Are they smarter than Americans? I'd dispute that.
You might want to look at data on the good UC schools now that racial quotas are not used in California(has this happened??) and see how "Americans" are going to fare on entrance vs. Asians.
There are more of them, which doesn't really effect the equation much.
It vastly effects the equation because of R&D in the technology sector. The reason that Intel & MSFT have defacto monopolies is that the cost of bring both a compatible and a competitive product to market against them is very large especially considering the timeline available to do so and remain competitive. However, the cost of R&D per unit of product is inversely proportional to the size of the market. A market of 1.3B is of a great competitive advantage vs a market of 300M (or course 6B is even better!) when faced with massive R&D issues. This is already playing out in several attempts by the Chinese government to mandate technology standards different from the west, which in their opinion, helps foster local technology IP while avoiding paying for foreign IP. This is particularly the case in cellular communications. The west wails about it, but the thought of forgoing playing in a 1.3B market place is difficult to ignore. As China matures, I expect their attitude will modify, but that will be largely because they will have already won in terms of being the manufacturing as well as the design center of the technology universe, so they can afford to codevelop standards from then on.
Also to the extent that Intel has such a large advantage, its not based on cheap manufacturing labor
Intel's advantage is entirely based on the fact that they can reap more $/cm2 of their wafers than other semiconductor manufacturers, because they lack effective competition for there products. Every time Intel has tried to play in commodity markets (DRAM, FLASH, a long list of consumer IC's) they end up bailing. TSMC, UMC, etc get significantly less revenue per wafer than Intel. Of course, so does AMD, which is why they are dying once again.
And overall better infrastructure (despite all the talk of "crumbling infrastructure"), and proximity to market (the US is the biggest market, to the extent that China itself becomes a bit market this can change, but if China becomes such a big market they will also import more)
Regarding infrastructure, etc, all those things are going to improve in China, so to the degree that China is doing well even with those things in poorer condition vs. the USA, as those things improve, China should do even better. At least that is what I would expect. |
