[Transsimian]

Great post Liberty Sea, I've learned a lot.

[SamuelBRoberts]

(04-21-2017 08:22 PM)Enigma Wrote:  

A country with 1.3+ billion people can't even develop a cell phone, TV, etc. that competes with LG or Samsung. Even in places like the Philippines and Thailand, Chinese brands are considered cheap, substandard products.

For what it's worth, I'm a high-end buyer, and my next phone will be a Chinese one. This (Chinese) company is doing really interesting things with the screen that nobody else is doing: maximizing the amount of screen on the front of the phone to make it bigger without increasing the size of the phone. And Samsung has gone into full 'tard mode with a non-disable-able button that calls up an irritating AI assistant on their latest S8, so I think I'm done with them.



The phone is gorgeous, and it's certainly fast enough for my uses.

Phones are kind of old, commoditized technology now, so this isn't the huge deal it might've been 5 years ago, but it's not true that China simply can't compete in this arena. Xiaomi is being held out of the US right now due to patent issues, but I think if they were here you'd see these phones doing very well against the Galaxy series, particularly as Samsung gets more and arrogant.

[Fortis]

TO be fair, I have a 100 dollar Chinese phone I got last year and it's only recently beginning to crap out after 1 year of total abuse. That said, it's a gorgeous phone and Xiaomi totally over delivered for 100 dollars. They are making some really solid phones out here.

[Enigma]

Samsung currently owns about 25% of the worldwide marketshare on smartphones. The largest Chinese manufacturers, Xiaomi and Huawei, are around 7% each.

And not only is Samsung the best-selling smartphone brand, it's also the best-selling TV manufacturer. #2 is LG, another Korean company. And Samsung also has the third highest selling laptop brand.

South Korea's population is 50 million; China's is 1.3 billion.

Again, context.

Most of the arguments for China revolved around "wow, look how big their population and gross GDP is!"

But their economy is already 10x times bigger than South Korea's. Their population is already 10x times that of Japan.

The point being that the economies of countries like Japan, Korea, and much of the West are built in an entirely different way than modern China's.

This is why a country with a fraction of China's total manufacturing base is able to produce Toyota, Honda, Nissan, Mazda, Suzuki, Yamaha, Kawasaki, Isuzu, Suzuki, and Mitsubishi.

China literally has the largest automotive industry in the world. Can you name any Chinese car brands? I've lived in fucking Asia for 3+ years, and I certainly can't. I know they have some, but they haven't penetrated the rest of Asia in anything resembling significant numbers.

And someone brought up, "well, China doesn't need to sell products internationally".

China doesn't need to export goods? Huh? And which economic powerhouses have existed without exporting goods?

Again, if China is going to accomplish the type of growth people are predicting, they're going to have to reinvent their economy. They're not going to quadruple their GDP paying wage slaves $1 an hour to churn out products all day.

I'm not saying it isn't possible. But anyone forecasting China's growth as if it's just a diagonal line that will continue on for eternity is missing the mark.

It is not particularly hard for a developing country to post high annual growth numbers. It is hard, however, for these countries to transition to a first world, developed economy that doesn't rely on keeping huge numbers of people dwindling in extreme poverty to fuel your labor force.

[Arado]

Liberty Sea has effectively countered the arguments of the China skeptics, but I just want to add a few more points.

(04-22-2017 09:02 AM)Liberty Sea Wrote:  

I've to second what Suits said above here. People often said that Mao destroyed China's traditional culture and common trust, that Chinese people are so treacherous and materialistic are due to the Cultural Revolution. This is incorrect. The Chinese have always been cunning. Throughout history, China have gone through countless war and political infighting, with the resource/population ratio always high. So to survive they have to be cunning, as Arado said. But would they stop being cunning once they get out of scarcity? I doubt that. I'm afraid that cunningness has gotten to their DNA. Perhaps they have never been more ruthless and cunning than they are now, and perhaps they will be less cunning and ruthless when things got better, but something of this nature will remain with them.

You know, I think being cunning is part of their nature, but I don't think it's really any worse than other countries - I've been to many countries where people have constantly been trying to cheat me, and that just no longer happens in the big cities in China. Also look at somewhere like Taiwan or Singapore - ethnic Han, but people there are pretty nice and honest. I really think that the cunningness of Chinese is overblown and in a less competitive society they will chill out a bit. It may take a generation or two. Either way, I don't think it will be a major hindrance on their march to superpower status.

(04-22-2017 11:35 PM)Enigma Wrote:  

China literally has the largest automotive industry in the world. Can you name any Chinese car brands? I've lived in fucking Asia for 3+ years, and I certainly can't. I know they have some, but they haven't penetrated the rest of Asia in anything resembling significant numbers.

And someone brought up, "well, China doesn't need to sell products internationally".

China doesn't need to export goods? Huh? And which economic powerhouses have existed without exporting goods?

Again, if China is going to accomplish the type of growth people are predicting, they're going to have to reinvent their economy. They're not going to quadruple their GDP paying wage slaves $1 an hour to churn out products all day.

I'm not saying it isn't possible. But anyone forecasting China's growth as if it's just a diagonal line that will continue on for eternity is missing the mark.

It is not particularly hard for a developing country to post high annual growth numbers. It is hard, however, for these countries to transition to a first world, developed economy that doesn't rely on keeping huge numbers of people dwindling in extreme poverty to fuel your labor force.

China has not HAD to have their own brands for the past few decades. All they were was an OEM production site for the world's products. That is changing now though. Fortis mentioned DJI before. Huawei and Xiaomi phones are doing well in poorer places like Africa and India. It starts there before it moves to more developed markets.

http://www.businesstoday.in/technology/n...43499.html

Quote:

Chinese smartphone vendors last year captured about 40 per cent share in India, the second largest smartphone market in the world, the official media in Beijing reported.
Among all, Lenovo saw its shipment volume rise to the second only after Samsung in the third quarter last year, state-run China Daily quoted global research firm International Data Corporation (IDC) survey as saying.
Xiaomi took the third spot with a market share of 10.7 per cent, whereas Chinese vendors collectively took up 40 per cent, according to the survey conducted across 30 major Indian cities.

It's not hard for developing countries to post high growth rates, but yet, so many other countries have failed where China is succeeding. China is now where South Korea and Japan and Taiwan were at this stage of development. Even if growth slows to 4 ish percent, that still puts them far ahead of the U.S. in PPP terms by 2030.

(04-20-2017 06:22 PM)Enigma Wrote:  

I'm talking about overseas Chinese. Most of them are not being educated in mainland China, they're being educated in the country that they're living in, using the same schools, more or less, as the ethnic majority.

And school systems are what the PISA measures, not raw/genetic intelligence, hence the reason predominantly Chinese states like Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, and Singapore score higher than the mainland.

Also, you should take a look at how China gathers their scores.

Their 2015 scores only measured students from Shanghai, Guangdong, Beijing, and Jiangsu. Those are the richest provinces in the country and only make up 230 million of the country's 1.3+ billion total population.

In short, China only measures the most affluent students from the largest cities.

In 2012, they only measured Shanghai. And their scores were about 50 to 80 points higher than the mainland.

Let's put that into perspective for a minute. Simply adding three other rich Chinese provinces to the average dropped Shanghai's scores by 50+ points in every category.

If Shanghai was 613 but the average of the four provinces was 531 in mathematics, how low are those other provinces' scores? They would have to be at least 100 points lower to drag the average down that dramatically.

That'd put them right on part with most of Southeast Asia.

Now, what would happen if you included the other 1 billion Chinese, measuring the total population, as countries like the US do? How about if we average the 300+ million Chinese living in extreme poverty with the 230 million in those four provinces?

This all supports my point, which is that ethnic Chinese, as a whole, are not that much genetically smarter than the natives of many Southeast Asian countries. Yes, there is an IQ difference, but it's not significant enough to account for 1% Chinese owning such incredible 50 to 99% wealth in some of these countries.

Even looking at the PISA scores that we have, China and Vietnam are roughly on part, yet the 1% Chinese in Vietnam own over 40% of the wealth, and it was at high as 80% in the 70s.

Well - Shanghai + Beijing population is just over 40 million compared to Jiangsu + Guangdong is 185 million so the score doesn't have to be that low in Jiangsu + Guangdong for the average to come out to 530. Plus, as you mention above, other ethnic Chinese states such as Taiwan and Singapore do well on PISA. Either way, a score above 500 is still perfectly respectable and puts them well in contention to developed economy status. Also, China is still not a rich country, and students get a fraction of the funding per capita that students in rich countries get. But yet, they are still able to do on par with other developed countries. That is impressive. As the other provinces catch up with the coast then they too will have improving test scores.

Look, there are plenty of flaws with the PISA study, no study is perfect. But it's the ONLY data we have, and so far, the data point to the Chinese being better educated on average than southeast Asians. You may say that the test only measures test taking abilities, but the evidence shows that PISA ability largely correlates with a country's overall level of development.

Also, historically, many of the countries in Southeast Asia have paid tribute to China throughout the dynasties and recognized their cultural, military, and economic superiority and SEA has not had a measurable contribution to science and technology progress as China has done.

(04-22-2017 04:40 AM)Liberty Sea Wrote:  

1. Why is it that the Filipinos do so well financially in the US, performing better than mainland Chinese immigrants but at home they are ruled financially by the Chinese? Well, honestly I don't know. I don't have answer for everything, so I've to guess. My guess is that the Chinese have set up network all-over SEA to help other Chinese, and they are just better at being thug-cunning, which works better in the terrible law enforcement of SEA than in the US.

Well, I'd venture several possibilities from this article, all of which are perfectly compatible with Filipino IQ in the Philippines being lower than Han IQ:

http://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/f...ted-states

Quote:

In 2013, about 30 percent of Filipino immigrants (age 5 and over) reported limited English proficiency, compared with about 50 percent of the foreign born overall.

English proficiency is a huge booster

Quote:

Three major waves characterize the history of Filipino immigration to the United States. Following the U.S. annexation of the Philippines in 1899, the United States began sponsoring select Filipino students to study at U.S. colleges and universities.

That would definitely select for IQ

Quote:

The second wave of Filipino immigration began in the aftermath of World War II. Many more than 100 Filipinos arrived annually outside the quota, primarily as “war brides” to U.S. servicemen and as recruits into the U.S. armed forces, particularly the U.S. Navy. In addition, an increasing number of Filipinos arrived in the United States to train as nurses and other health-care workers. While the postwar period saw a modest influx of Filipinos, particularly higher-educated professionals, their numbers grew considerably in the third major wave of immigration after 1965.

This would also have a highly selective effect.

Remember, Indians in the U.S. out earn Chinese. But does anyone here who has been to India really think the average Indian in India is smarter than the average Chinese in China? Doubt it. Btw, Nigerian-Americans, Pakistani-Americans, and Egyptian Americans also out earn white Americans.

Using the economic performance of immigrants in the U.S. as a proxy for the IQ of their home country compatriots is very inaccurate.

Point being, Chinese are smart and we should not underestimate their development prospects, nor should we should so casually dismiss how much of a disruptive force China's rise will be in the current world order.

[Enigma]

(04-23-2017 03:34 AM)Arado Wrote:  

China has not HAD to have their own brands for the past few decades. All they were was an OEM production site for the world's products. That is changing now though. Fortis mentioned DJI before. Huawei and Xiaomi phones are doing well in poorer places like Africa and India. It starts there before it moves to more developed markets.

Yes, the largest population in the world and second largest economy have produced about 4 somewhat significant technology brands, less than countries a fraction of their size.

How exactly does that run contrary to anything I just posted?

Quote:

It's not hard for developing countries to post high growth rates, but yet, so many other countries have failed where China is succeeding. China is now where South Korea and Japan and Taiwan were at this stage of development. Even if growth slows to 4 ish percent, that still puts them far ahead of the U.S. in PPP terms by 2030.

Can you tell me at which stages of development that South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan had 300+ million people living on $2 a day?

Also, China is already ahead of the US in PPP. What has that gotten them?

Their PPP is also larger than the entire European Union combined. So what? It's another meaningless statistic.

India's PPP is more than twice as large as almost every other country in the world. It's still filled with poor people shitting on the street.

(04-20-2017 06:22 PM)Enigma Wrote:  

Well - Shanghai + Beijing population is just over 40 million compared to Jiangsu + Guangdong is 185 million so the score doesn't have to be that low in Jiangsu + Guangdong for the average to come out to 530. Plus, as you mention above, other ethnic Chinese states such as Taiwan and Singapore do well on PISA. Either way, a score above 500 is still perfectly respectable and puts them well in contention to developed economy status.

Most of Southeast Asia scored just under 500. If China is just above 500, that means China is not much higher than SEA, which was exactly my point all along.

Quote:

Also, China is still not a rich country, and students get a fraction of the funding per capita that students in rich countries get. But yet, they are still able to do on par with other developed countries. That is impressive. As the other provinces catch up with the coast then they too will have improving test scores.

Is Vietnam a rich country? Is the Philippines? Indonesia? Thailand?

I'm talking about overseas Chinese compared to the natives of the country they live in.

Not mainland China vs. the rest of the world.

Not mainland China vs. Malaysia.

You are trying to combine two totally different conversation threads into one. I was discussing something very specific when I made those comments, and it was totally unrelated to China's success as a country.

Quote:

Look, there are plenty of flaws with the PISA study, no study is perfect. But it's the ONLY data we have, and so far, the data point to the Chinese being better educated on average than southeast Asians. You may say that the test only measures test taking abilities, but the evidence shows that PISA ability largely correlates with a country's overall level of development.

Also, historically, many of the countries in Southeast Asia have paid tribute to China throughout the dynasties and recognized their cultural, military, and economic superiority and SEA has not had a measurable contribution to science and technology progress as China has done.

Again, at what point did I compare Southeast Asia, as nations, to China? I didn't.

My assertion was that the 1% ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia did not accrue 50 to 99% of every countries' wealth simply by being smarter than the native population.

They did it through a combination of their business practices and China's political manueverings in the region.

Interestingly, your whole argument on the past few pages is that Chinese are good at business and will use their growing power to threaten their neighbors. Yet you disagree with a post where I explained how they've done the same in the past.

It's as if you're not actually reading what is being posted and simply disagreeing by reflex.

[Arado]

(04-23-2017 04:51 AM)Enigma Wrote:  

(04-23-2017 03:34 AM)Arado Wrote:  

China has not HAD to have their own brands for the past few decades. All they were was an OEM production site for the world's products. That is changing now though. Fortis mentioned DJI before. Huawei and Xiaomi phones are doing well in poorer places like Africa and India. It starts there before it moves to more developed markets.

Yes, the largest population in the world and second largest economy have produced about 4 somewhat significant technology brands, less than countries a fraction of their size.

How exactly does that run contrary to anything I just posted?

Well, point being that just a few years ago there were essentially no Chinese brands because it was all OEM. Now, there are more and more Chinese brands gaining market share throughout the world, and this trend sees no signs of dissipating. The point I'm making is that we should be thinking critically about where China is projected to be at in 2030 and what it means in terms of the West's ability to determine the direction of human civilization at that point vis a vis China.

Quote:

It's not hard for developing countries to post high growth rates, but yet, so many other countries have failed where China is succeeding. China is now where South Korea and Japan and Taiwan were at this stage of development. Even if growth slows to 4 ish percent, that still puts them far ahead of the U.S. in PPP terms by 2030.

Can you tell me at which stages of development that South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan had 300+ million people living on $2 a day?

Also, China is already ahead of the US in PPP. What has that gotten them?

Their PPP is also larger than the entire European Union combined. So what? It's another meaningless statistic.

India's PPP is more than twice as large as almost every other country in the world. It's still filled with poor people shitting on the street.

[/quote]

Well I won't disagree with you there - China is already ahead of the U.S. in PPP now, so by 2030 they will be far ahead of the U.S. And of course PPP is only one statistic in the broad spectrum of indices that we look at to measure national "power," which is why India is still uninfluential in the world despite their size. China's per capita income will hit high income status by 2030, and China's growing wealth will translate into more military capabilities vis a vis their neighbors, as well as economic leverage over other countries, and the ability to fund soft power initiatives such as Confucius institutes. Result? Growing Chinese influence, on par to surpass the U.S. in a couple of decades.

I know inequality is worse in China but at least in terms of per capita GDP and growth rates, China now is roughly where SK was in the 1990's.

(04-20-2017 06:22 PM)Enigma Wrote:  

Most of Southeast Asia scored just under 500. If China is just above 500, that means China is not much higher than SEA, which was exactly my point all along.

Quote:

Also, China is still not a rich country, and students get a fraction of the funding per capita that students in rich countries get. But yet, they are still able to do on par with other developed countries. That is impressive. As the other provinces catch up with the coast then they too will have improving test scores.

Is Vietnam a rich country? Is the Philippines? Indonesia? Thailand?

I'm talking about overseas Chinese compared to the natives of the country they live in.

Not mainland China vs. the rest of the world.

Not mainland China vs. Malaysia.

You are trying to combine two totally different conversation threads into one. I was discussing something very specific when I made those comments, and it was totally unrelated to China's success as a country.

Not quite - my point is that the Han do have a higher genetic IQ than the ethnic groups in other SEA countries, and it's not just their cunning that explains their dominance in that region.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_...Assessment

Thailand scored in the low 400's, Malaysia around 440, Indonesia barely broke 400. So when you write that most SEA is just below 500, that is 100% wrong.

Vietnam was the only other country somewhat close to China (reading and science score disparities cancel each other out), but were still crushed by them in math (531 to 495). Plus, we don't know anything about the sample size in Vietnam, so if the same selection issues were present there, then the disparity remains.

Quote:

Look, there are plenty of flaws with the PISA study, no study is perfect. But it's the ONLY data we have, and so far, the data point to the Chinese being better educated on average than southeast Asians. You may say that the test only measures test taking abilities, but the evidence shows that PISA ability largely correlates with a country's overall level of development.

Also, historically, many of the countries in Southeast Asia have paid tribute to China throughout the dynasties and recognized their cultural, military, and economic superiority and SEA has not had a measurable contribution to science and technology progress as China has done.

Again, at what point did I compare Southeast Asia, as nations, to China? I didn't.

My assertion was that the 1% ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia did not accrue 50 to 99% of every countries' wealth simply by being smarter than the native population.

They did it through a combination of their business practices and China's political manueverings in the region.
[/quote]

Well my point is that China's historical accomplishments as a civilization is a reflection of the talent of it's population. SEA countries have no such historical records of accomplishment, ergo, their population is less talented than that of China. This talent disparity largely explains the success of overseas Chinese in SEA.

As of now all we have is the PISA to compare talent across countries. I wish there was a god-test out there that sampled a broad spectrum of provinces and socio economic levels. But that test doesn't exist.

However, working off what we DO know, all indications point to China growing significantly in power over the next couple of decades. No hostility here - I'm not asking you to fully buy into my Chinese superiority arguments. All I'm saying is that there is at least a good argument to be made that China is on the path to exceeding the power of the West, and anyone who cares about world order should at least think seriously about what this means for the future of the U.S. and the West instead of dismissing China and assuming that the U.S. will be the #1 power forever.

That's all I'm saying.

Quote:



Interestingly, your whole argument on the past few pages is that Chinese are good at business and will use their growing power to threaten their neighbors. Yet you disagree with a post where I explained how they've done the same in the past.

It's as if you're not actually reading what is being posted and simply disagreeing by reflex.

Ok - hopefully it's a bit more clear now what my main argument is, not trying to disagree for the sake of it so let's keep this civil.

These IQ and overseas Chinese questions aren't really that important for this thread, I just brought them up in order to bolster my argument for why we should seriously be concerned with China rising and challenging the West. I'm mainly focused on two questions:

1) What should be the U.S. strategy to deal with a rising China that will surpass the U.S. (battered by political dysfunction and demographic replacement) in economic influence and military capability within a couple of decades?

2) Why has the alt-right completely ignored the China story, is it because China's growth does not fit into the alt-right narrative about (((globalist))) bogeymen?

[Enigma]

(04-23-2017 06:04 AM)Arado Wrote:  

Well, point being that just a few years ago there were essentially no Chinese brands because it was all OEM. Now, there are more and more Chinese brands gaining market share throughout the world, and this trend sees no signs of dissipating. The point I'm making is that we should be thinking critically about where China is projected to be at in 2030 and what it means in terms of the West's ability to determine the direction of human civilization at that point vis a vis China.

Huawei and Lenovo were founded in the '80s, and Lenovo has been performing at a high level for years. In fact, in terms of product quality, most people agree that they've gotten worse in recent years. Xiaomi is the only new brand out of that pack.

In short, you have the second largest economy in the world hanging its hat on Lenovo and two mid-level smartphone manufacturers. That is not at all impressive.

Yes, they haven't needed brands, which is exactly my point. Their economy has to undergo a massive shift in focus in order to accomplish the level of growth that's being predicted.

Quote:

Well I won't disagree with you there - China is already ahead of the U.S. in PPP now, so by 2030 they will be far ahead of the U.S. And of course PPP is only one statistic in the broad spectrum of indices that we look at to measure national "power," which is why India is still uninfluential in the world despite their size. China's per capita income will hit high income status by 2030, and China's growing wealth will translate into more military capabilities vis a vis their neighbors, as well as economic leverage over other countries, and the ability to fund soft power initiatives such as Confucius institutes. Result? Growing Chinese influence, on par to surpass the U.S. in a couple of decades.

I know inequality is worse in China but at least in terms of per capita GDP and growth rates, China now is roughly where SK was in the 1990's.

You're just repeating the same things over and over. Stating that China will do "this and that" by 2030 is not an argument.

"China will grow bigger because it grew bigger" is not an argument either. That's what I've been pointing out for the last few posts.

Earlier you claimed that China was going to grow its economy by 350% in 15 years, which you still haven't given any sort of explanation for.

And China is almost 30x times larger than South Korea. Large countries do not grow in the same way that small countries do, hence the reason that Taiwan, Singapore, etc. were able to grow so quickly.

Quote:

Not quite - my point is that the Han do have a higher genetic IQ than the ethnic groups in other SEA countries, and it's not just their cunning that explains their dominance in that region.

Yes, they do have have higher IQs. I already stated that. Their IQs, however, are not enough to account for their massive collection of wealth in SEA.

Quote:

Thailand scored in the low 400's, Malaysia around 440, Indonesia barely broke 400. So when you write that most SEA is just below 500, that is 100% wrong.

Vietnam was the only other country somewhat close to China (reading and science score disparities cancel each other out), but were still crushed by them in math (531 to 495). Plus, we don't know anything about the sample size in Vietnam, so if the same selection issues were present there, then the disparity remains.

You're arguing in circles.

If you measured all of China, their scores would not be above 500. This is clear based on how they take the scores.

When I pointed this out, you said, "well, China isn't a rich country and don't have good educaton". But then you take the scores of countries like Indonesia, which isn't a rich country either.

For the third time, "overseas" Chinese are not educated in mainland China.

The Hao, for instance, have been in Vietnam for generations. They go to school in Vietnam, not in China.

Quote:

Well my point is that China's historical accomplishments as a civilization is a reflection of the talent of it's population. SEA countries have no such historical records of accomplishment, ergo, their population is less talented than that of China. This talent disparity largely explains the success of overseas Chinese in SEA.

First of all, China is like 2x times larger and more populated than all of SEA combined.

Second of all, the claim that they have no historical records of accomplishment is ridiculous. Angkor was the largest preindustrial city in the world, for starters.

Quote:

However, working off what we DO know, all indications point to China growing significantly in power over the next couple of decades. No hostility here - I'm not asking you to fully buy into my Chinese superiority arguments. All I'm saying is that there is at least a good argument to be made that China is on the path to exceeding the power of the West, and anyone who cares about world order should at least think seriously about what this means for the future of the U.S. and the West instead of dismissing China and assuming that the U.S. will be the #1 power forever.

That's all I'm saying.

Clearly China will grow. The question is how fast and steadily they will grow, and whether they will overcome their own problems.

I have never said it's impossible for them to exceed the West, I'm simply unconvinced that it's the inevitable outcome.

Quote:

These IQ and overseas Chinese questions aren't really that important for this thread, I just brought them up in order to bolster my argument for why we should seriously be concerned with China rising and challenging the West. I'm mainly focused on two questions:

You didn't bring up overseas Chinese, I did. And I brought them up to show China's historic influence on the region, which is very relevant to the thread.

