There is a strangeness in the reasoning in the article. The claim is that these supercomputers pose a threat to the US but current purchases en route to China are exempted. Normally anything that poses a real threat would not create any exemptions.
“The new rules take effect immediately but do not apply to goods from U.S. suppliers already en route.”
>Normally anything that poses a real threat would not create any exemptions.
Citation please? Exemptions happen all the time for all sorts of reasons. Off the top of my head: if the goods in-flight were already invoiced and paid, and on the books for a publicly traded company, halting shipment and asking them to take the stock back could have massive ramifications to that company and the stock market as a whole.
If the parts shipped so far aren't enough to actually complete the supercomputer build, why on earth would the government force that company to jump through all those hoops? In general, retroactively punishing previously legal behavior is frowned upon by most folks in all but the rarest circumstances.
I’m not the person who you’re replying to but I believe they have made a mistake. There is the US Munitions List, for which export is controlled by the US Department of State. This is a US Commerce blacklist so these items are not on the USML.
I vaguely recall a shipment being stopped midway under the USML but I’m having an early 40s moment - I’ll update this if I remember the case and find a decent citation!
> Normally anything that poses a real threat would not create any exemptions.
Define "real threat". Are we talking about an imminent threat, a potential threat, a long-term strategic threat, etc?
The immediacy in which someone handles a threat depends on the details. For instance, high cholesterol and a heart attack are both a threat to someone's health. While you'd want to address both of those issues, one of them you might immediately call 911 for, and the other you might schedule an appointment for next week.
Own goal. We lost the chip lead because of outsourcing national-security-critical fab capabilities, and now we're telling China "don't make the same mistake we did -- develop your own capability".
china is not a hive mind, it does not exert the kind of iron grip over their private sector that westerners think. external stimuli like these could potentially have the effect of aligning the government's interests and the private sector's interests more closely
Creating semiconductor fabs takes billions of dollars in investment and can only be achieved by a few very large companies, most likely with government support and coordination in any country that builds them. While it is true that China has a private sector with its own set of interests, the Chinese government is already working very closely with relevant parties in this particular circumstance.
Its pretty much the cutting edge of engineering I'm told.
TSMC is planning to invest like 20 billion this year alone to stay ahead of their mainland, south Korean and potential US rivals.
Still I wouldn't be surprised that TSMC will be gutted by the US and get their tech stolen just to prop up failing Intel. That pretty much what super powers do, US has planned this really well making sure key component are all made in the US. Like the needed materials and the light source ASML uses for their EUV device.
it's all relative, right? compared to us, sure. but while the government can exert direct control when necessary, they don't have the capacity and/or desire to do that 24/7. look at the public fracas with the ant ipo for example, my concept of a hive mind wouldn't allow for a conflict like that
The TL;DR is that one of the sanctioned companies, Phytium, designs chips used in a Chinese supercomputer that the PLA's researchers use to simulate hypersonic weapons. The chips are designed using tools from Cadence and Synopsys (both American companies) and fabricated at TSMC.
As a millennial, I go to pretty significant lengths to avoid Chinese-made products and gladly pay quite a bit more to do so. I'm personally very aligned with Taiwan independence.
if it wasn't clear already, same as TeMPOraL. Do you have a point? Instead of this meaningless conversation I'd kindly suggest you use your majorly Chinese made phone and laptop to reply to that message instead. If you have something to add that is.
if it wasn't clear already, same as TeMPOraL. Do you have a point? Instead of this meaningless conversation I'd kindly suggest you use your majorly Chinese made phone and laptop to reply to that message instead. If you have something to add that is.
No, it wasn't clear, maybe it's a reflection my own insight, I can only apologise for jumping the gun.
It appeared to me as if you were making an attack on the sentiment of reducing Chinese purchases, because the replier obviously can't be avoiding Chinese brands completely because he uses a mobile phone.
Oh. Yea we were talking past each other in this case but we do agree. I'm should have written in a more comprehensive manner about how pervasive Chinese manufacturing is on our daily lives.
Wonder what the lengths are. Anything that you can share, particularly that could scale to more people?
Serious question. I wouldn't even know how to approach it. China is the world's factory - throw a dart at a random non-food storefront, and anything it hits was almost surely made entirely or in part in China. Hell, a quite a lot of locally-made products get packaged in China. I personally know of local producers in Poland that send their products to China to be packaged there and sent back - it turns out it's much cheaper to do that, even accounting for multi-month round trip on a container ship, than to pay locals to do the packaging...
It annoys me to no end that boomers sent all of our manufacturing overseas to make a quick buck and then turned around and criticized the “globalism” of the economy that they created, so yes. I gladly would pay a little more for quality, domestically produced goods. Technology has progressed far enough that the costs would be minimal in most cases.
Many of that generation honestly believed market capitalism went hand in hand with the spread of liberal ideology, and that trade with China would ultimately bring about an end to the Communist Party. Maybe that was just a convenient excuse, but I believed it when I was younger.
Honestly that's where a strong guiding government comes in. Since we know that the free market is a race to the bottom... they knew the money would go for the highest return in China.
The US government in the 70's, 80's, and especially 90's should've known that the CCP was playing a game and a long game at that. No doubt they had surveillance on high level communications.
Knowing they were playing the long game, they should've had strict laws that were basically limiting the US 1 for 1.
ex. For every US student that studies PhD in China, one Chinese student can come here.
What happened was that thousands of Chinese learned about the highest levels of physics and technology at our universities and then used that information back in China to build hypersonic missiles that will be used to destroy our carrier fleets in a few years. As well as medium range missiles to destroy Taiwan.
> The US government in the 70's, 80's, and especially 90's should've known that the CCP was playing a game
They were blinded by their ideology, which told them that capitalism is inseparable from freedom and democracy. And bringing the first to China would bring the other 2 as well.
> For every US student that studies PhD in China, one Chinese student can come here.
Were there a lot of US students lining up to go to Chinese universities in the 70s and 80s? How would that even work?
> thousands of Chinese learned about the highest levels of physics and technology at our universities
If they could learn it at universities, was it really all that secret?
2. No. That’s the point. They got all the knowledge transfer benefits and we got some tuition money (who cares).
3. You think studying a PhD in physics at MIT or a large CA State institution is gonna be commonplace knowledge? I’m not talking about undergrad or even grad stuff.
Technology was stolen at times, copied or given. Students studing in the US are not the cause. If that were the case the Saudi's would be on the same level / India included.
One student studying in China to one student in the US sounds like a bad deal. If the US education system is better shouldn't it be two to one?
Besides the money charged to foreign students (which is very high) helps pay for US students and keeps those fees lower.
Now if the ask was no ivy or tier I schools because of a shortage of space and crazy demand. I could come around.
Boomers also lost jobs to overseas manufacturing. Rural America was hit hardest, boomers there too. Now, only some boomers profited directly from this and indirectly all did by getting more bang for the dollar for manufactured products. Little did they know that the real bill comes decades later.
The exact same reasoning could be applied to big American manufacturers: Boeing, Intel - all provide products to the US military and have very large business interest in China.
Why doesn't China answer back with similar sanctions?
It is honestly a bit of mystery to me. The best answer I can come up with is that the Chinese government is actually quite content with the US forcing Chinese companies to fabricate on Chinese soil.
There are other ways to hit the US in their wallet, like allocating new sales to their EU rival. Let them fight each other. Its a more elegant way of putting diplomacy and economic heft at work.
Also COMAC should deliver their first model to (domestic?)customers this year. Then you also have a joint venture with a Russian plane company.
China is mostly just a buyer of their products. Not buying from them just gives power to the remaining handful of competitors in these oligopolies. It's not like they can threaten to disrupt their production--I recall that the 787 has parts mostly sourced from the US, western Europe, and Japan, not China. For any joint venture in China, there's probably also clear value in keeping Boeing and Intel facilities operating...
More importantly, China is still trying to jumpstart its own aviation juggernaut but is still using US suppliers, so it could very easily become an own goal.
Most of these sanctions don't really work either. China will get what it wants some other way. The US will get to look like it acted. Everyone will be happy...
>Most of these sanctions don't really work either. China will get what it wants some other way. The US will get to look like it acted. Everyone will be happy...
So, sanctions like these started in 2015 [0]. That was when the Chinese first topped the global super computer league (and that's for public super computers so presumably they'd been leading in private for a while?).
