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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Cogito Ergo Sum who wrote (152367)	1/7/2020 7:31:18 PM
From: TobagoJack	Respond to of 217773

Team China offered to help Teams Africa build build build, and Teams Africa agreed. So few years, and so much already done. Still, so much more to do. The next frontier is now.

To: Cogito Ergo Sum who wrote (152367)	1/12/2020 11:51:33 PM
From: TobagoJack	Respond to of 217773

Marking the copybook for watch & brief Believe the article emphasise too much the effect of state-help, but let's see Hard-fork bifurcation may be good for the planet, gives two horses to wager on economist.com With the state’s help, Chinese technology is booming Jan 2nd 2020 FOR MOST of human history, China was the world’s most advanced technological power. The blast furnace originated there, and thus so, too, did cast iron. Other breakthroughs included porcelain and paper. Its gunpowder propelled the first military rockets farther than javelin or arrow could fly; its compasses magically revealed magnetic north when the stars were hidden. Only in the Middle Ages did Europe begin to match Chinese ingenuity and capacity in these fields, doing so largely through imitation. Only with the growth of European mechanical industries and overseas empires in the 18th century did the Westerners become its rivals. In the centuries that followed, hampered by its own stifling education system, China was defeated in the opium wars, then suffered terrible civil unrest and a disastrous revolution that reduced the country to a technological bystander and “Made in China” to a byword for gimcrackery. Now China is back, trailing clouds of smartphones, high-speed trains, stealthy aircraft, bitcoin mines and other appurtenances of high-tech flair. The parts of the world that overtook it are worried. In 2015 its leaders announced a ten-year, $300bn plan, “Made in China 2025”, designed to make its semiconductor, electric-vehicle and artificial-intelligence industries (and many others) as good as any in the world, if not better. This declaration that China was no longer content with being a factory for American high-tech products created a new tension between the world’s two largest economies. As the plan approaches its halfway point, this conflict seem to be worsening. America accuses China of stealing and spying its way up the technology supply chain and hobbling American technology by keeping it out of the Chinese market. Its defence department worries about running military operations through networks stuffed with Chinese components. Senators are troubled by how China is using technology to oppress its own people. The American policy establishment fears that the trend for connecting previously unconnected objects like trains and cars to computer networks will offer the Chinese government increased geopolitical leverage at the very least—and at worst, direct control of parts of other countries’ infrastructure. China’s perspective is more straightforward: America is unfairly using its existing power to curtail China’s rightful technological return. Much thinking about these issues focuses on what technological capabilities China has and what it lacks, where it is ahead of America and where it is lagging behind. But that piecemeal account offers little help in understanding China’s ability to foster new technologies or to dominate the supply chains and standards that underpin them. The vital question is not what technologies China has access to now, but how it built that access and how its capacity for fostering new technologies is evolving. That is the focus of this report. Obviously, how the correlation of forces between the two powers ends up is important. But to understand that you also need to come to grips with Chinese technology on its own terms. Details of the processes behind the country’s technological development are vital to assessing the long-term challenge posed by a technologically ascendant China. They can get lost in a higher-level geopolitical discussion that is hyperbolic and polarised. The process of gaining that understanding starts with looking at older technologies, such as high-speed trains and nuclear-power plants. The work of indigenising these technologies is almost complete, and the Chinese firms and state-owned enterprises behind them are poised to export to the world. As such, they represent a model of successful state-led development that has used the state’s repressive power over its citizenry and the sway it holds over the economy to deploy technology on a massive scale. It’s my partyNo government controls more of an economy worth controlling than China’s does. Some 51,000 state-owned firms employ about 20m people and are collectively worth $29trn, according to analysis in 2017 by the OECD, a club of mainly rich countries. Many private Chinese firms claim that they receive no state support, and in strictly monetary terms that is often true, but free land from provincial governments and a side hustle in property management is the norm. The Communist Party’s ability to ensure the successful deployment of a technology is not restricted to funding. The state hedges risk, squashes NIMBYism and pays for infrastructure. But two other factors are taking over from raw state power as the motor of Chinese technological development. One is the place its companies occupy in many of the most important supply chains in the world, giving them easy access to all sorts of technological know-how. As workshop to the world, China—and particularly the Pearl River Delta region that includes the booming cities of Shenzhen and Guangzhou—makes components for almost everything, understands how to assemble them, and is set up to bring together the right ones as quickly as possible. This geoepistemological advantage explains why the only successful smartphone companies founded since 2010 have been those set up around Shenzhen. (They are all non-state firms.) Their success has spread to new markets based on similar components. The consumer-drone market is dominated by China because drones are basically phones with rotors. Secondly, the size and particularities of the Chinese market have become spurs to innovation in their own right. WeChat and Alipay, which use QR codes to make payments with phones, emerged and took hold in China because payment cards were not yet established; as a result Chinese cities are becoming cashless. The Communist Party’s need for social control has stimulated an entire industry of machine-learning technologies catering to the security services. The West does not like the applications to which China’s AI companies—mostly, also, non-state firms—turn their algorithms, but there is no denying the scale of their ambition (though their success has some under-appreciated foundations). Not every peculiarity of the Chinese system is a benefit. State support is frequently doled out to firms or industries based on non-commercial factors. Ignorance and corruption mess things up; so does a thirst for prestige. In the crucial battleground of semiconductors, Beijing’s investment policy is largely based on chasing after the highest-value sections of the supply chain by pumping money into Chinese versions of the foreign companies now commanding those heights. Truly innovative and effective semiconductor businesses sometimes suffer merely because they are less coveted by party officials. Examining Chinese tech development reveals things not just about China, it illuminates global trends. Some are obvious. A government able to shape and ignore public opinion can do things that governments forced to listen to the people—including vocal minorities—cannot. If China’s technocrats want nuclear power and genetically modified organisms, they will get them. Some trends are subtler. China’s failure to catch up in technologies like internal-combustion engines, civil aviation and, to date, semiconductors shows how hard it is to make humanity’s most complex mechanisms. The organisations which manage to do so depend on arcane insights and baroque procedures carefully nurtured by corporate hierarchies over decades. That even an economy as mighty as China’s can scarcely catch up should give pause for reflection about the possibilities for innovation elsewhere. The potential for new technologies to enhance and project Chinese power, and the threat that poses to a global order led by America, hangs over China’s technological development. But these are not its sole inspiration. China is grappling with an ageing population, environmental degradation and a slowing economy. The strengths and weaknesses of its attempts to solve these problems technologically will have lessons for other countries in similar straits, and for those which see China not just as a competitor but as an ever more sophisticated market. For countries which wish to co-exist with China, its weaknesses reveal good places to invest in developing one’s own capabilities. For those who wish to reduce or curtail Chinese technological power, knowing its strengths and vulnerabilities is vital. ¦ Technology in China A new revolution This article appeared in the Technology Quarterly section of the print edition under the headline "With the state’s help, Chinese technology is booming"

