Unfortunately all Chinese citizens must comply under Chinese law with spying requests whenever their intelligence agencies come asking. That makes every Chinese citizen in your company a potential spy.
This is shitty on so many levels, and what is the appropriate response? Should Chinese citizens have lower access in US companies? At universities? Etc. That would be a terrible outcome.
We do need some kind of clear asylum option for any Chinese citizen who gets pressured into this. But that only goes so far when the state back home can punish your family members etc.
> Should Chinese citizens have lower access in US companies? At universities?
If they can be compelled to act as spies by their government, then Yes, they should have restricted access. It is unfair to an honest person to be judged by the actions of a few in power in their country, but such is life globally (even for US citizens... especially lately).
Rather than being compelled, what happens if the citizen is voluntarily spying for their government? And maybe it's not even their government, maybe their brother in law is an exec for a competitor back home, so they want to help him out. And rather than being Chinese, maybe the citizen is French.
What if their brother in law is an exec at an American competitor? I don’t see how your example is relevant given we’re discussing governments spying/compelling citizens to spy for them.
My best friend is a naval architect, for about a decade he was involved in research at a big UK university. He would joke about how the Chinese students hammered the photocopiers like no one else.
I haven't heard about any Chinese law that forces its citizens to comply with spying. But, if such a law exists, hiring Chinese nationals (or people who visit China often, for example to visit family) are a risk to secret high-tech projects.
The same can be said for hiring Australians dealing with software. Australia has a law that forces its citizens to comply with requests by the government to hide backdoors in code. As a consequence, anything contributed to important project by any Australian citizen is a potential risk. If your project is important enough, Australian contributions should not be accepted.
Laws like this make it incredibly risky to hire people from certain nationalities in big companies or for secret projects. Governments are willing to sacrifice the economic value of their citizens for the ability to hack and spy on anyone they like and other countries should respond appropriately. If you show that you're willing to use your citizens to take aggressive action, be prepared to have your citizens refused elsewhere.
>>I haven't heard about any Chinese law that forces its citizens to comply with spying. But, if such a law exists, hiring Chinese nationals (or people who visit China often, for example to visit family) are a risk to secret high-tech projects.
They don't need a specific law, quite a few might do it because of patriotism (just because he is is living in USA for 4 years, he's still connected to the motherland.) Simply one that says "all national are required to answer questions from ..." then they make your life miserable until you do so. Imagine having the entire local and state of government on your back: lawn too dirty, you spit on the sidewalk, taxes...not just you, your entire extended family.
In other words, if China and Russia want to make their citizens talk, you will. Or 99% will.
Chinese citizen here but not a legal expert. I am not aware of any Chinese law requiring compliance with intelligence agencies' request. Can you please give a source?
Although there is debate regarding the circumstances under which assistance can be compelled, it appears quite broad:
The Intelligence Law, by contrast, repeatedly obliges individuals, organizations, and institutions to assist Public Security and State Security officials in carrying out a wide array of “intelligence” work. Article Seven stipulates that “any organization or citizen shall support, assist, and cooperate with state intelligence work according to law.” Article 14, in turn, grants intelligence agencies authority to insist on this support: “state intelligence work organs, when legally carrying forth intelligence work, may demand that concerned organs, organizations, or citizens provide needed support, assistance, and cooperation.” Organizations and citizens must also protect the secrecy of “any state intelligence work secrets of which they are aware.”
Ah yes, the Comac C919, 8 years late and counting, and brought to you by the company whose sole previous model still has trouble landing on wet runways:
> Funny thing to mention, I think 95% of industrial espionage effort yields zero if not negative benefit. The problem is that you are always stealing a "cat in a bag"
For machinery, rarely there is anything like a "secret sauce:" Soon after the fall of USSR, Chinese defence companies flocked to Russia buying every defence tech possible. Russian companies had a funny way to troll Chicoms: they will not sell them a simple, mid-tier equipment, but only the top notch, and most complicated one, with which even they themselves had problem dealing.
> For example, Soyuz transferred tech for their super expensive, small volume manufactured R179 engine. Yes, that was Soviet response to F135 class engines. The showstopper was its very high temperature turbine made with monocrystaline blades grown in situ within (!) a ceramic fibre reinforcing mesh.
> Even with all blueprints, tooling, documentation of manufacturing processes, and working samples on their hands, Chinese only made like 10 working engines. That state program to copy R179 continues to this day as I know.
> And I think they spent way more money on it in 25 years, than if they were to create a thing from scratch. That is something obvious to every experienced engineer, but not to bureaucrats from Chinese three letter agencies who are convinced that they are just an inch away from some "secret trick" that will magically make everything work.
My main point is that such big, state bureaucracy driven initiatives to make a Chinese analogue of some expensive widget often end up spending many times more resources that developing it from scratch in China with Chinese engineers, and often end up with inferior final product, than if it was an own original development.
