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Why is the act usually perpetuated against the US. China trades with other countries but rarely you hear news of China stealing their tech. Why does China striv

Why is the act usually perpetuated against the US. China trades with other countries but rarely you hear news of China stealing their tech. Why does China strive to a great deal to steal tech from the US

natch 8y ago
There is a lot of bitterness toward the US in China possibly stemming from their perception that they should be leading the world in every respect, and the irksome reality that for much of the past century or more the US has been at the forefront. Yes that is changing or has already changed now, but they are still very unhappy about having been behind for so long, given their rightful place as the superior (in their mind) civilization. Yeah our (US) civilization has plenty of flaws, I'm not meaning to suggest otherwise. Just saying since you asked, if it seems they are targeting the US a lot, this could be part of it. Plus the obvious fact that the US is the biggest and softest target.
- baybal2 8y ago
  A simple explanation: In China, the manager class, the bureaucrat class have an opinion of their own people as worthless. They don't believe that a Chinese engineer can make a widget better than an American engineer, because they think there is something inherently wrong with everything Chinese. In their disturbed minds, they think if everything Chinese is bad, this also makes them bad too. Thus, they make themselves appear as un-Chinese as possible: See, the only place in the world where American car brands making "falling apart as you drive" cars made a dent in the market is China! In reality though, this conduct of theirs, acquiring material attributes of "Americanness" themselves, is just a psychological compensation. I'm not trying to insult anybody here. This is my observation from working in trade with China for 10 years, and living there for 3 years. What needs to be fixed, is the toxic "Laoban" culture, an "old boys club" of inept, privileged, people currently running China. A real world example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16217995 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16217995
  - yourapostasy 8y ago
    > ...the toxic "Laoban" culture, an "old boys club" of inept, privileged, people currently running China. Is this largely a generation-specific culture, that will mostly pass on as the generation dies off, or embedded within the Chinese culture itself, and has a far greater inertial momentum to overcome and thus will take much longer to turn around (perhaps even generations of change)? My gut feel from my general reading is this is an intrinsic part of Chinese culture, though slowly changing starting at the more youth-oriented demographic-populated fringes that interact the most with the outside world.
    - ambicapter 8y ago
      Given the way their government work (one-party rule), I would blame it more on their political system than their culture. Obviously you can make the argument that culture precedes political system, and also the same argument the other way. Bit of a nature vs nurture thing.
  - tw04 8y ago
    >making "falling apart as you drive" cars That hasn't been reality in a LONG time. And even at their worst, American cars were still light years ahead of what China has managed to produce thus far.
seqastian 8y ago
They don't. What you hear (listen to) is about the US. Guess what makes news in Germany.
southerndrift 8y ago
1) US has the leading technology in many markets 2) If you are reading US news then you only have access to the biggest international stories since everything else is deemed irrelevant, e.g. [1] "Train Makers Rail Against China's High-Speed Designs" 3) Chinese companies simply buy companies in other countries to gain access to knowledge (Volvo) [1]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704814204575507353221141616 https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704814204575507...
hkmurakami 8y ago
I've written this here before but a chinese engineer stole 30,000 design docs from Denso, which supplies a lot of technology under the hood of Toyota vehicles. It made national headlines and was considered a moment of disgrace for the company. We don't hear about it because it's a national matter and only the national news outlets cover it.
- JoeAltmaier 8y ago
  I'm curious: did the company that benefitted from the Denso theft 'give them back'? Or did they quietly continue using the tech? Sometimes I think the whole 'disgrace' game is just a scapegoat to allow moneyed interests to keep doing exactly as they please. But I'm cynical.
  - 1231throwaway 8y ago
    Why would they? American companies also don't give back: https://www.windpowermonthly.com/article/960011/trans-atlantic-espionage-claimed-german-wind-company https://www.windpowermonthly.com/article/960011/trans-atlant...
    - JoeAltmaier 8y ago
      Because of the 'disgrace' angle, of course. It was recognized as a disgraceful act by an engineer. I am wondering if that disgrace extends to the money folk who took it from that person, or the disgrace ends at the scapegoat. That's all.
      - hkmurakami 8y ago
        No it was a disgrace for Denso to have allowed this to happen.
  - cc439 8y ago
    It was the company who was infiltrated who was disgraced, not the company (more like companies, Chinese tech espionage is state backed and whatever is collected is widely distributed) that benefited.
hevi_jos 8y ago
You are confusing two different things: Reality and perception of reality. All countries in the world strive to "steal" tech from those that have it. USA itself "stole" the designs of industrial mills and presses and machine tools from Britain while it was forbidden with capital punishment. Th USA also "stole" nuclear tech from Germany, that was the first to fission the atom or the first to create semiconductor diodes. They just gave the guys working on that on Europe much better quality of life. The jet engines of Germany (operation Paperclip), their rockets, the chemical industry traveled to the US after the war. Today the US spy on communications worldwide and the biggest application for it is industrial espionage. With things like Intel ME on every computer or your real name registered on it, it becomes extremely simple to steal the designs created on those computers when you have control of this hardware(intel is an American company and they are required to "cooperate" with secret services).
- eastendguy 8y ago
  > it becomes extremely simple to steal the designs created on those computers If it is so simple, so how does it work? (It might or might not happen, but it is certainly not simple or known)
- tonyhb 8y ago
  Nah, the UK developed nuclear weapons first and gave them to America.
sgift 8y ago
China stealing German/European technology is a common topic here in Germany. HN is just a relatively US focused site, so it isn't discussed as often here.
- rqs 8y ago
