28 ms·

Why is China smashing its tech industry?

311 points by exceptione 5y ago

rektide 5y ago
> Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. [1] Because cyberspace is ascendant over the old powers. Alas, sure, it's a pretty sad capitalist shell of what cyberspace could be, but it's still striding past the encumbered old giants. [1] https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence
- spiritplumber 5y ago
  I miss being that optimistic. What happened?
  - hprotagonist 5y ago
    and down they forgot/as up they grew
  - tablespoon 5y ago
    > I miss being that optimistic. What happened? The optimism turned out to be naive? I mean, regardless of whatever "cyberspace" was originally imagined to be, in actuality it turned out to be bunch of Facebooks. And more often than not it's allowed low-quality garbage to be spread with unprecedented effectiveness. Or to summarize in 1996 terminology: cyberspace turned out to be land of timecubes.
    - distribot 5y ago
      The printing press also allowed low-quality garbage to be spread with unprecedented effectiveness. I'm not convinced that previous systems of more centralized distribution of information (television networks and woodblock printing) were better than the ones that succeeded it.
      - tablespoon 5y ago
        > The printing press also allowed low-quality garbage to be spread with unprecedented effectiveness. I'd dispute that, after making one clarification to my original comment: I meant "unprecedented relative effectiveness." At no other time has any rando with a batshit insane idea been able to spread it with near equal access to same the tools people use to spread real knowledge and understanding. To contrast it with the previous system, it's like hiring a bunch of incompetents and then getting rid of code review.
    - creamytaco 5y ago
      Cyberspace does not exist in isolation, it's a network reflecting to a large extent the sum of its parts. In the early / mid 90s, before the masses moved in, "cyberspace" was for the most part what Barlow imagined it to be. The race to the bottom, adtech, consumerist takeover only started when the "stupid" society at large became the majority, so for the west this process was really inevitable. China, being a dictatorship on top of a closed-feedback system and unwilling to let capitalism run unrestricted, has a much better chance of controlling the process and using it to shape society according to a central vision. We should be worried.
    - rektide 5y ago
      dismay is I think due but "turned out to be" is not at all how I see it. the conquest of massified consumerism over the frontier is a true story, but the frontier is still out there, still ready, still awaiting, still vast beyond our wildest imaginings. the excitement of a new liberation, out of corporate data centers & back in to power, back into freedom & exploration, building new connective mediums and places, is more compelling to me personally than ever. and increasingly more feasible, as we get better at developing systems and software. in the aughs Tim O'Reilly was talking about chasing the alpha geeks. by contrast we seem fixated on the muck & mire of the lowest experiences, these days, and we have few visible free radicals pushing the ascent. I believe the former to be not worthy of fixation, and the latter to be imminently close to rediscovering themselves, & they will be equipped with vastly better means to pioneer onward with.
    - pierre 5y ago
      I still believe the pendulum will swing back to something else... internet 2021 is not the final state of the cyberspace, and things will evolve as connectivity, cost of hosting and ubiquity of computer systems increase. What will be the web once we move to a new 3D / AR media or a metaverse platform? What id the internet become distributed again (I see some seed in blockchain / DAO), or if connectivity become ubiquitous (think smart dust). We are just at the beginning of this journey, and the GAFAM of today are the IBM of tomorrow.
  - hosh 5y ago
    Software ate the world. I also remember feeling that optimistic about technology. It wasn’t until this past year, I am getting an inkling of what happened. It’s a continuation of much longer trends that I didn’t see until I started studying Carol Sanford’s work on regenerative paradigms, responsible business, etc. The dominant worldview these days is that of the machine world view. It sees the world as complex machinery, with people as cogs. It denies the power of living systems to be able to live and grow on their own, instead, forcing them to intermediate through the machine. As such, software eating the world is a continuation of that worldview. I think perhaps, this is the “punk” in cyberpunk; that even though people become part of the machine, they can still change the world for the better against old powers. Old powers didn’t understand how the emerging technology works, so there’s a window of time. Perhaps, that, technologists will maintain a tech gap over old powers. But the old powers had been eaten by machines a long time ago, and when new tech companies arose, that machine world view became further entrenched. It didn’t solve for the fundamental problem: living systems are not machines. We are capable of growing and changing on our own. We are not consumers. We are not users. Living systems are what makes software come alive; why would we want software to eat us?
  - ThrowawayR2 5y ago
    What happened was that the silly people who wrote that twaddle managed to forget (somehow) that the millions of miles of fiber optics and copper cabling, the millions of processors that go into servers and backbone routers, the thousands of satellites and microwave links, and so forth are all possible only because of the "Industrial World" and all the uncounted thousands of acres of land on which that infrastructure rests and the businesses that run them are under the jurisdiction of "Governments". There never was and can never be a cyberspace independent of the physical world. All there was was a brief moment of being ignored until the powers that be realized "Oh, hmm, looks like that Internet thingamajig is kind of important now; better start ruling it."
  - fidesomnes 5y ago
    FAANG interviews.
cainxinth 5y ago
They want a big, powerful, capable tech industry... that will never even think of challenging the supremacy of the government. This is their way of reminding the tech sector of that latter part.
- deltasixeight 5y ago
  This article is more than your classic "the CCP is just making moves to solidify it's own power." The article claims the actions taken by China also represent real philosophies about what constitutes economic health. They don't want their greatest minds optimizing ad tech or finding tax loop holes.
  - whatshisface 5y ago
    Tax loopholes would be accounting, not technology.
    - ASalazarMX 5y ago
      Fintech agrees and has motioned to change the subject
    - deltasixeight 5y ago
      Finance is the more broader term here. China likely also doesn't want their greatest minds working on High Frequency Trading algorithms. The article is about tech, but from a broader perspective letting the free market completely decide allocation of resources in all sectors of the economy is something China never completely bought into. After all it is technically a communist.
  - dotcommand 5y ago
    > This article is more than your classic "the CCP is just making moves to solidify it's own power." "And so, in classic CCP fashion, it was time to smash." It's your standard state propaganda. At least he attempts to cover his bases: "China’s leaders famously want to prevent the emergence of alternative centers of power, but is the West so different in this regard?" "For those outside China’s byzantine, opaque nexus of party, government, and big business, it’s very difficult to figure out what’s going on." I guess Noah Smith is in the inside so he knows his stuff? It's your standard "CCP bad because CCP is friends with iran due to BRI" propaganda you find all over traditional and social media. The real question is who is noah smith and why was his article spammed on hn? That would be an interesting article.
ru552 5y ago
I think it's because they want their best and brightest working on physics, materials, technological breakthroughs, etc., instead of ad tech.
- dicomdan 5y ago
  You’re giving a lot of benefit of the doubt to the dictatorship. Establishing complete control over emerging power structures (tech industry) is more likely to be their goal.
  - andy_ppp 5y ago
    We don’t actually know why anyone in power does anything. One thing I do know is we as the West need to figure out how to come together and defend democratic and liberal values, as without them we are seriously lost. We should start by not giving any more money and technology to a Chinese state that clearly do not have our best interests at heart. I think the west is in real danger of just falling apart over the next 50 years if we lose our reasons for existing and instead spend our time arguing about cultural issues. We spend so much time right now looking inward at our small differences we can’t see the reason why our nations became worthwhile in the first place.
    - throwaway4good 5y ago
      "We don’t actually know why anyone in power does anything." This is a not true. Dictators do long speeches. Often quite explicitly stating why they do what they do. Funnily sometimes in democracies there is a bigger space betweeen what is done and what is communicated.
      - simiones 5y ago
        Those speeches usually contain about as much actual information as a corporate PR statement: they, at best, tell you why the dictator wants others to think they are doing something. The only logical way to interpret the intentions of political leaders is to look at their effects. Anything else, even personal diaries, are likely full of interested reasoning and outright lies.
whatshisface 5y ago
Don't assume that there's a strategic explanation concerning externally visible factors when the true explanation may concern strategy, but only around internal factors.