To: Cogito Ergo Sum who wrote (152367)	1/12/2020 11:57:06 PM
From: TobagoJack	Respond to of 217773

Another one for the copybook Yes, somethings require state-backing, else cannot get off the drawing board The formulae for reactors and rail can and is being applied to many other things. BTW, the Beijing - Shanghai hi-speed rail IPO is soon scmp.com <<Beijing-Shanghai High-speed Railway cuts IPO size but is still on track for China’s biggest offering since 2015>> economist.com Success stories China’s nuclear industry and high-speed trains are world class And the state has been crucial in making them so Jan 2nd 2020 WITHIN THE cavernous factory of Dongfang Heavy Machinery Company (DFHM), a state-owned firm based in Guangdong province, lies what looks like a suit of armour built for a mis-shapen giant. In fact, they are parts built to contain something even more fearsome—nuclear reactors and the high-pressure, high-temperature steam that they produce. Some are still being worked on. Some are almost ready to head off, by barge, to sites along the southern coast where China is expanding its nuclear-power industry with greater ambition than any other country in the world. In 1996, with the help of Framatome, a French firm with a lot of nuclear history, China built a reactor at Ling Ao, 60km (37 miles) from Hong Kong. Part of the deal was that Framatome would share its know-how. It helped a local firm that had previously made boilers learn how to make the hulking metre-thick metal vessels that can safely contain a nuclear reaction. That firm became DFHM. As well as the main reactor vessels, it also now makes the steam generators which turn the nuclear heat into something which can drive turbines and make electricity. Zou Jie, a DFHM executive, says his firm’s products are now competitive with Framatome’s. One reason for this progress is that China’s nuclear industry has gained experience quickly. In the past 20 years China has built nuclear plants faster than any other country; its nuclear capacity is now 43GW, third only to that of France (63GW) and America (99GW). Unlike in those two countries, though, China’s capacity is growing. And whereas in 1996 just 1% of the value of its first nuclear plants came from domestic firms, that figure is now 85%. A very similar story can be seen in the country’s high-speed-rail network, though with a telling interlude. China committed to high-speed rail, as to nuclear plants, under Deng Xiaoping in the early 1990s. But it started off down a home-grown technological dead end of trains which, instead of running on wheels, levitate above their track on magnetic fields. Engineers around the world had failed to make such systems work; Chinese engineers proved no exception. So in the 2000s China swallowed its pride and commissioned more traditional trains from overseas providers who promised to let subcontractors indigenise the technology. They’ve been workin’ on the railroadAs with nuclear, once committed, the country pushed hard. By the end of 2018 China had 29,000km of high-speed track, two-thirds of the global total. Chinese-designed trains do not yet match their Japanese and European counterparts. But one of the four high-speed-train models deployed on the network is now fully Chinese-made, and ready for export. China’s development of nuclear power and high-speed trains shows that the power of technology does not, as is often assumed, lie primarily in innovation. What matters most about a technology is that it should be both useful and used. And the factors that make it so may be a matter of politics more than ever better widgets. For any technology that seems to meet a national need but faces right-of-way issues during its deployment, as high-speed rail does, or concerns about public safety, as nuclear does, there is no greater ally than the Chinese Communist Party. When 1m people in Hong Kong signed a petition against the construction of a nuclear plant nearby, a Chinese minister shut down their complaints by stating that “unscientific objections” would not stop the project. Knowing things can be built quickly makes the commitment to really big engineering projects more feasible in China than elsewhere. It is the same in Russia, the other authoritarian power where nuclear plants are still built for domestic use and export. Even with few political risks and lots of fairly skilled cheap labour the upfront capital costs of building nuclear plants are huge; but China’s governments, national and provincial, and state-owned companies had no worries about their balance-sheets. Being a one-party state does not blind China to public concerns about safety. When 40 people died in a high-speed-train collision near the city of Wenzhou in 2011, the public was outraged. Passenger numbers fell; work on new lines was paused; safety procedures were scrutinised. There has not been a similar accident since. After the Fukushima nuclear meltdown in Japan that same year, the Chinese government’s position on new plants went from “active” to “conservative”, says Mr Zou of DFHM, and deployment slowed down. That means China will miss the target of 58GW of nuclear-generation capacity it set itself for 2020. But if, as Mr Zou expects, China continues to build up to eight reactors a year, it should meet the lower end of its target of 120GW by 2030. Some of these reactors are still of foreign design. Versions of both the AP1000, an American design, and the EPR, a French one, have begun operating in China over the past two years. But that underlines China’s edge. It is the only country, including France and America, yet to have successfully built either design. Rather than importing more nuclear technology, Mr Zou and others are looking to export their own. The reactor of choice—Mr Zou says that Li Keqiang, China’s prime minister, has ordered that it be given pride of place—is China’s brand new Hualong One. It is developed from reactors based on French designs, as those were in turn based on American designs, but can reasonably claim to be completely Chinese. Although none has yet been finished (the first is due to be connected to the grid in Fujian province in 2020), two are being built near Karachi in Pakistan. Another is planned for Argentina, and Britain is evaluating plans to build one at Bradwell in Essex. One advantage of such exports is that the Chinese will get the design scrutinised by independent regulators abroad. That China’s nuclear regulator is part of the same government that is urging the industry’s expansion brings with it some serious concerns about safety. The reactor-export business development of China’s nuclear industry has gone well. Technology-transfer agreements with foreign companies like Framatome were carried out without controversy. Lower wages for manufacturing workers combined with cheap state-backed loans meant that Chinese nuclear plants are some of the most affordable in the world. There have been no accidents in 20 years of operation. Though many Western experts believe that nuclear power has a real, if smallish, role in the energy systems of the future, exporting nuclear plants may never be a huge business. In most places, the zero-carbon electricity they offer will not be as cheap as wind or solar. The Chinese are aware of this, too. Their renewables industry has grown even faster than nuclear power and the two sources are providing the country with broadly similar amounts of power. Again, the story is one of taking a foreign technology, indigenising it and scaling it up massively. Whether it be turbines, reactors, trains or satellite launchers, China has mastered this procedure. ¦ This article appeared in the Technology Quarterly section of the print edition under the headline "China’s nuclear industry and high-speed trains are world class"

