There is so much hubris online about Chinese R&D. Every conversation about Chinese research papers seems to devolve into accusations of scientific fraud, as if academics aren’t driven by the same incentives and companies can’t tell the difference between real and fake research.
The fact is, there are some extremely talented researchers in China, and cutting them off from a specific technology is frankly too little too late. Either the US needs to cool their jingoistic jets a bit or they need to seriously consider whether direct competition is sustainable.
Yes, the US has undoubtedly the best higher education system in the world now, but this is largely driven by immigration from China and India. Will this still be the case in 30 years when India and China’s economies have matured and high paying tech jobs can be found elsewhere?
Right now the immigration system for technically minded immigrants makes no sense. Rather than providing a path to citizenship, the US is sending some of the most talented individuals back to their old countries, where they’ll be developing the economy of those countries rather than that of the US. It’s a terrible strategy that any country not hindered by two year election cycle myopia would rectify.
Hubris is the right word. There are two things here I think are worth noting:
1) The US just challenged the world's leading manufacturing power to manufacture new things. That plan is not going to work. They're up against a culture that builds, builds smart and builds quickly.
2) There is actual racism in the US that is tipping the research scales towards China [0]. Between that and the concerning trends in political destabilisation the states are relying on China making a lot of mistakes as a nation if they intend to keep ahead. The whole US model was importing the bright sparks from other cultures and supporting them with freedom and strong property rights.
What does racism have to do with something that is so obviously an economic based power struggle? Preventing Chinese researchers is not racist. There seems to be no problems allowing any other Asians in. It's a uniquely China issue, and for good reason given the extent of the IP theft and threats against US interests.
No, I mean physical. China's lack of IP protections is one of the reasons they have managed to overtake the US in a few areas. Empowering people to block progress has never been a great plan for driving progress. Silicon Valley only holds together as an innovation engine because Stallman figured out how to hack copyright in a way that promotes a free-for-all.
China is not a safe place to own things. Compare Elon Musk to Jack Ma. Both annoy the powers that be. One gets the call-him-a-nazi treatment from time to time and the other disappeared for a bit then fled to Japan.
If Ma had built up his asset base in the US, he'd have been a lot better off.
I think I agree that the US is a decent place for the ownership of immaterial assets (so long as you can avoid civil forfeiture), but I'd argue it's a lousy place for property (of the real estate variety) rights.
Why do you see it this way? To me the US looks like one of the countries with the longest and best property rights travk-record in the world. I think this is a major factor underpinning the US economy
The US does very little to protect property rights. A lot of places have extremely aggressive zoning (a police power, established by the Euclid v. Ambler SCOTUS case) that limits even what kind of housing you can build or how big a parcel must be.
We also play fast and loose with eminent domain, allowing government to take away property and hand it to another private developer to produce pretty much anything; the development doesn't even have to be something like public infrastructure. (Kelo v. City of New London SCOTUS case)
Municipalities are free to extort a variety of silly easements out of folks seeking permits. In my own town, the planning commission routinely extracts enormous conservation easements or public pathway easements (often larger than an acre in the SF Bay Area, where that much land is handily worth north of $1M) from anyone trying to build or remodel a house. In what universe is that not a taking, as defined by the Constitution? This universe, of course.
So yes, our property rights protections are incredibly weak. You have more freedom to do what you will with your property in formerly Communist countries in Eastern Europe than you do in the United States.
> the US has undoubtedly the best higher education system in the world
I doubt that, as do the times higher education rankings on all but perceived reputation - i.e. US universities are more "famous" in that when scholars were asked to name 15 good universities, they often included US ones.
Although some US universities are highly rated, and mostly in the top 10 for certain metrics and subject matter, they certainly are not "undoubtedly the best".
Thats not to say they are bad, but clearly your judgement is clouded.
> as do the times higher education rankings on all but perceived reputation
The rankings are literally perceived reputation. All you need to do is look at where people want to go to university. And that is overwhelmingly in the US.
If you want to find out which higher education system is the best—as opposed to the most popular—, asking people who haven't even studied there is a terrible idea.
The education space is full of scams using perceived reputation to prey on students who don't know better. The US even set up a fake university without classes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Farmington and people still signed up because they couldn't tell the difference.
If you want to evaluate education quality, look at people who've gone through the system and how they're doing afterwards.
The rankings are made by people (employers, academics) who often went to those same universities. I suspect what's happening in China is invisible to many of them.
> All you need to do is look at where people want to go to university
Thats not what they are doing. They are asking people that have already been to university to name 15 universities that they consider good universities. They dont have to have attended them, they dont even rank them 1-15, they just name 15. Im assuming you can see the flaw with that model - a university that EVERYONE considers 15th would rank higher than one that 99% thought was the best and 1% didnt mention.
They also have rankings based on other metrics. And even in those where the metrics are still weighted 50% with the reputation survey the US is often not even in the top 10. I think you can draw your own conclusions there.
Influential, yes. Best? Depends on which major. If you are into political science not related to American political scene, uSA easily ranked bottom few. If you are talking about economics, depend on which school. I know some organization will filter you out if you from Chicago school.
