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Some people here are wondering about the implications of this. What this means IMO is that all Chinese investments in SV need to be liquidated at fire sale pric

Some people here are wondering about the implications of this. What this means IMO is that all Chinese investments in SV need to be liquidated at fire sale prices in the next 45 days. Regardless of how people here feel about China this is a huge escalation. The US is inflicting huge losses on Chinese companies for no clear violation of US laws on their part. The pandoras box is now open. Do countries get to do this to each other whenever they feel like it now ? Can China force Tesla to sell its Chinese operations because Teslas data gathering poses a national security risk ? China has some pretty serious means available to it for escalation. China can ban Boeing from China forcing the US taxpayer to incur serious losses in keeping the company afloat. The whole thing is pretty stupid overall. Most people don't realize that during the 2008 crisis it was Chinas 500 billion dollar stimulus that kick started demand and pulled the world out of a depression. China and the US are interdependent and hold up the global system upon which global growth depends. If China slows down as a result of all this that reduces global growth. Pushing China to the wall can make them take extreme steps like undercut the entire dollar based financial order leading to mass instability. The US might come out victorious anyway but its not worth the risks. Not to mention a war which if it breaks out could lead to WW3. Previous attempts to contain China were much more tactful with things like the TPP and the Iran deal. Right now the world is hurtling towards the abyss and most people here don't even realise it. A meta point I'd like to add is that currently 10 % of the earths population in the "Westosphere" controls 60 % of the worlds wealth. This is untenable in the long term and all this flailing about will not stop a reversion to a more balanced world. Its better that this happen gracefully than in a violent fashion.

