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Im a bit of a Doctorow fanboy, but I think hes hit the nail right on the head. The reason most American trade sanctions seem so poorly defined or defended as o

Im a bit of a Doctorow fanboy, but I think hes hit the nail right on the head. The reason most American trade sanctions seem so poorly defined or defended as of late is because we're not actually fighting to keep china from gleaning yet another ICBM Secret or gobbling up all of our data (American tech companies already do that.) What we're fighting so vehemently against is Huawei's introduction of 5G technology to the global market nearly a full year before any US players myopic market vision decided the US needed it. We're fighting chinese chipmakers --not because they are theives-- but because they are arriving to market with challenging, responsive, disruptive, and in some ways more advanced offerings than traditional western players. The Tiangong space station should have basically settled the oft rattled question from the octogenarians in congress: how close to the US is chinese technology. its there in most cases, beyond it in some. the sad part of Corys article is the conclusion that for every $chinese_company that now makes it to market with faster tech or better tech, the US will be forced to escalate using counterproductive and increasingly meaningless non-competitive responses like sanctions and tariffs. its a slow death unless the US gets more competitive, and by competitive i mean it cant just be axing domestic labor and posting higher revenue. US companies are going to have to eat their crow and actually offer something customers want, not something theyre told to want.

AnimalMuppet 4y ago
Could you give some specifics on where the Chinese chipmakers are more advanced than western players? (Note that Taiwan does not count as "Chinese" for this.) Also, note that the US didn't try to sanction Taiwanese chipmakers at all, so Doctorow's explanation of "why" seem to not hold water.
- yogthos 4y ago
  a few examples https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/28/us/politics/us-china-semiconductors.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/28/us/politics/us-china-semi... https://techwireasia.com/2021/12/the-newest-chip-by-alibaba-is-the-worlds-first-heres-why/ https://techwireasia.com/2021/12/the-newest-chip-by-alibaba-... http://en.people.cn/n3/2016/0323/c98649-9034426-2.html http://en.people.cn/n3/2016/0323/c98649-9034426-2.html https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202210/1277405.shtml https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202210/1277405.shtml
pessimizer 4y ago
> it's a slow death unless the US gets more competitive It's a slow death no matter what. China has 3x the population of the US, and Chinese people are both just as smart as Americans, and likely better educated. If the US has lost its lead, it's not getting it back.
- astrange 4y ago
  China has a much worse demographic outlook than the US. https://www.axios.com/2019/07/03/demographics-decide-us-china-rivalry https://www.axios.com/2019/07/03/demographics-decide-us-chin...
  - toomuchtodo 4y ago
    We’re all racing to be last in population heat death.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    There's no scenario in which an aging population reduces the size of the Chinese workforce to less than 3-4x the size of the US workforce.
    - astrange 4y ago
      The working/retired population ratio also matters; supporting your family might also make you less productive as a worker. (Speaking heartlessly and capitalistically.)
      - dirtyid 4y ago
        >less productive as a worker SKR/JP/TW all have extreme work cultures relative to west for highend sectors that are globally competitive, society structuring labour to work 100% harder to be 10% better than your lax competitors is not "efficient" but still viable way to brute force into leadership. Heartless capitalism works. As for work/retirement dependency ratios - some considerations (and blame Zeihan for popularizing spasming over demographic pyramid and neglecting the politics in geoPOLITICs) there's a reason Chinese households have some of the highest house hold savings rate, most don't expect retiring with comprehensive safety net. CCP + citizens know they're not going to transition into developed high-income country with comprehensive welfare state anytime soon. Culturally and structurally PRC is relatively well calibrated to to weather a demographic decline, with likely