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China Plans to Surpass the U.S. in Nanotech Development
Posted by
Soulskill
on Mon Feb 18, 2008 02:13 AM
from the don't-let-them-have-wil-wheaton dept.
from the don't-let-them-have-wil-wheaton dept.
SoyChemist writes "Sociologists at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting have reported that China is making major investments in nanotechnology. Their aim is to 'leapfrog' past the United States in technological development by focusing on long-ranging scientific goals. So far, the Chinese government has poured about $400 million into the young field of research. Considering the low cost of equipment and labor over there, that is a very large sum of money, and China's investment is expected to 'rise considerably.'"
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Unfortunately, (Score:2, Insightful)
Not trying to troll, but this sort of research and development is going to happen regardless. Other countries will take up the slack and fill any gap we do not.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Unfortunately, (Score:5, Insightful)
Nano Tech will require bright minds and very highend industrial technology. Currently, the US leads China in both fields.
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USA has no national goals (Score:5, Insightful)
USA lacks national technological goals now and no matter how bright the minds, if they don't have a supporting environment then they will not reach their potential.
China is working as a nation whiich means they will get further with what they have.
Money and equipment don't make for winning. Here's the story of the 1996 Americas Cup: The US team had the might of Boeing (Crays etc) and fleets of white coats to do their math modelling etc. The kiwis had a corner in their warehouse with a couple of SGI workstations. The kiwis achieved more with their math modelling because the math guy was onsite and slept on the floor next to his computers. They used what equipment they had with maximum effectiveness.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
[responding to an earlier comment about China's inability to innovate] Interestingly, a Communist society where national values are promoted by the central party has a stronger work-ethic and sense of teamwork than this country walking around the world insisting that everyone must
Re:USA has no national goals (Score:5, Insightful)
This article confuses being smart with being culture, which are two widely different things. Knowing lots of trivia about Shakespeare and Milton means you're cultivated (not smart). Knowing a lot about, say, nanotechs (as in: you're making valuable contributions to the field) means you're intelligent/competent in your field of expertise, but doesn't mean that you're cultivated. We can certainly lament that many Americans don't know much about history or geography, but it doesn't follow that they're less intelligent.
I also dislike how she labels everyone who disagrees with her an `anti-rationalist'. There is nothing irrational or anti-rational about claiming that the average American doesn't need to know foreign languages. Why would not knowing a foreign language be `a manifestation of ignorance'? Sure, if you're a businessman, a diplomat or a show-off, being multilingual is beneficial. If you're a mechanic, a bank teller or a steel-mill worker, I don't see the point.
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Re:USA has no national goals (Score:4, Insightful)
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the physics nerd vs. lit. nerd (Score:3, Interesting)
Are you saying one nerd is better than another?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
In Europe, knowing more than one language is beneficial, because (unless you live deep in Russia) you don't have far to go to find a place where people speak another language. There are, indeed, fairly small countries (like Belgium and Switzerland) that are multilingual.
In the US, knowing Spanish might be useful in the South, and possibly French in the Northeast, but other than that English is all you need. While there are good things about knowing a second language, it isn't nearly as useful as in oth
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:USA has no national goals (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is, she's right... but the xbox is not to blame.
Anyone who played monkey island and now plays halo knows what I mean. Likewise, anyone who has seen truly great films and now sees "live free or die hard", or worse, "transformers", knows what I mean. The content has become stupider, not the media. This is because people seem to want stupid fare, and that's not a phenomenon I know how to explain.
If I can offer any kind of proof of the innocence of videogames as a medium, it's this: when I was about six, my parents installed some simple games for me on the family computer. The games were educational; with mickey mouse as my avatar, I remember learning the word xylophone. In another game, the concept of opposites was illustrated to me by example. Later, I learned about pioneers in Oregon trail; I learned my sense of humor largely from exposure to lucasfilm games.
This is quickly becoming tl;dr. So, to summarize: this article is bullshit because it blames videogames (among other things) for the crumbling of the American mind; it fails to see that games without intelligent content, and movies of the same nature, are symptoms of modern-day America, not causes.
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Re:Unfortunately, (Score:5, Funny)
Second: How much high end equipment does the USA import from China?
And you're trying to suggest they don't have industrial technology?
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Re:Unfortunately, (Score:4, Insightful)
We've been able to do that because all the money was over here. However, between trade deficits and government borrowing, we've been working really hard on sending that money over to China lately. So before long it may not make much sense for their best and brightest to come over here when they can get paid with US cash right in their own hometowns.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
China is historically more capitalist than the US has ever been. There was a brief pause after the trauma of the Japanese invasion when Mao took over, but it seems to me that they're heading back to more normal times. (Of course, for China normal times means "We are the only important country. Everyone outside is a barbarian." And it includ
National Chauvinism? (Score:3, Insightful)
Nano Tech will require bright minds and very highend industrial technology. Currently, the US leads China in both fields.
The problem with the "bright minds" that the US leads with is that America doesn't really produce them domestically any more. The US imports most of its bright minds nowadays and from where is it getting a lot of them? China.
