Original: Shenzhen ningnanshan source: ningnanshan
This article is some recent ideas, which are not mature enough to be shared.
I have seen many different views on the competition between China and the United States,
Among them, a very typical view on scientific and technological innovation is that American culture or the culture of Anglo Saxon countries generally tends to equality rather than authority, and advocates individual freedom, while compared with East Asian countries, even Germany in Europe, Russian culture generally tends to authority and collectivism.
Different cultures lead to different social systems, and also have a significant impact on scientific and technological innovation.
It is believed that the culture of freedom and equality in Anglo Saxon countries led by the United States is more conducive to new ideas, the birth of new technology is more conducive to scientific and technological innovation, and the cultural environment of advocating authority and collectivism will inhibit innovation to a certain extent.
In fact, I partially agree with this view. I have dealt with many Westerners myself,
The overall experience is that their relationship between superiors and subordinates is indeed more equal, and there is less wine table culture that reflects power relations in China. Speaking of this wine table culture, I think it is the dross of Chinese traditional culture. It does not stop there, but reflects power relations and respect through how much you drink.
Only partially agree, because I also think it is difficult to quantify the extent to which this cultural difference can affect the innovation results. Is it 10%, 20% or 30%? The evidence is not sufficient,
Because culture is not the only factor for the success of innovation, but also has a lot to do with capital investment, the size of the market, and the maturity of surrounding technologies (industrial maturity, even basic scientific research requires a variety of equipment, instruments and software).
You said that your culture advocates freedom, so that technicians at all levels can speak freely, so your innovation is stronger, but it can’t be said that leaders are not important. If someone else’s leadership is not good, it’s a strategic genius. Qian Xuesen, who leads the development of China’s Aerospace Science and technology, is a strategist, bringing China’s aerospace from zero to the world’s first-class level.
The freedom loving Anglo Saxon countries are indeed ahead of the world in terms of overall scientific and technological capabilities, but they are not always ahead. Germany, Japan and Soviet Russia, which emphasize discipline, do not all have their own unique leading technologies, and there are also many Nobel Prize winners. China, such as 5g, quantum communication, UHV transmission technology, is not also ahead of foreign countries, Not long ago, the electromagnetic ejection level of aircraft carrier 003 is also the world leader.
You say that Anglo Saxon culture is more conducive to scientific and technological innovation, but the size and scale will also affect innovation. Now the overall scientific and technological strength of the five eye countries is stronger than that of China, that is, the United States, other Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The United Kingdom, with the highest economic aggregate, is less than one fifth of that of China, and the corresponding scientific and technological investment is only about one fifth of that of China, This leads to the lack of British capabilities in many scientific and technological fields. For example, the British aircraft carrier wants to buy gantry cranes from China. The Chinese Ambassador asked you if you have the technology to build nuclear power plants? Do you have any funds?, Chip design and manufacturing are also lagging behind. There is no large chip manufacturing factory like SMIC, no fourth generation aircraft such as the j-20, nor China’s ability to independently build space stations and large civil airliners. After all, it costs money to develop modern science and technology. Unlike European scientists hundreds of years ago, they can make epoch-making discoveries in the laboratory at a small cost.
It is difficult to quantify the impact of culture on innovation, but logically speaking, it seems to make sense. Scientific research teams need a more democratic, loose and free atmosphere. Good culture plays a positive role in innovation, so I think it is very important for China to adopt a diversified innovation system,
National scientific research institutions, state-owned enterprises, central enterprises, large private enterprises, venture capital and start-ups perform their respective duties. Don’t just go one way. This is the advantage of a super large country, which can tolerate multiple paths at the same time.
State owned enterprises and central enterprises undertake major national science and technology projects, while private enterprises, venture capital and start-ups engage in free innovation,
Moreover, we should encourage excellent young people to start businesses and overseas returnees to start businesses. After all, some young people and overseas returnees agree with the American and European corporate culture, so the companies they founded will also tend to the European and American innovation culture management, which can realize multi-path innovation in companies with different innovation cultures in China.
But today I don’t want to discuss this point too much, but I want to say another recent idea.
Moore’s law was proposed by Gordon Moore, one of the founders of Intel.
Its content is: when the price remains unchanged, the number of transistors that can be accommodated on the integrated circuit will double every 18 months, and the performance will also double.
This reflects the rapid development of information technology. Of course, Moore’s law is not applicable to all chips, but more refers to chips used in the highly competitive consumer electronics field. Chip technology used in the industrial field does not progress so fast.