To: Cogito Ergo Sum who wrote (152367)	1/13/2020 12:00:52 AM
From: TobagoJack	2 Recommendations Recommended By 3bar Cogito Ergo Sum Respond to of 217773

Speaking of the formulae for reactors and trains, skipping generation also can help a lot ... especially if followed up by arms and legs, cheaper flexible labour, dirt capital, and inexpensive IP economist.com Cars China has never mastered internal-combustion engines Electric cars will be different Jan 2nd 2020 AT A SHINY new factory in the suburbs of the port city of Wenzhou in south-eastern China, a sturdy robot arm picks up a curved sheet of glass. As a vehicle crawls past it on a conveyor belt, the arm gently nestles the windscreen into its housing, then swivels back to get its greedy suction cups on the next one. Bleepy electronic versions of “Greensleeves” and “Baa Baa Black Sheep” blare out over the factory floor every so often, signalling break time for one of the various groups of human workers. This is the first factory of a newish Chinese firm called WM Motor. At the end of the production line, brand new electric SUVs roll out into the world at a rate of about 16 every hour, two-thirds of the factory’s maximum rate. Though it currently makes only the one model, the company’s global ambitions are clear. The car’s Chinese name is Weima, which means “powerful horse”. Its Western name is a German word, Weltmeister, which means “world champion”. The German name is the one to focus on. Executives in China’s electric-vehicle industry believe it has a chance to do something that its older internal-combustion-engine carmakers never managed—become a global force. That is quite an ambition for a Chinese car company. Though China may now make nuclear-power plants able to dominate the world market, its domestic internal-combustion-engine cars cannot dominate even the Chinese market. The best-selling manufacturers are VW and Honda, whose vehicles are built by local joint ventures. This is because nuclear reactors, although they need extremely strong and carefully engineered components, are basically souped-up kettles. A car, and especially its engine, is something much finer, its pistons and valves continuously dancing, the string of explosions in each cylinder perfectly timed, the amount of torque transferred through the crankshaft to the wheels just what the driver expects, all of it owned by someone who wants to devote as little time to maintaining this mechanical miracle as possible—ideally, none. No amount of technology transfer, legitimate or otherwise, can boost a country to pole position in such an industry. As Japan and South Korea have shown, it takes decades of intense investment, hard graft and astute leadership to develop the engineering know-how and the intricate supply chains that make such things possible. China does not have the patience for that. “You would have to invest billions of dollars for another 20 years, and maybe then we would be getting close to the Germans,” says Freeman Shen, WM’s founder. “It’s hopeless.” Tapping into existing supply chains might make things easier; but although China has the access this takes in electronics, in cars it does not. And the car industry’s supply chains are lines of co-operation as well as commerce. To make affordable, high-quality cars you do not just need the likes of Bosch to sell you off-the-shelf components. You need their active co-operation in creating just the right parts. If providing that co-operation means risking established business with bigger, better incumbents, it is unlikely to be completely forthcoming. No ICE, babyChinese EV firms like WM think that the fact that they depend on a completely different—and more electronic—set of components means they can do an end-run around the internal-combustion incumbents, taking the lead in a new industry rather than catching up in an old one. And they are the only ray of light in a very gloomy Chinese carmaking outlook. The rest of the car market has been shrinking for 16 straight months. Sales of EVs have been set back by cuts to the government subsidy programme in 2019, but nonetheless the government still wants a quarter of all cars sold by 2025 to be electric. Today they account for only 7% of the market. But China being China, that still works out as 1.5m vehicles a year, making it the largest EV market in the world. The market is dominated by Chinese incumbents moving from internal-combustion vehicles to EVs. But there is also a pack of startups. Nio may be the most famous, but WM is perhaps the most ambitious. It owns and operates all of its factories, and although it said it had delivered only 12,600 cars in 2019 when your correspondent visited in October, it says it will soon have the capacity to produce 200,000 a year in Wenzhou, and that a slightly bigger plant in Huanggang, 630km inland in Hubei province, will make another 300,000 cars a year when it is completed. These facilities come with the compliments of the provincial governments in Zhejiang and Hubei. Officials see the factories as bringing their provinces jobs, prestige and VAT receipts, which in China are collected when the car leaves the factory. And if WM succeeds, the officials associated with it will earn the sort of kudos that can elevate them a long way in the party hierarchy. Nio and Xpeng, WM’s venture-capital-backed competitors, have not yet benefited from