I found a very detailed and well argumented opinion piece on X that struck really hard on this …

>Europe & America are optimizing variables that China stopped tracking years ago Net income? >looks insanely redundant from the outside until you realize redundancy is actually information density in disguise Everyone knows redundancy costs money today in exchange for security tomorrow. Presumably, Chinese executives are earning more by keeping redundancy, whereas executives in Europe and the US earn more by removing redundancy. How does China incentivize its executives to spend money on redundancy? I have to imagine it's some type of top down system that fights against personal interests to advance the interests of the tribe (obviously at the expense of personal liberties).

This is more like inefficiency in sheeps clothing. Being able to iterate that quickly and cheaply relies on spare capacity and people making salaries 10-25% of what Germans get.

> China accidentally built a distributed neural network of manufacturing intelligence where knowledge diffuses horizontally across thousands of agents I find it difficult to take statements like this seriously. China has built an incredibly dense manufacturing zone. They've done so by manufacturing more cheaply than other countries do, a key element of which is paying workers less than any European country would be able to do. The rest of what's being described is just what falls into place once you've created that dense, cheap in demand manufacturing zone.

100% agree. I am whitnessimg this on a daily basis working for a german company that develops both hard and software for indistrial machines.

Meanwhile our top VCs continue to invest in SaaS, AI (new SaaS), and crypto (ponzi returns) because I guess the only thing that matters is widening the wealth gap and enjoying the yacht life. I work in VC and make early stage investments primarily into industrial or other physical industries. It often feels like an uphill battle trying to get people to take interest in this stuff. My most recent company sources from China because the US infrastructure can’t supply what we need. This is a company that will be worth billions when it scales up and the US literally cannot supply it because our factories are so ancient.

This diffusion requires a different attitude towards IPR. Western countries prioritize protection of past investments (or dometes just the first to stumble through a gate or file first).

Is there realistically a path to the west learning any of these lessons without going through WW3? It’s not like any of this is news. My newspaper of choice has been telling me about how fast china moves, in vivid detail, since at least 2018 - others probably knew much earlier than I did. I watched a graphic documentary on YouTube about Shenzhen in 2019 that gave me all of the same information in this tweet, minus the accomplishments that have happened since then. My own eyes have seen how their consumer goods have transformed in a very short time. Maybe other Americans don’t notice because the key categories (tech, cars) have so much protectionism. I’m not sure about the Europeans. The west is better at coming up with excuses and red tape than actually solving problems, it seems.

> Europe’s answer to China is always a committee, a regulation, a 5 year strategic plan and a press conference > China’s answer to anything is ship it tomorrow and figure out the rest next week Yes, god knows we'd never see the Chinese delivering 5 year strategic plans, and they're notably committee-averse. A large part of China's success is they've been intentional about what they're doing - they've _had_ a strategy, whereas every time we consider that in the West, we're told that's a loser's bet and we need to just let the market do its thing.