China Landing on the Moon, and Good Luck
It is all the rage today in China. The MOON!
Finally, against all odds and the laughter and snickering in the
background, China has landed a rover on the MOON. For China, it’s a big deal. The rest of the World perhaps while not being
so surprised by this development, is still impressed that China was able to get
that little Jade Rabbit up there, albeit for only a brief time before it
appears to have died.
What’s next you ask?
Well…it’s still the MOON of course!
And why not? After all, haven’t
we all internalized the growing ability and POWER of China? Should we expect anything less?
Methinks not.
We’re all waiting for the Big Show to begin. The announcement from China on when it will
pay respect to the elephant in the room.
We are waiting for China to send Astronauts to the Moon, ala Neil
Armstrong.
Small problem with that, and I’ll tell you why: China won’t be “sending a man to the Moon and
returning him safely” anytime soon. No
need to hold your breathe and gasp in awe.
It just ain’t gonna happen.
It’s not that China has no sense of urgency about these
things. They do. And maybe that’s the problem. You see, as only China can so magnificently
do, it’s bold talk and daring has only raised the expectations of the
PEOPLE. China has raised the ante, and the Masses are
waiting. What’s strange is not that
failure will give China a big black eye in the eyes of the global community. You see….we get it Beijing!
We understand that Space Exploration has it’s risks. Just as the USSR and the USA both lost
people in the crusade we call Space Exploration, so may YOU. And…..we
will not hold it against you.
However….thanks to that mercurial phenomena we call Chinese
Psychology, it is a Big Deal.
Failure to
send Astronauts(or Taikonauts) to the Moon in a orderly fashion…or even worse,
to send them there to DIE, would just rock the Chinese gov…..and Beijing still
isn’t ready to look bad in the eyes of the people. So you see, all this incessant talk (and
success) has not only raised everybody’s hopes, but also heightened the
likelihood of China’s leaders losing FACE, if something isn’t done soon.
It is here, where China needs to be careful. Don’t rush.
Don’t hurry. You are not ready to
send astronauts to the moon, and bring them back safely. Not even close. And this is why:
Bad bicycles
How can China go to the MOON if it can’t even make a good
bicycle? For years, China was the
world’s largest bicycle manufacturer.
Shouldn’t it follow China should
therefore have some of the World’s best bikes?
Shouldn’t it follow the most prodigious builder of bikes would know a
thing or two about the technology? Might even be an exporter of them? For 40 years China’s people had nothing but
bikes and the public bus as a major mode of transportation.
Alas, “building a better mousetrap” doesn’t apply to
“building a better bike”. Despite the
more than plentiful experience China gained building bikes, they never really
got any better. One would think that
the more a product is built, the more innovative the newer version would be.
And so goes with manufacturing products in general, and
China’s inherent sloppiness.
Shanghai Automotive had a JV with GM for years. All to gain experience building cars. Siphoning off ideas for its own
products. Develop engineering
talent. And to this day SAIC has yet to
ship a single car to the States that has been organically developed. Not one.
China just doesn’t know how to build things very well. Bridges anyone?
Seriously, if you never mastered advanced bicycle
technology, and if your bridges keep falling down, what does that say about
your mfg prowess? Yes, China has lots of
shiny skyscrapers. That were designed by
other, foreign firms…. But I ask you…what has China designed and built on it’s
own?
Which leads us to…..
Organically developed vs Reverse Engineering
If you wanna make it to the Moon, you gotta get out of the
habit of reverse engineering everything.
Conducting RE in itself is not an inherently bad thing to do. It’s cheaper and it saves time. However, RE only mimics abt 80% of the
original products dimensions. So right
off the bat there will be something lost in the fit and perhaps functionality
of a product, though you will gain in savings and leadtime.
Still, a nation has to have a strong ethos of organically building product, ie
creating new products from scratch. A
nation can get away from copying others dwgs and designs only up to a
point. After all, RE is only a step in
the learning process, ie food for thought in terms of building an innovative
product yourself.
A nation can’t copy
forever. China is still in the copy
phase. Indeed, it’s apparently made this
part of it’s national industrial policy.
A way to save on investment, sure, but not the best thing for your engineering force.
Only by building original product and making mistakes, expensive
mistakes, can a nation progress towards making original product. China has conscientiously chosen not to do
this.
Design vs Build
Related to the above, a country needs to be able to develop
the ability to design it’s own product, not just build product that others
design. (I’m talking about exports to a
sophisticated market. One cannot
organically make product unless it has the ability to design it’s own product. )
Then it has to have the ability to sell that product.
The key to America’s success(or any other country) is still
it’s ability to design product. I always
laugh when I see folks focused on the US-Sino trade deficit. Nevermind almost all of that US deficit is
composed of US companies themselves building their own product in China and then
shipping it somewhere else.