quite this level of largesse. They are having their cars made by contract manufacturers, which is less capital-intensive but also yields less control over the process. Getting high-tech factories built for nothing gives WM a chance to achieve something that China’s combustion-engine car companies never managed: develop core technology that is globally competitive. Mr Shen, a car-industry veteran, says he has had 1,000 engineers dedicated to working on electric vehicles for the past four years. “I guarantee that the largest car company in the world, Volkswagen, does not have 1,000 engineers dedicated to electric vehicles,” he says. Mr Shen’s focus is on the EV’s battery packs and the power-management systems that distribute electricity around the vehicle. Because the battery pack is the most expensive part of the car, squeezing the same range out of less battery is a competitive advantage; that is what WM’s innovative battery-cell configurations are meant to do. Mr Shen says WM holds 1,200 patents, with the most important ones around the car’s battery, electric motor and control system. That is because such innovations could be reverse-engineered. The software that manages the battery’s thermal properties in a crash, on the other hand, is a complex trade secret. Mr Shen says he expects the best electric-car companies to start building their own batteries eventually. Those have hitherto been sourced from giant companies like CATL, a Chinese firm which holds a large share of the global electric-vehicle-battery market. Big car companies would never source their engines from third parties; integrating them closely into the design and production process improves overall performance. Mr Shen expects electric cars to be no different. Beside Nio and Xpeng, WM’s stiffest competition in China will come from two foreign firms, Tesla and VW. Tesla’s boss, Elon Musk, says the company’s Shanghai gigafactory will be making 1,000 cars a week by the end of 2019; they will mostly be its Model 3, which is both its cheapest car and, at 355,800 yuan ($50,000), still very expensive for the Chinese market. The factory, built in just eight months, is designed to make 500,000 cars a year. Meanwhile, Volkswagen is refitting one existing Chinese factory and building a brand new factory to produce 600,000 EVs a year. It expects to produce 1m electric cars a year in the country by 2022 and to have manufactured 11.6m electric cars in China by 2028. If those ambitions are fulfilled the firm’s EVs will have captured about 5% of the total Chinese car market. Plug me in, beam me upAll this ambition suggests that there may be a bust on the way, and that the EV startups may suffer badly from it. WM is hoping to turn those particular lemons, grown through overzealous and incontinent state aid, into lemonade. It expects many of its smaller competitors to go bust over the next few years, especially now that the subsidy programme has been stopped. That will free up talented engineers. A more rationally delivered advantage that the state is providing for WM and others hoping to sell EVs in China is charging infrastructure. This makes buyers more confident. The state also facilitates the roll-out of advanced technical features for the benefit of the public at large. Mr Shen says that WM is planning a pilot with State Grid, China’s largest utility, in 2020 whereby the batteries in its customers’ cars will be used as grid storage to help balance the flow of electricity in Beijing and Shanghai. Even if WM fails, China is set to be a large market for EVs long before any other country, and that will benefit the industry as a whole. Because the government demands that all cars sold in China are made with Chinese components, the country will come to host the world’s most important supply chains for electric cars. This opens up the possibility that Chinese supply chains will eventually be used to provide components for the rest of world, as with smartphones. It also suggests that such a strategy could see Chinese EV makers capture a lot of the value from vehicles made elsewhere. Their simplicity, compared with cars powered by internal combustion, makes EVs easier to manufacture in sections. Because there are no cooling fluids to pump around the vehicle, no drivetrain to run through the floor of the cabin, and no engine block poised to crush occupants in the event of a crash, the top and the bottom of the car can easily be separated out and produced independently. The bottom part, which contains the complexity of battery and power-management electronics, is called the “skateboard”, and embodies the lion’s share of the value of the car. Mr Shen imagines a scenario in which his firm’s skateboards are shipped around the world to be integrated with bodies and interiors created by other manufacturers that have failed to create their own core EV technology. It would be a complete reversal of the situation today, where Chinese car companies need Western firms to supply the most valuable components. China’s huge market for EVs is creating a supply chain that startups like WM and self-reinventing incumbents like vw will rely on. That may end up being an advantage for the Chinese industry on a global scale.¦ This article appeared in the Technology Quarterly section of the print edition under the headline "China has never mastered internal-combustion engines"

