If the current course continues this seems likely to lead to a bifurcation of the Arm ecosystem - presumably with Arm customers outside of China competing with incompatible products exported from China based on Arm China designs.
I don't have any insight into the quality of the Arm China team but isn't one possible outcome that there is strong competition between the two ecosystems. So we could be in an Arms race (sorry!)
They could try that, sure, but the "real" Arm would likely sue to stop imports at as many destinations as possible. And they'd probably win those court cases.
These are not counterfeit goods though. Where has the law been broken in a way that gives Arm the power to act? Probably IP licensed under Chinese law and Arm China will probably get its way in Chinese courts.
Author here. They specifically said they are not working with foreign companies. While they have exclusive rights to arm architecture in china, they cannot do anything outside china.
Arm does not manufacture chips. They license IP for per chip or blanket fees. The model of many of these licenses is irrevocable. I've seen a couple different Arm licensing contracts and they're all very different so hard to make blanket statements. The Chinese entity has the right to license to all Chinese semiconductor firms who have the right to sell their chips.
I'm aware of how ARM operates. I just find it incredible that ARM would allow some entity to license its designs contrary to ARM's own intentions, or generally do anything that entity wanted to do with them, and ARM would just consent to it in places where law is enforced. I mean, shredding counterfeit imported goods has been a traditional pastime in the west.
These are not counterfeit goods though. Where has the law been broken in a way that gives Arm the power to act? Probably IP licensed under Chinese law and Arm China will probably get its way in Chinese courts.
As dylan522p is saying, it depends very heavily on the actual agreement. Which unfortunately isn't public and has historically been very different in each case so we can't even look at similar agreements for guidance.
That being said, it wouldn't be totally out there for a clause in the agreement that doesn't allow export of chips with this IP, and that would probably be enforced as ITO judgements allowing seizing chips and end devices at ingress points. The ITO would essentially treat them as counterfeit if all of those assumptions hold true, similar to how how remanufactured and ghost shift iPhone replacement parts famously get labeled as counterfeit legally.
> Chips themselves can be sold, yes. The IP cannot be licensed to non Chinese based semi firms.
I'd be astonished if licenses to Chinese SoC designers prevented products with those SoC's being sold outside China. So RockChip, Spreadtrum etc would be cut off from the rest of the world? Or forced to license separately with Arm UK for chips for products that are to be exported? Seems very unlikely.
Plus I'd expect we'd have seen action taken already if they really had broken the terms of the licensing.
Agreed that we're all speculating to some extent though!
This is the standard Chinese operating model, as I understand it. Accept foreign subsidiary investment on condition of 51% Chinese ownership, transfer the technology, then turn around and compete with the parent. It was a similar story with maglev trains.
Does anyone think they were not nudged to sell to local state-designated champ and had one serious candidate (with the CCP pulling the strings behind the scene)?
Interesting that it's not the 51% (and I think some of the 51% may be held by non Chinese investors) that has been key but rather Allen Wu having the seal - so even without control of the board he's still been able to get control of the company.
Author here, there is a Singaporean investor as well, but they have deep Chinese ties. I agree with your assessment. Allen Wu is an American citizen too, but loyal to China with deep CCP contacts.
Since you are the author, there's a near duplicated paragraph below the CPU/XPU pictures, the paragraphs starts with "Besides standing out and calling themselves".
Very interesting content otherwise, I remember the seal issue being something very controversial too when other companies went there (I believe it was regarding Intel, that was maybe 15 years ago). To this day it still is a pretty prevalent issue when doing local branches in China.
The FARA act covers a person who “solicits, collects, disburses, or dispenses contributions, loans, money, or other things of value within the United States” while acting in the interests of a “foreign government, a foreign political party, any person outside the United States ... and any entity organized under the laws of a foreign country or having its principal place of business in a foreign country.”
But an individual person is not a foreign entity, especially not if they are a US citizen.
There is the loophole for "representing interests of a foreign principal before US government officials" though, so I guess this is written broadly enough to snag anyone who may step on some toes.
Please don't cross into personal attack. If another commenter is confused, or you feel they are, it's enough to supply correct information in a helpful spirit. Alternatively, it's always fine not to post.
You can't throw out accusations like that without evidence, what deep CCP contacts Allen Wu has? Elon Musk has a factory in Shanghai, is he "loyal to China with deep CCP contacts" too?
I'll agree with this but the difference is drastic. Compare the number of people in Guantanamo to the number of people in Xinjiang. An order of magnitude of an order of magnitude difference.
Guantanamo is an embarrassment but it isn't even close to the Xinjiang camps
Just say you don't care. The most unbearing thing for us is that you claim to care while brutalizing and fetishizing others to justify your own crusade.
That's because concentration camps refers to your own citizens. Which doesn't excuse what happened in those US facilities. This isnt a trivial distinction; government's have a specific responsibility to their own citizens which goes above and beyond. Besides which china does some super sketch stuff on its border with north Korea.
Iraq and Afghanistan until recently. And we send billions to Israel which is a straight up apartheid state. That's not even getting into the millions of minorities in the world's largest prison population. We also killed a significant portion of the vietnamese population, in the millions. Also, you should look into the decades of CIA interventions in dozens of latin American countries.
You’re joking right? Indian reservations are their land. And they are free to move live work where ever without government oversight. This comment must be bait because I don’t see the logic.
i agree. the problem i have with the author's comment is "loyal". I think we need to distinguish people from justing trying to make money (apple, microsoft, tesla) and being CCP agents.
The author clearly suggests this American CEO is a "loyal CCP" agent. I am just curious how did she/he spot him?
Thanks for an interesting piece. Presumably Wu wouldn't have done this if he didn't have (or think he has) CCP approval? Also Son with his long term business interests in China probably thought he would be OK. Someone has miscalculated badly?
Not really. The key here is that he needed to maintain legality, by contesting the ruling of the board and suing, he can now argue he is still the boss and keep the seal till chinese justice deliberates.
For those of us not familiar with Chinese business practices, is this an actual seal? Like someone would use to frank documents, or squish into hot wax to seal documents? Or is it a symbolic seal, like a legal document, or something else?
These days it's a round plastic handle with a carved rubber bottom that pairs with a spongy red-ink filled bottom. There's a picture and an explanation at [1]. It basically functions the same way as the signature of an authorized representative of the company does in the West.
Presumably it comes out of personal seals which are a fun item to get if you're in China. I never interacted with someone who used them, but it's cool. See pictures at [2] and history at [3].
"Chop" is also frequently used instead of "seal". I assume its not onomatopoedic, but that is a fair description of the "thunk" sound produced to when the seal is quickly pounded against the document on the table.
Ditto Korea. Something that shocked me is that it is common in medium-sized sole proprietorships (tech startups, small businesses, research labs) for the CEO to give their personal seal to the accountants/secretaries. It the West the equivalent would be giving away an autopen for your signature.
There are different grades of seals for different purposes. The secretary will have the garden-variety "The company has received this shipment" chop; they will not have the "The company has agreed to this contract" chop.
I wonder if they were giving their full official seal? I suppose if you're signing a ton of documents, handing that over might be needed. It would be interesting if there were a system to register certain seals with only some permissions (for example, manage business but not personal assets with a green seal). You could create a document stamped with your most important seal that indicates which seal is permissible for which purpose.
In Japan, the official "hanko" seal with red ink carries the force of a signature, but other seals do not carry as much or any legal weight.
That article talks a little bit about a similar system to the one I mentioned, where one seal is used for banking, one for title transactions, etc. Something like that but more customizable could be pretty useful.
in western companies, executive assistants very often have the exact same ability, up to and including signed full power of attorneys for executing on the ceo’s life where work blends into personal life.
i’m not surprised at this at all.
in the western context many executive assistants end up being appointed the executor of the ceo’s estate / will as a matter of business continuity.
It's a thing in the US too. Just formed a C-Corp and power to create a seal that serves as the company's official signature is one of the parts that needs to be figured out in bylaws. You can specify that the current Chairman or CEO's signature counts as a seal, but you legally need some seal entity so that .gov knows what's legally binding. We elected to have an actual seal just for the kitsch value of it. Why make a company if you can't have a little fun with it?
Sensible businesses usually keep the seal locked up somewhere in the head office, probably with a backup in a safety deposit box at their bank. They certainly don't let the CEO take it home with them.
I don't quite understand this either, isn't this something where you could make a new seal with the same design? Does the original seal have something specific that's not supposed to be copied? Or is this like the copyright ownership of the company's seal?
In my country seals are used for business. There's a legal arsenal that makes forging a company seal or using it without authority more risky than dealing drugs. You can get in jail for life for this kind of crime. It's very efficient because companies making seals took the habit of asking for a proof of authority for making the seal representing a company to shield themselves from prosecution
This gets overblown a lot in the same way that we used to discredit Soviet scientific advancements by claiming they stole all the important bits from the Americans.
Yes, China does steal US technology and industry and yes, it has happened on a number of occasions with concrete documentation. However, that does not mean that China is not capable of innovation or shrewd business moves and it should not be assumed to be the norm.
The fact that they are more than capable of innovation and shrewd business is the entire reason that casually stealing whatever they want on top of things is problematic.
> The fact that they are more than capable of innovation and shrewd business is the entire reason that casually stealing whatever they want on top of things is problematic.
Hardly casual. The theft is thoughtful, deliberate, careful, and strategic.
Maybe the West woruld come to realization that they could abolish paw protections of trade secrets and patents, and not lose much, but boost local innovation?
I don't see how that is any different if we're comparing it to the United States who is also capable of the same things but violently steals whatever they want.
I wonder how this happens. Is it the naivety of leadership at western corporations, or is it simple greed because those leaders may show short term results that boost their compensation? And of course, I have to wonder why western governments don’t restrict their corporations from risking their economic and military sovereignty in the future through these terrible partnerships.
Note, you say "leadership of western corporations", but in the case of high speed rail, Japanese companies are involved too, and have fallen to the scam just as well.
The maglev was developed by Siemens in the 80s in Germany. It was called Transrapid. But we Germans were motivated to built a single railroad for it. So when Siemens went to China with it, we knew what would happen. Personally, i am kind of grateful that they use the technology instead that it rots away in some storage room in Munich at Siemens.
Seems to be going on for decades if the book Poorly Made in China is to be believed. Western corporations deliver their intellectual property to chinese factories on a silver platter.
Yes. All companies that operate in China have to be 51% domestically owned. Often they're setup so the parent company keeps all of the IP but as the Arm situation shows, that only gives the parent so much power.
> All companies that operate in China have to be 51% domestically owned.
this is not true - there is a type of legal entity called a Wholly Foreign Owned Enterprise (WFOE). It is only allowed for certain lines of business, of course, which wouldn't include anything of strategic importance to China.
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American officials want to avoid sending any signals that would fuel China's belief that the United States is trying to ''contain'' China's power, militarily or economically. And they know that if they deny a range of industrial technology to China, other competitors -- chiefly France and Germany -- are ready to leap in and fill the void.