rtx 6y ago
What are your views on IP theft by some companies there. Should that be considered first strike by China.
- badRNG 6y ago
  Has Bytedance been implicated in IP theft?
  - Craighead 6y ago
    The question asked is "has China" and the answer is yes. China has a direct majority stake in technology companies specifically for data collection
- thewarrior 6y ago
  China says if you want to set up a factory in China you need to transfer IP. They aren't forcing western companies to invest. Most companies invested voluntarily. And this was seen as mostly OK when the rivalry wasn't as heated.
  - karterk 6y ago
    It was tolerated in the hope that over time China would open up. But that did not happen. When facts change, time to change your strategy.
    - peacefulhat 6y ago
      What does this "open up" actually mean? A bunch of American companies have set up shop in China, which was not possible 50 years ago. Now it's common for huge entertainment properties like blockbuster movies and the NBA to get a massive share of revenue from China. Video game consoles are now legal. And of course, China is now essential in the production of most American products.
      - keiferski 6y ago
        Open up means become a modern democratic state with respect for human rights, or at the very least, be on the road to one. The opposite has happened and the pundits from the 90s look pretty silly right about now.
        peacefulhat 6y ago
        Any pundit who thinks the ultimate goal of exchanging goods and services with another country is regime change is a lunatic.
        keiferski 6y ago
        This was the predominant geopolitical theory with regards to China for most of the past ~40 years.
- harpratap 6y ago
  The difference between west and CCP is that you follow rule of law, everyone is free until you're proven guilty. If you just replicate what CCP is doing you're admitting that their ideology is superior.
  - foogazi 6y ago
    Are US investors hurt by CCP blocking Google / Twitter from China ? When you reciprocate it’s not because of a superior ideology but because you won’t accept a one-sided transaction
- peacefulhat 6y ago
  A good clue is how vague your question is. Should bytedance and tencent be banned because of "ip theft" by "some companies?" no
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - icelancer 6y ago
    Bytedance and Tencent are partially owned by CCP. They are not innocent bystanders here.
    - peacefulhat 6y ago
      Is that all it takes to get you on board with a ban?
      - sumedh 6y ago
        What is your solution to make the Chinese Govt play by the rules?
        peacefulhat 6y ago
        This thread is about the US govt banning foreign companies for no justifiable reason. China sees the US abandon due process to screw over its companies and...? Somehow that leads to improved international legal norms. It doesn't make any sense.
        sumedh 6y ago
        It makes complete sense, its tit for tat, China can can arbitrarily impose their rules on foreign companies and now US is doing the same. Either Chinese businesses can lobby the Chinese Govt to make peace with US or the Chinese govt wont listen to them and have a more aggressive stand, only time will tell.
- billfruit 6y ago
  There is no evidence of IP theft being established against TikTok and ByteDance. Presumably they don't seem to have broken US laws as of now. Do countries take to banning Boeing, if they find problems with PepsiCo?.
  - remarkEon 6y ago
    No, but they certainly could if it suited their interests. What I find interesting in this thread is this assumption of both proportionality and rationality from the other party. China isn't, and hasn't, followed the same rules as the rest of the West. Why would we expect them to now? Moreover, from a game theoretical perspective it seems suicidal to act like they will, and then do nothing but complain about them "not following the rules".
  - Udik 6y ago
    > There is no evidence of IP theft being established against TikTok and ByteDance Actually, the forced acquisition of TikTok by MS and its Instagram copy are instances of the US copying from the Chinese.
- DSingularity 6y ago
  “Intellectual property”. What a joke. Throughout school how many times was I excited by a solution I devised until I realized my same exact approach was already discovered, published, and well known? These problems we are solving first dont entitle is to exclusive right over the solution. We want to kick down the ladder after we climb it. That’s what this is about.
  - agdtdudhegsjhs 6y ago
    That just means it wasn’t valuable
  - secondcoming 6y ago
    Who is 'we'? Have you not heard of a patent?
    - pinkfoot 6y ago
      Out of curiosity, how many American companies have Chinese patents (NOT USA patents) that get don't get relief after suing the violator in a Chinese court. Anyone have numbers?
      - baybal2 6y ago
        I know one, called Apple Computers
        pinkfoot 6y ago
        OK, can you give me the both the USA and chinese patent numbers? (You must have them). I would like to see for myself.
        baybal2 6y ago
        Qcom and Apple sued, and countersued each other in China over patents for god knows how many times. Please look it up in google.
- sschueller 6y ago
  How is Instagram's Reels not IP theft? "Good artists copy; great artists steal" - Steve Jobs
  - fastball 6y ago
    Software is generally harder to pin down than other things when it comes to IP theft, but even so there is still a clear distinction between "stealing" a feature and stealing the actual code that enables that feature. China / Chinese companies have been consistently caught doing the latter. They also do the former but that is not what anyone is complaining about.
zkid18 6y ago
Looks like Trump had been promoted to the external M&A consultant for SV tech companies.
peteretep 6y ago
> Do countries get to do this to each other whenever they feel like it now No, but wake me up when the US does this to another free and open country, rather than one that has a history of aggressively doing this to Western countries.
- thewarrior 6y ago
  China never forced US companies to sell their investments in China at firesale prices. This is not a proportionate response.
  - peteretep 6y ago
    Why do you believe it has to be firesale prices? Has intra-firm competition in the US for assets suddenly disappeared?
    - dodobirdlord 6y ago
      45 days is not a lot of time as these things go. It's hard to imagine that most companies could organize something like this in so little time.
  - systematical 6y ago
    Don't they prevent some of our companies from operating there though? And then developed their own competing solutions free from competition. That's not exactly a free market, is it?
    - peacefulhat 6y ago
      Which companies? If you mean Google search, they decided it wasn't worth complying with Chinese laws and left. You may not agree with the specific laws but complying with local laws is a bare minimum requirement for entry into the market of every country. Google even made a second attempt to reenter China, but shut down due to criticism from employees and the US government.
keiferski 6y ago
Can China force Tesla to sell its Chinese operations because Teslas data gathering poses a national security risk ? China can force any company out of the country for any arbitrary reason whatsoever. As far as I know, they are still banning Houston Rockets games because Morey supported Hong Kong in a tweet.
- toomuchtodo 6y ago
  More importantly, China has acted unilaterally in the past to inflict pain on western companies in preference of domestic firms. What’s new is the US doing it back. Tesla was one of the first US companies to operate with the level of autonomy they have in China. Perhaps there is some retribution from the CCP, but such is the consequence of doing business with a totalitarian state.
  - keiferski 6y ago
    Why is this downvoted? It’s true. Everything the US is doing, China has been doing for decades one thousand fold. Whether that’s right or wrong is a different issue.
    - michaelgiba 6y ago
      I’m confused too, this seemed like a normal comment
      - ArnoVW 6y ago
