News on China's scientific and technological development.

AssassinsMace said:

What's already happening that will negate any US attempt to stifle Chinese investment is Americans with good ideas and looking for an open-minded out-of-the-box-minded investors are going to China to develop their ideas.

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AssassinsMace said:

Bragging about which country a scientist would favor is of superficial and worthless value. Really if it were that important the West wouldn't be worrying over Chinese technological advancement as they have in recent weeks. Besides most Americans believe all US advancements are accomplished by white scientists and engineers and Asians in research and development are affirmative action cases. Some members of Congress have publicly called for a ban of foreign students especially from China to US colleges and universities. It just shows when they say everyone prefers to go to the US to why the US is ahead, it's pure propaganda and not based in truth. Again no reason to be alarmed over Chinese technology advancements if they don't have what it takes to be innovative and creative. Yet they are worried...

A story the media won't report much about is how foreign smart phone companies are watching China for technology and app ideas. And that's why China's financial tech is ahead of anyone else which is also being watched by the West as well. In the US new tech is hard to adopt by movers and shakers. Look at how long it took for credit cards to change and they're still vulnerable to being hacked even with the new tech because credit card companies have to accommodate those who are reluctant to spend the money for change. And that's what it really comes down to. Advancement in tech is really driven by those who have and more importantly are willing to spend the money and not where scientists and engineers prefer to go.

The US looking to stop Chinese investment in new US start-ups? Count that as a bad mark on the US's future. These start-ups wouldn't be accepting Chinese investments if Americans or other rich-Western countries were investing in them instead. No investment from home and no investment from China means no technological advancement at all. Look at the skepticism of the EM drive in the West. If China didn't dare invest money to see if it worked, no one would be working on it. What's already happening that will negate any US attempt to stifle Chinese investment is Americans with good ideas and looking for an open-minded out-of-the-box-minded investors are going to China to develop their ideas. The only way the US can stop that is to be everything they charge China is as the reason why China is not innovative and creative.

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Jura said:

now I read China Bets on Sensitive U.S. Start-Ups, Worrying the Pentagon

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A report commissioned by the U.S. Department of Defense was circulated among senior Trump administration officials this week, stating that Beijing has been encouraging Chinese companies to invest in American startups.

According to the report, Chinese firms with strong ties to China’s government have increasingly been investing in companies with cutting-edge technologies, many of which have potential military applications,

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According to three people knowledgeable about its contents, who spoke to The New York Times on the condition of anonymity, U.S. government controls that are intended to protect critical technologies are not working.

These critical technologies include companies that make rocket engines for spacecraft, sensors for autonomous Navy ships and printers that make flexible screens for possible use in fighter plane cockpits, in addition to companies researching artificial intelligence.

“What drives a lot of the concern is that China is a military competitor,” James Lewis, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies who is familiar with the report, told The New York Times. “How do you deal with a military competitor playing in your most innovative market?”

The investors could strike deals that give them access to intellectual property and the company’s technology development process, while also having access to the startups' data on facilities and personnel.

The report was commissioned during the Obama administration by Defense Secretary Ash Carter. Some Republican lawmakers, as well as Trump administration officials, have expressed interest in expanding the authority of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS.

According to two of the people who spoke to The New York Times about the report, Carter commissioned Mike A. Brown, the former chief executive of the cybersecurity firm Symantec, to lead the inquiry.

A Pentagon spokesman stated that DoD “will not discuss the details or components of draft internal working documents,” according to The New York Times.

In 2015, Chinese firms invested $9.9 billion in startups, four times what had been invested the previous year, according to CB Insights. The details of the deals made with startups, however, are unclear, as the companies are under no obligation to disclose them.

With an increase in foreign investment activity, the caseload for CFIUS is increasing, too. The total number of caseloads CFIUS covered from the three-year period of 2012-2014 was 358, up from 318 over the previous three-year period. China had the most cases, 68, up from 39 for the three years prior.

Christopher Brewster, an attorney with Washington-based Stroock & Stroock & Lavan,

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that China’s portion of the caseload is expected to be high, as their dealings received extra scrutiny from CFIUS.

“Any investment that would result in control of businesses in the national security sector by China is going to be reviewed by CFIUS,” he said.

