Notes from the ground here. My undergrad was in EE at an "elite" school - I can say definitively that ~50% of the MS/Ph.d. students in EE were from China (with the other 50% largely from India). They TA'd many of the graduate level courses and were the majority of the students taking high level semiconductor design courses that centered on fabrication and nanotechnology.
China's short term goal is clearly to reach parity so these students can enter a mature semiconductor industry. Give these students ~5-15 years to gain expertise from the American academic system and industrial research base and I think we'll start seeing China innovate.
American expertise will naturally decline because we don't have students studying EE. To many good full-stack jobs that pay ~40% more.
China dominates in the 'jelly bean[1]' chip business. This was the bread an butter for the dozen semiconductor shops in the Bay Area during the 70's through the early naughts. As fabs shut down they became 'fabless' and had their work shipped out to TSMC. Now they exist as a genre in China in much greater numbers than they do here. Companies that will make a couple of wafers of USB + ADC + random logic kinds of things.
And the innovation never comes from the chip companies, it comes from companies that are building the products. They go to the chip companies and say "Can you make a chip that does this?" and then a new jelly bean chip is born and if that product gets traction everyone decides to make one with their own bit of spin.
What is unique to the Chinese scene is that there are thousands of minute variations rather than any sort of ordered discipline. Transistors are free at the jelly bean chip level so there is no incentive to re-use or save on chips.
ARM has become the defacto microprocessor architecture because, in part, ARM will license it to anyone.
In the US all of these folks have coalesced into a few mega companies (TI, NXP, Microchip, Maxim) which don't have much in the way of competition locally. So innovation stops because conservative business practices rule.
This really became clear to me when I started perusing datasheet sites for the Chinese market and realizing there are hundreds if not thousands of chips for which there is no English data sheet. This is a complete reverse from the last century when nearly every data sheet was in English and getting a Chinese version was a challenge.
[1] Jelly Bean chips are those that are made in batches of 1 - 10 million with a set of functions that are fairly specific to their application.
> And the innovation never comes from the chip companies, it comes from companies that are building the products.
I agree with you.
Eng has really got to stop thinking they are the source of ideas, most good ideas come from customers that have needs that can't be currently met. Eng balances design constraints, as companies grow, hierarchies get stronger and creativity drops. Maximum innovation comes from small companies solving customer (the ones building the products) problems.
The Jelly Bean chip business could get disrupted by the proper mix of analog and digital. The PSoC [1] was almost but not quite there
I think you are correct as well, its a matter of timing. Eventually there will be the equivalent of an FPGA that instead of having "LUT"s or "CLB"s they will have a bunch of useful bits of tech and an internal wiring bus that will be programmed by setting switches or blowing fuses. Then the variation will be how many pins on the package which will determine how many of these things you can bring out to pins.
I did a thought experiement of what it would take to make a 'universal' TTL chip, which was basically a 14 pin, 16 pin, and 18 pin device where all 74xx chips were actually inside of them and through a programming step you bonded one of them to pins on the lead frame. It required a 90nm or better feature size. The trick was you only have (number of pins) number of input stages and output stages (all the "TTL" part of TTL (these are fairly large by their nature). The logic was all internal 1.8v with a simple step down regulator to go from 5V down to 1.8V.
You could cover both the SSI and MSI catalogs. Of course there isn't anyone designing new stuff with TTL any more so it remains a thought experiment only.
This would have been a godsend for managing inventory.
In a somewhat related idea, is that of unioning the footprint of alternate parts in a PCB design so that either part could be used. I have never used any high in EDA software, but if you had end to end design, schematic, pcb layout and parts databases with high level machine-readable symbolic pin descriptions, these could be inferred automatically (unioned footprints).
Using your idea, I wonder if you could automatically have "hot standby" components in the same package?
As chip manufacturing goes DRAM used to be at the bottom of the ladder. Many logic fabs did DRAM first to learn the rope because the fab technology is simpler for DRAM (less layers than logic). DRAM fabs bought used equipment from logic fabs, so there were always swing capacity available. DRAM business was tough and the main challenge was yield (therefore cost and margin). I don't know if any of this has changed more recently as it certainly seems people are not bringing DRAM capacity online as expected -- maybe they are scared by the prospect that China may bring in a large amount of capacity.
The Chinese company mentioned in the article is only incidental to the story so the article title is kind of a click bait. Sure they decided to buy technology from the Taiwanese fab UMC, which is perfectly legal. UMC as a very large fab itself, could also be expected to provide the technology. For whatever reason, UMC seemed unable to deliver and had allegedly resorted to underhanded tactics instead.
Well the vast majority of these kids would prefer to stay in the US.
Clearly the solution to prevent them from taking their knowledge back to their home countries is to denigrate them politically and make it harder and more inconvenient for them to live and work here.
I would not agree with this. I went to an elite business school and my Chinese classmates all felt there was far more opportunity for them in China with an American education.
They’re not stupid, they look at China and see an economy growing at 6-9% a year while the US is stuck at 1-2% and they know where the growth is for the medium-term. They also see a mature American economy that can be tough to crack even for native white citizens, so its not hard to see how their chances of long-term success are much higher in China than in the US.
My experience matches the parent's. Of a good 70 classmates the only two who went back had trouble finding work here. I suspect your business school experience might differ from an engineering department. A substantial personality difference wouldn't surprise me.
Is that new? Because the trend has been very stabke for the past 10 years: fuerdai kids (with rich parents) who come to america to study major in liberal arts and business but will almost always go back because that is where their connections are. These are relatively new foreign students in the USA and constitute much of the recent boom.
The more tradition Chinese students who have been coming here since the 1980s (and don’t have very rich parents) mostly pick STEM majors. On graduating, they would rather work for Google in Mountain View than Tencent in Shenzhen.
Nobody can predict anything today, with president temper tantrum throwing weekly wrenches into the global economy. But over the last decade they would have been right; and keep in mind that even in China, most economic gains have been captured by the elite — which anyone educated in a top American university would be a part of almost by definition.
Also weighing heavily on people are family and cultural conflict issues. But anecdotally I can say that the majority of Chinese students don’t want to stay in the US for a variety of reasons; and that many feel their prospects are at least as good in China as the US.
Yes, but the living standards in the United States are far higher. Sure you may never become a billionaire here like you can in China, but you can breathe the air and the traffic isn't that bad. The schools are better, the houses are bigger. China may get there, but I know where I'd rather be over the next 20-30 years. And they can always move back.
I'd be wary of thinking that it'll take that long. Live in Shenzhen and it is crazy the amount of progress here every year. Public transportation is way better than most American cities and housing is more expensive than most American cities. Apartments here regularly go for a couple million USD, the ads are plastered on the windows of every real estate agency on every street corner. The air here is quite breathable too, and from what I hear, other cities are getting better as well.
Yeah, I think US living standards are higher for now. But I can totally see China seeing parity in less than 20 years. For one thing, they have made large strides in infrastructure investment, and for another thing, they've been realizing and acting on their need to clean up their environmental act over the last few years.
By choosing to live in China, you take on the opportunity cost of a shortened lifespan, likely a decade or so give or take. As long as you can accept that, then China is perfectly fine place to live.
Not that far, and shrinking fast, depends on who and where you are in China, just like the US. Trump is fixing the air quality issue[1]. China has excellent high speed trains and very innovative and modern shopping malls and housing estates. Google around. Chinese primary and secondary schools are way better than American high schools. Chinese attend international universities to gain experience and network opportunities. They are not here to because here is better.
> Chinese primary and secondary schools are way better than American high schools. Chinese attend international universities to gain experience and network opportunities. They are not here to because here is better.
You heard of the (infamous) Gaokao? It's gruelling, and necessitates nothing but continuous study day in and day out to get into a decent Chinese university.
If they could, a lot of Chinese would prefer to study in the US (or any other western country for that matter).
At the undergrad and graduate level, perhaps, and as another poster commented, probably not for very long.
But for the school years before undergrad, I'm sorry to say, America is in a very bad way.
I don't know how it compares to China, but American public primary and secondary school is definitely not where I'd have my children receive an education
A lot of them would love to stay, trading better life/career prospect with the inconveniences of living in a foreign country which only partially accepts them.
That's the old trade-off, and how America got the worlds' talent. But as lives in home countries get better, US would have to do more to make those immigrants feel like home. Or that trade-off would slowly stop making sense, and more people will go back to their home countries. This is not just happening with the Chinese.
