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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   10861 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 17, 2026

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I appreciate the gesture of goodwill, but frankly it's still a lot of dreck. Let me just nitpick at one detail first:

blah blah Musk

Noted.

Rocket Lab…

There is no need for a niche between Falcon 1 and Falcon 9. Rocket Lab can just as well be understood to be a low-energy fast follower whose research program has hit a wall. Gushing poetic about the "improbable genius" who started 9 years before LandSpace, in a far richer and more advanced aerospace bloc, and is yet to make anything half as impressive as ZQ-3 is a bit over the top. They operate with incomparably greater resources than LandSpace. Beck has 2600 employees on LandSpace's 1200. Rocket Lab announced Neutron back in 2021 yet won't be flying until early 2027; ZQ-3 went from an announcement to a landing in 3 years. Rocket Lab is worth $50B though, which is maybe 10-50 times LandSpace's estimate, so there's that. Rewarded indeed.

Ames Research Center: Ames is one of the major NASA labs, located in Silicon Valley, a remnant of an earlier era when the American government was at the center of Space. NASA became bloated with bureaucracy and procedure over the course of the 20th Century, but Ames is interesting because of one man…

Planet Labs: Former NASA scientists (some of "Pete's kids") got together…

LandSpace: In 2014, the Chinese government, realizing the growing importance of space, issued Document 60 under the Development and Reform Commission, which opened up the Chinese space sector to private sector capital. Financier Zhang Changwu took advantage of the opportunity and began pitching LandSpace not only to private investors but to municipal governments

You lovingly regurgitate this biopic narrative of charismatic American autists, oddballs and mavericks (who are all sucking the government teat, reuse govt R&D or just work for the state directly), and then drop this "the Chynese government", very unsubtly (though I guess subtly enough for you) insinuating the essential difference in where the initiative comes from. Do you honestly not notice what you're doing here? For you, American state is not really a state, it's a background for colorful characters inside and outside it; the Chinese one is a hivemind machine dispatching soulless (but you'll generously grant that they're industrious and clever) workers. This is the most tired trope in how Americans engage with Communists or, really, with any geopolitical adversary, by alienating and dehumanizing them. "Document 60". "Financier Zhang Changwu" – at least not the Imperial Eunuch. He's LandSpace CEO, what does it matter that he worked in finance? LandSpace as such is a non-entity, a creature of external scheming. It's all, shall we say, rather dickless, huh? Not main character coded. So of course your position as the main characters is unassailable. Even if the Chinese can be pretty hardworking.

The Document 60 came out 11/26/2014.. Almost 9 months prior: «The 2nd Session of the 12th National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) opened in the Great Hall of the People. Li Yanhong, known as Robin Li, the CEO of the nation’s top search engine Baidu, expresses two proposals on March 4, 2014:

  1. Encourage private enterprises to enter the field of aeronautics to launch rocket and satellite
    2 Suggest the educational resources of some major cities should be openly pushed on the Internet.
    The following are the details of the two proposals:
  2. Encourage private enterprises to enter the field of aeronautics to launch rocket and satellite
    In recent years, China developed rapidly in aerospace industry and made a series of remarkable achievements. These achievements affect and prompt the development of the relevant industry and the whole economy in China. However, compared to the United States, Russia and Europe, China still need improvement in aerospace industry. Be aimed at current situation Robin Li encourages private enterprises to develop, build and launch rockets and satellites for the aerospace industry. In addition, he suggests the cooperation between the private enterprise and national aeronautic companies to promote the development of aerospace industry, to use space technology in other related industries.…»

Far as I know, this proposal by Robin Li is the real start of Chinese private space. We won't know if there was any maverick autist inside the CCP annoyed with the bureaucracy at CASC who had orchestrated this, or helped promote this. They don't get biopics. That's not CCP style. Maybe Netflix could dig something up. I doubt "The Chinese Government" is a hivemind capable of just Realizing This Was An Option without any individual first mover, however. Even the whole priority on industrial sovereignty versus more engagement was nontrivially shaped by input from private citizens, even nobodies. I'll find the receipts when I have the time or inclination.

And also, here's how your story looks from the perspective of LandSpace's chief engineer

Dai Zheng completed his undergraduate and graduate studies at Tsinghua University's School of Aerospace Engineering, and after graduation joined the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology, deeply involved in the development of the Long March series of launch vehicles. The same year he joined the rocket academy — 2010 — Elon Musk's SpaceX began to accelerate, ushering in a new era of low-cost, reusable commercial spaceflight globally.

