This is the standard Chinese operating model, as I understand it. Accept foreign subsidiary investment on condition of 51% Chinese ownership, transfer the technology, then turn around and compete with the parent. It was a similar story with maglev trains.
Interesting that it's not the 51% (and I think some of the 51% may be held by non Chinese investors) that has been key but rather Allen Wu having the seal - so even without control of the board he's still been able to get control of the company.
Author here, there is a Singaporean investor as well, but they have deep Chinese ties. I agree with your assessment. Allen Wu is an American citizen too, but loyal to China with deep CCP contacts.
Since you are the author, there's a near duplicated paragraph below the CPU/XPU pictures, the paragraphs starts with "Besides standing out and calling themselves".
Very interesting content otherwise, I remember the seal issue being something very controversial too when other companies went there (I believe it was regarding Intel, that was maybe 15 years ago). To this day it still is a pretty prevalent issue when doing local branches in China.
Thanks for an interesting piece. Presumably Wu wouldn't have done this if he didn't have (or think he has) CCP approval? Also Son with his long term business interests in China probably thought he would be OK. Someone has miscalculated badly?
The FARA act covers a person who “solicits, collects, disburses, or dispenses contributions, loans, money, or other things of value within the United States” while acting in the interests of a “foreign government, a foreign political party, any person outside the United States ... and any entity organized under the laws of a foreign country or having its principal place of business in a foreign country.”
But an individual person is not a foreign entity, especially not if they are a US citizen.
There is the loophole for "representing interests of a foreign principal before US government officials" though, so I guess this is written broadly enough to snag anyone who may step on some toes.
Please don't cross into personal attack. If another commenter is confused, or you feel they are, it's enough to supply correct information in a helpful spirit. Alternatively, it's always fine not to post.
You can't throw out accusations like that without evidence, what deep CCP contacts Allen Wu has? Elon Musk has a factory in Shanghai, is he "loyal to China with deep CCP contacts" too?
i agree. the problem i have with the author's comment is "loyal". I think we need to distinguish people from justing trying to make money (apple, microsoft, tesla) and being CCP agents.
The author clearly suggests this American CEO is a "loyal CCP" agent. I am just curious how did she/he spot him?
I'll agree with this but the difference is drastic. Compare the number of people in Guantanamo to the number of people in Xinjiang. An order of magnitude of an order of magnitude difference.
Guantanamo is an embarrassment but it isn't even close to the Xinjiang camps
Just say you don't care. The most unbearing thing for us is that you claim to care while brutalizing and fetishizing others to justify your own crusade.
That's because concentration camps refers to your own citizens. Which doesn't excuse what happened in those US facilities. This isnt a trivial distinction; government's have a specific responsibility to their own citizens which goes above and beyond. Besides which china does some super sketch stuff on its border with north Korea.
Iraq and Afghanistan until recently. And we send billions to Israel which is a straight up apartheid state. That's not even getting into the millions of minorities in the world's largest prison population. We also killed a significant portion of the vietnamese population, in the millions. Also, you should look into the decades of CIA interventions in dozens of latin American countries.
You’re joking right? Indian reservations are their land. And they are free to move live work where ever without government oversight. This comment must be bait because I don’t see the logic.
For those of us not familiar with Chinese business practices, is this an actual seal? Like someone would use to frank documents, or squish into hot wax to seal documents? Or is it a symbolic seal, like a legal document, or something else?
These days it's a round plastic handle with a carved rubber bottom that pairs with a spongy red-ink filled bottom. There's a picture and an explanation at [1]. It basically functions the same way as the signature of an authorized representative of the company does in the West.
Presumably it comes out of personal seals which are a fun item to get if you're in China. I never interacted with someone who used them, but it's cool. See pictures at [2] and history at [3].
"Chop" is also frequently used instead of "seal". I assume its not onomatopoedic, but that is a fair description of the "thunk" sound produced to when the seal is quickly pounded against the document on the table.
Ditto Korea. Something that shocked me is that it is common in medium-sized sole proprietorships (tech startups, small businesses, research labs) for the CEO to give their personal seal to the accountants/secretaries. It the West the equivalent would be giving away an autopen for your signature.
There are different grades of seals for different purposes. The secretary will have the garden-variety "The company has received this shipment" chop; they will not have the "The company has agreed to this contract" chop.
in western companies, executive assistants very often have the exact same ability, up to and including signed full power of attorneys for executing on the ceo’s life where work blends into personal life.
i’m not surprised at this at all.
in the western context many executive assistants end up being appointed the executor of the ceo’s estate / will as a matter of business continuity.
I wonder if they were giving their full official seal? I suppose if you're signing a ton of documents, handing that over might be needed. It would be interesting if there were a system to register certain seals with only some permissions (for example, manage business but not personal assets with a green seal). You could create a document stamped with your most important seal that indicates which seal is permissible for which purpose.
In Japan, the official "hanko" seal with red ink carries the force of a signature, but other seals do not carry as much or any legal weight.
That article talks a little bit about a similar system to the one I mentioned, where one seal is used for banking, one for title transactions, etc. Something like that but more customizable could be pretty useful.
It's a thing in the US too. Just formed a C-Corp and power to create a seal that serves as the company's official signature is one of the parts that needs to be figured out in bylaws. You can specify that the current Chairman or CEO's signature counts as a seal, but you legally need some seal entity so that .gov knows what's legally binding. We elected to have an actual seal just for the kitsch value of it. Why make a company if you can't have a little fun with it?
Sensible businesses usually keep the seal locked up somewhere in the head office, probably with a backup in a safety deposit box at their bank. They certainly don't let the CEO take it home with them.
I don't quite understand this either, isn't this something where you could make a new seal with the same design? Does the original seal have something specific that's not supposed to be copied? Or is this like the copyright ownership of the company's seal?
In my country seals are used for business. There's a legal arsenal that makes forging a company seal or using it without authority more risky than dealing drugs. You can get in jail for life for this kind of crime. It's very efficient because companies making seals took the habit of asking for a proof of authority for making the seal representing a company to shield themselves from prosecution
Not really. The key here is that he needed to maintain legality, by contesting the ruling of the board and suing, he can now argue he is still the boss and keep the seal till chinese justice deliberates.
" In the UK, he was called "Slater the Traitor"[2] and "Sam the Slate" because he brought British textile technology to the United States, modifying it for American use. He stole the textile factory machinery designs as an apprentice to a pioneer in the British industry before migrating to the United States at the age of 21. He designed the first textile mills in the US and later went into business for himself, developing a family business with his sons. He eventually owned thirteen spinning mills and had developed tenant farms and company towns around his textile mills, such as Slatersville, Rhode Island."
Historically, strong international IP protection only becomes extra important once you are an a big established incumbent rather than a developing upstart country.
> Historically, strong international IP protection only becomes extra important once you are an a big established incumbent rather than a developing upstart country.
The theft of IP in a less interconnected age with different IP laws, at a smaller scale? If it was good enough for the British and the Americans, why not a policy from the top down for the Chinese in the modern age?
It would explain what China is doing in Africa, and their treatment of African immigrants in China during the pandemic. Colonialism was OK back then too! And many countries did it! Why not a more modern take by China [1]?
And America didn't respect British copyright either. Charles Dickens was a bestselling author in 19th century America but didn't make any money from it because American publishers pirated his books -- and it was legal. Dickens eventually did a couple of tours of America where people paid for tickets to see and hear him read from his books because that was the only way he could monetize his American popularity.
There is a sort of lived-truth here, that innovative upstarts are generally going to be in opposition to IP laws rather than in favour of it. Laws generally favours established players with money, lawyers and political contacts.
Seems to be going on for decades if the book Poorly Made in China is to be believed. Western corporations deliver their intellectual property to chinese factories on a silver platter.
"""
American officials want to avoid sending any signals that would fuel China's belief that the United States is trying to ''contain'' China's power, militarily or economically. And they know that if they deny a range of industrial technology to China, other competitors -- chiefly France and Germany -- are ready to leap in and fill the void.
"""
I am not sure the clickbating sensentional title really can be substantiated by the content...
Except from the fact that China practiced a different political system and ideology, developing China is not morally worse or better than developing any other nations.
Of course, when China grows powerful, they'll become more aggressive, and may even become the next super bully.
That's not what I'm talking about. Notice that Airbus started assembling A320 planes in China (under Chinese pressure), then Comac was founded, most of Chinese people working at Airbus went to Comac 1000 km away to build an A320 clone. This isn't simply a case of people "freely switching jobs". Particularly not in light of blatant and repeated Chinese espionage of incredible breadth in France going on for years and years:
>most of Chinese people working at Airbus went to Comac 1000 km away to build an A320 clone. This isn't simply a case of people "freely switching jobs".
State directed espionage doesn't get hundreds/thousands of engineers to switch allegiances. Money does. Then the knowledge travels with them. Personal knowledge that Airbus like many Euro companies in China treated their local employees like shit.
Another example was ZTE/Huawei managed to poach Nortel and other Euro telcom empoyees in China was because mainland employees had very little advancement opportunities. This included foreign nationals like Canadians with PRC Chinese background. An aquaintence of Chinese Canadian background poached most of Nortel GuangZhou's engineering team because state companies simply compensated better and provided more opportunities. A few years later, he poached a bunch of engineers from state company back to a foreign one who promoted. That's the incentives driving these mass migrations. Many PRC talent would rather stay working with foreign multinations due to prestige and better conditions (nice offices etc), especially in the late 90s, but at the end of the day, there was a bamboo ceiling and they generally weren't respected. Of course state will continue to espionage, but don't estimate role of Western companies being racist biting self in the ass that drove mainland talent to work for domestic companies.
Yes. All companies that operate in China have to be 51% domestically owned. Often they're setup so the parent company keeps all of the IP but as the Arm situation shows, that only gives the parent so much power.
> All companies that operate in China have to be 51% domestically owned.
this is not true - there is a type of legal entity called a Wholly Foreign Owned Enterprise (WFOE). It is only allowed for certain lines of business, of course, which wouldn't include anything of strategic importance to China.
I wonder how this happens. Is it the naivety of leadership at western corporations, or is it simple greed because those leaders may show short term results that boost their compensation? And of course, I have to wonder why western governments don’t restrict their corporations from risking their economic and military sovereignty in the future through these terrible partnerships.
The maglev was developed by Siemens in the 80s in Germany. It was called Transrapid. But we Germans were motivated to built a single railroad for it. So when Siemens went to China with it, we knew what would happen. Personally, i am kind of grateful that they use the technology instead that it rots away in some storage room in Munich at Siemens.
Note, you say "leadership of western corporations", but in the case of high speed rail, Japanese companies are involved too, and have fallen to the scam just as well.
Does anyone think they were not nudged to sell to local state-designated champ and had one serious candidate (with the CCP pulling the strings behind the scene)?
Arm China was set up because they want to be listed on the Shanghai Star board, the Chinese Nasdaq. If Arm just want to do business in China, it's totally OK to have fully owned subsidiary.
And this whole setup was in turn from Softbank's acute sense that Arm China will be given a lofty valuation because of the tech wars happening right now...
And for all are happening right now, it's because Mr. Wu learned how to manuvurer based on his own interests. The Chinese investors are actually not directly benefiting from this mess.
This gets overblown a lot in the same way that we used to discredit Soviet scientific advancements by claiming they stole all the important bits from the Americans.
Yes, China does steal US technology and industry and yes, it has happened on a number of occasions with concrete documentation. However, that does not mean that China is not capable of innovation or shrewd business moves and it should not be assumed to be the norm.
The fact that they are more than capable of innovation and shrewd business is the entire reason that casually stealing whatever they want on top of things is problematic.
> The fact that they are more than capable of innovation and shrewd business is the entire reason that casually stealing whatever they want on top of things is problematic.
Hardly casual. The theft is thoughtful, deliberate, careful, and strategic.
Maybe the West woruld come to realization that they could abolish paw protections of trade secrets and patents, and not lose much, but boost local innovation?
I don't see how that is any different if we're comparing it to the United States who is also capable of the same things but violently steals whatever they want.
Not entirely defending things but observing that if you are of a view that IPR is basically absurd, "stealing" it may be equally absurd, but rational.
After you've stolen it, it's still "there" except for the exclusivity.
Chips will still exist, fab lines will still run. Profits have tanked, sure. Innovation is probably stifled but that's an opportunity loss.
There's a long history of stealing IPR at the state level around the world. States do this, private individuals do this, assets get seized everywhere from time to time.
'Sovereign risk' has always to be factored in to any business venture, anywhere. Nobody can possibly have been investing millions in China mainland without knowing this risk going in. At this point, "outrage" is part of the negotiating tactics. Outrage won't really stop this happening here or anywhere else. Bilateral consequences might? What Chinese assets will somebody seize?
The German petrochemical and drugs sector was economically robbed postwar WW1 and WW2 and personally I think somewhat rightly so. Bayer made cool drugs, but also helped the nazi party. Russia and America both took things as expropriation. Postwar, but.. does war make this IPR and asset claim really that much better?
Consider it from the perspective of the people who advocated for the hollowing out of industry, the "managed decline" crowd. It sure would be nice to hear an admission of, at best, shortsightedness... If only somebody had warned us about basing an economy on "knowledge work" (no joke, they call it that) in a world where "intellectual property" is just mouth noise.
Exactly. Most companies do know that intellectual property doesn't mean shit in China, but choose to do business with them anyways because they'd prefer the ability to manufacture things for ridiculously cheap. Just like how companies in developed nations leverage their capital advantage to make many times more profit than their Chinese suppliers, Chinese companies leverage their manufacturing advantage to capture IP from companies of developed nations. If you consider the latter theft, then you should consider the former theft as well.
There's a very strong anticommunist view in this tech community, combined with libertarianism and neoliberal economic views. If you add nationalism to the mix, it's fuel on the fire.
I don't want to live in an authoritarian society but foaming at the mouth about the CCP is really silly.
> The USA is currently in shambles and all this China bashing is a witch hunt to distract from the problems at home.
Eh, you're half right. The US is in shambles, but ideological competition from China isn't a distraction. The Chinese government is consciously opposed to many values that Westerners care quite deeply about: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/20/world/asia/chinas-new-lea.... The issue is that, unlike with Soviet Communism, the West may not be able to rise to the occasion this time.
As if everyone talking here were from the US. The US currently being in shambles doesn't justify any of China's human rights violations, imperialistic policies or genocides.
In addition, there's a very strong Anti-China view in this community. But the red scare was just an appetizer. The main serving is the anti-communism that has infected the subconscious of Americans who only hear and listen to the media that serves this insanely good propaganda.
If the current course continues this seems likely to lead to a bifurcation of the Arm ecosystem - presumably with Arm customers outside of China competing with incompatible products exported from China based on Arm China designs.
I don't have any insight into the quality of the Arm China team but isn't one possible outcome that there is strong competition between the two ecosystems. So we could be in an Arms race (sorry!)
Author here. They specifically said they are not working with foreign companies. While they have exclusive rights to arm architecture in china, they cannot do anything outside china.
Arm does not manufacture chips. They license IP for per chip or blanket fees. The model of many of these licenses is irrevocable. I've seen a couple different Arm licensing contracts and they're all very different so hard to make blanket statements. The Chinese entity has the right to license to all Chinese semiconductor firms who have the right to sell their chips.
I'm aware of how ARM operates. I just find it incredible that ARM would allow some entity to license its designs contrary to ARM's own intentions, or generally do anything that entity wanted to do with them, and ARM would just consent to it in places where law is enforced. I mean, shredding counterfeit imported goods has been a traditional pastime in the west.
These are not counterfeit goods though. Where has the law been broken in a way that gives Arm the power to act? Probably IP licensed under Chinese law and Arm China will probably get its way in Chinese courts.
As dylan522p is saying, it depends very heavily on the actual agreement. Which unfortunately isn't public and has historically been very different in each case so we can't even look at similar agreements for guidance.
That being said, it wouldn't be totally out there for a clause in the agreement that doesn't allow export of chips with this IP, and that would probably be enforced as ITO judgements allowing seizing chips and end devices at ingress points. The ITO would essentially treat them as counterfeit if all of those assumptions hold true, similar to how how remanufactured and ghost shift iPhone replacement parts famously get labeled as counterfeit legally.
> Chips themselves can be sold, yes. The IP cannot be licensed to non Chinese based semi firms.
I'd be astonished if licenses to Chinese SoC designers prevented products with those SoC's being sold outside China. So RockChip, Spreadtrum etc would be cut off from the rest of the world? Or forced to license separately with Arm UK for chips for products that are to be exported? Seems very unlikely.
Plus I'd expect we'd have seen action taken already if they really had broken the terms of the licensing.
Agreed that we're all speculating to some extent though!
They could try that, sure, but the "real" Arm would likely sue to stop imports at as many destinations as possible. And they'd probably win those court cases.
These are not counterfeit goods though. Where has the law been broken in a way that gives Arm the power to act? Probably IP licensed under Chinese law and Arm China will probably get its way in Chinese courts.
I'm not sure what anyone expected when we cut China off of chip IP. We did the same thing in the US, we had a policy of just straight up encouraging people to memorize patents before they immigrated over, and paying for their family to immigrate with them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Slater
I can understand the value of memorizing designs, plans, and technical drawings that are kept as proprietary information, but why bother memorizing a patent? Patents are public information and are only valid in the specific country granting the patent. Without additional local filings, foreign patents are not valid in America and vice versa.
Yes, this was the late 18th, early 19th century. A country's IP protectionism schemes obviously take a different approach now given modern communications media.
I contend that it's foolish to expect countries to not act in their own best interest. When you cut them off of technology because you're scared that they can reproduce it, you shouldn't be surprised that they actively go around your restrictions. It's the only sane move, the move that our own country took in their situation, and one aspect that led to our own economic greatness.
> I contend that it's foolish to expect countries to not act in their own best interest.
On one level absolutely yes, however best interest can sometimes mean co-operating and taking it in the shorts here for a win over there - this is largely how western countries have traded amongst each other.