  > HN is just a relatively US focused site Maybe it's language related. I'm Chinese, and I can tell you there are many people in the dark corners of China's Internet are talking about similar kind of things: Spy stories, military secrets, dark politics & histories, rumors etc. Basic human nature. But if you don't read Chinese and look into the right place, you'll simply unaware of their existence. I don't think all English speakers can also speak or read German, so maybe that's the reason, rather than "They just don't care".
pjc50 8y ago
There is occasional US technology theft as well, but you hear about it a lot less. It's kind of embedded in the Boeing/Airbus conflict, as well as lots of minor issues like taking out US patents for non-Western traditional medicine.
chrischen 8y ago
Because the US has good tech?
- danesparza 8y ago
  This stinks of naive Nationalism or simple confirmation bias. I'd suggest that China is beginning to match US creativity with software -- a quick glance at the rising popularity of several github repositories that have Mandarin README's would confirm this. https://qz.com/1280215/four-of-the-top-25-github-projects-are-written-in-chinese-six-contain-no-code/ https://qz.com/1280215/four-of-the-top-25-github-projects-ar...
  - Canada 8y ago
    Can you name 3 significant projects of Chinese origin? Any OS, protocol implementation, significant library or framework?
    - mrtksn 8y ago
      The naming part is probably about brand recognition and they are doing really well with Huawei(which recently surpassed Apple on the number of unites sold metric). Also, Vue.js seems to have a lot of Chinese contribution. Their Google, FB and Twitter knock-offs seem to be doing good too.
      - Canada 8y ago
        Let's take Vue as 1. Anything else? Programming languages, algorithms? Their Google, FB, and Twitter knockoffs don't count, they are all crap compared to Western versions. The only reason the Chinese versions are alive is because the competition is blocked. I'm not suggesting Chinese people aren't good, there's plenty of them working on top tier stuff outside of China. What I am suggesting is that China's policy of crippling the internet has consequences. As long as their internet is crippled China will lag the rest of the world in software.
        8y ago
gurkendoktor 8y ago
The Taiwanese tech sector is another target: http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/biz/archives/2018/04/19/2003691567 http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/biz/archives/2018/04/19/2003... The article also mentions the previous Nanya case that made national headlines in Taiwan. These incidents don't make it on Hacker News or US media, though.
- seanmcdirmid 8y ago
  Semiconductor are the other strategic area China wants to catch up in, which Taiwan can do pretty well. Still very protected industry (the knowledge is super diffuse and closely guarded, only outdated fab equipment is exported to mainland fabs).
sneak 8y ago
Copying information is not stealing.
- adventured 8y ago
  If you hire me at your company, then I take all the information, code, files, work on your big new project that you've invested all of your company's money into, and go to your competitor with it (for a handsome fee) - you're not going to proclaim 'copying' your IP et al is not stealing. Not unless you're suicidal and don't care about your employees and their jobs. No business could survive and make long-term plans and large capital investment if that's how the world actually worked. How about walking out of an accounting firm with private business files and handing them to competitors for a fee? Still not information stealing?
  - teddyh 8y ago
    Everything illegal is not “theft”. Kidnapping, for example, involves many of the same aspects of theft, but still isn’t theft. Likewise, illegal copying and corporate espionage, while they may be crimes, are not “theft”.
- zaroth 8y ago
  This is entirely false in the case of trade secrets where there can be no concept of “fair use”.
  - PurpleBoxDragon 8y ago
    I do think we could benefit from having a unique terms to differentiate the taking of something that doesn't belong to you which deprives another person of their copy and the making a copy of something that doesn't belong to you which does not deprive you of a copy. If I take your car, you biggest concern is that you don't have a car now. If I somehow copied your car, you probably wouldn't care too much. If I take your banking info, your concern is that I have a copy. That you didn't lose your copy is a lesser concern than that I have a copy and the damage I can do with that copy. While these two things seem related, they do seem different enough that having a different word to differentiate them.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
mattmanser 8y ago
We had one a few weeks ago in the UK, Rolls Royce: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-44489797 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-44489797
seanmcdirmid 8y ago
China steals IP (especially military and space) from Russia all the time. It just doesn’t get into the western news much. Even if they aren’t enemies anymore, they are still frenemies. IP theft is also a problem in Europe, Australia, etc, but again, the news doesn’t reach us often.
- picsao 8y ago
  Maybe just maybe the survival of the individual company is not that important to a politician who cares more about stability of a system of states. Kind of like the citizens property thrown under the bus for a interstate. Well at least they pay lipservice.
testingforwhat 8y ago
There are many more Chinese-Americans than there are Chinese-Germans.
tyu100 8y ago
It's common belief that Huawei's network technology was bootstrapped with stolen technology from Nortel in Canada.
- StudentStuff 8y ago
  But is there any evidence? The usefulness of Nortel's network tech is generally limited by the hardware platforms it was designed for, you really aren't going to run their PowerPC binaries for their PBXes and cellular gear on any other platform, and IBM isn't going to sell you the CPUs for making knockoffs in quantity. Reimplementing what Nortel had is non-trivial, but look at where Freeswitch and Asterisk are today. The closed competitors are limping along, with most repackaging the two main open source solutions.
  - huhtenberg 8y ago
    This surfaced not a week ago in another thread - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17614232 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17614232
    - 1996 8y ago
      Where I got downvoted to oblivion and then flagged. This worries me as much as this article, because it make people associate China and Chinese companies with unfriendly behaviours. If you say "not all", you are called a government shill. The same goes with articles trying to point out discrimination in US university admissions. This is not posted to create dissent, but to reduce exclusion or invalidation that other reader may feel. Maybe I should say differently: if you replace "asian" by "jewish" or "black" and the phrase sounds horribly racist, maybe that is because it is racist in the first place. Please do not do that.
  - stonogo 8y ago
    IBM doesn't have to sell you the CPUs. You just need to have a handful of companies in the OpenPOWER foundation and a fab or two. Or you can buy Xilinx FPGAs, which are available with PPC-compatible cores built right in. Or you steal the source code, instead of the deployment binaries.

