China today stands as the most aggressively innovative force in modern history. What truly matters isn't just the number of patents,it's the sheer volume of high-tech, cutting-edge developments they're churning out. These innovations are reshaping global industries at breakneck speed.
And soon enough, the West, clinging to its fading dominance, will have only one bitter word left to scream: "Stolen"
A little different, a house will always be a house but a fake innovation won't necessarily become something useful down the line. It probably has an effect on local funding too, if a lab producing good work is overshadowed by a lab producing a lot more useless work just to inflate numbers, at first glance they latter group might get the funding on metrics alone.
Still, I can't imagine more than a third is doing that kind of behavior, even that seems like a lot, and this means China is still out innovating the world several times over.
This isn't accurate. A poorly made building is only as good as a useless patent. The shoddy work will require costly fixes or rebuilding entirely. Most capitalist economies turn this into a benefit, but communist administrators would understand that it's merely a drain on resources and labour, and be less likely to accept this preventable waste. Despite my lack of particular knowledge I'd guess that the PRC is more inclined to have a more sensible process regarding patents than the West.
I'm any case this sort of rumour is quite old, as the other comrade pointed out. The Chinese have been accused of stealing IP for decades (mostly by the people who sold the know-how) and hearsay of near meaningless papers churned out to pump up numbers was thrown around when Jiang was still in charge, probably started before.
I'm not arguing with your conclusions, but we needn't take projection or rumours from the dying hegemon at face value. This one stings me especially since I believed it for years and only questioned it once I was reminded of it, after I'd already become an ML.
Edit: You said you saw it on XHS and while I irritate myself in questioning the locals' account, that app also revealed they plenty of Chinese people aren't very worldly, so to speak. Thinking easily proven facts about the US and Europe being CPC propaganda and the like.
I thought the ghost cities thing was about building places that no one lived, not about the quality being low. It has been awhile.
You know there has been widespread and endless anti corruption efforts in China right? It seems like you are romanticizing the fact that they are communists, thinking that they will naturally choose the smart and efficient choices because they are communists, but tens of thousands of CPC members have decided to enrich themselves and been caught, not to mention those who have not been caught and non party member's. Chinese people are very aware of these issues and talk about them openly online. There will be biases and misinformation and rumors and the like but let's not assume that there can't be any truth to these things, this is naive. My main point was to say that even when adjusting for this, China is still doing amazing things. I just thought it was an interesting anecdote about the patents because they are so much higher volume that it can't be explained by population alone, and China also has a large base of educated workers who can't find jobs. Just interesting context to me
No you're right, the poor construction thing is a different anti china meme, the ghost city thing was propaganda like, they're wasting concrete and labor to do useless work just to juice their gdp. Like this is a game of vic3 and gdp means something real
But then it turns out years later people moved into them and the infrastructure is being used, like, westerners just took the ground work for a plan having no results and ran propaganda on that.
But then it turns out, ironically also like a game of vic3, building infrastructure for future growth is a good thing to do, who knew
There's separate anti China memes about construction quality, bad concrete or whatever, idk
Yeah, and honestly the construction issues seem to happen more in other countries. There's that big scandal right now with the building that collapsed in the Thai earthquakes, the only building in the area to collapse and the most recently built, and which the company touted their earthquake resistant design.
but yes, the crackers being confused about planning things in advanced that will affect millions of people's lives was a good one. It's amazing how many waves of anti-China memes that have happened over the years, and to look back now on how China's development has just changed everything.