To: Cogito Ergo Sum who wrote (152367)	1/13/2020 12:03:10 AM
From: TobagoJack	1 Recommendation Recommended By 3bar Respond to of 217773

Another point, that weaker IP protection might not be all bad, for it keeps everyone running harder ... economist.com Intellectual property Chinese inventiveness shows the weakness of the law Entrepreneurs struggle to retain control of their inventions Jan 2nd 2020 AS THE DOTCOM boom was approaching its peak in 1999, Yi Li was working for JDS Uniphase, a Silicon Valley company that made lasers and optical fibres. JDS was a high-flyer, with a market capitalisation fives times the value of Apple at that time. Investors loved the firm for its role in building out the infrastructure of the internet. But when boom turned to crash JDS’s share price plunged by 99.8%. Employees whose stock options had made them paper millionaires lost it all overnight. “I got killed by the bubble,” says Mr Li. “I was too young, too naive. But it was a very good lesson.” The lesson was one that Mr Li would put to good use back in his native China. But even though he went on to make the fortune that he missed out on with JDS, he discovered first-hand the problems that Chinese entrepreneurs face in protecting their inventions in a nation where protections for intellectual property are nascent at best. His tussles to retain control of his inventions typify a big barrier to China’s technological advancement. As he picked himself up, Mr Li asked himself where all the money that had poured into JDS had gone. Had it really just evaporated? He decided that, in fact, the apparent financial destruction of the company was what physicists call a phase change—the stuff was still there, but arranged in different forms. The money that had poured into the manufacture of communications equipment had made that equipment cheap, made the construction of a global internet feasible, and the future growth of internet companies a possibility. He developed a thesis for future success: in the wake of any over-investment there would always be a related opportunity to build upon its ashes in the form of newly cheap supply chains. The money that had been in JDS had flowed off towards the next generation of internet companies that its infrastructure had enabled: Google, Amazon and eBay. Next time he saw a bubble, Mr Li was ready. It was 2004 and money had poured into the manufacture of light-emitting diode (LED) bulbs designed to illuminate rooms much more efficiently than incandescent bulbs. The price of the bulb’s fundamental component, the blue diode, had crashed. Mr Li saw that as an opportunity to develop a new kind of product: a laser projector that relied on the same supply chain that was pumping out cheap blue LEDs. At the time laser projectors were bulky and expensive because they needed three different types of laser, one to project each of the three additive primary colours of red, blue and green. But only the cost of blue laser components had crashed. Red and green lasers were still expensive. Mr Li started thinking about how to make a laser projector using just blue light. Most cheap LED bulbs work by shining blue light generated by a semiconductor through a phosphorescent filter that absorbs it and re-emits red and green light in its place, thereby producing white light from the mixture. The same works with a laser but, because its light is so intense—1,000 times brighter than an LED—the phosphor filter burns out immediately. Mr Li came up with a ridiculously simple solution. Instead of keeping the filter static in front of the blue laser light, he set it spinning, a disc of phosphor which, if kept moving, could pump out red and green light, as well as blue, while relying on just a blue laser source. The spinning filter did not burn out, because no single spot was ever subjected to enough light intensity for long enough. Mr Li had found a way to tap the cheap blue-LED supply chain and build a laser projector that was ten times cheaper than the competition. Once he had his design, Mr Li set up Appotronics in Shenzhen, as close to the LED supply chain as he could get. This cemented his first-mover advantage. His system for making a fully fledged laser projector out of a single blue diode was simple and easy to reverse-engineer, so he had to rely on patents for protection. If he had tried to keep it a secret and corner the market, competitors would have torn his devices apart and quickly copied them. The design was a global hit. If you have recently used a cheap, portable projector that throws a surprisingly good image, it is likely to contain Mr Li’s design. He estimates that Appotronics is the only Chinese firm that holds a patent that has been cited as “prior art” more than 400 times, a sign that large numbers of companies are using the idea. Apple, the beacon of Silicon Valley innovation, has only a few dozen patents cited so often. A suitably bloodthirsty competitor can license the patent, then use it to develop a better product. But Appotronics’ proximity to the Chinese LED supply chains meant it could move much faster than its competitors in building improved new versions of the product. While China’s supply chains have buoyed up his company, its intellectual-property (IP) system has held Mr Li and his firm back. The American government reels off a long list of problems with the Chinese system, such as trade-secret theft, failure to respect intellectual property and failure to license software (a $6.8bn hole, according to the American government). Mr Li’s problem is the cap on compensation for patent breaches. He says it is too low to disincentivise IP theft. This year the cap was raised from 1m to 5m yuan but that is still not very much. “The average payout in the American system is $2m. In China it’s 80,000 yuan ($11,300),” says Mr Li. “People [in China] are not going to waste money doing patent litigation. You discourage local companies from doing innovation.” So sue meIf Chinese companies do take patent disputes to court, the process often takes years—a lifetime for a young startup. But that is still progress. China did not have any patent law until 1985. Specialised courts for hearing IP cases were introduced in 2014. An analysis of those courts’ performance carried out by Renjun Bian of the law school at University of California, Berkeley, shows that, perhaps surprisingly, they have so far favoured non-Chinese patent holders over domestic ones. Ms Bian found that foreign patent holders were winning more cases, receiving injunctions at higher rates, and being awarded larger damages than domestic ones. Those results are probably a reflection of the legitimate nature of foreigners’ grievances—but they are also a sign of the courts’ good faith. China’s progress on intellectual property (see chart) is not proving enough for America’s trade hawks. But internal pressure from innovators like Mr Li is more likely to create positive change in China’s IP system than a trade war is. This presents a conundrum for American policymakers. The best path to a Chinese system which respects and protects intellectual property is for China itself to become more innovative. And yet that very same Chinese innovation, and the more efficient use of resources as a nation that it makes possible, is unsettling to Americans. The obsessive focus on the handling of IP in China also misses the bigger picture. Access to intellectual property is just one aspect of successful technology development. Mr Li’s valuable IP is sensitive because his design is simple and does not require a complex supply chain to produce (though being right next to the LED factories of Shenzhen has certainly been an advantage). His patent portfolio is the biggest edge he has. In the case of more complex technologies like vehicles, nuclear plants or semiconductors, other factors matter more—relationships with suppliers, access to affordable labour, the know-how to use the IP at all. As the West grapples with China’s technological rise, it should remember that it holds great power in these less tangible areas beyond IP, areas from which it is hard to pilfer.¦ This article appeared in the Technology Quarterly section of the print edition under the headline "Chinese inventiveness shows the weakness of the law"

To: Cogito Ergo Sum who wrote (152367)	1/13/2020 12:05:48 AM
From: TobagoJack	Respond to of 217773

