Discuss anything related to China.
Community Rules:
0: Taiwan, Xizang (Tibet), Xinjiang, and Hong Kong are all part of China.
1: Don't go off topic.
2: Be Comradely.
3: Don't spread misinformation or bigotry.
讨论中国的地方。
社区规则：
零、台湾、西藏、新疆、和香港都是中国的一部分。
一、不要跑题。
二、友善对待同志。
三、不要传播谣言或偏执思想。
China today stands as the most aggressively innovative force in modern history. What truly matters isn't just the number of patents,it's the sheer volume of high-tech, cutting-edge developments they're churning out. These innovations are reshaping global industries at breakneck speed.
And soon enough, the West, clinging to its fading dominance, will have only one bitter word left to scream: "Stolen"
China is capitalist, actually 
It is like the wave particle duality. When it does good it is capitalist when it does it bad they are authoritarian commies.
I've read some talking about many patents getting filed in China that aren't sound, just to inflate numbers for the associated institutions and universities that are submitting them.
Even if a third of those were fake and had no chance of producing a real innovation, Chinese scientists are still outputting much more than the west.
That also happens in the US of course. Big companies are very patent-happy because they can harass smaller companies with bogus patent lawsuits using them.
Yes very true
Shit even if two thirds were fake they'd still be in the lead.
Right, pretty incredible
Same rhetoric as the "china is building ghost cities to inflate their gdp" then it turns out 10 years later millions live in them
A little different, a house will always be a house but a fake innovation won't necessarily become something useful down the line. It probably has an effect on local funding too, if a lab producing good work is overshadowed by a lab producing a lot more useless work just to inflate numbers, at first glance they latter group might get the funding on metrics alone.
Still, I can't imagine more than a third is doing that kind of behavior, even that seems like a lot, and this means China is still out innovating the world several times over.
This isn't accurate. A poorly made building is only as good as a useless patent. The shoddy work will require costly fixes or rebuilding entirely. Most capitalist economies turn this into a benefit, but communist administrators would understand that it's merely a drain on resources and labour, and be less likely to accept this preventable waste. Despite my lack of particular knowledge I'd guess that the PRC is more inclined to have a more sensible process regarding patents than the West.
I'm any case this sort of rumour is quite old, as the other comrade pointed out. The Chinese have been accused of stealing IP for decades (mostly by the people who sold the know-how) and hearsay of near meaningless papers churned out to pump up numbers was thrown around when Jiang was still in charge, probably started before.
I'm not arguing with your conclusions, but we needn't take projection or rumours from the dying hegemon at face value. This one stings me especially since I believed it for years and only questioned it once I was reminded of it, after I'd already become an ML.
Edit: You said you saw it on XHS and while I irritate myself in questioning the locals' account, that app also revealed they plenty of Chinese people aren't very worldly, so to speak. Thinking easily proven facts about the US and Europe being CPC propaganda and the like.
I thought the ghost cities thing was about building places that no one lived, not about the quality being low. It has been awhile.
You know there has been widespread and endless anti corruption efforts in China right? It seems like you are romanticizing the fact that they are communists, thinking that they will naturally choose the smart and efficient choices because they are communists, but tens of thousands of CPC members have decided to enrich themselves and been caught, not to mention those who have not been caught and non party member's. Chinese people are very aware of these issues and talk about them openly online. There will be biases and misinformation and rumors and the like but let's not assume that there can't be any truth to these things, this is naive. My main point was to say that even when adjusting for this, China is still doing amazing things. I just thought it was an interesting anecdote about the patents because they are so much higher volume that it can't be explained by population alone, and China also has a large base of educated workers who can't find jobs. Just interesting context to me
I thought the ghost cities thing was about building places that no one lived, not about the quality being low. It has been awhile.
No you're right, the poor construction thing is a different anti china meme, the ghost city thing was propaganda like, they're wasting concrete and labor to do useless work just to juice their gdp. Like this is a game of vic3 and gdp means something real
But then it turns out years later people moved into them and the infrastructure is being used, like, westerners just took the ground work for a plan having no results and ran propaganda on that.
