2 education is practically sacred in Chinese culture
It is only natural that after China's century of Western humiliation and Mao's delusional cultural revolution that the country is retaking it's rightful place.
Product development is one of the first things PE cuts when they get their hands on a company. It's a form of investment and vulture capital hates all investment because their goal is to extract short term profits.
The ones really funding research are VCs, governments and founders taking bank loans.
If China is to the 21st century what the US were to the 20th century - economically, scientifically, industrially - what should I do as a US citizen working in tech, besides signing up my kids and myself for Chinese classes?
I'm quite lucky in that i have the right to live and work in America, Australia, New Zealand, UK and the EU. I've also thought about this a lot as i near retirement (working in tech in the USA atm, it's been a fun ride but definitely time to think about options).
Australians don't like to acknowledge it, i guess to avoid being flooded since house prices are high, but it's the easiest pick by far. A western nation which rises as China rises due to sheer resource wealth and stable government.
Currently it's already >3x the median wealth per capita of the USA. Slightly lower on average but medians the real way to judge for the typical (non-0.01%) person.
Exports more than it imports.
Government revenues have been far ahead of spending for the past few years. Can you believe that?! A western government not just going into ever increasing government debt!
An extraordinary rollout of solar and batteries (dwarfing China's attempts at solar on a per capita basis) to the point where you can sign up to plans where power is free during peak daylight hours and the government will pay you $3k to install a home battery to store that free power.
Basically no tariffs so you can buy an electric car for USD$15k. Which goes well with the above point.
I look at the USA, UK and EU and people seem to have given up trying to vote in a better government? They don't seem to care about importing more than exporting or government spending exceeding revenue as election issues worth voting on?
> I look at the USA, UK and EU and people seem to have given up trying to vote in a better government? They don't seem to care about importing more than exporting or government spending exceeding revenue as election issues worth voting on?
It's impossible for every country to be a net exporter so I don't see the issue on "care about importing more than exporting", exporting high-value added products and services while importing products/services lower in the value chain is how countries that aren't so lucky as Australia with immense natural wealth and low population get to be rich as well.
Many countries in the EU also have a balanced budget, it's a mixed bag, France overruns its revenue consistently, Germany had a debt brake and until the past few years consistently had surpluses, Sweden has quite low debt and a balanced budget, the Netherlands has a small deficit, so on and so forth. So it's entirely country-dependent instead of being a general EU issue.
I have EU, Australian and Brazilian passports, so I could live in even more countries including the Mercosul region. I actually live in the EU because of its culture, food, more advanced startup scene and tech companies. Living quality is very similar here and in Australia, what makes the difference is whether you prefer to avoid too cold or too hot weather. Swedens finances are actually better than Australia s as far as I know.
I couldn’t imagine a better place to live than Northern Europe, but Australia is a close second for me. Been to China, Japan, Canada, the US and I think parts of those countries are also really nice to live, just not a good match for me culturally.
Now South America is a different story. If you like good weather and a festive atmosphere it’s actually the best place to live, just don’t expect to have money or to live in a functioning state where services work!
That's the problem right. Learning Chinese wont help you, China is a closed shop, no immigrants, no sharing work with anyone outside the country, no employing people outside China, no cooperation with any other country really; just keep buying their stuff.
China is not a isolationist, monoethnic economy with draconian restrictions on its commerce and immigration. You are plainly wrong, uneducated and defeatist in your take. I'm a non-Chinese person who has lived and worked there for a decade.
China welcomes all skilled foreign talent to come work and take residence in the country with open arms. The process to live and work in China is open and transparent as in any other major Asian economy: first find a job there and second, apply for the visa. You can even work for a major Chinese multinational outside of China, provided that they aren't blacklisted like ZTE by the US government.
Don't enter with the expectation to naturalize and you will find you can do more than you think: go work for Baidu in Beijing, study in Fudan University as a student, or start your own business. Whatever you feel like mostly. Understand that you are on a visa and adjust your conduct like any immigrant in any western country understands.
Learning Chinese has amazing utility but most expatriates can get by without knowing a lick of it, my own family is living proof of this. Any multinational hiring a foreign talent will also hire translators for said talent. In day to day life there is no shortage of people in the city who can speak english, for the rest there are LLM's and translation apps. The Chinese community is behind on truly understanding life from the immigrant's perspective but it is adapting positively.
The most common objection from outsiders is the restricted access to global services like Google, Facebook, OpenAI, the easiest remedy for that is to just use a VPN. You can order a latte from Starbucks down the road in the meantime - or Luckin coffee if you want a better option.
A lot of the fear is unfounded. The local police station is not going to arrest you for accessing the outside world. You aren't going to lose a "social credit score" for being late to work, cutting a line or being obnoxious in public, the scoring system exists but AFAIK it serves as a tool in extreme scenarios, but AFAIK most foreigners don't get one.
Finally, coming back to intentionality of the restriction - most restrictions that irk outsiders are codified and enacted to protect domestic business and individual interests. Reasonable to heavy restrictions on curtailed big American conglomerates and services allowed for amazing domestic alternatives like TikTok/Douyin, BYD, Deepseek to flourish. Companies which provided keystone infrastructure the economy - like Visa - were deemed too critical to allow for a strangle-hold and regulated, for these acted as a foreign tax on every domestic transaction, thus Alipay and Unionpay were born.
> China welcomes all skilled foreign talent to come work and take residence in the country with open arms.
This just isn't true. There's a K visa for young STEM professionals, which is about a year old. It's a bit more flexible for this very narrow group, otherwise you need a Z visa and work permit. You need a job first before the provincial labor authorities will approve a work permit. There's a points system, salary requirements and age cap.
There's no practical path to permanent residence in China. The Chinese "green card" equivalent has been issued to under 15,000 people since 2004. Even under Trump, the US issues about 10x more green cards in a single year than China has in two decades.
The numbers don't lie: in a country of over a billion people, there are well under 1 million foreign workers. There's a massive problem with youth underemployment and unemployment and net migration has been negative for 75+ years.
Are you nuts or just misinformed? China is investing everywhere. Africa, south America, Russia, EU. And they do have immigrants, as a Western person it’s actually quite easy to move there to study or work. Lots of Europeans I know have studied and worked in China and Taiwan.
Everyone loves money but socially and culturally China is a lot more closed compared to US, much more so than what people are used to atleast.
US was arguably the most open country on the planet in terms of acceptance of ideas and cultural diversity especially in 20th century.
But I also don't think people need to be very worried but still we haven't had monocultures on the top or close to the top of power hierarchy for several decades so it's going to be uncomfortable for a lot of people.
For instance China is heavily censorious of LGBTQ and very likely against the Idea they haven't banned it outright yet thankfully. But then again lots of countries are in a similar boat.
But the biggest difference is China can easily back slide without possiblity of return on any metric because it's not a democracy.
China has a pretty vibrant LGBTQ scene, even Shenzhen was known as comrade city in the 90s. China is at the same time very closed and very open. It’s hard to describe.
I had lots of friends when I lived in Beijing who were gay, the gay bars weren’t underground and my gay coworkers weren’t in the closest, for L/girls it was even more out in the open (especially at the art schools). If you haven’t lived in China I guess you wouldn’t have a clue.
I went to China recently it felt different, the recent govt stance seem a lot more against the idea and the ones before which was my point, China in the 90s was a very different country from the China of today, then again I haven't been there then.
Again it's hard to say where it's open or where it's closed, they seem to be back sliding in very weird ways. I am not part of the LGBTQ community so I can't say for certain how bad it is, so I won't comment further but UN & human rights watch has been citing increasing censoring of LGBT representation and open-ness in China in recent times.
The biggest concern with China is lack of democratic freedom means as long as it's not bad enough to revolt the country can back slide pretty easily on many metrics with complete silence, no protests etc.
"Was" being the operative word there. It's been a long time since new (foreign) ideas were accepted, and the resistance to cultural change has been ever present.
American culture is capitalism, and that isn't changing, just getting more extreme. Equally American culture is "white European" and the resistance to change there (racially and culturally) is woven into US history.
This is bs. It is admitedly difficult to become a Chinese citizen, but a huge number of foreigners work in China, especially in tech, higher education, etc. Also, Hong Kong is another good place to find a job if you want to increase personal exposure to China without having to learn Mandarin.