"""
I am not sure the clickbating sensentional title really can be substantiated by the content...
Except from the fact that China practiced a different political system and ideology, developing China is not morally worse or better than developing any other nations.
Of course, when China grows powerful, they'll become more aggressive, and may even become the next super bully.
That's not what I'm talking about. Notice that Airbus started assembling A320 planes in China (under Chinese pressure), then Comac was founded, most of Chinese people working at Airbus went to Comac 1000 km away to build an A320 clone. This isn't simply a case of people "freely switching jobs". Particularly not in light of blatant and repeated Chinese espionage of incredible breadth in France going on for years and years:
>most of Chinese people working at Airbus went to Comac 1000 km away to build an A320 clone. This isn't simply a case of people "freely switching jobs".
State directed espionage doesn't get hundreds/thousands of engineers to switch allegiances. Money does. Then the knowledge travels with them. Personal knowledge that Airbus like many Euro companies in China treated their local employees like shit.
Another example was ZTE/Huawei managed to poach Nortel and other Euro telcom empoyees in China was because mainland employees had very little advancement opportunities. This included foreign nationals like Canadians with PRC Chinese background. An aquaintence of Chinese Canadian background poached most of Nortel GuangZhou's engineering team because state companies simply compensated better and provided more opportunities. A few years later, he poached a bunch of engineers from state company back to a foreign one who promoted. That's the incentives driving these mass migrations. Many PRC talent would rather stay working with foreign multinations due to prestige and better conditions (nice offices etc), especially in the late 90s, but at the end of the day, there was a bamboo ceiling and they generally weren't respected. Of course state will continue to espionage, but don't estimate role of Western companies being racist biting self in the ass that drove mainland talent to work for domestic companies.
Arm China was set up because they want to be listed on the Shanghai Star board, the Chinese Nasdaq. If Arm just want to do business in China, it's totally OK to have fully owned subsidiary.
And this whole setup was in turn from Softbank's acute sense that Arm China will be given a lofty valuation because of the tech wars happening right now...
And for all are happening right now, it's because Mr. Wu learned how to manuvurer based on his own interests. The Chinese investors are actually not directly benefiting from this mess.
" In the UK, he was called "Slater the Traitor"[2] and "Sam the Slate" because he brought British textile technology to the United States, modifying it for American use. He stole the textile factory machinery designs as an apprentice to a pioneer in the British industry before migrating to the United States at the age of 21. He designed the first textile mills in the US and later went into business for himself, developing a family business with his sons. He eventually owned thirteen spinning mills and had developed tenant farms and company towns around his textile mills, such as Slatersville, Rhode Island."
Historically, strong international IP protection only becomes extra important once you are an a big established incumbent rather than a developing upstart country.
There is a sort of lived-truth here, that innovative upstarts are generally going to be in opposition to IP laws rather than in favour of it. Laws generally favours established players with money, lawyers and political contacts.
> Historically, strong international IP protection only becomes extra important once you are an a big established incumbent rather than a developing upstart country.
The theft of IP in a less interconnected age with different IP laws, at a smaller scale? If it was good enough for the British and the Americans, why not a policy from the top down for the Chinese in the modern age?
It would explain what China is doing in Africa, and their treatment of African immigrants in China during the pandemic. Colonialism was OK back then too! And many countries did it! Why not a more modern take by China [1]?
And America didn't respect British copyright either. Charles Dickens was a bestselling author in 19th century America but didn't make any money from it because American publishers pirated his books -- and it was legal. Dickens eventually did a couple of tours of America where people paid for tickets to see and hear him read from his books because that was the only way he could monetize his American popularity.
> As part of the emphasis on the Chinese market, SoftBank succumbed to pressure and formed a joint venture. In the new joint venture, Arm Holdings, the SoftBank subsidiary sold a 51% stake of the company to a consortium of Chinese investors for paltry $775M. This venture has the exclusive right to license Arm’s IP within China.
Somewhere between a hard fork and rebase force push. There is even less value in Arm, but RISCV will face a slightly harder time, Arm China will be tough to compete against.
I suppose shareholders also want to maintain ownership of the technology that makes their profits happen in the first place, right?
Wait, who am I kidding? Only a handful of shareholders decide the actions of a company, and even fewer know what the company actually does besides money-in = more-money-out. Most just want as much profit as fast as possible, hence the risks taken with China.
How much money is "enough" is the problem. Companies seem to always choose "all the money" but I'm not sure that is always wise. What's wrong with doing work you are proud of and paying your employees a fair wage? It seems to always come back to the stock price and how it always has to go up for publicly traded companies.
The author of Dilbert, a comic popular because of its insight, has zero knowledge or insight? Good luck defending that assertion, let alone the rest of your claim.
This is why China can never be a global financial hub or have a global reserve currency.
Russian oligarchs, Saudi princes, and other shady characters would never move their money to China for safekeeping. No matter how friendly they are with the Chinese. Move only enough money to do business in China, all extra is moved elsewhere.
Without independent courts, separation of powers, ownership is a political privilege.
The visual cliche of the "evil Chinese man in front of a red background with five yellow stars" has come as far as that of the "hacker guy wearing a hoodie in a dark room with obfuscated JavaScript floating in the frame."
The "red background with five yellow stars" is the chinese flag. It's a common graphic pattern when you want to convey the idea of a person of geopolitical interest. Like putting Biden in front of the American flag o Macron in fron of the french one. Isn't specific to china nor represent any anti-china meaning.
So, I cannot see this sort of thing stopping, until we see a point where non-Chinese investors revolt when they hear about the company they've invested going into China, rather than cheering. If investors have had such a change of heart at this point, I have not seen it.
This sort of thing definitely has deterred investment in China. I was aware of it (in a very different industry) twenty years ago and it definitely affected decision making. It's impossible to track investments not made though.
If it's taken for granted that its impossible to make profits on the Chinese market, the best outcome for a company is to sell their IP to China and make sure the markets are kept completely segregated.
You can control the sale your own tech, but you have little control over whether you will then be competing against it down the road - regardless of the terms you thought you were all agreeing too.
The best way forward with any critical tech won't be a simple decision. Not competing in China, partnering in China, or selling tech for use only in China, all contain existential risks.
This is a battle happening at the Chinese (as a nation) vs. the non-Chinese world level. Non-Chinese tech actors will remain at high risk until the non-Chinese world can negotiate together with the same coherence as the Chinese system can.
> this is the macro playbook that we've seen time and time again over the last 20 years
What? American CEO in China are doing this kind of shit? Oh god, I have been in US for 12 years, so the American corporations have been plaguing the Chinese economy all the time?
No wonder indigenous Chinese companies eventually win. These American CEO are trash ...
One guy in China (with dual US citizenship) went rogue and refused to step down as CEO of a joint venture after board members representing most of the shareholders (including Chinese shareholders) voted to remove him.
He could only do that based on a legal technicality and the shareholders can still oust him via court action.
Presumably this is going to get interesting when they try to export hardware containing Arm-China items to the West. Arm will claim that it contains pirate IP, leading to seizures at the border.
Are there examples of mainland-grown IP/technology breakthroughs that resulted from such "transfers"?
It seems so far that this does enable China to further catch up and massively expand the use of the captured technology, but are there instances of them qualitatively surpassing it?
I'm sure China has enough resources for advancements beyond replication, as much as it's capable of showcasing something to the rest of the world equally valuable of "transfer".
That is confusing cause and effect. Because companies move their manufacturing operations to china it becomes harder to manufacture in the US. They did not initially move to China because of a lack of dometic skilled workers, but because of lower costs. The result of that move was, after a delay, the de-skilling of the US labor force, creating the lack of domestic skilled workers we have now. To recover from that would require a reverse migration of manufacturing activity which would, after a delay, create more skilled workers in the US.
Skills follow activity, they do not lead activity. You learn by doing.
If you want to develop good bridge building skills, then build a lot of bridges. As a result of that process, you will, after a delay, have a labor pool that knows how to do it well, and the bridges you build later on will be higher quality than the bridges you started out building.
You do not wait for the labor pool to sprout up like mushrooms spontaneously from the ground, so there are all these bridge builders standing around with nothing to do, and then you decide that you'll have them fill up a few rooms and and hire some of them to build a bridge.
It's not just a lack of domestic skilled workers. I'm not really sure there is much of a lack. It's just that US labor is so much more expensive compared to earning power. US workers can't pay other US workers.
Getting parts CNCed in China may be 10x less than the cost in the US, and materials are a tenth the cost as well (in small qty) as they haven't been transported yet. You can get roughly the same throughput in the US if you want to pay for it, but it will be vastly more expensive.
That is just logically false. It's not even a question of measurement, it is false by definition. The income paid to produce is by definition always sufficient to purchase the output that has been produced. But remember that income paid to the factors of production includes both labor and capital income, because both the owners of capital and the suppliers of labor purchase the products that are created by the combining of labor and capital to produce output.
What is unsustainable is running persistent trade deficits overseas. E.g. by allowing foreign capital inflows, we have allowed the foreign sector to distort prices in an unsustainable manner.
The buyer of US labor is the government and capital. Taxes on all US economic activity and coffers filled with worldwide profits are what purchases comparatively expensive US labor. This is why, e.g., most people can not afford new housing construction -- excess money has been dumped into it from the stimulus, driving costs up. Similar things have happened on a longer timescale for IT and engineering.
Take what I said with some restrictions, like "US workers can't afford skilled or semiskilled US labor" which is afaict true. I work in production automation, life sciences, and software; my hobby projects in these area are unfortunately quite expensive due to US labor costs. As much as possible I must avoid using US labor if I want to get anything done.
"Skills follow activity, they do not lead activity. You learn by doing."
Nicely put. Thanks for pointing that out. That really resonates for me as I think about my career and skillset. I'm where I am now because of building things with somewhat inferior skills (risky) at the start and growing my skills . I need to repeat that with new tools/processes now. It all seems obvious looking back.
...Perhaps another skill is having the foresight to see what will be needed in the next phase. I did it then, hopefully I'll be able to do it again. A bit like running a small company of one person. Where is the next investment made?
China - the populace - seem to be pretty good at this.
As far as I'm aware, the biggest innovation out of China in the past 300 years has been the face-kini.
Seriously though, has this country produced any new invention? I would expect a country with 1.5 billion would come up with something novel. I can think of nothing unique, only modification of existing inventions.
Depends on what you mean by "existing technology". Do electronic devices using quantum effects in solid state materials count? There you have the whole semiconductor industry. What about exploiting the behavior of charge carriers in vacuum? There you have the whole vacuum tube industry. Etc. etc. Before these things existed, nothing even remotely similar was being utilized by human civilization in our technological ventures at the very least in these two cases (or at least nothing did that readily comes to my mind, but considering the physics involved, it seems unlikely).
> Do electronic devices using quantum effects in solid state materials count? There you have the whole semiconductor industry.