caeril 5y ago
> China may simply see things differently. It’s possible that the Chinese government has decided that the profits of companies like Alibaba and Tencent come more from rents than from actual value added Excellent observation, and I hope, for China's sake, that this is the reason. The United States is likely in for a long-term rude awakening when it finally realizes that an economy predicated on negative-value-add activities like clicking heart icons on photos, repackaging financial securities into products with impossible-to-detangle risk profiles, advertisement and addiction optimization, and political outrage, will not remain any definition of "global superpower" for long. Facebook and Netflix are excellent examples of companies that contribute greatly to our GDP whilst simultaneously draining our reserves of actual capital and mental health.
- anotherman554 5y ago
  I'm surprised you put Netflix in there with Facebook. Do they not have television in China?
  - nceqs3 5y ago
    Yeah I agree with the FB part but Netflix? The chinese audience consumes huge amounts of video content.
    - caeril 5y ago
      Asia/Pacific region consumes, on average, 154 minutes per day of all media, compared to North America's 293. I'm old enough to remember the general optimism we in technology had about the unlocking of human productive potential as automation and globalization freed us from the constraints of scarcity. Marshall Brain, Clay Shirky, and many others write extensively on this zeitgeist. But that's not what ultimately happened. the zombification of our attention that began in the 1950s has accelerated in the last two decades. We're not volunteering our free time to space exploration collectives, life extension self-experimentation in biohacking hackerspaces, or even traditional enterprises like Habitat for Humanity. We're clicking heart icons on posts bemoaning billionaires conducting private space exploration, getting angry at CRISPR researchers on Twitter, and passively consuming "marathons" of Hollywood renditions of dystopian future worlds. This is to say nothing of the fact that we don't even have all that much more free time to begin with. Not because we're all working for SpaceX or in cancer research laboratories, but because the vast majority of the very people CAPABLE of doing so (IQ is in limited supply and not evenly distributed) are actively recruited to make iphone apps more addictive, make pornography engagement higher, and make front-running retail options order flow faster. Apropos of Netflix (or in this specific example, Amazon Prime Video): There are likely 40 million hours passively poured into marathons of The Expanse in North America, by people with an average IQ in excess of 115 (just by virtue of the type of audience). What if half (approximately the NA/Asia split) of those hours were instead poured into activities that actually got us closer to the technologies depicted? Well, the Chinese are doing it. We're not.
duxup 5y ago
Seems like this is just a typical kleptocracy or some authoritarian type system at work where ultimately if it doesn't benefit those in power it has a higher risk of running into trouble when someone is seen as a possible threat / or simply because it is convenient to make room for something those in power support.
saiya-jin 5y ago
I don't think they are smashing tech industry per se, just those in it who grew bold enough they thought they can actually do/say what they want, and not remain forever in servitude to those wielding real power. Be a good boy and stay a good boy and you shall be rewarded, at least domestically. This doesn't foster international success so easily but that's another story.
toss1 5y ago
The Western financial elites thought they were exploiting cheap Chinese labor by promoting outsourcing of manufacturing - it would make for far greater profits. Meanwhile the Chinese were exploiting the West's myopic focus on quarterly profits to gain access to and experience in fabricating and designing the top western technology. The scale of this strategic blunder by the Western societies will be considered of historic importance. The analysis in this article brings that into focus as well as anything I've yet seen. If the West does not rapidly regain focus on the things that matter -- real manufacturing, engineering, and AI (not consumerist opiates for the masses) -- we are soooo screwed.
- clydethefrog 5y ago
  Taking a quick look at the YC S21 offering that is posted here - it seems all this capital is still mostly based on software that stimulates more consuming.
  - toss1 5y ago
    Yup, consume now, profit some this quarter. Nevermind putting in the effort to invent new technologies that could profit and dominate for decades. It is exactly the myopic financialist's approach. It works great for a while, juicing artificial growth. Meanwhile it starves the real growth engines, so when it stops working, there is no hope of recovery before failure (but the finance wizards have by then moved on). Normally this applies at the scale of companies, but here it applies on the scale of nations or societies. Ignore at our peril.
  - orky56 5y ago
    Startup seeks to raise funding or generate profits as quickly as possible -> VCs invest and hope for 50x return within 10 years -> Liquidity event may take startup public where they focus on quarterly profit This is a system of private funding that generates maximum profits within a 5-10 year horizon while China and its public funding and actions is focusing on generating foundational returns and innovation that will last well beyond that 10 year horizon. The US approach of subsidies for loss leaders and laissez faire when it comes to regulation is kicking the can and optimized to pump out millionares/billionaires that can provide outsized returns to people in the market (employees/founders/congress/entrepreneurs) but less for people on the sideline.
FL33TW00D 5y ago
At what point do individual freedoms / economic freedoms (eg starting a company that builds addictive non-productive platforms) inhibit human progress? Perhaps China is right on this one.
citilife 5y ago
The U.S. has been in the process of delisting Chinese companies. I personally suspect that China wanted to get a jump on the effort and in turn force U.S. pension & hedge funds to lose $400B. https://www.wsj.com/articles/investors-rethink-china-bets-after-beijing-crackdown-triggers-stock-market-rout-11627669954 https://www.wsj.com/articles/investors-rethink-china-bets-af... That's a huge amount of money and will dramatically and negatively impact the public pension funds. It's not about the tech, it's about the economic war between China and the United States. At the same time, the CCP is exerting it's authority over these companies to tighten it's control.
- ffggvv 5y ago
  a lot of chinese also hold baba and some of these stocks
avmich 5y ago
Hard to judge this approach. On one hand, spartan approach to economy of USSR after WWII allowed the growth of 1960-s. On the other hand, it also helped with the collapse of 1980-s. Maybe China's trying to take that into account. I'd actually argue with the idea that China is doing this intentionally. Maybe it's not due to the centralized planning that tech sector gets smashed - maybe it's a much simpler reason behind that.
up_and_up 5y ago
How does this inspire founders to startup a company in China? Does this inspire me to invest more money in China?
johnnyApplePRNG 5y ago
I thought it was well known why Jack Ma/Ant were being crushed? He spoke out against and essentially insulted the government in a speech last year, and immediately disappeared from the limelight. [0] [0] https://entrepreneurshandbook.co/the-speech-that-cost-jack-ma-37-billion-dollars-5ad42393c9ba https://entrepreneurshandbook.co/the-speech-that-cost-jack-m...
- geodel 5y ago
  Jack Ma was essentially engaging in payday loan type shady business. Being some kinda free speech warrior is western media POV.
ftr45 5y ago
the question should be: ''why aren't any other governments doing that?''
nobody0 5y ago
More like smashing FAANG-like hegemony and K-12 riddle-solving army bootcamps. Given Internet companies are ubiquitous, we sort of equate tech firms to them...
ilamont 5y ago
I believe we're seeing yet another example of an ossified and hierarchal Chinese Communist Party struggling to maintain control over real or imagined internal threats. Under the CCP, the "rights" pendulum swings wildly for society and the economy, alternating between openness and crackdowns. Some policies seem well thought out, and then you have edicts which seem impulsive and extreme with little regard to long-term consequences or the impact on China's people. 100 flowers/Great Leap Forward. Cultural Revolution/Deng reforms. Tiananmen/hypernationalism. Tech has enjoyed a relatively open hand for two decades. Now the fist is closed and comes smashing down.
- zwieback 5y ago
  I also think this much simpler explanation is at least worth considering.
- whydoibother 5y ago
  Why do you have the same poorly informed take posted twice? (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27976920 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27976920) Couldn't find any other anti-CCP talking points to use?
volta83 5y ago
> There are certainly those in America who believe that Facebook and Google produce little of value relative to the profit they rake in; maybe China’s leaders, for reasons that will remain forever opaque to us, have simply reached the same conclusion. Arguably, capturing most of your country's top talent with absurd salaries and putting them to work on world-critical challenges like... how to generate more revenue from advertisement or... how to create as many "phone-addicts" as possible... could be quantified as producing tons and tons of negative value. If China's crackdown on "consumer-facing tech" is about this, that could be a very good thing for China long term. I grew up wanting to work on NASA and putting stuff on space, and during university got offered 10x the NASA salaries at FAANG companies, and was to week to just say "no thanks". 10 years later I am starting to wonder what my legacy is going to be.