However, Moore’s law also has an end and cannot be developed indefinitely. The larger or smaller the things made by human beings, the higher the cost will be. The chip has developed to 2nm, and the investment cost of building a factory has reached a staggering $30billion.
When the technology of a single product is constantly approaching the limit, or every step forward requires a very high cost, the speed of progress will be slower and slower. Think about how many chips a factory with an investment of more than $30 billion has to produce to recover its investment, which can only increase the market price.
When a single point of innovation in a field moves more and more slowly due to process limits and extremely high costs, the field may enter the system Moore era from the single point Moore era,
That is to say, the value brought by system level innovation will exceed the value brought by single point innovation. It can also be said that the benefits brought by each unit cost invested in system innovation will exceed the benefits brought by the unit cost invested in single point innovation.
The performance of the smart phone market in the past decade is a typical example,
Mobile communication network, a larger system level, has moved towards 4G and 5g networks technically, enabling hundreds of millions or even hundreds of millions of mobile phones in the world to easily and quickly send pictures, videos, visit websites and download apps to each other, so there have been new lifestyles, such as mobile payment, mobile e-commerce, mobile games, mobile live broadcasting and so on, and each lifestyle is based on the interconnection of a large number of mobile phones and terminals, It has formed huge industries, which makes relevant Internet enterprises grow rapidly, reflecting the great value of system innovation.
Tencent’s revenue in 2010 was only 19.646 billion yuan, and by 2021, it was 560.118 billion yuan, an expansion of dozens of times.
When China lags far behind foreign countries in single point technologies such as semiconductors, due to the strong promotion and development of communication technologies by global communication companies such as Huawei and Ericsson, the network system containing a large number of mobile phones has become more advanced, which has promoted the rise of a large number of Internet companies taking advantage of mobile e-commerce, payment, games, live broadcast and other mobile Internet.
This makes our country get huge benefits from it.
In other words, we can see that both system innovation and single point technological innovation have great value.
This makes me think about a problem,
If some industries encounter the bottleneck of technological progress in single point technology and begin to move towards system Moore, that is, the era of system innovation, is this beneficial or detrimental to China?
I think it is beneficial to China, because the whole industry chain countries have advantages over non whole industry chain countries.
The United States is not a country in the whole industry chain. The reason why their system products are more advanced than those in China and can achieve the highest end is mainly due to the significant leadership of some single point technologies such as chips and operating systems. In many sub-systems or parts, they have given up.
For example, Tesla is the world’s leader in electric vehicles. Its core competitiveness still comes from its self driving software + chips + vehicle system software. Tesla has a large number of parts, including batteries, which are outsourced. Its technology is not stronger than that in East Asia and Europe.
For example, in the news of the financial news agency on July 11, the reporter learned from insiders of Hisense Group that Sandian USA recently received orders for two electric compressors produced in the United States by customers of the world’s leading new energy vehicle manufacturer, and locked in the supply for five years. After the increase, the total annual order volume is expected to be more than US $100million. According to relevant sources, the head enterprise is Tesla. In June, 2021, Hisense appliances, a listed company of Hisense, completed the acquisition of Japan’s third power, holding about 75% of its voting rights, and officially became the controlling shareholder of Hisense holdings.
However, if Tesla encounters the limit of Technological Development in its leading single point technology and cannot maintain a significant lead, it will be approached by its competitors, which will cause a crisis. For example, the advantage of a core single point technology compared with China has changed from 100 points to 60 points to 100 points to 80 points, which may lead to lagging behind China in the performance of the whole system.
Let’s take electronic products as an example. Many parts including batteries, display panels, camera modules, passive components and so on are no longer made in the United States or have a small share, not to mention materials related to the appearance of consumer electronic products such as ceramics and metal shells,
The United States has a great leading edge mainly in semiconductor and operating system software. If these two companies are caught up by Chinese companies and the leading edge is reduced, the overall system capacity may be surpassed due to the lack of other sub component capabilities in the United States.
The gradual lack of upstream industrial chain will cause the collapse and backwardness of manufacturing system level products, that is to say, not engaging in the whole industrial chain will cause the lack of coverage of single point innovation, thus affecting the overall performance of the system.
