5 ms·

Is arbitrarily pointing out “fyi this is a CHINESE business” the new “fyi this is a JEWISH business”?

by balia 5y ago

CamperBob2 5y ago
That interpretation might be a bit inflammatory. But at a minimum, it's certainly the new "fyi this is a JAPANESE business." How'd that work out for the generation of manufacturers that used it as a veiled insult?
- DavidPiper 5y ago
  As a young(ish) person, I've definitely heard "fyi this is a CHINESE business", but haven't really heard "fyi this is a JEWISH business" or "fyi this is a JAPANESE business". Are there communicable/generalised messages or stereotypes people are trying to invoke with this sort of thing, or have they always just been intended as slander?
  - tuatoru 5y ago
    I can't speak to "Jewish", but I can to "Japanese". It relates to Japan's industrial rise after WWII. In the 1950s, "Japanese" was synonymous with "shoddy and cheap". The stereotypical import from Japan was an HB pencil. In the 1980s, "Japanese" became synonymous with "cheap and reliable" -- think Toyota vs General Motors. American manufacturers responded with racism rather than fixing their problems. There was hysteria in the mainstream media that Japan was going to overtake the US to become the biggest economy in the world. People who see the world in zero-sum terms made idiots of themselves.* In the 2010s, "Japanese" seems to have become synonymous with "advanced and very high quality". "Japanese capacitors" on computer motherboards, for instance. And now that the Chinese are here, we've always been best buddies with Japan. To some extent this same sequence is happening with South Korea and Taiwan, and possibly Israel. * There's a famous essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" which goes some way to describing this zero-sum, win-or-lose thinking in politicians. The first few paragraphs read like they could have been written this year. https://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-american-politics/ https://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-am...
    - bsder 5y ago
      > There was hysteria in the mainstream media that Japan was going to overtake the US to become the biggest economy in the world. People who see the world in zero-sum terms made idiots of themselves.* To be fair, the Japanese, through MITI subsidies, slaughtered the US semiconductor industry through the early 80s. It took a lot of US government funding through VHSIC and the VLSI Project to prevent semiconductors from collapsing completely. People too often assume that "things will work out" after the fact when sometimes it took great efforts up front to make it that way. Of course, I'm originally from the Rust Belt of the US, so I have a front row seat to "Yeah, things don't always work out."
      - CamperBob2 5y ago
        It took a lot of US government funding through VHSIC and the VLSI Project to prevent semiconductors from collapsing completely. What are some specific examples? I don't remember anything like that happening. Japan had Hitachi and Matsushita and Toshiba, but we had Motorola and Intel and NatSemi and TI and countless other dominant players. There was plenty of room in the market for both.
        bsder 5y ago
        Please remember that the only thing which had any real volume in that time (1985 and prior) period was dynamic RAM. DRAM drove semiconductor process development until microprocessors eventually took over as defining the process capabilities (about 1990-ish). The US DRAM manufacturers got absolutely destroyed by the Japanese ones. So much so that getting out of DRAM was an existential crisis moment for Intel. One big point of the crux was scan lithography vs step and repeat lithography. You needed step and repeat lithography to get to the next level, but it was way more complicated than scan lithography. The US companies made the jump--the Japanese ones didn't. The Japanese companies clobbered the US companies in terms of profitability and production. This is part of the origin of "never be first" in the semiconductor industry. The US government then stepped in and pumped a massive amount of money behind semiconductor tech to stabilize that. Of course, once step and repeat (and some other related technologies) went online, the Japanese DRAM companies now got slaughtered and basically driven out of business. Things don't always "just work out" and sometimes the game really does create "winners and losers".
  - CamperBob2 5y ago
