They're out publishing[1] and out spending everyone else[2], I asked Jack Clack from OpenAI that question a few years ago and he said he didn't really know exactly how far ahead they are, just that more people and more money is being applied in a more organized fashion.
When people bring up scientific advances in China, I am always skeptical.
What percent of Chinese publishing is not fraudulent?
Look at the scale of Fraud across China,
including in Academia:
"The online publication Quartz reported in 2017 that more than 50 percent of all articles retracted by scientific journals worldwide for fake peer reviews were submitted by Chinese authors. ... 55% - The percentage of articles submitted by Chinese authors that were retracted by scientific journals worldwide for fake peer reviews"
"It usually involves authors posing as their own peer reviewers and submitting made-up contact information for the supposed reviewer – a scam that publishers exposed by tracking the email addresses of author and reviewer to the same IP address. This type of fraud is on the rise and more often than not involves Chinese authors.
"In 2015, for instance, Britain-based publisher BioMed Central retracted 43 articles, including 41 from China.
"Later in the same year, Germany’s Springer retracted 64 papers, nearly all from Chinese scholars,
"while the Dutch publishing company Elsevier retracted nine medical science articles written by Chinese researchers.
"In what is said to be the largest single-incident retraction of journal publications in history, Springer Nature in 2017 retracted 107 articles in Tumor Biology published between 2012 and 2016, all of them authored by Chinese scholars from universities in Shanghai." [1]
Note, that doesn't say that 55% of submissions from Chinese authors were retracted. It says that 55% of retractions were from Chinese authors. If 60% of all submissions were from Chinese authors, then actual rate of retraction would be less than average. If say 40% of submissions were from Chinese authors, then the rate of retraction would be just slightly higher.
Just open your eyes and look at reality. TikTok, HarmonyOS, a rapidly advancing space program, and Shenzhen's 100% 5G coverage, and so on, did not come out of Silicon Valley. The writing is on the wall.
They went from making ball point pens in the 1980s to flying a rover Mars in 2021. So what if HarmonyOS is just rebranded Android? They modified it for their own designs, put in a few backdoors and it will achieve its purpose, capitalizing on the work of Westeners. They are standing on the shoulders of giants.
HarmonyOS is absolutely not just rebranded Android. That is total nonsense, and that Ars article is ridiculously bereft of any understanding of HarmonyOS.
HarmonyOS supports multiple kernels including Android/Linux
I open my eyes to data and objective, independent sources, where possible.
And I think the aforementioned findings of fraud in academia have analogs across industries in China-- construction (typically the industry with highest most corrupt activities regardless of nation), food manufacturing, accounting & finance, etc.
Here's an objective, independent source. I am a foreigner in China. Increasingly, robotics designed at my company are designed against Chinese chips because they are cheaper, more available, and therefore present less design risk. Meanwhile, a friend of mine in semiconductor trading just booked about a dozen life fortunes in a single month capitalising on the pain and suffering of conventional electronics producers with foreign BOMs.
[1]https://hbr.org/2021/02/is-china-emerging-as-the-global-lead...
[2]https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/12/05/65019/china-us-a...