The conclusion is actually quite contrary to the title, and far more interesting: the author uses that example to debunk the idea that more research leads to more innovation and more prosperity.
I have been tinkering around the same idea for a while, thinking that the state of a country's democracy matters way more than its research output.
I'll quote this article in the future!
In his own words: "Does any of it matter? Many people believe, or assume, that great output in terms of research articles should cause economic prosperity and innovation. I have post entitled Does academic research cause economic growth? that makes the contrary point. That is, though China is catching up in terms of scientific output, this may be a consequence of their prosperity: they can now afford to have their very best minds work on producing research articles. It is much easier for rich countries to fund people so that they can publish in Nature. So being rich will allow you to catch up. But Japan shows that you can be a very rich country and choose not to produce many great research articles. In the least, this establishes that you do not need to produce many great research articles to be prosperous."
> I have been tinkering around the same idea for a while, thinking that the state of a country's democracy matters way more than its research output.
While I agree with democracy as a whole, I think
0. A thorough understanding of the state of China is needed. In order for democracy to actually work, you need a population that is educated enough to make the right choices for the country. You also need to fight corruption first, or else people will take advantage of the democratic system. In the past 40 years there have been a lot of much higher priority things to the average Chinese citizen than having a fully democratic system. The last thing people want is another period of socioeconomic upheaval and chaos. Stability is the first priority of many. Democracy will come with time and I'm sure everyone wants it, but most people don't want to lose well-being on the road to get there.
1. Democracy isn't the biggest driver of scientific advancement. It's kind of irrelevant. Rather, you need:
- capitalism to distribute money to things that people want (China has a booming VC and startup ecosystem now)
- government funding for longer-term scientific research that has not yet identified a business model, and a system to distribute that funding to people that are worthy of it (funding is there in China; the distribution system needs improvement)
- education that trains the individual to self-learn and nurtures self-exploration rather than rote memorization (work is needed here in China and throughout Asia); education should encourage taking side projects and research seriously, if not more seriously, than classes
- good universities with skilled faculty (there are a few world-class institutions in China, but far too few good universities for China's population -- hence the competition)
Another issue is what defines progress. We have defined it thus far as GDP. But in the future we need new methods of defining progress. The world cannot just grow indefinitely, and we are hitting environmental and resource constraints in a number of ways already.
I think you would agree with Deirdre N. McCloskey who, in her tome Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World[1], thoroughly thrashes out the idea that the thing that made the difference is the dignity of the middle class to be able to bring an innovation to market.
None of the items you've listed do it alone, but taken together and with the cultural idealisation of innovating and bringing to market a novel idea or product, we have been able to create the world as we know it today.
> In order for democracy to actually work, you need a population that is educated enough to make the right choices for the country. You also need to fight corruption first, or else people will take advantage of the democratic system
I'm not sure what this means, given that the U.S. was uneducated and had massive, widespread corruption throughout the 19th century...but I've never heard anyone put forward the argument that democracy didn't work for the first 150 years of the U.S.
Actually, that's not true in the U.S. Before the WWI, there was a strong movement (which was killed by federal government because of the WWI) to direct democracy in many U.S. states and it left with the democracy that's modern comparatively to many countries even today.
I don't think it's a coincidence that the two most democratic countries, USA (at least at local level) and Switzerland are also among the most successful ones.
The "they have to wait until they are ready" argument was always a red herring regarding democracy. It's like with any other skill, you don't learn by waiting until you're ready to become an expert, you learn by doing.
I'm not against democracy. I'm just saying, by WWI women couldn't vote, most black people couldn't vote (though the legal right was there since the 14th and 15th amendment, white terror and legal disenfranchisement effectively suppressed the black vote) , so you're talking a majority of the population disenfranchised, that's a quite restricted democracy.
Maybe by 'democracy' you mean 'intelligent social organization'.
At the end of the day we don't need that much tech to have a great civilization and 'how to do it' is not rocket science.
Eating shellfish, having a glass of wine with a beautiful woman on the cost of the Med recently made me realize that someone could have had this very nice pleasure 2000 years ago.
If people act intelligently and responsibly both in life, in work and in governance, there's no reason any country can't be fairly advanced.
Especially since the dawn of the industrial revolution - we have surpluses of almost everything.
Especially since mass information/media the knowledge for how to do this is widespread.
If individual actors act intelligently then they can make generally a high standard of living for themselves in whatever region.
For about 100 years now most people have not had to work on farms to establish the food base, and are freed up to do all sorts of other things, so it's a matter how how to efficiently deploy them.
wow so shellfish and beautiful women are the hallmarks of civilization. amazing. Guess we should prioritze plastic surgery as a society, capitalism does that pretty well I guess.
For a straight middle aged dude, sitting by the side of the Med on perfect day eating sea-food, drinking great wine in the company of a beautiful and interesting woman ... is pretty near the height of civilization, yes.
interesting is an afterthought. None of that has anything to do with civilization, aside from I suppose the lack of complete and utter destruction of the local ecology.
It has to do with civ. in that with enough civ. a lot more of us have enough food and free time to have a little leisure time. It might be only working 5 or 6 days a week, it might be we survived heavy industrialization into the post period where we clean the air and remove dangerous chemicals from pollution.
The beauty and serenity of perfect weather, a perfect taste, a perfect smile - the moment. This is civilization, just not so much in industrial or even hard intellectual terms.
Slaughtering your opponent in a no holds barred contest of strength is also the height of human experience. Human experience is completely orthogonal to civilization. Civilization is found primarily in libraries and databases - civilization is an intellectual tradition.
If that's the argument it's fallacious. China and USA is not an apples to apples comparison. China would need the kind of explosive growth we have seen just to get everyone a refrigerator, while the USA is struggling with the "what now?" question of advanced nations. All the easy stuff is behind us and there is nobody for us to just copy.
The larger point still stands. China needs a high rate of grow just to be able to catch up and afford things taken for granted in the developed world.
