Dan Wang writes this week about Xi Jinping's increasing obsession with controlling every aspect of Chinese society and the impact this has on the already parlous state of China's technology sector:
The general political environment poses perhaps the greatest threat to technological momentum....I grow less certain that a third-Xi term China will sustain an innovative drive.
A lot of entrepreneurial Chinese are unsure too. The most startling news story I read this year is that rising numbers of Chinese nationals are being apprehended at the Mexican border, trying to make the crossing into the United States. I had not imagined that some Chinese would find such a harrowing trip to be worthwhile. That comes on top of the well-reported trend that many Chinese entrepreneurs have decamped to other markets. In the last few months, I’ve chatted with a good number of Chinese undergrads in the US, who almost to a person tell me that their parents are urging them not to return to the mainland. These groups make up a miniscule percentage of China’s population. But tech development depends on them too.
This dim view of China's technological progress shows up in patent activity as well. We've all seen the charts showing Chinese patent applications skyrocketing, but those are badly misleading for two reasons. First, China employs a subsidy system that encourages inventors to file meaningless patent applications, which results in impressive but ultimately hollow numbers. What matters is patents granted. Second, unlike the US, China grants a very large number of design and "utility" (i.e., small incremental) patents. But the patents that matter are "invention" patents. Here's what that looks like:
The US grants four times as many serious patents as China. What's more, US patents are of far higher quality:
Another measure of patent quality also leaves China far behind the US:
Only 4.17 percent of 1.2 million Chinese patent applications were filed overseas, and 6.31 percent of the total patents were granted in foreign countries. Conversely, 43.40 percent of 521,802 U.S. patent applications were filed overseas, and 48.10 percent of the total patents were granted in foreign countries.
There are several reasons why Chinese companies file so few foreign patents, but one is that China's lower-quality patents are unlikely to withstand international evaluation.
If you put all this together, China doesn't look like a technological powerhouse. They have plenty of world class research, but it's focused in very specific areas that are often mandated by the central government, leaving important areas such as biotech, AI, and semiconductors as backwaters. As with so many things China, a dynamic facade disguises the fact that it's basically still a developing country and the US remains about six times wealthier and more productive.
This is "startling", and is the first I have heard of it. Since no link is presented, it's hard to judge the credibility.
I was told years ago by graduate school professors in advanced physics programs that their Chinese students are not innovative (a fault of their upbringing? Their culture? Who knows?) and they generally just copy each other's work, and that China encourages Chinese patent applicants to make tiny changes to existing patents.
So now, @Salamander, you have two data points.
The assertion that Asians imitate but don't innovate is just genteel white supremacy.
It is far from clear how “Patent Quality” is measured/defined, but the chart does suggest “Asians” is rather more than the afore-thread-mentioned Chinese.
Guess you are a huge fan of KPop for its astonishing originality and deep well of real feeling?
I prefer J-rock to K-pop.
K-dramas are the only reason to have a Netflix subscription.
Except it's generally true for Chinese. That's why they begun cracking down.
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3012741/how-chinese-universities-are-trapping-academic-copycats
I taught accounting for six weeks in Xi'an about a decade ago. Of my twelve students, I caught four of them cheating on the final. Detection was eased by the fact that they all made the same arithmetic error on one of the problems.
Make of the anecdote what you will.
I'm a lefty, and even I'm getting pretty exhausted by our inability to discuss cultural issues without everything immediately being reduced to "race".
Is it actually possible that American culture produces different results than Chinese culture in certain areas, without the thought being dismissed as "white supremacy"? Was anyone actually discussing genetics? And must all cultures be valued as completely "equal"? You're not allowed to have a favorite, or wonder why people are fleeing theirs to join yours?
Going from 2 to 20 is a 10x increase
It's been widely reported in the media for months.
Huh. None of the commenters has yet addressed my point (clearly, it must have been poorly made) of Chinese migrants crossing over from Mexico. Are they emulating Mexicans/Central Americans? Learning Spanish?
And why hasn't the media made a big deal of it, if it's occurring?
I've never heard of an "invention patent". The patents the USPTO grants come in the flavors "plant" (relating to vegetation), "design" (think ornamental design like a Coke bottle), and "utility" (which are the patents you normally think of dealing with inventions).
The Soviet Union had a similar problem: areas of innovation that the government supported (nuclear technology, spaceflight) did very well, but other areas stagnated. Those other areas didn't draw much media coverage in the West, leading us to overestimate Soviet innovation. But we really were doing much better.
