We are not talking about stealing here. They are hiring senior people with the know-how, both engineers and executives, by offering them huge compensation packages. They are hiring from both Taiwan and South Korea btw.

Huawei does the same in mobile. Their know-how comes from hiring good people. They have R&D centers outside China where they employ people they hired from Qualcomm, Nokia, Ericsson and others to design their new 5G SoC and mobile technologies.

> They have R&D centers outside China where they employ people they hired from Qualcomm, Nokia, Ericsson and others to design their new 5G SoC and mobile technologies.

Then it is time to kick Huawei out. Dissolve or nationalize their local entities, ban banks from dealing with their money.

China does not allow foreign companies to operate in China, so why should Western countries do the same? It's either a level field for all - or no field at all. The Western world has appeased China for too long in the hope China would democratize itself. This has evidently failed, it's time to pull the plug.

Apple operates in China. ARM operates in China. Tesla operates in China.

Even Facebook operates in China. Their social network is banned (for refusing to comply to censorship laws), but the company is still allowed to do business. Facebook has quite a few advertisement deals in China.

Heck, walk down the street in China for 10 minutes and you'll see more McDonalds and StarBucks than you've ever seen in your life.

Since 2014 legal reforms, many foreign companies are no longer required to form joint ventures in China, and so own 100% of the shares (and technology).

Saying that "China doesn't allow foreign companies" is... unnuanced, to say the least.

>Heck, walk down the street in China for 10 minutes and you'll see more McDonalds and StarBucks than you've ever seen in your life.

Also KFC, I've been to China and Asia many times and I'm still surprised at just how many KFCs there are.

Yea, KFC has been extremely successful in Asia, even though their US home market has been shrinking.

Where they serve absolutely delicious local meals that you cannot get here!

ccp propaganda. Facts are Tesla was the first company allowed fully private ownership of ip in china. No other company has had that before.

Lucent and GM had WFOE arrangements (certain plants) in the mid 90s.

Artcile from 1997. https://hbr.org/1997/03/entering-china-an-unconventional-app...

I did say that the reforms a pretty recent, didn’t I?

Not to mention the NBA, too.

Nobody plays by the "level playing field" rules. The US likes to pretend it does, but as soon as there's an industry where it's not competitive (like agriculture for example), that goes out of the window. And IMO for good reason. Unfettered markets work in some cases. But in many cases they have lead to "winner takes all scenarios" where a single player (or 2/3 players) become dominant and the market is no longer competitive. We need a system that works against this over the long term, and some level of protectionism seems like a decent way of doing that.

Name one.

You are just repeating protectionist propaganda to justify overcharging customers to benefit protected corporations.

Well I was thinking of agriculture subsidies, which are substantial in both the US and the EU. The US also puts significant subsidies into the Oil&Gas and Aerospace industries.

Right. When the 2010 Haiti earthquake hit, it wasn't a natural disaster that killed. It was an infrastructure disaster that killed. For a country that went from self-sufficiency in food to having its domestic agriculture wiped out from dumping from subsidized US agricultural products.

Then there are the more overt attacks like on Alstom, Toshiba etc.

Agriculture isn't the best example. Agriculture provides for people's livehood. It's the actual industry that national security depends upon. Which is why so many countries subsidize agriculture, it's not a economical decision at all in any regard.

Technology isn't the best example. Technology provides for people's livelihood. It's the actual industry that national security depends upon. Which is why so many countries subsidize technology. It's not an economical decision at all in any regard.

You literally die without food in at max 21 days. Suppose food supply chain got cut because of war or pandemic, you have to be able to supply food locally.

This is not a pure economical issue because it's not about efficiency, it's about have some redundancy so when things get hard, one won't just be starved to death. Afterall, it takes time for the market to adjust itself and without food, there won't be time.

Without control over your technology, you will literally die immediately of an invasion. Besides, it's easier to import food than nuclear bombs.

If we are talking about End of the World level conflict, then yeah no preparation would mean anything, but that's not the case for most of the conflicts, if any since WWII, aren't they?

