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LearningTranscript
00:00Hi! This week I'm traveling so I don't have time to make the usual weekend
00:05video and obviously after one of the hottest and driest summer in Europe of
00:10the last decades, the day I'm going to hit the road it starts pouring cats and
00:16dogs. Anyway, I thought that I could bring you with me and while we go we can
00:23discuss what's true and what's not in the common perception that China is
00:30basically a country that copies everything from the West. Let's go!
00:54So I often say in my videos that China copies way less than is normally
01:03believed and this generates two kind of comments, some hilarious joke about the
01:10fact that is so blatantly obvious that China is copying everything that they
01:15don't really understand how I can say anything like that. Some of them also
01:20add that is so blatantly obvious that the Sun revolves around the heart that
01:25definitely there's no need for any further investigation. But there's also
01:29another type of comment which actually accuses me of being a Chinese
01:33propagandist, being paid for spreading Chinese propaganda or to be a traitor
01:40not to be a patriot or anything like that. Guys, as I have said I try to be
01:45balanced. There are really few channels that don't have some sort of bias which
01:50mind is totally okay as long as you say that you are biased and so you know what
01:55you're getting. I try not to be so I'm not particularly nice with the people
02:00that accuse me of being biased. The truth is that I've never explained why I am
02:07saying that China is not copying as much as is commonly believed. It's not just my
02:13assumption, it's not just my gut feeling. There are studies around this so it's
02:19worth talking about those. But this is for the next stop.
02:25For this discussion I am using the paper published in one of the many MIT
02:31publications by two professors, actually two Italian professors, two brothers. One
02:37of them is a professor at the NATO College in Rome, the other one is working
02:43in a Swiss University. In this paper they wanted to answer the question why China
02:48hasn't caught up yet, which I do believe China hasn't caught up yet despite the
02:54enormous progress, if the conventional wisdom was right. The conventional
02:59wisdom is that for the second mover is relatively easy to replicate the results
03:04of the first mover, which in this case we have the China as a second mover and
03:10obviously the first mover are the United States but also the West, Europe and
03:15Korea, Australia and so on in general. So if the second mover really has this big
03:20advantage, if it is relatively easy to replicate the technology of the first
03:25mover, why China hasn't caught up yet?
03:31So I'm here waiting in the queue waiting to go through the Mont Blanc, I have time
03:36to speak. Oh look at the glacier, yeah that's the glacier. So the conventional
03:45wisdom is that the knowledge relative to the technologies that are required even
03:52for the military effort are relatively easy to be shared between different
04:00countries, maybe developed in one country but then they will inevitably
04:05percolate to a different country. A lot of civilian technology is also double
04:10use technology that has relevance for the military, this makes keeping a secret
04:15definitely more difficult. And today we live in a world that is much more
04:20interconnected than it used to be, there are easier ways of sharing on the
04:24Internet, a lot of stuff is published, so it should be even more difficult to keep
04:30the technologies spreading to different countries. Well if this was true then why
04:37there are so many technology differences? And again the conventional wisdom says
04:42well it's mostly a matter of will and availability of capitals for investments.
04:51I can really understand where this is coming from, there are several cases in
04:54history where a country has put up with another country that had developed some
04:59decisive technologies. The paper goes into some details about the evolution of
05:07the German Kriegsmarine before the First World War, in the Fiddle case before the
05:12war in fact the Germans had remained behind the British that then when they
05:17realized that this was the case they tried catch up and indeed they succeeded.
05:23During the Battle of Jutland there were differences in the technologies of the
05:28two fleets but they were not decisive. From my point of view it's interesting the
05:34example of the Soviet Union of the 20s and the 30s when Stalin actually
05:38realized that without technological progress communism was condemned to
05:44disappear because at some point there would have been a confrontation with
05:49the other capitalist countries and if they had technological superiority then
05:54the Soviet Union would not have survived. So basically Soviet Union in 10 years
06:00moved on from being mostly agricultural and really backward country to become
06:06one of the industrial powers of the world. So if it was so easy to actually
06:13replicate someone else's technologies then there are a few questions that we
06:19need to answer. For example why countries invest in technology development it
06:25would be probably more advantageous waiting for someone else to do the
06:28investment and then replicate it. If it was so easy to copy or replicate the
06:33technologies then why there are relatively huge differences between
06:38countries? Why not all the medium-sized countries are pretty much on the same
06:42level?
