Go back far enough, and the cutting edge of technology development was in Egypt and Mesopotamia. Then China took center stage, only to lose it in the 1400s due to an excessive centralized bureaucratic government. England took the lead in the Industrial Revolution of the late 1700s and 1800s, only to lose it due to a detached ruling class enamored with “Free Trade”. The United States took the lead in the 20th Century – but we all can see what is happening there, and why.
The Usual Suspects will huff and say that carbon fiber is not exactly new technology – which is true. But China is putting that technology to work, which is what England and US did in their technological prime.
Maybe the positive message for residents of the US is that – just as China has been able to reclaim technological leadership after more than half a millennium of backwardness – the US may once again become the locus of global technology in about the year … 2500.
I’m not sure all the elements of this sequence are quite comparable: Egypt-China-England-US-China. For one thing, it leaves out the prodigious technological accomplishments of the Roman era and the architectural achievements of the High Middle Ages. Next, the England-US parts are phases of one thing, which really should include all of Europe and the West generally. The technological achievements of the Industrial Revolution and the post-industrial era were built on the scientific advances that began in the Renaissance (southern Europe) and moved north through France, Germany, and the Netherlands to England and Scotland, finally crossing the Atlantic to the US: the West. It’s an almost continuous series of advances with a dormant period after the fall of Rome.
I can’t identify a comparable series of advances in China in that period. Fireworks and spaghetti? Today, China is mostly copying and building on the discoveries and innovations from the West. Building on existing ideas is different from coming up with new ideas. Adopting and extending the innovations of others works for a while but that train eventually runs out of track.
I’m not the first person to observe that East Asian culture values conformity, yet nonconformists are exactly the people who come up with truly novel discoveries: Galileo, Copernicus, Newton, Darwin. There are no carbon fiber trains without Newton, Maxwell, Dalton, Lavoisier. There are no microprocessors to run those trains without Bohr, Heisenberg, Shockley. These guys didn’t mind shaking things up and, incidentally, offending everyone. Who are the comparable Chinese rebels? It’s the difference between an ant farm and an eagle’s nest.
That sort of misses the point. Good ideas get disseminated around the world – it always has been that way. Look, for example, at European contributions to US technological advances.
The key issue is whether a society can actually apply those good ideas and turn them into productive industries which make a positive contribution to the world. In much of the later 19th & early 20th Centuries, the society which was best at doing that had been the US – which is why the best & brightest from the rest of the world (from Carnegie to Musk) came to the US … the place where things could actually get done.
That locus has now moved to China, and no amount of whining about how “the West invented it all” will change the fact that we now depend on China for actual commercial goods based on those technologies.
I take your point that ideas need to be applied to make a difference. However, these ideas have to come from somewhere and that somewhere has not been China. Monkey-see-monkey-do copying of ideas is only of limited added value. Furthermore, the societies that originated the ideas have generally been the ones that also applied them first. That’s because deep understanding of a revolutionary idea will reside within the culture that spawned it. This is why the Industrial Revolution began in Britain and not in China or India.
This gets at a somewhat different issue: political. Carnegie and Musk came to the US for very different reasons and, btw, not both in the “later 19th & early 20th Centuries.” Musk wasn’t even born in that era; he’s a relatively recent arrival to North America (1989). That the political environment in South Africa in 1989 was not conducive to the development of a business, especially for a white boy, would be the understatement of the decade. In any case, Musk came to the US for college. As for Carnegie, his parents left a small town in Scotland (which I visited last August) to seek his fortune in a pre-antitrust, laissez-faire political regime. Carnegie arrived in Pennsylvania in 1848 as a child, part of the Scottish migration. Neither of these individuals made a decision to come to the US “…where things could actually get done.” This retconning of history does not serve your argument.
I didn’t detect any particular whining in my previous comment but I suppose opinions can reasonably differ. You also missed my point, which is not that “the West invented it all” but rather that the West invented and developed it all. Your model of a peripatetic locus of civilizational advancement is ahistorical. With or without China, civilization would be roughly in the same place as it is today. The same can not be said by replacing China with Western Civilization.
Returning to the example of Chinese innovation cited in the post, a carbon fiber train hardly strikes me as a great leap forward.* It’s allegedly 11% lighter and will use 7% less energy: hardly a game-changer — more like the small, incremental changes that one would expect from a copycat. In context, it’s important to consider the source of this information. The Global Times is a publication of the Chinese Communist Party. By the way, did anyone catch the irony of the world’s first carbon fiber train playing a “vital role” in driving China’s “low-carbon transformation”?
We are on the same page there – it is an incremental innovation. But most technological advances are combinations of large numbers of incremental innovations. In the meantime, China is climbing a learning curve about possible uses of carbon fiber and developing a trained workforce. Put that together with the magnetic levitation train and who knows where it might lead?