In an example related to the parent, China's cold chains while rapidly improving are well behind what would be acceptable in the developed world:
> While between 85 percent and 100 percent of fruit and vegetables sold in the U.S. are transported in refrigerated conditions, in China, only 20 percent of those perishables are shipped in such a manner, resulting in a high spoilage rate of up to 40 percent. In the U.S., that rate is closer to 5 percent.
Yeah, but they're new, and there's still a culture of food preservation that we lost here at some point.
US fish buying: Buy a pleasant-looking filet off a bed of ice, get it into refrigeration asap
China fish buying: Bring a plastic bag, put live fish in bag of water, transfer to a short-term tank at home. It's actually superior, you can't get any fresher than "I killed this fish 5 seconds ago".
And then there's all the salted food around spring festival. Plain cabbage has never been so appealing.
There was never "easy stuff". Thinking of "developed" versus "non-developed" nations is setting up "developed" nations as a place of stagnation and no improvements. That maybe have happened in the hippy controlled west since the 1970's, but their generation is on the wain. Tech progress outside of computing is making a comeback. I think some people are now trying, with a lot of hard work, to get the tech of atoms improving again. Elon Musk being the most high profile example.
This is the fallacy of looking at a first or second order derivative to say something is better. Also, assuming that the derivitive will stay constant (at china’s rate of growth, they will quickly be richer than the USA....isn’t something many will take seriously).
Everything being equal, sure. China is still in danger of hitting the middle income trap. They’ve tapped out almost all of the easy growth, now to make it to a high income country, it gets harder, growth is already tapering off obviously.
This post goes over science and research, which to me is a consequence to other, "big picture", areas of the Chinese growth. Areas such as economy, geopolitcs and finances. China is no longer a contender - It's the true looming power of the East. And depending on how internal politics play out, it will be interesting to see where exactly China stands in as little as 10-20 years in the future.
One thing that strikes me about China is their attitude towards foreign politics - They still want the world to consider them as a "developing country". Sure, it's a gigantic country, both in land and population - There are still many challenges to overcome, but this is now a country with enormous cash reserves, who own a significant lump of US debt, and making truly gigantic strides on all levels of society.
I have lived in Shenzhen for many years, traveled to tons of cities in China, and recently am back to silicon valley. From what I can tell on the ground, China is going to be in decline for the next 10-20 years. (I have a good hunch most people that comment favorabily on China here, have never been)
- Myth: China is developed. Truth: Start in Shanghai Huangpu (very rich neighborhood, in a very rich city). Take a subway a few stops in any direction. When you come out, you are surrounded by dilapidated communist blocks and electric bikees. Take another ride a few more stops, you are surrounded in villages that are right out of middle ages (shoddy huts with shared toilets). This is the same for any of the rich city in China. 90% of people in China live in middle ages. 9.99999% of people live in 1950s. 0.00001% of people live very richly.
- Myth: Chinese citizens saves and are rich. Truth: most rich people have left China already. The remaining middle class ($1000/month, many of my Chinese friends) are able to buy into the massive inflated housing with savings from parents. The savings, borrowed money from relatives, credit card debts are now stuck in real estate. My friends all have (fake) gucci, LV, brand name products. They take out loans to afford conspicuous lifestyle. These things are all for show. Some of them are paying all of their salaries into the mortgage payment every month!
- Myth: Chinese economy is doing fine. Truth: Many of my banker friends (expats and locals) know that it's all propped up by debts that will collapse any day now. There's a massive inflation happening everywhere, from food to housing to foreign products. It's harder to harder to get money out of China (I'm helping some with bitcoins). Most of them aren't optimistic.
- Myth: China is leading in green-tech, research, innovation, etc. Truth: tons of copy, chabuduo (good enough), cheating in classes and in business, pollution in Shanghai and Shenzhen is still cancer causing, most smart people want to go abroad.
Whenever I hear someone claim china is leading on the environment, I know they’ve never been there before.
Your analysis is harsh, however: there are still rich people left who haven’t migrated. China is all developed, developing, and undeveloped at the same time...it is a huge place after all. There is plenty of trouble on the Chinese eceonomy to work through, and the propaganda is incredulous, but they have made a lot of progress that isn’t going to go away even when the inevitable crash comes.
China could go through a decade or two of Japanese-style stagnation if they refuse to reform and allow the market to work out bad economic blood with crashes and failures. They could also go the other way, focus on real growth and start avoiding white elephants. Let’s see.
I agree that there's a ton of progress in conjunction with troubles of growth. However, I think they're past the point of no return with the reform; if they did the reforms when the stock market crashed a few years ago, that could've been different. But now you can see that the communist party is avoiding that pain completely (just like Japan in 1990) and trying to inflate the worries away. However, pegging to dollar and capital outflow is preventing them from doing that successfully (while Japan had the fortune of doing the inflation in the 90s when the world economy was healthy). Along with XiJingPing becoming a dictator, it doesn't bode well at all for China.
They haven’t really been inflating their way out of their debt problems. It’s more like lending money out, which almost immediately goes into inflated asset bubbles anyways. If you aren’t buying a house, you wouldn’t even notice.
Ya, there will be a bunch of losers when things go south, but wealth has been so concentrated that the number of losers will also be. Ya, it will be bad, but totally recoverable as most of what is lost was never really gained in the first place.
Xi isn’t really a dictator yet, he is the most powerful leader since Jiang Zemin, which is saying he is just stronger than Hu jintao. People forget that this isn’t much of a change, that the Hu era was just an exception.
> If you aren’t buying a house, you wouldn’t even notice.
I can't think of anyone I know that did not want to buy a house. It's a prerequisite for getting married. It's a prerequisite for having your kids get married. It's an investment vehicle. It's a store of value. It's all everyone talks about. Besides, rents have been going up everywhere.
> but wealth has been so concentrated that the number of losers will also be
These would-be losers are communist party bosses. I'm sure the peasants will feel the pain, not the bosses
Rents have been going up, but not as much as housing. An apartment that rents for 10k RMB/month will cost 7 million RMB to buy (about $1 million usd), that is just an insane rent to purchase ratio. We foreigners don’t need to buy anyways, and find rents even in Shenzhen quite reasonable. Anyone who bought after 2011, or maybe even 2006, will feel the pain, but at least it will be market based.