I get the intention, but I feel it may be a particularly extreme comparison, since the US being what it was to the 20th century involved two world wars, decolonization, the cold war, and decades of reconstruction.
Currently, even if China pulls ahead, it doesn't have to mean things getting worse in the US. Contrary to what the current government seems to believe, growth is not necessarily zero sum. Despite Americans' perception of Europe, they too remain competitive in various domains of research. Similarly with, say, Japan.
The UK was still doing quite well after the Suez crisis, but the oil shock and thatcherism was when deindustrialization really hit. Try to prevent that.
Yes I know, that's not what I said though, with "here" being the US and "there" being China. Just taking language classes in the US for Chinese aren't likely to be helpful.
You can totally get by on survival phrases. Many of my fellow foreign coworkers in Beijing could barely speak a few phrases and they did fine. Today it’s even easier than it was 20 years ago.
it will take local civics and community, from there it will "trickle up" but all great movements start with individuals having conversations, and is why freedom of speech is the first american amendment
you can start any time by speaking with strangers, which reduces in anxiety the more you do it
I'm ready to blame the current admin, federal funding cuts, and cuts to immigration, but we all do need to check that the year for this change is clearly 2024...
(But I am also ready to be even more depressed by 2025 stats!)
This battle was lost 20 years ago, and to reverse it you would need to go back 40 years to prevent US industry from outsourcing to China after it joined the WEF.
You can't divorce engineering from manufacturing, because designing better stuff heavily favors those who also make the stuff. The US was convinced otherwise by economists who don't believe in nation-states, because shareholders correctly saw that they could make massive profits by paying Chinese wages rather than American wages. But now China builds more ships in a year than the US does in a decade, and all of a sudden, the chickens have come home to roost. It will take generations for the US (and indeed the West in general) to regain what was given away, if it's even possible.
I’d wager it didn’t happen due to the advice of economists who don’t believe in nation states. What happened is the natural conclusion of optimizing for maximum profit and giving capital (read i.e. corporations) the means to do so.
Any attempt at course correction is now labeled with “government overreach, socialism, communism”, etc. in an absurd way.
It's both. Governments correctly realized that you don't outsource technologies that are critical to your defense toolchain, which is why Boeing still makes planes in Everett and not in China. The oversight was not realizing the extent to which all technologies feed into one another. Eventually, you're trying to get electromagnetic launchers working on your aircraft carriers, and you're discovering that you don't have that capability, because administrations 30 years ago let electronics manufacturing go to China. So not only do you not have the capability of doing the thing that you wanted to do, but your adversary has reached a level of electronics manufacturing that your country never achieved.
It's treason if you or I leak secrets to China, and I'd argue that it would also be treason if Lockheed or Boeing wanted to make jets vital to US military interests in China. But if you sell public assets that are subsequently bought by the Chinese, or you move manufacturing that feeds the logistical supply chain, and subsequently erode local capability, that's apparently fine.
The market will always seek to maximize profits, but it's on the government to actually bat for its own sovereign interests. It's that second part that has been lacking, hence why I said in my previous post that this stuff was given away. It didn't need to be stolen.
> The market will always seek to maximize profits, but it's on the government to actually bat for its own sovereign interests.
True that! But the US government is defanged (where it matters), lobbied to death and captured.
Also you never know what could one day prove to be critical to sovereign interests. It’s not one industry. It’s all of them together at the same time, from building the screws to hold your phone together to the advanced chips that AI runs on.
> More than 7,800 research grants terminated or frozen. Some 25,000 scientists and personnel gone from agencies that oversee research. Proposed budget cuts of 35% — amounting to US$32 billion.
> These are just a few of the ways in which Donald Trump has downsized and disrupted US science since returning to the White House last January. As his administration seeks to reshape US research and development, it has substantially scaled back and restricted what science the country pursues and the workforce that runs the federal scientific enterprise.
What number am I supposed to be looking at in that cbp.gov link?
I saw "Total CPB Enforcemnt Actions" yearly numbers for inadmissibles, expulsions and apprehensions (as per the footnotes). Are those the numbers your are referring to?
I don't get it. Weren't those the waves of people after the pandemic, the numbers showing how many were turned around?
The way the US is aggressively footgunning itself, while China (and others) win by default is so frustrating. The US could have invested in clean energy, in social programs to help towns experiencing economic depression.
Like, it's really not that hard. Yes, we'd have to squeeze the richest people and share a little more equally. But not even that much. Like, the rich would still be astonishingly wealthy.
It's just... devastating to see oligarchs who can't just accept being slightly less oligarchic resulting in the collapse of an entire country.
Unironically, Biden's Infra Act was held up by the other acts and policies favored by the left/democrats. America loves to pay more and get less across many areas of economy and society, which is the same reason we are facing a rise in populism. People will try other forms of government if they current one cannot deliver on the promises.
You're right. People will roll the dice if the government isn't working for them. That's why we got Trump, both times. Harris's campaign was clear, "it will be more of the same", and people didn't like that so they rolled the dice on Trump. They will roll the dice again too, maybe one day we'll roll the dice on trying a new form of government.
We haven't had any big changes for a very long time. People want change. They felt Trump was the change candidate, so they tried him.
Obama did the ACA, which was a compromise with Republicans by implementing the Republican plan, that was the most recent substantial change I can thing of, but it doesn't actually fix anything fundamental (and Republicans are forever at a loss about how to fix healthcare, because their plan was already implemented by Obama, so they can't actually say anything good about their own plan).
Political polarisation is also at a point where it's become sports team-esque. People are willing to go to further extremes to dunk on the other side, even if it means the stadium is becoming increasingly messy.
More than that, China funds polarization and disinformation projects in the west. Recently they've been seemingly funding anti-AI rhetoric in the US (1). There's allegations they're funding pro-Palestine protests in the UK (2).
Makes sense to sow discord among your rivals. The US certainly does the same.
Winning is a strong word, but they have significantly higher home ownership, purchasing power, less drug addiction, and generally safer big cities.
I believe the average worker in a tier 1-3 Chinese city is better off than a living in a North American City. Or at least, my content feed leads me to think this way.
Have you looked at China from 15 years ago? It was also said to be in a depression and youth unemployment was also high. Just look at articles from back then.
What people don't seem to understand is that China is developing in stages. Every 10 years there is a new stage, a new revolution, with different winners and losers. Maxxing out on the previous growth engine was already forseen 10 years ago. That's why they bit the bullet and decided to pay the price to transition to the next growth engine. All transitions are painful.
Besides, these are Chinese we're talking about. They'd even complain about the economy being bad even when it's growing 10% and they drive away in 2 luxury cars. When they say they're "barely surviving" they mean their savings account isn't growing.
When you look at the bad economy in China, are you looking at the costs, or are you looking at the development goals? Development goals have costs, not paying those costs to reach goals has even bigger costs pater on. The Made in China 2025 goals have already been largely achieved.
It doesn't, at all. Unlike the US (and to a lesser extend, Europe), Chinese do not have a majority of their wealth invested in stocks.
Besides, the Chinese st9ck market has been atrocious since.... pretty much forever. You'd think they still live in mud pools if you think the stock market is representative of overall development.
The oligarchs don't care. If they can make a buck ruining the US, they will, and then they'll move to another country whenever it's convenient for them and do it all again. Borders don't really exist for them.
It's easy to blame the rich here. And certainly they are the ones doing the damage and reaping the rewards.
But a third of Americans approve of the current administration. Around half of the people who voted, voted for this administration. And a lot of the footguns you refer to were gleefully part of the campaign.
If you want to apportion blame you might include moderate voters who may not approve of the status quo, but alas are so partisan that they cannot vote for the other side.
With more elections imminent, it remains to be seen if it's really the oligarchs fault, or if the root fault is the real source of power.
I understand your point here, between social media (for the young) and TV for the old, there's certainly a lot of sources of information.
I get the urge to find someone to blame. It's not the fault of the voter, because that would imply personal accountability. Or at the very least, it would imply a lot about the underlying character of chunk of the population.
On the other hand, you can't blame the media for gas price reports. Or the cost of housing. Or the people dying of measles. Or the men in masks rounding up people. The voter can see all that themselves.
The voter knows about the current conflict with Iran. That is not a "media bias". They are free to decide themselves if that is justified.
The voter who spends all day on Fox news is welcome to decide for themselves if they want a hand-out of cash promised for after the the election. (A promise they've heard before, but not seen).
