Food for thought
Food for thought
Chinese innovation, strategic weakness from raw material supply
China’s Innovations
It used to be a common opinion that China, and Asian countries by extension, are struggling with blue ocean innovations. They could copy, or improve on Western tech, but not really innovate.
Some recent data shows this is a wrong and at the very least an outdated point of view.
For example, China not only trains tons of engineers and scientists. But their works also top among the most cited article, the key metric to measure the quality of scientific research.
Altogether, the West (USA+EU) is still well ahead, but this advantage is diminishing quickly.
“China claiming 8,422 articles in the top category, while the US had 7,959 and the European Union had 6,074”
I would suspect if we looked at the most cited article published after 2016, the Western advance would be even smaller, as “most cited papers” are usually older breakthroughs every scientist in a field a referring to in their introduction, favoring papers published in 1995-2015.
SOURCE: https://asiatimes.com/2023/01/chinas-scientific-supremacy-shifting-balance-of-power/
Another key factor is attractivity to talent. American commentators often claim how brilliant the US is at innovating. What they leave out is that the real US brilliance is (was?) in the ability to siphon the best minds of the world into US universities and corporations.
When you study innovation and innovative companies, more often than not the key scientists or founders are not born in the US, but foreigners that moved to the US to utilize the capital made available by US finance.
But this is not really the case anymore. For example, this story about how the US refusing a visa to ONE Turkish man led to Huawei dominating 5G technology.
A headstart for Huawei that later required initiating a full set of sanctions on Huawei, diplomatic pressure on allies, and even arrests on bogus charges of Huawei officials. Something a LOT more costly than rationally treating the topic of high-skill immigration would have been.
The West’s Limited Industrial Capacity
I already covered the issue on ammo manufacturing, with Ukraine firing many multiples times the whole NATO artillery shells production capacity.
But it is even worse than I realized on some key materials.
Western artillery canons are made using titanium. So are a lot of airplane parts, including those used by Airbus, a key supplier to the US Air Force. We mostly source our titanium from … Russia.
This is not all, the tweet above explores some other vulnerability I was only vaguely aware of.
An almost never talked about metal, antimony, is in the same situation.
Antimony, which Forbes called "the most important mineral you never heard of," is a critical part of the defense-industrial supply chain used to make everything from armor-piercing bullets to night vision goggles and explosives and more.
The last American mine in Idaho ceased production in 1997. Today, the world's largest supplies are found in China, Tajikistan, and--of course--Russia. "There is no domestic mine for antimony," according to a 2020 report from the U.S. Geological Survey.
Add to this the more talked about rare earth supplies at 90% from China.
In an upcoming report, I will also highlight how the West is losing control over 80-90% of the world’s oil reserves.
Overall, the West needs to start to get serious about raw material production. And that means fighting back against green lobbies.
Or it will not be able to sustain any sort of military effort when its “adversaries” are also their main suppliers of key materials.
South Korea -Eastern Europe Connection
An unexpected result of the Ukraine invasion has been a quickly deepening connection between South Korea and Eastern Europe. The latest is “S. Korea discusses nuclear power cooperation with Poland, Czech Republic”
This followed a September 2022 massive Polish order for 1,000 Korean-made tanks, 600 artillery pieces, and dozens of fighter jets.
Romania is following this trend too:
And the main investor in Hungary in 2020 was surprisingly not Germany, but South Korea
Even Estonia, where I live, is boosting previous orders for Korean artillery.
With the US military-industrial complex seemingly out of spare capacity, Korea seems to be the winner in arms exports to the quickly re-arming Eastern European countries.
The same holds true for strategic capacities like nuclear power plants and other advanced technologies like advanced batteries.
Overall, this seems to me like a good thing. It will give Eastern Europe an alternative and more neutral supplier to the usual “Germany/France/UK/USA” option for strategic supplies.
French Intellectual Making the Rounds
English-speaking commentators have heavily discussed an interview in one of the top french publications by Emmanuel Todd. Todd is an interesting sociologist/anthropologist, even if I would not claim him to be the “greatest French intellectual”.
A few chosen exerpts in the tweet below. And as an English translation if you want to read the whole thing.
AI Tools
People have gone on crazy predictions about how AI will take over everything. While I think this is likely grossly exaggerated, the list below gathers many tools that you might find interesting or useful.
I personally think generative AI will be a real threat to visual arts that already lack real creativity (run-of-the-mill mobile games, book covers, stock photos).
And for text content that is generated by humans already acting like dumb AI (Top 10 lists, re-hash blog content, re-hash Wikipedia articles,…).
Truly creative or out-of-the-box thinking seems completely out of reach for AI for now. A heavy load of political correctness will also reduce the threat of AI on quality independent thinking:
Closing Thoughts
I think the Eurasian Century and the rise of multiple poles of power is a process, not an event. China becoming more innovative and the war in Ukraine are just stepping stones along the way.
Just when I was editing this article I saw an unexpected new step I had not forecasted at all, but making sense in the context of Argentina joining the BRICS:
I would not be surprised if this could be the very, VERY early stage of South America emerging as a center of power by itself, instead of an appendage to the US.
With the new empire of “Brazentina” at its core maybe?
Maybe the discussion of the “Sur” will be treated in 20-50 years as an important turning point in history. Something that the news cycle will have forgotten by next month.
I imagine AI will also redistribute the cards of influence in the world. At the country level and between people, social classes, etc…
For sure, we are under the old curse, wrongly attributed to the Chinese “May you live in interesting times“.