Because the world’s consumers’ requirements for industrial products are increasingly moving towards comprehensive experience,
This is due to the increasingly complex performance of industrial products brought about by technological progress. Just like mobile phones used to be used for making calls, good and stable signals are enough, but now mobile phones are also used to play games. Obviously, good signals alone are not enough, but also need to be configured high enough, strong endurance, and so on.
I think the system products of large civil aircraft, aircraft carriers and even automobiles are the same. Why are all the key sub components of C919 being localized in China? Because we know that if we don’t engage in the whole industrial chain, we may be stuck, or others will only sell you second-class and third-class parts on one or two parts, so that you can only produce slightly inferior system level products.
Almost all the world’s auto powers must have strong upstream parts enterprises. It can be said that systems and components complement each other,
Imagine that if a country’s upstream parts industry is largely lacking, has no design and manufacturing capacity, and all rely on outsourcing, it is difficult for the country’s system level products to take the lead, because the system design needs to be highly coordinated with parts or subsystems. A larger, heavier, and worse performance of this subsystem or components may lead to changes in system design, such as poor reliability of subsystems, More redundancy is often considered in system design.
Just like Vietnam, if it has no design and manufacturing capacity of any upstream parts, can Vietnam build a high-end smart phone brand that surpasses apple, Huawei, Samsung, OV and Xiaomi? I think it’s impossible.
The same is true of China’s automobile industry. If Chinese automobile companies do not master the core technology of any upstream parts such as engine, gearbox, chassis, braking system and vehicle engine system, and rely on outsourcing, can China have a world-class high-end automobile brand? Of course not.
In the era of fuel vehicles, due to the constraints of upstream parts technology, independent brands have been pressed for a long time. In the era of electric vehicles, parts have changed, and the competitiveness of domestic automobile brands in China is completely different.
Why is the United States so anxious about the concentration of advanced chip manufacturing in Taiwan,
The reason why TSMC, Samsung and other companies have vigorously introduced policies in recent years to promote the establishment of advanced chip factories in the United States is very simple. Now the United States can maintain the leading position of chip single point technology through American design + Taiwan manufacturing, but this dependence on outsourcing from Taiwan is detrimental to the United States, because the reunification of the two sides of the Strait is obviously getting closer and closer. Once the reunification of the two sides of the Strait is completed, it will lead to the United States’ high dependence on China on chips.
The United States has given up on many parts and subsystems, and is no longer a country in the whole industrial chain. If the chip, a single point field that the United States leads a lot, is controlled by China again, it will be difficult for the United States to produce industrial products with the most top performance.
The United States has been ahead of China in science and technology over the years, but the gap is getting smaller and smaller on the whole. I think the big reason is that China is a country with the whole industrial chain, while the upstream manufacturing industry of the United States is seriously lost, and the industrial chain is not as complete as China.
If the manufacturing of a system requires five key components, China can develop them by itself and achieve 80 points,
Two of the United States can do self-study and achieve 95 points, but the other three are gradually declining or even missing because they do not engage in the whole industrial chain, and the result is only 70 points. Then after the design and manufacture of the system, China is completely possible to surpass the United States in system performance, because system performance is not simply the sum of component performance.
First, if the United States completely loses the design and manufacturing capacity of a key component because it cannot engage in the whole industrial chain, and can only purchase it, competitors may strengthen the system capacity through the leadership of the key component. For example, electric vehicles, power batteries, on-board display screens, car air conditioners, on-board camera modules and so on are not made in the United States. They are all outsourced from Asian manufacturers.
Outsourcing is not necessarily wrong. On the contrary, I think we should be open in outsourcing. It can’t be said that better foreign suppliers will not buy it. We should still consider the proportion of self-development + outsourcing, which is also conducive to stimulating the progress of self-development.
However, if you give up self-study completely, it means that you give up the opportunity to lead in this field. The more sub fields you give up, the greater the impact on system innovation.
This is easy to understand. Of the 10 parts, 8 are self-developed and 2 are outsourced from China, which is different from 8 are outsourced from China and 2 are self-developed.
For a long time, China has been in the state that upstream core components have to be outsourced from the West. In this case, it is certainly difficult for China to create system level products that surpass the West.
The second is that if the United States only has the design ability for a key component, but does not have the manufacturing ability, it should entrust foreign manufacturers such as China to manufacture it. If the design ability of the entrusted country (such as China) for this key component has improved, then the synergy advantage of the industrial chain in distance will be brought into play. The design and manufacturing of others may be a few kilometers, dozens of kilometers, oneortwo hundred kilometers away, While your design is in the United States, but your manufacturing is 10000 kilometers away, so others’ communication and collaboration are naturally more efficient than yours, which may lead to the realization of anti overstepping in key parts.