- f00zz 5y ago
  > "That's just from EU consumers, never mind the rest of the world - spending so much on mobile netlink that companies can clear more than thirty billion in profit, in profit alone, over two years. Think of the gross! So you tell me - is that the best way of spending humanity's money, webbing friends, playing games on the bus? A fraction of a single percent of that money, we could have bases on Mars in five years. Destiny - possibility - glorious - but, no, we'll keep frittering our money on games, on cosmetics, on flim-flam, and we'll turn round in five hundred years and still be right here where we are now." - from Adam Roberts' sci-fi novel "Gradisil"
  - dematz 5y ago
    I mean, I can see the point. Maybe facebook is getting money but not actually creating value for people. ...but if we get Mars bases, so what? I'd rather play video games on earth than farm potatoes on Mars. Call it a lack of imagination but yeah.
- atom_arranger 5y ago
  I have a similar experience. I grew up wanting to work in robotics but found pure software work to be as enjoyable (maybe not as "meaningful", but as enjoyable), and much more lucrative. Not sure why coding CRUD pays so much more than what robotics tends to. I guess there's more material costs, costs to get a company started and profitable could be higher.
jeswin 5y ago
Asia is headed towards war - it almost seems inevitable. Xi has publicly committed to not leaving Taiwan invasion to the next generation. China is focused on building an industrial base that complements its military power while generating cash, and internet software startups aren't going to help. For the rest of Asia, they'd do well to militarize; for Japan and Australia to consider getting nuclear weapons or hosting them, and for India to rapidly increase stockpiles.
- deltasixeight 5y ago
  War is unlikely. Globalization of all economies means everybody loses in a war. The devastation will harm everyone in a significant way. The most likely outcome is just perpetual political squabbling and the continuous feeling that war is omnipresent but realistically will never occur. China likely plans to dominate the US from a prestige standpoint. Better GDP, higher technology, that kind of thing and they already have the momentum for it.
  - I-M-S 5y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Illusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Illusion
- cyberpunk 5y ago
  Can you elaborate on why you think it seems inevitable? From my armchair, I can't see a benefit to China for kicking off a superpower war; they're already pulling ahead in STEM, their economy is fairly safe and not really that dependant on exports, quality of life is improving massively, infra is improving.. ?
  - jeswin 5y ago
    I don't mean imminent war, but that it's headed there. From articles in Chinese news sites, it seems Xi wants to attach reunification to his legacy. The thing with dictatorships is that ultimately it will depend on what one person wants to achieve. Xi is of course not going to risk a war that he won't win easily. So there's enough time for the rest of the world to reverse the wholesale shift of industrial capacity into China. Taiwan had nuclear program in the 70s which would have prevented war and invasion. That was nipped under pressure from everyone else, so I imho defending a democratic nation must be a shared responsibility.
ppeetteerr 5y ago
China's investment into hard-tech (semiconductors, etc) doesn't not mean it can't also allow for the growth of consumer tech. For instance, we subsidize farming to keep it state-side but we don't prevent food processing companies from growing and consolidating. Maybe the point here is that the government in china wants to always be between the consumer and the service, which makes a lot more sense. Maybe Alibaba and the like have a connection to every person and the gov'ment is threatened by that relationship. There are many possibilities but I don't necessarily agree with the conclusion of the author: that to grow their hard-tech industry, they have to punish consumer tech.
- japhib 5y ago
  > doesn't not mean it can't also allow for the growth of consumer tech I can't understand this sentence haha ... Too many "nots" > I don't necessarily agree with the conclusion of the author: that to grow their hard-tech industry, they have to punish consumer tech. I don't think the author is trying to argue that this strategy is true -- I think they're just trying to explain China's behavior.
  - ppeetteerr 5y ago
    Not my finest post, I agree
fallingfrog 5y ago
Another perspective: https://www.asiafinancial.com/china-seen-ushering-in-new-era-as-it-puts-socialism-before-shareholders https://www.asiafinancial.com/china-seen-ushering-in-new-era...
granularity 5y ago
> And of course you need firmware as well. Love this. It's like Obama's "the bubble sort would be the wrong way to go". Clearly Mr Smith has done his homework on the subject of military technology and has learned a Technical Fact: "firmware exists". He probably even knows that it goes between hardware and software!
_448 5y ago
The USA tech industry did start with hard-tech. The hint is in the name "Silicon Valley". The spur in innovation in the American tech industry started with companies working on projects from the defence and aerospace industry. Along the way they lost the plot, mostly during the dot-com bubble when the investment/banking/family-office industry(that does not understand tech) got heavily involved into it to make quick money! That diversion from hard-tech to click-bait tech has continued even today, because the investors want quick return whereas for hard-tech you have to have a lot of patience to see positive outcome. One country that, to some extent, successfully emulated the early Silicon Valley type strategy is Israel that has encouraged lot of personnel from defence and aerospace industry to form commercial ventures. Not many countries understand this point; many go by the PR bling that is spewed by the USA internet companies(mostly pushed by get-rich-quick minded VCs) and try to encourage this type of non-essential startups in the hope of being "successful similar to Silicon Valley". The definition of successful is obviously is being set by these get-rich-quick VCs rather than the country itself. It is not surprising that you see lot of the VCs/Accelerators/Incubators fund me-too type companies in other geographies in the hope that they will be acquired by companies in the US! It is all bait-and-switch game and not meant to develop R&D and innovation that benefits societies at large. Benefits to the society, if at all there is one, is the by-product or after-thought of this whole process.
- ativzzz 5y ago
  It's much easier for Israel to justify investing into "hard" tech that accelerates military power because they are surrounded by ideological enemies and are perpetually at war.
- lasagnaphil 5y ago
  It's illuminating (and equally harrowing) to see how much of the fundamental technology we have today has been researched and invented by the military (the Internet is one prime example), in stark contrast to the widespread belief among today's SV techies that free market innovation is what's driving the tech.
  - _448 5y ago
Gollapalli 5y ago
This probably isn't a popular opinion, but I think China may be genuinely right here. Innovation requires solving genuinely hard technical problems. Consumer Internet is, in general, not that. I genuinely hope that America makes a similar shift in it's own VC sector.
- fma 5y ago
  Haven't read the article - but this is my sentiment for many years. I went to undergrad for computer engineering, then a masters in electrical engineering...hoping to do actual engineering work. And I end up having a career in web app development because that's where the money is at. I am surprised that those who continue to work on "genuinely hard technical problems" do so when web app/dev has so many jobs with pretty damn good pay. As an anecdote, my wife has a PhD in chemistry from a top program. Majority of her peers in grad school ended up taking classes in CS, Data Science, drop their program and work at a tech company. When she graduated...I remember sitting with her at a career website and just looking at the differences in quantity of jobs for hard sciences vs IT (my wife's career now has nothing w/ her hard earned degree)
- salt-thrower 5y ago
  You can broaden that statement and say that almost all the CRUD-app bullshit which devs get employed for these days isn't that, either. I've worked as a dev for insurance, B2B fintech, and athletic wear companies. They're all doing trivial CRUD problems behind the scenes, where the only real challenge is dealing with asinine management and organizational issues. And even if the consumer internet problems are technically challenging, like problems of scale for Facebook, you can argue pretty easily that solving them to increase Facebook's power and profitability is a net negative for society. For China to simply say "no" to that and invest more heavily in the physical economy is... a smart move, by my estimation. It tracks with what I'd do in my "king for a day" fantasy. Not that I think they're out there building a utopia - they're still a repressive regime - but they're wisely avoiding a class of problems that the West has jumped into headfirst.
ajmurmann 5y ago
In discussions like this people will always call out how our smartest minds are being wasted on serving advertisements. While I despise advertisements and the economy around it, I wonder how accurate that assertion actually is. So much of the work done at Google and Facebook seems to be solving general computing problems. That's how we got things like React and k8s that aren't specific to advertisements at all. On top we constantly complain about app the projects cancelled by Google. All these projects were build by someone and rarely are directly related to serving advertisements. Not to mention all the very valuable products provided by Google many of us use every day that provide tremendous value despite Google's ultimate goal of serving ads. Gmail, Maps, Docs, Calendar, YouTube, Google Voice and probably many more. Not to mention products we ridicule for their unnecessary changes and internal competitors like Meet/Hangouts. Pie on the sky stuff like self driving cars. AI advancements like Tensor flow. They have a leading security project that slowed down all out CPUs ;) What percentage of work at Google is in fact directly "wasted" on advertisements?
