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Comment by neya | Hacker News Reader

Well, one thing that is mentioned in the article, but deserves a lot more attention is IP theft. You should read about the chilling IP theft case of the bullet train where China pretended to contract Japan for the bullet train, but used it to steal their IP, patent it all and screw them over.

Here's a really good documentary on how much engineering went into Japan's bullet trains.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xA4aaSzqT9s

To see all this being stolen by someone who just walked in, pretending to make a deal, is so painful.

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IP theft is an important part of the Chinese "Miracle" but it is short-sighted to focus too much on that...If IP access is all it took, I think we would have seen the Chinese achievement replicated in many other places.

Most countries don’t have the military or self-sufficient economics of China though.

French Polynesia could probably never do this kind of thing to Japan for example.

What do you mean? Can NATO or US force any law they want? If I am in a small country and decide that patents and copyright is evil should I expect a war? If not what do you mean by military in your comment?

As I see it if you don't like China politics don't do business with them and do not involve the army(though we all know some big countries like to get involved in smaller countries politics and force laws).

Most smaller countries get subsidies from bigger ones. As the ruler of a small country, if you don’t play ball, those subsidies will go away, you’ll be blackballed, you won’t get those prestigious official visits that can boost your local popularity, you won’t get preferential treatment or inclusion in free-trade agreements, your citizens will have to pay for tourist visas, your exports will be triple-checked and slowed down at ports, the powerful “allied” military won’t show up at your ports (which makes your neighbours think twice about bullying you), etc etc etc. There are a million ways to basically ostracise a country without the issue ever surfacing on international media.

Most smaller countries depend on bigger ones for defence, and often for defence subsidies in order to support the strategic objectives of the bigger powers. So military considerations can be a huge factor in a way it just isn’t with China (not in the same ways, anyway).

Yeah, I know how it is, small countries get gifted one airplane in exchange on buying a dozen or more airplanes, ground vehicles, installing military bases.

My point is that it sucks that IP and copyright laws are forced by the countries with big armies, the big countries impose their values on the most small countries.

> French Polynesia could probably never do this kind of thing to Japan for example.

Just a nitpick but French Polynesia, being French territory, is clearly not averse to stealing technology[0]. On the topic of high-speed trains precisely, I certainly would not be surprised if the TGV had "borrowed" some features from Japan's shinkansen.

[0] https://www.france24.com/en/20110104-france-industrial-espio...

Exactly. You need process knowledge in addition to IP in order to make innovation and manufacturing happen. And China is really good at cultivating process knowledge, something the US is slowly ceding to them.

Transferring process knowledge is why, until very recently (Tesla, others?), all companies have been required to minority partner with a Chinese company in China and thus transfer their process knowledge along with IP.

China abandoned that requirement initially few months after Trump's trade war.

But things got escalated.

The reality is that often, neither the patents or the processes are available for licensing or through an acquisition and merger. Trade secrets and IP are used adversarialy, to limit competition and often times governments are deeply involved, vetoing against any technology transfer that could hurt national competitiveness. That makes sense for a nation but hurts the technological progress of the world.

So we are in effect, back to the pre-intelectual-property world. The moral connotations of IP theft hardly apply.

America owes its very existence to the land it stole from Native Americans. It owes a huge part of its prosperity to the entire lives it stole from generations of black people by using them as draft animal (hence freeing the white man to think about science, mathematics, whatever). The entire material infrastructure that enabled the production of these fruits of the intellect is stolen, with direct violent human consequences (by comparison, the consequence of "IP theft" is that certain already well-to-do entrepreneurs make less money than they think they are entitled to). It's like if I kicked someone out of their house, adducted someone else, put them in my basement in chains to work for me. I then did a bunch of experiments and came up with some nice designs. But as I was the process of monetizing them I realize someone else stole the design for me, and now I suddenly feel morally outraged. How can he do that to me? The injustice!!

(To anyone who's prepared to invoke 'whataboutism' or whatever, note that my point is that the US's moral outrage is hypocritical, given its extensive history of (much more violent) theft. It's not about whether "IP theft" is morally permissible.)

My parents immigrated here. Is it hypocritical for me to be upset about this?

Also my interpretation of the parent post is that we should not attribute China’s success to their authoritarian government without considering IP theft as a major factor.

