This is nothing else than the US panicking over losing their technological and economic supremacy, and using brute force to damage a competitor. Disgusting and very dangerous for the whole world.
I'd say it's an unnecessary dilution of national brand power. I know people who refuse to buy things directly from China, yet are perfectly happy buying the same items through a western distributer. That price delta is directly measurable brand equity that ends up as taxable money spent in western economies with no real value add.
Pulling this crap only incentives China to develop their own silicon. Since the west can't compete on manufacturing cost or quality, Chinese products will continue to dominate. But the importance of incorporating western technologies will deminish since there will be no legal alternative. The end result is just plain brand dilution, since not using western technology will become the new norm.
I'm not really personally concerned, the west will learn sooner or later that it actually needs to build something to remain competitive. A service based economy is simply everyone serving each other coffee, while gradually eroding existing equity so we can keep buying coffee beans.
>Pulling this crap only incentives China to develop their own silicon.
Operating under the assumption this isnt already a priority to them, which I would say is a big assumption.
You're looking at this as if it was in absence of the rest of the trade footings of the two countries.
The west is building stuff in this industry - semi conductors. The east is operating heavy industrial espionage to try and steal all the secrets of it so they can take it from the west.
I'm not sure why you think this trade war situation is indicative of the US not making things - its exactly a heavily US industry where China steals technology to leapfrog actual competition.
If China steals all your research you're going to have trouble affording coffee beans. If they steal your research and then open factories up you're going broke.
So the importance of producing is true, but its tied to the importance of protecting your advantages, national and otherwise.
If you're scared of cheap knockoffs, it's exactly the perception that your product is somehow superior that you want. Part of that might be less risk exposure to lawsuits for incorporating stolen IP.
But if you eliminate the legal option, the grey area alternative becomes normalized.
IP is also a highly artificial construct. If all documents were suddenly in the open, and your competitors are suddenly able to build a better product, how comfortable can you be that you can actually compete on quality?
It would simply devolve into whichever nation decides to put the most money into subsidies, removing environmental protections, and facilitating slave-like labor conditions.
> The west is building stuff in this industry - semi conductors. The east is operating heavy industrial espionage to try and steal all the secrets of it so they can take it from the west.
Let's not forget that a good part of the NSA's business is industrial espionage, allegedly also heavily in Western Allies.
Americans spreaded fake new 2 years ago stating that there are SPY-chips hiddenly built into Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Google products by Chinese. The companies investigated their chips and didn't find anything. Americans lost any credibility.
Don't know why you're downvoted given that you're correct. The end result of this is to ensure that China develops their own semi conductor industry. Besides the short term loss of sales, in the long term new companies will emerge that compete with the American semi conductor industry.
It actually was fast tracked by the trade war. Government mandated domestic development of certain things after the US made it clear to China that they're not trustworthy trading partner. Not that China is, but kind of besides the point.
Similar to how the google ban fast tracked Huawei working on google free systems e.g. buying third party map services like TomTom. Bad for Google good for competition.
Basically the US has lost its standing thanks to Trumps bully diplomacy[1].
“Some if not all regional countries may harbour concerns about the security ramifications of using Huawei, but there are real pragmatic considerations,” said Collin Koh Swee Lean, a research fellow at the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore. “Cost-wise in particular, Chinese offers for infrastructure development present more attractive propositions.”
> It actually was fast tracked by the trade war. Government mandated domestic development of certain things after the US made it clear to China that they're not trustworthy trading partner. Not that China is, but kind of besides the point.
I'm not sure why that's besides the point? The U.S. for years worked to invest in China and build them as a great trading partner and the CCP continued to just steal trade secrets and do everything in their power to undermine the U.S..
And it's probably true that this development was fast tracked by the trade war... but so what? This was coming since the CCP didn't want to be a partner with the West, so why wait around to cut the ties? It's going to happen either way, why not happen on your terms?
W.r.t Trump's "bully" diplomacy - I mean, playing nice certainly didn't work. We don't need to and shouldn't be trading partners with China so long as they're acting against U.S. and western interests in general. The U.S. tried to engage and endured years of malevolent activity by the CCP only to have the actions worsen over time. So... I'm not really sure what the advantage to the U.S. is besides having a big market. Ban Chinese products in the U.S. and China can ban U.S. products. Whatever.
> Cost-wise in particular, Chinese offers for infrastructure development present more attractive propositions
Sure. For now. And if you only want to look at cost. Maybe you want to look at other factors, like maybe you're Vietnam and concerned about the Chinese ramming your fishing boats? [1]
Let's put it this way: China is a huge country, that has been very well governed in the past 30 years. Its people are proud, smart, ingenious, and they're working a lot for a lot less than their western counterparts. Given this, and given it lasts, it was inevitable for China to overtake the US in technology, economic power and importance on the world scene. Sooner or later, even playing by all the rules.
Was the US prepared to accept that? What do you think happens when the world's only technological, economic and military superpower is about to be overtaken by a competitor? Did you think the US was going to lose its supremacy without trying everything it could to prevent it? Of course not.
And then, what kind of actions do you think it would take to prevent it? For example, the US could start a very aggressive trade war with China. They could try to justify it in various ways, for example by saying that China is a risk to the world, that its technology is tainted by some issue (maybe it could be used for spying). They could try to isolate China, advising all its partners not to trade with it. And so on.
And this is exactly what we're seeing. It would have happened anyway, independently from China's behaviour. Because the only variable is how close they are to threatening the US's power. And they're close.
Oh no doubt about that. It's just sad for the whole planet that they've chosen the path they've chosen (genocide, etc.) inb4 "but the U.S." .
Given that, I just don't think it makes much sense to engage with China unless the calculation is strictly that it benefits the U.S. (and the west in general). Like, if U.S. companies don't get access to the Chinese market then that means Chinese companies don't get access to the U.S. market, for example. To put it another way, from my current understanding I would say we should maintain U.S. hegemony at all costs short of nuclear war (or anything atrocious like that). Despite recent setbacks and general anxiety about U.S. actions over the last however many years, The U.S. has proven since WWII that it's a trustable world leader.
Although I'd certainly counter your claim that a "rise" is inevitable. Being large doesn't necessarily translate into anything. I think it's only a matter of time before the U.S. global reach is diminished, and China will certainly fill that void, but it won't solely be filled by China, especially in the Pacific.
Countries in Europe will also have to make tough choices. Is NATO still viable? Is it outdated? Should the U.S. pull out? For now those are easy decisions, but when push comes to shove the U.S. is strong-willed enough to do something like back out of NATO if they insist on integrating with Chinese systems. I don't think there will be a lot of having your cake and eating it too for the continent. Yet another disappointment.
From a tech perspective this will have quite the impact. China will eventually develop viable operating systems, but will you buy a laptop with one? Some are concerned about the NSA, but at least I can sort of fight the system. What if I'm from Cambodia? Do I want the Chinese spying on me instead or do I have more faith in the Americans?
Lots of questions and uncertainty here, in my view, except that the U.S. needs to pick up its toys and go home when it's being put at a disadvantage.
Yes, this is correct, it's the sign of the US losing its post WW2 grip on world affairs. But the normally balanced and insightful HN crowd is drowned out on topics like these. Pre-WW1 style national pride and competition for markets and raw materials is back with a vengeance it seems, and it's not only the US who got it; Russia, China, the EU and more got it too. It doesn't bode well.
> Pre-WW1 style national pride and competition for markets and raw materials is back with a vengeance it seems
I don't think those are the reasons, they are consequences. The reason, in my opinion, is just money. Your income depends on your job and the success of your company, which largely depends on the economy at large and, in case of large powers, on their world-wide power projection. People understand this instinctively, it's pure tribal behavior.
I believe most world-politics interpretation is just motivated reasoning, and you can change somebody's worldview by making them the beneficiary of a trust that's invested in whatever country they dislike. When they draw dividends from their enemy's success, they'll come to see them in a different light.
> How many foreign companies actually use US Chipmaking equipment?
In the semi industry, nearly all of them. You can hardly make anything in the semiconductor industry without using several of the major US companies. The US still dominates the semiconductor equipment industry. Of the six major players, half of them are US companies.
> The $412bn global semiconductor industry rests on the shoulders of just six equipment companies, three of them US-based. Together, the companies make nearly all of the crucial hardware and software tools needed to manufacture chips, meaning an American export ban would choke off China’s access to the basic tools needed to make their latest chip designs.
> "You cannot build a semiconductor facility without using the big major equipment companies, none of which are Chinese," said Brett Simpson, the founder of Arete Research, an equity research group. “If you fight a war with no guns you’re going to lose. And they don’t have the guns.”
> "ASML cannot do without Applied Materials and the other way around. If you take even one out of the value chain, that may hamper Chinese fabs," said a former ASML executive.
Mostly true, but you could come pretty close with ASML, ASM, TEL,ebara, hitachi and a couple others (particularly the Korean companies)
I don't think it is quite so widely understood that there are close seconds in every market.
It is pretty easy to imagine ASML giving up on Intel, cutting HMI, and all the chipmakers going outside of Lam, Applied, and KLA for their next tools. The industry would be a bit disrupted but outside the US...fine. and it would destroy the US industry.
This will also tend to pressure the Chinese to keep pushing their own supplier industry, rather than just integrators.
Basically, though, a process flow is deposition, track, litho, etch, clean, deposition, cmp, metro, inspect (lots of steps vary, but these are the basics)
You need each of these to work.
Deposition: Lam, Applied, TELand then Wonik, ASM, and others
Track: TEL
Litho: ASML
Etch: Lam, Applied, TEL
CMP: Ebara, Applied
Metro: Onto, KLA, Hitachi
Inspect: KLa, Applied
There are more, and I missed a bit, but basically, you need to tick off each of these layers, and quite often with the best at each.
ASML cannot make wafers for anyone without someone doing all the other parts. And really, that is true for all these companies. There is a best of breed and selection bias that makes each system imperfectly interchangeable.
But you can also see that ASML is the sole true monopoly. So if they are out, nothing works. There are plausible workarounds otherwise.not always easy or cost effective, but plausible in most cases.
ASML needs the rest of the infrastructure to sell tools. And likewise, everyone needs ASML to deliver, or there is no new node....
Sounds like a reason to pick the Free-electron laser pathway back up. Particle accelerators are arguably more of a commodity than ASML's EUV exposure technology.
And they might get nice introspection by operating an x-ray FEL to do coherent transmission imaging for analytical purposes.
After this move by the US, it wouldn't surprise me if there soon were 7-9 instead of 6 such companies, and the new entries were Chinese/China-friendly.
China has both, money and leverage (not just political, rare earths, etc), to throw at this problem, and from China's perspective it should be a strategic priority to get this done. It would in fact surprise me if there weren't such projects already in full drive since May 2019 when this all started.
You have brought up my largest concern over weaponizing IP and means of production. This might help Trump’s ability to win a second term, but I argue that long term we are forcing China and large parts of the world to develop their own tech and become stronger competitors.
I know that our system of government does not optimize long term gain, but this case seems especially bad.
So now you have EU companies that bought a product from US companies and are retroactively deprived of the ability to produce for their customers? Is this even legal?
That depends on a lot of things, including perspective. Things can be legal according to one set of rules, yet illegal under another set.
EU member states certainly could see this as illegal interference in their economies and a stretch of US jurisdiction. There is also a good chance that this goes counter to at least a few international trade agreements. Agreements the US still desperately needs for other things it wants to keep doing.
It appears a very short sighted policy, by people who probably don't give a shit about whatever damage they do long term. Once they are out of office, it is no longer their problem. If it made them richer, they won. It's the ordinary people that will likely pay a price for this at some point, but not them.
It’s pretty hilarious that the grounds for the block is that China will use the chips to spy on people, given that the United States is certainly doing that already.
The US judicial system doesn't protect the human rights of anyone who's not in America. Just ask the thousands of brown people killed as collateral damage from drone strikes without any chance of a trial in court.
America's human rights laws don't apply to non-US citizens outside of the US's landmass.
America has been exceptionally clear that US intelligence and immigration agencies consider non-Americans to be fair game for hacking, non-judicial imprisonment, torture et al.
So if I'm not American I might acknowledge that America treats it's own citizens slightly better than China treats theirs from a human rights perspective, but as someone who's British neither nation has a stellar track record of actions that effect me and my country personally or give me any rights protection.
No, there are no ‘human rights’ in America. There are only ‘American rights’. Non US citizens are not protected by the Constitution. Do not have free speech, etc...