Quote:

1) What should be the U.S. strategy to deal with a rising China that will surpass the U.S. (battered by political dysfunction and demographic replacement) in economic influence and military capability within a couple of decades?

2) Why has the alt-right completely ignored the China story, is it because China's growth does not fit into the alt-right narrative about (((globalist))) bogeymen?

Or is it because the alt-right is a nationalist American movement that's more concerned and familiar with the issues closer to their sphere?

The funny thing is your response to the alt-right's perceived dismissal of China is to pretend like China has no problems or weaknesses. You see this same kind of black and white thinking in the North Korea thread.

Yet if I take the stance that the US and China both have problems, and that China shows promise but has a lot to prove, this somehow means I'm an alt-right Trump fanboy China hater.

[Arado]

(04-23-2017 07:17 AM)Enigma Wrote:  

Quote:

1) What should be the U.S. strategy to deal with a rising China that will surpass the U.S. (battered by political dysfunction and demographic replacement) in economic influence and military capability within a couple of decades?

2) Why has the alt-right completely ignored the China story, is it because China's growth does not fit into the alt-right narrative about (((globalist))) bogeymen?

Or is it because the alt-right is a nationalist American movement that's more concerned and familiar with the issues closer to their sphere?

The funny thing is your response to the alt-right's perceived dismissal of China is to pretend like China has no problems or weaknesses. You see this same kind of black and white thinking in the North Korea thread.

Yet if I take the stance that the US and China both have problems, and that China shows promise but has a lot to prove, this somehow means I'm an alt-right Trump fanboy China hater.

We can agree to disagree on China's potential since it looks like we are arguing in circles and Liberty Sea has already addressed most of your points on Chinese brands, economic growth, and education potential. At the very least, we agree on the IQ issue and you are open to the idea that China could exceed the U.S. so we can at least work off of that - let's say it's a 50/50 chance that China exceeds the U.S. in terms of overall national power in two decades.

Should the U.S. take pre-emptive steps to constrain, contain, or weaken China? Do you really think that a superpower China will pose zero threat to an alt right nationalist America, and therefore the alt-right is completely justified in spending almost zero time thinking about it?

Chinese militarism is of course the most obvious example - should we be on the hook to defend Japan, Philippines, Vietnam, Taiwan, etc from Chinese expansionism? Should we risk WW3 for it? Should we cede the south China sea to the Chinese? And if we do abandon our Asian allies, is the alt-right ok with them abandoning their alliance with the U.S. to curry favor with China?

It's not just militarism. It's also China attempting to duplicate all the industries that we have a comparative advantage in. It's China pushing RMB internationalization to undermine dollar supremacy. It's China buying influence throughout the world through building infrastructure. China pushing Confucius institutes to increase their soft power. All of these issues have gone unaddressed by the alt-right, though these are all trends that will negatviely impact our standing in the world and the economic security of the middle class.

If the possibility comes to fruition that China becomes a superpower, then this is the first time that a non-Western non Judeo-Christian country will be the pre eminent power in the world. It's hard to overestimate the impact this will have.

I agree with you that a nationalist movement should pay attention to issues close to their sphere, but I really think that China becoming a superpower is not an issue that nationalists can't afford to ignore because on the surface it doesn't impact core national interests.

At the very least you can admit that China is the most likely candidate for "country there that will challenge American influence the most in the decades ahead."

Therefore, doesn't it merit some attention from this part of the web?

[Liberty Sea]

Brilliant chess move from China! Your move, mr. Trump!
http://thediplomat.com/2017/01/the-civil...china-sea/

China is populating the Paracels, Spratlys, and other islands in the South China Sea with its civilians, setting up government frameworks and tourist industries there. Within a few years, those islands will become de facto China towns, and de facto Chinese territory. By then, no matter what legal-formal reasoning any other side may use, it will be rendered empty and useless. That's how you make a territory yours: occupy it, populate it with yours people, set up economic activities and bureaucracy. WE LIVE HERE SO IT'S OURS! YOUR ARGUMENTS ARE INVALID!

Within a few years, the US can hardly have any legitimate reason to intervene there militarily. If it's just military occupation by China, then it's relatively simple: you beat them, chase them out. But now that it has been 'civilianized', you can no longer simply bomb the shit out of them, chase them out, deport them, tell them to go back, etc. Bannon used to say, “We’re going to war in the South China Sea in five to 10 years... There’s no doubt about that.". However by then it will have been too late.

The US is also currently too busy to stop this civilianizing process. It also needs alliance with China to counter North Korea. It's the perfect time for China to make this move (make me wonder if China also had some backroom dealing with NK).

Other parties in the region (Vietnam, Philippine, Japan, South Korea, etc.) cannot stop China from doing this, lacking either power or sufficient incentive. Japan and SK have absolutely no territorial claims, they cannot legitimately intervene. And even if some SEA country doesn't care about human lives, killing China's civilians will risk triggering a bigger war with China, which it cannot afford.

If things go optimally, China can take those islands without wasting a single bullet or life, then expand its presence in that whole water. This will greatly enhance China's political-economic capacity and influence in the region.


**********


http://thediplomat.com/2017/01/the-civil...china-sea/

Quote:

The 'Civilization' of China’s Military Presence in the South China Sea
Chinese policy in the South China Sea increasingly focuses on boosting its civilian presence on disputed islands.

By Zhibo Qiu
January 21, 2017



From increasing land reclamation activities to expanding military infrastructure and capacities, many international observers have expressed concerns over China’s “militarization” of the South China Sea. However, some have neglected the tendencies which actually witnessed a shift toward to opposite policy direction — the “civilization” of China’s military presence on the disputed islands. This trend will have profound implications for China’s foreign policy in the region, and deserves more attention from policymakers and scholars.

The increasing civilian elements of China’s South China Sea military presence are part of China’s grand strategy to integrate military and civilian capacities nationwide. On January 8, a new industrial alliance on strengthening military-civilian integration was established in Beijing, supported by the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. This alliance will create a cooperative platform to build up China’s military industrial capacity, drawing on resources from both state-owned defense companies and private companies.

Earlier this year, the Party issued a special circular on integrating military capacity building and economic development. The circular called for using market forces to optimize military resources nationwide, and actively guide private investment and technology to serve defense purposes, which in return will provide long-term economic development. Resources will be pooled and shared between military operations and civilian activities.

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In particular, the circular mentioned the implications for China’s maritime policy. According to the document, China will integrate its national interests in the territorial integrity of its oceans and economic exploitation of marine resources, and gradually form a joint force pooling the resources of the Party, state, military, police, and citizens to safeguard its maritime borders.

These plans are not only on paper; Beijing is already taking real-world steps toward these ends. A closer examination of China’s current activities in the South China Sea shed light on China’s integrated military-civilian strategy and its implications for the maritime disputes.

To legitimize the legal status of these islands domestically, China took an important step in July 2012, when it announced Sansha as a provincial-level city in Hainan Province. According to China, Sansha City has jurisdiction over the Paracels, Spratlys, and other disputed features. By legalizing the administrative status of these islands in its political system, China has set up a solid legal basis at home to claim territorial sovereignty against competing claims from Vietnam and the Philippines. Notably, the city government of Sansha is located on Yongxing (Woody) Island in the Paracels, which is also a center for China’s growing military capacity in the region.

The international legal status of Sansha City may face more challenges after an international tribunal at the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague ruled against China’s sweeping maritime claims. However, the set-up of a provincial-level city in Sansha has different implications domestically and is a substantial step toward making China’s military actions more “civilianized.” Intriguingly, the disputed islands, under Sansha’s leadership, are increasingly branded as a popular destination to attract patriotic tourists and private investors.

China plans to transform some of the islands into vacation destinations for domestic tourists. The local government has already launched public campaigns in the media, urging Chinese tourists to join the patriotic-themed cruise tours to these islands. On December 21, 2016, A new ship called Dream of the South Sea embarked on its first four-day cruise from Sanya City, on Hainan, to three islands and reefs in the South China Sea. Operated by the largest stated-owned travel agency, China International Travel Service, the themed cruise will include both patriotic and recreational activities. Aside from sightseeing, tourists will sign a long paper scroll to show their support for China’s territory sovereignty and sing China’s national anthem on the disputed islands.

The Dream of the South Sea, which can accommodate up to 893 people, will be scheduled to offer this cruise between four and six times per month. It is the second such ship operating in the South China Sea; a 300-person ship running the same route has already hosted 23,000 tourists since April 2013. From now on, the two ships will bring even more Chinese tourists to these islands.

This is only the start of China’s ambitious plan to increase its civilian presence in the South China Sea. In an interview with Xinhua News Agency, Xiao Jie, mayor of Sansha City, further confirmed that the city plans to focus on promoting tourism and developing tourist infrastructure. Sansha plans to offer a wide range of tourist services, including weddings, surfing, fishing and scuba diving trips, and wants to brand itself as an alternative tourist destination to Maldives. The local government’s blueprint also mapped out a plan to develop two to three marine national parks — likely to be in disputed areas as well — for sightseeing purposes.

Furthermore, the city government has formulated an “Action Plan on Promoting Sansha Tourism” with substantial funding from Hainan Province. Currently, Chinese tourists can only visit the South China Sea islands via cruises the depart from Sanya, a tourist city on Hainan Island. To attract more tourists, Sansha plans to open the airport on Yongxing (Woody) Island to civilian flights. Built in 1990, the Yongxing airport has long been an exclusively military airport, for the use of Chinese warplanes. Mayor Xiao Jie promised that soon Chinese tourists will be able visit Sansha via direct commercial flights from their home cities.

Opening the military airport to civilian flights is a perfect example of what the Party circular called pooling and sharing resources as part of military-civilian integration. China has also made a point of sending passenger jets to land on its newly-built airstrips on the Spratlys, opening up the potential for commercial flights to these islands as well.

Aside from tourism, Sansha is also trying to attract more permanent civilian residents. Sasha’s first local regulation, passed by the local legislature in January 2016, was the Administrative Measures on Sansha Residential Services. The local government has pledged to improve infrastructure for island residents, ranging from the water supply, electricity, and sewage to a full-coverage WiFi network.

As part of those efforts, China’s next step to “civilianize” these islands is to attract private investment. Feng Wenhai, Sansha’s deputy mayor, made it clear that Sansha welcomes private investors to support civilian infrastructure construction. Already, the local government plans to initiate a series of public-private-partnerships programs. Plus, Sansha has been branded as an important hub of China’s Maritime Silk Road, raising its profile for investors.

From the beginning, Sansha City has received preferential policies on taxation, which are attractive to private investors. According to the deputy mayor, so far 119 companies have registered in Sansha. Together with 110 individual businesses, they contributed approximately $106.6 million in local taxes in 2015.

If the local government in Sansha is as strategic as it is ambitious, it is likely that these tourism, infrastructure, and financial projects will gradually open to international private investors as well, further legitimizing China’s presence in the South China Sea.

In a few years, China will have a robust tourist industry, a well-populated residential community, and local businesses with mixed public-private ownership in the South China Sea. That will make it difficult for the international community to claim that China’s activities on the disputed islands are pure “militarization” anymore. Undoubtedly, the number of China’s South China Sea island residents and tourists will continue grow at an alarming rate, which will eventually change the nature of China’s military operations in these islands.

To some degree, these Chinese tourists and residents serve as a “civilian shield” in the South China Sea. The potential for large causalities among Chinese civilians will make foreign countries think twice before initiating military action. For all the stakeholders involved in the South China Sea disputes, the “civilianization” of China’s presence in the South China Sea is a significant factor to take into consideration when formulating future military strategy and foreign policy. The trend has already become a reality that international policy makers and experts can no longer afford to neglect.

Zhibo Qiu is an independent researcher and political consultant. Her research focuses on China’s domestic politics, foreign policy, and overseas investment. She holds master’s degrees from the University of Cambridge and the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. The article represents the author’s personal opinions.

[Liberty Sea]

Part (1) of 3.

(04-22-2017 11:35 PM)Enigma Wrote:  

Most of the arguments for China revolved around "wow, look how big their population and gross GDP is!"

The core thrust of my main argument was actually aiming at a much more long term and fundamental prospect, based on the persistence and sturdiness of the Han's racial substance and ethnic identity, its racial-evolutionary health and propagating-assimilating power, its high average IQ combined with the energy of its current national spirit. I haven't expounded these points sufficiently, since I figured it's a bit outside of the scope of thread (but if this is to be considered as The Master China Thread, then sure, I'll expound it at length). And while I have much to say on the subjects of its recent/current political-economic performances and prospects, such things are in the end only surface and ephemeral compared to its true fundamental, underlying strength. But since the topic at hand is whether China can attain superpower status within the foreseeable future, I'll address those subjects altogether.

****

1. There is much to agree with the points that Enigma has made. However my confidence in China's future remains high. My stance is that China, more likely than not, will attain superpower status. The specific time point is uncertain. My guess is that it would be somewhere within this century, and perhaps within my lifespan (if I live for another 50+ years).
One thing to keep in mind is that high GDP per capita is more of an indication of the quality of life of a country’s citizen, than the power and influence of the country itself. America have lower GDP per capita than a lot of country, but wield more power than them ever will.

2.

Quote:

In short, you have the second largest economy in the world hanging its hat on Lenovo and two mid-level smartphone manufacturers. That is not at all impressive.
Can you tell me at which stages of development that South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan had 300+ million people living on $2 a day?

I get your point, although I can't help pointing out that the population of all those countries combined wouldn't muster up to 300 million. 25% of their population would be more exact.

In some measures China has indeed underperformed compared to the economic miracles of Japan and South Korea. This was in part due to some strategical missteps of China's leadership, but also in part due to the fact that the difficulties that its leadership faced is much larger than that which Japan's and Korea's leaderships had to face. My argument is such underperformance does not mean China's potential is lower than that of those countries, but that it's actually higher, just not yet - and nowhere near- optimally realized.

2.2. Japan modernized way before China did. And although it was 'devastated' in WW2 and the two nuclear bombs, the damage was in comparison much smaller than what China suffered. Japan still has a highly developed framework and high-skilled human resources, whereas China's population was still predominantly peasants and its intellectual class was crushed by Mao and the Gang of Four's Cultural Revolution.

South Korea also opened its market before China did. Japan and SK's technological tradition is longer, more developed.

2.3. And because America 'took care' of Japan’s security, it could focus on developing its economy. Such is the upside of being America's ally (but that also has consequences, as we shall see). SK also heavily depended on America for protection, freeing its hand to engineer economic growth. Another benefit of being ally of the most economically and technologically developed superpower on Earth is that Japan and SK both enjoyed is enhanced economic and technological exchanges. Japan and SK wouldn't have achieved what they did, as fast as they did, without tremendous help from America (be proud, Americans!)

Meanwhile the CPC had to guard against the US and other possibly hostile forces attempting to overthrow it. It has had to guard the territory of China by itself. China also went sour with the USSR - it didn't have a powerful ally to rely on for economic and technological exchanges when it opened the market.

2.4. Also, when China entered the world market, the high-end market was occupied by Japan, SK, the US and other developed countries. It’s nigh impossible for an inexperienced, unprepared newcomer to compete in that market, so China had to go the route of competing in low- and mid-end market, producing cheap commodities. Even late into the game, entering that high-end market is still a challenge, due to things like brand recognition, brand familiarity, brand loyalty, and market saturation, etc. To successfully compete internationally, it's not enough for China's products to be on par with Japan's and SK's products; they had to be superior, and better marketed! Even if some China's luxury goods are just as good, they would mostly and firstly be consumed in their homeland for patriotic reason. Which is one of the reasons why China has targeted fresh markets like Africa.

2.5. Also, as you yourself have said:

Quote:

And China is almost 30x times larger than South Korea. Large countries do not grow in the same way that small countries do, hence the reason that Taiwan, Singapore, etc. were able to grow so quickly.

Looking at the difficulties China has had to face, I think we could be a bit more lenient on scolding China for not being as 'impressive' as Japan and SK.

In 1950, China’s urban population was only 13%. Japan’s was 63%. In 2015 China’s was 56% and Japan’s was 93%. China’s urban population increased by 43% whereas Japan’s increased by 30% (there is not much less for Japan to urbanize anyway, but that also mean, Japan has nearly reached the limit of its economic potential, whereas China still has tremendous potential left to realize). South Korea’s urban population went from 18% to 82% within that same span, which made sense considering its size.

Urbanizing 40% of population as massive as that of China is a tremendous task. Consider that within the same time span, India’s urban population has gone from 18% to only 33%. India has a relatively more developed high-tech IT industry than that of China, but still it does not truly have strong IT industry of its own. Focusing on high-end goods while the country still has not developed its urban condition and industrial base is not a good strategy. You do not produce high-tech by yourself in an industrial vacuum, it needs a co-ordination of numerous inter-related industries.

In the primary stage of development, China did what was most suited for its situation: moving people from farm to city and putting them to work in factories – and through doing so gradually urbanizing and upgrading the country conditions of production, preparing for higher stages – a process that is bound to be longer for large countries than for small countries. China has stayed on low-end manufacturing for as long as it could, longer than any developed nation at a similar stage of development, so as to suck out as much juice from this market as it could. It's a double-edged sword. While it has harvested much more from this market than Japan and Korea or any other country ever could, this strategy also make a much needed transition into high-end manufacturing more difficult. This has its downside for sure, and it is certainly true that optimally China could have done much better, could have moved to high-end manufacturing sooner, but let's not pretend that this means China is stupid for staying on low-end manufacturing for this long, or that the mainland Chinese people are inherently lower in their engineering and innovating capacity than Japan and SK, incapable of moving forwards and doomed to stuck on churning out cheap shit for eternity, or even that its "communist" government system is incompatible with a transition into high-end manufacturing.

3.

Quote:

Yes, they haven't needed brands, which is exactly my point. Their economy has to undergo a massive shift in focus in order to accomplish the level of growth that's being predicted...
Again, if China is going to accomplish the type of growth people are predicting, they're going to have to reinvent their economy. They're not going to quadruple their GDP paying wage slaves $1 an hour to churn out products all day.

I can't agree more. China's leadership would wholeheartedly agree. They're keenly aware of the problem. Despite what Samseau said in his currency manipulation thread, wages in China are going up faster than currency depreciation. There is no evil conspiracy to keep the poor Chinese forever in poverty and wage slavery. The quality of life in China has been improving for most of its workers.

Quote:

These days, China's labor costs are only 4% cheaper than those in the U.S. when productivity is factored in, according to Oxford Economics.
That's because wages in China have risen much faster than increases in productivity. Coupled with a strengthening yuan, Chinese labor costs have grown dramatically. Meanwhile, huge productivity improvements in the U.S. have helped keep labor costs down.
The bottom line: Manufacturing in China is no longer a surefire way to save on the cost of labor.
http://money.cnn.com/2016/03/17/news/eco...ductivity/
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/...-you-think

So manufacturers have been trying to relocate their factories and find cheap labor else, like in SEA, eg. Vietnam.

Quote:

China doesn’t release data on factory closings or relocations. But according to an analysis by researcher Justina Yung of Hong Kong Polytechnic University for the Federation of Hong Kong Industries trade group, the number of factories owned by Hong Kong companies in the Pearl River Delta near Hong Kong fell by a third to 32,000 in 2013 from a 2006 peak. Many of those that left moved to lower-wage countries.

Labor costs in China have grown faster than consumer inflation for years, according to consultancy BMI Research, and are currently nearly four times those in Bangladesh, Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar.

Some textile and clothing manufacturers see advantages in Vietnam as well. “Moving to Vietnam is a trend,” says Wang Wei, general manager of Guangzhou Weihong Footwear Industrial Co., which established its first factory in 2013 in the southeast Vietnamese town of Thuan An to supply shoe makers Nike Inc., Adidas AG and Puma SE. Weihong now plans to build a second footwear factory and shift several textile factories to Vietnam from China.

China's leadership knows that it cannot simply continue with the strategy of putting farmers into factory and depreciating its currency - it's trying to contain its currency from falling in fact (and this means: Trump likely won't ever label China a currency manipulator or put a tariff on its exports)

3.1. The Xi administration's next economic strategy to solve this problem is called "Made in China 2025". This is China's attempt towards a homegrown knowledge economy with high-end/intelligent manufacturing.

From the Center for Strategic and International Studies

Quote:

Q1: What is "Made in China 2025"?

A1: "Made in China 2025" is an initiative to comprehensively upgrade Chinese industry. The initiative draws direct inspiration from Germany's "Industry 4.0" plan, which was first discussed in 2011 and later adopted in 2013. The heart of the "Industry 4.0" idea is intelligent manufacturing, i.e., applying the tools of information technology to production. In the German context, this primarily means using the Internet of Things to connect small and medium-sized companies more efficiently in global production and innovation networks so that they could not only more efficiently engage in mass production but just as easily and efficiently customize products.

The Chinese effort is far broader, as the efficiency and quality of Chinese producers are highly uneven, and multiple challenges need to be overcome in a short amount of time if China is to avoid being squeezed by both newly emerging low-cost producers and more effectively cooperate and compete with advanced industrialized economies. The English translation of "中国制造2025" -- "Made in China 2025" -- does capture the goal of localization, but it misses the focus on the manufacturing qua manufacturing. The plan was drafted by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) over two and a half years, with input from 150 experts from the China Academy of Engineering.


Q2: What are its key contents?

A2: Based on the State Council document summarizing the plan released last week, "Made in China 2025" has clear principles, goals, tools, and sector focus.

Its guiding principles are to have manufacturing be innovation-driven, emphasize quality over quantity, achieve green development, optimize the structure of Chinese industry, and nurture human talent.

The goal is to comprehensively upgrade Chinese industry, making it more efficient and integrated so that it can occupy the highest parts of global production chains. The plan identifies the goal of raising domestic content of core components and materials to 40% by 2020 and 70% by 2025.

Although there is a significant role for the state in providing an overall framework, utilizing financial and fiscal tools, and supporting the creation of manufacturing innovation centers (15 by 2020 and 40 by 2025), the plan also calls for relying on market institutions, strengthening intellectual property rights protection for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and the more effective use of intellectual property (IP) in business strategy, and allowing firms to self-declare their own technology standards and help them better participate in international standards setting.

Although the goal is to upgrade industry writ large, the plan highlights 10 priority sectors: 1) New advanced information technology; 2) Automated machine tools & robotics; 3) Aerospace and aeronautical equipment; 4) Maritime equipment and high-tech shipping; 5) Modern rail transport equipment; 6) New-energy vehicles and equipment; 7) Power equipment; 8) Agricultural equipment; 9) New materials; and 10) Biopharma and advanced medical products.

Q3: Is "Made in China 2025" an extension of the 2010 plan to support "Strategic Emerging Industries"?


A3: The unveiling of "Made in China 2025" suggests a major departure from the Hu-Wen administration's approach to innovation and technology upgrading. The heart of their approach was the Medium- and Long-Term Plan on the Development of Science & Technology. A 15-year plan issued in 2006, the plan's key concept was "indigenous innovation" (自主创新) and focused entirely on advanced technologies. The culmination of the plan was the identification in October 2010 of seven "strategic emerging industries" (战略性新兴产业) that were seen as vital for China to achieve mastery in if it was to become an advanced economy. The core of the plan focused on developed leading-edge advanced technologies through investment in R&D from state and industry sources, accumulation of intellectual property, setting of distinct technical standards, and leveraging access to the Chinese market in exchange for foreign technologies. The plan set a target of SEI-related industries to account for 8% of the economy by 2015 and 15% by 2020. The plan was developed jointly by National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) and Ministry of Science & Technology (MOST), with supplemental input from MIIT and other ministries.

"Made in China 2025" is different in multiple respects: 1) It focuses on the entire manufacturing process and not just innovation; 2) It promotes the development of not only advanced industries, but traditional industries and modern services; 3) There is still a focus on state involvement, but market mechanisms are more prominent than in SEI. For example, instead of focusing on top-down, unique domestic technical standards, the attention is on self-declared standards and the international standards system; and 4) There are clear and specific measures for innovation, quality, intelligent manufacturing, and green production, with benchmarks identified for 2013 and 2015 and goals set for 2020 and 2025. In this regard, the proposal reads much more like a five-year plan (which I believe is intentional), even though laid out over 10 years.

