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I guess I am a somewhat neutral bystander here. I'm from India and the way I see it, these sorts of actions, will simply force China and Chinese companies to de

I guess I am a somewhat neutral bystander here. I'm from India and the way I see it, these sorts of actions, will simply force China and Chinese companies to develop alternatives to US products. For the short to medium term these blacklists will hurt Chinese companies severely, perhaps even put some of them out of business. However, in the long term 15-20 years, I would imagine, China would have fully caught up with the US particularly on semiconductor design and fabrication. Once that happens, the dominance of the US tech stack will start to falter and eventually erode away. If I were the US govt., I would invest every available dollar and minute on building up a technological lead, because, oh boy it is going to need every last bit of advantage it can get. And even that may not be enough. For the world, this may not be a terrible outcome, (although don't get me wrong -- no trade war would be the best outcome.) . For one thing, it breaks monopolies across the tech stack from E-commerce all the way to semi-conductor manufacturing equipment. That competition between US and Chinese companies can only benefit the world. It's happening in 5G already.

wideasleep1 7y ago
"However, in the long term 15-20 years, I would imagine, China would have fully caught up with the US particularly on semiconductor design and fabrication. Once that happens, the dominance of the US tech stack will start to falter and eventually erode away. " Are you assuming the U.S. will sit stagnant during these 15-20 years? If China is 15-20 years behind currently, I doubt they will ever be at parity. Their best hope is a cultural revolution.
- derwiki 7y ago
  Am I being whooshed? They had a Cultural Revolution..
- devoply 7y ago
  US was already shown to be behind in 5g, China is already caught up. Heck they even helped AMD catch up to Intel, and see what sort of major success that was ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD%E2%80%93Chinese_joint_venture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD%E2%80%93Chinese_joint_vent... ) . These moves are there to slow it down. But China can make other moves like moving tech knowledge from one company to others and play all sorts of games. Fact is knowledge despite what Americans want the world to believe, replicates and distributes powers in ways which are very difficult to stop. If China is not building it, they will move the knowledge to some ally which can build it. It's almost guaranteed at this point that we are already living in a bifurcated world where US will need to manufacture everything in other countries than China. And yet China's manufacturing edge is not going anywhere. They can clone any US product anyone else is producing and sell it to their trading bloc.
  - wideasleep1 7y ago
    "US was already shown to be behind in 5g, China is already caught up." So the mainstream media and politicians would have us believe. "Heck they even helped AMD catch up to Intel, and see what sort of major success that was ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD%E2%80%93Chinese_joint_vent.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD%E2%80%93Chinese_joint_vent.... ) " All I see here is an agreement for AMD to transfer technology to China, for x86 chips destined for chinese-only server market. Further, that agreement appears stalled, since AMD will NOT transfer their Zen2 technologies in this agreement. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-zen-china-x86-ip-license,39573.html https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-zen-china-x86-ip-licen... "And yet China's manufacturing edge is not going anywhere. They can clone any US product anyone else is producing and sell it to their trading bloc." More like their manufacturing may not be going anywhere...their market has been shrinking by leaps and bounds. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5G#Surveillance_concerns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5G#Surveillance_concerns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concerns_over_Chinese_involvement_in_5G_wireless_networks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concerns_over_Chinese_involvem... They can have Iran, AFAIC.
    - primordialsoup 7y ago
      > So the mainstream media and politicians would have us believe. Do you have sources from non-"mainstream media" that indicate otherwise?
