It's less a matter of technical capability and more one of cost. It's not like people didn't know how to build good, efficient homes before. It was just expensive.
Western economies are built on the exploitation of cheap labour abroad for both manufacturing (China, India) and resource extraction (most of Africa). In contrast, the Chinese economy is built on cheap domestic labour and cheap domestic resources so that it can build things for export. The incentive structure is vastly different, because while the West basically has to act out of altruism, it's in China's best interest to create more demand for your production.
Russia was very clear what their red lines were, even back in like 2009. NATO kept pushing the issue. Then, by their own admission, teams like the US 4th PsyOps orchestrated Euromaidan to overthrow the Ukrainian government. Ukraine might be mostly innocent here, but neither Russia nor NATO are.
Are you surprised? People in Washington are openly talking about how they should be focusing on China under the assumption that China will somehow make the decision to seize Taiwan tomorrow... As if they haven't been posturing about that literally since the end of the civil war and done nothing except increase trade, open up immigration, and increase cultural coupling with Taiwan.
The US needs an enemy to justify their extreme military budget and China is the bogeyman of the decade.
They account for like 80% of PV production. Basically all of that solar deployed in the rest of the world was built in China. For the fraction that isn't, it was probably built in Southeast Asia by a Chinese company.
I think you're misunderstanding to some degree. While silicon PV caps out at around 24% (I think up to 27% now), 100% conversion is basically impossible because of physics.
Plus, the sun basically has infinite energy, so it's not like efficiency is that big of a concern compared to energy density.
A fair bit, actually. China's political system is basically a popularity system from bottom to top. At the lowest level, politicians only stay in power if their population is happy. This trickles up to the provincial level, where politicians again only stay in power if their population is happy. At a national level, the national leaders stay in power by building, essentially, large cabinets out of different provincial and regional leaders - thus, their entire position relies on keeping the provinces happy.
It's not the perfect system, but Chinese citizens can fairly easily impact local and even provincial policy and, by extension, influence national policy (recently, by repealing the COVID lockdowns with mass protests).
The CCP isn't an absolute monarchy or something. At the end of the day, it serves it's people. The power of the Chinese economy is in its industrial capacity, after all, not in its wealth: the needs of the people need to be addressed to keep the country stable.
Best take I've seen here. The big countries in the world have way too much power. Problem is, if any one country has this amount of power, it automatically makes it so that other countries will also want to match that level of power.
It's not even illegal to cirumvent the Firewall... It's literally a glorified recommendation feed. It's technically illegal to use a VPN to circumvent the Firewall, but in practice this law is only ever used against the VPN vendor (and even then, it almost never is). Accessing and producing illegal content (e.g. CP) is, obviously, still illegal. Using a HK SIM in China is, obviously, still legal.
My claim is that the Chinese propaganda dissemination system is less developed and less competent than the American one, in large part BECAUSE of China's blatant censorship rather than in spite of it. Whereas the American system operates in this illusion of freedom of speech, China makes no such indication. People know that media in China will, by and large, follow government policy. As a result, manufacturing consent is very challenging because people are inherently more skeptical of "news" they read. As a result, there's a strong understanding around the fluidity of "fact" in modern Chinese culture.
Non-Chinese perspectives are easily accessible across the firewall as well as through travel to Hong Kong/Taiwan (which is both very cheap and very accessible for those in tier 1/2 cities).
Unlike Putin with Ukraine, Bush with Iraq, Bush with Afghanistan, or Clinton with Yugoslavia, Xi Jinping has struggled to get any sort of significant traction for an invasion of Taiwan. Public support for it is estimated at around 25% after adjusting for polling bias, with support for an invasion without first pursuing economic normalization or other solutions dropping to as low as 1%. This is despite Xi Jinping posturing on the issue for years. It's a startlingly failure of what many claim to be one of the most restrictive Internet systems in the world. In contrast, the Iraq War was started when public perception was polling at 60% happy for an invasion in the next week or so (54% if the UN didn't allow it).
I believe that this failure is in large part because Chinese propaganda is too blatant. Whereas the US has teams like the 4th PsyOps Airborne and "NGOs" like Atlantic Council, Chinese propaganda comes from the government or from people who are knowingly parroting government policy. While that's pretty good at getting broad public perception to align, it fails at driving any decisive action because it provides neither the illusion of choice nor the radicalization necessary for decisive policy to pass.
SMIC lacked investment for ages and they're all dependent on ASML (until sanctions got the Chinese government to throw billions into building domestic EUV lithography capability, I guess).
Ah yes, because the Russians will certainly decide to pick a fight with NATO... As if the US hasn't already described their willingness to use nuclear weapons offensively.
None of that matters for compute, though. I agree that a lot of people design MOSFETs and sensors in China... That's not really relevant in terms of computational capacity. Neither is the capacity to manufacture capacitors and resistors. Neither is the capacity to manufacture small microelectronics because the compute done on them is negligible.
People talk about semiconductors in terms of the computational gap exposed by smaller technology nodes.
China doesn't pretend that their media is unbiased, though. There's no aura of unbiased media in China. Meanwhile, Facebook's head of global threat intelligence, is literally a US intelligence plant (and most of the authors on his Meta adversarial threat reports are ex- or current US intelligence). Meta is just the most memorable example, which is why I'm picking on them. Given the algorithmic nature of news delivery nowadays, how much influence would you guess US intelligence has on what news people see?
Xiao Qiang at UC Berkeley did a study before the VPN crackdown and estimated that there are about 10 million DAUs (daily active users) of firewall-flipping VPNs in the country. DAU/MAU is usually between 20%-50%, so that gives 20-50 million people with VPN access monthly (2-5% of internet users). Last October, China clamped down on some VPNs, but then the user counts for those VPNs that were still working skyrocketed.
Anyway, these numbers are actually really quite high:
Bing has 100 million DAUs worldwide. Reddit has about 55 million DAUs worldwide. LinkedIn has about 22 million DAUs in the US. Twitter has about 54 million MAUs in the US. Threads has about 8 million DAUs worldwide (though probably less now, lol). 1-5% penetration of total users in terms of usage is indicative of very high awareness. Other options include using a HK SIM (widely available) and a VPS (harder to setup). I have no idea what kind of market penetration these methods have.
It's less a matter of technical capability and more one of cost. It's not like people didn't know how to build good, efficient homes before. It was just expensive.