And TBH, following that reasoning, that there is nuclear bomb, ground force should be cut to save cost and tax money too.

Yes, if you are a country that only wants to protect their homeland, cutting your ground forces as a result of nuclear bombs and ICBMs is perfectly rational.

Say that you are a citizen of a country endlessly threatened by invasion from a foreign power. Is it more important for you that your country has the nuclear bomb, which means your likelihood of being turned into glass falls from 50% to 0.1%, or that your country has greater control of agricultural production, meaning that in case of disaster you won't have to pay fortunes for imported food and cut your consumption? I'd say in this case the nuclear bomb is more important.

Also, we didn't see End of the World level nuclear destruction of any country because all the great world power developed the Nuke. The US Army very seriously considered using nukes in the Korean War as well as had plans for the invasion of the USSR (See : Operation Unthinkable and Operation Dropshot). The only reason these plans weren't carried out is because the USSR and China sacrificed very heavily in order to develop their technology and achieve technological parity with the West.

Tell that to the Lebanese. After the Beirut explosion took out the nation's largest grain depot (half of it got blasted to shreds by the explosion, the other half was contaminated) and the entire infrastructure of their dominant port, they're squarely fucked.

If a country loses access to state of the art tech, they might as well become a third world country within 5-10 years.

Agricultural subsidies are the clearest form of theft from consumers there is. There is zero chance of monopolies in an unrestrained agricultural, oil, or gas markets.

Your better example is Aerospace, but there is no proven reason we need those colossal companies, and a big part of the merger drive that created them us to monopolize access to government contracts. ULA is a perfect example of that.

I think what you miss here is that in addition to efficiency, resilience is important in agricultural (and arguably other industries). Depending on foreign supply is all well and good until there's a shortage. Then you're screwed.

Arguably China have just found this with semiconductors. It was all well and good depending on TSMC, until the US blocked their supply.

Microsoft has R&D centers in China where they employ graduates of China's top universities to work on cutting-edge research. https://www.msra.cn/

Kicking Huawei out because they fund research in Western countries would be just as stupid as China kicking out Microsoft because they fund research in China.

Pardon my ignorance, but has MSR China produced something good? I have seen a lot of interesting stuff come out of MSR but mostly it has been from the US.

Also, are top talent joining MSR China? From what I know, many Chinese companies beat MS in compensation easily and these new companies will have the lure of quick growth as well.

ResNet https://arxiv.org/abs/1512.03385 came out of Microsoft Research Asia. I think that's a pretty good thing they produced.

Evidently they managed to hire the top talent behind that work at some point. Looks like Kaiming He works at Facebook now, though. http://kaiminghe.com/

Ah, interesting to know that. Thanks.

Research institutions generally have lower salary then industry. That doesn't mean it's not a good place to go.

1. That's a bold assertion you make about the CCP. I don't like them, but they have proven quite resourceful.

2. You say this as someone knowledgeable with other high tech industries? Here in IT we tend to pat ourselves on the back quite a bit, how do you know you're not falling into the same trap?

> but they have proven quite resourceful

when it involves oppressing people...truly generative processes? nah...it gets done when they start utilizing markets but otherwise it's fundamentally doomed

> when they start utilizing markets

I don't think you're familiar with the modern Chinese economy...

Not to mention markets don’t really affect how TMSC or Samsung are organized internally.

that's what I'm saying: chinese prosperity is largely happening when they use markets, but the popular idea that there's some unstoppable, ultra-powerful chimera of totalitarianism and capitalism - I think there's a huge burden of proof that it isn't fundamentally still organizational folly like much of totalitarian states/communism

Even the USSR under Lenin utilized markets in some cases. Communist ideology isn't fundamentally opposed to markets.

The Chinese economy is hardly communist at this stage, it's a mix of socialism and state sponsored capitalism.

Agreed.

