China Shills are as Delusional as America Shills

Readers who know me from my previous writings, will be aware that my positions on almost every single issue are nuanced and do not fit into any established ideology. One consequence of my heterodox worldview is that I will often consider both sides of an issue- regardless of what supporters of either camp want to believe. It is my experience that few issues are one-sided. With that in mind, let us talk about some of my recent posts (link 1, link 2) which might have given the impression that I support China, their way of running things or think they have a bright future. As it turns out, my views of this topic are far more nuanced and complicated than “China is good and invincible, USA is bad and stupid loser”. Since there is much ground to cover, let us start with my first Meta take on this controversial topic.

1] China shills are as delusional as America shills. Paid online shills who spout BS about how China is about to become the only superpower or win future wars without fighting them are as delusional as their American counterparts who pretend that their economy is still the largest in the world or they still have any real military capability beyond nuclear. But why would I think that paid China shills are actually delusional rather than simply regurgitating what they were paid to say and write? It comes down to what they say and write between spouting propaganda points. To put it bluntly, it appears that a majority of China shills believe most of what they are paid to shill. In that way, they are quite similar to America shills- which is ironic.

2] While many China shills pretend to be more humble than America shills, it is clear that they are not fooling anyone with a modicum of intelligence. Regurgitating made-up “facts”, ridiculous projections and other pleasing delusions does not alter reality- as the shills promoting Ukraine during its war with Russia should have known a long time ago. Then again, they have to shill for a living. The only somewhat good thing one can say about China shills is that they are not quite as delusional as their American counterparts- which is not the complement it might initially seem. While I initially considered writing a short series of posts to dismantle China shills, that would be much of an effort to dunk on someone so pathetic. But before we start dismantling them, let us quickly talk about what China does better than USA and the West in general- because understanding that is necessary to dismantling the shills later.

3] China does industrial policy much better than USA, and has consistently done so since at least the late 1980s. There are many reasons for this such as the one party system, a competent accountable and fairly decentralized bureaucracy, coordination between the public and private sector, aversion towards financialization of economy etc. However, this set of conditions is not unique and can also be found in other East-Asian countries such as Japan, South Korea and even Vietnam. The biggest difference between those countries and China is the sheer scale and diversity of underlying economy. China’s industrial policy seems to work better because it is a far bigger country and not a vassal of some other power- like Japan and South Korea are to USA. To summarize, it is about seer size and scope rather than higher levels of competence. Also ask yourself, why China didn’t industrialize much earlier.

4] In spite of what China shills want you to believe, its recent industrialization and economic success are almost entirely due to two factors. Firstly, copying and stealing of ideas and designs of products from other countries- and then using industrial policy to make those products cheaper and more numerous. China as a society is still not capable of genuine innovation- something we will go into more detail later. This does not imply that someone of Chinese descent has some genetic flaw rendering them incapable of innovation. This is more about how that society rewards some behaviors (very high conformity, mindless hard work and the appearance of respectability) while actively discouraging others (thinking differently, unusual career paths and taking unorthodox risks). At this point, some might say that USA and the West are not any different in 2025- and you would be correct, but it wasn’t always so.

The West (including USA) was once truly innovative. There is a reason why the West came up from way behind China in 1400s-1500s to blowing way past it by the 1800s. It is also why China stagnated for hundreds of years and was unable to even properly copy western industrialization for well over a century. It took a century of humiliation by the West, rampant warlord-ism, a nasty civil war, disastrous conflict with Japan, another civil war and a “cultural revolution” to make them see the light. Does this look like the sign of a culture with a capacity for innovation? There is a reason why almost everything truly innovative (technology, engineering, arts, thought) came from the West- specifically the period between the early 1500s-late 1970s, but especially between mid 1850s- late 1970s. Note that the West was also incapable of innovation prior to the Enlightenment (1600s) and has lost the ability to do so since late 1990s. Innovation, therefore, has everything to do with social conditions and incentives- not latent ability.

