I wish Western countries had import bans on goods manufactured by Chinese companies that did that.
i swear it's like the collective west just infinite-loops through the stages of grief when it comes to china even existing.
and to those of you who think "well we have to do something about it" -- yeah, the west has been "doing something" about it for hundreds of years. various tactics, strategies, wars, colonialism, both pro- and anti- whatever regime is in power. none of it works long term.
Chinese cultural identity, centered around Han dominance and collectivism, has been a unifying force for quite some time. HK was a major exception because of British influence, but I have a hard time seeing the rest of the country willingly breaking up rather than just slowly forcing through change.
Low-end semiconductor manufacturing is one of the last essential things the world imports from China, but much of this is already moving to Vietnam. Medium to high-end semiconductor manufacturing largely takes place in Japan, Taiwan, and the United States - all of which are allied together and will respect export restrictions. We will see Germany (another ally) step in once their fabrication facilities are complete and operational, maybe by 2026.
Calling their wide-scale demographic collapse as merely “challenges” is disingenuous. This is a looming complete and total catastrophe that will spark a humanitarian crisis, the likes of which the world has not seen before. Their short-sighted one child policy they had into place from 1979 to 2015 has robbed them of more than half of their 30-40 year olds, people at their prime working age, just as their parents are entering retirement. The legal obligation of children to take care of their parents in their old age had put additional burden on the single child of each parental union. These adult children are putting off having a family of their own due to this. This cycle continues.
And this is just the stuff we know about. We likely won’t even know how many people died of COVID-19, what are the figures of major events that we don’t even know about? Disinformation campaigns stamp out people speaking ill China, but when all this comes to a head, it will seem sudden but will the crescendo of compounding events, falling onto the next like dominos.
2023 PRC isn't capturing $8 per iphone 3g in assembly anymore. She captured $100 / 25% BOM since iPhoneX. Current trend of PRC+1 reshoring (derisking) is moving low end industries / labour to cheaper labour regions while PRC moves up intermediate goods and value chains. Hence why PRC exports to Mexico increase proportional to Mexico exports to the US. Mexico is finishing PRC intermediate goods to evade tariff. What we have seen is PRC becoming more and more indispensable and integrated throughout the global value chain.
Actual low end semi production is expanding massively in PRC. Medium end (12nm+) expansion is going to be mostly in PRC, because it's capturing market share in worlds biggest semi market that western fabs will increasingly lose due to export controls. What you're seeing is west strategic expansion of fabs that will lead to bloc overcapacity. Most of those fabs will only be viable via state subsidy. This isn't even going into capital goods / machinery that RoW are increasingly dependent on the PRC to try to re/industrialize at all. It's not what PRC makes but how much of everything that she makes that positions PRC to be indispensable trade partner for at least decades.
Repeating the demographic collapse narrative from Zeihan tier analysis is disingenuous. It's a manageable challenge / transition because PRC demographers aren't retarded, this is one area where they actually had a long term plan and are mostly meeting expectations. There's a reason PRC society has ~90% (87 urban / 96 rural) home ownership and some of the highest household savings rate. Old cohorts who saw QoL expand hundreds of times, simply do not have expectation of massive state welfare program, or increasingly being taken care of by kids. The entire dependency ratio / confucius obligation is orientalist projection that overlooks the fact that in aging countries like JP, old people just kind of rot and die unceremoniously. That’s where cultural expectations are currently trending, elderly don’t want to be filial drag on the next gen and are going to die quietly in their house with their nest egg. And what happens when they die? Up to 8 household wealth transfers to a couple who have increased consumption and family planning options. Will some families get fucked, of course, but you know which cohort will see large intergeneration wealth transfer dividend, the educated/skilled ones whose pushing PRC up the value chain.
Meanwhile PRC family planning prevented like 200m-300m excess births, when west is meming about PRC youth unemployment, which at 20% still means 80% of a very large number of skilled workers are being integrated into PRC economy. Much more than US integrates via immigration. It’s very difficult to make 6-8m new jobs for youth, especially high skilled every year. Nevermind double that. See PRC still has 600M farmers + low skilled workers stuck in the informal economy. They’re productivity drags. Reality is avoided adding another 200m-300m mouths that system wasn't scaled to deal with. Current TFR lower than planners want, but right now PRC is where roughly demographers were aiming and planning for.