The US banned exports to 4 Chinese companies that made the machines.
So other companies spring up to fill the gap. This is problem 1: it takes very little time to setup a company, so sanctioning one is sort of pointless. You sanction PLA_Supplier1 LLC? Good thing PLA_Supplier1 LLC is interested in ordering the same kit!
The result was a roughly yearly round of sanctions. Every year's new list of names is a list of the companies that bypassed the last year's sanctions...
There is also problem 2: back in 2015 the computers used Intel parts but increasingly the Chinese are designing their own. They're not there yet, but they're making progress. TSMC still do most of the manufacture.
So the question is: how long till Chinese hackers steal the latest designs or Chinese engineers reverse engineer the parts they buy on the grey market? AND how long until China sets up a TSMC competitor?
I'm something of a hawk on China. I'm out on a ledge but here I am. I'd like to see real action on them for a long list of reasons. But before we can have real action, we need to drop the pretend action. Trump (what a turd) loved pretend action. Maybe Biden will be different? But this isn't that imho.
I was under the impression (mostly due to this podcast that talks about China's semiconductor history: https://chinatalkshow.libsyn.com/chinas-chip-dreams) that all of the big software companies that make chip tooling are outside of China and that a ban would be possible, but politically difficult.
> AND how long until China sets up a TSMC competitor?
SMIC has been around for years and at one point it look like it would overtake TSMC but TSMC managed to stay ahead helped by a US lawsuit and US sanctions.
The problem is that on free market it is more attractive for a Chinese chip designer to go for TSMC due to their maturity and reliability.
Obviously the broadening US sanctions changes that and effectively acts as a massive boost of the domestic fab industry.
China's population is well over 1.4 billion. They need to create new jobs every year with the same rate that some countries do in a decade. I think it's pretty significant that they are able to run a country with that demographics most of whom were not even educated.
China still benefits from its US relationship overall. The US does benefit too, but the US also wants to slow down their growth because it's a big threat to its power. I think everything else like human rights issues are just BS. We're partner with most of Arabian countries in the Middle East and we have active arms sell to them including Saudis which are far worst than China in terms of democracy and human rights.
I am upvoting this because you will undoubtedly get downvoted for this kind of criticism against the capitalistic empire of the US, but let's not mince words. The US has been years ahead of China in human rights' violations as you directly mention. It's a shame that this website is more acknowledging of said fact.
HN has a strong bias towards criticism of US policy, but that's actually good because we need to fix our stuff as well. It gets caught in the crossfire, sheds light and puts public eyes on shitty things we do in the USA. It's a win-win. City dwellers and highly educated people in the US (HN crowd essentially) are internationalized, but lately trying to be more fair to criticisms of CCP just for the sake of being "balanced". Truth prevails at the end of the day. What you're saying is true though. Are there 2 million people in reducation camps in the US based on ethnicity?
>HN has a strong bias towards criticism of US policy
You must read another HN than I do. I see a HN that is extremely pro-US and anti-PRC. So much so that a random American can pull stuff out his ass about Chinese education and get upvoted while the person living in China gets downvoted for disagreeing. Search this thread for PISA test and see the comments above...
>Are there 2 million people in reducation camps in the US based on ethnicity?
Have you not seen the historic and current state of blacks incarcerated in the US and how policy is made specifically to criminalise some skin colors and cultures? Some states have as high as 72% black population in prisons. Not to mention all the medicinally experimentation done on poor and/or black people in the US through time.
Even if we had been without those today it is still a crazy comparison. If country A have been a highly developed country for hundreds of years and they then point fingers of country B and C who is not only all the way to where A is yet but have also been highly developed for way less time then you are comparing apples to pumpkins.
Join me on the downvote train. Where Hacker News explicitly likes to downvote us without any accountability. I suspect this is why Reddit is a much more diverse group of people than here.
Yes while a lot of bad things can be said about Reddit I'm also convinced it is a lot more diverse. I'm not a Reddit user though. Too much meddling by admins and too much tracking.
See the other replies about mass incarceration based on skin color. At least China is figuring terrorism without dropping bombs on people they don't like.
> run a country with that demographics most of whom were not even educated.
PISA 2018 results
“The OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) examines what students know in reading, mathematics and science, and what they can do with what they know. It provides the most comprehensive and rigorous international assessment of student learning outcomes to date. Results from PISA indicate the quality and equity of learning outcomes attained around the world, and allow educators and policy makers to learn from the policies and practices applied in other countries. This is one of six volumes that present the results of the PISA 2018 survey, the seventh round of the triennial assessment.”
They picked the two richest cities and the two richest provinces in the whole country to do the study on, and you're extrapolating those numbers across the rest?
> I think it's pretty significant that they are able to run a country with that demographics most of whom were not even educated.
Citation needed :)
As a Chinese native who has friends in almost all provinces across China, I just don't see Chinese is less educated than US. Same K-12 education for almost all (exceptions are rare).
Eh, you're posting on HN in fluent English. Your personal friend group is probably nothing close to what's average in China. It's a straightforward sampling bias.
Did you go to a Western university? A good one? And now work at some Western company? You can add atypical points for all of those.
Most of the Chinese people I know are fine in terms of education, around the same as any other demographic. But most of them I know from a top European university, or from highly skilled work in China. Most of China is not like that at all.
I am really interested on your well researched work on this topic. Can you share a link to your book or articles? It is especially surprising given that last results indicate Chinese children consistently beating American(among the worst performers in OECD) kids in all academic categories.
I'm currently working in the bay area but I got my master degree in China and never attended any colleges in the west.
I was born in a city ranked 45th in China by population (from wikipedia). K-12 is 100%. My grandpa lives in a very small village with annual income just a few thousand dollars, K-12 is also 100%. My close cousins come from the same small village, now bank staffs and doctors.
I have friends who's family so poor that the roof got torn away by a typhoon. And I have friends whose parents are simply peasants.
My friend group is definitely biased since I graduated from one of the top universities, but they are selected by exams, so many families are actually not wealthy. In China money usually cannot help you directly on exams, people need to study hard.
Hmm, another thing I'm curious is that what gives the original post the impression that "Chinese people are uneducated". That's a rare heard haha.
Maybe? Another possible explanation is that some people try to correlate income in USD to education levels.
It's not a direct comparison since the cost for education is also cheaper in China. Also since K-12 is almost free (at least meals are not included 20 years ago when I was a kid), parents just send kids there.
In recent years the trend is that even assembly factories require high school education, bachelor preferred... That's another interesting topic though.
The top 45 cities are what, 200 million people? So 85% of Chinese people live somewhere more rural than where you grew up, and in China that's correlated with poverty and all sorts of negative things.
This is exactly what I mean; the relatively advantaged Chinese are under the impression that they are the average. They're not at all. The average Chinese person lives no place they're likely to escape for the Bay Area. Most people can't even escape to a normal life in a tier 1 city within China.
Rural China is the opposite of many rural places in the West. In the West, there are small towns seen as desirable, where you go to live when you're richer and have kids or just want more space. In China rural is almost always poorer.
I don't think K-12 attainment is an appropriate metric. Like I said elsewhere it's like comparing hygiene standards by saying we all have access to soap. But that's the most basic standard we can achieve.
I think if you compare the % of Chinese who go to world-class universities, it's a lot more relevant. China has maybe 2 or 3 such universities, so saying it's equal and fair because you have the gaokao or whatever doesn't make much sense. The biggest intake for world class universities is rich Chinese kids going to the West, not poor kids from the village going to Tsinghua. If you managed to do that then great for you, really, but it's not an average story.
Even if we don't want to go that high-end, tertiary educational attainment at any calibre of university in China is much much lower than in the US.
I think there are good things about the Chinese approach to education, but it's kind of silly to say they've caught up to the US and others.
> I think it's pretty significant that they are able to run a country with that demographics most of whom were not even educated.
and then eventually switch to
> I don't think K-12 attainment is an appropriate metric. Like I said elsewhere it's like comparing hygiene standards by saying we all have access to soap. But that's the most basic standard we can achieve
> I think if you compare the % of Chinese who go to world-class universities, it's a lot more relevant
This seems like a major shift in goal-posts. If your concept of "uneducated" means not going to a world-class university, then most of the world, including most people in the US are "uneducated".
Whether they're form China seems pretty irrelevant. You could very well make the opposite case that people from China know even less about its actual KPIs.