DamnYuppie 5y ago
China saw how the tech companies in the USA have too much power to influence conversations. They want no part of that, they want absolute control and if they have to destroy part of their economy to make sure it happens then so be it.
- celeritascelery 5y ago
  I don’t get it. Why wouldn’t you just put them under your control? Now you have all that power.
Animats 5y ago
China is not "smashing its tech industry". It's cracking down on private Internet companies that acquired too much power through network effects. This is completely consistent with CCP doctrine. Anything that central has to be state-owned. Xi declared this year that while digitization is important, “we must recognize the fundamental importance of the real economy… and never deindustrialize.” Right. China, remember, has a national industrial policy. It's expressed in the national 5 year plan, which is taken seriously and used to set priorities. What those priorities are is no secret. The current 5 year plan, the 14th, lists them.[1] Specific technology goals are in blue boxes. Semiconductors, gas turbines, biotech, new energy vehicles, robotics, advanced agricultural equipment. Internet services are mentioned in the Plan. One key line section out here: "We will strengthen the economic supervision of internet platforms in accordance with laws and regulations, clarify platform enterprise positioning and regulatory rules, improve the laws and regulations concerning the identification of monopolies, and crack down on monopolies and unfair competition. ... We will intensify anti-monopoly and anti-unfair competition law enforcement and judicial efforts and prevent the disorderly expansion of capital." If you think this isn't to be taken seriously, go back and look at the 13th 5 year plan and check off the completed items. [1] https://cset.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/t0284_14th_Five_Year_Plan_EN.pdf https://cset.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/t0284_14th_Fi...
- lasagnaphil 5y ago
  Maybe the headline's a bit misleading, but what you're saying is almost exactly what the article is talking about. (The article immediately refutes the notion of "smashing its tech industry" right away)
  - xchaotic 5y ago
    but they're 'smashing' the likes of Ant Financial who were doing predatory, unsecured lending on an unprecedented scale. So IMO the thesis of smashing 'Internet' companies is incorrect - they're just making sure economy doesn't go into bubble territory (lending fuels spending) and the likes of Jack Ma, who are detached from the party don't get too much power/money.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ffggvv 5y ago
american liberals really wish we could be china. you can sense it in how they talk. and some of that arrogance and desire for power seeps through their claims that it’s for the best for everyone. and of course they should be in control because they know what’s best for society. it’s the same people that want to ban large soda containers their goal is likely the same as the ccp too. destroy any power that isnt the government.
djanogo 5y ago
I am not surprised after seeing how US tech companies created their own rules what public can discuss and undermined democratically elected leaders. They don't want Chinese versions of Jack D, MarkZ, and numerous MSM groups. No country would want social media companies that US now has.
mcguire 5y ago
Alternative hypothesis: This is just another round in the infighting between China's party, government, and big business, one that the party and government intends to win. China's big, customer-facing "tech industry" (I agree with that part of the argument) lives in the same environment as that of the rest of the world, with the same ability to generate the same large profits. Those large profits provide a power base that threatens the party, which in turn uses its governmental power to smack down anything threatening.
steve76 5y ago
marxists and liberals don't believe in rules. Just power. Burn the world if you have to. That's why no one wants them around and wherever they go the smart nice rich people flee like a movie monster is attacking their village. There are rules, unavoidable ones. No one likes to be told what to do from far away. It's best to leave martial affairs for a return to civil life as fast as possible. Life and everything that comes with it is there for you. You're not there to act as some fuel source for a rapidly devolving, senile, incompetent auditor. With no principles to reign them in, no humanitarianism, marxists can never quit the conflict and always do themselves in. The world is much too big and complex to govern through brutality and bullying. Trying to qualify expertise is like trying to stop a flood. People are smart and adapt and work their way up and their shortcuts and mistakes are amplified to everyone instead of being siloed into their own lives. Laws are there to put a limit on the violence, not add to it. If you're making things worse, just go away. Governments are not there to turn self proclaimed intellectual progressives into movie stars.
AzzieElbab 5y ago
Is it just a big fu to investors of now delisted companies?
clipradiowallet 5y ago
Here's a conspiracy theory...China is not smashing its' tech industry. The CCP could be repositioning [financially] within the sector. Step 1 is to add regulation - which depresses market prices and gives the state more power. Step 2 is to swoop in and buy as much as is available at the [newly] depressed prices. It's unlikely, but in their position it's what I would want to do.
papito 5y ago
China is "cooling" certain sectors, to spur growth in physical tech and manufacturing. This is where the future power is - not in social networks and ad sales, it's in stuff. Just look at what happens when we can't manufacture our own chips. Car factories halt. Personal computing prices spike. Military tech sputters. China is doing what the U.S. would normally do in an effective anti-monopoly action, if our system was not broken and the government not bought with its guts by billionaires floating in tax-cut windfall. Now we have entities that have more legal resources than the government, which is a recipe for disaster (and runaway legalized corruption). China sees what happens when you let money run loose through power structures, and it does not want the same fate.
- Nbox9 5y ago
  > This is where the future power is - not in social networks and ad sales, it's in stuff.] I strongly disagree. The US was not able to win the Vietnam war with 100x the amount of military stuff. Stuxnet halted Iranian nuclear research. US elections were interfered with by foreign hackers. Microsoft’s revenue is >$100B a year, and it’s mostly software driven. Information, data, data-analysis, networking and intelligence is where power comes from.
  - papito 5y ago
    And how is your example even relevant to a war from a deep pre-Internet era? What about WWII? What about Desert Storm? There is absolutely no guarantee that your adversary does not outplay you in internet cat and mouse games right from the start, like this recent disastrous scenario shows: https://www.defenseone.com/policy/2021/07/it-failed-miserably-after-wargaming-loss-joint-chiefs-are-overhauling-how-us-military-will-fight/184050/ https://www.defenseone.com/policy/2021/07/it-failed-miserabl... And then what? If we think future wars will be won by hackers in hoodies, it's our funeral. An out-of-control hacking war will have to escalate to bare metal war. People will want to see explosions on TV, as they lose power and are unable to gas up their cars.
- ghomrassen 5y ago
  They are not doing this for anti-monopoly reasons. It's purely because they thought the tech companies had more data, and therefore more power than them. One of the examples I've seen over here, which I can't seem to find in English, was an infographic created by Didi. Either stupidly or some tech dick-waving contest, they made a chart of the most hard working government agencies in Beijing. They had all this work habit data and they released it as a fun little thing. Suffice it to say, it's hard to find now and a smaller part of a overarching data issue that has gone out of the government's hands. Totalitarians are gonna totalitarian, but now they've learned to do it effectively and use the terminology the free world does to make it sound righteous.
mrkramer 5y ago
Why is US smashing its tech industry that's the question.
rapjr9 5y ago
Another potential explanation is China is preparing for a possible cyberwar and after seeing the USA population manipulated by social networking during elections has decided they want their population to be less vulnerable to outside manipulation.
xmly 5y ago
"Fake-tech" industry, more precisely. If you can read Chinese, you know people in China percepts whether the company is a real-tech company based on whether they have been sanctioned by US. And most of Chinese think the fake-techs consumes too much resource and contributes too little, the more resources should be put on the real-tech companies.
magwa101 5y ago
Power, that's why China is smashing it's tech industry. In the US the industry, as a whole, has a massive influence on politics, culture and society. In China that is a non starter for the government. It is about maintaining power and nothing else.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
fennecfoxy 5y ago
They're not smashing it, they're taking control of it. Let capitalism and a faux free market/private companies do all the work & IP theft and then when they're successful take them over and apply party politics to them. Bet it's the same reason they took HK early.