The plan's language is also very different than under Hu-Wen. The term "indigenous innovation" appears only twice and "SEI" only once. There is no obvious effort to paint this as the successor to or extension of SEI, but in fact, to show that an SEI-oriented focus was too narrow and built on a misunderstanding of China's core needs and comparative advantage. In addition, the original focus on innovation took inspiration from similar innovation programs developed in the United States, Japan, and the EU during the 2000's in the wake of the information technology revolution and a common concern about technological competitiveness. As mentioned above, "Made in China 2025" is more consistent with how Germany and Japan approach their economies than the United States.

Although there will no doubt be problems with implementation and perhaps create new market-access challenges for multi-national companies (MNCs), from a Chinese national-interest perspective, this plan is much better conceived and more appropriate for China's situation than the "indigenous innovation" approach and SEIs. It will be more coordinated and utilize a wider array of policy tools. If a "Made in China 2025" leading group has not already been created, I expect there to be one soon.

Q4: What are the implications for MNCs?


A4: MNCs face new challenges and opportunities with this plan. In terms of challenges, a clear goal is to make Chinese companies more competitive across the board, to localize production of components and final products, and to have Chinese firms move up the value-added chain in production and innovation networks, and to achieve much greater international brand recognition. In addition, the plan calls for Chinese firms to ramp up their efforts to invest abroad, and to do so by becoming more familiar with overseas cultures and markets, and to strengthen investment and operation risk management. (The drafters are clearly sensitive to the high proportion of failed overseas investments.) It specifies focus on the countries that together make up the Silk Road initiative, but it is meant to apply everywhere. Government measures and market incentives will be used to pursue these goals. In some ways, this represents a frontal challenge to advanced manufacturing in the US, Europe, and East Asia.

At the same time, MNCs and other countries can benefit in three ways. First, there will be greater investment and attention to the ten industries, and MNCs that align themselves with these sectors and the general goals of this plan can benefit from its focus. In some ways, there will be greater competition from Chinese companies and a buy-local push, but it's a guarantee that MNCs will be needed to provide critical components, technology, and management for this plan is to work. Second, to the extent China genuinely embraces intelligent manufacturing, it will be much easier for Chinese companies and MNCs to collaborate, both in China and elsewhere. This is a big 'if', but it is potentially a way to reduce the zero-sum elements of the business relationship. And third, most broadly, if China successfully upgrades its manufacturing capacity, that will have meant it has also likely improved its overall economic governance, including its financial and fiscal systems, strengthened the education system, and increased access to varied sources of information. These should all be of general benefit to the global economy and MNCs.

Q5: How is Premier Li Keqiang's recent tour of Latin America related to this plan?

A5: Strengthening relations with Latin America has been a priority for China's leadership. In early 2014 Beijing announced the creation of the China-Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) Forum, which met for the first time this January. Xi Jinping has made two trips to the region, and Li Keqiang just completed a 9-day tour of Brazil, Columbia, Peru, and Chile. Li signed dozens of agreements promoting economic cooperation, worth over $100 billion. Although Premier Li didn't specifically tout "Made in China 2025," he emphasized that China's renewed focus on advanced manufacturing would be beneficial to Latin America's economy, moving the commercial relationship's focus away from natural resources toward basic infrastructure, industry, and information technology. Li stressed that expanded Chinese investment in everything from high-speed rail to telecom should also help Latin America upgrade its manufacturing capacity and industrial structure as well. We can expect that the Chinese leadership will continue to carry a similar message wherever their travels take them.

3.2. At the same time, China wants to maintain its advantage in low-end manufacturing at least to some extent, in order to maintain the high growth rate and upward mobility that has served to keep the CPC in power, and to continue to urbanize the country. To do this, it is trying to move its low-end factories to its poorer provinces:

Quote:

The central government is concerned about losses of low-end manufacturers to other countries and so is giving them incentives to move to lower-cost parts of China. But at the same time, it wants to raise wages and spur consumer demand by developing more high-tech manufacturing, such as semiconductors and robotics.

Policy makers thus walk a fine line as they try to keep wages from rising so fast they undermine competitiveness for one type of factory work, while seeking to promote other types of factory work to boost incomes to create a more consumer-driven economy.

... China’s share of total global manufacturing output was 25% last year, up from 7% in 2000, according to HSBC Ltd. To contain the loss of industries to lower-wage countries, it has offered subsidies and a range of incentives for manufacturers to relocate to cities in western and central China, where wages are as much as 30% lower than in eastern provinces.

Far western Xinjiang province, a major cotton-growing region, has budgeted 20 billion yuan ($3 billion) in tax benefits, rent and power subsidies to attract textile and apparel companies. “The country is doing crazy things to support Xinjiang and the textile industry,” says Hu Yiteng, deputy general manager of Flying Eagle Textile Co., which is considering a move to Xinjiang. “It’s near-guaranteed profit.”

At the same, moving its low-end and polluting factories to developing SEA countries such as Vietnam:

http://english.vietnamnet.vn/fms/busines...etnam.html

Quote:

... China's plan is to replace cheap energy-consuming industries that pollute the environment. They expect to have high-tech content accounting for at least 70 percent in products by 2025.

As such, China's low technologies will be transferred to other countries. Vietnam may be among them. "That is a very high risk," said Luong Van Khoi, deputy director of the National Center for Socio-Economic Information and Forecast.

China is also trying to cut the number of coal thermopower plants.

“It is possible that they would relocate the plants to Vietnam,” Khoi warned, adding that some Chinese investment projects have entered the country already.

“We need to keep a close watch over the situation, or Vietnam will be a dumping ground for other countries,” he said.

An MPI report showed that China has surpassed Japan, the US and other countries to become the third largest foreign investor in Vietnam, just after South Korea and Singapore.

In the first three months of the year, China registered $823 million worth of investments in 58 projects.

(Making a dumpground out of developing countries is not a practice unique to China, and other Western nations have done far worse: https://www.theguardian.com/global-devel...-countries)

3.3. China's also aggressively pressuring European companies to hand over technologies in exchange for access to market, which has received quite a bit of complain from those companies:

Quote:

China's plan to boost domestic manufacturing by 2025 is "highly problematic" and could be used to discriminate against foreign firms in favour of Chinese competitors, a top European business lobby has said.

Beijing's "Made in China 2025" plan calls for a dramatic increase in domestically-made products in 10 sectors - from robotics to biopharmaceuticals - that the government hopes will accelerate an industrial upgrade as economic growth slows.

But foreign business groups have grown more vociferous in criticising Beijing's lacklustre market reforms, and worry the plan will force members to give up key technology in order to access the market or bypass them altogether.

"Made in China 2025" amounts to a "large-scale import substitution plan aimed at nationalising key industries" or "severely curtailing the position of foreign business", the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China said in a report.

Chinese policies, including hundreds of billions of euros in subsidies, were already harming European business, the chamber said.

"Under recently passed legislation in the new energy vehicle industry, for example, European business is facing intense pressure to turn over advanced technology in exchange for near-term market access," the group said.

Read more at: http://www.news.com.au/finance/business/...66fe5763af

Dick moves, right? China is handling this like the thug state that it is. Some calls it protectionist - inspired by Trump with a thuggy twist? But since we are not discussing morality, it matters not whether they are dicks - what matters is whether they are effective.

3.4. Let’s look at a few key industries in the “Made in China 2025”. Bloomberg has an article on China's growing robot industry:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/...t-industry

Quote:

Standing in the way are established robotics superpowers like Japan, South Korea, Germany and the U.S. Yet China has three big advantages--scale, growth momentum and money. It’s home to the world’s fastest-growing robotics market and vast manufacturing sector where companies are under pressure to automate. China overtook Japan in 2013 in unit sales domestically. Guangdong province, for example, announced in 2015 plans to offer 943 billion yuan ($137 billion) in subsidies to about 2,000 local companies, including both robot makers and those making autos, home appliances, and construction materials, that are looking to automate their plants.



That creates a big opening for Chinese start-ups. “The mantle of leadership is wide open,” said Justin Rose, a partner and manufacturing expert with Boston Consulting Group in Chicago. “China has the ability to rise to prominence.”

To get there, China has a two-pronged strategy. President Xi Jinping’s government wants local industrial robotics makers like E-Deodar Robot Equipment Co., Anhui Efort Intelligent Equipment Co., and Siasun Robot & Automation Co. to take on foreign players including Japan’s Fanuc Corp. or California-based Adept Technology Inc. for leadership in the $11 billion market. Chinese corporate demand is expected to power double-digit demand for factory bots, according to Gudrun Litzenberger, General Secretary of the International Federation of Robotics. In 2016, China installed 90,000 new robots. That’s one-third of the world total and 30 percent more than the year before.

Yet China’s ambitions go beyond factory robots that bolt and weld. Earlier this year, officials deployed a pollution-monitoring robot in the Zhengzhou East Railway Station, one of China’s busiest, and a Chinese deep-sea robot broke a new record, descending to 6,329 meters (21,000 feet) in the Mariana Trench in March. Xi, who in 2014 called for a “robot revolution,” was greeted by a droid when he visited a top science academy in Anhui province last year. “I’m very happy to see you, dear President. I wish you happiness every day,” said Jia Jia, who is also known as "robot goddess" for her good looks, the China Daily reported.

Right now, China lags rival nations when it comes to robot adoption. China had only 49 robots per 10,000 workers in 2015, versus 176 for the U.S., Germany’s 301 and South Korea’s world-leading 531. Yet if China’s robot build-out succeeds, it may be able to stanch the flow of factories moving overseas.

Under a sweeping proposal called “Made in China 2025,” as well as a five-year robot plan launched last April, Beijing plans to focus on automating key sectors of the economy including car manufacturing, electronics, home appliances, logistics, and food production. At the same time, the government wants to increase the share of indigenous-branded robots in China to more than 50 percent of total sales volume by 2020 from 31 percent last year.

Robot makers and the companies that automate will be eligible for subsidies, low-interest loans, tax waivers, and rent-free land. “Fair or unfair, you can expect Chinese companies will get a lot of preferential treatment and funding,” said Rose with Boston Consulting. “They actually have a comprehensive plan to get there. And their track record isn’t terrible either.”



The Chinese productivity push is being watched with trepidation by global competitors. “They’re putting a lot of money and a lot of effort into automation and robotics in China. There’s nothing keeping them from coming after our market,” said John Roemisch, vice-president of sales and marketing for Fanuc America Corp.

There are obstacles for China to overcome, as well:

Quote:

Demand for robots in China is clear enough. Less certain is whether Chinese robotics companies have the tech savvy to compete globally. Lured by tax breaks and cheap land, some 800 Chinese robotics companies have set up shop. Trouble is, some startups buy key components from Siemens or Fanuc, put them in a robot shell with an arm, and then slap on a Chinese brand name, says Chai Yueting, director of the National Engineering Laboratory for E-Commerce Technologies at Tsinghua University.

“China has lots of robot companies. But their technology often is from the Japan or U.S.,” said Chai. “China’s own specific robot technology is still very limited.”

Chai predicts that at least half of China’s robot makers will eventually shut their operations. An overcrowded field is a challenge the government has also acknowledged. China risks being inundated with low-end robotics, Xin Guobin, the vice minister of industry and information technology, was quoted as saying in state media in March.

Still, with China’s huge demand, its financial heft, and the government’s clear desire to develop, Chai predicts a handful of globally competitive Chinese robot makers are likely to emerge.
...
The technology gap that must be overcome by Chinese robot-makers is still substantial, and it’s hard to imagine so many startup companies surviving long-term. However, foreign executives see China producing some globally competitive robotic companies eventually.

“As they learn how to compete, they’ll be a force to be reckoned with,” said Stuart Shepherd, CEO of Gudel Inc., the U.S. unit of the eponymous Swiss robot manufacturer.

4. China is not only making a change in what it produces, but also the people that produce them. Remember that in China STEM majors have much higher salaries than they do in the US:

Quote:

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Low-wage, unskilled labor was once its competitive edge, but now China is quickly rising as the world's largest supplier of college-educated workers.

By 2030, China alone will account for 30% of the world's new college-educated workers, predicts a study by the McKinsey Global Institute.

In comparison, the United States will account for only 5%, and collectively, advanced countries including the U.S., Japan and much of Europe will account for only 14% of new highly educated workers.

"Investments in education that China made much earlier are now paying off," said Anu Madgavkar, a senior fellow for the McKinsey Global Institute. "China invested in opening a lot of schools and they ramped up college enrollment."

China is also churning out far more science, technology, engineering and mathematics grads, giving it a leg up in some of the world's fastest growing sectors.
In 2008, only 14% of U.S. grads earned degrees in those specialties, whereas 42% of China's college grads did so.

Overall, the results of the study point to a global need for more college grads. It predicts employers around the world will be faced with a shortage of 38 million college-educated workers and a surplus of 90 million unskilled workers in 2030.

"An unprecedented level of response is required to raise education rates and then on the other hand, we also need a concerted effort to create more jobs for low-skilled workers," Madgavkar said.

In advanced countries, the imbalance is worrisome because it could lead to more income inequality and long-term joblessness, the report said.

4.1. It's trying to improve the quality of its workforce, by co-operating with educationally advanced foreign institutions.

For example:

Quote:

http://www.worldbank.org/en/results/2015...ed-workers
China: Improving Technical and Vocational Education to Meet the Demand for High-Skilled Workers

In response to the growing demand for higher level technical and professional skills, Guangdong Province in China worked with the World Bank to improve the quality and relevance of its vocational and technical education by promoting competency-based training and strengthening the delivery system, directly benefiting more than 9,000 students, as well as school teachers and administrators. The lessons learned from implementing the project was disseminated and used to inform policy development.

Solution

The Guangdong Technical and Vocational Education and Training Project was designed as a pilot to explore innovative approaches to reform of the technical and vocational education and training system in China. The following approaches were adopted to address the challenges identified:

-promoting and rolling out competence-based and demand-driven school reform;
-capturing lessons by closely monitoring and evaluating the project progress and subsequently disseminate them to other provinces and countries; and
-conducting surveys and data analysis for evidence-based management and policy development.

Results

Implemented between 2009 and 2015, the project help upgraded three project schools and achieve the following specific results:

The percentage of students that passed the skill certification exams increased to 90.37 percent by 2014, up from 70 percent in 2009 when the project started.
The percentage of graduates finding employment within six months increased from 86 percent in 2009 to over 98 percent by 2014. The relevance between jobs and majors in 2013 was 59 percent for technical college graduates and 46 percent for secondary technical school graduates, up from 48 percent and 45 percent respectively in 2010.

The average starting monthly salary showed an increase from RMB1,744 (about US$282) in 2009 to RMB2,625 (about US$424) in 2014.

At the national level, three policy studies themed, respectively, on financing of vocational education, quality improvement in curriculum development and school-industry collaboration, and long-term governance structure were produced, providing input for the preparation work for the 13th Five-Year-Plan. Moreover, results and lessons from the project were used to inform the development of two national-level guidelines related to technical education and training, and are expected to also inform the revision of China’s Vocational Education Law.
At the provincial level, the government’s directives on promoting technical education in Guangdong that drew on the project schools’ experience in competency-based curriculum development and implementation.

In addition, operational school-industry advisory bodies were put in place, with established guidelines and standard forms of contract for school-industry partnerships; teachers and administrators benefited from a variety of training activities; competency-based training syllabus, curriculum standards and textbooks were developed, tested and rolled out; training space was expanded for students to practice their newly acquired skills; and school management information system was enhanced.
....
Bank Group Contribution

The World Bank provided an IBRD loan of US$20 million in 2009, complemented by US$25.52 million in counterpart funding from the Guangdong Provincial Government, and US$0.4 +8million from the “Trust Fund for Bank-Korea Partnership on Poverty Reduction and Socio-Economic Development” to support the policy studies and impact evaluation. The Bank also brought its knowledge and experience in developing technical and vocational education and training projects in China and worldwide. This was the third such project supported by the World Bank in China, after the Vocational and Technical Education Project (1990-1996) and the Vocational Education Reform Project (1996-2002).

...

Moving Forward

Competency-based and demand-driven technical and vocational education and training continues to be promoted through exchanges and workshops, the two provincial policy documents, the three national policy studies and different provincial directives, providing a strong foundation for expansion.

The ongoing World Bank-funded Guangdong Social Security Integration and Rural Worker Training Project and Xinjiang Vocational and Technical Education and Training Project both continue a number of activities that were piloted under this project, including the development and roll-out of competency-based training, and strengthening school-industry linkages.

Beneficiaries

Wei Bincheng, Student at Guangdong Urban Construction Secondary and Tertiary School:

“In the past, teachers were leaders in class, and students were just listening to lectures. Now a new mode of learning has been introduced - teachers and students discuss and learn the subject together. Performance assessments used to be based on exam results alone. Now school puts more emphasis on our practical skills.”

He Xiaowen, Student at Guangdong Light Industry Secondary and Tertiary School:

“We are now encouraged to ‘learn by doing’ and ‘learn through trial and error’. We focus more on how to complete an assignment rather than just memorizing what teachers say in class.”

4.2. According to the Job Market Monitor, there is no acute gap in hard/technical skills, the problem is soft skills.

Quote:

https://jobmarketmonitor.com/2016/10/24/...port-says/

China – No acute skills gap, but a lack of soft skills report says

As China moves towards a services- and knowledge-driven economy, one of the main constraints will lie in the ability of its workforce to gain the requisite skills and knowledge to make the transition to a high-income country.

There is little evidence to suggest that China suffers from an acute skills gap across wide occupational areas. A surge in tertiary education graduates over the past decade has provided employers with a large pool of workers to recruit from.
All the companies interviewed said that a lack of soft skills posed a much greater challenge than the absence of hard skills. Notable soft skills mentioned as posing the greatest business and organisational challenges in China include leadership, communication and self-motivation.

The soft skills gap is still seen as being most prominent in middle management roles, with wages for these positions continuing to see rapid increases. However, there is a broader and rising demand for soft skills training at all levels, with companies generally dissatisfied with current training options available.

In manufacturing/engineering sectors, finding the requisite hard skills in the open labour market is a challenge. However, these skills tend to be specific to the technologies and processes deployed by individual employers. New recruits at these firms typically tend to undergo extensive in-house training, sometimes in co-operation with third-party training providers. In comparison, interviewees in high value-added services sectors, such as banking and finance, indicated a greater demand for training, which is likely due to the faster pace of development in this sector of China’s economy.

As China’s domestic firms become increasingly intertwined with the global economy, they are under pressure to bring business practices closer to international standards. Training in project management processes will be a notable area of growth in the coming years, as will training on overseas business regulation and cross-cultural management.

There is scope for international education and training providers to participate in China’s rapidly growing market for skills training and there remains a high degree of interest in learning from foreign institutions. The main area of unmet demand, according to interviewees, is currently the soft side of personal development, but skills associated with sectors that remain underdeveloped in China are also likely to be areas where international education providers can gain more traction in preparation for growth in the near future.

I think it's only a matter of time until the Chinese college-graduates get the soft skills they need, at least in managerial areas and the likes, unless they genetically disposed to be spergy dweebs - which I don't think they are. The Chinese have a knack for being cunning after all. They are going to be force to be reckoned with in the future:

http://www.shanghaidaily.com/metro/socie...aily.shtml

Quote:


CHINA, a seven-year-old member of the WorldSkills International, wants to host the 46th WorldSkills Competition in Shanghai in 2021 — and the message from the government is clear – the country is ready.

Shanghai is up against Basel, Switzerland, and the decision on who will host the 2021 competition will be announced in October.

China, the world’s most populous country and its second largest economy, is striving to upgrade its manufacturing sector and is very much aware of the importance of preparing a more skilled workforce.

An estimated 800 million of the country’s population are “economically active” and two years ago the State Council published “Made in China 2025,” a strategy document calling for more technologically driven, innovative and environmentally friendly industrial development.

Furthermore, several documents have been issued since 2010 about improving vocational education and specific mid and long-term plans to build a highly skilled workforce.

Currently there are 165 million skilled workers in China and 45 million highly skilled workers. About 27 million students are studying at more than 12,000 vocational schools and colleges, spanning all skill categories.
From 2010 to 2015, the government’s financial contribution to vocational education doubled.

China was accepted as a WorldSkills International (WSI) member in 2010 and the WorldSkills Competition has played a major role in the development of the country’s vocational education, which integrates standards of the competition into education programs and various domestic skill competitions.

China’s successes in the competition has seen its participants receive much media attention.

Already 86 training centers that use pedagogical methods generated from the competition that put practice first have been set up around the country. It is planned to open more of them in less developed areas, as young participants from China make a growing impression at the competition.

China made its debut at the competition in 2011, when six participants competed in London 2011 in six skill sectors.

In 2015, 32 participants traveled to San Paolo, Brazil, to compete at 29 skills.
China’s representatives won five gold medals in Brazil, six silver and four bronze — its best year so far. For this year’s competition, which will be held in Abu Dhabi in October, China will send 47 participants.

Through its participation in the past three editions of the competition, China has also built up a growing team of competent technical experts, translators and juries. As a result China is now capable of hosting the competition on its own.

Zhang Lixin, director of the Professional Capacity Building Department, which comes under China’s Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, said at a press conference in Shanghai on March 29 that bringing the competition to China would created a win-win scenario.

“Hundreds of thousands of Chinese audiences, especially teenagers among them, will be inspired by the excellence of the participants of the competition, while the competition itself will for the first time have a big exposure to this part of the world,” he said.

4.4. There will be a lot of obstacles and problems for sure. But with an workforce increasingly high-skilled and numerous, it is more likely than not that China will transition into a high-end manufacturing country that can compete globally by 2030, capable of innovation and clearing its path to superpower status in the further future.
http://www.mckinsey.com/business-functio...innovation

5. China is also learning from the US and developing its own Military-Industrial Complex with Chinese characteristics. It’s called Civil-Military Integration.

Quote:

China's Answer to the US Military-Industrial Complex
The Central Commission for Integrated Military and Civilian Development represents a new trend in civil-military relations.

On January 22, China’s Xi Jinping added a new title to his long list of state and party functions: the chairman of the Central Commission for Integrated Military and Civilian Development (CCIMCD). The aim of this commission is to cut costs and integrate existing civilian technologies and services into the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). Two months later, China announced its smallest military budget increase in a near decade. Improving efficiency and tapping into China’s existing economic power has become the new trend in China’s civil-military relations.

Background on the Commission and Chinese Civil-Military Integration

The CCIMCD is a coordination body for the integration of civilian and military sectors and is staffed by members of the Politburo and the Standing Committee. The aim of the commission is to promote innovation for dual-use technologies and integrate civilian sector services into the PLA. In practice, the CCIMCD is the latest of Xi’s efforts to reform the PLA and create efficiency for the largest standing army in the world. To understand the CCIMCD, one should first look at the developments leading up to China’s proposed civil-military integration.

Over the years, China made its own efforts to “catch up” (at all costs) to the United States. The latest attempt is to build a domestic version of the defense military-industrial complex. Xi noted as early as March 13, 2016 that “military innovations should take a central role in producing indigenous military wares; and that the governments from the state to the local levels should promote integration between the civilian and the military sectors.” This announcement was followed up by a report released from the PLA Daily on March 27 on reducing compensated services to the civilian sectors and drawing service directly from the civilian sector.
On July 21, the Recommendation on Integrating Economic and Defense Developments was issued by the Central Military Committee. In the recommendation, the term “civil-military integration” was first mentioned as a reform to provide the military with better services while at the same time helping advance the Chinese economy. The broad Keynesian statement should not be unfamiliar to China watchers, but the recommendations also laid out a military strategic goal for China. The recommendation stated that by 2020, collaborations between civilian and military sectors should provide better dual-use technologies, direct civilian participation, and services for the PLA. The recommendation also called for a loosening of the barriers between military technologies and services that had been long withheld from the private sector, a new training and promotion program for civilian experts, and a co-development scheme for the Chinese military installations by civilian contractors. Especially on the last point, the recommendation emphasized that maritime installations should be a key priority.

