WaPo: "America wants to believe China can't innovate"

[dannyf]

An interesting article to read: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/world/asia_pacific/america-wants-to-believe-china-cant-innovate-tech-tells-a-different-story/2016/07/19/c17cbea9-6ee6-479c-81fa-54051df598c5_story.html?client=ms-android-att-us#

I have to concur with the authors observations. When I visited China a year plus ago, I was absoluteky shocked by how digitally connected that society is. I think they are years ahead in terms of e-commerce, of digital innovations (both software and hardware), and overall connectivity. I understand why so much of the VC money went there.

The article is a confirmation, to me.

[lilos]

I agree look what is ESP 8266, Orange pi one, ESP 32 and possible future Risc-v chips ...
China offer best possible Value for money.

[nctnico]

The Chinese can engineer a lot but they still miss the last 10% which makes a product a good product. And that last 10% requires a culture change so that is not likely to happen anytime soon.

[Refrigerator]

The chinese basically want profit and in the electronics industry the better your product is compared to the opposition, in the same price, the more people will want to buy it thus the chinese people constantly battle each other by out-innovating each other, IMO.

[System Error Message]

The chinese basically want profit and in the electronics industry the better your product is compared to the opposition, in the same price, the more people will want to buy it thus the chinese people constantly battle each other by out-innovating each other, IMO.

The chinese make products cheaper than europeans and americans because many people dont realise the actual cost it will cost in owning the product.
Lets compare a product, the western one may be 50%-100% more than one from china but the one from china may only last a few months while the one from the west could last years. So if you have to keep buying cheap crappy chinese products, its really going to cost more than a product of quality which even though may cost a lot more would last a lot longer and probably have better warranty and support. Take laptops for example, other than lenovo (which was originally japanese) are there any chinese brands yet?

So getting crappy products out for cheaper = profit since people will just keep buying from you. The western world realised this so they stopped making quality products and made products of quality slightly less than before so they would still appear to be better than chinese products to keep up image but not last as long as they used to. This way consumers end up spending more on cheap crappy products than a single more expensive quality product. Im sure many could attest to this with their electronic tools such as buying hakko vs some chinese clone or cheap chinese crappy iron.

[Wytnucls]

Lenovo was founded in Beijing in 1984 as Legend and was incorporated in Hong Kong in 1988. Lenovo acquired IBM's personal computer business in 2005 and agreed to acquire its Intel-based server business in 2014. Lenovo entered the smartphone market in 2012 and as of 2014 is the largest vendor of smartphones in Mainland China. In January 2014, Lenovo agreed to acquire the mobile phone handset maker Motorola Mobility from Google, and in October 2014 the deal was finalized.[7][8]

Lenovo is listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the Hang Seng China-Affiliated Corporations Index, often referred to as "Red Chips."

For the first 20 years of its existence, the company's English name was "Legend" (in Chinese ?? Liánxi?ng). In 2002, Yang Yuanqing decided to abandon the Legend brand name to expand internationally. "Legend" was already in use by many businesses worldwide (whose products and services (in the United States, for example), would include those from both the technological and the non-technological arenas of industry and commerce),[10] making it impossible to register in most jurisdictions. In April 2003, the company publicly announced its new name, "Lenovo,"

[3db]

Lenovo was founded in Beijing in 1984 as Legend and was incorporated in Hong Kong in 1988. Lenovo acquired IBM's personal computer business in 2005 and agreed to acquire its Intel-based server business in 2014. Lenovo entered the smartphone market in 2012 and as of 2014 is the largest vendor of smartphones in Mainland China. In January 2014, Lenovo agreed to acquire the mobile phone handset maker Motorola Mobility from Google, and in October 2014 the deal was finalized.[7][8]

Lenovo is listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the Hang Seng China-Affiliated Corporations Index, often referred to as "Red Chips."