The Chinese government is much less willing to play the co-operate and we all benefit game which results in other governments having to adjust to that.
It's somewhat similar to what Russia did with their technology industry over the last 10-15 years.
Can be defended as rational from the Chinese viewpoint since they I think are planning over the long term (decades) to forge enough relationships outside of the west to be completely self-sufficient (that has been their goal for a long time in terms of technology IP, they don't just want to be the factory, they want to be the design bureau)
It does seem like the world is polarising around new nexuses of power, the traditional west with the US on one side, China and it's allies (some would say debtors) on the other and the EU somewhere in the middle but much closer to the US than China.
Where it gets interesting is historically those power blocs have formed where the world was much less interconnected than now and so I think that'll change things in ways we can't expect.
COVID has been an interesting lesson in disruption on a global scale (even if compared to how bad it could have been and it was truly awful - it was comparitively minor) and how fast things fall apart, throw in climate change and we are headed for interesting times.
What the US - and others, see my related comment about my own country (Germany) in this sub-thread - was not "questionable" at all. Instead, the way we defend "IP" today is what is questionable.
You won't find the equivalent of a law of physics to support either hypothesis, in the end those are different paths for society to take and it's a choice. I'M presupposing here that there is no end goal for humanity, so there is no obvious way to weigh the different outcomes by some higher level objective measure.
China is playing the same game that the US used to try to get ahead of the UK. Seems like turn about being fair play. FWIW US lawmakers have the power to do something about this by creating trade blockades until equal market access is provided. Trump tried this & look how unpopular a trade war with China is. I don't think it was all just because Trump was doing it, although the US being schizophrenic about which side implements an otherwise popular policy is going to be an ongoing challenge.
For my country (Germany), you just have to look up the history of "Made in Germany". Which Britain introduced to defend against cheap knock-off products made in Germany, which was learning from (i.e. "stealing" in today's terms) by copying.
> The label was originally introduced in Britain by the Merchandise Marks Act 1887, to mark foreign produce more obviously, as foreign manufactures had been falsely marking inferior goods with the marks of renowned British manufacturing companies and importing them into the United Kingdom. Most of these were found to be originating from Germany, whose government had introduced a protectionist policy to legally prohibit the import of goods in order to build up domestic industry
While I agree with most of the article, I find the conclusion makes it seem like propaganda:
"it is clear that SoftBank’s short sighted profit driven behavior has caused a massive conundrum"
If I understand things correctly, Arm China going rouge is a big problem for all western governments, who in the past have heavily relied on the leverage that they had thanks to western IP being needed for chip design. So shifting the blame onto SoftBank appears wrong. Did anyone expect a Japanese money-driven investment bank to do what's politically the right thing for the U.S.? I don't think it would be reasonable to expect that. So in my opinion, a better conclusion would be:
"Western governments allowing SoftBank to take Arm's IP into China has caused a massive conundrum"
So, I cannot see this sort of thing stopping, until we see a point where non-Chinese investors revolt when they hear about the company they've invested going into China, rather than cheering. If investors have had such a change of heart at this point, I have not seen it.
This sort of thing definitely has deterred investment in China. I was aware of it (in a very different industry) twenty years ago and it definitely affected decision making. It's impossible to track investments not made though.
If it's taken for granted that its impossible to make profits on the Chinese market, the best outcome for a company is to sell their IP to China and make sure the markets are kept completely segregated.
You can control the sale your own tech, but you have little control over whether you will then be competing against it down the road - regardless of the terms you thought you were all agreeing too.
The best way forward with any critical tech won't be a simple decision. Not competing in China, partnering in China, or selling tech for use only in China, all contain existential risks.
This is a battle happening at the Chinese (as a nation) vs. the non-Chinese world level. Non-Chinese tech actors will remain at high risk until the non-Chinese world can negotiate together with the same coherence as the Chinese system can.
> this is the macro playbook that we've seen time and time again over the last 20 years
What? American CEO in China are doing this kind of shit? Oh god, I have been in US for 12 years, so the American corporations have been plaguing the Chinese economy all the time?
No wonder indigenous Chinese companies eventually win. These American CEO are trash ...
I wish the author can learn some Chinese before writing this article. And the related Chinese news was already there last year.
The thing is the pure ARM internal political conflicts.
ARM China CEO WU, a US citizen, claimed that he reported few high-level managers' corruptions and then he got fired by the ARM Softbank. ARM Softbank united with all board directors, including all Chinese investors, to fire Wu.
But when Wu franchised ARM China, he signed a voting agreement with large shareholders to make sure he can not be fired for no reasons. So he claimed the board voting was illegal and Chinese shareholder violated the voting agreement. So even Chinese shareholders want him gone, but he refused to leave.
That represents an interesting twist in the story, but I don't seeing it affecting the conclusion - ARM has lost all control over their subsidiary (at least until the China judicial powers intervene). This couldn't have happened in a western country.
> This couldn't have happened in a western country.
Because control of the company is not determined by control of the company seal in Western countries, but it is in China. A legal technicality that the shareholders need to get the courts to address.
But there are also technicalities in Western company laws that need judicial intervention, like dealing with directors acting against shareholders' interests in English company law.
Google translate: And Wu Xiongang revealed in this interview that he had reached an agreement with Hopu Investment, and the two parties must maintain "a consistent pace" on all major matters involving Arm China. Therefore, the decision to vote to remove him was invalid.
I take your point, but wouldnt categorize what looks like on paper the largest ever theft of intellectual property in the history of the world as "drama"
I would expect some western sources to back those claims. Otherwise they look like run of the mill chinese propaganda
People don't know who Dylan is. This guy has a history of seeking out negative spins on Chinese issues and using his position as mod of r/hardware to keep them up.
Maybe Americans should start trying to start more on-shore factories.
(Just thinking about that makes me laugh. The environmentalists, the labor folks, the real-estate folks, the local and state tax authorities -- all will either slow things and/or get their cut. From what I understand the sad truth is that the CCP's real economic advantage lies in ignoring the environment, workers rights, and real-estate rights. So we are stuck with on-shore "too much" and Chinese "not enough" in each of these categories. Plus, our justice system is entirely dysfunctional and slows everything down 100x and increases cost of everything 1000x).
Don't forget "climate change", which people with "luxury beliefs" believe can just go away if we move all manufacturing to China and make it completely infeasible to do any on-shore manufacturing.
Instead it gets worse, since they won't be subject to any restrictions until IIRC 2030, and you have to burn oil to get stuff from there to here.
The firm's 49% shares belong to arm holding. Where are the "taking over everything". And literally the CEO and Softbank own the majority shares, are American and Japanese... What are the China taking everything in this non Chinese entity?...
Why would/should they? The short to medium term economic interests of most of the ruling/capital owning class (higher margins on production, real estate prices going up) and the plebs (cheaper products) are both tied to close cooperation. Maybe the long term interests are misaligned but in the prevailing Western capitalist system that has "won", long term costs and incentives are not really imposed on anyone - especially the capital owners/ruling class.
> It really feels like the rest of the world refuses to even try and prevent China from taking over everything.
A capitalist will sell you the noose you hang him with.
One of the cancers the West needs to deal with is people who value capitalism and personal greed over any other commitment, and the lack of political will to contain them.
Who would expect to remain an "ally" in China's eyes after their usefulness was exhausted? That's beyond wishful thinking. It is ascribing a magical western "loyalty" value that simply doesn't exist in business anywhere, even in the west.
Chinese companies no doubt believe they can do everything a western company can do, and they're right, for practical purposes. What do they need help with once they have the trade secret designs, processes, etc.?
I cannot believe these western "partners" believe in a long game where they come out being anything other than a chump.
I’m not saying this development is good, but didn’t ARM UK / SoftBank lose control of ARM China 3 years ago when they sold 51% of it and became a minority shareholder? Not being in control comes along with the minority shareholder status. The fact that ARM China CEO refused to step down is kind of irrelevant, the remaining 51% shareholders could just replace the board with whomever and install whomever they want as CEO. While this would require a unanimous vote by the other shareholders, I think it is just a technicality that this hasn’t already happened.
Still, you have to wonder if ARM China is still sending SoftBank 49% of the profits! Or if they’re just like “what profits”. This whole saga with the corporate seals and everything is hilarious. Actually giving the JV access to the RTL (== keys to the kingdom) has to be the dumbest move ever.
Also, goes without saying that none of this happens without the implicit consent of the CPC.
The entire board voted with SoftBank to kick this dude out. He literally refuses to step down. There would have to be a lengthy court battle which the board doesn't want.
ARM HQ and Chinese fund Hopu tried jointly to replace the CEO of ARM China who is refusing to step down. The ARM China board voted 7-1 to fire him but he controls the company seal.
In China, control of the physical company seal means control of the company.
The board voted 7-1 to replace him but he refused to hand it over, and used court proceedings to draw out the subsequent legal case until he was in defacto control.
“In the new joint venture, Arm Holdings, the SoftBank subsidiary sold a 51% stake of the company to a consortium of Chinese investors for paltry $775M. This venture has the exclusive right to license Arm’s IP within China. Within 2 years, the venture went rogue. Recently, they gave a presentation to the industry about rebranding, developing their own IP, and striking their own independently operated path.”
It sounds like what really happened is that Softbank and Chinese investors initially voted to oust Allen Wu, but he held onto something called a seal that gave him legal control of the company still. Retrieving the seal would have taken additional lawsuits and cooperation of Chinese courts, but they did not do this because the Chinese investors were not onboard with it.
Apart from Allen Wu holding onto the seal the rest is just cutthroat capitalism.
Presumably this is going to get interesting when they try to export hardware containing Arm-China items to the West. Arm will claim that it contains pirate IP, leading to seizures at the border.
I remember when bitcoin miners were transitioning from FPGA to ASIC... I nearly threw out my back from laughter when the Chinese deceitfully copied the masks with abandon, while also delaying fulfillment with longer and longer burn in tests.
Funnier still is the fact that the network's aggregate hashing power can easily be calculated by anyone logging the rate and difficulty of solved blocks, and that anyone would still bother trying to lie. But then the whole Craig Wright debacle hadn't yet gone down... so I guess they might have been visionaries when it came to leveraging the power of self-delusion to defeat cryptographic guarantees.
lol, gee - wonder how that happened? There have been a few non-Chinese sourced chips decapped that predate the Chinese offerings, but as soon as some idiot uploaded his design to a Chinese fab in an attempt to undercut the competition...
Close. If they just ghosted the client it would have been bad for that client (a managed group buy, from what I remember), but word would have spread quickly and the most they'd have had to show for it was a single revision zero ASIC for hashing SHA256 - no big deal in the grand scheme of things. Instead they churned out as many as they possibly could, only partially fulfilling orders in drips and drabs - and with a quality that made one wonder how low they were in the binning hierarchy. For some strange reason the fulfillment rate would drastically improve during periods of heightened uncertainty in bitcoin's exchange rate... Anyway, by stringing designers along like that they maintained access to later optimizations in design revisions.
It was really weird to watch these early events unfold, because it provided the kind of satisfaction that accompanies the reinforcement of prior held positions - but tempered with the knowledge that you'd eventually be forced to take a bite from same shitsandwich.
Are there examples of mainland-grown IP/technology breakthroughs that resulted from such "transfers"?
It seems so far that this does enable China to further catch up and massively expand the use of the captured technology, but are there instances of them qualitatively surpassing it?
I'm sure China has enough resources for advancements beyond replication, as much as it's capable of showcasing something to the rest of the world equally valuable of "transfer".
China repeats Japan 1950-1980. Focus on incremental innovation, instead of big leaps.
They started at the bottom rung of the quality chain. They are constantly climbing it up but the speed seems slow. Then suddenly they are in par or little ahead.
Chinese are already within a spitting distance in most technologies. Semiconductors have some technology bottlenecks like EUV machines that are hard to replicate. Chinese firms are already in a position where they don't need joint ventures. They hire directly senior engineers from South Korean and Taiwanese firms to work for them.
Interestingly, Japan also had very lax IP laws as it was catching up to the rest of the world, which basically enabled it to do what China has been doing, and only really shifted to strong IP protections as it started to develop its own tech and IP that it wanted to export.
They send their businessmen into trips trough Europe and the US with cameras hanging in their necks taking pictures of the factories and taking notes. When their hosts waited orders from Japan, they build factories and started competing.
Industrial Revolution in the US started with stealing. Samuel Slater – "Father of the American Industrial Revolution" ("Slater the Traitor" in the UK) didn't invent anything. He just memorized and copied British cotton spinning mill designs, especially the water frame and moved to America.
> He learned of the American interest in developing similar machines, and he was also aware of British law against exporting the designs. He therefore memorized as much as he could and departed for New York in 1789. Some people of Belper called him "Slater the Traitor", as they considered his move a betrayal of the town where many earned their living at Strutt's mills.[4]
That is confusing cause and effect. Because companies move their manufacturing operations to china it becomes harder to manufacture in the US. They did not initially move to China because of a lack of dometic skilled workers, but because of lower costs. The result of that move was, after a delay, the de-skilling of the US labor force, creating the lack of domestic skilled workers we have now. To recover from that would require a reverse migration of manufacturing activity which would, after a delay, create more skilled workers in the US.
Skills follow activity, they do not lead activity. You learn by doing.
If you want to develop good bridge building skills, then build a lot of bridges. As a result of that process, you will, after a delay, have a labor pool that knows how to do it well, and the bridges you build later on will be higher quality than the bridges you started out building.
You do not wait for the labor pool to sprout up like mushrooms spontaneously from the ground, so there are all these bridge builders standing around with nothing to do, and then you decide that you'll have them fill up a few rooms and and hire some of them to build a bridge.
It's not just a lack of domestic skilled workers. I'm not really sure there is much of a lack. It's just that US labor is so much more expensive compared to earning power. US workers can't pay other US workers.
Getting parts CNCed in China may be 10x less than the cost in the US, and materials are a tenth the cost as well (in small qty) as they haven't been transported yet. You can get roughly the same throughput in the US if you want to pay for it, but it will be vastly more expensive.
That is just logically false. It's not even a question of measurement, it is false by definition. The income paid to produce is by definition always sufficient to purchase the output that has been produced. But remember that income paid to the factors of production includes both labor and capital income, because both the owners of capital and the suppliers of labor purchase the products that are created by the combining of labor and capital to produce output.
What is unsustainable is running persistent trade deficits overseas. E.g. by allowing foreign capital inflows, we have allowed the foreign sector to distort prices in an unsustainable manner.
The buyer of US labor is the government and capital. Taxes on all US economic activity and coffers filled with worldwide profits are what purchases comparatively expensive US labor. This is why, e.g., most people can not afford new housing construction -- excess money has been dumped into it from the stimulus, driving costs up. Similar things have happened on a longer timescale for IT and engineering.
Take what I said with some restrictions, like "US workers can't afford skilled or semiskilled US labor" which is afaict true. I work in production automation, life sciences, and software; my hobby projects in these area are unfortunately quite expensive due to US labor costs. As much as possible I must avoid using US labor if I want to get anything done.
"Skills follow activity, they do not lead activity. You learn by doing."
Nicely put. Thanks for pointing that out. That really resonates for me as I think about my career and skillset. I'm where I am now because of building things with somewhat inferior skills (risky) at the start and growing my skills . I need to repeat that with new tools/processes now. It all seems obvious looking back.
...Perhaps another skill is having the foresight to see what will be needed in the next phase. I did it then, hopefully I'll be able to do it again. A bit like running a small company of one person. Where is the next investment made?
China - the populace - seem to be pretty good at this.
What does the west do? Tech is the only real growth industry left in the US. Right now 80% of the county slaves away in dead end jobs to cater to the remaining 20% white collar professional+capital class. That 20% seems like its going to get smaller :/
Eventually something has got to give in this country. Soon nothing will be left but a hollow husk.
I remember right around 2000 George Will bloviated about how Russia was a third world nation by economy size, why do we treat them with such deference.
Psst George: They still have a LOT of nukes.
That might be us. A shell of a country with a failing economy, strong military, and huge number of nukes.
Of course right around then global warming might really start taking off and a billion or two people are starving and become refugees. Then we see what happened in the EU and Syria, but worldwide and 100x worse.
Could tech and manufacturing combine to become automated high-end tech?
Could robotics and aggressive automation of production lines make this shift? ...Or is it in fact more complex than it seems and the lead times for setting up these kinds of businesses too large to have a useful effect in the short/medium term?
The US manufacturing real output continues to increase and never really declined (briefly in the Great Recession but quickly restored). Manufacturing employment on the other hand continues to drop.
Depends on what you mean by "existing technology". Do electronic devices using quantum effects in solid state materials count? There you have the whole semiconductor industry. What about exploiting the behavior of charge carriers in vacuum? There you have the whole vacuum tube industry. Etc. etc. Before these things existed, nothing even remotely similar was being utilized by human civilization in our technological ventures at the very least in these two cases (or at least nothing did that readily comes to my mind, but considering the physics involved, it seems unlikely).
> Do electronic devices using quantum effects in solid state materials count? There you have the whole semiconductor industry.
That was invented by Jagadish Chandra Bose in Bangladesh, who built working millimeter-wave radios using Schottky diodes in 01894. Of course, he didn't understand the quantum effects, but then, semiconductor diodes were in wide industrial use (mostly in the rich West) for decades before Shockley's Equation in 01949.
The quantum theory was largely a Western discovery during those 55 years, but also included significant contributions from non-Western people like Shinichiro Tomonaga, Yoshiro Nishina, Leo Esaki, Tsung-Dao Lee, Hideki Yukawa, and Hantaro Nagaoka, and of course since 01949 quantum theory has been a field of investigation dominated by non-Western people. As you may be aware, there have been significant improvements in solid-state electronics since 01949, including full-color LEDs that permit LED lighting (due to Shuji Nakamura) and the switch to MOSFETs (due to Mohammed Atalla and Dawon Kahng, who were not from the West but were in the West) which eliminated the power consumption barrier that restricted 01960s electronics to dozens of transistors on a chip.