a reversal in demographics when multiple inheritances starts concentrating into single children households once deaths > births in coming years. I'd expect baby & consumption boom especially among more affluent/educated regions with spare wealth. TBH I'd be more worried over developed west ALREADY breaking down from being unable to support onerous welfare obligations that's been getting worse with immigration. There's a reason protests over generational QoL decline is happening in west not PRC. IMO implementing these trial [0] community centers for elders is pretty much enough to keep Chinese seniors content - cheap meals is enough to bribe people who rememeber hunger - old people who can't vote nor have energy to protest. Combine with recent focus on building out pharma & medsci sectors with automation [1] and ability to negotiate cheap bulk med acquistions = CCP should be able to take care of elder on a pareto budget. Few are going to complain CCP won't be spending magnitude more resources to stretch life expectancy from already above average of 78 to "high" level of 80-84. Nor would CCP want that burden if speaking heartlessly and strategically. [0] http://sh.people.com.cn/n2/2021/1204/c134768-35035843.html http://sh.people.com.cn/n2/2021/1204/c134768-35035843.html [1] http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2021-08/12/c_1310123218.htm http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2021-08/12/c_1310123218.htm
commandlinefan 4y ago
> We're fighting chinese chipmakers Well, hang on, what's the counter strategy here? Part of the reason that Chinese chipmakers are so advanced is because they work 80 hours a week, 52 weeks a year. The whole essay is about returning dignity and prosperity back to the American worker - although I disagree with his socialist slant on how that should be done, I don't think adopting the Chinese work-til-you-drop mentality is the right way to get there, either.
- Apocryphon 4y ago
  Public funding for research and moonshot projects?
- timbit42 4y ago
  Automation. Bringing manufacturing back isn't going to be affordable with our labor costs. We can only do it via automation.
csdvrx 4y ago
> We're fighting chinese chipmakers I totally agree, and this is very wrong because it means the government is trying to pick winners. I like eink readers and phones from China, and I don't like it when daddy government tells me I can't plug a simcard in the device I purchased to use it on say AT&T network, while the device is compliant with international formats. If the government was so concerned about malicious non-compliance, they could prepare a doomsday removal of all "bad" devices IF AND WHEN they start doing bad things, with the same IMEI blacklist approach, and NOT BEFORE which is only going to hurt customers. Doing the IMEI blacklist before any device is caught doing bad things means it's just a commercial war.
jstarfish 4y ago
The battlefield isn't (only) economic. Whoever deploys more networking gear has visibility into more networks around the world via "accidental" backdoors. Same goes for IoT devices. They're all just sleeper agents awaiting orders. Be it on price or features, the more commercial appeal the device has, the broader its deployment around the world. There's at least one foreign-produced, internet-connected listening device in every boardroom (and bedroom). We can insist on pushing Cisco gear so the former exploits are available only to ourselves, but we don't have anything that competes with the latter since we don't actually make anything in this country-- no smart TVs, drones and IoT vibrators that we sell to Chinese consumers. iPhones are about it, and we outsource their production to...China. We make "intellectual property," which is easily stolen and replicated. They're NIH-adherents so we can't push software on them either-- not only do they subvert ours (Equifax, Grindr almost), they onboard us to theirs (TikTok). The language of their biggest competitor/adversary is taught in schools. The US curriculum is limited to introductory French or Spanish. Never in my life have I needed to communicate anything in either language that couldn't be conveyed in English. Mandarin or Russian would have been more useful. They beat us at the spycraft game big-time, but we can't address that in public. So instead we're sowing confusion through vague trade sanctions to disrupt their deployment strategy. Since we never had a coherent plan to begin with, it won't achieve anything. The ultimate disruptor usually ends up being war.