That was invented by Jagadish Chandra Bose in Bangladesh, who built working millimeter-wave radios using Schottky diodes in 01894. Of course, he didn't understand the quantum effects, but then, semiconductor diodes were in wide industrial use (mostly in the rich West) for decades before Shockley's Equation in 01949.
The quantum theory was largely a Western discovery during those 55 years, but also included significant contributions from non-Western people like Shinichiro Tomonaga, Yoshiro Nishina, Leo Esaki, Tsung-Dao Lee, Hideki Yukawa, and Hantaro Nagaoka, and of course since 01949 quantum theory has been a field of investigation dominated by non-Western people. As you may be aware, there have been significant improvements in solid-state electronics since 01949, including full-color LEDs that permit LED lighting (due to Shuji Nakamura) and the switch to MOSFETs (due to Mohammed Atalla and Dawon Kahng, who were not from the West but were in the West) which eliminated the power consumption barrier that restricted 01960s electronics to dozens of transistors on a chip.
China in particular has had a pretty bad couple of centuries, in between being invaded by the US, England, Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Belgium, the Austro-Hungarian empire, Russia (twice), and Japan (three times), having two of the most ruinous civil wars in human history, and having the worst famine in human history. So it's been innovating a bit below par, though it seems to be doing okay now.
> What about exploiting the behavior of charge carriers in vacuum? There you have the whole vacuum tube industry.
It does seem that the whole cathode-ray thing was a Western discovery, but it was built on the Hindu ayurvedic techniques of mercury distillation that formed the basis for Arabic and then Western alchemy (necessary for the Sprengel pump, which was for decades the only source of a hard enough vacuum); also, building the apparatus drew on the Mesopotamian techniques of glassmaking, which are usually considered to hail from Asia Minor, though some believe they originated in Egypt.
(It's possible that the Hindus imported the techniques of mercury distillation from China, but that is far enough back that it's difficult to know. At any rate, the Europeans got them from the Arabs, who got them from the Hindus.)
Is there a specific esoteric or cabbalistic reason to prefix the number of bygone summers with a zero? Both make for invalid octadecimals and have broken my builtin parser.
> and of course since 01949 quantum theory has been a field of investigation dominated by non-Western people. As you may be aware, there have been significant improvements in solid-state electronics since 01949
Not quite sure how that matters for the question I was answering, which was emphatically NOT "is there a field of inventions historically wholly monopolized by the west". The question was for "AN example of a western invention not based on existing technology" - one would be sufficient.
> but it was built on the Hindu ayurvedic techniques of mercury distillation
?????? We're not talking about pseudoscience here.
> The effect in question was discovered by a German two decades earlier
Oh hey, you're right. So Bose only invented the use of the effect for radio, not the Schottky diode itself. I stand corrected.
> ?????? We're not talking about pseudoscience here.
Mercury distillation is not pseudoscience; like glassblowing, it was an existing technology that was a basis for the vacuum-tube age. Of course, if you trace any technology back, you will find that its origins are mixed with pseudoscience; Semmelweis promoted handwashing because he was convinced disease was caused by cadaveric particles, Priestley invented water carbonation because he was convinced scurvy was a carbonated water deficiency, etc. Naturally enough, mercury distillation seems to have been invented by people who were convinced that drinking mercury was good for you. They were wrong about that, but their distillation technology still works.
1) Chemistry and physics has nothing to do with the pseudoscience of ayurveda, and vice versa.
2) Even if somehow you could make the connection (which I still strongly doubt since I haven't seen the these Ancient Indian vacuum pumps in museums any more than I've seen a vimana in a museum), it still would be hardly relevant since it would be the same connection as between a car and a screwdriver. A screwdriver can be employed to assemble a car once you know what parts the car should comprise, but you'd most likely describe the resulting car as a thermodynamics-based device, or internal-combustion-heat-engine-based device, and not as a screwdriver-based device. Likewise, a vacuum pump utilizing mercury can be utilized to manufacture a vacuum tube, but most people would probably describe a triode as a electrostatics-based device, or as a thermionic-emission-based device, not as a mercury-vacuum-pump-based device, not matter where the mercury vacuum pump came from.
Probably you'll have a different perspective about the significance of screwdrivers once you learn a little more about the history of technology.
To correct one misreading on your part, though, my claim was that the technology of distillation was developed in India (or possibly China), not the Sprengel pump. I too would be very surprised to find a medieval Sprengel pump from India or anywhere else.
I'm curious: would you also be so foolish as to claim that chemistry and physics have nothing to do with the pseudosciences of phlogiston, numerology, astrology, and alchemy? How about the steady-state theory of cosmology?
A vacuum tube is not based on "distillation" of anything. It operates with charge carriers in vacuum, with no phase change of any masses involved, whereas distillation involves liquid/gas transitions so it can't possibly have anything to do with the operation of a vacuum tube which is based on an arrangement of solid electrodes in a vacuum and the flow of charge carriers between them. As for the history of technology, I'm moderately familiar with it and I don't see the relevance here. If absolutely everything you touch when creating something were relevant for the question of "Have you an example of a western invention not based on existing technology?", then not only would the answer be "there isn't any", but as a corollary, one would have to conclude that there is NO example of ANY invention from ANYWHERE that isn't based on existing technology. Clearly that doesn't seem to be the intended reading of that question.
You can't make a Sprengel pump without distilling your mercury (it doesn't work if the mercury sticks to the walls of the tubes and leaves crap all over them), and you can't make a vacuum tube without some kind of hard vacuum pump, and, as I pointed out above, the Sprengel pump was the only kind of hard vacuum pump available for decades. (I already explained all of this fairly clearly in previous comments, such as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28333304.) In fact, the invention of the Sprengel pump produced an explosion of inventions and discoveries, of which the so-called Edison effect was only one.
I do think that that there is no example of any invention from anywhere that isn't based on existing technology, including specifically existing technology invented on other continents, and my reading of the question was that it was intended to make precisely that point, thus concisely pointing out the ignorant fallacy at the heart of the original racist bullshit comment, "I can think of nothing unique, only modification of existing inventions."
1) the tools are traditionally not a part of the invention,
2) by referring to distillation as a prerequisite for the mercury vacuum pump operation, you're referring to a tool twice removed from the invention in question, and
3) even mercury distillation itself is not based on ayurveda anyway. It's based on physics.
I'm going with the lightning rod. Granted, metalworking was probably discovered somewhere in the Levant. But the "West" has only been defined by the Bosporus since about 1300.
Bonus: India - place-value numbers; China - paper money.
What does the west do? Tech is the only real growth industry left in the US. Right now 80% of the county slaves away in dead end jobs to cater to the remaining 20% white collar professional+capital class. That 20% seems like its going to get smaller :/
Eventually something has got to give in this country. Soon nothing will be left but a hollow husk.
Could tech and manufacturing combine to become automated high-end tech?
Could robotics and aggressive automation of production lines make this shift? ...Or is it in fact more complex than it seems and the lead times for setting up these kinds of businesses too large to have a useful effect in the short/medium term?
I remember right around 2000 George Will bloviated about how Russia was a third world nation by economy size, why do we treat them with such deference.
Psst George: They still have a LOT of nukes.
That might be us. A shell of a country with a failing economy, strong military, and huge number of nukes.
Of course right around then global warming might really start taking off and a billion or two people are starving and become refugees. Then we see what happened in the EU and Syria, but worldwide and 100x worse.
The US manufacturing real output continues to increase and never really declined (briefly in the Great Recession but quickly restored). Manufacturing employment on the other hand continues to drop.
China repeats Japan 1950-1980. Focus on incremental innovation, instead of big leaps.
They started at the bottom rung of the quality chain. They are constantly climbing it up but the speed seems slow. Then suddenly they are in par or little ahead.
Chinese are already within a spitting distance in most technologies. Semiconductors have some technology bottlenecks like EUV machines that are hard to replicate. Chinese firms are already in a position where they don't need joint ventures. They hire directly senior engineers from South Korean and Taiwanese firms to work for them.
Interestingly, Japan also had very lax IP laws as it was catching up to the rest of the world, which basically enabled it to do what China has been doing, and only really shifted to strong IP protections as it started to develop its own tech and IP that it wanted to export.
They send their businessmen into trips trough Europe and the US with cameras hanging in their necks taking pictures of the factories and taking notes. When their hosts waited orders from Japan, they build factories and started competing.
Industrial Revolution in the US started with stealing. Samuel Slater – "Father of the American Industrial Revolution" ("Slater the Traitor" in the UK) didn't invent anything. He just memorized and copied British cotton spinning mill designs, especially the water frame and moved to America.
> He learned of the American interest in developing similar machines, and he was also aware of British law against exporting the designs. He therefore memorized as much as he could and departed for New York in 1789. Some people of Belper called him "Slater the Traitor", as they considered his move a betrayal of the town where many earned their living at Strutt's mills.[4]
I'm not sure what anyone expected when we cut China off of chip IP. We did the same thing in the US, we had a policy of just straight up encouraging people to memorize patents before they immigrated over, and paying for their family to immigrate with them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Slater
I can understand the value of memorizing designs, plans, and technical drawings that are kept as proprietary information, but why bother memorizing a patent? Patents are public information and are only valid in the specific country granting the patent. Without additional local filings, foreign patents are not valid in America and vice versa.
Yes, this was the late 18th, early 19th century. A country's IP protectionism schemes obviously take a different approach now given modern communications media.
For my country (Germany), you just have to look up the history of "Made in Germany". Which Britain introduced to defend against cheap knock-off products made in Germany, which was learning from (i.e. "stealing" in today's terms) by copying.
> The label was originally introduced in Britain by the Merchandise Marks Act 1887, to mark foreign produce more obviously, as foreign manufactures had been falsely marking inferior goods with the marks of renowned British manufacturing companies and importing them into the United Kingdom. Most of these were found to be originating from Germany, whose government had introduced a protectionist policy to legally prohibit the import of goods in order to build up domestic industry
China is playing the same game that the US used to try to get ahead of the UK. Seems like turn about being fair play. FWIW US lawmakers have the power to do something about this by creating trade blockades until equal market access is provided. Trump tried this & look how unpopular a trade war with China is. I don't think it was all just because Trump was doing it, although the US being schizophrenic about which side implements an otherwise popular policy is going to be an ongoing challenge.
I contend that it's foolish to expect countries to not act in their own best interest. When you cut them off of technology because you're scared that they can reproduce it, you shouldn't be surprised that they actively go around your restrictions. It's the only sane move, the move that our own country took in their situation, and one aspect that led to our own economic greatness.
> I contend that it's foolish to expect countries to not act in their own best interest.
On one level absolutely yes, however best interest can sometimes mean co-operating and taking it in the shorts here for a win over there - this is largely how western countries have traded amongst each other.
The Chinese government is much less willing to play the co-operate and we all benefit game which results in other governments having to adjust to that.
It's somewhat similar to what Russia did with their technology industry over the last 10-15 years.