311 points by exceptione 5y ago

> Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. [1] Because cyberspace is ascendant over the old powers. Alas, sure, it's a pretty sad capitalist shell of what cyberspace could be, but it's still striding past the encumbered old giants. [1] https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence

spiritplumber 5y ago
I miss being that optimistic. What happened?
- hprotagonist 5y ago
  and down they forgot/as up they grew
- tablespoon 5y ago
  > I miss being that optimistic. What happened? The optimism turned out to be naive? I mean, regardless of whatever "cyberspace" was originally imagined to be, in actuality it turned out to be bunch of Facebooks. And more often than not it's allowed low-quality garbage to be spread with unprecedented effectiveness. Or to summarize in 1996 terminology: cyberspace turned out to be land of timecubes.
  - distribot 5y ago
    The printing press also allowed low-quality garbage to be spread with unprecedented effectiveness. I'm not convinced that previous systems of more centralized distribution of information (television networks and woodblock printing) were better than the ones that succeeded it.
    - tablespoon 5y ago
      > The printing press also allowed low-quality garbage to be spread with unprecedented effectiveness. I'd dispute that, after making one clarification to my original comment: I meant "unprecedented relative effectiveness." At no other time has any rando with a batshit insane idea been able to spread it with near equal access to same the tools people use to spread real knowledge and understanding. To contrast it with the previous system, it's like hiring a bunch of incompetents and then getting rid of code review.
  - creamytaco 5y ago
    Cyberspace does not exist in isolation, it's a network reflecting to a large extent the sum of its parts. In the early / mid 90s, before the masses moved in, "cyberspace" was for the most part what Barlow imagined it to be. The race to the bottom, adtech, consumerist takeover only started when the "stupid" society at large became the majority, so for the west this process was really inevitable. China, being a dictatorship on top of a closed-feedback system and unwilling to let capitalism run unrestricted, has a much better chance of controlling the process and using it to shape society according to a central vision. We should be worried.
  - rektide 5y ago
    dismay is I think due but "turned out to be" is not at all how I see it. the conquest of massified consumerism over the frontier is a true story, but the frontier is still out there, still ready, still awaiting, still vast beyond our wildest imaginings. the excitement of a new liberation, out of corporate data centers & back in to power, back into freedom & exploration, building new connective mediums and places, is more compelling to me personally than ever. and increasingly more feasible, as we get better at developing systems and software. in the aughs Tim O'Reilly was talking about chasing the alpha geeks. by contrast we seem fixated on the muck & mire of the lowest experiences, these days, and we have few visible free radicals pushing the ascent. I believe the former to be not worthy of fixation, and the latter to be imminently close to rediscovering themselves, & they will be equipped with vastly better means to pioneer onward with.
  - pierre 5y ago
    I still believe the pendulum will swing back to something else... internet 2021 is not the final state of the cyberspace, and things will evolve as connectivity, cost of hosting and ubiquity of computer systems increase. What will be the web once we move to a new 3D / AR media or a metaverse platform? What id the internet become distributed again (I see some seed in blockchain / DAO), or if connectivity become ubiquitous (think smart dust). We are just at the beginning of this journey, and the GAFAM of today are the IBM of tomorrow.
- hosh 5y ago
  Software ate the world. I also remember feeling that optimistic about technology. It wasn’t until this past year, I am getting an inkling of what happened. It’s a continuation of much longer trends that I didn’t see until I started studying Carol Sanford’s work on regenerative paradigms, responsible business, etc. The dominant worldview these days is that of the machine world view. It sees the world as complex machinery, with people as cogs. It denies the power of living systems to be able to live and grow on their own, instead, forcing them to intermediate through the machine. As such, software eating the world is a continuation of that worldview. I think perhaps, this is the “punk” in cyberpunk; that even though people become part of the machine, they can still change the world for the better against old powers. Old powers didn’t understand how the emerging technology works, so there’s a window of time. Perhaps, that, technologists will maintain a tech gap over old powers. But the old powers had been eaten by machines a long time ago, and when new tech companies arose, that machine world view became further entrenched. It didn’t solve for the fundamental problem: living systems are not machines. We are capable of growing and changing on our own. We are not consumers. We are not users. Living systems are what makes software come alive; why would we want software to eat us?
- ThrowawayR2 5y ago
  What happened was that the silly people who wrote that twaddle managed to forget (somehow) that the millions of miles of fiber optics and copper cabling, the millions of processors that go into servers and backbone routers, the thousands of satellites and microwave links, and so forth are all possible only because of the "Industrial World" and all the uncounted thousands of acres of land on which that infrastructure rests and the businesses that run them are under the jurisdiction of "Governments". There never was and can never be a cyberspace independent of the physical world. All there was was a brief moment of being ignored until the powers that be realized "Oh, hmm, looks like that Internet thingamajig is kind of important now; better start ruling it."
- fidesomnes 5y ago
  FAANG interviews.

cainxinth 5y ago

They want a big, powerful, capable tech industry... that will never even think of challenging the supremacy of the government. This is their way of reminding the tech sector of that latter part.

deltasixeight 5y ago
This article is more than your classic "the CCP is just making moves to solidify it's own power." The article claims the actions taken by China also represent real philosophies about what constitutes economic health. They don't want their greatest minds optimizing ad tech or finding tax loop holes.
- whatshisface 5y ago
  Tax loopholes would be accounting, not technology.
  - ASalazarMX 5y ago
    Fintech agrees and has motioned to change the subject
  - deltasixeight 5y ago
    Finance is the more broader term here. China likely also doesn't want their greatest minds working on High Frequency Trading algorithms. The article is about tech, but from a broader perspective letting the free market completely decide allocation of resources in all sectors of the economy is something China never completely bought into. After all it is technically a communist.
- dotcommand 5y ago
  > This article is more than your classic "the CCP is just making moves to solidify it's own power." "And so, in classic CCP fashion, it was time to smash." It's your standard state propaganda. At least he attempts to cover his bases: "China’s leaders famously want to prevent the emergence of alternative centers of power, but is the West so different in this regard?" "For those outside China’s byzantine, opaque nexus of party, government, and big business, it’s very difficult to figure out what’s going on." I guess Noah Smith is in the inside so he knows his stuff? It's your standard "CCP bad because CCP is friends with iran due to BRI" propaganda you find all over traditional and social media. The real question is who is noah smith and why was his article spammed on hn? That would be an interesting article.

ru552 5y ago

I think it's because they want their best and brightest working on physics, materials, technological breakthroughs, etc., instead of ad tech.

dicomdan 5y ago
You’re giving a lot of benefit of the doubt to the dictatorship. Establishing complete control over emerging power structures (tech industry) is more likely to be their goal.
- andy_ppp 5y ago
  We don’t actually know why anyone in power does anything. One thing I do know is we as the West need to figure out how to come together and defend democratic and liberal values, as without them we are seriously lost. We should start by not giving any more money and technology to a Chinese state that clearly do not have our best interests at heart. I think the west is in real danger of just falling apart over the next 50 years if we lose our reasons for existing and instead spend our time arguing about cultural issues. We spend so much time right now looking inward at our small differences we can’t see the reason why our nations became worthwhile in the first place.
  - throwaway4good 5y ago
    "We don’t actually know why anyone in power does anything." This is a not true. Dictators do long speeches. Often quite explicitly stating why they do what they do. Funnily sometimes in democracies there is a bigger space betweeen what is done and what is communicated.
    - simiones 5y ago
      Those speeches usually contain about as much actual information as a corporate PR statement: they, at best, tell you why the dictator wants others to think they are doing something. The only logical way to interpret the intentions of political leaders is to look at their effects. Anything else, even personal diaries, are likely full of interested reasoning and outright lies.

whatshisface 5y ago

Don't assume that there's a strategic explanation concerning externally visible factors when the true explanation may concern strategy, but only around internal factors.