Dai Zheng: At that time, I had a feeling: if the national team wasn't meeting this commercial demand, or if the cheaper way to meet it was SpaceX, why couldn't we do this in China? I believed there was definitely demand, and supply would definitely emerge.

Reporter: You joined LandSpace in 2016. Did you go through a long period of deliberation and judgment?

Dai Zheng: I wrestled with it mentally for a long time. I joined a state-owned enterprise right after graduation. I never thought about leaving — I had a lot of emotional attachment there. What I remember vividly is that the night before I decided to submit my resignation letter to my boss, I knew that once I handed it in, there was no turning back. I spread out all the certificates of honor I had received at the unit across my bed. I cried that night — it felt like being reborn. Emotionally, I felt like I was leaving the system. What if the previous generation gets washed up on the beach and ends up failing? There was insecurity, immense anxiety, and uncertainty. But rationally, I felt I should leave.

Do NASA engineers who left for SpaceX feel anything similar about the National Team?

Dai Zheng: The main source was investment from venture capital firms. There were several critical junctures where we worried about money. In 2017 and 2018, the first thing we had to explain to investors was that what we were doing was not illegal — because in people's minds, aerospace is something the state does. Can private companies and individuals do this? Will the state allow it? From another perspective, the Zhuque-1 has historical significance. After the Zhuque-1, in June 2019, the State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense and the Equipment Development Department jointly issued a notice on promoting the standardized and orderly development of commercial spaceflight. After that notice, we no longer had to explain to investors that this was legal — it was compliant with state regulations and state encouragement.

That's some solid state backing, man. The Document 60 sure did a lot of work.

…

Dai Zheng: I'm often grateful that we were born in a great power, and a manufacturing powerhouse. Take the liquid oxygen-methane engine injector — previously, machining one cost over a thousand yuan. Later, we found a domestic company that used to do precision machining of small parts for the watch industry. This company had since transitioned to doing precision machining for electronics and automotive industries, and they did excellent work. When we gave them our requirements, they found a way to continuously feed material and perform both external machining and drilling on the same equipment in a continuous process — dramatically reducing machining time and bringing the cost down to less than 100 yuan — a tenfold reduction. This country has an immense industrial base — it's like a vast treasure trove. You can always find what you need in it.
Dai Zheng: Our thrust chamber designer, Yuan Yu, was at a crayfish restaurant when he suddenly saw the owner using a particularly large ultrasonic cleaner to wash crayfish. Crayfish are notoriously difficult to clean, and he had a flash of inspiration — could we borrow this equipment? He wasn't sure if it would work, and buying one directly and finding it didn't work would be wasted money.
Dai Zheng: We didn't have much money then, and everyone was thinking about cost savings. The owner said, "If I lend this to you, I can't run my restaurant." Then he asked what they needed it for. Yuan Yu said, "We're building rocket engines — China's first high-thrust liquid oxygen-methane engine." The owner said, "Take it, no rent. Consider it my support for China's space program." I really feel that every Chinese person has a great-power dream in their heart.
… Dai Zheng: This responsibility comes naturally to every Chinese person. It's just like the shop owner who supported us with the crayfish washer — he was willing to sacrifice several days of his restaurant's business. I gradually came to realize that whether you're in the national team or a private company, society's evaluation of a group is never about where they come from or what kind of enterprise they're in. It's about what you're doing now, and whether it's what the country needs. If it's what the country needs, then you are part of the national team.

Is the crayfish anecdote not "American maverick" coded enough? Was a Document 60.1 dispatched to make this happen? Did the Financier Zhang Changwu promise behind the scenes to compensate the crayfish dude for his downtime? (he probably did) You guys make entire soapy movies out of such stuff, with Silicon Valley nerds peering into the monitor autistically, green glow on their faces, and no-bullshit Texas bros grunting homoerotically in rundown sheds, as they forge the American Dream. Maybe in 10 years they'll make a movie about LandSpace too. And about DeepSeek (have you heard of that time Liang Wenfeng drove into the vast emptiness of Tibet and totaled his car? Or the three years he was a shut-in in Chengdu, making money to bootstrap his eventual rise as a quant trader and an AGI maverick?), and about the Unitree CEO guy who's too autistic to learn to spell, and about the Moonshot guy who had everything in the US and came back to build his own thing, a whole bunch of others. And even the national team will get some spotlight: Rear Admiral Ma Weiming is the man who made EMALS on aircraft carriers work (yours is inferior btw, to the point Trump considers scrapping it – maybe too many mavericks for once), because he was just that "autistically" convinced that his scheme will work. Frank Wang will definitely be appreciated more as drones grow more important. You can surely say he didn't invent "the drone". Well, Musk didn't invent "the rocket". No, he didn't. He didn't go from "Zero to one". In fact I'd say this Thielian frame is an insult to what Musk does. He, in my opinion, does a very Chinese thing, just better. He picks up an underrated tech tree and finances it until it works.