I find it funny how US nationalists keep bringing up that China can't innovate and can only steal/copy.
Have they looked inside a tech company office before? Have they seen how many Chinese immigrants/second generation Chinese Americans power high-tech US tech companies? Do they think that only the Chinese people in the US can innovate? And that once they're in China, they lose that ability?
> I find it funny how US nationalists keep bringing up that China can't innovate and can only steal/copy.
Most of them are undereducated with highly censored access to real life in China.
They were never offered the choice to study the Chinese language when they were young, while Chinese have to learn English to get into any Chinese university. As a result, they don't get the freedom to read Chinese online discussions & reports through first hand channels, they have to rely on some "free" media to feed them fake news.
Please be nice to them, they are the victims here.
I had always read that (perhaps over-hopefully) as referring to the structural incentives of the Chinese economic system not leading to innovation rather than a racist statement that Asians can't innovate. Neither statement seems completely accurate but the former is considerably less offensive.
> Have they seen how many Chinese immigrants/second generation Chinese Americans power high-tech US tech companies?
But this is the whole point. They might be Chinese immigrants but they are adding value to US companies.
Your later point on top US university papers - same thing. The US has been doing this for 200 years. So many ambitious and talented people migrate there, because their home countries don’t allow them to succeed for all kinds of reasons.
In the broad scheme of things, it doesn’t matter if they are immigrants or not, they are boosting the US economy.
Just like how almost no scientists working on the atomic bomb with oppenheimer were from the US, and they didn’t build nuclear bombs for European countries…
2. SMIC's 7nm was developed in 2020, largely made possible by former TSMC engineers, like Mong Sang Liang, former head of TSMC's R&D, and now co-CEO of SMIC. China already had all the tools and lithos required for 7/5nm at this point.
3. main challenge was not of "if," but how fast they would improve efficiency, cost-effectiveness and yield rates at scale without ASML's EUVs.
4. most key executives at TSMC hold advanced graduate degrees from US universities and were trained at various US tech companies before returning to Taiwan (eg, Morris Chang, C. C. Wei). And they still send their kids to US universities.
5. US sanction was too little, too late. the most cutting edge 3nm would be difficult without EUV's, but Mong Sang Liang stated that 5nm was almost complete back in 2020.
see #1. China doesn't really have their supply-chain of their own. SMIC's 7nm in particular runs on ASML DUV's.
China's most advanced litho maker is SMEE. It was reported that their most cutting-edge node 28nm would be mass-produced this year, but don't hold your breath -- they've been saying it for at least a couple of years now.
SMIC's 7/5nm use ASML's Twinscan NXT:2000i deep ultraviolet DUV. According to SCMP, SMIC can import them until 2024 as the new restriction in the Netherland/Japan doesn't kick in until then.
The scientific fraud doesn't mean the scientists are bad. It means the incentives for scientists in China are much more misaligned than in many western countries. My understanding is that the number of publications plays a much stricter and more formal role in China, which in the end means you get the output you measure. So you get more papers because that's the main thing that counts.
This doesn't say anything about how much good science is underneath all this.
What evidence is there for the notion that the incentives in China are more misaligned than in western countries? Seeing the rapid technological progress China has achieved in a very short time seems to suggest the opposite.
>Will this still be the case in 30 years when India and China’s economies have matured and high paying tech jobs can be found elsewhere?
Even EU can't compete with the US on funding and high tech skilled wages(except London and Switzerland which aren't in the EU), what makes you think India and China can?
> where they’ll be developing the economy of those countries rather than that of the US
To develop companies that can threaten the established US ones you need more than educated capable brains, you need massive amounts of VC funding, which even the EU doesn't hand out, let alone see India and China match not only enough money to catch up with the US, but also to overtake it. Returning Indian and Chinese engineers and scientists means nothing if there isn't tens of billions waiting for them in funding when they get home.
China salaries are surprisingly high for skilled specialists (IT, robotics, biotech, etc), if you factor in cost of living and taxes, they would be higher than EU ones even now.
As an Indian techie who moved away in 2011 and still living in the West(US & EU), I was recently shocked by this revelation. A fellow Indian engineer who moved to Amsterdam recently scoffed about the economic state of affairs here, and said he was able to save so much more while living similar lifestyle back in India. I blindly asked “how could it possibly be?!, with Indian salaries..” and we got down to details. Boy was he right. The purchase power of an Indian techie is so much more than one even in Amsterdam. Although he, and I chose to move and live in Netherlands for many reasons(cleaner air, cleaner/saner/safer/more equal society, etc.), the case still holds true purely by numbers that a techie working in tier-1 companies in India earns more(after expenses and taxes) than the same metric in EU.
As like most things in life, to each their own. But, I was surprised to learn of this shift in balance.
The biggest shock my indian colleagues percieved when coming for few weeks into Europe - wow, you guys dont have home slaves err maids that you pay like half a dollar a day and abuse err 'employ' to no end? You actually clean your home, do the dirty parts of raising kids, do errands? Why are you living so poor? Their star-struck eyes about Switzerland very quickly sobered up, life aint a Bollywood movie.