Don't forget how much American intellectual progress actually came from Europe. Europe did the hard work of educating and raising generations of scientists and other cream of the crop intellectual elites, who then proceeded to get chased away by wars and persecution and ended up in America. I heard some execs in startup land joke about how they managed to "get their Russian scientists" with relief that their intellectual problems will be solved now.

The land was not stolen any more than the native Americans stole it from someone else. Did they have no war before the Europeans came?

America had slavery, but unlike untold other empires and large countries, it ended it. It owes very little if any part of its port-1865 prosperity to the work of slaves, given the destruction wrought by the Civil War.

The fact this got down voted so much proves how American centric this site is. Disgusting

So who are these groups of people with morally irreproachable ancestors who've contributed so much to our world?

I personally like the idea of the ancient Indian college (in modern day Pakistan) that considered knowledge a gift from God (meaning it should be free to all).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxila

This idea could propel mankind into the future faster than the steal, iterate, then lock down IP method we are using today.

I agree to make the knowledge to free. They should be public domain, not copyright and patent. (Public domain is what I do, at least. The law ought to abolish copyright and patents (to make them all public domain), in my opinion.)

However, I fail to find the mention in that Wikipedia article (am I not looking enough?)

Japan’s KHI licensed their technology to China’s CSR. Japan was never going to have the Chinese market to itself because it has competition: in addition to indigenous competitors Europe was competing for contracts as well. The dispute was over CSR’s redevelopment of licensed technology and attempts at export of the new package overseas. As it turns out there is not much of a market for HSR outside of China, Japan and Europe after all. Still it is weird to keep on calling licensed technology “theft”, when blueprints were actually sold. It’s also weird to have this fetish of how superior Japanese technology is (so China must have stolen theirs from Japan) while ignoring evidence to the contrary as revealed by the recent Taiwan rail disaster.

They stole the idea from the US: https://foreignpolicy.com/2012/12/06/we-were-pirates-too/

Wow.

So they steal bullet trains etc and we stole steam tech etc. I guess it just indicates that it's foolish for a nation to pay for technology if it's poor.

I wonder are there any examples of poor nations in history that actually paid market prices for technology, and became super powers? (Or at least maybe regional powers?)

Would Germany count? Obviously Post WWII without any of their acquisitions, debilitated infrastructure, and debt

Yet third time's a charm!

They didn't pay market prices. We gave them most of the stuff via the Marshall Plan. (You could say the same thing about Japan. We gave them all the stuff they needed to rebuild.)

I'm wondering if anyone has ever actually paid for the stuff they need?

Perhaps not!

Also when it comes to private persons, I find many examples of the currently wealthy 1% having done things that elevated and cemented their status that are no longer legal today. I dare say most.

Its not just that the laws changed and they coincidentally were a common practice at the time, its that those were the particular nuanced laws they were using.

Everything from selling securities door to door 100 years ago, to self-benefitting charities using overlooked and accidental combinations of tax code.

Germany didn’t pay market prices, thanks to US subsidies, and even defaulted on their debt.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, infringement of British patents was stated U.S. policy. In contrast, China keeps saying one thing and doing another. For example: they deny any involvement in industrial espionage, yet keep doing it. They are a member of the WTO, yet they consistently flout its rules. Then they have the chutzpah to complain about U.S. tariffs. If you ask me, it's the malicious and persistent dishonesty that irks other countries almost more than economic competition.

https://www.itif.org/publications/2015/09/17/false-promises-...

Do not do business with them, it is not like other countries politicians and politics are good examples to follow.

>Do not do business with them

This tactic works when it comes to mercantilist trade policy (see also: new U.S. tariffs, and recent EU complaint against China in the WTO). Less effective when it comes to stemming IP theft.

Which country are you from, that is such a beacon of moral righteousness on the global stage?

And the British

https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/arti...

The UK also did something similar with rubber - originally it was a product closely guarded by Brazil but a "bio-pirate" stole samples and they were then planted widely within the Empire - with Malaya going on to become the top producer:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Wickham_(explorer)

The history of silk production is similarly full of continuous theft between cities and countries, from China to Turkey to Italy and beyond. Some cities tried harder than others to keep their secrets, but “theft” eventually happened anyway.

Any experienced businessman understands that there's a risk of being duped. Like you imply, the risk depends on the country of origin of your business partner: China is worse than the US; the US is worse than Scandinavia; etc. It also depends on the industry, the reputation and history of the company and its owners, the nature of the deal, and many other factors. It's just part of doing business.