      - wideasleep1 7y ago
        Presently, I'd consider The Verge to be mainstream, but Nilay was on point with his skepticism: https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/23/18637213/5g-race-us-leadership-china-fcc-lte https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/23/18637213/5g-race-us-leade... I think one could produce articles supporting either view quite easily, which them becomes a task of separating the agendas of its authors.
        thawaway1837 7y ago
        I’m pretty sure the poster you replied to was talking not about deployment of 5G but the fact that Huawei is supposed to be far ahead of its non Chinese peers when it comes to 5G tech. That’s basically why the US has to ban the supply of tech to them, because otherwise nearly every 5G deployment would be Huawei.
- thaumasiotes 7y ago
  > If China is 15-20 years behind currently, I doubt they will ever be at parity. Yes, no lesson from world history is more obvious and robust than "once in the lead, always in the lead".
  - rubber_duck 7y ago
    Like all the historic civilizations that peaked and fell apart ?
    - baq 7y ago
      my reading of the OP is that was exactly the point
    - kenny_r 7y ago
      The comment you replied to was sarcastic.
      - rubber_duck 7y ago
        I thought it might be since it's so obvious but discussing a similar topic with coworkers a few days back had a similar situation where someone just frames the argument in a time window that explains their narrative - I wouldn't be surprised if someone argued this because of the US economic dominance post WW2
- daniel_iversen 7y ago
  Apparently China is already leading the world as far as AI goes (I first saw this in Mary Meeker’s internet report this year I think it was and she usually links to the research in her slides). I read somewhere that Chinese scientists found it easier to get Chinese government funding for bold and ambitious research (and I imagine they’d also have other “advantages” given how the country is governed). So I wouldn’t be surprised if China would overtake the US in a whole bunch of technical sectors.
  - BiasRegularizer 7y ago
    This is not completely true. China lead in terms of AI startup funding, but due to the huge shortage of talents, a good number of startups don't hold much water. The top Chinese talents (e.g. Kaming He, Fei Fei Li etc) all chose to move to the US. AFAIK, there are no Chinese institutions that employ elite foreign AI researchers. The US universities and companies still lead with a large margin in terms of high impact publications in NIPS, ICML, CVPR etc.
    - govg 7y ago
      You're wrong with the "large margin" terms. A lot of Chinese universities have stepped up in the recent past. You can take a look here : http://csrankings.org/#/fromyear/2017/toyear/2019/index?ai&vision&mlmining&nlp&ir&world http://csrankings.org/#/fromyear/2017/toyear/2019/index?ai&v... 3 of the top 10 (all in the top 5 even) are Chinese in origin. This is a list of publications at the top venues in AI / ML for the past two years. If you extend it to past 5 years, you get a slightly better picture, but that doesn't change the 3 in top 5 comment either.
      - BiasRegularizer 7y ago
        The keyword is "high impact". The link you provided is only ranked by publication count, it doesn't consider the impact factor of journal/conferences. If you look at stats from ICML this year[0], the only Chinese institution TsingHua is ranked #13 in the top #20 list. Take a look at recent major advances in deep learning: information bottle neck, mask-rcnn, transformer, normalizing flow, all originated from US/Canadian/EU institutions. Chinese academia has very serious systematic issues that discourages innovation and encourages quantity over quality. https://medium.com/@dcharrezt/icml-2019-stats-4ba18fbc6543 https://medium.com/@dcharrezt/icml-2019-stats-4ba18fbc6543
- jdnenej 7y ago
  The lack of IP law in china will allow them to progress much much faster.
  - yorwba 7y ago
    China does have IP law, and the big companies sue each other for copyright infringement all the time, e.g. https://technode.com/2019/04/26/baidu-bytedance-lawsuits-continue/ https://technode.com/2019/04/26/baidu-bytedance-lawsuits-con... There's a lot of talk about political censorship in China, but the majority of the content I've seen removed was not political, but in violation of copyright. What China does not have is a legal system that is both able and willing to stop all instances of copyright infringement (or most other crimes, for that matter). So you get a lot of small-scale operations flying under the radar for as long as possible and vanishing as soon as they risk punishment.
