A crucial difference is the US spying is for state use, whereas in China the state is deeply intermixed with industry. State industrial espionage is used for commercial competitive advantage. This is a huge structural and cultural difference.
For instance it’s hard to believe China bootstrapped BYD and GWM among others from green fields. They’ve been exfiltrating and transferring automotive technology for decades. Their products are often near duplicates of other brands - such as the fiat case:
These aren’t cheap knock offs, they have a relatively high quality and with stolen R&D it’s easy to produce at a low cost - the cost can’t be explained by labor alone, as automakers outside China have access to similarly low cost labor.
Note, I don’t think China is incapable of making their own R&D at the same quality as anywhere else; they can. But they don’t when they don’t have to.
The next few decades will see a huge realignment as the decades of theft and forced transfer will begin to seriously pay off.
It's not just China. For example, there's been several accusations of the French state assisting in industrial espionage against the US, and France has acknowledged some of these cases as true
“When governments permit counterfeiting or copying of American products, it is stealing our future, and it is no longer free trade.” - US President Donald Trump, commenting on China.
Actually, the above quote is not Trump and not on China. It's Ronald Raegan on Japan in 1985.
When a new economic threat rises, the US will use the same playbook- demonizing in media, accusations, turn the public against said country, ban products, increase tariffs from said country, turn to allies, etc.
Except China has required technology transfer and has been actively committing state sponsored industrial espionage for decades. Surely this isn’t news?
I’m down with China as a competitor, but we have a strong division between state and industry and China does not. I don’t think a unipolar world is a good idea, and I’m glad for a resurgent China. But it’s absurd to put on blinders and believe forced technology transfer and industrial espionage isn’t a cornerstone of their success.
At several megacorps seeking access to Chinese markets we were forced to transfer crucial trade secrets in exchange for access. We did our best to render it as useless as possible, but it was still very key stuff. Over two decades the Chinese government erected barrier after barrier even after complying to the point that the market access failed and competitors based on our technology dominated the domestic Chinese economy.
I see your parallel comments where you vigorously decry these statements as some sort of nationalism and anti Chinese sentiment. This isn’t that - this is simple historical fact, and I have had first hand experience with it and know the game being played from personal experience. I assumed this was all common knowledge given how much press it’s gotten over the last twenty years, which makes me wonder why you’re grinding this contrarian axe so hard?
Edit: I would note that this is fundamentally different from counterfeiting. This is capturing R&D directly at the top end of technology and processes through extortion and outright theft. I don’t actually blame China or Chinese people, it’s just a cultural difference in what’s acceptable and a belief that the state and industry are separate, which China doesn’t agree with. But the lesson to be learned is China doesn’t play by our rules, and we need to adapt to the situation better.
> actively committing state sponsored industrial espionage for decades
I'm sure you are right but I feel this is actually beneficial.
The interests that have captured China are likely different from the ones in the US, and much different from the inferior oligarchs that have captured my home country (Canada). I see their national interests having an unintended consequence; the creation of markets of scale for products that are not politically viable here.
We all know the stories of oil companies buying the rights to battery technologies and sitting on them. There is even a Wikipedia article about it [1] that I'll link to below. China is never going to have enough oil to export, and as such, Oil will always be a cost center for them.
Copyright maximalism and intellectual "property" is strangling all of us, and I don't want it to put us in an early grave as a race. I'm grateful that China is "stealing" this "property" and turning it into batteries, solar panels and other products that I can buy, and that it iterates on them rapidly - rather than being put in a box.
I don't get it. Literally everyone is doing this concept. Everbody is snatching every last drop of data that isn't nailed down. Nobody asks for permission.
ChatGPT is the most recent example.
"Study hard and keep the rewards" is basically a dead concept.
The separation between state and corporation is a red herring. It's trivially easy for Bill Gates to reveal secrets to Bill Clinton behind closed doors.
Corporations are absolutely abmysal at keeping secrets. They are open-by-default and cannot legally stay in business with the level of security required to keep knowledge from leaking.