China in particular has had a pretty bad couple of centuries, in between being invaded by the US, England, Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Belgium, the Austro-Hungarian empire, Russia (twice), and Japan (three times), having two of the most ruinous civil wars in human history, and having the worst famine in human history. So it's been innovating a bit below par, though it seems to be doing okay now.
> What about exploiting the behavior of charge carriers in vacuum? There you have the whole vacuum tube industry.
It does seem that the whole cathode-ray thing was a Western discovery, but it was built on the Hindu ayurvedic techniques of mercury distillation that formed the basis for Arabic and then Western alchemy (necessary for the Sprengel pump, which was for decades the only source of a hard enough vacuum); also, building the apparatus drew on the Mesopotamian techniques of glassmaking, which are usually considered to hail from Asia Minor, though some believe they originated in Egypt.
(It's possible that the Hindus imported the techniques of mercury distillation from China, but that is far enough back that it's difficult to know. At any rate, the Europeans got them from the Arabs, who got them from the Hindus.)
> and of course since 01949 quantum theory has been a field of investigation dominated by non-Western people. As you may be aware, there have been significant improvements in solid-state electronics since 01949
Not quite sure how that matters for the question I was answering, which was emphatically NOT "is there a field of inventions historically wholly monopolized by the west". The question was for "AN example of a western invention not based on existing technology" - one would be sufficient.
> but it was built on the Hindu ayurvedic techniques of mercury distillation
?????? We're not talking about pseudoscience here.
> The effect in question was discovered by a German two decades earlier
Oh hey, you're right. So Bose only invented the use of the effect for radio, not the Schottky diode itself. I stand corrected.
> ?????? We're not talking about pseudoscience here.
Mercury distillation is not pseudoscience; like glassblowing, it was an existing technology that was a basis for the vacuum-tube age. Of course, if you trace any technology back, you will find that its origins are mixed with pseudoscience; Semmelweis promoted handwashing because he was convinced disease was caused by cadaveric particles, Priestley invented water carbonation because he was convinced scurvy was a carbonated water deficiency, etc. Naturally enough, mercury distillation seems to have been invented by people who were convinced that drinking mercury was good for you. They were wrong about that, but their distillation technology still works.
1) Chemistry and physics has nothing to do with the pseudoscience of ayurveda, and vice versa.
2) Even if somehow you could make the connection (which I still strongly doubt since I haven't seen the these Ancient Indian vacuum pumps in museums any more than I've seen a vimana in a museum), it still would be hardly relevant since it would be the same connection as between a car and a screwdriver. A screwdriver can be employed to assemble a car once you know what parts the car should comprise, but you'd most likely describe the resulting car as a thermodynamics-based device, or internal-combustion-heat-engine-based device, and not as a screwdriver-based device. Likewise, a vacuum pump utilizing mercury can be utilized to manufacture a vacuum tube, but most people would probably describe a triode as a electrostatics-based device, or as a thermionic-emission-based device, not as a mercury-vacuum-pump-based device, not matter where the mercury vacuum pump came from.
Probably you'll have a different perspective about the significance of screwdrivers once you learn a little more about the history of technology.
To correct one misreading on your part, though, my claim was that the technology of distillation was developed in India (or possibly China), not the Sprengel pump. I too would be very surprised to find a medieval Sprengel pump from India or anywhere else.
I'm curious: would you also be so foolish as to claim that chemistry and physics have nothing to do with the pseudosciences of phlogiston, numerology, astrology, and alchemy? How about the steady-state theory of cosmology?
A vacuum tube is not based on "distillation" of anything. It operates with charge carriers in vacuum, with no phase change of any masses involved, whereas distillation involves liquid/gas transitions so it can't possibly have anything to do with the operation of a vacuum tube which is based on an arrangement of solid electrodes in a vacuum and the flow of charge carriers between them. As for the history of technology, I'm moderately familiar with it and I don't see the relevance here. If absolutely everything you touch when creating something were relevant for the question of "Have you an example of a western invention not based on existing technology?", then not only would the answer be "there isn't any", but as a corollary, one would have to conclude that there is NO example of ANY invention from ANYWHERE that isn't based on existing technology. Clearly that doesn't seem to be the intended reading of that question.
You can't make a Sprengel pump without distilling your mercury (it doesn't work if the mercury sticks to the walls of the tubes and leaves crap all over them), and you can't make a vacuum tube without some kind of hard vacuum pump, and, as I pointed out above, the Sprengel pump was the only kind of hard vacuum pump available for decades. (I already explained all of this fairly clearly in previous comments, such as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28333304.) In fact, the invention of the Sprengel pump produced an explosion of inventions and discoveries, of which the so-called Edison effect was only one.
I do think that that there is no example of any invention from anywhere that isn't based on existing technology, including specifically existing technology invented on other continents, and my reading of the question was that it was intended to make precisely that point, thus concisely pointing out the ignorant fallacy at the heart of the original racist bullshit comment, "I can think of nothing unique, only modification of existing inventions."
1) the tools are traditionally not a part of the invention,
2) by referring to distillation as a prerequisite for the mercury vacuum pump operation, you're referring to a tool twice removed from the invention in question, and
3) even mercury distillation itself is not based on ayurveda anyway. It's based on physics.
Is there a specific esoteric or cabbalistic reason to prefix the number of bygone summers with a zero? Both make for invalid octadecimals and have broken my builtin parser.
I'm going with the lightning rod. Granted, metalworking was probably discovered somewhere in the Levant. But the "West" has only been defined by the Bosporus since about 1300.
Bonus: India - place-value numbers; China - paper money.
It's almost like China wants to make sure nobody ever lets them near useful IP again. This just seems counterproductive for them in the long run, though if you understand geopolitics better than I do, please help my understand how this is a good long-term strategy for China
As long as there's a chance to eek out some more money, companies will continue to do it. This isn't remotely a new thing.
There's a pretty reasonable chance part of the downfall of Nortel was a lot of their data being extracted by the government and provided to Huawei.
After Nortel shut down, the Canadian Department of National Defense picked up their headquarters to move into, but the move was delayed for years because the building was chock full of listening devices.
This started almost 20 years ago. But here we are still willing to gamble that they'll respect our IP because maybe we can make a few bucks.
> As long as there's a chance to eek out some more money...But here we are still willing to gamble that they'll respect our IP because maybe we can make a few bucks.
What I observe is the motivation isn't to "make a few bucks", it is "give the perception that a few bucks will be made". It looks like the agency problem: move to China, convincingly explain to the board and shareholders that such a move was bold, strategically sound, daring, fiscally prudent, and courageous. Gather stacks. Show a few years of expense sheet fluffing, meanwhile cutting everything else that isn't measured. Exit stage left. By the time the chickens come home to roost, IBGYBG.
What I find curious is I don't really see Japanese corporations doing this, even though they also do a tremendous amount of business in China. I hazard a guess at an overall business leadership culture difference between Japan and America; America's is more value extractive-oriented ("unlocking" value), while Japan's is more value constructive-oriented (looking for compounding small, incremental improvements to deliver value).
China is closing off and turning inwards. It's a fundamental political drive due to their communist party structure. They can't continue to let the wealthy get richer because it threatens their grip on power, so you see Xi reverting to traditional socialist policies and cracking down on everyone that threatens him and his supporters.
So basically they're just rushing to steal and copy all the technology they can, so they can make everything they need for themselves internally. Their goal isn't to compete internationally, just to be self-reliant enough to have a reasonably good economy while maintaining absolute political control.
China probably doesn't care that they can't access IP from other countries again. They've mostly gotten what they need.
The alternative is that the party gradually loses its power, and that liberalisation eventually makes the whole system collapse. It's the exact same forces that made the Soviet Union collapse and it's well known that this is Xi's biggest fear.
Viewed through the lens of the original Silk Road, the "closing off and turning inwards" trend is consistent with an increasingly Middle Kingdom posture. China is the center of the world in this posture, and in a very nearly literal sense all roads lead to China with BRI.
It also neatly dovetails with asserting greater, more finely-granular political and social control the leadership desires (from which all other power emanates in such a world-view). Chinese nationalism is strongly encouraged, and evolving it to a "New Middle Kingdom" posture will generate incredibly powerful historical resonance with Chinese.
Convincing 1.4B people to politically turn inward to only concerning themselves with domestic matters because China is the only nation that matters in an exceptionalism narrative, while delivering a practical logistics network to feed their ramping up resource requirements (because China cannot sole-source these resources domestically), could be a winning formula for a leadership that wants to maintain the bargain they have struck with the people: continued increasing prosperity in exchange for continued Mandate from Heaven.
This is just my uninformed perspective from the outside looking in, without extensive corroborating data and cultural referents. I welcome discussion on what is really going on.
You’re right, it’s an uninformed perspective. You’re starting with a conclusion of what the Chinese government’s intent is and then trying to find a way to fit the facts into that narrative.
> Arm Holdings, the SoftBank subsidiary sold a 51% stake of the company to a consortium of Chinese investors
The story can be shaped in many ways. The fact is that after that transaction, that consortium owns more than half, and SoftBank is a minority investor, which means that it's not theirs anymore. I might be missing something, but once you surrendered the control of the company, can you really say it went rogue?
"Allen Wu has aggressively taken over the firm and is operating it how he sees fit. One interesting tidbit is that Allen Wu sued Arm China in order to declare his dismissal illegal. He essentially sued himself as he represented both sides in that specific court case. "
This article repeats “安谋科技” so many times but as far as I can tell, doesn’t mention even once how I might attempt to pronounce it or recognize when anyone else mentions it in the future. Can anyone at least provide a transliteration?
It's Chinese, though, not Japanese, and the Japanese meanings borrowed in the Tang dynasty are no longer modern Chinese. (Common words like "to eat" is 食 in Japanese, but in Chinese now that means "foodstuff" and is a noun, not a verb. The common Chinese word for to eat is 吃. There are a lot of these.)
谋 appears to mean more like "plan" as a neutral word. Obviously you could have hidden plans and devious plans as well as ambitious plans, public plans, wise plans, and helpful plans. I don't think anyone would name their company "Cheatful Scheme", even if that was actually their intention. And 谋 is modified by 安 (peace, safety, good health). So it'd be more like "Wholesome-safe plan".
I've grown up with a constant understanding of implicit liberties, so much so that I have the freedom to openly _discuss_ my general distrust of the government. The events that float by in HN are outliers: threats of more risk, but statistically unusual enough that they're stories of interest.
This means that living and acting in a country where your very _thoughts_ are monitored is practically an alien concept for me. How do you live and decide with a government over you that can grab control at any time they wish?
Remember that nobody was threatened or, as a result, morally offended by China until the last few years when we figured out we couldn't keep them at the bottom of the value chain forever.
How do we live in a society where we can just be aimed at a new foreign enemy and all of our free, enlightened citizens go along every time? Russia (support afghanistan), Iran (support Iraq), Iraq (support gulf emirates), Al Qaeda, Afghanistan, Iraq again, now China! It seems so normal to us, because that's all we know.
They're not perfect, we're not perfect, and both states are feeding off of national rivalry to legitimize themselves because that's what states do.
Disagree. Not only have Americans pointed out their disagreement with Chinese government for as long as I’m aware, one of our core foreign policy concepts was that doing commerce with China would push them to liberalize and adopt more Western values in their government.
As another commenter noted, what’s happened so far is that the quality of life has improved for so many Chinese that they seem willing to accept this system despite its problems. This may indicate American foreign policy was wrong-headed, but it’s still too early to tell. A middle class represents a large power base, and especially as second generation middle class Chinese come to adulthood, they may no longer see this model of government as acceptable. But: who knows? Nobody has a crystal ball.
American foreign policy was wrong-headed because it envisioned China happily assimilating into a world order which recognized US as rightful hegemon of all oceans and most land. This was more of an unspoken assumption, the spoken version had all the stuff you said.
Why would they accept that? There's a billion and a half of them and they work harder. They're going to have regional hegemony over their area as a matter of arithmetic.
It was wrong headed because it gave a lifeline to an immoral authoritarian government. Without being allowed to participate in the WTO and the west's world order CCP would have collapsed by the end of the 90s. Once a democratic rule of law government took over then they could have become just as prosperous but without the evil power structure that keeps is here to stay. It would be more like Taiwan or South Korea or Hong Kong pre-National Security Law, prosperous and free.
Their way is _working_. No, Taiwan and South Korea and Hong Kong are not proof that democratic methods work. Calling Hong Kong under Britain democratic is wildly disingenuous. Taiwan and South Korea are only _very_ recently democratic. Arguably the bulk of their ascendance occurred under authoritarian rule.
You also don't get to point only at successes. They looked at Singapore and sought to emulate that model, who are you to dictate that this is not acceptable? They looked at India and saw failure, what's your rebuttal?
Their way isnt their way through. They just regiment society and produce technology and goods designed elsewhere. Without technology transfers 'their way' would be living in poverty pretending everything was fine because their society is so terrified of criticism..
Honesltly, more developed nations paid for cheap labour in China and hoped they would adopt more libertarian views (as the technology which pulled them out of poverty was created in freer nations), instead they are amassing power and think they can suddenly supercede the current world order. They are so xenophobic that it will never happen, not until their values change and they accept foreigners like the US, at which point there is little difference anyway
> Remember that nobody was threatened or, as a result, morally offended by China until the last few years when we figured out we couldn't keep them at the bottom of the value chain forever.
I was helping companies figure out how to isolate IP from their Chinese branches 10+ years ago. This is not new, and definitely not “the last few years”.
Maybe I'm biased somewhat as Australia has a history of being threatened by an aggressor taking over the Pacific in the past, but I don't think the situation with Xi Jinping is as simple as "national rivalry" or "a new foreign enemy".
Xi is reinstating policies that have not existed in China since the days of Mao: lifelong leadership terms, extreme cults of personality, a fostered sense of nationalistic violence, the beginnings of territorial expansion and mass incarceration and repression of an entire ethnic group.
There are very real fears that he could become the next Hitler and violently subjugate the entire Asia-Pacific region to his rule.
That is not true. There have been many reports concerned with China's aggressive efforts at stealing IP for at least 10 years that I'm aware of, probably more like 20.
> There have been many reports concerned with China's aggressive efforts at stealing IP for at least 10 years that I'm aware of, probably more like 20.
Over 20 sounds about right. Definitely since Clinton was in office. The number of times that satellite designs were ripped off was memorable.
There's still various articles that haven't been lost to bitrot.
This was hilarious because Congress was asking if the US military was straight up sharing. The reported US designs ending up in Chinese hands was of notable concern to draw a few inquiries.
> Remember that nobody was threatened or, as a result, morally offended by China until the last few years when we figured out we couldn't keep them at the bottom of the value chain forever.
No. Not really. Just stating things doesn't make them true.
You should ask China's neighbors (esp. India) whether they felt threatened before.
It's not hard when if you go back more than 40 years (so parents) knew first hand living in substandard housing, in huts and muddy fields, bunking two families to a flat and one "mao coat" per person in their wardrobe. Eking out a living. When you propel a billion (now 1.4) into the middle class, they will forgive a lot.
>How do you live and decide with a government over you that can grab control at any time they wish?
You don't. That's why chinese millionaires/billionaires are parking (at least some of) their wealth outside of china so it's safe from expropriation by the chinese government. Also, this isn't limit to china. It's the default state of affairs when rule of law and property rights isn't respected (ie. most developing countries).
I know that businesses in China are tied to the CCP in inextricable ways, but this take on the story doesn't make sense to me. This article was about a private takeover of a semiconductor business, what does it have to do with free speech, surveillance, or the government taking over anything?
The fact that the court system and government is not respecting property rights. It's not a private takeover. It's theft. And the Chinese government is allowing it because it serves their purposes.
> This means that living and acting in a country where your very _thoughts_ are monitored is practically an alien concept for me. How do you live and decide with a government over you that can grab control at any time they wish?
SOOOOO NO. In this case, ARM China has one oddball dude who is playing Robinhood to the World Order Intellectual Property Policing Regime that has been absolute & tyrannical. No country in the world DARES tries to do a single thing on their own.
We're just getting wind that 10 years ago, Microsoft and IBM showed up and told New Zealand, who was dangerously considering thinking for themselves, that they had to fall in line, and sure enough, they bought the influence they needed[1].
Your wind up is 100% about fear, about a country where liberties are constrained, data monitored & controlled. And yet this story is something utterly different. This occurrence is different. It's not about your personal liberties being stepped on. This is where a person within a nation finds a way to use that nation to seize control of that arm of the business. But what's wild here to me is: that person is going to act like Robinhood. They've stolen intellectual property, freed it from the shackles & chains the rest of the world says it has on it. The rest of the world restricted the liberty of this information, the rest of the world prevented discussion of this information, the rest of the world monitored how it was used. The rest of the world backed ARM Holding LTD's exclusive right to determine the fate of the chips used almost everywhere on the planet, at all manners of scale, and no one absolutely no one had a single say about that. That's what Intellectual Property meant to the world.
This sounds like a total nutjob episode, aboslutely wacked out single-actor hijinks. But holy shit, this is about freeing something that has been locked up for a long time, and it's fucking epic.
So when is the western world going to wake up and realize that China is a cutthroat competitor that does not respect western law or traditions, cannot be trusted, and intends to dominate the world? This seems especially troubling for the tech world as IP is easily copied and the only thing that really protects it is the legal system, which China has shown over and over they don't care about.
Western businesses will never care. They don't care that the chinese destroy the planet. They don't care that the chinese manipulate the quality of the products they manufacture on their behalf. They don't care that the chinese sell counterfeits at huge markups in markets developed countries couldn't care less about.
The only thing they care about is money. They'll never stop doing business with China until it stops making them money.
You make the implicit assumption that it is possible to maintain an advantage in the market after destroying ongoing business relationships/expectations (as ARM China appears to have done). I think you may be overestimating the importance of 'apparent market power', and underestimating the value of consistency and adaptability.