So yeah, it eould be nice to blame the oligarchs, or the media, or China, or the church, or pretty much anyone, as long as that anyone is not the voter who can see what is happening, and votes for more of the same.
You go to a chinese city today it looks like the future short of flying cars. All the novel things we invent here and cities look the same as they did 30 years ago, only more people in tarps on the side of the road.
What is "wrong" is that they have a culture of being conversative when it comes to 0-1 innovation. Everything is set up to reward concrete results. With 0-1 innovation you have no idea whether it's viable, so few people have the risk appetite and would rather pursue proven venues.
But westerners also underestimate the importance of 1-10 innovation. Scaling manufacturing and iterating on existing concepts are not at all trivial, and are also very valuable.
0-1 and 1-10 are complementary. Unfortunately, many people deliberately turn this into a pissing contest by accusing the Chinese of "only being able to steal" while ignoring how their own country is unable to produce basic goods like masks on a large a cheap scale, and can't fix a brige for less than xx million.
With all due respect to what I'm sure was a well meaning comment, I think your comment is also an example of why the problem IS hard. Lots of Americans think a vague prescription of "squeezing the richest a little more" is the answer to everything, including apparently declining R&D expenditures. It's not. More clean energy deployments and more social programs are not bad things but they also will not solve this problem.
If we want to fix this there are probably two broad levers that need to be pulled. Notably indiscriminately "squeezing the billionaires" isn't one of them because you want to encourage capital to invest in the US:
1) The US has developed a real problem with production quality/capability, it makes a lot of spam and trash, it increasingly can't make anything at home, etc. The two big trends driving this have been a reduction of competition in its domestic market (i.e. monopolies emerging) and a broad range of policies which encourage US companies to design stuff, license out and have the production done overseas by someone who promptly steals and copies it... hello China. What's needed here to actually make the US economy "great again" are strong enforcement of anti-trust laws and some kind of legal framework where the incentive is to not just design in the US but also build there. This certainly puts limits on what "the billionaires" can do but by no means is it really "squeezing" them or trying to limit what they can earn in the US. You want the capital to get deployed in America but under a legal framework that's aligned with productivity, innovation and job creation as well as profits. This is how you get private R&D going again. The US framework is more "scams and profits" at this point.
2) On the public side, the US formerly had amazing federal support for R&D. This sounds like it should be easy to fix but I don't really think it is. The government is not as healthy fiscally as it once was, and there used to be more public appetite for science and technology related expenditures; Americans seem more enamored with get rich quick schemes than with a STEM education these days. If you're a politician who is going to reward you for supporting big federal investment in long-term, moonshot R&D? Voters won't, the capital class won't. So personally I don't see much of a solution here without a cultural shift occurring first, we need to believe as a society that long term research and innovation can make a more perfect world, but due to the realities of the modern slopconomy we believe the exact opposite.
Social programs are the polar opposite of how the US should be spending its money if it wants to outcompete China. Social programs both reduce the incentive for Americans to work while also depriving research/infrastructure projects of funding.
Social programs to help towns experiencing economic depression would inject money, training, education, etc. which would create opportunity for new growth and development in areas with a low cost of living. When people are too busy just trying to survive, they are not going to be working on inventing the next big thing, and they certainly are not going to support tax dollars going toward investments for tomorrow.
Pretty much everywhere has proved that ensuring people have a place to shelter and eat doesn't stop them from wanting to do something with their lives. It's the oldest and most wrong talking point from this debate.
This is completely wrong. A majority of people only work because it's necessary to put food on the table and purchase other necessities. You know this is true because you can see how many of them choose to do nothing productive with their free time. Basically nobody is performing research in their free time.
I concur, a majority are not productive most of the time. However a majority is far from everyone.
Leaving aside for the moment people working multiple jobs for whom free time is a luxury.
Leaving aside working parents who are also raising children who choose to spend that time with them.
Of the rest, though we do see some productive outlets. Open Source Software for example being perhaps the poster child for work done without return.
Or what about those who volunteer? Perhaps in a church context or charity context or whatever.
Or all those with a side hustle, selling home-made goods in weekend markets. Some of that to earn more, some to exercise their creativity.
Yes, in countries where there are sufficient social nets that unemployed people can survive some choose not to work. And yet the overall unemployment numbers in those countries is pretty low.
When someone tries to argue based solely on "common sense logic" like this comment, we all know it's baseless. If there was any truth to your statement, you'd refer to statistics that show your idea to be true, but it isn't.
If you work in China, you get their universal healthcare but you still need a private insurance policy. It’s hard to explain though, you wouldn’t be completely up sh*t creek without a private policy, but some things become really inconvenient, and the standard of care is different (bring your own nurse in the public plan).
China sort has welfare but the hukou system means most people who need it don't qualify in the city they live in.
China has labor laws similar to the US. 40 hour work weeks, extra pay for overtime or for having to work weekends. They just don't enforce them very well. That's what my research tells me anyway, am I wrong?
You are not wrong about the laws, but people are working in factories doing 12 hour days 7 days a week. Yes they get overtime, but that's because you can't even afford to live with a roommate in run down company dorms on a standard 5 day work week. Its still slave labor over there. This amount of work nets workers about $1000USD per month, and this is in foreign owned factories which are much more regulated than the locally owned ones.
- Private insurance is always up to one's own, very few employers provide this.
- If young, your parents or yourself have to pay for coverage until you graduate, otherwise no coverage.
- If elderly, depends on your employment history. To qualify, your employers have to contribute continuously for decades and it's tied with social security. Otherwise you are on your own.
- If working age but no job, similar to being young you have to pay.
If it is about "incentivizing people to work" and getting warm butts in chairs or out swinging hammers... well, how are we going to compete with a country that has 4x the number of warm bodies?
We can't compete with China via the number of people we have working.
We need to build a functioning society instead of a group of rugged individual capitalists who only come together when we need to help out the wealthy with a bail out or tax break.
It's amazing how people think this is true when by every known metric, people who are given a minimally comfortable life almost always end up being far more productive members of society than those who are not.
That is why China is losing to the US. China massively more social programs than the US and it has reduced their economy to shambles because no one has incentive.
> China forces its citizens to work 12 hours a day, 6 days a week.
As someone who lived there for 5 years, this is laughable and totally untrue.
I'm guessing you heard that some tech companies have a 996 policy and inferred that the government is somehow imposing this on every single worker in China.
Actually most, programmers have protested a few years ago to no veil. The movement is called 996.icu if you are interested, and they complied lists of companies that run 996 schedule and the normal 955.
> the government is somehow imposing this on every single worker
Of course not, the gov with communism in its name is simply not enforcing their own labor law and cracking down labor movements.
In 2026 saw a Japan news site report a thing in 2024..its so Japan. ok jokes aside:
All of this is actually bound to happen, and it is laid out clearly in China's Five-Year Plans. Industrial upgrading is something China is bound to do, and it is bound to succeed—a colossal nation built on Confucian moral values with science as its religion.
Of course, if we ask the classic "but at what cost," it's that wealth distribution in these emerging high-tech industries is deeply unequal. Being right in the middle of it, every day I see two extremes: some company is hiring AI interns for 5,000 yuan a day, or offering PhD graduates an annual salary of 1 million yuan! Yet at the same time, massive numbers of people are unemployed, and countless others are living on baseline minimum wages.
If China truly wants to become a socialist country, beyond technological progress, it must properly resolve the inequality issues brought about by the reform and opening-up.
What a bizarre swipe. Countries don't necessarily post specific statistics like this so quickly and 2 years behind is actually pretty fast. And even though it took them 4-5 months to see the OECD numbers, Nikkei and Yomiuri seem to be the only two English language outfits reporting on this. They actually posted at around the same time many Chinese language outfits noticed.
Not to sound like a broken record here but the big problem is housing. When housing becomes the best investment, it cannibalizes capital investment into productive output.
There have been other errors along the way, such as the Bayh-Doyle Act [1], a law signed by Jimmy Carter in a lame duck session after losing to Ronald Reagan to essentially give away NIH research. I'm a firm believer that federal research dollars should come with equity strings attached in the results. Otherwise, fund your own research. And in pharmaceuticals, it's basically all federal research, despite the myth that Big Pharma invests in a lot of research. It doesn't. Actually there's one thing it does invest in: patent extension.