06:45And the Chinese are openly admitting that they haven't reached the parity yet
06:50because they they have a long-term plan and they gave themselves the target of
06:542040 for they say becoming a world-class military which can easily be
07:02interpreted as parity with United States.
07:19Okay second leg of the journey I stopped for the night in Burgen-Bass before
07:25leaving a couple of observations. So this capability of coping or imitating
07:29someone else's progresses has progressively diminished after World War
07:352. There are several reasons for that maybe the most important one is
07:41complexity. In the Second World War an aircraft was mostly a mechanical device
07:46with some electrical elements some electrical features and look what it is
07:52today or look what an F-35 is today or any other combat aircraft is today where
07:59the electronics and the computers have a fundamental role. So many modern
08:05aircraft wouldn't even be capable of flying without fly-by-wire control
08:09without a computer governing the aerodynamic surfaces and that's not
08:15everything material science has changed. Crucially in the engines for the turbine
08:20systems but also for the fuselage with the composites now is a technology that
08:27starts being rather common but it hasn't been like this for quite a long
08:31time. Obviously aerodynamics has become numerical aerodynamics with the
08:35simulations physiology and in general biology because now the aircraft fly in
08:40environments that are definitely not hospitable for humans or even psychology
08:46or even anything that is related to the interface between the man and the
08:50machine which is something so critical and where the accent has been for the
08:54last few decades now because the pilot was overloaded with information and the
08:59modern cockpits, modern systems try to help the pilot to make sense of this
09:05overload of information. So if you want to copy something you have to copy
09:11something which is very very complex.
09:17Yeah I think I deserve a coffee now but before the coffee I just want to stress
09:23that a consequence of the increased complexity of modern weapons you
09:30basically need more people. The corpus, the range of knowledge that is necessary
09:35to build a modern fighter is definitely beyond the capability of every single
09:41person. Again in the Second World War the core team of designers that designed an
09:48aircraft was small, few tenths at most. For example the core team for the F-117
09:55was about 50 people. The core team for the F-35 is almost 6,000. During the
10:03Second World War you could have a chief designer that was really the father of
10:06every system and now identifying a real father for the F-35 for example is
10:14basically impossible.
10:18Another interesting consequence of complexity and specialization of the
10:29people working on it is the fact that for example the replacement of a single
10:35person or let's say in the worst case the defection of a single person is not
10:41a big damage to the whole project because a single individual doesn't have
10:45a deep knowledge of all the aspects of the project. Innovation and progress in
10:50the past was more a matter of a brilliant individual finding an
10:56alternative solution that brought benefits and then implementing it. Today
11:01this is no longer possible. Innovation happens in research labs, it happens in
11:06universities and it's often a team effort that actually requires a lot of
11:10tests, a lot of experimentation. The time of the brilliant individual that alone
11:17changes the world is gone.
11:27Now the paper doesn't say this but this makes me think that now people are the
11:32weakest link in the whole chain. Think about it if you had to strategically
11:37attack the American or any other country's capability of sustaining and
11:43producing weapons that are innovative and cutting-edge you're probably going
11:48to attack the unreplaceable element and in this case seems to be the people.
11:58Now I don't want to make any hypothesis of how this could be done you can easily
12:04imagine yourself but if I was a security director of one of those big government
12:10contractors yeah it would be difficult to sleep well at night.
12:22Yeah France is definitely very long. France is a country you have to drive
12:29through to get to Italy that's all it's for. So if everything we said before is
12:35true then what is the Chinese position? Well it's a fact that the Chinese
12:40engaged in several, let's call them intelligence activities that brought to
12:46the acquisition, let's call it like this, of foreign technologies either military
12:52or civilian. That has been proven and unfortunately is a fact. Well you may
12:56also say that everybody is pretty much engaged in looking for stuff that
13:01should not be in the public domain but in any way I'm not here to justify China
13:05but I really want to understand what's going on. So if China had access to
13:11documents, blueprints, designs or whatever but they didn't have the people that
13:17could actively understand them, that could work on them, then they had to do
13:24something different. They surely had the second-mover advantage. They already knew
13:29what was working but they had to redevelop all this technology themselves.
