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Comment by paganel | Hacker News Reader

And it was a very stupid thing to do, and I say that as an European. If the Chinese Government and its citizens want to subsidize clean energy production in Europe by selling us subsidized solar panels why should we say no? A similar question was posed by Jean-Baptiste Say about 200 years ago end since then no protectionist politicians were able to come up with a valid answer, they just go "by their instinct" or "it's best for our home industry that we behave this way", both answers that don't stand on any solid rational grounds.

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> If the Chinese Government and its citizens want to subsidize clean energy production in Europe by selling us subsidized solar panels why should we say no?

Because European know-how and industry, and thus competitive advantage, gets lost. I don't want a dictatorship like China having the massive amount of leverage it already has. China has brought European solar, steel and electronics production to its knees by a combination of slavery-backed price dumping, industrial espionage, knowledge-transfer extortions (aka "to do business in China you have to find a local partner and work with them") and outright buying of the shells of doomed European companies.

Especially the stranglehold China has over the West when it comes to electronics will bite the West more sooner than later.

By the way, China is doing a similar thing to Africa: with all the money the West gave to them for cheap electronics they're building (and thus taking operational control) rail and road infrastructure.

From Chinese perspective it's the perfect ultra long game... the rest of the world is in for a massive shock once they run afoul of Chinese goals wherever and whenever that might be.

Not to be inflammatory, but are you stating that building rail and road infrastructure is morally worse than European actions on that continent (as recently as our own lifetimes)? Just seeking clarification.

> but are you stating that building rail and road infrastructure is morally worse than European actions on that continent

No, and that's why I said "long game". For now, of course, African countries selling themselves out to China will profit - but the countries are, basically, binding their future on the goodwill of China. Just imagine the countries decide one day that they're done with cheap low quality China crap, that they want to incentivize local production or that they want to show solidarity with Tibet or Taiwan... say goodbye to your traffic infrastructure, that will be the Chinese response.

The West made Africa totally dependent on mitumba (cheap second-hand clothing that all but destroyed local textile industry) and other foreign aid (after all, Africa is a nice dumping ground for overproduced European milk and other food - do "something good" and keep European prices high at the same time), and the Chinese are doing the same with their money. Colonialism at its finest.

> say goodbye to your traffic infrastructure

I'm not sure how you're proposing that would happen. Like ripping up roads? Or like, not renewing a contract for future repairs? And would that be different from the abandoned projects from NGO's?

> the Chinese are doing the same with their money. Colonialism at its finest.

I think there's some projection here... Although I grew up in the U.S., I've visited relatives frequently enough to come at this with a different perspective.

In Chinese culture (and perhaps some other cultures as well), there is a notion that nations that have economic ties with one another are highly disincentivized from going to war with each other. And also, that nations with hard infrastructure, such as roads, a stable power grid, and soft infrastructure, including high literacy rates, low rates of religion, and dual-income households being the norm, have the ability to grow their GDP more effectively, and less likely to give into religious fundamentalism, civil wars, and general unrest.

In American culture, I've heard it said that no two countries that both have a McDonalds would go to war with one another. So I don't think this is really so different.

> cheap low quality China crap

um... I'm not sure whether to call this conscious bias or unconscious bias. A lot of high quality products come out of China these days, and the last time I visited (in 2017), Shanghai seemed way more high tech than the SF Bay Area. One area in which there is a lack of talent is in brand marketing, and I'll explain what the problem is with two scenarios:

1) U.S. brand wants to get a particular product made. Gets quotes from X suppliers. Chooses the lowest cost estimate, which happens to cut corners, reinforcing the low image of Chinese exports.

2) Chinese manufacturers release their own products into a Chinese market. Manufacturers compete against each other for consumer preference, and high quality products are rewarded. That's where the good stuff is. Problem is, these companies don't tend to have a lot of in-house marketing talent for making the right kind of ads for the West, despite having lots of technical / manufacturing / design expertise.

> I'm not sure how you're proposing that would happen.

