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Britain should not quake before Xi Jinping: China has already peaked and faces economic stagnation

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  1. Silbern
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    This was quite an interesting article, and one that I actually agree with a lot. I think way too many people have been overrating China's raw economic strength, and underrating the damage they...

    This was quite an interesting article, and one that I actually agree with a lot. I think way too many people have been overrating China's raw economic strength, and underrating the damage they keep doing to their own international credibility. One of the reasons why the US became so dominant was because it ingrained itself in the changing world order after WWII. We gave money away freely to recovering countries, so that our dollar would become the global currency for finance. We provided free, non-exploitive (at least in general) military defense to weaker allies, like South Korea, so that our military would be active in nearly every theater around the world. We accepted tons of immigrants, who in turn brought their skills and knowledge with them, and powered the US into a global leader many of the new fields that've emerged since that time, such as space exploration and IT. Given their Trump-esque approach to international diplomacy, China's failed to seriously challenge the US' position, and their window has almost completely slammed shut, and it will if/when Biden becomes president.

    That being said, there is one particular point in this article I strongly disagree with:

    The Centre for Strategic and International Studies estimates that China has yet to crack the materials science that goes into the latest microscopic chips, despite hurling money at the challenge in successive programmes, the latest one commanding more than $20bn. Its high-end chip industry is ten years behind, but in ten years the infrastructure of global cyber dominance will already be in place.

    It's chip industry is most certainly not that far behind. I actually use a 10 year old phone as my daily driver, a Samsung Galaxy S Epic 4G, and it turns 10 in literally a few months I believe. This phone runs a version of Android that's extremely out of date (Jelly Bean), can't handle most modern applications anymore, and has a battery life of about 4 hours of screen on time. The chip itself (the famous Hummingbird processor) was manufactured with 45nm lithography, runs at a maximum of 1GHz, and has only a single core. It's hopelessly outdated, and only a combination of a few unique physical characteristics of the phone, good backwards compatibility in the Android ecosystem, and affection on my part that keep this thing operational in 2020.

    Huawei's modern phones, powered by their self-produced Kirin processors, are made with at least 10 and 16nm lithography, possess 8 cores, and are perfectly competitive with older generations of Snapdragons. While they're not cutting edge, they possess more than enough power to deliver a pretty good experience, especially as Chinese firms compete most ferociously in the low to mid end segments. They probably won't be able to develop much further on the technology, for a while at least, if ARM cuts them off, but they don't need to - it'll remain competitive for quite a while, especially since China can partially sustain these companies of their own consumers' massive demand.

    6 votes