It's trivial to pick a relevant metric and look up the median value for China. A quarter of the people there live on less than $5/day. They're not swanning off to do a Masters at MIT any time soon. They're not even able to move to the better cities within China, for the most part.
This person is a total anomaly. Taking them as representative is quite ridiculous and rather insulting to the hundreds of millions "with a K-12 education" that somehow are still living in abject poverty with no opportunities. It's an arbitrary and meaningless claim to make. It's like saying China and America have the same hygiene standards because most people in both places have access to soap.
I would say K-12 education and unemployment are different issues here, do you agree with that? For the latter that's another story and I agree it's more complicated.
Sure, I'm really saying that it's fine to be K-12 educated but it doesn't seem to be translating into further educational opportunities for most people. They often don't go from K-12 to university, rather they go into some not great job and never get such opportunities. Same happens in the West of course, just to a lesser degree.
That doesn't change the fact that all tests and statistics shows Chinese students are better educated than American counterparts. Since more Chinese are in poorer schools those numbers are loop sided against Chinese students which make it even worse.
But that you think you both know better than a Chinese person and didn't even bother to put in some links to facts (unlike those liked that disagree, like the Pisa test) says enough.
Since Americans started leaving schools without knowledge of basic English skills. We were talking about English skills, not how top universities fare in tests.
The PISA scores are not for “China”. They’re for a tiny percentage of China’s population, living in the wealthiest districts, with the most sought after 户口.
The gathered statistics are in no way comparable to Western countries which gather scores from all districts, rich and poor alike.
China already enjoys a massively lopsided business advantage compared to the US. It's an uphill battle for non-chinese companies to operate in China, for one China requires that part of the ownership of the chinese venture must be owned by Chinese nationals, which means that the CCP also gets to sit on the board and see and influence everything they do. I can't think of any other major power that is this xenophobic.
Yes, the way the CCP does enforcement there is the Hong Kong model: there's an entity 100% owned by Tesla called Tesla Shanghai that has a 50 year lease on a state owned factory, Tesla invests $700 mil, state invests $2 bill, when loans are paid off, Tesla can begin transferring revenue stateside
From this and prior reading I'd expect: they (TSLA) own the factory and things in it, but the land it sits on is leased from the state, perhaps in some proportion to the funds invested. I don't live there, just been a couple times.
I'm always thinking of companies who were making deals in Soviets almost a hundred years ago[1]. Obviously the capitalist leanings in the USSR were weaker after the 1920s and there are many differences, but I am not fully convinced it will look that different from a long term (many decades') perspective.
I suppose these companies turned out okay? The fate of locals notwithstanding. /s
Foreigner running a (second) wholly owned venture in China here. While there are difficulties, the parent comment is certainly and completely wrong when it comes to ownership. I do not think China's approach to foreign economic immigration is particularly "xenophobic", and the regular people are exceptionally warm and welcoming. It's all the other issues once you get here that do you in!
Food logistics and robotics. Issues: horrific HR market, immature and ineffective court and legal system, unstable if nominally progressive regulatory environment, corrupt gatekeeping businesses and no antitrust oversight, obtuse and opaque regulatory processes, loss of foreign talent over COVID (government suspended the use of already issued foreign visas and the issuing of any new ones), general infrastructure issues, outright blackmail, etc. China is not for the feint hearted.
China is not just a source of cheap labour. But a source of cheap labour highly skilled in manufacturing which other countries all but abandoned over the previous decades.
Because China is trying to promote more trading -- which it benefits from. And she does need the products or connections of Boeing/Intel.
If China breaks her compeletely from all major US manufacturers, it's equivalent to a declaration of the end of post-2001 world economy and can bring ripples across the world. China is not prepared for that, yet.
China both needs these companies and has nothing to gain in attacking them.
On other hand, the US are trying to slow China's rise by hurting key industries.
This is a geopolitical struggle. The US cannot win because China is bigger than they are and so will overtake them sooner or later, but they can slow things down to maintain their dominance as long as they can.
> The US cannot win but they can slow things down to maintain their dominance as long as they can.
They (the USA) fucked up Japan pretty bad. Throughout the 70s-80s the USA was fearful of the rise of Japan, their incredible ability to usurp American businesses, and their growing trade deficit surplus, which they then rolled back into US T-bonds. From an American perspective, Japan was in the 70s what China is today.
In the early-80s, the Yen-to-dollar ratio was really high. This kicked off an inflationary asset bubble within the country that lasted for several years. Starting in 1985, the yen-to-dollar ratio collapsed, falling by half from mid ¥200s in just two years and reaching a low of ¥85 by 95.
Japan entered the Lost Decade as a result of this situation. The lost decade became two, then the GFC happened, bringing it to three decades.
It is suspected that this was the result of an intentional attack on the Japanese economy by US officials with the express intent to curb Japan's rising economic power.
> In the early-80s, the Yen-to-dollar ratio was really high. This kicked off an inflationary asset bubble within the country that lasted for several years.
I believe this is commonly referred to in geopolitics as the Plaza Accord.
Japan never realistically had any shot at overtaking the US economy. They have 1/3rd the population, 1/4th the land, next to no natural resources, and very little immigration. It's a testament to the nation's effort, ingenuity, and strength of character that they got as close to the US economically, as they did in the half-century after WW2. But it could never have been that close in the long term.
You realize there are several countries, like Singapore, that are in the same situation (small population, little land, no natural resources) that already exceed the US on a GDP/capita basis?
Singapore's GDP per capita isn't actually higher than the US but I get your overall point. The key differences there are "small nation" and "GDP/capita". Singapore is more comparable to a metropolitan region in the US, such as New York or Los Angeles, rather than the entire country.
There are smaller countries that have a higher GDP on average. Although some of those are suspect in reality; Ireland's is higher, but no one thinks of Ireland as especially more prosperous than say England. I wonder if it's because it's a tax haven.
Japan is not a small country at all. It's probably in the top 10 for population (off the top of my head, China > India > USA > Indonesia > Nigeria > Russia > Japan?). But there are no medium-to-large countries - population 35m+ - whose GDP per capita is within $10k of the US. The US is an outlier.
Moreover, I was talking about total GDP and not per capita. Among the current nations, only China and India have any hope of overtaking the US within our lifetimes (very slim for India). And that's only because of their gargantuan populations - per capita they'll still be far behind. For Japan to have overtaken the US in the 90s, they would have had to have a GDP per capita 3x of the US - which no country of any size has even today. Japan got really close, which is very impressive given its size.
Japan is a small country for the discussion at hand, which is threatening the US's dominance.
> And that's only because of their gargantuan populations
All things being equal the relative economic and industrial power of countries is proportional to their population.
Unless a catastrophe befalls the US it's the countries with comparable or larger population that are threats.
These includes the EU, actually, which is why the US are always wary of further EU integration.
With the likes of the EU, China, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, the US will pretty much inevitably lose their dominance and become one of the "big guys", key words being 'one of', not 'the' and not the biggest of the big guys, either.
It's undeniable that Japan managed to overtake American businesses in key industries, such as silicon and automotive manufacturing, as well as being a world leader in technological innovation.
Japan's small population and land area means that they can never be world leaders in commodity production, such as oil, agriculture, mining, or timber - all of which are industries the USA performs really well in. Oil, specifically, is a crutch relied on by many nations to pad their GDP.
That's why Japan is so incredibly impressive. If you start removing commodities from the GDP comparisons (which are largely based on geographic luck), Japan, is and was an economic powerhouse.
Japan never needed to overtake the economy of the USA in pure GDP, since so much of USA GDP is in areas Japan could never compete in, such as agricultural output, they just needed to overtake the USA in a handful of key industrial areas. Which they did.
Japan is a small country with a much smaller population. It's not the same situation at all.
China has 4x the population of the US. The US have 4x the population of the UK.
Did the UK manage to stop the rise of the US? No. The US is much larger than any European country and thus it was inevitable that they became the dominant power (Europe helped by self-destructing, but economically the US had already overtaken European countries).
The only way the US can remain dominant is by trying to keep 'third world' countries poor. Once massive countries are on a strong development path it's just a matter of time and this is what's happening with China.
India also has the potential to overtake the US. In the future Nigeria could as well. This is actually an optimistic view as it assumes that no country is bound to be poor forever.
1/7 of Chinese citizens are either unemployed or underemployed (in poverty) contrary to their public pronouncements.
