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Comment by mc32 | Hacker News Reader

(Almost) Any country can be a leader in some area even if they are not a superpower. Germany, Japan, UK, France, Taiwan: they all have leadership in some technologies even though they are small compared to the US and China.

Should they throw their hand up and say, guys and gals of the world, we can’t keep up with you in all areas, please, come take our IP!

I think the answer is obvious.

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i am not for sure i understand.

i was saying that it seems to me that the u.s. can't always rely on the argument and stance that "oh, it's just china making cheap copies". it seems that china has directly stolen and continues to do so, which is a major problem of course, but they will eventually have no need to. so the problem is worse than just needing to stop china from stealing. the problem is that it's possible the u.s. will be left behind because of our unconcentrated effort versus the chinese's highly concentrated economic approach.

my simple understanding is that u.s. corporation's greed and other u.s. economic factors caused a move of nearly all manufacturing to china and now everyone's saying "hey, wait a minute".

I see. But still, even if they are a leader in most areas, they will not be leaders in every area. If they play fair, then we can learn and cooperate.

The answer to our losing leadership to them isn’t to capitulate and continue allowing undeterred advantage, it’s, as you imply, to on-shore some of those lost skills. It’s not impossible, but it takes concerted effort by government, industry and citizens (who care about environmental impact, working conditions, fellow citizens).

I may misunderstand what you mean. Are you saying that you believe China will stop producing inferior (made as cheap as possible) copies of desirable goods and marking the price up? Why would they stop? They have already proven that they have no interest in acting in good faith, and in the absence of morals, this practice is obviously much more profitable than innovation.

China now has all the capital & knowledge required to become the worldwide leader in innovation. However, their entire industrial culture was built to the specifications of "making cheap copies". It will be interesting to see what the side effects of those origins will be for China in the long run.

China has manufacturing facilities and capacity that far exceed any other nation. This includes making high end products based on foreign designed specifications (I.e. iPhone). GP is saying that it is not if, but when, China will have attained the baseline IP to spend remaining efforts on exceeding foreign innovation and using their domestic manufacturing capabilities to deliver on them.

Currently the “trade war” just attacks Chinese companies that have done exactly what I described above (Huawei being a primary example) - claiming cybercrimes, arresting executives, slamming lawsuits, barring imports, etc.

Manufacturing is not a switch that can be turned back. America had severe oversight when allowing our manufacturing capacity to head south to Mexico and east to China. We are pretending the trade war is the US “sticking it” to China. But in reality China has all the cards in this war - the US is bluffing to its citizens; the economy of the coming decades will be on China’s terms.

you're exactly right. although i think the oversight was coupled with greed. corporations in the u.s. began a race to the bottom in terms of manufacturing cost, and now we're paying for both incompetent oversight and greed. consumers are to blame as well, but that blame is hard to place when consumers in the middle and lower class are getting squeezed in every direction.

it's very disappointing that the u.s. took this turn.

i am saying that they will continue to do both low end and high end copies. but at the high end, they will eventually (and have in some markets), catch up to external innovation. at that point, they no longer need to copy and can go off innovating on their own. at the low end, innovation isn't needed, so cheap copies remain useful to them. but at the high end, why copy when you can do your own innovation and exceed western products in both features and price? copying is useful to catch up, but catching up is just a transition state. once they've "caught up", the copying conversation and policies won't be relevant anymore.

Some Chinese companies are already making very high-end products.

Look at DJI, Huawei 5G and phones, even pure-software like WeChat.

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