I see this as a win-win. These U.S. companies tried to take shortcuts by outsourcing to China and they got burned. China engaged in all sorts of unethical and illegal behavior in the process and will (hopefully) get burned.

Early on, the US companies cut their costs: good for them, and likely their customers. In the long term, China developed the expertise needed to contribute to the development of advanced technologies: good for them, and for humanity's aggregate progress.

There's a lot of acrimony over how to divide the surplus, but this shouldn't overshadow the technological and economic development happening before our very eyes.

This is a recipe for tyranny, and the elites of the CCP have oppressed the good citizens of China by developing tech for suppression of speech, identification and targeting of dissent, etc. Even worse, they have begun exporting this technology to other autocracies.

I say this as somebody who has no illusions about the corrupt nature of the US government. However, the US government doesn't have nearly the power over its citizens that the CCP has. Just wanted to clarify that I'm not pretending I live in a perfect democracy. Just empathizing with the Chinese people, and wishing they had more say over their situation than they do now.

Moreover, the highest organ of the state is National People's Congress (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_People%27s_Congress), with elected representatives coming from all kinds of professions, including CCP and non-CCP members. The idea is exactly to give everyone representation in government.

https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1002438/party-people-what-kin...

for the mentioned "Communist Youth League of China" thing, 95%+ of the suitable age group are members. you need to do something really naughty to avoid becoming one.

I wonder, of the 91% who aren’t party members, what percentage are non-members because they don’t want to join the party, versus what percentage wouldn’t be allowed to join even if they wanted to?

In another country, there's was no "I don’t want to join the party" when invited, just relatives with bad reputations as far as the party was concerned so no invitation. In that case, even if you were applied, you'd be refused. Think for a second, you not wanting to join the party? Granted, China in 2020 is different from Eastern Europe in the 1960-1980's but the idea is probably the same.

However, probably 95% join to enjoy the perks.

https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/pap-casting-net-wide-...

I have no reason to believe that this was necessary for progress.

> I have no reason to believe that this was necessary for progress.

What are the reason that you believe that this is not necessary for progress?

There doesn't exist a single example of technologically advanced country that did not jump start its technological development by using protectionist policies and/or knowledge transfer. Be that knowledge transfer legal or illegal.

I guess I dont buy the argument that China and Chinese citizens would not have benefitted from legal transfer of knowledge and providing a useful service to the world exporting mineral wealth, importing food, oil, and tech, creating supply chain expertise to be cooperative partners in worldwide manufacturing booms, and paying experts to relocate (above board!) to China to teach the next generation.

This is 95% of what they are doing anyway. Its the remaining 5% of theft and espionage that is fair game for prosecution.

I guess I dont understand the apologists who think we should eschew legal action against the 5% just because "everyone does it".

I wonder how this form of representation is distributed. In a democracy, theoretically everyone is represented equally. In the CCP, how much say do the lowest members have? Are they yes men all the way up?

Depends how China uses the technology. More censorship wouldn't be that good for humanity.

I don't think social credit and proof that democracy isn't necessary for profit is good for humanity's progress.

And America eventually eclipsed the British that they were stealing from, so don't expect China to be "punished" too much.

Can anyone really develop new technology, bring it to market, have it immediately brought by a competitor with zero R&D investment, and expect to compete? Is there something that is supposed to be magical about US technology that this scenario does not apply?

While I agree copying source code is bad, but doing so and maintaining someone else's code is a monumental task.

To quote you: "who figured out how to build them first."

In fact it's a standard open source business model to make money off the expertise on the open source code base.

Yours really is another ironic comment.

The British at least tried to stop it by making it illegal to take the machines out of the country

The Americans sent the machines to China themselves to save a few bucks on labor.

Modern export restrictions are akin to making it illegal to take machines out of a country.

Even if it was somehow exactly the same thing happening, saying "you did this 200 years ago so I'm going to do the same thing now" isn't any kind of acceptable reasoning. Mauritania can't say that they are cool to have slaves because America had slaves 170 years ago. Or rather, they can say that, it just isn't very convincing.

It's just history repeating itself, delude yourself however you want that Amrrica holds some moral high ground by holding life improving knowledge to ransom.

I'm no China fan, but Inthis defending America is pathetic.

I would not guess this to be true of China nor likely to become true for a very long time at least.

