Inside Asian Gaming

JANUARY 2018 INSIDE ASIAN GAMING 37 THE DISMAL OPTIMIST The one quarter number apparently leaves out Indian foreign students and Asian American students who also are reported to be big in the STEM subject area. Is it that some groups are better at math and science or is there some other reason? This is one politically charged subject that needs taking on but not in this column. I will just cite inadequacies in the American educational process and the eagerness of the Chinese to learn. One might ask – where are the American STEM students? Ban the Chinese (and Indian) nationals and some graduate schools would probably close. It is unlikely the foreign students would be replaced by Americans. You can’t win with nobody. America’s educational problems lie with America, not China. Another problem for those who would cut off the flow of tech to China, China will prove a magnet for engineers and scientists in surrounding countries with a similar culture. There won’t be any stopping this flow. The Middle Kingdom (China) has been the center of East Asian intellectual life for millennia. Japan, Taiwan and South Korea are loaded with engineers and tech talent. So long as Xi Jinping doesn’t pull down an iron isolationist curtain around China, many of these talented professionals will migrate to seek their fortune in the Middle Kingdom. They already have. And America may have a hard time bullying other countries to cut tech to China. For example, Taiwan Semiconductor just announced it was considering building a 3nm chip fab (chip factory) in China. Without getting into the technical “weeds”, this is a very big deal and very state of the art. True, Taiwan Semi will control the fab and the technology but still… Regarding its military, America should worry about its internal The Chinese Academy of Sciences placed in the top 10 on the Nikkei list for most quoted AI-related research papers from 2012 to 2016.