Also, we've addicted to fossil fuels, IMHO because it induces demand for weapons.
One big difference between the US and China is that China has significant capital controls so China has a captive market of over $100T in household savings that has to be invested in something and it can't just leave. This too creates problems but the gains in China and decrease in costs cannot be dismissed easily. Also, China has basically managed to recreate all the technologies the US has tried to restrict from being exported to China, everything from welding large container ships to the latest and greatest lithography and manufacturing.
But housing absolutely needs to stop being an investment. It's a huge reason why the manufacturing sector has been hollowed out in the West.
I think you're begging the question a bit here by assuming China is spending excess wealth. In 2024 China's general government debt was 88.33% of GDP, the US was 120.79% [1]
Now in 2026 we can look at the Financial Times [2] and see it's estimated that debt servicing is 19.2% of China's central government spending with a public debt of 122% of GDP, compared to debt service spending for the US of 14.2% (total debt 126% of GDP?) and Japan 26% (total debt 204% of GDP?).
So we're all spending money that we don't have and if you look at the rankings in the Japan article and compare to the debt % of GDP in [1] then it doesn't seem to matter.
the current ai boom started here in america with private funds. china is spending government funds in a desperate attempt not to lose the race. it’s not clear that china is in the stronger position, at least yet.
The amount that the US spends on R&D is a rounding fraction of the excess of military budget compared to other nation's military budgets. And by scaring off most other countries from buying US military supplies in the future, as Trump has been doing, we will end up paying a ton more for less military hardware now.
The "structural" deficit would be easily fixed by repealing the Trump tax cuts for the wealth from his first term. None of us benefitted from those but we all pay for them.
It's true that China is remarkable, but the concern is that China is too large.
Basically, these cutting-edge industries require industrial chains to be connected across different countries, but China can do almost everything within its own borders. China's greatness is greatness, but if China becomes highly developed, will this kind of technological development spread to neighboring countries?
U.S. industry, for one, spreads to many countries through outsourcing. But China can consume outsourcing within its own borders. If that happens, what will become of it?
I don't understand the complaint, China will just continue progressing while the rest of the world falls behind. It'd be the same as it has always been in Chinese history, in terms of isolationism.
Assuming the expected thing happens and Trump gets shellacked in the midterms, do Americans think this will have some impact (ie reverse or accelerate) the current trend of cuts to science, cracking down on foreign students, cuts to NIH, HHS etc? Those being big recent change in this area.
I'm not American, but since those things are being done by the executive branch, with the approval of the Supreme Court, I'm not sure changes in congress will make much of a difference.
Short of impeachment (reasons for which are not in short supply, but which seems unlikely) there's not much congress can actually do to change things. 60 votes is a tough threshold to reach.
Even in the worst case scenario for Trump, the Democrats won't have a veto-proof majority. Trump will need to negotiate much harder and make concessions, but will largely keep doing what he was elected to do.
Also, the current projections don't point to a major Democrat victory. On average, midterms flip 27 seats. This midterm will likely flip 20-25 seats: a clear victory, but below average. A major victory would be like the 2010 against Obama (almost 70 seats flipped).
Oiy you people are boring. The US will remain a world power just due to its geographical position. It owns the Americas economically and militarily. This is something no other country in the world is close to capable of doing.
Democrats winning the midterms would moderately accelerate this. They won't have a veto-proof majority so they won't be able to enact any of their policies; however, they will be able to prevent Trump from making any improvements. They have shown countless times that harming Trump is more important to them than the good of the country (ex: they're openly cheering for Iran), so you can bet they will have no interest in advancing any sort of new research that has Republican support.
I wouldn't say I support Iran, but I'm not happy that we attacked them in an illegal war of aggression (Congress approves legal wars).
I see no reason to believe they were close to having nuclear weapons. Trump didn't say anything about nukes when he announced the beginning of the war, they made that up later.
I disapprove of the Iran war, but to play devils advocate: there's a major shift occurring right now in the way wars are fought. The Ukraine-Russia war has made it clear that conventional militaries will find themselves in a meat grinder in the next war.. that includes the US.
Iran is one of the largest drone producers... and the US military is doing live testing of anti-drone weapons and energy directed weapons in the straight of hormuz against Iranian drones.
A lot of Americans are going to die in the next war if we don't figure out the right way to maintain our dominance against these new tactics.
Trump hasn’t proposed any improvements except maybe year round DST, so we wouldn’t miss it much. Trump has tried to brand the democrats as pro-Iran for not supporting his war, and it has worked on some people like you, but most of us don’t see it his way. You can be against a war and not for the country the war is with.
There are two things that I feel impacted the US here:
1. the R&D tax credit was gone from 2022 - 2025 thanks to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act signed in 2017.
2. private equity does not invest in R&D
Nah it's a simple numbers game.
1 China has a billion people
2 education is practically sacred in Chinese culture
It is only natural that after China's century of Western humiliation and Mao's delusional cultural revolution that the country is retaking it's rightful place.
Private Equity does fund R&D.. mostly the D(evelopment) part. Most R&D, both in the US and China, is not fundamental/basic research.
Product development is one of the first things PE cuts when they get their hands on a company. It's a form of investment and vulture capital hates all investment because their goal is to extract short term profits.
The ones really funding research are VCs, governments and founders taking bank loans.
VCs are a type of PE firm. So is growth capital. You're confusing a sub type--called LBOs--for the entire industry.
If China is to the 21st century what the US were to the 20th century - economically, scientifically, industrially - what should I do as a US citizen working in tech, besides signing up my kids and myself for Chinese classes?
I'm quite lucky in that i have the right to live and work in America, Australia, New Zealand, UK and the EU. I've also thought about this a lot as i near retirement (working in tech in the USA atm, it's been a fun ride but definitely time to think about options).
Australians don't like to acknowledge it, i guess to avoid being flooded since house prices are high, but it's the easiest pick by far. A western nation which rises as China rises due to sheer resource wealth and stable government.
Currently it's already >3x the median wealth per capita of the USA. Slightly lower on average but medians the real way to judge for the typical (non-0.01%) person.
Exports more than it imports.
Government revenues have been far ahead of spending for the past few years. Can you believe that?! A western government not just going into ever increasing government debt!
An extraordinary rollout of solar and batteries (dwarfing China's attempts at solar on a per capita basis) to the point where you can sign up to plans where power is free during peak daylight hours and the government will pay you $3k to install a home battery to store that free power.
Basically no tariffs so you can buy an electric car for USD$15k. Which goes well with the above point.
I look at the USA, UK and EU and people seem to have given up trying to vote in a better government? They don't seem to care about importing more than exporting or government spending exceeding revenue as election issues worth voting on?
> I look at the USA, UK and EU and people seem to have given up trying to vote in a better government? They don't seem to care about importing more than exporting or government spending exceeding revenue as election issues worth voting on?
It's impossible for every country to be a net exporter so I don't see the issue on "care about importing more than exporting", exporting high-value added products and services while importing products/services lower in the value chain is how countries that aren't so lucky as Australia with immense natural wealth and low population get to be rich as well.
Many countries in the EU also have a balanced budget, it's a mixed bag, France overruns its revenue consistently, Germany had a debt brake and until the past few years consistently had surpluses, Sweden has quite low debt and a balanced budget, the Netherlands has a small deficit, so on and so forth. So it's entirely country-dependent instead of being a general EU issue.
If you are importing more than exporting on paper then you are silently chipping of pieces of your land holdings.
I have EU, Australian and Brazilian passports, so I could live in even more countries including the Mercosul region. I actually live in the EU because of its culture, food, more advanced startup scene and tech companies. Living quality is very similar here and in Australia, what makes the difference is whether you prefer to avoid too cold or too hot weather. Swedens finances are actually better than Australia s as far as I know.
I couldn’t imagine a better place to live than Northern Europe, but Australia is a close second for me. Been to China, Japan, Canada, the US and I think parts of those countries are also really nice to live, just not a good match for me culturally.
Now South America is a different story. If you like good weather and a festive atmosphere it’s actually the best place to live, just don’t expect to have money or to live in a functioning state where services work!
I feel like government is on easy mode if you have a huge amount of natural resources vs your size. See Norway too.
Not saying these countries don't do good things too, but a lot of bad things compound when the government has to balance its books.
