Denis Staunton, China correspondent of The Irish Times joined Pat Kenny to discuss how China has outpaced the most wealthy economy in the world
A China-based journalist has said China has outpaced the United States as the most wealthy and skilled economy in the world.
China is the leading country in 57 out of 64 critical technologies.
The country is rapidly emerging as the global technology superpower, outpacing the United States across most critical innovation areas from AI and robotics to batteries and quantum computing.
State-backed investment and strategic planning are driving an unprecedented surge in scientific output and industrial capacity.
Speaking on The Pat Kenny Show, China Correspondent of the Irish Times, Denis Staunton said China had “in many ways supposedly outpaced the most skilled and most wealthy economy in the world.”
“They already had this enormous and enormously efficient manufacturing industrial base”, he told Newstalk.
“What they developed from the 1980s was a whole system of every element of the manufacturing process, from the raw materials, to the labor, to the logistics, to everything else.
“They also invest enormously in research and development and in education. The other thing is that they embrace technology.”
He told Pat Kenny that most factories were almost entirely automated 24 hours a day and that China had fully embraced robotics and AI.
“It’s a sense of ‘If the technology is jere, we’re going to go with it’”, he said.
“They don't stop to think, if it’s going to cost people jobs, because they just think, they’ll find other jobs or it's going to grow the economy, it'll make the place more prosperous.
Denis Staunton, China Correspondent for the Irish Times said that the Chinese counterpart to the Children’s Hospital which opened in Beijing a few years ago was six times as big as the Irish one is anticipated to be.
A newborn baby is treated in a ward. Photo by: An Xin.“From the moment of conception to the first patient, the difference was three years”, he said.
“When they decide they're going to do it, they do it very quickly and Chinese people work very hard.
“They work very long hours as there is this work culture called 996, where you work from 9am to 9pm six days a week.
“It's also part of the culture that if your boss calls you at 11 o'clock on Saturday night, you pick up the phone and you do whatever the boss wants you to do.”
How China outpaced the United States in innovation
Mr Staunton said that living in China now felt like living in the future with remnants of the past.
“It feels like a very traditional society, and yet it’s hyper modern”, he said.
“They've embraced technology with the use of, say, facial recognition to enter places, the seamless way in which you just pay for everything by showing your phone rather than using credit cards or cash or anything like that.
“There's a kind of an old-fashioned quality about it, partly because the society is very traditional in many ways: families are very close and people are superstitious.”
Main Image: China and US rivalry illustration.