> To many good full-stack jobs that pay ~40% more.
The gap is even greater in China, since China has a booming Internet industry, second only to the US, while its semiconductor industry is still in infancy and cannot survive without subsidies. My friend, who graduated with a degree in EE from Tsinghua University, lamented that almost none of her classmates stayed in EE fields. Note that Tsinghua University is the undisputed best Chinese university in engineering schools.
Throughout the 20th century, the United States benefited greatly from this sort of knowledge drain, from war-torn Europe, and from the Soviet sphere of influence.
Many scientists and academics immigrated to the US because of its values: it was a free country and a multicultural country where immigrants are welcomed. The knowledge drain moved smart people to a free country to build a knowledge economy. (Economists too: the Bretton Woods system was built in part by smart people who fled the autocratic or fascist countries). That system of free exchange between stable democracies with social safety nets kept peace in the world for 50 years.
Not sure this brain drain has equal intentions for rule of law and democratic societies.
That's a lie. United States get 1M immigrants a year since 2000. There's over 37,000,000 legal immigrants in US. United States gets the creme of the crop from countries around the world. On the other hand, there were approximately 594,000 immigrants living in China in 2010, most from Asia.
If you can live in US and make 300k-400k, you would do that in a heartbeat, vs living in China where the pollution could shorten you and your family's life, a brush with someone in CCP could destroy your life, no way to get the money you make in China out, no ownership of properties, censorship prevents you from doing research in the real internet, etc.
Oh yeah, what do you think will happen to China after additional $400 billion tariffs, when XiJingPing dies, when the massive shadow debt ($12Trillion and counting) causes widespread defaults and 30% devaluation of yuan?
The current US government approach to immigrants, legal or otherwise, would seem designed to convince immigrants to go elsewhere.
I think China will be fine given that it can simply shut down exports to the US if Trump's tariff pettiness starts to sting. Where, precisely, do you think your phones and computers are manufactured?
> The current US government approach to immigrants, legal or otherwise, would seem designed to convince immigrants to go elsewhere.
I'm curious where you live and wether or not you can actually, personally, witness the effects of legal immigration there. In SoCal, where I've spent the last decade+, what you're saying rings completely hollow, to me. I have seen literal tour buses of mainland Chinese folks touring new developments, inside of my own new development, in fact, as recently as this spring. If what you're saying were true, why aren't these folks getting the message? That they're touring these homes this way is a discussion for another day. But, as far as I can tell, the only morale panic happening about legal immigration to the United States is happening with American citizens.
> I think China will be fine given that it can simply shut down exports to the US if Trump's tariff pettiness starts to sting. Where, precisely, do you think your phones and computers are manufactured?
As far as I've seen from the last 2 years of living in this neighborhood, they're moving in and staying here. At least enough time out of the year that you don't notice if they're gone for prolonged periods of time (and it would be hard not to notice, the neighborhood is blanketed by solicitors and their ridiculous flyers). A few homes are known to be empty, but only a few, and this development has > 2k homes in it. There are a couple of rentals, but from what the neighbors and I have gathered there really are only a few. It's Irvine, CA, so it's just sort of like this, I gather.
edit/ Having said that, it's not very different from what you'd see in the San Gabriel valley in recent years, either. If they're living here full-time, or not, is any ones guess. I suppose I could find out if I really wanted to, but it'd probably take weeks.
> Where, precisely, do you think your phones and computers are manufactured?
Vietnam, which now produces more Samsung phones than China does.
"Samsung has invested $17.3 billion in eight factories and one research and development center in Vietnam, turning the country into its largest smart phone production base, the government said. ... Exports from Samsung Electronics’ factories in Vietnam totaled $54 billion last year" [1]
US trade with Vietnam has massively exploded higher over the last decade. The US now imports as much from Vietnam as it does France (an economy 12 times larger). That trend will continue.
China's low value manufacturing is too easy to replace.
The US can move its manufacturing to any number of about two dozen other low cost countries. Just as US capital and the vast US consumption machine built China (and Japan + South Korea before that), it can next build up numerous other nations. The US has no permanently fixed need for China, there's nothing they contribute that can't be manufactured elsewhere (as witnessed by the way clothing manufacturing rapidly fled China on cost, and now eg Samsung's smart phone manufacturing).
Most of what China is looking to do is copy and then compete with what the US already does, from Boeing planes to military tech to semiconductor tech to software to biotech, medtech & pharma. China is a giant clone machine, nothing has changed about that at all. Accordingly, China has nothing novel that the US doesn't already have access to elsewhere or otherwise.
“I think China will be fine given that it can simply stop accepting money from the US if Trump's tariff pettiness starts to sting. Who do you think precisely, phones and computers are sold to?”
lol right, China is going to stop exporting $100B a year of electronics to US. Even though Xi Jing Ping begged Trump not to kill ZTE.
China is not fine. China is trying to balance its shadow debts (12T, 170% corporate debt to gdp), prop up stock market (lost 15% this year), prop up real estate (decline in 1st tiered cities, 25.96x House price to income ratio), and prop up yuan (4% loss this year).
We've banned this account for using HN primarily for political and nationalistic battle. That's not ok here, as the site guidelines make clear: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
This happened with Japan too, anyone that wants to know how they dominated the electronics industry in the 70's/80's should checkout the book "We were burning"
Funny, and beneath the joke lies a nice nugget of truth: the landscape of hardware design languages is a truly sad thing to behold and deeply hinders innovation in the space.
There are numerous attempts at fixing the problem, but all of them ring hollow as the big ASIC design shops basically are all relying on ancient languages.
Another thing that IMO has dealt a grave blow to the whole scene is a cultural one: people in the hardware business still haven't understood and digested the lessons of open source and sharing. The whole industry still operates on notions of "industrial secrets" and spends tremendous amounts of energy trying to hide how what they build works.
I mean if you need a example of how bad it still is, the dominant word still used to describe a chunk of functionality in that world is "IP".
Who in their right mind in the software industry would call a piece of code they wrote "intellectual property", as in "just download my IP and use it in your project" ?
If you think Verilog is bad, you should see the languages used by heart surgeons, civil engineers and rocket scientists. The language of human biology is ridiculously verbose without even a hint of polymorphism. ;-)
My point is that it's a little silly to evaluate hardware engineering through the lense of software engineering.
In hardware engineering the part that looks like "software" (what a HW engineer may refer to as the behavioral RTL) is a small component of the total design effort. The tradeoffs are all completely different.
Computer hardware engineering is much closer to designing a bridge than it is to writing a software application. Debating the best hardware-descriptor language is similar to debating whether bridge designers should use No. 1 or No. 2 pencils.
I am not claiming in any way that the problem we face in HW design are the same as the SW folks do. I most certainly agree that RTL is but a small chunk of the overall effort of designing a chip. But I am afraid my point that this chunk is in a terrible place still stands.
Your second point was that HW engineers haven’t learned about sharing—as evidenced by the fact that they use a different term for it than SW does.
Again this is evaluating HW through a SW prism. Where’s github for bridge designers? rocket scientists? brain surgeons?
HW engineers share info in pretty much the same way that every other industry in the world does (except SW). The concepts are made available through patents, conferences, journals, and press releases. More detailed info is often made available through purchaseable IP.
Maybe it could be better, but there are good reasons that HW IP can’t be shared as easily as SW source code.
Sure, the circuits might catch fire once in a while, but imagine the ease of development when you can get a bunch of underqualified people to develop stuff!
Same here. Switched to CS from EE and never looked back, although my respect for EE majors increased a lot.
(I had trouble with the continuous math once we reached steady-state analysis. Besides, I wanted to just get through all that to the fun stuff: discrete math, logic design, and programming.)
On that path after 12 years of blood and sweat as a HW engineer in various FAANG companies. Self teaching myself Algos so that I can eventually leetcode the day light out of my life and take a crack at the same FAANG this time as a SW engineer. The problem with the whole EE landscape is much beyond the Mandarin syndrome. It’s systemic. In fact the canary in the coal mine is Berkeley where the enrollment in graduate level EE courses in analog circuit design and RFIC have been falling rapidly as more and more grads prefer the “deep learning” bandwagon much more than the traditional popcorn chip design and manufacturing which was the mainstay of the local Silicon Valley economy until I was in grad school. Back to my BFS study from clrs :-)
> American expertise will naturally decline because we don't have students studying EE.