The Biden admin passed the chips act along w the infrastructure bill. Too bad about their support for genocide and endless military spending.
Hard to say what good the Trump admin is doing except exposing the rot in right wing “governance.”
Support for genocide and endless military spending seems like a both parties problem, not sure why you are pointing that out for Biden.
That's the problem right. Learning Chinese wont help you, China is a closed shop, no immigrants, no sharing work with anyone outside the country, no employing people outside China, no cooperation with any other country really; just keep buying their stuff.
China is not a isolationist, monoethnic economy with draconian restrictions on its commerce and immigration. You are plainly wrong, uneducated and defeatist in your take. I'm a non-Chinese person who has lived and worked there for a decade.
China welcomes all skilled foreign talent to come work and take residence in the country with open arms. The process to live and work in China is open and transparent as in any other major Asian economy: first find a job there and second, apply for the visa. You can even work for a major Chinese multinational outside of China, provided that they aren't blacklisted like ZTE by the US government.
Don't enter with the expectation to naturalize and you will find you can do more than you think: go work for Baidu in Beijing, study in Fudan University as a student, or start your own business. Whatever you feel like mostly. Understand that you are on a visa and adjust your conduct like any immigrant in any western country understands.
Learning Chinese has amazing utility but most expatriates can get by without knowing a lick of it, my own family is living proof of this. Any multinational hiring a foreign talent will also hire translators for said talent. In day to day life there is no shortage of people in the city who can speak english, for the rest there are LLM's and translation apps. The Chinese community is behind on truly understanding life from the immigrant's perspective but it is adapting positively.
The most common objection from outsiders is the restricted access to global services like Google, Facebook, OpenAI, the easiest remedy for that is to just use a VPN. You can order a latte from Starbucks down the road in the meantime - or Luckin coffee if you want a better option.
A lot of the fear is unfounded. The local police station is not going to arrest you for accessing the outside world. You aren't going to lose a "social credit score" for being late to work, cutting a line or being obnoxious in public, the scoring system exists but AFAIK it serves as a tool in extreme scenarios, but AFAIK most foreigners don't get one.
Finally, coming back to intentionality of the restriction - most restrictions that irk outsiders are codified and enacted to protect domestic business and individual interests. Reasonable to heavy restrictions on curtailed big American conglomerates and services allowed for amazing domestic alternatives like TikTok/Douyin, BYD, Deepseek to flourish. Companies which provided keystone infrastructure the economy - like Visa - were deemed too critical to allow for a strangle-hold and regulated, for these acted as a foreign tax on every domestic transaction, thus Alipay and Unionpay were born.
> China welcomes all skilled foreign talent to come work and take residence in the country with open arms.
This just isn't true. There's a K visa for young STEM professionals, which is about a year old. It's a bit more flexible for this very narrow group, otherwise you need a Z visa and work permit. You need a job first before the provincial labor authorities will approve a work permit. There's a points system, salary requirements and age cap.
There's no practical path to permanent residence in China. The Chinese "green card" equivalent has been issued to under 15,000 people since 2004. Even under Trump, the US issues about 10x more green cards in a single year than China has in two decades.
The numbers don't lie: in a country of over a billion people, there are well under 1 million foreign workers. There's a massive problem with youth underemployment and unemployment and net migration has been negative for 75+ years.
Are you nuts or just misinformed? China is investing everywhere. Africa, south America, Russia, EU. And they do have immigrants, as a Western person it’s actually quite easy to move there to study or work. Lots of Europeans I know have studied and worked in China and Taiwan.
Pretty sure OP meant mainland China only, excluding Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan.
Easy or not is hard to argue, but more foreigners live in Taiwan than the whole mainland China.
Taiwan is not part of China.
I mean, have you worked with the Chinese? They're not like that at all.
They love money so much, you could swear they're American!
Everyone loves money but socially and culturally China is a lot more closed compared to US, much more so than what people are used to atleast.
US was arguably the most open country on the planet in terms of acceptance of ideas and cultural diversity especially in 20th century.
But I also don't think people need to be very worried but still we haven't had monocultures on the top or close to the top of power hierarchy for several decades so it's going to be uncomfortable for a lot of people.
For instance China is heavily censorious of LGBTQ and very likely against the Idea they haven't banned it outright yet thankfully. But then again lots of countries are in a similar boat.
But the biggest difference is China can easily back slide without possiblity of return on any metric because it's not a democracy.
China has a pretty vibrant LGBTQ scene, even Shenzhen was known as comrade city in the 90s. China is at the same time very closed and very open. It’s hard to describe.
I had lots of friends when I lived in Beijing who were gay, the gay bars weren’t underground and my gay coworkers weren’t in the closest, for L/girls it was even more out in the open (especially at the art schools). If you haven’t lived in China I guess you wouldn’t have a clue.
I went to China recently it felt different, the recent govt stance seem a lot more against the idea and the ones before which was my point, China in the 90s was a very different country from the China of today, then again I haven't been there then.
Again it's hard to say where it's open or where it's closed, they seem to be back sliding in very weird ways. I am not part of the LGBTQ community so I can't say for certain how bad it is, so I won't comment further but UN & human rights watch has been citing increasing censoring of LGBT representation and open-ness in China in recent times.
The biggest concern with China is lack of democratic freedom means as long as it's not bad enough to revolt the country can back slide pretty easily on many metrics with complete silence, no protests etc.
[1]: https://www.hrw.org/news/2026/06/25/china-social-media-films...
"Was" being the operative word there. It's been a long time since new (foreign) ideas were accepted, and the resistance to cultural change has been ever present.
American culture is capitalism, and that isn't changing, just getting more extreme. Equally American culture is "white European" and the resistance to change there (racially and culturally) is woven into US history.
You're describing pretty much any bug nation that has enormous economic wealth.
What does "bug" mean in this context? I apologize if this is an acronym or jargon I should know.
*Edit it's a typo. You meant big.
Probably get a PR in Hong Kong and hope to be automatically "promoted" to Chinese in 20 years?
This is bs. It is admitedly difficult to become a Chinese citizen, but a huge number of foreigners work in China, especially in tech, higher education, etc. Also, Hong Kong is another good place to find a job if you want to increase personal exposure to China without having to learn Mandarin.
As someone who lived in China for 5 years pre-pandemic, it's fine to visit China, enjoy the cuisine, enjoy the culture. Learn the language, all good.
But living full time in China and competing with Chinese in China as a non Chinese person- that's not something you want to do.
> But living full time in China and competing with Chinese in China...
Even countless Chinese in China don't want to do this.
[dead]
I get the intention, but I feel it may be a particularly extreme comparison, since the US being what it was to the 20th century involved two world wars, decolonization, the cold war, and decades of reconstruction.
Currently, even if China pulls ahead, it doesn't have to mean things getting worse in the US. Contrary to what the current government seems to believe, growth is not necessarily zero sum. Despite Americans' perception of Europe, they too remain competitive in various domains of research. Similarly with, say, Japan.
Chinese people do not consider themselves inferior to white people and do not accept Western world domination.
For those of us living in America and Europe this truly is shocking and earth shattering. It is the end of the world as we know it.
The UK was still doing quite well after the Suez crisis, but the oil shock and thatcherism was when deindustrialization really hit. Try to prevent that.
Chinese and Spanish…
Move there, not sure taking language classes would help if you're still staying here.
You don't need to speak Chinese to live in big cities.
Yes I know, that's not what I said though, with "here" being the US and "there" being China. Just taking language classes in the US for Chinese aren't likely to be helpful.
You need to speak the language…
You can totally get by on survival phrases. Many of my fellow foreign coworkers in Beijing could barely speak a few phrases and they did fine. Today it’s even easier than it was 20 years ago.
Sounds like a horrible idea. You don't need to be in the #1 fastest growing country to have a good life and Asian work culture seems miserable.
Well that's what the parent seems to want, since they're the one asking, not me.
Move to a cabin in the woodlands and teach them how to work on engines, and animal husbandry.
Another programmer who played Stardew Valley one too many times, I see.
Every tech worker seems to have a Ted Kaczynski streak lol
Neither. Align yourself with the AI that will be running the show and hope it adequately feeds you.
This is the real answer.
But noone is gonna want to hear it.
