Comment by enslavedrobot

I think you'd be surprised by how much hustle culture China has. The notion of them being simply copyists is outdated. It's the same mistake that the US made with Japan in the 1970s.

The Chinese one-party system is a lot more authoritarian than the West's, but it doesn't micromanage everything the way people imagine it does. People at the bottom are entirely capable of innovating. It's true that for a long time they just innovated new, cheaper, better ways to copy, but that was a matter of economic position, not political organization.

They've been improving that for decades. And while there's still a lot of very dull people produced in Chinese universities, there are a lot of people there overall, and the top 0.01% is a huge number.

I don't know if this is a good or bad thing for the world. I've always felt weird that the US should have such a corner on the market for novel design. Despite our back-patting we're not better than everybody else.

I wonder if the top-down mindset can provide some benefits for innovation.

* State backing-- whether it's guaranteed markets or simply R&D on a government budget-- means innovators have a disruption-free space for work. There's less worry about "we've got to ship some garbage before we run out of runway."

* The goals of government research initiatives are also likely to be more broadly palatable than "the shareholders will love this!" Nobody in the Central Committee is saying "we really want to be the world leader in adding annoying subscription features to stuff." Even the grand boogeymen-- surveilance and social credit-- come from a place of trying to improve public safety and quality of life.

The free market is good at making marketable products. Is it good at basic research that's not directly monetizable, or producing things we need but don't want?