Of course they will catch up. It's impossible to maintain a lead forever in a field that is slowing down as a whole. It will take some time, but they will definitely get there at some point. There is no magic sauce that makes TSMC or Samsung better at this than China can ever be. So better plan for that.

Also, China gets things done incredibly quickly when state motivation aligns with technology. See: three gorges dam, national fiber optic network, mobile coverage, HK-Zhuhai-Macau bridge, 100% contactless mobile payment and instant messaging penetration, high speed trains, electric vehicles, etc. All of these examples are from the last 20 years.

That's just about the only advantage a planned economy has: reaction speed. All it takes is one decision to mobilize massive resources.

I would restate that as a more general advantage, possibly only when operating at China's immense scale: relative cognitive freedom in creating solutions due to a broader pool of options. Because the sum total of available regulatory, fiscal, environmental and other resources necessarily exceed that of private actors, courses of action that would be untenable in other systems or require difficult and expensive public-private-partnerships are certainly feasible. This is why, for example, the 'super app' did not emerge in a western economy and China is one of the only countries improving its forest cover.

People said similar things about Japan before they took the lead in DRAM development back in the 1980s.

And then South Korea took the lead in the 1990s (SK Hynix and Samsung).

Imagine it's 1946 and someone would have made a similar statement regarding nuclear bombs and Russia...

Where there are resources problems will get solved.

There was a period when many scientists and engineers were convicted on some bogus anti-soviet charges and jailed. Then Stalin realized that many of those were world class people with unique talents and knowledge and they were allowed to work in their area of expertise but in jail like but somewhat softer conditions. In 1953 after Stalin's death the practice was eliminated (took few years).

"I strongly doubt anyone will ever catch up with TSMC or Samsung at this point."

What timeline are we talking about here? 1 year? 5 years? Forever?

Yes, of course people will "Catch up" to Samsung and TSMC, both of which are relatively recent leaders in this field. There are are loads of foundries around the world, all of which have virtually equivalent level of complexity, but it is small (literally small) advances that give one foundry or another a competitive lead. And those small advances are certainly stealable, quite aside from independent orthogonal advances.

They probably don't need to "catch up" in the traditional sense.

By that, I mean that if someone was starting from nothing and trying to make the same stuff and enter the same market as them, then yes, they will have a massive uphill battle and would likely fail without legislative help. If they did something different but in the same space then that's another matter.

Remember, a short while ago it was all about x86 where Intel had the distinct advantage. AMD cut some of that down and is now gaining rapidly on them.

Nowadays it's all about ARM but in 10 years time it may be something else and if you get in early enough and your predictions are correct then who knows...

One thing I am convinced of is that if Microsoft embrace ARM wholeheartedly (I mean port everything across and let x86 go to hell) then Intel (and AMD for that matter) are in trouble.

What? We're talking about fabs. AMD didn't catch up, they dropped out. TSMC caught up.

The goal is not exclusively to conquer the consumer chip industry.

Ability to manufacture strategic chip industry is also very important.

Remember the sanctioned big Chinese facial recognition companies? They do not really need 5nm chip for their product, I think 14nm can also work (albeit performance penalty).

Also, PLA, if they ever need to manufacture AI chips for whatever reason, they need to manufacture them in mainland for supply chain security.

At one point Intel was way ahead of everyone else. Saying "anyone will ever catch up with TSMC or Samsung" is a very broad think to say.

> you would realize there is nothing as complex as that system anywhere else in the discipline of engineering.

I've heard people say the same about the ITER reactor being assembled.

It depends on how you want to compare them. You could look at it from a funding perspective. The total cost of ITER through 2013-2025 is expected to be 20-65 billion.

Samsung just revealed they are investing 50 billion to build an EUV foundry. This is on top of all the knowledge and assets they already have. It does not include the R&D to get to the point where you can just buy EUV machines, etchers, atomic layer deposition, etc.

As far as I am aware, ITER has no aspects of construction or operation which require manufacturing tolerances measured in nanometers.