- conjectures 7y ago
  > Their best hope is a cultural revolution. You say this phrase, but I do not think it means what you hope it means.
peter303 7y ago
Doubt it. China has yet to invent a new class of technology not copied/stolen from Europe or US. There are very good ar perfecting technologies developed elsewhere.
- x86_64Ubuntu 7y ago
  Not yet. But 20 years ago, we weren't having this conversation of China even being seen as a threat. Back in the day, China was simply and exotic communist land that the West exploited for cheap manufacturing. Now it's appearing to be going down the path of militarily deterring the US and competing in the tech field.
  - killjoywashere 7y ago
    Ah... China has been a one-party police state with intercontinental ballistic nuclear missiles for my entire adult life (I'm in my 40s). The only thing I don't understand is why anyone ever thought they weren't a threat.
    - lgvln 7y ago
      Their no first use policy perhaps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_first_use#China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_first_use#China
      - hnick 7y ago
        That seems to be a useful policy when you're on your way to being a world power. It also seems to be the kind of policy that will be broken when convenient after becoming a world power.
        SheepleUSA 7y ago
        ...in a world where no one else has nukes.
  - alasdair_ 7y ago
wozniacki 7y ago
A lot of people - even some past China-appeasers - would currently disagree with that line of thinking. That was the sort of hopeful thinking that opened the worlds markets to China when Bill Clinton urged lawmakers to let China into the WTO in the year 2000.[1] Several years ago, Robert Kagan in Foreign Affairs magazine, commented that China lacks bigger humanistic aspirations than material ones and a limited vision to find ways to furnish those material resources for itself. China lacks a grander vision, he said. ( Paraphrasing here. I can't find the article ) Now witnessing world events, I doubt many people would argue against that opinion. [1] When the World Opened the Gates of China Was it a mistake for the U.S. to allow China to join the World Trade Organization? Assessments of the 2001 deal often determine positions in today’s bitter trade debate. https://www.wsj.com/articles/when-the-world-opened-the-gates-of-china-1532701482 https://www.wsj.com/articles/when-the-world-opened-the-gates... edit: citation corrected
- ThinkBackTo 7y ago
  Are you the real Woz?
- alexron782 7y ago
  Not sure why this is downvoted. I agree with this point. There is a certain level of ambition that is lacking in Confucius culture, which is a very critical drive when exploring the unknown field.
ThinkBackTo 7y ago
I don't understand why you consider yourself a neutral observer. Aren't our countries allies, politically, economically and militarily?
- serf 7y ago
  Citizenship is usually a passive trait that is imbued by right of locale of birth. A citizen can very much be a neutral observer philosophically, given that a citizen has very little capability to sway the nation politically, economically, or militarily. In fact, a citizen who thinks that they are participating on the nation-stage is probably more delusional than the opposite.
JimboOmega 7y ago
Actually, a lot of the reasoning behind the tariffs is the converse, that if we can't rely on China for making all of our [insert thing here], we'll have to make it ourselves. I mean, maybe we have to build iPhones in the United States and build up the supply chain for that? At least, that's the thinking.
thawaway1837 7y ago
Not just China. It’s also leading to India, and Europe to reconsider their reliance on the US.
quotz 7y ago
The US has been leading the world in tech, however, not leading the world in how to defend that tech. Chinese hacking and stealing of tech is vastly more powerful right now. We need to put an end to this
mtgx 7y ago