Can be defended as rational from the Chinese viewpoint since they I think are planning over the long term (decades) to forge enough relationships outside of the west to be completely self-sufficient (that has been their goal for a long time in terms of technology IP, they don't just want to be the factory, they want to be the design bureau)
It does seem like the world is polarising around new nexuses of power, the traditional west with the US on one side, China and it's allies (some would say debtors) on the other and the EU somewhere in the middle but much closer to the US than China.
Where it gets interesting is historically those power blocs have formed where the world was much less interconnected than now and so I think that'll change things in ways we can't expect.
COVID has been an interesting lesson in disruption on a global scale (even if compared to how bad it could have been and it was truly awful - it was comparitively minor) and how fast things fall apart, throw in climate change and we are headed for interesting times.
What the US - and others, see my related comment about my own country (Germany) in this sub-thread - was not "questionable" at all. Instead, the way we defend "IP" today is what is questionable.
You won't find the equivalent of a law of physics to support either hypothesis, in the end those are different paths for society to take and it's a choice. I'M presupposing here that there is no end goal for humanity, so there is no obvious way to weigh the different outcomes by some higher level objective measure.
Western executives are in over their heads dealing with China. I don't think they even realized who was holding their leashes until China decided to start yanking on them a bit.
They don't care because they'll be long gone and next generations will be dealing with the problem. Same as engineers who come in at the start of a project and do a number on the architecture, get their accolades and bonus, leave to their next gig, and let the suckers deal with the BS they built.
I know one shouldn't attribute to malice what can be attributed to incompetence, but in this case I think malice is where it's at. Western executives are not so dumb to think China will play nice with them. I've never met anybody whose spent more than 2 hours working with the Chinese who thinks they are remotely trustworthy. Western execs whole plan has been to pump short term numbers, cash in, and get out before the CCP pulls the rug out from under them.
I met a US California man who made a lot, a lot of money selling western tech in China, and I believe he had exactly this intention, from anecdotal evidence.
Western executives only care about getting paid, they don't need to care about geopolitics because they will have already offloaded their responsibilities before it matters.
Ray Dalio is fucked. Bridgewater has been expanding and expanding their Chinese assets. Dalio moved his Home Office to Singapore to really manage the assets from diversifying between America and China.
He is still defending his position. (He can't talk negatively about Cina anyways) 'Billionaire investor Ray Dalio said investors are misconstruing China's regulatory clampdown on tech companies as "anti-capitalist."' https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/25/ray-dalio-wrong-about-china-...
Ray Dalio is actually part of the minority of the Western FIRE sector that is not "fucked", precisely because Bridgewater has a strong position in China.
It implies that there is a relationship between the fed balance sheet and performance of the s&p500, suggesting that a large part of the economic growth in America since the 08 economic crisis has been because of things like quantitative easing and not actual growth.
The interest rate is officially ~zero and effectively negative due to consistent QE (over $120,000,000,000 printed and given to banks every month). The Fed is practically paying the global financial system (in USD) to keep using USD.
There will be a massive reckoning as the global economy refuses to get ripped off by the Fed's relentless money printing. Yet the Fed is extremely hesitant to taper its QE policy, because that will detonate the domestic stock market.
It is not an exaggeration to suggest we are literally in the final years/months of the neoliberal economic order.
Trick question. What we are dealing with is a redefinition of economics with a substantially reduced emphasis on "money". Minimize how much of your wealth is exposed to the financial system.
He's written (a lot) about his views on the future of the US and China here [1]. In general, he views them as the rising world power and the US being in (at least relative) decline. He seems about as well informed as anyone, apparently he's been involved there for 36 years and has personal relationships with high-level officials (I believe he even sent his kid to live and go to school there for a while). He also has a section on cultural differences - he expects them to continue to develop but doesn't expect them to become like the US.
As for how other people should invest there, I have no idea.
The oddity to me is that this has been going on for at least 40+ years and people still seem surprised when something like the Arm situation occurs. Great, humorous book written a long time ago on this subject is Mr.China.
Dealing with China requires multilateral agreements to make sure companies and executives don't sell-out at the expense of the democratic open societies.
Having a license for the architecture isn't worth much if you aren't playing by the rules anyway. The IP and expertise for the best implementations? That's useful.
So when is the western world going to wake up and realize that China is a cutthroat competitor that does not respect western law or traditions, cannot be trusted, and intends to dominate the world? This seems especially troubling for the tech world as IP is easily copied and the only thing that really protects it is the legal system, which China has shown over and over they don't care about.
You joke, but I was earnestly pleasantly surprised to see that dang isn't chilling this conversation with his complaints about "nationalist flamebait" yet.
Naw, we shall label them as racist and xenophobic for even bringing it up, and we just can't have people labeled as racists running around spewing "facts," so out the ban hammer comes. And the world will cheer it on as they only read the headline of "Another racist banned from x" and scroll on thinking what good people they are.
You make the implicit assumption that it is possible to maintain an advantage in the market after destroying ongoing business relationships/expectations (as ARM China appears to have done). I think you may be overestimating the importance of 'apparent market power', and underestimating the value of consistency and adaptability.
Highly centralized (command & control) and mercantilist systems tend to do well in the short term, but struggle and founder in the long term. In contrast, more chaotic, free market economies tend to look messy in the short term, but achieve amazing, spontaneous order over time.
> Highly centralized (command & control) and mercantilist systems tend to do well in the short term, but struggle and founder in the long term.
That sounds like a prayer to me.
What evidence is there that China can't win? How are you certain that authoritarian regimes can't both gain and keep dominance over timescale of decades or centuries?
Consider that the dominance of democracy is a relatively short term thing on the historical timescale. For the vast majority of human history, civilizations have been ruled by authoritarian dictators. The rise of China could just be reversion to the mean.
I don't want totalitarianism to win. But if we just complacently assume that it won't, doesn't that make the worst case scenario much more likely?
If your system can’t win because it’s inherently better, then maybe your system shouldn’t win?
Have a little faith. Our system shouldn’t win just because we are using it. After all, our core beliefs are that it is a better system, not just through our pure force of will.
The OP is right, much of China is is still undeveloped and their policies short-sighted and naive. In fact the whole government is so sensitive to face-saving that it screams insecure teenager. Getting worried they might be winning and that we must start to take alternative measures just legitimizes their tactics.
The GDP of the Soviet Union never exceeded that of the United States at any point.
If the GDP of China exceeds the United States in the near future (which seems quite possible), how does that fact reconcile with your analysis?
I find the government of China to be morally reprehensible. However there are plenty of cases in history in the real world where that which is morally reprehensible prevails, at least in the short term.
The "short term" on a historical timescale can easily be longer than your lifetime or mine.
If China collapses in two hundred years due to it's moral failings, that will be no more comfort to us than the United States collapsing might be to the indigenous tribes that used to live in North America before Europeans arrived.
> How are you certain that authoritarian regimes can't both gain and keep dominance over timescale of decades or centuries?
Authoritarianism always comes with a top-down execution structure, which optimises for cost-to-execute but not cost-to-transform.
When the need-to-transform exceeds a certain value, it would either have to re-adjust its internal structure or it will crumble (as the cost skyrockets) [1].
Interestingly, the same applies to compiler design, as well as any software systems when viewed at the right abstraction.
And from a functional programming perspective, it is also the principle that underlines the famous Alan Perlis' epigram "LISP programmers know the value of everything and the cost of nothing" (which outlines the importance of compiler optimization such as in tail-end recursion.)
[1] We're already seeing this in China's aging population crisis (thanks to the one-child policy introduced in 1980 [3]), and I doubt Xi's banning of private tuitions [2] would help (if we take his policy at face value).
[3]: fun fact - this policy had affected many people including myself in a deep personal level. By law I am not supposed to exist (I'm a Gen Z born in China illegally as a second child (after my parents bribed the hospital, and afterwards we still had to pay huge fines)).
Your point about cost-to-adjust resonated with me. What I’ve found is that designing for software successfully existing over time implies giving up control and instead going up to a meta-level, enabling sound methods of development to evolve—as opposed to defining specific processes, architecture and implementation, which in longer term leads to a situation in which whenever lead developer has not enough time (or is replaced) the software stops living. Something about infinite games in Carse’s and building worlds in Ian Cheng’s terminology.
To your footnote, I’ve read that the one-child policy in China was not strictly enforced outside of major cities, and resulted in many children born in the countryside essentially “outside of the system”, not having access to education or healthcare… I wonder how much of it is true.
> giving up control and instead going up to a meta-level, enabling sound methods of development to evolve - as opposed to defining specific processes, architecture and implementation...
Intriguing! Sounds like we'll end up with something hugely team-players-dependent. Also removing lead dev dependency is an interesting take. (I had at most worked with 2 devs in a project so this is definitely something to keep in mind when the team scales up.)
> I’ve read that the one-child policy in China was not strictly enforced outside of major cities, and resulted in many children born in the countryside essentially “outside of the system”, not having access to education or healthcare
Maybe not that many. But definitely not a phenomenon unfamiliar to the city dwellers (esp when there had been a huge rural-to-urban migration from 2005~2018)
At one point they did (unofficially, I think) relax access to education and healthcare. Ultimately every actor in the societal chains of command would try to milk out from the perpetrators as much as possible (in the form of bribes/fines), until eventually very little can be milked and then things became cheaper (or close-to-free).
I mean, they seem to win by simply throwing bodies on the pyre, working their own citizens to suicide in order to provide cheap labor to the rest of the world until they get valuable IP and steal it.
Capitalism thrives on cheap labor and cannot stop itself from being lead like a lamb to slaughter as long as China keeps pumping out all of those man hours of labor for the taking.
We've been down this road with the Soviet Union during portions of the cold war, when folks in the West thought that high Soviet GDP catch-up growth would translate into sustained non-catch-up growth and meant non-authoritarian governments were doomed. It didn't work out that way.
Democracy isn't assured, we could easily vote it away in the West. But there is definitely a pattern whereby enormous cutting-edge economic growth seems to require relatively free societies. To make a long term bet on an authoritarian approach in a world where those societies exist, that seems like a very risky thing to do.
And China has its own problems, including hugely problematic demographics and an export-fueled economy that is still highly dependent on trade with the West.
Your reasoning is based on narratives which I personally always discount.
Economists expect China to overtake the US economy in size by the 2030s. This can obviously either accelerate or decelerate and there will be hindsight reasoning in any case. Nevertheless, I don't see any of your narrative based arguments substantive.
All those centuries of authoritarian rule also coincided with technological and economic stagnation. That might not be causal, but I think it is. The industrial revolution came after a number of liberalizing political movements in northwestern Europe.
There's no evidence here. We're talking about predicting the future in a system that's too complex to make predictions with any certainty.
But for those of us following the politics and economics of China closely, it's pretty clear that they're screwed.
People said Japan would dominate the world. Then the demographic shift hit them and the economy has been stagnating ever since. China's demographic shift is much bigger and faster, they're further behind (per capita), and they're way less prepared. China has the same problem of not accepting enough immigrants, and they just made it worse by cracking down on after-school tutoring.