PRC is also food self-sufficient in caloric terms. Agri imports mostly bulk animal feed and luxury items that don't undermine absolute food security. Not that it matters since she's shifting away from western agri to BR/RU/global south. And really this entire obsession with PRC food imports is dog whistle for PRC food insecurity, in which case, the US has exactly as much food and energy security as PRC because any disruption of PRC energy SLOC is going to be met with disruption of CONUS energy infra. Fortress America is over. PRC can starve US as much as she can starve PRC.
The entire idea that the PRC is unknowable is stupid. Incredible amounts of info on PRC is available via one of the largest western diaspora in the world. The problem is people choose to double down on the dumbest PRC collapse narratives from analysts with piss poor track records or outdated info that’s no longer relevant because US gov literally spending 100s of millions to seed disinfor about PRC while useful idiots wonder why PRC is not collapsing due to XYZ stupid reasons.
I took an upper-level course from a China expert in 1989. At the time, a big question was exactly how long China's government could maintain national unity unity in the face of the many contradictory forces pulling at it. Turns out the answer was: longer than a lot of Westerners thought.
They're not quite communist but they don't protect individual property rights to the same degree that we do. If we stole their designs they'd probably just shrug, but we'd still have to contend with our own laws and domestic competitors and international trade agreements with other Western nations, while they just continue on their merry way, growing and growing while securing logistics and supply routes from a bunch of small countries and mines.
At the end of the day, their system can more efficiently organize national production around some shared goal. Ours allows more independent experimentation and a faster pace of innovation. But once they have their minds set on something, collectively, I don't think our market would be able to keep pace unless we keep being able to technologically leapfrog them. But that can only last for so long, especially as our education continues to weaken...
That sounds like propaganda. Oligopolies are historically hilariously inefficient, and China's brain drain hardly seems like it portends well for them:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-brain-drain-threatens-it...
https://web.archive.org/web/20170225132236/http://www.nytime...
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/china-s-millio...
That's why US/west copying PRC industrial policies, because PRC industrial policy is initially "inefficient", and then they become absurdly efficient, saturating domestic market at first, then export massive surplus to globe, and eats away at western shares. Analysis of PRC moving up value chain and global export share on PV, telecom, android smartphone, display panel shows reduction in operating margin of leading companies by 50-90%. Hence US is trying to stop PRC semi. And I'm guessing west on PRC EV soon. Because the efficiency of PRC indy policy is also measured in making western companies less productive.
As for PRC brain drain, Chinese academics/talent in west floating back to PRC in record numbers. Those are good portends vs statistically insignificant % of millionaires trying to hide their money abroad. Which entire ignores the fact that PRC generates so much domestic talent now that west can't meaningfuly braindrain even if they wanted to. PRC is in process of milking the greatest high skill demographic divident in recorded history. It took PRC 20 years to build up ~15M STEM talent to catch up in west in most sectors except extremely difficult integration projects like aviation and semi. She's generating that much talent every 3-4 years now.
China's massive digital divide is shameful, as is its neglect and brutalization of ethnic minorities. China's sexism is notorious the world over, as is its noxious pollution and the utter disregard its companies have for environmental laws. There's little for the West to copy, and even less the West should copy.
I'm not entirely convinced by this, of course. But it's important to note that headwinds are not brick walls. And even the inevitable next collapse of the Russian Empire will probably not happen for years, if ever. There are levels of survival that the elites who run sovereign states are willing to accept.
[0] On the timescales of normal family planning, the difference between home ownership and a ninety-nine year lease with no rent payment is immaterial.
China has its problems and its risks, to be sure, but it would be dangerous to underestimate their hybrid model of quasi-capitalism, quasi-communism. What is freedom limiting at the small scale (why would I innovate when the government owns me) can become absolute beasts at sufficient economies of scale. When they decide something is of national priority, they can top down refocus much of the national productivity (both money and people) towards it and then spin up a multinational logistics chain behind it across Asia and Africa. Then they scale up and dominate. It's happened to many industries already and just saying "China bad" isn't going to stop it.