One way, for example: Have only Chinese nationals operate the railway equipment or the dispatching. In case of conflict, forbid the personnel from working, order the personnel back home - or, in severe cases, to activate a hidden killswitch on the IT equipment (which can be done even from remote). A railroad network without a working dispatch is useless, dito for airports. In today's world where nothing operates without massive amounts of computers the unspoken threat alone is enough to coerce any country into doing what China wants.

> In Chinese culture (and perhaps some other cultures as well), there is a notion that nations that have economic ties with one another are highly disincentivized from going to war with each other. And also, that nations with hard infrastructure, such as roads, a stable power grid, and soft infrastructure, including high literacy rates, low rates of religion, and dual-income households being the norm, have the ability to grow their GDP more effectively, and less likely to give into religious fundamentalism, civil wars, and general unrest.

Indeed, indeed - and exactly this is what makes me afraid. Who is going to oppose China when they try to annex Taiwan for good? I'd be surprised if the US actually follows through on their decades of pledges to Taiwan. Or when they will turn into that massive monster of a surveillance state enabled by modern technology? When everyone has ties to China, China has leverage. (Just as the US has, yes, but at least the US are a democracy and bound to human rights at their core.)

> um... I'm not sure whether to call this conscious bias or unconscious bias.

Combination of both, I'd say - the "conscious bias" backed by countless stories of faked high-quality Western products ending up even in legitimate supply chains and sometimes endangering lives.

> backed by countless stories of faked high-quality Western products ending up even in legitimate supply chains

One privilege of starting a company in the U.S. is that people don't automatically assume your business practices are similar to Uber's, or Exxon, or pharma bro. And conversations about your products aren't derailed by 10-things-I-hate-about-(country) (e.g., was there another drone strike on a wedding?).

The problem is that whenever a Chinese company does good things, is completely reasonable, makes great progress, which is 99.99% of the time, it is either: 1) not covered because it's not news, or 2) somehow spun into OMG-China-is-ahead fear-mongering.

Why does this happen? China-bashing gets you eyeballs. As an acquaintance of mine has mentioned to me, she gets requests from Western journalists of OMG-Asian-guys-are-sexist article quotes all the time. When she wants to tell them the truth, they no longer want to get her quote. There's an army of those writers and they're all full time. It's their job to tell you how nice it is here and terrible over there even when they're not giving you an accurate impression.

China is recovering from generations of being colonized, being doped-up-by-drug-cartels-with-a-navy, acts of genocide by a colonizing neighbor, forced to cough up money (like Haiti did) due to losing wars, violent revolution, and is only in my lifetime lifting almost 1.3B out of extreme poverty. My own grandfather was sold into indentured servitude to support his parents' opium habit. I have a grandmother who ran away from home because her (single) mom could only afford education for one of her two children, so she prioritized the boy. I am glad that China is no longer like that, that it's a legit modern (or getting there) nation, and no amount of spin on how that's 'bad' for the West for China to 'catch up' can change that.

Nefarious plans to control the world? China has a historical tendency to under-invest in the military and over-invest in consumer production / quality-of-life infrastructure. This is literally the opposite of the colonizing powers. It is the crucial tendency towards commerce over war that has caused the past couple centuries of turmoil.

Relevant question: which countries, during their Industrial Revolution, had universal suffrage? What were their international politics like during their Industrial Revolution? How does China measure up to that?

> One way, for example: Have only Chinese nationals operate the railway equipment or the dispatching... In today's world where nothing operates without massive amounts of computers...

I've only met a few Chinese entrepreneurs who work in Africa, so my insight here will be limited in scope, but that's better than entirely theoretical.

These are just ordinary people -- I mean, they're adventurous enough to venture out and build a company, find product-market-fit, whether that's selling cell phones in South Africa or lingerie in Egypt. The notion that they are secretly at the beck-and-call of a shadowy government organization as opposed to entrepreneurs eking out a profit doesn't ring true. As much as that's not a researched scientific opinion, I can say that your assessment bears no resemblance to the folks I've gotten to know.

They have more in common with the Chinese diaspora, the engineers, the doctors and lawyers, the parental generation of restauranteurs and laundry shop owners, than some shadowy conspiracy to hold some country's infrastructure hostage for military reasons.