We won't decline in absolute numbers but comparatively. We will never produce as many engineers as china because they outnumber us by more than a billion people.
Having worked in China in the semiconductor industry, it really saddens me what the Chinese are trying to do. You simply cannot out innovate 4 decades of work in a few years no matter how much money you throw at it.
Also, China has a branding problem and it is only going to get worse. They can make short term progress but it takes a long time to build a great brand.
Stealing IP mostly helps manufacturing, It doesn't really help innovation. If they want to build up their semiconductor industry they need to steal the people who are creating IP, which is kinda the opposite of what is happening.
the culture that creates new tech is something that china can't steal and it can't replicate it without giving up authoritarian rule.
Stealing IP definitely helps innovation. To get to the innovation stage you first need to reach parity. There is no faster way to reaching parity than to steal IP.
As for the "the culture that creates new tech is something that china can't steal and it can't replicate it without giving up authoritarian rule", that's nonsense that would have found an audience in the 1950's or so when talking about Russia, but it really is out of place in 2018 when talking about China.
China has a lot of catching up to do but this kind of reasoning is so far off-base that it makes me wonder whether or not you've given it much thought at all. The political system of a country does not magically stop people from thinking about technological problems. It's mostly a matter of degree of efficiency than it is of achieving a certain capability.
I disagree with your opinions and your characterization of my argument. I didn't say people will not think about technological problems.
Despite the incredible amount of good the party has done for the people of china they are still an authoritarian regime. I don't think authoritarian regimes are good at fostering innovation.
They don't need to be 'good' at anything, they just will move slower than an equivalent market based system but eventually they will get there.
As long as the rest of the world out-innovates them they may not catch up but do not underestimate the power of over 1 billion people, especially not when a large number of them are very smart.
Have a look at China 30 years ago and China today and tell me that that authoritarian regime isn't moving forward, and relative to the rest of the world they are moving at an incredible pace.
We, the West (assuming you are in the West like I am) should count our blessings that China isn't going full-bore on a market economy and democratic system because the Chinese in such a configuration would be absolutely un-stoppable.
They are catching up, which is a net good for humanity. The highbred command/market economy and the focused bureaucracy of the Party have has been amazingly effective at industrializing and modernizing China. They have lifted many people out of poverty in a very short time.
Catching up and innovating are different though. There is so much structure and even culture in China that will make getting ahead in tech and science very difficult.
The protected industries and closed internet incentivizes making copy cat businesses. The lack of established academic institutions hurts research. Innovation depends on individuals, and the lack of individual freedoms does make staying in china less appealing to talented individuals.
I really, really hope china can become more open and democratic. That would be an amazing win for humanity. More opportunity and freedom for more people! For a while they seemed to be on the path to doing that but with Xi staying in power indefinitely I worry that what the powerful and rich want is at odds with what would be best for the population.
Actually I'm not so sure if much would change (w.r.t. performance) if they switched to a more democratic regime.
In the end I were always a bit scared/reluctant about the US often touted ultimate justification for democratic capitalism that it is simply more efficient -- "Cultivate freedom -- after all, in the end it's just more efficient!". What if... it isn't?
China is turning the tables on this argument quite a bit. Heavy handed government control, aggressive state-sponsored corporate espionage, citizens surveillance and strict punishment of detractors, exploitation of workers, all combined with hand-picked aspects of market economy to lubricate the system. China is designing itself as an efficient economic machine with minimal regard for personal freedom or expression.
It's still unclear whether China will be able to achieve technological parity, but it's quite probable it will overtake the US as the foremost economy this century.
The US has slid away from a free and fair market too. By moving to completely unregulated markets, they have given control to the biggest companies. In a totally unregulated market, inequality grows.
That’s bad for a society. Most free market economists (before “free market” was taken over by billionaires and plutocrats trying to increase their wealth) understood that regulations (anti-trust, anti-price fixing, anti-dumping etc) were needed to give small players and workers a fair shake.
When the US emerges from this national emergency, will it restore balance to markets as it did in the 1930s and 40s in reaction to the 1920s plutocrats? To me that is totally unclear. Let’s hope so. Let’s hope Europe joins it.
>> It's still unclear whether China will be able to achieve technological parity, but it's quite probable it will overtake the US as the foremost economy this century.
China is already #1 by GDP (PPP) with ~$23 trillions [1]. US is #2 with ~$19 trillions (numbers are from 2017). So here China already overtook US.
If you look at nominal GDP, then US is #1 with ~20 trillions and China is #2 with ~14 trillions [2]. With the government and political system that US currently has it will take very short amount of time for China to close this gap as well.
Another metric that shows that China will continue having growth in near future is human capital. China's school education system is better, they have number of pretty good universities, state supports STEM. Yes, they have a lot of problems, but they have good human capital to solve them.
> With the government and political system that US currently has it will take very short amount of time for China to close this gap as well.
That's a pretty amusing claim given China is a wildly regressive Communist dictatorship and the world's most indebted nation (before they even get well-off at the median, which bodes very badly for their future). Not to mention that the people of China have few rights at all at this point, the little progress they had made has been revoked by dictator Xi. That extreme repression is going to get worse with time, dictatorships only tend to get more violent and repressive (as witnessed by Xi's million person Muslim concentration camps, one would have to assume that's just the beginning of his reign of terror). Ultimately it will break China if they don't topple the dictatorship. The system that Deng Xiaoping created that made the Chinese expansion possible, will not function under a Mao-like zero rights gulag system.
> China's school education system is better, they have number of pretty good universities, state supports STEM.
The US university system is vastly superior. The US has 45 of the top 50 universities on earth, and 19 of the top 20. China has nothing like: MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Princeton, Brown, Duke, Chicago, Columbia, Penn, CIT, Hopkins, Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, et al. China can't even match the second tier US schools. It'll take them generations to catch up in a best case scenario.
>> That's a pretty amusing claim given China is a wildly regressive Communist dictatorship.
That is true that China is a dictatorship and I am not suggesting that China's system is better than US's. Their dictatorship does not need to function as effective as US's political system, it can be pretty ineffective, yet they can surpass US and have higher GDP both PPP and nominal, and in a long run they can have higher influence in the world.
>> The system that Deng Xiaoping created that made the Chinese expansion possible, will not function under a Mao-like zero rights gulag system.
I agree, if they push too hard, they can reverse positive changes.
>>The US university system is vastly superior. The US has 45 of the top 50 universities on earth, and 19 of the top 20. China has nothing like: MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Yale...
It'll take them generations to catch up in a best case scenario.
I highly doubt that it is going to take them generations to catch up. In past ~30 years China moved out of poverty close to 1 bln people. Number of Chinese students studying abroad is growing, for example look at number of Chinese students studying in US [1], it is 350K students annually and number goes up each year. They do not need to have MIT in China, instead they can send their students to study in MIT and meanwhile invest in their own higher education system to catch up.
Also, with modern technological advancements soon every major university is going to have all the classes available online for a fraction of full tuition or for free. China's school system is significantly better than US's and when online world class education becomes more affordable, China is going to have vastly more students studying in top universities than US has.
We always underestimate the speed with which world changes, since it is hard for us take in account what technological advancements will take place in the future. If China's economy keeps growing, I do not think it is going to take generations for their higher education to catch up, I think it will take 5-10 years. They have one of the best school systems in the world and it is a good framework to build on.
> China isn't going full-bore on a market economy and democratic system... the Chinese in such a configuration would be absolutely un-stoppable
This is ideology. For growth, it is the outcome that matters. Democracies can make terrible decisions (Brexit) and authoritarian regimes can make great ones. In particular, government investment is a primary driver of economic growth, and China has a fabulous track record of five year plans for transportation, manufacturing, energy, technology, etc. Note that government investment represents state allocation of capital as an alternative to markets. On other aspects such as rent seeking or productivity, it is also unclear whether democracies would be better.
On the micro scale, I agree that markets are needed for efficient allocation and on this scale China is completely capitalist. It has private property rights and free markets. On issues such as consumer protections, China's markets are more free than those in the West.
>isn't going full-bore on a market economy and democratic system
No that's the dumbest thing china could do. They would lose their protectionist advantages like the great firewall and currency manipulation which resulted in decade long trade surpluses. China is doing the "walmart strategy" of price dumping and killing off competitors but on a global scale. On top of that stealing IP is a very cheap way to build manufacturing capability while avoiding expensive R&D costs. Homegrown innovation is only required if they no longer have competitors.