Highly centralized (command & control) and mercantilist systems tend to do well in the short term, but struggle and founder in the long term. In contrast, more chaotic, free market economies tend to look messy in the short term, but achieve amazing, spontaneous order over time.
> Highly centralized (command & control) and mercantilist systems tend to do well in the short term, but struggle and founder in the long term.
That sounds like a prayer to me.
What evidence is there that China can't win? How are you certain that authoritarian regimes can't both gain and keep dominance over timescale of decades or centuries?
Consider that the dominance of democracy is a relatively short term thing on the historical timescale. For the vast majority of human history, civilizations have been ruled by authoritarian dictators. The rise of China could just be reversion to the mean.
I don't want totalitarianism to win. But if we just complacently assume that it won't, doesn't that make the worst case scenario much more likely?
> How are you certain that authoritarian regimes can't both gain and keep dominance over timescale of decades or centuries?
Authoritarianism always comes with a top-down execution structure, which optimises for cost-to-execute but not cost-to-transform.
When the need-to-transform exceeds a certain value, it would either have to re-adjust its internal structure or it will crumble (as the cost skyrockets) [1].
Interestingly, the same applies to compiler design, as well as any software systems when viewed at the right abstraction.
And from a functional programming perspective, it is also the principle that underlines the famous Alan Perlis' epigram "LISP programmers know the value of everything and the cost of nothing" (which outlines the importance of compiler optimization such as in tail-end recursion.)
[1] We're already seeing this in China's aging population crisis (thanks to the one-child policy introduced in 1980 [3]), and I doubt Xi's banning of private tuitions [2] would help (if we take his policy at face value).
[3]: fun fact - this policy had affected many people including myself in a deep personal level. By law I am not supposed to exist (I'm a Gen Z born in China illegally as a second child (after my parents bribed the hospital, and afterwards we still had to pay huge fines)).
Your point about cost-to-adjust resonated with me. What I’ve found is that designing for software successfully existing over time implies giving up control and instead going up to a meta-level, enabling sound methods of development to evolve—as opposed to defining specific processes, architecture and implementation, which in longer term leads to a situation in which whenever lead developer has not enough time (or is replaced) the software stops living. Something about infinite games in Carse’s and building worlds in Ian Cheng’s terminology.
To your footnote, I’ve read that the one-child policy in China was not strictly enforced outside of major cities, and resulted in many children born in the countryside essentially “outside of the system”, not having access to education or healthcare… I wonder how much of it is true.
> giving up control and instead going up to a meta-level, enabling sound methods of development to evolve - as opposed to defining specific processes, architecture and implementation...
Intriguing! Sounds like we'll end up with something hugely team-players-dependent. Also removing lead dev dependency is an interesting take. (I had at most worked with 2 devs in a project so this is definitely something to keep in mind when the team scales up.)
> I’ve read that the one-child policy in China was not strictly enforced outside of major cities, and resulted in many children born in the countryside essentially “outside of the system”, not having access to education or healthcare
Maybe not that many. But definitely not a phenomenon unfamiliar to the city dwellers (esp when there had been a huge rural-to-urban migration from 2005~2018)
At one point they did (unofficially, I think) relax access to education and healthcare. Ultimately every actor in the societal chains of command would try to milk out from the perpetrators as much as possible (in the form of bribes/fines), until eventually very little can be milked and then things became cheaper (or close-to-free).
We've been down this road with the Soviet Union during portions of the cold war, when folks in the West thought that high Soviet GDP catch-up growth would translate into sustained non-catch-up growth and meant non-authoritarian governments were doomed. It didn't work out that way.
Democracy isn't assured, we could easily vote it away in the West. But there is definitely a pattern whereby enormous cutting-edge economic growth seems to require relatively free societies. To make a long term bet on an authoritarian approach in a world where those societies exist, that seems like a very risky thing to do.
All those centuries of authoritarian rule also coincided with technological and economic stagnation. That might not be causal, but I think it is. The industrial revolution came after a number of liberalizing political movements in northwestern Europe.
And China has its own problems, including hugely problematic demographics and an export-fueled economy that is still highly dependent on trade with the West.
Your reasoning is based on narratives which I personally always discount.
Economists expect China to overtake the US economy in size by the 2030s. This can obviously either accelerate or decelerate and there will be hindsight reasoning in any case. Nevertheless, I don't see any of your narrative based arguments substantive.
If your system can’t win because it’s inherently better, then maybe your system shouldn’t win?
Have a little faith. Our system shouldn’t win just because we are using it. After all, our core beliefs are that it is a better system, not just through our pure force of will.
The OP is right, much of China is is still undeveloped and their policies short-sighted and naive. In fact the whole government is so sensitive to face-saving that it screams insecure teenager. Getting worried they might be winning and that we must start to take alternative measures just legitimizes their tactics.
The GDP of the Soviet Union never exceeded that of the United States at any point.
If the GDP of China exceeds the United States in the near future (which seems quite possible), how does that fact reconcile with your analysis?
I find the government of China to be morally reprehensible. However there are plenty of cases in history in the real world where that which is morally reprehensible prevails, at least in the short term.
The "short term" on a historical timescale can easily be longer than your lifetime or mine.
If China collapses in two hundred years due to it's moral failings, that will be no more comfort to us than the United States collapsing might be to the indigenous tribes that used to live in North America before Europeans arrived.
I mean, they seem to win by simply throwing bodies on the pyre, working their own citizens to suicide in order to provide cheap labor to the rest of the world until they get valuable IP and steal it.
Capitalism thrives on cheap labor and cannot stop itself from being lead like a lamb to slaughter as long as China keeps pumping out all of those man hours of labor for the taking.
There's no evidence here. We're talking about predicting the future in a system that's too complex to make predictions with any certainty.
But for those of us following the politics and economics of China closely, it's pretty clear that they're screwed.
People said Japan would dominate the world. Then the demographic shift hit them and the economy has been stagnating ever since. China's demographic shift is much bigger and faster, they're further behind (per capita), and they're way less prepared. China has the same problem of not accepting enough immigrants, and they just made it worse by cracking down on after-school tutoring.
The vast majority of history is very different from the world we live in today. People can move between countries relatively easily, and all countries compete for the top talent. A huge share of workers these days are knowledge workers. You can't generalise based on history when the fundamentals are so vastly different. China has very little to offer there, and they're increasingly becoming hostile to foreigners.
They have an enormous housing bubble. Well, if you can call it a bubble when it's propped up so it never bursts. But much of their GDP is pure waste as they're building apartments nobody lives in, and that deteriorates within years. Why? Because they can't build a trustworthy stock market where people can invest, so people invest in housing. They just demonstrated once again that you should never but money in the Chinese stock market, so the problem isn't getting better.
Chinas infrastructure is weak. Many cities are built without proper drainage. Dams are breaking. The US may have a huge infrastructure debt, but at least it was solid to begin with.
China has an insane amount of public servants per worker. The whole economy is deeply inefficient, and has only been propped up by a crazy 996 work ethic, one that Xi is now trying to crack down on.
Which illustrates the fundamental instability: they can't continue to grow through capitalism anymore. The insane income inequality is becoming a big problem, and the wealthy was accumulating too much power, threatening the power of the party. So Xi is reverting to more traditional socialist policies, to remove some of the power of wealthy individuals and satisfy the public. But that will fundamentally weaken the economy. It'll push them in the direction of economies like North Korea and Venezuela.
China is being squeeze from both ends: low value manufacturing is moving to other countries as labor costs in China increases. But China has trouble establishing high value exports and services. How many trusted brands are there from China? Quite a few sure, but not compared to its population size.
If the GDP of China exceeds that of the United States and keeps a higher level for more than a few years, what would that mean for your thesis? Are you predicting that cannot happen, and therefore your thesis is falsified if it does?
Almost every country has a dark side with slavery. Slavery however was not what made empires.
What makes empires different is that they extracted the riches from lamds abroad, thru violence (stealing) which often meant war, murder, and pillaging. Usually this was followed by slavery. Slavery itself was often transactional consequence between to original human traffiker and the idiot buyer.
The US was a global power before it went on military adventurism. It can be argued whether the US could have become a world power without slavery, but that line of question can be leveled to any other country with significant power today.
The US became a global power and incredibly rich , in spite of its government only deciding to stick its nose abroad starting around the 1960s.
The US may have done pretty dark things abroad in the last 50-60 years. But thats when it really starts. And by that time, we had already a monopoly on world power.
If anything, the US has proven that it's technique for stealing to keep its advantage has been incredibly ineffective and downright inept (cuba, vietnam, arguably Afghanistan)
This is unlike china, that steals as a matter of national policy, and its stealing its way to the top
A couple of points. Not to turn this into a discussion about advantages of one system vs another, but here is why China has a leg up:
1. What the United States has is not Capitalism - it's a badly broken Capitalism. The power of healthy oversight and regulation has been decimated by shocking amounts of money which, now, thanks to the same corrupted system, is mostly "dark". We are not exactly in an oligarchy, but we are very close.
2. You can think of China as a team. They still, as a whole, unite around their national and strategic interests, as a nation. We, on the other hand, wonder about which country owns this or that particular Congressperson, and wearing a mask as a health measure for the greater good of the country is bloody murder.
I have an honest question: why could China catch up to the western countries in many verticals and even become the dominant player, while in history the western could stay lightyears ahead of developing countries, no matter how hard the developing countries tried, with or without government interference or industrial espionage? What's changed?
We have an example most readers here are familiar with: the US ignored European (mostly British) intellectual property when they were developing and now they produce more innovation than any European country. Germany, Switzerland, and Italy also ignored patents for a while and now they are power houses when it comes to pharmaceuticals and chemicals.
> the US ignored European (mostly British) intellectual property when they were developing and now they produce more innovation than any European country.
There's this common trope, but there's two parts to IP; infringement and enforcement.
The British didn't enforce their patents. They could have, but they didn't.
The west was not light years ahead of, say, India, when it was first colonized.
In the process of colonizing it, India's industrialization was stopped.
Countries didn't somehow fall into 'developed' and 'undeveloped' buckets by divine fiat. The latter tended to be invaded by the former, with the occupiers focusing more on wealth extraction, than development.
Once that parasitic relationship has been broken, a large number of developing countries have started moving towards prosperity. Some slower than others, to be sure.
If the west wasn’t light years ahead of India, why was it so easy for the west to take control of India and rule it for hundreds of years? I am honestly interested in what you think the reason was.
Britain invaded during a period of political instability, civil war, and factionalism immediately following the collapse of the Mughal empire. It then carried out divide-and conquer tactics, fighting India peacemeal.
During colonization, GDP, productive output, life expectancy, and quality of life in India plummeted.
I'm not sure if we can attribute the gap solely to colonialism. Chinese rulers back in 1890s thought the products of industrialization were simply exotic crap. They despised STEM and didn't have a single school teaching STEM (there were a few such schools due to the Western Affairs Movement, but they were not created by the government). I don't think this level of barbarian culture was caused by colonialism.
In 1890s? In other words, soon after China lost the second Opium War. The British took Hong Kong and secured their right to poison the populace with opium. Are you sure colonialism was not at play?
You can't speculate as to China's outcome in the 21st century, based on what its rulers may have thought in the 19th century, on an alt-historical timeline that skipped the opium wars, and the century of occupation, civil war, war, and some more civil war.
I mean, you can, but your speculation is as good as anyone else's.
In the late 19th century, Russia still had serfs, and Americans practiced chattel slavery. By the mid 20th century, both of those countries built the atomic bomb. A century is a very long time to make accurate alt-historic predictions about.
You can't blame colonialism for China's pre-colonial-period problems, but you sure as hell have to give it the lion's share of credit for it's colonial problems.
Colonialism in China ended in 1945, a generation after the Qing dynasty. That time period was not a great time to live there, between the Japanese occupation, the civil war, and the country being split amongst a gaggle of warlords.
Whether or not the country would have developed without all of that is an open question. But if we were to ask whether not all those things were preventing development, the answer is 'Obviously, yes.'
they want to dominate the world? shall we compare war involvement or record of foreign influence?
this is literally a response to an American act of aggression to cut China off of access to chips. but we're the peaceful good guys?
This is what the US did in its infancy and after WWII since their country was not devastated by the war took in all the scientist they could take for their own benefits.
Naw, we shall label them as racist and xenophobic for even bringing it up, and we just can't have people labeled as racists running around spewing "facts," so out the ban hammer comes. And the world will cheer it on as they only read the headline of "Another racist banned from x" and scroll on thinking what good people they are.
They were distracted by their "clash of cultures" wars in the middle east. They failed to fully identify China as the main threat to democratic nations and allowed the transfer of capital and technology to go on unhindered. The lack of democracy and human rights wasnt a real issue to them because China wasnt considered to be a future threat. There was the naive belief that democracy would be the inevitable outcome of economic growth and a growing and more affluent middle class.
But people care primarily about their economic well being, and whatever system delivers it is what they'll be happy with. There are no huge movements calling for democratic reforms in well off non-democracies like Saudi Arabia, or the Gulf states. And even in democracies like Hungary or Poland the slow slide to a more authorotarian government hasnt got the majority of people worked up, as long as their personal circumstances arent too badly affected. Democracy is only that thing which is demanded when they want to change their circumstances for the better, otherwise its forgotten or undermined when the good times are rolling.
Will China win? No I dont think they will, they dont have the ability to change course peacefully or quickly enough under an authorotrian system. They let momentum carry them in straight lines until they crash into a wall.
Our problem is that we're stuck with a rich and technologically advanced threat that we built. Trump for all his faults did the right thing by starting the economic war with them, Obama was quite happy to let the status quo of technology, capital and job transfers continue unabated.
But we havent learnt our lesson and we risk making the same mistakes with India. The western nation are looking for another low wage, low cost manufacturing base, and they're going all out on India. But we can see the authorotarian and less democratic direction the government there is taking everyday. Yet all our major tech companies and planning to build and invest in capacity over there. Until we end up with another rich and technologically nation that isnt a friend of democracy.
Yes but what Softbank essentially bought was ARM's relationship with its captive western downstream market, at the time the Chinese downstream market was essentially 0 - $775m for that at the time probably seemed like a great deal for Softbank at the time .....
ARM did this to themselves. When you create a new entity in China, you agree that you don't control it. It is free to go off and do it's own thing. So when you create a nee entity in China, and give it a ETERNAL LICENSE to your CPU CORES you can't take that back if it "goes rogue". ARM created a monster and now they have to compete with it.
They still own 49% of it, so are still entitled to a share of the profits. And if they prevail in court (assuming that court action is initiated), they can regain control of the subsidiary as well.
Western executives are in over their heads dealing with China. I don't think they even realized who was holding their leashes until China decided to start yanking on them a bit.
Western executives only care about getting paid, they don't need to care about geopolitics because they will have already offloaded their responsibilities before it matters.
They don't care because they'll be long gone and next generations will be dealing with the problem. Same as engineers who come in at the start of a project and do a number on the architecture, get their accolades and bonus, leave to their next gig, and let the suckers deal with the BS they built.
Ray Dalio is fucked. Bridgewater has been expanding and expanding their Chinese assets. Dalio moved his Home Office to Singapore to really manage the assets from diversifying between America and China.
He is still defending his position. (He can't talk negatively about Cina anyways) 'Billionaire investor Ray Dalio said investors are misconstruing China's regulatory clampdown on tech companies as "anti-capitalist."' https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/25/ray-dalio-wrong-about-china-...
He's written (a lot) about his views on the future of the US and China here [1]. In general, he views them as the rising world power and the US being in (at least relative) decline. He seems about as well informed as anyone, apparently he's been involved there for 36 years and has personal relationships with high-level officials (I believe he even sent his kid to live and go to school there for a while). He also has a section on cultural differences - he expects them to continue to develop but doesn't expect them to become like the US.
As for how other people should invest there, I have no idea.
Ray Dalio is actually part of the minority of the Western FIRE sector that is not "fucked", precisely because Bridgewater has a strong position in China.
It implies that there is a relationship between the fed balance sheet and performance of the s&p500, suggesting that a large part of the economic growth in America since the 08 economic crisis has been because of things like quantitative easing and not actual growth.
The interest rate is officially ~zero and effectively negative due to consistent QE (over $120,000,000,000 printed and given to banks every month). The Fed is practically paying the global financial system (in USD) to keep using USD.
There will be a massive reckoning as the global economy refuses to get ripped off by the Fed's relentless money printing. Yet the Fed is extremely hesitant to taper its QE policy, because that will detonate the domestic stock market.
It is not an exaggeration to suggest we are literally in the final years/months of the neoliberal economic order.
Trick question. What we are dealing with is a redefinition of economics with a substantially reduced emphasis on "money". Minimize how much of your wealth is exposed to the financial system.
The oddity to me is that this has been going on for at least 40+ years and people still seem surprised when something like the Arm situation occurs. Great, humorous book written a long time ago on this subject is Mr.China.
Dealing with China requires multilateral agreements to make sure companies and executives don't sell-out at the expense of the democratic open societies.
I know one shouldn't attribute to malice what can be attributed to incompetence, but in this case I think malice is where it's at. Western executives are not so dumb to think China will play nice with them. I've never met anybody whose spent more than 2 hours working with the Chinese who thinks they are remotely trustworthy. Western execs whole plan has been to pump short term numbers, cash in, and get out before the CCP pulls the rug out from under them.
I met a US California man who made a lot, a lot of money selling western tech in China, and I believe he had exactly this intention, from anecdotal evidence.
from EET China, this image look interesting. It look like ARM China plan to add additional features into ARM or is it to build different chip on top of ARM?
Question about ARM China's exclusive rights for the China market:
1. I assumed ARM China can only sell their IPs to their Chinese customers. what about the add-on? the article say they going to develop its own IPs. Can they sell those outside of China?
