Aporia's Lipton Matthews has an article China's Tech Power Overrated. I have no expertise in this area but put it forward because it goes against what most I have read in the last decade or more, and the arguments he puts forward seem like good points.
The backbone of China's high-tech export machine is not domestic Chinese industry but foreign-invested enterprises. By 2003, 86% of China’s high-tech exports were produced by FIEs. These companies—multinational giants and Taiwan-based IT manufacturers—relocated their assembly operations to China to exploit lower labor costs, not technological prowess.
Even more revealing is that 93% of China’s high-tech exports involve importing sophisticated parts, assembling them, and then exporting the final products. China is an assembler more than an innovator.
3 comments:
https://spectrum.ieee.org/orbit-policing-spacecraft: "Leading those developments appears to be China, which stunned the world in 2022 by using a robotic grabber to pluck one of its satellites from its orbital slot and drag it into a graveyard orbit."
Process innovation is as important as product innovation, and process innovation tends to happen where the manufacturing is happening.
China has a deployable anti-drone microwave weapon that looks to me like a much cheaper-to-manufacture version of our Leonidas system, which we can barely deploy even as prototypes. Does it work? I don't know.
Likewise, reports are that Pakistan may have shot down those Indian fighters using advanced Chinese missiles -- maybe. Well, they shot them down somehow.
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