Noncitizens are protected by the Constitution. It's just that those who are blithely violating the rights of noncitizens simply don't care about obeying the laws themselves.
Those who are blithely violating the rights of noncitizens are also doing so for citizens (most obviously, those suspected of being noncitizens due to skin color, use of foreign language, etc., but it doesn't stop there.)
Not only doesn't apply to non-Americans, but sometimes it doesn't even apply to American citizens, (Chelsea Manning was tortured in a U.S. military prison).
Why does the US having an arguably better domestic human rights record than China make it preferable for a European to be spied on by the US government rather than the Chinese government?
As an American I'd rather be spied on by China than my own government because China spying on me won't discover anything that they can use against me themselves. That's not so for my own government.
I'd expect this is similar in most countries. Your own government is the biggest danger because your own government has much more power over you than foreign governments and much more interest in you. The biggest threat for an average civilian from a foreign government spying on them is that the foreign government might share that information with their their own government.
Since many European governments have close intelligence sharing arrangements with the US and do not have such arrangements with China, I'd expect that for the average European it would be better to be spied on by China than the US.
Yeah, China uses their technological advantage to do horrible things. Like invading Iraq and overthrowing the leaders, leaving the country in chaos and leading to hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths. Or the time they invaded Afghanistan and overthrew their leaders, leaving the country in chaos. Or the mass surveillance of their citizens. Or they harsh punishments they mete out to whistle-blowers who expose wrongdoing, forcing them to free to countries like Russia if they don't want to lose their freedom.
> to try and equate what the US does to what China does is simply ludicrous
This is such a West-centric viewpoint. The fact is that they're only only different in where they're the most horrible. China is worse on the domestic front and the U.S. bullies more on the foreign front. Then there's soft power, where Hollywood makes you think the U.S. actually cares about democracy and human rights, (while supporting the likes of Saudi Arabia at the same time), which are quite powerful tools of propaganda.
The 90% of civilians targeted by U.S. drones would probably strongly disagree with your assertion. Is just that there's not a strong voice speaking for them on TV, where's there's plenty on China.
So what? Just because the US does something too does not mean that they’ve to be ok with others doing the same. You may think the world works like that, but it don’t.
This after previous indictments of Huawei for RICO violations and theft of trade secrets from USA companies T-Mobile, Qualcomm, and Cisco. Including theft of 5G technology that is now being used in equipment sold to EU countries.
Whatever happened to arresting Huawei’s Chief Financial Officer Wanzhou Meng? Was she ever extradited from Canada after being captured in Vancouver, BC?
You seem to be under the rather odd impression that all of the limitations you agree to when you enter into contract with another entity are supposed to be ignored. Just because you're doing business with someone who has a reputation of breaching faith doesn't mean it's appropriate that they do so, and you certainly don't have to like them for it.
China actually ranks high in adherence to contracts. It’s what’s not in the contracts that creates problems. The issues are a bit more nuanced. Harris Bricken is a law firm with a great blog on related legal topics.
Most technological invention is paid for by the US government investment. Name any high technology and it's lineage points back to some government grant or purchase agreement.
Companies that use these inventions and innovate on top to bring them to market are themselves using technology we paid for. But we don't call that "stealing". Do you think they care that China also gets them?
> America because what it was because it "stole" technology from Europe during the industrial revolution.
A falsehood. The US was one of the primary innovators during the industrial revolution, along with Germany, Britain and France. In the oil/mining, steel, railroad/transport, electricity, building, manufacturing, automobile, farming and communication segments the US held its own when it came to invention in the 1870-1930 era. It doesn't take very long to canvas the major industrial segments and point to various large US contributions.
The recent claim that the US stole all of its industrial revolution era technology, is an empty defamation that you mostly only see on sites like Reddit as a propaganda angle, and it's always unsupported in argument.
It's pretty difficult to take the accusations of theft of 5G technology seriously, when Huawei is far ahead of its competitors and has massively outspent them on R&D for 5G.
> Was she ever extradited from Canada after being captured in Vancouver, BC?
No, it's still a giant political mess. The Canadian government wishes they had never gotten involved - they should have just let her slip. With the US and China, Canada is between a rock and a hard place.
> The Canadian government wishes they had never gotten involved - they should have just let her slip. With the US and China, Canada is between a rock and a hard place.
Source on this? I certainly haven't heard the government say anything to this effect. As a Canadian I certainly do not wish we had "just let her slip". We're a country of laws. We should follow those laws, not just give in to pressure from China because they're big, mean, and scary.
The standard for extradition is that the alleged infraction must also be a crime in the country being asked to extradite. So that's what Canada is trying to determine right now.
> Source on this? I certainly haven't heard the government say anything to this effect.
I'm basing this on the government's paralysis in this case.
> We're a country of laws.
Canada's system of laws is being abused by the Trump administration, which has made no secret of its desire to use Meng Wanzhou as a bargaining chip in the trade war. Allowing the Canadian extradition treaty with the US to be abused for political ends was not wise. There were smarter ways to deal with the request. Hong Kong's reaction to the US extradition request for Snowden (please resubmit the paperwork while we let him fly out of our jurisdiction) would have been a good model to follow.
> We should follow those laws, not just give in to pressure from China because they're big, mean, and scary.
The possible US reaction to not extraditing Meng Wanzhou would be just as - if not more - scary. Canada is extremely dependent on trade with the US. That's why the government arrested Meng Wanzhou, and why it is finding it so difficult to acknowledge the obvious: that this is a politically motivated prosecution that does not fall under the terms of the extradition treaty.
> I'm basing this on the government's paralysis in this case.
What paralysis? It's moving through the court system at the court systems typical pace. (Which is slower than I would like... but that's just a general comment about our court system)
> Canada's system of laws is being abused by the Trump administration
This is primarily an argument for amending our laws in response to this case, not ignoring them in this case. Admittedly it's partially an argument that might be raised to say that the laws do not support extradition in this case, but of course at the time we detained Meng Wanzhou this was nowhere near as clear, and her lawyers are more then capable of making this argument to the court.
> The possible US reaction to not extraditing Meng Wanzhou would be just as - if not more - scary.
Indeed, and we should pay as little attention to that as we do to China's threats and retaliatory arrests. I have complete faith that our courts are paying as little attention to it.
You can be certain that there is heavy government involvement in the case, just as there was in the SNC Lavalin case. The government is not simply going to leave an important matter of state like this to the vagaries of the courts.
> This is primarily an argument for amending our laws in response to this case, not ignoring them in this case.
The political exception to extradition quite obviously applies here. This is a standard clause in extradition treaties. The thing is, the Canadian government is afraid to use this clause for political reasons - fear of retaliation from the Trump administration.
So you're saying we should all ignore the very, very obvious political angles here and trust that it's all about the rule of law, applied neutrally and apolitically?
Next you'll be telling us that a police officer would never lie on the stand.
No, I'm telling you that you should look at the public court process and conclude that it's the rule of law being applied, very little trust is necessary in this instance.
Not requiring trust is the entire reason why we have such a public court process.
This case is pretty irregular as far as rule of law goes. You just don't see executives imprisoned for corporate accounting shenanigans or trade with the wrong countries way down in their reporting chain. The laws are long and can capture anyone, why was this one brought to bear in particular, at this particular time?
I suspect we have very different opinions on how frequently police lie on the stand.
I doub't her detainment had anything at all to do about Canada, so in this case Canada was, it appeared merely toeing the US line, rather than having a specific stake in the matter.
Really though the crux of the matter is wether Meng is held due to a real criminality as per Canadian/US law, or is being held as a political move, and signals from both US and Canadian administration has been confusing in this regard. Some statements from US and administrations give a feeling that she's being held for political reasons.
"Several well-known Canadians, including former prime minister Jean Chrétien and former foreign minister John Manley, have suggested that Canada let Meng go or orchestrate a “prisoner exchange” with China."
Canada does have a stake in the matter as Huawei hacked Nortel to steal their IP and then undercut all their business deals causing nortel to go bankrupt to the detriment of 94,000 employees and every single Canadian that owned just about and stock market fund.
It is embarrassing that we haven’t banned Huawei products in Canada yet.
Yes but that is not related to the case at hand. So if that is used a justification to hold Meng, that is a political reason. Governments in democracies, esp the judicial system is supposed to act to uphold fairness and not national self-interest.
Nortel was hit by the tech bubble bursting, then engaged in financial fraud.[1][2] Blaming Huawei for Nortel's failure is a pretty massive rewrite of history.
Not Huawei hacking - alleged Chinese hacking. By that time, Nortel had already been hit by the bursting of the tech bubble - which it never really recovered from - and was in the midst of a scandal in which top executives were accused of financial fraud. Nortel's final downfall occurred during the Great Recession, after years of limping along on life support. People blaming Huawei for Nortel's collapse are really banking on people forgetting the history of Nortel.
admittedly I am as biased as they come being a formel Nortel employee.
Chinese government hacking and Huawei hacking are one and the same as the end result is Huawei benefitting from the stolen information.
Had Nortel not been hacked they wouldn't have had to deal with their competitors ripping off their products and out manoeuvring them in their business deals.
The article I linked to cites an ex senior security advisor at Nortel stating that the hacking dated back to 2000, before the tech bubble burst.
Instead of being swept under the rug the demise of Nortel due to hacking should be a case study in why computer security needs to be given a lot more attention even if it is at the expense of convenience.
Hang on a second there. We really have to go back to the history of Nortel, because the claim that Chinese hacking brought down Nortel really does not hold up.
Nortel expanded massively during the dot-com bubble, and went on a nearly $20 billion acquisition spree that caused it to lose money every quarter for years, even while its stock price was driven up by unrealistic expectations. Then the dot-com bubble burst, at which point these expectations were tempered and people began worrying about Nortel's unprofitability. The stock crashed, raising capital became difficult, demand for Nortel's products (and all telecommunications hardware) plummeted, and the company had to lay off 20% of its workers. At this time, Huawei was a tiny player outside of China. Nortel's major competitor was Cisco.
In 2003, for the first time in years, Nortel finally posted a quarterly profit, but then came under investigation from the SEC over suspicions that it was fudging its numbers (specifically, the accusation was that executives shifted revenue in time in order to meet targets that earned them bonuses). The SEC charged top Nortel executives with fraud, and the case was eventually settled, but Nortel had to change out its top management. Nortel was also sued by shareholders, to whom it had to pay billions of dollars in a settlement. There were layoffs and downsizing throughout this entire period.
To look at that history, and then to claim that hacking that might have helped one of Nortel's several competitors (and not even the largest, by a long shot) is the reason for Nortel's demise just seems completely out of left field to me. To be honest, it sounds like a batter yelling at the ump about being distracted by a fan after he strikes out 0-3.
It's more like someone on base on your team stealing the catcher's signals to the pitcher and telling your batter what pitch is coming so they can hit a home run by cheating.
Here is a quote from one of the articles I linked:
>Nortel was once one of the dominant telecom providers globally, but in early 2004, Huawei was caught stealing trade secrets from Nortel. This was proven by Nortel security expert Brian Shields. However, Nortel management had a hand in their own eventual downfall when it outsourced manufacturing to Huawei in the ’90s.
>In the hack, Huawei gained credentials of Nortel executives, including CEO Frank Dunn and Brian McFadden. It then simply stole documents that contained the future product and marketing plans of Nortel.
>The hack went even further than usernames and passwords. It has never been proven, but U.S. sources discovered that it was most likely Huawei that used sophisticated malware to record nearly every phone call that Frank Dunn made. After all of this, Huawei grew and Nortel faded, eventually going bankrupt.
All of the history of some mismanagement or funny accounting means nothing to me. Nortel had a large portfolio of IP that was stolen by China and ended up in the hands of Huawei and then the details of all of the deals they were trying to make to sell equipment were also stolen and used to out manoeuvre them, driving losses and unprofitability.
However, at least for me, that then taints the credibility of Trudeau and the government he leads.
I have idea if the claims against Huawei are true (many of these details seem to be kept secret) and my suspicion would be they may well have been involved in some sort of industrial espionage.
I'm also sure many companies and countries around the world are also actively engaged in all sorts of espionage.
However, the fact a government has been shown to easily bend it's own laws for the sake of business also means Huawei's claim this is a politically motivated attack can't be so easily dismissed.
I will be very surprised if Huawei would be found guilty of anything. The company plays an important role in actually defining the 5G standard as a member of 3GPP, and holds 3 times the number of 5G patents than Qualcomm.