2. Can a product made in China use ARM China's IPs then sell it outside of China?
3. How can ARM China build its own IPs if they are based on top of ARM UK's IPs?
The continual failure of American political leadership is to be asleep at the wheel while China eats our lunch. It’s been happening for 40 years and the only President with any inclination to stop it was too idiotic to succeed.
The British ARM company got sold to the Japanese Softbank investment company which then did a bad deal in China but somehow Americans think it is all about them.
This 40 year process has very little to do with Arm or Softbank. Arm and SoftBank are the end stages of the disease, the window for treatment is long passed.
Sure, there may be some larger process going on too -- but that has nothing to do with this. According to the article: SoftBank started "ARM China" as a joint venture with a Chinese consortium, and later sold more of it to them, so they now hold a controlling 51% interest in it. ARM China isn't "going rogue"; it's doing what its owners want it to do, just like a good obedient non-rogue subsidiary should. The article not mentioning this basic fact with a single word doesn't mean what's happening is weird; it means the article is bad.
ARM China isn't "going rogue"; it's doing what its owners want it to do, just like a good obedient non-rogue subsidiary should. The article not mentioning this basic fact with a single word doesn't mean what's happening is weird; it means the article is bad.
This isn't actually correct. The board voted to replace the CEO (7-1) but the CEO wouldn't give up the physical company seal (which is China represents the company), and he used that to gain control of the company.
People need to wake up to the fact that China being a potential market of >1B people is an illusion. This is particularly relevant for any tech company.
Let me spell it out: Chinese companies are extensions of the state. They are tools of Chinese foreign and trade policy. What cooperation you think US companies provide the US government, it is nothing in comparison.
The Chinese government will ensure that no Western competitor will "win" in China. Period. I understand why to a point. My main issue is with the West being completely oblivious to it.
If China wants to impose such restrictions on Western companies, they shouldn't get access to Western markets. And that's it.
Here's where I think this will first come to a head: I believe the US government will at some point soon decide that any person born in mainland China is a security risk as far as working on anything national security related. This will probably extend to key industries of national importance too (eg SpaceX).
> Here's where I think this will first come to a head: I believe the US government will at some point soon decide that any person born in mainland China is a security risk as far as working on anything national security related. This will probably extend to key industries of national importance too (eg SpaceX).
Even naturalization or birth in America can't erase ties to Chinese entities, through family links for instance. Beware of double allegiances. [0]
One of the problems is that Chinese Americans may still have family ties in China, and the CCP's United Front [1] or other orgs will use those ties to extort, blackmail, or otherwise pressure them.
It's absolutely imperative that the US Govt, and the govts of all democracies, recognize and combat this, and take active measures to protect their Chinese citizens.
One thing that needs to happen if it's not the case already, is ensuring the 5th Amendment - no self-incrimination - protects any who want to come forward about such pressure. They need to know there's a legal safe-haven for them to cooperate with the government.
Democratic governments should probably also look into providing an expedited immigration path for their Chinese citizens' relatives still in China.
Right-wingers may complain about this, but they have to understand that: 1) historically, subjects/victims of oppressive govts are more likely to be allies of US and other democracies, rather than enemies, and 2) innocent till proven guilty must apply universally.
> It's absolutely imperative that the US Govt, and the govts of all democracies, recognize and combat this, and take active measures to protect their Chinese citizens.
Agree.
> Democratic governments should probably also look into providing an expedited immigration path for their Chinese citizens' relatives still in China.
Just want to point out that, Chinese spies tried to exploit expedited immigration paths in UK intended for Hong Kongers [1]. I don’t have an easy solution.
>Just want to point out that, Chinese spies tried to exploit expedited immigration paths in UK intended for Hong Kongers [1]. I don’t have an easy solution.
Yup, though I'd rather get the innocents out first and deal with any spies later.
> It's absolutely imperative that the US Govt, and the govts of all democracies, recognize and combat this, and take active measures to protect their Chinese citizens.
Yes, but they can't protect the Chinese-mainland-living extended families of those citizens
It's impossible to make a case to right wingers because 2nd generation immigrants tend to be strictly left wing, and more progressive to boot. And imo, as a 2nd generation asian american, they tend to have a more overt racial identity and it doesn't necessarily manifest in a way that leads to a cohesive society. I knew a fair number of other asian americans who strictly saw America as a colonizing force, basically the bad guy. On one hand they're not wrong about the colonizing, but on the other hand it's not exactly a healthy mindset to have about your nation, and more to the point, it's antithetical to the entire right wing political ideology. The strict nationalism of the Chinese works in their favor imo, and the US doesn't have much of a chance in matching it.
> Right-wingers may complain about this, but they have to understand that: 1) historically, subjects/victims of oppressive govts are more likely to be allies of US and other democracies, rather than enemies, and 2) innocent till proven guilty must apply universally.
You are dreaming. In reality what will happen is that the US will realize that there is no shame in being 2nd place.
American exceptionalism is somthing created by the media, in reality phenomenons such as the shifting of the global powers have been happening since forever and are so enormous that they are like the tectonic plates. They can't be stopped or messed with.
It's not a tragedy either, Europe was #1, then it dropped 2nd place and people there aren't exactly running around like chickens with their head cut off.
It's only an issue here on HN and reddit where people love to deeply analyze scenarios that they don't have any real saying on.
The rest of people just live their lives concerned with other and more pressing matters.
Things will get really ugly once you codify special classes citizens and other US persons. It won't happen even though conservative congresspeople have been pushing for it for decades.
Are you sure about that? It's the norm in Europe. E.g. you can't work for UK security services (MI5, MI6) unless one of your parents was also British, you lived in the UK for a while and you might be required to give up dual citizenship.
> Are you sure about that? It's the norm in Europe. E.g. you can't work for UK security services (MI5, MI6) unless one of your parents was also British, you lived in the UK for a while and you might be required to give up dual citizenship.
I think it's actually similar for US security clearances, though not explicitly codified like that.
IIRC, if you're a dual citizen, you have to renounce the non-American one. Apparently it's not good enough to say "I'll renounce it if you ask," since that's conditional (on them requesting it). You have to renounce it unconditionally. I think that even applies to allied countries (e.g. no US-Canadian dual citizens).
I think the US would also reject a clearance if the applicant had relatives that were in a situation that could be used to exploit them (e.g. foreign nationals, living in a non-friendly country, etc).
Basically, the idea is that you shouldn't have any (discoverable) competing loyalties, and you shouldn't have anything in your life that makes you vulnerable to manipulation.
Disclaimer: I have no actual expertise in this area, but I did spend an afternoon browsing the government website where they described security clearance rejection appeals.
You can get approved for secret clearance if you are a citizen of a NATO ally. I guess because you can be vetted. Higher than that I think would be hard.
You are correct my brother got denied top secret clearance despite being active duty military because his wife is from a Caribbean nation. To get the right clearance is hard.
Constitutional amendment that the government can't deny citizens "privileges" and that they get equal protection under the law. There's a whole mess of court cases around that and it can get complicated. But it's going to be tough to get something like you suggest past the courts.
Those don’t meaningfully apply for security clearances where an argument can be made that it exposes someone to the possibility of blackmail, etc. (such as extended family in the mainland being held hostage, which has happened)
It will. Yet, any country has the right to discriminate in any way against someone wishing to enter the country. It's once those people are let in, and given citizenship or PR that they enjoy protections against discrimination.
This would have to be a "moving forward policy". Anyone in the US already enjoys protection against discrimination based on place of their birth or race.
In the future, it could be a condition of entry that people acknowledge they are not allowed to work in certain industries, for the government, or universities etc.
Yes, the cohort with security clearances is very white and eurocentric, which perpetuates a racial/ethnic divide between the in and outgroups for power in the US. Yes, you can't be legally discriminated against when seeking to be a wage slave, but if you want to get into the real echelons of secrecy and power, it's status quo, and without transparency.
I believe Chinese law is you can't hold dual citizenship so anyone with Chinese citizenship who becomes a naturalized US citizen loses their Chinese citizenship.
A shallow look at that may lead one to think there's no security issue. It's actually the opposite.
My sense is that this allows the Chinese government to entice former citizens with restoration of their citizenship if they come home, bringing all their skills and IP with them.
I'm not even sure this is explicit. It's simply understood that if you have knowledge in key industries the door is always open to your return to China.
Or it may be much more active and quid pro quo. Who knows?
> US government will at some point soon decide that any person born in mainland China is a security risk
Chinese people earn 15-20% of graduate STEM degrees in US, double the percentage of 10 years ago, and not counting second generation Chinese. At this rate, 'US' STEM will be Chinese dominated long before anyone wakes up to the security risk.
This Mr. Wu did something bad inside China, without any evidence that he was colluding with the national and local government of China. How is that translate to security risk at US domestic?
And all these Chinese stem students already contributed critical work to the boom of high tech industry. You are not appreciting their hard work, and link a speculation to national security risk?! How heartless one can be, not only thankless, but vile and judgemental...
I have no strong opinions on this, but for background, there are a bunch of Silicon Valley types like Eric Weinstein (Thiel Capital) who maintain that there are sinister undertones to the growing influence of Chinese immigrants in Tech and Higher Education.
Looking at what Peter thiel and Weinstein presented, my impression has been that they are seeing the threat as a general trend as an influence on the US way of society. Or to be precise, the type of society that enjoyed by the rich. The powerful in US are not as better off as their counterparts in China.
As a Chinese American myself, any derivation from Peter and Weinstein's argument as the basis for special treatment to Chinese immigrants, or default being suspicious stereotype, is plain racism (looking at how Chinese Americans are treated, racism seem not applicable to our group).
I mean, if the US wanted to "solve" the issue, it's pretty easy.
Offer anyone who graduates with a STEM degree from a reputable institution US citizenship... and require they if they renounce their Chinese citizenship (which happens automatically per Chinese law, but just to be sure).
I don't think it's going to dispel the scary monster because some people would argue that "They have roots in China", so maybe just get every Chinese out of the door?
maybe both, but i was just reading the other day about the CCP setting up offices/groups/whatever basically everywhere. even around american colleges though its more low key. many chinese (ethnically, many are not even citizens) overseas join the party because they either worry about problems with relatives in mainland china, or some think itll help their careers, or they may think itll help grease the wheels if and when they return. a lot of them just spend hours studying speeches by xi for their club, apparently.
i think whats more worrying is that ive recently become concious of what i say about china online, and i have no connection at all to china. would it be a problem for me tomorrow? probably not, but 20 years from now? maybe.
There is zero chance that the OP claim 'US government will decide that any person born in China is a security risk' will ever happen. There is an ongoing STEM arms race between US and China, with China possibly already ahead. US has its hands tied, as it can't restrict 15-20% (and growing) of its STEM workforce pipeline and risk falling further behind.
Chinese firms are not directly controlled by the state.
This 'Arm Heist' is probably not driven by state apparatus.
But, some artifacts of state power and intervention are egregious enough to make them essentially an extension of state power.
1) The 'China Venture' ownership policy, is the first foundation of this 'Arm Heist', without this Nationalist policy, it'd be a different situation.
2) China has required IP transfer for many things, this is state intervention.
3) The lack of commercial legal recourse for ARM in this case, is a 'de fact' pro-China issue. It's probably not designed to be this way, but it puts every foreign company at a major disadvantage, there may be behind the scenes shenanigangs by the state, we don't know.
4) The CCP has minders in every company to ensure CCP loyalty and compliance. They were in 85% of companies, soon 100%. Imagine having a group of guys from the CIA/NSA who you have to hire inside your company, who work directly for the President, who is unelected. This is a major tool of control few people talk about.
5) Large deals and orgs are often politicized, either by powerful politicians as individuals or state apparatus. Nobody knows who owns Huawei, other then there seems to be a strategic state component.
6) The state can make powerful reforms that fundamentally reshape the industry at their leisure - they pulled Didi and And listings at the last minute and disallowed them from raising money outside China which really brought their valuation down. Not only is the government flexing it's power, but it's doing it in a sketchy, hypernationalist way. Forcing Chinese companies to remain all Chinese to raise Chinese cash etc. To me - this is the 'last straw' and it's a raising of a form of wall of capital that's frankly probably going to hurt China more than anything. Alibaba is tanking [1]
7) CCP ultimately access to any and all the data from Ant, Didi, TikTok that it needs to enforce total 360 absolutism and thought control policies.
Jack Ma style Entrepreneurs probably don't care that much about the Chinese state, but the mechanisms in place by the CCP ensure that ultimately, they are tools to it.
If a Western company can sell something in China that can't be stolen, well, they can try while it lasts. But joint ventures etc. will probably fail.
The notion of doing an IP deal with China is absurd at face value.
'Brand' is probably the best thing to have, like Pizza Hut because it's ownership of 'hearts and minds' - that said, any company that does do this is going to have to 'toe the line'.
As we've seen LeBron James become a vocal SJW in his own country, but line up like a perfect stooge anti-SJW for the CCP for Chinese related issues, actively calling on people to not call out China etc. - this does have relevance as well.
In the end, the problem is that nobody seems to be able to have enough power or intelligence to do anything about any of it. Only the US alone has enough power but even then it's fragmented. Germany depends on exports to China and their voice is the influencer in EU. Moreover, even if they were at the same table, I'm not sure if they would have a solution.
Probably what is needed is a 'China Alliance' which is to say US, EU, UK, Canada, Aussie, Japan, Korea, India etc. form some kind of common agreement with respect to dealing with China and then try to work on big issues without China trying to fragment the group. Trans Pacific Partnership was sort of that, but Trump's personal business instincts, which make sense on some level, were completely wrong on that one.
The point is that it's true when you point the finger to US companies. US companies are extensions of the US elites (while the state is just a tool). Actually US elites have way more power over foreign companies than Chinese elites do.
I really don't think it's gonna make any real difference if we are facing (strong state + weaker corporations) or (strong corporations + weaker state).
> US companies are extensions of the US elites (while the state is just a tool)
Incorrect. In the US, the state, the courts, corporations, elites, and everyone else all have competing and overlapping interests, and out of that democracy comes the sausage.
In China, the system is specifically rigged so that the state always trumps everyone else, when it decides it needs to.
The US is waking up from a post-cold war reality. In the 1980s a consensus formed that.
1. US military and economic power meant that countries could be relied on to follow US influenced IP laws or be excluded from the global market.
2. US military and economic power was large enough and benign enough that no major trading partner would pose an existential military or political threat - validated by the economic rise of Germany and Japan.
These two ideas powered US and to a lesser extent European outsourcing for the next 40 years. Very few executives believed that there was a serious risk of their outsourced manufacturing or outsourced engineering firm becoming independent - and they certainly didn't think through the reality that in such an event the holding firm would not have the capital or knowledge to compete against the newly formed firm.
The reality is that the US and Chinese economic spheres are likely to fracture in whole or in part. China owns the factories and the IP, the Chinese military is increasingly capable of achieving any military goal they are likely to have against the US military using indigenous military hardware.
There is no reason the Chinese authorities would not support subsidiaries and joint ventures becoming independent by eliminating legally ambiguous joint ventures and Variable Interest Entities, forcing sales of Chinese assets to Chinese investors, or simply creating new legislation to free such entities from foreign corporations.
I fear that the US has been so focused on outsourcing for the last 40 years that it's forgotten how unusual of a relationship outsourcing was in the first place, and why it wasn't done for most of the industrial era.
Naive question here: why China is able to close its market to foreign companies? Same thing for trade sanctions on Iran which impacted European companies but not China (if I'm not wrong). Seems they don't play by the same rules as anybody else.
China can control its market without serious reprisal because there aren't any serious reprisals available that are palettable.
As an individual country, blocking or tarrifing imports from China isn't very effective because it hurts consumers and industry that rely on importing products and raw materials/commodities/industrial inputs from China more than it hurts China who can often export to other countries instead.
Blocking exports to China is tricky because one the one hand, China doesn't import too many things, but on the other hand, for those things they do import, they're a large portion of the global market, so a country that cuts off those exports will leave their exporters will a large surplus, often of perishable goods, that will be difficult to deal with.
So, trade controls are tricky. Most western countries don't have much in the way of laws that could restrict foreign ownership of land or businesses except in exceptional cases. And military intervention would be wholy inappropriate and probably disasterous. Really just not a lot of options.
> As an individual country, blocking or tarrifing imports from China isn't very effective because it hurts consumers and industry that rely on importing products and raw materials/commodities/industrial inputs from China more than it hurts China who can often export to other countries instead.
This isn't really true. If there is a tariff on importing iPhones from China, in the short term iPhones become more expensive by the amount of the tariff, but also the US taxpayer pays lower taxes for the same level of government services because the tariff money is going to the US government. So to US citizens in the short term it's net-zero.
In the longer term, Apple builds an iPhone factory in India or Mexico. The US iPhone customer doesn't even really notice the difference from this, but China obviously does.
> Blocking exports to China is tricky because one the one hand, China doesn't import too many things, but on the other hand, for those things they do import, they're a large portion of the global market, so a country that cuts off those exports will leave their exporters will a large surplus, often of perishable goods, that will be difficult to deal with.
Nobody really even wants to block exports to China. Gaining fair access to the Chinese market is kind of the point, and for things like soybeans or something like that, "fair access" mostly just means they're buying your products.
It's more complicated when you start talking about tech companies and censorship, because then it's about more than just "they're buying it from you."
Moreover, where export restrictions hurt isn't necessarily for things where they're paying a lot of money. It's for things they can't get elsewhere.
> Most western countries don't have much in the way of laws that could restrict foreign ownership of land or businesses except in exceptional cases.
That wouldn't be that hard to change. Especially for ownership of land, the change would be locally popular because it would make housing more affordable, and the foreign interests who would have to sell their holdings don't get a vote in US elections.
Because china, unlike most of the other countries in the world, has a massive population and resources to get atleast partially self sustaining.
Also, the fact that exporting manufacturing to the east let to a lot of short-term profits for western companies.