The Africa that they describe to me is so different from the one I see in movies like Black Hawk Down. They talk about every shortcoming as a potential business opportunity, not as a derogatory way to judge the country or continent. They talk about the impact of gender roles being an inhibitory force on GDP growth, and how frustrating / unexpected it is for women to quit a manufacturing job when they get married. Like, that kind of employee turnover really impacts the economics of production, and what the hell does marriage / children have to do with quitting one's job anyway? Don't they need to be breadwinners?

> Indeed, indeed - and exactly this is what makes me afraid. ... when they try to annex Taiwan for good

Are you aware that amongst Taiwan's trading partners, the largest one by far is Mainland China? It's also funny that every Western article that criticizes Foxconn (b/c China-bashing) doesn't mention that it's actually a Taiwanese company. Not that Foxconn-bashing is at all rational...

> One privilege of starting a company in the U.S. is that people don't automatically assume your business practices are similar to Uber's, or Exxon, or pharma bro.

Well anything with "disruption" in the name certainly will be assumed to follow business practices similar to Uber - they (and AirBnB) poisoned the well pretty much with their blatant disregard for any kind of law. For the other part, I fully agree with you - and hell there should be way more discussions on drone strikes.

> China is recovering from generations of being colonized, being doped-up-by-drug-cartels-with-a-navy, acts of genocide by a colonizing neighbor, forced to cough up money (like Haiti did) due to losing wars, violent revolution, and is only in my lifetime lifting almost 1.3B out of extreme poverty. My own grandfather was sold into indentured servitude to support his parents' opium habit. I have a grandmother who ran away from home because her (single) mom could only afford education for one of her two children, so she prioritized the boy. I am glad that China is no longer like that, that it's a legit modern (or getting there) nation, and no amount of spin on how that's 'bad' for the West for China to 'catch up' can change that.

I agree that China has done massive leaps in economic terms - but not so on the human-rights part... and that's where much of the progress that has been made actually comes from: debts in terms of ecology disasters and debts in human rights (as shown e.g. by the suicide sprees routinely making headlines. Suicide prevention nets, I haven't ever heard about something like that in any other country).

> China has a historical tendency to under-invest in the military and over-invest in consumer production / quality-of-life infrastructure. This is literally the opposite of the colonizing powers.

Because today you don't need a massive army to be a formidable power. China has learned there from the Soviet Union which was dragged into bankruptcy by trying to keep up with the US in military terms... today all you need is economic power. China (and to a certain extent the Arabian countries) have total leverage over the West, given the dependence of Western civilizations on cheap oil and China as a production house.

> Relevant question: which countries, during their Industrial Revolution, had universal suffrage? What were their international politics like during their Industrial Revolution?

None for #1, and "warmongering" is a bit of an understatement for #2.

> How does China measure up to that?

On this part: very well indeed. What angers me is that the Chinese leadership does not have a tiny dent of respect for human rights (e.g. Tibet, but especially their desire to be a state in total control over their citizenry). Today's China simply has different focus on where they want to ignore any progress in human rights.

> debts in terms of ecology disasters

They may have made missteps along the way, but if Flint, Michigan or Puerto Rico were in China, they'd both be fixed by now... Though hypotheticals are unhelpful, I know.

> suicide sprees routinely making headlines. Suicide prevention nets, I haven't ever heard about something like that in any other country

Bashing Foxconn (a Taiwanese company) is often done in the same vein as China-bashing. Even before the suicide nets, the suicide rates were lower than the population at large. It's just that when you have a large enough population working at the same company, any number seems like a lot. Even without accounting for the suicide clustering effect, the rate was lower than similar-age populations at universities. After the nets went up, the suicide rate became almost negligible, similar to the prevention methods installed at the Golden Gate bridge.

> Because today you don't need a massive army to be a formidable power.

Until someone fear-mongers you into a plausible enemy. And then you're screwed. Prepare for another century of bloodletting? (Shudders.)

