Some advancements specific to the PRC:
- The elimination of city-poverty.
- An attack on rural poverty that’s lifted more people out of extreme poverty than any country in world history.
- Upcoming fusion power
- The Chinese space program that’s likely to land people on mars within a few decades.
- The ubiquitious payment systems and apps that can even let you book doctors appointments.
- Digitally connected cities with 5g.
- Ubiquitous and affordable health care.
- The most high speed rail per capita.
- Lots of up and coming natively developed tech like CPUs and wireless that for years have been controlled only by western powers.
All of these point to what’s possible when you eliminate capitalist’s control of the surplus.
Probably yes. If it isn’t already then it will be very soon. The big hurdle that it is currently working on overcoming is the unequal level of development between the more developed coastal regions and the traditionally less developed rural interior. But already based on what i am seeing it seems that advanced technology has penetrated to a wide degree even some of the most remote areas of China. Both in terms of physical as well as digital infrastructure. Cashless app based payment mechanisms are virtually ubiquitous, and more and more you see even in some of the smallest villages very modern technological amenities.
The concept of being the most technologically advanced nation is kind of a false concept in the modern era, at least compared to the way people thought about these things 20-30 years ago. Everyone has pretty much the same smartphones, everyone has pretty much the same computers. Everyone has pretty much the same textiles and cars and drones and other consumer products. There isn’t very much “secret sauce” any more, nor are there tons of the quirky regional feature sets in consumer electronics that set for example 90s and 2000s Japan ahead by having the ability to watch live TV on a cell phone or have the first lane departure warning systems in cars.
Today, there are essentially two groups of countries, consumers and producers. Some countries like the US largely only consume technology, others like China also produce it. While China does have some of them most advanced production capability in the world, that doesn’t mean they don’t also sell both the advanced products they produce and systems by which to produce those products worldwide.
The primary factors prohibiting other nations from producing and advancing technology are real material conditions like capital and training, rather than constructed conditions like intellectual property. That’s largely thanks to China’s focus on international cooperation and opposition to the concentration of capital by national bourgeoisie.
There’s no objective way to measure technological advancement and it varies by field. China’s probably not the number 1 in robotics or petroleum refinement to name two major fields.
If we go by some indirect measures that foreshadows technological advancement such as the number of patents granted or the number of researchers, it is ahead of all other countries in the world.
There’s no objective way to measure technological advancement and it varies by field.
Idk about that. There are definitely some basic measures of advancement predicated on universal human needs.
So, for instance, find the total agricultural production divided by the number of agricultural man hours. The variance between historical and modern civilizations will differ markedly.
Or look at the number of lumens produced by a unit-standard light source divided by man hours to produce those lumens. You’ll notice a huge difference between torch, candle, lightbulb, and LED rates.
You could go to the GINI index and consider the life expectancy and infant mortality rates, which track well with advances in medical science and attendant infrastructure.
You could look at the energy consumption per capita, which scales with advances in fuel and energy storage technology.
You could even just measure the size of buildings, as everything from steel to concrete to modern motor technology and cooling technology (elevators and A/C and heating) scale with these advances.
They’re all imperfect to some degree, and I’m sure you can find exceptions. But as a broad measure, its undeniable that the Chinese economy has made advances in the last 40 years that brought them up to speed with modern Americans. And there are some edge cases - mass transit, agriculture output, energy production/usage, medical technology - where you could feasibly make the argument that the Chinese economy is edging ahead.
You can also point to instances in which a country - say, the UK, which just surrendered its last working primary steel mill or Ukraine/Gaza which are quite literally being bombed back into the stone age - are falling behind their historical high water marks.
These aren’t perfect measures, but they’re functional broad estimates and gauges for a nation’s scientific and industrial outputs relative to one another.
I would argue that overall it’s the case. China has a large population that’s well educated, and provides massive government funding for technological development. China is one of the few countries that has end to end domestic supply chains for a lot of critical technologies.
