> they are just keen to buy/cheat/steal

Nationalistic swipes are not ok on HN. Please don't post like this again.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: looks like we've had to warn you about this before. We ban accounts that do this repeatedly, so can you please take the spirit of this site to heart more? Obviously we can't have people slurring other countries or peoples and have this forum remain civil and substantive.

Are you seriously considering banning someone when pointing out the obvious? This is clear censorship and not in the spirit of this forum to ban someone when they point out known transgressions or very clearly known problems.

China's IP theft isn't some conspiracy theory: https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-deploys-new-tactics-to-curb...

To say that China steals is not a fallacy or an exaggeration in the slightest.

There's a huge difference between "they are just keen to buy/cheat/steal" and, say, "intellectual property theft continues to be an issue in China". It amounts to the difference between a nationalistic flamewar and a discussion that at least has a chance of remaining thoughtful. If you can't see the difference, you might find some of these links helpful for getting a better idea of the spirit of this site:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html

http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html

http://www.paulgraham.com/trolls.html

You don't have to read all that, but we do need you not to post any more comments like you did upthread. Blowing up inflammatory territory does no one any good.

I think the cheat/steal method of describing China is becoming outdated. Cheat/steal is a viable technique to quickly catch up if you don't mind being a bad actor in a game theory setting. Then you have to surpass.

In AI they seem to be at the late stages of stealing. The top two films in the global box office last weekend were both Chinese (The Wandering Earth, $172m and Crazy Alien, $77m). Chinese blockbusters seem to just flip American tropes (The Chinese coming to save the day Rambo style).

>The only issue I can see from ownership is if they start to censor the platform.

I doubt they'll do any overt censoring (eg. "no talking about what happened at Tiananmen Square in 1989), but I wouldn't be surprised if they do subtle manipulation like silently deemphasizing anti-China content, or emphasizing anti-westnern content (eg. infighting, failure of western democracy). The latter probably would probably even good for the site (in terms of engagement) as outrage drive cilcks.

The Chinese government forced USA airlines to remove mention of the sovereign nation of Taiwan.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-44948599

They also forced GAP to remove a proper map of China that accurately displays its sovereign borders off a sweater, and then, heinously, forced it to release a map that incorrectly displays Taiwan as a portion of Chinese territory through GAP marketing channels. (Incidentally, if anybody has the correct map in male's M, I'm buying, and willing to pay dearly)

https://www.dallasnews.com/business/business/2018/05/15/gap-...

China will go to overt lengths to push their lies on the world.

A great display of how one can rewrite history with enough power.

They’ve been plenty overt when someone talks about Taiwan...

Tiananmen event is really terrible

I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but China is the only country outside the US with an independent tech ecosystem. To the point where they're buying pieces of Reddit, even, I heard somewhere.

Tencent, qq, weibo, Baidu, Alibaba, taobao, and I'm sick of typing but the list goes on.

It started with protectionism but pride goes before the fall as they say.