That American Ai companies have convinced so many this is a foregone conclusion is the defeatism they are after. We can choose a different future
it will take local civics and community, from there it will "trickle up" but all great movements start with individuals having conversations, and is why freedom of speech is the first american amendment
you can start any time by speaking with strangers, which reduces in anxiety the more you do it
I'm ready to blame the current admin, federal funding cuts, and cuts to immigration, but we all do need to check that the year for this change is clearly 2024... (But I am also ready to be even more depressed by 2025 stats!)
This battle was lost 20 years ago, and to reverse it you would need to go back 40 years to prevent US industry from outsourcing to China after it joined the WEF.
You can't divorce engineering from manufacturing, because designing better stuff heavily favors those who also make the stuff. The US was convinced otherwise by economists who don't believe in nation-states, because shareholders correctly saw that they could make massive profits by paying Chinese wages rather than American wages. But now China builds more ships in a year than the US does in a decade, and all of a sudden, the chickens have come home to roost. It will take generations for the US (and indeed the West in general) to regain what was given away, if it's even possible.
I’d wager it didn’t happen due to the advice of economists who don’t believe in nation states. What happened is the natural conclusion of optimizing for maximum profit and giving capital (read i.e. corporations) the means to do so.
Any attempt at course correction is now labeled with “government overreach, socialism, communism”, etc. in an absurd way.
It's both. Governments correctly realized that you don't outsource technologies that are critical to your defense toolchain, which is why Boeing still makes planes in Everett and not in China. The oversight was not realizing the extent to which all technologies feed into one another. Eventually, you're trying to get electromagnetic launchers working on your aircraft carriers, and you're discovering that you don't have that capability, because administrations 30 years ago let electronics manufacturing go to China. So not only do you not have the capability of doing the thing that you wanted to do, but your adversary has reached a level of electronics manufacturing that your country never achieved.
It's treason if you or I leak secrets to China, and I'd argue that it would also be treason if Lockheed or Boeing wanted to make jets vital to US military interests in China. But if you sell public assets that are subsequently bought by the Chinese, or you move manufacturing that feeds the logistical supply chain, and subsequently erode local capability, that's apparently fine.
The market will always seek to maximize profits, but it's on the government to actually bat for its own sovereign interests. It's that second part that has been lacking, hence why I said in my previous post that this stuff was given away. It didn't need to be stolen.
> It's both.
True but one is the consequence of the other.
> The market will always seek to maximize profits, but it's on the government to actually bat for its own sovereign interests.
True that! But the US government is defanged (where it matters), lobbied to death and captured.
Also you never know what could one day prove to be critical to sovereign interests. It’s not one industry. It’s all of them together at the same time, from building the screws to hold your phone together to the advanced chips that AI runs on.
https://www.nature.com/immersive/d41586-026-00088-9/index.ht...
> More than 7,800 research grants terminated or frozen. Some 25,000 scientists and personnel gone from agencies that oversee research. Proposed budget cuts of 35% — amounting to US$32 billion.
> These are just a few of the ways in which Donald Trump has downsized and disrupted US science since returning to the White House last January. As his administration seeks to reshape US research and development, it has substantially scaled back and restricted what science the country pursues and the workforce that runs the federal scientific enterprise.
>cuts to immigration
Between 2020 and 2024 the admin let over 11M people walk across the US southern border. It was over 200,000 per month.
https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/cbp-enforcement-statistic...
Since deportations have basically wound down those people are effectively being given amnesty.
2024 should have been THE year to see any positive effects of immigration.
How many people do you think monthly walk across from New Jersey into New York?
11M sounds like peanuts.
The site you linked is recording the amount of people not allowed to cross so not really helpful to computing 11M.
What number am I supposed to be looking at in that cbp.gov link?
I saw "Total CPB Enforcemnt Actions" yearly numbers for inadmissibles, expulsions and apprehensions (as per the footnotes). Are those the numbers your are referring to?
I don't get it. Weren't those the waves of people after the pandemic, the numbers showing how many were turned around?
This does not translate into better jobs, if you’re wondering. The main complaint inside China is still fair pay for fair hours.
The way the US is aggressively footgunning itself, while China (and others) win by default is so frustrating. The US could have invested in clean energy, in social programs to help towns experiencing economic depression.
Like, it's really not that hard. Yes, we'd have to squeeze the richest people and share a little more equally. But not even that much. Like, the rich would still be astonishingly wealthy.
It's just... devastating to see oligarchs who can't just accept being slightly less oligarchic resulting in the collapse of an entire country.
Sometimes I think about the infrastructure projects that could’ve been done instead of a war in Afghanistan and Iraq and Iran.
It’s shocking really how wasteful the leaders of the United States can be.
Unironically, Biden's Infra Act was held up by the other acts and policies favored by the left/democrats. America loves to pay more and get less across many areas of economy and society, which is the same reason we are facing a rise in populism. People will try other forms of government if they current one cannot deliver on the promises.
You're right. People will roll the dice if the government isn't working for them. That's why we got Trump, both times. Harris's campaign was clear, "it will be more of the same", and people didn't like that so they rolled the dice on Trump. They will roll the dice again too, maybe one day we'll roll the dice on trying a new form of government.
We haven't had any big changes for a very long time. People want change. They felt Trump was the change candidate, so they tried him.
Obama did the ACA, which was a compromise with Republicans by implementing the Republican plan, that was the most recent substantial change I can thing of, but it doesn't actually fix anything fundamental (and Republicans are forever at a loss about how to fix healthcare, because their plan was already implemented by Obama, so they can't actually say anything good about their own plan).
Political polarisation is also at a point where it's become sports team-esque. People are willing to go to further extremes to dunk on the other side, even if it means the stadium is becoming increasingly messy.
How to defeat America: Wait.
More than that, China funds polarization and disinformation projects in the west. Recently they've been seemingly funding anti-AI rhetoric in the US (1). There's allegations they're funding pro-Palestine protests in the UK (2).
Makes sense to sow discord among your rivals. The US certainly does the same.
1: https://www.axios.com/2026/08/28/china-ai-data-center-backla... 2: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/08/13/china-funding-pr...
you think China is winning?
China is already in a depression and is just recovering, youth unemployment is high and it has maxed out development.
Government stats lies all the time you only need to look at their stock market for the real info.
Winning is a strong word, but they have significantly higher home ownership, purchasing power, less drug addiction, and generally safer big cities.
I believe the average worker in a tier 1-3 Chinese city is better off than a living in a North American City. Or at least, my content feed leads me to think this way.
Have you looked at China from 15 years ago? It was also said to be in a depression and youth unemployment was also high. Just look at articles from back then.
What people don't seem to understand is that China is developing in stages. Every 10 years there is a new stage, a new revolution, with different winners and losers. Maxxing out on the previous growth engine was already forseen 10 years ago. That's why they bit the bullet and decided to pay the price to transition to the next growth engine. All transitions are painful.
Besides, these are Chinese we're talking about. They'd even complain about the economy being bad even when it's growing 10% and they drive away in 2 luxury cars. When they say they're "barely surviving" they mean their savings account isn't growing.
When you look at the bad economy in China, are you looking at the costs, or are you looking at the development goals? Development goals have costs, not paying those costs to reach goals has even bigger costs pater on. The Made in China 2025 goals have already been largely achieved.
Sources?
What does the stock market have to do with anything?
It doesn't, at all. Unlike the US (and to a lesser extend, Europe), Chinese do not have a majority of their wealth invested in stocks.
Besides, the Chinese st9ck market has been atrocious since.... pretty much forever. You'd think they still live in mud pools if you think the stock market is representative of overall development.
The oligarchs don't care. If they can make a buck ruining the US, they will, and then they'll move to another country whenever it's convenient for them and do it all again. Borders don't really exist for them.
Our current President first and foremost among them.
It's easy to blame the rich here. And certainly they are the ones doing the damage and reaping the rewards.
But a third of Americans approve of the current administration. Around half of the people who voted, voted for this administration. And a lot of the footguns you refer to were gleefully part of the campaign.
If you want to apportion blame you might include moderate voters who may not approve of the status quo, but alas are so partisan that they cannot vote for the other side.
With more elections imminent, it remains to be seen if it's really the oligarchs fault, or if the root fault is the real source of power.
It's less a masterstroke of the rich, and more the media environment the various voter blocs you mentioned are soaking their minds in 24/7
That media environment was in fact the masterstroke.
I understand your point here, between social media (for the young) and TV for the old, there's certainly a lot of sources of information.