You are right that it will depend on if they take their losses themselves or force the people to take it. But they really can’t handle that much worker unrest, I’m sure they’ll eat it, or better yet, have a corruption campaign and get their political enemies to take most of the losses (then it will depend on who has power when the bubble pops).
It is definitely an autocracy, but it isn’t a dictatorship (well, they call it a dictatorship of the people). My point is that Xi’s power is nowhere near absolute, there are plenty of king makers behind the scene that duke it out with each other, Xi is just an obvious one.
Any dictatorship has a ruling coalition, so I think you are making an artificial distinction. What keeps a dictator in power is his/hers ability to compensate their ruling coalition to keep in place a system where you do not have to rule in the best interest of the majority.
A core tenet for a successful dictator is the power and willingness to replace anyone that acts against your interest with someone from a large pool of replacements. A dictatorship also only thrive when most people are relatively uneducated so that they can't challenge you and that most people do not have enough resources to afford dissidence.
If you want to learn more about the topic "The Dictators Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics" is highly recommended.
Maybe we are just being pedantic, but it sounds like you are looking for autocracy. I would class china’s system as more aristocratic now with multiple red families running most of the politics and much of the economy. But even that isn’t exactly right, china’s political system is difficult to categorize.
On second thought I think you are right that it is its own thing. I do not remember the details, but political scientist Fukuyama classifies the Chinese political system in "The Origins of Political Order" and due to the cultural context it has many unique properties.
>I have lived in Shenzhen for many years, traveled to tons of cities in China, and recently am back to silicon valley. From what I can tell on the ground, China is going to be in decline for the next 10-20 years.
Most of what you've written are arguments for China to be on the up-and-up in the next 10-20 years, not in decline as you seem to think (undeveloped parts = still has areas for future growth).
Others are just on par with the situation in the West (credit debt, propped up etc).
>(I have a good hunch most people that comment favorabily on China here, have never been)
Which doesn't say much. There are tons of people who don't understand anything about their own society despite having been born and raised there (which entails more familiarity than merely living in some place for some years).
Disagree there. I didn't even mention China's middle income trap, 300% gdp to debt, pollution crisis, demographics crisis, gender crisis, censorship impact on innovation and research, wage inflation impact on factories leaving, etc.
The wage inflation is why I've never been too scared about these China will take over soon scaremongering tactics. We've heard the same a few years ago about Japan. Now Japan has high salaries and we can still compete with them. As soon as Japanese produced the same quality as Europe and America, they also got the same prices. The same happened with South Korea now. A Kia car costs basically the same as a European car, it's a good car, but it's not super cheap.
And Chinese products first have to show care for craftsmanship to command these prices, which is something I haven't seen so much until now. India is probably worse.
>As soon as Japanese produced the same quality as Europe and America, they also got the same prices.
That's not the point though.
It's that if they have the same quality AND high wages, then they would be like a 1.6 billion strong USA.
It's not just about market competition -- and even if it was, their huge domestic market (further developed to Japan levels as you expect it to) would be a huge advantage in itself.
>And Chinese products first have to show care for craftsmanship to command these prices, which is something I haven't seen so much until now.
Craftmanship? The kind of stuff they can make, few if any factories in the US can. There's a reason almost all high end stuff is made in China as well (from Apple and Armani, to BMW parts). If they make and sell cheap stuff too is not because they can't make the good stuff, it's because that sells.
(And of course in the level of high artistry and craftmanship China as a culture, has had extreme global masters for millennia, in painting, sculpture, woodwork, and tons of other arts. Of course they don't compete with that -- which are very low yield -- but with mass products for the industrial age).
>There's a reason almost all high end stuff is made in China as well (from Apple and Armani, to BMW parts).
Yeah, they're cheap. If you've ever worked with Chinese suppliers unless you give them a lot of crap they will send you parts where 10-20% aren't useable. They only pay attention to quality if there's a foreign company putting lots and lots of pressure on the factory to produce to their standards.
>China as a culture, has had extreme global masters for millennia, in painting, sculpture, woodwork, and tons of other arts.
Yes, but they lost them in the last century because of some movement, where they killed artists, intellectuals, etc... They still haven't recovered from this. If you kill a whole generation of intellectuals it will take probably a few more centuries to regain that culture they lost.
I used to be at importer/exporter equipment exhibitions when I was younger, the unfortunate truth is that a lot of products are assembled in other countries but that the materials made come from China or some cheap place for production and/or simply rebranded as made in a certain location to increase the prices. But yeah apple iphones etc are made in China since about 2012 or before.
Whenever China is discussed on HN, someone usually pops up with overly negative and biased comments that explain why China is doomed prefaced with "I have lived in China" like it adds extra validity.
This is like an Chinese international student coming to the US, reading about the opioid epidemic, obesity epidemic, the rust belt, black gang violence, out-of-wedlock birth rates, the world's highest incarceration rates, Hurricane Maria destroying Peruto Rico, mass shootings in Vegas, Flint water crisis, healthcare bankruptcy, the rise of alt-right Trump voters, 11M illegal immigrants, high P/E in the stock market, unsustainable pension obligations, social security crisis etc. and coming to the conclusion that the US is doomed. Obviously, the US has many problems but to only focus on the negatives but not the strengths is not an objective analysis.
===
Regarding your anecdotes:
1) I a cousin who grew up in rural Shandong, who moved to Shanghai with nothing and live in one these neighborhoods "a few subway stops away" and drives an electric scooter. While the living standards is not as good as the city center or rich western cities, his apartment is small but clean with running water and functional toilets. His standard of living is not any worse than when my family first immigrated to Canada. To say 90% of Chinese people in Shanghai lives in squalor is absurd and shows how biased you are.
2) These anecdotes of some your rich friends are pretty meaningless. I'm sure you can find vain people in any western city including the bay area as well. I know rich Chinese families who "half" immigrated to Canada who still have plenty of assets and business in China and want their children to go back after graduating from a Canadian university.
