In Five Reasons China Will Rule Tech, Forbes claims China will soon be taking over the tech world.
I’m not buying it.
I set out Forbes’ five reasons in bold below and then I analyze them in normal font.
1. China’s leadership understands engineering. Eight of nine members of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau, including the Chinese president, Hu Jintao, have engineering degrees; one has a degree in geology. Of the 15 U.S. cabinet members, six have law degrees. Only one cabinet member has a hard-science degree — Secretary of Energy Steven Chu has a doctorate in physics. President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden have law degrees. So what? Running a country is running a country and there is no evidence that those better able to design a television are any better at running a country than those who are not. Jimmy Carter was a mediocre president since and he was (I think) the only one who was an engineer. And since when has the U.S. Cabinet been the determinant of how our our technology is going? Silicon Valley has led the world in technology through many a president and cabinet that was not made up of engineers, so why should that not continue?
2. China’s leadership wants to out-innovate the U.S. and it has made technological innovation a leading goal in everything from supercomputers to nanotech. Again, so what? The United States’ leadership wants to out-innovate China and it too has made technological innovation a leading goal. More substantively, this analysis wrongly assumes government to be the end-all on innovation and that just is not the case.
3. China’s science and technical talent pool is vast. In 2005, the U.S. awarded 137,500 engineering degrees, while China awarded 351,500. This argument is so flawed I have trouble seeing straight enough to know where to start, but here goes.
- China has four times the number of people as the United States so one would expect China to have four times the number of engineering degrees each year, though it doesn’t even have three times the number.
- The number of engineering degrees is far less important than the quality of those degrees and on quality the United States still leads by a vast margin.
4. The U.S. is failing at science and math education. A stark assessment of the U.S. failure in science and math education was made by Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson at a Senate hearing, when she compared the performance of students in Texas to those in China. Wow, if a politician says it, it must be true! More seriously, if the United States is failing so bad in education, why does it seem like everyone in China with money is trying to figure out how to send their children to school in the United States?
5. China is getting U.S. technology, all of it. In 2008, Sony Corp. closed what was identified as the last television manufacturing plant in the U.S., in Westmoreland, Pa. It shifted work to an assembly plant in Mexico, but the vast majority of TVs’ electronics components are made in Asia. If the United States is losing television manufacturing then it must be falling behind on the newest technology?!?
I am NOT saying China is not moving forward with its technology and I am NOT guaranteeing China may not some day surpass the United States on this. But I am saying that the arguments in this article are no different than the arguments that were being made about Russia in the 1960s and about Japan in the 1980s and neither country is really anywhere these days on the technology map.
In the end, if I had to choose a country that will be the leader in technology ten, twenty, thirty and fifty years from now I would be looking more for the country that welcomes diversity (and I use that word in the most purely capitalistic least mamby-pamby way possible) in its population/people and in its ideas over a country with a government that decrees innovation will start happening now.
What do you think?
UPDATE: Just discovered an excellent post by GE Anderson over at ChinaBizGov, America is rotten; China is awesome, also taking this same article to task. Anderson describes its conclusions as “way overdrawn” and he too focuses on how it puts quantity over quality:
This is an issue of quality vs quantity. I spent two years teaching at universities in China, and I continue to maintain close touch with the academic community there. Though China is turning out math and science whizzes up through high school level, nothing is being done to nurture the kind of creative and critical thinking that produces innovation.
Furthermore, among the engineers earning degrees in China, very few have a passion for what they are learning. It doesn’t bother me that a relative handful of students in the US are choosing the sciences as long as the vast majority of these students love what they’re doing and eventually find their way to Silicon Valley, Austin, TX or other similar clusters of talent. Again, this is where the innovation comes from.
Anderson does toss out the proverbial bone, by noting that this article “may have been intended somewhat as hyperbole to shock our leaders into action.”
Yeah sure. Whatever.