The vast majority of history is very different from the world we live in today. People can move between countries relatively easily, and all countries compete for the top talent. A huge share of workers these days are knowledge workers. You can't generalise based on history when the fundamentals are so vastly different. China has very little to offer there, and they're increasingly becoming hostile to foreigners.
They have an enormous housing bubble. Well, if you can call it a bubble when it's propped up so it never bursts. But much of their GDP is pure waste as they're building apartments nobody lives in, and that deteriorates within years. Why? Because they can't build a trustworthy stock market where people can invest, so people invest in housing. They just demonstrated once again that you should never but money in the Chinese stock market, so the problem isn't getting better.
Chinas infrastructure is weak. Many cities are built without proper drainage. Dams are breaking. The US may have a huge infrastructure debt, but at least it was solid to begin with.
China has an insane amount of public servants per worker. The whole economy is deeply inefficient, and has only been propped up by a crazy 996 work ethic, one that Xi is now trying to crack down on.
Which illustrates the fundamental instability: they can't continue to grow through capitalism anymore. The insane income inequality is becoming a big problem, and the wealthy was accumulating too much power, threatening the power of the party. So Xi is reverting to more traditional socialist policies, to remove some of the power of wealthy individuals and satisfy the public. But that will fundamentally weaken the economy. It'll push them in the direction of economies like North Korea and Venezuela.
China is being squeeze from both ends: low value manufacturing is moving to other countries as labor costs in China increases. But China has trouble establishing high value exports and services. How many trusted brands are there from China? Quite a few sure, but not compared to its population size.
If the GDP of China exceeds that of the United States and keeps a higher level for more than a few years, what would that mean for your thesis? Are you predicting that cannot happen, and therefore your thesis is falsified if it does?
A couple of points. Not to turn this into a discussion about advantages of one system vs another, but here is why China has a leg up:
1. What the United States has is not Capitalism - it's a badly broken Capitalism. The power of healthy oversight and regulation has been decimated by shocking amounts of money which, now, thanks to the same corrupted system, is mostly "dark". We are not exactly in an oligarchy, but we are very close.
2. You can think of China as a team. They still, as a whole, unite around their national and strategic interests, as a nation. We, on the other hand, wonder about which country owns this or that particular Congressperson, and wearing a mask as a health measure for the greater good of the country is bloody murder.
Almost every country has a dark side with slavery. Slavery however was not what made empires.
What makes empires different is that they extracted the riches from lamds abroad, thru violence (stealing) which often meant war, murder, and pillaging. Usually this was followed by slavery. Slavery itself was often transactional consequence between to original human traffiker and the idiot buyer.
The US was a global power before it went on military adventurism. It can be argued whether the US could have become a world power without slavery, but that line of question can be leveled to any other country with significant power today.
The US became a global power and incredibly rich , in spite of its government only deciding to stick its nose abroad starting around the 1960s.
The US may have done pretty dark things abroad in the last 50-60 years. But thats when it really starts. And by that time, we had already a monopoly on world power.
If anything, the US has proven that it's technique for stealing to keep its advantage has been incredibly ineffective and downright inept (cuba, vietnam, arguably Afghanistan)
This is unlike china, that steals as a matter of national policy, and its stealing its way to the top
Western businesses will never care. They don't care that the chinese destroy the planet. They don't care that the chinese manipulate the quality of the products they manufacture on their behalf. They don't care that the chinese sell counterfeits at huge markups in markets developed countries couldn't care less about.
The only thing they care about is money. They'll never stop doing business with China until it stops making them money.
I have an honest question: why could China catch up to the western countries in many verticals and even become the dominant player, while in history the western could stay lightyears ahead of developing countries, no matter how hard the developing countries tried, with or without government interference or industrial espionage? What's changed?
We have an example most readers here are familiar with: the US ignored European (mostly British) intellectual property when they were developing and now they produce more innovation than any European country. Germany, Switzerland, and Italy also ignored patents for a while and now they are power houses when it comes to pharmaceuticals and chemicals.
> the US ignored European (mostly British) intellectual property when they were developing and now they produce more innovation than any European country.
There's this common trope, but there's two parts to IP; infringement and enforcement.
The British didn't enforce their patents. They could have, but they didn't.
The west was not light years ahead of, say, India, when it was first colonized.
In the process of colonizing it, India's industrialization was stopped.
Countries didn't somehow fall into 'developed' and 'undeveloped' buckets by divine fiat. The latter tended to be invaded by the former, with the occupiers focusing more on wealth extraction, than development.
Once that parasitic relationship has been broken, a large number of developing countries have started moving towards prosperity. Some slower than others, to be sure.
I'm not sure if we can attribute the gap solely to colonialism. Chinese rulers back in 1890s thought the products of industrialization were simply exotic crap. They despised STEM and didn't have a single school teaching STEM (there were a few such schools due to the Western Affairs Movement, but they were not created by the government). I don't think this level of barbarian culture was caused by colonialism.
In 1890s? In other words, soon after China lost the second Opium War. The British took Hong Kong and secured their right to poison the populace with opium. Are you sure colonialism was not at play?
You can't speculate as to China's outcome in the 21st century, based on what its rulers may have thought in the 19th century, on an alt-historical timeline that skipped the opium wars, and the century of occupation, civil war, war, and some more civil war.
I mean, you can, but your speculation is as good as anyone else's.
In the late 19th century, Russia still had serfs, and Americans practiced chattel slavery. By the mid 20th century, both of those countries built the atomic bomb. A century is a very long time to make accurate alt-historic predictions about.
You can't blame colonialism for China's pre-colonial-period problems, but you sure as hell have to give it the lion's share of credit for it's colonial problems.
Colonialism in China ended in 1945, a generation after the Qing dynasty. That time period was not a great time to live there, between the Japanese occupation, the civil war, and the country being split amongst a gaggle of warlords.
Whether or not the country would have developed without all of that is an open question. But if we were to ask whether not all those things were preventing development, the answer is 'Obviously, yes.'
If the west wasn’t light years ahead of India, why was it so easy for the west to take control of India and rule it for hundreds of years? I am honestly interested in what you think the reason was.
Britain invaded during a period of political instability, civil war, and factionalism immediately following the collapse of the Mughal empire. It then carried out divide-and conquer tactics, fighting India peacemeal.
During colonization, GDP, productive output, life expectancy, and quality of life in India plummeted.
This is what the US did in its infancy and after WWII since their country was not devastated by the war took in all the scientist they could take for their own benefits.
They were distracted by their "clash of cultures" wars in the middle east. They failed to fully identify China as the main threat to democratic nations and allowed the transfer of capital and technology to go on unhindered. The lack of democracy and human rights wasnt a real issue to them because China wasnt considered to be a future threat. There was the naive belief that democracy would be the inevitable outcome of economic growth and a growing and more affluent middle class.
But people care primarily about their economic well being, and whatever system delivers it is what they'll be happy with. There are no huge movements calling for democratic reforms in well off non-democracies like Saudi Arabia, or the Gulf states. And even in democracies like Hungary or Poland the slow slide to a more authorotarian government hasnt got the majority of people worked up, as long as their personal circumstances arent too badly affected. Democracy is only that thing which is demanded when they want to change their circumstances for the better, otherwise its forgotten or undermined when the good times are rolling.
Will China win? No I dont think they will, they dont have the ability to change course peacefully or quickly enough under an authorotrian system. They let momentum carry them in straight lines until they crash into a wall.
Our problem is that we're stuck with a rich and technologically advanced threat that we built. Trump for all his faults did the right thing by starting the economic war with them, Obama was quite happy to let the status quo of technology, capital and job transfers continue unabated.
But we havent learnt our lesson and we risk making the same mistakes with India. The western nation are looking for another low wage, low cost manufacturing base, and they're going all out on India. But we can see the authorotarian and less democratic direction the government there is taking everyday. Yet all our major tech companies and planning to build and invest in capacity over there. Until we end up with another rich and technologically nation that isnt a friend of democracy.
they want to dominate the world? shall we compare war involvement or record of foreign influence?
this is literally a response to an American act of aggression to cut China off of access to chips. but we're the peaceful good guys?
"Allen Wu has aggressively taken over the firm and is operating it how he sees fit. One interesting tidbit is that Allen Wu sued Arm China in order to declare his dismissal illegal. He essentially sued himself as he represented both sides in that specific court case. "
While I agree with most of the article, I find the conclusion makes it seem like propaganda:
"it is clear that SoftBank’s short sighted profit driven behavior has caused a massive conundrum"
If I understand things correctly, Arm China going rouge is a big problem for all western governments, who in the past have heavily relied on the leverage that they had thanks to western IP being needed for chip design. So shifting the blame onto SoftBank appears wrong. Did anyone expect a Japanese money-driven investment bank to do what's politically the right thing for the U.S.? I don't think it would be reasonable to expect that. So in my opinion, a better conclusion would be:
"Western governments allowing SoftBank to take Arm's IP into China has caused a massive conundrum"
Is anything shocked by this? Chinese has been stealing IP for over 40 years now with government backing. In-fact government of China has encouraged such behavior and in some cases down right funded it.
Just like before they'll get away with it. Who's going to stop this behemoth thug China?
not only does "arm china" license "arm limited" technology and develop its own technology, but "arm china" also employs many people on behalf of "arm limited" for global (not "arm china") r&d
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 398 ms ] threadI don't have any insight into the quality of the Arm China team but isn't one possible outcome that there is strong competition between the two ecosystems. So we could be in an Arms race (sorry!)
These are not counterfeit goods though. Where has the law been broken in a way that gives Arm the power to act? Probably IP licensed under Chinese law and Arm China will probably get its way in Chinese courts.
And software bifurcation is the real problem, and would be handled at layer not exclusive to China.
How would even that be possible? Surely ARM's laywers are not interested in ripoff products being sold in the West.
That being said, it wouldn't be totally out there for a clause in the agreement that doesn't allow export of chips with this IP, and that would probably be enforced as ITO judgements allowing seizing chips and end devices at ingress points. The ITO would essentially treat them as counterfeit if all of those assumptions hold true, similar to how how remanufactured and ghost shift iPhone replacement parts famously get labeled as counterfeit legally.
> Chips themselves can be sold, yes. The IP cannot be licensed to non Chinese based semi firms.
I'd be astonished if licenses to Chinese SoC designers prevented products with those SoC's being sold outside China. So RockChip, Spreadtrum etc would be cut off from the rest of the world? Or forced to license separately with Arm UK for chips for products that are to be exported? Seems very unlikely.
Plus I'd expect we'd have seen action taken already if they really had broken the terms of the licensing.
Agreed that we're all speculating to some extent though!
Or do nothing and look at their chips being turned back to sand as soon as they land in a western country.
Custom's responsibility is to destroy counterfeit goods.
> Arm Holdings, the SoftBank subsidiary sold a 51% stake of the company to a consortium of Chinese investors for paltry $775M.