> How does China measure up to that? > ignore any progress in human rights

A lot of the progress simply doesn't get reported in the West because it's not China-bashing enough to get eyeballs. There is this popular perception that freedom of assembly doesn't exist or that all protests get cracked down on. In recent memory, there was a strike of factory workers in Beijing and Shanghai, and it resulted in better working conditions and a higher minimum wage. There's lots of progress, but we just don't hear about it here. You should have seen the state of human rights during my grandparents' time when the KMT (the political party that self-exiled to Taiwan and was the official China internationally for a generation) was in charge.

I'm glad we live in modern times and not those times.

There's a good documentary about Chinese infrastructure work in Africa called "Empire of Dust" which can be found on YouTube and similar sites.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2148945/

It appears to be popular with racists (at least going by the YouTube comments) because the middle-class Chinese engineers are needing to cope with very poor tribal workers who are not quite on board with the concept of the 9-5 culture but I felt the film itself humanised all sides and I was particularly touched by one scene where the engineers try to decide what to do about a worker who has damaged some bit of equipment that he wouldn't be able to afford to repair.

Generally made me feel good about the future of humanity.

No sub-saharan African country except South Africa has really stood on its own feet and been long term successful by modern standards. It's hard to say they would have done any better without colonialism or in the future without Chinese infrastructure. These might all be good things, despite the dependence they create.

> Because European know-how and industry, and thus competitive advantage, gets lost

1. This assumes that the way we build solar panels (or whatever) never changes. We lost a lot of steel-making knowledge in the early 20th century. Of course, all that "expertise" was replaced by machines, so it was mostly a loss of obsolete knowledge.

2. The solution is to pocket a fraction of the savings and keep that in your back pocket to maintain a teaching/research corps and to ramp up internal expertise when/if the subsidies stop flowing. Of course, this assumes a level of competence, self-control, and foresight that may be missing in modern legislatures.

> 1. This assumes that the way we build solar panels (or whatever) never changes.

Yeah but the Chinese basically took the European process, scaled it up and dumped the prices by using extremely low cost labor and massive state subsidies both at construction of the plants and at selling the product. There's no invention there, only the aim of totally destroying the competition. The only inventions happening are in research labs - and as there are no more notable fabs left in Europe or the US, that research will be applied in China. Our taxes basically funding our continued downfall...

> Of course, this assumes a level of competence, self-control, and foresight that may be missing in modern legislatures.

The only country which ever had this is Norway with its ultra massive oil fund. The Arabian countries are playing catch-up there with their recent investments but... well... building a fully air conditioned soccer stadium right in the midst of a hot desert isn't exactly a wise (or environment friendly) investment, much less a dozen of them. In addition, engaging in more-or-less pointless turf and proxy wars all over Arabia (and parts of Northern Africa too) are a totally unneeded drain on their resources.

> There's no invention there

A common bias amongst Westerners who have never visited China. Actually, a lot of "home-grown" innovation happens in China, but is not really covered by Western media. You don't get double digit GDP growth without research into R&D across a broad range of sectors.

The solar panels that were produced a decade ago are also not as efficient as the ones produced today, and are productized in very different ways. For instance, light-weight solar panel kits that include a battery pack and LED lighting have a very high product-market-fit for ethnic Mongolian nomads (who follow their herds) and sell like hotcakes over there. You can get another add-on kit for charging your smartphone.

> A common bias amongst Westerners who have never visited China

I meant this sentence in direct reference to what happened with solar panel productions (because scaling and dumping in an extremely short timeframe was what happened and broke the neck of European solar).

I know that China has a massive ecosystem of invention (evidenced e.g. by the "gongkai" reports by Andrew Huang), I didn't want to laugh that down - sorry if it came across that way.

Acknowledged. Thanks for the clarification.

> Chinese perspective it's the perfect ultra long game... the rest of the world is in for a massive shock

For centuries this has just been called plain capitalism. Now that China is doing the same, Europeans and Americans are in a shock? How interesting.

>Because European know-how and industry, and thus competitive advantage, gets lost.

Is your assumption here that no non-europeans (including the Chinese) have contributed to solar research?

>by a combination of slavery-backed price dumping, industrial espionage, knowledge-transfer extortions (aka "to do business in China you have to find a local partner and work with them") and outright buying of the shells of doomed European companies.