The July recommendation was endorsed by Xi and officially adopted on January 22, 2017, after a series of high-profile conferences and expositions demonstrating existing dual-use technologies and services. Branding civil-military relation as a new policy agenda, the CCIMCD was established to coordinate the July recommendation to create efficiency and political support for China’s national security strategies.
Xi’s chairmanship on the committee raises speculations for the private sector. To many, the CCIMCD may create an opportunity to set a low bar for private sector businesses to gain entrance into the lucrative defense market. From January, civil-military integration has since risen to one of the most frequently used terms in Chinese mainstream media, and many are speculating about the economic incentives for the Chinese private sector to be engaged with the patriotic duty of providing service and technology to the PLA. However, what may seem to be a boon for private sectors may also cause trouble in the long run.
…
Read more at: http://thediplomat.com/2017/04/chinas-an...l-complex/

6. To get to its power status China needs a long peace to develop. It cannot afford a war with a major power, especially with the US. It was smart of China to quickly populate the South China Sea island chains with its people during a temporary alliance with the US against North Korea so as to avoid a war with the US and its ally while at the same time expanding its power.
For its own interest, China wants peace (as do I for my interest). The longer the peace, the more time for China to develop, and the more the US destroy itself with political correctness, multiculturalism and ethnic replacement. A war may end up reviving the US’s culture of masculinity.

Ironically enough, a big war or a tremendously threatening enemy country is precisely what the US needs in order to regain its vitality. War and war pressure accelerate technological development and forge masculinity.
https://aeon.co/essays/has-progress-in-s...-to-a-halt

Let’s not forget that it’s WWII and the Cold War that propelled the US to superpower status. China does not have the US’s geographical advantage which enabled to the US to stay outside of damages inflicted on its own land, so it cannot benefit from war the same way the US did. The US also has to thank the USSR for propelling its military-industrial complex to its current size:

Quote:

China’s quest for superpower status is undermined by something else, too: weak incentives to make the sacrifices required. The United States owes its far-reaching military capabilities to the existential imperatives of the Cold War. The country would never have borne the burden it did had policymakers not faced the challenge of balancing the Soviet Union, a superpower with the potential to dominate Eurasia. (Indeed, it is no surprise that two and a half decades after the Soviet Union collapsed, it is Russia that possesses the second-greatest military capability in the world.) Today, China faces nothing like the Cold War pressures that led the United States to invest so much in its military. The United States is a far less threatening superpower than the Soviet Union was: however aggravating Chinese policymakers find U.S. foreign policy, it is unlikely to engender the level of fear that motivated Washington during the Cold War.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/sarahsu/201...7a27a7234d

I’d say that China is driven by something else (something quite similar to what propelled Japan into an imperial power), and currently it is far more driven than the US to strengthen itself, but that is for another time. On the other hand, China is nowhere near threatening to the US as the USSR was. Trump is not enough to stop femininization of the US (ironically enough, Trump has inspired and emboldened many in China, causing a surge in masculine spirit there - he may end up making China great again more than he would make America great again). Also, China has time. Time works in China’s favor and against the US. China has been biding its time and it can afford to bide for longer – there is no need for China to rush and act rashly, like Japan and Germany did when they get strong, a lesson that Deng Xiaoping has learned well and put into practice. Meanwhile, as time peacefully passes, the US slips further into ethnic replacement and cultural deterioration.

So yeah, it’s in China’s best interest not to become a superpower in 20 years, but in 50 years or more.

8. It should be noted that while China has a lot regionally dialects and ethnic minorities, unlike India, the Chinese government has been trying to enforce the Mandarin on other populations, in an attempt to enhance the country’s unity, with relative success. Kids in Guangdong began to speak Mandarin and can’t communicate with their grandparent.

http://www.businessinsider.com/china-is-...rin-2014-8

http://www.voanews.com/a/china-promotes-...91207.html

Only some monks in Tibet are allowed to learn Tibetan. Their culture is fading:
Tibetans Fight to Salvage Fading Culture in China

China is not cracking down on, say, Protestantism. However it has been enforcing de-islamization in Xinjiang Uyghurs.

http://www.rfa.org/english/news/uyghur/c...23917.html

It’s banning the last name Mohammed. It’s banning muslim beard and burqa.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/...00646.html
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/...57826.html

For some reason I’m not cheering for the Muslims in this case.

Whether you consider this an ominous violation of human rights or not, if things keep going the way they are, China is becoming more and more unified and homogeneous, which enhances the ability of the CPC to manage the country and mobilize resources and power, and any other party that is going to govern China in the future, if there be any, would have to thank it for that.

Also, Christianity is growing fast in China, especially Protestantism.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnew...years.html
This could in the future improve China's work ethics and accordingly the quality of their products. Protestantism has been associated with the capitalist spirit by sociologists of the caliber of Weber, so we may see a rise in China's entrepreneurial spirit and creativity. And also more ethical treatment. This may be optimistic, but I don't see why not.

9. To double the response on the concern about China's aging population issue, I think we are going to see the advantage of an authoritarian government over all-too-nice democracies such as Japan and the US. Let me quote Ron Unz here:

Quote:

http://www.unz.com/runz/the-long-decline...economist/

Meanwhile, The Economist argues that China may find it almost impossible to eventually raise fertility rates back to a stable 2.1 target after decades of much lower numbers, and a vicious spiral of permanently shrinking numbers caused by “ultra-low fertility” may result. But does this make any sense? After all, if the Chinese government eliminated its restrictive one child policy, births would presumably increase. If the centralized Communist government began a mass propaganda campaign about the glories of two or three or four children, births would presumably increase even more. And if worst came to worst, the Chinese government could easily afford to pay a bonus of $5,000 or more for every second or third child, which would surely boost the birth rate enormously for low total cost.
I find it difficult to believe that a determined national government commanding vast financial resources could not speedily revive a five thousand year tradition of large families if it somehow felt the need to do so. Perhaps the writer was confusing China with America, whose dysfunctional government can never seem to get anything done.

10. Lastly, let’s evaluate the prospects of various other competitors for superpower status.

While China and the US both have problems, but the problems in the US are much more serious and damaging in long term than that of China. Much of Europe have the same problems. In much more serious degree than America.
Japan is and has been killing their drive with porns, video games and manga-anime, producing more and more hikkinomori and herbivore men, lower birth-rate and higher suicide rate. Meanwhile the bad-ass old generation is dying. The nationalist faction in Japan consists mostly of dying old men. Japanese cultural products are also becoming more and more politically correct, which reflect a current in larger culture.

http://time.com/2911630/japan-politician...colleague/

Akihiro Suzuki, a member of the Tokyo metropolitan assembly, bows to Ayaka Shiomura, a fellow assembly member, to apologize for his sexist jeer during a recent event, at Tokyo city hall on June 23, 2014.


The US chopped Japan’s dick with its military nannying and political meddling. [If you’re right that Japan flipped its shit when the US suggested removing their military nannying, then it poses a question of whether Japan is capable of holding itself isn’t it? In technology the Japanese is certainly not inferior to China, but the men who man them are up to further investigation.] Japanese youths also do not care about disputes such as the Diaoyu Island as much as Chinese youths does.
Japan’s problems are nowhere as bad as that of the US or Europe, and they are still a considerable potential threat to China. China should do its best to let them sleep and not wake them up. With its move on the South China Sea, I think China has managed to avoid imminent conflicts with Japan. Seems like it doesn’t intend to meddle with Japan any time soon.

South Korea has even lower birth-rate and higher suicide rate than Japan. And I heard from this forum that their military is pathetic. Their youths are increasingly destroying themselves with video game addiction. K-pop with its effeminate male idols is destroying the masculinity of its male youths and other nations consuming its product (Chinese leadership has been aware of the negative impact of K-pop and is going to do something about it).

https://cmr.berkeley.edu/blog/2016/4/south-korea/

It seems to me that Japanese and SK youths have serious issues concerning personal goal in life. You can detect a different drive and energy in China, but that is for later.

India is too ethnically, regionally, linguistically, religiously and socioeconomically diverse. Their unity and manageability is much lower than the mostly homogeneous Han population of China.

We are going to see an increasingly unified and homogeneous China, whether you like it or not. The Chinese leadership is aggressively pushing in that direction.The same thing is not being done in India.

India is also held back by its caste system. Not to mention low average IQ over all, and the wealth and iq gaps between the rural areas and the urban areas are massive. Muslim birth rate is currently higher than that of Hindu and this is going to pose serious problems in the future. Not that India cannot become a powerhouse, but it is going to face much more challenge and difficulty in its path than China does. I’m not saying this because I love China and hate India or any other country – I’m just putting down my observations.

Russia’s economy is not dynamic enough, and relies to much on natural resources. It’s going to be a hegemon in the region as it has been. But it is eventually going to be surpassed by China.

That leaves us with Israel. Well, Israel is stuck in the Middle East with a lot of hostile Muslim nations. It has its hand busy. The larger strength of Israel come from its diaspora, who are increasingly intermarry, and whose performance in Ivy League School have been declining in comparison with Asians. I’ve no ideas what the Jewish elites are up to, and how they are going to deal with changing population in America, with more and more Muslims immigrants and converts who are hostile to them. They are a variable, but for the time being I don’t see them posing a real threat to China’s growth and advance to superpower status.

I’m certainly not wishing for the Chinese economy to crash. In our globalized age, an economic crash in China would ensue an economic disaster all over the globe like what we see in 2008 or even more severe. Those who want (as opposed to merely forecasting with disinterested mind) to see an economic collapse in China perhaps want to watch the world burn –and I’m not one of them. With my personal interest in mind I wish China do well economically.

... to be continued.

[Arado]

Liberty Sea crushed it again - establishing pretty convincingly that on most of the issues China is being criticized for, it is at least taking steps to deal with it and/or is not as screwed as other countries, so it's relative power is poised to dramatically increase in the coming decades.

I just wanted to bring up an interesting article on how Chinese fisherman are causing the world's fish stocks to collapse. Yes, I know #failingnytimes but I think on this issue it's actually not to biased.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/30/world...brink.html

Quote:

Overfishing is depleting oceans across the globe, with 90 percent of the world’s fisheries fully exploited or facing collapse, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. From Russian king crab fishermen in the west Bering Sea to Mexican ships that poach red snapper off the coast of Florida, unsustainable fishing practices threaten the well-being of millions of people in the developing world who depend on the sea for income and food, experts say.

But China, with its enormous population, growing wealth to buy seafood and the world’s largest fleet of deep-sea fishing vessels, is having an outsize impact on the globe’s oceans.

Having depleted the seas close to home, Chinese fishermen are sailing farther to exploit the waters of other countries, their journeys often subsidized by a government more concerned with domestic unemployment and food security than the health of the world’s oceans and the countries that depend on them.

Increasingly, China’s growing armada of distant-water fishing vessels is heading to the waters of West Africa, drawn by corruption and weak enforcement by local governments. West Africa, experts say, now provides the vast majority of the fish caught by China’s distant-water fleet. And by some estimates, as many as two-thirds of those boats engage in fishing that contravenes international or national laws.

China’s distant-water fishing fleet has grown to nearly 2,600 vessels (the United States has fewer than one-tenth as many), with 400 boats coming into service between 2014 and 2016 alone. Most of the Chinese ships are so large that they scoop up as many fish in one week as Senegalese boats catch in a year, costing West African economies $2 billion a year, according to a new study published by the journal Frontiers in Marine Science.

So basically Chinese greed is vacuuming up fishing resources throughout the world as far away as West Africa - they have pretty much consumed all the seafood in their territorial waters so they are moving further and further afield to fish. This makes it more expensive for others throughout the world to get needed protein from their own territorial waters.

Quote:

In Senegal, an impoverished nation of 14 million, fishing stocks are plummeting. Local fishermen working out of hand-hewn canoes compete with megatrawlers whose mile-long nets sweep up virtually every living thing. Most of the fish they catch is sent abroad, with a lot ending up as fishmeal fodder for chickens and pigs in the United States and Europe.

The sea’s diminishing returns mean plummeting incomes for fishermen and higher food prices for Senegalese citizens, most of whom depend on fish as their primary source of protein.

“We are facing an unprecedented crisis,” said Alassane Samba, a former director of Senegal’s oceanic research institute. “If things keep going the way they are, people will have to eat jellyfish to survive.”

When it comes to global fishing operations, China is the indisputable king of the sea. It is the world’s biggest seafood exporter, and its population accounts for more than a third of all fish consumption worldwide, a figure growing by 6 percent a year.


The nation’s fishing industry employs more than 14 million people, up from five million in 1979, with 30 million others relying on fish for their livelihood.

“The truth is, traditional fishing grounds in Chinese waters exist in name only,” said Mr. Zhang of Nanyang University. “For China’s leaders, ensuring a steady supply of aquatic products is not just about good economics but social stability and political legitimacy.”

I know people here on the forum don't care about the environment, but mile long nets that sweep up everything? That sounds like a recipe for ecological catastrophe.

And here is an interesting parallel with Europe's migrant crisis. These demographics area catastrophe waiting to happen - rapidly growing population combined with decreasing food supply. You think China is going to accept these migrants that they're stealing food from? Hell no - they are going to Europe!

Quote:

With two-thirds of the population under 18, the strain has helped fuel the surge of young Senegalese trying to reach Europe.

“Foreigners complain about Africa migrants coming to their countries, but they have no problem coming to our waters and stealing all our fish,” said Moustapha Balde, 22, whose teenage cousin drowned after his boat sank in the Mediterranean.

There is a lot to digest here, but I just want to make the point that despite the nationalist and "America first" sentiment common on the forum here, the U.S. can't just retreat and expect other nations to be able to cooperate to avoid ecological disaster.

Without U.S. leadership, looks like Chinese greed (consuming 1/3 of the world's fish and growing) is going to destroy the world's fish supply.

[Fortis]

I don't know how much experience you guys have interaction with youth in china but china is one of the biggest consumers of video games and video game products.

Tencent purchased Riot gaming which was one of american's biggest indepedent game developers (league of legends!)

I can't go more than 10 feet without seeing some advertisements for league of legends or having my students ask me which games I like.

I once was chastising a student and he did the hadouken motion at me while wagging his tongue at me.




I think China is also going to suffer greatly from western video game corruption in much the same way that SK and Japan are.

Even the chinese middle-class has this problem. Many of my students (when i taught adults) were my age were also just as big into video games as their western peers despite having very limited free time.

I am also not sold on this idea of china suddenly pivoting and becoming and invasionary force in Asia. It seems as though much of their military structure is based on keeping people out rather than actually being able to launch full-scale invasions.

[Arado]

(05-02-2017 10:12 AM)Fortis Wrote:  

I think China is also going to suffer greatly from western video game corruption in much the same way that SK and Japan are.

Well Japan and SK are both developed countries, so if China follows their pattern then we are looking at a country with 3x the GDP of the U.S. and a lot of historically justified anger at the current world order.

In any case, video game addiction is such a recent phenomenon that it's hard to predict what long term impact it will have on a country's overall expansionist tendencies. I would think not that much, as countries will still need resources to feed and power their population, and invasion is a great way to secure resources. If you are arguing that at some point, we're all going to retreat into the Matrix of video games, so no one cares about what happens in the real world, well then you have a point but in that situation I think we have a lot more to worry about and international relations doesn't become too important at that point.

Quote:

I am also not sold on this idea of china suddenly pivoting and becoming and invasionary force in Asia. It seems as though much of their military structure is based on keeping people out rather than actually being able to launch full-scale invasions.

This is a bit of an exaggeration. I'm not giving a timeline on "China will invade x country on x date," but rather that the pattern has held throughout history that any time a country has a need for resources and is more powerful than its neighbors, it will often resort to violent means to seize territory. Of course this will take time and China's aggression will be highly dependent upon where it ranks vis a vis its competitors.

Back to reality, though - looks like Trump has pretty much caved on south China sea in order to secure China's help in NK. Is there a 3d chess explanation here? If China is so peaceful and against invasion, per your statement above, then why is China being so aggressive now, when in 10-15 years they will have caught up much more with the West? A lot of people say in the future "China will be too busy to deal with its internal problems to invade another country," but often aggressive moves abroad often help a leader solidify his power base at home.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/02/world....html?_r=0

Quote:

WASHINGTON — Six weeks ago, the United States Pacific Command requested permission from senior American officials for a United States warship to sail within 12 nautical miles of Scarborough Shoal, a disputed reef in the South China Sea that is claimed by the Philippines and China.

The Navy had good reason to think the request would be granted. During last year’s campaign, Donald J. Trump labeled President Barack Obama as weak in defending international waters in the South China Sea, where Beijing has started a sharp military buildup to reclaim land, install runways and haul equipment onto reefs and shoals it claims as its own. Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson, during his confirmation hearing in January, called for China to be denied access to the artificial islands. And foreign policy experts and Asia watchers braced for a return to routine Navy patrols within China’s self-proclaimed territorial waters, something Mr. Obama allowed sparingly.

But instead, the Pacific Command request — and two others by the Navy in February — was turned down by top Pentagon officials before it even made it to President Trump’s desk. More than 100 days into the Trump presidency, no American Navy ship has gone within 12 miles of any of the disputed islands in the South China Sea, Defense Department officials said.

The decision not to challenge China’s territorial claims represents a remarkable deference toward Beijing from an administration that is increasingly turning toward President Xi Jinping for help amid the escalating crisis in the Korean Peninsula.

Without the U.S. conducting freedom of operations in the south China sea, pretty much no other countries will dare to challenge China. Then it's game over, and China has just made the largest territorial claim of the 21st century. The only question after that is what's next - Taiwan? Diaoyu islands? Arunachal Pradesh? Mongolia? Half the people on the forum say that it's none of our business and that the U.S. should focus only on the national interest. In that case, are we ready for NE Asia to adopt nuclear weapons or China to keep expanding until they start to fix their gaze on Guam?

[Enigma]

(04-23-2017 08:47 AM)Arado Wrote:  

We can agree to disagree on China's potential since it looks like we are arguing in circles and Liberty Sea has already addressed most of your points on Chinese brands, economic growth, and education potential. At the very least, we agree on the IQ issue and you are open to the idea that China could exceed the U.S. so we can at least work off of that - let's say it's a 50/50 chance that China exceeds the U.S. in terms of overall national power in two decades.

Should the U.S. take pre-emptive steps to constrain, contain, or weaken China? Do you really think that a superpower China will pose zero threat to an alt right nationalist America, and therefore the alt-right is completely justified in spending almost zero time thinking about it?

Chinese militarism is of course the most obvious example - should we be on the hook to defend Japan, Philippines, Vietnam, Taiwan, etc from Chinese expansionism? Should we risk WW3 for it? Should we cede the south China sea to the Chinese? And if we do abandon our Asian allies, is the alt-right ok with them abandoning their alliance with the U.S. to curry favor with China?

It's not just militarism. It's also China attempting to duplicate all the industries that we have a comparative advantage in. It's China pushing RMB internationalization to undermine dollar supremacy. It's China buying influence throughout the world through building infrastructure. China pushing Confucius institutes to increase their soft power. All of these issues have gone unaddressed by the alt-right, though these are all trends that will negatviely impact our standing in the world and the economic security of the middle class.

If the possibility comes to fruition that China becomes a superpower, then this is the first time that a non-Western non Judeo-Christian country will be the pre eminent power in the world. It's hard to overestimate the impact this will have.

I agree with you that a nationalist movement should pay attention to issues close to their sphere, but I really think that China becoming a superpower is not an issue that nationalists can't afford to ignore because on the surface it doesn't impact core national interests.

At the very least you can admit that China is the most likely candidate for "country there that will challenge American influence the most in the decades ahead."

Therefore, doesn't it merit some attention from this part of the web?

I've already addressed basically everything you're asking, much of it my first post on the first page of this thread.

This is why I pointed out that you don't appear to actually be fully reading the posts here.

Yes, Chinese influence IS a threat, which is why I've repeatedly stressed how important it is that their current economy and territorial encroaches be pushed back, and spent the time laying out exactly how and where China's used their influence in Asia in the past.

The difference is that my view of China is based in a nuanced reality, where I actually look at HOW China has grown and the factors that surround it.

Through unbalanced trade deals, through the stealing of American intellectual property, through the exploitation of their own citizens and the environment, through the devaluation of their currency, through failed US foreign policy.

Did China simply trick American politicians into selling out the US because they were so cunning? No, US politicians did it because they only want to make money and don't care about what happens to the American people and our allies as a whole. Not to mention the leftists' white washing of all things "red".

Is China able to seize territory in the South China Sea because they're stronger than the US and their allies? No. It's because the Obama administration had their head up their ass and let China dig themselves in without push back.

American politicians and media have done similar with their support of Saudi Arabia and Turkey, which I view as the other two actual threats to the West, rather than boogeymen like Syria or Russia.

That's why I remain skeptical of China's ability to shift from an economic model that relies on them taking value to one of creating value.

But yet again...

Quote:

Well Japan and SK are both developed countries, so if China follows their pattern then we are looking at a country with 3x the GDP of the U.S. and a lot of historically justified anger at the current world order.

So, I called out your claim that China was going to double the US GDP, which would require them to quadruple their own economy, and now you've doubled down with a claim that they will TRIPLE the US economy, which will require China to increase their own GDP by nearly 600%.

This is exactly what I'm talking about. Your arguments are based on a combination of exaggerated claims and tons of strawmen.

I don't think there's a poster on this forum who's talked about the threat of China more than me. But because I don't think China is going to magically increase the second-largest economy in the world by 600%, I'm somehow denying the threat.

No, I'm simply taking a more nuanced look at the nature of the threat, which anyone who actually read my dozen or so posts in this thread, on everything from Cambodian politics to the Philippines economy, would see.

Yet for some reason you even disagree with me on points like the ethnic Chinese's influence on Southeast Asian economies, even though it supports your point. As I already pointed out, you seem to disagree by reflex rather than an actual consideration of what's being said.

[WalterBlack]

Is China the World’s New Colonial Power?

Quote:

The rising superpower has built up enormous
holdings in poor, resource-rich African countries —
but its business partners there aren’t always thrilled.

By BROOK LARMER MAY 2, 2017

Every weekday before dawn, a morning migration takes place near the desert on Africa’s southwestern coast. At 5:30 in the Namibian enclave Swakopmund, whose century-old buildings still bear the imprint of German colonization, solitary men in khaki uniforms emerge from houses and apartment complexes, the white reflective strips on their pants flashing as they walk briskly through the darkness. They are not African but Chinese. No one else is stirring in the Atlantic Coast town as the men converge on a tidy house on Libertina Amathila Avenue, the only one in the neighborhood with its lights ablaze.

Dylan Teng, a boyish 29-year-old engineer with a brush cut and wire-rimmed glasses, is among the last to arrive. Just as he has done nearly every day since landing in Namibia three and a half years ago, Teng joins the others in wolfing down a breakfast of steamed buns and rice porridge. He picks up a packed lunch prepared by a company chef and at precisely 6 o’clock, with stars still glimmering overhead, he boards a bus emblazoned with the letters C.G.N. — China General Nuclear, a state-owned behemoth that owns the biggest Chinese project in all of Africa.

An hour later, as the sun clears the horizon, the bus winds through a craggy moonscape and descends to the Husab Uranium Mine, a $4.6 billion investment that is the second-largest uranium mine in the world. Teng has made this trip nearly a thousand times, but Husab always seems like a mirage: a virtual city stretching seven miles across the desert floor, from two vast open pits being gouged out of the rocky substratum to a processing plant that, on the last working day of 2016, produced its first drums of U₃O₈, the yellowcake that can be used to generate nuclear power (and also to make weapons). “We had a big ceremony that day,” Teng says.

One of the few university graduates from his village in China’s southwestern Sichuan Province, Teng is keenly aware of Husab’s significance. It is not simply a lifeline for Namibia’s struggling economy, one that the country estimates will increase its gross domestic product by 5 percent when the mine reaches full production next year. The uranium itself, almost all of which will go to China, will also help turn Teng’s homeland into a world leader in nuclear energy and reduce its dependence on coal. In Beijing, where he worked before coming here, Teng lived under the gray blanket of coal-generated pollution that hangs over much of eastern China. Now he is working for the future — his own and his country’s — under an endless African sky of cobalt blue. “I never imagined,” he says, “I would end up halfway around the world.”

China’s gravitational pull can be felt today in every nook of the globe. Few countries feel the tug more strongly than Namibia, a wind-swept nation with a population of 2.4 million — barely a tenth the size of Beijing’s — some 8,000 miles away from the Chinese capital. The desert where the Husab mine has materialized in recent years used to be known only for the presence of Welwitschia mirabilis, the short, droopy national plant that grows just two leaves — and can live for more than 1,000 years. Now, in little more than 1,000 days, China’s reach has spread far beyond the uranium mine.