5] As things stand today, China has caught with the West in industrial and manufacturing capability. Its large size, population and industrial policy have allowed it to even exceed the West in some respects- specifically building infrastructure, training institutions and modern factories. Having said that, it still has not demonstrated any capacity for real innovation. But what is real innovation and how is it different from what every shill and scammer in both East and West wants to labels as innovation nowadays? Let us use a couple of examples to explain the difference starting with the field of computer hardware. Products such as the first Integrated Circuits (IC), discreet ALUs, single chip CPUs, SoCs or fundamental manufacturing process such as Photolithography were real innovations. A slightly brighter screen in latest iPhone, slightly faster generation of CPUs from Intel or AMD, next-generation GPUs from Nvidia are small improvements, at best- not actual innovations. The Xerox Alto (ancestor of all PCs with GUI and Ethernet among other features), IBM’s Simon proto-smartphone, GridPad 1900 proto-convertible tablet, Apple Newton etc are real innovations. The latest smartphones from Huawei, Xiaomi or Apple are small improvements- not innovations.

Seminal operating systems such as OS/360, Unix and the Xerox Alto GUI were true innovations- while Windows 11 is an abomination. Some programming languages such as Fortran, C, COBOL, LISP, BASIC, Perl, Python were real innovations, while Rust, R, C#, Ruby, Julia etc are improvements. Office software such as VisiCalc, WordStar, VCN ExecuVision were real innovations while Google Docs is a mediocre update while Office 365 is an extortion scheme. Developing anything from scratch to competently perform a task or function that was hitherto impossible is much harder than rolling out the next insipid “improved” version of something which already exists. China as a society can produce hundreds of thousands of perfectly capable engineers and programmers to make the next iteration of a computer chip, operating system, program, programming language or smartphone. They can even do it faster and cheaper than their western equivalents- as we saw with DeepSeek and other LLM-based “AI” systems. But for all the numbers and technical competence they have not even come up with anything small but important and novel such as the Twisted Pair Ethernet standard, the PC Bus concept or USB standard.

6] Every single high-tech product which China shills boast about is a direct copy of some Western product from before the 2000s. Their main “innovation”, if you want to call it that, is making it on a large scale and significantly cheaper- which is not a bad thing- but is not an actual innovation. Their only “innovation” is an administrative one whereby they actively chose to actively suppress neoliberalism and financialism- which is why they can keep building better factories and making cheaper products. And in case you are wondering what happened to real innovation in West after 1990s, neoliberalism and financialism killed it off- on multiple levels. But unlike China, the West actually had the social structures to do innovation. But why believe me- look at the evidence. China’s high speed trains and the underlying technology was originally developed by Kalmar Verkstad, Siemens, Alstom, Bombardier, Kawasaki, Mitsubishi, Hitachi and other non-Chinese companies.

Their military and transport airplanes are mostly either direct copies or modified versions of Soviet airplanes and of late- a couple of American designs. The same goes for the engine technology powering those aircraft. Their still developing commercial aircraft sector is based on designs that borrow their technology from both Airbus and Boeing. Their manned spacecraft program started with a slightly updated version of the venerable Soyuz spacecraft and is still heavily based on what they learned from Russian designs. The main hypergolic engine series (YF-20 and derivatives) used in their space launchers has a striking similarity to the French Viking engine in Arianne 4 series of launchers. The main LOX/RP-1 engine (YF-100) used in more recent families of Chinese launchers is based on Soviet and Russian (RD-801 and RD-120) designs. I could go on, but you get the point.

7] By now, the reader must have figured out that the real strengths of China are size, manufacturing capacity, natural resources, large internal market, being a nuclear weapon power, competent bureaucracy, industrial and financial policy and ability to copy and slightly improve foreign technology. Note lack of demonstrated capability for real technological or ideological innovation. At this some point some China shills might say something about how they are starting to dominate innovation in new energy economy or by number of patents. Over past 2-3 decades, patents (all over the world) have become completely detached from innovation- just like the ballooning numbers of scientific publications have lost any correlation with actual scientific progress. Both are now just useless proxy measures whose main purpose is to create fake credibility and allow people to play shell games whose sole reward is financial.

Moving on to the topic of the scam known as “new energy” economy- does anyone really believes that solar energy and wind power can reliably support any large electrical grid. Building a so-called “green energy” electrical system requires you have to build two electric grids- one with regular thermal, hydro and nuclear power plants for reliable power + another one for the “green energy” nonsense. Then again, environmental zealots are not known for the prowess in math, science and engineering. As things stand, China still produces the absolute majority of electricity it uses (over 90 %) from thermal and hydro power plants. Note my choice of words “electricity it uses” because setting up some big solar array or windmill farm to make fake claims about how their energy system is transitioning to “non-carbon” energy sources is the sort of scam that China loves to pull off. And no amount of lithium batteries or any other chemical storage tech can safely and reliably store the power to run very large electric grids- not to mention the cost considerations.