I've spent 6 months backpacking all over india, seeing all the dirty underbelly some decade and half ago, interacting mostly with poor and poorer. Life-changing, extremely intense, beautiful and harsh experience. Those indians getting to the west are mostly from those top layers like brahmins, not your usual poor hard working common indians - 'american dream' is hard to achieve anywhere, but is nigh impossible there, regardless of talents and hard work put in. Everybody knows it, and profit from it as much as they can. Young brahmin couple telling me its fine that 5 year old kids work in fireworks factories instead of going to school, at least they bring some money home. Small kids with various medical situations begging on streets. Some sights and their utter unfairness still haunt me to this day.
I know damn well how extremely, ridiculously unfair indian society is, to the core, for millenias. Upper castes dont give a nanofraction of a fuck about poorer people, their suffering. Yes, you can live there like a king on IT salary, maybe not in central Bangalore or Pune, but India is bigger than Europe in more than 1 way.
Yet once you stop being poor, money is of little concern. Things like clean air, water and nature, safety, not having 50 C during summer, free good healthcare if not in US, free good education or social services are things we often take for granted, so do the immigrants over time. Life with some poor immitation of that is not that great, and it doesnt matter how high are the walls you build around yourself to shield yourself from the crap behind them, it simply ain't a great life.
So, comparing how much one earns, or saves is largely meaningless in longer scale. You decide which system overall you want to live in and often raise your kids, the rest are details.
I'm not going to disagree with the inequality, bad air quality, or the gap in development between the classes of people in India.
But, as someone with one foot on either sides of the world, I'd like to caution against a closed-off narrative that sounds like "Look, this, this, and this are bad, so overall it is conclusively bad!". We humans all over the world develop as a society and are posed with different challenges that we solve very differently. I certainly have made my personal choice and moved around (US, Denmark, and now Netherlands), but that doesn't entitle me to say any particular world view _must_ be the good one. I for one, certainly miss the cultural openness, family bonds imposed on one by the typical South Indian society. I miss the attitude of "how do we get by and do this? no point in complaining that the government is failing to do blah, or relying on the safety net of a social system" - weird, I know. But, it gives you a certain mindset to look at things differently. I see this in my daily life with my Austrian wife and my son born in Denmark and being raised in The Netherlands - we(including myself) expect things to be in certain place, and feel entitled to them that we almost do not care. Look up the energy use and water use per capita in any western country versus that of India's and you'll see the eye-opening difference. India simply cannot afford to be as wasteful as the Americans or Europeans when the world is already lit on fire.
Sure, western societies do not have underpaid home maids and servants, but the society here has been developing for a long time, and haven't had the misfortune of another country colonising them right during the industrial age and loot all of the resources and treating people like underpaid home maids and servants. Neither did they have the constraints of a warming climate dictating what or how much fossil fuel to burn to build out their infrastructure.
India is huge, it has a different set of problems than the ones encountered by the western countries while they were developing. Over time, things will rationalise and I'm optimistic that the society will move towards the same priorities that the West has. But, I already cherish the secular credentials, diversity, innovation, and hard working populace of India. The scale of elections that occur that lead up to the election of the prime minister is a marvel to observe. I was only surprised to see the creme of the labour force(IT, one I happen to know) is already on par with the West that already seem to have it all. The rest will follow.
>wow, you guys dont have home slaves err maids that you pay like half a dollar a day and abuse err 'employ' to no end? You actually clean your home, do the dirty parts of raising kids, do errands?
My colleagues from Israel also said they missed having cheap Arab maid back home that would take care of the house chores whereas in EU they'd have to pay over 20 Euros an hour which is out of their budget, for the wages here.
Yeah mate, it sucks not having exploitable labor. /s
>I know damn well how extremely, ridiculously unfair indian society is, to the core
Both India and China have a pretty nasty caste system.
>Prison labor has been a part of the U.S. economy since at least the late 19th century. Today it's a multi-billion dollar industry. Incarcerated people do everything from building office furniture and making military equipment, to staffing call centers and doing 3D modeling.
>13th is a 2016 American documentary film by director Ava DuVernay. The film explores the "intersection of race, justice, and mass incarceration in the United States";[3] it is titled after the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, adopted in 1865, which abolished slavery throughout the United States and ended involuntary servitude except as a punishment for conviction of a crime. DuVernay contends that slavery has been perpetuated since the end of the American Civil War through criminalizing behavior and enabling police to arrest poor freedmen and force them to work for the state under convict leasing; suppression of African Americans by disenfranchisement, lynchings, and Jim Crow; politicians declaring a war on drugs that weighs more heavily on minority communities and, by the late 20th century, mass incarceration affecting communities of color, especially American descendants of slavery, in the United States. She examines the prison-industrial complex and the emerging detention-industrial complex, discussing how much money is being made by corporations from such incarcerations.