There are increasing job opportunities for scientists in China, and aggressive programs to recruit them like the Thousand Talents program.When I was a chemistry grad student back in the dark ages (in the US), students from mainland China were few and far between. Visiting scientists were closely scrutinized by their governments and not allowed to bring their families with them to the US as a means of ensuring they would return to China. Over time, these rules relaxed and we began seeing more Chinese students and visiting faculty at American universities and national labs in the 90's and 2000s. The best of them landed jobs in the US and most of them wanted to stay in the US. Now, many of them are returning to China to take positions at the top universities and scientific institutions there, and are given huge incentive packages. OTOH, one of my best postdocs took a job as a professor at a prestigious U.S. university even though he was recruited for the Thousand Talents Program. He told me that the best Chinese students still want to study abroad and he was afraid that if he took an academic position in China, the graduate students there would be inferior to those who had been accepted to study in the US. That could change. I wouldn't necessary assume that China's lagging record in patents or student quality (for those who remain in China to get their education) is going to last very long, having seen the huge ramp-up in research effort there over the past few decades. As for the old bromide about Chinese scientists not being creative-well, I heard that same thing about Japanese scientists decades ago, and no one says that any more (at least not seriously). It's just a matter of time before Chinese STEM catches up to us, and they are moving aggressively in that direction.
Maybe not by patents, but in terms of science output China is comparable to the US. Nature magazine actually tracks the national affiliations of authors in a group of the highest-quality journals: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01705-7 . In 2022, China just edged out the US overall. They already had in 2021 in physical sciences and chemistry.
In my own field, semiconductor chip design, I have seen more and more good work out of China in the last 10 years. They are a leading group in the Journal of Solid State Circuits, and at the most important meeting in the field, the International Solid State Circuits Conference. That's held every February in San Francisco. They're not imitators and are not behind.
The sanctions on Huawei can be lifted now, can't they?
They've done a pretty good job at making solar panels, sneakers, etc. Breakthroughs may take decades to pay off--it's the incremental improvements in processes that will make or break production and drive adoption.
Over the past few months The Economist has published a series of articles lamenting President Xi's crackdown on politically-independent businesses in China. Among other effects, this is strangling innovation in China.
Couple this with the fact (noted above) that most of the best Chinese academics would rather be teaching overseas, and it's totally plausible that China's strength in technology is far less than it appears.
Yes, he does seem to be killing the geese that laid the golden eggs.
He's an ignoramus on managing the economy. He also (relatedly) prioritizes economic strength far less than political control.
Used to work for an aerospace company that was supplying parts for the C919 Chinese jettliner. I could never shake the feeling that the Chinese lead engineers were not the best and the brightest, but rather those that had an uncle highly placed in the party. The C919 itself is the sort of airliner Airbus and Boeing were building 20 years ago.
The C919 itself is the sort of airliner Airbus and Boeing were building 20 years ago.
I'm firmly in the "PRC tech success is probably exaggerated and likely due for a period of relative decline due to the Party's brain-dead policies" camp.
But, to be fair, no country leads in every single area of science and technology. So, while China is behind the West by all accounts in the broad area of aeronautics, they likely lead the world in drone technology....and big data...and high speed rail...and facial recognition software...and maybe quantum computing. And quite possibly electric vehicles. And probably some others. And their payment systems are the best and easiest to use I've yet encountered. And their social media and online retails sectors are extremely robust (the former somewhat ironic given the country's censorship policies).
For the record, I don't believe that there are significant differences between races, and the concept of "race" itself is probably not real or measurable, but I do believe that there are HUGE differences between cultures.
Chinese President Xi seems to be reducing the amount of freedom available to the average person in China*, which is a huge mistake. Since China is so large and parts of it are underdeveloped, it is a very hard country to govern, and the quick and easy (and wrong) way for the government to control the population is to limit the information and education and wages going to the average person.
Xi isn't alone in wanting to do this. DeSantis is right there with him.
Unfortunately, this usually causes an economy to stagnate.
I've been in China twice, both times to negotiate the sale of machine tools to the Chinese, and I met some amazingly stupid people there. I also met some world-class managers who would succeed anywhere on earth. What China needs to do is to pay its workers more and create an environment where those great managers want to stay and prosper. That's a lot harder, though, than just adding to the security forces and putting people in jail.
Of course, the same thing applies to Florida, and I don't see much hope for progress there, despite its location in North America.
*To me, Xi looks like he could play a pretty convincing prison warden in a movie. Not a good sign, if you believe that by age forty, we have the face that we deserve.
So the same stories about the domination of Chinese brilliance and ingenuity can be binned along with the stories of the devastating and overwhelming Russian Army?
I'd say no. If Xi isn't careful, he's going to smother the natural vigor of China's private economy (he's well on that road), but they're not there yet. Russia never had anything like the robust, cutthroat markets that characterize broad swaths of the PRC economy. Russia never had Western partners like Apple. And Russia never had any success to speak of in terms of exports or global markets save oil: China has some legitimate world-leaders in SHEIN, TikTok, etc. Indeed, the West has taken to implementing trade barriers to stymie China's most powerful players (eg, Huawei). And by all accounts Europe (if not yet the US) is about to face a tsunami of PRC electric vehicle sales.