The question is at what costs, looking at climate change, the current shortage of nearly anything manufactured right now and the destablisation of society thanks to the dropping of quality of life of many people in the west.
> Because we assumed that prosperity would lead to liberal democracy. That underwrote complacency while profit motivations took root.
this might be a formal narrative, but the simple truth is that we did it because it made powerful people rich and entrenched specific factions in both parties
> this might be a formal narrative, but the simple truth is that we did it because it made powerful people rich and entrenched specific factions in both parties
I don't think this is true. When these policies were first enacted upon, the revolution had just ended in China and Mao had just taken over. The population of China was large, but nothing like today, and cheap labor was plentiful all around the world. In short, there was nothing in particular that made doing business in China more lucrative than any other developing nation at the time.
The belief was that doing trade and business with the new Chinese government would encourage the developing nation to embrace western ideals... which it clearly did not.
Today, doing business in China is lucrative only because they have well over a billion people to buy products and use services... it's clearly short-term profit-driven thinking that has the likes of Apple bending over backwards to stay in the CCP's good graces, all the while the CCP steals Apple's IP, forces Apple to bend their morality, aid in censorship, unwittingly employ slave camps and more.
Or that capitalism was an inextricable part of democracy, and bringing the former would inevitably lead to the latter.
A quite foolish assumption given the 20th century counterexamples of capitalism + authoritarianism - Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Imperial Japan.
In the 90s, Wall St. and corporate America bankrolled the largest ever lobbying campaign to open US markets and the WTO to China, and got it by 2000.
Just two decades later and the result is massive inequality, a decimated middle class, vulnerable supply supply chains, and rising authoritarianism again.
The US has stupidly snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in the Cold War.
> that capitalism was an inextricable part of democracy, and bringing the former would inevitably lead to the latter
This was never argued by anyone of prominence in the debates on China's WTO accession. Raising living standards through trade was the pitch. The faulty assumption was wealthier Chinese would demand more freedom. That didn't happen.
The implication at the time - the "End of History" era - was that free trade capitalism had prevailed and was the way to raise living standards, and that political liberalization would follow. However you slice it, it was a poor assumption.
Regarding Nazi Germany, let's say, it's complicated. While it's true that Hitler apparently envisioned a corporate society in "Mein Kampf", in actuality, the industry was much more structured capitalist than anything else, even in WWII. Thus, corporatist tendencies merely controlled the labor force and bound the intellectual class and educational system to the state, rather than actually defining the economic system. (This is also true for Austria, which was an explicitly corporate state in the 1930s before the Anschluss.)
Edit: As far as economic theories of the "Third Reich" are concerned, there was (quite naturally) a fascination with Fordism.
Fascism is not a capitalist economic model. It is a "third way" socioeconomic system that proposes an alternative to both capitalism and socialism where both capital and labor are regulated by an all-powerful stern father figure Leader, who mediates and subordinates their petty squabbling to nationalistic interests.
Pre-CCP history — the two Opium Wars demonstrated to the Chinese about staying in control of domestic markets ahead of foreign merchants, otherwise, they lose some of their sovereign power: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars
To be fair, Imperial China has a history of developing vassal states in its sphere of influence, so what goes around, comes around.
Main thing is that China used to have greater influence and I think the current generation of Chinese citizens see no reason why China shouldn’t be a superpower, even if they have to share it with the US.
What's different in China's case compared to other protectionist countries is they can get away with being protectionist.
How can they get away with it? They have powerful people lobbying with foreign governments on China's behalf. Take Apple for example: they contract out iPhone manufacturing to Foxconn in China. Due to the low cost of manufacturing they are able to generate astronomical profits.
Every measure against China will directly or indirectly impact some US multinational corporation and it's natural for the corporation to lobby Western governments to put the brakes on such measures.
On the contrary, if you look at Iran or Russia, multinational corporations don't have a similar deep-seated interest or supply chain infrastructure as they do in China. How did this come to be? A lot of it can be attributed to Deng Xiaoping's setting the tone for China's relationship with the West: “stabilize the position, observe calmly, take all in stride, never take the lead,
and hide our capacity to bide our time.”
>why China is able to close its market to foreign companies?
Why shouldn't they? It's their market. Do you propose we do like the British, which bomb them and opened it by force to have them buy opium?
For perspecive, and to answer the "seems they don't play by the same rules as anybody else", part, the US has historically had tons of tarrifs on its own, it's how it got big - they only switched to "free trade" when Europe was devastated from WW II, and the US was already top dog dictating this "free" trade terms:
"The United States pursued a protectionist policy from the beginning of the 19th century until the middle of the 20th century. Between 1861 and 1933, they had one of the highest average tariff rates on manufactured imports in the world." [1].
Even so, US still has tarrifs and protectionist policies in many areas, not to mention the whole "yield the power of our military and diplomatic power to enforce favorable deals making a mockery of the free market we pay lip service to" thing.
Not to mention selectively targeting countries they don't like to close their markets via embargos, and using their force to force adherence to those embargoes to other countries around the world, something which no country dares do back (and can't anyway). Talk about "not playing by the same rules as anybody else".
Yes, because China is not in the development stage the US is now, but where it was decades ago and with huge setbacks from the 19th century and Mao era.
The finger pointing to that is a "I kicked the ladder after I've climbed" thing (or "do as I do now that I'm on top, don't do what I did to get on top, I don't want competition up here" kind of advice).
> why China is able to close its market to foreign companies?
It is not though, many foreign companies do business in China. Even Facebook and Google retain part of their Ad business.
> Same thing for trade sanctions on Iran which impacted European companies but not China (if I'm not wrong). Seems they don't play by the same rules as anybody else.
First, EU doesn't like the idea that US sanctioned their companies because of Iran oil, that's why they rolled out some law that protect against it recently. Second, it's just US (and part of other western countries' as they have to eat it) rule, regarding the Iran oil example. China is not playing by that rule simply because so far there is not enough push from US.
A point on addressing China as market: for a non US company, I think there just isn’t any market that will be much easier to compete in either way.
If we imagine a Swedish chip maker that wants to become a global powerhouse, the US will dip a finger or two in it to make sure it mostly goes along their interests, otherwise the maker will just get banned from US use (Huawey…). China will do the same if the chips ever touch the chinese soil. Japan will tax it through the roof anyway. India is another kind of wild ride.
We’re left with the Russia, middle east, and Africa. Basically any company with big ambitions will need to choose to open up to China or US control up to a point, and understand that if they really become critical any legal ground they stand on can be swooped away with a sleight of hand.
The US is not going to interfere in 'Swede Corp' unless it's a serious issue of state security. Spottily could be worth $500B and they would not care. Recently Erickson took the spotlight as one of the few alternatives to 5G Huawei there was talk of US sate intervention but that might have been a good thing for them, otherwise, if they came to totally dominate 5G gear sales, again, the US wouldn't really have cared.
Nokia used to completely own mobile, Apple and Google game to dominate that but not out of a national strategy of some kind, although there are systematic artifacts of it behind the scenes.
Spotify has barely any material relationship with the US Gov. and that they are closer to Apple and Google is normal.
Nokia might have some relationship with US gov. but that's also normal.
US Gov. will not interfere in most cases with things.
With energy security i.e. Petrodollar, yes, but usually it requires a 'problem' to surface i.e. chip shortage for them to take action.
The US benefits from 'open trade' - being the biggest economy i the world and fairly open, it usually means 'they win' so they're fine with it, they don't have to be protectionist or nationalist. 'Open' is a winning strategy for them in a way that it's not for say, Sweden or Columbia, which may have to have more selective national strategies.
> The Chinese government will ensure that no Western competitor will "win" in China. Period. I understand why to a point. My main issue is with the West being completely oblivious to it.
> If China wants to impose such restrictions on Western companies, they shouldn't get access to Western markets. And that's it.
And there are people around who give this a pass. And usually the defense is "China is just following Chinese law".
It's fine if China and Chinese want it this way. It just means that our posture with them should be adjusted, i.e. extracting a price for IP theft etc.
And if China is in China, they can follow Chinese law. Once they come out of China, to do business with the West, then that excuse doesn't cut it. (Just like the way that Western companies have to follow Chinese law to do business in China.)
There is reason I'm willing to be slapped by you.
May be is your daughter or w
Just like some company do tech transfer in exchange for access to the market.
You are welcome to take advantage of my hospitality and tea. But do you know what is in the tea?
You might get addicted to the tea that you willing to obey me.
Just like sanction ( weaponizing dollar )
So you concede that China imposes unfair and unilateral constraints on foreign businesses, and you are asserting that it's alright because foreign businesses _still_ have something to gain.
But you don't mention what that something is. Stockholm syndrome? Or a propaganda bot user?
The question stands: Why should anyone put up with a one-sided, unfair trade regime.
I suspect China doesn't really need western markets in the long term so denying access isn't all that powerful. Their population is the same as the entire OECD combined. They could become an entire "western developed economy" isolated within themselves plus a bunch of 3rd world allies.
I suspect China doesn't really need western markets in the long term
Being from the West, we see things with West-Centric eyes. When, if we look more closely, we see that China alone has more customers than the whole of the West (Five-Eyes, Europe, Japan) combined.
The West is pretty much unimportant, relatively speaking, in the over-all scheme of things. A mere 20% of the world's customers.
As a whole, the world is reverting to the status-quo that existed prior to the 1400s: The world's big economies being in India and China, with Europe/Europeans being a quiet backwater.
Yeahh except for the fact historically the west have been developing technologies and social ideologies which are ultimately adopted by other 'civilizations' for millenia. For what counts, they have always been on top, and will be for the forseeable future. other civilizations are still playing catch-up and have social structures which inhibit development, as for china, its delusion of being the centre of the world is what is making them set such arrogant, unreasonable trade terms.
The West + Japan + S. Korea, is where almost all the money, power and GDP is. China has roughly the same as the US, but with many more people. The 'Rest of Asia Minus Japan+Korea' is big, but still poor.
Sorry to say, but this is typical Western 'markets above all' blinders. Very true, long term China doesn't need Western markets. But China needs World's resources, and Western markets will crash when starved for resources. The future is one Eastern developed economy, and various backwater client states in constant state of quarrel with each other while being striped bare for resources. There is a lot of corn grown in Iowa, I hear there is a big market for it overseas.
>Let me spell it out: Chinese companies are extensions of the state. They are tools of Chinese foreign and trade policy. What cooperation you think US companies provide the US government, it is nothing in comparison.
I'm not so sure. It just goes through a few more mediators and more roundabout ways.
In the end, the fruit companies that turned Latin American countries into banana repubics, for one example, had big support from the state and vice versa. Ditto for oil, telecommunications, social, and so on.
> The Chinese government will ensure that no Western competitor will "win" in China. Period.
Isn’t it the MO of any country that wants to go ahead ?
Wasn’t born during the period, but I know of the US’ Japanese bashing in the 80s and pulling all the levers to stop foreign companies from getting dominant in the car market. As far as I know Toyota & co had to bring manufacturing to the US to get a foothold, and I get the feeling China has just made that a policy from the start instead of going throught all the cycle.
There are better words for a conflict that's not currently active warfare. The US and China can disagree and take action that isn't mutually beneficial without it being a war. How we talk about things reflects how we think about them and limits the solutions we consider.
None of which changes the fact that there is a war. Not only are the two nations still involved on opposite sides of the Korean War, which has never concluded, but China routinely scrambled fighters and bombers to harass U.S. ships in international waters.
There is no economic tie between US/Soviet and nothing happens. 40 years of trade with China had propelled China to the number 2 economy in the world while sacked American manufacturing some projected China will surpass US in the near future. middle class American suffered and they voted Trump. is gig economy all that's left for middle class? while rich get even more rich from US/China trade.
>Here's where I think this will first come to a head: I believe the US government will at some point soon decide that any person born in mainland China is a security risk as far as working on anything national security related.
I was at Google during the Project Dragonfly revelations. My name is on this petition [0]. Internally, I expressed discomfort at cooperation with a state that (among other things) sets up covert Communist Party cells at American universities and requires Party members to write reports on other Chinese students' political speech and activities. After sharing this concern, a fellow Googler reached out and told me earnestly, "don't worry, none of us writing those reports took it seriously."
I worked at Google years ago when in response to what most believe was a Chinese state-sanctioned hack, Google decided to pull out of China. Many believed (myself included) that this pull out was largely driven by Sergey Brin. This all happened in the 1-2 years before I joined but I like many greatly respected that stance.
It was sad to see (from the outside this time) this principle get thrown aside with Dragonfly. What's worse is that Google will never be allowed to succeed in China so there was literally no point.
SoftBank sold ARM to Nvidia. And I thought Nvidia is Taiwanese since the parent comment mentioned China but maybe I was wrong. It seems like Nvidia is American. Why he mentioned China?
> As part of the emphasis on the Chinese market, SoftBank succumbed to pressure and formed a joint venture. In the new joint venture, Arm Holdings, the SoftBank subsidiary sold a 51% stake of the company to a consortium of Chinese investors for paltry $775M.
Taiwan is indeed the Republic of China, but generally when people refer to “China” without qualification they are referring to the People’s Republic of China.
Not sure how did you get the idea that the market was not there.
Arm China had stellar financial results. Arm holding, with 49% share of the company, has significant upside to gain from the market.
And this fiasco is partly a misconduct of Mr. Wu, showing no signs of being directed by Chinese investors.
And partly because of Trump's tech ban, which obviously affect arm China's prospect.
And then this statement:
> I believe the US government will at some point soon decide that any person born in mainland China is a security risk as far as working on anything national security related.
Even if Mr. Wu was directed by CCP, how can you extend that to all of Chinese immigrants? There are plenty of Chinese Americans who had misconduct inside China, and flee the country back to US to escape Chinese law (numerous corrupted officials of course are such examples) recently https://m.sohu.com/a/412302008_220095/?pvid=000115_3w_a are these people US spys to sabotage Chinese economy then? How ridiculous was that logic.
"Arm China had stellar financial results. Arm holding, with 49% share of the company, has significant upside to gain from the market."
This is because clients and accounts that previously belonged to Arm had to be handed over to Arm China if Arm wanted to continue doing any business with Chinese firms, regardless of whether they'd actually courted their business.
This is like picking your left pocket and arguing that you stand to gain because I'm putting some of the money back into your right pocket. I'm still robbing you, even if I'm giving you some of your own money back.
I'm talking about US 20 years from now. Those in corporate America who think they are 'winning' today by selling out Western knowhow to China and failing to cultivate an indigenous STEM workforce are in for a big surprise when the high value add industries fade away into China, just like basic industry did. They may still run the local subsidiary of Huawei under Chinese upper management pushing overpriced Chinese surveillances to the US market, but the profits will belong to the victors and head straight to China.
one of the best arguments against anarcho-capitalism is that without a goverment, there would be no market to speak of.
why exchange in trade if no one can guarantee it will be beneficial for you? Why would the other party trade instead of just stealing your stuff?
You could ofcourse defend against by carrying a bigger stick then the next guy or cooperating with others.
Which starts to look an awful lot like the organised structure of a state..
> one of the best arguments against anarcho-capitalism is that without a goverment, there would be no market to speak of.
> why exchange in trade if no one can guarantee it will be beneficial for you? Why would the other party trade instead of just stealing your stuff? You could ofcourse defend against by carrying a bigger stick then the next guy or cooperating with others.
> Which starts to look an awful lot like the organised structure of a state..
Anarcho-capitalism is like one of those high atomic number elements with a half-life of microsecond. The society it describes is so unbelievably unstable, due to its own internal contradictions, that it practically cannot exist. A stable version of it is a literal fantasy.
Yeah, same thing with communism and the assumption everyone will work for the best interest of the state. It just takes one bad actor and the corruption cascades and ruins the system. At least capitalism uses human greed as a motivator. I do think humans can be selfless, if they are mindful and educated, unfortunately with current poverty levels and disinformation, people arent smart enough to realise whats good for you is good for me
> Let me spell it out: Chinese companies are extensions of the state.
Where this comes to a head, and where western capitalistic governments seem ill equipped to handle it sufficiently, is in how China itself can and does act like one giant super conglomerate company and uses that to bully smaller companies because they are bigger than anything around. Western governments are loathe to intervene in business dealing when they don't have to, because their systems are based on a fairly hands off approach with the free market. The one place they sometimes do step in is when there's a monopoly or some other anti-competitive practice. The problem here is that the anti-competitive practice is being enabled by a foreign state that's working under the illusion of separate corporate entities.
What's a country like the US or UK to do? Tell it's local companies that want to and are totally willing to shift IP to China to access the market "No, sorry, you aren't allowed to, even though you own that information and it's not a state secret"? That may be what's needed, but it's a large difference in thought in how they've treated their markets to this point.
>What's a country like the US or UK to do? Tell it's local companies that want to and are totally willing to shift IP to China to access the market "No, sorry, you aren't allowed to, even though you own that information and it's not a state secret"?
Yes, that is literally what the US has always done. The government can ban you from exporting anything it wants, which explicitly includes tech transfer.
China isn't just taking tech IP. They're taking everything. They localized and took a bunch of train IP from German company they partnered with in the past. They've been doing it for decades.
You can say we do that all the time, but have we really been prohibiting experienc and technology for diesel engines?
Like you say, maybe we should, but it will be an interesting argument to have with companies that really want access to the market, and view this specific aspect of the contract as none of the governments business.
Stuff like train IP is actually included in tech, same as rockets would be. My understanding is this is a legal definition of technology which can include basically anything (especially anything you might ever patent or have patented).
I also didn't mean to imply that the US has done a lot of this. I don't think they have in the free trade era. I just meant to point out that it has always been done for some stuff (one of the most controversial and what introduced me to this many years ago was the crypto export ban). The last few years have already seen an explicit expansion of much more general purpose tech being restricted, with China being a known bad actor for forced tech transfer, so it doesn't seem like a stretch that we'll see more of it.
