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The exact same reasoning could be applied to big American manufacturers: Boeing, Intel - all provide products to the US military and have very large business in

The exact same reasoning could be applied to big American manufacturers: Boeing, Intel - all provide products to the US military and have very large business interest in China. Why doesn't China answer back with similar sanctions? It is honestly a bit of mystery to me. The best answer I can come up with is that the Chinese government is actually quite content with the US forcing Chinese companies to fabricate on Chinese soil.

thefounder 6y ago
>> Why doesn't China answer back with similar sanctions? Because it can't, yet.
- throwaway4good 6y ago
  Sure not directly maybe. But they could go after Boeing or Nike or Starbucks. But my sense is that the ccp likes their “Sputnik moment”.
  - babesh 6y ago
    Go look at how plane orders from China are shifting to Airbus.
    - dragonelite 6y ago
      There are other ways to hit the US in their wallet, like allocating new sales to their EU rival. Let them fight each other. Its a more elegant way of putting diplomacy and economic heft at work. Also COMAC should deliver their first model to (domestic?)customers this year. Then you also have a joint venture with a Russian plane company.
peytn 6y ago
CCP is sensitive to its unemployment problem and needs the jobs for stability.
z2 6y ago
China is mostly just a buyer of their products. Not buying from them just gives power to the remaining handful of competitors in these oligopolies. It's not like they can threaten to disrupt their production--I recall that the 787 has parts mostly sourced from the US, western Europe, and Japan, not China. For any joint venture in China, there's probably also clear value in keeping Boeing and Intel facilities operating...
- bobthepanda 6y ago
  More importantly, China is still trying to jumpstart its own aviation juggernaut but is still using US suppliers, so it could very easily become an own goal.
LatteLazy 6y ago
They're playing the long game. Most of these sanctions don't really work either. China will get what it wants some other way. The US will get to look like it acted. Everyone will be happy...
- throwaway6734 6y ago
  >Most of these sanctions don't really work either. China will get what it wants some other way. The US will get to look like it acted. Everyone will be happy... What are you basing this on?
  - LatteLazy 6y ago
    So, sanctions like these started in 2015 [0]. That was when the Chinese first topped the global super computer league (and that's for public super computers so presumably they'd been leading in private for a while?). The US banned exports to 4 Chinese companies that made the machines. So other companies spring up to fill the gap. This is problem 1: it takes very little time to setup a company, so sanctioning one is sort of pointless. You sanction PLA_Supplier1 LLC? Good thing PLA_Supplier1 LLC is interested in ordering the same kit! The result was a roughly yearly round of sanctions. Every year's new list of names is a list of the companies that bypassed the last year's sanctions... There is also problem 2: back in 2015 the computers used Intel parts but increasingly the Chinese are designing their own. They're not there yet, but they're making progress. TSMC still do most of the manufacture. So the question is: how long till Chinese hackers steal the latest designs or Chinese engineers reverse engineer the parts they buy on the grey market? AND how long until China sets up a TSMC competitor? I'm something of a hawk on China. I'm out on a ledge but here I am. I'd like to see real action on them for a long list of reasons. But before we can have real action, we need to drop the pretend action. Trump (what a turd) loved pretend action. Maybe Biden will be different? But this isn't that imho. Source on the original tariffs: [0] https://www.economist.com/business/2019/06/29/an-american-ban-hits-chinas-supercomputer-industry https://www.economist.com/business/2019/06/29/an-american-ba...
    - throwaway6734 6y ago
stunt 6y ago
