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Roger Boyd's avatar

Single shot wonders do not an industrial economy make, and also new technologies may not be able to overcome old technologies that have so much of the investment already in place that they can be incrementally improved for a long time at little extra cost - e.g. magnetic drives vs. optical drives for computers.

In addition, many technologies are actually a combination of a whole suite of technologies, organization structures, industrial clustering etc. Things that the Chinese development model excels at - e.g. photonic microprocessors.

The real problem in the US is the CEO/executive suite level which is full of the wrong kind of people and the incompetence of the state administrations. We don't need more H1-Bs we need corporations run for the long term instead of by profiteering executives and a government not run by ideologically-blinded fools.

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Yi Xue's avatar

I'd add another cause for China's "0-1 innovation" problem - its education system does not celebrate thinking out of the box nor independent thinking, but rather "do as told" and "improve by repeating". But one can argue 以量取胜 is still winning. That's also one of the reasons why it has been difficult for Chinese universities to attract top student talent, especially foreign talent: its teaching system is not attractive to people who are used to free-thinking, so to speak.

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