caeril 5y ago

> China may simply see things differently. It’s possible that the Chinese government has decided that the profits of companies like Alibaba and Tencent come more from rents than from actual value added Excellent observation, and I hope, for China's sake, that this is the reason. The United States is likely in for a long-term rude awakening when it finally realizes that an economy predicated on negative-value-add activities like clicking heart icons on photos, repackaging financial securities into products with impossible-to-detangle risk profiles, advertisement and addiction optimization, and political outrage, will not remain any definition of "global superpower" for long. Facebook and Netflix are excellent examples of companies that contribute greatly to our GDP whilst simultaneously draining our reserves of actual capital and mental health.

anotherman554 5y ago
I'm surprised you put Netflix in there with Facebook. Do they not have television in China?
- nceqs3 5y ago
  Yeah I agree with the FB part but Netflix? The chinese audience consumes huge amounts of video content.
  - caeril 5y ago
    Asia/Pacific region consumes, on average, 154 minutes per day of all media, compared to North America's 293. I'm old enough to remember the general optimism we in technology had about the unlocking of human productive potential as automation and globalization freed us from the constraints of scarcity. Marshall Brain, Clay Shirky, and many others write extensively on this zeitgeist. But that's not what ultimately happened. the zombification of our attention that began in the 1950s has accelerated in the last two decades. We're not volunteering our free time to space exploration collectives, life extension self-experimentation in biohacking hackerspaces, or even traditional enterprises like Habitat for Humanity. We're clicking heart icons on posts bemoaning billionaires conducting private space exploration, getting angry at CRISPR researchers on Twitter, and passively consuming "marathons" of Hollywood renditions of dystopian future worlds. This is to say nothing of the fact that we don't even have all that much more free time to begin with. Not because we're all working for SpaceX or in cancer research laboratories, but because the vast majority of the very people CAPABLE of doing so (IQ is in limited supply and not evenly distributed) are actively recruited to make iphone apps more addictive, make pornography engagement higher, and make front-running retail options order flow faster. Apropos of Netflix (or in this specific example, Amazon Prime Video): There are likely 40 million hours passively poured into marathons of The Expanse in North America, by people with an average IQ in excess of 115 (just by virtue of the type of audience). What if half (approximately the NA/Asia split) of those hours were instead poured into activities that actually got us closer to the technologies depicted? Well, the Chinese are doing it. We're not.

duxup 5y ago

Seems like this is just a typical kleptocracy or some authoritarian type system at work where ultimately if it doesn't benefit those in power it has a higher risk of running into trouble when someone is seen as a possible threat / or simply because it is convenient to make room for something those in power support.

saiya-jin 5y ago

I don't think they are smashing tech industry per se, just those in it who grew bold enough they thought they can actually do/say what they want, and not remain forever in servitude to those wielding real power. Be a good boy and stay a good boy and you shall be rewarded, at least domestically. This doesn't foster international success so easily but that's another story.

toss1 5y ago

The Western financial elites thought they were exploiting cheap Chinese labor by promoting outsourcing of manufacturing - it would make for far greater profits. Meanwhile the Chinese were exploiting the West's myopic focus on quarterly profits to gain access to and experience in fabricating and designing the top western technology. The scale of this strategic blunder by the Western societies will be considered of historic importance. The analysis in this article brings that into focus as well as anything I've yet seen. If the West does not rapidly regain focus on the things that matter -- real manufacturing, engineering, and AI (not consumerist opiates for the masses) -- we are soooo screwed.

clydethefrog 5y ago
Taking a quick look at the YC S21 offering that is posted here - it seems all this capital is still mostly based on software that stimulates more consuming.
- toss1 5y ago
  Yup, consume now, profit some this quarter. Nevermind putting in the effort to invent new technologies that could profit and dominate for decades. It is exactly the myopic financialist's approach. It works great for a while, juicing artificial growth. Meanwhile it starves the real growth engines, so when it stops working, there is no hope of recovery before failure (but the finance wizards have by then moved on). Normally this applies at the scale of companies, but here it applies on the scale of nations or societies. Ignore at our peril.
- orky56 5y ago
  Startup seeks to raise funding or generate profits as quickly as possible -> VCs invest and hope for 50x return within 10 years -> Liquidity event may take startup public where they focus on quarterly profit This is a system of private funding that generates maximum profits within a 5-10 year horizon while China and its public funding and actions is focusing on generating foundational returns and innovation that will last well beyond that 10 year horizon. The US approach of subsidies for loss leaders and laissez faire when it comes to regulation is kicking the can and optimized to pump out millionares/billionaires that can provide outsized returns to people in the market (employees/founders/congress/entrepreneurs) but less for people on the sideline.

FL33TW00D 5y ago

At what point do individual freedoms / economic freedoms (eg starting a company that builds addictive non-productive platforms) inhibit human progress? Perhaps China is right on this one.

citilife 5y ago

The U.S. has been in the process of delisting Chinese companies. I personally suspect that China wanted to get a jump on the effort and in turn force U.S. pension & hedge funds to lose $400B. https://www.wsj.com/articles/investors-rethink-china-bets-after-beijing-crackdown-triggers-stock-market-rout-11627669954 https://www.wsj.com/articles/investors-rethink-china-bets-af... That's a huge amount of money and will dramatically and negatively impact the public pension funds. It's not about the tech, it's about the economic war between China and the United States. At the same time, the CCP is exerting it's authority over these companies to tighten it's control.

ffggvv 5y ago
a lot of chinese also hold baba and some of these stocks

avmich 5y ago

Hard to judge this approach. On one hand, spartan approach to economy of USSR after WWII allowed the growth of 1960-s. On the other hand, it also helped with the collapse of 1980-s. Maybe China's trying to take that into account. I'd actually argue with the idea that China is doing this intentionally. Maybe it's not due to the centralized planning that tech sector gets smashed - maybe it's a much simpler reason behind that.

up_and_up 5y ago

How does this inspire founders to startup a company in China? Does this inspire me to invest more money in China?

johnnyApplePRNG 5y ago

I thought it was well known why Jack Ma/Ant were being crushed? He spoke out against and essentially insulted the government in a speech last year, and immediately disappeared from the limelight. [0] [0] https://entrepreneurshandbook.co/the-speech-that-cost-jack-ma-37-billion-dollars-5ad42393c9ba https://entrepreneurshandbook.co/the-speech-that-cost-jack-m...

geodel 5y ago
Jack Ma was essentially engaging in payday loan type shady business. Being some kinda free speech warrior is western media POV.

ftr45 5y ago

the question should be: ''why aren't any other governments doing that?''

nobody0 5y ago

More like smashing FAANG-like hegemony and K-12 riddle-solving army bootcamps. Given Internet companies are ubiquitous, we sort of equate tech firms to them...

ilamont 5y ago

I believe we're seeing yet another example of an ossified and hierarchal Chinese Communist Party struggling to maintain control over real or imagined internal threats. Under the CCP, the "rights" pendulum swings wildly for society and the economy, alternating between openness and crackdowns. Some policies seem well thought out, and then you have edicts which seem impulsive and extreme with little regard to long-term consequences or the impact on China's people. 100 flowers/Great Leap Forward. Cultural Revolution/Deng reforms. Tiananmen/hypernationalism. Tech has enjoyed a relatively open hand for two decades. Now the fist is closed and comes smashing down.

zwieback 5y ago
I also think this much simpler explanation is at least worth considering.
whydoibother 5y ago
Why do you have the same poorly informed take posted twice? (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27976920 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27976920) Couldn't find any other anti-CCP talking points to use?

volta83 5y ago

> There are certainly those in America who believe that Facebook and Google produce little of value relative to the profit they rake in; maybe China’s leaders, for reasons that will remain forever opaque to us, have simply reached the same conclusion. Arguably, capturing most of your country's top talent with absurd salaries and putting them to work on world-critical challenges like... how to generate more revenue from advertisement or... how to create as many "phone-addicts" as possible... could be quantified as producing tons and tons of negative value. If China's crackdown on "consumer-facing tech" is about this, that could be a very good thing for China long term. I grew up wanting to work on NASA and putting stuff on space, and during university got offered 10x the NASA salaries at FAANG companies, and was to week to just say "no thanks". 10 years later I am starting to wonder what my legacy is going to be.