China's population is well over 1.4 billion. They need to create new jobs every year with the same rate that some countries do in a decade. I think it's pretty significant that they are able to run a country with that demographics most of whom were not even educated. China still benefits from its US relationship overall. The US does benefit too, but the US also wants to slow down their growth because it's a big threat to its power. I think everything else like human rights issues are just BS. We're partner with most of Arabian countries in the Middle East and we have active arms sell to them including Saudis which are far worst than China in terms of democracy and human rights.
- Layke1123 6y ago
  I am upvoting this because you will undoubtedly get downvoted for this kind of criticism against the capitalistic empire of the US, but let's not mince words. The US has been years ahead of China in human rights' violations as you directly mention. It's a shame that this website is more acknowledging of said fact.
  - systemvoltage 6y ago
    HN has a strong bias towards criticism of US policy, but that's actually good because we need to fix our stuff as well. It gets caught in the crossfire, sheds light and puts public eyes on shitty things we do in the USA. It's a win-win. City dwellers and highly educated people in the US (HN crowd essentially) are internationalized, but lately trying to be more fair to criticisms of CCP just for the sake of being "balanced". Truth prevails at the end of the day. What you're saying is true though. Are there 2 million people in reducation camps in the US based on ethnicity?
    - thatcat 6y ago
      No, but maybe more in prison for victimless crimes and those prisoners are disproportional of minority ethnicity.
    - Daho0n 6y ago
      >HN has a strong bias towards criticism of US policy You must read another HN than I do. I see a HN that is extremely pro-US and anti-PRC. So much so that a random American can pull stuff out his ass about Chinese education and get upvoted while the person living in China gets downvoted for disagreeing. Search this thread for PISA test and see the comments above... >Are there 2 million people in reducation camps in the US based on ethnicity? Have you not seen the historic and current state of blacks incarcerated in the US and how policy is made specifically to criminalise some skin colors and cultures? Some states have as high as 72% black population in prisons. Not to mention all the medicinally experimentation done on poor and/or black people in the US through time. Even if we had been without those today it is still a crazy comparison. If country A have been a highly developed country for hundreds of years and they then point fingers of country B and C who is not only all the way to where A is yet but have also been highly developed for way less time then you are comparing apples to pumpkins.
Covzire 6y ago
China already enjoys a massively lopsided business advantage compared to the US. It's an uphill battle for non-chinese companies to operate in China, for one China requires that part of the ownership of the chinese venture must be owned by Chinese nationals, which means that the CCP also gets to sit on the board and see and influence everything they do. I can't think of any other major power that is this xenophobic.
- SEJeff 6y ago
  They did not require that for Tesla. The Shanghai is 100% American Tesla owned with no joint venture.
  - refulgentis 6y ago
    Yes, the way the CCP does enforcement there is the Hong Kong model: there's an entity 100% owned by Tesla called Tesla Shanghai that has a 50 year lease on a state owned factory, Tesla invests $700 mil, state invests $2 bill, when loans are paid off, Tesla can begin transferring revenue stateside
    - SEJeff 6y ago
      That’s not a terrible model
    - blueblisters 6y ago
      Wait so the gigafactory plant and machinery is technically owned by the Chinese? Or is it just the factory land?
      - derivagral 6y ago
        From this and prior reading I'd expect: they (TSLA) own the factory and things in it, but the land it sits on is leased from the state, perhaps in some proportion to the funds invested. I don't live there, just been a couple times. https://www.loc.gov/law/help/real-property-law/china.php https://www.loc.gov/law/help/real-property-law/china.php
2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago
My totally armchair geopolitical opinion is that they know US companies can simply go elsewhere. Nobody manufactures in China for their "expertise".
- threeseed 6y ago
  Actually everyone does. China is not just a source of cheap labour. But a source of cheap labour highly skilled in manufacturing which other countries all but abandoned over the previous decades.
  - unishark 6y ago
    No they aren't very cheap anymore. You always can get the same manufacturing done elsewhere. It just may not all be available in the same country.
markus_zhang 6y ago
Because China is trying to promote more trading -- which it benefits from. And she does need the products or connections of Boeing/Intel. If China breaks her compeletely from all major US manufacturers, it's equivalent to a declaration of the end of post-2001 world economy and can bring ripples across the world. China is not prepared for that, yet.
mytailorisrich 6y ago
China both needs these companies and has nothing to gain in attacking them. On other hand, the US are trying to slow China's rise by hurting key industries. This is a geopolitical struggle. The US cannot win because China is bigger than they are and so will overtake them sooner or later, but they can slow things down to maintain their dominance as long as they can.
- mywittyname 6y ago
  > The US cannot win but they can slow things down to maintain their dominance as long as they can. They (the USA) fucked up Japan pretty bad. Throughout the 70s-80s the USA was fearful of the rise of Japan, their incredible ability to usurp American businesses, and their growing trade deficit surplus, which they then rolled back into US T-bonds. From an American perspective, Japan was in the 70s what China is today. In the early-80s, the Yen-to-dollar ratio was really high. This kicked off an inflationary asset bubble within the country that lasted for several years. Starting in 1985, the yen-to-dollar ratio collapsed, falling by half from mid ¥200s in just two years and reaching a low of ¥85 by 95. Japan entered the Lost Decade as a result of this situation. The lost decade became two, then the GFC happened, bringing it to three decades. It is suspected that this was the result of an intentional attack on the Japanese economy by US officials with the express intent to curb Japan's rising economic power.
  - thereare5lights 6y ago
    Japan doesn't have over 4x the population of US and a comparable amount of land. China has many advantages that Japan doesn't have. It's not a given that the same thing will happen.
  - ampdepolymerase 6y ago
    > In the early-80s, the Yen-to-dollar ratio was really high. This kicked off an inflationary asset bubble within the country that lasted for several years. I believe this is commonly referred to in geopolitics as the Plaza Accord.
  - triceratops 6y ago
bumbada 6y ago
>Why doesn't China answer back with similar sanctions? They want to, but they can't, yet. If you listen to CCP officials the long term plan is very clear: To transform China from an export driven economy to a internal market economy so they don't need others, but currently they need them. China currently can not consume what it produces. When I was living there I could not buy the cooking tool(blender) I wanted. I went to Europe, bought the Blender(manufactured in China) and brought it to China. There was not market in China for those and they went straight from the factory to the port. China is not the US, most people in China are very poor. The CCP is very powerful but the country is weak in many ways. In fact China is closing down a lot recently, expats are going out the country fast.
- cambalache 6y ago
  > China is not the US, most people in China are very poor. https://www.forbes.com/sites/daviddawkins/2019/10/21/china-overtakes-us-in-global-household-wealth-rankings-despite-trade-tensionsreport/?sh=675ccf91749e https://www.forbes.com/sites/daviddawkins/2019/10/21/china-o... https://finance.yahoo.com/news/china-overtake-u-world-largest-135614391.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/china-overtake-u-world-larges... I dont know what China you are talking about. China sheer size is enough to beat already the US in absolute numbers. The per capita numbers is way below but that gap will keep shrinking.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