Trump's decision to implement tariff is a very conservative strategy to even out the imbalance of protectionism between china and us but unfortunately the execution of the tariffs is terrible, he's targeting components instead of finished goods and he is also targeting allies that are not excessively abusing the trade imbalance.
They've got such a large population they just need to concentrate a relatively small section where they have looser rules and it would work as an engine for them much like SF does for the US. Look at cities like Shenzhen
>I don't think authoritarian regimes are good at fostering innovation.
The USSR came from far behind and beat us to space. Authoritarian regimes may struggle to allocate food efficiently but they're fine at allocating scientists.
> The USSR came from far behind and beat us to space. Authoritarian regimes may struggle to allocate food efficiently but they're fine at allocating scientists.
I would say that's debatable. The USSR did beat the US to orbit (and in space station technology), but it fell short getting to the Moon, launching scientific space probes, and building a space plane.
"The USSR did beat the US to orbit (and in space station technology), but it fell short getting to the Moon, launching scientific space probes, and building a space plane."
Those are arguably issues of running out of resources, to some extent, not inability to innovate. At some point you need money to turn innovative ideas into reality.
Elon Musk got asked what’s the best way to get started on building a space oriented company and his response was essentially “build a billion dollar internet company first”.
By innovating and letting private individuals to do as they please in their own self pursuits the US was able to get that money for space.
A market based system and an authoritarian regime are not mutually exclusive. Singapore is very capitalistic but its political structure is basically a dictatorship. The same family has ruled it from the beginning. The Singapore model is very attractive to other countries who want to emulate the same. In fact, when Deng Xiaoping opened up China, Singapore was one of those places he visited and studied.
It’s good if you find the right family.
But this is exactly what Tolkien was saying in Lord of the Rkngs with the ring metaphor (Tolkien’s work was a big allegory on European World Wars and politics).
Tolkien said Gandalf couldn’t take the ring because he would be corrupted by power and become an evil autocrat.
There are few rulers who can assume dictatoral power and not use it for ill. And once a family has autocratic power, it is difficult and bloody for the people to take power back.
In violent agreement with you and I love your comparison! This is precisely the trap the Chinese are falling into as they reverse their democratization and remove the guardrails put in place after Mao. People are attracted by the "glamour" of a strong authoritarian and the exercise of power to quickly get things done. But the moment that power falls into the hand of the corrupt, it's hell for everyone. We see this over and over in Chinese history: this is the heart of the dynastic cycle. China has tried to remedy this by trying to pound education into the heads of their rulers and have good advisers/ruling elite around the rulers. However, you can only go so far with that. The repeated rise and fall of Chinese dynasty is a manifestation of these failures.
Apparently big difference between the US and Germany in the nuclear race was not science but instead engineering.
Fermi and Oppenheimer were useful to the US effort but Heisenberg probably had the intellectual firepower to do that for Germany.
The REAL advances the US made were in chemical and metallurgical engineering at an industrial scale. Dealing with gaseous and liquid uranium and plutonium compounds took a lot of innovation. And the plants at Hanford and Oak Ridge were ENORMOUS. So if Germany was going to build a bomb they would have needed a massive industrial complex. Not just physicists.
Apparently Leslie Groves commissioned a public report in 1945. He deliberately put a lot of physics in it, but left out the chemical engineering. Because he regarded the latter as the key difficult steps in bomb building. And the physics was mostly known.
Maybe if Germans had not wasted their engineering efforts on idiotic “superweapons” like the Schwerer Gustav [0] or the 130m long V-3 cannon [1], they could have succeeded with their nuclear program.
Well, it's supporting your argument, as I perceived it. Germany unnecessarily suppressed groups for reasons not related to maintaining its authoritarianism. During the First World War the German army had Jews like Fritz Haber. In the Second they didn't. I don't see China doing the same. If Germany is used as a model for what we can expect from China, then the values we would get have to be adjusted upwards to compensate for China not wasting its human resources* the way Germany did.
>(By the way, the death toll of Mao’s cultural revolution clocks in around 50 million.)
The 1970s wants its news back. China isn't doing that sort of thing anymore.
*There's of course a lot more to the Holocaust than "wasting human resources". Please read this in good faith.
People write this glibly without understanding history. Soviet Russia made great leaps in science and technology where it was a national priority. You can have academic freedom in most scientific disciplines without the political freedom to criticize the government.
Soviet Russia had a rather different trajectory than China. By the 1917 Russia had significant ties with Europe, which helped both economically and scientifically. Having good pre-revolution scientific schools helped to maintain the lead in hard sciences - military tech like planes and artillery. Then achievements were also demonstrated in rockets and space (up to orbital stations), nuclear area (competing program for nuclear power plants, thermonuclear weaponry, particle accelerators), quantum physics (e.g. lasers), computers and material science (friction welding and Al-Li alloys come to mind as examples).
It could be possible to maintain lower level of life comfort while keeping the "academic part" competitive, if the world outside USSR wouldn't demonstrate that a better life is possible. So, I think for some time USSR could maintain the lead, which it did, but then it wasn't enough.
China has tremendous advantage in number of people - 4x compared to USSR - and way better economical system, but disadvantage in scientific schools traditions (which it tries - up to a point - to improve) and similar problems with freedoms. Improving scientific level takes time and may lead to conflicts with societal limitations. China may have some years - or even decades - before such problems will become critical.
I'm not an expert in soviet history but I feel like their efforts around science and technology were economically unsustainable and almost all of them were directly or tangentially related to the military. I don't remember the soviets exporting consumer goods to the west.
Academic freedom isn't the only freedom that scientists and engineers care about.
I don't doubt that china can spend a ton of money, trap its engineers/scientists and use its media machine to try to keep its population focused on nationalism. I just think that if that didn't work for the Soviets it wont work for China.
That said china's current system will probably work great right until it doesn't. Idk I'm just some person on a computer though....
My experience with hacker news is that comments with China mentioned in a not so positive way will result in a flood of initial downvotes. As to the the why, I haven't a clue
My observation is that on certain topics, HN votes and comments become largely based on ideological stances rather than objective reality.
Take this thread for example: "the culture that creates new tech is something that china can't steal and it can't replicate it without giving up authoritarian rule"
This truism that China "can't innovate" because they live under an authoritarian government is very commonly believed on HN, but it's nothing more than an opinion. However, if you were to suggest to these same people that China is a poor source for sourcing immigrants, because <some unique characteristic of China>, the logical parts of their brains would fire into action and point out how "wrong" that statement is, for obvious reasons.
A lot of people, including people on HN, passionately believe things that are absolutely contradictory, and they vote accordingly.
>Soviet Russia made great leaps in science and technology
Yes, we sent rockets to the moon, but an average Ivan couldn't have proper plumbing in his apartment.
Those great leaps were made in things without real life value.
P.R. China on other hand, can't be bothered with "prestige project." The only thing that can bother a government official here is money. And money undoubtedly have value in everyday life... unlike moon rovers.
I want to pick at your “moon rovers” comment because I think it’s somewhat misguided (although, yes, it does apply specifically to Chinese government officials).
One of the reasons that the United States won the race to the moon (while definitively losing the race to space and manned space flight) was because we were the first to dump exorbitant sums of money into the hot (and extremely expensive) new kid on the computing block: integrated circuits.
Before ICs, computer parts were often hand-welded, which NASA determined was too failure-prone to reliably control the lunar lander, as such a device had to be able to handle shaking, cosmic radiation, temperature shifts, extreme G-forces from liftoff, and so on. For that same reason, the Soviets were also unable to complete a reliable lunar lander before the Americans, regardless of their past successes with spaceflight.
NASA’s immense investment in integrated circuits greatly accelerated their adoption, and as a result, computers became much faster, and much cheaper, than ever before.
The history of computing goes straight through the Apollo 11 lunar lander, which does not get nearly as much credit as it deserves.
Wow “chip guy” is understatement of the year. I just looked up vathys.ai from your profile. Very excited to see what comes from that! My personal focus is in embedded computing (Arduino/Pi), and seeing all of these amazing AI-focused chip startups makes me really excited for the days once SBCs can handle heavy-duty machine learning - THEN we’ll get to see the future we were promised in the 90’s!
