Ex-Apple Employee Stole Secrets for Chinese Firm, U.S. Says

Damn I came in here to say the same thing and feel sad at myself now too.

So not to be racial but from an American standpoint I liken it to hiring an American who happens to be Chinese versus an engineer from China.

For the first, they are American, their family is here, their life is here - where would they flee to?

For the latter, they're here temporarily most likely. So why not take the risk and get a big reward?

Those are just people, let's not lower our standards

Not quite. This is stereotyping.

I’m not looking at data, so I don’t know the answer, but dismissing an apparent cultural/political tendency to engage in IP theft or espionage as “racist” is simplistic. HN loves to generalize about Americans and American companies and their practices, yet to do that with China is somehow racist? Regarding Chinese students — how do you think they get permission to study in the US? Chinese people don’t have unlimited freedom of travel. You have to be “approved” before they’ll let you study abroad. That “approval” has a lot to do with the political reliability of that person. So while it is fair to say all Chinese don’t agree with this sort of thing, it is fair to say that the Chinese that end up in US graduate programs represent a set of those who have demonstrated adherence to the CCP mindset.

Race doesn’t have anything to do with the discussion; it’s a cultural-political question and, culturally, mainland communist Chinese have a different viewpoint than international IP law upholds.

You rarely hear of a British person stealing secrets or British companies blatantly stealing sensitive IP. Is that because it happens far less frequently or because it doesn’t get reported?

It seems as if the Chinese way of doing business supports these sorts of situations and it seems that the Chinese cultural attitude towards IP is at odds with the very idea of IP. It’s fair to point that out. Flagging a legitimate story because you don’t like the racial implication is itself racist — you seem to be suggesting that we ought not to discuss this if the perpetrator is of a certain nationality because it might reflect badly on the country and it’s people. Censoring something because you object to the conclusions that might be fairly drawn is to limit the range of intellectual discussion.

Despite the seeming cooperation, China views the US as an adversary. It would be naïve to discount the critique of Chinese practices as simple racism.

I would much more strongly link it to the fact that academic success and workplace success leads to high economic again and societal standing. This is fostered at an early age and progresses all throughout life. The gaokao [0] is a striking example of just how much pressure goes into academics in particular:

> Suicides are a regular feature of every exam season; a 2014 study claimed that exam stress was a contributing factor in 93% of cases in which school students took their own lives. Last year, a middle school in Hebei province fenced off its upper-floor dormitory balconies with grates, after two students jumped to their deaths in the months leading up to the gaokao.

Given that many classes don't have an impact on the end career (or at least, many feel this way), it's unsurprising that students would rather cheat on the "less important" work that they just need to pass, versus what they actually find valuable.

I don't think it's correlated to IP. Just societal expectations and norms.

[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/oct/12/gaokao-china-t...

I always thought this was a bit strange because I’m sure most software developers could transform a piece of source code so that it would not appear to be a copy.

But I tend to view it in the context of Feynman's remarks about Brazilians (who I've also had the pleasure of working with and being enlightened by) [0].

Even if there is some cultural resistance, there will always be exceptions, depending how you choose to select from that data. Personally, I value those traits that choose certain value over others. Being right (with the qualification of being right, rather than appearing right) is essential for a good engineer.

I don't think any country has a monopoly on good engineers or on bad. The best we can do is engage these like minds and cultivate a shared appreciation of the Good.

I think politics (from the education level up) makes it hard to question the cultural norm, I find there are plenty of folks who hold "correctness" a higher value than compliance.

All this said as a white guy looking in and lucky enough to have found aligned mentalities among the folks I've worked with.

[0] http://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education

Being a TA for undergrad courses this pattern is very common. Other group that consistently gets caught was guys from ME. East Europeans cheat but they almost always put enough effort to make it hard to catch.

Thing is that universities do not prosecute this at all. I have seen people graduate who I think never submitted their own assignment at all.

Additional thing is that “community” usually has all the tests for last 10 years and profs don’t change them that much. So they memorize the whole thing which is enough to get passing grade.

There was one Math prof that I adored who would put clever traps into his tests. Every single time he would catch people.. and they would not learn. Still graduated.

The podcast (I listened to it a long time back) goes into how the Hoverboard invention was fueled in late-night drinking sessions by Chinese engineers / businesspeople trying to make a more accessible and more fun and less dorky Segway. All those people bounced ideas off each other and made incremental improvements to get to the form that was commercialized by umpteen companies. Maybe this product was developed in a prototypical "Chinese model" where ideas are cheap, widely shared or purloined, improved on, reverse-engineered, etc. -- with the obvious downsides of rushing low-quality products to market that are subject to exploding batteries with no accountability.

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/11/27/457404184/epis...

That's kinda selective bias. Only these students have higher chance of making it to the U.S. lol

It seems weird to us but it’s worked well for them. And while our system might seem better, or at the very least “normal” it certainly has its flaws (i.e. patent trolling).