From what I've read (which admittedly limited to media available to an American), there is an urban/rural differentiating system whereby rural folks can be identified by their identification card (I think by number) and need to apply for low-paid migrant labor work in urban centers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mingong
The distinction between this and implicit systems of caste found in Western countries (like US racial inequality), in my mind, is that it is a caste system that's embedded into and enforced by their legal system.
It's disappointing to me, too. If there's one noteworthy plus-side to any communist system, it should be an unyielding commitment by the communist party NOT to allow a legal system that enforces a class system. It's like the one thing they should be good at, even if nothing else.
Thanks for clarifying. Hukou itself is indeed very bad. There's a few subtle details which made it not feel like a (traditional) class system to me. tl;dr it's no longer a urban/rural class system, it's more of a born-in-Beijing/Shanghai vs others class system.
AFAIK, the urban/rural differentiating part (农业户口; "agricultural hukou" vs urban hukou) is no longer relevant. The "you can't have social welfare where you want to live/work; you can only have social welfare where your hukou is at" part is still relevant and unlikely to be changed in the near future.
Thanks to capitalism, what type of hukou you have no longer limits what kind of work you can do. Most of the mingong-s do low-paid migrant labor work because on the market that's the best they can do with their skills. I have talked with a software engineer at Tencent who was claiming to have rural hukou. This is generally true, to the point that rural hukou holders no longer want to convert their hukou to the urban one, from [1]:
> A recent study [2] finds that only one-fifth migrant workers are interested in converting their rural hukou to urban hukou, as they are unwilling to give up their rural land – valuations having increased sharply in recent years.
It is still unfair to them because of the welfare thing mentioned above, though. But it is not because of the urban/rural difference: for example, if someone has a urban hukou in, say, Zhengzhou (a city with 12mln people), they still can't have welfare in Beijing even if they lived in Beijing for 10+ years. Which is also why they don't convert to urban hukou unless it's Beijing/Shanghai one - benefits of poorer cities are meh, and it is not possible to convert back so they lose their lands permanently.
Sorry for late response. Yes, I did some further research and it turns out your characterization of the Hukou system is much more accurate than mine, which is why you find disclaimers and such on my comment. Mea Culpa.
East-Germany also has some amazing skilled wages when you factor in the cost of living, but there's a reason the cost of living there is so low. Nobody wants to live there.
US is still much more attractive for ambitious people from Asian countries than India, China and even the EU.
I make about the same as a very good offer in EU would get me, but my costs are much less and taxes are about 5%. I guessing I save 2-4x as much. This is in China.
How do you get ~5% effective tax rates? With EU-level salary you should be hitting 30% in their progressive income tax system. China has hidden sales tax (in the form of VAT), too.
IIRC As long as you work in tech (OK, there's some more subtle rules but let's assume parent gets it), Shenzhen caps your income tax at 15%. Still nowhere near 5%.
Shanghai has a foreign employee tax system, which works out to about 5% income tax. This system is only available to choose at some companies and provinces. At a previous company I did indeed pay something like 25-30%.
And what are they going to do with those salaries? Buy unbuilt or unfinished apartments in sinking tofu-dreg towers from bankrupting construction companies?
To a considerable extent, Europe has ceded it's tech sector to the US. We use American search engines, retailers, social networks and messaging apps. China especially has fervently avoided that mistake. India not so much, Facebook, WhatsApp and Amazon reign supreme, but even they have blocked tiktok. So they provide the space for domestic competitors to build up in a protected environment before having to compete with US VC money.
> Even EU can't compete with the US on funding and high tech skilled wages(except London and Switzerland which aren't in the EU), what makes you think India and China can?
India and China tolerate more inequality than continental EU. Software engineers probably only make 2 to 3 times as much as teachers or nurses here, rather than maybe 4 to 10 times as in the US (and probably also India and China).
You're confusing socialism with Soviet communism and the red scare.
Some of the EU countries I talked about are social democracies, and are ruled by socialist parties and have socialist policies who's consequences are a healthy lower class at the expense of a hot sw engineering market due to high taxes on businesses.
Social democracies are not socialist, which means that workers own the means of production. Any other twisting of the word socialism is simply wrong. This changing of definitions is not helpful for both true socialists nor for those who oppose it, as both sides will misunderstand each other. If you mean to say social democratic policies such as high taxes and generous social safety nets, say so, but that is not socialism inherently.
> socialism: a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.
"we want a real democratic and pluralist left party—one which unites all those who believe in socialism"
Or, if you want the Marxist definition:
> a transitional social state between the overthrow of capitalism and the realization of communism.
"socialism is the first stage of the worldwide transition to communism
And therefore:
> Communism (from Latin communis, 'common, universal') is a left-wing to far-left sociopolitical, philosophical, and economic ideology within the socialist movement, whose goal is the creation of a communist society, a socioeconomic order centered around common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange that allocates products to everyone in the society based on need. A communist society would entail the absence of private property and social classes, and ultimately money and the state (or nation state).
Reading further into communist societies:
> A communist society is characterized by common ownership of the means of production with free access to the articles of consumption and is classless, stateless, and moneyless, implying the end of the exploitation of labour.