The One Child Policy is causing a demographic "bottleneck" that will burst in the next generation, leaving the current generation in the lurch at retirement time.
China imports half of several food groups, meaning they can't grow their own food.
80% of hospitals are dedicated to retired party members (the CCP is only about 15% of the population.)
China talks a mean game, but most of that is from a position of weakness and insecurity - "fake it til you make it."
>Why doesn't China answer back with similar sanctions?
They want to, but they can't, yet. If you listen to CCP officials the long term plan is very clear: To transform China from an export driven economy to a internal market economy so they don't need others, but currently they need them.
China currently can not consume what it produces. When I was living there I could not buy the cooking tool(blender) I wanted. I went to Europe, bought the Blender(manufactured in China) and brought it to China. There was not market in China for those and they went straight from the factory to the port.
China is not the US, most people in China are very poor. The CCP is very powerful but the country is weak in many ways.
In fact China is closing down a lot recently, expats are going out the country fast.
I'm sympathetic to the view that China is a long term threat to Democracy. Their leadership is authoritarian and most people underestimate the monopoly that the CPC has over China's economy. China's leader is not quite, but very close to an absolute despot. He does not at this time have any credible opposition or balancing centers of power.
The only thing constraining Xi Xinping from going the route of Putin or Kim is his own self control. That's not a long term stable situation.
Having said all that, half-measures to contain China are pointless. We either should have free trade with China, or almost no trade with China. Our tech controls are highly porous. There is constant interchange in expertise and high tech goods. China is only about 5 to 10 years behind the West on any given technology that is commercially available. The only stuff they lag further behind on is stuff that is completely classified. And that stuff is a very small list of things.
Arguably, China is already exceeding America's capabilities in many next generation military technologies like drones and cyberwarfare.
The West has to make a decision ... either we go the free trade route and hope domestic competition takes down Xi Xinping ... or we withdraw completely from China and disengage as much as possible ... cold war style.
Hmmm and a reversal of roles vis a vis Russia and China. For it to work the EU, US, India and the RF would have to form a block to counteract China like Nixon and successors did with China and the precursor to the EU to counteract the then USSR.
Xi's point is - democracy isn't necessary for success. XiJinPing's thought is literally based on the idea that the future is a huge idealogical battle between socialism (socialism with chinese characteristics) and capitalism (corporatism). personal freedoms be damned till china gains it's previous position in the world. he doesn't want China to end up like the soviet union. once you read his manifesto you'll see the chinese singular goal.
by the time, the west decides to disengage with china. china would be self sufficient and be able to engage with other countries.
Democracy isn't necessary for success, until it is. Xi's whole idea is that you have a highly efficient government that takes care of their people for the most part. That's great, and I would agree it's better... until the unaccountable people in power become corrupt or inept. Then it's terrible.
Great so long as Xi is a benevolent father. As soon as he becomes abusive you will have no outlet for protest or change of control. Nice system while it works. And when it breaks untold misery.
Democracy is inefficient crap for the most part, but it has a safety valve for the worst times.
China may even have 20, 30, 100 years of prosperity with such a system ... then it will inevitably fall on dark times.
>The only thing constraining Xi Xinping from going the route of Putin or Kim is his own self control.
I believe you have been brainwashed by American Media if you believe Putin is on par with Kim Jong-il.
There is hysteria in US media because Putin defends the interest of his own country against the interest of others like the US.
It seems pretty unreasonable for me to expect Putin to abandon Sevastopol and access to the black Sea,or the Mediterranean in Syria, but that is exactly what US media wanted from Putin.
They wanted a Russian leader to follow US' interest. If the Russian president were to do that, he would be loved in the US, and hated inside Russia, while the opposite happens.
BTW, China is a very complex thing, it is almost a continent in size, lots of people and it is rotten inside in many levels. The population is old and the system extremely corrupt in levels you can not understand in the West.
>China is only about 5 to 10 years behind the West on any given technology that is commercially available.
Launch a global plague, clamp down on democracy, abandon the rule of law, try to steal land and sea areas, run a genocide and begin an armed conflict with your nuclear neighbour?
Nationalistic flamewar is not welcome here, regardless of which nation you have a problem with. Flamewar in general is not what HN is for, either.
You broke the site guidelines egregiously with this comment and have been doing it elsewhere also. We ban accounts that do that (and have had to warn you before). If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and fix this, we'd appreciate it.
The Biden administration shows that America First continues beyond the Trump Age. Long-arm jurisdiction along with a broad definition of National Security means that anyone anywhere in the world can be sanctioned.
Why would America First not continue with any American president? Any nations' leader not acting first and foremost in the interest of their own country ought to be removed from office.
An obvious answer here is that "America First", as with any isolationist and protectionist policy, is explicitly bad economic policy in our globalized world.
Isolationism's probably not a great idea, sure, and there might be room to argue that protectionism is typically bad policy for the US, but the argument that protectionism is bad for all states in the modern economy, or that it's bad for every trade relationship the US maintains, is much harder to support.
"Globalized world" is bullshit - quarterly profit driven mentality has reduced our manufacturing sector to the point where it's a security concern.
Also, the globalized world (re China) was, at one point, looking like they'd liberalize and join the rest of the world - we would all rather trade goods than bullets. That has proven to be a mistake, and we're correcting it by investing in manufacturing and infrastructure here.
"But the global economy" - nope. It turns out it matters where the factories are located, and we're trying to right the ship - finally!
Yeah like these people think you need a PhD to tell the working class has been getting fucked here in this country for the last 40 years. Real wages are flat, housing is through the roof, manufacturing jobs offshoring left entire regions destitute, healthcare costs skyrocketed, there's lead in the tapwater... but apparently if we think globalization is bad (or that the myth of the free market) we're uneducated - while the CCP sends jets to intimidate Taiwan and even Ford can't get semiconductors.
We're going to finally increase taxes on corporations and the government is going to spend freely on semiconductors and R&D like they did in the 50's and 60's, but these things are... bad, compared to the last 40 years of policy?
Citation needed.
There needs to be a clear delineation between "globalization" (we're all multicultural and can all be friends - this is true and good) and "globalization" (we compete for the bottom of the barrel pricing with people who throw the untreated water from the factory into the local river - this is bad).
Excellent remark. The report card on globalization thus far is a hollowed out economy in the west with rent-seeking and the profits of globalization floating around in financial assets in a sterile fashion.
Even the new conservatives are waking up to this. It's far better that the west employ these new protectionist approaches and reindustrialize their countries. China isn't just producing cheap Hasbro toys. They are increasingly moving up the value chain while America moves down and its people are employed in increasingly low productivity jobs. Our old elite sold us out.
Thankfully some of the elite have figured this out. The rest are still reading their 2000s-era textbook telling them some abstract idea of globalization is great. No thank you. That's how you get a worse Trump.
I don't buy the lines about the elite - regular people voted in the republicans and the neocons who favored these policies.
It's hard to pin it on "the elite" when they were voted in after explicitly explaining their views. There's a large section of the populace that would rather other people do worse than have everyone do better - and they got exactly what they voted for.
We can't pawn it off on "elites". Same with "rent-seeking behavior" - if you incentivize it that way, you get exactly what you structured the policies for. It's the people's fault, not some high and mighty class that's smart enough to look at the policies and come to the same conclusion everyone else would (and did).
> The report card on globalization thus far is a hollowed out economy in the west with rent-seeking and the profits of globalization floating around in financial assets in a sterile fashion.
These arguments from emotion are, again, so saddening on see on HN. The "report card" of globalization is that the last few decades have been by far the best period to be alive in human history essentially anywhere on the planet.
The economy isn't "hollowed out", the US is a booming & dynamic economy. The US is the second largest manufacturer in the world by a wide margin(unless you consider the EU as a singular entity).
The idea that we've been "sold out" implies things were just fine before those pesky elites and globalists screwed it up. The perception of the US middle class in the mid-20th century is idealized to the point of mythology and has no real basis in reality. If you were suddenly teleported into the 50s you would very quickly wish to come back.
The sort of economically illiterate brand of populism is probably the single greatest threat to the prosperity of this country, not the things that it(falsely) attributes our problems to, like globalism.
"The perception of the US middle class in the mid-20th century is idealized to the point of mythology and has no real basis in reality."