I get the urge to find someone to blame. It's not the fault of the voter, because that would imply personal accountability. Or at the very least, it would imply a lot about the underlying character of chunk of the population.
On the other hand, you can't blame the media for gas price reports. Or the cost of housing. Or the people dying of measles. Or the men in masks rounding up people. The voter can see all that themselves.
The voter knows about the current conflict with Iran. That is not a "media bias". They are free to decide themselves if that is justified.
The voter who spends all day on Fox news is welcome to decide for themselves if they want a hand-out of cash promised for after the the election. (A promise they've heard before, but not seen).
So yeah, it eould be nice to blame the oligarchs, or the media, or China, or the church, or pretty much anyone, as long as that anyone is not the voter who can see what is happening, and votes for more of the same.
and yet the oversupply of investment funds looking for projects created the current AI boom here in America, not China.
China “leads” but only in iterating on things already invented.
but we never ask what’s wrong with china that they spend so much on r&d but fail to invent novel things.
You go to a chinese city today it looks like the future short of flying cars. All the novel things we invent here and cities look the same as they did 30 years ago, only more people in tarps on the side of the road.
They have flying taxies in guangzhou. Though they're prototypes and I wouldn't use one.
What is "wrong" is that they have a culture of being conversative when it comes to 0-1 innovation. Everything is set up to reward concrete results. With 0-1 innovation you have no idea whether it's viable, so few people have the risk appetite and would rather pursue proven venues.
But westerners also underestimate the importance of 1-10 innovation. Scaling manufacturing and iterating on existing concepts are not at all trivial, and are also very valuable.
0-1 and 1-10 are complementary. Unfortunately, many people deliberately turn this into a pissing contest by accusing the Chinese of "only being able to steal" while ignoring how their own country is unable to produce basic goods like masks on a large a cheap scale, and can't fix a brige for less than xx million.
With all due respect to what I'm sure was a well meaning comment, I think your comment is also an example of why the problem IS hard. Lots of Americans think a vague prescription of "squeezing the richest a little more" is the answer to everything, including apparently declining R&D expenditures. It's not. More clean energy deployments and more social programs are not bad things but they also will not solve this problem.
If we want to fix this there are probably two broad levers that need to be pulled. Notably indiscriminately "squeezing the billionaires" isn't one of them because you want to encourage capital to invest in the US:
1) The US has developed a real problem with production quality/capability, it makes a lot of spam and trash, it increasingly can't make anything at home, etc. The two big trends driving this have been a reduction of competition in its domestic market (i.e. monopolies emerging) and a broad range of policies which encourage US companies to design stuff, license out and have the production done overseas by someone who promptly steals and copies it... hello China. What's needed here to actually make the US economy "great again" are strong enforcement of anti-trust laws and some kind of legal framework where the incentive is to not just design in the US but also build there. This certainly puts limits on what "the billionaires" can do but by no means is it really "squeezing" them or trying to limit what they can earn in the US. You want the capital to get deployed in America but under a legal framework that's aligned with productivity, innovation and job creation as well as profits. This is how you get private R&D going again. The US framework is more "scams and profits" at this point.
2) On the public side, the US formerly had amazing federal support for R&D. This sounds like it should be easy to fix but I don't really think it is. The government is not as healthy fiscally as it once was, and there used to be more public appetite for science and technology related expenditures; Americans seem more enamored with get rich quick schemes than with a STEM education these days. If you're a politician who is going to reward you for supporting big federal investment in long-term, moonshot R&D? Voters won't, the capital class won't. So personally I don't see much of a solution here without a cultural shift occurring first, we need to believe as a society that long term research and innovation can make a more perfect world, but due to the realities of the modern slopconomy we believe the exact opposite.
It's not stealing, it's learning. The original person still has it. Copied, duplicated, sure. But not stolen.
Social programs are the polar opposite of how the US should be spending its money if it wants to outcompete China. Social programs both reduce the incentive for Americans to work while also depriving research/infrastructure projects of funding.
Social programs to help towns experiencing economic depression would inject money, training, education, etc. which would create opportunity for new growth and development in areas with a low cost of living. When people are too busy just trying to survive, they are not going to be working on inventing the next big thing, and they certainly are not going to support tax dollars going toward investments for tomorrow.
Pretty much everywhere has proved that ensuring people have a place to shelter and eat doesn't stop them from wanting to do something with their lives. It's the oldest and most wrong talking point from this debate.
This is completely wrong. A majority of people only work because it's necessary to put food on the table and purchase other necessities. You know this is true because you can see how many of them choose to do nothing productive with their free time. Basically nobody is performing research in their free time.
I concur, a majority are not productive most of the time. However a majority is far from everyone.
Leaving aside for the moment people working multiple jobs for whom free time is a luxury.
Leaving aside working parents who are also raising children who choose to spend that time with them.
Of the rest, though we do see some productive outlets. Open Source Software for example being perhaps the poster child for work done without return.
Or what about those who volunteer? Perhaps in a church context or charity context or whatever.
Or all those with a side hustle, selling home-made goods in weekend markets. Some of that to earn more, some to exercise their creativity.
Yes, in countries where there are sufficient social nets that unemployed people can survive some choose not to work. And yet the overall unemployment numbers in those countries is pretty low.
So maybe "majority" isn't really the right term?
When someone tries to argue based solely on "common sense logic" like this comment, we all know it's baseless. If there was any truth to your statement, you'd refer to statistics that show your idea to be true, but it isn't.
People need down time, even researchers.
I work on hobby projects when I'm not burned out from working + getting all my other stuff done in the remaining 4 hours of the day I have left.
Doesn't China have better social programs? They have universal healthcare.
If you work in China, you get their universal healthcare but you still need a private insurance policy. It’s hard to explain though, you wouldn’t be completely up sh*t creek without a private policy, but some things become really inconvenient, and the standard of care is different (bring your own nurse in the public plan).
China sort has welfare but the hukou system means most people who need it don't qualify in the city they live in.
No? Chinese people have to work 6 days a week for a lower quality of living than a minimum wage American.
China has labor laws similar to the US. 40 hour work weeks, extra pay for overtime or for having to work weekends. They just don't enforce them very well. That's what my research tells me anyway, am I wrong?
You are not wrong about the laws, but people are working in factories doing 12 hour days 7 days a week. Yes they get overtime, but that's because you can't even afford to live with a roommate in run down company dorms on a standard 5 day work week. Its still slave labor over there. This amount of work nets workers about $1000USD per month, and this is in foreign owned factories which are much more regulated than the locally owned ones.
No they don't:
If you work, you automatically get enrolled in a hybrid healthcare system (state+private)
If you are young or elderly you get automatic coverage.
If you are working age but have no job --then you get basic healthcare (not comprehensive)
Lots of people who can afford will buy private insurance on top if they have a serious illness (basic healthcare is not comprehensive)
Also copays and high deductibles. People can end up footing 20 to 50% of their medical bills (out of pocket).
Pretty spot on for most urban ppl, a few comments
- Private insurance is always up to one's own, very few employers provide this.
- If young, your parents or yourself have to pay for coverage until you graduate, otherwise no coverage.
- If elderly, depends on your employment history. To qualify, your employers have to contribute continuously for decades and it's tied with social security. Otherwise you are on your own.
- If working age but no job, similar to being young you have to pay.
If it is about "incentivizing people to work" and getting warm butts in chairs or out swinging hammers... well, how are we going to compete with a country that has 4x the number of warm bodies?
We can't compete with China via the number of people we have working.
We need to build a functioning society instead of a group of rugged individual capitalists who only come together when we need to help out the wealthy with a bail out or tax break.
It's amazing how people think this is true when by every known metric, people who are given a minimally comfortable life almost always end up being far more productive members of society than those who are not.
That is why China is losing to the US. China massively more social programs than the US and it has reduced their economy to shambles because no one has incentive.
Shambles?
China forces its citizens to work 12 hours a day, 6 days a week. The idea that it has better social programs than the US is utterly laughable.
> China forces its citizens to work 12 hours a day, 6 days a week.
As someone who lived there for 5 years, this is laughable and totally untrue.
I'm guessing you heard that some tech companies have a 996 policy and inferred that the government is somehow imposing this on every single worker in China.