f00zz 5y ago
> "That's just from EU consumers, never mind the rest of the world - spending so much on mobile netlink that companies can clear more than thirty billion in profit, in profit alone, over two years. Think of the gross! So you tell me - is that the best way of spending humanity's money, webbing friends, playing games on the bus? A fraction of a single percent of that money, we could have bases on Mars in five years. Destiny - possibility - glorious - but, no, we'll keep frittering our money on games, on cosmetics, on flim-flam, and we'll turn round in five hundred years and still be right here where we are now." - from Adam Roberts' sci-fi novel "Gradisil"
- dematz 5y ago
  I mean, I can see the point. Maybe facebook is getting money but not actually creating value for people. ...but if we get Mars bases, so what? I'd rather play video games on earth than farm potatoes on Mars. Call it a lack of imagination but yeah.
atom_arranger 5y ago
I have a similar experience. I grew up wanting to work in robotics but found pure software work to be as enjoyable (maybe not as "meaningful", but as enjoyable), and much more lucrative. Not sure why coding CRUD pays so much more than what robotics tends to. I guess there's more material costs, costs to get a company started and profitable could be higher.

jeswin 5y ago

Asia is headed towards war - it almost seems inevitable. Xi has publicly committed to not leaving Taiwan invasion to the next generation. China is focused on building an industrial base that complements its military power while generating cash, and internet software startups aren't going to help. For the rest of Asia, they'd do well to militarize; for Japan and Australia to consider getting nuclear weapons or hosting them, and for India to rapidly increase stockpiles.

deltasixeight 5y ago
War is unlikely. Globalization of all economies means everybody loses in a war. The devastation will harm everyone in a significant way. The most likely outcome is just perpetual political squabbling and the continuous feeling that war is omnipresent but realistically will never occur. China likely plans to dominate the US from a prestige standpoint. Better GDP, higher technology, that kind of thing and they already have the momentum for it.
- I-M-S 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Illusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Illusion
cyberpunk 5y ago
Can you elaborate on why you think it seems inevitable? From my armchair, I can't see a benefit to China for kicking off a superpower war; they're already pulling ahead in STEM, their economy is fairly safe and not really that dependant on exports, quality of life is improving massively, infra is improving.. ?
- jeswin 5y ago
  I don't mean imminent war, but that it's headed there. From articles in Chinese news sites, it seems Xi wants to attach reunification to his legacy. The thing with dictatorships is that ultimately it will depend on what one person wants to achieve. Xi is of course not going to risk a war that he won't win easily. So there's enough time for the rest of the world to reverse the wholesale shift of industrial capacity into China. Taiwan had nuclear program in the 70s which would have prevented war and invasion. That was nipped under pressure from everyone else, so I imho defending a democratic nation must be a shared responsibility.

ppeetteerr 5y ago

China's investment into hard-tech (semiconductors, etc) doesn't not mean it can't also allow for the growth of consumer tech. For instance, we subsidize farming to keep it state-side but we don't prevent food processing companies from growing and consolidating. Maybe the point here is that the government in china wants to always be between the consumer and the service, which makes a lot more sense. Maybe Alibaba and the like have a connection to every person and the gov'ment is threatened by that relationship. There are many possibilities but I don't necessarily agree with the conclusion of the author: that to grow their hard-tech industry, they have to punish consumer tech.

japhib 5y ago
> doesn't not mean it can't also allow for the growth of consumer tech I can't understand this sentence haha ... Too many "nots" > I don't necessarily agree with the conclusion of the author: that to grow their hard-tech industry, they have to punish consumer tech. I don't think the author is trying to argue that this strategy is true -- I think they're just trying to explain China's behavior.
- ppeetteerr 5y ago
  Not my finest post, I agree

fallingfrog 5y ago

Another perspective: https://www.asiafinancial.com/china-seen-ushering-in-new-era-as-it-puts-socialism-before-shareholders https://www.asiafinancial.com/china-seen-ushering-in-new-era...

granularity 5y ago

> And of course you need firmware as well. Love this. It's like Obama's "the bubble sort would be the wrong way to go". Clearly Mr Smith has done his homework on the subject of military technology and has learned a Technical Fact: "firmware exists". He probably even knows that it goes between hardware and software!

_448 5y ago

The USA tech industry did start with hard-tech. The hint is in the name "Silicon Valley". The spur in innovation in the American tech industry started with companies working on projects from the defence and aerospace industry. Along the way they lost the plot, mostly during the dot-com bubble when the investment/banking/family-office industry(that does not understand tech) got heavily involved into it to make quick money! That diversion from hard-tech to click-bait tech has continued even today, because the investors want quick return whereas for hard-tech you have to have a lot of patience to see positive outcome. One country that, to some extent, successfully emulated the early Silicon Valley type strategy is Israel that has encouraged lot of personnel from defence and aerospace industry to form commercial ventures. Not many countries understand this point; many go by the PR bling that is spewed by the USA internet companies(mostly pushed by get-rich-quick minded VCs) and try to encourage this type of non-essential startups in the hope of being "successful similar to Silicon Valley". The definition of successful is obviously is being set by these get-rich-quick VCs rather than the country itself. It is not surprising that you see lot of the VCs/Accelerators/Incubators fund me-too type companies in other geographies in the hope that they will be acquired by companies in the US! It is all bait-and-switch game and not meant to develop R&D and innovation that benefits societies at large. Benefits to the society, if at all there is one, is the by-product or after-thought of this whole process.

ativzzz 5y ago
It's much easier for Israel to justify investing into "hard" tech that accelerates military power because they are surrounded by ideological enemies and are perpetually at war.
lasagnaphil 5y ago
It's illuminating (and equally harrowing) to see how much of the fundamental technology we have today has been researched and invented by the military (the Internet is one prime example), in stark contrast to the widespread belief among today's SV techies that free market innovation is what's driving the tech.
- _448 5y ago

Gollapalli 5y ago

This probably isn't a popular opinion, but I think China may be genuinely right here. Innovation requires solving genuinely hard technical problems. Consumer Internet is, in general, not that. I genuinely hope that America makes a similar shift in it's own VC sector.

fma 5y ago
Haven't read the article - but this is my sentiment for many years. I went to undergrad for computer engineering, then a masters in electrical engineering...hoping to do actual engineering work. And I end up having a career in web app development because that's where the money is at. I am surprised that those who continue to work on "genuinely hard technical problems" do so when web app/dev has so many jobs with pretty damn good pay. As an anecdote, my wife has a PhD in chemistry from a top program. Majority of her peers in grad school ended up taking classes in CS, Data Science, drop their program and work at a tech company. When she graduated...I remember sitting with her at a career website and just looking at the differences in quantity of jobs for hard sciences vs IT (my wife's career now has nothing w/ her hard earned degree)
salt-thrower 5y ago
You can broaden that statement and say that almost all the CRUD-app bullshit which devs get employed for these days isn't that, either. I've worked as a dev for insurance, B2B fintech, and athletic wear companies. They're all doing trivial CRUD problems behind the scenes, where the only real challenge is dealing with asinine management and organizational issues. And even if the consumer internet problems are technically challenging, like problems of scale for Facebook, you can argue pretty easily that solving them to increase Facebook's power and profitability is a net negative for society. For China to simply say "no" to that and invest more heavily in the physical economy is... a smart move, by my estimation. It tracks with what I'd do in my "king for a day" fantasy. Not that I think they're out there building a utopia - they're still a repressive regime - but they're wisely avoiding a class of problems that the West has jumped into headfirst.

ajmurmann 5y ago

In discussions like this people will always call out how our smartest minds are being wasted on serving advertisements. While I despise advertisements and the economy around it, I wonder how accurate that assertion actually is. So much of the work done at Google and Facebook seems to be solving general computing problems. That's how we got things like React and k8s that aren't specific to advertisements at all. On top we constantly complain about app the projects cancelled by Google. All these projects were build by someone and rarely are directly related to serving advertisements. Not to mention all the very valuable products provided by Google many of us use every day that provide tremendous value despite Google's ultimate goal of serving ads. Gmail, Maps, Docs, Calendar, YouTube, Google Voice and probably many more. Not to mention products we ridicule for their unnecessary changes and internal competitors like Meet/Hangouts. Pie on the sky stuff like self driving cars. AI advancements like Tensor flow. They have a leading security project that slowed down all out CPUs ;) What percentage of work at Google is in fact directly "wasted" on advertisements?

