if you look at the first chart, it basically says that when compared with the US, China is producing comparable number of third party cited AI papers when its number of AI professionals is just like 10% of the US total. clearly you don't need to be an AI professional to see the problem here - it is all about quantity not quality. then the sad truth is that for most other categories, China is also far behind in term of quantity.
Well developed mobile payments are nothing but a sign of undeveloped finance sector, people not having bank accounts or credit cards creates massive market for e-payments. I won't be surprised if Kenya is even more advanced in that field than China.
The explosion in mobile payments in China vs America/Europe is amazing, but it grates when it’s used as an example of tech advantage (ie. as if Chinese companies were being more innovative or groundbreaking).
There’s a lot of cool things that happen or become possible when you have a mobile payments environment like China, but it’s possible because of fairly special (and not necessarily desirable) market conditions and lack of regulation in China.
Hackernews and the English tech media in general tends to be very US/euro centric, but there is a lot more innovation going on in the Chinese market that never gets highlighted in English tech media. Almost like a parallel universe, until said western audience goes there and experience first hand a paradigm shift. Look up shanzai.
But yeah - I think there’s amazing things happening. It’s a bit of a shame that the discussion is regularly framed as ‘who is number one?’ - there’s some straight up great innovation, and there’s a lot of interesting adaptation and innovative use of existing tech to suit market conditions in China.
side question...how do short term tourists who might not be able to open a local bank account access wechat or alipay/mobile payments while in China? Are they forced to use just cash?
> because of fairly special market conditions and lack of regulation in China.
On the contrary, China has very tight (if not most) financial regulations. E.g. oversea transaction above ￥10,000 need to be reported to central bank.
IMHO The secret factor of mobile payments boom in China is infrastructure.
Central bank completed near real time cross bank clearing system decade ago. It requires very low fee, has no tech debt like the US. For example, the ACH works by uploading files to FTP and has at least one day delay. In China, it only costs few seconds with 0 fee. Internet giants (网联, Nets Union Clearing Corporation) are in the same position as banks (银联, Unionpay)
You need a bank account to use Wechat payments, it’s just much more convenient (and small shops don’t typically accept bank card payments). Credit cards are not very popular yet due to cultural norms around spending on credit, though heavily promoted by the banks.
Trying to argue that the Chinese finance sector is undeveloped sounds a little uniformed, to tell you the truth...
This is such an ignorant comment...everyone has bank accounts in China, probably more so then in the US. You cant access the mobile payments platform in there without a bank account.
You are probably confusing e-payments with cryptocurrency usage - so, for reference: "traditional" e-payments are based on actual bank accounts and inter-bank payment platforms like SWIFT, or credit card payments.
I think it's not a sign, just a second mover advantage. Those who came later had access to better/faster tech and didn't have to deal with the sunk cost of existing slow technology.
As others have commented e-payments require bank account. What i think is that the fact we’re still using the same tool for payment before and after the internet and the mobile revolutions is more the symptom of a totally crippled banking sector. Either because of bad regulations, or simply dominant position abuses that has been tolerated for too long.
What I can say as an more or less of an insider: the report is credible.
Look at electronics industry, while the "China wave" is waining already, but you still can't do anything electronics without going to a single city in China.
Same will eventually be true for software, but it will take no less than a decade as it was for electronics.
It took around 15 years for the sentiment to change from "hey look, they can actually make electronics" to "I can't make parts A and B for my project outside of China" to "to don't even try making out of China"
With electronics - like with most physical products - having your production facilities near your suppliers and customers, and having lots of low cost labor, has a really big impact. With software, it's a completely different story.
Not that much. It is an illusion that Shenzhen has an overwhelming advantage from the cluster effect. China still imports even passive components from Taiwan, and labour costs for professionally trained assembly line staff are higher than in some parts of Europe.
It is 100% percent due to intellectual capital there. Multiple cities in China has more developers than a whole state of California.
Just now the lion share of them toil in China's analogues of pets.com, or outsourcing sweatshops for Western online giants like Amazon.
It will be take just a flick to turn the tide in reverse when Chinese domestic companies get to the point when making software for themselves will make more money than selling as a service outside. Then, the chain reaction will start.