Making contributions doesn’t cancel stealing secrets. We all know most of the chinese technology was IP stolen and improved upon. Lets take for example Solowheel. Do you know the story behind it?
Have you ever stopped to ponder why Ford, GM, and Chrysler's four-stroke motors look ever so much like the one the Germans Nicolaus Otto, Gottlieb Daimler, and Wilhelm Maybach invented?
Because a lot of german technology was force-exported to the US and USSR after Germany lost the WWII. What are you implying here regarding China’s IP theft? Did they win a war Im not aware of?
worked for a main competitor of Huawei building UMTS/LTE base stations which at the time weren't even properly standardized (early systems design). Searched for my own name on github. Found source code I wrote for said vendor which was taken from somebody who worked for our Hangzhou office and had access to the same internal VCS[1] as me. The guy downloaded anything he had access to then moved to Huawei and from there to another Chinese state owned company. He uploaded everything to his own github account (under his real name). Not even an isolated case. They don't even have to plant a mole in your org in the West they can simply just coerce Chinese based employees to extract interesting IP from your sites in China. These guys just don't give a f*ck! (also Nokia, Ericsson management were never held accountable for enabling this by opening up sites in China without thinking this won't bite them. they all did it because of promise of cheap manufacture and they all got rolled. thousands of jobs lost in Europe and the US as a consequence so it's not just the Chinese who are to blame here)
note: I was involved in early tech standardization on 3GPP for many years. yes Huawei contributes a lot. That doesn't mean they also don't steal your shit. They do it because there literally is no way to hold them accountable. You just got to make sure you don't travel to a country that may extradite you to the US. And by the way they are _not_ the leader in 5G. This is constantly parroted propaganda. You can get the same "mature" Tech for 5G from Ericsson, Nokia ... yes Huawei might have more patents but you can only sell what the standard supports in terms of interoperability, and so the constant claim that the only 5G player is Huawei is plain wrong.
[1] obviously we didn't use github to manage our source code.
Man, I get your point, they did/are doing tons of bad stuff. But so is every-fucking-body else, everywhere. Industrial espionage is a thing for more than a century, everybody tries to steal whatever they can, even US from Europe and vice versa. US secret services help their own private companies get an edge (for some other favors obviously), and so do other secret services.
Friendships among nations is a very relative term.
What you describe is just less attempts by chinese to cover up their tracks, since it doesn't matter that much now.
So in that case, then it's surely fine to just block Huawei. It's just a continuation of the same shenanigans that "everybody is doing".
Right?
I think there are certain lines that aren't supposed to be crossed. You'll notice in the U.S. that Uber and Levandowski were sued by Waymo. Why? Because they stole source code. If "everybody is doing it" surely Waymo would just chalk it up to business as usual right?
I guess you could say, well in the U.S. we enforce certain standards blah blah... exactly. There are certain standards. You can play dirty within certain limits. The U.S. doesn't have a national policy of having companies steal stuff from trading partners. If I, as a U.S. citizen, started hacking into Chinese companies and stealing their source code, set up an operation to call and scam old Chinese ladies out of their life savings, or any of that I'd be in serious shit. In China it's business as usual because the CCP has an unofficial policy of "steal as much as possible and fuck em".
I really don't like when people try and normalize CCP actions or equate their actions with the U.S. or Europe for that matter. It's nonsense and self-hating.
Don't worry, in a few years China will be producing so much of its own IP it will start hypocritically crying about other countries stealing from it and being unfair and protectionist, and that will be a copy of the US too.
> If I, as a U.S. citizen, started hacking into Chinese companies and stealing their source code, set up an operation to call and scam old Chinese ladies out of their life savings, or any of that I'd be in serious shit.
It really depends on how much valuable stuff you got
This is classic disruptive innovation at nation state scale.
Imaginary property only worked when all jurisdictions agreed to follow the same rules, and could enforce these rules onto individual actors. Obviously China isn't playing by these rules and has no desire to play by these rules, regardless of any lip service paid. So we can either adjust our own philosophies to better match how the real world operates. Or we can continue trying to force our rules on everyone else, which will end catastrophically when reality finally does catch up.
maybe in hindsight it's always easy to spot the problem. but the tragedy here is that we're feeling the effects of lost opportunities and mistakes that were made already 15-20 years ago. We had a window of opportunity when China was still coming up to give them a carrot/stick treatment and force them to either reform in exchange for export opportunities or remain isolated. The same mistakes were made with Russia (that window closed around 2002-2004). The US has been just one foreign policy blunder after another unfortunately.
China has changed enormously in the last 15-20 years, especially in intellectual property enforcement. China is one of the most active venues in the world for IP enforcement now. They've created an IP regime out of nothing, established specialized courts that deal only with IP, and now try hundreds of thousands of cases a year.
Yet all of this seems completely unknown in the West, outside of the legal/business community that actually engages with the Chinese IP system. The same comments about there being no IP enforcement in China are made over and over again, completely disregarding the massive changes that have occurred.
There's always been a lot of inside baseball with regards to international trade "rules."
Countries always act in what they perceive to be their best interests.
Ergo, there will always be tension over rules that further those interests and rules that act counter to them.
Pharma patents have historically been a major example. Disempowering smaller countries in their negotiations with pharmaceutical companies (via mandatory IP enforcement) tilts the playing field in favor of corporations headquartered in first world countries.
So, even in the most lawful of times (2000s?), it's a constantly shifting landscape.
While China may have ignored more rules than most, the existing rules certainly didn't favor them, and they believed they had the power to ignore them.
Yeah because they sell cheap. Yeah because they didnt incur the cost of IP, it’s on the backs of others whose work was stolen.
This is the problem with China, they unashamedly want to eat the hand that feeds them. Even in China there’s a saying, somethink like “Don’t wake up the sleepy giant” in reference to the US’ lax policy in dealing with this. They, the Chinese themselves, think that the US is dumb for letting them get away with so much.
In 2019, Huawei had the 5th largest R&D budget of any company in the world. Its R&D budget was larger than that of Apple.[1]
> They, the Chinese themselves, think that the US is dumb for letting them get away with so much.
What are you basing this on? It might surprise you to know that China has established dozens of specialized IP courts since 2014, which now handle hundreds of thousands of cases per year. What you're saying sounds like pure prejudice, born out of a lack of knowledge.
I don't know anything about telecoms, but I work in a different area of software development in China and can confirm it is not uncommon for developers here to bring their whole previous employer's repo with them when they switch jobs. One of my most cringeworthy moments was when I saw the same XyzUtil class pop up in two different companies, and both had been sourced from the same (not open source) third company repo, with the same bug that I ended up fixing twice.
I suspect this happens in other countries too, but I think elsewhere people make an effort to be less obvious about it. I get the impression copy paste programming isn't as looked down upon here as it is in the west.
Pretty sure it happened in Europe and UK in early '00s too, from my limited experience. Sure, not in an obvious way, but it happened - mostly kept as a reference to go back when you're sure you've already seen/solved this or that problem before.
I mean, in Europe salespeople routinely take customer contact-lists with them whenever they move, everybody knows it. Developers do the equivalent stuff in their field. Asians are just a bit more blunt about it, because they have less to lose. Plenty of Europeans did the same sort of thing when moving to the US in 18th/19th century - I call it "hungry makes right".
I'd be shocked to see this (employees taking employers' proprietary source code) happen in the U.S., or in Canada, or in Europe, or in Japan, or in South Korea, or in most of LatAm. I've no idea about Africa, India, and elsewhere, though I expect this doesn't happen in India either (possibly due to British influence).
>This after previous indictments of Huawei for RICO violations and theft of trade secrets from USA companies T-Mobile, Qualcomm, and Cisco
Refusing to sell chips to them incentivizes further theft of intellectual property. If these two things are linked, this seems like a terrible strategy.
That's the danger of being the patsy. I think more and more people should try to transact business at an arm's distance with China in this kind of environment. The opposite is true as well. Your average Chinese businessperson should think long and hard about transacting any business with the US that requires their physical presence in the US.
All nations have way too many laws. You will be in violation of one of them. So the only thing the Chinese or US government needs to do is pick a US or Chinese citizen, and then hold up the probably 10 laws that he/she is violating. It's impossible to live somewhere and be law abiding while simultaneously not knowing what all the laws are.
Let's be frank, we're not at the level of the elites in these nations who are arguing over which nation has the largest most attractive tits. On our level, and I'm talking to western and Chinese workers alike, but we're so far down the chain that we won't have people out there pulling strings for us. You don't want to be the hapless patsy sitting in US and Chinese prisons for 10 years while the elites compare dick size or whatever. To paraphrase that old adage, "They can remain irrational much longer than you can comfortably sit in prison."
At least in a democracy with a free press, you (the average person) can try to start a news frenzy and bug your elected government representatives to apply pressure on your behalf.
You have no elected officials. That's the point. You are an American being held for geopolitical reasons in China, or you are a Chinese citizen being held for geopolitical reasons in the US. There is no elected official representing you to which you can appeal. You're just screwed. Again, unless you are an elite and people will pull strings for you. But most of us here are not elites, we're too far down the chain. No one is going to pull strings for us. We just have to sit in prison until China and the US finish comparing bra sizes.
I'm saying both americans and chinese should be mindful of this risk when working in the other country.
Yeah, they would have been arrested in China, where their elected official means exactly dick. The whole reason China arrested a patsy is to provoke the US. So how exactly is senator useless gonna get him out of jail? The entire reason the Chinese arrested him, was to anger senator useless and american media. Were it not for senator useless, the american wouldn't be sitting in a Chinese prison in the first place. Were it not for Chinese party member dickmouth, the Chinese guy would not be sitting in an american prison. The government officials are the problem, they're definitely not going rush right out to get a regular worker out of prison. At least not until they finish their argument over who has the best hair or whatever.
Putting faith in the government officials is just a bit naive I think.
Huawei is screwed for RF front end components, specifically integrated PA, switching, and BAW filtering. I don’t believe there is a domestic supplier of those.
I implore anyone to check out ‘Trade is War’ by Yash Tandon:
“ Globalization has reduced many aspects of modern life to little more than commodities controlled by multinational corporations. Everything, from land and water to health and human rights, is today intimately linked to the issue of free trade. Conventional wisdom presents this development as benign, the sole path to progress.
Yash Tandon, drawing on decades of on-the-ground experience as a high level negotiator in bodies such as the World Trade Organization, here challenges this prevailing orthodoxy. He insists that, for the vast majority of people, and especially those in the poorer regions of the world, free trade not only hinders development—it visits relentless waves of violence and impoverishment on their lives.”
Can we please stop flagging comments like these? It's annoying and imho should lead to revoking flagging privileges for everyone part of the "ring". Deplatforming by mass-flagging is shit on Twitter and it's shit on HN as well.
With the perspective of COVID19, China seems like a threat to the global community. I support any efforts to restrict China’s ability to expand their footprint, global reach, ability to reach into and influence the affairs of other nations. I’m completely exhausted with the deeply flawed “Golden Arches” b.s. at this point.
>With the perspective of COVID19, China seems like a threat to the global community
This does not make any sense to me. Though I do not approve of all of the actions China took at the start of the pandemic, I can not understand how you can consider them a threat over it.
Have you not considered that China made an exerted effort to withhold information about COVID19 from the world... How is that not an act of aggression? Hundreds of thousands dead...
China seems to have reacted to the epidemic quicker and more effectively than the rest of the world did. Acts of aggression are voluntary: like dropping bombs on Iraq, financing civil wars or reneging a signed agreement and imposing an embargo on a foreign country.
>Have you not considered that China made an exerted effort to withhold information about COVID19 from the world? How is that not an act of aggression?
Though I have issues with some of the early reporting, I do not think their aim was to attack the rest of the world. At worst, which I'm still not convinced of, it was prioritizing their own citizens over others. Hardly an act of aggression.
>Hundreds of thousands dead.
Presumably you live in the US. If killing hundreds of thousands makes you a threat unworthy of influence you might want to look at our actions. Or consider what the results of your desired actions against the Chinese might be.
There's evidence it was in Europe long before it was ever noticed in China.
Was France and Italy covering it up to harm the planet? There was an irregularly high number of pneumonia deaths in Italy oct/nov 2019 and yet you won't see a single person alleging it's a conspiracy.
There's evidence it was in Europe long before it was ever noticed in China.