> will simply force China and Chinese companies to develop alternatives to US products. As if they weren't already doing that very aggressively, using mostly either IP that the American companies have given away willingly to "gain access to the Chinese market" (a hopeless dream) or IP the government's spy agencies have stolen and then handed over to a handful of companies in the relevant industries to catch-up to the American ones. If you haven't been (actually) paying attention, China was already favoring local Chinese competitors for legal permissions to do stuff, subsidizing them, and also restricting the foreign companies' access to the local markets way before the whole trade war started. If anything, the trade war should've begun 10 years ago, because then their companies wouldn't have been in as good as a position they are now to be able to keep up with the foreign companies. By now they've already stolen, copied, and were handed over just about all the tech IP they needed, and they also had time to work with it and develop the expertise over the past few years, often helped by their (forced) American "venture partners". This whole thing actually started because of American corporations' greed, which wanted to make even more billions of dollars in profit every year by moving their factories to China. If that wouldn't have happened, China may not be in the position it is today.
andrewmb 7y ago
The thing to understand about China is that domestic alternatives to international products, especially in 'sensitive' industries (basically anything technologically significant) is ALREADY a core government goal and a major cornerstone of their tech, IP, and political policy. The CCP has stated on many occasions--going back years--that their goal is to eliminate any reliance on non-Chinese firms. This has more urgency in some industries (eg semiconductors) than others, but the ultimate goal is the same.
- silexia 7y ago
  The other thing to understand though is that in a dictatorship people do not have economic freedom or the incentives to truly do the hard work necessary to build this industries. If the United States cuts off support for China and these industries, China will fall far behind unless it can steal the technologies. This is the fate of most dictatorships.
  - chaostheory 7y ago
    They have the incentive. Despite having a totalitarian gov, the economy is still largely capitalistic. The issue is that environments which lack freedom of expression also tend to lack the creativity needed for great leaps of innovation. If I were to guess, a large percentage of China’s captains of industry spent a decent amount of time living abroad
  - NotSammyHagar 7y ago
    That seems incredibly naive. of course they do have the incentives, wanting to get rich. They do have the economic freedom, at least enough to do very creative software and hardware engineering. The evidence is there.
  - thaumasiotes 7y ago
    > in a dictatorship people do not have economic freedom or the incentives to truly do the hard work necessary to build this industries. At the end of the Ming dynasty, there was a commercial family dominating the sea trade out of the southern coast. When the Qing took power, they told the family patriarch he could keep everything, as long as he was willing to swear loyalty to the new dynasty. He immediately did so. His son, however, issued a rousing formal denunciation of his father, questioning how anyone whose oath to the Ming had been sincere could betray them at the drop of a hat like that. It was so persuasive that it convinced the Manchus, who threw the patriarch in prison -- devolving control of the whole enterprise onto the Ming-loyalist son. He went into open rebellion, took his hundreds of ships and thousands of seamen to Taiwan, and waged war on the Qing for decades. His rebellion was only ended when the Qing took the dramatic step of fully evacuating the coastline to prevent anyone from supporting him from the mainland. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koxinga https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koxinga Dictatorships allow quite a bit of freedom.
asdfman123 7y ago
> For the world, this may not be a terrible outcome In terms of consumer product choice? Sure. However, in terms of an authoritarian government rising to superpower status...
TheEndin 7y ago
I mean, today you have a functional democracy building your hardware/software while allowing others such as South Korea and Japan to fight toe to toe in the tech environment. In the future you will have a foreign authoritarian dictatorship stealing yours and everyone's IP making sure that India and others can never compete with their interests. You will be using cameras and other IT tools with backdoor ensuring that they can keep tabs on every Indian so that they can use that data to blackmail and exert power on your government. Yesterday it was the Hun under Mao, then Tibet, today it is the Uighurs, tomorrow it is their own population and yours.