4) Make similar comments like this about African American achievement and you'll quickly realize how racist it is and stop. But it's suddenly okay to say the same thing about Chinese since westerners aren't socialized to understand the racism and do not feel the same amount of shame.
I agree with most of your observations but disagree with your interpretations.
China's per capita GDP is only 8000 USD (vs 57000 for USA). So average Chinese people are still poor, and only few people are rich. But that's what is supposed to happen in a developing country undergone huge socio-economic changes.Also impoverished districts and poor people on streets can be found in pretty much any country, developed or not.
Older Chinese people (born before 1980) are mostly savers with mortgage paid off. Younger Chinese in big cities are more open to spending. Because those older people still hold majority of the existing wealth, China is a saver economy overall. That may change when younger generations start to take over. Housing is expensive and bubbly in big cities and certain regions but more affordable in smaller cities and rural areas. There is no property tax on housing in China and rent is expected to rise for many years to come. So high property cost is not as crazy as the price comparison suggests.
Chinese economy has some problems. Its debt load and housing bubble may bring major slowdown to the economy. But a recession will not be the end of China. Economic cycles should occur in China anyway. USA has experienced many financial crises and recessions and is still doing fine.
Pollution is bad in China, as in many other developing countries and in US and Europe a hundred years ago. That does not contradict its leading status in green-tech investment and research. Big problems lead to big problem-solving effort and political support.
I've also traveled to tons of cities in China and what I found is that many expats and local Chinese that hang around the expat bubble have a similar "doom and gloom" viewpoint.
Whereas when I started to hang around local, blue collar Chinese workers (who don't speak English or hang around expats at all), their outlooks were extremely optimistic about China's future.
It makes me wonder if this is more of a class issue. The poorer, blue collar workers will start to prosper more, but the upper-middle class will start to face difficulties.
I would also add that all my Chinese friends that stayed in China are wealthier than those that left. And of those that left, many are returning to China. But again, these are all people that are outside the expat bubble so perhaps their viewpoints would be different.
Almost any foreigner who lives in china for more than a few years develops a healthy amount of cynicism to keep going (those that don’t inevitably leave). It has nothing to do with an expat bubble (most of us work jobs around mostly Chinese, and spent way more time in zhongguancun than sanlitun).
A lot of my Chinese coworkers left for the states while I was there. Something about “pollution and young kids” was their reason, not to make more money. You can make a lot of money in china, as long as you don’t mind knocking a few years off your lifespan (and just forget about it if you have kids, unless you can afford the private schools with full bubbles around them, and even then....).
I've made friends with many local Chinese workers; I speak Mandarin as well. The (very few) workers that are intelligent and knows about foreign things, usually tends to be very pessimistic about China. Most of the workers that only reads stuff put out by the government, and reads censored mobile contents, are optimistic (logically, since the government approved contents are optimistic). or they're just very afraid to speak their minds.
Ironically that's why China will fall sooner rather than later. It's because most people aren't aware of the downfall until it's too late, because of censorship.
"Local, blue collar workers" are generally completely uninformed outside of their little bubbles, much more so than the "expat bubble" you speak of.
They have a job and are making a reasonable salary? Things are great.
There may be all sorts of looming major issues for the country, but their existence is local, not looking at national debt loads, workforce statistics, and the like.
I don't think their outlooks are particularly useful other than as a measure of consumer confidence in their little area.
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"The poorer, blue collar workers will start to prosper more, but the upper-middle class will start to face difficulties."
Why? It's a serious question. Poor, blue collar workers in China (and elsewhere) are generally that because they lack useful skills to do anything higher-paying.
Are they going to suddenly develop those skills as adults?
Is China's economy going to have big increase in it's need for unskilled labor and a decline in it's need for skilled labor? (And if so, do you expect that is somehow also going to be paired with rising economic opportunity rather than a decline and return to sweatshops?)
Well, I dont think those are "Myths", because I dont see anyone who say China is developed, Citizens are Rich, Economy is doing fine, and they are leading the green tech.
No mainstream media are saying that, and anyone thinking like that is very much uninformed.
I very much agree with your view, although i believe it is a little over exaggerated. Because if you take the whole world into account, US, EU, I dont think China is in such a bad shape at all. Especially the EU i dont even know if it is fixable. China comparatively speaking has lots and lots of upside, that is why they are battling to bring those undeveloped parts to balance things out.
And it is not they are running out of tools and waiting for the bubble to burst.
Yes there are lots of things i dont like about China, but truth to be told I dont think they are going to be in decline anytime soon. I think, with the government power now all concentrated in Xi's hand and relatively stable. Their best has yet to come.
Same of your opinion or arguments have raised 10 or 20 years ago, and lots of economists predicted China's economy would collapse 10 years ago several times, but it didn't. As most western couldn't fully understand how Chinese economy working, and how Chinese society different with US.
About the first point: in the 60s Paris suburbs were also filled with wood cabins and shared toilets. I wouldn't take this as that important.
But the rest hints at real problems, actually about my comment above, France has suffered problems due to the way they tried to improve things at mass-scales (which backfired into social problems 30 years later and now people back pedal a bit).
Now if we extrapolate this to the scale of China, and the frailty/falsity of their infrastructure.. and a sensation that they mostly want to feel like a great nation on the international scene .. I could see a catastrophic implosion.
There are several residential blocks in central Shanghai, just a couple miles from the bond, that are still not fully served by indoor plumbing i.e. most dwellings have mains water but no sewage lines. Waste buckets are dumped by hand in communal septic tanks which is then emptied by regular vacumm truck visits.The neighborhoods are otherwise quite clean so people from the outside will rarely notice. It's more of an interesting anectode but people should know.
Anyway, there is a looming demographic catastrophy that nobody has mentioned: The working age population in China is due to crash in a decade or two thanks to irrational family planning policies of the past and it may already be too late to prevent it. Japan's decline coincided with their own demographic crisis and some even claim that the USSR collapsed because the Soviet society have never fully recovered from the massive population loss iN WWII. I don't see how China could get themselves out of the same fate.