While I have no specific knowledge on even jet engines, from general engineering principles, who says you cannot have 2 groups of people, one working on your own design, the other working on reverse-engineering / replicating others' works? For critical projects like this, it's not hard to imagine a State Actor throwing at least this much resources (including human resources of course) at this. One benefit I can think of is that reverse engineering can shine light on some tough problems during the "forward engineering", like "can this be done at all", and "what is the major concern / bottleneck when designing a particular component". Even if you don't figure out the whole thing, the process can still be useful, especially when you don't already have all the know-how.
For material science, replication is an issue because of differences in machines etc. Very little standardization.
It's like back in those days where HP/SGI/IBM had their own version of 'C' compilers and it was a nightmare to port from one platform to another. Especially when they used non standard behavior (e.g. dereferencing null returns 0) and use it as part of their core logic.
You REALLY need to know your stuff to make things work. Source code alone isn't enough.
China managed to quite quickly absorb the technology transfer from Alstom/Siemens to build high-speed trains. Now their trains are better than anyone else's and they have more high-speed rails than any other country. They even managed to beat competitors and export their trains to Turkey and Argentina...
I have no doubt their airplane will ultimately be successful.
They can go slightly faster with a top speed of 350km/h instead of 320km/h but one could argue that is marginal improvement.
What happened with Siemens is tragic because they wanted so hard to get a foothold in the Chinese market, they agreed to the technology transfer. In the long term, they helped start a competitor that now beats them in other foreign markets.
Well, it was also a tech transfer from Kawasaki (makers of Shinkansen trains), unless you think they bungled the technology, it's very possible these trains at least match the quality of Siemens and Kawasaki trains. You can see the specs and pictures on Wikipedia and decide for yourself.
Like the sibling post says, the tragedy is that they got both companies to give up their tech because each thought the winner would get a monopoly over the entire domestic market for at least a decade or so.
The Swiss watchmaking industry was once largely focused on producing cheap copies of English and French watches. Today Swiss watchmakers are renowned for quality and innovation.
"On December 20, 1790, water-powered machinery for spinning and carding cotton was set in motion in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Based on the designs of English inventor Richard Arkwright, a mill was built by Samuel Slater on the Blackstone River. The Slater mill was the first American factory to successfully produce cotton yarn with water-powered machines. Slater was a recent English immigrant who apprenticed Arkwright's partner, Jebediah Strutt.
Samuel Slater had evaded British law against emigration of textile workers in order to seek his fortune in America. Considered the father of the United States textile industry, he eventually built several successful cotton mills in New England and established the town of Slatersville, Rhode Island."
In the 1980s, electronics that said "Made in Japan" were well-regarded (still are today), but in the 1950s it was the opposite: they were seen as cheap. This was actually a joke in the movie Back to the Future.
See also Japanese cars from the 1970s versus the 1990s to today.
In the 60 and early 70ies, Made in Japan guitars, specially copies of Gibson and Fender guitars where not well regarded.
But they started to greatly improve, and by the late 70ies and 80ies they were equal if not better than their originals (specially Fender which was not well managed by CBS at the time).
In the copy department you still have brands like Burny/Fernandez or Tokai, and also brands that outgrew the simple copy business with genuine models such as Ibanez, Yamaha or Takamine (a few lawsuits may have helped them develop in that direction).
There's a lot to be said for letting someone else spend billions perfecting a design and then just copying it. If you can do it quickly and make improvements you'll maintain second place very cheaply, which let's you spend the rest of your resources on more useful things.
It's intriguing to see that during the last 3 decades, China has made so much progress, and from a historical perspective, I think China will make its own plane, just like how they made their own cars and trains, I do think they have the ability to reverse engineer the plane related stuff,sooner or later, but innorvaton is another thing, it totally make sense to me that China wants to copycat all the high tech stuff, and also, the counter massure that US took is totally reasonable. From the human species' point of view, it is fascinating.
If you look at the top computer systems and networking conferences, you'll see an increasing fraction of the research is from the top Chinese universities. The best Chinese students used to go abroad for their PhD studies. In the last five years or so, this has significantly changed, and Chinese home-grown research is just as innovative as US or European research. I've no reason to believe that aerospace will be any different, except that the lead times are probably quite a bit longer.
Given time, resources, and education, certainly Chinese people can come up with functional solutions to any problem. The same is true for people of practically any other country.
But it seems that for one reason or other, technology theft is attractive enough to be a primary method of "innovating" in some places.
It's really a matter of degrees. People copy anything they see that seems like a good idea (better than the idea they previously had). It's just a matter of how much original effort is put in vs how much detail from the other party's effort is acquired and used to fast-track the development.