wideasleep1 7y ago

"However, in the long term 15-20 years, I would imagine, China would have fully caught up with the US particularly on semiconductor design and fabrication. Once that happens, the dominance of the US tech stack will start to falter and eventually erode away. " Are you assuming the U.S. will sit stagnant during these 15-20 years? If China is 15-20 years behind currently, I doubt they will ever be at parity. Their best hope is a cultural revolution.

derwiki 7y ago
Am I being whooshed? They had a Cultural Revolution..
devoply 7y ago
US was already shown to be behind in 5g, China is already caught up. Heck they even helped AMD catch up to Intel, and see what sort of major success that was ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD%E2%80%93Chinese_joint_venture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD%E2%80%93Chinese_joint_vent... ) . These moves are there to slow it down. But China can make other moves like moving tech knowledge from one company to others and play all sorts of games. Fact is knowledge despite what Americans want the world to believe, replicates and distributes powers in ways which are very difficult to stop. If China is not building it, they will move the knowledge to some ally which can build it. It's almost guaranteed at this point that we are already living in a bifurcated world where US will need to manufacture everything in other countries than China. And yet China's manufacturing edge is not going anywhere. They can clone any US product anyone else is producing and sell it to their trading bloc.
- wideasleep1 7y ago
  "US was already shown to be behind in 5g, China is already caught up." So the mainstream media and politicians would have us believe. "Heck they even helped AMD catch up to Intel, and see what sort of major success that was ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD%E2%80%93Chinese_joint_vent.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD%E2%80%93Chinese_joint_vent.... ) " All I see here is an agreement for AMD to transfer technology to China, for x86 chips destined for chinese-only server market. Further, that agreement appears stalled, since AMD will NOT transfer their Zen2 technologies in this agreement. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-zen-china-x86-ip-license,39573.html https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-zen-china-x86-ip-licen... "And yet China's manufacturing edge is not going anywhere. They can clone any US product anyone else is producing and sell it to their trading bloc." More like their manufacturing may not be going anywhere...their market has been shrinking by leaps and bounds. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5G#Surveillance_concerns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5G#Surveillance_concerns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concerns_over_Chinese_involvement_in_5G_wireless_networks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concerns_over_Chinese_involvem... They can have Iran, AFAIC.
  - primordialsoup 7y ago
    > So the mainstream media and politicians would have us believe. Do you have sources from non-"mainstream media" that indicate otherwise?
    - wideasleep1 7y ago
      Presently, I'd consider The Verge to be mainstream, but Nilay was on point with his skepticism: https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/23/18637213/5g-race-us-leadership-china-fcc-lte https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/23/18637213/5g-race-us-leade... I think one could produce articles supporting either view quite easily, which them becomes a task of separating the agendas of its authors.
      - thawaway1837 7y ago
        I’m pretty sure the poster you replied to was talking not about deployment of 5G but the fact that Huawei is supposed to be far ahead of its non Chinese peers when it comes to 5G tech. That’s basically why the US has to ban the supply of tech to them, because otherwise nearly every 5G deployment would be Huawei.
thaumasiotes 7y ago
> If China is 15-20 years behind currently, I doubt they will ever be at parity. Yes, no lesson from world history is more obvious and robust than "once in the lead, always in the lead".
- rubber_duck 7y ago
  Like all the historic civilizations that peaked and fell apart ?
  - baq 7y ago
    my reading of the OP is that was exactly the point
  - kenny_r 7y ago
    The comment you replied to was sarcastic.
    - rubber_duck 7y ago
      I thought it might be since it's so obvious but discussing a similar topic with coworkers a few days back had a similar situation where someone just frames the argument in a time window that explains their narrative - I wouldn't be surprised if someone argued this because of the US economic dominance post WW2
daniel_iversen 7y ago
Apparently China is already leading the world as far as AI goes (I first saw this in Mary Meeker’s internet report this year I think it was and she usually links to the research in her slides). I read somewhere that Chinese scientists found it easier to get Chinese government funding for bold and ambitious research (and I imagine they’d also have other “advantages” given how the country is governed). So I wouldn’t be surprised if China would overtake the US in a whole bunch of technical sectors.
- BiasRegularizer 7y ago
  This is not completely true. China lead in terms of AI startup funding, but due to the huge shortage of talents, a good number of startups don't hold much water. The top Chinese talents (e.g. Kaming He, Fei Fei Li etc) all chose to move to the US. AFAIK, there are no Chinese institutions that employ elite foreign AI researchers. The US universities and companies still lead with a large margin in terms of high impact publications in NIPS, ICML, CVPR etc.
  - govg 7y ago
    You're wrong with the "large margin" terms. A lot of Chinese universities have stepped up in the recent past. You can take a look here : http://csrankings.org/#/fromyear/2017/toyear/2019/index?ai&vision&mlmining&nlp&ir&world http://csrankings.org/#/fromyear/2017/toyear/2019/index?ai&v... 3 of the top 10 (all in the top 5 even) are Chinese in origin. This is a list of publications at the top venues in AI / ML for the past two years. If you extend it to past 5 years, you get a slightly better picture, but that doesn't change the 3 in top 5 comment either.
    - BiasRegularizer 7y ago
      The keyword is "high impact". The link you provided is only ranked by publication count, it doesn't consider the impact factor of journal/conferences. If you look at stats from ICML this year[0], the only Chinese institution TsingHua is ranked #13 in the top #20 list. Take a look at recent major advances in deep learning: information bottle neck, mask-rcnn, transformer, normalizing flow, all originated from US/Canadian/EU institutions. Chinese academia has very serious systematic issues that discourages innovation and encourages quantity over quality. https://medium.com/@dcharrezt/icml-2019-stats-4ba18fbc6543 https://medium.com/@dcharrezt/icml-2019-stats-4ba18fbc6543
jdnenej 7y ago
The lack of IP law in china will allow them to progress much much faster.
- yorwba 7y ago
  China does have IP law, and the big companies sue each other for copyright infringement all the time, e.g. https://technode.com/2019/04/26/baidu-bytedance-lawsuits-continue/ https://technode.com/2019/04/26/baidu-bytedance-lawsuits-con... There's a lot of talk about political censorship in China, but the majority of the content I've seen removed was not political, but in violation of copyright. What China does not have is a legal system that is both able and willing to stop all instances of copyright infringement (or most other crimes, for that matter). So you get a lot of small-scale operations flying under the radar for as long as possible and vanishing as soon as they risk punishment.
conjectures 7y ago
> Their best hope is a cultural revolution. You say this phrase, but I do not think it means what you hope it means.