Does anyone think they were not nudged to sell to local state-designated champ and had one serious candidate (with the CCP pulling the strings behind the scene)?
Any time you're in a hurry to buy or sell, and the counterparties know that, you're gonna get taken to the cleaners.
Very interesting content otherwise, I remember the seal issue being something very controversial too when other companies went there (I believe it was regarding Intel, that was maybe 15 years ago). To this day it still is a pretty prevalent issue when doing local branches in China.
There is the loophole for "representing interests of a foreign principal before US government officials" though, so I guess this is written broadly enough to snag anyone who may step on some toes.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Yes, CCP bad.
Guantanamo is an embarrassment but it isn't even close to the Xinjiang camps
That's not nearly as bad as the 16 billion Uighurs the Chinese have in camps right now.
Just say you don't care. The most unbearing thing for us is that you claim to care while brutalizing and fetishizing others to justify your own crusade.
You've probably already thought of multiple excuses, because you've been conditioned not to think of immigrants in concentration camps as people.
You are correct. I don't find that in any way to be a compelling argument.
The author clearly suggests this American CEO is a "loyal CCP" agent. I am just curious how did she/he spot him?
What are the evidence of this? Other than him being self interested and commit misconduct.
For those of us not familiar with Chinese business practices, is this an actual seal? Like someone would use to frank documents, or squish into hot wax to seal documents? Or is it a symbolic seal, like a legal document, or something else?
Presumably it comes out of personal seals which are a fun item to get if you're in China. I never interacted with someone who used them, but it's cool. See pictures at [2] and history at [3].
"Chop" is also frequently used instead of "seal". I assume its not onomatopoedic, but that is a fair description of the "thunk" sound produced to when the seal is quickly pounded against the document on the table.
[1] https://www.china-briefing.com/news/company-chops-in-china/
[2] https://www.chinahighlights.com/travelguide/culture/chinese-...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seal_(East_Asia)
In Japan, the official "hanko" seal with red ink carries the force of a signature, but other seals do not carry as much or any legal weight.
https://www.nippon.com/en/features/jg00077/
That article talks a little bit about a similar system to the one I mentioned, where one seal is used for banking, one for title transactions, etc. Something like that but more customizable could be pretty useful.
i’m not surprised at this at all.
in the western context many executive assistants end up being appointed the executor of the ceo’s estate / will as a matter of business continuity.
A chairmanner can be declared by the board, and the power of his seal goes with that automatically.
Say, somebody steals a seal now...
Yes, China does steal US technology and industry and yes, it has happened on a number of occasions with concrete documentation. However, that does not mean that China is not capable of innovation or shrewd business moves and it should not be assumed to be the norm.
Hardly casual. The theft is thoughtful, deliberate, careful, and strategic.
I wonder how this happens. Is it the naivety of leadership at western corporations, or is it simple greed because those leaders may show short term results that boost their compensation? And of course, I have to wonder why western governments don’t restrict their corporations from risking their economic and military sovereignty in the future through these terrible partnerships.
The same thing is happening in aerospace and it isn’t even new. For example China tried cloning a Boeing jet it acquired way back in 1980 (https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1980/05/09/c...). China’s more recent attempts are much more successful (https://www.bbc.com/news/business-47689386) and although they rely on western avionics and engines, I am sure they’re busy trying to clone those as well.
EDIT: found an article detailing IP competition and theft relating to HSR broadly, including maglev (https://itif.org/publications/2021/04/26/heading-track-impac...)
on paper.
where is loyalties actually lie is another story.
Edit: backing this up with a link https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/greggardne...
this is not true - there is a type of legal entity called a Wholly Foreign Owned Enterprise (WFOE). It is only allowed for certain lines of business, of course, which wouldn't include anything of strategic importance to China.
China has been making a joke out of foreign entities for years with this blatant rip-off.
https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/how-bill-clinton-and-amer...
I am not sure the clickbating sensentional title really can be substantiated by the content...
Except from the fact that China practiced a different political system and ideology, developing China is not morally worse or better than developing any other nations.
Of course, when China grows powerful, they'll become more aggressive, and may even become the next super bully.
Buy is that particularly exceptional in history?
2011: https://www.lefigaro.fr/actualite-france/2011/10/12/01016-20...
2014: https://www.nouvelobs.com/societe/20141204.OBS7033/comment-l...
2015: https://www.liberation.fr/futurs/2015/02/16/l-espionnage-chi...
2018: https://www.capital.fr/economie-politique/la-france-visee-pa... https://www.businessinsider.fr/des-espions-chinois-ont-ete-a...
2019: https://rmc.bfmtv.com/emission/expliquez-nous-quand-le-contr...
2020: https://www.leparisien.fr/faits-divers/l-improbable-trahison...
State directed espionage doesn't get hundreds/thousands of engineers to switch allegiances. Money does. Then the knowledge travels with them. Personal knowledge that Airbus like many Euro companies in China treated their local employees like shit.
Another example was ZTE/Huawei managed to poach Nortel and other Euro telcom empoyees in China was because mainland employees had very little advancement opportunities. This included foreign nationals like Canadians with PRC Chinese background. An aquaintence of Chinese Canadian background poached most of Nortel GuangZhou's engineering team because state companies simply compensated better and provided more opportunities. A few years later, he poached a bunch of engineers from state company back to a foreign one who promoted. That's the incentives driving these mass migrations. Many PRC talent would rather stay working with foreign multinations due to prestige and better conditions (nice offices etc), especially in the late 90s, but at the end of the day, there was a bamboo ceiling and they generally weren't respected. Of course state will continue to espionage, but don't estimate role of Western companies being racist biting self in the ass that drove mainland talent to work for domestic companies.
Arm China was set up because they want to be listed on the Shanghai Star board, the Chinese Nasdaq. If Arm just want to do business in China, it's totally OK to have fully owned subsidiary.
And this whole setup was in turn from Softbank's acute sense that Arm China will be given a lofty valuation because of the tech wars happening right now...
And for all are happening right now, it's because Mr. Wu learned how to manuvurer based on his own interests. The Chinese investors are actually not directly benefiting from this mess.
Contrast with how Chinese companies operate in the west, essentially imposing a system of apartheid between Chinese bosses and western workers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Slater
" In the UK, he was called "Slater the Traitor"[2] and "Sam the Slate" because he brought British textile technology to the United States, modifying it for American use. He stole the textile factory machinery designs as an apprentice to a pioneer in the British industry before migrating to the United States at the age of 21. He designed the first textile mills in the US and later went into business for himself, developing a family business with his sons. He eventually owned thirteen spinning mills and had developed tenant farms and company towns around his textile mills, such as Slatersville, Rhode Island."
Historically, strong international IP protection only becomes extra important once you are an a big established incumbent rather than a developing upstart country.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Patents_Company...
The theft of IP in a less interconnected age with different IP laws, at a smaller scale? If it was good enough for the British and the Americans, why not a policy from the top down for the Chinese in the modern age?
It would explain what China is doing in Africa, and their treatment of African immigrants in China during the pandemic. Colonialism was OK back then too! And many countries did it! Why not a more modern take by China [1]?
1 - https://thediplomat.com/2020/11/is-china-a-new-colonial-powe...
Of course, the state controlled joint venture gives more benefit on the table, like any business deals.
Use your brain...
US capitalists are the best and smartest. You think they are willing to subject to such draconic rullings?!
Somewhere between a hard fork and rebase force push. There is even less value in Arm, but RISCV will face a slightly harder time, Arm China will be tough to compete against.
Wait, who am I kidding? Only a handful of shareholders decide the actions of a company, and even fewer know what the company actually does besides money-in = more-money-out. Most just want as much profit as fast as possible, hence the risks taken with China.
From their perspective, is there an incentive to maximize long term profit?
Greed is at the root of your conundrum. Put that aside, and you'll see more clearly.
Russian oligarchs, Saudi princes, and other shady characters would never move their money to China for safekeeping. No matter how friendly they are with the Chinese. Move only enough money to do business in China, all extra is moved elsewhere.
Without independent courts, separation of powers, ownership is a political privilege.
Name a major American brand, and odds are you've named either someone who manufactures in China, sells to China, or more commonly, does both.
When it comes to optics or money, boards and investors will choose money.
If it's taken for granted that its impossible to make profits on the Chinese market, the best outcome for a company is to sell their IP to China and make sure the markets are kept completely segregated.
The best way forward with any critical tech won't be a simple decision. Not competing in China, partnering in China, or selling tech for use only in China, all contain existential risks.
This is a battle happening at the Chinese (as a nation) vs. the non-Chinese world level. Non-Chinese tech actors will remain at high risk until the non-Chinese world can negotiate together with the same coherence as the Chinese system can.
This is a rogue CEO who is exploiting a particular legality niche to fight his own board. And had committed misconduct before.
This is a extradinary situation. Not something you see often.
What? American CEO in China are doing this kind of shit? Oh god, I have been in US for 12 years, so the American corporations have been plaguing the Chinese economy all the time?
No wonder indigenous Chinese companies eventually win. These American CEO are trash ...
China simply stole an entire business division.
One guy in China (with dual US citizenship) went rogue and refused to step down as CEO of a joint venture after board members representing most of the shareholders (including Chinese shareholders) voted to remove him.
He could only do that based on a legal technicality and the shareholders can still oust him via court action.
How much of it do you think has been audited for IP protection?
It seems so far that this does enable China to further catch up and massively expand the use of the captured technology, but are there instances of them qualitatively surpassing it?
I'm sure China has enough resources for advancements beyond replication, as much as it's capable of showcasing something to the rest of the world equally valuable of "transfer".
It's only a matter of time until they work their way up the chain.
Remember the Tim Cook quote how it's difficult to fill a room with machinists in US, while in China you can fill 3 football fields with them.
Skills follow activity, they do not lead activity. You learn by doing.
If you want to develop good bridge building skills, then build a lot of bridges. As a result of that process, you will, after a delay, have a labor pool that knows how to do it well, and the bridges you build later on will be higher quality than the bridges you started out building.
You do not wait for the labor pool to sprout up like mushrooms spontaneously from the ground, so there are all these bridge builders standing around with nothing to do, and then you decide that you'll have them fill up a few rooms and and hire some of them to build a bridge.
Getting parts CNCed in China may be 10x less than the cost in the US, and materials are a tenth the cost as well (in small qty) as they haven't been transported yet. You can get roughly the same throughput in the US if you want to pay for it, but it will be vastly more expensive.
That is just logically false. It's not even a question of measurement, it is false by definition. The income paid to produce is by definition always sufficient to purchase the output that has been produced. But remember that income paid to the factors of production includes both labor and capital income, because both the owners of capital and the suppliers of labor purchase the products that are created by the combining of labor and capital to produce output.
What is unsustainable is running persistent trade deficits overseas. E.g. by allowing foreign capital inflows, we have allowed the foreign sector to distort prices in an unsustainable manner.