Third, as mentioned above, there is also the risk of being strangled by key competitors. Yes, the world is not only the United States, but also others may be strangled by the United States.
There are many forms of this kind of choke. It is not a single administrative order not to supply goods, as the United States sanctions Huawei. For example, the most typical is in the military field. Products and technologies that can be used in key military fields will not be sold to the United States casually, even China, which is now holding high the banner of globalization, which will restrict the United States from building top-notch military equipment systems.
In the commercial field, due to the shortage of production capacity, priority is given to domestic or our company’s customers,
Or the latest generation of products are first used in the system products launched by our country / company,
Or all kinds of best prices and services are given priority to international big brand manufacturers, which is actually a kind of bottleneck in a sense.
At the beginning, Chinese auto independent brand companies had low brand value and small sales volume. They generally sold hundreds of thousands of vehicles a year. How can they compare with international auto giants that sell millions or even tens of millions of vehicles every year and have higher single vehicle prices? Of course, they also lack a position in European, American and Japanese auto parts suppliers.
Why should apple now transfer some of its production capacity to Vietnam and India? In fact, it also wants to reduce the dependence on Chinese manufacturing capacity.
Why is the United States so anxious about the concentration of advanced chip manufacturing in Taiwan? They know that sooner or later the two sides of the Strait will be unified, and these advanced chip manufacturing plants will be in China’s hands.
Fourth, you rely on others to make, and the manufacturing capacity of different countries is also different,
The efficiency and quality of made in China are not comparable to those of made in Vietnam and made in India. If you rely on made in India, made in Vietnam and made in China to fight, especially in medium and high-end industries, you will suffer.
Because different production capacity quality and production efficiency will ultimately affect the overall performance and innovation of the system. Components with poor quality will affect the performance of the system, and the slow ramp up of production means that the speed of recovering benefits from the market is slow and the benefits are less, which may affect the R & D investment of the next generation of products.
I repeat that “big” is also a part of “strong”, and “big” includes the meaning of the whole industrial chain,
Today, this article is also one of the thoughts.
I have always felt that the advantages of China’s entire industrial chain must be fully exploited. A team (system) composed of five people with 80 points of ability may exceed a team (system) composed of two people with 95 points of ability + three people with 70 points of ability.
For China, the whole industrial chain is not only large-scale, which can reduce costs and enhance competitiveness, but also means that we have more comprehensive parts and subsystem capabilities to do system level innovation, which can fight against the single point significantly leading system innovation of the United States.
In other words, even if Americans are really as they say, their culture advocates freedom and equality more, so it is more suitable for innovation, but innovation has never been a single point, and a few single points of sharp leadership does not necessarily guarantee the overall system performance leadership,
Innovation is never just a factor of culture, especially the increasing investment in modern scientific and technological research and development, which is often tens of millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars, billions of dollars or even tens of billions of dollars. On the contrary, the investment of funds has increasingly become the core factor for the success of innovation, which is obviously beneficial to a large country like China.
To maintain our advantage in the whole industrial chain, even though we can only achieve 80 points in several technologies, and the United States can achieve 90 points, China can also achieve 80 points in other single point technologies, while the United States can only achieve 70 points or even 60 points due to lack of capacity, and we can still surpass in the overall system performance.
However, if there is a bottleneck of Moore’s law in the key areas where the United States is significantly ahead, resulting in a decline in the value of single point innovation and an increase in the value of system innovation, it will be more beneficial to China.
Looking forward to the future, it is only a matter of time before China’s economic aggregate exceeds that of the United States due to its large population. I think the general estimate is that China’s economic aggregate is expected to reach twice that of the United States.
Therefore, China will surpass the United States in terms of total capital investment in scientific and technological innovation in the foreseeable future, which is our advantage.
With our scale and volume, we can accommodate multi-path and multi-mode innovation and the advantages of the whole industrial chain. We can use massive capital investment + whole industrial chain innovation + state-owned and private enterprise start-up multi-path and multi-mode innovation to fight against the single point innovation + part of the industrial chain innovation of the United States,
Even if it is true that American thought advocates freedom more and therefore has stronger innovation ability, China will win a lot in the end. If a single point technology that the United States is significantly ahead of meets the technical limit, it will be more beneficial to China.
The above is an immature idea today.