There is probably some middle ground we could come to in the future but the US is completely unwilling to budge from its position. The Chinese simply don’t even understand what that is. How can someone own an idea? Especially one which is just a fundamental truth. Think about that for a second. Think about it as if you were a child. It’s kind of strange. We grow up in the US being taught that we can own just about anything, and to the exclusion of all others, and then we develop systems to promote and protect this. That’s definitely something you can do (as we do) but there is nothing natural about it.

Back when I did business in Asia, we had a cultural training session before our group went over. We were told that in certain Asian nations, especially China but to a lesser extent South Korea and Thailand, the concept of copying someone else's work or intellectual property as a bad thing is foreign. Instead, the cultural feeling is that copying someone else's work is a subtle way of honoring them and their work.

Our consultants said that South Korea was growing out of this phase in its development, the way Japan did decades earlier. In both nations because the growth of home-grown ideas gave intellectual property cultural worth.

Perhaps over the next 30 years, China will also learn to respect other people's property as it develops into a modern industrial power.

This was a couple of decades ago, though. Things might be different now.

It's now roughly 50% Chinese and this has caused some issues, although it's not something that can be discussed.

The culture in universities are generally more relaxed with processes being more open as compared to high schools. This is more pronounced in China with college entrance exams being the most stressful and rigorous process that decides your future. So when students join colleges (China or US), they would no longer feel restricted by the rigorous curriculum and exams in high school. Like a spring that has been pressed for very long time, they would "bounce back" and neglect their school work, sometimes going too far into cheating.

While this issue in generally applicable anywhere, China's college entrance exam makes it worse for Chinese students entering college. On top of that, overseas colleges are farther from their families and friends so they feel even less restrictions and easily steer into wrong paths.

The other point to consider is that part of the overseas Chinese student body consists of rich kids whom their parents sent to overseas in search of better education. They might not have the same aptitude as others who studied hard and passed exams to go overseas hence resort more to cheating.

Currently we allow innovative firms to pay a lot of money for engineers who then develop unique and great products that carry a premium. This applies pretty much across the developed world.

If "IP theft" is allowed to occur at any decent scale, every market will rapidly become a race to the bottom, and premium products will simply cease to exist, with a lot of casualties in both the companies involved and the engineers doing development.

So what does it have to do with China, and Chinese nationals ? Well simple: the Chinese government has large-scale corporate espionage as a stated goal [1] and has gotten caught red-handed in more than a few cookie jars, for example [2] ... that is seriously at odds with the goals of, frankly, every engineer and company worldwide (even Chinese ones). Note that in most cases, this appears to be not "actual" corporate espionage, but it is actually the state organizing large-scale corporate espionage (and sabotage in some cases), then going out to Chinese companies and actually forcing them to use the stolen data.

The predictable response is of course that engineers, companies, management and even unions will start systematically boycotting anything to do with the Chinese state, and that includes Chinese nationals' job prospects. This does not reflect on them, except insofar as they support this disgraceful state policy, but there is no alternative.

The ideal solution would be that Chinese people start sabotaging and striking and ... until the Chinese state gets the message. That's what SHOULD happen. After that, trust can be earned again. When the Chinese state starts cooperating and imposing large scale fines on companies caught duplicating products with stolen data, then this can end.

Obviously the current situation cannot exist for any real length of time without ever more serious consequences.

Now I get it, the Chinese state is trying very hard to confuse acting against their spying with "racism" (funny that given their ethnic and religious policies in China that that is not considered disgraceful. This is Hitler berating countries for not treating Jews well (which, incidentally, he did do, hell, he even had a point))

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_espionage_in_the_Unite...

[2] https://www.pddnet.com/news/2017/10/video-day-four-legged-ro...

As much as we'd all like if every country to got along with one another, if we find ourselves in that position I'm sure the intel agencies will get it in gear.

Maybe the war on terror has to die before we really turn and see the threat that China poses.

It's dramatically faster and cheaper to steal than to invest decades and countless billions of dollars doing it the hard way.

The only way China can fully stand toe to toe with the US in the next two decades or so, is to aggressively plunder beneficial IP wherever they can. There has been no serious consequence for them doing so the past 30 years of their rise. It's not below their dignity, because the mission overrules all. They'll continue doing it until the cost is too high; their calculation is probably that by that point they will already be fully self-sustaining as a superpower. At that point they'll show you the door if you have a problem with it (or worse).

China very carefully plays by the hide your power and bide your time strategy. Xi recently admonished state media about bragging too heavily; that's all about playing down their strength. China's ideal is to play it down until they're strong enough so as to be beyond a reasonable challenge by other powers (at least in their sphere of influence, Asia broadly).

Why do all that when you can skip to printing money by knocking off something that already sells?

They can, but why should they when the world will innovate for them? They have nuclear weapons and most of the world's manufacturing base already, they do it because can get away with it.

China should on average has 4x more people stealing tech than US, based on pure population numbers.

Even Chinese are 75% less likely to innovate, that's as many innovators as the US.

> Their other homegrown products such as WeChat and Xiaomi seem pretty competitive and very catered to the local market.

Well obviously they can based on the second sentence you wrote.