For the first 20 years of its existence, the company's English name was "Legend" (in Chinese ?? Liánxi?ng). In 2002, Yang Yuanqing decided to abandon the Legend brand name to expand internationally. "Legend" was already in use by many businesses worldwide (whose products and services (in the United States, for example), would include those from both the technological and the non-technological arenas of industry and commerce),[10] making it impossible to register in most jurisdictions. In April 2003, the company publicly announced its new name, "Lenovo,"

Before they bought the PC business they bought the laptop business.
I think they were also making the IBM thinkpads for IBM.

[all_repair]

The Chinese can engineer a lot but they still miss the last 10% which makes a product a good product. And that last 10% requires a culture change so that is not likely to happen anytime soon.

I used to think so.  It is economic, strategy and competitive strength.  If the Chinese had adopted the same strategy as the old HP and wanted to be just like old-HP on the first day, their shops would have folded before they could get started.  They just did not have the capital, skills and know-how.  Growing is a long spiraling process.  Innovation is there, it is fierce if you are seeing what is going on in their crowdfunding scene.

[nctnico]

That may be but for now the Chinese only seem to really understand their own internal market (which is huge and getter bigger every day).

[Delta]

Is it even possible to buy any consumer electronic product that isn't made in China?

[CatalinaWOW]

No country has a monopoly on smart people.  Some countries have better infrastructure support for technical innovation, but that changes rapidly.  When most of the worlds engineers order their parts and minor equipment from one country, one might infer that that country has pretty good support.  They may lag at the very highest margins of technical support, but "if" that is true it will not last long. 

There are those that say that language shapes the thinking of those who speak any particular language, merely by shaping the way ideas are formulated.  The papers I have seen on the subject are intriguing but not quite compelling.  It would be interesting to know if any of the forms of Chinese has any impact on technical innovation.

[blueskull]

China is going to go down. When my dad was young people thought it is their obligation to work hard and get little so they build heritage to their kids.
When my older cousin was young, people thought to catch up with the western they need to work hard for the nation. At their age, being a good student and a good worker was an honor.
When I was a kid, people thought being idols and hippies is cool, studying hard is what only nerds do, but at least there are people like me who want to be nerds.
Nowadays the new generation think completely different. Most of them have no interest in engineering and science, and what they want to do is to learn "how to be success" and how to get money from the others, rather than actually creating values.

When I was in middle school, I can at least talk to someone who shares the same hobby with me, and I know some local engineers, plus I can actually buy books and magazines about EE as a hobby.
Then, a couple of years later, the engineering community around me has shrunk so much that finding someone of the same kind is so hard. Books and magazines of STEM are dying, and being replaced with business and financial books.
Once at a time, I can walk into a bookstore and read for an entire day in the sea of thousands of different engineering books, while nowadays at my hometown, there is not a single bookstore carries more than 100 different EE books. People simply don't like to learn any STEM things anymore.

I see this is inevitable as a side effect of economical development and open up -- there are more ways to make money, faster and easier, than doing science and engineering. However, that also means brains that powers the country will be insufficient, sooner or later.
So my prediction is, as soon as those born in the 80s or 90s become old enough that they can not, or are not willing to work at the front line (say, 40 years old), which is in the next 5~15 years, R&D in China will slow down quite a bit.

[blueskull]

The Chinese can engineer a lot but they still miss the last 10% which makes a product a good product. And that last 10% requires a culture change so that is not likely to happen anytime soon.

Because many Chinese engineers I know does not know the basic. They simply copy schematics from data sheet and do PCB artwork. Finding one with solid understanding of SI, PI and other PCB layout skills is hard. The same thing happens on firmware. Getting it up and running is easy, getting it bug free requires systematic planning and scientific project management, which most small Chinese companies do not have. Hiring an entry level engineer in China is cheap, but try to find one that knows everything and can over watch the R&D of an entire company costs so much that most companies simply can not afford.

[ebclr]

When the Chinese learn how to make a instruction manual, and take more attention on details, will kill the remaining 3% of the world industry that they failed to kill. Only 97% was already killed

[station240]

The chinese engineers look at all the parts of something, and think they know how it works.
But they don't know what it was built in a certain way, or the indepth history of the device/process.