Was France and Italy covering it up to harm the planet? There was an irregularly high number of pneumonia deaths in Italy oct/nov 2019 and yet you won't see allegations of a a conspiracy because it's an absurd assumption given him much self inflicted harm it caused.
Going down the cover up and "act of aggression" rabbithole, the whole world knew about it months before ever impacted them and had all the time in the world to prepare.
As usual, no one responds, just tries to grey it out.
For those whose minds aren't so already made up, here's a virologist doing a Q&A debunking all your conspiracy theories about where it came from and its origins.
Your posts give the impression that you are supporting the Europe origin conspiracy, though I don't think that is the case. That and the double post is probably the issue.
Edit: you've unfortunately broken the site guidelines quite a bit, and we've had to warn you several times already. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful.
I doubt this will be my most popular comment on HN but Trump really has to be congratulated for being the first President to actually do something about the growth in strategic strength of the absolutely terrifying regime that currently controls China. I know the Obama administration made some noises but I don't recall them actually inconveniencing China in a serious way.
To me this is all naked geopolitics, hardly fair and extremely risky. But finally America is transitioning to worrying about real problems rather than, say, the policy of treating shepherds in Afghanistan as a major threat in the Bush era.
>Trump really has to be congratulated for being the first President to actually do something about the growth in strategic strength of the absolutely terrifying regime that currently controls China
He might deserve congratulations if his strategies made sense, but they seem more likely to hurt the US than China in the long run.
There are no sure things. We don't like the current situation because its risky. But no risk no reward. If we wanted less risk our only option was to have done it way earlier - under Bush 1 or Clinton.
I'm fine with risks, so long as they're calculated from a position of expertise. I don't trust Trump to take smart risks, given his business history, narcissism and well documented disdain for expert advice. Someone who ignores intelligence briefings because he thinks he's too smart to need them shouldn't be acting like a maverick on the world stage.
Simply doing something, anything, for the sake of having something be done is even worse than the status quo.
I think this is why ppl (msm) should tune out the "Obamagate" nothing-burger, cos it's potentially less dangerous than anti-asian sentiments given the population demographics in the US. Who's next after; Muslims, Blacks, Mexicans, Jews, Asians??
The problem for the US is that it is difficult to imagine a realistic, and peaceful, scenario in which China does not ultimately become a larger global power than the US.
The actions they are taking are delaying tactics but do not change the fundamentals. In fact, blocking shipments of semiconductors may even hasten the rise of a competing Chinese industry.
I think being #1 is deeply embedded in the American psyche and it is shocking for them to even imagine otherwise (Edit: as we see in these very comments and the reactions...), which is actually a risk for world peace, IMHO.
He got rid of the most effective global efforts to contain China’s growth through the TPP. I know HN hates the TPP because of amorphous claims about IP, but flouting IP norms forms the entire basis of these actions by Trump, and the whole point of TPP’a IP protections (which HN hated, apparently) was to make sure China’s neighbors would not flout IP protections the way China did, giving private companies incentives to move manufacturing and research from China to the neighboring countries instead.
That would have been a broad ranging global effort to ensure China followed rules, that would have cost the US nothing (in fact other countries were making concessions to the US for it), and would not have required 2-3 years of barely legal efforts to contain 1 Chinese company and even there only in the US market, but would have instead affected all Chinese companies, non Chinese companies manufacturing in China, and not just the US market but also eastern Asian and Australasian markets.
So yeah, if by Trump did something you mean he dismantled an effort that would have been more effective by orders of magnitude and cost the US nothing but actually won it more friends in favor of a barely legal effort that is pissing off even allies that are not friendly to China and has taken 3 years to maybe impact 1 Chinese company, then sure.
Obama was quietly working on the TPP. It or something like it would probably have been the better strategy to check Chinese power and put us on a path to decouple from them, while boosting friendly allies in their orbit.
Trump pulled out of the deal and decided to do a trade war instead.
The TPP would simply have incentivized more manufacturing to leave the west for other asian countries.
You got a trade war because there was finally a US president willing to risk confrontation like the chinese are, who started calling out chinese practices like dumping steel in canada to kill the US steel industry.
A year ago people said trump was crazy for talking about chinese steel dumped in canada as a national security issue. Then you couldnt get n95 masks and the world realized things run out if you dont produce them and someone else makes them.
The trade war is a positive - the US-China relationship needs redefining. If you look at chinese influence campaings the chinese are well aware of US efforts to deal with orbitting allies and is pushing their own influence. Your ideas would have worked 15 years ago, maybe.
I think we should all keep something in mind before we go celebrate the end of globalization. If we go on a rampage pulling manufacturing and capital out of China while simultaneously blaming them for the pandemic, in a few years we’ll end up seeing a nation with a shattered economy, a pissed off populace, and the largest and most well supplied army on Earth. Rhetoric tends to devolve into a limited decision matrix when we should be trying to expand the tree instead. Diplomacy works, anger doesn’t.
On the other hand, it's difficult to be diplomatic when one side is so belligerent, sensitive and petty. China has started imposing trade sanctions on my country (Australia) because our Prime Minister had the audacity to suggest there should be an independent inquiry into the origin of COVID-19. Meanwhile, they see fit to interfere in our domestic and political affairs through various front organisations, bribery and even directly through their embassy and ambassador in Australia.
People are fast growing tired of China's aggressive and abusive approach to 'diplomacy'.
Absolutely, I just wanted to point out that e.g. China <=> Australia is most likely not considered it's own conflict, but rather a subconflict of China <=> US, as Australia is part of the US bloc, just like every other Western nation and close allies in Asia.
China <=> Russia would be considered a different conflict, as few people believe that Russia would be acting as a proxy for the US.
I am well aware of the benefits of free trade and comparative advantage. Such benefits do not, however, take into account the requirement of at least some degree of self-sufficiency in terms of national security, both in immediate defense applications, and maintaining manufacturing capability and capacity for the longer term. Such benefits also do not take into account China's rapacious appetite for stealing American technology. I am glad that the US government is finally taking a stand.
Someone somewhere is playing to win, though. You can only successfully use diplomacy from a position of power. I think some of the sabre rattling is an attempt to suggest power.
Oh no! A shattered authoritarian country that routinely steals IP from the rest of the world and consistently ruins the lives of its own folk will be angry?
What is it that is actually preventing this from escalating to a hot war? It feels like we are just waiting for China to manufacture enough warships and nukes or killer drones or AGI with spiking neural networks or whatever can give them an edge so that a real war can start.
It's even a war in the comments section.
I don't think it's safe. How do we really know it can't progress to some kind of overt military activity?
Why are people not more concerned about this?
I get the impression that people think the best way to prevent a war is to keep doing things to hold them down. But that seems to be escalating tensions and not actually limiting them.
What is the plan for getting out of this? I hope that Elon hurries up with his Mars rockets so I can emmigrate before the whole planet turns into a complete bloody (literally) science fiction nightmare.
Nothing's preventing it from escalating to war. The national defense agencies in all countries probably have plans if that happens... I believe and really hope that an actual war won't happen. There's too much to lose, and little to gain.
A technological cold war will likely happen, Huawei and other Chinese companies will just continue R&D and manufacturing on their own. In a way, the US is letting go of whatever control they had left and making it easier for them to form their own alliances in this matter. It will just polarize the world more... again, as always.
I don't think I agree. Mars has a lot of things going for it that Earth doesn't.
For one their are no explosions, or people with guns. On mars you don't have to worry about people trying to steal your shit because it's valuable (or "necessary for the national defense"), and you don't have to worry about being collateral damage during the war.
On mars there aren't earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, mudslides, tsunamis, floods, volcanoes, lightning strikes, forest fires, and basically any other natural disaster that I missed except sandstorms. When you build a static structure on mars you can expect it to last basically forever, when you build one on earth it has a relatively short halflife. When your static structures become extremely valuable and difficult to replace because you need them to grow your food and you don't have the manufacturing capability to build more, I'd rather be one mars.
On mars you can reliably avoid radiation by putting enough "stuff" (water, soil, whatever) between you and the sun. On earth after a nuclear war it would be coming from everywhere exposed to the atmosphere (in the shortish term).
On mars you get to plan for the hardships while the pre-nuclear-war earth manufacturing base is still functioning. On earth you don't know when the nuclear war is going to happen, or what portions of the earth it's going to glass, so that becomes much more difficult.
On the downside, the martian atmosphere is actually deadly to humans (since it's nearly a vacuum), while the post nuclear war atmosphere is likely only ... very hazardous. Mars has no native plants so you have to be entirely self sufficient inside your colonies, while the post-nuclear war earth colonies could forage for (mildly radioactive) food in emergencies.
It is better to hold them down while we, the west get stronger. They can escalate tensions all they want they still need warships, nukes, microchips, etc. to do something and as long as we stay better then them they won't do anything. In my opinion the best way to avoid a war is to have the bigger stick
Maybe but at some point it turns into a case where people are constantly beating each other with sticks of various sizes. And then it's not civilized anymore.
So it seems like either that stick needs to get much more effective very quickly, or probably more reasonably at this point we need to try to de-escalate somehow.
In my opinion there is a very obvious lack of cultural and political integration which is inevitably going to be resolved. One way or another. I don't see a plan for doing it peacefully really being promoted by leaders. Which to me indicates that the leadership and overall awareness of the situation is inadequate. And probably we are going to be totally fucked by this ignorance and stupidity at some point.
I'd even go so far as to say a hot war is inevitable. Not because of any particular reason, but because the US and China are the only superpowers left. And if there's one thing power doesn't like, it's sharing. My very simplified view is that war happens when more than one 'power' axis vies for control of some sort of a geographic area. We're at a point in history where the last remaining relevant geographic area is the whole world, and the primary axis of power are China and the US. I don't think humanity has the capability of avoiding war in such a situation.
I'll even venture into complete speculation, and posit that WWIII will be fought over, and largely in, Africa. In many ways Africa represents the last frontier on earth, with great natural resources but largely behind in many areas of development and not 'controlled' by either China or the US. South America would also be a potential hot zone, but it's too close to the US. China has realized this already and is investing heavily in Africa, while the US just in the last decade established Africom. Once the US' focus on the middle easy wanes a bit with oil decreasing in relevance, they'll turn their focus to somewhere else. The only reason the middle easy didn't turn into WWIII is because of the relatively powerful players in the area, including Israel, Saudi, Iran, and formerly Iraq. Large enough to hold their own, but not so large that they individually pose a threat to the US hegemony. That, and china wasn't really a relevant player in the world-war starting game until the 80's or 90's or so, and kind of missed the whole middle east war phase. But they're ahead of the game in Africa, and are establishing control there already. And as China transitions from developing country to rich country, they will, in turn, need overseas territories to vassalize themselves. So, there's my wild prediction, that WWIII will happen between the US and China as primary axis of power, sparked over something to do with Africa, right around the time when oil is no longer the US' middle-eastern siren song that it is today. Maybe in 20-30 years or so. Also around the time that millennials will be in the 'old guard', and have no living memory (on a broad, population-scale level) of how horrific war really is. Boomers had the WWII generation still hanging around to warn them off of WWIII, and they still nearly got us there.
What's the problem with China's growth? China uses to be a friend when they can only manufacture T-shirts and socks, now a threat when they can even do chips and aircraft? The foreign policy of the US is a failure, wars in mid east and anti-terrorsim has costed too much, and that gave China an opportunity to grow. You cannot blame China for this. The business practice need to be changed for sure, but let's hope there is no war.
Sometimes war is inevitable, if your modus operandi is to avoid war someone who does not have that qualm will use the threat of war to extort and dominate you.
> Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross told Fox Business “there has been a very highly technical loophole through which Huawei has been in able, in effect, to use U.S. technology with foreign fab producers.” Ross called the rule change a “highly tailored thing to try to correct that loophole.”
This is very vague. Does anyone understand what they are talking about?
“Under the new rule, any foreign company that uses American technology to produce microchips would need a license to sell to Huawei. That makes it difficult for major chip contract manufacturers like Taiwan’s T.S.M.C. to sell to Huawei, because its supply chains rely heavily on American manufacturing tools. It could also clamp down on sales by makers of semiconductor equipment, like Applied Materials and KLA, and chip design software companies like Cadence.”
I don't really understand why they are requiring a license to sell to Huawei in the first place.
That this is all such a string of vagueness makes me suspect it's a bunch of bullshit, more about politics (in the 'optics' sense) or business competitiveness than actual national security.