    There are some striking parallels between China and Japan, not so many between China and Holocaust victims. In the 1940s, great industrialized nations vied with each other to see who could commit the biggest atrocities on the other guys. Japan lost out, but once set straight, they began an impressive multi-decade recovery. In the 1950s, Japan's own considerable efforts, along with help from their former enemies, started to pay off. In the US, we were slow to let go of old grudges, though, and the (understandably) poor quality of Japanese exports was a standing joke. As tuatoru points out, anything that said "Made in Japan" was almost guaranteed to be crap, similar to the outlook many people have towards Chinese exports today. In the 1960s, Japan's reputation as an industrial power was growing, but they were still mostly seen as imitators rather than innovators, again very much like the Chinese are today. The Japanese took an early lead in areas like solid state electronics, exploiting inventions that mostly originated in the West but weren't being used to their full potential in the consumer space. Companies like Honda and Toyota were also starting to sell a few cars here, but nobody took them seriously. In the 1970s, the gas crunch hit. People stopped laughing at small Japanese cars and started buying them. There was still a lot of latent resentment towards the Japanese, though, coming from everyone from organized auto industry labor who saw their well-feathered nests falling apart, to WWII veterans whose interactions with Japan had proven too traumatic to forgive and forget. Not to mention anti-Asian sentiment being on the upswing as a whole, thanks to Vietnam and the "boat people" who were, of course, "coming to take our jobs" or worse. The Chinese aren't selling cars in the US market but you can bet there'd be a lot of prejudice out there in the roads and parking lots of small-town America if they were. Later, in the 1980s, Japan emerged as a player in computing and data processing, but we all knew that they were culturally ill-adapted to develop good software, so no biggie. Of course, this was just a refrain of 1930s-era prejudices. "They're all nearsighted. No way these guys can fly fighters and bombers." By the 1990s, many young people thought of Japan as the country where the best video games came from, and any notion that they were somehow incapable of writing code was forgotten. So with respect to China and the US, I think we'll end up as valued trading partners in the long run. It's just a matter of waiting for one irrational prejudice after another to go away. This will take time, but it'll happen... if neither of us does anything stupid.
    - AnthonyMouse 5y ago
  - balia 5y ago
    Because it’s no longer socially acceptable. You should look up the history of dogwhistles about Jewish ownership of banks and financial firms. It usually seems harmless, ex: “hey isn’t this owned by a Jewish person?” which masquerades the deep antisemitistic insinuation that Jews are taking over banking and media
- p1mrx 5y ago
  "What do you mean, Doc? All the best stuff is made in Japan."
macinjosh 5y ago
I don't think so, though perhaps it should more accurately be phrased as a COMMUNIST CHINESE business. That is why people care, because the CCP has an aytpical way of doing business that comes with its own risks and potential problems. It really has everything to do with economics and nothing to do with race/nationality/heritage.
- whimsicalism 5y ago
  It has a lot to do with jingoism/nationalism, albeit maybe not race explicitly (although I doubt the cultural rift between the two does much to help). I rarely see the same level of outrage against Saudi Arabian oil (yes, yes, a low proportion of gas in the US nowabouts) or things produced in many other circumstances that are at least as "unfree" as they are in China. Because of that, I find it difficult to believe that it is based off of some principled stand over governance.
  - Jensson 5y ago
    Saudi Arabia selling oil is just them selling natural resources. China selling high tech better than anyone else in the world is signs of the world order changing. Edit: Personally I am excited that we can potentially have another billion educated people to help solve the worlds problems. I see more and more good things come out of China, so I am optimistic over the potential to trade ideas and not just cheap labor.
    - Syonyk 5y ago
      Careful there. They might decide that the problem that the world needs solved is that China and the CCP don't rule all of it. Yet. China has been moving in a very, very nationalistic direction lately.
da_big_ghey 5y ago
Closer to in 1939 remarking on somebody who buy their chemicals from IG Farben or weapon from Heckler and Koch.
simondotau 5y ago
If it's arbitrary, then yes. In this case I don't think it's arbitrary because country of origin has significant ramifications for application of patents, etc.
brandonmenc 5y ago
Well, BDS gets away with saying "fyi this is an ISRAELI business"
- __blockcipher__ 5y ago
  JFYI comments like these are very likely to trigger flame wars and the like

Is arbitrarily pointing out “fyi this is a CHINESE business” the new “fyi this is a JEWISH business”?

by balia 5y ago

Is arbitrarily pointing out “fyi this is a CHINESE business” the new “fyi this is a JEWISH business”?