Right the baby boomers who could work flipping burgers and put themselves through college and buy a house at 22 really did poorly, and if we all just give a LITTLE MORE to the global economy so it can function "more smoothly" we'll all be better off.
We're producing more shit - and getting less of the pie as workers.
If we have to sacrifice the American middle class to bring up the standard of living in Wherever, I think it's a bad trade. I could not care less if it comes at a cost to us.
"The economy isn't "hollowed out", the US is a booming & dynamic economy."
"But the stock market is great!" - for the top 10% of us with stocks, awesome. We left a shitload of people in the dust. Millennials have what 1/3 of the wealth boomers did by the same age?
But if we all gave more... Trust us it's better...
> Right the baby boomers who could work flipping burgers and put themselves through college and buy a house at 22 really did poorly
Yes! You, living in the modern world, would never tolerate the quality of housing, automobiles, education, and essentially everything else that was "in reach" of someone flipping burgers at 22 in this fabled period of history.
What they had was shit, and you'd quickly be backpedaling on this opinion if you ever had to live with it yourself.
You are immeasurably better off than your parents. The array of amenities, options & opportunity in front at this very moment is something people in this mythical period
you're describing could not even fathom.
> "But the stock market is great!" - for the top 10% of us with stocks, awesome. We left a shitload of people in the dust. Millennials have what 1/3 of the wealth boomers did by the same age? But if we all gave more... Trust us it's better...
"Top 10% of us with stocks" - really? Anyone with any kind of retirement plan is exposed to the stock market. But the kicker is I wasn't even talking about the stock market when I say the US economy is booming & dynamic!
I'm not sure what you mean by "if we all gave more". Honestly your(and the other person's) replies reek of young, terminally online talking points, not anything based on data or empirical study.
...you mean the "fabled period" where 1 income could support a family of 4 and nobody needed the stock market because they had pension plans?
Yeah some myth. It wasn't long ago Homer Simpson wasn't considered "aspirational".
You're so into your text books you've lost sight of reality.
Why do you think the suicide rates for men are so much higher - and, nightmarishly enough, are increasing for children?
Because if you enforce some kind of bullshit about the world being flat, a few people win and you get better TVs - and MOST PEOPLE LOSE.
Homer Simpson is aspirational. That's how far the truth of "globalist" policies have gone. We got... Cheaper shit? Not worth it. At all.
Also:
"Because the housing market is not allowed to function as it should, through a slew of NIMBYist policies that cover virtually the entire country. In most parts of the country it is illegal to build anything but a single-family detached house."
You mean the standard house of our parents and grandparents? I thought you said we just "wouldn't accept" the quality of those dwellings? Is it housing policy, or are we being told we...wouldn't live there anyway?
Let's face it. Shit is much worse now. The current generation isn't even going to live as long! - the fastest growing category is "deaths of despair".
Why do you think the birth rate is declining? It's too expensive to even have kids! What kind of fucked up dystopia are you going for???
Respectfully, there is so much wrong with this that I don't even know where to begin. The homer simpson bit made me laugh though - in the US, Homer isn't seen as aspirational at all. Maybe you mean the Kardashians?
Still, the world is objectively better by any metric you'd care to use. You can find some exceptions as long as you don't control for historical or geopolitical context. If I had to guess, you're young and surrounded by populism and outrage porn on the internet - /r/latestagecapitalism, /r/aboringdystopia, rose twitter, so on, and so your opinion stems from being engrossed in that.
I will say that when I was younger(late teens/early 20s) I had a very similar sentiment as yours, insofar that the world's woes are easily understood and would be solved if it weren't for special interests who benefit from the way things are. The issue is you extrapolate way too far from this, and the solutions you arrive at are often regressive(and in some cases even already exist and contribute to the very problems you're trying to solve).
Because the labor market is largely not allowed to function as it should. UBI would help people already stuck in this conundrum have the breathing room to shop for employment. but the reality is between occupational licensure, unions and other protectionist schemes, there's only a select few occupations that benefit from market dynamics.
> housing is through the roof
Because the housing market is not allowed to function as it should, through a slew of NIMBYist policies that cover virtually the entire country. In most parts of the country it is illegal to build anything but a single-family detached house.
Housing in general is an area where markets excel, we should let them.
> We're going to finally increase taxes on corporations
Our issues are not because the government is not bringing in enough tax revenue. It would be better to have the corporate tax rate at 0% and reform/increase taxation on the other side, when people take profits from the company. This encourages investment & takes away the incentive to shelter money from taxes through a variety of schemes.
> government is going to spend freely on semiconductors and R&D like they did in the 50's and 60's
This isn't really "America First" in the same way that forcing companies to buy American made goods is. THIS is where the US should be spending big, if anywhere.
> There needs to be a clear delineation between "globalization" (we're all multicultural and can all be friends - this is true and good) and "globalization" (we compete for the bottom of the barrel pricing with people who throw the untreated water from the factory into the local river - this is bad).
Comparative advantage is a real thing we should be embracing, not turning away from.
Protectionism only leads to worse outcomes. The government has a role in easing suffering, to that end we should be consolidating our current constellation of welfare programs into something resembling UBI.
Instead, protectionism tries to force the market to keep a set of conditions so some subset of the population is unaffected by a changing economy, to the detriment of everyone else.
I mean it wouldn't surprise me if a European company supplying the Chinese military would get sanctions. These small sanctions have ripple effects and create a fear in companies worldwide to avoid dealing with Chinese military-associated companies. That's kind of the intention.
Rather hypocritical since the best Supercomputers in the US are often used for military purposes. For example the ones at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
The entire point of sanctions is to exert a strategic influence over a rival.
> “Supercomputing capabilities are vital for the development of many – perhaps almost all – modern weapons and national security systems, such as nuclear weapons and hypersonic weapons, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said in a statement.
And? The US prohibited the export of all sorts of products to the Soviet Union because of their potential military applications. Why was China be exempt from these restrictions? China is still a one party, communist state. Perhaps they realized this fact again after the Hong Kong and Xinjiang crackdowns.
I mean there's nothing hypocritical here. What you said is like saying "in a war shooting the opposing side is hypocritical since you aren't shooting your own soldiers". Obviously you only penalize one side.
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[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 194 ms ] thread“The new rules take effect immediately but do not apply to goods from U.S. suppliers already en route.”
Citation please? Exemptions happen all the time for all sorts of reasons. Off the top of my head: if the goods in-flight were already invoiced and paid, and on the books for a publicly traded company, halting shipment and asking them to take the stock back could have massive ramifications to that company and the stock market as a whole.
If the parts shipped so far aren't enough to actually complete the supercomputer build, why on earth would the government force that company to jump through all those hoops? In general, retroactively punishing previously legal behavior is frowned upon by most folks in all but the rarest circumstances.
I vaguely recall a shipment being stopped midway under the USML but I’m having an early 40s moment - I’ll update this if I remember the case and find a decent citation!
Define "real threat". Are we talking about an imminent threat, a potential threat, a long-term strategic threat, etc?
The immediacy in which someone handles a threat depends on the details. For instance, high cholesterol and a heart attack are both a threat to someone's health. While you'd want to address both of those issues, one of them you might immediately call 911 for, and the other you might schedule an appointment for next week.
But I agree with your sentiment on the first point, what a huge strategic mistake.
Still I wouldn't be surprised that TSMC will be gutted by the US and get their tech stolen just to prop up failing Intel. That pretty much what super powers do, US has planned this really well making sure key component are all made in the US. Like the needed materials and the light source ASML uses for their EUV device.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/devices/how-the-fat...
https://www.eenewseurope.com/news/tsmc-confirms-5nm-fab-us
* https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/china-hyper...
* https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/biden-admin...
The TL;DR is that one of the sanctioned companies, Phytium, designs chips used in a Chinese supercomputer that the PLA's researchers use to simulate hypersonic weapons. The chips are designed using tools from Cadence and Synopsys (both American companies) and fabricated at TSMC.
Not sure where I saw them say
> I don't buy Chinese-made products
As already asked, what point are you trying to make?
It appeared to me as if you were making an attack on the sentiment of reducing Chinese purchases, because the replier obviously can't be avoiding Chinese brands completely because he uses a mobile phone.
And yes, it is nigh impossible to escape unless we are willing to live as we did 100+ years ago
Have a good day.