        I would imagine because "two wrongs don't make a right" and because "doing like the others" validates their doing. Giving up the moral high ground is not a move of a superpower, and aides in destabilising the geopolitical playing field.
        cthor 6y ago
        Geopolitics is a little more complicated than phrases we tell children. At the core of it, the kind of protectionism China has engaged in is defecting in a prisoner's dilemma. If you play always cooperate against a defectbot, you're going to lose eventually, even if you start very far ahead.
euix 6y ago
I think we are already passed the point of any of this mattering. Increasingly the rhetoric seems to me to just be: what matters isn't who is in the right or what is just or fair. Increasingly the only thing that matters is which side you are on. Are you with us or are you against us? It's just dogma at this point. In this kind of environment people that are rational either stick to their tribe or learn to keep their mouths shut because it's no longer safe to express a contrarian opinion (just like in China). You see already see this in comments sections throughout western publications and forums where questioning policy or taking the opposite side means you are a bot/stooge/unpatriotic/50 cent warrior, etc, etc, etc.
- thewarrior 6y ago
  Thats how world wars break out.
  - euix 6y ago
    I might get downvoted for this but I think it's a very real possibility. Withdraw the embassy from Beijing, recognize Taiwan and force a embargo of all Taiwanese/Korean and Japanese semiconductor supplies and components to Mainland China. Then sit back and let China then make the first move. Might not work, but at this point I wouldn't put it past somebody in the White House having already gamed it. There has never been a case in human history where one group of people voluntarily gave up their wealth, status and privilege to another group of people. Wealth transfer always leads to violence.
    - godzillabrennus 6y ago
      Ending Corporate America’s reliance on Chinese slave labor would create global recession. Not likely that Trump would inflict even more economic damage during his presidency just before the Election.
      - evan_ 6y ago
        Respectfully- have you not been paying attention? The dude doesn’t make decisions with a long-term outcome in mind. He did this so he can send a tweet tomorrow morning about how he’s sticking it to the commies. That’s where the plan ends.
airstrike 6y ago
> Do countries get to do this to each other whenever they feel like it now ? No, countries get to do this to each other whenever they feel like since the dawn of mankind. "Now" isn't any different.
AimForTheBushes 6y ago
Anytime you do business with China your essentially doing business with the CCP. We would all like China to be a positive part of the global community but the fact of the matter is you can't ignore their overall policy. A possible genocide against the ethnic Uighurs, aggressive expansion in the South China Sea, normalization of censorship and suppression, treatment of Hong Kong & Taiwan: all of which are a complete contrast of Western values. Could China force Tesla to sell Chinese operations? Absolutely. I don't think any one would be surprised. Companies that enter the Chinese market (if they can in the first place) are subjected to getting a smaller piece of the pie from the start. Facebook has relentlessly tried to tap the Chinese market but are blocked by the CCP. So why does TikTok get a free pass to the American market? Why does __any__ Chinese company get a pass? I think we need to continuously evaluate our relationship with China.
aey 6y ago
Despite all this, US tech firms still have a harder time operating in China. > A meta point I'd like to add is that currently 10 % of the earths population in the "Westosphere" controls 60 % of the worlds wealth. True wealth is really hard to measure. Stocks and dollars and euros are not wealth. They are mediums of exchange no different then dogecoin. When I am hungry, I can’t eat them directly, I can only trade them for food. And the amount of food I will get varies based on supply and demand.
- cblconfederate 6y ago
  > US tech firms still have a harder time operating in China. It's entirely hard to believe this considering the obscene amounts of profits that US companies make by just "designing in california". Our whole era is enabled and defined by cheap chinese labor.
  - chrisco255 6y ago
    Clearly many companies benefit from outsourcing manufacturing to China. But they don't own the manufacturing process, they're basically using contract labor and supply chains. Software and design has proven harder to outsource or I'm sure that would be gone, too. The point is that our software apps are not freely allowed to exist there. The firewall is a thing, information is tightly controlled, and they can't allow freedom of speech so they typically ban or limit many American applications.
    - cblconfederate 6y ago
      it's a tit for tat. chinese labour market isn't exactly a free market, and its state controlled policies is precisely the reason why the world chose china in the first place
  - aey 6y ago
    > It's entirely hard to believe this considering the obscene amounts of profits that US companies make by just "designing in california". Our whole era is enabled and defined by cheap chinese labor. Labor is fungible, if it wasn't in China it would be somewhere else.
exprath35 6y ago
> Do countries get to do this to each other whenever they feel like it now ? Can China force Tesla to sell its Chinese operations because Teslas data gathering poses a national security risk ? Yes? Are you unaware that China has been doing exactly this for many, many years? Just as two examples, AWS was forced by China to sell off its Chinese operations to a Chinese company because of arbitrary national security reasons. Blizzard Entertainment was forced by China to go through a Chinese intermediary who controls and publishes all Blizzard games in China.
- baybal2 6y ago
  1. No foreign company is allowed to run a telecom business in China Telecom thus involves anything with a computer, and any "com," being applied with arbitrary eagerness.
- mikechen233 6y ago
  But the big difference is that Amazon still controls aws in China, the product, the brand, the IP. And aws is developed employees in Seattle. It's just operated by the Chinese company. The Chinese company deal with servers, deployment, accesses to the servers and stuff. Amazon also get a significant share of revenue from that market. That is totally different from US gov forcing Bytedance to sell tiktok. Bytedance will no longer own tiktok. It's will have 0 shares. Zero control and no revenue sharing. Technically Microsoft can do whatever they want with tiktok in the future.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- _lsq 6y ago
  No it's not "exactly this". The Chinese government sets their (extremely authoritarian) rules on censorship for companies to legally operate in China but the rules apply to everyone equally. Chinese companies of course have to comply, but foreign companies have the choice to comply or not. Google chose to comply initially but decided to pull out later on. Microsoft/Apple choose to comply and are still operating in significant ways in China. In contrast, US is proposing to ban TikTok, Huawei, DJI without clear rules: the reason to ban these companies is that they are Chinese companies. In other words, Chinese companies are "born a crime" to the US in the current climate, without the need to show what rules are violated or evidence of wrongdoing. China also doesn't have the monopolistic power in tech that the US does: forbidding Google to operate in China it's not the same as forcing app stores to de-list certain apps globally. It's even more absurd to force ByteDance to sell their US business to a US company. If the US feels justified that this could be done on "national security" ground, why shouldn't EU do the same to US tech companies? I do hope that US citizens see that for much of the world, US is no longer the champion of free market, promoter of free-speech or guardian of world-order. All that matters is if these values benefit US economically or politically. The US lost it when Japan was economically sanctioned for its competitive auto/electronic sector in 1980s. China is taking the same heat today and India would be the next target if India were to want to play its role on the international stage. The best outcome for the world would be to have multiple strong economies globally that keep each other in check; rather than one country having monopolistic power over all globally significant online forums.