AnimalMuppet 4y ago

Could you give some specifics on where the Chinese chipmakers are more advanced than western players? (Note that Taiwan does not count as "Chinese" for this.) Also, note that the US didn't try to sanction Taiwanese chipmakers at all, so Doctorow's explanation of "why" seem to not hold water.

yogthos 4y ago
a few examples https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/28/us/politics/us-china-semiconductors.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/28/us/politics/us-china-semi... https://techwireasia.com/2021/12/the-newest-chip-by-alibaba-is-the-worlds-first-heres-why/ https://techwireasia.com/2021/12/the-newest-chip-by-alibaba-... http://en.people.cn/n3/2016/0323/c98649-9034426-2.html http://en.people.cn/n3/2016/0323/c98649-9034426-2.html https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202210/1277405.shtml https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202210/1277405.shtml

pessimizer 4y ago

> it's a slow death unless the US gets more competitive It's a slow death no matter what. China has 3x the population of the US, and Chinese people are both just as smart as Americans, and likely better educated. If the US has lost its lead, it's not getting it back.

astrange 4y ago
China has a much worse demographic outlook than the US. https://www.axios.com/2019/07/03/demographics-decide-us-china-rivalry https://www.axios.com/2019/07/03/demographics-decide-us-chin...
- toomuchtodo 4y ago
  We’re all racing to be last in population heat death.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  There's no scenario in which an aging population reduces the size of the Chinese workforce to less than 3-4x the size of the US workforce.
  - astrange 4y ago
    The working/retired population ratio also matters; supporting your family might also make you less productive as a worker. (Speaking heartlessly and capitalistically.)
    - dirtyid 4y ago
      >less productive as a worker SKR/JP/TW all have extreme work cultures relative to west for highend sectors that are globally competitive, society structuring labour to work 100% harder to be 10% better than your lax competitors is not "efficient" but still viable way to brute force into leadership. Heartless capitalism works. As for work/retirement dependency ratios - some considerations (and blame Zeihan for popularizing spasming over demographic pyramid and neglecting the politics in geoPOLITICs) there's a reason Chinese households have some of the highest house hold savings rate, most don't expect retiring with comprehensive safety net. CCP + citizens know they're not going to transition into developed high-income country with comprehensive welfare state anytime soon. Culturally and structurally PRC is relatively well calibrated to to weather a demographic decline, with likely a reversal in demographics when multiple inheritances starts concentrating into single children households once deaths > births in coming years. I'd expect baby & consumption boom especially among more affluent/educated regions with spare wealth. TBH I'd be more worried over developed west ALREADY breaking down from being unable to support onerous welfare obligations that's been getting worse with immigration. There's a reason protests over generational QoL decline is happening in west not PRC. IMO implementing these trial [0] community centers for elders is pretty much enough to keep Chinese seniors content - cheap meals is enough to bribe people who rememeber hunger - old people who can't vote nor have energy to protest. Combine with recent focus on building out pharma & medsci sectors with automation [1] and ability to negotiate cheap bulk med acquistions = CCP should be able to take care of elder on a pareto budget. Few are going to complain CCP won't be spending magnitude more resources to stretch life expectancy from already above average of 78 to "high" level of 80-84. Nor would CCP want that burden if speaking heartlessly and strategically. [0] http://sh.people.com.cn/n2/2021/1204/c134768-35035843.html http://sh.people.com.cn/n2/2021/1204/c134768-35035843.html [1] http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2021-08/12/c_1310123218.htm http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2021-08/12/c_1310123218.htm

commandlinefan 4y ago

> We're fighting chinese chipmakers Well, hang on, what's the counter strategy here? Part of the reason that Chinese chipmakers are so advanced is because they work 80 hours a week, 52 weeks a year. The whole essay is about returning dignity and prosperity back to the American worker - although I disagree with his socialist slant on how that should be done, I don't think adopting the Chinese work-til-you-drop mentality is the right way to get there, either.

Apocryphon 4y ago
Public funding for research and moonshot projects?
timbit42 4y ago
Automation. Bringing manufacturing back isn't going to be affordable with our labor costs. We can only do it via automation.

csdvrx 4y ago

> We're fighting chinese chipmakers I totally agree, and this is very wrong because it means the government is trying to pick winners. I like eink readers and phones from China, and I don't like it when daddy government tells me I can't plug a simcard in the device I purchased to use it on say AT&T network, while the device is compliant with international formats. If the government was so concerned about malicious non-compliance, they could prepare a doomsday removal of all "bad" devices IF AND WHEN they start doing bad things, with the same IMEI blacklist approach, and NOT BEFORE which is only going to hurt customers. Doing the IMEI blacklist before any device is caught doing bad things means it's just a commercial war.

jstarfish 4y ago

The battlefield isn't (only) economic. Whoever deploys more networking gear has visibility into more networks around the world via "accidental" backdoors. Same goes for IoT devices. They're all just sleeper agents awaiting orders. Be it on price or features, the more commercial appeal the device has, the broader its deployment around the world. There's at least one foreign-produced, internet-connected listening device in every boardroom (and bedroom). We can insist on pushing Cisco gear so the former exploits are available only to ourselves, but we don't have anything that competes with the latter since we don't actually make anything in this country-- no smart TVs, drones and IoT vibrators that we sell to Chinese consumers. iPhones are about it, and we outsource their production to...China. We make "intellectual property," which is easily stolen and replicated. They're NIH-adherents so we can't push software on them either-- not only do they subvert ours (Equifax, Grindr almost), they onboard us to theirs (TikTok). The language of their biggest competitor/adversary is taught in schools. The US curriculum is limited to introductory French or Spanish. Never in my life have I needed to communicate anything in either language that couldn't be conveyed in English. Mandarin or Russian would have been more useful. They beat us at the spycraft game big-time, but we can't address that in public. So instead we're sowing confusion through vague trade sanctions to disrupt their deployment strategy. Since we never had a coherent plan to begin with, it won't achieve anything. The ultimate disruptor usually ends up being war.