I can hear you sigh, Doctor Lorentz, saying that the West invented MagLev trains. And it is true that Germany and the US fiddled around with MagLev for decades – but it took China to build an actual operating commercial MagLev service, and thereby gain real-world experience no-one else has. We have to face the world today. China has four times the population of the US, and has a significantly higher proportion of highly educated STEM graduates among its young people, which is why so many US university postgraduate departments are critically dependent on attracting Chinese nationals. It is an easy prediction where tomorrow’s technological advances are more likely to come from.
We can’t afford to become like the old English Upper Class which sat around remembering how great their Empire had once been, while their country went to the dogs around them. No country can survive on past glories for long. It’s time to get off our butts!
Indeed, we are in general agreement. China is advancing in many areas. In a sense, China is a mass of contradictions. They’re building some beautiful cities even as the landscape is dotted with ghost cities. They’ve embraced elements of capitalism but it’s a corrupt, autocratic state that demands its citizens remain meek and obedient. And therein lies the problem: real innovation requires freedom and disdains conformity. It’s a top-down, rather than bottom-up society.
One point of disagreement I have is with the incrementalist model of innovation. Many small improvements do not equal innovation. There is no practical computer without the transistor. And there are no transistors without quantum mechanics. The transistor was not invented in small steps nor was it created as the result of a government mandate to miniaturize electronics. Genius-level work is done by nonconformists who are low in agreeableness. Those traits are simply not in the Chinese DNA — at least they’re not common there.
You have the wrong reason. If these students were not paying full price, US universities would have no use for them. Ask yourself why Chinese students come to American universities where they have to pay full price tuition. If there are so many big brains in China, why do Chinese students come to the US to attend university?
I’d modify that to read, “It is an easy prediction where tomorrow’s incremental advances are more likely to come from.”
Take a wander over to Argonne National Laboratory’s website. That is a US National Laboratory, by the way – the kind of place which supposedly hires the best & brightest of the A+ students coming out of US universities. Look at the first paper listed on their recent publications page:
Zhai, Xuedong; Gao, Jinling; Nie, Yizhou; Guo, Zherui; Kedir, Nesredin; Claus, Ben; Sun, Tao; Fezzaa, Kamel; Xiao, Xianghui; Chen, Weinong - Real-time visualization of dynamic fractures in porcine bones and the loading-rate effect on their fracture toughness. Journal of the Mechanics and Physics of Solids (2030) (Yes, the US support staff put in that 2030 date. They are ahead of their time!)
Notice something about the names of those authors? And this paper is not at all unusual at that US National Laboratory.
A good idea is a good idea, regardless of the ethnicity of its developer. Maybe the Chinese will have only quantity, not quality, when it comes to cutting-edge researchers. But, to echo Stalin, quantity has a quality all of its own.
I’d point out that many technologies that do not appear in this figure are Western led: SpaceX, Nvidia, commercial aerospace, novel pharmaceuticals. New technologies are sometimes invented in one place and manufactured elsewhere. Nevertheless, the fundamental know-how resides with the creators. [I 'm cribbing some of this from a colleague I probably shouldn’t name.]
Regarding institutions such as the national labs and the leading universities, I’m not so sure they represent the best & brightest anymore either. A quick look at Argonne’s home page shows there’s a lot of diversity there, if you know what I mean. The lab is committed to diversity and inclusion (I wonder what happened to equity). This may be the crux of the issue: it’s not so much that China is pulling ahead as that the traditional sources of innovation in the West are atrophying. Perhaps that will leave a vacuum or, since nature abhors a vacuum, other centers of excellence will emerge.
Last of all, there’s the problem of the negative Flynn effect. The world is getting more stupid. Along with the fertility crisis, there may be dark days ahead.
There is no question that those traditional sources are now shadows of their former selves. Universities – what can we say? But it is not just academia. Where are you now, Bell Labs? or Xerox Parc? or many other once important industrial R&D facilities?
To the extent that innovation is a product of individuals, the question is where are those mobile individuals going to go? Arguably, historically they have moved to the place where things would get built, rather than attracting the industry to the place where they made their innovation. Obviously there are counters to this – Detroit in its heyday; Silicon Valley in happier days. It is not a clear-cut picture.
I wonder if the bigger picture is that the key country at any point is the one that can claim to be the Workshop of the World? That country will attract the innovators. It was once England. It was once the US. Now it is China.
The downside of being Workshop of the World is that the country needs to be able to export, since it can produce much more than it can consume internally. When that country loses those export markets, it declines. That happened to England. It has happened to the US. Is that the real minefield lying in China’s future?