peter303 7y ago

Doubt it. China has yet to invent a new class of technology not copied/stolen from Europe or US. There are very good ar perfecting technologies developed elsewhere.

x86_64Ubuntu 7y ago
Not yet. But 20 years ago, we weren't having this conversation of China even being seen as a threat. Back in the day, China was simply and exotic communist land that the West exploited for cheap manufacturing. Now it's appearing to be going down the path of militarily deterring the US and competing in the tech field.
- killjoywashere 7y ago
  Ah... China has been a one-party police state with intercontinental ballistic nuclear missiles for my entire adult life (I'm in my 40s). The only thing I don't understand is why anyone ever thought they weren't a threat.
  - lgvln 7y ago
    Their no first use policy perhaps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_first_use#China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_first_use#China
    - hnick 7y ago
      That seems to be a useful policy when you're on your way to being a world power. It also seems to be the kind of policy that will be broken when convenient after becoming a world power.
      - SheepleUSA 7y ago
        ...in a world where no one else has nukes.
- alasdair_ 7y ago

wozniacki 7y ago

A lot of people - even some past China-appeasers - would currently disagree with that line of thinking. That was the sort of hopeful thinking that opened the worlds markets to China when Bill Clinton urged lawmakers to let China into the WTO in the year 2000.[1] Several years ago, Robert Kagan in Foreign Affairs magazine, commented that China lacks bigger humanistic aspirations than material ones and a limited vision to find ways to furnish those material resources for itself. China lacks a grander vision, he said. ( Paraphrasing here. I can't find the article ) Now witnessing world events, I doubt many people would argue against that opinion. [1] When the World Opened the Gates of China Was it a mistake for the U.S. to allow China to join the World Trade Organization? Assessments of the 2001 deal often determine positions in today’s bitter trade debate. https://www.wsj.com/articles/when-the-world-opened-the-gates-of-china-1532701482 https://www.wsj.com/articles/when-the-world-opened-the-gates... edit: citation corrected

ThinkBackTo 7y ago
Are you the real Woz?
alexron782 7y ago
Not sure why this is downvoted. I agree with this point. There is a certain level of ambition that is lacking in Confucius culture, which is a very critical drive when exploring the unknown field.

ThinkBackTo 7y ago

I don't understand why you consider yourself a neutral observer. Aren't our countries allies, politically, economically and militarily?

serf 7y ago
Citizenship is usually a passive trait that is imbued by right of locale of birth. A citizen can very much be a neutral observer philosophically, given that a citizen has very little capability to sway the nation politically, economically, or militarily. In fact, a citizen who thinks that they are participating on the nation-stage is probably more delusional than the opposite.