Result is everywhere.
For example the chinese bought a coke coal plan in Germany, dismantled it into a giant 'paint by numbers' project and shipped every single nut, bolt and pipe it back to China. So now they have this huge factory, but little idea of how it all works. When the world expects them to clean up their industrial pollution, I cannot see how they can manage it without paying people from the west who do remember this stuff.

End result is obvious, from things like PCB designs with shocking clearances, to equipment that burns out, to pollution and environmental issues.
The west don't care as they have exported their huge problem to china.

[ebclr]

Don't underestimate those guys, The average ones is very low level, but they have few extremely high level, and few on a 2 billion population means millions

[dannyf]

Is it even possible to buy any consumer electronic product that isn't made in China?

Plenty.

China makes a lot of stuff or more accurately they assemble a lot of stuff. Much of the trade deficits that the western countries run against China are really deficits the western countries run against Korea, Japan, Australia, Canada, etc. ***through*** china.

[ebclr]

This is not 100% true, this is only a part of the game, Chinese aren't much smarter than you think and have no "copyright moral" and any kind of exporting rules, It's bare metal production without restriction of any way. They copy , make better learn improve, destroy the environment bribe people  and sell for less and those Westerns stores , and the customers are very happy to Leave the Made in Western on the store and bring the China product to home.

All Western that wanna go on the cheap workmanship band wagon, have a nice surprise some years latter with a new competitor with a similar name and products, at this pointy in time with less quality but extremely low price, and the quality increases year after year and the price not.

Unfortunately is to late to wake up....

[vodka]

So now they have this huge factory, but little idea of how it all works

That's impossible that they don't know as works the plant, so how do they maintain the plant?  For intuition or they begin  to do the exam of the fail and success .
They go to change the piece for seeing that it successes. This hasn't got sense. 

When you teardown the machine , you always have to know as work or if not when you will go to mount ,How do you know that you are mounted fine the machine?

[KL27x]

The Chinese can engineer a lot but they still miss the last 10% which makes a product a good product. And that last 10% requires a culture change so that is not likely to happen anytime soon.

Patent law might have something to do with that? Also, a lot of the products that WE get as imports are selected by us. It is western consumers that are deciding they like cheap over quality. As long as people are buying it, they will keep on making it.

Also manufacturing. They have invested huge in manufacturing. They are going to pump out something, regardless. If manufacturing was that cheap, and next door, we would be making a lot of poo, too. 

[Assafl]

Why would the Chinese market evolve differently than say Japan (in the 60's) and Taiwan (90's) - where the perceived quality increases? (With Vietnam at its heels?)

Fact is - Many chinese manufacturers do ISO certifications aspart of trying to portray that they indeed care about quality.

Lenovo's thinkpad brand is every bit as good as IBM's was - Rigol does spiffy products at a market segment that only ever existed for used products.

China is not going down since it is on a trajectory up. In 20 years they could start worrying about lost decades...

[blueskull]

Why would the Chinese market evolve differently than say Japan (in the 60's) and Taiwan (90's) - where the perceived quality increases? (With Vietnam at its heels?)

Believe or not, the economical abundance of China only shows in some developed cities (capital of provinces and some southern factory-heavy cities). In our vast under developed areas living quality, hence ability of pursuing high quality, is still very limited.
I spent 4 years college life living in a place in the middle of nowhere, and that's what it is real of the vast undeveloped areas of China. At there, you can not buy any genuine products unless taking a bus for 1.5 hours to the nearest city, or just buy online. The only things local stores carry are absolutely cheap and shitty things.
That's the reason why Chinese factories do not make a lot of high quality goods -- lack of market. Most people living in rural areas simply can not, or not willing, to pay $5 on a genuine Philips CCFL, they would rather buy a $1 cheap one that does not have full spectrum coverage, and making their skin looks like dead bodies.
Another reason is the huge income gap. Rich people in China can easily afford imported goods, while poor people in China can not even afford cheapest goods that are actually conforming to safety standards. That also contributes to factory decision.