Luckily for those of us who cannot speak Chinese, even papers from Tsinghua University are generally published in English.
There are so many Chinese natives compared to the rest of the world. It will be interesting to see in the next decade how the open source community evolves as China grows from 50->100% Internet penetration and some of those users become involved in open source. Anecdotally, you can already see this happening on some fairly popular repos on github that are entirely in Chinese.
Will we see two open source communities develop in parallel, one in English and one in Chinese? Will we see more effort at translation of documentation for major software packages?
> Luckily for those of us who cannot speak Chinese, even papers from Tsinghua University are generally published in English.
Generally published, so already not always, and I sometimes wonder for how much longer it will be until the ratio flips to the majority of Chinese produced papers being published in Chinese.
Currently they need to publish in English for the recognition. As the Chinese tech and software industry grows stronger, that may get less and less necessary.
It's likely to be decades away, but it'll still be interesting to watch if it happens.
The first chart says that the number of AI professionals in China is less than 10% that of the US, while the number of third-party cited AI papers is around 80-90%. This implies that either 1) each Chinese AI professional publishes many, many times more papers than a US-based one, which seems unlikely, or 2) there are many more non-publishing AI professionals in the US, e.g. working as a non-research engineer, than in China, where presumably many or most with the label 'AI professional' publish papers.
Anyone with more knowledge/insight about this peculiarity?
There's a geopolitical dimension to this question, because of one-party rule in China. If the regime were less oppressive, reactions would be different.
Joking aside, one of my latest worries is that China will win out in the end with its EV-focused industry, which will also be self-driving vehicles for the most part. I think they're planning on doing to the western auto industry what they did to the western solar panel industry: encourage its own EV industry aggressively through subsidies and regulation, then subsidize exports, too. Western car companies in 2 decades = bankrupt.
If half of the world ends-up travelling via backdoored self-driving Chinese cars 20 years from now, I think we're screwed. And I mean that even if the Chinese government has no intention of exploiting the backdoors maliciously itself - other than the occasional assassination of Chinese dissidents/critics (say no more than a few hundred a year - they've got to keep that sort of thing in check after all) and complete surveillance of your driving habits, what you say in your car, who you're seeing in your car, and other stuff like that, of course. The backdoors in there will be more than enough for every other malicious actor out there to exploit them.
I am pretty sure the "western" auto industry has been doing themselves more harm for a long time, compared to what the Chinese could do.
And as far as State created exploits, there are plenty of these being introduced by "western" governments. I don't really prefer to have either having access to this.
I think similar observations and arguments were made in the 80s about Japanese firms. It would be interesting to make some comparison, if only to see how things are (or could be) different this time.
This trend should not be surprising. China has a population of 1.4 billion people, almost 5x the population of the US. If you'll excuse the Saturday morning math, the Chinese population only needs to produce quality software engineers at 1/5 the rate of the US in order to outpace US engineers in terms of pure numbers.
Programming is not some elite field that only enlightened Western minds are capable of. After a certain point it really is a numbers game -- how many smart people can you throw at big problems? In this sense, the US is at a distinct long-term disadvantage compared to larger countries like China and India, simply due to the sheer size of the population differences.
And yet china population has been 5x US population for at least a century, but we’re witnessing china waking up only for the last 20 years. The fact that they’re reaching phd level in large quantity is a new thing.
Is the number of PhDs per capita higher than the US? My point is that even if it’s 5x lower PhD per capita, just by virtue of having 5x the population, China will have the same absolute number of PhDs as the US.
Actually I was disappointed the article did not touch on education trends within China. Do you have any sources for analyses of educational trends?
I would be interested in the number of Chinese getting PhDs in the US, vs in China, and how that ratio has changed in the past two decades.
Might be even more interesting to compare the primary/secondary school systems across the two countries. Education is obviously valued more highly in the average Chinese family than it is in the average American family. This early emphasis on education could certainly explain the Chinese success in higher education.
Interesting isn't it? Chinese people didn't just bootstrap themselves either. They got help. I mean, does anyone actually think that the Chinese populace asked for Communism and built up their tyrannical government from within? No way.
