alt Hacker NewsListening to the heads of the American and European car companies say the same and driving in them in china. I know that is different than personally disassembling one and reviewing it, but I am not sure the incentive for the other companies to say they have inferior products, unless it was a play for subsidies or deregulation of some form.
Personally I feel that the rest of the world continues to dramatically under estimate China’s progress and technological advancement at our own peril. Is there fluff and are their lots of untrue claims, of course, but that is certainly not something they have a monopoly on.
It's because the West still views Chinese people as dumb laborers: just a bunch of cheap bodies who can do nothing more than screwing together our brilliant inventions.
China creates something of equal quality as a Western company? It must've been IP theft! China competes on price? It must be state subsidies! China creates something innovative? Don't use it - it'll send your data back to the CCP! Or just pretend it doesn't exist.
In reality Chinese people aren't idiots. We've spent a couple of decades giving away all of our manufacturing knowledge for a few cents of shareholder value, so it is not exactly surprising that they now possess that knowledge - and are able to build upon it. China is dealing with huge demographic changes, so obviously they've been pushing for automation, so it shouldn't be a surprise that those factories are now rapidly automating. Which we could've done in the West, but outsourcing it to cheap Chinese labor was cheaper in the short term.
For every genius in the West there are ten geniuses in China, and with their top-down economic policy they are able to apply it where it truly matters.
We created our own worst enemy, and are now crying foul. If we don't get rid of our outdated racist biases soon and start treating China like the successful superpower that it is, we're going to get completely steamrolled in the next few decades.