DamnYuppie 5y ago

China saw how the tech companies in the USA have too much power to influence conversations. They want no part of that, they want absolute control and if they have to destroy part of their economy to make sure it happens then so be it.

celeritascelery 5y ago
I don’t get it. Why wouldn’t you just put them under your control? Now you have all that power.

Animats 5y ago

China is not "smashing its tech industry". It's cracking down on private Internet companies that acquired too much power through network effects. This is completely consistent with CCP doctrine. Anything that central has to be state-owned. Xi declared this year that while digitization is important, “we must recognize the fundamental importance of the real economy… and never deindustrialize.” Right. China, remember, has a national industrial policy. It's expressed in the national 5 year plan, which is taken seriously and used to set priorities. What those priorities are is no secret. The current 5 year plan, the 14th, lists them.[1] Specific technology goals are in blue boxes. Semiconductors, gas turbines, biotech, new energy vehicles, robotics, advanced agricultural equipment. Internet services are mentioned in the Plan. One key line section out here: "We will strengthen the economic supervision of internet platforms in accordance with laws and regulations, clarify platform enterprise positioning and regulatory rules, improve the laws and regulations concerning the identification of monopolies, and crack down on monopolies and unfair competition. ... We will intensify anti-monopoly and anti-unfair competition law enforcement and judicial efforts and prevent the disorderly expansion of capital." If you think this isn't to be taken seriously, go back and look at the 13th 5 year plan and check off the completed items. [1] https://cset.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/t0284_14th_Five_Year_Plan_EN.pdf https://cset.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/t0284_14th_Fi...

lasagnaphil 5y ago
Maybe the headline's a bit misleading, but what you're saying is almost exactly what the article is talking about. (The article immediately refutes the notion of "smashing its tech industry" right away)
- xchaotic 5y ago
  but they're 'smashing' the likes of Ant Financial who were doing predatory, unsecured lending on an unprecedented scale. So IMO the thesis of smashing 'Internet' companies is incorrect - they're just making sure economy doesn't go into bubble territory (lending fuels spending) and the likes of Jack Ma, who are detached from the party don't get too much power/money.

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ffggvv 5y ago

american liberals really wish we could be china. you can sense it in how they talk. and some of that arrogance and desire for power seeps through their claims that it’s for the best for everyone. and of course they should be in control because they know what’s best for society. it’s the same people that want to ban large soda containers their goal is likely the same as the ccp too. destroy any power that isnt the government.

djanogo 5y ago

I am not surprised after seeing how US tech companies created their own rules what public can discuss and undermined democratically elected leaders. They don't want Chinese versions of Jack D, MarkZ, and numerous MSM groups. No country would want social media companies that US now has.

mcguire 5y ago

Alternative hypothesis: This is just another round in the infighting between China's party, government, and big business, one that the party and government intends to win. China's big, customer-facing "tech industry" (I agree with that part of the argument) lives in the same environment as that of the rest of the world, with the same ability to generate the same large profits. Those large profits provide a power base that threatens the party, which in turn uses its governmental power to smack down anything threatening.

steve76 5y ago

marxists and liberals don't believe in rules. Just power. Burn the world if you have to. That's why no one wants them around and wherever they go the smart nice rich people flee like a movie monster is attacking their village. There are rules, unavoidable ones. No one likes to be told what to do from far away. It's best to leave martial affairs for a return to civil life as fast as possible. Life and everything that comes with it is there for you. You're not there to act as some fuel source for a rapidly devolving, senile, incompetent auditor. With no principles to reign them in, no humanitarianism, marxists can never quit the conflict and always do themselves in. The world is much too big and complex to govern through brutality and bullying. Trying to qualify expertise is like trying to stop a flood. People are smart and adapt and work their way up and their shortcuts and mistakes are amplified to everyone instead of being siloed into their own lives. Laws are there to put a limit on the violence, not add to it. If you're making things worse, just go away. Governments are not there to turn self proclaimed intellectual progressives into movie stars.

AzzieElbab 5y ago

Is it just a big fu to investors of now delisted companies?

clipradiowallet 5y ago

Here's a conspiracy theory...China is not smashing its' tech industry. The CCP could be repositioning [financially] within the sector. Step 1 is to add regulation - which depresses market prices and gives the state more power. Step 2 is to swoop in and buy as much as is available at the [newly] depressed prices. It's unlikely, but in their position it's what I would want to do.

papito 5y ago

China is "cooling" certain sectors, to spur growth in physical tech and manufacturing. This is where the future power is - not in social networks and ad sales, it's in stuff. Just look at what happens when we can't manufacture our own chips. Car factories halt. Personal computing prices spike. Military tech sputters. China is doing what the U.S. would normally do in an effective anti-monopoly action, if our system was not broken and the government not bought with its guts by billionaires floating in tax-cut windfall. Now we have entities that have more legal resources than the government, which is a recipe for disaster (and runaway legalized corruption). China sees what happens when you let money run loose through power structures, and it does not want the same fate.

Nbox9 5y ago
> This is where the future power is - not in social networks and ad sales, it's in stuff.] I strongly disagree. The US was not able to win the Vietnam war with 100x the amount of military stuff. Stuxnet halted Iranian nuclear research. US elections were interfered with by foreign hackers. Microsoft’s revenue is >$100B a year, and it’s mostly software driven. Information, data, data-analysis, networking and intelligence is where power comes from.
- papito 5y ago
  And how is your example even relevant to a war from a deep pre-Internet era? What about WWII? What about Desert Storm? There is absolutely no guarantee that your adversary does not outplay you in internet cat and mouse games right from the start, like this recent disastrous scenario shows: https://www.defenseone.com/policy/2021/07/it-failed-miserably-after-wargaming-loss-joint-chiefs-are-overhauling-how-us-military-will-fight/184050/ https://www.defenseone.com/policy/2021/07/it-failed-miserabl... And then what? If we think future wars will be won by hackers in hoodies, it's our funeral. An out-of-control hacking war will have to escalate to bare metal war. People will want to see explosions on TV, as they lose power and are unable to gas up their cars.
ghomrassen 5y ago
They are not doing this for anti-monopoly reasons. It's purely because they thought the tech companies had more data, and therefore more power than them. One of the examples I've seen over here, which I can't seem to find in English, was an infographic created by Didi. Either stupidly or some tech dick-waving contest, they made a chart of the most hard working government agencies in Beijing. They had all this work habit data and they released it as a fun little thing. Suffice it to say, it's hard to find now and a smaller part of a overarching data issue that has gone out of the government's hands. Totalitarians are gonna totalitarian, but now they've learned to do it effectively and use the terminology the free world does to make it sound righteous.

mrkramer 5y ago

Why is US smashing its tech industry that's the question.

rapjr9 5y ago

Another potential explanation is China is preparing for a possible cyberwar and after seeing the USA population manipulated by social networking during elections has decided they want their population to be less vulnerable to outside manipulation.

xmly 5y ago

"Fake-tech" industry, more precisely. If you can read Chinese, you know people in China percepts whether the company is a real-tech company based on whether they have been sanctioned by US. And most of Chinese think the fake-techs consumes too much resource and contributes too little, the more resources should be put on the real-tech companies.

magwa101 5y ago

Power, that's why China is smashing it's tech industry. In the US the industry, as a whole, has a massive influence on politics, culture and society. In China that is a non starter for the government. It is about maintaining power and nothing else.

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fennecfoxy 5y ago

They're not smashing it, they're taking control of it. Let capitalism and a faux free market/private companies do all the work & IP theft and then when they're successful take them over and apply party politics to them. Bet it's the same reason they took HK early.