Serious question. I wouldn't even know how to approach it. China is the world's factory - throw a dart at a random non-food storefront, and anything it hits was almost surely made entirely or in part in China. Hell, a quite a lot of locally-made products get packaged in China. I personally know of local producers in Poland that send their products to China to be packaged there and sent back - it turns out it's much cheaper to do that, even accounting for multi-month round trip on a container ship, than to pay locals to do the packaging...
The US government in the 70's, 80's, and especially 90's should've known that the CCP was playing a game and a long game at that. No doubt they had surveillance on high level communications.
Knowing they were playing the long game, they should've had strict laws that were basically limiting the US 1 for 1.
ex. For every US student that studies PhD in China, one Chinese student can come here.
What happened was that thousands of Chinese learned about the highest levels of physics and technology at our universities and then used that information back in China to build hypersonic missiles that will be used to destroy our carrier fleets in a few years. As well as medium range missiles to destroy Taiwan.
They were blinded by their ideology, which told them that capitalism is inseparable from freedom and democracy. And bringing the first to China would bring the other 2 as well.
> For every US student that studies PhD in China, one Chinese student can come here.
Were there a lot of US students lining up to go to Chinese universities in the 70s and 80s? How would that even work?
> thousands of Chinese learned about the highest levels of physics and technology at our universities
If they could learn it at universities, was it really all that secret?
2. No. That’s the point. They got all the knowledge transfer benefits and we got some tuition money (who cares).
3. You think studying a PhD in physics at MIT or a large CA State institution is gonna be commonplace knowledge? I’m not talking about undergrad or even grad stuff.
Technology was stolen at times, copied or given. Students studing in the US are not the cause. If that were the case the Saudi's would be on the same level / India included.
One student studying in China to one student in the US sounds like a bad deal. If the US education system is better shouldn't it be two to one?
Besides the money charged to foreign students (which is very high) helps pay for US students and keeps those fees lower.
Now if the ask was no ivy or tier I schools because of a shortage of space and crazy demand. I could come around.
2. Colleges are expensive because they go carte Blanche. If they kept costs down by cutting frivolous positions, they could be sustainable.
That's why.
Why doesn't China answer back with similar sanctions?
It is honestly a bit of mystery to me. The best answer I can come up with is that the Chinese government is actually quite content with the US forcing Chinese companies to fabricate on Chinese soil.
Because it can't, yet.
But my sense is that the ccp likes their “Sputnik moment”.
Also COMAC should deliver their first model to (domestic?)customers this year. Then you also have a joint venture with a Russian plane company.
Most of these sanctions don't really work either. China will get what it wants some other way. The US will get to look like it acted. Everyone will be happy...
What are you basing this on?
The US banned exports to 4 Chinese companies that made the machines.
So other companies spring up to fill the gap. This is problem 1: it takes very little time to setup a company, so sanctioning one is sort of pointless. You sanction PLA_Supplier1 LLC? Good thing PLA_Supplier1 LLC is interested in ordering the same kit!
The result was a roughly yearly round of sanctions. Every year's new list of names is a list of the companies that bypassed the last year's sanctions...
There is also problem 2: back in 2015 the computers used Intel parts but increasingly the Chinese are designing their own. They're not there yet, but they're making progress. TSMC still do most of the manufacture.
So the question is: how long till Chinese hackers steal the latest designs or Chinese engineers reverse engineer the parts they buy on the grey market? AND how long until China sets up a TSMC competitor?
I'm something of a hawk on China. I'm out on a ledge but here I am. I'd like to see real action on them for a long list of reasons. But before we can have real action, we need to drop the pretend action. Trump (what a turd) loved pretend action. Maybe Biden will be different? But this isn't that imho.
Source on the original tariffs:
[0] https://www.economist.com/business/2019/06/29/an-american-ba...
I was under the impression (mostly due to this podcast that talks about China's semiconductor history: https://chinatalkshow.libsyn.com/chinas-chip-dreams) that all of the big software companies that make chip tooling are outside of China and that a ban would be possible, but politically difficult.
> AND how long until China sets up a TSMC competitor?
From that same podcast it seems as though they've been trying for decades and have so far unable to do so and recent attempts(https://chinatalk.substack.com/p/billion-dollar-heist-how-sc...) have ended in massive fraud.
The problem is that on free market it is more attractive for a Chinese chip designer to go for TSMC due to their maturity and reliability.
Obviously the broadening US sanctions changes that and effectively acts as a massive boost of the domestic fab industry.
China still benefits from its US relationship overall. The US does benefit too, but the US also wants to slow down their growth because it's a big threat to its power. I think everything else like human rights issues are just BS. We're partner with most of Arabian countries in the Middle East and we have active arms sell to them including Saudis which are far worst than China in terms of democracy and human rights.
You must read another HN than I do. I see a HN that is extremely pro-US and anti-PRC. So much so that a random American can pull stuff out his ass about Chinese education and get upvoted while the person living in China gets downvoted for disagreeing. Search this thread for PISA test and see the comments above...
>Are there 2 million people in reducation camps in the US based on ethnicity?
Have you not seen the historic and current state of blacks incarcerated in the US and how policy is made specifically to criminalise some skin colors and cultures? Some states have as high as 72% black population in prisons. Not to mention all the medicinally experimentation done on poor and/or black people in the US through time.
Even if we had been without those today it is still a crazy comparison. If country A have been a highly developed country for hundreds of years and they then point fingers of country B and C who is not only all the way to where A is yet but have also been highly developed for way less time then you are comparing apples to pumpkins.
PISA 2018 results
“The OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) examines what students know in reading, mathematics and science, and what they can do with what they know. It provides the most comprehensive and rigorous international assessment of student learning outcomes to date. Results from PISA indicate the quality and equity of learning outcomes attained around the world, and allow educators and policy makers to learn from the policies and practices applied in other countries. This is one of six volumes that present the results of the PISA 2018 survey, the seventh round of the triennial assessment.”
https://www.oecd.org/pisa/PISA-results_ENGLISH.png
These latest results have various parts of China‡ in #1 position, the USA in #13
‡ It is true that the sub-regions looked at are Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang.
The 2021 results have been postponed until 2022 for obvious reasons.
Citation needed :)
As a Chinese native who has friends in almost all provinces across China, I just don't see Chinese is less educated than US. Same K-12 education for almost all (exceptions are rare).
Did you go to a Western university? A good one? And now work at some Western company? You can add atypical points for all of those.
Most of the Chinese people I know are fine in terms of education, around the same as any other demographic. But most of them I know from a top European university, or from highly skilled work in China. Most of China is not like that at all.
https://bigthink.com/politics-current-affairs/pisa-test-chin...
I was born in a city ranked 45th in China by population (from wikipedia). K-12 is 100%. My grandpa lives in a very small village with annual income just a few thousand dollars, K-12 is also 100%. My close cousins come from the same small village, now bank staffs and doctors.
I have friends who's family so poor that the roof got torn away by a typhoon. And I have friends whose parents are simply peasants.
My friend group is definitely biased since I graduated from one of the top universities, but they are selected by exams, so many families are actually not wealthy. In China money usually cannot help you directly on exams, people need to study hard.
Hmm, another thing I'm curious is that what gives the original post the impression that "Chinese people are uneducated". That's a rare heard haha.
Propaganda? The stats I have seen all state that Americans are the uneducated ones in this comparison.
It's not a direct comparison since the cost for education is also cheaper in China. Also since K-12 is almost free (at least meals are not included 20 years ago when I was a kid), parents just send kids there.
In recent years the trend is that even assembly factories require high school education, bachelor preferred... That's another interesting topic though.
This is exactly what I mean; the relatively advantaged Chinese are under the impression that they are the average. They're not at all. The average Chinese person lives no place they're likely to escape for the Bay Area. Most people can't even escape to a normal life in a tier 1 city within China.
I mentioned my grandpa, he lives in a small village (1~2k people?), I would say it is something like rural Fresno maybe.
If you can have supporting numbers, I can help explain.
I don't think K-12 attainment is an appropriate metric. Like I said elsewhere it's like comparing hygiene standards by saying we all have access to soap. But that's the most basic standard we can achieve.
I think if you compare the % of Chinese who go to world-class universities, it's a lot more relevant. China has maybe 2 or 3 such universities, so saying it's equal and fair because you have the gaokao or whatever doesn't make much sense. The biggest intake for world class universities is rich Chinese kids going to the West, not poor kids from the village going to Tsinghua. If you managed to do that then great for you, really, but it's not an average story.