How ironic that you tell others to read when you yourself don't know the definitions of words you use.
Indeed, it's really something that grinds my gears too, when people don't use socio-politico-economic terms correctly like the above commenter. It just makes it hard for either side to be on the same page when debating because they're essentially using different definitions from one another.
Like the other person already said, no way an average sw engineer makes 2-3 times more than a teacher in Western Europe.
In countries where teachers are well paid (such as Germany), it's not rare for developers to earn less than teachers. Otherwise it varies by the developer seniority, but 0%-50% more would be a realistic range.
Is the VC funding part important or just the lots of money part?
I've got the impression that VCs aren't really interested in hardware so it's governments that have to step in and fund it.
I also believe the Chinese government is throwing crazy money at this sector at the moment, I heard they were giving money out to anyone with a PhD that mentioned RISC-V or semiconductors. This was a couple of years back so not sure if this is still the case.
> Even EU can't compete with the US on funding and high tech skilled wages(except London and Switzerland which aren't in the EU), what makes you think India and China can?
Wages aren't the only point though. Life is not all about money. I had to take a pay cut to move to Spain but quality of life is so much better here.
We're talking about what attracts top talent to move somewhere in terms of geopolitics. The US is vastly more attractive to top tech worker than Spain, even if you choose otherwise.
>Returning Indian and Chinese engineers and scientists means nothing if there isn't tens of billions waiting for them in funding when they get home.
China has a huge trade surplus and they are starting to trade in the BRICS currency. Why shouldn't there be billions? Once the investments pay off, why shouldn't there be even billions more?
They don't have to do anything. The US visa system already excludes most of the Chinese and India people eager to immigrate to the US. The brain drain is bounded above by the US policy.
Will China be devastated by sanctions? Clearly not. Affected? Yes. Are they able to develop a competitive industry? Surely yes. Easily surpass US? Surely not.
Easily not. But the US has issues. We just have to see, in 1000 years, who manages better. This decade staring is boring. You cannot move mountains in decades.
And in fact, as many a strategy game buff knows, it is rarely a single move or "feature". Even chip industry doesn't exist in a vacuum, it needs trained employees, good management, good regulation... It is all about who can build and maintain a more productive ecosystem, at the end of which is the output of high quality chips.
China has actually passed US both in quantity and quality of research now. Vast majority of Chinese students who study in the west end up coming back to China, and some end up teaching at top Chinese universities. Many scientists are leaving the US for China as well now.
Chinese education system also has the advantage of being far more accessible, and China has a much bigger population than US. There is absolutely no way for US to compete against a bigger and better educated population in China in terms of R&D.
From my experience, I don't think this is true (at least not in the way that matters). I finished my PhD in CS as few years ago from a good school and I am now a researcher in industry. In my time in grad school and industry, I have only seen one of the many Chinese nationals I met during my studies return to China. The Chinese researchers and interns I work with have no desire to return to China. The interns express concerns about job opportunities and quality of life if they were to return to China after finishing graduate school. I have never met any non-Chinese researchers who expressed interest in working in China either in industry or academia.
Obviously this is anecdotal so take from that what you will. The computer graphics and machine learning communities in academia and industry are small (even with the ML/AI explosion), if this was happening in any significant amount it would be difficult to miss it.
As for research output, I think there are definitely more top-tier papers from Chinese universities than in the past. It still seems like there are more Chinese surnames from Europe and NORAM universities than from Chinese ones. The big names in the field are still in European and NORAM universities.
I wonder how these are articles you linked are counting numbers. It's hard to understand how something like this could be happening completely under the radar.
Anecdotal experience can often be misleading, that's why statistics are valuable. It's clear that at least some students are returning, and now thanks to rampant racism in US a lot of ethnic Chinese scientists are going back to China.
At the end of the day, a single individual can educate many thousands of people or produce high quality research that will advance the country. There's a pretty famous case of this Qian Xuesen who is the father of Chinese space program. He got his education in US, and then left to China during the red scare.
However, all that aside, the most important point is that China has a very good education system that's accessible to everyone, and they have a large population. This is coupled with government having a lot of direction over the industry and actively funding the types of research and technology development that's strategic for China. This is a recipe for success.
It's much easier to apply for your local flagship state school or go the CC -> state school route than to pass the margins needed for the gaokao though? I think most would agree that the US admissions process is significantly easier, even for elite colleges (UC Berkeley), than it is for comparable institutions in China (Peking).
Having a stricter admissions process just means that you're selecting for higher level of competence to start with. In absolute numbers, China completely dwarfs the US in terms of STEM graduates. China had 4.7 million recent STEM graduates in 2016, while the U.S. had a mere 568,000.
> Right now the immigration system for technically minded immigrants makes no sense. Rather than providing a path to citizenship, the US is sending some of the most talented individuals back to their old countries, where they’ll be developing the economy of those countries rather than that of the US. It’s a terrible strategy that any country not hindered by two year election cycle myopia would rectify.
It's terrible for the US but at least in terms of fairness to the societies who trained, and exported these minds it's pretty damn good.