JimboOmega 7y ago

Actually, a lot of the reasoning behind the tariffs is the converse, that if we can't rely on China for making all of our [insert thing here], we'll have to make it ourselves. I mean, maybe we have to build iPhones in the United States and build up the supply chain for that? At least, that's the thinking.

thawaway1837 7y ago

Not just China. It’s also leading to India, and Europe to reconsider their reliance on the US.

quotz 7y ago

The US has been leading the world in tech, however, not leading the world in how to defend that tech. Chinese hacking and stealing of tech is vastly more powerful right now. We need to put an end to this

mtgx 7y ago

> will simply force China and Chinese companies to develop alternatives to US products. As if they weren't already doing that very aggressively, using mostly either IP that the American companies have given away willingly to "gain access to the Chinese market" (a hopeless dream) or IP the government's spy agencies have stolen and then handed over to a handful of companies in the relevant industries to catch-up to the American ones. If you haven't been (actually) paying attention, China was already favoring local Chinese competitors for legal permissions to do stuff, subsidizing them, and also restricting the foreign companies' access to the local markets way before the whole trade war started. If anything, the trade war should've begun 10 years ago, because then their companies wouldn't have been in as good as a position they are now to be able to keep up with the foreign companies. By now they've already stolen, copied, and were handed over just about all the tech IP they needed, and they also had time to work with it and develop the expertise over the past few years, often helped by their (forced) American "venture partners". This whole thing actually started because of American corporations' greed, which wanted to make even more billions of dollars in profit every year by moving their factories to China. If that wouldn't have happened, China may not be in the position it is today.

andrewmb 7y ago

The thing to understand about China is that domestic alternatives to international products, especially in 'sensitive' industries (basically anything technologically significant) is ALREADY a core government goal and a major cornerstone of their tech, IP, and political policy. The CCP has stated on many occasions--going back years--that their goal is to eliminate any reliance on non-Chinese firms. This has more urgency in some industries (eg semiconductors) than others, but the ultimate goal is the same.

silexia 7y ago
The other thing to understand though is that in a dictatorship people do not have economic freedom or the incentives to truly do the hard work necessary to build this industries. If the United States cuts off support for China and these industries, China will fall far behind unless it can steal the technologies. This is the fate of most dictatorships.
- chaostheory 7y ago
  They have the incentive. Despite having a totalitarian gov, the economy is still largely capitalistic. The issue is that environments which lack freedom of expression also tend to lack the creativity needed for great leaps of innovation. If I were to guess, a large percentage of China’s captains of industry spent a decent amount of time living abroad
- NotSammyHagar 7y ago
  That seems incredibly naive. of course they do have the incentives, wanting to get rich. They do have the economic freedom, at least enough to do very creative software and hardware engineering. The evidence is there.
- thaumasiotes 7y ago
  > in a dictatorship people do not have economic freedom or the incentives to truly do the hard work necessary to build this industries. At the end of the Ming dynasty, there was a commercial family dominating the sea trade out of the southern coast. When the Qing took power, they told the family patriarch he could keep everything, as long as he was willing to swear loyalty to the new dynasty. He immediately did so. His son, however, issued a rousing formal denunciation of his father, questioning how anyone whose oath to the Ming had been sincere could betray them at the drop of a hat like that. It was so persuasive that it convinced the Manchus, who threw the patriarch in prison -- devolving control of the whole enterprise onto the Ming-loyalist son. He went into open rebellion, took his hundreds of ships and thousands of seamen to Taiwan, and waged war on the Qing for decades. His rebellion was only ended when the Qing took the dramatic step of fully evacuating the coastline to prevent anyone from supporting him from the mainland. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koxinga https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koxinga Dictatorships allow quite a bit of freedom.

asdfman123 7y ago

> For the world, this may not be a terrible outcome In terms of consumer product choice? Sure. However, in terms of an authoritarian government rising to superpower status...

TheEndin 7y ago

I mean, today you have a functional democracy building your hardware/software while allowing others such as South Korea and Japan to fight toe to toe in the tech environment. In the future you will have a foreign authoritarian dictatorship stealing yours and everyone's IP making sure that India and others can never compete with their interests. You will be using cameras and other IT tools with backdoor ensuring that they can keep tabs on every Indian so that they can use that data to blackmail and exert power on your government. Yesterday it was the Hun under Mao, then Tibet, today it is the Uighurs, tomorrow it is their own population and yours.