In complex projects like this, just seeing provides limited benefit. But in other simpler cases, just see another's working model can convey enough information for the newcomer to quickly come up to speed and compete.
You know, I have nothing against China building things from scratch on their own. I'm sure there are engineers in China who disdain all these espionage efforts and want to do their own original works, but are forced to "make use" of the information.
i don’t disagree with your point, but the level of difficulty in building an airliner and a (even high speed) train is much higher than most people realize.
I don't think so, and if they are, I don't think it will be through hacking.
Refactoring other people's code is often harder than coming up with your own, and this is when you have the corresponding ability. Just receiving source code/ design without know-how to actually implement anything might even be worse in the long run.
Yeah, with all the effort CrowdStrike took to divide and preface each section of the doc, mark footnotes, and all the formatting junk....it's a very visually "noisy" document, and I really don't want to read it. Whatever happened to double-spacing? Simply godawful UX.
They're padding the document heavily is why. That's also why they have a whole section on "we spent time tracking down the Jiangsu Bureau of the MSS's buildings", with the conclusion that they're the buildings with "Jiangsu Bureau of the MSS" written in big letters on the side.
Hah! And to think, their client could have paid $50k for this report that I and a few undergrads could hammer out in a Thursday evening after some yerba mate.
> In the rare occasions when the hacking team couldn't find a way inside a target, a second MSS JSSD officer would intervene and recruit a Chinese national working for the target company, and use him to plant Sakula on the victim's network, usually via USB drives.
I'm not sure how the US is going to deal with things like this given that we have so many Chinese nationals working in most major corporations across so many industries.
Well, when your adversary is effectively an ethnostate (at least in terms of the classes capable of travel), scrutiny on their nationals is going to be harder to distinguish from racial profiling (if most Chinese people where you're at are new).
At least, we should be monitoring Confucius Institute outposts and scams/blackmail making Chinese nationals vulnerable in the U.S. and Canada.
Racial profiling is just a slur for pattern recognition. If it turns out that 95% of Chinese scholars in the US are more loyal to China than to America, and that when given a chance, will illegally send information back to China, what are you supposed to do?
It's fine if you don't want to have a racial bias yourself, but it doesn't mean you need to ignore the fact that (in this hypothetical) the vast majority of Chinese are highly ethnocentric.
> Racial profiling is just a slur for pattern recognition
...?! Did you really write that?! Do you really believe that? WTF, man! Do you realize how that would sound in any other context? A few steps down this line and you'd use machine learning concepts to justify natzy ideas or stuff like that.
Machine learning is based on sample data, which time and time again has been proven to be biased, producing errors due to racism which then get fed back into the system and perpetuate the cycle. It is not infallible and it does not reveal truths that people are 'worried' about seeing, it's a reflection of current mindsets.
...that's one of the reasons why I think 60% of the time we're applying machine learning "at the wrong end of the problem". We should:
(1) pick a set of goals we deem worthy
(2) use machine learning to find patterns of actions that push things towards our goals - that's why I think we should move as much as possible in reinforcement learning, and figure out ways to use RL for data-science too, both supervised learning and time-independent unsupervised learning are really dangerous and biasing tools, and I think they're sort of dead ends on the road to true-AGI
There's no such thing as "seeing the world for how it is". Looking for patterns in data using a tool/machine trained on data (that will be inherently biasedly selected) will just lead you to find the patterns that confirm your f up world view, out of the infinity of patterns that there always are in everything...
We need to figure out how to manipulate the world in order to shape it into the patterns that we'd enjoy more.
There's a sort of "Chinese perspective" in applied machine learning nowadays (which is probably not originating in China, but being associated with "ML empowered surveillance and social scoring" is easier labeled like this) that I think is very wrong and extremely dangerous... we should grow up out of it quickly, because later on properly purging it from our cultures will be a violent endeavor... Heck, I even hope we as species get a Mars base up as a backup if this conflict of world views goes hot because there's a high chance it will be very very hot, like in nuclear hot...
If recruiting Chinese nationals stops working the Chinese state will just start recruiting other nationalities. Plenty of people would pop a USB drive in their work PC for $100k. The only reason they don't now[1] is that it's more expensive, there's a bigger risk of the person turning themselves in, and if caught it's more politically difficult.
[1] Assuming they don't already, which is a huge assumption.
If black Americans are more likely to commit local crimes and you are developing software for police to predict hotspots of crime, wouldn't race be another aspect of pattern recognition in this narrative?
And would it be wrong for banks or loan programs to optimize on such pattern recognition if it were found that ethnicity could improve their forecasting? Or for software companies to forecast employee effectiveness on similar pattern recognition?
Do you know what will happen with such an optimization? The pattern will be reinforced and you will end up with something like a civil war. At some point, your company will suffer because people will be busy shooting each other.