China is no longer a contender - It's the true looming power of the East. And depending on how internal politics play out, it will be interesting to see where exactly China stands in as little as 10-20 years in the future.
What if the Japanese don’t want to move forward and are happy to live out the remainder of their lifespans as is?
Progress without purpose is not progress. GDP over quality of life is like measuring your success of curing HIV in a human using bleach. You’ve succeeded, but for what?
It’s sad people are downvoting this. Maybe they disagree but this is absolutely a question all of us must ask.
There are side effects to growth. We lose cultural practices, we lose languages, we lose neighborhoods, we lose species, we lose entire ecologies.
I actually really appreciate the conservative (well...Republican) argument that sometimes it’s worth it. Maybe we should burn some fossil fuels to help developing countries build economically, bring down mortality, be able to support larger investments, etc, in exchange for some extinctions, and the loss of some indigenous culture. I’m open to that.
But you also have to be open to the fact that sometimes it’s not worth it, and ask what does it look like if we were to try to preserve our cultural and biological heritage. This is a conservative ideal too.
And when I think about how to do that, I am drawn back to Japan over and over who solved many of these problems hundreds or thousands of years ago. Japan has already asked the question: “should we destroy all of our native ecologies and cultures in order to fuel industrial growth?” And they are one of the few countries who has taken a stance on that issue, and succeeded at preserving things America seems destined to continually destroy in its relentless path towards an industrial monoculture.
We can’t write that off as provincialism or regressiveness. We (in the U.S.) have something to learn here, and the advantage is not entirely ours.
I don't think that's an accurate description of what's actually been happening in Japan. They have literally paved over ecologically sensitive sites and built bridges to nowhere in a misguided, counterproductive attempt to stimulate economic growth. For details see "Dogs and Demons: Tales from the Dark Side of Japan" by Alex Kerr.
Japan answered "Yes" to that question. Every river in Japan is dammed and concreted, ~all old growth forests have been logged and replaced with cedar plantations, and all native minorities (Okinawan, Ainu, etc) have been steamrollered by mainstream Yamato language & culture.
By most measures, progress in happiness and quality of life in has stalled compared to other industrialized nations. Fewer people are getting married with many citing economic pressures. The world happiness report lists the worlds 3rd largest economy in 56th place in the list of happiest countries.
From my own experiences living there, Japan may have a strong sense of community that shines during crises, but that connection is often only surface level. Relationships are heavily compartmentalized. You may have drinking buddies, golf friends, etc. But they aren't friends in the sense that you'll visit them outside of those activities or really open up to them to reveal your vulnerable side. If an older person loses a spouse, they often don't have anyone else for companionship.
Japan's suicide rate is still among the highest in the world and 2nd highest of rich, industrialized countries. It is the leading cause of death for women 15-34, who are amongst the longest lived in the worls.
Career satisfaction is also pretty low. The reality of work. The system is based on seniority. Hours are unecessarily long, most likely hurting produxtivity. Gaining advancement based upon merit is rare.
What incredible timing. I just got off the phone with some friends in Germany who were accusing me in particular and programmers and SV in general of being cold optimizers who leave out basic human needs and can't even make their own surroundings a better place. I think there is at least some truth in their accusations. To me part of the problem is that you can't quantify quality of life readily. We usually just have proxy metrics like life expectancy, child mortality, income etc. If you can't measure it, you can't optimize it. I'm somewhat in agreement but at a loss of actionable thoughts.
> What if the Japanese don’t want to move forward and are happy to live out the remainder of their lifespans as is?
They don't want to move forward, under the condition that Japan would still be rich and prosperous as it is/was today.
No, not anymore.
The Japanese has lost their electronics industry to US/South Korea/China. The myth of Made by Japan equals high quality is debunked by scandals that just doesn't seem to stop. And look at the crazy policies Japan had used to stimulate their economy. Don't want? No, they are more than desperate.
When you stay static, the world moves forward, you will be left behind. If US decides not to move forward, then China would happily reap all the economical outcome for the years to come, and US would become poorer and jobs would go away too. It is indeed a myth that politics can fix this. No, it cannot. Conservative thinking that they can freeze the time by voting is fantasy. Growth is a game you have to participate, it is a capitalist world, after all. However, what politics could fix, is to solve the redistribution problem, to have more people share the pie, not a handy few.
It depends, people can move in the wrong direction too. I especially worry about country with recent growth too tied in their fever. I appreciate countries with experience. Also not all new is good. Look at the nutrition theories of the 50s that are somehow bogus, while old japanese villages and Mediterranean islands have longer lifespans. We need perspective and patience.
You're saying like it's a dichotomy, but in reality it's a false one.
And I would agree with you if they didn't have things like long work shifts that are almost mandatory, because they're not exactly happy as is.
They don't need to focus in growth, they could focus in improving their conditions, but instead it seems they're coasting aimlessly and no one is grabbing the steering wheel.
>What if the Japanese don’t want to move forward and are happy to live out the remainder of their lifespans as is?
Then the country will die -- and in due time it might be taken to be a satellite to another power.
It's not about wanting to present their current way of life (as opposed to changing customs etc). They could be doing that and be still fine.
But they've already sacrificed quality of life over GDP (working themselves to death), and now they're also dying in numbers (not enough young people).
All countries will eventually experience a population death spiral due to structural issues. It’s how we keep quality of life high during this period in human history that will define us.
For most of the 20th century the UK did disproportionately well in the metrics of scientific research - Nobel prizes, key articles.. The UK has not had the kind of outstanding economic success that should have accrued to it if these things matter economically. Especially once north sea oil is removed from the calculation.
Maybe it has to do with deindustrialization. ICI in its days was a scientific and economic force. Nowadays no one does chemistry any longer, especially not in Britain. The only thing that is produced in Britain nowadays is financial malfeasance.
The way research is done at companies like these has really changed - nowadays it's all mergers & acquisitions, look in Wikipedia at just how many companies AZ has acquired since the merger, it wasn't like that before the 1990s. These companies are knowledge brokers and what research is done is outsourced to contract research organizations.
