I believe you underestimate the speed at which large scale manufacturing economies go from copying to innovating. It takes less than a generation historically if you look at Japan and Korea. In mid 60s, Japanese products were second rate. By early 80s American and European manufacturers were inferior. China has been at it for a couple of decades now.
From personal observation, in mobile tech at least, China are a few years ahead already of the West and Japan in terms of usage and convenience. Why won't they pull ahead in other fields as well?
While I agree with you in principle, your application is wrong.
IMO, China's innovation is in large-scale PCBs and other such manufacturing. See Apple's investment of CNC machines in China as an example. China has several other innovations that does in fact make them a world leader in certain fields.
As far as battery tech goes however, Japan has that on lockdown. Panasonic's Silicon-Lithium batteries are light-years ahead of the competition, even as US battery manufacturers (A123 systems) try to break through. Japan (and Panasonic really: now that Panasonic owns Sanyo / Eneloop) has all of the major high-quality battery manufacturing facilities: Energizer, Duracell, Panasonic (owner of Sanyo / Eneloop).
Korea has the next best bet as far as I can tell. LG Chem's batteries were chosen by GM probably for some reason.
If China were to be making good batteries, then we'd first see some manufacturing companies make some batteries. Most "top-down grown" companies, be in the USA or China, fall flat on their face for the first few decades. It takes a long time to build up expertise.
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There's no reason why China can't grow into a battery powerhouse. Except for the fact that Panasonic is so massive.
China's innovation is being able to adopt their society rapidly for adopting new technologies in general.
Tolerating the violating of foreigner's IP laws, which stand in the way of progress, is one of the things that helped enable their success.
Right now China has progressed to the point were things that are done by the Chinese simply cannot be duplicated anywhere else on the planet. It's not just a matter of scaling their production... They are simply the only game in town. You CANNOT do what they do in China anywhere else.
It's no longer a issue of cheap labor. They have innovated their way past their competitors in USA and Europe.
The part where China falls short is quality control. In the mad rush to produce goods at the cheapest price possible they habitually cut corners and undermine their own foreign markets.
When USA and European companies use China to produce high quality goods they just have to have people on-site to ensure quality and use robust post-production testing. Otherwise things tend to go sideways. Right now places like Japan, Germany, and Korea have a slight end in quality, but for most purposes it's a wash.
The biggest threat to the Chinese economy is their own government policies spiraling the place into a massive depression.
It's worth noting that Panasonic does a lot of it's lithium battery manufacturing in China.
What exactly is produced in China that can't be produced elsewhere? The only thing I can think of is rare earths at cheap cost, since no one else is willing to pollute their environment so much with the lack of environemtal protections needed to achieve that. Then we have the whole QR payment systems that can't really exist without the lack of pervasive credit card infrastructure.
China has lots of labor resources, they have developed supply chains that have been left to rot elsewhere, but those can be ressurected relatively quickly if the need arises. They still have no modern fabs to speak of, and can't build a decent jet turbine or avionics for their own aviations efforts.
> they have developed supply chains that have been left to rot elsewhere, but those can be ressurected relatively quickly if the need arises
how long would it take to recreate a complete electronics manufacturing supply chain outside of China?
perhaps more interesting, how long would it take for one single country to develop the electronics manufacturing supply chain which China currently has?
Silicon Valley wasn't called Silicon Valley because it had lots of sand. It had the whole supply chain before it upped out to Asia. Even today, china does not produce many of the higher end components that go into say an iPhone, not as much as Korea, Taiwan, and Japan. The supply chain still depends on lots of imports, and none of that is coming to china anytime soon (or it would already be there, like high end fabs).
i can grant you all of that, but i still have little idea how long it would take to resurrect the parts of the supply chain which have been moved to China (and left to rot in various places outside of China).
maybe it's better to focus the question on a single region: how long would it take to resurrect the manufacturing component of SV's economy to the level it was at 25 years ago?
a year or two? five years? a decade? what would the time scale be?
If you consider the Ipad came out in 2011, which was 5 years ago (for a few more days), I would say 5 years. Touchscreen devices make up about half of the global electronics industry, so by extension half of Shenzhen was built to accommodate that.
With a focused agenda, the US could rebuild a supply chain in 5 years if it wanted to. I think it is unlikely to want to however.
The question is really moot as long as china is willing to do the dirty work for us at a discount (actually ruining their environment in the process), there is just no incentive to regrow that capacity. No one in the west will say no to free money.
But as long as the need and incentives were there, it would be rebuilt pretty quickly, possibly in radically different and improved ways (more automation, 3D printing, upgraded processes....).
I now see Panasonic involvment in Tesla's GigaFactory differently. EV is probably the future most demanding market in terms of innovation. If Panasonic can and need to grow it's advance it's here.
As I understand it, the problem was that the anode and cathode wound up touching, causing a short, causing heat, boom.
This was, in turn, caused by the manufacture of the case: they didn't leave enough (or any?) expansion room for the battery, and since when charged they heat up and expand, and there wasn't room to expand, boom.
So, probably, the batteries in question, if packaged properly, would have been fine.
IP that's taken out of the jurisdiction where it's theft is illegal isn't really stolen. It's not like stealing a TV where the person who used to own it loses it. The reason it causes a problem is that the customs aren't strict enough banning the import of goods made with illegal IP use.
China of course has IP laws, since they're a signatory to international conventions like the Berne Convention. Enforcement is quite another matter.
As for whether they would overlook foreign companies infringing on domestic IP -- would depend very much on the particular companies and countries involved. Fining a foreign company always has a political component that the Chinese authorities are much more sensitive to, than, say, a Western court.
They are when it's done entirely for the purpose of having friendly trade relations with the USA.
That's one of the benefits of running a country like the USA. The USA market is so desirable to participate in that they can black mail countries all over the world to adopt your IP laws despite the fact that (if it wasn't for the lure of USA markets) it is entirely against their best interest to do so.
"The first U.S. Patent Act encouraged this policy. Although the law safeguarded domestic inventors, it didn’t extend the same courtesy to foreign ones -- they couldn’t obtain a U.S. patent on an invention they had previously patented in Europe. In practice, this meant one could steal a foreign invention, smuggle it to the U.S., and develop it for domestic commercial applications without fear of legal reprisal."
As far as I remember the Chinese battery makers started doing cheap copies of known brands but because they were constantly looking for new ways to improve profitability and weren't being regulated by more strict european or american labor laws, soon developed better and better production methods while increasing the quality of their products and soon found themselves selling to some of the larger European car manufactorer.
I will see if I can dig up the story it's been a while and was in some radio program.
The US steals talent, say Chinese graduate students. They steal the results of that stolen talent. You can justify anything if you put your mind to it.
The article clearly stated: "TDK separated from CATL to focus on batteries for mobile consumer electronics, but still collects royalties on some intellectual property used by CATL, a spokesman for the Japanese company said."
Is there any justification to call a company paying royalty for technology "stealing"?
There could be justification, as licensing some tech does not mean you are licensing all tech that you are using. At the end of the day it's a question about reputation. The Chinese have a reputation of not respecting the property rights of Western companies. And for good reason, because how else are you going to get ahead?
You can't steal talent, only offer them a better life.
(For the record I don't know enough to see if there is any "stealing" of ip going on here either)
Is this type of rule common in China? (Granted, we do the same thing in the U.S. by printing red tape.)