speaking of cheaper flexible labour, dirt capital, and inexpensive IP; factors that are obvious unless one is up a pole, but from the bottom of a well economist.com Data China’s success at AI has relied on good data But cheap labour has also played an important part Jan 2nd 2020 CHINA IS THE land of face recognition. Cameras able to extract face prints from passers-by are common in the streets of large cities like Guangzhou and Shenzhen. Boxy vending machines at airports offer to let you pay for a cup of orange juice, robot-squeezed for perfect freshness, by scanning your face. From December 1st all people applying for an account with one of China’s telecoms companies such as China Mobile must have their face scanned. Previous regulations required proof of identity, but the possession of users’ face prints will let firms verify identities in real-time via smartphone cameras. Considering the oppressive purposes to which this technology is being put—most notably in the Muslim-majority areas of north-west China—it would not be appropriate to call China’s rapid adoption of it anything more than a technical success. The underappreciated fact that companies leaping ahead in the field are more reliant on cleverly deployed cheap labour for their progress than on any technological edge, suggests another reason for caution before declaring a Chinese victory in the tech wars. But understanding how China has got face recognition to flourish is nonetheless instructive. Two of the world’s most valuable startups, Megvii and SenseTime, worth $4bn and $7.5bn respectively, are Chinese AI companies specialising in the field. Their application of it alone would make it one of the most widely deployed forms of artificial intelligence in the world. Like most companies deploying intelligent software, Megvii and SenseTime rely on a technique called machine learning. They do not ask their human coders to program computers with rules that distinguish between one face and another. Instead the coders provide the computer with masses of data about faces, usually photographs, and write software which trawls through those photos looking for patterns which can be used reliably to tell one unique face from another. The patterns picked up by that learning software make better rules for recognising faces than anything a human coder could describe explicitly. Humans are good at recognising faces but, with the right software, computers can learn to be much better. Face-recognition software is much easier and cheaper to deploy than human recognisers. It just needs software, powerful computers and data—the new trinity of AI. It is in the third of those categories, people will warn you, that China’s great advantage lies. It has loads of data. But its advantage is subtler than that. Data alone are not much use for building AI software. They must first be labelled. This means that the data set must be endowed with the contextual information that computers need in order to learn statistical associations between components of that data set and their meaning to human beings. To learn to differentiate between cats and dogs, a computer is first shown pictures in which each animal is correctly labelled. To learn to distinguish between one person’s face and another, a computer must first be shown what a face is, using labelled data, and then how to tell the difference between cheekbones and brows, again via human labelling. Only with enough labelled instructions will it be able to start recognising faces without human help. Underpinning companies like Megvii and SenseTime is a sprawling digital infrastructure through which data are collected, cleaned and labelled before being processed into the machine-learning software that makes face recognition tick. Just as Apple adds its brand to phones mostly assembled by cheap Chinese labour, so too the Chinese AI companies design and brand AI software and services which sit atop a data supply chain using cheap labour at Chinese data factories no one has ever heard of. Megvii has spent 218m yuan ($31m) on labelled data in the past three and a half years, according to its IPO prospectus. Many of the algorithms used contain little that is not available to any computer-science graduate student on Earth. Without China’s data-labelling infrastructure, which is without peer, they would be nowhere. Charles Liu is the founder of one of China’s largest data factories, known in English by the initials MBH. He employs 300,000 data labellers across China’s poorest provinces. Each labeller works a six-hour shift each day, tagging a stream of faces, medical imagery and cityscapes. MBH pushes a stream of data to them as if on a digital conveyor belt, and they churn through it, creating the syllabus from which machines learn. They can turn it off to take a bathroom break, but that is the extent of their control. They do not choose which data to label but have them chosen for them. Mr Liu claims that MBH’s trick is not just numbers, but the methods the firm uses to distribute labelling work efficiently to its workers. This is done using the same kind of machine-learning systems that Amazon, an American e-commerce giant, uses to recommend products to its customers. Instead of suggesting stuff to shoppers, MBH assigns labelling tasks to workers. First, it gathers data from its workers as they carry out labelling jobs. Mr Liu says the company records its workers’ gaze, mouse movements and keyboard strokes. It also takes note of what sort of data-labelling task the worker is performing, from medical-imagery labelling to text translation. By measuring performance according to the type of task, he says, he is able to find workers who are better at some tasks than others, and steer those tasks to those workers. All of this happens automatically as MBH’s customers feed tasks into the company. At its most finely tuned, Mr Liu says these systems let his army of workers classify data almost in real time. In work for TikTok, a popular short-form video app owned by ByteDance, a company based in Beijing, he says MBH’s data labellers handle imagery which TikTok’s automated system cannot be sure is not pornographic. MBH shows the putative porn to hundreds or thousands of human workers who, like Justice Potter Stewart, know it when they see it. The company then returns their aggregated answer to TikTok in less than a second. AI arbitrageFor their efforts, MBH’s workers are paid an average salary of 3,000 yuan ($425) per month, three times more than the average worker in China’s poorest regions. Mr Liu can deploy wage arbitrage between the richest and poorest places, using the internet. In many ways MBH’s business works like Uber, a ride-hailing firm, as a crowdsourcing platform connecting supply of labour with demand. But the minimum wage that Uber can reasonably expect its drivers to take home is constrained by geography, as its drivers must live within a few hours of their markets. This restricts them to urban areas with high living costs, putting a lower bound on even the stingiest wage. Mr Liu suffers no such constraints. Workers from areas in which 3,000 yuan per month is a fine wage can happily label data for AI companies in Shenzhen, where it is not. Many provincial governments are keen to get Mr Liu to open a data factory in their region and offer much-needed jobs. For every 5,000 workers MBH employs in a given month, local governments pay the firm 50,000 yuan. Across all 300,000 workers that adds up to 3m yuan ($425,000) in government money every month. Mr Liu says that his firm sees fewer and fewer face-recognition labelling tasks these days compared with the boom of 2017. Increasingly common now are labelling requests for medical imagery from which software can learn to diagnose disease. There are also endless streetscapes which, once labelled, can teach autonomous cars about the cities they must navigate. Those are more difficult labelling tasks. Whereas every human knows what a face looks like, not everyone understands what a tumour looks like in an X-ray. Labelling such conditions requires specialist knowledge, and means that MBH must pay its labellers more money. Still, those labelling requests are indicative of the kinds of AI service that may reach widespread adoption in China in a few years’ time. Mr Liu says he will expand his workforce by 50% next year. Without this data-labelling infrastructure, China’s AI services would not have taken off. Labelling services like MBH are what have allowed Alibaba to create a powerful machine-learning service like Taobao’s image-based product search. An Alibaba shopper can take a photo of an item in a shop window and immediately be steered to a page where they can purchase it. Alibaba processes a billion images like this a day. It also relies on labelled data for the machine-learning algorithms that are used in its retail stores, which operate under the brand Hema. Cameras installed throughout the glitzy new supermarkets track shoppers around the store and identify the products they take off the shelves. Masses of labelled data don’t just make for powerful machine-learning software. By studying the inner workings of the software, microprocessor architects can concoct powerful new chips designed specifically to run machine-learning tasks. China’s digital infrastructure has produced some of the world’s most powerful such systems. Now those systems are producing, in turn, AI chips that are competitive with the best Silicon Valley has to offer. ¦ This article appeared in the Technology Quarterly section of the print edition under the headline "China’s success at AI has relied on good data"