Back then, everything was done in-house. The Frythe employed people like Joseph Chatt and James Black. You don't have central research like that any longer, except at Facebook/Amazon/Google/Microsoft, and that's a problem. They can sell us ads but will not come up with the next antibiotic when the present ones have become useless.
UK does well in UK-based/influenced rankings. There is this magic "reputation score" where Oxbridge are near 100% while lacking significantly in other areas comparing to competition; yet due to this magic value are always in top 5. If this is the source of national pride, then good luck competing with China!
Maybe because the upper class and the educated class have abandoned the lower classes.
Scientific excellence is not worth very much economically if it does not trickle down into society. This didn't happen in the UK and that's why the economy is suffering.
With all this talk of publication output, I'd like to see some examples of good research coming out of mainland Chinese universities.
In my field (programming languages), I can name one total paper that I liked that came from a mainland Chinese university. It stood out for that reason. A friend in another field (CS theory) complained similarly: massive amounts of shoddy work comes out of China, but nothing worth reading.
Meanwhile, China now has a spam journal called "Nature and Science," so you can tell your friends "I have 5 papers in Nature and Science."
Ah, can I ask what paper it is? I’m in PL, and unless it’s coming out of MSR China, I haven’t seen PL papers that are interesting. China isn’t into PL, though, and it gets better in systems (big data, cloud, whatever is hot these days), there are some good labs with good output (Andy Yao’s algo lab at qinghua). Many of the researchers are foreigners however (just like in the USA).
I’m curious about the quality of published work coming out of china in ML. Has anyone who does ML research read recently a paper that came out of china that had something really useful to them in it? I think those are fairly good measures of output (a contribution found useful).
The paper I have in mind is Zhai et al's "Automatic Model Generation from Documentation for Java API Functions" presented at ICSE last year, from Nanjing University. It is arguably more of an SE paper though, and a lot of the authors are at US/Canadian universities; for all I know, she did most of the work in the US.
Still, the number of good faculty who come from China is growing; it's only a matter of time before some of them choose to start research groups back home.
Mei Hong’s group among others do well enough at PKU in SE. Never saw anything out of NJU, interesting.
China’s normal research faculty system is really messed up, more so than the American system. Special labs like Andy Yao’s are actually funded well (so no need to body shop your grad students to make ends meet), but seem to be the exception. Let’s see what happens.
It’s like you as a professor have grad students in your lab, not just a few like a western professor, but maybe 10 or even 20. A company needs some work done, you need the money, your grad students need to graduate, so...they use the lab to do the work for the company, professor gets paid (important since their normal salary is 10k RMB/month or less), grad students get to graduate, company gets cheap labor....
It was really annoying to us because the professors would always keep their best students (especially undergrads, the good ones were better than grad students as they would go abroad and not become grad students in china) not allowing them to work for us as interns unless we had really tight guanxi with them. America is still 10 times better than china in this regards. Unless they root out the corruption, they are never going to advance beyond paper farms no matter how much money they throw at it.
Interesting. So, I understand that the grad students are not interested in the research. Are they writing papers on these "projects?" What good is a Chinese Ph. D. then?
Some European (Belgian?) students told me that, in their country, it was common to have an "industry-funded" Ph. D. (hence all the people I've met doing DSLs for insurance companies). I wonder to what extent their system is similar.
Think of it like a very focused internship. You still get something out of it (you did the work after all!), but it’s not like you got to explore your own thing and there was a lot more grunt work involved; since the professor had 20 student you also got a lot of experience in managing other students (senior PhDs will direct junior PhDs and master students, who will direct undergrads if any, you might rarely see the professor unless you are at the top of the lab). In that sense, many employers might find a chinese grad degree more preferable to a western one. On the other hand, research breakthroughs are much less likely.
I think China is huge in Computer Vision. And in terms of good Chinese papers ... there are really a lot of them in this Area, some of them are hugely influential.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1502.01852 Delving Deep into Rectifiers: Surpassing Human-Level Performance on ImageNet Classification. Also known as PreLU, citation 1600+. The initialization scheme is widely adapted by a lot of following works.
Those are the most influential ones, all come from Kaiming He. He is now in FAIR, and keeps very good publication record, with works like MASK-RCNN, but that doesn't really count as purely Chinese contribution, so we skipped here.
We asked about papers from universities in mainland China. You posted 7 papers. One of them had a second author from Shanghai Jiao Tong, and another had a second author from Tsinghua. The rest were from industry, MSR, and western universities.
So, we had someone from another field go searching for examples of good research from mainland Chinese universities, and come up empty-handed. I think this counts as further evidence for mainland Chinese universities being paper farms. :)
And, what do you know? Kaiming He did his Ph. D. in Hong Kong, not mainland China.
You might not take a close look, the one from Tsinghua is not second author, it is noted as an equal contributor. And there may be two western universities in total, taking into account of all authors. I like how your logics goes, that it is up to you to assign the credit as how much goes to who, everything doesn't fit your narrative doesn't count. As to your trivia, I don't think it matters, since his best research is done in MSRA, with coauthors that are mainland Chinese, not in that Hong Kong University.
Majority of authors of the papers are from China, the research is done by Chinese, mainly in mainland China, I believe they are Chinese enough, the point I want to make is obvious. Otherwise, I feel majority of the US CV papers would be disqualified because they are likely not done by locals here.
Last but not least, I was answering to the question as regards to good Chinese papers, not specifically from Chinese universities, not directly towards your question after all.
Sean worked at Microsoft China; I don't think he's worried about Chinese output. There was never any question that lots of people from mainland China do great research (otherwise my department is in trouble). The question is about universities in mainland China. This is kinda the equivalent of me saying that the City University of New York isn't very good, and then you trying to name smart people from New York to disprove it.
I understand you may be upset that I didn't like your answer, but I ask that you assume good faith and not accuse me (us?) of believing something we didn't say.
I think it is then easy to settle. I wasn't answering your question, my answer is never about Chinese university anyway.