Just north of Swakopmund, a Chinese telemetry station sprouts from the desert floor, its radar dishes pointing skyward to track satellites and space missions. Twenty-five miles south, in Walvis Bay, a state-owned Chinese company is building an artificial peninsula the size of 40 baseball fields as part of a vast port expansion. Other Chinese projects nearby include new highways, a shopping mall, a granite factory and a $400 million fuel depot. Chinese trade flows through the port: shipping containers filled with cement, clothing and machinery coming in; tiles, minerals and — in some cases — illegal timber and endangered wildlife heading out to China. The activity is so frenzied that rumors of a proposed naval base in Walvis Bay, though vehemently denied by Chinese officials, do not strike locals as implausible.

This small outpost offers a glimpse of what may be the largest global trade-and-investment spree in history. Driven by economics (a hunger for resources and new markets) and politics (a longing for strategic allies), Chinese companies and workers have rushed into all parts of the world. In 2000, only five countries counted China as their largest trading partner; today, more than 100 countries do, from Australia to the United States. The drumbeat of proposed projects never stops: a military operating base, China’s first overseas, in Djibouti; an $8 billion high-speed railway through Nigeria; an almost-fantastical canal across Nicaragua expected to cost $50 billion. Even as China’s boom slows down, its most ambitious scheme is still ramping up: With the “One Belt, One Road” initiative — its name a reference to trade routes — President Xi Jinping has spoken of putting $1.6 trillion over the next decade into infrastructure and development throughout Asia, Africa and the Middle East. The scheme would dwarf the United States’ post-World War II Marshall Plan for Europe.

China’s relationship with Africa goes back to the 1960s, when Chairman Mao Zedong promoted solidarity with the developing world — “Ya Fei La,” as he called it, using the first syllables for Asia, Africa and Latin America. Though it was poor and mired in the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, China won new allies in Africa by finishing, in 1976, a 1,156-mile railroad through the bush from Tanzania to Zambia. Aid continued to trickle in, but there were no other big projects for nearly 30 years, as China focused on building up its domestic economy, following its leader Deng Xiaoping’s prescription to “hide your strength and bide your time.” That ended in the 2000s, when Beijing, recognizing the need for foreign resources and allies to fuel its economic growth, exhorted the nation’s companies to “go out” into the world.

Today, if you take the red-eye flight from Shanghai to Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital, chances are you’ll be seated among Chinese workers heading to a construction site in oil-rich Equatorial Guinea, a cotton-processing plant in Mozambique, a telecom project in Nigeria. China’s trade with African nations has increased fortyfold in the past 20 years. The workers and migrants carrying out China’s global vision are now so ubiquitous in Africa — as many as a million of them, according to one estimate — that when my wife and I wandered into a Hunanese restaurant in Addis, the red-faced workers devouring twice-cooked pork blurted out: “Ah, laowai laile!” “Foreigners have come!” It seemed rude to point out that they were foreigners, too.

China’s advances have come as the West seems to be retreating. United States engagement in Asia, Africa and Latin America declined after the Cold War, when the regions served as proxies for superpower rivalries. China’s rise and the wars in the Middle East also pulled away resources and attention. And now, with Washington raising doubts about global agreements on issues like free trade and climate change, Beijing has more leverage to push its own initiatives and show its capacity for global leadership. President Trump’s disdain for the Trans-Pacific Partnership has already made Beijing’s trade proposals, which exclude the United States, more appealing. “In certain parts of the world, the relative inattention of the Trump administration is definitely creating an opening for China to fill,” says David Shambaugh, director of the China Policy Program at George Washington University and author of the 2013 book “China Goes Global.” But “China remains very much a partial power — and only offers other countries an economic relationship.”

Still, for a nation like Namibia, China’s pitches can be irresistible partly because they’re rooted in historical solidarity. Beijing backed the black nationalist movement’s liberation struggle against apartheid and its white South African overlords. Sam Nujoma, the leader of the South West Africa People’s Organization (Swapo), visited Beijing in search of guns and funds in the early 1960s. When Namibia finally claimed independence in early 1990, with Nujoma as president, China became one of its first diplomatic allies, pronouncing the two countries “all-weather friends.” (Beijing was also desperate for allies to break its diplomatic isolation after its violent crackdown on the 1989 democracy movement.)

In addition to offering its own history as a model for climbing out of poverty, China provides no-strings financing that, unlike Western aid, is not conditional on such fine points as human rights, clean governance or fiscal restraint. “We welcomed China very much because, for the first time, it gave us a real alternative to a Western-driven agenda, whether it was South Africa or the Western world,” Calle Schlettwein, Namibia’s minister of finance, told me. “The Chinese say, ‘We want you to be masters of your own destiny, so tell us what you want.’ ” But they have their conditions, too, he says. “They want de facto total control over everything, so it’s difficult to bring about a situation that is truly beneficial.”

China’s leaders insist that its influence is entirely benign, a global exercise in what they call “win-win cooperation.” And indeed, many of the projects Chinese companies are pursuing — roads and railways, ports and pipelines, mines and telecom networks — might never be built without them. China’s investment in the Husab uranium mine, in which C.G.N. subsidiaries hold a 90 percent stake and the Namibian government owns 10 percent, is doing its part to stave off a recession. “We helped Namibia gain its political liberation,” Xia Lili, a former Chinese diplomat who now works as an executive at a Chinese company in Windhoek, the Namibian capital, says. “Now we’re helping it fight for economic emancipation.”

For some Namibians, however, the flood of Chinese loans and investments doesn’t look so much like freedom as it does a new form of colonialism. The infrastructure is welcome, but as projects made possible by loans — financed by the Chinese — they have saddled the economy with debt and done little to alleviate the nearly 30 percent unemployment rate. Over the last few months, moreover, a series of scandals involving Chinese nationals — including tax evasion, money-laundering and poaching endangered wildlife — has soured locals on a foreign presence that can seem largely extractive: pulling uranium, timber, rhino horns and profits out the country without benefiting a population that, because of apartheid’s legacy, ranks among the most unequal economically in the world. In January, a Windhoek newspaper captured the rising sentiment with an illustration on its front page of a golden dragon devouring the Namibian flag. The headline: “Feeding Namibia to the Chinese.”

The question of how China is changing the world is often framed as a binary proposition: Is China the savior for developing nations, the only world power investing in their future — or is this the dawn of a new colonial era? The question itself, however, is misleading. In Namibia, as in much of the rest of the world, the narratives live uncomfortably side by side, impossible to disentangle. “You can argue that China is the best thing to happen to Africa — or the worst,” says Eric Olander, the co-host of the weekly “China in Africa Podcast.” “The beauty is in the complexity.”

The sign on the lime green cement wall outside the restaurant, written in Chinese, read “Ye Shanghai”: “Shanghai Nights.” Inside, the lunch crowd was already gone, but six middle-aged Chinese men and women — including James Shen and his wife, Rose, the proprietors — crowded around a table peeling prawns and sucking heartily on the shells. Nobody spoke. Blaring from the flat-screen television on the wall was a special report on CCTV-4, a channel from China’s state television broadcaster, breathlessly describing the powers of the People’s Liberation Army. When a double row of explosions erupted in the sea, Rose exclaimed, “Wah, our China is so strong!”

The couple’s restaurant is in Walvis Bay, a port surrounded on three sides by the Namib Desert, which some consider the oldest in the world. James and Rose are part of the early wave of Chinese immigrants who landed in Africa 20 years ago and never left. The Chinese diaspora has a long history of finding a foothold, and then thriving, in some of the world’s most remote places: I’ve bumped into Chinese merchants everywhere from the Arctic tundra of Siberia to mining towns in the Andes. In Africa, entrepreneurs like James and Rose found a new frontier with the space, freedom and opportunities that many early settlers saw in the American West. “My husband came to look at business here, and he fell in love with the wide-open spaces,” Rose told me. “But we’re still Chinese first and foremost.”

Like many Chinese immigrants around the world, the couple began by opening a small mom-and-pop shop, filling the shelves with cheap clothes, shoes and bags shipped by container from China. Their store, James and Rose, still stands at a central intersection of Walvis Bay, even as their ventures have expanded to include a hotel, a restaurant, a karaoke bar, a massage parlor and a trading company. Today there are such Chinese-run stores in nearly every town in Namibia — and thousands more across Africa.

On a recent Sunday in Windhoek’s Chinatown, where dozens of shops occupy a series of long warehouses in the city’s industrial district, Namibian families strolled the lanes, haggling over everything from knockoff Nikes and plastic children’s toys to solar panels and secondhand mobile phones. One man told me he liked the low prices, even as he complained about the goods’ poor quality — and the harm they did to the local garment industry. Wu Qiaoxia, a Chinese entrepreneur whose real estate business began with a simple store in the northern town of Oshakati, waves off such criticism. “Many Namibian children didn’t even have shoes before we got here,” Wu says. “The people here needed everything, and we sold it to them, cheaply.”

One of the most influential Chinese immigrants in Namibia, Jack Huang, parlayed a small textile business into a mining, real estate and trade conglomerate. A backslapping 49-year-old native of Nantong, a city located about two hours northwest of Shanghai, Huang moved to Namibia nearly two decades ago. Early on, he helped transform Oshikango, a sleepy town on the Angolan border, into a raucous Chinese trading post anchored by his properties. Angolans made rich by a boom in oil production flooded in to buy things like stereos and S.U.V.s, paying with United States dollars or, at times, diamonds. The collapse of oil prices has turned Oshikango into a ghost town. But Huang, through his Sun Investment Group, has diversified into many lucrative businesses, including a mining venture that has identified other uranium deposits close to Husab.

Huang’s success has come, in part, from cultivating connections with Namibia’s political elite. Swapo, the guerrilla-group-turned-political-party, has dominated Namibia’s elections since its independence — the kind of stability that appeals to China’s rulers and to entrepreneurs hoping to make long-lasting connections. Huang has referred to Sam Nujoma, Namibia’s founding father, as “my special adviser.” During the 2014 election campaign, Huang and the Swapo candidate Hage Geingob (then the prime minister, now the president) attended a gala dinner at which, according to local reporting, the Chinese businessman pledged Geingob’s political party a donation of 1 million Namibian dollars — about $90,000. (Huang denies this.)

Huang’s friends prefer to emphasize how much he has given back to his host country through his charity, the Namibia-China Loving Heart Organization. (Huang was out of the country at the time of my visit, but he authorized two deputies to speak with me on his behalf.) Over the last seven years, Huang’s charity has awarded more than $2 million in scholarships to Namibian students to attend medical school in China (in Nantong, naturally). Some critics, however, claim that a few recipients of Huang’s philanthropy were not needy students but children of the ruling elite. Last year, moreover, the local media revealed that before Geingob was elected president in 2014, Huang was the owner of a majority stake in a real estate venture whose only other shareholders are Geingob’s family trust and ex-wife. The men tried to distance themselves from each other in the press, and Geingob professed to have no operational control of the company. Still, Huang’s friends worry about his courting of the powerful. “I kept warning Jack,” says one businessman who occasionally socializes with Huang. “ ‘Don’t get too close to the fire. You’ll burn your fingers.’ ”

The exact number of Chinese living in Namibia remains the subject of contentious debate. No definitive data exist, and the constant ebb and flow of contract workers muddies the picture. Last fall, Namibia’s home-affairs ministry raised alarms when it claimed that 100,000 Chinese nationals live in Namibia — a figure that would be equivalent to 4 percent of the population. More conservative estimates run between 10,000 and 20,000. It is clear, however, that in Namibia and all across the developing world, the older generation of long-term immigrants is being eclipsed by China’s new diaspora: younger, more educated workers going abroad to get experience — and make a small fortune — before returning to China. “We were among the first ones here,” Rose Shen says, “but now there are Chinese everywhere.”

Sean Hao, a young telecommunications engineer in Windhoek, is part of that diaspora. Raised in a cave dwelling in central China’s Shaanxi province, he wasn’t expected to venture far beyond his village’s orchard of jujube trees. But Hao was accepted by a university, a first for his family, and worked after graduation installing networks for a Chinese telecom giant. Renting a room for just $15 a month helped him squirrel away most of his $500 monthly salary, but his savings were hardly enough to buy the apartment he would need to marry. In a country where young men far outnumber women — a legacy of the government’s restrictive family-planning policy — an apartment is seen as a prerequisite for attracting a wife and avoiding the fate of a “bare branch” (an unmarried person). But real estate seemed an impossible aspiration for a young man who grew up in a cave.

When a headhunter told Hao about a job in Africa that would pay more than $6,000 a month, Hao figured it was a swindle. “I thought this must be a case of human trafficking,” he remembers, laughing. The offer was real, but the job was in Nigeria, which he thought was unsafe. So Hao instead signed a contract to work on building the telecom system in Angola for more than $5,000 a month, more than 10 times his previous salary. After a year in Africa, Hao put a down payment on an apartment in Xi’an, a city in central China, and persuaded his girlfriend’s parents that he was financially secure enough to marry their daughter. Hao and his wife soon had a baby girl, but his job in Africa meant that he saw her for only one month out of her first 15. “She didn’t even recognize me,” he said. His wife and daughter joined him in his new posting in Namibia, but they lasted one lonely year before going home, leaving Hao stuck between his longing to be with his family in China and the opportunity to make money in Namibia.

On a warm Saturday night in late March, Hao joined a dozen Chinese colleagues under the thatched roofs of Joe’s Beerhouse in Windhoek. Two of the men were headed back to China after finishing their short-term contracts, and the group was sending them off by knocking back pints of German-style lager. By the time I arrived at the bar, three men had already passed out, their heads planted on the table, and a few others were listing badly. Hao, the designated driver, had barely sipped any beer at all. Celebrating his colleagues’ return to the motherland had put him in a contemplative mood. “I’d like to go home, too,” he said, “but there are no jobs in China that could pay me even close to what I’m making now.”

In the hardscrabble hills of Sichuan Province, the parents of the uranium miner Dylan Teng still work as farmers, growing rice and maize in a hillside hamlet where most families share the same surname. Their village, called Tengjiayan (or Teng Family Rock), had only a primary school, so Teng left to study in nearby Guang’an, the birthplace of Deng Xiaoping, and then went on to college in China’s northeast. It was a long road that was about to grow longer. “I never thought I’d go abroad,” he says, “so I didn’t even try in my English classes.”

In Teng’s first job after graduation — at the Beijing-based Uranium Resources Company, a C.G.N. subsidiary — he learned about the company’s mining interests in Kazakhstan, Australia and Namibia. The rural kid knew nothing about these foreign lands. But soon he was flying off to the most distant of the three to work in one of China’s largest and most strategic mines. And one where C.G.N. was fully in control.

As a load-and-haul engineer at the Husab mine, Teng helps choreograph 26 gargantuan trucks whose wheels stand twice as tall as he does. So far, the trucks have hauled more than 100 million metric tons of rock out of Husab’s open pits. As production increases this year, far more will be needed to process the 15 million pounds of uranium oxide that the mine aims to produce annually. “The pressure is always on to stockpile enough so the processing plant never runs out of rock,” Teng says.
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To feed its hungry economy, China has worked frantically to secure enough resources to keep the juggernaut going. Besides oil and gas, which are a primary focus of its investments abroad, China’s state-owned companies have gobbled up mines around the world: copper in Peru, nickel in Papua New Guinea, iron ore in Australia. In Africa, Chinese mining investments have increased 25-fold in just 10 years, from stakes in a handful of mines in 2006 to more than 120 in 2015.

As its economy has slowed recently and commodity prices have plunged, China has sharply reduced some of its imports, causing a few boom areas, like Western Australia, to go bust. Chinese mines in Zambia (copper) and South Africa (iron ore) have been forced to close. It might seem something of a miracle, then, that Husab runs at all. With uranium prices at less than half their level before the 2011 nuclear disaster in Fukushima (and less than a quarter of what they were in 2007), Namibia’s two other active uranium operations have stopped digging up rock and process only already-stockpiled material. But Husab forges ahead, hiring many of the hundreds of workers laid off at those other mines. As one Namibian engineer who landed a job there after spending six months unemployed told me, “Husab was my salvation.”

There is a simple reason that C.G.N. can afford to ramp up production at Husab: It is selling most of the uranium to itself, the Chinese state, so price is almost irrelevant. (Low prices, in fact, have enabled China both to stockpile uranium cheaply and to buy part of a struggling Namibian uranium mine, Langer-Heinrich.) An even bigger reason is China’s ambition both to reduce its carbon emissions and to become a world leader in nuclear power.

Nearly 88 percent of China’s energy now comes from fossil fuels, only 1 percent from nuclear power. (Solar, wind and hydropower account for the remaining 11 percent.) To reach its clean-energy goals — and shed the ignominious title of world’s biggest producer of greenhouse gases — China has put nuclear power back on an almost impossibly fast track. The country now has 37 nuclear reactors, with another 20 under construction, and it aims to have 110 reactors by 2030. (Beyond that, the goal is to become an exporter of nuclear-reactor technology. China has already built six reactors overseas, and last month, Swakop Uranium, a C.G.N. subsidiary, submitted a proposal to construct a reactor in Namibia.)

This rate of growth, six new plants each year, would catapult China past the United States as the world’s top nuclear power, but it also raises concerns. In January, an American consultant to C.G.N. pleaded guilty to charges that he conspired to illegally recruit United States nuclear engineers to help accelerate the design and manufacture of C.G.N. reactor components. Critics at home and abroad also question whether China’s safety standards can keep pace with the new reactors. One Chinese physicist, He Zuoxiu, even told The Guardian that the plan is “insane.”

C.G.N. did not allow me to visit the mine or interview its managers, claiming that they were too busy increasing production. To get a glimpse of the vast complex, I drove down a dusty back road to the highland plain where the Welwitschia mirabilis grow, near Husab’s back gate. Before construction began at Husab in 2013, the company transplanted four rare Welwitschia specimens that would have been destroyed in the blasts — a symbolic gesture in a country that reveres the ancient plant. Since then, C.G.N. has seemed eager to dispel the uncaring reputation that Chinese state-owned companies have earned: It has made donations to drought victims, offered scholarships to local engineering students and, in a first for a Chinese company in Namibia, even invited a local labor union to set up shop at the mine site.

Independent unions are essentially illegal in China. And the Metal and Allied Namibian Workers Union had waged a campaign against Chinese state-owned companies, accusing some of paying Namibian workers only one-third of the minimum wage and others of using armies of Chinese workers for unskilled jobs that by law should go to Namibians. So when C.G.N. invited the union’s secretary general, Justina Jonas, to China for the mine’s inaugural event, she was skeptical. “The Chinese will promise you heaven,” she told me, “but the implementation can be hell.” Jonas threatened not to go to China if Husab didn’t sign a project labor agreement protecting workers’ wages, hours and safety. Just days before the trip, C.G.N. signed the agreement, a first for a Chinese company.

For all its public outreach, Husab still operates in a self-contained Chinese universe. Chinese managers often schedule key meetings for the weekend, when it’s convenient for them to review and plan — but also when Namibian colleagues are not present, according to local employees. Local workers marvel at how, when a non-Chinese part breaks down, Chinese engineers will sometimes send the specs home so Chinese companies can reverse-engineer replacement parts at a fraction of the cost. This looks different from a Chinese perspective: Just as the mine offers young engineers an opportunity to hone their expertise in vital new jobs, it also gives Chinese companies a chance to show that they can make high-quality vehicles and equipment — at a third of the cost of top foreign brands. Husab still makes companies go through testing and bidding, but as one worker put it: “We have to help and support our brother companies. It’s all part of the ‘going out’ policy.”

Mining is hardly China’s only interest in Namibia. The land is too arid to sustain the kinds of vast agricultural projects underway in Mozambique and Brazil. But China’s state-owned construction companies are burning up their excess capacity building Namibian highways and ports, a Chinese embassy compound and a new military academy in Okahandja. Military relations are close, too. China trains Namibian officers — an echo of its 1960s assistance to Swapo — and supplies weapons. In April, the United States intervened to stop Namibia from paying $12 million to Poly Technologies, a subsidiary of a Chinese company on the American sanctions list for selling banned weapons to Iran, Syria and North Korea. It was a reminder that the United States is still in the background, warily watching China’s incursion into Africa.

Husab is a tangible, direct investment, but most Chinese projects in Namibia and around the world are financed by soft loans that carry risks. Last year, China established a new $60 billion fund to finance infrastructure projects in Africa, mostly with Chinese lending. The easy money is alluring, and the projects can be essential. But most of the loans stipulate that a Chinese state-owned company must take the lead, ensuring that the work, skills and profits are kept largely in the Chinese family. Countries like Namibia are left holding the debt. Schlettwein, the finance minister, told me, “I don’t think those are real investments, but opportunities latched onto by Chinese enterprises without really adding value to the Namibian economy.”

Such criticism irritates Chinese business owners and diplomats, who point out that Chinese companies have invested more than $5 billion in Namibia and now employ more than 6,000 Namibians. “We’re here to do business on an equal footing with the locals,” says Xia Lili, the former diplomat who is deputy general manager of Jack Huang’s Sun Investment Group and secretary general of the Namibia-China Loving Heart Organization. “We bring in money to establish mines and factories. Who benefits? The Namibians. Did the Western powers ever do this? Not nearly as much. So this talk of new colonialism is untrue.”

Namibia, though, is starting to push back. Last year the government pulled out of a $570 million loan agreement with a state-owned Chinese company to expand the Windhoek airport. Then in September, as sluggish growth and other foreign loans pushed Namibia’s debt to over 40 percent of its G.D.P., the government suspended all new loan tenders. Schlettwein says the freeze was a prudent act of belt-tightening, not a move specifically targeting China. Nevertheless, he says: “It sends out a signal that Namibian interests are not to be trampled on indiscriminately. It sends a signal that our relationship must mature.”
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One morning in late December, the Namibian conservation biologist Chris Brown was working alone in his Windhoek office when he heard a banging at the gate. Rushing out, he found two angry Chinese men in button-down shirts: the first and second secretaries from the Chinese Embassy. One of them threw a crumpled letter through the gate, Brown says, and shouted: “These are lies! You are making China look bad in the eyes of the world!”

The pages were the same ones Brown hand-delivered to the Chinese Embassy two days before — and then sent to other diplomatic missions, media outlets and international organizations. Signed by 45 local environmental groups, including Brown’s own Namibian Chamber of Environment, the letter blamed Chinese nationals for a sharp surge in the commercial poaching of wildlife in Namibia — and excoriated the embassy for doing little to stop it.

Over the last two years, Namibia has lost nearly 200 elephants and endangered rhinos to poaching. In November, a Chinese smuggler was caught in the Johannesburg airport with 18 rhino horns — all from Namibia. Two months earlier, four Chinese men were sentenced to 14 years in prison for trying to smuggle out 14 rhino horns in 2014. (Rhino-horn powder is an ingredient in traditional Chinese medicine that is believed to strengthen the immune system.) Brown had meant the letter to provoke a response, but this visit was unexpected.

“You are abusing China’s good nature,” one of the diplomats said, in a raised voice, according to Brown. “Only a handful of Chinese have been involved in poaching.”

“No, Chinese demand is driving all of this,” Brown replied. “I think you are trying to strip all of our resources for China.”
When the yelling subsided, Brown says, he invited the men inside. Sitting in his conference room, they leafed through binders filled with photographs of slaughtered rhinos and elephants. “They got quieter and quieter,” Brown recalls. A few days later, he met with the Chinese ambassador, who cautioned him against letting a few “rotten apples” tarnish the entire Chinese community. Brown again insisted it was a more systemic problem. “Listen, we can ratchet up the pressure and make things even worse for you,” he says he argued. “Or we can come together to solve this problem.” The ambassador, he says, agreed to join the antipoaching fight.

One of the most troubling dimensions of China’s global expansion is its reputation for pillaging and pilfering the natural world. China is not the only culprit in the $19 billion illegal wildlife trade. But its growing hunger for the rare, exotic and dubiously curative is devastating worldwide populations of rhinos and elephants, sharks and tigers — and spurring illegal timber operations in rain forests stretching from Congo to Cambodia. Huang Hongxiang, a former journalist from China who investigated ivory and rhino-horn poaching in Namibia, has started a Kenya-based nonprofit organization, China House, to help Chinese companies and communities engage in wildlife conservation as a form of corporate social responsibility. “In a lot of global environmental issues, Chinese are part of the problem,” he says, “so they have to be part of the solution.”

