Inside a Heist of American Chip Designs, as China Bids for Tech Power

China is not fine. China is trying to balance its shadow debts (12T, 170% corporate debt to gdp), prop up stock market (lost 15% this year), prop up real estate (decline in 1st tiered cities, 25.96x House price to income ratio), and prop up yuan (4% loss this year).

Fixed it for ya. (I tease)

I'm curious where you live and wether or not you can actually, personally, witness the effects of legal immigration there. In SoCal, where I've spent the last decade+, what you're saying rings completely hollow, to me. I have seen literal tour buses of mainland Chinese folks touring new developments, inside of my own new development, in fact, as recently as this spring. If what you're saying were true, why aren't these folks getting the message? That they're touring these homes this way is a discussion for another day. But, as far as I can tell, the only morale panic happening about legal immigration to the United States is happening with American citizens.

> I think China will be fine given that it can simply shut down exports to the US if T​r​u​m​p's tariff pettiness starts to sting. Where, precisely, do you think your phones and computers are manufactured?

What does that have to do with anything?

Vietnam, which now produces more Samsung phones than China does.

"Samsung has invested $17.3 billion in eight factories and one research and development center in Vietnam, turning the country into its largest smart phone production base, the government said. ... Exports from Samsung Electronics’ factories in Vietnam totaled $54 billion last year" [1]

US trade with Vietnam has massively exploded higher over the last decade. The US now imports as much from Vietnam as it does France (an economy 12 times larger). That trend will continue.

China's low value manufacturing is too easy to replace.

The US can move its manufacturing to any number of about two dozen other low cost countries. Just as US capital and the vast US consumption machine built China (and Japan + South Korea before that), it can next build up numerous other nations. The US has no permanently fixed need for China, there's nothing they contribute that can't be manufactured elsewhere (as witnessed by the way clothing manufacturing rapidly fled China on cost, and now eg Samsung's smart phone manufacturing).

Most of what China is looking to do is copy and then compete with what the US already does, from Boeing planes to military tech to semiconductor tech to software to biotech, medtech & pharma. China is a giant clone machine, nothing has changed about that at all. Accordingly, China has nothing novel that the US doesn't already have access to elsewhere or otherwise.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-samsung-elec-vietnam/sams...

You have also entirely ignored my second point :)

Also weighing heavily on people are family and cultural conflict issues. But anecdotally I can say that the majority of Chinese students don’t want to stay in the US for a variety of reasons; and that many feel their prospects are at least as good in China as the US.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/10/05/climate/trump...

Yeah, I think US living standards are higher for now. But I can totally see China seeing parity in less than 20 years. For one thing, they have made large strides in infrastructure investment, and for another thing, they've been realizing and acting on their need to clean up their environmental act over the last few years.

At the undergrad and graduate level, perhaps, and as another poster commented, probably not for very long.

But for the school years before undergrad, I'm sorry to say, America is in a very bad way.

I don't know how it compares to China, but American public primary and secondary school is definitely not where I'd have my children receive an education

http://semiengineering.com/fpgas-becoming-more-soc-like/

In a somewhat related idea, is that of unioning the footprint of alternate parts in a PCB design so that either part could be used. I have never used any high in EDA software, but if you had end to end design, schematic, pcb layout and parts databases with high level machine-readable symbolic pin descriptions, these could be inferred automatically (unioned footprints).

Using your idea, I wonder if you could automatically have "hot standby" components in the same package?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NK-33

The GDR did.

Human welfare is always a priority that competes with 'national interests'.

One of the reasons that the United States won the race to the moon (while definitively losing the race to space and manned space flight) was because we were the first to dump exorbitant sums of money into the hot (and extremely expensive) new kid on the computing block: integrated circuits.

Before ICs, computer parts were often hand-welded, which NASA determined was too failure-prone to reliably control the lunar lander, as such a device had to be able to handle shaking, cosmic radiation, temperature shifts, extreme G-forces from liftoff, and so on. For that same reason, the Soviets were also unable to complete a reliable lunar lander before the Americans, regardless of their past successes with spaceflight.