The US companies extract the value they need/want from these individuals, after their tenure they go back and help to develop their societies which paid for their education/training. It's fair enough, the US is a place for business, that's just business.
"the US has undoubtedly the best higher education system in the world now"...Are you sure about that? It is almost impossible to find undergraduate education for electrochemistry, for example https://www.acs.org/education/students/highschool/collegepla...
Hence applicants for PhD level education come from all over the world just not the US. Elecgtrochemistry is the backbone for battery, fuel cell or electrolyzer development. For companies, startups in particular, this becomes a challenge when you need to hire qualified team members, you invest in them and after two or three years they have to leave the country and you start from scratch. In the UK if your team member works on an employer (!) sponsored visa for 5 years s/he becomes a UK resident.
Will immigration to China or India for education be as pleasant and rewarding as with the US? Especially with internships at local companies and industry interaction,etc... is needed? Also, US tech companies would need to collapse basically, else the demand for talent will finance/incentivize continued quality of US higher education (as will china fears and national security concerns).
I don't think many people care if education focused migrants to the US decreased, so long as that need for workers is still met some other way.
Before Covid, we used to have projects with Huawei that needed visits to China, specifically to their HQ in Shenzhen. The calibre of their R&D is nothing short of world class.
I've had the pleasure of deep-dive analysis and problem solving with some extremely talented and intelligent minds there. Though we had a language barrier, it became irrelevant after a few discussions.
What also amazed me about a company of that size was their decision making process and ability to commit resources and money to actions at very short notice. Their divisions and teams operate in a very autonomous style, and the teams I interacted with were definitely empowered to make strategic calls and commit to them. This may not be true across the whole organisation, but it does broadly appear to be an indicator of their culture.
Back then, they were already doing a fair amount of work on upstream cellular networking and related tech around 5G, SOC design, manufacturing processes and improvements, and a whole lot more. They were not shy about discussing sanctions and were (still are) hard at work towards self-sufficiency, sanctions or not.
What's happening now was not only expected, it could not have turned out otherwise. Also note, we're hearing about Huawei because they are one of the biggest. There are several other smaller and niche players who are part of the game.
>The calibre of their R&D is nothing short of world class.
It's no coincidence that Huawei's global R&D offices are right next to, or even exactly where the likes of Nortel, Nokia, Ericsson, ARM, Imagination, Intel, etc. either used to be or currently are, plus on the campuses of Europe's top EE universities.
If there's top talent somewhere, Huawei will invest there, and often pay better than the local competition (Ericsson and Nokia are more akin to body-shops these days).
"US-led global campaign to prevent China’s access to cutting-edge technology"
I find this attitude from the US government believing that only the US is capable of advanced technology extremely arrogant and foolish. The US may have had an advantage back after WW2 when half the world was in ruins but this has changed a long time ago.
The fact that I have to sign an export agreement with Apple because my app uses SSL encryption is ridiculous. Even more ridiculous is the fact that I am not even in the US.
All of that is a good point, but in contrast I can’t believe that the West just gave all manufacturing to one country for decades, and everything got copied, and no repercussions happened, for decades……
You should be getting a kick out of the rhyme. If the US had cared more about teaching history instead of promoting itself as everyone's savior, I wonder whether so many would have made such predictable blunders.
~7% real rate of return on capital means that you are financially irresponsible if you didn't give up manufacturing in exchange for large cost savings. You might see repercussions in 30 years, but by then your savings increased tenfold. That applies just as much to the individual board member as to the government who's #1 priority was GDP growth.
short term monetary gain for the politicians and companies?
These things were always going to work out for at least another 5 years, likely 10. So why not go for it, earn yourself a few million, and let the next one clean it up?
It's simultaneously the most sad and hilarious part about it, the communists didn't need to seize the means of production, it was handed to them on a platter by western capitalists, in the pursuit of short term profit.
The US is literally doing for the Chinese foundry industry what nations often do to develop an advanced industry: force the local economy to use it so it has a revenue source and is protected from foreign competition, so it isn't snuffed out before it can really compete.
100%. China was going to achieve this technology at some point but we we sort of forced them into Manhattan style projects for this as a result of the sanctions. So they are likely going to achieve technology independence from the US faster as a result and then may surpass it clearly if they continue this level of effort/investment.
To be fair the state of the art is 3mn as of now (eg iPhone 15 releasing next week or so.) But 7mn is pretty darn close.
Consider however that 7 nm (TSMC N7, Intel 10ESF/Intel 7, Samsung 8/7 nm) is universally a DUV (193 nm light) process using multipatterning. The nodes below are universally EUV. That's a step-change in complexity. If "The West" manages to contain EUV to friendly countries, then it doesn't seem unlikely to me at all that Chinese semiconductors will run into the EUV wall and get stuck for a significant amount of time trying to get over it.
Yes, but it is likely China can over come it. China has lots of educated people and as close to infinite resources as you can get on this planet. So it is just a matter of focus.
Blockading a small country that doesn't have a lot of resources can be very effective, even long-term, look at Cuba or Gaza Strip, but blockading China just slows them down temporarily until they overcome this challenge.