natch 8y ago

There is a lot of bitterness toward the US in China possibly stemming from their perception that they should be leading the world in every respect, and the irksome reality that for much of the past century or more the US has been at the forefront. Yes that is changing or has already changed now, but they are still very unhappy about having been behind for so long, given their rightful place as the superior (in their mind) civilization. Yeah our (US) civilization has plenty of flaws, I'm not meaning to suggest otherwise. Just saying since you asked, if it seems they are targeting the US a lot, this could be part of it. Plus the obvious fact that the US is the biggest and softest target.

baybal2 8y ago
A simple explanation: In China, the manager class, the bureaucrat class have an opinion of their own people as worthless. They don't believe that a Chinese engineer can make a widget better than an American engineer, because they think there is something inherently wrong with everything Chinese. In their disturbed minds, they think if everything Chinese is bad, this also makes them bad too. Thus, they make themselves appear as un-Chinese as possible: See, the only place in the world where American car brands making "falling apart as you drive" cars made a dent in the market is China! In reality though, this conduct of theirs, acquiring material attributes of "Americanness" themselves, is just a psychological compensation. I'm not trying to insult anybody here. This is my observation from working in trade with China for 10 years, and living there for 3 years. What needs to be fixed, is the toxic "Laoban" culture, an "old boys club" of inept, privileged, people currently running China. A real world example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16217995 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16217995
- yourapostasy 8y ago
  > ...the toxic "Laoban" culture, an "old boys club" of inept, privileged, people currently running China. Is this largely a generation-specific culture, that will mostly pass on as the generation dies off, or embedded within the Chinese culture itself, and has a far greater inertial momentum to overcome and thus will take much longer to turn around (perhaps even generations of change)? My gut feel from my general reading is this is an intrinsic part of Chinese culture, though slowly changing starting at the more youth-oriented demographic-populated fringes that interact the most with the outside world.
  - ambicapter 8y ago
    Given the way their government work (one-party rule), I would blame it more on their political system than their culture. Obviously you can make the argument that culture precedes political system, and also the same argument the other way. Bit of a nature vs nurture thing.
- tw04 8y ago
  >making "falling apart as you drive" cars That hasn't been reality in a LONG time. And even at their worst, American cars were still light years ahead of what China has managed to produce thus far.