Except for their computers :)

> open collaboration & innovation sessions that the CCP seems fundamentally incompatible with.

The Soviet Union had managed to surpass the US in constructing nuclear bombs in a relatively short matter of time (I'd say that by the 1960s they were already in front), even though they were not as "open" and they didn't have as many Nobel laureates working for them as the US had.

That's not accurate [1]. In the 60s and for most of the 70s, the Soviets were far behind in bombs and delivery systems. Many sources say that the US vastly overestimated the size of the Soviet arsenal at that time - and hence was very cautious. Some sources say that the US did have a fairly decent estimate, but they overstated the threat to get more funding.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_nuclear_weapons_s...

I was judging things based on the Tsar Bomb, mostly.

Once you know how to chain thermonuclear stages, you can obtain arbitrarily high yield without further advances in technology. The Americans pioneered this technique, they just didn't bother building as big of a chain.

At a certain point bigger yields are less desirable than more, smaller yields. Picture an enormous spherical fireball, then picture chopping it up and using the "useless" slices that were at high/negative altitude to instead cover more ground. Once it became clear that they were past the regime of yield scaling, the Americans moved on to developing smaller warheads that could do just that: pepper targets and deliver more devastation per pound than a corresponding single warhead of high yield.

Vanity metrics are always more important to the second place player, and that's what Tsar Bomba was.

From the outside this sounds like rationalisation.

That's why the USSR did it. Tsar Bomba is still serving its purpose 60 years later!

The USSR's followup actions give it away, though: they stopped pursuing higher yields, even though there was no theoretical or engineering limit prohibiting them, and instead chased the USA down the path of miniaturization. SLBMs and MIRVs were the future and everyone knew it.

Everyone stopped pursuing them because the massive falloff of effectiveness at higher yields. The explosions got large enough that the difference in air pressure at higher altitudes meant that more and more of the energy released was going straight up rather than directed at the ground.

I'd call that an engineering limit.

It's an engineering limit to effectiveness but not an engineering limit to higher yield. I think we agree and are just nailing down the terminology here.

how do you think the missive Tsar bomb was going to be delivered? It would need a bomber which is a vastly inferior method of delivery compared to ICBMs.

The Tupolev Tu-95 is a very nice piece of machinery [1]. Speaking of ICBMs, I also think the Soviets were better at this compared to the Americans, their military had a dedicated Army branch for it, unlike the US.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-95

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Missile_Forces

Both the US and Russia still use bombers despite having ICBMS and SLBMs. Bombers are an important piece of the nuclear triad.

The framing that I’ve typically seen (from a Western, US-based background) is that the Tsar Bomba was the quintessence of the USSR’s overcompensation for their relatively inferior delivery systems. Bluntly, it doesn’t matter if you’re a mile off target if you create a nuclear fireball a couple miles wide.

The “overcompensation” framing may be true, it may be a bias I’ve picked up from my society, or both or even downright false. In any case, the Soviets established a way to build and demonstrate a weapon that established the threat they wanted. And maybe the CCP will do similar, and get what they want from a path that we in the West will turn up our noses at—but that will still be effective.

It wasn't that long ago (10 or 15 years?) that Intel seemed to have an insurmountable lead on process upgrades.

Anybody can fall behind if they get complacent or have some bad luck.

I was having this same thought the other day when looking at Herman Miller chairs and scratching my head.

How can a CPU, with physics that are more complex than most can even barely grasp, cost 1/3 of what an Embody retails for?

Because photolithography is a wonderfully scalable manufacturing process!

Manufacturing volume

TSMC’s advantage is an order of magnitude more engineers of high quality handling yield issues, the machines used to make cutting edge transistors is the same.

With China doing this, TSMC’s advantage will decrease.

I doubt anyone will ever catch up to Intel, look they are already producing 14nm!

> requires the kind of long term, open collaboration & innovation sessions that the CCP seems fundamentally incompatible with

I always see this but it just seems like such a reach - Nazi Germany didn't seem to do too badly on the innovation front, did it?