaccine they are developing is based on this new mRNA vaccine technology which has largely been developed and invented outside China.