You will need to provide massive objective evidence (i.e. not 2-3 links from googling "china solar" ) before anyone believes that giant assertion. Personally, I neither want a $5000 made in USA iPhone or a $99 bottom of the barrel chiPhone, but YMMV.

> You will need to provide massive objective evidence (i.e. not 2-3 links from googling "china solar" ) before anyone believes that giant assertion.

* "slavery-backed price dumping": There have been more than enough reports on the gruesome working conditions in Chinese factories. They are so widespread and notorious, they got dedicated their own Simpsons "couch gag" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEki-IBdop8). And yes, I consider this dumping - because a company that operates to Western working conditions has no way of competition against people with 80-hour workweeks, armies of children and adhering to safety protocols.

* For industrial espionage, the same (e.g. Nortel, Dupont, Transrapid, Volkswagen/First Automotive Works, plus countless cases in the German Mittelstand - even the German Constitution Protection Bureau warns about this: https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/verfassungsschutz-china-spi...). According to a (bit dated, though) report, up to half of Mittelstand companies have reported Chinese cyber-espionage: http://www.sueddeutsche.de/wirtschaft/industriespionage-was-...

* For buying shells of doomed European companies, have a look at e.g. https://www.morgenpost.de/wirtschaft/article207409333/Chines... - companies from as humble as trash burner EEW to such household names as Krauss-Maffei and Syngenta.

Your assertion - "China has brought European solar, steel and electronics production to its knees" via X,Y,Z is a very broad assertion. Your evidence for that is merely circumstantial. You expect the reader to connect the dots with the underlying subtext of "well, what else could this mean". Sorry, but this is not a serious way to put forth such an argument. Granted, I too, realistically cant expect a PhD dissertation in a HN comment, but then again, I'm not the one putting forth that argument.

Protectionist politicians have always had an answer.

* Manufacturing them at home is better for local workers and provides a straightforward path for dispaced workers from other plant work.

* Trying to compete on even terms with what is essentially slave labor overseas drags us all down.

* There is value in economic independence, especially when you're importing from a fairweather ally. You don't want to wipe out a local industry that you might need to lean on someday.

The reasons for having tarriffs are apparently obvious to everyone except economists.

* Increased pricing is bad for local installation workers and creates additional displaced workers. Installer jobs greatly exceed manufacturing jobs.

* Innovate on automation.

* Then subsidize our industry, rather than tax imports. Taxing imports simply hurts the industry as a whole. Minnesota solar is a good case study [1]

1 http://midwestenergynews.com/2016/02/15/solar-job-growth-exp...

You literally cannot have an effective national security apparatus without massive amounts of protectionist economic policy that guarantees that the resources your armed forces depend on (and the resources those resources depend on, and so on) aren't immediately cut off when you enter a conflict. Every politician this side of Hammurabi has understood this basic fact of sovereignty and in this day and age of military mega-alliances, that kind of control becomes more important than ever.

With the way the electrical generation industry is going, it won't be long before solar panel manufacturing is critical to our national security.

Because it destroys the local industry which you will need at some point.

As simple example: the British supported the German chemicals industry prior to WWI.

At the start of WWI, the money the British spent had been turned into German chemical expertise. This lead to the development of the Haber process, poison gas, and generally making Germany a powerhouse in chemicals in the same way Britain was in mechanical manufacturing.

If a tariff had been put in place on German imports to Britain the German chemical industry would have been much smaller, with much less capability and WWI would have finished in 6 months because Germany would have run out of nitric acid for their explosives.

Are you saying it's better to keep underdeveloped countries technologically disadvantaged in case your own country worries they're becoming too powerful and so starts a war with them to keep them underdeveloped?

Another way to stop wars is to accept that somebody else is more economically productive and let the whole world benefit from that instead of trying to destroy it.

That's a very naive way of looking at the world.

Economics is only allowed a free reign so long as it meets the goals of those currently in power in a given political unit.

Try selling nuclear technology to Iran if you don't think that it applies to the US as much as to China.

Doing it strategically to prevent a nuclear war 30 years down the line is the lesser of two evils.

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