All of this is about national security. US & Taiwan’s TSMC are in talks to open a TSMC factory in the US. Chairman of TSMC has publicly stated if the US gives them enough money, they’ll do it. Appears US (Trump) is telling TSMC if they do not open the factory for free, they’re going to have trouble making money at all. Taiwan wants to keep TSMC because it’s an insurance policy, China & the US both need TSMC. That or it is a plausible way for TSMC to deny they’re cutting off China.
Hm, I think you and I mean a different thing by 'national security'. I think of, like, spying, or trying to insert malicious vulnerabilities in software (attack), etc.
Like maybe if Huawei were accused of being used by the Chinese government to spy on America, it would make sense to require a license to sell tech to Huawei. (I have sometimes seen it accused of such; I have no idea how credible such accusations are; but this is an example of what 'national security' means to me, particularly in regard to requiring licenses to do business with a particular company).
You seem to be talking about whether TSMC gets a federal subsidy or not to open a factory or not as 'national security'. I mean, I get how the general economic environment has 'national secuirty' implications; how the future access to semiconductor market has 'national security' implications. But if that's "national security" it seems like the entire economy is "national security", and "national security" doesn't actually mean anything. Especially when Huawei is being penalized for concerns about a different company?
With that understanding of national security, is there any aspect of international trade negotiations that isn't "national security", or any international trade measure that can't be said to be "justified by national security"? Do you have an example of any international trade measure (a tariff, an embargo, a subsidy, a penalty, a ban, any method of one nation trying to get an economic/trade advantage over another) that you do not think would be "national security" related under this understanding? Is there such a thing?
Among other things, it's another reminder that the era of legal-norms-based international trade has been brought to an end...
All national security has a cost, access to TSMC is obviously national security issue, and appears US is positioning itself to reduce the cost of access to TSMC and increase it for China.
National security is an ends, not a means; its ultimate form is shapelessness, not a strict definition.
I'll ask again, is there any example of international trade dispute/conflict that would not be about 'national security' with this understanding? Can you give one? Or does this intentionally and consciously reconceptualize all attempts to get advantage in international trade, or a business advantage for domestic corporations over foreign ones, as 'national security'?
Can you explain that example in your own words, and what you think makes it not an issue of national security? Or is your position just, hard to say, whatever the WTO says?
What the WTO determines has changed over time, and can depend on the balance of power. The WTO knows that if it keeps making rulings that countries just ignore, it loses power and legitmacy, it has to try not to push too hard.
But your opinion is whatever the WTO decides is correct?
To me, if the penalties against Huawei are really about negotiations over a government subsidy for a TSMC plant, I'd expect the WTO to rule against the US, if it was playing 'fair'. Which doesn't mean it will.
Here's an example of the WTO ruling against the US in a trade dispute with China, and the US retaliating to try to weaken the WTO.
China has been working on challenging actions against Huawei specifically at the WTO; although it has to be careful because they know the WTO's rulings can be effected by politics, and the US (especially current administration) may not abide by the WTO ruling anyway, they need to try to remain on good terms to avoid escalating trade war, regardless of what the WTO might ultimately rule (which can take a while too).
There is not. In more peaceful times smaller trade disputes can be seen as having no national security relevance. But otherwise international trade absolutely is of relevance to national security. And that's as true for perennial exporters as for perennial importers.
> Hm, I think you and I mean a different thing by 'national security'. I think of, like, spying, or trying to insert malicious vulnerabilities in software (attack), etc.
Supply chain security is also part of national security. Economic (in)dependency is also part of national security. Economic well-being and competition is also part of national security. There's more to national security than espionage and military capabilities. You don't have to agree -- it doesn't matter if you don't because the people work in the national security apparatus do think that national security encompasses all of that and more, and their opinion matters a hell of a lot more than your typical HN commenter's (mine included).
Well, that's definitely not the case, a lot of labs are on this (including Berkley's hammer/chisel [1]).
I've seen some tools presented at RISC-V conferences, but the major closed-source component nowadays is the PDK, I'm afraid.
Hopefully, inkjet-printed transistors or some other fabless technology will make open source ICs a lot more feasible. One of the major issue is costs, when you look at more than 40k/mm² for multiproject wafers in advanced nodes and contrast that with the anemic budget most open source software has to do with. You don't need to be on the very latest node, if you can afford going slower, on bigger, cheaper dies.
A lot of open source "hardware" project seem to focus on FPGAs, since that's more approachable, and the costs are nowhere as high.
Just something I didn't make clear in the above comment: I expect that Hardware-description-language-to-layout pipelines will improve a lot in the upcoming years, so if a process becomes viable for open hardware, projects that were developed on an FPGA (here is a wi-fi chip, for instance: https://github.com/open-sdr/openwifi) might be transferable with a lot less effort than doing everything from scratch.
I would also like to point out that these tools will likely help us juice up a bit more performance from the existing processes, but we aren't really likely to see a lot more of Moore's scaling, going forward. So the door is open to new processes, that may or may not be open hardware-friendly. And current, top-end processes might also become cheaper over time. While I doubt a lot of new foundries will catch up with the end of Moore's scale, it might actually become easier to get there, while disruptive technologies get some time to play catch-up. Together with innovative synthesis tools.
pretty shocking how biased these hn comments are against china. it's clear the US has lost leadership in the crucial technology of 5g and is trying everything it can to stop the leader, huawei. while i'm no china-phile, the US actions is just silly and will have far reaching consequences that will just quicken the demise of our technological prowess. and if you're gonna argue from the point of view that huawei broke the law, then let them have their day in court. we're acting like judge, jury and executioner. how is that right?? shows up hn as a bunch of biased tech bros! let the downvotes begin
> pretty shocking how biased these hn comments are against china.
And it took only a few years of media campaigns- the first one I remember was the announcement of spy chips in China-made boards, which turned out to be fake. It's scary how quickly you can steer public opinion to suit your needs.
It's actually been a long time coming: Tiananmen, South China Sea, Hong Kong protests, threats against Taiwan, Uyghurs, Tibet, Surveillance State, Authoritarian ruler for life, IP thefts, currency manipulation, shooting down satellites, lop-sided market access and more.
How is that a bad thing? Would you rather see HN support a country with literal ethnic cleansing policies? Or one that executes dissenters or makes them disappear? Btw, China does not have the technical lead in 5G. Just the cheaper equipment. And chinese tech is barely able to reproduce 8-10 years old semiconductor technology on it's own, so it's very very far from technological lead. Unless you believe the CCP narrative that they will magically outpace America/the west by barely being able to catch up despite the enormous scale of their industrial espionage.
> It's an invisible war of nations and we dont really have a clue about allegiances nor what is right or wrong.
I don't see any doubt regarding "allegiance". The Chinese regime is a totalitarian nightmare that not only became a massive surveillance state but also has a long track record of human rights abuse and extrajudicial assassinations. Between what the West enjoyed in the past half century and the oppressive hell that countries have endured in the hands of the Chinese regime, the choice is pretty clear, even if we take into account Putin's pull on Trump.
Between the end of WWII and now, Western Europe, and now Eastern as well, have enjoyed American defense and economic benefits. Europe almost as a monolithic whole has been fixated on a different economic model than the American model, but that's its own choice -- the U.S. did not impose its model on Europe.
> The US needs a framework for smaller nations where we can build better relations.
What could that be? We've had the U.N., NATO, the WTO, and what not.
the last time we effectively blocked china from acquiring tunneling machines, they ended up building their own, a mean feat, and now they're looking to start exporting them! disrupting the market economy has a vicious way of getting back at ya
[0] http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1121448.shtml
They are already building their own chips. Huawei has started to use 14nm chips manufactured by Shanghai-based SMIC. They plan to replace TSMC's chips with SMIC's chips in their phones. TSMC blocking will just accelerate their plans.
It is very interesting reading all the comments from you guys, some from tech prospective others from policical ones. But from my angle, a normal Chinese guy working in the field of material research in China for a decade and deep inside the system, my points would be:
1. you guys really worry too much about our ability to innovate, seriously. There is no room for real innovations. But at the same time the system rewards stealing and copying. The system, the education, the overall political environment are not designed with innovations in mind but to help a few to stay in power. My personal take on this is that Chinese "innovation" is now built upon: Chinese with foreign education/working background bringing back technologies, CCP buying foreign companies with OUR everyday people's money, and of course hacking/stealing directly. I don't believe we have a change winning the innovation war, not in the long run.
2. for a "private" company like huawei, isn't it weird that it's always backed by CCP? Lots of Chinese private companies get balls kicked everyday and why only huawei get treatment worthy of a state owned business? Even us Chinese knows better.
3. please think about us everyday Chinese citizens. we are currently under direct information warfare and systematic repression waged by CCP for decades, and our lives/future squeezed out in order to found companies like huawei and projects like one belt one road, without a fking vote. It's much bigger than us vs huawei, at least from our side.
btw it is not my field of expertise but I'd like to call for experienced software/hardware engineers from the west, help us bring down the CCP's GFW system before it's too late. If it is built by man it can be broken.
In business, there is the perennial question of "Do I "buy built" thus taking advantage of economies of scale within the supplier while at the same time making myself dependent on the good intentions of that supplier? Or do I "go to the cost and effort and time wasted in making it myself", which means I don't get dependent on that supplier, puts me behind for a year or two, and then possibly may be able to take away his business and keep it for myself in the future?
Most administrators find it's better overall to "buy built". But if forced to, they will "roll their own".
If Huawei starts making its own semiconductors, the US can wave goodbye to its own semiconductor companies like Intel, AMD, Radeon and Nvidia. Just like GM, Ford and Chrysler are there in name only today- when once they made over 50% of the entire world's cars back in the 1960s.
In the words of that famous hair product: "It may not happen overnight, but it will happen!"
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Edit: also paid by damore lmao what a terrible person
Pulling this crap only incentives China to develop their own silicon. Since the west can't compete on manufacturing cost or quality, Chinese products will continue to dominate. But the importance of incorporating western technologies will deminish since there will be no legal alternative. The end result is just plain brand dilution, since not using western technology will become the new norm.
I'm not really personally concerned, the west will learn sooner or later that it actually needs to build something to remain competitive. A service based economy is simply everyone serving each other coffee, while gradually eroding existing equity so we can keep buying coffee beans.
Operating under the assumption this isnt already a priority to them, which I would say is a big assumption.
You're looking at this as if it was in absence of the rest of the trade footings of the two countries.
The west is building stuff in this industry - semi conductors. The east is operating heavy industrial espionage to try and steal all the secrets of it so they can take it from the west.
I'm not sure why you think this trade war situation is indicative of the US not making things - its exactly a heavily US industry where China steals technology to leapfrog actual competition.
If China steals all your research you're going to have trouble affording coffee beans. If they steal your research and then open factories up you're going broke.
So the importance of producing is true, but its tied to the importance of protecting your advantages, national and otherwise.
But if you eliminate the legal option, the grey area alternative becomes normalized.
IP is also a highly artificial construct. If all documents were suddenly in the open, and your competitors are suddenly able to build a better product, how comfortable can you be that you can actually compete on quality?
Let's not forget that a good part of the NSA's business is industrial espionage, allegedly also heavily in Western Allies.
It's just a dumb move all around.
Seems to me that's happening either way and probably always was. Why wouldn't they?
Similar to how the google ban fast tracked Huawei working on google free systems e.g. buying third party map services like TomTom. Bad for Google good for competition.
Basically the US has lost its standing thanks to Trumps bully diplomacy[1].
“Some if not all regional countries may harbour concerns about the security ramifications of using Huawei, but there are real pragmatic considerations,” said Collin Koh Swee Lean, a research fellow at the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore. “Cost-wise in particular, Chinese offers for infrastructure development present more attractive propositions.”
https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/southeast-asia/article/301282...
I'm not sure why that's besides the point? The U.S. for years worked to invest in China and build them as a great trading partner and the CCP continued to just steal trade secrets and do everything in their power to undermine the U.S..
And it's probably true that this development was fast tracked by the trade war... but so what? This was coming since the CCP didn't want to be a partner with the West, so why wait around to cut the ties? It's going to happen either way, why not happen on your terms?
W.r.t Trump's "bully" diplomacy - I mean, playing nice certainly didn't work. We don't need to and shouldn't be trading partners with China so long as they're acting against U.S. and western interests in general. The U.S. tried to engage and endured years of malevolent activity by the CCP only to have the actions worsen over time. So... I'm not really sure what the advantage to the U.S. is besides having a big market. Ban Chinese products in the U.S. and China can ban U.S. products. Whatever.