Neurala, a Boston-based AI startup, is one of the companies to receive funding from China, taking a minority investment from a Chinese fund called Haiyin Capital. Haiyin Capital receives support from the Chinese state-run Everbright Group.

Before the investment, Neurala had been pursued by the U.S. Air Force, demonstrating their technology to the service’s secretary, then Deborah Lee James. They used a ground drone from Best Buy in their tech demonstration, programming the drone to recognize and follow around James.

“We were told by the secretary of the Air Force: ‘Your tech is awesome, we should put it everywhere,’ ” Neurala CEO Max Versace said. “No one followed up.”

Versace said his company has taken major precautions to prevent Chinese investors from having access to source codes and other important information.

In 2014, analysts pointed out that China’s new J-31 stealth fighter closely resembled Lockheed Martin’s F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. The consensus in the defense industry has remained that Chinese hackers breached Lockheed’s programs to gain information on the plane, as well as long-range air surveillance radar systems.

Other notable startups receiving Chinese investments include Quanergy, a company making light-detecting sensors for driverless cars; Kateeva, a Silicon Valley-based company making flexible screens that could be used in fighter jets; and XCOR Aerospace, an aerospace and commercial space travel company that works with NASA. XCOR also received funding from Haiyin Capital.

Ken Wilcox, chairman emeritus of the high-tech investor Silicon Valley Bank, told The New York Times that he was approached by three different Chinese state-owned firms. They wanted Wilcox to be their investment agent in Northern California — an offer he declined.

“In all three cases they said they had a mandate from Beijing, and they had no idea what they wanted to buy,” Wilcox said. “It was just any and all tech.”

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I have often jested that the main difference between the United States and China is not that one is capitalist and the other communist. Rather, it is that one is run by lawyers and the other by engineers.

Nowhere is this truer than in the astonishing “catch-up” occurring on the mainland in the explosion of digital technologies and their application to the daily lives of hundreds of millions of ordinary Chinese consumers.

As long as China is governed by engineers, I reckon this breakneck transformation will shock, intimidate and challenge us for decades to come
Ask people in the US or Europe about Chinese technology and most will still cast a dismissive smile and say China remains home of the cheap and cheerful copycat stuff that fills Walmart shelves. The dangerous naivity of this view was brought home forcefully at our APEC Business Advisory Council (ABAC) meetings last year – the first in San Francisco and the second in Shenzhen. The first thing we noticed was that our internet worked noticeably faster in Shenzhen than around San Francisco. The second was that our Chinese colleagues were paying for everything via AliPay on their smartphones.

In awe of the smart technologies on display at PayPal, Google and Dolby sound studios, we were blown away by Huawei, where 40 per cent of its 170,000 staff are working on pure research, and the foundations being are being laid for roll-out of 5G across the whole of China by 2020.

Hardly a week goes by without fresh reminders of extraordinary technological developments occurring on the mainland – many unique to China. Take the bike-sharing boom that has gripped Shanghai and other mainland cities over the past year. Many cities worldwide have bike-sharing operations, but none like those offered by Mobike and Ofo in Shanghai: find your brightly-coloured bike (there are an estimated 450,000 of them parked around Shanghai), open the Mobike app on your phone, scan the QR code on the bike, and you are away. AliPay charges you a security deposit, and user charges of RMB1-2 an hour. The bikes are GPS-tracked. This e-payment revolution has left the rest of the world in the dust. China’s digital payments market is today 50 times larger than that in the US.


China’s digital payments market is today 50 times larger than that in the US
More seriously, look at the 500-metre-wide radio telescope in Guizhou province that has joined the global search for extraterritorial life. Or the Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer which is by far the fastest in the world. Or lithium battery development. Or 3D-printed blood vessels made from stem cells…the list goes on.

I even noticed this recently when a tech publication compared the specs of the pride of America’s drone market – the GoPro Karma – with the Mavic Pro drone made by DJI in the Pearl River Delta. By every measure the Mavic was superior – it flew faster, flew twice as high, weighed 25 per cent less, could fly 30 per cent longer time, and cost US$749 compared with the GoPro’s US$799. Where do the GoPro team go to slit their wrists?