It's like a game of Factorio played well, except with a billion workers and a lot of money that can be moved around at will. We see similar effects in the West during controlled wartime economies (when production can be directed to a particular cause), or government subsidies and money injections (like during covid, or with the infrastructure bill). It's also how our military is run, for example, and most of our big companies. Top down control economies have certain efficiencies (and inefficiencies) of scale that a bunch of small businesses don't have. But when it comes to commodity manufacturing, it's hard to beat their hybrid approach.
https://theworld.org/stories/2014-02-18/us-complains-other-n...
Of course, the obvious solution would be to not respect international patent priority from China, but that is tantamount to fighting a trade war, which has significant strategic implications. You can't sue the US to force them to de-normalize trade relations with China for the same reason why you can't sue the US to force the army to nuke China.
I stopped working on OSHW because it can't protect hardware. It has no legal teeth. Better to just give it away (public domain or whatever).
It does, it specifically protects chip die masks and by implication and case law protects PCB layouts and circuit diagrams.
China can do whatever the f..k they want. The problem is our own governments: they could and should have sanctioned the country to oblivion... had they not foolishly tied their entire nations to the success of China.
We all allowed, hell we welcomed Chinese products in our markets because our population got a decade or two of cheap Chinese made crap products which helped to hide wage stagnation (and rich CEOs getting ever richer). Then we got addicted, a ton of jobs got shipped off to China, here in Germany they stripped an entire mining facility and sent it overseas [1], and far-right parties fed themselves fat on the resulting economic devastation. And then we went even more foolish and sat idly by as our car companies completely ignored the domestic market and only focused on growing in China... with the predictable fuck-up that China learned how to make cheap EVs and now our industry is at the curb of collapsing against cheap Chinese cars and no competent competition bar Tesla.
[1] https://www.nd-aktuell.de/artikel/205443.vom-ruhrgebiet-nach...
20 years ago it "could" be justified by selling the idea that American or European labor is light years away in terms of quality compared to Chinese or any developing country's labor.
And that may still be true, but the gap has shrunk in size by a lot. To the point that corporations may not want to pay 120k or 200k a year for something that can be made in a developing country for 20k a year and with ~80% of the quality.
The thing is, the comparatively high labor cost in Western countries is so high because we can actually have a life on it and feed a bunch of uber rich people with our labor and taxes (because guess what, people like Warren Buffett and his ilk pay a ridiculously low tax rate [1] compared to legitimately employed working class people). In contrast, China, India, Thailand or Vietnam can offer very cheap labor because for the people there even utter pittances and absolutely ridiculous exploitation are better than the life these people had before.
While I do support the efforts China and India both have committed to lifting literally a billion of people out of utter poverty, it has at the same time brought disastrous consequences on our own society. I'd be happier with globalization if we had forced importers of any good to make sure that wages, labor conditions and environmental impact were on par with domestic regulations because the status quo is exploitation on all levels to benefit Western oligarchs (and imagine how the life of Chinese factory workers would be with Western wages!).
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/08/bezos-musk-buffett-bloomberg...
The objectively fair solution would be for the developed world - particularly the countries that have benefitted from slavery, colonization, theft and other crimes the most - to pay for actual restoration and to meaningfully and sustainably help these countries.
Instead, the status quo is that Western countries exploit cheap labor and lax environmental laws to the detriment of the source countries in the usual rat race to the bottom - say China bans something toxic to the environment, there's always a poorer country willing to let that happen just to get an inflow of hard dollars/euros. On top of that we dump our second-hand clothes or surplus food especially in Africa under the disguise of "aids", which has completely wrecked local industries.
The EU is beginning to do at least something with the supply chain monitoring regulations, but the opposition to them is fierce - it's a pure show of how profitable exploitation (or its ignorance) still is.
If first world labor is living an extravagant lifestyle how much would you suggest dialing it down to? Should it be totally equivalent to the state of Chinese or Indian labor today?
The accusations of unsustainable lifestyle and over valued contributions can easily be hurled in the other direction. From a standpoint of pure self interest this should be concerning - by definition numbers are on labors side.
I am a very libertarian person and I acknowledge that the low prices of my daily living are in part due to the exploitation of others. This is unacceptable morally and I change my spending habits to compensate, despite it not being in my best financial interests.
The gap in price between Chinese labor and first world labor has also decreased.