ezVoodoo 6y ago
WAL-MART, Starbuck, Ford, General Motors, GE, Microsoft, Apple, Tesla, UnitedHealth, HP, IBM, JPMorgan, Pepsi, CocaCola... all these companies are easy targets of China. But the Chinese government is not likely to make any move unless really cornered.
pldr1234 6y ago
Quite a shallow post that essentially boils down to: "We should not be this hard with China, let's keep doing what we were doing in the past." Your post history also looks very interesting, for anyone investigating state-actor social nets.
- dang 6y ago
  This comment breaks the site guidelines. We ban accounts that do this. Please review the rules and stick to them when posting here. Note this one: "Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html This community is vastly more diverse than the people making up accusations of astroturfing imagine that it is. If you don't have evidence, you can't sling such insinuations around. Someone advocating for a view you disagree with does not remotely clear the bar for evidence of astroturfing or foreign spies. If you want more explanation, you'll find years' worth at these links: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=true&page=0&query=astroturf%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&type=comment&dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=chin%20by%3Adang https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&type=comment&dateRange=a...
mlindner 6y ago
China has been doing this for a very long time to US companies. I'm not sure what pandora's box is being opened here. They just didn't selectively to two companies, they do it to all of them (other than Tesla who was the exception to the rule).
fastball 6y ago
Wasn't China already doing stuff like this?
curiousgal 6y ago
> forcing the US taxpayer to incur serious losses in keeping the company afloat. That would be a first now would it.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
nujabe 6y ago
"China can ban Boeing from China..." Not if they don't want an airline industry. China does not have the capacity to build a jet engine yet alone a commercial plane in service.
- babesh 6y ago
  Airbus
- KingOfCoders 6y ago
  a.) They could buy from Airbus b.) https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Aircraft_Corporation_of_China https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Aircraft_Corporatio...
  - nujabe 6y ago
    a) Fair enough. But I reserve some doubts it will be that easy. If it gets to the point that China bans Boeing, I'm convinced many EU companies would also be in the firing line of US sanction regulators and China. b) Cormac cannot even produce jet engines after 25+ years of state backed R&D.
    - KingOfCoders 6y ago
      "China does not have the capacity to build a jet engine yet alone a commercial plane in service." My point was that they are building a commercial plane (not with Chinese fans yet), as your usage of "yet alone" expressed some kind of dependency or sequence, at least to my non native speaking ears.
onetimemanytime 6y ago
>>it was Chinas 500 billion dollar stimulus that kick started demand and pulled the world out of a depression. unlikely. That much doesn't move the needle, world economy right now is $140+ TRILLION. USA gave out over $700 Billion for that matter in 2008-2009 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Recovery_and_Reinvestment_Act_of_2009 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Recovery_and_Reinvest... EU gave $200+ billion, plus each country did their own thing. Ask FB or Google about their Chinese websites. How are they doing? This should have been done long time ago, tit for tat. As for the rest, I doubt China can resort to stupid stuff. US and EU are not happy with them for a lot of things, including Covid, and China desperately needs them. China allowed manufacturing not to help us, but to gain taxes, employment and to steel IP.
kstenerud 6y ago
This is nothing new; it's geopolitics. The big boys have been doing this since the dawn of time. Think of it like a playground: Everyone generally gets along, but the big kids can and sometimes do monopolize things they think are important at the time. The smaller kids make way for the bigger kids, and every now and then there's a fight between the bigger kids when they disagree strongly enough. They exchange words, jostle and block each other, or maybe it even comes to blows, and then things return to the status-quo for awhile. That's how geopolitics work, except that it's usually a LOT more subtle or at least hidden from the public eye. Trump isn't a member of the political elite and is completely lacking in tact, so it's a lot harder to keep an appearance of calmness when he's in the room. Expect a much cleaner appearance of normalcy once he's out of office.
Nitramp 6y ago
> A meta point I'd like to add is that currently 10 % of the earths population in the "Westosphere" controls 60 % of the worlds wealth. This is untenable in the long term and all this flailing about will not stop a reversion to a more balanced world. Its better that this happen gracefully than in a violent fashion. That has been the case since at least the start of colonialism, so something like 200 years now. It depends on what you mean by long term, but that is already a long time. (And it has been sort of non-violent since the de-colonization wars in the 60s).
loceng 6y ago
I'd prefer we reference CCP instead of China to differentiate the Chinese people from their tyrannical rulers. The laws in America not outright making it illegal for tyrannical organizations who operate concentrate camps and partake in genocide (Uighurs) to have access to our democratic societies and benefit economically doesn't mean it's not something you should stand for - and where the laws likely should exist for that. Likewise, the CCP would likely just takeover Tesla's operations - maybe paying them, maybe not. The difference in the US, currently at least, is TikTok has options: 1) they don't sell and the ban comes, they don't receive any $x billions compensation, or 2) they understand a ban is likely in the US (and growing other democratic nations) and they make the smarter economic decision of selling for $x billions - maybe at fire sale pricing, however there are many competitors who could still compete and be capable of taking over operations, so perhaps not as low as otherwise it could be. We're not hurtling towards the abyss, that's fear mongering; you may be right that SV startups may have to divest their China based investors, however that may or may not hurt them - and that would be the result of countering external costs to supporting and allowing CCP that we haven't been adequately accounting for for decades. This is a strategic political-economic pressure decision to put pressure onto the CCP - notice that we're paying attention and won't stand for the level of abuse and tyrannical behaviours of the that we're becoming more and more aware of. Economic pressure and preventing access to democratic societies for economic gain IS the graceful way to go about this, rather than allow CCP to gain more reach, access for propaganda for intelligence gathering and manipulation, to then spoil politicians further and become more entrenched in our societies economically and via investments in the most popular apps, etc. And finally, the CCP isn't suicidal - their $500 billion stimulus you reference was for their own survival as well; they also wouldn't want this system they've been creating getting its fingers strongly into the rest of the world economy (which they depend on to maintain) to collapse, the collapse of which would mean things would shift greatly and more likely away from their own benefit.