The movement towards fixing discrimination did not emerge because old folks were bad and the new folks are better people, it emerged because people recognized the issues it creates. It adresses the same issues that anti-competitive practices of the monopolies create: destruction of the market for short term gains of a single company.
When we use the coercive power of the state, it can only be with respect to the actions of an individual. Group punishments are completely unacceptable.
Quote Rev. Bayes till you're blue in the face, but profiling amounts to holding a group responsible for the actions of bad individuals.
I want it to be effective, which is why racial profiling is a bad idea. Crime rates correlate to poverty rather than race. If you design your system to target race you'll get lots of false positives in middle class black neighbourhoods and you'll ignore crime in poor white neighbourhoods. Racial profiling doesn't work.
This is just not true. The percentage of blacks in a population is a higher correlate for crime than income, poverty, or any other economic factors. This has been replicated many times.
edit:
Here are some studies. I would have put them in a reply but I'm being rate limited. Any one is sufficient on its own, but all are interesting.
> Any one is sufficient on its own, but all are interesting.
You use technical terms like "sufficient" and "replicated", as though you actually understood how science worked, but then link to a pile of crap scholarship published in third-rate journals by cranks and racists. It's annoying. And dangerous. Worse, you appear to be completely unaware of the distinction between correlation and causation, and what policy implications that has. Kindly get a clue.
This opinion is heavily biased toward a white-nationalist narrative. For instance, the second linked “study” is actually a propaganda piece published by the New Century Foundation, an organization described by its founder, Jared Taylor, as “white-separatist”.
> Applying your intelligence effectively is what it's all about.
They actually do correlate to race, beyond that which income accounts for, but you'd kind of expect that if law enforcement was racist against blacks and was perceived as such: policing is less effective in black communities both because of police attitudes toward blacks and vice versa. (Racial profiling—literally law enforcement targeting people based on race—obviously exacerbates this.)
During WW2, there was an internment camp called Manzanar, where the US put all the Japanese, even those with full American citizenship, simply because they were Japanese.
I think both GP and GGP are somewhat loaded questions. The first is a hypothetical question that, while possibly genuine, can have a scaremongering side-effect. The second (perhaps unnecessarily) takes this as flamebait and extrapolates that cold calculation can lead to seemingly rational decisions such as mass interment based on the perpetual foreigner status of East Asians.
I have not studied rationalism or humanism at all and don't have much opinion on anti-discrimination or anti-anti-discrimination. The issue that sometimes boils over on mostly homogeneous countries like China is that people conflate many different things together. A distinction needs to be made, rather than blurred, on ethnic background, nationality, current government, their culture, or something else. (This is an assumption.)
Say what you will about 'The Chinese,' but please make it clear who and what you are talking about. A communist party member is very different from a middle class worker who holds a Chinese passport, or someone who has resided outside of China for decades. or a second generation immigrant with a Chinese-sounding last name. The above people probably have very different views on ethnocentrism or loyalty to 'the motherland' and should never be lumped together by proxy and acted on with uniform policy. This isn't racism because there are many other things at play, and discriminatory outcomes might defined by consequence. But such levels of ambiguous smearing can cause the same kind of prejudice from applying abstract, ill-placed fears more broadly than deserved.
"While the Yoshikawa case appeared to retroactively justify the decision to intern Japanese Americans, he himself distrusted the Japanese-American community which in his mind was loyal to America over Japan."
Moles are not unique to China, it just happens that China currently happens to be the enemy. Most people whether immigrant or not just want to get the work done and go home.
The situation is a bit more unique with Chinese working/studying abroad. Since most of their families, friends, and relatives are still in China, they can be coerced by the CCP to engage in espionage out of fear of hurting their families.
I'm confused by your main point. Do you mean, as opposed to other foreign workers and students on temporary work/student visas, who can somehow migrate their friends and family over and therefore be subject to less coercion?
No, I was pointing out that China is unique in that they would have no moral qualms in coercing their citizens abroad using violence. I'm sure my coworkers from the EU probably don't ever have to worry about being in a situation where they would have to choose between spying or hurting their family.
I agree with you (Someone from France doesn't have to worry about the modern version of China's 9 generation purge[1]), but as a Canadian it's very common to see the Chinese students here wildly supportive of the CCP, including harassing and attacking Hong Kong protesters. I imagine the ones that are outspoken against the CCP have a much harder time going abroad in the first place.
With a billion and a half citizens it's unlikely they lack for fanatics to exploit.
> I imagine the ones that are outspoken against the CCP have a much harder time going abroad in the first place.
Resistance against the CCP is a very tiny minority since there is a heavy brainwashing about how great everything CCP does since kids go to school at a young age - and they never get any other version of reality.
Disclaimer: I'm french and I'm living in China since my wife is Chinese.