If labor is too expansive, then nobody gets the goods. This is a feature of capitalism, not a bug.
Now that scaffold has no real foundation, save for a handful of gigantic corporations holding on as tightly as they can, and punishing anyone who dares contradict them.
China has been depending on industrial espionage in order to keep up for decades now.
Punish them for their malfeasance.
The way that the west works is far from ideal, but limited term intellectual property protection provides a significant portion of the motivation for the creation of novel products.
Without those protections, and the products that depend on them, there won't even be designs for China to steal.
Of course, there is a very valid argument that we don't actually need a lot of that shit, regardless of who's making it.
Oh, that's been done plenty. They don't care. Now what...escalate?
That's been done, too. Hell, that was probably Trump's biggest campaign promise. Obviously it didn't work.
So how far should we keep escalating? Do we declare war over intellectual property? Fuck that. It's time to wake up.
We are the ones being called out on our bullshit. China called our bluff, and we are left holding the cards. There is no sense in waiting around: we should fold ASAP.
I refuse that and actually would go to war over it.
Because without that, you just reward war-like tactics in business, thievery, deception, etc, until nobody wants to create ideas anymore, and thinkers are selected out of the gene pool until we're a hive of drones sucking the toes of our queen bee influencers.
Where can I see the names of the people who designed my phone? Is it printed on the box? Or those who wrote a service I use like GitHub?
Inventors have been dispossessed of their authorship for the last hundred years.
> thinkers are selected out of the gene pool
Right now having contributed to openbsd makes a guy the sexiest dude in every party, right?
Honorable, idealistic, yeah. I deeply value the people that work on OpenBSD. I wish they had fewer struggles in life. They should start by valuing their time and effort more, like lawyers, who charge 10s of thousands of dollars to read PDFs.
It is absolutely morally debased and corrupt to advocate violence to resolve intellectual pursuits. I want to exist in a society that shares ideas since they are not scarce and we can argue over the actually scarce things we care about.
It's just personal preference, like all politics. We create the world we want to live in. Yes, I once idealized your society, but after years in the corporate world I learned there will always be plenty of snakes out there. I'd prefer not structuring society in a way that rewards them even more.
this is known as impotent range.
Either way, your comment really added nothing at all to the discussion - no counter points, just a poorly considered insult.
So here's the thing - China is a self deluding autocracy that has repeatedly purged competency from its institutions and government (the extent to which this is true far exceeds that of any western nation), I don't need to exert any control in order for that titanic economic system to fail - I just don't.
The entire system is built on lies told to superiors - exaggerated, repackaged and passed on to the next level, all the way up to Xi.
Everything they build depends on stolen technology, but they lack the tacit domain knowledge required to correctly implement what they steal; Cha bu duo simply is not good enough.
Not only can they never compete on merits, they can't even reach a baseline of competency.
That system will fail all by itself, and the more nationalistic they become (and that's a feedback loop) the faster that western support will erode, and the faster the collapse.
The ground falling away like a Ponzi.
What need have I for... range?
just like the US federal reserve, the US federal debt, the US stock market... it's all going to collapse any day now.
give me a break. both the US and china doomsayers are perennially WRONG. they're all fueled by the same stupid handful of youtube channels that spout the same shit over and over and over again.
Come on, China was pretty irrelevant to the outside world until the US started pumping money into it in the 70s. That's exactly what the West should stop doing.
literally everyone has tried to take over china, from the mongols to the british to the japanese. i bet even the romans had some half-assed plan they were working on.
China was an Empire because they tried(and succeeded) taking over neighbours by force, including Mongols and Japanese.
To portray Chinese like saints or victims is not knowing about the thousands of years you talk about.
Uhm... You clearly have no idea about China.
First, it was _itself_ conquered by Mongols ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_conquest_of_China ). Who were then simply assimilated.
Second, China has never conquered Japan.
Overall, China has been remarkably non-aggressive.
They're no saints. Anybody can see that. But by my estimation 90% of the discourse around China in the west is just pure consent manufacturing.
OKAY BUDDY.
you are literally just making shit up.