Meanwhile, in the United States, we can figure out how to send a robot to kill a family on the other side of the world, but we can't figure out how to supply drinking water in Flint.
Human welfare is always a priority that competes with 'national interests'.
Ironically, in retrospect, outhouses are a better technology and plumbing is solving a problem we never had. Removing waste that can be easily recycled is wasteful.
It’s not clear why Lenin felt the need to state this, he obviously didn’t know anything about it, but he did, and so it became the official position of Soviet science. But Stalin was nothing if not pragmatic so...
The NK-33 engines from 1960s and 70s Soviet Union were used by American space companies as late as 2014. These were just stuck and forgotten in a Russian warehouse. Doubtlessly other Soviet technology has also been lost and awaits rediscovery.
It's not just about the price; these engines are still highly competitive fifty years after they were designed. That's quite a feat. They're also based around unique technology.
Stealing IP mostly helps manufacturing, It doesn't really help innovation
One of the lies we were told was that only manufacturing and other low-value-add activities would be going offshore, all the high-pay and -prestige design work would be staying in the West.
But Japan showed in the 80s and 90s that once a country has achieved a level of manufacturing, design comes naturally and quality comes naturally, and the hollowing out of the West shows that once you lose manufacturing, your design capabilities stagnate. And now the West is squandering what little it has left making the same mistake with China.
We even say it on this site often enough, ideas are cheap, executing is hard. Manufacturing is executing.
I've seen papers from back in the cold war documenting a study regarding east german IP theft. The conclusion was stealing IP actually put them behind. You steal the IP, then have to learn how to make it without the context.
So you end up only learning how to reverse engineer production processes - which takes longer without the context, and don't build the skills needed to create the technologies in the first place.
It's like being handed the answers to your calculus class then being asked to move on. It doesn't help.
> the culture that creates new tech is something that china can't steal and it can't replicate it without giving up authoritarian rule.
I've seen this trope repeated here, and it needs to die (IMO). Where's the evidence for this assertion?
The soviet union with it's command economy saw plenty of innovation coming out of its design bureaus (weaponry, rocketry, aerospace engineering). Present-day China seems less authoritarian than cold-war USSR, but I could be wrong.
It’s the same culture that sends tidal waves of students to American universities to earn Ph.Ds, and because of our piss-poor immigration system, most of them have to go back home with all of that valuable education and use it in China or India or wherever instead of the USA.
Just my personal anecdote but a vast majority of the Chinese students I've known do not want to stay after their degree. A couple have rattled off the statistics on the huge advantage they have in the job market back home with a degree from the US.
Not that I'm arguing against immigration reform, though. Just playing devil's advocate.
The U.S. helps to educate and provide opportunity to people, regardless of national origin - regardless of the arbitrary, invisible lines on a map, drawn by the powerful, in which they were born. Partly as a result, the greatest economic miracle in history has occurred since WWII (and especially since the end of the Cold War), with hundreds of millions of people pulled from millennia of hopeless, abject poverty.
Another great result is that U.S. businesses now have enormous markets in China and India in which to sell, vendors from which to buy, and more talented employees which to hire. China and India are the top two markets in the world for many products, including cell phones IIRC. Imagine the impact on the bottom line of SV companies if they went away. A smart businessperson wants other businesses to do well; they want rich, successful neighbors; otherwise, who do they sell to? Who do they hire? Who provides goods and services to them?
Yet another result is that those people are familiar with the United States and its values, and can bring them home. Wars start because political leaders can propagandize about how evil the <other people> are, which is hard to do with populations that have direct experience with each other. And the values of democracy and universal human rights (i.e., regardless of political borders) have revolutionized humanity.
And finally, due to immigrants the U.S. has become the academic center of the world. You may notice that much of the great scientific work before WWII was done in Europe, but then nationalism and ideology in Europe chased out their great scientists, who emigrated to the U.S. English become the language of science. The halls of U.S. academia have been filled with immigrants since then. If the center of knowledge and research moved someplace else, the U.S. will have lost what has really become an enormous, and really an unfair benefit. How much does SV benefit from all that research, talent, and knowledge at Stanford and Berkley?
So I want more immigration, more opportunity for more people. How absurd that people with the talent and drive to get PhDs would never have had the opportunity. If the U.S. has to build more universities, that's great.
I'm mostly with everything but the second half of your first sentence here, but unfortunately that embeds such a huge misconception that the net value of your comment could very well be negative unless you acknowledge and clarify/correct this.
The boundaries of Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, etc. are "arbitrary [and] invisible" to some extent, and obviously drawn by the powerful. But "the current set of lines are arbitrary and clearly not the only possible solution" does not imply that "no lines is a better solution"; indeed, the latter has only been empirically true when there are preexisting strong and stable force(s) which perform enough of the function of explicit admission criteria to render the latter unnecessary. In real life, you find formerly-exceptional institutions which quickly and irreversibly declined to a lower level after switching to the open admissions policy that your phrasing advocates for (consider the City College of New York in the 30s-60s vs. afterward).
Instead, the most impressive results in both hiring and immigration policy have combined race/nation-blindness with a distinct lack of blindness to other criteria which really do matter. You cannot do the latter (and perhaps more importantly, properly incentivize cultivation of the relevant personal and institutional qualities across the world) without maintaining some "arbitrary, invisible" lines across at least a multi-decade timescale.
So, more immigration and education of foreign students? I'm totally fine with that, for both national and universalist reasons. (This is particularly clear for India, which is a natural US ally. None of the 'frenemy' complications we have with China; I WANT Indians to 'steal' more of our tech!) But only on the right terms, which are not being offered by anyone using the language you're currently using in the second half of your first sentence. I suggest that you explicitly distance yourself from those people if you want the rest of your comment to be heeded by anyone outside your tribe.
> This is particularly clear for India, which is a natural US ally.
India has only become a natural US ally fairly recently... And largely due to the 'frenemy' status that the US has with China. (Which in itself is a consequence of the 'frenemy' status that the USSR had with China... It's turtles all the way down.)
Through much of the Cold War, US-India relationships were very, very cool. Instead, they had good relations with Russia, while the US had good relations with Pakistan.
There's nothing 'natural' about nation-state alignment. It's all political, and politics is capricious.
I agree that "India and the US are natural allies" is not the kind of statement that has a multi-century shelf life, for the reasons you describe.
However, I claim that it can be expected to be sufficiently true for the next several decades, to the point that continued rapid development of India should not only be something the US doesn't have a problem with, it should be an explicit strategic goal of 21st century US foreign policy. It's not every day that self-interest and humanitarianism align so well on a matter of such importance; it would be a pity if the opportunity was not taken.
What has made the past 50 years so peaceful (amongst the big powers, at least) is that nations that share values have aligned. France and Germany and the US and Australia share a philosophy of governance, not just a short term realpolitik goal. (Of course sharing a language helps too: Canada, UK, US, Aus, NZ are tight for that reason in good part)
(And also don't forget Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and almost all of Latin America among the liberal democratic governments, and Turkey until recently.)
But I think the emphasis on values is unfortunately not true. The parent overlooks all the right-wing dictatorships that the U.S. allied with, from Indonesia under Suharto to Iran (under the Shah) to Iraq under Saddam Hussein (when Iran turned against the US) in the 1980s to Chile under Pinochet to the junta in Greece to Saudi Arabia to Egypt to Mobutu in Zaire/Congo to Central American dictators to many more on every continent.
And today, right-wing dictatorships are arising among NATO allies, but I haven't heard a word about ejecting them from the alliance.
I'm not interested in your advice but I'm happy talk about the issues. That said, I'm not sure what you're saying or what you think I said.
Immigration is, I believe, a human right. It's liberty - liberty to travel, to make the most of yourself, and it's opportunity. People should be free to make the most of themselves. It's also economic freedom, which generally yields more productive economies for all.
For practical reasons, mostly to prevent the economic shocks of mass migrations, it needs to be somewhat limited and controlled. But I want the poorest, most oppressed people coming to my country; they are the ones who need freedom the most - the most marginal social and economic gain. I'm completely confident that they and their children will thrive and make my country better. And for practical and moral reasons, I'd like more diversity; the sooner we can do away with the dominance of any ethnic group, the sooner we can be rid of their BS bigotry, which is a drain on us all. (Imagine, for a moment, the world without bigots - so many problems solved.)