Without even looking at individual players, you can see what's going on. The USA has empowered China by buying everything they've made over the past 60 years. You'd think based on our values, a country like the US would have a big problem doing business with China. But nope! Everything's fine, just don't let any controlled-media mouthpiece talk about it though.
There are many, many, many open and obvious details which outline an invisible hand at work here. If you look deeper, you'll also find the involvement of such shady characters as a certain well-known family of international banksters who loan money to start wars and people who start wars to be able to sell their drugs to people. Long story short: I think that China is the prototype for a new world-wide government that is going to take over after the big-bad USA (my homeland) is wiped out either economically or physically. The stage is being set right now and there is no time in history that we've looked worse than we do right now. I'm pretty sure we deserve whatever we get though because we've let our tax dollars be used for some pretty nasty business.
Regardless of who anyone thinks the players are, we all know that the culture of corruption is real. This is the absolute height of corruption and it is definitely possible if not probable.
Exactly as the US did to the UK in the late 1800s, and Japan + Korea to the US in the 1970s on.
There is advantage to not being the incumbent. First you copy (badly) and soon enough you match quality and innovate. That you can do so without the years of technical debt or obsolete tooling and infrastructure gives speed advantages.
Here is one likely root cause of China's rapid rise and US' relative stagnation:
"“Of 200,000 doctorates in science and engineering earned worldwide in 2010, about 33,000 were awarded by universities in the United States, China 31,000, Russia 16,000, Germany 12,000 and the United kingdom 11, 000,” says the report."
"But China leads the world when factoring in doctorates in the biological, physical, Earth, atmospheric, ocean and agricultural sciences and computer sciences."
"Also, in the United States only 57% of doctorates were earned by citizens and permanent residents, while temporary visa holders obtained the remainder." [1]
China's figures are likely higher now in 2018.
Note that there appears to be some quality issues that come with the acceleration of China's PhD production, although initiatives are being taken to reform the system. [2]
In the long run, the advantage of having an abundant number of STEM and CS graduates to recruit from may prove highly impactful, or even decisive, for many tech-based industries. To compete, the US needs to develop more local talent in STEM as well as attracting talent from abroad.
A focus on the very top-end by doing groundbreaking research, which the US has often excelled at, might also be necessary.
Hardly matters what groundbreaking research the US does if it's happening neck deep in a celeb worshiping, engagement metric obsessed culture. Unless you are an Elon Musk type P.T. Barnum character good luck getting any attention. All I forsee happening is NASA, National Science Foundation etc being run by YouTube stars soon.
I'm reluctant to use "number of PhDs" as a proxy for "depth of tech talent pool". PhDs in the US have become somewhat odd -- I see advertisements on public transit (!) for quick doctoral programs in all sorts of fields, and many of these programs appear to be PhDs in name only, awarding degrees with little to no connection with actual original research. So a PhD alone is no longer an indicator of actual research ability but just another academic credential to slog your way through.
I would guess something like this holds in China as well, possibly confounded by 1. China's different political culture, which appears to blend political advancement and academic titles in a weird way, 2. a stronger cultural emphasis in China on academic titles, and 3. China's historical preference for people with science/engineering backgrounds (rather than, say, law as in the US) to lead its state.
If anything I imagine China's loose regulatory environment, abundant supply of citizens unconcerned about data privacy, and sheer number of people trying things are bigger advantages.
The thing with China though, is that it consistently has something fall apart right before it makes the transition from contender to influencer on the world stage.
Historically it has been famine, but other times it has been the cultural emphasis on being the best copier of ideas (the civil service exam used to be about who could recite the teachings of Confucius the most actually, not who could create the best new interpretation), and not on creating original ideas. When you're at the top you must create original content.
And the third case, although not relevant this time, is the lack of maritime tradition / cultural emphasis on exploration. So somewhat related to point two in that there's little drive to explore the unknown.
BTW, the middle kingdom WAS the "influencer on the world stage" prior to the industrial revolution in Europe. You could argue that civil service exam tested for rote memorization as it was looking for a specific aptitude that led to been a good administrator. Plenty of science, math and inventions originated or were independently discovered in China up to at least the Renaissance.
