Comment by reeedom | Hacker News Reader

Comment by reeedom | Hacker News Reader

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Actually this is not even close to nationalization.

The article's title is misleading even by the standard's of the article, which goes on to call it, "quasi-nationalization".

But even that is misreading the situation.

The objective is not "control" of the tech sector as the article pretends, it is just greater collaboration. So the state and tech companies can both benefit.

The state doesn't want the burden of taking control. Plus they don't want to interfere and slow things down. They want to learn from tech to better their own ogranizations and also to teach tech how they can benefit from working with the state more closely.

It's about greater integration, not control. And since China is so successful at organizing and governing more than 1 billion people already, the more they work with cutting edge tech, the better things will get.

You can say they are making a police state, but at least they can maintain law and order, and are willing to keep thinking long-term and keep innovating even in government. The government wants to support its nation's tech companies. If Chinese tech companies can become the best / most valuable in the world, it will be more advancement toward the great rejuvenation of the Chinese people that China is pursuing.

In the drive to find any negative spin to put on Chinese progress, commentators frequently miss important points, and mischaracterize / misread significant developments. Finding fault is easier, and perhaps more satisfying for someone who is really desperate to feel good about themselves without other reasons to, but seeing what's really going on is more useful.

You claim:

> The objective is not "control" of the tech sector as the article pretends, it is just greater collaboration.

From the article:

> This quasi-nationalization applies to China's startup scene, too. One recent report found that 60 percent of Chinese unicorns have either direct or indirect investment from the BATs. China's venture-capital sector is dominated not by traditional tech dealmakers but by the state: There are more than 1,000 government-owned VC firms in China, controlling more than $750 billion.

So the Chinese government buys stakes in most Chinese startups, through its wholly-owned VCs and other vehicles.

These stakes give the Chinese government control over these startups.

You further claim:

> You can say they are making a police state, but at least they can maintain law and order, and are willing to keep thinking long-term and keep innovating even in government.

Which frankly sounds like PRC propaganda.

> These stakes give the Chinese government control over these startups.

Does it? Any more than it already has, what with China being communist and all.

I don't see why the general ideas /u/reeedom discusses can't be true, and can't turn out to in fact be a perfectly workable way to successfully run an economy. This isn't to say it's not risky and scary, with so much power in the state, all it takes is one tyrant to come along and screw everything up, but this is something altogether different than believing it is impossible to govern a society successfully in this form, for a very long period of time.

> but this is something altogether different than believing it is impossible to govern a society successfully in this form, for a very long period of time.

The West seems to have forgotten its own political history, which was based on the divine right of kings far longer than the current populist democratic consensus, which only has a 100-year history.

As for China——well, it's had something like 2500+ years of cycling between Imperial dynasties. China (along with India) was the world's pre-eminent economic power for the majority of that period.

The hubris of the West is that anything it does necessarily represents a permanent form of progress, rather than a single swing of the pendulum. That's not to say that societies that are more rooted in common law and popular representation aren't desirable, but blithely assuming that the 'end of history' has arrived is a bit silly.

Yes, comrade, you are so very right! It is much more useful for us to see the truth of how great China and it's future are! Truly there is no need to worry, the Party will take care of all!

For what it’s worth you can “maintain law and order” without having to have a dictatorial state in place. Not living under a dictatorship also comes with the added benefit of being free to read and speak whatever you want to, which I (and other people like me) regard as a fundamental human right.

Yes this is HN so expect relentless and ignorant anti-China sentiment. Just ignore it.

What's happening in China is extraordinarily interesting. Nationalization is not the goal. The government has invested enormously in tech. And it's not just a matter of money, the government has rebuilt whole cities in order to house the growing number of tech workers. (What's happening in San Francisco would never happen in China.)

It's a level of government investment not seen since the US gave it's military-industrial complex a blank check in the 50s and the 60s. And this is exactly what China is trying to copy: just like those massive US investments led to world changing innovations like Silicon Valley and the internet itself, China is going its own investments will produce similarly huge innovations around AI and much else. The goal here is not to produce a few unicorns here and there or to have a Chinese version on FANG but to produce another transistor or Internet. This is what's necessary to produce whole new paradigms and whole new markets and will ultimately generate the real lasting wealth and power that the Chinese think they need to "take care of everybody."

The interesting thing is that this money isn't being tunneled through the military. China is handing money straight to the technologists.

It'll be interesting to see if it pays off. The biggest problem in Chinese tech is not the enormous stream of government money but that it is still very insular. What China is missing that the US had in its hey day was very open borders that allowed the best and the brightest scientists and entrepreneurs from all over the world to come and put all that money to good use. The danger here is not simply that Chinese tech will fail to penetrate other markets but that it will fail to even really innovate due to lack of global input.

Enjoy your promotion in China.

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