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I'm not saying China is a perfect state. The One-Child Policy was a bad move, amongst other things. But in a great many fields, they do better than the US does. There is a level of comprehensive strength and cohesion they have that the US lacks.
Unlike the blatherings of US elected officials, (one of which started a diplomatic furor by threatening to blow up TSMC in scorched earth policy as you linked, which is not helpful to the US) Xi knows that officials are forced to pick over everything he says with a fine-toothed comb if they want to get ahead. Everything he says is super super bland and dull-sounding but it's never into the vacuum. Xi Xinping Thought is big and important in Chinese officialdom, just as Biden 'Thought' is laughable in America and routinely corrected by officials. Xi consistently says the time for struggle is near, we must be resolute, train more soldiers, prepare for confrontation. That's what the fleet, air and rockets are for. Why is Xi's China building such a gigantic fleet if not to challenge the US? If he wanted just to defend Fortress China, he could just stack up ICBMs, land-based missiles and SAMs.
Well by this logic, Russia can just nuke the US tech sector to ash. Sarmat and Topol can fulfil their destiny, do what they were made to do. If nukes are on the table, then that radically evens the playing field. In a scenario where megadeaths are locked in, why not have a full exchange?
According to Reuters, CHina can shrug off US AI sanctions using the dumbed-down US H-800s, theft and smuggling. The US is terminally dopey. They don't learn from their mistakes. Do you think Kamala Harris is going to lay down some really effective, well-thought out AI policy? Her presence reveals a level of unseriousness - she was previously supposed to be border czar where she did next to nothing to defend US national interests.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/chinas-ai-industry-barely-slowed-by-us-chip-export-rules-2023-05-03
They overwhelmed their enemies with industrial output. Now they face China. Anyway, my point was that if the US is so united and committed, they should be able to put boots in the ground.
Well you asked for supercomputers, I gave you supercomputers! How can China be capable of putting together a FP 64 supercomputer on par with the US but not FP 16? Everyone agrees that they have first-rate chip design skills. They designed a TPU-equivalent back in 2018: https://www.networkworld.com/article/3289387/baidu-takes-a-major-leap-as-an-ai-player-with-new-chip-intel-alliance.html
Now I can't find out what exactly came of these chips, I can't read mandarin and China doesn't have a habit of announcing everything they do for foreign audiences like the US does. (America's previous plan to undermine CCP rule by economic liberalization and free trade failed for precisely that ludicrous, anime-tier insistence on declaring how their attack works, as they use it in battle). You're free to say that it's a nothingburger, another dancing robot puppy. I will say that something's powering Tiktok, which is a truly impressive soft-power/adversary cultural degradation tool. Profitable too. Nobody seems to know where they trained and refined their algorithm but it's still important.
How much division and conflict in the West has it's root in Tiktok? Libsoftiktok, those abhorrent social media trends, shortening attention spans of the youth. Where is the US equivalent, if they're so far ahead in AI? Now I sense you'll think of me a strident boomer, maniacally warning against the evil Chicoms corrupting the youth. Well, it's still true. Fentanyl and Tiktok are corrupting Western society, though it's like pissing into an ocean of piss at this point. Shouldn't we expect the leading power in AI to get to these things first? Shouldn't there be some American Tiktok-equivalent that can make patriotism really cool, get kids into STEM, make it fun to hate China? The US is still doing analogue stuff like NAFO and brigading reddit, stuff that can't even pierce the Great Firewall. And why can't the US make anything superior to Huawei's 5G on cost-efficiency? That's not AI but it's AI-adjacent.
Why can't the US produce commercially valuable products if they're so far ahead? Sure, ChatGPT is coming online now but there are Chinese equivalents, multimodal too (though I'm not willing to pay for Chinatalk's substack to see. This looks fairly decent, especially the trick question noticing stuff: https://www.chinatalk.media/p/baidus-ernie-china-reacts ). If they're just leveraging the huge amount of Chinese data they've sucked up to counter their crappier hardware, then so be it. That works too.
Now I'm not saying the US is behind China, just that it's close enough for the conflict to be interesting.
Well, at the cost of trillions of dollars and about 130,000 US veteran suicides plus a good chunk America's global reputation, what was the outcome of the Middle East Wars 2001-2023? Iraq and Yemen are now in the Iranian sphere of influence, by extension they're in the Chinese sphere. Saudi is flirting with Beijing, Russia is now wedded at the hip. Maybe if US diplomats studied Daoism and practiced a little inaction, they'd have saved blood, prestige and treasure while getting a much better outcome. The Chinese sage spent over a decade building up strength while the musclebound MMA thug bashed his head into the wall. This is what skilful diplomacy looks like, cheap victories over expensive losses.
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