Exit makes sense as a human right. This is true across many levels of organization: you are free to quit your job, drop out of school, even emancipate yourself from your family after a certain age, and it's widely recognized that protecting the freedom to do these things improves collective outcomes.
A corollary is that you should be allowed to join organizations that want you.
But entry to any organization, regardless of whether they want you or not? In a world where Google has to hire everyone who applies, or Stanford has to admit everyone, or families have to house and feed anyone who shows up at their doorstep even when they don't want to, you no longer have a Google or a Stanford or a family functioning anywhere close to its current level. "Entry to anywhere as a human right" is an idea which may be initially attractive due to its simplicity, but the only people I know who stick with it after further thought appear more interested in harming groups of people they don't like than trying to lift up everyone.
And as a practical matter, for all of its flaws, the US has nevertheless done more than any other country over the last 7 decades to enforce a right of exit across most of the globe. A more diverse and stronger US would be an improvement, yes, and I'm pretty sure Canada/Australia-style immigration policy will get us there. But there are ways to become more diverse and weaker, too; and importantly, in that world, bigotry is even further from being solved, because the probable leading superpower is a more bigoted, monoracial China. (In contrast, when the City College of New York ceased to be a top-tier institution, the damage was fortunately limited to just itself; other top universities had ended anti-Jewish admissions practices some years earlier.) You seem completely blind to this danger.
Private business was just one of several examples I gave to illustrate principles which hold across a wide range of scales of human organization.
It is straightforward to verify that they don't stop holding at nation-scale. A good place to start is Lee Kuan Yew, who's both one of the only leaders in history to preside over the entire transition from Third World to First World for millions of people, and an architect of what's currently the most open immigration policy among Chinese-majority states. Singapore is a multicultural place whose government is widely acknowledged to have one of the best technocratic track records in the world, and they spent considerable effort on trying to get immigration policy right, iterating through alternatives while deliberately taking a popularity hit; what were their conclusions?
Or what are the odds, under your stated worldview, that two of the closest things to actual open borders existing in 2018 are
(i) the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, which lets almost anyone stay as long as they can support themselves ...but ranges from 74 to 81 degrees N latitude, and
(ii) the United Arab Emirates, which has more than five times as many expats as actual citizens, the largest number from India ...but ruthlessly maintains a two-tiered society, where even people who were born in the UAE and have lived there their entire lives are exceedingly unlikely to be granted citizenship unless they are Arab?
Contrary to claims that nothing like open borders has ever been tried, the existence of cases like this make it abundantly clear that this area of policy space has already been subject to substantial exploration. And every surviving result has an obvious and unusual force that does something similar to what traditional immigration controls accomplish in most countries, such as Svalbard's -40C winters. This is, to put it mildly, not a likely result if traditional immigration controls no longer have a useful function.
Academic immigrants these days are also potentially undercutting/warping expectations about labor in academic labs. 36k (for grad students) or 50k (for postdocs) are hardly acceptable salaries from an American perspective, but to folks from India and China those salaries are fortunes relatively speaking. To Indians/Chinese a 70 hour work week for that money might be worth it.
Contrast this to past academic immigration in the 40s that you refer to, where immigrants were from countries with similar sensibilities and levels of development (primarily German Jews).
I don't think that this necessarily invalidates your points, but it's worth pointing out that there are economic consequences when larger slices of the PhD candidates out there are from developing nations instead of other developed nations.
> immigrants were from countries with similar sensibilities
People in the U.S. have been complaining about the 'values' and 'sensibilities' of the new immigrants since Benjamin Franklin would go off about Germans. Then of course it was Irish, the Italians, etc. etc. Older generations of Central European Jewish people even complained about the Eastern European Jewish immigrants at the turn of the 20th century. Of course, for most Americans, those people with the 'wrong values' and 'foreign sensibilities' are your ancestors.
Human beings have their own sensibilities as individuals, not those of some country or ethnicity - people in my own family don't even share those things. I'm sure the parent would not want to be told what they will think and what they will do based on where they were born; that they can't determine their own character; it's absurd. And the truth is that when you give them liberty and opportunity, they thrive and share those same universal values. The track record is undeniable.
So please let's not make the same mistake again. The sensibilities of 1930s Germany? Italy? Egads. Though I guess they also discriminated based on nationalism and ethnicity.
It's a happy, wonderful thing: Let's believe in people, give them freedom and opportunity, and everyone thrives.
Or maybe the sensibilities of early 20th century Europe, which was friendlier towards socialist, pro-labor policies than both modern India and China (people tend to forget that the SPD existed before Hitler).
I know it's a hot-button issue, but I'm not anti-immigration and you're preaching at the wrong person. I will strongly disagree with your somewhat extreme belief that sensibilities are purely individual; having lived two separate countries, with two separate languages and cultures, it's a bit quixotic to claim that cultural and other environmental factors are irrelevant, and cultural universals are notoriously difficult to pin down.
These are the sensibilities that led to the two worst wars in world history, that gave birth to both Nazism (and other fascists) and Bolshevik totalitarian Communism, that produced millions of people (in Germany, Russia, Eastern European countries, France, and more) who participated in or stood by while tens of millions were murdered in German-controlled territory and were starved in Ukraine?
All those people were the products of the 'sensibilities' of early 20th century Europe. By the standards of some, the U.S. should never have let any emigrate.
> I can't believe what I've read in this sub-thread.
Human naturally follow the norms around them. It's how they choose their clothes, their music, their phones, and unfortunately, their politics. If they see other people saying these things, they will think it's acceptable; if they see lots of other people saying them, they will think it's the norm and join in.
> Thanks for sticking up for liberty and opportunity
First, I want to make clear that I'm nothing special. Second, I'm going to be an a-hole for a moment and quote a line from a song I heard from a frustrated advocate:
It's nice that you listen; it would be nicer if you joined in.
It's critical that everyone speak up. Imagine that nobody responded in this thread; think of the impression that would leave for readers - these prejudices are an unchallenged, widespread belief. Look at what it means for just one person to speak up. Now imagine two, or three. It's like bullying; one person speaking up can change things. Two do even more, and provide even more inspiration to the third and fourth and fifth people. It takes some nerve and courage for me, but never let these things pass; speak up; in social situations it can be tricky, but find polite ways to speak up. I have the privilege of safety; I'm not going to let some social pressure and natural human herd mentality stop me while people are suffering; people have suffered far more for liberty than that! People worry that there's nothing they can do, but in fact every single voice counts.
Your comment is excellent, and I agree with everything you say.
I will retort, however, that we Americans should not take our technological dominance for granted, just as a precious generation of carmakers and related industries had to learn what happens when foreign competitors (especially with government support) eat up domestic markets that companies like Ford and GM thought belonged to them forever.
I’m not suggesting that in 20 years Americans will do all their social networking on RenRen or shopping on Alibaba, but there are many, many high tech companies most people have never heard of, churning out profits and paying the taxes that support our society. The more talented, US-educated non-citizens we turn away after graduation, the harder it is for domestic high tech firms to form and hire.
And another thing to note: just because the rest of the world is getting wealthier doesn’t mean they’ll share our values. The biggest geopolitical fucky-wucky of the post-Cold War era was the assumption that Chinese people would demand more freedoms like we have in the West as their living standards approach ours.
China owns A LOT of Hollywood. How many big budget films these days criticize China or make them the bad guys? I grew up watching films that stamped “Russian” and “villain” as inseparable qualities in my impressionable, young American mind - at least until 9/11 happened and the Russians and Arabs changed jerseys.
The economic development of China has been nothing short of a miracle for the hundreds of millions of poor farmers lifted out of extreme poverty, but at what cost to us?
The correlation of the rise of Europe/US and the decline of China/India (55% of world gdp at the time) is directly tied to a massive amount of illegal drugs pumped by US/England/France into China for a 100 year period.
The reaction of a society to a forced drug epedemic will create 2nd and 3rd order effects (like a closed society) that are very easy to criticize today by people who are unaware of one of the largest poisonings in modern history (done by Roosevelts and Forbes family) ...but I digress.
The destructive civil war between 1927 to 1950 between the Kuomintang and the CCP had a big impact. So did the 1930s Japanese invasion.
Most damning of all, Mao's bad economic policies directly killed more than 35 million people, mostly through starvation. He killed more people than Stalin or Hitler.
But the CCP does not discuss these much. It's harder to accept that another 30 years of humiliation (from 1949 to 1979) was the leadership of China shooting itself in the foot.