Take what I said with some restrictions, like "US workers can't afford skilled or semiskilled US labor" which is afaict true. I work in production automation, life sciences, and software; my hobby projects in these area are unfortunately quite expensive due to US labor costs. As much as possible I must avoid using US labor if I want to get anything done.
Nicely put. Thanks for pointing that out. That really resonates for me as I think about my career and skillset. I'm where I am now because of building things with somewhat inferior skills (risky) at the start and growing my skills . I need to repeat that with new tools/processes now. It all seems obvious looking back.
...Perhaps another skill is having the foresight to see what will be needed in the next phase. I did it then, hopefully I'll be able to do it again. A bit like running a small company of one person. Where is the next investment made?
China - the populace - seem to be pretty good at this.
Seriously though, has this country produced any new invention? I would expect a country with 1.5 billion would come up with something novel. I can think of nothing unique, only modification of existing inventions.
That was invented by Jagadish Chandra Bose in Bangladesh, who built working millimeter-wave radios using Schottky diodes in 01894. Of course, he didn't understand the quantum effects, but then, semiconductor diodes were in wide industrial use (mostly in the rich West) for decades before Shockley's Equation in 01949.
The quantum theory was largely a Western discovery during those 55 years, but also included significant contributions from non-Western people like Shinichiro Tomonaga, Yoshiro Nishina, Leo Esaki, Tsung-Dao Lee, Hideki Yukawa, and Hantaro Nagaoka, and of course since 01949 quantum theory has been a field of investigation dominated by non-Western people. As you may be aware, there have been significant improvements in solid-state electronics since 01949, including full-color LEDs that permit LED lighting (due to Shuji Nakamura) and the switch to MOSFETs (due to Mohammed Atalla and Dawon Kahng, who were not from the West but were in the West) which eliminated the power consumption barrier that restricted 01960s electronics to dozens of transistors on a chip.
China in particular has had a pretty bad couple of centuries, in between being invaded by the US, England, Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Belgium, the Austro-Hungarian empire, Russia (twice), and Japan (three times), having two of the most ruinous civil wars in human history, and having the worst famine in human history. So it's been innovating a bit below par, though it seems to be doing okay now.
> What about exploiting the behavior of charge carriers in vacuum? There you have the whole vacuum tube industry.
It does seem that the whole cathode-ray thing was a Western discovery, but it was built on the Hindu ayurvedic techniques of mercury distillation that formed the basis for Arabic and then Western alchemy (necessary for the Sprengel pump, which was for decades the only source of a hard enough vacuum); also, building the apparatus drew on the Mesopotamian techniques of glassmaking, which are usually considered to hail from Asia Minor, though some believe they originated in Egypt.
(It's possible that the Hindus imported the techniques of mercury distillation from China, but that is far enough back that it's difficult to know. At any rate, the Europeans got them from the Arabs, who got them from the Hindus.)
Is there a specific esoteric or cabbalistic reason to prefix the number of bygone summers with a zero? Both make for invalid octadecimals and have broken my builtin parser.
The effect in question was discovered by a German two decades earlier: https://www.computerhistory.org/siliconengine/semiconductor-...
> and of course since 01949 quantum theory has been a field of investigation dominated by non-Western people. As you may be aware, there have been significant improvements in solid-state electronics since 01949
Not quite sure how that matters for the question I was answering, which was emphatically NOT "is there a field of inventions historically wholly monopolized by the west". The question was for "AN example of a western invention not based on existing technology" - one would be sufficient.
> but it was built on the Hindu ayurvedic techniques of mercury distillation
?????? We're not talking about pseudoscience here.
Oh hey, you're right. So Bose only invented the use of the effect for radio, not the Schottky diode itself. I stand corrected.
> ?????? We're not talking about pseudoscience here.
Mercury distillation is not pseudoscience; like glassblowing, it was an existing technology that was a basis for the vacuum-tube age. Of course, if you trace any technology back, you will find that its origins are mixed with pseudoscience; Semmelweis promoted handwashing because he was convinced disease was caused by cadaveric particles, Priestley invented water carbonation because he was convinced scurvy was a carbonated water deficiency, etc. Naturally enough, mercury distillation seems to have been invented by people who were convinced that drinking mercury was good for you. They were wrong about that, but their distillation technology still works.
2) Even if somehow you could make the connection (which I still strongly doubt since I haven't seen the these Ancient Indian vacuum pumps in museums any more than I've seen a vimana in a museum), it still would be hardly relevant since it would be the same connection as between a car and a screwdriver. A screwdriver can be employed to assemble a car once you know what parts the car should comprise, but you'd most likely describe the resulting car as a thermodynamics-based device, or internal-combustion-heat-engine-based device, and not as a screwdriver-based device. Likewise, a vacuum pump utilizing mercury can be utilized to manufacture a vacuum tube, but most people would probably describe a triode as a electrostatics-based device, or as a thermionic-emission-based device, not as a mercury-vacuum-pump-based device, not matter where the mercury vacuum pump came from.
To correct one misreading on your part, though, my claim was that the technology of distillation was developed in India (or possibly China), not the Sprengel pump. I too would be very surprised to find a medieval Sprengel pump from India or anywhere else.
I'm curious: would you also be so foolish as to claim that chemistry and physics have nothing to do with the pseudosciences of phlogiston, numerology, astrology, and alchemy? How about the steady-state theory of cosmology?
I do think that that there is no example of any invention from anywhere that isn't based on existing technology, including specifically existing technology invented on other continents, and my reading of the question was that it was intended to make precisely that point, thus concisely pointing out the ignorant fallacy at the heart of the original racist bullshit comment, "I can think of nothing unique, only modification of existing inventions."
1) the tools are traditionally not a part of the invention,
2) by referring to distillation as a prerequisite for the mercury vacuum pump operation, you're referring to a tool twice removed from the invention in question, and
3) even mercury distillation itself is not based on ayurveda anyway. It's based on physics.
Bonus: India - place-value numbers; China - paper money.
Eventually something has got to give in this country. Soon nothing will be left but a hollow husk.
Could robotics and aggressive automation of production lines make this shift? ...Or is it in fact more complex than it seems and the lead times for setting up these kinds of businesses too large to have a useful effect in the short/medium term?
I remember right around 2000 George Will bloviated about how Russia was a third world nation by economy size, why do we treat them with such deference.
Psst George: They still have a LOT of nukes.
That might be us. A shell of a country with a failing economy, strong military, and huge number of nukes.
Of course right around then global warming might really start taking off and a billion or two people are starving and become refugees. Then we see what happened in the EU and Syria, but worldwide and 100x worse.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_in_the_United_Sta...
They started at the bottom rung of the quality chain. They are constantly climbing it up but the speed seems slow. Then suddenly they are in par or little ahead.
Chinese are already within a spitting distance in most technologies. Semiconductors have some technology bottlenecks like EUV machines that are hard to replicate. Chinese firms are already in a position where they don't need joint ventures. They hire directly senior engineers from South Korean and Taiwanese firms to work for them.
They send their businessmen into trips trough Europe and the US with cameras hanging in their necks taking pictures of the factories and taking notes. When their hosts waited orders from Japan, they build factories and started competing.
Industrial Revolution in the US started with stealing. Samuel Slater – "Father of the American Industrial Revolution" ("Slater the Traitor" in the UK) didn't invent anything. He just memorized and copied British cotton spinning mill designs, especially the water frame and moved to America.
> He learned of the American interest in developing similar machines, and he was also aware of British law against exporting the designs. He therefore memorized as much as he could and departed for New York in 1789. Some people of Belper called him "Slater the Traitor", as they considered his move a betrayal of the town where many earned their living at Strutt's mills.[4]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Slater#American_factori...
I think the entire West has had short sighted profit driven behavior with respect to China for the past 40 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_Germany#History
> The label was originally introduced in Britain by the Merchandise Marks Act 1887, to mark foreign produce more obviously, as foreign manufactures had been falsely marking inferior goods with the marks of renowned British manufacturing companies and importing them into the United Kingdom. Most of these were found to be originating from Germany, whose government had introduced a protectionist policy to legally prohibit the import of goods in order to build up domestic industry
Got it.
Our systems are going to collapse before long and China will be ready to take the reigns.
On one level absolutely yes, however best interest can sometimes mean co-operating and taking it in the shorts here for a win over there - this is largely how western countries have traded amongst each other.
The Chinese government is much less willing to play the co-operate and we all benefit game which results in other governments having to adjust to that.
It's somewhat similar to what Russia did with their technology industry over the last 10-15 years.
Can be defended as rational from the Chinese viewpoint since they I think are planning over the long term (decades) to forge enough relationships outside of the west to be completely self-sufficient (that has been their goal for a long time in terms of technology IP, they don't just want to be the factory, they want to be the design bureau)
It does seem like the world is polarising around new nexuses of power, the traditional west with the US on one side, China and it's allies (some would say debtors) on the other and the EU somewhere in the middle but much closer to the US than China.
Where it gets interesting is historically those power blocs have formed where the world was much less interconnected than now and so I think that'll change things in ways we can't expect.
COVID has been an interesting lesson in disruption on a global scale (even if compared to how bad it could have been and it was truly awful - it was comparitively minor) and how fast things fall apart, throw in climate change and we are headed for interesting times.
As long as the USA keeps blockades on European companies selling to China whilst doling out exemptions to US companies, expect that balance to shift.
What the US - and others, see my related comment about my own country (Germany) in this sub-thread - was not "questionable" at all. Instead, the way we defend "IP" today is what is questionable.
You won't find the equivalent of a law of physics to support either hypothesis, in the end those are different paths for society to take and it's a choice. I'M presupposing here that there is no end goal for humanity, so there is no obvious way to weigh the different outcomes by some higher level objective measure.
You know how they say in communism:
Your company is our company.
Your IP is our IP.
I wonder if the joint venture structure was contemplated as a pre-condition for Chinese approval of the Softbank acquisition.
I dare you to a) change "Chinese" to "African Americans" and b) use your real name.
Despicable.
He is still defending his position. (He can't talk negatively about Cina anyways) 'Billionaire investor Ray Dalio said investors are misconstruing China's regulatory clampdown on tech companies as "anti-capitalist."' https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/25/ray-dalio-wrong-about-china-...
Already in 2018 someone asked: "Ray Dalio Needs China. Does China Need Ray Dalio?" https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/b1936rrvltbzc1...
This is what "fucked" looks like: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=GoIg
Serious question.
There will be a massive reckoning as the global economy refuses to get ripped off by the Fed's relentless money printing. Yet the Fed is extremely hesitant to taper its QE policy, because that will detonate the domestic stock market.
It is not an exaggeration to suggest we are literally in the final years/months of the neoliberal economic order.
But how does one invest in China without worrying about their capricious, personality-centered policies?
As for how other people should invest there, I have no idea.
[1] https://www.principles.com/the-changing-world-order/
Dealing with China requires multilateral agreements to make sure companies and executives don't sell-out at the expense of the democratic open societies.