China isn't a ten foot tall giant. But neither is it reminiscent of Brezhnev-era Russia (though in ten years, who knows?).
Tangential, but that border-apprehension anecdote does make me wonder whether China's near future might include some kind of straight-out exit permission regime (assuming it doesn't have that now, but it doesn't seem to). They wouldn't be the first country to do it by a long shot, probably had it before; but from what I understand, population trends are heading toward reduced working-age numbers-- not necessarily the profile of a rising power if accurate.
PRC working age population started declined several years ago.
Demographic trends has it looking like Japan a number of years ago. In that case, expect a deflationary cycle to hit China in about a decade.
I've worked at a major US high-tech chip maker for decades. Regarding patents, our management, rather than encouraging submitting ideas for patents for just anything, they have a patent committee that carefully reviews the claims and value for each patent idea submitted. They have a quota for the number of patent applications that will be filed with the patent office each year, so all the submitted patent ideas are competing with each other. Typically it has to be a pretty good idea to get approved. Ideally, it is an idea good enough that it will get used in our chip designs in products. Thus, weaker patent ideas submitted get put on the shelf and never filed. A lot get rejected.
But even with this system of screening, I'd say that of the patent applications that we submit to the patent office, fewer than 20% of them ever get used in an actual chip product that we sell. So while we have a patent committee to review and limit patents we’ll apply for, a whole lot of the patents that actually get issued by the patent office are not strong enough inventions to get implemented in our products. I suppose you could say they are lower “quality” inventions. But that is not always fair.
Almost all of our patents are about inventions. Just trying to patent your design work is hard to accomplish since it’s not considered novel enough to be patent-worthy by the patent office. If someone “skilled in the art” can come up with a comparably effective design implementation based on the requirements given to the designers, then the circuit design ideas are not novel enough to get a patent. (As an analogy, two different people could write different software to accomplish the exact same system requirements given to them.) However, sometimes we do try to capture a bucket of clever circuit design work in a patent just in case we get some legal protection from it down the road.
From my experience, for digital chips, it’s hard to get design patents. Patents tend to come more for the algorithms to be run by specialized circuits on a chip. Think of an algorithm’s design as setting the requirements for the circuit design to be implemented. Complex digital chips have many sub-processing blocks where each block is custom-designed to execute a specialized, complex algorithm in an ultra-efficient manner, much more efficiently than using a general-purpose processor. So the detailed concepts for algorithms drive the digital chip circuit architectures. Each complex algorithm typically easily passes as a novel invention in the patent office. I know this because I have about 40 patents for algorithms. In fact, for me to bother with the patent process, I have to feel about 90% certain the patent will actually get issued by the patent office. I think only one or two didn't get issued. Funny, none of our algorithms are for AI, but I have seen the importance of algorithms first hand in chip development. Ultimately, AI is a collection of algorithms meant to collectively give outputs similar to human intelligence. If you get teams of really smart and competent people working on AI algorithms, the speed of advancements is going to be mindboggling. And custom chips will be getting designed to efficiently run the core algorithms in the overall set of AI algorithms. Kevin Drum's warnings may come true. Sure hope not! Still, AI is scarier to me than nukes or global warming.
Sorry for the long comment.
This is my experience with patents also. My company doesn't like to file unless there's a high chance it'll get used, since the filing is expensive and tedious. There are people and companies who game the system to get high numbers, usually as trolls, but real companies take the process seriously.
The papers on Chinese-only journals appear to be of low value, but I can report that the papers in international journals are good, at least in my experience. There have also been some dramatic concrete successes recently, like returning samples from the Moon, and the first orbital launch of a liquid-methane and LH2 rocket. The clearest area where China is ahead is in small drones, where DJI dominates the market.
Real on the web home based work to make more than $14k. Last month I made $15738 from this home job. Very simple and easy to do and procuring from this are just awesome.
For more detail visit the given interface.. http://incomebyus.blogspot.com/
When I was working at DEC back in the mid-80s, I attended a short (and pretty funny) seminar on US patent law. Back then the terms used were "original" and "derivative".
An original patent had to be a new and useful invention and/or a major improvement over a prior invention. So, I file an original patent for a "chair" consisting of horizontal wooden platform ("seat") supported by four upright wooden "legs". Patent is granted based on the fact that the "chair" is new and useful improvement over a large, flat rock. Later on, another person files a derivative patent adding the concept of a vertical support called "a back" to the "chair".
Then we get "butt grooves" to make the chair more comfortable, padding, and eventually Stressless chairs, stools, etc.