To: Cogito Ergo Sum who wrote (152367)	1/13/2020 12:09:41 AM
From: TobagoJack	1 Recommendation Recommended By 3bar Respond to of 217773

I know a bit about designing processors, and know it is going well Manufacturing? that shall follow, per scale of market, arms and legs, and state-backing Designing is where the money is Manufacturing is a dog's life, but money from the former can help out the latter A process is after all a process economist.com Microprocessors China is slowly moving up the microprocessing value chain Getting good at designing is easier than at manufacturing, however Jan 2nd 2020 THE FORTUNE PRECISION EQUIPMENT COMPANY makes chunks of metal. Hulking sheets of it are cut with millimetre accuracy using robot arms in room-sized enclosures bearing the brand of their German or Japanese manufacturers. The white spray of cooling lubricant makes the process look like an industrial-strength shower for some post-modern Cleopatra. Based in Shenyang, five hours north-east of Beijing by train, Fortune is the bottom rung of the most important and complex supply chain on Earth: the one which produces the integrated circuits, or chips, found in smartphones and servers. Fortune’s robots make parts for equipment which will be installed in factories in Taiwan and Oregon, and used to etch circuitry on silicon and make chips. Selling equipment to industry giants like Applied Materials in America makes it a small success for the semiconductor supply chain. Much of the rest of the industry is not doing so well. Failure to make cutting-edge chips is not exactly China’s fault. It is a difficult industry to kick-start. The factories that produce the chips are phenomenally expensive. The technology itself is even more complex than an internal-combustion engine. The intellectual property behind cutting-edge processes is fiercely guarded. In many ways the manufacturing of chips represents the supreme technological challenge for China, an amalgamation of all the other challenges presented in this report. It will have to call upon everything it has learned from successes and failures like nuclear plants and engines if it is to succeed. The Chinese government is trying hard (the country’s biggest chip factory, SMIC, a private firm, has settled many suits over IP theft). In October the government raised 204bn yuan ($29bn) from the finance ministry, state-owned firms and local governments for its domestic chipmaking efforts. That followed 139bn yuan raised in 2014. The problem is that the government’s chip programme is optimising for the wrong thing. Instead of trying to stimulate a domestic chip industry to meet China’s huge market needs, the funds are being spent on trying to reach parity with chip companies like Intel. Chips are a vital product to China because they are fundamental to any technology-led growth that the country desires for its future, as well as for making weapons. PwC, a consultancy, estimates that the global market for chips will grow by 4.6% a year, to be worth $575bn in 2022, driven by the requirements of cars, AI systems and communications networks. Currently a huge share of that market value moves through China, but is not captured by it. The 418bn chips the country imported in 2018 cost $312bn, a quarter more than it spent importing crude oil. And beyond grabbing a larger part of the value chain for itself, controlling the production of chips would also give China indirect control over myriad other industries, from social networking to personal computing. Most of the state-led efforts have failed so far. SMIC is on the verge of producing chips at levels of sophistication roughly equivalent to those reached by Intel a decade ago. Its revenues—$3.4bn in 2018—were about a tenth those of TSMC, its Taiwanese rival. SMIC is not yet globally known for its quality and reliability. But Fortune is making progress. It used to ship its metal components off to third parties in Japan and Taiwan to be cleaned up. Today it does not need to do that. The firm has its own clean rooms where it sands down its shiny aluminium components and gives them a smooth grey coating before vacuum packing them in thick plastic. The firm has also started shipping more complex components to its suppliers, simplifying what its customers have to do while capturing more of the value of the final product. Although Chinese firms are still behind in the manufacture of chips, they have recently achieved some success with designing them for AI applications. In late September the nerdier corners of Silicon Valley were abuzz after Alibaba, a Chinese tech-giant, released Hanguang 800, a chip designed specifically for carrying out machine-learning tasks. Even though Alibaba relied on TSMC in Taiwan to fabricate the chips, AI engineers in the Valley remarked on the Hanguang’s performance, stating that it had beaten all other chips in its class. This was not supposed to happen, as China was thought to be well behind American chip companies. Faster, higher, strongerOn November 6th the latest results of MLPerf, an industry-standard benchmark for AI chips, were published. They showed that the Hanguang 800 chip was performing a standardised machine-learning task 13 times faster than the chip that Intel had just released (see chart). The comparison is not totally fair, as the Alibaba chip was made physically larger than the Intel chip, letting it draw more power and perform more calculations per second. But even compared with a bigger chip from Nvidia called the Titan RTX, the Hanguang 800 clocked in four times faster. There are probably more caveats. Alibaba ran only one out of five tests. Poor performance in the others would betray a chip over-optimised for one task. But even in the most pessimistic scenario it is impressive. That a Chinese company has designed an AI chip which performs as well as, or better than, its Western competitors should alert American politicians and innovators to China’s progress in this area. Whereas Fortune’s more industrial flavour of success in the manufacturing supply chain took a traditional route for Chinese firms—start at the bottom and work up—Alibaba’s success in designing a chip is more interesting. It is rooted in its wide deployment of machine-learning systems across its business, both in its Taobao online market and its Hema shops on the high street. The firm processes billions of images a day as part of its normal operations, and the machine-learning software it has trained to do that work is now very accurate and powerful. The Hanguang 800’s designers spent a lot of time sitting next to the coders who built those algorithms. Their job was to work out how to render the algorithms in silicon, so the more time they could spend learning from engineers writing high-performance algorithms, the better. By being close to the market in which AI is used, like Taobao’s and Alibaba’s offline shops, the Hanguang designers were able to tweak the design of the chip to optimise its performance on those tasks. Indeed, in many ways, the data-labelling grunt work that makes Alibaba’s machine-learning algorithms as good as they are translates directly into the high performance of its new chip. China’s strength in data-labelling at the very bottom of the AI supply chain is translating into design strength at the top. Must do betterIn other parts of the semiconductor supply chain, things are less rosy. Several executives, who asked for their names not to be attached to criticism of government policy, said that the stimulus had been going to the wrong place in trying to catch up with Western giants such as Intel, or TSMC in Taiwan. While Hanguang 800 is remarkable, Alibaba’s design work is a far less capital-intensive, less complex process than the physical manufacture of a chip (which, in Hanguang’s case, was still done in Taiwan). If catching up on internal-combustion engines was hard, doing so on traditional semiconductor manufacturing will be close to impossible. The market for chips is changing fast. Instead the government would do well to focus on stimulating both design and manufacture of chips aimed at middle-end markets such as the internet of things, and emerging areas like AI. In one way, China’s challenge with chips is even harder than the problem it faced with combustion-engine cars. There is no completely new technology arriving which will free China from the need to catch up with the rest of the world. But China’s chip companies should still listen to the market, not chase prestige. Manufacturing and designing chips for the internet of things and AI applications offers an opportunity to leapfrog less agile chip companies, even if it is not the wholesale opportunity that electric vehicles present. If they can focus on these new areas and be patient, it is likely that the scale and depth of the country’s resources could end up winning its companies a permanent spot high on the global supply chain for semiconductors.¦ This article appeared in the Technology Quarterly section of the print edition under the headline "China is slowly moving up the microprocessing value chain"

