I think well meaning people in the west are looking for a silver lining and in the process overcomplicating a rather simple issue: the US government is cutting spending everywhere while its electorate demands even deeper cuts. The money has dried up and people are leaving.
(One of my best friends was a nuclear medicine phd who left his cancer research lab after covid to work at a VoiP company, so i too have anecdotes)
The US is in a weird spot. The electorate does not generally want education and research cut.
Republicans here have convinced their base that education and the educated are bad, which has fed their desire to cut academic funding and research at all levels.
That is to say, the federal government doesn't have a popular mandate to do any of this. They simply hold all levers of power through a slim majority of the voting populace.
And lets not forget that its only 22% of the total amount of people who live here. A large minority of potential voters are disenfranchised and do not vote. The government isnt just without a mandate it is extremely unpopular.
China is famous for low-quality research and bad papers, which is exactly what you'd expect from a system that grants an expanded number of formal credentials to people who aren't actually doing good scientific research.
Be that as it may, China also has persistent threat actors outfoxing American cybersecurity in the form of Salt Typhoon. The cards are on the table, and the US is already undoubtedly losing several fronts of asymmetrical warfare.
I have a friend who, to explain it simply, worked medium high up in the CIA for 8-12 years during Bush and Obama. The only time he gets serious about talking about his time there is on this topic. Chinas cyber security is, according to him, light years ahead of the US to the point where its embarrassing.
If I understand Salt Typhoon correctly it's a masterpiece. The descriptions I've seen indicate that they penetrated lawful intercept. Lawful intercept operates outside network operators network management systems because it was designed not to trust the network operators. I am skeptical of claims that Salt Typhoon has been eliminated from US networks. Any such implicitly claim to detect lawful intercept traffic and ensure it isn't nefarious, which traffic that system is designed to hide.
Geely owns Volvo and IIRC a significant portion of Volvos are Chinese made now.
There's a number of companies or brands that are now Chinese owned. China knows that home grown brands (like Geely) don't work on an international stage, so they buy well known brands like Volvo.
It's a bit of a silent behind the scenes takeover but I'd say that China is now seriously making competitive cars. If you can follow the brands and notice.
Geely is Volvo's parent company but Volvo still designs and manufactures its cars. Geely gets to benefit from Volvo technology for its own Chinese brands.
Just like Tata owns Jaguar and Land Rover but it doesn't mean India is "pumping out world-class cars".
I left China in 2017 so my info is a little dated but unless there was a _giant_ leap in quality I wouldn't trust a Chinese car any more than I trust other Chinese products (products made to spec in China is a different matter altogether). And when I was there anyone in China who could afford a foreign brand wasn't buying Chinese brands either.
It's not that Chinese are incapable of making great products, but cutting corners and crappy customer service is deeply embedded into their business culture. Things are changing but there's still a long way to go.
> It's the manufacturer's principal's bid and proposed criteria that are key.
Agreed. And Chinese brands are, on the whole, more concerned with cost than quality. Things are made to look shiny on the outside with a great "spec list", but are crap on the inside.
Lol, the fully homegrown BYD is destroying Tesla everywhere outside the US where it’s basically banned and you’re taking about Geely and Volvo and behind the scenes. It’s all out there on the stage.
> It’s just objective fact that BYD along with Tesla are world class cars
World class propaganda maybe. Cars definitely not.
I'll give China the Volvo brand. I can see the quality difference at any car show. I remember seeing some other nice looking Chinese cars but BYD (and Tesla for that matter) are objectively awful.
They’re still world class cars as they sell well everywhere in the world. The quality compared to some other smaller brands are not really important criteria in that context.