It's not only about brainwashing.
40 years ago 85% of the chinese population was below the poverty line. Today it's between 10% and 15%. Under the party governance, almost everyone saw their life standards go up
substantially. A lot of the people studying abroad saw their family starting from the bottom and they can now afford to study in western universities.
They think the Chinese system works because economically it is working very well so far.
Just another example: We have some friends who bought a very expensive new apartment in Beijing (around 4.5M US$). This is a brand new residence founded by Wang Jianlin, the founder of Wanda Group (the most powerful estate developer in China).
The government allowed him to run this project under one condition: to build 3 apartment blocks on the same field (sharing the same park) which will be given to families under the poverty line.
A lot of the wealthy people complained a lot about this, 1/3 of them got a refund and the price of the apartments dropped.
So to get back to my point, this is not only brainwashing. The party is giving its people a new life, and these people will be thankful and loyal for at least decades.
I'm curious about how a long term economic recession could change people minds though.
And yet it is brainwashing that they believe the CCP is responsible for the bulk of the poverty reduction, rather than simply opening China to international trade. When one compares the postwar growth of Japan, Hong Kong and Taiwan to that of China it might be more correct to say that rather than making them rich, the CCP stopped empoverishing the people.
> I'm curious about how a long term economic recession could change people minds though.
At what point will be start going up Maslow's hierarchy of needs and what more that material / economic satisfaction? Will there come a point when people feel "rich enough" and want other things?
Recently the vlogger laowhy86 and his Chinese wife have moved to the US because things have gotten a bit too 'totalitarian' for him in China:
China is wealthy in spite of the CCP and its strict control, not because of it. And until they get private property rights figured it out, they could fail to stay wealthy.
That is the definition of brainwashing. If people believe economic growth comes from CCP and not opening up China to international trade then their view of the world is massively skewed.
> I'm curious about how a long term economic recession could change people minds though.
What is the 'cultural priority' of the Chinese people?
> But, with only very few exceptions, they really conceived of liberalism not as an end in itself but rather as a means to the decidedly nationalist ends of wealth and power. They believed that liberalism was part of the formula that had allowed the U.S. and Great Britain to become so mighty. [...]
> It must be understood that liberalism and nationalism developed in China in lockstep, with one, in a sense, serving as means to the other. That is, liberalism was a means to serve national ends — the wealth and power of the country. And so when means and end came into conflict, as they inevitably did, the end won out. Nationalism trumped liberalism. Unity, sovereignty, and the means to preserve both were ultimately more important even to those who espoused republicanism and the franchise.
Kind of similar to North America in a way. And just like the Chinese, you guys don't realize it because as the saying goes, everybody thinks their crap doesn't stink.
Sure in the case of China it is a more crude form of propaganda, but if you don't believe me, just try to find information about what happened in Ecuador just now in your newsmedia. That information was supressed by media conglomerates because of a pro-US president that ended up doing something wildly unpopular. Compare the same exact event happening in a country like Venezuela. You get the idea.
Not really the same. Americans are taught to love an abstract, idealised version of America, an eagle perched atop a flag, and it doesn’t really work, half of Americans hate even that, and that’s fine, no one really cares. Whereas the Chinese are taught to love a specific leader of a specific party operating a specific system, etc. And the consequences for not complying are harsh.
Oh nobody denies that you have more political freedoms, I'm talking about why for instance, would your society focus so much about China being bad, highlighting the differences, whereas countries like Vietnam, still a communist state, you get to see tourism articles and everything.
What Israel is doing to some Palestinians would also qualify as shady behavior, but what I'm saying is that I don't have a personal feud with any of those countries, and I would totally visit them. But I have friends and family that based on the amount of propaganda about China are refusing to buy certain products, use software like Wechat, etc. That is sophisticated propaganda in my opinion.
> Moles are not unique to China, it just happens that China currently happens to be the enemy.
The special position of China goes dramatically beyond that. I'm not sure you could downplay China's position more than what you just did. I'd almost confuse them for being Cuba by that description.
For all but a few countries, stealing data on how to build the next great airplane, does not enable them to actually build it.
The unique position of China is the combination of: vast resources and a very determined, centrally orchestrated, national will to pursue hegemony (now almost universally culturally regarded as their natural right).
Pretending a mole from China is similar to a mole from most any other nation, is pretty absurd. No other nation other than the US has the capabilities that China now possesses.