Remember that second and third order effects are difficult to measure. EVERYTHING is first, second, third etc order effect of something that happened in the past. China's current growth can only occur in the post WW2 US world order that allows all nations to lift themselves out of poverty through trade.
For other readers: parent account is 10 months old with only 1 other comment. This is an indication of a 50 cent army member or at least someone who has been influenced by CCP propaganda, which has grains of truth but systematically exaggerates the influence of certain things.
It is though an interesting question to what China would be like if the Opium Wars never happened.
The secret treaty between President Roosevelt (relation of the leading drug pushers) and Japan, giving the Japanese permission to invade Korea/China in 1905 didn't help either.
Many historians believe reversal of this treaty caused Pearl Harbor and started WW2.
Quite embarassing for the Nobel Prize winning Roosevelts indeed.
Did not record password to 'asdfasdfklj' throwaway acc.
I agree that great power horse trading before and after WW1 has caused a lot of issues. A rules based world order is an improvement on that. I wish USA followed the rules and did not invade nations such as Iraq.
I forgot to mention relative GDP is a bad measure. Absolute GDP (on a log scale) is a much better measure. The relative GDP graph will falsely make it look like India and China declined far worse than they did around 200 years ago. The reason is the industrial revolutions, which separated population size from a nation's GDP (at least until recent globalization). One nation growing due to industrial revolution by itself does not make a stagnating non industrial economy weaker in absolute terms.
I think a large fraction of that relative decline would have happened even if there was not an absolute decline due to misdeeds of certain British and American people in the 1800s.
+1 for focus on values.
America itself would do well to refocus itself internally on its long-held values.
(To do that, it needs to fix the huge right-wing propaganda apparatus in America, beginning with right wing radio. You can’t understand modern America until you listen to Limbaugh for a few hours. But that’s another story. Americans have to start thinking again about what their values are.)
What is wrong with that? Some of them might not want to stay in the US. Also do you want the US to deprive all other countries of their smart people that might improve their own society also? Its not always us vs them.
See forapurpose’s excellent comment and my reply for the answers to most of your questions.
No, I don’t want to “deprive” other countries of the education their people get here. I work in higher education. I believe in the transformative power of education for everybody. But the American immigration system leaves talent on the table when people who really do want to stay in America are not given the option of a US green card stapled to their US diploma.
Not sure if you know but the American industrial revolution was largely kicked off with stolen IP from the UK and would later overtake it. I'm not trying to condone a wrong with another previous wrong but rather to point out that such methods can lead to something in the long run.
There is another word for "stealing IP" that has worked quite well in the software industry.
It's called open source.
Yes, most startups aren't releasing all their code or anything, but there is a huge culture of open source development tools and software.
I think this open source culture, where lots of stuff is available easily and for free, is a big reason why the software industry has been so successful, and why places like SF have been so successful. (IE, SF job hopping, and "stealing"/poaching engineering talent, so that knowledge transfers).
> You simply cannot out innovate 4 decades of work in a few years no matter how much money you throw at it.
Sure you can, as long as you have the people, resources and the infrastructure.
> Also, China has a branding problem and it is only going to get worse.
So did every country. When we were starting out as a nation, we stole IP from britain and we were known as the nation of the shoddy. Believe it or not, germany was once known as a nation of terrible brands and shoddy products. So was japan. Ask your grandparents. "Made in japan" was equivalent to junk in our grandparents time. The same with korea. It's only within the past 20 years that korea shed the "junk" image with Samsung, LG, etc.
Also, for most of history, "made in china" was considered high quality. That's why we have terms like "fine china". Until the opium wars and the collapse of china, china was renown for quality goods.
History has shown that countries move from shoddy manufacturing reputation to quality reputation. Don't really see why china would be the exception to the rule.
>Having worked in China in the semiconductor industry, it really saddens me what the Chinese are trying to do.
I too have worked in China, and there is nothing sad about fighting and investing heavily to catch your competition. If the competition isn't careful, they'll get blindsided just like auto companies were by similar looking Japanese manufacturing investments in the 80s. Japan used to have a reputation for really low-quality manufacturing.
Equating China with Japan is totally asinine. Japan long before the 70's had always been considered as a culture that respected quality and efficiency. In fact, every major manufacturing industry in the world today adopts some form of Japanese manufacturing principles. From airports to cancel hospitals; systems such as Kanban and Kaizen have been universally adopted.
Name one thing we have adopted from China in terms of manufacturing principles/philosophy.
Saying that China is what Japan was in the 80's is totally absurd and impossible to reason with. Not to mention, immense difference in Japanese and Chinese culture.
It has little to do with culture and everything to do with current economic stage of development, Japan was known for making faulty mass produced garbage in the 50's and 60's, they used that economic model to bootstrap the manufacturing industry and to make investments in education, science, tech and manufacturing. From 1950 to 1970 Japan went from 40% agricultural to 17%. [0]
Similar story taking place in China, just 30 years later (following the cultural revolution). From 1980 to 2010 China went from 33% agricultural to <10%.[1] Now you're seeing deep investments in education, software, high tech manufacturing, science. In 20 years, it will be normal to see Chinese brands leading the market in some areas the way Toyota, Honda, Sony and Panasonic did in the 90s and 2000s (and still now in some areas).
>Name one thing we have adopted from China in terms of manufacturing principles/philosophy.
I don't know who we are in this conversation, but from my point of view, there seems to be some kind of hegemonic-cultural war going on in the JAPAC region. I have no stake in the fight, so arguments stemming from the point of view of cultural superiority will fall on deaf ears.
edit: A side note is that Japan in the 80s was exporting their highest quality goods to the US while leaving lower-mid quality goods for the domestic market, this is also contributed to Japan's good brand growth internationally.
I can give you an example of semiconductor manufacturing and its supply chain. Say, I am a company with X billions to throw at building a Fab. You could probably build one, but finding lithography suppliers, automation, building long term relationships with them and being able to do it in a cost effective manner is a monumental challenge. Intel, Global Foundries, TSMC runs on decades of internal knowledge to be able to manufacture silicon. Furthermore, you now need to package silicon, test it, and post-silicon assembly is insanely complex as we go towards chip-scale manufacturing.
Another example is Tesla. They will and in the past have throw billions of dollars to build a solid manufacturing lines, suppliers and personnel; but you can see the challenge today when theyre trying to ramp up.
On small scale, you can buy time with money; but on a large scale, that transaction often becomes difficult or simply impossible.
>I can give you an example of semiconductor manufacturing and its supply chain. Say, I am a company with X billions to throw at building a Fab. You could probably build one, but finding lithography suppliers, automation, building long term relationships with them and being able to do it in a cost effective manner is a monumental challenge.
Okay, all that sounds logical, but they're not building a fab from scratch here. They already have (IIRC) 30 operational fabs in China. If you said this in 1999 or 2000 when China had no fabs you could have had a point - but they would have proven you wrong because they did precisely what you said they couldn't do by throwing money at the problem.
>Another example is Tesla. They will and in the past have throw billions of dollars to build a solid manufacturing lines, suppliers and personnel; but you can see the challenge today when theyre trying to ramp up.
Tesla had never built a single car before they got started, I do not think its a comparable example.
History rhymes. American industrialists famously begged, borrowed and stole machine designs from Europe -- Slater the traitor kickstarted the American cotton industry.
Of course, the lack of foresight of Wall St is legendary! Many companies have traded long term loss for short term gain.
IP and knowledge was much less valuable in the 19th C industrial economy than it is today. Back then execution and raw materials and access to semiskilled labor was most important.
The Chinese (NK, Iranian, Russian) corporate hacks we have seen recently could have a MUCH larger economic effect.
Not really. Britain banned textile technicians from leaving the country because textile machinery knowledge was overwhelmingly valuable. Semiconductor IP is not nearly that important.
> IP and knowledge was much less valuable in the 19th C industrial economy than it is today.
Actually it was far more valuable because it was far rarer and you could do far more with it. With IP you could own/dominate the entire textile market, the entire cotton market, the entire oil market, etc. With IP you could dominate the world's oceans with your navy.
It's counterintuitive but IP at the beginning stages was far more important.
> The Chinese (NK, Iranian, Russian) corporate hacks we have seen recently could have a MUCH larger economic effect.
This is simply not true. The markets today are much larger and far more diverse and the IP space is ridiculous complex, large and diverse. Of course IP theft has a significant economic impact today, but IP theft 200 years had a far greater effect when industries and IP was so limited.