thefounder 6y ago

>> Why doesn't China answer back with similar sanctions? Because it can't, yet.

throwaway4good 6y ago
Sure not directly maybe. But they could go after Boeing or Nike or Starbucks. But my sense is that the ccp likes their “Sputnik moment”.
- babesh 6y ago
  Go look at how plane orders from China are shifting to Airbus.
  - dragonelite 6y ago
    There are other ways to hit the US in their wallet, like allocating new sales to their EU rival. Let them fight each other. Its a more elegant way of putting diplomacy and economic heft at work. Also COMAC should deliver their first model to (domestic?)customers this year. Then you also have a joint venture with a Russian plane company.

peytn 6y ago

CCP is sensitive to its unemployment problem and needs the jobs for stability.

z2 6y ago

China is mostly just a buyer of their products. Not buying from them just gives power to the remaining handful of competitors in these oligopolies. It's not like they can threaten to disrupt their production--I recall that the 787 has parts mostly sourced from the US, western Europe, and Japan, not China. For any joint venture in China, there's probably also clear value in keeping Boeing and Intel facilities operating...

bobthepanda 6y ago
More importantly, China is still trying to jumpstart its own aviation juggernaut but is still using US suppliers, so it could very easily become an own goal.

LatteLazy 6y ago

They're playing the long game. Most of these sanctions don't really work either. China will get what it wants some other way. The US will get to look like it acted. Everyone will be happy...

throwaway6734 6y ago
>Most of these sanctions don't really work either. China will get what it wants some other way. The US will get to look like it acted. Everyone will be happy... What are you basing this on?
- LatteLazy 6y ago
  So, sanctions like these started in 2015 [0]. That was when the Chinese first topped the global super computer league (and that's for public super computers so presumably they'd been leading in private for a while?). The US banned exports to 4 Chinese companies that made the machines. So other companies spring up to fill the gap. This is problem 1: it takes very little time to setup a company, so sanctioning one is sort of pointless. You sanction PLA_Supplier1 LLC? Good thing PLA_Supplier1 LLC is interested in ordering the same kit! The result was a roughly yearly round of sanctions. Every year's new list of names is a list of the companies that bypassed the last year's sanctions... There is also problem 2: back in 2015 the computers used Intel parts but increasingly the Chinese are designing their own. They're not there yet, but they're making progress. TSMC still do most of the manufacture. So the question is: how long till Chinese hackers steal the latest designs or Chinese engineers reverse engineer the parts they buy on the grey market? AND how long until China sets up a TSMC competitor? I'm something of a hawk on China. I'm out on a ledge but here I am. I'd like to see real action on them for a long list of reasons. But before we can have real action, we need to drop the pretend action. Trump (what a turd) loved pretend action. Maybe Biden will be different? But this isn't that imho. Source on the original tariffs: [0] https://www.economist.com/business/2019/06/29/an-american-ban-hits-chinas-supercomputer-industry https://www.economist.com/business/2019/06/29/an-american-ba...
  - throwaway6734 6y ago

stunt 6y ago

China's population is well over 1.4 billion. They need to create new jobs every year with the same rate that some countries do in a decade. I think it's pretty significant that they are able to run a country with that demographics most of whom were not even educated. China still benefits from its US relationship overall. The US does benefit too, but the US also wants to slow down their growth because it's a big threat to its power. I think everything else like human rights issues are just BS. We're partner with most of Arabian countries in the Middle East and we have active arms sell to them including Saudis which are far worst than China in terms of democracy and human rights.

Layke1123 6y ago
I am upvoting this because you will undoubtedly get downvoted for this kind of criticism against the capitalistic empire of the US, but let's not mince words. The US has been years ahead of China in human rights' violations as you directly mention. It's a shame that this website is more acknowledging of said fact.
- systemvoltage 6y ago
  HN has a strong bias towards criticism of US policy, but that's actually good because we need to fix our stuff as well. It gets caught in the crossfire, sheds light and puts public eyes on shitty things we do in the USA. It's a win-win. City dwellers and highly educated people in the US (HN crowd essentially) are internationalized, but lately trying to be more fair to criticisms of CCP just for the sake of being "balanced". Truth prevails at the end of the day. What you're saying is true though. Are there 2 million people in reducation camps in the US based on ethnicity?
  - thatcat 6y ago
    No, but maybe more in prison for victimless crimes and those prisoners are disproportional of minority ethnicity.
  - Daho0n 6y ago
    >HN has a strong bias towards criticism of US policy You must read another HN than I do. I see a HN that is extremely pro-US and anti-PRC. So much so that a random American can pull stuff out his ass about Chinese education and get upvoted while the person living in China gets downvoted for disagreeing. Search this thread for PISA test and see the comments above... >Are there 2 million people in reducation camps in the US based on ethnicity? Have you not seen the historic and current state of blacks incarcerated in the US and how policy is made specifically to criminalise some skin colors and cultures? Some states have as high as 72% black population in prisons. Not to mention all the medicinally experimentation done on poor and/or black people in the US through time. Even if we had been without those today it is still a crazy comparison. If country A have been a highly developed country for hundreds of years and they then point fingers of country B and C who is not only all the way to where A is yet but have also been highly developed for way less time then you are comparing apples to pumpkins.

Covzire 6y ago

China already enjoys a massively lopsided business advantage compared to the US. It's an uphill battle for non-chinese companies to operate in China, for one China requires that part of the ownership of the chinese venture must be owned by Chinese nationals, which means that the CCP also gets to sit on the board and see and influence everything they do. I can't think of any other major power that is this xenophobic.