They have: extraordinary national wealth ($50x trillion in household wealth); extraordinary annual economic output; rather openly flaunted mercantilism; global leading manufacturing capabilities spanning nearly anything as needed and supply networks to match; a strong cohesive nationalism, supported by both the people (culture) and the leadership; very large, very potent tech capabilities, spanning everything from software to hardware, unrivaled by any nation other than the US; military spending that pretty well matches the US when you adjust for either PPP or just merely adjust for the difference in salaries; extremely large land & water territory, and all the benefits that go with it; nuclear weapons and military technology that by the day is getting close to parity with other elite militaries; an authoritarian system that is willing to entirely disregard human rights whenever it suits their national purpose at the time and a culture that heavily tolerates it; the ability to rapidly pursue epic scale, unmatched (eg Three Gorges) national construction and or engineering challenges at the snap of a CPC finger; and 18% of the world's population, for practical purposes an endless supply of relatively cheap labor of all types.
Show me a bunch of other nations like that. In all of human history you can count on one hand the number of nations even remotely comparable to where China is now at, their general position and capability vs peers in the world order. And they're not quite done rising in power yet.
As a non-US nor Chinese national, I find it interesting how the US keeps creating these artificial enemies. Of course the Chinese are not pro-America but they are very much self-contained and just interested in making money. Aside from internal old and new revolutions, China have also had a long history of not invading other countries.
I can understand that the US feels threatened by the massive competition created on the other side, but this is very rapidly leading to a similar situation like the anti-Japanese mentality that ended up stigmatizing a whole swath of people based on ethnicity alone.
> Read up on what's happening today in Africa and Afghanistan. Or the many examples of state-sponsored corporate espionage and hacking. Are these not forms of invasion in 2019?
I do recall a couple of countries invading Afghanistan, none of them named "China."
If you're going to call building railroads, highways, power plants and other infrastructure in Africa an "invasion," that's just plain unreasonable. I get that you may find the amount of debt African nations are taking on troubling, but it's dangerous hyperbole to call this sort of thing an "invasion."
China does have a long history of invading other countries, but they try to suppress knowledge of it. That’s why they’re so hypersensitive about the definition of China, because they’re hiding their present and former invasions.
Tibet, Xinjiang, Taiwan, all the islands inside the vague nine-dashed line... Even border disputes with India.
Internment like in WW2? Probably not. Pretty sure the only viable way would be to enact laws to enforce extremely stringent eligibility requirements on foreign students/workers.
> I agree in principle. My thoughts are more along the lines of mass denials of any type of visa from [mainland] China for the purposes of study and/or work. If it gets bad enough, total denial of all visas. (I don't feel a kinship with China that I do with Mexico/Latin-America and Canada.)
No, that's dumb.
The answer is to let the students in, maybe push them away from militarily sensitive areas of research, and improve the education they receive in the US to counter CCP propaganda narratives. If the later is done, maybe we can actually realize the hopes of someday liberalizing China.
As expected. But from reading the article I think the current plane probably had very little IP theft in the final design. Just your usual clusterfuck of inexperience and poor management.
What they’re after ultimately is the ability to replace foreign components in future planes. Software, Hardware, the whole lot. Along with stealing all the management processes for systems integration.
So in this sense, the hacking might have shaved a few years off their efforts.
With everyone hacking each other, maybe countries should just openly share IP and avoid the expense/troubles of cyber espionage. The end result is the same.
These are the statistics that would be referred to by IP proponents should this discussion ever reach a legislative stage. Don't shoot the messenger. Think about counter arguments.
I don't have a horse in this fight, but if I was on COMAC's risk committee I would also make sure that no foreign president could ever cut my company - and its enormous investment - off from critical supplies with no more than a stroke of a pen.
Especially since that is what just happened to another Chinese company with Western suppliers.
Personally, I think we'd have all been better served by the IPR being available on some RAND basis. There is a reason Buran looked like the Shuttle, which goes beyond spying.
Often problem constraints shape form, but Buran is maybe not such a great example of this. Buran looked like shuttle because the program was told to copy the US program to my knowledge.
A better comparison is with China’s state-led expansion abroad. While it lacks the EIC’s habit of violence, modern China shares both its strategic ambition and its commercial veneer. Asia is still grappling with that awkward mix, four centuries after the EIC’s motley crew sailed from the foggy Thames
I mean, for all fairness, one side is using non-market arguments to disallow acquisition, another side uses non-market ways to get access to this technology.
Am I allowed to make such statement?
I would like to challenge anyone who's immediate response to this is "China are always stealing our intellectual property" to stop, and really consider whether IP laws are providing a net benefit here.
Sure they provide an incentive to innovate, but they also actively prevent others from innovating. This technology will now be available to many more people, and can now be built on and developed.
It's a very capitalistic view to think that the only motivation to innovate is the profit motive. And it surprises me little that an economy which functions on very different principles also takes a very different attitude to knowledge sharing. Even if we don't wish to emulate this way of doing things entirely, perhaps we all have something to learn from this difference in perspective.
