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The Chinese control their media, and they love to purport nationalistic propaganda. However, folks in the United States reading their information should take it all with a grain of salt. Indeed, we've all heard quite a bit about how China is going to surpass the United States militarily, economically, educationally, and eventually dominate all industries and technologies. Often the articles we read in the mainstream media, and the international press say that China is surpassing the US and innovation, invention, and new concepts. To this I say; baloney.
In the Wall Street on August 18, 2011 there was an article by Nathan Hodge titled; "China Debuts a Drone at Robotics Show," but the picture accompanying the article shows nothing more than a radio controlled quad-copter, the kind that kids here in Junior High School science classes are playing around with these days. Any difference, oh sure, better sensors, designed and innovated in the US, just like the quad-copter which you can buy off the shelf at Wal-Mart just put in the AA batteries.
The photo did show a sleek body, kind of cool but really, that's just the thin plastic body, and we know they have lots of injection plastic molding companies there, and really that design too could have easily been ripped off from the US. The article stated;
"China made its debut this week at the world's largest robotics tradeshow when a Shinzhen-based firm showcased its F50, a small drone with a high definition video camera that a company brochure billed as a tool for monitoring protests. The relatively small, short range drone, about the size of a pizza pan, in the drone market underscores the ever increasing international competition in the market for unmanned aerial vehicles and military robots."
The number of scientific research papers published in the last five years in China is up substantially, it is truly amazing, until you read some of them. Apparently, after "simple" peer review it seems that 45% of them contain errors, mistakes, cheating, bogus data, plagiarism, and many just defy logic, physics, and are nothing more than creative writing projects. China's students at the lower levels show higher math scores than US students, but when you pit Asian American students against Chinese students they are statistically practically equal.
The Chinese have filed record number of patents in recent years as well, however on closer scrutiny we see most of those patents are nonsensical, and less-than-innovative at least by US standards. There is not much creativity there. Nothing to impressed with, and yes, occasionally there is a diamond in the rough, but usually it is borrowed technology or ripped off proprietary information. Okay so, maybe I am being too hard on the Chinese, as there is a small percentage of decent patents being filed, but they are far and few between really.
Luckily for China, even with all this mediocrity, they have the massive numbers of people, even if only a few of these innovations are legitimate or revolutionary they certainly have some amount of promise on the innovative front, but they aren't off to a very good start, and they are hardly challenging us presently in any major way. In the future, surely they will grow up, get with the program, and perhaps be able to compete with us head-to-head. However, I doubt if that will be for a couple more decades. So if we are wise we have plenty of time to upgrade our own society, way of thinking, and push the boundaries of the unknown.
We have the right mindset, the right culture, and the right attitude to remain the world's greatest nation ever created for 100 more years, if we will walk our own talk. And I must say we are not doing so shabby as it is. Still, that doesn't mean there isn't work to do or we should rest on our laurels. There is more to conquer in the future, yes, there surely is. But if we are going to use China as a measuring bar that would be a silly mistake, and we would have to backtrack pretty far to do it. Indeed I hope you will please consider all this and think on it.
Lance Winslow is a retired Founder of a Nationwide Franchise Chain, and now runs the Online Think Tank. Lance Winslow believes writing 24,500 articles by August 24th or 25th will be difficult because all the letters on his keyboard are now worn off now..
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