rtx 6y ago

What are your views on IP theft by some companies there. Should that be considered first strike by China.

badRNG 6y ago
Has Bytedance been implicated in IP theft?
- Craighead 6y ago
  The question asked is "has China" and the answer is yes. China has a direct majority stake in technology companies specifically for data collection
thewarrior 6y ago
China says if you want to set up a factory in China you need to transfer IP. They aren't forcing western companies to invest. Most companies invested voluntarily. And this was seen as mostly OK when the rivalry wasn't as heated.
- karterk 6y ago
  It was tolerated in the hope that over time China would open up. But that did not happen. When facts change, time to change your strategy.
  - peacefulhat 6y ago
    What does this "open up" actually mean? A bunch of American companies have set up shop in China, which was not possible 50 years ago. Now it's common for huge entertainment properties like blockbuster movies and the NBA to get a massive share of revenue from China. Video game consoles are now legal. And of course, China is now essential in the production of most American products.
    - keiferski 6y ago
      Open up means become a modern democratic state with respect for human rights, or at the very least, be on the road to one. The opposite has happened and the pundits from the 90s look pretty silly right about now.
      - peacefulhat 6y ago
        Any pundit who thinks the ultimate goal of exchanging goods and services with another country is regime change is a lunatic.
        keiferski 6y ago
        This was the predominant geopolitical theory with regards to China for most of the past ~40 years.
harpratap 6y ago
The difference between west and CCP is that you follow rule of law, everyone is free until you're proven guilty. If you just replicate what CCP is doing you're admitting that their ideology is superior.
- foogazi 6y ago
  Are US investors hurt by CCP blocking Google / Twitter from China ? When you reciprocate it’s not because of a superior ideology but because you won’t accept a one-sided transaction
peacefulhat 6y ago
A good clue is how vague your question is. Should bytedance and tencent be banned because of "ip theft" by "some companies?" no
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- icelancer 6y ago
  Bytedance and Tencent are partially owned by CCP. They are not innocent bystanders here.
  - peacefulhat 6y ago
    Is that all it takes to get you on board with a ban?
    - sumedh 6y ago
      What is your solution to make the Chinese Govt play by the rules?
      - peacefulhat 6y ago
        This thread is about the US govt banning foreign companies for no justifiable reason. China sees the US abandon due process to screw over its companies and...? Somehow that leads to improved international legal norms. It doesn't make any sense.
        sumedh 6y ago
        It makes complete sense, its tit for tat, China can can arbitrarily impose their rules on foreign companies and now US is doing the same. Either Chinese businesses can lobby the Chinese Govt to make peace with US or the Chinese govt wont listen to them and have a more aggressive stand, only time will tell.
billfruit 6y ago
There is no evidence of IP theft being established against TikTok and ByteDance. Presumably they don't seem to have broken US laws as of now. Do countries take to banning Boeing, if they find problems with PepsiCo?.
- remarkEon 6y ago
  No, but they certainly could if it suited their interests. What I find interesting in this thread is this assumption of both proportionality and rationality from the other party. China isn't, and hasn't, followed the same rules as the rest of the West. Why would we expect them to now? Moreover, from a game theoretical perspective it seems suicidal to act like they will, and then do nothing but complain about them "not following the rules".
- Udik 6y ago
  > There is no evidence of IP theft being established against TikTok and ByteDance Actually, the forced acquisition of TikTok by MS and its Instagram copy are instances of the US copying from the Chinese.
DSingularity 6y ago
“Intellectual property”. What a joke. Throughout school how many times was I excited by a solution I devised until I realized my same exact approach was already discovered, published, and well known? These problems we are solving first dont entitle is to exclusive right over the solution. We want to kick down the ladder after we climb it. That’s what this is about.
- agdtdudhegsjhs 6y ago
  That just means it wasn’t valuable
- secondcoming 6y ago
  Who is 'we'? Have you not heard of a patent?
  - pinkfoot 6y ago
    Out of curiosity, how many American companies have Chinese patents (NOT USA patents) that get don't get relief after suing the violator in a Chinese court. Anyone have numbers?
    - baybal2 6y ago
      I know one, called Apple Computers
      - pinkfoot 6y ago
        OK, can you give me the both the USA and chinese patent numbers? (You must have them). I would like to see for myself.
        baybal2 6y ago
        Qcom and Apple sued, and countersued each other in China over patents for god knows how many times. Please look it up in google.
sschueller 6y ago
How is Instagram's Reels not IP theft? "Good artists copy; great artists steal" - Steve Jobs
- fastball 6y ago
  Software is generally harder to pin down than other things when it comes to IP theft, but even so there is still a clear distinction between "stealing" a feature and stealing the actual code that enables that feature. China / Chinese companies have been consistently caught doing the latter. They also do the former but that is not what anyone is complaining about.