The problem is that it does affect the free market systems that China trades with. If China didn't trade with other countries I would agree, however Chinese companies do trade in massive amounts, and the government has signed on as a member of the WTO. They agreed to certain rules of the road when dealing with foreign market economies and have benefit greatly from selling goods and services abroad. And in those market economies, expensive R&D that is cheaply replicatable is disincentivized without IP- the dominant strategy is to just wait for a competitor to innovate and then clone them. IP is a hack that balances out this strategy with licensing costs. If you remove the licensing costs, the free market most likely won't incentivize expensive R&D, and there will be a net loss to everyone in the market system. So of course people in the capitalist market system are kvetching about how they are competing with someone who doesn't pay licensing fees to balance out R&D costs.
The difference between patent trolls and protecting capital intensive IP for a "head start" to get to market are so hugely different. It's not a difference in perspective. It's a harmful act of laziness.
I've heard that what was stolen was mainly internal documentation on how the engines comply with the various regulatory frameworks, which were designed around the specific Western families of engines that existed and evolved with them. If that's all true and China was more than capable of building an engine with the same performance and safety as their Western counterparts, but simply wouldn't have been certified due to not being a slight variation of an existing design, would that change your judgment?
Given that China has struggled to produce a jet engine even for _military_ uses, which is in no way hindered by western regulatory frameworks, I think the burden of proof is on your side:
I mean, they supposedly stole the full plans for everything related to the F22 and F35, including their engines. So, that doesn't really jive with your idea that it's lack of access to IP there.
What's way more likely given all that is that Chinese companies so contract lots of the commercial engines' components, it's that putting it together and filli g in the gaps in a way that passes cert is the issue. The fighter jets engine components are starting from scratch, and being very very different designs that are much more exotic from a materials science perspective.
Maybe bad if you look from the perspective of a single team. However, if the overall techniques and qualities of sports teams went up, it can lead to more interesting matches and innovation.
Sports teams is putting things lightly. It's a bad idea to let your industries fail, while your rival's grow at your expense. You can already see what happens to those over whom China gains influence - economic power is a large part of that.
If a Chinese family goes from a 3rd-world life to a modern one, is that a relative loss for America? In sports, it would be.
Yes, we should be firm about our interests. No, we shouldn't be obsessed with some 'score' -- or if we are, maybe channel it towards fixing our own house.
And if a Chinese airplane manufacturer out-competes a US one, causing it to fail, its workers go unemployed, weakening the US economy, and making it more dependent on China?
How long does an average company last, if it gives away all its IP and know-how? Why should the result differ on the scale of countries? I assumed these dynamics are obvious to everyone.
> And if a Chinese airplane manufacturer out-competes a US one, causing it to fail, its workers go unemployed, weakening the US economy, and making it more dependent on China?
This won't happen, because despite the US's public insistence that free markets should be enforced everywhere, it is in fact quite protectionist over several of its industries, aerospace being one of them.
A wise company with secret sauce wouldn't give it away.
If our corporate culture is pathologically short-term-obsessed, that's on us. It's not on the 'bad guys' who lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty.
>It's a very capitalistic view to think that the only motivation to innovate is the profit motive.
But isn't your entire argument self-contradictory with the story? This isn't a case of them developing them same thing and then, say, ignoring being sued over patent infringement or something. This is them just taking it instead. If your argument was right that IP wasn't useful for innovation, then they wouldn't need to take it from others, they could create it themselves. They've certainly got enough of a unified population, and can even see where others have gone first.
More fundamentally, IP is not at the core about "motivation", it's a hack to deal with a limited resource problem. Replicating information is essentially free, but generating it is not. R&D, particularly in areas where iteration requires enormous capital expenditure and there is a lot of finding paths in the dark, takes significant resources. And since we don't have unlimited amounts of those, decisions have to be made about how and where to spend them. The market, properly used, has proven to be one of our most effective tools for dealing with efficient resource allocation. Markets though normally are based around the specific resources and replication. IP attempts to graft that. IP also is intended to encourage sharing and decrease inefficient efforts to hide valuable information through technical and personnel based means.
As I said it's a hack, because information isn't the same as real world materials. There are different costs to society in maintaining it, and it requires societal cooperation in a way that defending limited physical property does not. It's more than reasonable to debate the frameworks for IP, such as how long it should last (be it fixed term or dynamic terms with ever increasing renewals required), what exceptions should be made, etc. But if you've got a steep hill to climb if you want to claim IP should be done away with. It'd help if you could even posit a better way to direct resources, keeping in mind the failures of the past. It'd help even more if you could point to anyone developing valuable information better without IP, which right now you cannot. China hacking into places to take it vs developing itself certainly doesn't help you there.
I think he's trying to say that there could be an argument made for catching China up to the rest of the world, so that they can spend their resources innovating on new things, not just trying to get caught up.