If u feel being accused of and it is not what u mean, I am sorry. However, your post comes with a fighting spirit, and a trollish account, that seems to designatedly trigger people, if you expect good faith, I would suggest u to improve on the use of language
Apology accepted. I do see why my posts would provoke a reaction in someone who confuses "Chinese universities" with "Chinese people." If that's not you, then I'm mystified.
What you observed is exact how we set the goal and play the game. As a Chinese, I think your observation is very insightful to point to the model/structure of these kind of advance measured by normal ways. But most people follow the normal fact checking measurement. That's one of the powerful way to manipulate people's perspectives by improving on some facts. In the end of the day, we all react to some signals.
Agreed. These couple of sentences deflate the click-baity title a bit:
"The report echoes my earlier observations: lots of new countries are become scientific powers in terms of publication output, with China leading the charge. The major claim made by the report is that developed countries continue to dominate in terms of highly cited publications."
The trend the article is talking about is China is catching up in terms of publication output. I've heard elsewhere that in Chinese universities things like tenure, promotions etc. are heavily weighted by publication output - perhaps without much respect for the research quality. I could see some fields/journals becoming echo chambers where researchers spam publications without actually making meaningful technical accomplishments. That's probably what we're seeing.
Professors in China get cash bonuses for publications in major western journals. The average payment for a Science or Nature paper is $44k and the average university professor makes $8k per year. See [1] for details and other journal payout rates. Imagine if US professors got half a million dollars for publishing in Nature or Science. The gaming going on to get published would be even crazier than it already is.
Does it seem like "productivity" shouldn't be measured in number of papers?
The fact that in many places it is measured in number of publications gave us Hindawi/Elsevier open access and OMICS spam conferences.
That said, the number of really good publications from China in Western journals has risen from almost none in 1995 to a few in 2005 and nowadays they are plentiful. India, not so much, Japan, not so much.
> Furthermore, the data presented in the paper clearly indicate that countries like China are bridging the gap with respect to how impactful their work is (see Fig. 2 in the report), on top of bridging the gap with respect to the total volume (see Table 1 in the report).
This is an enormous exercise in trying to prove that, despite reality, China doesn't matter in research and related areas. It is futile. The results of scientific production are a lagging indicator, and China nowadays produces almost as much research as the US. China is a growing society, with growing life standards, while the US life standards are stagnating. I was once a China doubter, these days are over however. While the US is constantly worried about supporting its oligarchy, China is using all its resources to invest in a better society. While this battle is not completely lost to the US, it seems more and more like the situation that lead the UK to its downfall.
The rise of a generation that believes that scientific output is not important, even in a technical field like ours, is an indicator that makes me bearish on the future of the American society.
I think you're misinterpreting his comment. I'm fairly sure he's raising issue with "quantity" of research as a useful metric for scientific strength. China produces massive amounts of research, but is positively inundated with fraud, to a much higher degree than the West, and makes the West's publish or perish mindset look positively relaxed.
I know there is fraud going on, but I see it as a (unintended) consequence of the general increase in production. I also know the scientific literature and there is a huge production of real papers from Chinese authors, so yes, this is just another way to badmouth the changes that are happening in China.
You're doing major mental gymnastics to perceive it as "just another way to badmouth" China. People made descriptive comments about absolute quantity of publishing and some observations about how well that correlates with national success. Neither the article nor the commenters here have denied that quality and impactful research is also coming out of China.
I would even go as far to say that quantity in and of itself is negative. If you only get more quantity and no more quality, then you have more noise. More papers to wade through to get something useful. Meaning that the quality papers presented by the well-meaning Chinese researchers will more or less likely not even get read, because they're buried under a pile of horseshit.
This is why I would never hire Indian software engineers. There are a few good ones, like in every country, but they're hard to find among a sea of terrible software engineers that went into software engineering, because everyone does, and that went to a school only teaching with rote memorization.
If quantity were the thing, then Kim Jong Il was the greatest author of all time, assuming you discount forum posting, in which case probably some on David Icke's forums takes the prize.
Seems obvious to me that it's because of language. China cares more about rankings so they'll force people to push in english journals (to their own detriment) where they get cited. Most of the world doesn't speak Japanese so japanese papers don't get cited.
The problrm is that Japanese journals are less competitive. So, second-rate researchers can continue to publish in these and "work" (i.e., look productive).
The biggest problem with Japanese universities is not funding (there is to much), but the old chaff with tenure.
Unfortunately old second-rate researchers has a lot of institutional power (and funding).
The premise of this headline is that the USA is indisputably in the lead and that the winner is whoever catches up the USA. After spending years in Asia, my impression is that there is another game being played entirely, and the USA is merely a player whose ability to interfere in the outcome is being carefully managed. (And the same is true about Russia, incidentally.) I won't be at all surprised if Asia rules the world by the time I'm an old man.
My brother in law spent 10 years in China doing business and went from "China will rule the world" to "China is Enron." I suspect the truth is between these extremes.
China's formula has been GDP at all costs. It's an experiment in Keynesianism on meth. It will be interesting to see how it plays out. One visible result is some of the worst regional environmental destruction in human history, which could be considered a form of debt.
I think "China is Enron" is closer to the truth, in the longer term. I expect to see a collapse of the CCP in my lifetime. China itself will survive of course, just like the oil Enron owned still existed.
It would take more than an HN comment to describe. The key thing I observed is an intense lack of empathy throughout the society. It's simultaneously anarchic and totalitarian without the rule of law, and little societal trust. I don't see how they approach Western standards of living without the CCP loosening its grip, but the CCP is only tightening its grip, which belies a deep insecurity. I believe their government is only metastable, relying mostly on economic growth for its legitimacy. Once their growth inevitably plateaus, watch out.
Small example - lack of toilet paper in most restrooms (might not apply so much in the touristy parts of Shanghai). Instead of empathy towards others who might use the same restroom and need toilet paper, the toilet paper is quickly stolen because how foolish of the place to offer free toilet paper, they're basically asking for it to be stolen. Or seeing a Mom change a baby's poopy diaper on a restaurant table, because the sanitation will be someone else's problem. So much bad behavior that comes from empathy that seems to only extend to family and very little beyond that.