To: Cogito Ergo Sum who wrote (152367)	1/13/2020 12:14:07 AM
From: TobagoJack	1 Recommendation Recommended By Arran Yuan Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 217773

the writer assumes that the Taiwan engineers wish to stay in Taiwan bad assumption, because the most dynamic Taiwan residents have been and are moving to the mainland economist.com The future Technological progress in China could still lead to fireworks Is a showdown likely with America? Jan 2nd 2020 CHINA’S TECHNOLOGICAL rise, brought about by an authoritarian state actively guiding a market-oriented industrial base with access to global supply lines, is unlike anything in history. That does not necessarily make it unstoppable, or world-beating. But the possibility that it will provide a definitive edge in technologies vital to 21st-century success makes the West anxious. America, in particular, is unsettled by the prospect of Chinese technological capabilities that might erode its geopolitical dominance. Behind their legitimate concerns that China has stolen IP and that some of its companies cheat, American politicians worry that China’s approach to technological development can produce results which America’s mostly market-led model cannot. It is true that China has shown that a determined state can do much to accelerate the appropriation, diffusion, development and large-scale implementation of new technology and technology from elsewhere. It is also true that the processes by which it does so can be damaging—the state can misallocate resources, follow foolish fashions, refuse to accept that it is barking up the wrong tree. Patronage lends itself to corruption. China shows all these failings and more. At the same time, alignment between the state and the companies that develop and build technologies is important not just because it allocates, or misallocates, funding. The state may call on technology to answer questions that the market, left to itself, would not. In China the alignment between government policy and corporate technology development can be seen in the shift towards electric vehicles, largely to cut air pollution. Government-led invention has a strong history in America, too. The network which became the internet was developed to test new approaches to military communication. But it has fallen from fashion. Some suggest that the world could divide into techno-camps, with the current system in which most technology spreads globally unpicked—“decoupled”—into competing systems, one controlled by America, another by China. This would be very hard to bring about. Published research, patents, people, contracts, supply chains and technical standards all link Chinese technology to that which underpins all the other advanced economies—and vice versa. The location of the mind fomenting the next world-changing invention is impossible to predict. China can capture supply chains and rule its markets with an iron first. But it cannot capture all the world’s ideas. Indeed, contributing at the highest level requires the country to change. A smallish cadre of researchers with some independence will often be more effective than an army of boffins required to optimise their output to hit political targets, as can be the case in China. This does not mean that freedom of political thought is necessary for high levels of technological achievement. Rather it suggests that when you use your time to hit mandated goals you will skip real invention in favour of political box-ticking. One reason not to fear imminent decoupling is that, even at its most successful, China’s model of technological development can proceed only so fast. When a technology is complex and expensive, progress is slow, as is shown in the manufacture of semiconductors. Even assuming you know how to build and run a cutting-edge chip factory, it takes tens of billions of dollars to do so. It also requires close co-operation with an array of high-tech suppliers who are already tightly bound to the existing market leaders. Since China will not be capturing a large slice of the semiconductor manufacturing pie any time soon, and because semiconductors are vital to future economic growth, the world’s existing locus of chip production gains heightened strategic importance. That the locus is Taiwan—over which China claims sovereignty, and where America has enough influence to urge restrictions on exports—further complicates the situation. Both American and Chinese firms rely on Taiwan for chip supplies, adding to its potential as a cause of conflict. If the tension between America and China keeps ratcheting up, the island nation could well come under pressure from both sides to curtail its supplies to the other. Any meddling risks upsetting the existing delicate balance and leading in a dangerous direction. That would have been unthinkable a decade ago. At that time China’s technological progress was mostly unopposed by other powerful countries, which profited from it. But the age of perceived mutual benefit is over. It is hard for the world’s powerful countries, particularly America, to tolerate a China with a global outlook, access to advanced technology and real geopolitical heft. America has reportedly already started pressing the Taiwanese to restrict chip exports to Huawei, the Chinese tech giant, though the Taiwanese government denies it. America should be careful about such interventions. A clumsy attempt to kneecap Huawei has shown that the Trump administration has little grasp of the dynamics of the technology ecosystem in which it is intervening. Its understanding of other aspects of Chinese technological development is probably even hazier. The threat posed by a technologically enabled Chinese Communist Party is real. In responding to it, America must be sure not to become its own worst enemy.¦ This article appeared in the Technology Quarterly section of the print edition under the headline "Technological progress in China could still lead to fireworks"