If IP theft (or other dishonest behavior) is too extreme, eventually that country would lose foreign business. This is what happened in Russia soon after Gorbachev opened it up: many foreign companies and investors gave up their attempts to enter Russia because they could not handle the amount of trickery being done to them. It took many years for Russia to fix that to some extent.

The fact that foreign businesses are still very much present and expand in China means that IP theft and other deceitful practices are within the limits of accepted business risks.

According to Mark Goodman "Future Crimes", it amounts to over 1 trillion USD over the last 10 years.

Micron being the latest victim.

https://www.wired.com/story/us-accuses-chinese-stealing-micr...

It is interesting that an agrarian society can transform and innovate itself in approx 10-15 years to become the world leader in Technology, etc. They also never seem to run out of funds to drive anything they do?

Not that remarkable: the USSR had done it before China, and Japan had a similar big push in the Meiji era, in similarly short timeframes (taking into consideration the communication and transportation technology available at the time).

You could argue that stealing IP is necessary fuel for any striving world power. As bad as China is with respect to IP abuse we need to realize that they are ready to turn the corner and start developing IP of their own. China is too self-reliant to continue to rely on US/EU based semiconductors and aerospace technology for long. I honestly think it's too late to halt China's growth from the outside.

I was going to go to bed (it's 2:29 AM here), but Richard Hammond is a fantastic orator and a delight to listen to

Also he looks so YOUNG in that video

China has also totally rejected environmentalism and monetary discipline. Need energy? Burn coal with no scrubbers and fake the air quality data. Have waste? Dump it in rivers and bribe local officials. Economy slowing? Print money. Need infrastructure? Print the money to pay for it.

Western liberals say ignoring the environment will catch up to them. Western conservatives say you can't ignore fiscal discipline forever. So far both are wrong.

These go along with IP as things China is ignoring. They seem to be calling BS on all forms of large scale socioeconomic restraint that might restrain GDP growth. Strap a brick to the accelerator and go.

It's an interesting experiment and as others have pointed out not that different from America in the 19th century.

The USSR looked similarly all-powerful between ‘45 and ‘78, roughly. If we say “new China” started its rise in the late ‘80s/ early ‘90s, we should expect another decade or so of its power looking “inevitable” before cracks start to be a bit too big to ignore - possibly longer, considering their superior scale.

The timescales are slightly shorter than many people think - the 1970s-90s were basically a whole scale westernization of Chinese society. Big economic reforms in the mid-late 1990s really freed up the economy from the burdens of inefficient state enterprise, and then real insane growth started in the 2000s and post 2008 with huge quantitive easing.

A lot of the “China can’t fail” rhetoric suggests it’s been a 40-50yr trend that defies all critics, but it’s only in the last 10-20 years we’ve seen a rise of this insane wealth, massive debt fueled economy, reverse in liberalization trends etc.

They're working on the enviro bit:

> China is the world's leading country in electricity production from renewable energy sources, with over double the generation of the second-ranking country, the United States.

All great nations are built by theft of a valuable resource.

It's the sure fire way to get ahead in any game.

well okay guys, after a cumulative -2 on the above, I want to disclose that I'm open to counterpoints if you have a compelling one!

Just because an ego is bruised or you want a better world doesn't mean you need to project that through downvoting, it is effectively censorship when you do that

The borders of all nations are determined by some previous conquest and the great nations are the ones that were most successful conquering their neighbors, but what made them able to do so where most could not? The ability to conquer obviously can't be taken by conquest. Only recently has IP been as or more valuable than natural resources, but the concept remains. Why has Nigeria stuck to stealing a few of our dollars instead of making a killing like China stealing our IP? Because they can't and China can. That ability is what makes it a great nation, and was necessarily developed before it was used.

The point is that ALL superpowers and empires were created by some unilateral expropriation, and being able to defend that.

I was looking for a counterpoint to that. The "any random country" comparison wasn't what I was going for

Eh, I'll give it a go, although I realize the goalposts have not been properly fixed here. You can argue about what a "great country" is, what "theft" is and what is a "valuable resource". No country is a saint, at least no large country.

Anyway, I nominate Germany as a counterpoint to your thesis. Germany's greatness has not been built on theft, but on hard work and skill of the Germans. When Germany tried theft, or rather conquest, they failed badly, but when they got on with developing their own country rather than war, they succeeded pretty spectacularly.

Do you agree...?