Very cool and convenient information. I've been looking this for a long time. I think it will come in handy for my design project. Thanks for your work!
50 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 110 ms ] threadThere’s a lot of cool things that happen or become possible when you have a mobile payments environment like China, but it’s possible because of fairly special (and not necessarily desirable) market conditions and lack of regulation in China.
But yeah - I think there’s amazing things happening. It’s a bit of a shame that the discussion is regularly framed as ‘who is number one?’ - there’s some straight up great innovation, and there’s a lot of interesting adaptation and innovative use of existing tech to suit market conditions in China.
On the contrary, China has very tight (if not most) financial regulations. E.g. oversea transaction above ￥10,000 need to be reported to central bank.
IMHO The secret factor of mobile payments boom in China is infrastructure.
Central bank completed near real time cross bank clearing system decade ago. It requires very low fee, has no tech debt like the US. For example, the ACH works by uploading files to FTP and has at least one day delay. In China, it only costs few seconds with 0 fee. Internet giants (网联, Nets Union Clearing Corporation) are in the same position as banks (银联, Unionpay)
Bank infrastructure has been a minor factor at best in the adoption/explosion of mobile payments - we’re talking about Wechat and Alipay basically.
Mobile payments are starting to gaining traction in southeast asia. The market is like mainland china 5 years ago.
> we’re talking about Wechat and Alipay basically
Wechat and alipay both has bank level clearing. Very few people "get" that.
Look at electronics industry, while the "China wave" is waining already, but you still can't do anything electronics without going to a single city in China.
Same will eventually be true for software, but it will take no less than a decade as it was for electronics.
It took around 15 years for the sentiment to change from "hey look, they can actually make electronics" to "I can't make parts A and B for my project outside of China" to "to don't even try making out of China"
It is 100% percent due to intellectual capital there. Multiple cities in China has more developers than a whole state of California.
Just now the lion share of them toil in China's analogues of pets.com, or outsourcing sweatshops for Western online giants like Amazon.
It will be take just a flick to turn the tide in reverse when Chinese domestic companies get to the point when making software for themselves will make more money than selling as a service outside. Then, the chain reaction will start.
There are so many Chinese natives compared to the rest of the world. It will be interesting to see in the next decade how the open source community evolves as China grows from 50->100% Internet penetration and some of those users become involved in open source. Anecdotally, you can already see this happening on some fairly popular repos on github that are entirely in Chinese.
Will we see two open source communities develop in parallel, one in English and one in Chinese? Will we see more effort at translation of documentation for major software packages?
Generally published, so already not always, and I sometimes wonder for how much longer it will be until the ratio flips to the majority of Chinese produced papers being published in Chinese.
Currently they need to publish in English for the recognition. As the Chinese tech and software industry grows stronger, that may get less and less necessary.
It's likely to be decades away, but it'll still be interesting to watch if it happens.
Luckily I can speak/read Chinese :-)
Anyone with more knowledge/insight about this peculiarity?
Don’t we want the rest of the world to equal the US?
People would also see a path to take to have a better life.
Joking aside, one of my latest worries is that China will win out in the end with its EV-focused industry, which will also be self-driving vehicles for the most part. I think they're planning on doing to the western auto industry what they did to the western solar panel industry: encourage its own EV industry aggressively through subsidies and regulation, then subsidize exports, too. Western car companies in 2 decades = bankrupt.
If half of the world ends-up travelling via backdoored self-driving Chinese cars 20 years from now, I think we're screwed. And I mean that even if the Chinese government has no intention of exploiting the backdoors maliciously itself - other than the occasional assassination of Chinese dissidents/critics (say no more than a few hundred a year - they've got to keep that sort of thing in check after all) and complete surveillance of your driving habits, what you say in your car, who you're seeing in your car, and other stuff like that, of course. The backdoors in there will be more than enough for every other malicious actor out there to exploit them.
And as far as State created exploits, there are plenty of these being introduced by "western" governments. I don't really prefer to have either having access to this.