But then it turns out, ironically also like a game of vic3, building infrastructure for future growth is a good thing to do, who knew
There's separate anti China memes about construction quality, bad concrete or whatever, idk
Yeah, and honestly the construction issues seem to happen more in other countries. There's that big scandal right now with the building that collapsed in the Thai earthquakes, the only building in the area to collapse and the most recently built, and which the company touted their earthquake resistant design.
but yes, the crackers being confused about planning things in advanced that will affect millions of people's lives was a good one. It's amazing how many waves of anti-China memes that have happened over the years, and to look back now on how China's development has just changed everything.
It's a similar problem, building in the middle of nowhere without planning will similarly have future costs. More importantly, those supposed ghost cities have hundreds of thousands of inhabitants now.
From my POV anti-corruption efforts, even though proof of past corruption without doubt, isn't a contradiction. It's very much the system working: anti-corruption efforts are nowhere to be seen in liberal democracies. Like all the other improvements in AES, the capitalist economies could do it, but never do.
Besides, I wrote about incentives and inclinations, not rich guy dumb commie smart. A faulty system that benefits oneself directly or one's benefactors doesn't provide an incentive to improve to replace that system. Similarly, someone without a liberal indoctrination, even if they're engaging in some (different kinds of?) corruption, would be more likely to see issues as they come up and more incentivised to fix them. None of this is to say China or other AES make no mistakes, there're plenty of errors to be found, big and small. But the structures that exist there are different than those in capitalist economies and as I understand them, have better incentives to catch long-term wasteful choices.
I mean it's the same "perfidious asiatics just making shit up" rhetoric though
Ah I see, it was Chinese people talking about it on XHS.
Idk i don't care who is saying it im saying it has the same vibes as the ghost city propaganda where oh it can't be possible that china is actually creating that much value, they must be lying about it for nefarious reasons!
I hear you, I had someone tell me 10 years ago that my position in favor of China's counter terrorism measures in Xinjiang had the same vibes as the US using terrorism as a way to justify oppressing people in Afghanistan. China says they are terrorists, and now they are being oppressed by China in response, are you a denier of genocide? We see how that turned out, their vibes based analysis was very emotionally driven but not taking into account the very real things that exist in the material plane. I think a lot of vibes based analysis struggles to differentiate the content of things versus their forms.
Individual humans living within a capitalist society have material reasons to lie, and it may even be easier to get away with in a nation like China where they want to give money to people to do cool shit. I don't know if it is easier, but it isn't hard to imagine, based on the information available. China has had a long history of corruption, especially in the 80's and 90's, and Xi's political momentum lied heavily in his anti-corruption commitments. These things don't just go away overnight, and for a nation that is investing billions back into scientific research and development at an unprecedented scale, an opportunity arises for those who seek to get a piece of that action without being able to promise the results that funding warrants. The Chinese government has put out statements about patent fraud. People have been tried in court for these things, an example of which I linked in a different comment. I get that, at first glance, you see a comment online by a stranger and want to uplift the possibility that narratives critical of China could be based in Sinophobic rhetoric. My comment wasn't that, just relevant anecdote I heard from Chinese people in China about a real thing that is going on that Chinese people are talking about, in China. To me, an interesting peek into the incredibly competitive, endlessly expanding science machine that is developing in China which, if I'm being honest, is one of the few things I have hope for if our species is to survive. 
Keep in mind these are conspiracy theories. Literally. 1.4 million patent applications? How many people have to be "in" on it before someone speaks about the lie? At some point the lack of evidence is damning. This can't possibly be true without clear and obvious evidence.
According to a news report by 知识产权界, on December 3, 2020, the People’s Court of Shehong City, Sichuan heard the corruption and bribery case of defendant Guo, and the corruption case of defendants Chen, Wu, and Wu . The court of first instance sentenced Guo to 6 years and 8 months imprisonment, fined Guo 400,000 yuan, and ordered him to refund the economic losses caused by his corruption. Guo had fraudulently filed and obtained 231 utility model patents and then applied for awards of 3,000 RMB (~$459 USD) each from Shehong County Government’s intellectual property award funds.
As I said in a different comment, fraudulent patents are taking government grants that could be going to teams working on quality work. Here are the conspiracy theorists of the people's court of shehong city, sichuan confirming such a thing. This popped up from a cursory search on Google in English, but it is widely talked about in Chinese on Chinese platforms, it is a real thing that is happening
There's a difference between "some people try to commit fraud" and "China is inflating its numbers to look innovative when it's actually not".