> Cost-wise in particular, Chinese offers for infrastructure development present more attractive propositions
Sure. For now. And if you only want to look at cost. Maybe you want to look at other factors, like maybe you're Vietnam and concerned about the Chinese ramming your fishing boats? [1]
[1] https://www.news.com.au/world/south-china-sea-tensions-at-ne...
Was the US prepared to accept that? What do you think happens when the world's only technological, economic and military superpower is about to be overtaken by a competitor? Did you think the US was going to lose its supremacy without trying everything it could to prevent it? Of course not.
And then, what kind of actions do you think it would take to prevent it? For example, the US could start a very aggressive trade war with China. They could try to justify it in various ways, for example by saying that China is a risk to the world, that its technology is tainted by some issue (maybe it could be used for spying). They could try to isolate China, advising all its partners not to trade with it. And so on.
And this is exactly what we're seeing. It would have happened anyway, independently from China's behaviour. Because the only variable is how close they are to threatening the US's power. And they're close.
Given that, I just don't think it makes much sense to engage with China unless the calculation is strictly that it benefits the U.S. (and the west in general). Like, if U.S. companies don't get access to the Chinese market then that means Chinese companies don't get access to the U.S. market, for example. To put it another way, from my current understanding I would say we should maintain U.S. hegemony at all costs short of nuclear war (or anything atrocious like that). Despite recent setbacks and general anxiety about U.S. actions over the last however many years, The U.S. has proven since WWII that it's a trustable world leader.
Although I'd certainly counter your claim that a "rise" is inevitable. Being large doesn't necessarily translate into anything. I think it's only a matter of time before the U.S. global reach is diminished, and China will certainly fill that void, but it won't solely be filled by China, especially in the Pacific.
Countries in Europe will also have to make tough choices. Is NATO still viable? Is it outdated? Should the U.S. pull out? For now those are easy decisions, but when push comes to shove the U.S. is strong-willed enough to do something like back out of NATO if they insist on integrating with Chinese systems. I don't think there will be a lot of having your cake and eating it too for the continent. Yet another disappointment.
From a tech perspective this will have quite the impact. China will eventually develop viable operating systems, but will you buy a laptop with one? Some are concerned about the NSA, but at least I can sort of fight the system. What if I'm from Cambodia? Do I want the Chinese spying on me instead or do I have more faith in the Americans?
Lots of questions and uncertainty here, in my view, except that the U.S. needs to pick up its toys and go home when it's being put at a disadvantage.
I don't think those are the reasons, they are consequences. The reason, in my opinion, is just money. Your income depends on your job and the success of your company, which largely depends on the economy at large and, in case of large powers, on their world-wide power projection. People understand this instinctively, it's pure tribal behavior.
I believe most world-politics interpretation is just motivated reasoning, and you can change somebody's worldview by making them the beneficiary of a trust that's invested in whatever country they dislike. When they draw dividends from their enemy's success, they'll come to see them in a different light.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23187698
In the semi industry, nearly all of them. You can hardly make anything in the semiconductor industry without using several of the major US companies. The US still dominates the semiconductor equipment industry. Of the six major players, half of them are US companies.
> The $412bn global semiconductor industry rests on the shoulders of just six equipment companies, three of them US-based. Together, the companies make nearly all of the crucial hardware and software tools needed to manufacture chips, meaning an American export ban would choke off China’s access to the basic tools needed to make their latest chip designs.
> "You cannot build a semiconductor facility without using the big major equipment companies, none of which are Chinese," said Brett Simpson, the founder of Arete Research, an equity research group. “If you fight a war with no guns you’re going to lose. And they don’t have the guns.”
> "ASML cannot do without Applied Materials and the other way around. If you take even one out of the value chain, that may hamper Chinese fabs," said a former ASML executive.
https://www.ft.com/content/4a8553a6-f3b2-11e8-ae55-df4bf40f9...
I don't think it is quite so widely understood that there are close seconds in every market.
It is pretty easy to imagine ASML giving up on Intel, cutting HMI, and all the chipmakers going outside of Lam, Applied, and KLA for their next tools. The industry would be a bit disrupted but outside the US...fine. and it would destroy the US industry.
This will also tend to pressure the Chinese to keep pushing their own supplier industry, rather than just integrators.
Basically, though, a process flow is deposition, track, litho, etch, clean, deposition, cmp, metro, inspect (lots of steps vary, but these are the basics)
You need each of these to work. Deposition: Lam, Applied, TELand then Wonik, ASM, and others Track: TEL Litho: ASML Etch: Lam, Applied, TEL CMP: Ebara, Applied Metro: Onto, KLA, Hitachi Inspect: KLa, Applied
There are more, and I missed a bit, but basically, you need to tick off each of these layers, and quite often with the best at each.
ASML cannot make wafers for anyone without someone doing all the other parts. And really, that is true for all these companies. There is a best of breed and selection bias that makes each system imperfectly interchangeable.
But you can also see that ASML is the sole true monopoly. So if they are out, nothing works. There are plausible workarounds otherwise.not always easy or cost effective, but plausible in most cases.
ASML needs the rest of the infrastructure to sell tools. And likewise, everyone needs ASML to deliver, or there is no new node....
And they might get nice introspection by operating an x-ray FEL to do coherent transmission imaging for analytical purposes.
China has both, money and leverage (not just political, rare earths, etc), to throw at this problem, and from China's perspective it should be a strategic priority to get this done. It would in fact surprise me if there weren't such projects already in full drive since May 2019 when this all started.
I know that our system of government does not optimize long term gain, but this case seems especially bad.
Yet.
Eh, you know what, bring it on. The CCP needs to chill the fork out, but new sources/manufacturers for this kind of technology are always welcome.
I bet prices would go down a lot, like it happens every time AMD brings out something that can actually compete with Intel.
Funny thing is that TSMC +10 nm is subject to these rules, but not the 7 nm as it uses under 13% USA technology.
Yes, I think ASML will not sell them equipment.
EU member states certainly could see this as illegal interference in their economies and a stretch of US jurisdiction. There is also a good chance that this goes counter to at least a few international trade agreements. Agreements the US still desperately needs for other things it wants to keep doing.
It appears a very short sighted policy, by people who probably don't give a shit about whatever damage they do long term. Once they are out of office, it is no longer their problem. If it made them richer, they won. It's the ordinary people that will likely pay a price for this at some point, but not them.
I don't like spying period, but to try and equate what the US does to what China does is simply ludicrous.
America has been exceptionally clear that US intelligence and immigration agencies consider non-Americans to be fair game for hacking, non-judicial imprisonment, torture et al.
So if I'm not American I might acknowledge that America treats it's own citizens slightly better than China treats theirs from a human rights perspective, but as someone who's British neither nation has a stellar track record of actions that effect me and my country personally or give me any rights protection.
A document without maintainers is dead.
1 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/mar/12/bradley-mannin...
As an American I'd rather be spied on by China than my own government because China spying on me won't discover anything that they can use against me themselves. That's not so for my own government.
I'd expect this is similar in most countries. Your own government is the biggest danger because your own government has much more power over you than foreign governments and much more interest in you. The biggest threat for an average civilian from a foreign government spying on them is that the foreign government might share that information with their their own government.
Since many European governments have close intelligence sharing arrangements with the US and do not have such arrangements with China, I'd expect that for the average European it would be better to be spied on by China than the US.
This is such a West-centric viewpoint. The fact is that they're only only different in where they're the most horrible. China is worse on the domestic front and the U.S. bullies more on the foreign front. Then there's soft power, where Hollywood makes you think the U.S. actually cares about democracy and human rights, (while supporting the likes of Saudi Arabia at the same time), which are quite powerful tools of propaganda.
The 90% of civilians targeted by U.S. drones would probably strongly disagree with your assertion. Is just that there's not a strong voice speaking for them on TV, where's there's plenty on China.
[0] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/chinese-telecommunications-co...
[1] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/chinese-telecommunications-de...
Whatever happened to arresting Huawei’s Chief Financial Officer Wanzhou Meng? Was she ever extradited from Canada after being captured in Vancouver, BC?
a) The deal china made with US companies is bring us your technology and we will manufacture for you cheaply.
b) Giving technology as part of a deal and then retroactively calling it stealing is, well, strange.
c) America because what it was because it "stole" technology from Europe during the industrial revolution.
American companies understood what they were getting into and what the deals were and took them. China didn't force US companies to make those deals.
Most technological invention is paid for by the US government investment. Name any high technology and it's lineage points back to some government grant or purchase agreement.
Companies that use these inventions and innovate on top to bring them to market are themselves using technology we paid for. But we don't call that "stealing". Do you think they care that China also gets them?
Knowledge should be shared and free anyway.
A falsehood. The US was one of the primary innovators during the industrial revolution, along with Germany, Britain and France. In the oil/mining, steel, railroad/transport, electricity, building, manufacturing, automobile, farming and communication segments the US held its own when it came to invention in the 1870-1930 era. It doesn't take very long to canvas the major industrial segments and point to various large US contributions.
The recent claim that the US stole all of its industrial revolution era technology, is an empty defamation that you mostly only see on sites like Reddit as a propaganda angle, and it's always unsupported in argument.
> Was she ever extradited from Canada after being captured in Vancouver, BC?
No, it's still a giant political mess. The Canadian government wishes they had never gotten involved - they should have just let her slip. With the US and China, Canada is between a rock and a hard place.
Source on this? I certainly haven't heard the government say anything to this effect. As a Canadian I certainly do not wish we had "just let her slip". We're a country of laws. We should follow those laws, not just give in to pressure from China because they're big, mean, and scary.
I'm basing this on the government's paralysis in this case.
> We're a country of laws.
Canada's system of laws is being abused by the Trump administration, which has made no secret of its desire to use Meng Wanzhou as a bargaining chip in the trade war. Allowing the Canadian extradition treaty with the US to be abused for political ends was not wise. There were smarter ways to deal with the request. Hong Kong's reaction to the US extradition request for Snowden (please resubmit the paperwork while we let him fly out of our jurisdiction) would have been a good model to follow.
> We should follow those laws, not just give in to pressure from China because they're big, mean, and scary.
The possible US reaction to not extraditing Meng Wanzhou would be just as - if not more - scary. Canada is extremely dependent on trade with the US. That's why the government arrested Meng Wanzhou, and why it is finding it so difficult to acknowledge the obvious: that this is a politically motivated prosecution that does not fall under the terms of the extradition treaty.
What paralysis? It's moving through the court system at the court systems typical pace. (Which is slower than I would like... but that's just a general comment about our court system)
> Canada's system of laws is being abused by the Trump administration
This is primarily an argument for amending our laws in response to this case, not ignoring them in this case. Admittedly it's partially an argument that might be raised to say that the laws do not support extradition in this case, but of course at the time we detained Meng Wanzhou this was nowhere near as clear, and her lawyers are more then capable of making this argument to the court.
> The possible US reaction to not extraditing Meng Wanzhou would be just as - if not more - scary.
Indeed, and we should pay as little attention to that as we do to China's threats and retaliatory arrests. I have complete faith that our courts are paying as little attention to it.
> This is primarily an argument for amending our laws in response to this case, not ignoring them in this case.
The political exception to extradition quite obviously applies here. This is a standard clause in extradition treaties. The thing is, the Canadian government is afraid to use this clause for political reasons - fear of retaliation from the Trump administration.
Next you'll be telling us that a police officer would never lie on the stand.
Not requiring trust is the entire reason why we have such a public court process.
I suspect we have very different opinions on how frequently police lie on the stand.
Really though the crux of the matter is wether Meng is held due to a real criminality as per Canadian/US law, or is being held as a political move, and signals from both US and Canadian administration has been confusing in this regard. Some statements from US and administrations give a feeling that she's being held for political reasons.
"Several well-known Canadians, including former prime minister Jean Chrétien and former foreign minister John Manley, have suggested that Canada let Meng go or orchestrate a “prisoner exchange” with China."
From WaPo on this issue:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/extraditio...
It is embarrassing that we haven’t banned Huawei products in Canada yet.
1. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/nortel-files-for-bankruptc...
2. https://www.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSN1936265020080619
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/former-nortel-exec-warns-ag...
https://aragonresearch.com/cyber-war-flashback-remembering-t...
Chinese government hacking and Huawei hacking are one and the same as the end result is Huawei benefitting from the stolen information.
Had Nortel not been hacked they wouldn't have had to deal with their competitors ripping off their products and out manoeuvring them in their business deals.