I think China will not really be able to develop it’s Space
Program until it can do the above.
Brain Drain
Don’t know about you, but an awful lot of smart Chinese live
in my local community. They all have
graduate degrees and work for big name companies. They are appreciated and highly sought after. Akin to Chinese workers building the first
American Transcontinental Railroad, they are a godsend to America’s
workforce. They dominate our IT labor
force. They are all either
statisticians, mathematicians, etc.
Every engineer I come across is one fewer that lives in China. Simple as that. I came across a pretty Mathematics Grad
Student the other day. First Female in
this field I’d ever met. And she was
thinking of getting her Phd!
Think she’s going back home anytime soon? (Ha!)
I have to wonder as a result if China’s best and brightest
are still in China or not? I don’t think
so.
As a result, I have to wonder if any of the many engineers
in China’s Space Program aren’t thinking the same? Why wouldn’t they? It’s only natural for the most talented and
ambitious to want to work in places where others just like them exist. Where their talents will be more fairly
rewarded.
Money and Culture
While China without question has the passion to reach the
moon, it has yet to make the true investment required to get to the Moon. In the 60’s 5% of the American budget…(5%!),
was dedicated to NASA. People ask why
the USA hasn’t gone back since the early 70’s.
See above. Money. In today’s dollar’s NASA’s yearly budget
would need to equal over $200 billion dollars, in order to equal the annual
investment of the 60’s.
Today’s NASA
investment is less than $20 billion.
Notoriously willing to spend great sums of money to advance a national
cause(Olympics anyone?), does China really have the money available to spend
such sums today? Of course not.
And if it did, it obviously lacks the concentration of talent(brain
drain, right?).
And even if it had the, money, and the talent(with the
passion), it lacks the culture. What do
I mean?
China lacks both the entrepreneurial zeal, and the give and
take within large companies that is needed
to create original hi tech product of such stature. Small companies will not be taking China to
the Moon. (yes, it would be helpful if smaller companies that do have the
entrepreurial focus were able to more easily get gov’t loans)
That’s really the difference between the West and
China. Smaller companies in the West
lead innovation. In China, it’s
behemoth organizations are planned and directed by the State. Yes, sure there are a few smaller companies
in China doing ok. Are any of them
involved directly with critical industry?
The larger the company, the more bureaucratic. The more bureaucratic, the less likely
innovative ideas will rise to the top.
Thus
the influx of small companies in the West.
(if you’ve read my previous posts, you’ll know I’m not always
a big fan of large organizations. They’re
all abt the next performance review. Too
many employees go to work not with the goal of creating value but with the goal
of not fucking up. People with passion
all too often get dinged as being “impolite”, or not “harmonious enough”. Thus the pressure to “conform”. Value creation isn’t emphasized as much as “getting
along” is, when you work for an American company. That’s why talented people quite often leave
and create their own firm. )
China is too guanxi
focused, and it’s people too sensitive to negative criticism. The concept of constructive criticism through all layers of society does not
exist, accept amongst very good friends.
When in a factory setting I often see engineers from the same company,
on the same project, come to near fisticuffs.
The ability to calmly debate without taking personal offense, while hard
in any country, is especially so in China.
The Chinese tend to hold grudges, more so than the West. The concept of FACE simply is too strong an
impediment to allow free discourse to flow.
And when there is a lack of discourse, the ability to solve problems
disappears.
And this brings me to….
Habits are hard to die
China has poor societal discipline. Nothing illustrates this more than China’s
attitude towards litter. Few things
rile, or even amaze the laowai, when in China, as willful littering. All strata of society within China brazenly
litter. Yet if one thinks for a moment,
there is a logic to China’s habit of littering.
Doesn’t China have more street cleaners than any other
country you’ve visited? Constantly cleaning
the streets. (Despite what one may
think, recycling of plastic bottles is really very efficient here. Hardly anything gets put in the recycle
dumpster. Sr citizens simply pick them
out of the trash. )
When in a mall, or in my case, the vast electronic
components markets of Shenzhen, though every single kiosk has it’s own
wastepaper basket, the workers willfully just throw their paper trash outside
the kiosk onto the floor! Why do this
when you have your own trash basket? Because
the workers fully understand someone will pick it up! (Nevermind when)
When the whole population has this mindset that someone else will clean this up, how
does this lead to good societal discipline?
The sense of personal
accountability takes a hit. A nation
cannot develop it’s own sophisticated mfg and design prowess, with original
product that can be sold at nice margins, until it has this.
China will make it to the Moon. It will bring Taikonauts back safely. But I think for now, China has reached the
limits of the “easy stuff”. Give it some time. I hope it succeeds. The USA needs a perceived rival. Only when China has successfully made it to
the Moon, and brought it’s astronauts back, will the USA feel any sort of
motivation to pick up the pace.
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