Because the Americans so helpfully moved all their manufacturing to China, they had to teach manufacturing and engineering to their Chinese workers to troubleshoot problems, and are now losing that ability themselves.

Turns out when you're designing a product it useful to have practical manufacturing experience, which the Americans have lost.

It what universe is it a 'shortcut' to manufacture in another country where there are tons of people looking for jobs, wherein, by the way, said jobs will fundamentally improve the lives of millions, and in most cases, manufacturing such products in the US would not be viable anyhow.

There is no 'win win' - China is blatantly cheating, and that's basically the story.

You mean every developing nation? Just look at U.S. industrial espionage in Europe during the 18th-19th century when it was developing.

Pretending this is somehow how China specifically operates is disingenuous.

It was taught in first year of international business classes that outsourcing abroad was functionally equivalent to a transfer of technology — so you always had to factor in the time it took for your magic low-cost solution to fade out and become your competitor, essentially, but not just them: by then the whole market has access to that cost structure, so you have to keep finding new lower-cost solutions, and keep innovating on your technological part (HQ in Europe, USA, Japan, etc).

It's just international business 101, really, and has been for at least 20 years in my personal experience — but I'm pretty sure I read articles from the 1970s describing this process, because Japan was the first one to pull it off brilliantly.

People focus on China because somebody is waiving that name a lot and his voice carries a lot through the media; but this is definitely just how the world works, and has been forever — if you ask workers from the next village to come and help build stuff with your super tech, it won't take long before they replicate the process over there.

And that's called culture, knowledge, it lives and grows and moves like populations of viruses or molecules, it's been modeled for some time in anthropology at that macro-level.

To somehow equate the direct theft of IP and innovation as just 'shared culture and knowledge' completely avoids the material criminality at hand.

Huawei is charged with literally incentivizing their employees to steal knowledge and IP, and of directly copying designs, on a systematic and widespread scale. These activities are instituted far beyond just Huawei.

This is not a situation of the natural flow of industrial knowledge, it's direct theft.

You wouldn’t download a car. But I would. I don’t think it’s possible to steal information.

So did Turing.

https://www.history.com/news/industrial-revolution-spies-eur...

/s

But very good point.

I feel like military tech is another issue entirely tho. And concerns me with what I'm perceiving as an arms race with carriers and fighter jets over I presume China's ability to project power within their naval territory .

Invaded Chinese sovereign territory during the Korean war and got beat back into the current border of South Korea.

Supported a western friendly government during WW2 to take over China.

In International relations there are no rules.

"After the first two months of war, South Korean Army (ROKA) and the US forces rapidly dispatched to Korea were on the point of defeat. As a result, the ROKA and US troops retreated to a small area behind a defensive line known as the Pusan Perimeter. In September 1950, an amphibious UN counter-offensive was launched at Incheon, and cut off many KPA troops in South Korea. Those who escaped envelopment and capture were forced back north. UN forces invaded North Korea in October 1950 and moved rapidly towards the Yalu River—the border with China—but on 19 October 1950, Chinese forces of the People's Volunteer Army (PVA) crossed the Yalu and entered the war.[51] The surprise Chinese intervention triggered a retreat of UN forces back below the 38th Parallel by late December."

I can't find anything related to US/UN forces invading. But this is most likely a western view of the war. China looks like anything but just standing idly by during the war (did not realize that China was deeply involved in the Korean War before).

https://visitguilin.org/things-to-do/guilin-attractions/flyi...

And if you insist on applying 18th and 19th century situations to current IP theft, then logically you should also be willing to accept what the British did to America: burn the capital. Is Huawei's IP harvest worth the torching of Zhongnanhsi and the Renmin Datang?

Yes.

> I thought America was the aggressor in that war and Britain just retaliated.

It's more complicated than that. Britain tried to prohibit America from trading with France, as part of their war against Napoleon. America thought that was against international law. Britain also had a habit of seizing sailors off of American ships and forcing them into service in the Royal Navy, which the US regarded as extremely over the line. The British were also (pre-war, IIUC) arming Native Americans on the US western frontier.

Eventually, the US declared war. But I'm not sure that makes them the aggressor, at least not 100%...

I am pretty sure US did not invade Chinese territory during the Korean War. There are a few instances of US fighters straying into China but pretty sure it wouldn't count as 'invasion'.