> one of the most controversial and what introduced me to this many years ago was the crypto export ban
Yeah, I'm well aware of that ban, which is what I was alluding to originally with the "even though it's not state secrets". Crypto isn't really a state secret, but it's classified as munitions, which is equally as weird and convoluted, and probably only really accepted because they were able to make a case about it being a national defense issue.
Controlling what companies can and can't do with their own property gets weird fast. So maybe some laws go in place to prevent China from cooercing IP from companies that want to work in their market. What if China just wants to outright pay for the technology and buy the IP? Is that okay? What if that purchase price is based on some other stipulation that they don't follow through on? The whole problem here is that some Chinese companies are willing to just say "screw it, your laws don't apply here and our prior agreements don't matter, and my government will back me up" and there's not a lot of recourse at a company level to stop that. The only way to actually stop any abuse is to disallow all business with China unless they adhere to the rules, but that's a hard sell when it looks like it's a nationwide ban because of a few bad companies, which is definitely how China would spin it and how it would be disseminated through specific media campaigns.
And actually banning business with China would be so disruptive and so unpopular for some companies (and companies that would be willing to push against that legislation) that it really would be extremely disruptive internally, and be presented as an issue of over regulation and big government intervention and racist and everything we've already seen before, just turned up to 11. And honestly, China might see that as a win no matter what happens, because it either exposes the dysfunction in our economic model or it moves it closer to their economic model, which would be a vindication of their path.
Some are, some aren't. The current China "antitrust" flap is over ones that got really big without being extensions of the state, such as Tencent and Ant Financial. The classic big ones, such as Baowu (steel), Cosco (shipping), and China Railway Group (obvious), are directly state-owned. There are also large companies owned by provinces, regions, and cities. Most small and medium sized companies, though, are not state-owned. State ownership of almost everything was tried during the Mao era, and it didn't work.
The CCP insists on being the only major center of power in China. They're willing to tolerate capitalism until it generates companies big enough to push back. Those get taken over or converted to state ownership.
At a minimum, the CCP has full visibility into every company operating in China. They require taxes to be filed via government-provided software, and this software was found to contain backdoors.
It gets even more insidious when every company above a certain size (10? 15?) is required to hire a Party Officer for oversight.
>any person born in mainland China is a security risk
We've staffed our campuses and laboratories with these people because there's nothing university administrators like more than cheap labour. The Chinese Communist Party has agents inside western countries who can get to these people, to say nothing of what they can do to these people's families back in mainland China.
University administrators? More like any medium to large employer these days.
The carrot on the stick is gone for a lot of westerners and so they would rather bring in modern slaves from China, India, and Iran and blame the whole thing on "lazy" youth and "worker shortages". Gee, I wonder what the cause of that shortage is. Could it be because workers are miserable and have no foreseeable future? Nah, must be because the government is giving them a few thousand bucks.
Who's the main currency manipulator? The US, and its many, many trillions of dollars in debt which other countries are forced to purchase in order to participate in the global market. As long as the dollar remains the world reserve currency, i.e. as long as the US monetary hegemony lasts, the US will remain the leading currency manipulator. They've shamefully printed about 10 trillion dollars the past couple of years.
PRC has made irredentist claims to parts of Tajikistan (Pamir), India (Ladakh), Vietnam (Paracels) and of course Taiwan. They invaded Vietnam in 1979 when the latter overthrew the genocidal Khmer Rouge in Cambodia (PRC supported KR) and have provided support to both the Burmese and North Korean dictatorships. Granted, they haven't done nearly as much meddling as the United States, but they nonetheless demonstrate a willingness to turn a blind eye to the worst sorts of atrocities when it suits them, and a generally expansionist ethos.
I've heard a couple stories in SV of a certain chinese network hardware maker hiring phd researchers away from places like Cisco. Then finding ways to coerce or blackmail (threatening to ruin them) them into coughing up secrets from their previous employer.
"If China wants to impose such restrictions on Western companies, they shouldn't get access to Western markets. And that's it."
Why? Why should we prohibit US citizens from purchasing things they want from wherever/whoever they want? Why would we do that to ourselves (I'm a US citizen), and to each other?
The same reason we don't let people do business with North Korea or purchase stolen goods. The same reason we shouldn't let people buy conflict diamonds or clothes made with slave labor.
It will come to a head with WWIII, millions dying from nuclear or biological warfare (which by the way Wuhan was the Hiroshima of biological warfare [whether it was intentional or not]). Or if we are lucky, they will just give in rather than face the next bioweapon.
A greedy CEO's American way of screwing his own partners, when painted with the China markers, suddenly becomes an insightful report that supports the so-called predatory behaviors orchestrated by CCP.
With a single word, China, self-interest is no longer a universal guiding principle. It was replaced by a CCP reality distortion field that the loyalty to the party becomes an instinct, the original sin of any Chinese. Once Chinese always CCP loyalist!
Having a license for the architecture isn't worth much if you aren't playing by the rules anyway. The IP and expertise for the best implementations? That's useful.
Is this a true story? If so, this is an extraordinary indictment of the Chinese court system and a real wake up call for Silicon Valley.
Thus far I've been of the opinion that people exaggerate the danger that Chinese IP theft poses ... but this is just ridiculous. Has any major newspaper covered this? It seems like it should make headlines ... ARM IP is a strategic asset!
The subtext here being that China won’t circumvent the “long” legal process to remove Mr. Wu? I wish the author had provided any information regarding how the Chinese government had responded to the situation. Surely they understand that China as a whole is a loser and not a gainer in this situation.
This might be bad news for ARM shareholders, but it's good news for the rest of the world.
When a market leader like ARM is forced to compete against last year's products sold at rock bottom prices (as Arm China will presumably do), it spurs serious amounts of innovation.
The visual cliche of the "evil Chinese man in front of a red background with five yellow stars" has come as far as that of the "hacker guy wearing a hoodie in a dark room with obfuscated JavaScript floating in the frame."
The "red background with five yellow stars" is the chinese flag. It's a common graphic pattern when you want to convey the idea of a person of geopolitical interest. Like putting Biden in front of the American flag o Macron in fron of the french one. Isn't specific to china nor represent any anti-china meaning.
Let this be a cautionary tale for anyone wanting to set up shop in China, go in with your eyes wide open. As far as I know only Tesla has been able to retain 100% ownership while operating in China.
Any CEO that invest or transfers IP into China at this point after countless examples of them stealing IP and businesses needs to be held civilly or criminally liable.
Any CEO who sells 51% of anything to anyone, anywhere and still expects to be able to control what he's just sold may perhaps not be criminally liable, but certainly insane.
not only does "arm china" license "arm limited" technology and develop its own technology, but "arm china" also employs many people on behalf of "arm limited" for global (not "arm china") r&d
Why is the article blaming SoftBank? They bought Arm fair and square. They can do with their acquisitions as they please. Arm is a profit seeking company like every other profit seeking company. They sold themselves to make their founders rich. They are not some beacon of Western liberty that people like to make it out to be.
Look at everything China have done over the last 10 years. And we in the west have done nothing. One has to wonder if there is anything the CCP even could do to be taken seriously as a threat. I had hoped that with Trump out and Brexit at least quite we might see some action. I was wrong.
The PRC isn’t fucking around. They’re playing for the whole show and the West is bringing a significantly weaker game than it did against a significantly dumber geopolitical adversary last time.
Being England or whatever isn’t the end of the world, there is life after global hegemony, but e.g. the USA should be realistic about the fact that e.g. shit like a legislature whose job is to get nothing done isn’t how you win in full-contact sports.
For all its innumerable faults, flaws, and outright human rights violations: the West of the latter 20th century seemed like a plausible v0.0.1 of some future, hypothetical, benevolent society. Sucked ass if you were a minority but there was movement on that, real wages seemed to be trending ok, technological innovation was on point. It looked to be going somewhere.
I’m not sure when it all went sideways, but the PRC is looking more than happy to design the future, and it seems unclear at best if that would be a net win in the “get to Star Trek as fast as possible” game.
The West and Americans (in my experience) take for granted that civil rights, free speech, democracy, and other values automatically create better outcomes than authoritarianism. This is how it was taught to me, and it seems baked into the culture.
Unfortunately, the reality is that while (in my opinion) liberal values create better outcomes, it takes care and concerted effort to get the benefits. A democracy isn't automatically better than an authoritarian regime; that assumes that the democracy is effective and that the authoritarians are not.
The CCP is clearly effective. They are able to nail jello to the wall and have it stick. The US Congress is clearly not effective. Chinese people got to go to movie theaters and eat at restaurants and dance at raves for most of 2020 and 2021; I, as an American, could not. The CCP delivered for their people in a way that the US did not.
The United States is not particularly effective at national security (2021-01-06), foreign engagements (Afghanistan and Iraq, last 20 years), or social mobility (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socioeconomic_mobility_in_the_...). The media ecosystem is a mess (due to purposeful de-regulation), voting rates are abysmal, education is poor by rich world standards. Democracy doesn't work well when the populace is not sufficiently educated, accurately informed, and empowered by a political system (see the Senate's strong R electoral advantage). We keep choosing leadership who lose at the polls because we haven't invested in modernizing our democracy.
The US and other Western states need to step up and put in the work to prove that their values can deliver for their people better than the authoritarians can.
In 2-5 years, US/Japan/UK can/will block every single silicon build with "ARM China" IP for < 28nm, similar to how it block Huawei last year. Just look at Huawei's current, next couple years revenues, you can predict what will happen to "ARM China".
"ARM China" without any IP license / Interop tests for USB4, PCIe gen4,5,6, LPDDR5,6 etc, will be completely useless in 3 years.
CCP is following the path of North Korean/Iran/Mao.....
China also has some unique ineffective areas. One example I ran into a little while ago was that China has essentially a review board that approves video games to be distributed to the Chinese market. A particular political backdoor to expedite the approval process was exposed, which quickly lead to an extreme backup of the approval queue as the party clamped down on that backdoor and made the entire video game industry wait several months to a year for them to get their ducks back in a row.
Additionally, if you want to publish in China, it is advisable (although I don't think strictly required... yet...) that you provide some way to block any messages in your game that the party disapproves of. For some sorts of games, this is basically untenable.
Essentially, China is effective where its policy of iron-handed top-down dictatorship is effective. It is less effective at bottom-up development, except insofar as that bottom-up development is done with the express intent of being a tool of the iron hand (but the iron hand's whims can change, so that presents a moving target).
I suspect what we'll see over the next hundred-or-so years is that the iron-handed approach is effective while it has intelligent leadership (and though I disagree with China's politics, I'll concede they're making strong strategic decisions). Inevitably, though, every empire has stupid emperors and we'll probably see China stumble when its turn comes.
Some of what you mention is indeed true, but some of it is selective. The US is truly a union, and one that is increasingly heterogenous.
The US higher education system is the best in the world, which is why you will see wealthy Chinese send their kids to the US (or Oxbridge). The high school system is very mixed, as half the union runs around trying to convince the world that math is racist (no joke).
I’ve lived in China. You’re not likely to see the next SpaceX emerge from there for all the reasons you mention. It’s an economy that is tuned to replicating/copying. But this is so culturally enshrined now that I cannot fathom the emergence of the Sino version of the American Dream.
This comment should be the parent of mine. You’ve laid out a far more detailed and compelling case for what I called a “queasy feeling” about how the West lost its stride.
I agree with your first two paragraphs but I don't necessarily agree with the rest.
The CCP is clearly effective at letting you see what it wants you to see because no matter what you think of our media, even the most biased right-wing or left-wing sources are more open than theirs and criticism of everything that goes wrong in the US flows freely. We're more like a reality TV drama that frequently airs our dirty laundry. Taking news from China at face value is like looking at someone's Instagram feed, you are only seeing the highlights. Some Chinese people got to go movie theaters and eat at restaurants in contemporary urban middle class sense. Hundreds of millions in the interior cannot afford the aforementioned middle class lifestyle.
You can see the large gap in per capita GDP for provinces here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_administrative...
Also, if you were under the impression that they locked down once and beat the virus, then you'd be surprised to find out that they've had to do multiple recurring region-wide lock-downs all throughout, even up until now.
I don't know what state youre from; I went through lockdowns too but I've gone to restaurants and movie theaters and traveled to other places freely as well. If you didn't, that's on your state, just like there were times that people in Shanghai had more freedom than people in Shenzhen, and vice versa.
Your third paragraph is hard to comment on briefly and partly subjective, I can't comment on 1/6 because it's still an ongoing investigation with the FBI reporting a lack of evidence that it was some centrally coordinated plot. Sometimes riots get out of hand, we should be thankful that unlike a certain riot in 1989 we didn't roll out the tanks and run them over. Instead we arrested them all and they are going through due process. The foreign engagement failures of Afghanistan and Iraq don't exist in a vacuum. We've been in Germany, South Korea, and Japanese for decades and those are going quite well - you win some you lose some. When South Koreans went under repressive rule by Park Jung Hee, you could've said our nation building failed, but we held on and now it's a thriving country that exports its culture worldwide. As for social mobility, I'm an ethnic minority and no matter how bad you think social mobility is, and it's not easy, you do not have better chances anywhere other than the US and Europe. Make of that what you will, I've experienced it. First in my family to go to college, got a job in tech and all that. Believe me if you want. I appreciate the social mobility here and acknowledge that my family couldn't have done it without the civil rights movement of decades prior. I also understand why Americans look down on their own history, but the thing is contemporary Chinese folks do not look down on theirs. They are proud, they want their country to be the best, they want to win. More power to them, but the "Chinese Dream" is only for them. You can go there as a student, be an expat, but it's almost impossible to become a citizen. They are not a nation of immigrants. At best you can be a permanent resident, preferably if you have a western passport. Africans there are not treated as kindly:
They didn't get the support of allies mass protesting police brutality in every city like Americans did.
People like me don't appreciate the self-defeating sentiment that China's ascension is inevitable and well deserved because of our bad history. I don't mean to detract from your points too much. We do need better education, better healthcare, a more prudent foreign policy and all that. I'm just adding more context and my input that all hope is not lost and that western values are inferior to Chinese ones. All hope is not lost. We don't want to get to the point where we say "welp that settles it the only way to improve our standard of living is to become repressive authoritarian regimes too"
> Chinese people got to go to movie theaters and eat at restaurants and dance at raves for most of 2020 and 2021; I, as an American, could not.
I suspect this is largely CCP propaganda.
> The United States is not particularly effective at national security (2021-01-06), foreign engagements (Afghanistan and Iraq, last 20 years), or social mobility (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socioeconomic_mobility_in_the_...). The media ecosystem is a mess (due to purposeful de-regulation), voting rates are abysmal, education is poor by rich world standards
I'm not sure that I accept these as facts, but even so, I believe you're comparing the US to other democracies. If you compare the cohort of democracies to the cohort of authoritarian regimes, how do the democracies compare? I suspect China is an outlier among authoritarian regimes, and even while we marvel at Chinese foreign policy, their per-capita GDP and other indicators don't suggest that they are meeting our Western standards for "effective government".
And even if an authoritarian government is more effective at establishing a global hegemony, what's the point if it comes at the cost of its citizens' basic rights, prosperity, etc?
If you're looking for a turning point, it was fall of 2001 with the 9/11 attacks and China's accession to the WTO. The USA became distracted and the 00s were the time when China's economy grew like gangbusters.
Turning point for China, yes. The turning point for the USA was as late as the Reagan administration dismantling the country for profit, though the seeds were planted earlier.
Speaking for myself I’m happy that many millions of people got lifted out of crushing poverty in Asia. I think it’s a good thing that the economy in the PRC started producing fewer famines and more of a middle class.
The part I’m less happy about is whatever point the Western economies began working less well for most people in them.
Even serious economists have trouble being rigorous about this sort of thing, so I won’t even try. But I don’t think I’m the only one with a queasy feeling that Eastern elites seem to be admitting more people to the middle class while Western elites seem to be pushing people out of it. In spite of there being powerhouse economies in both systems.
People love to nitpick this stuff to pimp whatever dumbass Ayn Rand thing, but people outside the elite in the West seem to be doing worse over time, and that is not how you get an economy that is and feels fair, that’s not how you make sure the talent rises to the top, that’s not how you get a financial system that isn’t a ripoff, that’s not how you get a government that gets shit done, that’s not how you get a military that buys good weapon systems at a compelling price point.
>But I don’t think I’m the only one with a queasy feeling that Eastern elites seem to be admitting more people to the middle class while Western elites seem to be pushing people out of it.
I agree with this and everything in your comment but that specifically doesn't really make me queasy. I'm glad that the elites of some countries still seem focused on creating positive outcomes for their citizens, even if some in the West may want to quibble about the nature of those outcomes.
What gives me the queasy feeling is reading threads like this on HN where the top comments discuss the "security risk" of Chinese nationals/ABCs in American STEM fields (the parent makes the distinction of those fields related to national defence, but replies do not) (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28334051, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28332562) and the general preponderance of what I consider extremely shortsighted, low-info, and jingoistic comments. It's frightening. It's possibly hyperbolic but these comments about "security risk" in particular seem to carry the shadow of internment camps.
My basic queasy feeling is that certain western elites may be sleepwalking into something very bad here. I really hope that this feeling I have is just that mid-pandemic feeling of living through history in the making, but metastasized into areas where it doesn't belong.
edit: the comments I refer to are I guess a microcosm of the fact that China hawkishness in all its forms is one of the very few bipartisan issues in US politics right now. I'm not American, and again, this makes me very uneasy.
I read something pretty interesting recently that pretty much convinces me that the folks at the top get there by luck rather than merit. Obviously I'm sure that they themselves would disagree but I'm talking about them, not to them.
The US got to the position it is in the 20th century by luck, we discovered a new world with wealth to exploit, took the country from the indigenous, then had a stack of decades with slavery, then took that momentum into the world wars, coming out on top into the boom years when our competitors were saddled with rebuilding ruins.
If we're in decline then its our own undoing, heck we pretty much inherited the best deal in the world and pissed it away.