The main issue China has is just that they have a population decline problem which will continue to get worse over the next 50 years. That to me is the only thing that truly threatens China long-term and will sap its innovation and productivity.
Why is China still struggling to build reliable, top-tier aircraft engines? Isn’t relatively non-exotic metallurgy fairly rudimentary technology compared to cutting edge semiconductor fabrication?
I struggle to follow along with this. I understand Moore's law, but at what point can we just keep using 7nm for most things instead of always moving down an integer 3>7. How many things will require a 2nm and not be satisfied by a 7nm fab?
The issue is you can make this claim anywhere over the past 50 years. When you just achieve a new node, you think it isn't yet useful. But what happens is that software starts to take advantage of it and it gives you new types of capabilities you didn't have before.
For example, if we never got down to where we are now, we likely wouldn't have LLMs or viable real-time ray tracing or the ability to run various types of photo improvement algorithms on your iPhone to make all your pics look good. Those require significant processing and it wouldn't have been achievable if technology here just stopped a decade ago.
If we had stopped CPU progress 25 years ago we would have never gotten smart phones at all.
It is hard to know what will be possible in a decade with all the additional compute resources we get from moving down more nodes. But I do expect there to be a lot.
Depends how you count. Per design we already use >7nm for way more things because older processes are cheaper. But per $ (and perhaps also in volume) the leading-edge processes get the lions share.
It’s a utopia, that sanctions will help keep China in technology research behind. There is no star metal in ASML machines. Same silicon, tightly manufactured mechanical parts. Same laws of physics. One day China will catch up and compete with classical semiconductor companies. It’s actually already happening. See ESP32 wireless microprocessors.
More general: as soon as a country (or group of 'friendly nations') reaches a certain technology base, it can start doing things that technology base enables. Will it do so? Of course that also depends on politics & economic factors.
This happened for steel smelting, electricity, all sorts of manufacturing, IT, internet access, medicine & so on.
Right now, a process node like 7nm is only manufactured in a few places. A decade or 2 from now, that'll likely be a few more (I put my money on India, EU & Brazil. Unsure about Russia given the self-destruct path it has chosen). Some more time, and 7nm is old news that every reasonable tech-able country can do for themselves (should they choose to).
Assuming tech keeps advancing, one or 2 high tech hubs will become many.
The US sanctions encouraged the Chinese government to invest even more in it's local brands. Why wouldn't the US government have preferred to keep them dependent on US tech...
The US is in a tricky position, China gets the best of both worlds, they buy in US goods when they're better and they build their own when they can. That's an asymmetric advantage China has - since the US doesn't want to buy in Chinese equipment when it's better due to national security concerns. So the US has moved to change that - they'd rather decouple than allow China to more easily reach parity. Yes in the long term this forces China into full self-dependence, but the US has to back itself - does it think it can out-innovate China? You better hope so.
This could be a downer for would-be US entrepreneurs. Would you start a company there if you can't export product to China? Or import from there because reasons? Whatever your opinion, CN is a big market.
Unlikely to turn the overall situation around, I think. But just might tilt the playing field a little bit in favor of say, India or the EU.
Do 20/30/40 old politicians know significantly more about technology? I mean, they can hold a phone right but do they know about foundries, cryptography, whatever?
Success in their career path depends on their ability to get voted, not on knowing what to do next or their general or specialist knowledge. This is the same for any age group of politicians.
RockChip is also made in mainland. RK3588 is up there to contend with the latest TSMC chips. So is TH1520 that can compete with Raspberry 4 per watt, GPU drivers are still lacking, but progress is being made.
Personally I like to keep my devices around 5W so that they can run full speed below 60C without fan; so I'm going with JH7110, I got all my 3x MMO engines to work on my Vision Five 2 last week!
It's actually easy to make one advanced chip in a laboratory, but making it at scale is what's difficult. That single chip may cost 10s of k of USD. That's why Taiwan is the world leader: scale.
Yes, using imported equipment, tools, labour, QA, know how and management staff. They just rubber stamp the made in China seal. And data supports that claim since it's Taiwan the world producer of 7nm chips.
Yes. I understand your logic. But Truth and Facts are two different things.
We have no evidence that China has actual real capacity to mass produce those phones for mass demand.
As other comments say, it may well be chips that were manufactured before sanctions, or chips manufactured on low scale.
The second point is why Global Foundries dropped the chip race, and why TSMC is the global leader.
And under sanctions, I see no reason why China would suddenly become better at mass production than TSMC.
China has a long tradition of inneficiently throwing money at things, so their chips may also be on a very low yield wafers and heavily subsidized. That's not sustainable either
The article is based on an analysis of a Canadian firm that bought the phone on the open market, tore it down, and confirmed the chips were made by SMIC.
There is no reason why China needs to be better at mass production than TSMC. They just need to be able to do it, because they can't reliably buy chips from TSMC anymore. The evidence is overwhelming that yes they can do it.
Without competition from TSMC the price merely has to be reasonable, not competitive, so I don't see why they would go the GloFo route either.