Did you mean when the US saved China from being obliterated by nuclear weapons by the USSR in 1969? Or when the US saved China from continued genocide by the Empire of Japan by almost single-handedly defeating the Japanese military in the Pacific? Maybe you mean when the US funded the build-out of modern China through trade & commerce and not only allowed them into the WTO, but openly invited them in (we got rewarded nicely for that).

> Invaded Chinese sovereign territory during the Korean war and got beat back into the current border of South Korea.

When the US tried to save the people of North Korea - the Korean War was a UN military mission - from half a century of extreme poverty, genocide and misery that continues to this day (and with zero human rights). With China on the opposite side of that equation, supporting the outcome of genocide, dictatorship, zero human rights, extreme poverty. Meanwhile South Korea became an affluent, liberal democracy.

> Supported a western friendly government during WW2 to take over China.

When the US tried to spare China half a century of extreme poverty, genocide and misery. China could have developed much faster and with human rights, as with South Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan - and without the slaughter of tens of millions of people.

Perhaps if those Yankees could have pointed at the Brits stealing tea trees, then the Brits would have been struck with a sense of self-realization of their own hypocrisy, and let the Yanks make off with those machine designs with no hassle?

> Pretending this is somehow how China specifically operates is disingenuous.

No one is pretending this is how China specifically operates. This IS how certain entities from China operate. Especially certain SOE that have the backing of the CCP.

All the vast majority of people in the "West" know about China is whatever happens to be propagated by mainstream propagandists for current purposes. Ignorance is much more common (and hence likely) than disingenuity.

Once again the Chinese 'moral relativism' argument I think falls flat.

"Hey look, 500 years ago someone did something, so hey, it's ok"

What is 'disingenuous' is this kind of rhetoric that completely denies the material issues at hand. China (and not just Huawei) has been systematically stealing and cheating far beyond anyone else (by the way, probably anyone else in history not that it matters), and this is really just the tip of the iceberg.

These charges are well warranted, and they should be applied to any number of entities who've encroached on general principles of trade.

If China wants to play with such shenanigans, it's fine actually, it's their choice to use this strategy, but the response should be pretty forceful as well.

Plus, whataboutism.

So? It's not like the US didn't know that it was breaking British laws back then. IP protectionism is nothing new, it is is fair to make comparisons to 18th/19th century events.

Are you saying it's okay because others did it before ? That it shouldn't be debated ?

What's the position ? What is the point of preventing people from saying China is playing the IP theft game hard at the moment ?

Yes and no - it depends entirely on whose perspective you are arguing from (upstart vs. establishment), and even that changes over time. For the US, it used to be okay, but no longer is. Also it's not "others" who did it before, but the very same nation-state that is now screaming blue murder.

> That it shouldn't be debated ?

Oh, it should absolutely be debated, but the US has no moral high ground when making its arguments. Turnabout is fair play

Well, this is the classic continuity problem: is the US from centuries ago the same US of today ?

> Oh, it should absolutely be debated, but the US has no moral high ground when making its arguments. Turnabout is fair play

I am from Europe. Anyway, I disagree. Moral stances aren't cancelled because past wrongdoings.

Yes

I'm just pointing out that every other nation seems to have gone through a phase of "cheating" to get to where they are, to the point where I can't even say with 100% certainty that it's possible to become a technological superpower without doing it.

On topic though, Most of the pot-banging from Washington is at the behest of AT&T and other US carrier/handset/chip companies who are rightly livid that Huawei made it to market with 5G before they had a chance to monopolize it.

They also “side-step” the capital and years of research required to come up with the products.

Why invest in R&D when you can invest in corporate espionage for a fraction of the cost?

And if your product is so weakly innovative that a picture of the circuity or some power point slides basically give away significant trade secrets, then your product probably sucks.

These charges sound like they're for non-innovation based trade secrets, whatever those may be.

Handset manufactures probably don't care since they're sourcing from others. Perhaps Samsung (Exynos) being the exception, but they're Korean. Apple bought Intel's 5G division.

The only chip company that I could imagine cares is Qualcomm.

This one sentence summarized everything.

The US doesn't actually have any vendor for most of this kind of equipment, the competitors here are either European or Chinese.

It’s like how the music industry kept saying that people would no longer sing and make songs, because piracy would prevent them from doing so. As if there was no money to be made, and money was the only point of singing. As if piracy ever stopped people from singing for the past 10,000 years.

Well, artists do make money from songs, by having concerts. They are selling the service and the experience of of a live performance. This was the way that it had always been done throughout human history.

