Yeah no. The education system you’re referring to is optimized strictly for performance on standardized tests. From a very early age kids are trained to answer test questions, not to understand those questions or how to apply them in real life. It has been this way in China for thousands of years; their civil service exams were the only way to move ahead of your station in life without connections.
Innovating is not done in polite company in China. If you come up with a clever new way of doing something, there is an extremely high possibility that your superiors will suppress it on the off chance that it could embarrass them (“lose face“).
These big long term plans you’re referring to exist, but in the plane of reality you imagine. There is nothing like a meritocracy in the CCP. That is even more true now than 10 years ago,
because Xi has systematically removed dissenting voices in what you have heard is an anti-corruption campaign. Companies like Blackrock and Boeing are breathtakingly corrupt and are taking us taxpayers for a huge ride. But they can usually do a pretty competent job of getting the job done. They are run by technocrats, who often have an engineering background.
Imagine if the top 10 levels or so of any of these companies were nothing but connected people and their friends and children. That’s what happens to all of these projects in China. China can’t build a 5m chip or a new type of wing or a useful new programming language. Most of the people who could even do that job are either out of the country or unable to be recognized for their work.
> China can't build a 5 nm chip or a new type of wing or a useful new programming language.
You are saying this in a reply to the post to open source RTL of high performance CPU from China?
China also can demonstrably build a competitive distributed database like TiDB. I think PL vs DB boils down to that it is hard to create a profitable business building PL, compared to a profitable business building DB.
Vast majority of my family is Chinese nationals, many of them software engineers, EEs, mathematicians. Have done extensive business in China, mostly real estate. Not getting into any more detail publicly.
I don't know what "culture essentialist" means, sorry. And it's good to hear your experience is unusual. I'm quite surprised. But the simple fact is conformity is treasured in China, and has been for untold generations.
Innovating is not done in polite company in China. If you come up with a clever new way of doing something, there is an extremely high possibility that your superiors will suppress it on the off chance that it could embarrass them (“lose face“).
These big long term plans you’re referring to exist, but in the plane of reality you imagine. There is nothing like a meritocracy in the CCP. That is even more true now than 10 years ago, because Xi has systematically removed dissenting voices in what you have heard is an anti-corruption campaign. Companies like Blackrock and Boeing are breathtakingly corrupt and are taking us taxpayers for a huge ride. But they can usually do a pretty competent job of getting the job done. They are run by technocrats, who often have an engineering background.
Imagine if the top 10 levels or so of any of these companies were nothing but connected people and their friends and children. That’s what happens to all of these projects in China. China can’t build a 5m chip or a new type of wing or a useful new programming language. Most of the people who could even do that job are either out of the country or unable to be recognized for their work.