zkid18 6y ago

Looks like Trump had been promoted to the external M&A consultant for SV tech companies.

peteretep 6y ago

> Do countries get to do this to each other whenever they feel like it now No, but wake me up when the US does this to another free and open country, rather than one that has a history of aggressively doing this to Western countries.

thewarrior 6y ago
China never forced US companies to sell their investments in China at firesale prices. This is not a proportionate response.
- peteretep 6y ago
  Why do you believe it has to be firesale prices? Has intra-firm competition in the US for assets suddenly disappeared?
  - dodobirdlord 6y ago
    45 days is not a lot of time as these things go. It's hard to imagine that most companies could organize something like this in so little time.
- systematical 6y ago
  Don't they prevent some of our companies from operating there though? And then developed their own competing solutions free from competition. That's not exactly a free market, is it?
  - peacefulhat 6y ago
    Which companies? If you mean Google search, they decided it wasn't worth complying with Chinese laws and left. You may not agree with the specific laws but complying with local laws is a bare minimum requirement for entry into the market of every country. Google even made a second attempt to reenter China, but shut down due to criticism from employees and the US government.

keiferski 6y ago

Can China force Tesla to sell its Chinese operations because Teslas data gathering poses a national security risk ? China can force any company out of the country for any arbitrary reason whatsoever. As far as I know, they are still banning Houston Rockets games because Morey supported Hong Kong in a tweet.

toomuchtodo 6y ago
More importantly, China has acted unilaterally in the past to inflict pain on western companies in preference of domestic firms. What’s new is the US doing it back. Tesla was one of the first US companies to operate with the level of autonomy they have in China. Perhaps there is some retribution from the CCP, but such is the consequence of doing business with a totalitarian state.
- keiferski 6y ago
  Why is this downvoted? It’s true. Everything the US is doing, China has been doing for decades one thousand fold. Whether that’s right or wrong is a different issue.
  - michaelgiba 6y ago
    I’m confused too, this seemed like a normal comment
    - ArnoVW 6y ago
      I would imagine because "two wrongs don't make a right" and because "doing like the others" validates their doing. Giving up the moral high ground is not a move of a superpower, and aides in destabilising the geopolitical playing field.
      - cthor 6y ago
        Geopolitics is a little more complicated than phrases we tell children. At the core of it, the kind of protectionism China has engaged in is defecting in a prisoner's dilemma. If you play always cooperate against a defectbot, you're going to lose eventually, even if you start very far ahead.

euix 6y ago

I think we are already passed the point of any of this mattering. Increasingly the rhetoric seems to me to just be: what matters isn't who is in the right or what is just or fair. Increasingly the only thing that matters is which side you are on. Are you with us or are you against us? It's just dogma at this point. In this kind of environment people that are rational either stick to their tribe or learn to keep their mouths shut because it's no longer safe to express a contrarian opinion (just like in China). You see already see this in comments sections throughout western publications and forums where questioning policy or taking the opposite side means you are a bot/stooge/unpatriotic/50 cent warrior, etc, etc, etc.

thewarrior 6y ago
Thats how world wars break out.
- euix 6y ago
  I might get downvoted for this but I think it's a very real possibility. Withdraw the embassy from Beijing, recognize Taiwan and force a embargo of all Taiwanese/Korean and Japanese semiconductor supplies and components to Mainland China. Then sit back and let China then make the first move. Might not work, but at this point I wouldn't put it past somebody in the White House having already gamed it. There has never been a case in human history where one group of people voluntarily gave up their wealth, status and privilege to another group of people. Wealth transfer always leads to violence.
  - godzillabrennus 6y ago
    Ending Corporate America’s reliance on Chinese slave labor would create global recession. Not likely that Trump would inflict even more economic damage during his presidency just before the Election.
    - evan_ 6y ago
      Respectfully- have you not been paying attention? The dude doesn’t make decisions with a long-term outcome in mind. He did this so he can send a tweet tomorrow morning about how he’s sticking it to the commies. That’s where the plan ends.

airstrike 6y ago

> Do countries get to do this to each other whenever they feel like it now ? No, countries get to do this to each other whenever they feel like since the dawn of mankind. "Now" isn't any different.

