China marches on towards Fourth Industrial Revolution

[onebyone]

China marches on towards Fourth Industrial Revolution
Pundit predictions of China's demise are the latest self-consoling illusions of a lazy elite who can't see the AI writing on the wall
By DAVID P. GOLDMANOCTOBER 8, 2021

NEW YORK – When Covid-19 hit China before it hit the rest of the world, the meme in the Western media called it China’s “Chernobyl moment.” China’s remarkable success in suppressing the pandemic put that to rest. But every hiccup in Chinese markets elicits new predictions of Chinese economic decline.

Stratfor’s George Friedman declares that “China’s power has been vastly overestimated” and that China will have to dial back its global ambitions due to straitened circumstances.

Hal Brands and Michael Beckley write in Foreign Policy that “the problem is that China is declining.” “Since the late 2000s,” they claim, “the drivers of China’s rise have either stalled or turned around entirely.”

China's is investing more in productivity-enhancing technologies than the United States. Image: Twitter


A generation from now, the Chinese won’t remember the misery of Ant Financial, or the failure of property giant Evergrande, or this year’s power shortage, or any number of minor interruptions of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. They will remember automated warehouses, smart ports running on 5G networks, mines operated by remote control, factories run by self-programming robots and driverless taxis.

All of this is happening now in China, and at scale. The linked videos on Youtube provide more information than anything you will read in the Western media. China’s artificial intelligence (AI) applications look like science fiction, but they are real as rain, and happening before our eyes.


The application of big data and AI to flexible manufacturing, smart logistics, health care and other fields promises to transform economic life as profoundly as the Second Industrial Revolution changed the United States and Germany.

Historians well may date the AI revolution to January 2020 when the Covid-19 pandemic hit China. As former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Harvard historian Graham Allison wrote last August:

The US is playing catch-up with China in the 5G race. Photo: AFP / Getty Images / Josep Lago


The virus has also pulled back the curtain on one of this century’s most important contests: the rivalry between the United States and China for supremacy in artificial intelligence (AI). The scene that has been revealed should alarm Americans. China is not just on a trajectory to overtake the US; it is already surpassing US capabilities where it matters most.

Most Americans assume that their country’s lead in advanced technologies is unassailable .… In fact, China is already a full-spectrum peer competitor in terms of both commercial and national-security AI applications. China is not just trying to master AI; it is mastering AI ….

To stop the spread of the virus, China locked down the entire population of Hubei province – 60 million people. That is more than the number of residents in every state on the US East Coast from Florida to Maine. China maintained this massive cordon sanitaire by using AI-enhanced algorithms to track residents’ movements and scale up testing capabilities while massive new health-care facilities were being built ….

Top Chinese tech companies responded quickly by creating apps with “health status” codes to track citizens’ movements and determine whether individuals needed to be quarantined. AI then played a critical role in helping Chinese authorities enforce quarantines and perform extensive contract tracing. Owing to China’s large-scale datasets, the authorities in Beijing succeeded where the government in Washington, DC, failed.
All of China’s major ports are at or close to full automation. Industrial automation, although impressive, is still in pilot phase: Huawei says that it has 16,000 private 5G networks under development for factory automation, a small fraction of the country’s 2.8 million factories (as of 2015), but more than enough for proof of concept. And the Chinese telecom giant has installed 5G networks in 1,800 of the country’s 34,000 hospitals.

China turned a population of subsistence farmers into industrial workers, moving 600 million people from countryside to city in less than 40 years, increasing per capita income tenfold in the process.

China has built out its 5G infrastructure faster than the US. Photo: Facebook

An industrial nation with Western living standards is already gestating inside China. Economist Lin Yifu, a former World Bank official, points out that China’s most developed provinces and cities are a country within a country, with per capita GDP approaching that of the United States. In a book scheduled for release later this month, he writes:

At the end of the 19th century, the United States and Germany led the second industrial revolution. At that time, the highest income and technology levels were in the United Kingdom. The United States and Germany were at a stage of catching up in terms of income levels. In terms of purchasing power parity, the per capita GDP of the United States in 1870 was 76.6% of that of the United Kingdom, and that of Germany was 57.6% of that of the United Kingdom.
The seven provinces and cities with the highest per capita GDP in my country – Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Fujian, and Guangdong – have a total population of 350 million. The per capita GDP of these seven provinces and cities has reached 54.5% of that of the United States, which is roughly the same level as Germany’s per capita GDP relative to UK’s per capita GDP when Germany began to lead the second industrial revolution.

Yin adds, “In technology R&D, human capital is the main input.” China, he notes, has a much larger talent pool with a population four times that of the United States. “China’s sheer size gives it “economies of scale,” with “lower marginal cost of products and services,” and “stronger competitiveness in the international market. When new technological standards are set in competition with developed countries, my country’s population and the size of its market gives it a comparative advantage.”

In addition, “My country is the country with the most complete set of industries, so that the time required for new technology to advance from concept to production will be the shortest, and at the lowest cost.”

China is serious, focused and disciplined in its campaign to lead the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The US at best gives lip service to the concept, and at worst ignores the problem, the better to focus on “diversity” and “equity.”

China marches on towards Fourth Industrial Revolution - Asia Times

NEW YORK - When Covid-19 hit China before it hit the rest of the world, the meme in the Western media called it China’s “Chernobyl moment.” China’s

asiatimes.com

 

[MH.Yang]

Let me introduce Lin Yifu. He is a Taiwanese and a postdoctoral in economics at Yale University. In 1975, he worked in the school of management of Taiwan Chengchi University. In 1979, he defected from Taiwan's Kinmen Island (he swam 12 kilometers) to the mainland and became a PRC National. He is currently a counsellor of the State Council and an important decision-maker of China's economic development line. Thank Taiwan for providing such excellent talents to the mainland.