The bigger problem seems to be that the i3 printers are table stakes now, while Prusa engine seized up and forward progress went to pot. The Prusa XL is not vaporware but it's close and preposterously expensive, while the MK4 released without input shaping in their extremely customized port of Marlin. Those "Chinese knockoffs" are shipping Klipper-based printers, with SBCs, where you get that for free.
And then you have the Bambu printers, which are OSS-compliant where required (their slicer is a derivative of PrusaSlicer) but built an in-house OS (not actually that shocking, and almost certainly not pirated; 3D printers just aren't that hard) that has given them a printer that's conservatively 18-24 months ahead of everybody except maybe Prusa with the XL. I really don't like Bambu's patent saber-rattling, that sucks, but they just shipped a better mousetrap, too.
Open-source 3D printing is on the ropes because it isn't making stuff as good as the closed-source stuff. Not because of cheap cloners. I didn't want to buy a Bambu printer so held out for the Creality K1 (and they are being bad citizens, they haven't released their Klipper source) and it's not good, I waited for Prusa to sell me on a Prusa XL but to get one I'll be waiting until 2024 at the earliest and spending $500 on that "preassembled" option to boot, and...Bambu just sold me a P1S with an AMS for $1000 flat. C'mon.
This is the crux of the problem. Where Prusa is openly sharing, you have companies that are benefiting from that without reciprocating. Part of the tax you're paying when buying an i3MK4 is the continued investment in the open source/hardware contributions of the company, not just the end product. Shelling out $1k for a Bambu is your prerogative, but it does cast a vote with your wallet for a company that is more predatory than collaborative.
So what, exactly, is your point here? Bambu is compliant and is reciprocating; OrcaSlicer derives from Bambu Studio and works great. Their printer firmware is not as far as anyone can prove derived from GPL software (and I tend to think that by now somebody would've found it), so they keep that.
Let's get to the brassest of tacks: one can talk about "contributing" until one's blue (or orange) in the face, but Prusa can't or won't ship a functioning, assembled-before-you-get-it multimaterial CoreXY for less than $2,500. Bambu came out the gate with one, not reliant on Marlin or Klipper, and it actually works.
I genuinely can't believe I'm having to point this out, because I think Bambu does suck as a company and sniffing about patents well-and-truly sucks, but they remain, and are the only, such bastard-coated bastards that can actually ship something usable at a price somebody can afford. $2500 for a Prusa XL would be more expensive than my CNC. I actually do need multimaterial, not for models but for tooling, so continuing to limp along with my collection of Klipper printers isn't reasonable. So what's your actual solution for a quality-outcomes tool at a reasonable price?
That being said, everyone I've interacted with at/from DJI have been fellow tech-nerds of the highest order, and I mean that as a compliment. I've enjoyed talking to people who are excited about building things.
Why is this China factor even a problem for open-source? The open source community have always been threaten by closed-source copycat. Even western companies also do that without much repercussion. The real threat is, as the article pointed out, the trend of `open source` companies going closed source because of profit motive.
I am more annoyed that Prusa is doing a bad job of shepherding open source and shipping bad products than that Bambu has a closed-source better one.
Bambu lab on the other hand came up with something pretty good, very well integrated that has basically taken 0 from the prusa designs. So it's not really closed source profiting off of public or open source work. Maybe for the slicer, but that's it.
Just compare the abysmal performance and quality of prusa's MMU that still really sucks almost half a decade after they originally released the product. Even if they are super expensive too! While on the bambu printers... It just works.
In other words, is this a fear of something that might happen or something that is currently ongoing?
Or, to put it another way, is the simply rationalization for decision to close source made for other reasons or an actual reason?
If a Chinese company simply makes and sells a version of an open source design are they doing anything wrong? This is allowed by the licensing terms.
I have only marginal sympathy for Prusa when they aren't shipping things people want to buy.
The problem is rather the customers who buy China stuff instead of products from western companies.
"The upstart nation was a den of intellectual piracy. One of its top officials urged his countrymen to steal and copy foreign machinery. Across the ocean, a leading industrial power tried in vain to guard its trade secrets from the brash young rival.
In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the rogue nation was the United States."
It's a very, very sad story. It sounds like open-source hardware could have thrived if it weren't for China subsidizing local companies and enforcing bad IP claims for its domestic companies (which was really IP stolen from other countries but filed for patent first in China by Chinese companies).