seqastian 8y ago

They don't. What you hear (listen to) is about the US. Guess what makes news in Germany.

southerndrift 8y ago

1) US has the leading technology in many markets 2) If you are reading US news then you only have access to the biggest international stories since everything else is deemed irrelevant, e.g. [1] "Train Makers Rail Against China's High-Speed Designs" 3) Chinese companies simply buy companies in other countries to gain access to knowledge (Volvo) [1]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704814204575507353221141616 https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704814204575507...

hkmurakami 8y ago

I've written this here before but a chinese engineer stole 30,000 design docs from Denso, which supplies a lot of technology under the hood of Toyota vehicles. It made national headlines and was considered a moment of disgrace for the company. We don't hear about it because it's a national matter and only the national news outlets cover it.

JoeAltmaier 8y ago
I'm curious: did the company that benefitted from the Denso theft 'give them back'? Or did they quietly continue using the tech? Sometimes I think the whole 'disgrace' game is just a scapegoat to allow moneyed interests to keep doing exactly as they please. But I'm cynical.
- 1231throwaway 8y ago
  Why would they? American companies also don't give back: https://www.windpowermonthly.com/article/960011/trans-atlantic-espionage-claimed-german-wind-company https://www.windpowermonthly.com/article/960011/trans-atlant...
  - JoeAltmaier 8y ago
    Because of the 'disgrace' angle, of course. It was recognized as a disgraceful act by an engineer. I am wondering if that disgrace extends to the money folk who took it from that person, or the disgrace ends at the scapegoat. That's all.
    - hkmurakami 8y ago
      No it was a disgrace for Denso to have allowed this to happen.
- cc439 8y ago
  It was the company who was infiltrated who was disgraced, not the company (more like companies, Chinese tech espionage is state backed and whatever is collected is widely distributed) that benefited.

hevi_jos 8y ago

You are confusing two different things: Reality and perception of reality. All countries in the world strive to "steal" tech from those that have it. USA itself "stole" the designs of industrial mills and presses and machine tools from Britain while it was forbidden with capital punishment. Th USA also "stole" nuclear tech from Germany, that was the first to fission the atom or the first to create semiconductor diodes. They just gave the guys working on that on Europe much better quality of life. The jet engines of Germany (operation Paperclip), their rockets, the chemical industry traveled to the US after the war. Today the US spy on communications worldwide and the biggest application for it is industrial espionage. With things like Intel ME on every computer or your real name registered on it, it becomes extremely simple to steal the designs created on those computers when you have control of this hardware(intel is an American company and they are required to "cooperate" with secret services).

eastendguy 8y ago
> it becomes extremely simple to steal the designs created on those computers If it is so simple, so how does it work? (It might or might not happen, but it is certainly not simple or known)
tonyhb 8y ago
Nah, the UK developed nuclear weapons first and gave them to America.

sgift 8y ago

China stealing German/European technology is a common topic here in Germany. HN is just a relatively US focused site, so it isn't discussed as often here.

rqs 8y ago
> HN is just a relatively US focused site Maybe it's language related. I'm Chinese, and I can tell you there are many people in the dark corners of China's Internet are talking about similar kind of things: Spy stories, military secrets, dark politics & histories, rumors etc. Basic human nature. But if you don't read Chinese and look into the right place, you'll simply unaware of their existence. I don't think all English speakers can also speak or read German, so maybe that's the reason, rather than "They just don't care".

pjc50 8y ago

There is occasional US technology theft as well, but you hear about it a lot less. It's kind of embedded in the Boeing/Airbus conflict, as well as lots of minor issues like taking out US patents for non-Western traditional medicine.

chrischen 8y ago

Because the US has good tech?

danesparza 8y ago
This stinks of naive Nationalism or simple confirmation bias. I'd suggest that China is beginning to match US creativity with software -- a quick glance at the rising popularity of several github repositories that have Mandarin README's would confirm this. https://qz.com/1280215/four-of-the-top-25-github-projects-are-written-in-chinese-six-contain-no-code/ https://qz.com/1280215/four-of-the-top-25-github-projects-ar...
- Canada 8y ago
  Can you name 3 significant projects of Chinese origin? Any OS, protocol implementation, significant library or framework?
  - mrtksn 8y ago
    The naming part is probably about brand recognition and they are doing really well with Huawei(which recently surpassed Apple on the number of unites sold metric). Also, Vue.js seems to have a lot of Chinese contribution. Their Google, FB and Twitter knock-offs seem to be doing good too.
    - Canada 8y ago
      Let's take Vue as 1. Anything else? Programming languages, algorithms? Their Google, FB, and Twitter knockoffs don't count, they are all crap compared to Western versions. The only reason the Chinese versions are alive is because the competition is blocked. I'm not suggesting Chinese people aren't good, there's plenty of them working on top tier stuff outside of China. What I am suggesting is that China's policy of crippling the internet has consequences. As long as their internet is crippled China will lag the rest of the world in software.
      - 8y ago