But what about all those new and shiny Electric Vehicles (EVs) made in China? Firstly, the majority of EVs sold in China (as a country) are either very light utility vehicles driven by old men in rural areas or subcompact/ compact city cars in urban areas. This fact is relevant because of the distribution of China’s population- specifically having a handful of very dense and massive urban centers and being one of the few countries with a large capacity for surplus electricity generation. Consider the Pearl River Delta, with a population of over 86 million in an area of about 200 km x 200 km. Also note that this megalopolis, like others in China, has excellent and multiple public transport systems and thoughtful zoning rules which keep the average daily work transit to levels typically seen in urban western Europe. So why is it surprising that some in urban China will purchase compact inexpensive EVs when there is enough electric grid capacity to easily recharge them- at least for the moment. Note that most people in China do not use their cars like they do in USA or indeed in most parts of the world. Get back to me when people in Mexico, India, Brazil, Indonesia etc start preferring EVs over regular gasoline/diesel automobiles- and no amount of regulation is going achieve that outcome.

And we are not even going to go into the issues of their long-term reliability or usability of cars full of touchscreens and no mechanical controls. There is a reason why companies like Toyota, Honda, Subaru etc have a certain reputation for quality and reliability- and why most western auto brands do not. To put it bluntly, EVs are not going to successful in most parts of the world because of their limitations, poor user design, questionable long-term reliability and most importantly- because the current electric grid in most parts of the world cannot support anything more than 10-20% of all automobiles being EVs. Could we update the electric grid? Sure- but who is paying for it and best of luck building new reliable power plants with white NIMBYs blocking any new infrastructure project. More importantly, such projects are even more infeasible in the developing world- which is where the real growth in automobile ownership is occurring. It is also worth repeating that the excellent public transport infrastructure in most of urban China is one of the hidden reasons why people living in those places are OK with buying crippled cars that are not used regularly and are not suitable for longer-distance trips.

But what about “AI”, quantum computing, humanoid robots, flying electric taxis, high-rises with coordinated LED lighting and festive swarms of quadcopter drones? Well.. most are shiny baubles made for impressing simpletons. But let us tackle the somewhat useful one in that list- LLM based “AI”. As mentioned previously in this post and others, LLM-based “AI” is a good tool for searching, filtering and formatting data to produce thoroughly generic outputs. It is however incapable, at a mechanistic and architectural level, of being even as intelligent as a retarded cat. The real impact of Chinese “AI” products such as DeepSeek and others was on the ridiculous AI bubble that was being inflated in USA. Do I expect to see LLM-based “AI” in upcoming software products to streamline repetitive tasks in the near future? Sure.. but the impact is going to similar to having Google search and Maps on your iPhone in 2009 rather than something far more disruptive. Quantum computers, or what people claim to be quantum computers, on the other hand are outright scams which have been out for over a decade and have still not solved any real mathematical problem faster than conventional computers.

As far as humanoid robots are concerned- there is a reason why every single industrial robot looks like a machine than anything vaguely humanoid. Robots are very good at doing a single set of related tasks, but are awfully bad at doing general tasks. We have had prototypes of robot dogs and donkeys for over a decade without any real mainstream use of their alleged capabilities- not unlike the similar fake promise of true self-driving automobiles. Flying electric cars, aka large glorified quadcopters drones, have been around for almost a decade now and thus far even the stupid rich in West don’t buy them on any scale- which should tell you everything you need to know about them. High rise buildings with coordinated LED lighting and drone swarms for celebrating festivals are the sort of stuff 3rd year engineering students from any decent university can pull off, and are nothing more than useless shiny baubles to impress simpletons and make social media reels. As an aside, it is telling that even prestigious high-rises which crowd the skyline of Chinese cities are cut-and-paste copies of designs developed by western architects and civil engineers. Originality is a concept alien to Chinese society.

In summary, while China has certain advantages over the West at this point in history- they are insufficient for going beyond the levels achieved by West by late 1990s-early 2000s. Then again, the West has been stuck in a doom loop of its own creation since the early 2000s. Neither is capable of winning the race for future.

What do you think? Comments?