That is sort of the definition of the informal red herring fallacy whataboutism. It doesn’t mean the US hasn’t. It means it’s not related to China being wrong to use military power to bully countries. An awful lot of folks here agree it’s wrong for anyone to bully anyone in any context, especially nations bullying the people of another country. We are all, after all, people. But people citing a fallacy when a fallacy is used is fully appropriate, even if you really wish it wasn’t a fallacy.
I don't have a problem with the US bullying others. My problem is that people here on HN and in the west in general, demonizing China for doing the exact same thing when the US has done worse. They think it's ok to boycott Chinese products, but they won't boycott product from their own country. They will say that the Chinese government is evil, but is completely ok with the government of their own. They will say China has no right to bully Vietnam, but they will vote in politicians who advocate for war with just about anyone.
It's hypocritical. Don't demonize China unless you're willing to demonize yourself.
Hell, don't demonize China unless you read their point of view too. I'm sure you're only getting one POV.
> My problem is that people here on HN and in the west in general, demonizing China for doing the exact same thing when the US has done worse
Er, no. Far more ink is spilled on the US being bad, or Western countries in general being bad, by people in the West. What you're saying is not true for HN, nor for the West in general.
Because China's government is the CCP, which is the sole political party of China, which is headed by a dictator, whose endgame is to ultimately have all power concentrated into his hands, forever.
We're not demonizing Chinese people, Chinese culture, Chinese land or Chinese industry, but the forceful alignment of those things to serve a single entity over any other concern.
The West, no matter how bad it can be, doesn't have _that_ problem. Elites come and go, grassroots revolutions have happened and will keep happening without major bloodshed.
> through incentives and pressure on consortium members.
No doubt this would be "bribes and threats" if it were done by a geopolitical opponent.
Second, posts critical of the US tend to get many less votes or flagged quickly, with people calling it whataboutism in posts about China or Russia. That leaves no space to properly discuss those things.
Finally, it’s good to have things in a realist context. It’s idealist thinking if we get upset when a geopolitical enemy does something which is commonplace in out own country and that if allies.
And you use the “whataboutism” as your main argument for whenever someone isn’t anti-china. The world runs on reciprocity. Whataboutism is built into assumptions. It’s called fairness and it’s an intrinsic human trait.
Fallacious thinking is in fact an intrinsic human trait, but to equate fallacious thinking with fairness is a little creepy.
I’d also note while we are on the topic of anti-China, and you’ve lobbed anti Chinese out there - I’ll wager almost (almost!) everyone here, myself especially, isn’t anti anything about China or Chinese people. But that doesn’t mean we are pro the communist party’s policies - and frankly so are very few Chinese. The fact that forced tech transfer and industrial espionage is embarrassing to the Chinese government and sullies all success is no one’s fault but the Chinese governments, and that’s where it begins and ends.
I’m no defender of the US government either, but that’s not even the topic here. I’ll be happy to engage on that topic in the relevant threads. That’s, after all, fair.
What you’re doing is completely denouncing BYD’s accomplishments by saying they must have stolen the technology to get to where they are today.
That’s the exact argument you will use to convince yourself of any of China’s successes stories. They can’t possibly innovate because they’re Chinese and not western. Therefore, they must have stolen the tech. This is how Raegan convinced the public in 1980s.
China has enormous success stories that don’t depend on pilfering or extorting, and a rich history for thousands of years. In fact I think the Chinese governments behavior in this respect is below the divinity of Chinese people and Chinese culture. This plays out in the recent domestic behavior of the Chinese government towards its own people. I even said I welcome a multipolar world with a resurgent china.
But if you think forced technology transfer and industrial espionage by the Chinese state to benefit the Chinese states industrial interests - which have become pervasive in China under Xi with most major Chinese ventures being forced to take state funding and control - you are deluded, or are trying to delude. I say this with all the force of someone who has experienced the fact of what’s happening directly - you can throw racism or nationalism around all you want, but there’s a cold reality that exists independent of such concepts and I - and many others in technology - have experienced it first hand. It’s calculating, cold, and very much real - and race and nationalism have very little to do with it. It’s political and it’s absolutely real.