On the recent podcast 'The China Show' [1], all evidence so far points to their 5G chips that were manufactured and imported from Taiwan just before they underwent sanctions. The chip itself performs like a 2-3 year old chip. It is likely a similar story for the SMIC chip - they 100% do not yet have a 7nm process in mainland China.
I think recently China released an "Intel competitor" that turned out to be an old i3 that was de-lidded and had a Chinese name thrown on it, with the firmware reporting rewritten.
> It is unclear how many units of the new device Huawei intends to produce.
> They also suggested that Huawei may be powering some Mate 60s with chips from TSMC, which it had stockpiled before the US cut off such purchases.
You could probably estimate it based on the number of chips they were able to procure prior to sanctions. The other option they have (at incredible cost) is to buy new devices, reverse engineer them, then buy tonnes of them and recover the chips.
Put simply, the title is false. This shows that sanctions are working incredibly well.
The PowerStar was the i3. This happened this year and there is no mention of it in any articles I see.
The fear generated from this story adds a ton of power to things like the CHIPS Act. It benefits manufacturers, pushes a ton of narratives from China, US, Taiwan, Korea, Japan. Kind of a perfect story for so many different players.
> The PowerStar was the i3. This happened this year and there is no mention of it in any articles I see.
I found some articles on it [1] [2], but not any mentions in these recent articles.
Given this history, you can see why there might be some doubt about their ability to produce original products. If they were to for example steal the 5G architecture from another company, you can't be certain they would even report it in fears their stock prices would drop.
> The fear generated from this story adds a ton of power to things like the CHIPS Act.
It's difficult to say whether the fear is warranted or not. China have blatantly stolen IP for many years now without accountability, and have no plans to stop.
It was just an example and as you suggest, probably not something they are interested in as Huawei was part of the 5G research. A better example might be amd64 acceleration architecture, or Nvidia's CUDA cores.
That said, these large companies are highly motivated to patent anything and everything the patent office will accept. It's a broken system anyway, but I can't suggest anything better.
The irony of Huawei or any Chinese manufacturer wanting to charge for use of patents is that they have grown by abusing the patents and trademarks of others. Apple for example lost the trademark fight over the use of 'iPhone', despite filing a trademark bid some 8 years prior [1].
Yeah for sure - if people outside of China and their sphere of influence can get hold of a device to do impartial testing.
I think we already know what the answer is:
1. China does not have the manufacturing capability to produce chips reliably at this scale. There are multiple key technologies they need that they do not have.
2. Taiwan and other chip manufacturing companies are extremely unlikely to export newer chips to China. The cost of losing business by leaking parts or designs would be exceptionally high. Apple for example would likely pull their production from a manufacturer that started selling chips with the M1 architecture to third-parties without permission.
3. There was very little boasting from the phone manufacturer, something you would expect when it is so closely tied to the CCP. Instead we see lots of smaller, apparently independent news sources reporting on this. It appears neither Huawei or the CCP want to directly break this news, as they know it will backfire.
4. They appear to be limited in numbers, likely due to supply issues. If these are new chips hot off the press, you would expect they would have got large batches made to fulfil their own needs and to sell them into the market.
> Yeah for sure - if people outside of China and their sphere of influence can get hold of a device to do impartial testing.
That's exactly what the article you're commenting on is about. An independent organization in Canada just did a teardown of the new Huawei phone, and verified that it's using a new SoC manufactured by SMIC.
From what I understand, they have not yet confirmed this [1]:
> TechInsights has received the Huawei Mate 60 Pro in its Ottawa, Canada laboratory. Work has begun to determine if the application processor is indeed SMIC’s latest generation process node – advancing it from its N+1 7nm node found by TechInsights in July 2022 in the MinerVA7 Bitcoin Miner.
From what I can tell, Reddit has also mistakenly jumped the gun too [2].
Kirin 9000 was TSMC's 5nm process. The new chip is on a presumed 7nm process and is only 2% bigger, which confirms that for finfet processes transistor density is decoupled from claimed feature size.
It's not the communism that restricts freedom of thought in China but the dictatorship at the top. True communism (and socialism) are democracies and permit freedom of thought. Actually, communism and socialism are more democratic than capitalist societies because even the workplaces are democratic. Capitalist workplaces are dictatorships. Some day the world will see dictatorial workplaces like we see slavery today and capitalism will end.
The fact is, there are some extremely talented researchers in China, and cutting them off from a specific technology is frankly too little too late. Either the US needs to cool their jingoistic jets a bit or they need to seriously consider whether direct competition is sustainable.
Yes, the US has undoubtedly the best higher education system in the world now, but this is largely driven by immigration from China and India. Will this still be the case in 30 years when India and China’s economies have matured and high paying tech jobs can be found elsewhere?
Right now the immigration system for technically minded immigrants makes no sense. Rather than providing a path to citizenship, the US is sending some of the most talented individuals back to their old countries, where they’ll be developing the economy of those countries rather than that of the US. It’s a terrible strategy that any country not hindered by two year election cycle myopia would rectify.