The article I linked to cites an ex senior security advisor at Nortel stating that the hacking dated back to 2000, before the tech bubble burst.
Instead of being swept under the rug the demise of Nortel due to hacking should be a case study in why computer security needs to be given a lot more attention even if it is at the expense of convenience.
Nortel expanded massively during the dot-com bubble, and went on a nearly $20 billion acquisition spree that caused it to lose money every quarter for years, even while its stock price was driven up by unrealistic expectations. Then the dot-com bubble burst, at which point these expectations were tempered and people began worrying about Nortel's unprofitability. The stock crashed, raising capital became difficult, demand for Nortel's products (and all telecommunications hardware) plummeted, and the company had to lay off 20% of its workers. At this time, Huawei was a tiny player outside of China. Nortel's major competitor was Cisco.
In 2003, for the first time in years, Nortel finally posted a quarterly profit, but then came under investigation from the SEC over suspicions that it was fudging its numbers (specifically, the accusation was that executives shifted revenue in time in order to meet targets that earned them bonuses). The SEC charged top Nortel executives with fraud, and the case was eventually settled, but Nortel had to change out its top management. Nortel was also sued by shareholders, to whom it had to pay billions of dollars in a settlement. There were layoffs and downsizing throughout this entire period.
To look at that history, and then to claim that hacking that might have helped one of Nortel's several competitors (and not even the largest, by a long shot) is the reason for Nortel's demise just seems completely out of left field to me. To be honest, it sounds like a batter yelling at the ump about being distracted by a fan after he strikes out 0-3.
Here is a quote from one of the articles I linked: >Nortel was once one of the dominant telecom providers globally, but in early 2004, Huawei was caught stealing trade secrets from Nortel. This was proven by Nortel security expert Brian Shields. However, Nortel management had a hand in their own eventual downfall when it outsourced manufacturing to Huawei in the ’90s.
>In the hack, Huawei gained credentials of Nortel executives, including CEO Frank Dunn and Brian McFadden. It then simply stole documents that contained the future product and marketing plans of Nortel.
>The hack went even further than usernames and passwords. It has never been proven, but U.S. sources discovered that it was most likely Huawei that used sophisticated malware to record nearly every phone call that Frank Dunn made. After all of this, Huawei grew and Nortel faded, eventually going bankrupt.
All of the history of some mismanagement or funny accounting means nothing to me. Nortel had a large portfolio of IP that was stolen by China and ended up in the hands of Huawei and then the details of all of the deals they were trying to make to sell equipment were also stolen and used to out manoeuvre them, driving losses and unprofitability.
History has shown us and it keeps showing us principles are great as long as they don't get in the way of business.
For example why was it that Trudeau decided to "just let [it] slip" when it came to the SNC-Lavalin corruption investigation?
https://edition.cnn.com/2019/03/06/americas/canada-politics-...
I have idea if the claims against Huawei are true (many of these details seem to be kept secret) and my suspicion would be they may well have been involved in some sort of industrial espionage.
I'm also sure many companies and countries around the world are also actively engaged in all sorts of espionage.
However, the fact a government has been shown to easily bend it's own laws for the sake of business also means Huawei's claim this is a politically motivated attack can't be so easily dismissed.
I mean, look at the number of contributions to the 5G standards by company in this document, and compare the positions of Huawei, Qualcomm and Cisco: https://www.iplytics.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Who-Lead... (page 9).
What are they supposed to steal there? They literally are defining what 5G is.
No mate, it was a rip-off.
note: I was involved in early tech standardization on 3GPP for many years. yes Huawei contributes a lot. That doesn't mean they also don't steal your shit. They do it because there literally is no way to hold them accountable. You just got to make sure you don't travel to a country that may extradite you to the US. And by the way they are _not_ the leader in 5G. This is constantly parroted propaganda. You can get the same "mature" Tech for 5G from Ericsson, Nokia ... yes Huawei might have more patents but you can only sell what the standard supports in terms of interoperability, and so the constant claim that the only 5G player is Huawei is plain wrong.
[1] obviously we didn't use github to manage our source code.
Friendships among nations is a very relative term.
What you describe is just less attempts by chinese to cover up their tracks, since it doesn't matter that much now.
Right?
I think there are certain lines that aren't supposed to be crossed. You'll notice in the U.S. that Uber and Levandowski were sued by Waymo. Why? Because they stole source code. If "everybody is doing it" surely Waymo would just chalk it up to business as usual right?
I guess you could say, well in the U.S. we enforce certain standards blah blah... exactly. There are certain standards. You can play dirty within certain limits. The U.S. doesn't have a national policy of having companies steal stuff from trading partners. If I, as a U.S. citizen, started hacking into Chinese companies and stealing their source code, set up an operation to call and scam old Chinese ladies out of their life savings, or any of that I'd be in serious shit. In China it's business as usual because the CCP has an unofficial policy of "steal as much as possible and fuck em".
I really don't like when people try and normalize CCP actions or equate their actions with the U.S. or Europe for that matter. It's nonsense and self-hating.
It really depends on how much valuable stuff you got
Imaginary property only worked when all jurisdictions agreed to follow the same rules, and could enforce these rules onto individual actors. Obviously China isn't playing by these rules and has no desire to play by these rules, regardless of any lip service paid. So we can either adjust our own philosophies to better match how the real world operates. Or we can continue trying to force our rules on everyone else, which will end catastrophically when reality finally does catch up.
Yet all of this seems completely unknown in the West, outside of the legal/business community that actually engages with the Chinese IP system. The same comments about there being no IP enforcement in China are made over and over again, completely disregarding the massive changes that have occurred.
Countries always act in what they perceive to be their best interests.
Ergo, there will always be tension over rules that further those interests and rules that act counter to them.
Pharma patents have historically been a major example. Disempowering smaller countries in their negotiations with pharmaceutical companies (via mandatory IP enforcement) tilts the playing field in favor of corporations headquartered in first world countries.
So, even in the most lawful of times (2000s?), it's a constantly shifting landscape.
While China may have ignored more rules than most, the existing rules certainly didn't favor them, and they believed they had the power to ignore them.
We'll see where that ends up.
You can argue that Ericsson and Nokia are equals to Huawei in 5G technology. But Huawei are by far the leaders in 5G equipment sales.
This is the problem with China, they unashamedly want to eat the hand that feeds them. Even in China there’s a saying, somethink like “Don’t wake up the sleepy giant” in reference to the US’ lax policy in dealing with this. They, the Chinese themselves, think that the US is dumb for letting them get away with so much.
In 2019, Huawei had the 5th largest R&D budget of any company in the world. Its R&D budget was larger than that of Apple.[1]
> They, the Chinese themselves, think that the US is dumb for letting them get away with so much.
What are you basing this on? It might surprise you to know that China has established dozens of specialized IP courts since 2014, which now handle hundreds of thousands of cases per year. What you're saying sounds like pure prejudice, born out of a lack of knowledge.
1. https://www.caixinglobal.com/2019-01-11/chart-of-the-day-hua...
I suspect this happens in other countries too, but I think elsewhere people make an effort to be less obvious about it. I get the impression copy paste programming isn't as looked down upon here as it is in the west.
I mean, in Europe salespeople routinely take customer contact-lists with them whenever they move, everybody knows it. Developers do the equivalent stuff in their field. Asians are just a bit more blunt about it, because they have less to lose. Plenty of Europeans did the same sort of thing when moving to the US in 18th/19th century - I call it "hungry makes right".
https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/19/21187651/anthony-levandow...
Refusing to sell chips to them incentivizes further theft of intellectual property. If these two things are linked, this seems like a terrible strategy.
We shouldn't punish theft in a way where stealing now becomes their best option to survive.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-huawei-argu...
So, a condo then.
All nations have way too many laws. You will be in violation of one of them. So the only thing the Chinese or US government needs to do is pick a US or Chinese citizen, and then hold up the probably 10 laws that he/she is violating. It's impossible to live somewhere and be law abiding while simultaneously not knowing what all the laws are.
Let's be frank, we're not at the level of the elites in these nations who are arguing over which nation has the largest most attractive tits. On our level, and I'm talking to western and Chinese workers alike, but we're so far down the chain that we won't have people out there pulling strings for us. You don't want to be the hapless patsy sitting in US and Chinese prisons for 10 years while the elites compare dick size or whatever. To paraphrase that old adage, "They can remain irrational much longer than you can comfortably sit in prison."
I'm saying both americans and chinese should be mindful of this risk when working in the other country.
Has something changed?
Putting faith in the government officials is just a bit naive I think.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful.
“ Globalization has reduced many aspects of modern life to little more than commodities controlled by multinational corporations. Everything, from land and water to health and human rights, is today intimately linked to the issue of free trade. Conventional wisdom presents this development as benign, the sole path to progress.
Yash Tandon, drawing on decades of on-the-ground experience as a high level negotiator in bodies such as the World Trade Organization, here challenges this prevailing orthodoxy. He insists that, for the vast majority of people, and especially those in the poorer regions of the world, free trade not only hinders development—it visits relentless waves of violence and impoverishment on their lives.”
This does not make any sense to me. Though I do not approve of all of the actions China took at the start of the pandemic, I can not understand how you can consider them a threat over it.
Also McDonald's?
Golden Arches Theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lexus_and_the_Olive_Tree
Though I have issues with some of the early reporting, I do not think their aim was to attack the rest of the world. At worst, which I'm still not convinced of, it was prioritizing their own citizens over others. Hardly an act of aggression.
>Hundreds of thousands dead.
Presumably you live in the US. If killing hundreds of thousands makes you a threat unworthy of influence you might want to look at our actions. Or consider what the results of your desired actions against the Chinese might be.
Was France and Italy covering it up to harm the planet? There was an irregularly high number of pneumonia deaths in Italy oct/nov 2019 and yet you won't see a single person alleging it's a conspiracy.
Was France and Italy covering it up to harm the planet? There was an irregularly high number of pneumonia deaths in Italy oct/nov 2019 and yet you won't see allegations of a a conspiracy because it's an absurd assumption given him much self inflicted harm it caused.
Going down the cover up and "act of aggression" rabbithole, the whole world knew about it months before ever impacted them and had all the time in the world to prepare.
For those whose minds aren't so already made up, here's a virologist doing a Q&A debunking all your conspiracy theories about where it came from and its origins.
https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/covid19_did...
We're here for curious conversation, and talking about how $other-country is a threat to the world is very far from that.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: you've unfortunately broken the site guidelines quite a bit, and we've had to warn you several times already. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful.
To me this is all naked geopolitics, hardly fair and extremely risky. But finally America is transitioning to worrying about real problems rather than, say, the policy of treating shepherds in Afghanistan as a major threat in the Bush era.
He might deserve congratulations if his strategies made sense, but they seem more likely to hurt the US than China in the long run.
Simply doing something, anything, for the sake of having something be done is even worse than the status quo.
The actions they are taking are delaying tactics but do not change the fundamentals. In fact, blocking shipments of semiconductors may even hasten the rise of a competing Chinese industry.
I think being #1 is deeply embedded in the American psyche and it is shocking for them to even imagine otherwise (Edit: as we see in these very comments and the reactions...), which is actually a risk for world peace, IMHO.
He got rid of the most effective global efforts to contain China’s growth through the TPP. I know HN hates the TPP because of amorphous claims about IP, but flouting IP norms forms the entire basis of these actions by Trump, and the whole point of TPP’a IP protections (which HN hated, apparently) was to make sure China’s neighbors would not flout IP protections the way China did, giving private companies incentives to move manufacturing and research from China to the neighboring countries instead.
That would have been a broad ranging global effort to ensure China followed rules, that would have cost the US nothing (in fact other countries were making concessions to the US for it), and would not have required 2-3 years of barely legal efforts to contain 1 Chinese company and even there only in the US market, but would have instead affected all Chinese companies, non Chinese companies manufacturing in China, and not just the US market but also eastern Asian and Australasian markets.
So yeah, if by Trump did something you mean he dismantled an effort that would have been more effective by orders of magnitude and cost the US nothing but actually won it more friends in favor of a barely legal effort that is pissing off even allies that are not friendly to China and has taken 3 years to maybe impact 1 Chinese company, then sure.
Trump pulled out of the deal and decided to do a trade war instead.
You got a trade war because there was finally a US president willing to risk confrontation like the chinese are, who started calling out chinese practices like dumping steel in canada to kill the US steel industry.
