| ▲ | graemep 4 hours ago |
| China is bigger, and a lot more ambitious, and is willing to put resources into it. European countries (except maybe Russia!), in the EU and outside, are very complacent. |
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| ▲ | trinix912 4 hours ago | parent [-] |
| It's not as much about complacency as it is about the lack of funding and resources. We're talking about countries with government budgets as low as 20 billion USD. Looking at common election promises, people here would rather see that money spent on non-profit housing, healthcare, infrastructure, than some ambitious AI or tech project that they likely wouldn't directly benefit from - at least compared to the things mentioned before - so there's little money left for "developing our own MS Office / LLM / Google". Whereas China not only has a much bigger budget than individual EU countries, but also central planning on a large scale, so they can just "force" things be done, no matter whether people like it or not. China giving 0.01% for such projects is way more money than a small EU country giving the same %. And it's not like they'll vote the party out for a failed project (which happens in EU countries quite often). |
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| ▲ | canyp 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Does China actually "force" things to be done? As far as I can tell, in the realm of technology at least, the government mostly just sets direction and then lets private capital do its thing, albeit without letting power concentrate in a way that subverts government. | | |
| ▲ | anonzzzies 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | When they want something to be done, it just gets done. I guess that is the point; I was working in China when one year there were 0 electric scooters; the next year, only. Gas scooters were forbidden overnight basically and that was that. Try doing that over here... | | |
| ▲ | canyp an hour ago | parent [-] | | Hilarious. Such efficiency, not even the free markets can catch up! Also, curious: did you not like it there and left, or was that a fixed-duration contract or something? | | |
| ▲ | anonzzzies 34 minutes ago | parent [-] | | I loved it (still go on holiday), but the sentiment changed (during/after HK + Covid) and clients started to demand non-china produced electronics so we had to leave. |
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| ▲ | code123456789 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Yes, see Great Chinese Firewall. Providing a VPN access to civilians is a criminal offense in PRC.
This is not the same as forcing companies to use domestic software, but to illustrate the ability of Chinese government to implement draconian limitations in general. |
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