Programming is not some elite field that only enlightened Western minds are capable of. After a certain point it really is a numbers game -- how many smart people can you throw at big problems? In this sense, the US is at a distinct long-term disadvantage compared to larger countries like China and India, simply due to the sheer size of the population differences.
Actually I was disappointed the article did not touch on education trends within China. Do you have any sources for analyses of educational trends?
I would be interested in the number of Chinese getting PhDs in the US, vs in China, and how that ratio has changed in the past two decades.
Might be even more interesting to compare the primary/secondary school systems across the two countries. Education is obviously valued more highly in the average Chinese family than it is in the average American family. This early emphasis on education could certainly explain the Chinese success in higher education.
So who helped them start all this and why? Yale admits that they were complicit in helping Mao Tse Tung come to power in an article entitled "Yale Group Spurs Maos Emergence" - http://digital.library.yale.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collectio...
Without even looking at individual players, you can see what's going on. The USA has empowered China by buying everything they've made over the past 60 years. You'd think based on our values, a country like the US would have a big problem doing business with China. But nope! Everything's fine, just don't let any controlled-media mouthpiece talk about it though.
There are many, many, many open and obvious details which outline an invisible hand at work here. If you look deeper, you'll also find the involvement of such shady characters as a certain well-known family of international banksters who loan money to start wars and people who start wars to be able to sell their drugs to people. Long story short: I think that China is the prototype for a new world-wide government that is going to take over after the big-bad USA (my homeland) is wiped out either economically or physically. The stage is being set right now and there is no time in history that we've looked worse than we do right now. I'm pretty sure we deserve whatever we get though because we've let our tax dollars be used for some pretty nasty business.
Regardless of who anyone thinks the players are, we all know that the culture of corruption is real. This is the absolute height of corruption and it is definitely possible if not probable.
There is advantage to not being the incumbent. First you copy (badly) and soon enough you match quality and innovate. That you can do so without the years of technical debt or obsolete tooling and infrastructure gives speed advantages.
"“Of 200,000 doctorates in science and engineering earned worldwide in 2010, about 33,000 were awarded by universities in the United States, China 31,000, Russia 16,000, Germany 12,000 and the United kingdom 11, 000,” says the report."
"But China leads the world when factoring in doctorates in the biological, physical, Earth, atmospheric, ocean and agricultural sciences and computer sciences."
"Also, in the United States only 57% of doctorates were earned by citizens and permanent residents, while temporary visa holders obtained the remainder." [1]
China's figures are likely higher now in 2018.
Note that there appears to be some quality issues that come with the acceleration of China's PhD production, although initiatives are being taken to reform the system. [2]
In the long run, the advantage of having an abundant number of STEM and CS graduates to recruit from may prove highly impactful, or even decisive, for many tech-based industries. To compete, the US needs to develop more local talent in STEM as well as attracting talent from abroad.
A focus on the very top-end by doing groundbreaking research, which the US has often excelled at, might also be necessary.
[1] http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=2014022...
[2] https://www.editage.com/insights/where-does-china-stand-in-t...
I would guess something like this holds in China as well, possibly confounded by 1. China's different political culture, which appears to blend political advancement and academic titles in a weird way, 2. a stronger cultural emphasis in China on academic titles, and 3. China's historical preference for people with science/engineering backgrounds (rather than, say, law as in the US) to lead its state.
If anything I imagine China's loose regulatory environment, abundant supply of citizens unconcerned about data privacy, and sheer number of people trying things are bigger advantages.
Historically it has been famine, but other times it has been the cultural emphasis on being the best copier of ideas (the civil service exam used to be about who could recite the teachings of Confucius the most actually, not who could create the best new interpretation), and not on creating original ideas. When you're at the top you must create original content.
And the third case, although not relevant this time, is the lack of maritime tradition / cultural emphasis on exploration. So somewhat related to point two in that there's little drive to explore the unknown.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zheng_He
BTW, the middle kingdom WAS the "influencer on the world stage" prior to the industrial revolution in Europe. You could argue that civil service exam tested for rote memorization as it was looking for a specific aptitude that led to been a good administrator. Plenty of science, math and inventions originated or were independently discovered in China up to at least the Renaissance.