> some tech companies
Actually most, programmers have protested a few years ago to no veil. The movement is called 996.icu if you are interested, and they complied lists of companies that run 996 schedule and the normal 955.
> the government is somehow imposing this on every single worker
Of course not, the gov with communism in its name is simply not enforcing their own labor law and cracking down labor movements.
As someone whose only idea of China is what I see in western media and what I project onto it based on my deepest fears, it is 100% true.
In 2026 saw a Japan news site report a thing in 2024..its so Japan. ok jokes aside:
All of this is actually bound to happen, and it is laid out clearly in China's Five-Year Plans. Industrial upgrading is something China is bound to do, and it is bound to succeed—a colossal nation built on Confucian moral values with science as its religion.
Of course, if we ask the classic "but at what cost," it's that wealth distribution in these emerging high-tech industries is deeply unequal. Being right in the middle of it, every day I see two extremes: some company is hiring AI interns for 5,000 yuan a day, or offering PhD graduates an annual salary of 1 million yuan! Yet at the same time, massive numbers of people are unemployed, and countless others are living on baseline minimum wages.
If China truly wants to become a socialist country, beyond technological progress, it must properly resolve the inequality issues brought about by the reform and opening-up.
What a bizarre swipe. Countries don't necessarily post specific statistics like this so quickly and 2 years behind is actually pretty fast. And even though it took them 4-5 months to see the OECD numbers, Nikkei and Yomiuri seem to be the only two English language outfits reporting on this. They actually posted at around the same time many Chinese language outfits noticed.
Not to sound like a broken record here but the big problem is housing. When housing becomes the best investment, it cannibalizes capital investment into productive output.
There have been other errors along the way, such as the Bayh-Doyle Act [1], a law signed by Jimmy Carter in a lame duck session after losing to Ronald Reagan to essentially give away NIH research. I'm a firm believer that federal research dollars should come with equity strings attached in the results. Otherwise, fund your own research. And in pharmaceuticals, it's basically all federal research, despite the myth that Big Pharma invests in a lot of research. It doesn't. Actually there's one thing it does invest in: patent extension.
Also, we've addicted to fossil fuels, IMHO because it induces demand for weapons.
One big difference between the US and China is that China has significant capital controls so China has a captive market of over $100T in household savings that has to be invested in something and it can't just leave. This too creates problems but the gains in China and decrease in costs cannot be dismissed easily. Also, China has basically managed to recreate all the technologies the US has tried to restrict from being exported to China, everything from welding large container ships to the latest and greatest lithography and manufacturing.
But housing absolutely needs to stop being an investment. It's a huge reason why the manufacturing sector has been hollowed out in the West.
[1]: https://issues.org/bayh-dole-innovation-policy-woodson/
> despite the myth that Big Pharma invests in a lot of research. It doesn't.
That's the first time I've heard this. Can you elaborate? How do they produce new drugs without heavy investment in research?
And increasingly so. R&D requires excess wealth, the US has a structural deficit it cannot plug growing faster than inflation.
I think you're begging the question a bit here by assuming China is spending excess wealth. In 2024 China's general government debt was 88.33% of GDP, the US was 120.79% [1]
Now in 2026 we can look at the Financial Times [2] and see it's estimated that debt servicing is 19.2% of China's central government spending with a public debt of 122% of GDP, compared to debt service spending for the US of 14.2% (total debt 126% of GDP?) and Japan 26% (total debt 204% of GDP?).
So we're all spending money that we don't have and if you look at the rankings in the Japan article and compare to the debt % of GDP in [1] then it doesn't seem to matter.
[1] https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/GG_DEBT_GDP@GDD/CHN/...
[2] https://www.ft.com/content/a0ffc43a-231a-40aa-b5f9-521757830... => https://archive.li/k3PEH
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the current ai boom started here in america with private funds. china is spending government funds in a desperate attempt not to lose the race. it’s not clear that china is in the stronger position, at least yet.
> the current ai boom started here in america with private funds.
private funds until the bubble pops, then it becomes public funds for the bailout.
same as 2008.
I hope you're wrong, but I worry you're right.
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The amount that the US spends on R&D is a rounding fraction of the excess of military budget compared to other nation's military budgets. And by scaring off most other countries from buying US military supplies in the future, as Trump has been doing, we will end up paying a ton more for less military hardware now.
The "structural" deficit would be easily fixed by repealing the Trump tax cuts for the wealth from his first term. None of us benefitted from those but we all pay for them.
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archived, no trackers: https://nonograph.com/china-overtakes-us-for-first-time-as-t...
Engineers vs lawyers
It's true that China is remarkable, but the concern is that China is too large. Basically, these cutting-edge industries require industrial chains to be connected across different countries, but China can do almost everything within its own borders. China's greatness is greatness, but if China becomes highly developed, will this kind of technological development spread to neighboring countries?
U.S. industry, for one, spreads to many countries through outsourcing. But China can consume outsourcing within its own borders. If that happens, what will become of it?
I don't understand the complaint, China will just continue progressing while the rest of the world falls behind. It'd be the same as it has always been in Chinese history, in terms of isolationism.
Every year, there is an issue with stats coming from China. Be it casualties, deficit, populations. It's always proven to be wrong after a decade.
This 2024 will be the same as the historical data shows, as China number is never right.
Upvote this in 2034 until then chinese will downvote the crap outta my comment.
You found me at a very chinese time in my life
Assuming the expected thing happens and Trump gets shellacked in the midterms, do Americans think this will have some impact (ie reverse or accelerate) the current trend of cuts to science, cracking down on foreign students, cuts to NIH, HHS etc? Those being big recent change in this area.
I'm not American, but since those things are being done by the executive branch, with the approval of the Supreme Court, I'm not sure changes in congress will make much of a difference.
Short of impeachment (reasons for which are not in short supply, but which seems unlikely) there's not much congress can actually do to change things. 60 votes is a tough threshold to reach.
Even in the worst case scenario for Trump, the Democrats won't have a veto-proof majority. Trump will need to negotiate much harder and make concessions, but will largely keep doing what he was elected to do.
Also, the current projections don't point to a major Democrat victory. On average, midterms flip 27 seats. This midterm will likely flip 20-25 seats: a clear victory, but below average. A major victory would be like the 2010 against Obama (almost 70 seats flipped).
He will continue to ignore Congress and the current laws on the books, probing the limits of what the Supreme Court will allow him to get away with.
He hasn’t bothered to work with a Republican Congress to pass laws. He certainly won’t bother with a Democratic or split Congress.
It might stop the bleeding, but it won't repair the damage, is how I think of it.
I'm 50, and I am thinking basically "the rest of my life" is what it will take to start fixing some of this stuff, if it's even possible.
We could have had a slowly declining empire and a smooth handoff.
Instead we decided to elect a bunch of people to burn it all down and speedrun the fall of Rome.
We'll still be a world power at the end of it--in the same way France and England are world powers.
Oiy you people are boring. The US will remain a world power just due to its geographical position. It owns the Americas economically and militarily. This is something no other country in the world is close to capable of doing.
Democrats winning the midterms would moderately accelerate this. They won't have a veto-proof majority so they won't be able to enact any of their policies; however, they will be able to prevent Trump from making any improvements. They have shown countless times that harming Trump is more important to them than the good of the country (ex: they're openly cheering for Iran), so you can bet they will have no interest in advancing any sort of new research that has Republican support.
I wouldn't say I support Iran, but I'm not happy that we attacked them in an illegal war of aggression (Congress approves legal wars).
I see no reason to believe they were close to having nuclear weapons. Trump didn't say anything about nukes when he announced the beginning of the war, they made that up later.
I disapprove of the Iran war, but to play devils advocate: there's a major shift occurring right now in the way wars are fought. The Ukraine-Russia war has made it clear that conventional militaries will find themselves in a meat grinder in the next war.. that includes the US.
Iran is one of the largest drone producers... and the US military is doing live testing of anti-drone weapons and energy directed weapons in the straight of hormuz against Iranian drones.
A lot of Americans are going to die in the next war if we don't figure out the right way to maintain our dominance against these new tactics.
Trump hasn’t proposed any improvements except maybe year round DST, so we wouldn’t miss it much. Trump has tried to brand the democrats as pro-Iran for not supporting his war, and it has worked on some people like you, but most of us don’t see it his way. You can be against a war and not for the country the war is with.
Trump administration has done such a deep and lasting damage on USA