Of course some people commit fraud. Of course, some people actually do try to take government money and run with it.
The former is basically true in every single country no matter where you look. The latter is actually the conspiracy theory that China isn't innovative because "1.4 million patents are all universally bullshit" or something to that extent.
That's my 2c
Yeah and no one here said the latter, so glad you cleared that up
What that article also shows is that this issue is being taken seriously and fraud is being severely punished.
Did I imply something else? I didn't say it was being ignored, although it's obvious that there would be many cases that haven't gotten caught, and it is an issue that exists which some commenters seem to think is a conspiracy theory.
No, it's a fair point. Though i don't know how you would extrapolate from "we know some fraud exists because we have examples of people getting caught and punished" to "therefore there must be many cases which haven't been caught".
I mean yes there are surely some cases, because no system is going to be 100% perfect all the time. But i would caution against making unfalsifiable assumptions and inferences about how frequently something occurs without real statistical evidence.
Let's take for instance the hypothetical scenario that you never heard of anyone being caught doing fraud. Would that mean that no fraud or very little fraud is taking place, or would that mean that it is being insufficiently policed? How about if no one was ever caught? Does that imply little fraud or (deliberately?) poor enforcement?
If for both scenario A - there have been some fraud convictions - and scenario B - there have been no fraud convictions - your conclusion is: this means there must be a lot of cases that haven't been caught, then how could any evidence ever convince you that this is not the case, if there really was little or no fraud taking place? If you leave no possibility for the evidence to indicate the opposite of a statement, then you have a-priori decided that said statement is true and you are merely seeking ways of making the evidence support your conclusion, not the other way around.
And what if there were a lot of convictions for patent fraud happening in China? Would it mean that China is very diligent in enforcing the law, or would you assume that this simply means that the problem is even bigger still, because there must be a lot more that they aren't catching?
You see the point i'm trying to make? You're trying to extrapolate about an unknown quantity based on the existence of known cases, without knowing what percentage of the whole those cases actually are. We should be careful with this, because we see this kind of faulty logic from liberals a lot: they have an already pre-conceived idea of what they want to believe about X country, so when confronted with a lack of evidence that something is happening (or only very few cases of that something happening) they paradoxically become more sure that that thing is happening and moreover that there is a conspiracy to hide it.
I think the only justifiable position to take is to say, ok, we know that some instances of fraud are happening and being punished, but we honestly don't know how common of a problem it is. It's ok to admit that we have insufficient data to draw conclusions beyond what we know for a fact.
Anyway, putting China aside, i wonder if you can find similar sentences being handed out in the US. Because obviously it's not like patent fraud only takes place in China, right? But do we ever see the US punishing their fraudsters as harshly? Or does the US rather reward them, especially if they are big corporate entities doing the fraud? I don't know. I haven't looked into this topic much. I'd be interested to find out.
To your first point, it is the sheer volume of it that makes it easy to assume there are many cases that haven't (yet) been caught. China is producing such an absurd amount of patents, and there are clearly people who are willing to try and defraud the government in China enough that it's been a real problem. There is also a huge problem with providing enough jobs for qualified scientists in China, it is not hard to imagine that there will be people doing whatever it takes to provide for their family if the alternative is not having any job at all. I wasn't even saying China was trying to hide anything, although we know that they do that. The Thai building collapse I mentioned in another comment was pretty quickly scrubbed from Chinese social media, for example. In the case of fraud, I would imagine that China would prefer to be open about that data domestically because it shows they are diligent to the masses and potentially scares other people from trying. I haven't had the time to look for it myself yet. Either way, I wasn't making a point that there are many cases that haven't been caught, I was saying that in context to being told the very notion is a conspiracy theory with no evidence, that there are some that have been caught that we can see makes it real, and surely there are more that haven't been caught.
I'm just posting on forum, not writing to convince an audience of anything, so I feel fine making speculative statements without statistical evidence. I get if you hold yourself to a different standard, but I don't take any of this seriously enough to think about it like that. I agree that China is probably setting the global standard on fraud prevention and prosecution, and that the US does something like the opposite.
Perhaps. But by that same logic one can assume that the same is happening in other countries too, so those would also need to be adjusted downwards.