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This extraordinary transition from cheap and cheerful to world-matching high tech is not an accident, and in many governments around the world it is triggering alarm and protest. Back in the early 2000s, China’s engineers – whoops, party cadres – realised that as “manufacturer to the world” its companies were playing a mug’s game. They had captured the low-cost assembly parts of the global supply chains of companies worldwide, but this kept their millions of migrant workers in virtual poverty, while they were importing high-value-adding components from manufacturers in the US, Japan, Germany and Korea.


Domestic patent applications inside China have soared from nothing at the start of the century to 928,000 in 2014 – 40 per cent more than the US’s 579,000 and almost three times Japan’s 326,000
These engineers quickly worked out that if they were ever going to build a middle-class consumer economy, China’s workers would need to earn much higher wages – which meant higher productivity, and the technological capacity to make the high-value-adding sophisticated components inside China. From this, the Made in China 2025 scheme was conceived, attracting billions of dollars into research at home, and the acquisition of foreign companies, and foreign talent, wherever possible.

Within two years high-tech experts, particularly in the US, were pressing panic buttons. Robert Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, told the US Congress in January that China had plunged into “an aggressive by-hook-or-by-crook strategy that involves serially manipulating the marketplace and wantonly stealing and coercing transfer of American know-how”.

In truth, China’s government was not doing anything unique or even novel. The Made in China 2025 initiative was based on Germany’s Industrie 4.0 blueprint for technology development. What is awesome is the speed and effectiveness with which they have built this technology self-reliance initiative from scratch. A total of 19 data labs have been established in universities across the country. STEM education (science, technology, engineering and maths) is being prioritised countrywide. A “Qianren Jihua” (Thousand Talents) scheme is trawling the world to attract brilliant scientists.

And for a US official who has for decades had first-hand experience of how US government-funded defence industry research has been carefully used to fuel the US’s technology leadership worldwide, complaints about Chinese government support for high-tech research sounds a tad hypocritical.

But Mr Atkinson is right to be unnerved, and wary of the massive global implications of what is now occurring across the mainland. From a horse-and-cart economy just three decades ago, China is not only being transformed: its lack of legacy technology infrastructure, and a ruthlessly hypercompetitive private sector, are leapfrogging in ways most of the rest of the world can barely imagine. China’s Huawei in 2015 became the world’s biggest issuer of new international patents. According to the World Intellectual Property Organisation, domestic patent applications inside China have soared from nothing at the start of the century to 928,000 in 2014 – 40 per cent more than the US’s 579,000 and almost three times Japan’s 326,000.


China’s engineers – whoops, party officials – have not simply been driven by the quest for technology leadership, or fear of reliance on technology from overseas. They hate its gigantic deficit in royalty and licence fees to foreign technology-holders. From zero payments for intellectual property in 2000, China today pays royalty and licence fees of almost US$20bn. Since its companies currently earn a meagre US$1 billion a year in such payments from foreign companies, that means an intellectual property deficit of over US$18bn.

As long as China is governed by engineers, I reckon this breakneck transformation will shock, intimidate and challenge us for decades to come. And I suspect Americans will respond the way they know best – as lawyers.

David Dodwell researches and writes about global, regional and Hong Kong challenges from a Hong Kong point of view

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Blackstone said:

Meh, I don't buy it.

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Blackstone said:

Meh, I don't buy it.

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B.I.B. said:

Just wondering, years ago barely a month would pass without an article surfacing on the net about the ground breaking progress China was making with the use of stem cells to cure all sorts of terminal medical ailments. Scientists were suggesting stem cells could be used to grow heart parts, livers kidneys etc, thus reducing the need for organ donations.
Now it's gone quiet.........with little news..

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vesicles said:

Stem cell is still the way to go. No doubt about it. In peer reviewed journals, you still see stem cell work often, especially in high impact journals. Using stem cells is still a sexy thing if you want to get grants. I myself use stem cells to grow organoids (basically grow human tissue in a Petri dish). So the hope is still someday to grow entire organs for patients. And targeting stem cells is still one of the most promising ways to treat serious diseases.

I guess you don't see these news in the public as much any more because it's no longer new and hot. Back in the days when stem cell work first came out, it was new and it was shocking. Everyone wanted to hear about this flashy new tech. It is no longer new. It is no longer flashy. So the media has moved on to other new and flashy stuff. I guess that would be CRISPR-Cas9 nowadays...

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