A year ago people said trump was crazy for talking about chinese steel dumped in canada as a national security issue. Then you couldnt get n95 masks and the world realized things run out if you dont produce them and someone else makes them.
The trade war is a positive - the US-China relationship needs redefining. If you look at chinese influence campaings the chinese are well aware of US efforts to deal with orbitting allies and is pushing their own influence. Your ideas would have worked 15 years ago, maybe.
It would have incentivized manufacturing to leave China, along with a large share of all the western dollars currently feeding the regime.
Trump's strategy doesn't really seem to decouple us from China so much as it seems to invert the relationship.
People are fast growing tired of China's aggressive and abusive approach to 'diplomacy'.
I believe most people see US <=> China in conflict, they don't really consider China <=> Australia, Vietnam or Japan.
China <=> Russia would be considered a different conflict, as few people believe that Russia would be acting as a proxy for the US.
Your argument is a half step up from "she was dressed like she was asking for it".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage
I wouldn't make such a dire prediction about the future of America.
Please.
It's even a war in the comments section.
I don't think it's safe. How do we really know it can't progress to some kind of overt military activity?
Why are people not more concerned about this?
I get the impression that people think the best way to prevent a war is to keep doing things to hold them down. But that seems to be escalating tensions and not actually limiting them.
What is the plan for getting out of this? I hope that Elon hurries up with his Mars rockets so I can emmigrate before the whole planet turns into a complete bloody (literally) science fiction nightmare.
A technological cold war will likely happen, Huawei and other Chinese companies will just continue R&D and manufacturing on their own. In a way, the US is letting go of whatever control they had left and making it easier for them to form their own alliances in this matter. It will just polarize the world more... again, as always.
The same thing that's always prevented nuclear-armed countries from going to war: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction
For one their are no explosions, or people with guns. On mars you don't have to worry about people trying to steal your shit because it's valuable (or "necessary for the national defense"), and you don't have to worry about being collateral damage during the war.
On mars there aren't earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, mudslides, tsunamis, floods, volcanoes, lightning strikes, forest fires, and basically any other natural disaster that I missed except sandstorms. When you build a static structure on mars you can expect it to last basically forever, when you build one on earth it has a relatively short halflife. When your static structures become extremely valuable and difficult to replace because you need them to grow your food and you don't have the manufacturing capability to build more, I'd rather be one mars.
On mars you can reliably avoid radiation by putting enough "stuff" (water, soil, whatever) between you and the sun. On earth after a nuclear war it would be coming from everywhere exposed to the atmosphere (in the shortish term).
On mars you get to plan for the hardships while the pre-nuclear-war earth manufacturing base is still functioning. On earth you don't know when the nuclear war is going to happen, or what portions of the earth it's going to glass, so that becomes much more difficult.
On the downside, the martian atmosphere is actually deadly to humans (since it's nearly a vacuum), while the post nuclear war atmosphere is likely only ... very hazardous. Mars has no native plants so you have to be entirely self sufficient inside your colonies, while the post-nuclear war earth colonies could forage for (mildly radioactive) food in emergencies.
So it seems like either that stick needs to get much more effective very quickly, or probably more reasonably at this point we need to try to de-escalate somehow.
In my opinion there is a very obvious lack of cultural and political integration which is inevitably going to be resolved. One way or another. I don't see a plan for doing it peacefully really being promoted by leaders. Which to me indicates that the leadership and overall awareness of the situation is inadequate. And probably we are going to be totally fucked by this ignorance and stupidity at some point.
I'll even venture into complete speculation, and posit that WWIII will be fought over, and largely in, Africa. In many ways Africa represents the last frontier on earth, with great natural resources but largely behind in many areas of development and not 'controlled' by either China or the US. South America would also be a potential hot zone, but it's too close to the US. China has realized this already and is investing heavily in Africa, while the US just in the last decade established Africom. Once the US' focus on the middle easy wanes a bit with oil decreasing in relevance, they'll turn their focus to somewhere else. The only reason the middle easy didn't turn into WWIII is because of the relatively powerful players in the area, including Israel, Saudi, Iran, and formerly Iraq. Large enough to hold their own, but not so large that they individually pose a threat to the US hegemony. That, and china wasn't really a relevant player in the world-war starting game until the 80's or 90's or so, and kind of missed the whole middle east war phase. But they're ahead of the game in Africa, and are establishing control there already. And as China transitions from developing country to rich country, they will, in turn, need overseas territories to vassalize themselves. So, there's my wild prediction, that WWIII will happen between the US and China as primary axis of power, sparked over something to do with Africa, right around the time when oil is no longer the US' middle-eastern siren song that it is today. Maybe in 20-30 years or so. Also around the time that millennials will be in the 'old guard', and have no living memory (on a broad, population-scale level) of how horrific war really is. Boomers had the WWII generation still hanging around to warn them off of WWIII, and they still nearly got us there.
It is time for the hammer now.
This is very vague. Does anyone understand what they are talking about?
“Under the new rule, any foreign company that uses American technology to produce microchips would need a license to sell to Huawei. That makes it difficult for major chip contract manufacturers like Taiwan’s T.S.M.C. to sell to Huawei, because its supply chains rely heavily on American manufacturing tools. It could also clamp down on sales by makers of semiconductor equipment, like Applied Materials and KLA, and chip design software companies like Cadence.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/15/business/economy/commerce...
That this is all such a string of vagueness makes me suspect it's a bunch of bullshit, more about politics (in the 'optics' sense) or business competitiveness than actual national security.
All of this is about national security. US & Taiwan’s TSMC are in talks to open a TSMC factory in the US. Chairman of TSMC has publicly stated if the US gives them enough money, they’ll do it. Appears US (Trump) is telling TSMC if they do not open the factory for free, they’re going to have trouble making money at all. Taiwan wants to keep TSMC because it’s an insurance policy, China & the US both need TSMC. That or it is a plausible way for TSMC to deny they’re cutting off China.
...any thoughts?
Like maybe if Huawei were accused of being used by the Chinese government to spy on America, it would make sense to require a license to sell tech to Huawei. (I have sometimes seen it accused of such; I have no idea how credible such accusations are; but this is an example of what 'national security' means to me, particularly in regard to requiring licenses to do business with a particular company).
You seem to be talking about whether TSMC gets a federal subsidy or not to open a factory or not as 'national security'. I mean, I get how the general economic environment has 'national secuirty' implications; how the future access to semiconductor market has 'national security' implications. But if that's "national security" it seems like the entire economy is "national security", and "national security" doesn't actually mean anything. Especially when Huawei is being penalized for concerns about a different company?
With that understanding of national security, is there any aspect of international trade negotiations that isn't "national security", or any international trade measure that can't be said to be "justified by national security"? Do you have an example of any international trade measure (a tariff, an embargo, a subsidy, a penalty, a ban, any method of one nation trying to get an economic/trade advantage over another) that you do not think would be "national security" related under this understanding? Is there such a thing?
Among other things, it's another reminder that the era of legal-norms-based international trade has been brought to an end...
National security is an ends, not a means; its ultimate form is shapelessness, not a strict definition.
https://www.csis.org/analysis/wtos-first-ruling-national-sec...
What the WTO determines has changed over time, and can depend on the balance of power. The WTO knows that if it keeps making rulings that countries just ignore, it loses power and legitmacy, it has to try not to push too hard.
But your opinion is whatever the WTO decides is correct?
To me, if the penalties against Huawei are really about negotiations over a government subsidy for a TSMC plant, I'd expect the WTO to rule against the US, if it was playing 'fair'. Which doesn't mean it will.
Here's an example of the WTO ruling against the US in a trade dispute with China, and the US retaliating to try to weaken the WTO.
https://www.ft.com/content/131a55ea-a84a-11e9-984c-fac8325aa...
Here's an expert writing on "Why Limiting U.S. Tech Exports to Chinese Companies Like Huawei Is a Risky Strategy",
https://itif.org/publications/2019/05/23/why-limiting-us-tec...
China has been working on challenging actions against Huawei specifically at the WTO; although it has to be careful because they know the WTO's rulings can be effected by politics, and the US (especially current administration) may not abide by the WTO ruling anyway, they need to try to remain on good terms to avoid escalating trade war, regardless of what the WTO might ultimately rule (which can take a while too).
https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2019/05/29/huawei-go...
Supply chain security is also part of national security. Economic (in)dependency is also part of national security. Economic well-being and competition is also part of national security. There's more to national security than espionage and military capabilities. You don't have to agree -- it doesn't matter if you don't because the people work in the national security apparatus do think that national security encompasses all of that and more, and their opinion matters a hell of a lot more than your typical HN commenter's (mine included).
I've seen some tools presented at RISC-V conferences, but the major closed-source component nowadays is the PDK, I'm afraid.
Hopefully, inkjet-printed transistors or some other fabless technology will make open source ICs a lot more feasible. One of the major issue is costs, when you look at more than 40k/mm² for multiproject wafers in advanced nodes and contrast that with the anemic budget most open source software has to do with. You don't need to be on the very latest node, if you can afford going slower, on bigger, cheaper dies.
A lot of open source "hardware" project seem to focus on FPGAs, since that's more approachable, and the costs are nowhere as high.
[1]: https://github.com/ucb-bar
I would also like to point out that these tools will likely help us juice up a bit more performance from the existing processes, but we aren't really likely to see a lot more of Moore's scaling, going forward. So the door is open to new processes, that may or may not be open hardware-friendly. And current, top-end processes might also become cheaper over time. While I doubt a lot of new foundries will catch up with the end of Moore's scale, it might actually become easier to get there, while disruptive technologies get some time to play catch-up. Together with innovative synthesis tools.
And it took only a few years of media campaigns- the first one I remember was the announcement of spy chips in China-made boards, which turned out to be fake. It's scary how quickly you can steer public opinion to suit your needs.
It's an invisible war of nations and we dont really have a clue about allegiances nor what is right or wrong.
Sure as a european I feel more connected to the US but at the same time I feel very much excluded from that larger sphere protection and benefits.
The US needs a framework for smaller nations where we can build better relations.
I don't see any doubt regarding "allegiance". The Chinese regime is a totalitarian nightmare that not only became a massive surveillance state but also has a long track record of human rights abuse and extrajudicial assassinations. Between what the West enjoyed in the past half century and the oppressive hell that countries have endured in the hands of the Chinese regime, the choice is pretty clear, even if we take into account Putin's pull on Trump.
> The US needs a framework for smaller nations where we can build better relations.
What could that be? We've had the U.N., NATO, the WTO, and what not.
https://www.gizmochina.com/2020/05/12/huawei-kirin-710a-smic...
1. you guys really worry too much about our ability to innovate, seriously. There is no room for real innovations. But at the same time the system rewards stealing and copying. The system, the education, the overall political environment are not designed with innovations in mind but to help a few to stay in power. My personal take on this is that Chinese "innovation" is now built upon: Chinese with foreign education/working background bringing back technologies, CCP buying foreign companies with OUR everyday people's money, and of course hacking/stealing directly. I don't believe we have a change winning the innovation war, not in the long run.
2. for a "private" company like huawei, isn't it weird that it's always backed by CCP? Lots of Chinese private companies get balls kicked everyday and why only huawei get treatment worthy of a state owned business? Even us Chinese knows better.
3. please think about us everyday Chinese citizens. we are currently under direct information warfare and systematic repression waged by CCP for decades, and our lives/future squeezed out in order to found companies like huawei and projects like one belt one road, without a fking vote. It's much bigger than us vs huawei, at least from our side.
btw it is not my field of expertise but I'd like to call for experienced software/hardware engineers from the west, help us bring down the CCP's GFW system before it's too late. If it is built by man it can be broken.
thanks and apologize for my broken English.
Is HN not blocked/censored in China?
In business, there is the perennial question of "Do I "buy built" thus taking advantage of economies of scale within the supplier while at the same time making myself dependent on the good intentions of that supplier? Or do I "go to the cost and effort and time wasted in making it myself", which means I don't get dependent on that supplier, puts me behind for a year or two, and then possibly may be able to take away his business and keep it for myself in the future?
Most administrators find it's better overall to "buy built". But if forced to, they will "roll their own".
If Huawei starts making its own semiconductors, the US can wave goodbye to its own semiconductor companies like Intel, AMD, Radeon and Nvidia. Just like GM, Ford and Chrysler are there in name only today- when once they made over 50% of the entire world's cars back in the 1960s.
In the words of that famous hair product: "It may not happen overnight, but it will happen!"