AimForTheBushes 6y ago

Anytime you do business with China your essentially doing business with the CCP. We would all like China to be a positive part of the global community but the fact of the matter is you can't ignore their overall policy. A possible genocide against the ethnic Uighurs, aggressive expansion in the South China Sea, normalization of censorship and suppression, treatment of Hong Kong & Taiwan: all of which are a complete contrast of Western values. Could China force Tesla to sell Chinese operations? Absolutely. I don't think any one would be surprised. Companies that enter the Chinese market (if they can in the first place) are subjected to getting a smaller piece of the pie from the start. Facebook has relentlessly tried to tap the Chinese market but are blocked by the CCP. So why does TikTok get a free pass to the American market? Why does __any__ Chinese company get a pass? I think we need to continuously evaluate our relationship with China.

aey 6y ago

Despite all this, US tech firms still have a harder time operating in China. > A meta point I'd like to add is that currently 10 % of the earths population in the "Westosphere" controls 60 % of the worlds wealth. True wealth is really hard to measure. Stocks and dollars and euros are not wealth. They are mediums of exchange no different then dogecoin. When I am hungry, I can’t eat them directly, I can only trade them for food. And the amount of food I will get varies based on supply and demand.

cblconfederate 6y ago
> US tech firms still have a harder time operating in China. It's entirely hard to believe this considering the obscene amounts of profits that US companies make by just "designing in california". Our whole era is enabled and defined by cheap chinese labor.
- chrisco255 6y ago
  Clearly many companies benefit from outsourcing manufacturing to China. But they don't own the manufacturing process, they're basically using contract labor and supply chains. Software and design has proven harder to outsource or I'm sure that would be gone, too. The point is that our software apps are not freely allowed to exist there. The firewall is a thing, information is tightly controlled, and they can't allow freedom of speech so they typically ban or limit many American applications.
  - cblconfederate 6y ago
    it's a tit for tat. chinese labour market isn't exactly a free market, and its state controlled policies is precisely the reason why the world chose china in the first place
- aey 6y ago
  > It's entirely hard to believe this considering the obscene amounts of profits that US companies make by just "designing in california". Our whole era is enabled and defined by cheap chinese labor. Labor is fungible, if it wasn't in China it would be somewhere else.

exprath35 6y ago

> Do countries get to do this to each other whenever they feel like it now ? Can China force Tesla to sell its Chinese operations because Teslas data gathering poses a national security risk ? Yes? Are you unaware that China has been doing exactly this for many, many years? Just as two examples, AWS was forced by China to sell off its Chinese operations to a Chinese company because of arbitrary national security reasons. Blizzard Entertainment was forced by China to go through a Chinese intermediary who controls and publishes all Blizzard games in China.

baybal2 6y ago
1. No foreign company is allowed to run a telecom business in China Telecom thus involves anything with a computer, and any "com," being applied with arbitrary eagerness.
mikechen233 6y ago
But the big difference is that Amazon still controls aws in China, the product, the brand, the IP. And aws is developed employees in Seattle. It's just operated by the Chinese company. The Chinese company deal with servers, deployment, accesses to the servers and stuff. Amazon also get a significant share of revenue from that market. That is totally different from US gov forcing Bytedance to sell tiktok. Bytedance will no longer own tiktok. It's will have 0 shares. Zero control and no revenue sharing. Technically Microsoft can do whatever they want with tiktok in the future.
deleted 6y ago
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_lsq 6y ago
No it's not "exactly this". The Chinese government sets their (extremely authoritarian) rules on censorship for companies to legally operate in China but the rules apply to everyone equally. Chinese companies of course have to comply, but foreign companies have the choice to comply or not. Google chose to comply initially but decided to pull out later on. Microsoft/Apple choose to comply and are still operating in significant ways in China. In contrast, US is proposing to ban TikTok, Huawei, DJI without clear rules: the reason to ban these companies is that they are Chinese companies. In other words, Chinese companies are "born a crime" to the US in the current climate, without the need to show what rules are violated or evidence of wrongdoing. China also doesn't have the monopolistic power in tech that the US does: forbidding Google to operate in China it's not the same as forcing app stores to de-list certain apps globally. It's even more absurd to force ByteDance to sell their US business to a US company. If the US feels justified that this could be done on "national security" ground, why shouldn't EU do the same to US tech companies? I do hope that US citizens see that for much of the world, US is no longer the champion of free market, promoter of free-speech or guardian of world-order. All that matters is if these values benefit US economically or politically. The US lost it when Japan was economically sanctioned for its competitive auto/electronic sector in 1980s. China is taking the same heat today and India would be the next target if India were to want to play its role on the international stage. The best outcome for the world would be to have multiple strong economies globally that keep each other in check; rather than one country having monopolistic power over all globally significant online forums.

ezVoodoo 6y ago

WAL-MART, Starbuck, Ford, General Motors, GE, Microsoft, Apple, Tesla, UnitedHealth, HP, IBM, JPMorgan, Pepsi, CocaCola... all these companies are easy targets of China. But the Chinese government is not likely to make any move unless really cornered.

pldr1234 6y ago

Quite a shallow post that essentially boils down to: "We should not be this hard with China, let's keep doing what we were doing in the past." Your post history also looks very interesting, for anyone investigating state-actor social nets.

dang 6y ago
This comment breaks the site guidelines. We ban accounts that do this. Please review the rules and stick to them when posting here. Note this one: "Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html This community is vastly more diverse than the people making up accusations of astroturfing imagine that it is. If you don't have evidence, you can't sling such insinuations around. Someone advocating for a view you disagree with does not remotely clear the bar for evidence of astroturfing or foreign spies. If you want more explanation, you'll find years' worth at these links: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=true&page=0&query=astroturf%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&type=comment&dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=chin%20by%3Adang https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&type=comment&dateRange=a...