That interpretation might be a bit inflammatory. But at a minimum, it's certainly the new "fyi this is a JAPANESE business." How'd that work out for the generation of manufacturers that used it as a veiled insult?

DavidPiper 5y ago
As a young(ish) person, I've definitely heard "fyi this is a CHINESE business", but haven't really heard "fyi this is a JEWISH business" or "fyi this is a JAPANESE business". Are there communicable/generalised messages or stereotypes people are trying to invoke with this sort of thing, or have they always just been intended as slander?
- tuatoru 5y ago
  I can't speak to "Jewish", but I can to "Japanese". It relates to Japan's industrial rise after WWII. In the 1950s, "Japanese" was synonymous with "shoddy and cheap". The stereotypical import from Japan was an HB pencil. In the 1980s, "Japanese" became synonymous with "cheap and reliable" -- think Toyota vs General Motors. American manufacturers responded with racism rather than fixing their problems. There was hysteria in the mainstream media that Japan was going to overtake the US to become the biggest economy in the world. People who see the world in zero-sum terms made idiots of themselves.* In the 2010s, "Japanese" seems to have become synonymous with "advanced and very high quality". "Japanese capacitors" on computer motherboards, for instance. And now that the Chinese are here, we've always been best buddies with Japan. To some extent this same sequence is happening with South Korea and Taiwan, and possibly Israel. * There's a famous essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" which goes some way to describing this zero-sum, win-or-lose thinking in politicians. The first few paragraphs read like they could have been written this year. https://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-american-politics/ https://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-am...
  - bsder 5y ago
    > There was hysteria in the mainstream media that Japan was going to overtake the US to become the biggest economy in the world. People who see the world in zero-sum terms made idiots of themselves.* To be fair, the Japanese, through MITI subsidies, slaughtered the US semiconductor industry through the early 80s. It took a lot of US government funding through VHSIC and the VLSI Project to prevent semiconductors from collapsing completely. People too often assume that "things will work out" after the fact when sometimes it took great efforts up front to make it that way. Of course, I'm originally from the Rust Belt of the US, so I have a front row seat to "Yeah, things don't always work out."
    - CamperBob2 5y ago
      It took a lot of US government funding through VHSIC and the VLSI Project to prevent semiconductors from collapsing completely. What are some specific examples? I don't remember anything like that happening. Japan had Hitachi and Matsushita and Toshiba, but we had Motorola and Intel and NatSemi and TI and countless other dominant players. There was plenty of room in the market for both.
      - bsder 5y ago
        Please remember that the only thing which had any real volume in that time (1985 and prior) period was dynamic RAM. DRAM drove semiconductor process development until microprocessors eventually took over as defining the process capabilities (about 1990-ish). The US DRAM manufacturers got absolutely destroyed by the Japanese ones. So much so that getting out of DRAM was an existential crisis moment for Intel. One big point of the crux was scan lithography vs step and repeat lithography. You needed step and repeat lithography to get to the next level, but it was way more complicated than scan lithography. The US companies made the jump--the Japanese ones didn't. The Japanese companies clobbered the US companies in terms of profitability and production. This is part of the origin of "never be first" in the semiconductor industry. The US government then stepped in and pumped a massive amount of money behind semiconductor tech to stabilize that. Of course, once step and repeat (and some other related technologies) went online, the Japanese DRAM companies now got slaughtered and basically driven out of business. Things don't always "just work out" and sometimes the game really does create "winners and losers".
- CamperBob2 5y ago
  There are some striking parallels between China and Japan, not so many between China and Holocaust victims. In the 1940s, great industrialized nations vied with each other to see who could commit the biggest atrocities on the other guys. Japan lost out, but once set straight, they began an impressive multi-decade recovery. In the 1950s, Japan's own considerable efforts, along with help from their former enemies, started to pay off. In the US, we were slow to let go of old grudges, though, and the (understandably) poor quality of Japanese exports was a standing joke. As tuatoru points out, anything that said "Made in Japan" was almost guaranteed to be crap, similar to the outlook many people have towards Chinese exports today. In the 1960s, Japan's reputation as an industrial power was growing, but they were still mostly seen as imitators rather than innovators, again very much like the Chinese are today. The Japanese took an early lead in areas like solid state electronics, exploiting inventions that mostly originated in the West but weren't being used to their full potential in the consumer space. Companies like Honda and Toyota were also starting to sell a few cars here, but nobody took them seriously. In the 1970s, the gas crunch hit. People stopped laughing at small Japanese cars and started buying them. There was still a lot of latent resentment towards the Japanese, though, coming from everyone from organized auto industry labor who saw their well-feathered nests falling apart, to WWII veterans whose interactions with Japan had proven too traumatic to forgive and forget. Not to mention anti-Asian sentiment being on the upswing as a whole, thanks to Vietnam and the "boat people" who were, of course, "coming to take our jobs" or worse. The Chinese aren't selling cars in the US market but you can bet there'd be a lot of prejudice out there in the roads and parking lots of small-town America if they were. Later, in the 1980s, Japan emerged as a player in computing and data processing, but we all knew that they were culturally ill-adapted to develop good software, so no biggie. Of course, this was just a refrain of 1930s-era prejudices. "They're all nearsighted. No way these guys can fly fighters and bombers." By the 1990s, many young people thought of Japan as the country where the best video games came from, and any notion that they were somehow incapable of writing code was forgotten. So with respect to China and the US, I think we'll end up as valued trading partners in the long run. It's just a matter of waiting for one irrational prejudice after another to go away. This will take time, but it'll happen... if neither of us does anything stupid.
  - AnthonyMouse 5y ago
- balia 5y ago
  Because it’s no longer socially acceptable. You should look up the history of dogwhistles about Jewish ownership of banks and financial firms. It usually seems harmless, ex: “hey isn’t this owned by a Jewish person?” which masquerades the deep antisemitistic insinuation that Jews are taking over banking and media
p1mrx 5y ago
"What do you mean, Doc? All the best stuff is made in Japan."