Poaching is a scourge in Damaraland, an arid region of rocky outcroppings in northwest Namibia. “Locals are enticed into killing rhinos by the China market,” my Namibian guide, Taffy, who tracks elephants and rhinos, told me. “The horns always seem to end up in Chinese hands.” In the past, conservation issues were mostly championed by white Namibians. That is changing. “Blacks used to think whites cared more about the animals than them,” says Shinovene Immanuel, a reporter at The Namibian. “But now that poaching has gotten out of hand, everybody is upset.”

Public anger is also rising over some Chinese business proposals that could do damage to the environment. One Chinese-owned company has sought to clear-cut part of Namibia’s only pristine forest, in the Zambezi region, to create a tobacco plantation nearly double the size of Manhattan, despite the fact that the area’s sandy soil is unsuitable. Another Chinese business wants to set up donkey abattoirs to meet China’s soaring demand for donkey meat and skin (the latter is considered a curative in Chinese medicine). And a Namibia-based Chinese company filed a request last fall to capture killer whales, penguins, dolphins and sharks in Namibian waters — all to sell to aquatic theme parks in China. Local activists protested for weeks until the Chinese firm withdrew its proposal.

Three months after Brown’s letter provoked the indignant response, the Chinese Embassy hosted a much more diplomatic meeting of Namibian activists and some 60 Chinese business leaders. Besides trumpeting China’s recent ban on all ivory sales — and airing an antipoaching video featuring the basketball star Yao Ming — the acting ambassador, Li Nan, denounced poaching and lectured Chinese nationals about obeying Namibian law. Li told me in an email that, at Brown’s invitation, he will visit the rhinos’ habitat in northern Namibia this month. The two countries, he said, are also working to form a joint law-enforcement task force to combat transnational wildlife criminals.

Jack Huang also spoke out against poaching, but a different kind of dragnet was closing around him. On Feb. 1, the tycoon and four others (three of them Chinese) were arrested at Windhoek’s international airport for their participation in a supposed tax-fraud scheme that netted nearly $300 million — the largest case in Namibian history. The arrests were part of a two-year investigation into more than 30 Chinese companies accused of concealing illegal earnings. While in custody, Huang reportedly tried to contact President Geingob, but his business partner refused to help. “When my ‘friend’ was arrested and spent a night in jail, there was no interference or intervention,” Geingob told a local paper later. “This is because in Namibia, we uphold the rule of law, the separation of powers, and pride ourselves on the total independence of our judiciary.”

Huang, the man with all the connections, now finds himself disconnected. In mid-February, soon after his release on $75,000 bail, he claimed that the tax-fraud case against him was based on outdated information. Xia, his deputy at Sun Investment, told me that Huang actually divested from Golden Phoenix, a company named in the case, more than eight years ago, but that the transaction had not been entered into the official computer system. When this trial is over, Huang may file lawsuits against those who attacked his businesses, Xia says. In the meantime, the gregarious entrepreneur will probably spend more time dining alone. When he invited an old friend out to dinner recently, he was gently rebuffed — the power broker was suddenly a pariah.

Arresting a high-flying Chinese businessman may be a simple matter of law, but it is also one more sign of how the relationship between Namibia and China is being recalibrated. Li Nan wrote to me that he believes that the boisterous local press is “trying to whip up racist sentiments and hatred.” The animosity in Namibia, though, is nowhere near the levels that have caused explosive riots at a Chinese coal mine in Zambia, including one in 2012 that left a Chinese manager dead, or that sparked unruly protests against Chinese traders in Kampala, Uganda, last month. (The rising resentment toward the Chinese in Uganda recalls another era, when the dictator Idi Amin expelled an earlier wave of immigrant merchants, from the Indian diaspora, in 1972.)

Still, the new tensions between China and Namibia are laid bare at police checkpoints around the country, where Chinese nationals are routinely singled out for inspection. The police say this new policy has already exposed several cases of wildlife smuggling. Jack Huang’s associate, Xia, was pulled over at the checkpoint on the airport road last month. The police frisked him, combed through his luggage and scoured his car. “All the while they were yelling, ‘Rhino horn, rhino horn, where’s the rhino horn?’ ” Xia recalls. “I was shocked that this could happen in Namibia. This is a country that is supposed to be our all-weather friend.”

As the afternoon sun weakens over the Husab Uranium Mine, most of the 2,000 or so Namibian workers return to their desert barracks. Teng and the other Chinese engineers board buses for the ride back through the moonscape to Swakopmund and the little house on Amathila Avenue. After sharing another Chinese meal together, the men disperse. Teng walks back to his apartment, where he will spend a few hours on his computer doing administrative and supervisory tasks. “Our real secret,” Teng says, “is that we work 12-hour days while everybody else works eight.”

It’s a chilly Saturday in April — the antipodal winter is coming — and Teng has worked overtime again. He has missed one of the only diversions here: Saturday-afternoon basketball games at the local sports center. (China now has so many state-owned companies in Namibia that they stage an annual 15-team championship; China Harbour Engineering, the port builder in Walvis Bay, won this year.) Strolling on the Swakopmund waterfront, Teng was no longer clad in his khaki mining uniform. Wearing jeans and a Quiksilver T-shirt and cradling a cappuccino, he looked like any tourist gazing out over the crashing Atlantic surf. During his nearly four years here, Teng has not had too many chances to be a tourist, though he took advantage of a recent holiday to go on a wildlife tour in Etosha National Park.

In their bubble at Husab, Teng and his colleagues are mostly insulated from the tensions between China and Namibia. These huge Chinese projects all over the developing world can seem like spaceships landing on distant planets. Chinese workers often have little incentive — or latitude — to venture out into the alien environment, especially when the state-owned mother ship provides food, lodging and transport. And the exhausting work can sap them of all curiosity about their surroundings. On a plane back to China in April, I sat next to a worker who had just spent two years in Equatorial Guinea — but had no idea where it was.

The tech-savvy Teng, by contrast, can pinpoint his exact location on Google Earth, even though his routine is largely circumscribed by the 43-mile route between Husab and Swakopmund. Saving more in Namibia than he could back in China — thanks, in part, to all those free meals on Amathila Avenue — Teng has built a tidy nest egg. In 2014, when a C.G.N. delegation from China visited Husab, Teng chatted with one of the two women in the group. Online flirting ensued. In January, Teng stunned his Husab colleagues when he returned from a trip to China with a ring on his finger. He’d married the visitor — mission accomplished — joining a handful of others who had done the same thing. Teng’s other goal has not yet been achieved. He wants to see Husab reach its full potential next year, fueling China’s continued rise. “This is an important thing for China, ” he says, “and I want to be a part of it.”

The Chinese migrants who have gone out into the world, the risk-takers who have found spots in Asia, Latin America and Africa, are as diverse as China itself: young and middle-aged, unschooled and highly educated, working for private companies and state-owned enterprises — and even for themselves. They are not a monolith. And yet, in these far-off places, they are connected to one another in a way that they never could be back home in a land of 1.4 billion people. It’s not just the shared food, culture or language — or the solidarity that comes from being thrown together in a harsh environment. What binds these individuals together is an abiding belief that their presence overseas is making China better and stronger. This shared conviction, as much as the state that has nurtured it, is what makes China a colossus, a nation that can be seen by others, in the same instant, as a blessing and a curse.

[Handsome Creepy Eel]

What really hurts about the story above is that it serves as a stark reminder of how North American and European countries have squandered the last 20 years on raping and pillaging African culture instead of engaging in mutually beneficial economic cooperation. We're more focused on whether Uganda will hold a Gay Pride than on whether we could get a few thousand of our engineers employed to build a dam there.

Now instead of the locals being connected with US, French, German, Spanish or even ex-Yugoslav people and civilizations, they look up to the Chinese. We have been reduced to pampered, culturally-insensitive brutes that occasionally visit the continent for a safari and return home to write snarky blog posts about dowry practices.

What a waste. A horrible, tragic waste.

[Arado]

(05-03-2017 10:32 AM)Enigma Wrote:  

I've already addressed basically everything you're asking, much of it my first post on the first page of this thread.

This is why I pointed out that you don't appear to actually be fully reading the posts here.

Yes, Chinese influence IS a threat, which is why I've repeatedly stressed how important it is that their current economy and territorial encroaches be pushed back, and spent the time laying out exactly how and where China's used their influence in Asia in the past.

The difference is that my view of China is based in a nuanced reality, where I actually look at HOW China has grown and the factors that surround it.

Through unbalanced trade deals, through the stealing of American intellectual property, through the exploitation of their own citizens and the environment, through the devaluation of their currency, through failed US foreign policy.

Did China simply trick American politicians into selling out the US because they were so cunning? No, US politicians did it because they only want to make money and don't care about what happens to the American people and our allies as a whole. Not to mention the leftists' white washing of all things "red".

Is China able to seize territory in the South China Sea because they're stronger than the US and their allies? No. It's because the Obama administration had their head up their ass and let China dig themselves in without push back.

American politicians and media have done similar with their support of Saudi Arabia and Turkey, which I view as the other two actual threats to the West, rather than boogeymen like Syria or Russia.

That's why I remain skeptical of China's ability to shift from an economic model that relies on them taking value to one of creating value.

But yet again...

Quote:

Well Japan and SK are both developed countries, so if China follows their pattern then we are looking at a country with 3x the GDP of the U.S. and a lot of historically justified anger at the current world order.

So, I called out your claim that China was going to double the US GDP, which would require them to quadruple their own economy, and now you've doubled down with a claim that they will TRIPLE the US economy, which will require China to increase their own GDP by nearly 600%.

This is exactly what I'm talking about. Your arguments are based on a combination of exaggerated claims and tons of strawmen.

I don't think there's a poster on this forum who's talked about the threat of China more than me. But because I don't think China is going to magically increase the second-largest economy in the world by 600%, I'm somehow denying the threat.

No, I'm simply taking a more nuanced look at the nature of the threat, which anyone who actually read my dozen or so posts in this thread, on everything from Cambodian politics to the Philippines economy, would see.

Yet for some reason you even disagree with me on points like the ethnic Chinese's influence on Southeast Asian economies, even though it supports your point. As I already pointed out, you seem to disagree by reflex rather than an actual consideration of what's being said.

I don't understand why you are getting so angry, but let's at least focus the discussion on points that we agree on. We obviously disagree on GDP and/or power projections of China 20-30 years down the line. That's fine - no one has a crystal ball and no one can predict how the combination of disruptive technological change, nationalism, environmental degradation, feminism, demographic change, etc, will alter the West's power balance via China. The future will probably be more bizarre than we could imagine.

However, I think that we can AT LEAST agree that China is growing in its economic power and influence, even if we disagree on the speed and the causes of that growth and even its potential to continue. We can also agree that on the economic and geopolitical/military/resource front, China's interests are in a direct conflict with the U.S.'s, and so they are likely to pose more of a challenge to the U.S. than any other country.

Looking back at your posts, we are in agreement that China is a bad actor. Therefore, what should we do right now, while we still have the advantage?

What should we do about China's growing quasi-colonial influence in Africa, per the article above? Here are two interesting quotes:

Quote:

Driven by economics (a hunger for resources and new markets) and politics (a longing for strategic allies), Chinese companies and workers have rushed into all parts of the world. In 2000, only five countries counted China as their largest trading partner; today, more than 100 countries do, from Australia to the United States. The drumbeat of proposed projects never stops: a military operating base, China’s first overseas, in Djibouti; an $8 billion high-speed railway through Nigeria; an almost-fantastical canal across Nicaragua expected to cost $50 billion. Even as China’s boom slows down, its most ambitious scheme is still ramping up: With the “One Belt, One Road” initiative — its name a reference to trade routes — President Xi Jinping has spoken of putting $1.6 trillion over the next decade into infrastructure and development throughout Asia, Africa and the Middle East. The scheme would dwarf the United States’ post-World War II Marshall Plan for Europe.

China’s trade with African nations has increased fortyfold in the past 20 years. The workers and migrants carrying out China’s global vision are now so ubiquitous in Africa — as many as a million of them, according to one estimate — that when my wife and I wandered into a Hunanese restaurant in Addis, the red-faced workers devouring twice-cooked pork blurted out: “Ah, laowai laile!” “Foreigners have come!” It seemed rude to point out that they were foreigners, too.

China’s advances have come as the West seems to be retreating. United States engagement in Asia, Africa and Latin America declined after the Cold War, when the regions served as proxies for superpower rivalries. China’s rise and the wars in the Middle East also pulled away resources and attention. And now, with Washington raising doubts about global agreements on issues like free trade and climate change, Beijing has more leverage to push its own initiatives and show its capacity for global leadership. President Trump’s disdain for the Trans-Pacific Partnership has already made Beijing’s trade proposals, which exclude the United States, more appealing. “In certain parts of the world, the relative inattention of the Trump administration is definitely creating an opening for China to fill,” says David Shambaugh, director of the China Policy Program at George Washington University and author of the 2013 book “China Goes Global.” But “China remains very much a partial power — and only offers other countries an economic relationship.”

...

To feed its hungry economy, China has worked frantically to secure enough resources to keep the juggernaut going. Besides oil and gas, which are a primary focus of its investments abroad, China’s state-owned companies have gobbled up mines around the world: copper in Peru, nickel in Papua New Guinea, iron ore in Australia. In Africa, Chinese mining investments have increased 25-fold in just 10 years, from stakes in a handful of mines in 2006 to more than 120 in 2015.

This is a colossal level of investment and trade, and I think we should be very cautious before we assume that these countries will always look up to America when their economic future is increasingly tied to China. With an "America First" philosophy can we really keep up with China?

I posted the article about fishing above. Not only is China eating up the world's fish resources, they are now also killing endangered species.

Quote:

One of the most troubling dimensions of China’s global expansion is its reputation for pillaging and pilfering the natural world. China is not the only culprit in the $19 billion illegal wildlife trade. But its growing hunger for the rare, exotic and dubiously curative is devastating worldwide populations of rhinos and elephants, sharks and tigers — and spurring illegal timber operations in rain forests stretching from Congo to Cambodia. Huang Hongxiang, a former journalist from China who investigated ivory and rhino-horn poaching in Namibia, has started a Kenya-based nonprofit organization, China House, to help Chinese companies and communities engage in wildlife conservation as a form of corporate social responsibility. “In a lot of global environmental issues, Chinese are part of the problem,” he says, “so they have to be part of the solution.”

I know people don't care about the environment on this forum, but I still think it would be a shame if multiple species go extinct or endangered because of Chinese greed.

Seems like the globalists have gotten to Trump, and in order to solve NK, he has pretty much abandoned all of his hardline views on China, whether it be South China sea or the economy. Withdrawing from TPP just gave China a huge opening to integrate more with economies in the Asia Pacific.

I'm willing to wait and see, but again, it seems like the alt-right is sleeping at the wheel and ignoring this threat.

[Liberty Sea]

(05-03-2017 10:32 AM)Enigma Wrote:  

That's why I remain skeptical of China's ability to shift from an economic model that relies on them taking value to one of creating value.

Basically you're saying, China's success is largely due to the US willingly giving it to them. Well, that may be true to an extent, and some Chinese may be butthurt about that. But China's leaderships are painfully aware of their technological dependence of foreign power and technologies and are trying to move from this and come into their own.

You can afford to underestimate the cunning of the Chinese, but those in charge cannot.
China Tech Investment Flying Under the Radar, Pentagon Warns

It's up to you to be skeptical, but China's rivals are worried.

Korea's High-Tech Economy Threatened by Chinese Catch-up

Quote:

China is only six months behind in information technology

South Korea is famous as a high-tech powerhouse, from Samsung’s smartphones, the world’s fastest internet connection speed and world-beating innovation.

And while presidential hopefuls are laying out plans to develop new technology to drive the economy over the next five years, here is a reality check: the advantage of Korean companies over their Chinese competitors is closing fast.

In five years’ time there’ll be little difference between the tech of Chinese and Korean companies in most sectors, including high-end smart phones, wearable devices, memory chips, and smart electronics, according to a report by the state-run think-tank Korea Institute for Industrial Economics & Trade.



“Of the main industries, it seems Korea has a competitive edge over China only in the semiconductor and display sectors,” said Kim Hyeon-wook, an economist at SK Research Institute in Seoul.



The “Made in China 2025" strategy aims to push the world’s second-largest economy beyond labor-intensive work into more sophisticated sectors, from robotics to aerospace. It will enable increasingly advanced industries and make its companies into Korea’s “strong rivals,” according to the industrial think-tank’s report.

China’s rapid catch-up in technology comes as Korea struggles to find new growth engines to replace traditional manufacturing such as shipbuilding, which has struggled recently. And the rivalry is especially stark in new technologies.

According to a report by the Korea Evaluation Institute of Industrial Technology, the average gap with China on 24 key industries like biotechnology and displays was 0.9 years. This means if Korean companies make no effort, China would catch up in that amount of time.

“China’s improvement of industry is changing the structure of the value chain between Korea and China,” according to Cho Chuel, the director of Chinese industry research at Korea Institute for Industrial Economics & Trade. Rather than the previous vertical structure where Korea made value-added, high technology products, competition will become more equal... he said.

Locking China as forever technologically inferior to the West is not exactly a wise thing to do. China’s transforming, and transforming fast.

China has created the worst first photon quantum computer.
China adds a quantum computer to high-performance computing arsenal

Quote:

China already has the world's fastest supercomputer and has now built a crude quantum computer that could outpace today's PCs and servers.

Quantum computers have already been built by companies like IBM and D-Wave, but Chinese researchers have taken a different approach. They are introducing quantum computing using multiple photons, which could provide a superior way to calculate compared to today's computers.

The Chinese quantum computing architecture allows for five-photon sampling and entanglement. It's an improvement over previous experiments involving single-photon sourcing, up to 24,000 times faster, the researchers claimed.

The Chinese researchers have built components required for Boson sampling, which has been theorized for a long time and is considered an easy way to build a quantum computer. The architecture built by the Chinese can include a large number of photons, which increases the speed and scale of computing.

China is strengthening its technology arsenal in an effort to be self-sufficient. China's homegrown chip powers TaihuLight, the world's fastest computer.

In 2014, China said it would spend US$150 billion on semiconductor development so that PCs and mobile devices would convert to homegrown chips. Afraid that low-cost Chinese chips will flood the market, the U.S. earlier this year accused China of rigging the semiconductor market to its advantage.

It's not clear yet if a quantum computer is on China's national agenda. But China's rapid progress of technology is worrying countries like the U.S. A superfast quantum computer could enhance the country's progress in areas like weapons development, in which high-performance computers are key.

But there's a long way to go before China builds its first full-fledged quantum computer. The prototype quantum computer is good for specific uses but is not designed to be a universal quantum computer that can run any task.

The research behind quantum computers is gaining steam as PCs and servers reach their limit. It's becoming difficult to shrink chips to smaller geometries, which could upset the cycle of reducing costs of computers while boosting speeds.

If they deliver on their promise, quantum computers will drive computing into the future. They are fundamentally different from computers used today. Bits on today’s computers are stored as ones or zeros, while quantum computers rely on qubits, also called quantum bits. Qubits can achieve various states, including holding a one and zero simultaneously, and those states can multiply. The parallelism allows qubits to do more calculations simultaneously. However, qubits are considered fragile and highly unstable, and can easily breakdown during entanglement, a technical term for when qubits interact. A breakdown could bring instability to a computing process.

The Chinese quantum computer has a photon device based on quantum dots, demultiplexers, photonic circuits, and detectors.

There are multiple ways to build a quantum computer, including via superconducting qubits, which is the building block for D-Wave Systems' systems. Like the Chinese system, D-Wave's quantum annealing method is another easy way to build a quantum computer but is not considered ideal for a universal quantum computer.

IBM already has a 5-qubit quantum computer that is available via the cloud. It is now chasing a universal quantum computer using superconducting qubits but has a different gating model to stabilize systems. Microsoft is trying to chase a new quantum computer based on a new topography and a yet-undiscovered particle called non-abelian anyons.

In a bid to build computers of the future, China has also built a neuromorphic chip called Darwin.

China Races to Show Quantum Advantage

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Quantum computing has been one of those long-promised breakthroughs, forever on the horizon yet just out of reach, but a quickening is upon us with Google, IBM and others vying to cross a major threshold in a matter of months (as reported recently by MIT News). The target they are gunning for is quantum supremacy, the term coined by theoretical physicist John Preskill to define the point at which a quantum processor surpasses the ability of the largest classical supercomputer to carry out a well-defined problem.

A front-runner in the global supercomputing race, China is also proving itself as a world leader in quantum research. At a press conference in Shanghai on Wednesday, a quantum research team from Eastern China announced they had a hit a milestone in creating a quantum machine that can compete with today’s classical computers.

Team leader quantum physicist Pan Jianwei, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and his colleagues Lu Chaoyang and Zhu Xiaobo (of the University of Science and Technology of China), and Wang Haohua (of Zhejiang University) reported that their quantum processors could solve certain tasks faster than classical machines.


Experimental set-up for multiphoton boson-sampling (Source: Nature Photonics)

The researchers’ quantum device is called a boson sampling machine, considered “a strong candidate to demonstrate ‘quantum computational supremacy’ over classical computers,” according to the team. At the crux of the advance are two primary components: “robust multiphoton interferometers with 99% transmission rate and actively demultiplexed single-photon sources based on a quantum dot–micropillar with simultaneously high efficiency, purity and indistinguishability.”

The scientists’ implementations of three-, four- and five-photon boson sampling achieve sampling rates of 4.96 kHz, 151 Hz and 4 Hz, respectively, reaching speeds 24,000 times faster than previous experiments. “Our architecture can be scaled up for a larger number of photons and with higher sampling rates to compete with classical computers,” they write in their paper, which was published in the scientific journal Nature Photonics on Tuesday.

The Chinese team said their prototype quantum computing machine is 10 to 100 times faster than the first electronic computer, ENIAC, and the first transistor computer, TRADIC, and could “one day could outperform conventional computers.”

University of Texas at Austin Professor Scott Aaronson, who proposed the boson sampling machine, reported that the research showed “exciting experimental progress.”

“It’s a step towards boson sampling with say 30 photons or some number that’s large enough that no one will have to squint or argue about whether a quantum advantage has been attained,” he told the South China Morning Post.

Pan Jianwei is also the chief engineer of the world’s first quantum satellite, launched by China in August 2016. The goal of the project is to secure ultra-secure “hack-proof” quantum communications and to demonstrate features of quantum theories, such as entanglement. In January, Jianwei stated, “the overall performance has been much better than we expected; it will allow us to conduct all our planned experiments using the satellite ahead of schedule and even add some extra ones.”

More: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vw1bKuSe49A

It's true that China's reliance on foreign technology has been useful for some certain primary stage of development, but up to a point it becomes harmful for both sides. It slows down China's innovative process, and China realized this. Last year the US ban Intel from selling Xeon chips to China, which accelerated China's determination to build its own super chips.

China Knocks U.S. From Top Spot And Builds World’s Fastest Supercomputer Without U.S. Computer Chips

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China revealed its latest, and most powerful, supercomputer on Monday. It is a monolithic system with 10.65 million computer cores built entirely with Chinese microprocessors. The reveal of this groundbreaking device comes approximately one year after the U.S. government made a decision to deny China access to Intel’s fastest microprocessors.

Now China holds the most of the top 500 supercomputers in the world and is also number one on this list for the first time – knocking the U.S. off the top spot. China has 167 systems on the June 2016 Top 500 list compared to 165 systems in the U.S. Just 10 years ago China had only 10 systems on the list.

The supercomputer, named the Sunway TaihuLight, far outperforms any U.S. built system. There is no U.S. built system that comes close to the power of the TaihjuLight.

The most significant aspect of this reveal is the origin of the TaihjuLight’s microprocessors. It uses ShenWei CPUs developed by Jiangnan Computing Research Lab in Wuxi. In the past China has relied heavily on U.S. microprocessors in building its supercomputing capacity.

These microprocessors show that the Chinese are moving away from reliance on U.S. parts and are attempting to become self-sufficient. It has been long known that China was developing the TaihjuLight system. However, it was believed that China would turn to U.S. chip technology to reach this performance level.

The Chinese hit a snare when the U.S. government unexpectedly banned Intel from supplying Xeon chips to four of China’s top supercomputing research centers. U.S. government officials initiated this ban because it claimed China was using its microprocessors for nuclear explosive testing activities. The U.S. ceased live nuclear testing operations in 1992 and was hoping to influence the Chinese to do the same. Unfortunately, Chinese officials misinterpreted the move as an attempt to slow their supercomputing development efforts.