How does this hurt the society? Well, now you have to take toilet paper with you wherever you go. It's a deadweight loss for the society, and China is riddled with these due to the empathy gap.
EDIT: you are probably familiar with the homeless guy, down on his luck, who visits a restaurant, doesn't buy anything, takes a huge helping of free condiments and uses the bathroom. Now imagine a society where it's not just the homeless guys acting like this.
I think there is a certain inconsiderateness, or like a "fuck you got mine" vibe reflected in things like crowding to get into a subway, or cutting people in line (I hate queueing in China).
I'm not sure I chalk up the lack of TP towards that as much as there being no expectation of offering free TP so nobody does it. For instance there are also toilets in Japan where you have to buy the TP in a vending machine but people there are exceptionally considerate. In many places in Europe you usually have to pay to use restrooms in public places too. Just a different norm.
The TP probably isn't the best example, but I think you get the general idea. I went to Disneyland Shanghai and even Disney, legendary for their line management, couldn't get the queues under control in China. People would push into your back or walk right past you if you left any space.
Indeed. I'm old enough to remember the panicky statements by US politicians about how the Japanese were going to destroy our auto industry, dominate the next generation of computers, buy up all our real estate, etc. It never happened, and then the Japanese wrecked their own economy.
I think such prophecies are greatly exaggerated, since it's rare that a developed country "gets taken over" by another country. The only cases that come to mind would Germany and Japan after WW2 and even these bounced back and took back control. And that was after WW2, so after huge disruptions.
But, getting back on track, things are different. China is 10x the size of Japan. If China's GDP per capita gets at least close to that of Japan's, they will both double the world's economy and also become 50% of it, like the US was a few decades ago. They will dwarf everyone, including the US. So there will definitely be a huge Chinese influence, world wide.
Writing Japan off is another favorite pastime, I notice. What most impresses me about Japan is their ability to weather the doldrums of their current economy, and still have a higher quality of life than Americans do. How well do you think America will fare under similar economic conditions? (You can probably guess what I think.)
I think this entire exercise is conversational bullshit because there is no metric for 'winning'. Quality of life is relative. People prefer different things, that's why those who are able, relocate to somewhere that suits their preferences. Japan benefits greatly from being an island, not having to worry about their national security for decades and a tight immigration policy.
> the USA is merely a player whose ability to interfere in the outcome is being carefully managed. (And the same is true about Russia, incidentally.)
Agreed. The world rests on China's and soon also India's shoulders. They already rule the world economically and diplomatically, the next domino to fall will be cultural influence. Russia is a good demonstration of the impotence of military power alone, and hard power is looking like the US' only advantage over China.
Your post is borderline trollish considering Luxembourg has a population of less than San Francisco. And the fractions are somewhat different with the US in much closer per GDP striking distance to the tiny city-state protectorate of Luxembourg versus the huge per capita gap between the USA and China.
Please try to post constructive comments. This is not Reddit.
The comment was constructive. You brought the attention to "GDP per capita" yourself, so pointing out the obvious problem with that metric singled out is as ad rem as it gets.
If the comment pointed out a country of comparable size (within an order of magnitude) to the US with a significantly higher GDP per capita (on a similar order to the gap between the USA and China), it would have been constructive and informative.
Imagine a discussion of average tech salaries among the tech giants and someone points out they know a company with 2 people and the average salary is $350k per person. That's irrelevant and derailing.
Don't worry about the downvotes. Freedom of speech is a pillar of American society, until you express doubt about their unassailable exceptionalism, at which point the censure is relentless.
Good thing censure doesn't deny anyone their free speech! If it did, you might have actually made a well-formed argument.
It's also good that your point is empirically, observably false. Few non-Americans can actually match Americans in the amount of passion that goes into doubting and angrily denouncing American exceptionalism.
When you stop to think why every major nation in the world today spends tens to hundreds of billions of dollars on military spending each and every year, it should be clear that it is.
We have all grown up in an era of unprecedented peace, and I think it's easy to take that peace for granted. But that would be unwise. When you look at history since time immemorial people constantly have disagreements on the right path forward. And the group that decides which path is taken is the most powerful group - which is often decided by force. I see no reason to believe that this has changed. But the peace? What has changed is that we've created an international stalemate thanks to nukes. Mutually assured destruction makes military enforcement of will a nonstarter.
Consider the very recent comments made by USAF General Kwast a few days ago [1]. He is not concerned about China militarizing space - that is taken as a granted. He is concerned about the militarizing space before we do. In his words: "Militaries will soon work more extensively in the space between the earth and moon. That realm is the next high ground, where nations are straining to gain a strategic advantage." It's not even a question of if there will be another great conflict but rather when will it be. Whenever it is, it's likely that this conflict -like so many before- will be decided not by man, but by the technology of man.
IMHO, I think it is a good thing as now it implies a knowledge-race (akin to the arms-race). Whatever happens, eventually all humanity benefits from the development.
I found that so many people are stupy which cannot think about a question with a bit of intelligence. One of the evilest thing is the argument of orient-west politics. Let's despise them. Most people is just small potato, politics is really matter no you. Just push forward to the future of human being!
`coupled with strong racist immigration policies towards asian in USA ` - Elaborate, please. I was looking at GRE scores the other day out of curiosity (white American) and they have it broken down by country and China, for example, does a lot better than Saudi Arabia. Netherlands does a lot better in reading, than say, Pakistan. Some countries might just have better candidates?
I have been tinkering around the same idea for a while, thinking that the state of a country's democracy matters way more than its research output.
I'll quote this article in the future!
In his own words: "Does any of it matter? Many people believe, or assume, that great output in terms of research articles should cause economic prosperity and innovation. I have post entitled Does academic research cause economic growth? that makes the contrary point. That is, though China is catching up in terms of scientific output, this may be a consequence of their prosperity: they can now afford to have their very best minds work on producing research articles. It is much easier for rich countries to fund people so that they can publish in Nature. So being rich will allow you to catch up. But Japan shows that you can be a very rich country and choose not to produce many great research articles. In the least, this establishes that you do not need to produce many great research articles to be prosperous."