Or Apple for example, they don’t make money from selling software, but they make it from selling very expensive hardware, that they force to expire after a few years.

Getting billions invested in anything won't happen without a return. If a company is limited to a short window before everyone can copy means less funding and more valueless throwaway products.

In many industries patents are an innovation blocker. Companies often spend more money fighting patents trolls than they gain form having patents. Patens are increasingly acquired for defensive purpose to defend against patent troll attacks rather than actually protecting any innovation.

I am not against intellectual property protection, but I think how things have developed in the US in particular is excessive and counterproductive.

And now, solar energy just crossed a milestone, at 4 cents per kilowatt hour, making it competitive with other energy sectors.

Everything is derivative.

Even the latest generation of CPU technology pushing faster clock rates and adding more cores. It’s still derivative of the initial idea of the transistor.

You build value by building a moat. You make your business more valuable by making it harder for others to get into, almost like a natural monopoly.

Like consumer automobiles, which require a huge investment in societal knowledge and capability. Only a few countries can mass produce cars at a commercial level. Or commercial airplanes, where only a few companies can really make a profit. Or even Tesla, by changing the paradigm, from internal combustion engines, to fully electric drivetrains.

My initial comment was only to rebut the idea that you can’t do anything without massive amounts of patents and copyrights. Which in itself, has gone too far.

So companies don’t do this, because there is no profit in it? Perhaps, that is the problem with late stage capitalism itself? Everyone wants to become a rent-seeking landlord.

What about a societal need? What about for the survival of the human race?

This is like arguing that humanity can’t muster up the ingenuity to solve something to save the human race, just because there’s no profit in it.

Necessity is the mother of all invention. If there are fewer antibiotics, then maybe this just means that it is not necessary.

Sorry folks! You’re just going to have to take your chances with the Grim Reaper! My bank account can’t be bothered to find a cure for you.

Stealing IP does have an impact on capital allocation.

Yet I don't think the solution to this problem is to abandoned both systems completely. Rather copyright period should be shortened, and patents should cover less and last for a shorter time.

Right now the system is not setup to support innovation and creation but rather to act as cash cow for big corporations.

Put heavy encryption on it. Keep it off the internet. Keep your computers air-gapped.

If you don’t do this, then sorry, this is your fault.

However, if someone else wants to compete with you, then they can just reverse engineer what you did. Any engineer competent enough can figure out the process details, by just working backwards. They don’t even need to bother looking at your source code or blueprints.

Though as used, "innovation" really means "figuring out new things to make money on", which renders your question tautological - "in a world where it's harder to invent new tricks that make money, what incentive is there to invest in inventing new things that make money?".

They are commoditizing their compliments.

Nobody is claiming _all_ ideas business finds / works on should be immediately shared freely with the world. The benefactors of a business are naturally motivated to protect their know-how. But it should be the business' responsibility to protect its secrets, not HN commenters or governments'. If an idea can't be kept secret, then government issues patents, which should be time limited and regional.

Yeah, many of these vendors do improve upon the original products quite a bit so even while initial versions can be shoddy knockoffs, later editions are often times improved compared to the original.

> Its hard not to see a lot of them as sort of a Robin Hood.

They're definitely profiting, and they're doing it partially through lower worker standards and looser laws on pollution. They are acting for profit, not to fix the flaws of Western capitalism.

You said it yourself: later editions are improved often times. Yes, some of this gain is due to lower worker standard, but I highly doubt ATT, VZ, etc. are really maximizing for worker standards, either.

Don't mean to go off topic, but general China bashing isn't productive. Lumping together all China related topics as if it was all the grand project of an evil mastermind is only good in the movies.

AT&T, like most carriers, is perfectly happy to get super cheap and gear from China, at a fraction of the price they'd pay otherwise.

In fact, carriers around the world are the one's pushing to use Huawei.

Second - the US doesn't really have any capabilities in the 5G space, for the most part. It's European companies: Erikson and Nokia that have capabilities. Cisco, Lucent etc. are not even on the radar on this issue.

Given that your position is completely at odds with the reality of the market, you'll have to provide some material evidence of your claim that the US is just up in a fuss over their lack of dominance of 5G, otherwise, they just don't seem true.

Once again, all of this narrative misleads us from the real underlying issue, which is that Huawei and others have been systematically and openly stealing property.