Don't misunderstand me: I'm not saying your propaganda is false. I've spoken here in defense of Musk, for instance. These men are real, they do have certain noble ambitions and qualities of character, and championing them and their archetype is a great achievement, merit and source of power for the American nation. It's just very tedious after a lifetime of huffing it without being an imperial citizen. And it's depressing to see this being appropriated as an oversaturated marketable aesthetic by your grifters who chase said deep capital – domestic grifters and, increasingly, imported ones. And it's obnoxious how you are, perhaps without even realizing it, trying to monopolize the status of men. It all comes down to this. One side has eccentric geniuses with Faustian visions, the other "directives of the state".

Dan Wang is a midwit who found a nice simplifying pitch for airport reading. China is, at least for now, ran by Communists first and engineers second (Xi's pipeline is oversaturated with Tsinghua STEM Ph.Ds though so it may change). Why China doesn't make a lot of new categories of products or technologies, and whether stuff like BYD/CATL batteries can be brushed off with "everyone knows this is a matter of technical working out" is a complex question. The biggest part of the answer is "in 2000, they had $1000 GDP per capita, they physically couldn't fuck around with shoveling money at frivolous mavericks until very recently, they didn't have even a fraction of the capital needed".
Still, I agree that any honest answer will be at least somewhat damning to policies of Communists, and perhaps to the Chinese character as such. Liang Wenfeng says that what they lack is confidence to dare. But looking at, for example, the trend in novel biomedical research, I'd say this answer will be of mostly archival significance, whereas "can they catch up" is very salient in a geopolitical sense, and the discourse about caprices of the CCP sounds increasingly quaint. Jack Ma got disciplined for overestimating his leverage and going through with his scammy fintech idea, and a thousand op-eds were written on how the CCP "crushes innovation", and today Jack Ma's company publishes near-frontier models on Huggingface and develops pretty decent AI accelerators. This is all concern trolling. I don't advise the US to adopt their ways, but if you think you've calibrated your arrogance down far enough, I think you're still wrong.

But they will never have their share of the breakthroughs, because they can't, they constitutionally can't, it's the epistemological hole in their entire system. They can't build something unless they can measure it, they can't measure it if it hasn't been created, and they can't create it because there are no rewards for someone who might do anything that fundamentally changes the world. Because anything that so changes the world could change the CCP.

They can, and they will, and the CCP is confident enough in its power to allow it. But more importantly, China is already advanced by singular men, you just don't notice them.

What I got out of this is that Huawei was able to optimize incredible efficiency out of old systems by eliminating huge abstraction layers that generally come with the ecosystem

Yes, it's a "gain in efficiency". That's kind of the whole deal with semiconductors. Of course you find a deflationary way to put it.

And if Western companies aren't doing the same, it's because they're genuinely working on bigger stages of the problem

It's mainly that there isn't a single Western company comparable to Huawei in breadth of relevant expertise. Nvidia does chips, TSMC does manufacturing, ASML does lithography. Huawei is a networking giant plus everything all at once. They can, in fact, simply do some necessary and important things first.

For one thing, it's relatively easy to gain in efficiency at the start but it's much harder to maintain over time, what happens when Huawei's architecture diverges so much from standard that it becomes more and more difficult to hire engineers who can understand it.

I agree that within your paradigm, that would be a huge problem for Huawei. Luckily, Moore is dead and, as per their argument, everyone else will also have to do natively 3D design and logic folding for increasingly large chips, so they'll manage somehow. Just gotta wait to copy from eccentric geniuses who are copying them. In the meantime they'll be busy developing their 3D EDA tools. Whether it'll get a biopic or not, we'll eventually see the product.

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