Even if we don't want to go that high-end, tertiary educational attainment at any calibre of university in China is much much lower than in the US.
I think there are good things about the Chinese approach to education, but it's kind of silly to say they've caught up to the US and others.
> I think it's pretty significant that they are able to run a country with that demographics most of whom were not even educated.
and then eventually switch to
> I don't think K-12 attainment is an appropriate metric. Like I said elsewhere it's like comparing hygiene standards by saying we all have access to soap. But that's the most basic standard we can achieve
> I think if you compare the % of Chinese who go to world-class universities, it's a lot more relevant
This seems like a major shift in goal-posts. If your concept of "uneducated" means not going to a world-class university, then most of the world, including most people in the US are "uneducated".
It's trivial to pick a relevant metric and look up the median value for China. A quarter of the people there live on less than $5/day. They're not swanning off to do a Masters at MIT any time soon. They're not even able to move to the better cities within China, for the most part.
This person is a total anomaly. Taking them as representative is quite ridiculous and rather insulting to the hundreds of millions "with a K-12 education" that somehow are still living in abject poverty with no opportunities. It's an arbitrary and meaningless claim to make. It's like saying China and America have the same hygiene standards because most people in both places have access to soap.
Weren't we talking about education?
But that you think you both know better than a Chinese person and didn't even bother to put in some links to facts (unlike those liked that disagree, like the Pisa test) says enough.
For example, Chinese tertiary attainment is half that of the US:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tertiary_...
Again, soap and hygiene. Since when do we compare education levels only on basic literacy and numeracy?
No, 'educated' was the term used. I'm not sure why you would think we're only talking about basic 'English' skills.
The gathered statistics are in no way comparable to Western countries which gather scores from all districts, rich and poor alike.
https://www.loc.gov/law/help/real-property-law/china.php
I suppose these companies turned out okay? The fate of locals notwithstanding. /s
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrialization_in_the_Sovie...
China is not just a source of cheap labour. But a source of cheap labour highly skilled in manufacturing which other countries all but abandoned over the previous decades.
If China breaks her compeletely from all major US manufacturers, it's equivalent to a declaration of the end of post-2001 world economy and can bring ripples across the world. China is not prepared for that, yet.
On other hand, the US are trying to slow China's rise by hurting key industries.
This is a geopolitical struggle. The US cannot win because China is bigger than they are and so will overtake them sooner or later, but they can slow things down to maintain their dominance as long as they can.
They (the USA) fucked up Japan pretty bad. Throughout the 70s-80s the USA was fearful of the rise of Japan, their incredible ability to usurp American businesses, and their growing trade deficit surplus, which they then rolled back into US T-bonds. From an American perspective, Japan was in the 70s what China is today.
In the early-80s, the Yen-to-dollar ratio was really high. This kicked off an inflationary asset bubble within the country that lasted for several years. Starting in 1985, the yen-to-dollar ratio collapsed, falling by half from mid ¥200s in just two years and reaching a low of ¥85 by 95.
Japan entered the Lost Decade as a result of this situation. The lost decade became two, then the GFC happened, bringing it to three decades.
It is suspected that this was the result of an intentional attack on the Japanese economy by US officials with the express intent to curb Japan's rising economic power.
China has many advantages that Japan doesn't have. It's not a given that the same thing will happen.
I believe this is commonly referred to in geopolitics as the Plaza Accord.
There are smaller countries that have a higher GDP on average. Although some of those are suspect in reality; Ireland's is higher, but no one thinks of Ireland as especially more prosperous than say England. I wonder if it's because it's a tax haven.
Japan is not a small country at all. It's probably in the top 10 for population (off the top of my head, China > India > USA > Indonesia > Nigeria > Russia > Japan?). But there are no medium-to-large countries - population 35m+ - whose GDP per capita is within $10k of the US. The US is an outlier.
Moreover, I was talking about total GDP and not per capita. Among the current nations, only China and India have any hope of overtaking the US within our lifetimes (very slim for India). And that's only because of their gargantuan populations - per capita they'll still be far behind. For Japan to have overtaken the US in the 90s, they would have had to have a GDP per capita 3x of the US - which no country of any size has even today. Japan got really close, which is very impressive given its size.
> And that's only because of their gargantuan populations
All things being equal the relative economic and industrial power of countries is proportional to their population.
Unless a catastrophe befalls the US it's the countries with comparable or larger population that are threats. These includes the EU, actually, which is why the US are always wary of further EU integration.
With the likes of the EU, China, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, the US will pretty much inevitably lose their dominance and become one of the "big guys", key words being 'one of', not 'the' and not the biggest of the big guys, either.
Agreed. And this is why I said the US never had to seriously fear Japan surpassing them.
Japan's small population and land area means that they can never be world leaders in commodity production, such as oil, agriculture, mining, or timber - all of which are industries the USA performs really well in. Oil, specifically, is a crutch relied on by many nations to pad their GDP.
That's why Japan is so incredibly impressive. If you start removing commodities from the GDP comparisons (which are largely based on geographic luck), Japan, is and was an economic powerhouse.
Japan never needed to overtake the economy of the USA in pure GDP, since so much of USA GDP is in areas Japan could never compete in, such as agricultural output, they just needed to overtake the USA in a handful of key industrial areas. Which they did.
China has 4x the population of the US. The US have 4x the population of the UK.
Did the UK manage to stop the rise of the US? No. The US is much larger than any European country and thus it was inevitable that they became the dominant power (Europe helped by self-destructing, but economically the US had already overtaken European countries).
The only way the US can remain dominant is by trying to keep 'third world' countries poor. Once massive countries are on a strong development path it's just a matter of time and this is what's happening with China.
India also has the potential to overtake the US. In the future Nigeria could as well. This is actually an optimistic view as it assumes that no country is bound to be poor forever.
I suggest you look at the demographics in China.
1/7 of Chinese citizens are either unemployed or underemployed (in poverty) contrary to their public pronouncements.
The One Child Policy is causing a demographic "bottleneck" that will burst in the next generation, leaving the current generation in the lurch at retirement time.
China imports half of several food groups, meaning they can't grow their own food.
80% of hospitals are dedicated to retired party members (the CCP is only about 15% of the population.)
China talks a mean game, but most of that is from a position of weakness and insecurity - "fake it til you make it."
They want to, but they can't, yet. If you listen to CCP officials the long term plan is very clear: To transform China from an export driven economy to a internal market economy so they don't need others, but currently they need them.
China currently can not consume what it produces. When I was living there I could not buy the cooking tool(blender) I wanted. I went to Europe, bought the Blender(manufactured in China) and brought it to China. There was not market in China for those and they went straight from the factory to the port.
China is not the US, most people in China are very poor. The CCP is very powerful but the country is weak in many ways.
In fact China is closing down a lot recently, expats are going out the country fast.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/daviddawkins/2019/10/21/china-o...
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/china-overtake-u-world-larges...
I dont know what China you are talking about.
China sheer size is enough to beat already the US in absolute numbers. The per capita numbers is way below but that gap will keep shrinking.
The only thing constraining Xi Xinping from going the route of Putin or Kim is his own self control. That's not a long term stable situation.
Having said all that, half-measures to contain China are pointless. We either should have free trade with China, or almost no trade with China. Our tech controls are highly porous. There is constant interchange in expertise and high tech goods. China is only about 5 to 10 years behind the West on any given technology that is commercially available. The only stuff they lag further behind on is stuff that is completely classified. And that stuff is a very small list of things.
Arguably, China is already exceeding America's capabilities in many next generation military technologies like drones and cyberwarfare.
The West has to make a decision ... either we go the free trade route and hope domestic competition takes down Xi Xinping ... or we withdraw completely from China and disengage as much as possible ... cold war style.
by the time, the west decides to disengage with china. china would be self sufficient and be able to engage with other countries.
[0]: https://palladiummag.com/2019/05/31/xi-jinping-in-translatio...
Democracy is inefficient crap for the most part, but it has a safety valve for the worst times.
China may even have 20, 30, 100 years of prosperity with such a system ... then it will inevitably fall on dark times.
I believe you have been brainwashed by American Media if you believe Putin is on par with Kim Jong-il.
There is hysteria in US media because Putin defends the interest of his own country against the interest of others like the US.