Btw, you can’t sit in a BYD and not see the technology transfers and the espionage spoils. China could be successful on its own merit, but not with the Chinese communist party controlling industry and civil society. I just hope some day Chinese people will be free to be that competitor on equal footing with the world. What happens in China today is a disgrace to Chinese everywhere, who are some of the most brilliant and hard working people out there. Until that day I welcome them to work with me here, and we can make great things together.
The way I see it, this problem will solve itself. People do not enjoy having to copy others. Historically, countries have done it to get to a comfortable state, then it stops once they're comfortable. The biggest example being Japan.
You cannot watch older Japanese animations and not see the heavy inspiration from Disney, but the style used in their shows today is far evolved. You equally cannot sit in a Toyota and not see the western influence. Travelling to America was literally part of their game plan to improve their own technology though at first it was for investigating automatic looms [1]. I would be surprised if Toyota did not reverse engineer a western vehicle. Today however, I imagine you need no convincing that Toyota is simply the superior product compared to its western counterparts and can stand on its own two feet.
Your counter argument might be that it's different with China because the government is assisting in this. To that, I would point out the Meiji Restoration in Japan. Similarly, their government encouraged young scholars to learn abroad in order to pull Japan forwards technologically. Not only that, the government hired foreigners known as "O-yatoi Gaikokujin" and " the main goal in hiring the O-yatois was to obtain transfers of technology and advice on systems and cultural ways." [2].
That last one sounds a lot like a government-funded technology transfer to me. It's definitely not happening today in Japan, but at one point the government deemed it necessary.
I agree on the point about BYD. We would definitely see the result of a technology transfer in a BYD car. But how much of that can just be attributed to hiring talent from foreign companies? There are articles about Japanese engineers being headhunted by Chinese automakers [3]. This is common in developing countries. A lot of top positions/ executives are senior engineers coming in from abroad getting a significant title bump and pay increase (the pay increase is even greater if you consider the cost of living in the host country).
If you consider headhunting talent to not be competing on equal footing with the world, then that's a completely separate discussion. But I wish to provide more peace of mind for you that this problem is indeed transitory. To do that, I will direct your attention towards the rhetoric used against minorities.
People say that minorities are criminals, but we know that's not true. It's poor people who are desperate enough to perform those acts who will turn to crime. Minorities get over-represented due to society being biased against them causing them to be in more dire financial situations. Nobody takes pride in being a criminal. The moment they are financially stable, they stop - 2nd generation immigrants have extremely low rates of criminal activity.
Similarly, China is still a poor country. We might not think of it because we think of Shanghai and Shenzhen, but their GPD per capita is lower than Russia's, and their HDI is lower than Ukraine's. As China develops, they will find more effective ways to compete that don't tarnish their image, just like other countries have done on their path of development.
My goal is not to debunk you. There are definitely some instances of shady IP dealings in China, but there are some instances that are clean as you have also pointed out. What I do want to get across though is that these are the growing pains of a developing country that successful countries also went through in the past.
People probably had this conversation about Japan when Japan was developing. They do not have them today. So too will we no longer have these conversations about China in the future.
Huawei is a giant. In phones they had bigger marketshare than Apple. Their chips are nearly on par with Qualcomm. It is naive to believe they are banned for security concerns.
For instance it’s hard to believe China bootstrapped BYD and GWM among others from green fields. They’ve been exfiltrating and transferring automotive technology for decades. Their products are often near duplicates of other brands - such as the fiat case:
https://www.carsguide.com.au/car-news/spot-the-difference-ca...
These aren’t cheap knock offs, they have a relatively high quality and with stolen R&D it’s easy to produce at a low cost - the cost can’t be explained by labor alone, as automakers outside China have access to similarly low cost labor.
Note, I don’t think China is incapable of making their own R&D at the same quality as anywhere else; they can. But they don’t when they don’t have to.
The next few decades will see a huge realignment as the decades of theft and forced transfer will begin to seriously pay off.