The problem was recognized at the time, though. The first US patent was in 1790 (a process to make potash), the beginning of the industrial revolution.
Of course, now we buy portfolios of patents as an investment backing extortion as a business model, or as bludgeon to slow competition.
> China broke all the rules TODAY. and is still breaking them.
Speaking about whataboutism...
Let's not forget the cases of state-level industrial espionage performed by the NSA against targets such as France (with Germany's help) as well as against Germany itself, which both occurred and came to light within the last 20 years. There's probably more but those are the ones I remember.
There's also no indication the NSA has stopped these activities. Unless the the former being revealed by Snowden finally changed anything.
Everyone is spying on everyone right now. And why shouldn't they? The internet age has made it much easier than it used to be.
You can't demand change and be outraged at other countries' behavior unless you first change your own. At least the Chinese refrain from virtue signaling at the same time.
So. In conclusion I don't think this is a case of "whataboutism", but rather a case of "Look who is complaining".
I worked for Nokia when we outsourced part of our R&D to Huang Shu. 2 years later many of the sites employees moved on to work for Chinese gov backed tech firm, and the source code of what I wrote for Nokia and that of several colleagues popping up on github. It wasn't critical in terms of copyright or deep secrets about the product. But it contained info that allows an outsider get a very accurate picture of the software supply-chain and a potential gold-mine for further social engineering and/or attacks against the firms supply chain security.
So if you have the habit of adding your name in the /* comment stanza */ in all your source code, I urge you to "vanity search" your name in github/gitlab repos.
Also if you are serious about supply-chain security, and go to great lengths of buying in China but assembling your IP in Malaysia, Vietnam, etc, ... remember to compartmentalize.
If you're a person of interest (any engineer in a larger tech-company is), then use a dedicated phone for communicating with China where you install WeChat and be careful how you move information across the 2 domains.
"It's a very secret industry, and getting even tighter now since China has been blocked from acquiring the latest semiconductor technology. China has so far invested over $40 billion in boosting their chip-making abilities, to acquire capital, IP, and knowledge-workers. Given their history of borrowing technology from other countries without attribution, if I were at the head of a semiconductor related company, I would clamp down on the secrets ahead of the danger."
Looks like the clamp-down didn't happen soon enough...
>China has so far invested over $40 billion in boosting their chip-making abilities, to acquire capital, IP, and knowledge-workers.
There is a rumour going that the ministry of commerce has been given a war chest of ~$140B+ to establish self sufficient semiconductor industry in China. I can guess that those $40B is just a part of it that was spent on direct funding of their chipmakers. Another big part probably goes to "one day funds" like Canyon Bridge Capital that appear out of nowhere with few billion bucks just to disappear a year later when they are done buying a target company.
Considering the two sticks of Micron RAM I purchased in mid 2016 have appreciated 2-3x value, I don't have much sympathy for the big three DRAM producers. There's a reason the Chinese are looking so longingly at their lunch.
Micron and other DRAM producers were losing money due to DRAM gluts two years ago. That discouraged capacity investment and, as many insiders had predicted, it led to eventually higher price today.
Sure, you got bargain at their expense two years ago and now everyone is complaining about the higher cost of DRAM today. But that still doesn't justify IP theft.
DRAM makers make $10k per platter. A single fab pops 20k - 30k complete wafers a month, and each top tier maker has 4 to 6 of them. Thought, all makers are working at only 60 to 70 percent capacity now.
You can guess, they are plump with money, and MOFCOM officials naturally want to communize some part of this money pile.
> DRAM makers make $10k per platter. A single line pops out 40k a month, a single fab has 20+ lines, a fab complex has up to 8 fabs. Each DRAM maker has few fab complexes.
If I do this I get 10,000 * 40,000 * 20 * 8 which is $64 Billion.... per month.
Are you suggesting that the average DRAM maker should have revenue of $64 Billion a month or $768 Billion a year?
It sounds like you know the industry and I'm looking for some additional colour here.
my bad, my bad. Corrected my digits. We are looking at around 20 to 30k complete DRAM waffers per fab. For god knows what reason, digits for a line and a whole fab swapped places in my head.
yeah, but ... does the IP for TSMC reside in some easily transferred tangibles? wouldn't the DOD really need to transfer the whole community of engineers and ecosystem of suppliers?
Engineers in Taiwan don't make that much money. Just saying you'll pay them standard US engineer salaries and add instant green cards for their families as part of the acquisition and you'd probably get most of them to move.
TSMC although is a pretty foundational company of Taiwan. It would be like the US buying samsung and then moving everyone to the USA. Taiwan might stop you.
It has been interesting reading the various opinions being expressed here in this discussion. As a couple of writers have noted, the appropriation of knowledge (without attribution to the source) has been the mainstay of technological advancement by the major powers over many decades, if not centuries.
Even though it is popular to classify such appropriation as "theft", it isn't theft. The term is used often in a cynical way by those who have appropriated such knowledge from others before them to provide a justification to maintain an advantage over those who follow them. Theft requires that the original party no longer have access to the items in question. For theft of knowledge, one would have to ensure that the deaths of those who know it have occurred and that there are no extent records available for that knowledge.
There have been many in the USA, including government organisations (civil and military), who have appropriated knowledge from others for their own benefit. One only needs to look at the history since the late 1800's to see many of these appropriations.
Many countries, organisations and individuals have done this. It has happened in the past, it happens today and it will happen in the future. In one sense, the only solution is for the free dissemination of knowledge in every area, but in many areas that will not happen.
I have a friend who will be prosecuted if he releases any information about a certain subject matter that he developed and was going to use commercially because a certain government pushed another government to appropriate that knowledge. These things happen and happen regularly.
So China appropriating technological know-how to various areas is nothing new and is just following in the footsteps of those who have gone before. So getting in a tizzy about it is not helping. If one wants to make a difference then be better at that area than anyone else. Produce what the consumers want at a price they are willing to pay and you will get a market share.
If someone copies you, then use that as a marketing strategy. Make sure that you can do it better than them. There are enough examples of companies and individuals that produce quality and still make enough to keep going. Look at your game plan and stop worrying inappropriately about the competition. If you are being copied then you must be doing something right and you can use that to your advantage, even if you are a one-man shop.
My comment on the article. Usually I am of higher opinion of NYT, but now this piece of writing is simply tendencious
The court case covered there is just plainly the case of plaintiff's lawyers being paranoid about about petty theft case, and having rich imagination. Think of Aron Schwartz case, except even more absurd here, as the defendant have called police on himself.
An employee from mainland who previously worked at a competitor company accidentally put coworker's phone into her bag along with papers on the table. They guy thought that his phone was stolen and called police, police found his phone in a locker of a coworker.
During investigation of that theft, they stumbled on some company docs on the phone, and opened an espionage case based on that. Why a defector would file a police report on his accomplice?
For it to be an espionage, a less lame way to exfiltrate information would be employed, and certainly, a spy will not call the police to arrest his accomplice.
Just thinking that somebody can carry netlists for a chip which take few hard drives to store in compressed form on a tiny memory of a smartphone does not pass a BS test.
Corporate and national espionage are as old as time, and senior leadership needs to wise up to this threat. China is running the most broad and sophisticated IP espionage campaign in history, and most companies think a 15m PowerPoint about not responding to phishing emails is sufficient protection against this. Until we get some strong legislation on corporate data security, this is just going to keep happening.
Is there a 'fruit of the poisoned tree' rule in international trade and tariffs? If the US puts tariffs on Chinese chips because they think they are derived from knowledge that was stolen from a US company, will they get chastised by the big international trade organizations?
Boo hoo, poor Micron. Seems there are some hidden costs to exporting all manufacturing to China. This has happened over and over (see because China often requires American companies "partner" with a Chinese company to setup shop in China:
US companies like cheap foreign labor and manufacturing, but need to realize there could be a high long-term cost - one that could put them out of business. We Americans seem to have a hard time focusing on long-term results. If an action boosts short-term profits or the stock price, we do it.
China's short term goal is clearly to reach parity so these students can enter a mature semiconductor industry. Give these students ~5-15 years to gain expertise from the American academic system and industrial research base and I think we'll start seeing China innovate.
American expertise will naturally decline because we don't have students studying EE. To many good full-stack jobs that pay ~40% more.