China’s global technology ascendancy is pretty much total, yet it has only half the number of billionaires as the US and that number grew this year by only half as much, so how is this possible?<\/p>\n
And China is supposedly a Marxist-Leninist society, and Karl Marx was very suspicious of technology, writing in Wage, Labour and Capital (1847): “The instrument of labour, when it takes the form of a machine, immediately becomes a competitor of the worker himself.”<\/p>\n
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A Unitree Robotics humanoid robot at the inaugural World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing earlier this year.\u00a0 (REUTERS: Tingshu Wang)<\/p>\n
Can the West catch up?<\/p>\n
No such qualms in the Chinese Communist Party, which is in charge of a country whose population of workers is declining.<\/p>\n
The communists are driving the technology bus, not billionaires as in the US, and the few Chinese entrepreneurs who managed to amass a fortune serve at the pleasure of the party.<\/p>\n
China’s arrival as tech supremo was on display last month at the 27th Hi-Tech Fair in Shenzhen.<\/p>\n
It was 400,000 square metres (about 20 big cricket grounds) of dazzling technology (or so I read and saw on YouTube \u2014 I wasn’t there) with plenty of humanoid robots, including two of them slugging it out in a boxing ring behind that interview, and a whole zone dedicated to flying cars, or “eVOTL” vehicles (electrical vertical take-off and landing).<\/p>\n
As Industrial Transition Accelerator executive Faustine Delasalle says<\/a>: “There’s an acceleration in China that we’re not seeing in the rest of the world.”<\/p>\n China used to be trying to catch the West, specifically the US; then it caught up; now the West is trying to catch up to China, but likely can’t.<\/p>\n There are plenty of engineering marvels in China apart from those on display in Shenzhen last month.<\/p>\n Here’s a random list of a few things I’ve seen lately:<\/p>\n a mosquito-sized drone<\/a> for surveillance operationsa mountain<\/a> in Guizhou covered with solar panelscancer therapy<\/a> research that disguises a tumour as pork, so the immune system attacks itan open-source AI model outperforming the best human score<\/a> in the maths Olympicshumanoid robots<\/a> being shipped to industrial customers, according to the companya robot designed to clean<\/a> hotel rooms and bathrooms48,000 kilometres fast rail<\/a>, with 350km\/h top speed, including the Shanghai Maglev (magnetic levitation) which goes at over 400km\/h<\/a>the world’s highest bridge \u2014 the Huajiang Canyon Bridge<\/a>China ‘ditches the standard innovation model’<\/p>\n Analyst Dan Wang explains what’s behind all this in a book<\/a> titled Breakneck \u2014 China’s quest to engineer the future.<\/p>\n He explains that China is an engineering state, which can’t stop itself from building, while America is a lawyerly society which “has a government of the lawyers by the lawyers and for the lawyers” \u2026 and “blocks everything it can”, although Donald Trump is bulldozing regulations now.<\/p>\n “As the United States lost its enthusiasm for engineers, China embraced engineering in all its dimensions,” Wang says.<\/p>\n An aerial photo shows more than 60,000 solar photovoltaic panels installed on a barren mountain in Jinhua, Zhejiang province, China. (AFP: Yuan Xinyu)<\/p>\n China’s government spends hundreds of billions of dollars on what it calls a “whole of nation” industry policy, which began with “Made in China 2025” unveiled 10 years ago<\/a>, and morphed into the 14th five-year plan in 2020 committing US$1.4 trillion<\/a> over five to six years on new infrastructure, including 5G networks, smart cities, and industrial digitalisation.<\/p>\n Blogger Noah Smith described what “whole of nation” means in a post<\/a> last week: “Essentially, what China has done is to ditch the standard innovation model, where government, academics, corporations, and financiers all work independently toward their own goals, and to replace it with a model where the government coordinates their interaction toward a single overarching goal from beginning to end.<\/p>\n “Basically, the government now tries to take innovation ‘from bean to bar’, as the chocolate shops say.<\/p>\n “It tries to identify a technological goal \u2014 say, becoming nationally self-sufficient in robotics \u2014 and then work backwards to figure out what breakthroughs it needs in order to reach that goal. Then it tries to fund the basic and applied research to create those breakthroughs, transfer the breakthroughs to the appropriate companies, help the companies create new products, and then help the companies commercialise and scale those products.”<\/p>\n The government works backwards from the goal for heaven’s sake! And then directs the basic research and funds the companies to create products and then to commercialise.<\/p>\n Now that’s what I call an industry policy! No wonder they’re ahead.<\/p>\n People try AR glasses during the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai earlier this year. (REUTERS:Go Nakamura)<\/p>\n Australia’s ‘National AI Plan’ lacking<\/p>\n This approach has also led to China having a monopoly on critical minerals<\/a> and rare earths needed for modern technology, giving them powerful geopolitical clout, now being wielded.<\/p>\n The downside to it is overcapacity, and now the government is trying to stop what’s called “involution<\/a>” \u2014 that is, intense cut-throat competition with diminishing returns, characterised by price wars and oversupply in a crowded market.<\/p>\n Needless to say, the comparison of China with Australia is less flattering than the one with the United States. We’re not e-cycling on the same velodrome.<\/p>\n Last week, the Labor government launched<\/a> its “National AI Plan”, which is more brochure than serious plan.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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