NASA’s immense investment in integrated circuits greatly accelerated their adoption, and as a result, computers became much faster, and much cheaper, than ever before.

The history of computing goes straight through the Apollo 11 lunar lander, which does not get nearly as much credit as it deserves.

Older properties in London sometimes still had outhouses into the 1960s.

As long as the rest of the world out-innovates them they may not catch up but do not underestimate the power of over 1 billion people, especially not when a large number of them are very smart.

Have a look at China 30 years ago and China today and tell me that that authoritarian regime isn't moving forward, and relative to the rest of the world they are moving at an incredible pace.

We, the West (assuming you are in the West like I am) should count our blessings that China isn't going full-bore on a market economy and democratic system because the Chinese in such a configuration would be absolutely un-stoppable.

The USSR came from far behind and beat us to space. Authoritarian regimes may struggle to allocate food efficiently but they're fine at allocating scientists.

Werner Von Braun would disagree.

Contrast this to past academic immigration in the 40s that you refer to, where immigrants were from countries with similar sensibilities and levels of development (primarily German Jews).

I don't think that this necessarily invalidates your points, but it's worth pointing out that there are economic consequences when larger slices of the PhD candidates out there are from developing nations instead of other developed nations.

I will retort, however, that we Americans should not take our technological dominance for granted, just as a precious generation of carmakers and related industries had to learn what happens when foreign competitors (especially with government support) eat up domestic markets that companies like Ford and GM thought belonged to them forever.

I’m not suggesting that in 20 years Americans will do all their social networking on RenRen or shopping on Alibaba, but there are many, many high tech companies most people have never heard of, churning out profits and paying the taxes that support our society. The more talented, US-educated non-citizens we turn away after graduation, the harder it is for domestic high tech firms to form and hire.

And another thing to note: just because the rest of the world is getting wealthier doesn’t mean they’ll share our values. The biggest geopolitical fucky-wucky of the post-Cold War era was the assumption that Chinese people would demand more freedoms like we have in the West as their living standards approach ours.

China owns A LOT of Hollywood. How many big budget films these days criticize China or make them the bad guys? I grew up watching films that stamped “Russian” and “villain” as inseparable qualities in my impressionable, young American mind - at least until 9/11 happened and the Russians and Arabs changed jerseys.

The economic development of China has been nothing short of a miracle for the hundreds of millions of poor farmers lifted out of extreme poverty, but at what cost to us?

The boundaries of Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, etc. are "arbitrary [and] invisible" to some extent, and obviously drawn by the powerful. But "the current set of lines are arbitrary and clearly not the only possible solution" does not imply that "no lines is a better solution"; indeed, the latter has only been empirically true when there are preexisting strong and stable force(s) which perform enough of the function of explicit admission criteria to render the latter unnecessary. In real life, you find formerly-exceptional institutions which quickly and irreversibly declined to a lower level after switching to the open admissions policy that your phrasing advocates for (consider the City College of New York in the 30s-60s vs. afterward).

Instead, the most impressive results in both hiring and immigration policy have combined race/nation-blindness with a distinct lack of blindness to other criteria which really do matter. You cannot do the latter (and perhaps more importantly, properly incentivize cultivation of the relevant personal and institutional qualities across the world) without maintaining some "arbitrary, invisible" lines across at least a multi-decade timescale.

So, more immigration and education of foreign students? I'm totally fine with that, for both national and universalist reasons. (This is particularly clear for India, which is a natural US ally. None of the 'frenemy' complications we have with China; I WANT Indians to 'steal' more of our tech!) But only on the right terms, which are not being offered by anyone using the language you're currently using in the second half of your first sentence. I suggest that you explicitly distance yourself from those people if you want the rest of your comment to be heeded by anyone outside your tribe.

We should all care about other humans in this world.

(That said, not all governments care about other humans, and I tend to agree with crchang below.)

No, I don’t want to “deprive” other countries of the education their people get here. I work in higher education. I believe in the transformative power of education for everybody. But the American immigration system leaves talent on the table when people who really do want to stay in America are not given the option of a US green card stapled to their US diploma.