Issue for whom? Most people are perfectly happy with one company learning and mimicking products of another company, if they get cheaper and better versions. This is perfectly natural. If some rich guys feel like China got ahead of them too much too quickly, that's too bad - they should have protected their stuff, not teach Chinese to manufacture it.

The number of people here trying to downplay what's going on is astonishing, I can only imagine they themselves are not legit posters.

I don't know what _exactly_ has been going on with Huawei and other companies, but I understand that the publicized outrage about Huawei and other Chinese companies stealing from America isn't natural. Most people were fine with Chinese advancing and copying, since everybody benefited from cheap labor/products. Until the powerful in the West realized american economy is in bad shape, power balance in the world is shifting and it's time to do something about it. I guess shaping public opinion on China is part of that.

'State espionage' for issues of security is understandable and nobody is screaming about it.

"I understand that the publicized outrage about Huawei and other Chinese companies stealing from America isn't natural"

This is really not true. It's 100% natural to be concerned about the blatant theft of research and IP.

Literally Huawei was rewarding staffers for stuff they'd stolen.

In fact, I'd argue that it's 'unnatural' for people not to be concerned about it.

"Most people were fine with Chinese advancing and copying, since everybody benefited from cheap labor/products. "

No way - that was not 'China stealing IP' - that was China using their competitive advantage: labour, factories, supply chains to add value. This is a good thing and few were complaining other than those who lost jobs. Everyone else was winning.

"Until the powerful in the West realized american economy is in bad shape" ?

The US has the lowest unemployment in 25 years, the lowest unemployment ever for African Americans, stocks are at crazy all-time highs. While nobody will ever say it's rosy, and historical growth is a little low, the US is overall doing just fine.

This is all a distraction: China and Huawei stealing IP and other elements and it's blatantly illegal and a serious transgression of international norms of trade.

Why would any company in the world even allow Huawei staff anywhere near their workers or offices, knowing that they're literally trying to steal whatever they can? The consequences of this are real and will factor into how nations contemplate trading with China.

Hell as late as 1850 the US straight up didn't recognize copyright of non US citizens. I forget exactly when that changed.

> They didn't stop to consider that by teaching China how to build their products they were creating a new low-cost competitor.

This is pretty obvious and highly desirable. I think if all other countries adopt this chinese model they will be more competitive and earn more without engaging in wars and American companies will be forced to be lot more competitive.

Note that China is already making pretty big moves in other areas of Tech. Tiktok happens to be incredibly popular and I would expect DoJ to make more delinquent claims about Tiktok soon.

Going out to plunder foreign countries for cheap labour and materials and then complaining when they begin to 'return the favour' so to speak, is just being woefully ignorant.

1) The 'rules' are agreed upon and mutual.

2) Providing 100's of millions of people with jobs is not 'plunder' it's a win for both sides.

"is just being woefully ignorant" - your comment.

Perhaps a bit of an over generalization. Some were interested in licensing technology to Huawei as was the case with Akhan.

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190204005211/en/AKH...

This case was especially alarming considering the dual-purpose potential of the IP.

Paying an American company—and such a subsidiary shell company, despite being purely a legal fiction, is still an American company—for its services, no matter who owns it, should not result in China being taught how to build your tech; and it's not the responsibility of other American corporations to ensure it is. If such bad things happen, that's the fault of the American government for allowing the business relationship between the foreign company and its American subsidiary to exist, in light of clear treaties (WIPO, for one) that require the American government to embargo trade with countries that don't comply with them.

By analogy: it's not your web browser's responsibility to protect its memory from other processes snooping on it. That's the OS's job. If another process can read your process's memory, it was a failure on the OS's part. The process shouldn't be expected to be spending resources securing its memory; it should be expected only to pay its dues to the OS (in e.g. context switches) such that this gets handled for it.

Or, after the fact, when the state realizes what is happening, they can dissolve the subsidiary's business license—just like with the DMCA, where the state can require local DNS resolvers to not resolve the domains of foreign companies found to be breaking local laws.

There's two ways this can end:

1. China becomes the global #1, we all get social credit scores, etc

2. Something is done to stop the ascendancy of China

Our losses far exceed the companies' short-term gains.

So I’m not sure what they have to complain about.

But that doesn’t diminish my criticism for China and their culpability in egregious acts. Our greatest sin is ever working with any authoritarian country but their sin is they fundamentally deny what it means to be a human being.