It's not hard to see how that would be a net benefit for the world (except of course for the Western IP holders).
Please don't think I'm supporting this, just trying to see this side of the argument.
I think we'd be better off with a system that promotes free flow of information, but local production of goods and services. Products shouldn't be available without full specifications and fabrication methods. Web services shouldn't exist without interoperability protocols and source code. I think this would be a hackers' paradise, and this is "Hacker News", after all.
Upvote. This is a very interesting alternative take on globalization vs protectionism I'd love to hear from Hacker News, even if it may be impractical.
Perhaps something close to what you've described is LibreSilicon [0], a free and open source semiconductor manufacturing process (only 1 micrometer though) currently in development.
The US famously did the "catch up and then leap fast" thing, which worked out great for the US, and probably less bad for the rest of the world than if Germany had won WWII or the Soviet Union had been more dominant.
Hard for me to feel that all that influence over the next century going to the particular flavor of country that is modern China is gonna be good for the rest of the world, though.
But, interestingly, that's not an IP-related argument, that's a political system one.
By "different principles", you presumably mean totally in the service of an autocratic, hegemonistic nation bent on the brutal oppression its own citizens and its rise to become an unchallengeable global power able to curtail the social, political and human rights of anybody, anywhere on Earth, who it deems an enemy?
These sorts of comments are what make most online discussions about China seem so out of touch.
If I told you that most people in China generally support the government and don't feel oppressed by it, how would that affect your worldview? Most people in China are primarily concerned with improving their standard of living. For hundreds of millions of people, that standard has improved more than you can probably imagine in the last 30 or so years. That's what they care about.
Sure, they get upset when they hear about governmental corruption, or when wages aren't paid, and young people even care about internet censorship (though they all have VPNs). But if you were to go to them and propose overthrowing the government, most people would be horrified. They don't want chaos. They think that would put the enormous gains in social welfare they've achieved at risk. They want a competent government that delivers economic growth, and maybe some day in the future slowly - gradually - opens up political life.
Why should it be the least bit difficult to imagine that the average Chinese citizen is not remarkably concerned about their government's curtailment of civil liberties?
Cultural differences between China and the Western world are not insignificant. The average Chinese citizenry might not feel particularly oppressed, or be receptive to western views of authoritarianism.
I've made the acquaintance of many Chinese nationals throughout my professional and academic life, and in my experience their views on such topics as authoritarianism, the role of the individual in society, the significance of individuality, egalitarianism, civil disobedience and civil liberties ( among other things ) tend to differ widely from their western counterparts. Although I'm aware it's dangerous to make assumptions, I do presume that there is some bias in my observations here. The Chinese nationals I am exposed to might be more likely to hold ( or at very least be exposed to and familiar with ) cosmopolitain, westernised views than their countrymen due to having had encountered them living in the western world.
I don't doubt that there are a very large number of people in the Chinese diaspora with widely divergent and pro-Western views, but in my experience they have been a small minority.
For fairly obvious reasons, "look the other way at the government's indiscretions in exchange for raising per-capita GDP to ~10k USD" isn't an appealing bargain for anyone in the developed world.
We're not talking about the developed world. We're talking about a country whose GDP/capita was $300 just 30 years ago. For citizens of that country, increasing GDP/capita to $10k (a factor of 30) and looking the other way on various political issues is an appealing bargain. It doesn't take that much imagination to empathize with that view, which in my experience is shared by many (I'd say most) Chinese people.
It continually amazes me how little effort people make in Western online discussions to put themselves in the shoes of someone who's seen their country go from utter poverty to relative wealth in one generation. That person might want to gain more political freedoms eventually, but they mainly don't want to destroy everything by plunging the country into chaos.
Keep in mind that the catastrophic experience of the Cultural Revolution soured many Chinese people to politics, and convinced them that stability and steady improvement of living standards are the most important things. Many people who remember those times are allergic to any sort of fanaticism.
Also keep in mind that although many things are restricted in China, the country has opened up a huge amount. In contrast to how things were not so long ago, Chinese people are now able to travel around the world, and largely live their lives without experiencing much government interference. The limits on political activism are clear, but most people just focus on improving their own situation and enjoying the modest luxuries they can now finally afford.
It’s often inconceivable for them to understand because their life experiences are just so different. Ask anyone from a poor nation about China, and while they may dislike the government, they also talk with admiration at how many people were lifted out of poverty.
that seemed to worked well for Saudi Arabia, a country which has far more human right abuses and you never see the kind of propaganda we are seeing against the Chinese.
This is shitty on so many levels, and what is the appropriate response? Should Chinese citizens have lower access in US companies? At universities? Etc. That would be a terrible outcome.
We do need some kind of clear asylum option for any Chinese citizen who gets pressured into this. But that only goes so far when the state back home can punish your family members etc.