Sure, some of those bright minds stay in America after they a
Re:National Chauvinism? (Score:4, Interesting)
Lots of venture capital is pointed at China, simply because the cost to start something up is about 20% of setting it up in the US (and without a lot of the legal constraint as well, as an added bonus). Given that you see projects of bright ideas, some of which fail, some of which make millions.. Given a set budget, would you prefer to place bets on 10 of these, or 50 (given that the success is about even wherever the startup is performed, due to global nature of the project).
I'll bet on the 50 please. Five times the likely payoff, and the failures don't really hurt that much, as you don't gamble an awful lot out there.
VC is incredibly easy to find out in China.
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Re:Unfortunately, (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3)
I think it's more akin to pouring water into sand to build a pool.
China does not have a research base and trying to "leapfrog" without a base makes no sense. (research base in terms of university research structure and the experts)
NSF gets $6-7 billion a year. What is $400 million spread over 5 years.
Re:Unfortunately, (Score:5, Interesting)
What scares people about China is not that it is getting ahead but that we're open to their citizens but they are not really open to us (for instance, no foreign companies can have more than 49% ownership in a domestic company over there).
In some ways, other than the cheap doo-dads, it seems like a one sided relationship and that in the long term only China will benefit from it.
In the end, all great countries have declined. This has happened to China as well in the past. From what I see in history, it's usually when a people, as a whole, want to live for today with no thought of tomorrow.
It can be achieved by living off the riches of their past instead of working/producing themselves which got their predecessors to where they were. It's seen in our media companies who can't bear the thought of letting go of old systems or even 80 year old cartoons (Steamboat Willy), songs, etcetera. It's seen in many rich families too - the 1st generation works hard and brings in the billions, the second generation generally doesn't have to work quite as hard but enough to keep the empire afloat, and the 3rd generation tends to squander the luxury they grew up with. You can see the same trend in successful immigrant families as well.
Nationwide -- just look at the deficits being run up this year (3 trillion dollar budget!) -- the politicians are directly mortgaging our and our children's future for some frivolous spending today -- and there will be consequences even though they seem distant -- extremely high taxes or high inflation wiping out the middle class.
America isn't falling behind because of China's size. Switzerland never really looked America enviously and wistfully wondered if only they had our size and population, what great things they could achieve technologically - they are the leaders in many technological areas of the world. And China only surpassed Germany as top exporter recently even though Germany has less than 1/15 the population.
http://www.cnn.com/2005/BUSINESS/11/23/wto.germany.role/index.html [cnn.com]
It's generally in the attitude of the leaders and people as a whole. Not the size of the country.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
This is not true. Foreign companies may own 100% of Chinese companies. Foreigners may operate businesses in China. In industries considered vital to the nation, foreign ownership is limited - for instance banking, oil, transportation, telecommunication. The US, which has the world's most liberal policies in terms of foreign ownership, has similar limits in place, and in the case of banking, China's po
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Open? I don't think so (Score:4, Informative)
I must disagree. I've been to China, and I'm going back soon. It was _very_ easy to obtain a visa as an American citizen.
I have a very dear friend in China who wanted to come here. She could not obtain a visa - a tourist visa - to visit the USA. The requirements and the questions asked are amazingly intrusive. It is very difficult for a citizen of the PRC to obtain a tourist visa to come to the USA.
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Re: (Score:2)
totally ignorant (Score:5, Insightful)
Furthermore, my experience suggests that the Chinese have a much more substantial and real cultural barrier to any kind of technological progress (which is, I think, one reason why a society civilized a thousand years before the West, and having had a far larger population for far longer, has nevertheless consistently lagged behind the West in terms of invention and innovation, at least on a per capita basis).
The problem is that the Confucian tradition strongly reinforcea an acceptance of existing heirarchy, and of paying the utmost respect to your elders and those better educated and more experienced than yourself. This is antithetical to innovation and invention. The only way you can invent something new is by doing something that older and wiser heads think is foolish. (If they didn't think it was dumb, they'd have done it themselves already.)
Consequently true innovation happens only in a culture that does not value established wisdom too much, which is willing to take some chances on a young, hot-headed, crazy contrarian way of thinking. China has a long and strong cultural tradition of valuing established wisdom, and I think that is a much more significant cultural barrier to innovation than any silly Chicken-Little faddish fear that evangelicals are going to rise up and smite researchers working on nanoscopic gears and motors because the latter weren't described in the Bible.
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talk about bs... (Score:3, Insightful)
Let's see - China had the sundial, sextant, gunpowder and circumnavigation of the planet under their belt long before the west stopped playing with dolls and you make a claim like that?
They were tossed back to the stone age during world war two, courtesy the Japanese, and basically left to rot by the West - they are just now regaining technical traction. The Chinese used to lead the planet in terms of innovation
Corrections (Score:5, Informative)
Sundials were used by the ancient Egyptians and it's rather unlikely they got them from China -- it's probably something that's been invented many times in many places.
