John Chuckman
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY FRED REED IN CHECKPOINT ASIA
“Yesterday’s Country: Don’t Worry, They Can’t Innovate
“The Chinese invented paper, compass, gunpowder and printing yet Americans convinced themselves they couldn't innovate”
https://www.checkpointasia.net/china-is-tommorows-country-america-is-the-past/#disqus_thread
While we have a few unneeded pejoratives here, nevertheless, this is a good collection of stories on the amazing scientific and technical progress China is making.
It is just stunning that only forty years ago, China was ruled by a secular equivalent of the Middle Ages' Catholic Church.
In so short a time they have leapt, literally leapt, to a leadership role in a number of fields and a challenger in others.
I regard this achievement of China's sudden rise as one of two great miracles of our time, the other being personal computers and the Internet.
They both are genuinely revolutionary in their effects for the entire world.
The native talent and ability at application one sees in Chinese people - and I have known several Chinese students studying abroad quite well - are what have been unleashed after being long suppressed.
What a gigantic pool of talent and human capital.
And China, while still nominally "communist," has in fact morphed into something else, a country focused on meritocracy and led by some exceptionally intelligent people.
It is offering a new model of development to the world.
While the United States in fact takes retrograde steps in becoming something more like what China was - severe ideologues spending great time and effort on often meaningless achievements, such as trying to dominate everyone, instead of competing.
My God, the 1950s and American notions turned on their heads.
By the way, the business, often heard in the past about China not being able to innovate, comes from the same place as fairy tales like the American Dream and its even more childish Trumpian update, Make America great again.
Americans, under the effects of a long easy dominance after WW II - a dominance as much the result of luck in having all competitors flattened as in their own efforts - really have come to believe, again as a form of secular religion, that they are special. God has blessed their enterprise. And America is indispensable. Always and everywhere such beliefs engender foolishness.