I proposed Germany in this same thread and it got shot down because they didnt pay market rate for anything

Others said the Marshall Plan was a subsidy and they also defaulted in their debt

So I would have agreed 22 hours ago but not now

> To see all this being stolen by someone who just walked in, pretending to make a deal, is so painful.

I mean, if you want to talk about pain, a lot of Chinese people see Japan primarily as the country responsible for the Rape of Nanking [0], among other atrocities. It doesn't make IP theft justified, but it probably puts it into context for why the Chinese government, people, or companies would have very little compunction against doing it.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing_Massacre

EDIT - wow, people here really hate China. Is it so hard to see human factors affecting behaviors?

No, it doesn't. China steals everything worth stealing from anyone that has it.

Censorship is bad. Free exchange of information is good. Unless we're talking about IP, then suddenly the opposite is true.

Really, when you get under all the BS from people who've been propagandized against China, they believe America should win and China should lose. Of course China isn't going to agree to this, and they're big enough that they don't have to. Might makes right, until China becomes the mightiest global economic power.

> Censorship is bad. Free exchange of information is good. Unless we're talking about IP, then suddenly the opposite is true.

Alright, let's torture your false equivalence a little more: you shouldn't have privacy because that's prevention of the free exchange of information.

How is it false equivalency? This has nothing to do with the concept of sanctuary.

Even Adam Smith regarded IP laws to be an 'Unessecary Evil'. Even in SV, an engineer works for one company, learns the tricks of the trade, and then takes that knowledge to another. This is business as usual, and it's a critical ingredient to Silicon Valley's success, and it's the secret to the success of many city states and industrial hubs all throughout history.

Not some defender of IP here but it doesn't seem equivalent. Guy transferring companies takes domain knowledge with them, they don't take the blueprints to project X with them.

Not only that, the political rhetoric just massively overstates reality.

From PIIE [1],

> Overlooked are the data that suggest the popular narrative exaggerates the magnitude of China's forced technology transfer and theft and does not allow for the possibility that China's protection of intellectual property is improving rather than worsening. […] Since the subsidiaries of these holding companies using the licensed foreign technology are located in other jurisdictions worldwide, China probably ranks second globally in the magnitude of licensing fees paid for technology used within national borders.

From MMC's Brink [2]

> In the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, Western firms such as Apple and Intel made large profits by investing in China to take advantage of the cheap labor, often at terrific human cost. As China’s economy grew and the population became wealthier, Western firms were then able to profit by selling their products back to the wealthier children of the same labor force that made them. The Chinese government saw this happening and wanted Western firms benefiting from the Chinese market to give something back. It established a system of approving foreign investments on the condition that the businesses involved agreed to partner with local firms and transfer knowledge and skills to the local Chinese market.

and [3]

> …Paul Goldstein, an IP expert at Stanford. Instead, it’s given away in negotiations with Chinese businesses, officials and investors.

[1] https://piie.com/blogs/china-economic-watch/china-forced-tec... [2] https://www.brinknews.com/why-china-is-a-leader-in-intellect... [3] https://www.brinknews.com/how-much-american-ip-is-china-stea...

Oh come on. Chinese are known for stealing IP from everyone including other Chinese. They consider this an achievment.

They would have stolen the tech from anyone else, Japanese or not.

Yeah. Just googling about Alibaba in Chinese and one would find articles about the IP theft culture within the organisation. There are tons of stories circulating in Chinese start-up communities about how project managers from Alibaba, Tencent, etc, pretended to be interested in funding (or collaborating with) a start-up before stealing ideas/designs/code/algorithms from them.

e.g. https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/29783732

Edit: elaboration

That strategy is not uncommon for big companies, think about Facebook, Microsoft.

I guess at least they don't pretend to be interested in funding or collaborating with another company before stealing, say, design/code/algorithms from them. Or are there any anecdotes about these big conglomerates doing disgraceful things like that as well?

From talking to friends, I can think of 3 examples from MSFT, GOOG, and AMZN right off the bat. Capitalism is dog eat dog by nature IMO.

But most of the atrocities in china in the 20th century were committed by the chinese against other chinese? And most of the atrocities in the 19th century were by european imperialists. Also, everyone committed atrocities against everyone else. Using your logic, we should all be stealing from each other since it is all justified because of historical wrongs. Sure you can't be arguing that?

> Sure you can't be arguing that?

You're right, I wasn't.

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