While it’s true the Chinese government is on pace to exceed the U.S. in supercomputing power the U.S. government hopes to regain their position as the leader in supercomputing technology by continuing to make advancements in the field, not by slowing the progress of other nations.

In July 2015, the White House issued an executive order creating a “national strategic computing initiative.” The goal of the initiative is to maintain an “economic leadership position” in high-performance computing research. It has long been known that China and countries in Europe want to decrease their dependency on U.S.-made chips. The U.S. is battling this by aiming to increase the power of U.S. supercomputers.

According to Jack Dongarra, a professor of computer science at the University of Tennessee and one of the academic leaders of the Top500 supercomputing list, this is the first time the U.S. has lost its lead in the total number of systems on the Top 500 list. China has 167 systems on the June 2016 Top 500 list compared to 165 systems in the U.S. Just 10 years ago China had only 10 systems on the list.

Many analysts argue that the writing on the wall shows that China has been striving to develop its own high-powered microprocessors for some time now. They state the U.S. chip ban didn’t slow the growth of China’s microprocessor program and instead accelerated it. The U.S. plans to increase China’s dependence on U.S. microprocessors with acts like the National strategic computing initiative. They aim to continue to build superior microprocessors. It appears competition with Chinese microprocessor developers has cause an acceleration in the American program in the same way the U.S. chip ban allegedly accelerated the Chinese program.

More info at:
China builds world’s fastest supercomputer without U.S. chips - China’s massive system runs real applications and is ‘not just a stunt machine,’ says top U.S. supercomputing researcher

China's secretive mega chip powers the world's fastest computer - China sends a warning to Intel: We can develop blazing fast chips, too

China still has the two most powerful supercomputers in the world

The US National Security Agency-Energy Department is worried that this can threaten US Security, in more than one way.

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China, Not Silicon Valley, Is Cutting Edge in Mobile Tech

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Snapchat and Kik, the messaging services, use bar codes that look like drunken checkerboards to connect people and share information with a snap of their smartphone cameras. Facebook is working on adding the ability to hail rides and make payments within its Messenger app. Facebook and Twitter have begun live-streaming video.

All of these developments have something in common: The technology was first popularized in China.

WeChat and Alipay, two Chinese apps, have long used the bar-codelike symbols — called QR codes — to let people pay for purchases and transfer money. Both let users hail a taxi or order a pizza without switching to another app. The video-streaming service YY.com has for years made online stars of young Chinese people posing, chatting and singing in front of video cameras at home.

Silicon Valley has long been the world’s tech capital: It birthed social networking and iPhones and spread those tech products across the globe. The rap on China has been that it always followed in the Valley’s footsteps as government censorship abetted the rise of local versions of Google, YouTube and Twitter.

But China’s tech industry — particularly its mobile businesses — has in some ways pulled ahead of the United States. Some Western tech companies, even the behemoths, are turning to Chinese firms for ideas.

“We just see China as further ahead,” said Ted Livingston, the founder of Kik, which is headquartered in Waterloo, Ontario.

The shift suggests that China could have a greater say in the global tech industry’s direction. Already in China, more people use their mobile devices to pay their bills, order services, watch videos and find dates than anywhere else in the world. Mobile payments in the country last year surpassed those in the United States. By some estimates, loans from a new breed of informal online banks called peer-to-peer lenders did too.

China’s largest internet companies are the only ones in the world that rival America’s in scale. The purchase this week of Uber China by Didi Chuxing after a protracted competition shows that at least domestically, Chinese players can take on the most sophisticated and largest start-ups coming out of America...

Industry leaders point to a number of areas where China jumped first. Before the online dating app Tinder, people in China used an app called Momo to flirt with nearby singles. Before the Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos discussed using drones to deliver products, Chinese media reported that a local delivery company, S.F. Express, was experimenting with the idea. WeChat offered speedier in-app news articles long before Facebook, developed a walkie-talkie function before WhatsApp, and made major use of QR codes well before Snapchat.

Before Venmo became the app for millennials to transfer money in the United States, both young and old in China were investing, reimbursing each other, paying bills,and buying products from stores with smartphone-based digital wallets.

“Quite frankly, the trope that China copies the U.S. hasn’t been true for years, and in mobile it’s the opposite: The U.S. often copies China,” said Ben Thompson, the founder of the tech research firm Stratechery. “For the Facebook Messenger app, for example, the best way to understand their road map is to look at WeChat.”

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CHINA: THE WORLD’S NEW FINTECH LEADER

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The centre of financial technology (or fintech) is migrating eastwards. In November 2016, a report jointly produced by professional-services firm Ernst & Young (EY) and leading Singaporean bank DBS stated in no uncertain terms that China has now leapfrogged ahead of global technology hubs such as Silicon Valley and London to become “the undoubted centre of global fintech innovation and adoption”. Multiple fintech hubs have now emerged in China alone, most prominently in Shanghai, Hangzhou, Beijing and Shenzhen, which has led to EY and DBS concluding that the country now clearly leads the way in fintech and is “revolutionising many aspects of financial services”.

Shanghai tops next global innovation hub ranking

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Shanghai recently came at the top of the list in a KPMG report on the next global innovation hubs. (in Chinese). KPMG selected Shanghai as a future tech leader, due to its “growing base of digital media and entertainment companies”, among others.

KPMG employed six criteria to evaluate shortlisted cities: availability of talent, access to tech infrastructure, the ability to drive customer adoption, access to alliances and partnerships, access to capital, as well as training and access to educational programs.

China’s Beijing and Shenzhen also made the list, ranking third and thirteenth, respectively. In addition, New York was ranked the second on the list, followed by Tokyo, tying for third with Beijing.

It’s worth noting that Shanghai won a 26% nod this year (PDF) compared with 17% one year ago.

In recent years, Shanghai has been spearheading efforts to develop itself into an innovation-driven metropolis and a major global entrepreneurial hub. It has made significant advances in the development of its high-tech industry with the gross output value reaching RMB 680.99 billion, or 21.7% of the city’s industry total in 2015.

Electronic computers and office equipment, electronic and communication equipment, as well as medical and pharmaceutical products are the largest three contributors of the industry’s revenue source by gross output value, as is shown in the 2016 Shanghai Statistical Yearbook.

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One of the first fruits of the Military-Civilian Integration and Made in China 2025 projects.

8,000 innovations added on China's first home-made aircraft carrier

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China's ambition to build aircraft carriers will boost the country's economic development and industrial upgrade, and will benefit society militarily and technologically, experts said.



China's first domestically built carrier, the Type 001A, was launched on Wednesday, while another with more advanced technology, the Type 002, is under construction.

"The huge project of building an aircraft carrier provides a valuable opportunity to many Chinese companies, and industries will be able to push industrial advances," Song Zhongping, a military expert who used to serve in the PLA Rocket Force, told the Global Times. Song believes that the aircraft carrier is a typical civil-military integration project that President Xi Jinping has promoted, and its technologies can be transferred to civilian use.

"The homegrown aircraft carrier involves 8,000 technological breakthroughs and some industrial standards in advanced manufacturing sectors, such as electronic equipment, power plants and steel products that have been developed in the wake of the project," said Liu Xuezhi, a senior analyst at the Bank of Communications. "The money spent on the aircraft carrier is an investment rather than a mere expenditure," Song said.

For instance, the steel with which the aircraft carrier is built is of a durable type, and performs better than other steel. Production capacity of this steel will be boosted by the construction of carriers, which in turn reduces the price, and eventually this will enable it to be used for civilian ships and improve their resistance to corrosion, Song said.

Han Pu, executive director of the Civilian-Military Integration Equipment Research Institute, said that an aircraft carrier such as the Type 001A is a boon for both State-owned and private players, especially at a time when the world economy is grappling with a downturn.

"There is money to be made for military products, averaging at above 30 percent of the investment," Han said, noting that even for private sector suppliers of military support equipment, the profit margins are still around 20 percent.

If China builds more aircraft carriers in the next few years, the investment would amount to 130 billion yuan ($18.8 billion) and fuel the country's economic growth, Han said.

"The direct contribution to GDP, in the form of creating jobs in high-tech sectors and driving the development of industries such as computers and telecommunications, is estimated to be in the hundreds of billions of yuan," Han said.

Han added that China's military industry still has great potential and will feed into the domestic economy in the long-term.

Liu agreed. He hailed the launch of the carrier as a milestone in the government's "Made in China 2025" agenda, noting that "technology-intensive projects like that have greatly boosted the country's research and development ability and the upgrade of the manufacturing industry."

China netizens nicknamed it Mantis Shrimp.

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China, Sending a Signal, Launches a Home-Built Aircraft Carrier

China's New Carrier 'Just First Stage in Creation of Fleet of Supercarriers'

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"The Chinese carrier program will likely develop in two stages," the expert noted. "In the first stage, China is striving to build three aircraft carriers (including the already-commissioned Liaoning), which are a development on the Soviet Union's Project 1143.6. These will be ships with non-nuclear power plants, and a springboard take-off system for its aircraft, although the third of the ships is likely to also be equipped with a steam catapult."

"In the second stage, China will switch to the construction of 'American-style' nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, although the first such vessel will probably join the fleet closer to the mid-2020s," the expert noted.

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China's homegrown amphibious aircraft.

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Successful First Flight OF China's AG600 Amphibious Aircraft Strengthens Territorial Claims

The AG600, also known as TA-600, is the world's biggest amphibious aircraft developed by Chinese state aircraft manufacturer, Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC). The aircraft is intended for forest fire-fighting, ocean monitoring, ocean rescue, and maritime enforcement missions.

Watch it spin.

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The aircraft has a maximum takeoff weight of 53.5 tons and can collect 12 tons of water in 20 seconds.

More details at:
http://www.aerospace-technology.com/proj...-aircraft/
http://www.militaryfactory.com/aircraft/...ft_id=1252

It won't be long until Japan is no longer superior to China in military technology. China’s military tech is becoming less of a joke and more of a threat.

Despite all this China doesn't seem to plan to go to war with the US in the near future. Its increase in military budget is smaller than before – it’s in race with Trump’s military budget raise. It's spending to money to upgrade military technology rather than expanding the military. Innovation is all the rage.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/04/world...years.html
China said Saturday that its military budget would rise by about 7 percent this year, apparently the lowest increase in seven years, signaling that its leaders do not plan to engage the United States in an arms race even as President Trump seeks to bolster the Pentagon’s spending.

Addressing reporters before the start of the annual National People’s Congress, Fu Ying, a spokeswoman for the legislature, said the increase would be “about” 7 percent. She said defense spending would amount to roughly 1.3 percent of China’s gross domestic product.

Last year’s proposed increase was 7.6 percent, though China has yet to release final figures indicating how much was actually spent. Those figures, and the exact number of this year’s projected increase, will be revealed in a budget that the government releases on Sunday, when the national legislature starts its annual full session.

Before 2016, the military budget had received double-digit increases for six years, a reflection of China’s then-roaring economy.
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Mr. Yang probably found the relationship to be on a sound enough footing, Mr. Blasko said. “I don’t think they want to get into a military budget fight with us, not even a rhetorical one.”

Ni Lexiong, a naval expert in Shanghai, said that if China really felt the need to spend more heavily on the military, it would not hesitate to do so.

“If China felt threatened, I don’t think slower economic growth would stop them from spending more on the military,” Mr. Ni said. “You have seen how the Chinese were willing to starve to build an atomic bomb. We do not worry about poverty when we think a larger military is necessary.”

He said the new budget would allow China to keep modernizing its navy and air force, the two services currently getting the most attention. The navy launched 22 warships in 2016 to replace old ones, and the budget would let it keep up that pace this year, he said.

“A chunk of the expenditure will go towards developing and manufacturing the latest weapons for a stronger air force and navy,” he said. “I believe this speed of replacement will continue, because it has been one of China’s long-term growth goals to build a military stronger than America’s one day, in either quality or quantity.”

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Finally, I have prepared this post for a while but waited until today to post it. Since today is the day C-919: first Chinese-built passenger jet makes 'beautiful' takeoff

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Many top leaders attended the event, a sign of the economic and geopolitical significance that Beijing attaches to its entry into open competition with Airbus and Boeing. Planning for the 158-seat C919 began more than a decade ago, but the plane has become a centerpiece of the country’s more recent Made in China 2025 plan to become largely self-sufficient in many high-tech goods and to export them as well.




“We used to believe that it was better to buy than to build, better to rent than to buy,” President Xi Jinping of China told workers during a recent visit here. “We need to spend more on researching and manufacturing our own airliners.”

... The C919 is designed to compete with the Airbus 320 and the Boeing 737, single-aisle planes that are the workhorses of the world’s airlines. For Comac, the plane represents the culmination of decades of work; for Airbus and Boeing, it is a challenge to a profitable duopoly that has endured for decades.

For China, the C919 is just the beginning. Even if the plane proves less fuel-efficient than Western alternatives, the state-controlled airline industry may still be required to buy it, and the Chinese aviation market in the coming years is expected to rival only the American market in size and perhaps surpass it.

And although the plane represents a new challenger for aircraft sales, Airbus and Boeing, increasingly dependent on Chinese airlines for sales as well as on Chinese suppliers for parts, publicly welcomed its arrival.

Comac is already looking past the C919 to the design and manufacture of a wide-body jet that would compete with larger, more profitable planes like the Boeing 747 and the A340.

With this China has become one of the few countries that can build its own narrow-bodied commercial jets. Japan and South Korea are not among them.

Xi Jinping is determined to reduce China's dependence on foreign technology.

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Long-haul Ambition
During a visit to COMAC in 2014, President Xi Jinping said not having a homegrown plane left China at the mercy of foreign industrial groups, state media reported at the time.

The people don’t want to rely on foreigners forever either, for obvious reasons.

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National pride
At the air expo here, where the model of the C919 was a big draw, the prospect of Chinese airliners evoked a sense of excitement and even a little economic nationalism.
"The Chinese people can do this," enthused Mao Caihong, 35. "I am very excited by this plane. If China can keep on developing, we can build high-level, comfortable and safe planes."
Cheng Zhong, the mechanical engineer, was more to the financial point in his assessment.
"Airplanes cost China billions of dollars every year," he said. "Since we have the capability to make them, why let foreigners earn all the money?"

Among the forces that drive all this innovation rage and achievement is the government's push for an innovation-driven economy (aside from the ingenuinity and thirst for knowledge and forward drive of the Chinese people themselves). China's leadership has made innovation a central component of their reform. They truly understood that innovation is the key to becoming a superpower.

Boosting innovation capabilities among domestic companies is at the forefront of China's supply-side structural reform, experts said on Thursday.

Science is a major plank in China’s new spending plan

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China will invest heavily in S&T over the next 5 years and cut red tape hampering science spending with the hope that innovation will help the country weather its economic slowdown.

In a speech to open the National People’s Congress on 5 March, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang—the country’s top economic official—gave a broad-brush overview of the central government’s draft plan for economic development during the 13th 5-year plan, which runs from 2016 to 2020. Major elements include boosting science spending, which will rise 9.1% this year to 271 billion yuans ($41 billion), reducing bureaucratic barriers for scientists, and improving environmental protection while curbing carbon emissions and other pollutants.

“Innovation is the primary driving force for development and must occupy a central place in China's development strategy,” Li told delegates on the first day of the 2-week congress. Li’s speech, considered a guidepost for the specific policies that will be fleshed out in the next year or two, used the word “innovation” 61 times—nearly double the mentions it received in his work report last year, the state-run Xinhua News Agency pointed out.

The 5-year plan, which serves as a framework for the Chinese Communist Party’s long-term development goals, contains few concrete details on exactly how such measures will be implemented or funded. Instead, it contains a long list of priorities, from building national science centers and space programs to expansion of major infrastructure with thousands of kilometers of new high-speed rail and roadways. China’s new plan promises that by 2020, R&D investment will account for 2.5% of gross domestic product, compared with 2.05% in 2014.

Chinese scientists welcome the budget boost for science, but note that the real impact remains in the as-yet unknown details. “The government always has big plans, but it’s an uncertain time for the economy so we have to watch what happens next. Implementation is crucial,” says Wang Tao, an energy and climate analyst with the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center for Global Policy in Beijing.

China’s economic growth slowed to 6.9% in 2015, and the government has set a 5-year GDP growth target of 6.5% to 7%. In Li’s outline, technology and infrastructure investments figure prominently in what officials clearly hope is a new growth strategy less reliant on manufacturing and heavy industry.

Themes in the new 5-year plan include the domestic production of gas-turbine engines and planes, and increased focus on neuroscience and genetic research, national cyberspace security, and deep space exploration. Chinese aerospace officials told state media last week they hope to launch a Mars probe by 2020. Big data, high-tech medical devices, and cloud computing also earned mention as priority projects. Li spoke of tax breaks for companies that invest in high-priority endeavors and promised a reduction of bureaucratic hurdles to promote R&D.



“We will implement the strategy of innovation-driven development, see that science and technology become more deeply embedded in the economy, and improve the overall quality and competitiveness of the real economy,” Li said.

The plan spells out some measures for China’s environmental protection and energy production, but it’s unclear how much the measures will differ from what is already underway. By 2020, the government wants to reduce energy consumption by 15% and carbon emissions by 18%. In a news conference yesterday, Xu Shaoshi, the head of the National Development and Reform Commission in Beijing, said China will remove 500 million tons of coal production capacity in the next 3 to 5 years. Meanwhile, nuclear power capacity is slated to double to 58 gigawatts installed by 2020.

China is reorganizing its environment ministry to create separate departments focused on water, air, and soil. Scientists applaud what they view as a concerted government effort to tackle soil pollution. “After so many years of rapid industrialization and urbanization in China, soil pollution is clearly now evident and needs due attention,” says Yong-Guan Zhu, director general of the Institute of Urban Environment in Xiamen. He says that measures should include creation of a national soil surveillance system.

China’s leadership is funding and pushing for innovation in intellectuals, in State-Owned Enterprises, and in Private Sectors as well.

Xi Jinping urges Chinese intellectuals to devote to innovation-driven development

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The Chinese President... said that intellectuals should increase knowledge accumulation, strengthen innovation awareness and improve innovation capacity by focusing on the core links of economic competitiveness, the bottlenecks restraining social development and the major challenges of national security.

The interests of the country and nation should be put at the first place, he added, encouraging the intellectuals to take the initiative and help make nation a great scientific power.

The whole society should care for and respect intellectuals and cultivate a favorable environment that honors knowledge and intellectuals, Xi said, adding that authorities must create better conditions, speed up the mechanism-building and follow the work features of intellectuals so that they can concentrate on their duties and fully unleash their talent.

SOEs have potential in mass entrepreneurship, innovation: Premier

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[Premier] Li said centrally-administered SOEs should serve as vanguards in revitalizing the real economy by developing new growth engines and advancing industrial upgrades.

To meet the nation's strategic needs and implement the "Made in China 2025" strategy, centrally-administered SOEs should move up the industrial and value chains and increase their presence in emerging sectors, through developing revolutionary new technologies and new business models that bring into full play China's unique advantage of having a vast market, according to Li.

China to fund private-sector research and development projects

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The Chinese government has announced a programme to fund private-sector research and development (R&D) projects in military and related activities.

It is thought to be the first time that Beijing has supported private-sector defence R&D through state funds.

New and High-Tech Development Zones

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China has built up thousands of new and high-tech development zones. In the 53 state-level new and high-tech development zones, a great many sci-tech research results have been put into use in production. Over 30,000 were identified as high-tech enterprises in these zones, 20 of which had annual production values over 10 billion yuan, more than 200 over five billion yuan, and 3,000 over 100 million yuan. In these zones, the average growth in major economic indicators has been maintained at 60 percent per annum for 13 years running, and they have become important engines of national economic growth. In 2005, with a growth of 31.8 percent than the previous year, the export value of high-tech products of China reached US$218.3 billion, exceeding US$200 billion for the first time.

Private science and technology enterprises have also made great headway, some becoming group corporations with annual output values of several billion yuan. Their high-tech products now account for over half of the domestic market for such products.

Establishing export bases for new and high-tech products in selected high-tech industrial development zones is an important part of the government's plan for developing trade through science and technology. The first designated export bases, selected because of their rapid overall development, rich talent, excellent equipment, and rapidly growing export of high-tech products, include the Beijing Zhongguancun Science and Technology Park and high-tech industrial development zones in Tianjin, Shanghai, Heilongjiang, Jiangsu, Anhui, Shandong, Hubei, Guangdong, Shaanxi, Dalian, Xiamen, Qingdao and Shenzhen. The Pearl River Delta, Yangtze River Delta and the Beijing-Tianjin region have the greatest concentration of such export bases; consequently export volumes of new and high-tech products from these areas account for over 80 percent of the national total.

Xi is also intense establishing extensive innovation partnership with technologically advanced country such as Israel and Germany. In fact, he is going all over the globe, including countries as varied as Finland and South Africa, to push for strengthening technology partnership. They’re really seriously going at it. The attempt is anything but lackluster.

So, should the US be worried?

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While the United States is still at the top in total investment in research and development — spending $500 billion in 2015 — a new Boston Consulting Group (BCG) study released Monday has made a startling finding: A couple of years ago, China quietly surpassed the U.S. in spending on the later stage of R&D that turns discoveries into commercial products. And at its current rate of spending, China will invest up to twice as much as the U.S., or $658 billion, by 2018 on this critical late-stage research.
...
The country is still the global leader in “basic and applied” R&D, which makes early discoveries and further refines them. About a third of the $500 billion the country spends on R&D is funneled to those activities. But while two-thirds of the total goes to later-stage “development” R&D, China invests 84% of its R&D money on advances that yield commercial products. For the past decade, “development” R&D has been growing 20% a year in China, versus 5% in the U.S., the BCG report says. As recently as 2004, the U.S. spent four times as much as China.

In China, many technology companies are state-owned and so they don’t have to worry if massive R&D spending yields losses until a product is commercialized, and even the research of private firms is often subsidized by the government, says Robert Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. The Chinese government, he says, also gives the private sector specific timetables for achieving dominance in areas such as solar, printers, robots and drones.

How China is fast narrowing the technology gap with the West

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China recently scored impressive breakthroughs in science and technology (S&T). These include a gigantic 500m-aperture spherical telescope, the launch of the world's first hacker-proof quantum satellite and the world's fastest computer - the new Sunway Tianhe-1A - which extends China's lead in supercomputing.



Indeed, China has in recent years made remarkable progress across several S&T sectors. In space technology, for instance, it has sent 10 astronauts into orbit over the last 13 years, launched its first moon probe and two space stations (Tiangong 1 and 2). Most recently, China launched the Shenzhou XI manned spacecraft with two astronauts to the Tiangong II space lab for a 30-day manoeuvre.

Former US energy secretary Steven Chu has even observed that China is ahead of America in areas ranging "from wind power to nuclear reactors to high-speed rail". China is also catching up fast in artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, 5-G broadband technology and the "Internet of Things".

China's military modernisation is such that the Pentagon has started to worry. Beijing's growing arsenal of modern weapons includes the high-performance fifth-generation stealth fighter, "aircraft-carrier killer" missile, anti-ship cruise missile, nuclear submarine and long-range intercontinental missile.

All these should come as no surprise, given that China is the world's second largest economy. Last year, it devoted 2.1 per cent of its GDP to research and development activities, lower than Japan's 3.6 per cent and the 2.7 per cent of the US. But China's sum translates into a hefty US$220 billion (S$306 billion), making it the world's second largest research and development (R&D) spending after that of the US.

Consequently, China has become the world's largest source of new patents, industrial designs and trademarks. According to the World Intellectual Property Organisation, China in 2014 filed 34 per cent of the world's patents, compared with 22 per cent for the US and 12 per cent for Japan. China also filed 50 per cent of the world's new industrial designs, against 9 per cent for the US; and 76 per cent of new trademarks, compared with the US' 13 per cent.

The size of China's R&D manpower force looks even more formidable. Its total R&D personnel last year numbered almost four million, against 2.4 million for the whole of the European Union and 0.9 million for Japan. China also has a huge reserve army of graduates, thanks to 2,900 universities and colleges as of last year, with a total enrolment of 37 million, against the 21 million of the US. One in five of the world's university students is in China and, in line with other East Asian countries like Japan and South Korea, China has a relatively high proportion (about 40 per cent) of its university students taking up science and technology subjects.