SEJeff 6y ago
They did not require that for Tesla. The Shanghai is 100% American Tesla owned with no joint venture.
- refulgentis 6y ago
  Yes, the way the CCP does enforcement there is the Hong Kong model: there's an entity 100% owned by Tesla called Tesla Shanghai that has a 50 year lease on a state owned factory, Tesla invests $700 mil, state invests $2 bill, when loans are paid off, Tesla can begin transferring revenue stateside
  - SEJeff 6y ago
    That’s not a terrible model
  - blueblisters 6y ago
    Wait so the gigafactory plant and machinery is technically owned by the Chinese? Or is it just the factory land?
    - derivagral 6y ago
      From this and prior reading I'd expect: they (TSLA) own the factory and things in it, but the land it sits on is leased from the state, perhaps in some proportion to the funds invested. I don't live there, just been a couple times. https://www.loc.gov/law/help/real-property-law/china.php https://www.loc.gov/law/help/real-property-law/china.php

2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago

My totally armchair geopolitical opinion is that they know US companies can simply go elsewhere. Nobody manufactures in China for their "expertise".

threeseed 6y ago
Actually everyone does. China is not just a source of cheap labour. But a source of cheap labour highly skilled in manufacturing which other countries all but abandoned over the previous decades.
- unishark 6y ago
  No they aren't very cheap anymore. You always can get the same manufacturing done elsewhere. It just may not all be available in the same country.

markus_zhang 6y ago

Because China is trying to promote more trading -- which it benefits from. And she does need the products or connections of Boeing/Intel. If China breaks her compeletely from all major US manufacturers, it's equivalent to a declaration of the end of post-2001 world economy and can bring ripples across the world. China is not prepared for that, yet.

mytailorisrich 6y ago

China both needs these companies and has nothing to gain in attacking them. On other hand, the US are trying to slow China's rise by hurting key industries. This is a geopolitical struggle. The US cannot win because China is bigger than they are and so will overtake them sooner or later, but they can slow things down to maintain their dominance as long as they can.

mywittyname 6y ago
> The US cannot win but they can slow things down to maintain their dominance as long as they can. They (the USA) fucked up Japan pretty bad. Throughout the 70s-80s the USA was fearful of the rise of Japan, their incredible ability to usurp American businesses, and their growing trade deficit surplus, which they then rolled back into US T-bonds. From an American perspective, Japan was in the 70s what China is today. In the early-80s, the Yen-to-dollar ratio was really high. This kicked off an inflationary asset bubble within the country that lasted for several years. Starting in 1985, the yen-to-dollar ratio collapsed, falling by half from mid ¥200s in just two years and reaching a low of ¥85 by 95. Japan entered the Lost Decade as a result of this situation. The lost decade became two, then the GFC happened, bringing it to three decades. It is suspected that this was the result of an intentional attack on the Japanese economy by US officials with the express intent to curb Japan's rising economic power.
- thereare5lights 6y ago
  Japan doesn't have over 4x the population of US and a comparable amount of land. China has many advantages that Japan doesn't have. It's not a given that the same thing will happen.
- ampdepolymerase 6y ago
  > In the early-80s, the Yen-to-dollar ratio was really high. This kicked off an inflationary asset bubble within the country that lasted for several years. I believe this is commonly referred to in geopolitics as the Plaza Accord.
- triceratops 6y ago

bumbada 6y ago

>Why doesn't China answer back with similar sanctions? They want to, but they can't, yet. If you listen to CCP officials the long term plan is very clear: To transform China from an export driven economy to a internal market economy so they don't need others, but currently they need them. China currently can not consume what it produces. When I was living there I could not buy the cooking tool(blender) I wanted. I went to Europe, bought the Blender(manufactured in China) and brought it to China. There was not market in China for those and they went straight from the factory to the port. China is not the US, most people in China are very poor. The CCP is very powerful but the country is weak in many ways. In fact China is closing down a lot recently, expats are going out the country fast.

cambalache 6y ago
> China is not the US, most people in China are very poor. https://www.forbes.com/sites/daviddawkins/2019/10/21/china-overtakes-us-in-global-household-wealth-rankings-despite-trade-tensionsreport/?sh=675ccf91749e https://www.forbes.com/sites/daviddawkins/2019/10/21/china-o... https://finance.yahoo.com/news/china-overtake-u-world-largest-135614391.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/china-overtake-u-world-larges... I dont know what China you are talking about. China sheer size is enough to beat already the US in absolute numbers. The per capita numbers is way below but that gap will keep shrinking.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]