13:34They probably already knew the starting point and the end point. They knew what
13:38was possible and mind this is a big advantage of course but this is not
13:41coping. They had to redevelop and rebuild, reinvent the knowledge. Is this coping?
13:48Well up to a point it is but I would rather say that is more akin to building
13:54replicas. It is clear that where they can they don't even try to do anything
13:59different from the West and that's the reason why a lot of Chinese systems are
14:04really look-alikes of Western systems. But apart from these superficial
14:09similarities probably everything is inside, has been redesigned, rebuilt,
14:15rediscovered, recreated in China. Also you have to consider that the Chinese
14:21industrial system is not the Western industrial systems. It's not just the
14:25technologies that are in the weapon and also the technologies to build the
14:30technologies. And surely China, as it was 30 or 40 years ago, didn't have a lot of
14:36these precursor technologies and also they had to acquire them as well. So if
14:40China copied something was the direction of development but not
14:45development itself. You may say that they're lacking creativity. Yeah but it
14:50is efficient. It is using as much as possible the second mover advantage. Now
14:55that they have caught up in many areas you start seeing a lot of original
14:59creations. For example in space activities or about the AESA radars and
15:04so on. Also the hypersonics which is an area where the West sort of slept for a
15:10while. So now they are probably to the point where all this development, all
15:15this effort, is starting to pay off.
15:32Okay I'm home and the holiday is over. I've got some rest. It was a long journey.
15:38However I hope that my rambling sort of made sense. The reason why I am saying
15:44that China copies way less than normally intended goes as follows. Today
15:50copying technology is not as easy as it used to be. The key reason is the high
15:55complexity that is involved in designing and building modern weapons, in
16:01particular modern combat aircraft. And this complexity requires a lot of human
16:06expertise and many precursor technologies that in turn require a lot
16:12of expertise as well. So either having the final result to copy or just having
16:18the original designs and the original documentation is not going to be enough
16:23to replicate a modern aircraft. So what China may have had is a form of guidance.
16:29They know where they need to go. But how to get there? Well it needs to be
16:36rediscovered and redeveloped. So modern Chinese systems, I mean the modern ones
16:41because in the past it was different, but the modern systems actually bear just a
16:46superficial resemblance of their Western counterparts. What's inside and the way
16:53they are built and everything that just can be deducted by simple observation
16:59had to be redeveloped in China. And this is what I mean when I say that China
17:04copies way less that is normally believed. Thank you so much for watching
17:08the video till now, but I am pretty much sure that there will be a non-negligible
17:13part of the viewers that will feel the unbearable necessity of commenting down
17:19below and feel free to do it. The comment section is open to everyone, but I'm
17:24completely wrong that Chinese stuff is just a badly working copy of anything
17:29Western and nothing good can come from China that anyway is going to collapse
17:33in the next five to ten years. If I didn't convince you, well feel free to
17:39believe what makes you happy. If you think so I would suggest you to
17:43subscribe to the channel if you haven't done yet and click the bell because in
17:47this way you will be in the best position to keep telling me that I am
17:52just a Chinese propagandist. Thank you so much to all those who are supporting the
17:56channel either on Patreon or by being a member or with one-off donation on PayPal.
18:02You can support the channel by buying an aircraft model from Air Models. There is
18:07an affiliate link below. I get a small percentage to no extra cost to you. So if
18:12you liked this video and you watched so far thank you very much. If you didn't
18:17like this video and you're still watching well thank you even more. Either
18:22you hate or love my videos about China there are plenty on the channels that
18:28are going to appear beside me and I would suggest you to have a look at
18:32those so you can either watch something that is interesting for you or you can
18:37watch something that you thoroughly hate. Once again thank you very much for
18:40watching and see you next time.