mlindner 6y ago

China has been doing this for a very long time to US companies. I'm not sure what pandora's box is being opened here. They just didn't selectively to two companies, they do it to all of them (other than Tesla who was the exception to the rule).

fastball 6y ago

Wasn't China already doing stuff like this?

curiousgal 6y ago

> forcing the US taxpayer to incur serious losses in keeping the company afloat. That would be a first now would it.

deleted 6y ago

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nujabe 6y ago

"China can ban Boeing from China..." Not if they don't want an airline industry. China does not have the capacity to build a jet engine yet alone a commercial plane in service.

babesh 6y ago
Airbus
KingOfCoders 6y ago
a.) They could buy from Airbus b.) https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Aircraft_Corporation_of_China https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Aircraft_Corporatio...
- nujabe 6y ago
  a) Fair enough. But I reserve some doubts it will be that easy. If it gets to the point that China bans Boeing, I'm convinced many EU companies would also be in the firing line of US sanction regulators and China. b) Cormac cannot even produce jet engines after 25+ years of state backed R&D.
  - KingOfCoders 6y ago
    "China does not have the capacity to build a jet engine yet alone a commercial plane in service." My point was that they are building a commercial plane (not with Chinese fans yet), as your usage of "yet alone" expressed some kind of dependency or sequence, at least to my non native speaking ears.

onetimemanytime 6y ago

>>it was Chinas 500 billion dollar stimulus that kick started demand and pulled the world out of a depression. unlikely. That much doesn't move the needle, world economy right now is $140+ TRILLION. USA gave out over $700 Billion for that matter in 2008-2009 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Recovery_and_Reinvestment_Act_of_2009 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Recovery_and_Reinvest... EU gave $200+ billion, plus each country did their own thing. Ask FB or Google about their Chinese websites. How are they doing? This should have been done long time ago, tit for tat. As for the rest, I doubt China can resort to stupid stuff. US and EU are not happy with them for a lot of things, including Covid, and China desperately needs them. China allowed manufacturing not to help us, but to gain taxes, employment and to steel IP.

kstenerud 6y ago

This is nothing new; it's geopolitics. The big boys have been doing this since the dawn of time. Think of it like a playground: Everyone generally gets along, but the big kids can and sometimes do monopolize things they think are important at the time. The smaller kids make way for the bigger kids, and every now and then there's a fight between the bigger kids when they disagree strongly enough. They exchange words, jostle and block each other, or maybe it even comes to blows, and then things return to the status-quo for awhile. That's how geopolitics work, except that it's usually a LOT more subtle or at least hidden from the public eye. Trump isn't a member of the political elite and is completely lacking in tact, so it's a lot harder to keep an appearance of calmness when he's in the room. Expect a much cleaner appearance of normalcy once he's out of office.

Nitramp 6y ago

> A meta point I'd like to add is that currently 10 % of the earths population in the "Westosphere" controls 60 % of the worlds wealth. This is untenable in the long term and all this flailing about will not stop a reversion to a more balanced world. Its better that this happen gracefully than in a violent fashion. That has been the case since at least the start of colonialism, so something like 200 years now. It depends on what you mean by long term, but that is already a long time. (And it has been sort of non-violent since the de-colonization wars in the 60s).

loceng 6y ago

I'd prefer we reference CCP instead of China to differentiate the Chinese people from their tyrannical rulers. The laws in America not outright making it illegal for tyrannical organizations who operate concentrate camps and partake in genocide (Uighurs) to have access to our democratic societies and benefit economically doesn't mean it's not something you should stand for - and where the laws likely should exist for that. Likewise, the CCP would likely just takeover Tesla's operations - maybe paying them, maybe not. The difference in the US, currently at least, is TikTok has options: 1) they don't sell and the ban comes, they don't receive any $x billions compensation, or 2) they understand a ban is likely in the US (and growing other democratic nations) and they make the smarter economic decision of selling for $x billions - maybe at fire sale pricing, however there are many competitors who could still compete and be capable of taking over operations, so perhaps not as low as otherwise it could be. We're not hurtling towards the abyss, that's fear mongering; you may be right that SV startups may have to divest their China based investors, however that may or may not hurt them - and that would be the result of countering external costs to supporting and allowing CCP that we haven't been adequately accounting for for decades. This is a strategic political-economic pressure decision to put pressure onto the CCP - notice that we're paying attention and won't stand for the level of abuse and tyrannical behaviours of the that we're becoming more and more aware of. Economic pressure and preventing access to democratic societies for economic gain IS the graceful way to go about this, rather than allow CCP to gain more reach, access for propaganda for intelligence gathering and manipulation, to then spoil politicians further and become more entrenched in our societies economically and via investments in the most popular apps, etc. And finally, the CCP isn't suicidal - their $500 billion stimulus you reference was for their own survival as well; they also wouldn't want this system they've been creating getting its fingers strongly into the rest of the world economy (which they depend on to maintain) to collapse, the collapse of which would mean things would shift greatly and more likely away from their own benefit.