Obviously this way of doing business is not acceptable though
Highly centralized (command & control) and mercantilist systems tend to do well in the short term, but struggle and founder in the long term. In contrast, more chaotic, free market economies tend to look messy in the short term, but achieve amazing, spontaneous order over time.
That sounds like a prayer to me.
What evidence is there that China can't win? How are you certain that authoritarian regimes can't both gain and keep dominance over timescale of decades or centuries?
Consider that the dominance of democracy is a relatively short term thing on the historical timescale. For the vast majority of human history, civilizations have been ruled by authoritarian dictators. The rise of China could just be reversion to the mean.
I don't want totalitarianism to win. But if we just complacently assume that it won't, doesn't that make the worst case scenario much more likely?
Have a little faith. Our system shouldn’t win just because we are using it. After all, our core beliefs are that it is a better system, not just through our pure force of will.
The OP is right, much of China is is still undeveloped and their policies short-sighted and naive. In fact the whole government is so sensitive to face-saving that it screams insecure teenager. Getting worried they might be winning and that we must start to take alternative measures just legitimizes their tactics.
The GDP of the Soviet Union never exceeded that of the United States at any point.
If the GDP of China exceeds the United States in the near future (which seems quite possible), how does that fact reconcile with your analysis?
I find the government of China to be morally reprehensible. However there are plenty of cases in history in the real world where that which is morally reprehensible prevails, at least in the short term.
If they prevail in the long term, then we might need to revisit our morals.
If China collapses in two hundred years due to it's moral failings, that will be no more comfort to us than the United States collapsing might be to the indigenous tribes that used to live in North America before Europeans arrived.
Authoritarianism always comes with a top-down execution structure, which optimises for cost-to-execute but not cost-to-transform.
When the need-to-transform exceeds a certain value, it would either have to re-adjust its internal structure or it will crumble (as the cost skyrockets) [1].
Interestingly, the same applies to compiler design, as well as any software systems when viewed at the right abstraction.
And from a functional programming perspective, it is also the principle that underlines the famous Alan Perlis' epigram "LISP programmers know the value of everything and the cost of nothing" (which outlines the importance of compiler optimization such as in tail-end recursion.)
[1] We're already seeing this in China's aging population crisis (thanks to the one-child policy introduced in 1980 [3]), and I doubt Xi's banning of private tuitions [2] would help (if we take his policy at face value).
[2]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-24/china-ban...
[3]: fun fact - this policy had affected many people including myself in a deep personal level. By law I am not supposed to exist (I'm a Gen Z born in China illegally as a second child (after my parents bribed the hospital, and afterwards we still had to pay huge fines)).
To your footnote, I’ve read that the one-child policy in China was not strictly enforced outside of major cities, and resulted in many children born in the countryside essentially “outside of the system”, not having access to education or healthcare… I wonder how much of it is true.
Intriguing! Sounds like we'll end up with something hugely team-players-dependent. Also removing lead dev dependency is an interesting take. (I had at most worked with 2 devs in a project so this is definitely something to keep in mind when the team scales up.)
> I’ve read that the one-child policy in China was not strictly enforced outside of major cities, and resulted in many children born in the countryside essentially “outside of the system”, not having access to education or healthcare
Maybe not that many. But definitely not a phenomenon unfamiliar to the city dwellers (esp when there had been a huge rural-to-urban migration from 2005~2018)
At one point they did (unofficially, I think) relax access to education and healthcare. Ultimately every actor in the societal chains of command would try to milk out from the perpetrators as much as possible (in the form of bribes/fines), until eventually very little can be milked and then things became cheaper (or close-to-free).
Capitalism thrives on cheap labor and cannot stop itself from being lead like a lamb to slaughter as long as China keeps pumping out all of those man hours of labor for the taking.
Democracy isn't assured, we could easily vote it away in the West. But there is definitely a pattern whereby enormous cutting-edge economic growth seems to require relatively free societies. To make a long term bet on an authoritarian approach in a world where those societies exist, that seems like a very risky thing to do.
Economists expect China to overtake the US economy in size by the 2030s. This can obviously either accelerate or decelerate and there will be hindsight reasoning in any case. Nevertheless, I don't see any of your narrative based arguments substantive.
There's no evidence here. We're talking about predicting the future in a system that's too complex to make predictions with any certainty.
But for those of us following the politics and economics of China closely, it's pretty clear that they're screwed.
People said Japan would dominate the world. Then the demographic shift hit them and the economy has been stagnating ever since. China's demographic shift is much bigger and faster, they're further behind (per capita), and they're way less prepared. China has the same problem of not accepting enough immigrants, and they just made it worse by cracking down on after-school tutoring.
The vast majority of history is very different from the world we live in today. People can move between countries relatively easily, and all countries compete for the top talent. A huge share of workers these days are knowledge workers. You can't generalise based on history when the fundamentals are so vastly different. China has very little to offer there, and they're increasingly becoming hostile to foreigners.
They have an enormous housing bubble. Well, if you can call it a bubble when it's propped up so it never bursts. But much of their GDP is pure waste as they're building apartments nobody lives in, and that deteriorates within years. Why? Because they can't build a trustworthy stock market where people can invest, so people invest in housing. They just demonstrated once again that you should never but money in the Chinese stock market, so the problem isn't getting better.
Chinas infrastructure is weak. Many cities are built without proper drainage. Dams are breaking. The US may have a huge infrastructure debt, but at least it was solid to begin with.
China has an insane amount of public servants per worker. The whole economy is deeply inefficient, and has only been propped up by a crazy 996 work ethic, one that Xi is now trying to crack down on.
Which illustrates the fundamental instability: they can't continue to grow through capitalism anymore. The insane income inequality is becoming a big problem, and the wealthy was accumulating too much power, threatening the power of the party. So Xi is reverting to more traditional socialist policies, to remove some of the power of wealthy individuals and satisfy the public. But that will fundamentally weaken the economy. It'll push them in the direction of economies like North Korea and Venezuela.
China is being squeeze from both ends: low value manufacturing is moving to other countries as labor costs in China increases. But China has trouble establishing high value exports and services. How many trusted brands are there from China? Quite a few sure, but not compared to its population size.
1. What the United States has is not Capitalism - it's a badly broken Capitalism. The power of healthy oversight and regulation has been decimated by shocking amounts of money which, now, thanks to the same corrupted system, is mostly "dark". We are not exactly in an oligarchy, but we are very close.
2. You can think of China as a team. They still, as a whole, unite around their national and strategic interests, as a nation. We, on the other hand, wonder about which country owns this or that particular Congressperson, and wearing a mask as a health measure for the greater good of the country is bloody murder.
How is this going to work?
It worked for the greeks. It worked for the mongols. Arguably it worked for the spanish and british.
I dont see the free market holding back authoritarian takeovers. At some point the west will wake up but when they do, is it too late?
What makes empires different is that they extracted the riches from lamds abroad, thru violence (stealing) which often meant war, murder, and pillaging. Usually this was followed by slavery. Slavery itself was often transactional consequence between to original human traffiker and the idiot buyer.
The US was a global power before it went on military adventurism. It can be argued whether the US could have become a world power without slavery, but that line of question can be leveled to any other country with significant power today.
The US became a global power and incredibly rich , in spite of its government only deciding to stick its nose abroad starting around the 1960s.
The US may have done pretty dark things abroad in the last 50-60 years. But thats when it really starts. And by that time, we had already a monopoly on world power.
If anything, the US has proven that it's technique for stealing to keep its advantage has been incredibly ineffective and downright inept (cuba, vietnam, arguably Afghanistan)
This is unlike china, that steals as a matter of national policy, and its stealing its way to the top
The only thing they care about is money. They'll never stop doing business with China until it stops making them money.
Western business and the ruling class that are in bed with the said corporate world.
There's this common trope, but there's two parts to IP; infringement and enforcement.
The British didn't enforce their patents. They could have, but they didn't.
Colonialism ended.
The west was not light years ahead of, say, India, when it was first colonized.
In the process of colonizing it, India's industrialization was stopped.
Countries didn't somehow fall into 'developed' and 'undeveloped' buckets by divine fiat. The latter tended to be invaded by the former, with the occupiers focusing more on wealth extraction, than development.
Once that parasitic relationship has been broken, a large number of developing countries have started moving towards prosperity. Some slower than others, to be sure.
I mean, you can, but your speculation is as good as anyone else's.
In the late 19th century, Russia still had serfs, and Americans practiced chattel slavery. By the mid 20th century, both of those countries built the atomic bomb. A century is a very long time to make accurate alt-historic predictions about.
Colonialism in China ended in 1945, a generation after the Qing dynasty. That time period was not a great time to live there, between the Japanese occupation, the civil war, and the country being split amongst a gaggle of warlords.
Whether or not the country would have developed without all of that is an open question. But if we were to ask whether not all those things were preventing development, the answer is 'Obviously, yes.'
During colonization, GDP, productive output, life expectancy, and quality of life in India plummeted.
But people care primarily about their economic well being, and whatever system delivers it is what they'll be happy with. There are no huge movements calling for democratic reforms in well off non-democracies like Saudi Arabia, or the Gulf states. And even in democracies like Hungary or Poland the slow slide to a more authorotarian government hasnt got the majority of people worked up, as long as their personal circumstances arent too badly affected. Democracy is only that thing which is demanded when they want to change their circumstances for the better, otherwise its forgotten or undermined when the good times are rolling.
Will China win? No I dont think they will, they dont have the ability to change course peacefully or quickly enough under an authorotrian system. They let momentum carry them in straight lines until they crash into a wall. Our problem is that we're stuck with a rich and technologically advanced threat that we built. Trump for all his faults did the right thing by starting the economic war with them, Obama was quite happy to let the status quo of technology, capital and job transfers continue unabated.
But we havent learnt our lesson and we risk making the same mistakes with India. The western nation are looking for another low wage, low cost manufacturing base, and they're going all out on India. But we can see the authorotarian and less democratic direction the government there is taking everyday. Yet all our major tech companies and planning to build and invest in capacity over there. Until we end up with another rich and technologically nation that isnt a friend of democracy.
Well, Smart.
Don't be silly, common sense applies in China...
It is very smart.
"it is clear that SoftBank’s short sighted profit driven behavior has caused a massive conundrum"
If I understand things correctly, Arm China going rouge is a big problem for all western governments, who in the past have heavily relied on the leverage that they had thanks to western IP being needed for chip design. So shifting the blame onto SoftBank appears wrong. Did anyone expect a Japanese money-driven investment bank to do what's politically the right thing for the U.S.? I don't think it would be reasonable to expect that. So in my opinion, a better conclusion would be:
"Western governments allowing SoftBank to take Arm's IP into China has caused a massive conundrum"
Somewhere in this conversation I think someone made a typo and it's gained its own life in the comments, thinking it's the correct term?
However, in this case Softbank must be "rouge" (embarrassed) for their mistake... So perhaps it's kind of okay :)
Just like before they'll get away with it. Who's going to stop this behemoth thug China?