It is not just in quantity that China has made progress; its efforts to improve the quality of its S&T sector has also borne fruit. In 2014, the Nature Index/Global, which tracks high-quality scientific publications, ranked China second in the world in terms of number of scientific papers published, behind the US. Another indicator is the performance of Peking and Tsinghua universities, which were listed in the 2015-16 Times Higher Education World University Ranking as among the world's 50 best universities.

...

Ancient China was famous for its Four Great Inventions: the compass, gunpowder, paper-making and printing. The great Cambridge sinologist-cum-scientist Joseph Needham, in his Science And Civilisation In China, had painstakingly chronicled both its past discoveries and inventions and sought to explain why these inventions did not take off and develop in China as they did in Europe. He cited these unfavourable factors: China's agrarian economy, bureaucratic obstacles and the failure of its scientists to mathematise their hypotheses.

Today, however, China's S&T sector enjoys strong state support and ample funding and thus the pre-conditions for strong growth. Indeed, many of its research institutes are flush with funds and their laboratories equipped with state-of-the-art instruments...

US Undermining Patents, Innovation – Meanwhile, China Gains Ground

Quote:

Unfortunately, recent data shows that we are losing ground when it comes to the protection of IP and patents – consequently, we are falling behind in the innovation race. While China has long been seen as a nation which does not respect Intellectual Property and where piracy has been rampant, it appears they may have seen the error of their ways and are increasing their patent protections as we have started to undermine ours.

This past February, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Global Intellectual Property Center (GIPC), released the fifth edition of their International IP Index, which ranks nations according to their ability to foster innovation and economic success. The new edition shows that the United States is losing ground – especially when it comes to protecting our innovations through patents.

At first glance, the U.S. appears to be in a strong position, once again taking the top overall spot in the index – although a number of countries are nipping at our heels. Most concerning is that the U.S. has dropped from number 1 to number 10 in the world on protection of “patents, related rights and limitations.” This is the first time that the United States has not held the top position.

Meanwhile, the nations of Western Europe, along with Japan and Singapore, have leaped forward in patent protections – we are tied with Hungary, which continues to recover and reform from its days as a Soviet Union puppet state.

Most significantly, China appears to be gaining major ground as they have started to implement smart policy changes. Gene Quinn at IPWatchDog.com notes,

“China has introduced new enforcement mechanisms and specialized IP courts to better combat counterfeiting and piracy, and joining them in these efforts were Pakistan, the UAE and Sweden. And while not reflective in the 2017 rankings, China’s recent patent law changes, which make software and business method patent eligible, should result in a significant improvement in the patent landscape moving forward throughout 2017 and beyond.”

Additional data from the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) indicates that these policies have paid off. Patent applications in China surged 45 percent in 2016, while in the U.S. they declined .9 percent. CBS News has reported that in 2015, “China accounted for more than one in three of the total 2.9 million patent applications in 2015, followed by the U.S. and Japan with about a half-million each.”

It’s certainly heartening if China is indeed moving away from the model of piracy and IP theft towards greater property rights. It is clearly in their interest to foster an economic environment where the protection of ideas is encouraged. And while it makes sense that nations with economies in transition, like China, would have a higher growth rate, the disparity between its ascent and our decline is very concerning.

China has only begun to put to use of the high IQ of its large population instead of wasting them away in dreary repetitive low-skilled manufacturing work.
China has 4.7 million STEM students graduating per year and on the rise, while the U.S only has half a million.

What is more,

Quote:


Study: International Students Outpace Americans in STEM Degrees
According to data from the National Center for Education Statistics, international students earned 11.6 percent of all American doctoral degrees conferred during the 2012-2013 academic year. However, at the department level, a different picture emerges, with international students earning 57 percent of doctoral degrees in engineering; 53 percent of doctoral degrees in computer and information sciences; and 50 percent of doctorates in mathematics and statistics.
...
Looking at enrollment, according Institute of International Education data, more than 886,000 international students were enrolled in American colleges and universities during the 2013-2014 school year. This figure is up 72 percent from 1999, with nearly all of the growth coming from Asian countries.

China sends the most international students, with 274,439 in 2013-2014, or 31 percent. Of these, 28 percent were studying business and management and 20 percent were studying engineering...

At some point China will have more engineers than the US has white people at this rate.

Going in by corporation, Huawei was the one that filed the most international patent in 2015. China's are growing (and growing fastest), the US's are declining.

Quote:

Among the top 15 origins, sizeable growth was registered in China (+16.8%), the Republic of Korea (+11.5%), Israel (+7.4%), Switzerland (+4.4%), Japan (+4.4%) and the Netherlands (+3.6%). Like the U.S., Finland (-12.1%) and Canada (-7.2%) saw fewer filings than in the previous year.

China overtakes US as top nation for technology acquisitions

Quote:

China has overtaken the United States for the first time as the world’s biggest “acquiring nation” for mergers and acquisitions in the technology industry, accounting for a 45 per cent share of the market in the first four months of this year, according to a report from Dealogic.
It estimated that Chinese technology acquisitions reached a new high of US$65.7 billion through 456 transactions, up from the previous record of US$41.6 billion through 434 deals in the same period last year.

Xi Jinping has ben pushing for China's entrepreneur to acquire foreign technology. Midea bought Kuka, one of Germany's top robot producers, and began to spend billions on building industrial robots.
**********************

In other news,

China to launch Wikipedia rival in 2018

China leads the world in wind energy installations

New Chinese-made Diaper Surpasses European Brands in Performance Tests

China's Stocks Overtake Europe

Quote:

Market cap for the whole world now stands at $71.5 trillion. The US has – in absolute terms – accounted for much of that growth, though US markets are up a relatively modest 92%.

Other "developed" markets, like the UK, France, Canada, and Japan, have seen their market caps grow by much less. Slow economic growth, Eurosclerosis, and endless union and currency troubles have crippled European markets. The UK is up just 37% since 2004, and France has risen 51%.

But the real story here is China. Since 2004, the country's market cap has grown an incredible 1,242%.

In just 13 years, China's market cap has surpassed every country in Europe. Today, China's stock markets are worth more than those of France, Germany, and Switzerland – combined. European markets are losing their influence.

This tremendous growth in market cap also means that China's markets now account for a much larger share of the world's total...

China to connect regions with 400kph bullet trains by 2020

Quote:

Beijing is developing a new generation of trains capable of reaching 400 kilometers per hour, China Daily reported. The high-speed trains will be part of the so-called Belt and Road Initiative to boost economic ties with other countries.

“We will apply new materials in the research and production of the future high-speed trains, such as carbon fiber and aluminum alloy, which will help to reduce weight and enhance energy efficiency,” said Qiao Feng, a senior engineer at the CRRC Changchun Railway Vehicles, a subsidiary of China Railway Rolling Stock Corporation.

He added the new trains would be able to reduce energy consumption per passenger by ten percent. They are expected to promote regional connectivity and create new businesses for China and overseas economies.

...

China has the world’s largest high-speed rail network with more than 20,000 kilometers and expects to more than double that to 45,000 km by 2030.

According to the Chinese National Railway Administration, the country has passenger train services running at operational speeds of 200 – 250 km/h and has the technology to produce trains with a top speed of 350 km/h.

It is actively developing high-speed train technology and last year set a new speed record with a train reaching 840 km/h on a test run. Two trains, known as Golden Phoenix and Dolphin Blue zipped past each other with only 1.6 meters of space between them.

Quote:

http://www.railwaygazette.com/news/singl...ramme.html
CHINA: The two prototype China Standard high speed EMUs being tested by China Railway Corp have successfully completed more that 600 000 km of trial running, under a programme that began in June 2015.

The 350 km/h China Standard EMUs have been developed using purely domestic technology, unlike the 23 types of high speed train currently operating in China which draw on international designs. Three trainsets were built by different manufacturers using standardised traction equipment, bogies and other key components, of which two were used for the testing programme. One, code-named Blue Dolphin, was built by CRRC Qingdao Sifang, while the Golden Phoenix was developed by CRRC Changchun Railway Vehicles and the third by CRRC Tangshan.

Chinese scientists propose 2,000km/h submarine maglev

Quote:

Chinese scientists have proposed the building of an undersea maglev system that would run at a speed of up to 2,000 km/h, more than twice as fast as the much-discussed Hyperloop proposed by Elon Musk.

The concept is similar to Hyperloop, being essentially a rail gun in a vacuum tube. The novelty is that the tunnel would float in water, which would bear 90% of its weight.

‘Robot’ technology employed to ease China’s notorious traffic jams

In some parts of China drones are being used to do intelligent agriculture.

Chinese drones rule the skies

Chinese company implants 3-D printed blood vessels into monkeys

China's space missions in 2016 tied to military ambitions

Highly informative China Watch: Technology at the Telegraph.

[Peregrine]

Quote:

I've already addressed basically everything you're asking, much of it my first post on the first page of this thread.

This is why I pointed out that you don't appear to actually be fully reading the posts here.

Yes, Chinese influence IS a threat, which is why I've repeatedly stressed how important it is that their current economy and territorial encroaches be pushed back, and spent the time laying out exactly how and where China's used their influence in Asia in the past.

The difference is that my view of China is based in a nuanced reality, where I actually look at HOW China has grown and the factors that surround it.

Through unbalanced trade deals, through the stealing of American intellectual property, through the exploitation of their own citizens and the environment, through the devaluation of their currency, through failed US foreign policy.

Did China simply trick American politicians into selling out the US because they were so cunning? No, US politicians did it because they only want to make money and don't care about what happens to the American people and our allies as a whole. Not to mention the leftists' white washing of all things "red".

Is China able to seize territory in the South China Sea because they're stronger than the US and their allies? No. It's because the Obama administration had their head up their ass and let China dig themselves in without push back.

American politicians and media have done similar with their support of Saudi Arabia and Turkey, which I view as the other two actual threats to the West, rather than boogeymen like Syria or Russia.

That's why I remain skeptical of China's ability to shift from an economic model that relies on them taking value to one of creating value.

I've read every post in this thread, really enjoyed the back and forth. Agree with you all, actually I think y'all don't really disagree.

Here's my (tangentially related) two cents (I'm also piss drunk):

China invented gunpowder. They used it for fireworks. Some Westerner picked up this very Chinese invention and was like YO HOW ABOUT WE KILL PEOPLE DIRECTLY WITH IT? And then they proceeded to dominate China.

Who cares who invented what (e.g. omg china steals everything now)? Who cares why (e.g. obama was weak)? All that matters is winning. And right now China is firing on all cylinders.

[Hell_Is_Like_Newark]

The Kushner and China making the news:

Jared Kushner’s sister offered wealthy investors in China a chance to score American visas if they invest in one of the family’s properties — a deal that watchdogs saw as blatant bribery.

Nicole Kushner Meyer took the stage at a Ritz-Carlton hotel in Beijing on Saturday with a pitch to a room with about 100 investors: They could get green cards if they poured money into One Journal Square, a $150 million luxury Jersey City development from her family.

The quid-pro-quo would come through the EB-5 program, which grants visas to foreigners who invest at least $500,000 in American development projects. Politicians on both sides of the aisle have often criticized the program as a golden road to citizenship for the wealthy.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics...-1.3144365

This VISA is nothing new and has been used for years. There is massive amounts of hot money flowing out of China right now. That money has been landing on real estate projects. The Chinese don't care if it makes money, just as long as it doesn't cause them to lose everything (which is the fear if they keep the money in China).

The press keeps trying to tie this whole thing to Trump of course. "China" may replace "Russia" as the Bogeyman of choice.

[GlobalMan]

(04-22-2017 05:32 PM)SamuelBRoberts Wrote:  

For what it's worth, I'm a high-end buyer, and my next phone will be a Chinese one. This (Chinese) company is doing really interesting things with the screen that nobody else is doing: maximizing the amount of screen on the front of the phone to make it bigger without increasing the size of the phone. And Samsung has gone into full 'tard mode with a non-disable-able button that calls up an irritating AI assistant on their latest S8, so I think I'm done with them.

The phone is gorgeous, and it's certainly fast enough for my uses.

Phones are kind of old, commoditized technology now, so this isn't the huge deal it might've been 5 years ago, but it's not true that China simply can't compete in this arena. Xiaomi is being held out of the US right now due to patent issues, but I think if they were here you'd see these phones doing very well against the Galaxy series, particularly as Samsung gets more and arrogant.

It is really amazing the level of technology we can have in the palm of our hands if you think about it.

That phone comes in a version with 6 GB RAM and 256 GB storage. My current laptop came with 4 GB of RAM.

My laptop around the year 2000 had a 20GB hard drive, this phone has 256GB and is infinitely smaller.

[Fortis]

(05-07-2017 12:15 PM)Hell_Is_Like_Newark Wrote:  

The Kushner and China making the news:

Jared Kushner’s sister offered wealthy investors in China a chance to score American visas if they invest in one of the family’s properties — a deal that watchdogs saw as blatant bribery.

Nicole Kushner Meyer took the stage at a Ritz-Carlton hotel in Beijing on Saturday with a pitch to a room with about 100 investors: They could get green cards if they poured money into One Journal Square, a $150 million luxury Jersey City development from her family.

The quid-pro-quo would come through the EB-5 program, which grants visas to foreigners who invest at least $500,000 in American development projects. Politicians on both sides of the aisle have often criticized the program as a golden road to citizenship for the wealthy.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics...-1.3144365

This VISA is nothing new and has been used for years. There is massive amounts of hot money flowing out of China right now. That money has been landing on real estate projects. The Chinese don't care if it makes money, just as long as it doesn't cause them to lose everything (which is the fear if they keep the money in China).

The press keeps trying to tie this whole thing to Trump of course. "China" may replace "Russia" as the Bogeyman of choice.

Like a wealthy chinese dude once told me: "Chinese billionaires spend most of their time trying to find ways to get their money out of China."

[WalterBlack]

(05-07-2017 12:15 PM)Hell_Is_Like_Newark Wrote:  

The Kushner and China making the news:

Jared Kushner’s sister offered wealthy investors in China a chance to score American visas if they invest in one of the family’s properties — a deal that watchdogs saw as blatant bribery.

Nicole Kushner Meyer took the stage at a Ritz-Carlton hotel in Beijing on Saturday with a pitch to a room with about 100 investors: They could get green cards if they poured money into One Journal Square, a $150 million luxury Jersey City development from her family.

The quid-pro-quo would come through the EB-5 program, which grants visas to foreigners who invest at least $500,000 in American development projects. Politicians on both sides of the aisle have often criticized the program as a golden road to citizenship for the wealthy.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics...-1.3144365

This VISA is nothing new and has been used for years. There is massive amounts of hot money flowing out of China right now. That money has been landing on real estate projects. The Chinese don't care if it makes money, just as long as it doesn't cause them to lose everything (which is the fear if they keep the money in China).

The press keeps trying to tie this whole thing to Trump of course. "China" may replace "Russia" as the Bogeyman of choice.

There's been a few cases of Chinese getting screwed over because of the EB-5 visa.

Here's a group of Chinese screwing them over:

San Gabriel Valley raids target scammers who helped wealthy Chinese get U.S. visas, feds say

Quote:

After years of sleuthing, federal agents Wednesday raided San Gabriel Valley homes and an office that investigators have linked to an alleged multimillion-dollar immigration and finance scam that allowed wealthy Chinese investors to obtain U.S. residency.

The suspects in the case are accused of collecting $50 million from scores of Chinese nationals, who were granted permission to live in the United States in exchange for investing the money in development projects that authorities say never occurred.

The money, investigators claim in court records, fueled a luxurious life of multimillion-dollar homes and high-priced cars for the alleged masterminds of the scheme — Victoria Chan, an attorney; Tat Chan, her father; and Fang Zeng, the father’s friend.

The raids come as money has poured into the San Gabriel Valley in recent years from China, causing home values to soar and fueling a boom in upscale development catering to wealthy visitors from the mainland.

Investigators said Wednesday’s searches targeted a scheme that exploited a little-known type of immigration visa reserved for high-end investors that has been beset by poor oversight and claims of fraud.

Each year, the government issues thousands of temporary residence visas through its Immigrant Investor Program. To qualify for the visas, immigrants must typically invest at least $1 million into a U.S. business venture, but the amount required is cut by half if an investment project is located in an area of high unemployment and is designed to create full-time jobs. If a project ultimately meets the visa program’s requirements, the investors are granted permanent legal residence in the U.S.

Over the last several years, the Chans and Zeng have collected the half-million-dollar ante from more than 100 Chinese nationals and submitted plans to federal officials for several development projects that didn’t exist, according to an affidavit agents submitted to a judge who granted warrants to search the properties.

No one has been arrested or charged in the investigation. The Chans and Zeng could not be reached for comment.

Wednesday’s raids centered on the small office of the California Investment Immigration Fund — a corporation the Chans set up in 2008 under the visa program to solicit investors. The office is located inside the Hilton San Gabriel on a bustling stretch of Valley Boulevard lined with Chinese businesses.

The front windows of the office were decorated with red and gold Chinese good-luck symbols alongside miniature American flags. Several copies of a Chinese book, “Into the United States,” featuring a red, white and blue American flag cover, were displayed.

In addition to a sign advertising the visas, Chinese lettering on the windows offered services including school admissions, real estate investment, life insurance and legal services. Two homes in Arcadia and South El Monte owned by the Chans were searched as well.

With the raids, investigators hoped to confiscate computer files, banking records and other documents they said would shed more light on a tangle of six- and seven-figure financial transactions among dozens of bank accounts in China and the U.S.

One outstanding question is which of the Chinese investors were either complicit or victims in the alleged fraud, authorities said. Several people who contributed money have raised investigators’ suspicions.

Some of the investors, for example, are on a Chinese government list of most-wanted fugitives, accused of bribery and other crimes, according to the affidavit. Others did not invest their own money but allegedly used funds loaned to them from the suspects’ investment fund.

Interest in obtaining EB-5 visas, as they are known, has taken off in recent years, in large part because of demand from wealthy Chinese citizens. After issuing only 350 of the visas in 2005, the government granted 9,500 of them in 2015, and 85% of those went to Chinese people, the affidavit said.

A 2013 report by the watchdog arm of the Department of Homeland Security found serious problems with the oversight of the EB-5 program. Immigration officials, the report found, had failed to effectively manage the part of the program that the Chans and Feng were allegedly exploiting.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services is “limited in its ability to prevent fraud or national security threats that could harm the U.S., and it cannot demonstrate that the EB-5 program is improving the U.S. economy and creating jobs for U.S. citizens as intended by Congress,” the Office of Inspector General report concluded.

Such concerns over poor oversight and some highly publicized scams led the North American Securities Administrators Assn., an advocacy group, to label EB-5-related fraud as one of the top new threats to investors.

And earlier this year, Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) cited the problems while introducing legislation that would eliminate the program.

In their affidavit, agents from the FBI and an investigative arm of the Department of Homeland Security laid out the case against the Chans and Zeng, which appears to have been going on for years.

In seeking approval for their investment fund in 2008, the father and daughter said their projects would focus on real estate developments, especially in the restaurant and hotel industries.

As part of the investigation, agents found 72 bank accounts linked to the investment fund or one of many holding companies affiliated with it. From 2009 to 2016, approximately $50 million was wired or deposited into the accounts, the affidavit said. Most of the money originated from accounts in mainland China or Hong Kong.

About $15 million of the money was used to purchase several personal homes for the Chans and Zeng, including a four-bedroom home in Arcadia that was bought in Zeng’s name in 2011 for $3.2 million, according to the affidavit.

The trio also used the money to purchase an array of business properties, such as $2.25 million they spent in 2012 for a vacant lot off Highway 111 in Indio and $5.2 million in 2015 for vacant land in Rancho Cucamonga.

Despite the purchases of open land, agents found no significant work was ever done on any of the proposed projects.

“No real construction took place at any of the proposed project locations and very few, if any, actual full time American jobs were created,” an FBI agent wrote in the affidavit.

Photographs that investigators snapped of some of the locations of proposed projects in 2013 and again in 2016 showed no progress, the agent said.

One site on South Hacienda Boulevard in the City of Industry remains a vacant lot surrounded by a chain-link fence, the agent wrote. Signs in Chinese and English read “retail shops for lease” and “partnerships welcome.”

About 30 of the investors received some or all their money back — amounting to about $10 million — but concealed the refunds from U.S. officials and have continued to pursue legal permanent residence in the country, agents found.

In June, investigators sent an undercover informant into the office to meet with Victoria Chan. Posing as a representative of an interested investor and wearing a concealed recorder, the informant was charged $200 before he was allowed to see Chan, who told him a $500,000 investment would be returned within five years, the affidavit said.

Surveillance teams also followed Tat Chan and Zeng when they traveled earlier this year from China to the U.S. for a few weeks’ stay. Agents also trailed Victoria Chan as she moved between the office and her home in her Porsche SUV, according to the affidavit.

Here's an Indian American guy:

Indian American hotel developer Anshoo Sethi sentenced to 3 years in prison for $158 million EB-5 visa scam

Quote:

Indian American Chicago hotel developer Anshoo Sethi was sentenced to three years in prison for exploiting EB-5 visa program to fraudulently raise capital from Chinese nationals who were seeking permanent residency in the United States.

The EB-5 visa program allows individuals from around the world to invest a minimum of $500,000 in a federally approved project around the US which would create at least 10 American jobs for a period of two years, in exchange for a Green Card for the investor and his immediate family members.

The EB-5 program has run into several controversies over the last two years with the Justice Department uncovering scams that have fleeced investors, and thrown a shadow over the future of the EB-5 visa program itself.

Recently, the US government came out with new proposals to increase the EB-5 seed investment to minimum 1.3 million, to as much as $1.85 million, depending on the location of the federally approved projects. There have been talk in Congress to end the program, in the wake of several scams like that done by Sethi.

Sethi, 32, the founder of A Chicago Convention Center LLC, purported in 2011 to build a hotel and convention center near O’Hare International Airport in Chicago, according to the Justice Department.

Sethi solicited Chinese nationals to invest $500,000 apiece in the project, plus $41,500 in administrative fees in his company. Each Chinese national who participated in the project also applied for an EB-5 visa.

While soliciting investors, Sethi made several false statements, including lies about funding and tax credits from the State of Illinois and the City of Chicago, none of which materialized.

The $900 million project never got off the ground, and no EB-5 visas were ever granted to investors.

Sethi pleaded guilty last year to one count of wire fraud. In addition to the 36-month prison term, U.S. District Judge John Z. Lee also ordered Sethi to pay $8.85 million in restitution to the victim investors.

The prosecution represents the largest EB-5 criminal fraud case in the United States to date.

“Defendant Anshoo Sethi abused the EB-5 visa program and blatantly lied to investors and the United States government on a massive scale,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Sunil Harjani argued in the government’s sentencing memorandum. “Overseas investors spent much time and energy making the difficult decision to invest in the Sethi project, and processing their visa applications – not knowing that the project was built on a bed of lies and forged documents.”

According to his plea agreement, Sethi’s fraud scheme began in the summer of 2011 and continued until February 2013. He told investors that he planned to build the hotel and convention center on a three-acre parcel of land in the 8200 block of West Higgins Road in Chicago, just east of O’Hare.

Sethi falsely told investors that his company maintained relationships with large hotel chains that purportedly were interested in the project, including Hyatt, Starwood and Intercontinental Hotel Group. To bolster an additional false statement regarding City of Chicago funding, Sethi signed a “Redevelopment Agreement TIF” document that purported to convey a relationship between the city and Sethi’s company. The document, which contained a bogus city ordinance implying that the project had been approved for TIF funding, was provided to third party brokers who used it to solicit investors.

In all, Sethi raised approximately $158 million from more than 290 investors. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission brought a civil lawsuit against Sethi and was able to restore approximately $147 million to Chinese investors.

[Suits]

Interesting Forbes article.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard...nd-part-1/

Quote:

Sunday marked the start of the Belt and Road Forum (BARF) in Beijing, a first-of-its-kind conference about China's Belt and Road initiative. Despite the repulsive acronym, 28 heads of state, 100 lower-level government officials, dozens of major international organizations and 1,200 delegates from various countries were scheduled to attend. This event was expected to be a kind of coming-out party for an initiative that commenced in 2013 but has yet to define what it actually is.

In the spring of 2015, I began traveling the various overland and maritime routes of the New Silk Road, an array of five new overland and maritime trade routes that are rising up between China and Europe, to see what was happening on the ground for a new book and a series of articles. What follows is the first installment of my main takeaways from these travels.

That's just the introductory paragraphs. Follow the link for the rest of the two page article.