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Comment by projectramo | Hacker News Reader

Here is my confusion: if the war against China is really about high tech dominance, and Huawei is a particular target because it just surpassed Apple for #2 spot, then why isn't action taken against Samsung instead which is at the #1 spot?

Samsung is not a Chinese company, so this seems to be about national competition and not tech "dominance".

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We have a large military presence within South Korea. They are an ally. We’ve fought together, and have a common interest in a contained China.

Tech dominance IS national competition.

Samsung is the result of US's stripping of Japan's manufacturing power. Japan used to challenge US's hi-tech status in the 70s and 80s. US forced Japan signing the "Plaza Accord" and immediately Japan entered the "lost decade", and so the chip manufacturing power was strategically moved to Taiwan and S.Korea.

Now it's turn for China.

The "Plaza Accord" was an agreement between the US, France, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom to depreciate the USD in 1985. USD deprecation was halted by the "Louvre Accord" in 1987

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plaza_Accord https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louvre_Accord

One thing I don't understand is how US, Japan and S.Korea led high-tech outsourced manufacturing efforts in China. As far as I understand everything is hunky dory starting with _Good will_ from Deng, until China became world's manufacuting hub. Only then it became a huge issue. My question is didn't any one consider China's current rise in late 80's and early 90's when they started outsourcing manufacturing?

I think the idea was to let china do the dirty work of manufacturing and staying at that. That didn't work as we we can now see. And I'm blaming the west's confidence of conveniently outsourcing the production to China thinking they'll always be in control.

I like how we're supposed to have a relatively free market in the west, yet the hands of large companies are always tied by the government, because any company, if large enough, is "a national security concern".

More like the hands of the government are tied by large companies.

It is a money laundering case. HSBC tipped off the US gov't to a transfer that was effectively made using a false identity, to a recipient that was on a sanctions list. The US has banking laws, just like China has. If Tim Cook goes to Bank of China on Nanjing Lu and lies to SAFE so that he can wire a lot of RMB out of China, then the Chinese authorities will apprehend him. It's not as mysterious as it is being made out to be. Maybe she will walk because she's a celebrity executive in China, and because her case has been spun to be all about competition between the US and China, but still: banking laws are banking laws, in the US, China, Hong Kong, Europe, you name it. If you don't want to be in danger of breaking them, don't use the banks in that country.

They are korean we share goals and markets.

Because even if South Korea joined North Korea and even if they doubled or tripled their wealth, they would still be too small to impose a threat to the US dominance. Australia, Canada or even large European nations are not seen as threats either. But a unified EU is seen as a threat by Trump.

Maybe SamSung is playing fair? Usually the US is okay with others outdoing us, if they play fair, and historically even if they play a little dirty (Japan late 80s early 90s) but probably not okay of they play wholly unfair with gov't backing and support.

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