gurkendoktor 8y ago

The Taiwanese tech sector is another target: http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/biz/archives/2018/04/19/2003691567 http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/biz/archives/2018/04/19/2003... The article also mentions the previous Nanya case that made national headlines in Taiwan. These incidents don't make it on Hacker News or US media, though.

seanmcdirmid 8y ago
Semiconductor are the other strategic area China wants to catch up in, which Taiwan can do pretty well. Still very protected industry (the knowledge is super diffuse and closely guarded, only outdated fab equipment is exported to mainland fabs).

sneak 8y ago

Copying information is not stealing.

adventured 8y ago
If you hire me at your company, then I take all the information, code, files, work on your big new project that you've invested all of your company's money into, and go to your competitor with it (for a handsome fee) - you're not going to proclaim 'copying' your IP et al is not stealing. Not unless you're suicidal and don't care about your employees and their jobs. No business could survive and make long-term plans and large capital investment if that's how the world actually worked. How about walking out of an accounting firm with private business files and handing them to competitors for a fee? Still not information stealing?
- teddyh 8y ago
  Everything illegal is not “theft”. Kidnapping, for example, involves many of the same aspects of theft, but still isn’t theft. Likewise, illegal copying and corporate espionage, while they may be crimes, are not “theft”.
zaroth 8y ago
This is entirely false in the case of trade secrets where there can be no concept of “fair use”.
- PurpleBoxDragon 8y ago
  I do think we could benefit from having a unique terms to differentiate the taking of something that doesn't belong to you which deprives another person of their copy and the making a copy of something that doesn't belong to you which does not deprive you of a copy. If I take your car, you biggest concern is that you don't have a car now. If I somehow copied your car, you probably wouldn't care too much. If I take your banking info, your concern is that I have a copy. That you didn't lose your copy is a lesser concern than that I have a copy and the damage I can do with that copy. While these two things seem related, they do seem different enough that having a different word to differentiate them.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

mattmanser 8y ago

We had one a few weeks ago in the UK, Rolls Royce: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-44489797 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-44489797

seanmcdirmid 8y ago

China steals IP (especially military and space) from Russia all the time. It just doesn’t get into the western news much. Even if they aren’t enemies anymore, they are still frenemies. IP theft is also a problem in Europe, Australia, etc, but again, the news doesn’t reach us often.

picsao 8y ago
Maybe just maybe the survival of the individual company is not that important to a politician who cares more about stability of a system of states. Kind of like the citizens property thrown under the bus for a interstate. Well at least they pay lipservice.

testingforwhat 8y ago

There are many more Chinese-Americans than there are Chinese-Germans.

tyu100 8y ago

It's common belief that Huawei's network technology was bootstrapped with stolen technology from Nortel in Canada.

StudentStuff 8y ago
But is there any evidence? The usefulness of Nortel's network tech is generally limited by the hardware platforms it was designed for, you really aren't going to run their PowerPC binaries for their PBXes and cellular gear on any other platform, and IBM isn't going to sell you the CPUs for making knockoffs in quantity. Reimplementing what Nortel had is non-trivial, but look at where Freeswitch and Asterisk are today. The closed competitors are limping along, with most repackaging the two main open source solutions.
- huhtenberg 8y ago
  This surfaced not a week ago in another thread - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17614232 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17614232
  - 1996 8y ago
    Where I got downvoted to oblivion and then flagged. This worries me as much as this article, because it make people associate China and Chinese companies with unfriendly behaviours. If you say "not all", you are called a government shill. The same goes with articles trying to point out discrimination in US university admissions. This is not posted to create dissent, but to reduce exclusion or invalidation that other reader may feel. Maybe I should say differently: if you replace "asian" by "jewish" or "black" and the phrase sounds horribly racist, maybe that is because it is racist in the first place. Please do not do that.
- stonogo 8y ago
  IBM doesn't have to sell you the CPUs. You just need to have a handful of companies in the OpenPOWER foundation and a fab or two. Or you can buy Xilinx FPGAs, which are available with PPC-compatible cores built right in. Or you steal the source code, instead of the deployment binaries.