Earlier quoted context omitted.
china is basically doing exactly what the US did to come to economic power and people are shocked, shocked! to see it. people really, truly, honesty believe the last 200 years of US and European ascent didn't happen, as if the world sprang forth fully formed in 1997. the vast majority of people haven't spent 5 minutes really thinking about how this stuff works. a lot of this double-standard is inextricably tied to ra…
Who did the US steal the transistor, cell phone, modern operating system, microprocessor, router and Internet from? Did the US steal all the oil in Titusville (which instigated a massive economic boom) from Britain? How about all the chemistry work and exploration work that the US did to make oil useful and plentiful? Standard Oil had one of the most advanced R&D labs on the planet. I guess all the advanced technolog…
what you are doing is comparing the height of the US as it was hitting its stride (cellphones, cpus, internet) with the very beginnings of an industrial revolution in china. the US also had a beginning industrial revolution, and it stole much of that technology from the UK/Europe.
read that again: you are comparing the HEIGHT of a country (20th century US) to the BEGINNINGS of another. what you should be doing is comparing the BEGINNINGS of the US to the BEGINNINGS of china 2.0
then of course there's:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_inventions
but nobody really gives a shit about this stuff anymore because it's so old. what have you done for me lately, right?
yes, the US achieved prominence through all those inventions, but not before there were sweatshops, theft of English intellectual property, mass exportation of cheaply made goods, etc.
and maybe now china is ascending again, and in the next 50 years, you will see the equivalent of transistor, cell phone, CPUs, etc.
but then again that's probably just WAY too far-fetched for you to believe.