The Mongoloid brainpan is 637.4% more duplicitous than the Caucasoid brainpan though. That’s just basic race science. /s
One of the things I remember from the past is people saying "Their schools tell their students what to think, our teach us how to think." and like... I know what they mean, that our schools teach us abstract philosophical ideas about how to construct an idea, pare it down, and build a corpus of supporting (and counter) evidence.
Except they don't, really. I don't know if you remember school, but there is a bonkers amount of rote memorisation, and there's a limited amount of "how to think" you can teach a classroom of 30-40 kids who are mostly checked out. Like, I went to several well regarded high schools with pretty good grades, and the vast majority of education is simply remembering work schedules to get particular results. Not that there wasn't some exploratory stuff here and there, and that critical readings of what texts were saying wasn't touched on, but the majority of students struggled with even surface level readings and mathematical proofs.
This argument always bothered me even when I was a lib. Like, assuming that Chinese high schools were just rote memorisation entirely, they would functionally not be that different to our schools.
My school literally showed me the Animal Farm animation movie during a history lesson on communism. There is no critical thinking thaught whatsoever.
I don't know if you remember school, but there is a bonkers amount of rote memorisation, and there's a limited amount of "how to think" you can teach a classroom of 30-40 kids who are mostly checked out.
I had the benefit of experiencing two different school systems. One in a formerly socialist Eastern European country and one in a Western European one. Of course times change and i'm sure by now it's different than it was even two to three decades ago, but from my experience there is some truth to the statement that there was more rote memorization in the eastern educational system.
I wouldn't say this was always a bad thing though, because in many subjects the results produced by that system were objectively better. Students not only fared much better in international math and sciences competitions (where it's definitely not all about simple memorization but often about solving new and quite complex problems that you have never encountered before), but also generally students were at least one, maybe even two years ahead in many subjects over their western counterparts, at least until you get to the university level where things become much more equalized.
As for the western educational system "teaching how to think", maybe in theory, but in practice from my experience what this usually resulted in is a lot of "unconventional" teaching methods (a lot of props and group work, the latter being very bad at getting everyone to actually engage with the material) that could be frustrating and even confusing for some students. Some of these methods worked while some were a complete waste of time.
And also there was a lot of "i won't tell you what to do, you have to figure it out for yourselves" which ended with a lot of students just giving up and never actually learning how to do something because they couldn't get there on their own and the teacher wouldn't take the time to properly explain and do demonstrations themselves of how it's done because that was considered too "traditional" of a teaching method, and the class would eventually just move on to the next thing.
Also, in the more "humanities" oriented subjects there is a lot of refusal to just give a straight up "this is the correct answer", which again can be confusing for a lot of students and end up with them finishing the class without having actually learned anything concrete. In general there is a lot less factual information that is imparted on students in the western educational system. I probably knew more historical facts from early childhood schooling in eastern Europe than i learned in all my years in a western European school.
The western system relies on students being motivated to go further on their own initiative, which frankly is simply not the case most of the time. Even the best and most motivated students often want to do other things after school than more voluntary school work that goes beyond your assigned homework. The result of this is that when you go to university you often find that you have serious gaps and a lot of catching up to do to even get to the level that is expected of first years, whereas you don't see this problem in international students coming from certain other countries that still have a more "old fashioned" system. Again, this depends, it's not always the case, but more often than not, it can be.
This is not to say that there aren't some advantages to the western system, i can't speak to higher education in the humanities for instance, so maybe there are certain skills there that are better developed in this system (though judging by the state of "economics" and "political science" in the West, i'm not even sure that's true). And maybe some students do feel more comfortable with this style rather than the "traditional" one. But overall i don't think it's enough to say that it's a superior system, especially in the hard sciences.
This whole thing was interesting as my schooling experience was 20 years ago (good grief). I've been meaning to ask my friends who teach what their experience is like.
i'm sure by now it's different that it was even two to three decades ago, but from my experience there is some truth to the statement that there was more rote memorization in the eastern educational system.
That may be true, but I'm not sure it manages to encompass the thought "and therefore the perfidious Chinese will always be behind us in every sector unless they cheat and steal", which is the underlying message.
(Also, for my part, my failures at uni going from decent grades in high school was going from 100 to 0 in terms of how much control my parents had over my time and also suddenly having a social life.)
(and severe depression)