macinjosh 5y ago

I don't think so, though perhaps it should more accurately be phrased as a COMMUNIST CHINESE business. That is why people care, because the CCP has an aytpical way of doing business that comes with its own risks and potential problems. It really has everything to do with economics and nothing to do with race/nationality/heritage.

whimsicalism 5y ago
It has a lot to do with jingoism/nationalism, albeit maybe not race explicitly (although I doubt the cultural rift between the two does much to help). I rarely see the same level of outrage against Saudi Arabian oil (yes, yes, a low proportion of gas in the US nowabouts) or things produced in many other circumstances that are at least as "unfree" as they are in China. Because of that, I find it difficult to believe that it is based off of some principled stand over governance.
- Jensson 5y ago
  Saudi Arabia selling oil is just them selling natural resources. China selling high tech better than anyone else in the world is signs of the world order changing. Edit: Personally I am excited that we can potentially have another billion educated people to help solve the worlds problems. I see more and more good things come out of China, so I am optimistic over the potential to trade ideas and not just cheap labor.
  - Syonyk 5y ago
    Careful there. They might decide that the problem that the world needs solved is that China and the CCP don't rule all of it. Yet. China has been moving in a very, very nationalistic direction lately.

da_big_ghey 5y ago

Closer to in 1939 remarking on somebody who buy their chemicals from IG Farben or weapon from Heckler and Koch.

simondotau 5y ago

If it's arbitrary, then yes. In this case I don't think it's arbitrary because country of origin has significant ramifications for application of patents, etc.

brandonmenc 5y ago

Well, BDS gets away with saying "fyi this is an ISRAELI business"

__blockcipher__ 5y ago
JFYI comments like these are very likely to trigger flame wars and the like