It seems pretty unreasonable for me to expect Putin to abandon Sevastopol and access to the black Sea,or the Mediterranean in Syria, but that is exactly what US media wanted from Putin.
They wanted a Russian leader to follow US' interest. If the Russian president were to do that, he would be loved in the US, and hated inside Russia, while the opposite happens.
BTW, China is a very complex thing, it is almost a continent in size, lots of people and it is rotten inside in many levels. The population is old and the system extremely corrupt in levels you can not understand in the West.
>China is only about 5 to 10 years behind the West on any given technology that is commercially available.
I don't think so.
OK.
Build a super computer?
No, no, no!
You broke the site guidelines egregiously with this comment and have been doing it elsewhere also. We ban accounts that do that (and have had to warn you before). If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and fix this, we'd appreciate it.
Also, the globalized world (re China) was, at one point, looking like they'd liberalize and join the rest of the world - we would all rather trade goods than bullets. That has proven to be a mistake, and we're correcting it by investing in manufacturing and infrastructure here.
"But the global economy" - nope. It turns out it matters where the factories are located, and we're trying to right the ship - finally!
We're living in a globalized world, and everyone is better for it.
We're going to finally increase taxes on corporations and the government is going to spend freely on semiconductors and R&D like they did in the 50's and 60's, but these things are... bad, compared to the last 40 years of policy?
Citation needed.
There needs to be a clear delineation between "globalization" (we're all multicultural and can all be friends - this is true and good) and "globalization" (we compete for the bottom of the barrel pricing with people who throw the untreated water from the factory into the local river - this is bad).
Even the new conservatives are waking up to this. It's far better that the west employ these new protectionist approaches and reindustrialize their countries. China isn't just producing cheap Hasbro toys. They are increasingly moving up the value chain while America moves down and its people are employed in increasingly low productivity jobs. Our old elite sold us out.
Thankfully some of the elite have figured this out. The rest are still reading their 2000s-era textbook telling them some abstract idea of globalization is great. No thank you. That's how you get a worse Trump.
It's hard to pin it on "the elite" when they were voted in after explicitly explaining their views. There's a large section of the populace that would rather other people do worse than have everyone do better - and they got exactly what they voted for.
We can't pawn it off on "elites". Same with "rent-seeking behavior" - if you incentivize it that way, you get exactly what you structured the policies for. It's the people's fault, not some high and mighty class that's smart enough to look at the policies and come to the same conclusion everyone else would (and did).
These arguments from emotion are, again, so saddening on see on HN. The "report card" of globalization is that the last few decades have been by far the best period to be alive in human history essentially anywhere on the planet.
The economy isn't "hollowed out", the US is a booming & dynamic economy. The US is the second largest manufacturer in the world by a wide margin(unless you consider the EU as a singular entity).
The idea that we've been "sold out" implies things were just fine before those pesky elites and globalists screwed it up. The perception of the US middle class in the mid-20th century is idealized to the point of mythology and has no real basis in reality. If you were suddenly teleported into the 50s you would very quickly wish to come back.
The sort of economically illiterate brand of populism is probably the single greatest threat to the prosperity of this country, not the things that it(falsely) attributes our problems to, like globalism.
Right the baby boomers who could work flipping burgers and put themselves through college and buy a house at 22 really did poorly, and if we all just give a LITTLE MORE to the global economy so it can function "more smoothly" we'll all be better off.
We're producing more shit - and getting less of the pie as workers.
If we have to sacrifice the American middle class to bring up the standard of living in Wherever, I think it's a bad trade. I could not care less if it comes at a cost to us.
"The economy isn't "hollowed out", the US is a booming & dynamic economy."
"But the stock market is great!" - for the top 10% of us with stocks, awesome. We left a shitload of people in the dust. Millennials have what 1/3 of the wealth boomers did by the same age?
But if we all gave more... Trust us it's better...
Yes! You, living in the modern world, would never tolerate the quality of housing, automobiles, education, and essentially everything else that was "in reach" of someone flipping burgers at 22 in this fabled period of history.
What they had was shit, and you'd quickly be backpedaling on this opinion if you ever had to live with it yourself.
You are immeasurably better off than your parents. The array of amenities, options & opportunity in front at this very moment is something people in this mythical period you're describing could not even fathom.
> "But the stock market is great!" - for the top 10% of us with stocks, awesome. We left a shitload of people in the dust. Millennials have what 1/3 of the wealth boomers did by the same age? But if we all gave more... Trust us it's better...
"Top 10% of us with stocks" - really? Anyone with any kind of retirement plan is exposed to the stock market. But the kicker is I wasn't even talking about the stock market when I say the US economy is booming & dynamic!
I'm not sure what you mean by "if we all gave more". Honestly your(and the other person's) replies reek of young, terminally online talking points, not anything based on data or empirical study.
Yeah some myth. It wasn't long ago Homer Simpson wasn't considered "aspirational".
You're so into your text books you've lost sight of reality.
Why do you think the suicide rates for men are so much higher - and, nightmarishly enough, are increasing for children?
Because if you enforce some kind of bullshit about the world being flat, a few people win and you get better TVs - and MOST PEOPLE LOSE.
Homer Simpson is aspirational. That's how far the truth of "globalist" policies have gone. We got... Cheaper shit? Not worth it. At all.
Also: "Because the housing market is not allowed to function as it should, through a slew of NIMBYist policies that cover virtually the entire country. In most parts of the country it is illegal to build anything but a single-family detached house."
You mean the standard house of our parents and grandparents? I thought you said we just "wouldn't accept" the quality of those dwellings? Is it housing policy, or are we being told we...wouldn't live there anyway?
Let's face it. Shit is much worse now. The current generation isn't even going to live as long! - the fastest growing category is "deaths of despair".
Why do you think the birth rate is declining? It's too expensive to even have kids! What kind of fucked up dystopia are you going for???
Respectfully, there is so much wrong with this that I don't even know where to begin. The homer simpson bit made me laugh though - in the US, Homer isn't seen as aspirational at all. Maybe you mean the Kardashians?
Still, the world is objectively better by any metric you'd care to use. You can find some exceptions as long as you don't control for historical or geopolitical context. If I had to guess, you're young and surrounded by populism and outrage porn on the internet - /r/latestagecapitalism, /r/aboringdystopia, rose twitter, so on, and so your opinion stems from being engrossed in that.
I will say that when I was younger(late teens/early 20s) I had a very similar sentiment as yours, insofar that the world's woes are easily understood and would be solved if it weren't for special interests who benefit from the way things are. The issue is you extrapolate way too far from this, and the solutions you arrive at are often regressive(and in some cases even already exist and contribute to the very problems you're trying to solve).
Because the labor market is largely not allowed to function as it should. UBI would help people already stuck in this conundrum have the breathing room to shop for employment. but the reality is between occupational licensure, unions and other protectionist schemes, there's only a select few occupations that benefit from market dynamics.
> housing is through the roof
Because the housing market is not allowed to function as it should, through a slew of NIMBYist policies that cover virtually the entire country. In most parts of the country it is illegal to build anything but a single-family detached house.
Housing in general is an area where markets excel, we should let them.
> We're going to finally increase taxes on corporations
Our issues are not because the government is not bringing in enough tax revenue. It would be better to have the corporate tax rate at 0% and reform/increase taxation on the other side, when people take profits from the company. This encourages investment & takes away the incentive to shelter money from taxes through a variety of schemes.
> government is going to spend freely on semiconductors and R&D like they did in the 50's and 60's
This isn't really "America First" in the same way that forcing companies to buy American made goods is. THIS is where the US should be spending big, if anywhere.
> There needs to be a clear delineation between "globalization" (we're all multicultural and can all be friends - this is true and good) and "globalization" (we compete for the bottom of the barrel pricing with people who throw the untreated water from the factory into the local river - this is bad).
Comparative advantage is a real thing we should be embracing, not turning away from.
Protectionism only leads to worse outcomes. The government has a role in easing suffering, to that end we should be consolidating our current constellation of welfare programs into something resembling UBI.
Instead, protectionism tries to force the market to keep a set of conditions so some subset of the population is unaffected by a changing economy, to the detriment of everyone else.
> “Supercomputing capabilities are vital for the development of many – perhaps almost all – modern weapons and national security systems, such as nuclear weapons and hypersonic weapons, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said in a statement.
Interactions between nation-states are always driven by self interest. There is zero benefit in acting any differently.