> For all its innumerable faults, flaws, and outright human rights violations: the West of the latter 20th century seemed like a plausible v0.0.1 of some future, hypothetical, benevolent society.
A large digression, but I do wish we didn't need these silly ritual flagellations each time we mention that the West was actually pretty good. To call these things "human rights violations" implies that the West defied some accepted standard for how we treated people, but the West was always on the leading edge for human rights (slavery, colonialism, racism, etc were normal on virtually every continent until the West decided they were wrong). We often talk about the West as though it is some great failure because it didn't emerge from the mists of history fully-formed and prepared to adhere to our modern moral standards, ignoring the fact that our modern moral standards are precisely the product of millennia of Western progress.
I think you make a fair point and arguably better articulate something I was trying to say. People, institutions, and nations do in fact need to be viewed in the context of the relevant time period, applying present-day values to e.g. the Framers is a silly waste of time. They did what they did, hopefully it was their best, and there seems to be lasting value.
On the other hand while it is in fact unreasonable to expect a civilization to spring socially equitable from the forehead of Zeus, we should also continue to strive to be better.
To be perfectly clear, I wasn't rebutting you, but the bizarre anti-West kayfabe culture.
> On the other hand while it is in fact unreasonable to expect a civilization to spring socially equitable from the forehead of Zeus, we should also continue to strive to be better.
I don't think even the most zealous western chauvinist would disagree with this. :)
I agree with you except post-independence in the middle of the 19th and 20th century, the supposedly benevolent West hedged and continue to plunder and usurp Africa and Asia. Values based? Sure, see how rational it is, for you but not for us. We must agree upon universal declarations and you better listen up we know what we're doing.
I have no idea why you think these are `silly ritual flagellations`. Drop everything, the British left the Indian subcontinent in flames. Oh wait, this sounds a lot like Afghanistan. Down vote me for all I care, but if you've not experienced the horror of colonialism and the mess we have to pickup after and fix, with poverty, disease and f_cking IP (TB, Aids, Food Security), and fragile democracy setup to serve external masters, in the presence of evolved men, I respectfully ask you to be empathetic to a lot of voices that still can't be heard. You clearly don't seem to understand the utter s_it some of us and our parents have lived through.
Sure, the awesome Western cultural evolution is grand and something to wait for, who knows what form it will take.
Ok, let's drop all of history except the last 70 years. The zenith of evolution. A poor country had to give you, the West, the finger to save the less fortunate from Aids[1].
I respectfully ask you to continue to self-flagellate.
When we sold our manufacturing base and equipment to them, then bought the same products from them just shipped over seas. They had suppressed labor prices and used it to tilt the table.
I find it more than a little disturbing that most of the interest in this comment centers on people trying to refute what amounts to a parenthetical that while a lot of things were looking pretty awesome in 1960 in e.g. the US, being black or gay probably weren’t among them.
Being black or gay in the west was better than being black or gay in any other part of the world. There are still countries where homosexuality is punishable by death. Being black or gay in the US in the 1960s was worse than being white and straight in the 1960s, but my precise point in my sibling comment is that this a stupid criticism because the West was pioneering equality.
There seems to be some widely-held superstition that if we acknowledge Western progress, then we will stop progressing.
>e.g. shit like a legislature whose job is to get nothing done isn’t how you win in full-contact sports
So we need a totalitarian government to compete with their totalitarian government? No thank you. If your company gets ripped off by the Chinese, like many do, then that is your company's fault.
There’s a little daylight between having a central committee and having legislators who don’t even pretend that the top of their to-do list every day is preventing, ya know, legislation. This is a non-partisan observation. Everybody pulls this shit these days.
Well, on one hand you have mass ideological repression, concentration camps designed for cultural genocide against ethnic minorities, and censorship that means you can't trust common knowledge, so we don't even know if the persistent rumors of mass organ harvesting from religious dissidents are true. But on the other hand you have the capacity to manufacture respirators and stop pandemics dead in their tracks, not to mention most of the world's microelectronics (particularly if you include ROC), and PRC was vaccinating people in July of last year, only four months after the first vaccine was developed (in March in the USA).
Meanwhile, the EU has banned borax on grounds that amount to pure superstition, California has banned xylene, Texas only recently repealed a years-long lab glassware ban, the US Supreme Court didn't legalize screen-scraping until this year, and the USA still has 1% of its adult population imprisoned, just like shortly after the lead-driven crime wave crested 30 years ago (I guess its legislature does get some things done; they also direct the world's biggest military budget). Also, the US maaybe just passed 50% of the population believing in evolution, and gifted programs are being cut out of their high schools because they "promote inequality". And apparently police killing people with impunity is a major political cause in the US now? And let's not forget that Armadillo Aerospace had to abandon their working rocket engine design and restart from scratch because nobody would sell them peroxide, probably due to the US regulatory regime surrounding product liability. And when Clinton launched the National Nanotechnology Initiative in 02000, instead of diamondoid mechanosynthesis we got the fraudulent rebranding of any random submicron particle research, down to the study of medieval stained glass, as "nanotechnology".
In short, the US and EU are stupid enough that they're dooming themselves, regardless of whatever happens in China. I can empathize.
Having your government run by the kind of people who would vote for Donald Trump might be okay as long as the government doesn't control anything important, but inevitably putting the foolish and stupid in charge of the wise and learned is going to end in disaster, as it has with the covid pandemic. On the other hand, dictatorships and monarchies are no guarantee of wise leadership, often the opposite; they tend to oscillate randomly, often when succession happens. Marcus Aurelius is succeeded by Commodus, who is succeeded by Pertinax, then Didius Julianus, and the country is thrown into catastrophe. Qin Shi Huang may have been an asshole who destroyed China's cultural heritage, but he wasn't the fool Qin Er Shi was.
I'm not sure Star Trek is a worthy ideal; it's a militarist naval soap opera that doesn't begin to grapple with the political and psychological implications of post-scarcity civilization. Let's have the courage to imagine a future worth living in, and then create it.
It went sideways when the CCP/PRC realized that they could just sell off their citizens to U.S. corporations as cheap slave labor. My speculation is that they also figured out an effective system for blackmailing the executives of those companies and U.S. politicians into doing whatever they want (e.g. Christine Fang).
In case you aren't aware, the reason we have intellectual property is because we have 300 years of human history showing that countries without intellectual property never innovate anything. The countries of the world adopted intellectual property rights, even though the nobility of Europe resisted for over a century, because they were forced to just to keep up with Britain.
We also have 300 years of history showing what happens to countries who adopt policies that China do (it used to be called Mercantilism). It has always been an excellent system for copying superior countries and catching up with them. It is also an excellent system for launching economic (and real) warfare against your enemies, but in the end it always leads to stagnation (which in turn leads to these kind of countries using their state power for the only thing it is really good for - war).
History shows that this will be the path China takes. We can only hope China begins to suffer from the stagnation part before they destroy the world.
Ok, so let me innovate. I'm going to dump a bunch of my money into researching and developing a new product. Great, that $100M paid off, now we have something we can produce and market.
Oh, what's that? Someone who didn't put $100M of their own money into R&D just came along and stole our design. Now I'm $100M in the hole, and need to sell my product for more money than my rip-off competitor, because I actually need to make my R&D investment back. Of course, consumers don't care about whether I invested money in R&D or not, they just want the cheapest thing. So they buy the rip-off, and then I go out of business.
I've learned my lesson: Never innovate when someone can come along and just take exactly what you innovated. It's far better to be a parasite, and rip off a true innovator and send them into bankruptcy while you reap the profits.
Where exactly does the innovation race happen?
If I could just steal books and publish them as my own, do you expect there to be an "innovation race" in authorship? Or, will authors-who-earn-money just stop writing because they can't make a living off of it?
China has been doing this for, what, 30-40 years now? How is this news?
It is astonishing to me how many people have been, apparently, sleeping under a rock for decades, and are just now announcing their bitter realizations that China is not a free market open to Western companies.
Hillary Clinton did one of these announcements within the past year or so, and my eyes rolled right out of the back of my head.
> China has been doing this for, what, 30-40 years now? How is this news?
Company take-overs maybe. But to say that this is like the past is either ignorant or misleading. The stakes here are so much different than a mere spat over corporate property.
This is the modern right to build computing machines. One rogue element in China has hijacked not merely a company, but a volume of IP that circumscribes probably hundreds of billions of devices. 99% of the consumer mobile devices on the planet are powered exclusively by this IP and a vast vast range of other consumer devices too. By usurping & overthrowing IP controls, by seizing this asset, Allen Wu has instigated a civilization-level technical fork, where the rest of the world has pre-legally-bound themselves to ban practically all future ARM China chips & any device licensed by ARM China. ARM China meanwhile is incentivized to license, sell & distribute as widely as possible, to make themselves an interesting competitive force, turning the heist into a self-sustaining movement of progress & growth for chipmaking, bolstered by less rules, less cruftiness, less legalese, more can do.
Just to remind everyone, software has eaten the planet. Modern upstarts like RISC-V have been trying to grow a reasonable new basis to compute from, to host software atop, but to be honest, x86 and ARM are the only two players running this world-eater. AMD has gotten to play & keep x86 interesting & competitive because they got a license very very long ago, and ARM has been holding the reigns of the other horse, dictating how it evolves. RISC-V is just getting started, is almost no where, is only beginning to find itself, albeit has some good chops demonstrated on the lower end microcontroller type chips. But so far no one has been able to be interesting with chips. And ARM China is hereby announcing that they give no ducks, that they have whatever blasted sovereignty they want, that they will take & make new as they see fit from here on out. And they will almost certainly find many in China to work with. Which is something ARM in the rest of the world has gotten worse and worse and worse at over the years, as countless companies fold their application processor divisions to increasing competition.
No one talks about it? China inventing paper, printing and gunpowder is something every school child knows. I think I've heard about it about a million times. These facts are common knowledge; certainly paper and gunpowder.
Printing is an odd example; the reason Gutenberg was influential is not the reason most people think. He did not invent movable type. He invented systems for mass producing movable type, particularly technology for casting type blocks out of metal, instead of carving them out of wood. So yes, movable type was invented in China. But no, Gutenberg's contribution was not "stealing from the Chinese" (as has become popular to claim on the internet these days...) The root of this particular misconception is the general public's general ignorance of printing technology.
Nitpick: Paper is different to papyrus and was much more important because you don’t need reeds to make it, which Egypt had a monopoly of. After the Roman Empire collapsed no-one could get papyrus and had to use parchment which was super expensive and resulted in most people becoming illiterate because they could’t afford writing / reading material (the dark ages)
Then paper came along (from China) and made it cheap again.
When I was in elementary school I made paper out of cut up blue jeans and learned that it was invented in China. I also learned that the Egyptians invented papyrus, which was similar to paper but shittier. Recalling it now, I also remember that I grew up in a paper mill town.. so maybe my school placed an unusually strong emphasis on paper. Still, I don't think China inventing paper is esoteric knowledge in America.
I can't remember when I first heard that China invented wooden movable type, but I do recall reading about it a whole lot online in discussions quite like this one.
Why do you need to mass produce moveable type? Don’t you just need one of each letter? Or in the context of Chinese: one for each stroke (so perhaps a simpler problem).
Count the number of letters on any single newspaper page: You need a whole bunch of each letter. Also, AIUI, they wear out with use, so you need a steady supply of fresh new ones.
It seemed shocking, and stunningly incompetent when our UK government allowed ARM to be controlled by a dodgy bunch of Japanese venture capitalists, it is no surprise that it ends badly.
No one and everyone is responsible. Capital has its hands tied and must pursue higher profits. The ones responsible aren't just the ones that signed the paper but the ones that made and perpetuated the system that made that decision necessary.
The author of Dilbert, a comic popular because of its insight, has zero knowledge or insight? Good luck defending that assertion, let alone the rest of your claim.
I suppose shareholders also want to maintain ownership of the technology that makes their profits happen in the first place, right?
Wait, who am I kidding? Only a handful of shareholders decide the actions of a company, and even fewer know what the company actually does besides money-in = more-money-out. Most just want as much profit as fast as possible, hence the risks taken with China.
How much money is "enough" is the problem. Companies seem to always choose "all the money" but I'm not sure that is always wise. What's wrong with doing work you are proud of and paying your employees a fair wage? It seems to always come back to the stock price and how it always has to go up for publicly traded companies.
This is why China can never be a global financial hub or have a global reserve currency.
Russian oligarchs, Saudi princes, and other shady characters would never move their money to China for safekeeping. No matter how friendly they are with the Chinese. Move only enough money to do business in China, all extra is moved elsewhere.
Without independent courts, separation of powers, ownership is a political privilege.
Please don't take HN threads on generic ideological tangents, and please stop using HN for ideological battle or flamewar, especially race war. Those things are not what this site is for.
You are quoting a paper described by the author as "twisted" to make the case against diversity while trying to argue against diversity.
> Putnam denied allegations he was arguing against diversity in society and contended that his paper had been "twisted" to make a case against race-based admissions to universities. He asserted that his "extensive research and experience confirm the substantial benefits of diversity, including racial and ethnic diversity, to our society." [1]
The paper is comedy gold. The data says one thing but when you read his conclusion one of the reasons he gives to ignore the data is 'ethnic restaurants'. Hilarious. This is not how you're supposed to do science. Data is supposed to inform the conclusion and not the other way around.
I don’t think I’ve ever flagged anyone, I rarely even downvote.
With that said are you trying to make a case that analogies to the conclusion that some German cartographer drawing nice straight lines on a map of Africa in 1860 or whatever was a win for Africa?
The Middle East is a mess for a number of reasons, and in fairness some of them (like sitting on the tectonic fault line between Europe and Asia) predate predatory colonialism.
But most of them don’t predate predatory colonialism. The world powers of whatever era slicing and dicing it, toppling stable regimes, setting up pliant authoritarian regimes to extract resources cheaply, and generally raping the region senseless plays uh, a meaningful role in it being a mess.
In almost every mention of Sykes-Picot, not laying lines along "actual sectarian, tribal, or ethnic distinctions" is brought up as a contributing reason to present-day strife. I believe that in the US, people who publicly champion diversity typically also align with political movements which partly blame where the borders are for strife.
An I wrong? Is it a big tent ideology and they don't share the same views? Or do people hold both ideas simultaneously? If so, how do you reconcile them?
Apart from the fact that the article doesn't support the point you're trying to make, as pointed out by other answers, historically, we have an excellent example of an extremely successful empire that embraced diversity and stuck around for, depending on how you look, a couple of millennia, namely Rome. Embracing diversity was a key factor in how Rome managed to expand and conquer it's (typically significantly xenophobic) neighbors. Rome co-opted territories it conquered, giving the conquered peoples a path toward Roman citizenship, while crucially giving Rome manpower for its armies. In more detail: https://acoup.blog/2021/06/11/collections-the-queens-latin-o...
"The West" is absolutely reliant on the people that emigrate to it from elsewhere for its success. There is empirical evidence that startups that incorporate H1B workers see their measures of "financial performance, likelihood of going public, and quantity and quality of innovation" increase significantly[1], the paper detailing as such trended on HN not one week ago[2].
Efforts to stymie diversity and decrease immigration have in fact caused permanent damage to the industry. Insularity and ignorance concretely undermines both economic and social growth. China has come far by holding tight to the reins of private capital wealth and forcing it to reinvest in common infrastructure. Meanwhile the nations of "the west" have undermined their social safety nets and unmoored their hypercapitalists to the point that they have nothing better to do with their money then burn it up chasing their toddler cowboy astronaut fantasies.
You wrote that under the article that shows the long-term consequences of short-term profits you mentioned.
"Prior to joining Arm, Wu was the founder of AccelerateMobile in Silicon Valley, and held management, marketing, sales, and engineering positions at Mentor Graphics, LSI Logic, and Intel."
He definitely increased economic growth for a while, a very competent man. Now he captured a part of Arm for China and his experience (presumably) allows him to competently manage it.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not criticizing him. He deserves praise - a patriot exploiting stupidity of foreigners for the benefit of his people.
China is never going to repeat these strategic blunders, which is what virtually guarantees a Chinese century - once they're top dog in something, good luck trying to learn anything near state of the art if you aren't Chinese. They have enough people for a complete blanket ban of foreigners for any position even near advanced knowledge or executive control.
Ironically, you shit on Elon Musk, yet SpaceX is the only entity that has the potential to prevent a total Chinese domination of yet another sector - space. It's somewhat protected by ITAR so there's a real chance.
Somehow I fail to see a line from the civil rights movement to smash-and-grab late capitalism. Diversity happened a long time ago, treating minorities ever-so-slightly more like human beings fails the smell check for the cause of a crumbling distribution of rewards for hard work and innovation.
If I had to point to a single set of policies that I’d call an “own goal” it’s making it difficult for brilliant people to live and work in the West generally and the US in particular. Yeah, get your world-class technical education here and then get the fuck out of my country and into the H1-B maze.
Is anything shocked by this? Chinese has been stealing IP for over 40 years now with government backing. In-fact government of China has encouraged such behavior and in some cases down right funded it.
Just like before they'll get away with it. Who's going to stop this behemoth thug China?
For a link with so many points and comments, this fell off of the front page unusually fast. Consider this link for contrast, which is one hour older with fewer points and comments (299|264 vs. 854|555) but still #10 on the front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28329286
> As part of the emphasis on the Chinese market, SoftBank succumbed to pressure and formed a joint venture. In the new joint venture, Arm Holdings, the SoftBank subsidiary sold a 51% stake of the company to a consortium of Chinese investors for paltry $775M. This venture has the exclusive right to license Arm’s IP within China.
Somewhere between a hard fork and rebase force push. There is even less value in Arm, but RISCV will face a slightly harder time, Arm China will be tough to compete against.
One guy in China (with dual US citizenship) went rogue and refused to step down as CEO of a joint venture after board members representing most of the shareholders (including Chinese shareholders) voted to remove him.
He could only do that based on a legal technicality and the shareholders can still oust him via court action.