'Circumnavigation' appears to be an idea from Gavin Menzies' book and has little scholarly support (probably lots of *political* support) even in China and nothing resembling actual evidence, although like the Da Vinci Code it's probably going to be remembered as real history by hordes of idiots.
Manchu China was technologically and politically stagnant for a LONG time before the Japanese arrived, and Ming China had been technologically and politically stagnant for an even longer time before that, which is how the Manchurians were able to conquer China in the first place.
HTH
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The modern world's scientific achievements are mostly the product of the Western scientific method, and the difference between what China may have accomplished in ancient times and today's science cannot even be compared. Just a reminder that gunpowder, paper, etc. are called inventions of "ancient" China, even by the Chinese themselves.
I agree only to a degree with the original poster. Traditional Chinese culture does indeed stifle
Re:talk about bs... (Score:5, Interesting)
Exactly why Europe became what it did is an interesting thing. There is no reason, on the surface, why Europe over any other major culture, and Europe was backwards in many ways.
I believe it had to do with the free exchange of ideas, that challenged the status-quo. We introduced trial by jury, and reduced violence in society by placing vengence in the hands of judges.
There was an economic, social and scientific revolution as well. Holland become independent of Spain, but couldn't use its ports, so they created a vast fleet with which to explore and trade. They brought back ideas and money, and common folk became comparatively wealthy. The society was forward thinking and became full of painters, artists and scientists. They invented the microsope which became a popular curiosity. The motions of the planets were described, and the microscopic zoo was discovered. Something fundemental had happened. They saw past themselves to the book of nature, and began to read it.
While the Ming dynasty sent great junks to explore the world, they also stagnated. A comparatively tiny country - Holland - became a super-power much like Venice once was. The Chinese had invented all sorts of things, but their fundemental direction did not lead them to free thinking.
Of the eastern powers, only Japan successfully made the transition to an industrial society before WWII. I'm sure the reasons are very complex. The west didn't "throw" china away. They economically exploited it - yes. The British left a legacy of good government in many places in the world, and also let their empire go. This does not right the wrongs of the past, that is impossible. But it does allow the situation to move forward.
They will leapfrog the industrial revolution and plow headlong directly into the technological revolution while the rest of the world sits and watches.
I wonder where China will end up. Politically they are as arrogant and close-minded as the US. Taiwan is mine. Tibet is mine. You cannot critize us for how you treat what is mine. When the british cast free their empire, they acknowledged that how they treat their own and each other is a fundemental expression of who they are.
China's pride - and lust for economic prosperity - has exposed the worst qualities of our industrial age. The rest of the world is watching with facination and horror at China's economic miricle.
Sometime in the future we're going to be talking about sustainable development like it's the most important thing in the world. But between now and then, there will be a lot of conflict over who gets what. I wonder where China will end up.
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Re:talk about revising history. (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:talk about revising history. (Score:5, Insightful)
We're following steps they have trod, about a thousand years later, with our Christian Fundamentalists.
But I still don't see China stepping into the leadership role, the way they're planning. Look at my
Back before the Iraq war, I suggested that Saddam had "his most loyal scientists" working feverishly on WMD. Had he had "his best scientists" working on them, they might have achieved something. I see something of the same quandary for China, as long as the Party insists on retaining absolute political power.
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Kneejerk anti-religious trolling (Score:3, Interesting)
I've seen two areas in which people's ethical or religious beliefs or aesthetics may affect nanotech research - one is what to do about an
meh (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward [wikipedia.org]
No, it didn't work out very well.
Re:meh (Score:5, Informative)
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
But capitalism and Americans are still worse right?
This is a good point. Honestly, until recently, the US has performed extremely well with innovation in technology. By and large it is still performing well.
However, the culture in the US has been changing for the worse over the decades, as have education standards and national infrastructure. Festering corruption in financial circles and in political leadership is becoming ever more apparent and attempts for even a moderate return to sanity in government are quashed without much subtlety.
Capitalism can
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
"Worse"? Both capitalism and communism can be, and often are, terrible.
For example [zmag.org], economist Amartya Sen, who won a Noble Prize, did a comparison of India's democratic capitalist experiment with that of the Chinese famine, and the Chinese communist experiment. His work "Hunger and Public Action" estimated the deaths caused by the famines in China to be around 16.5 to 29.5 million. Most estimates regarding the total deaths from the Chinese communist experiment are said to be around 100 million.
Although
Err... Read more history. (Score:2)
Re:I plan ... (Score:5, Funny)
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Pollution (Score:2)
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Re:Pollution (Score:4, Funny)
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In contradiction to the Summary (Score:5, Informative)
Re:In contradiction to the Summary (Score:4, Funny)
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China is already huge in micro and nanotechnology (Score:2)
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Standard funding scare & beg (Score:5, Insightful)
Things to worry about. Srsly. (Score:2)
Real nanotech, or hype nanotech (Score:2)
Are they talking about "real" nanotech (atomic-level assemblers), or "hype" nanotech (surface chemistry of finely ground powders)? Much of what's now being touted as "nanotech" is the latter.