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Comment by Nerada | Hacker News Reader

Seems strange to me that China was able to manufacture processors but they couldn't manufacture ballpoint pens domestically until 2017.

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> China was able to manufacture processors

The actual manufacturing is done in Taiwan (TSMC) and South Korea (Samsung). USA can do it too (Intel, Global Foundries) but these are either not leading edge or only for private use.

SMIC in China are up to 14nm: https://www.anandtech.com/show/13941/smics-14-nm-mass-produc...

Everyone uses equipment from the Netherlands (ASML).

> they couldn't manufacture ballpoint pens domestically until 2017

They were already producing 38 billion ballpoint pens a year. Just the tips had to be imported because domestic steel was too low-grade.

Since they weren't given assistance in learning steel production techniques it had to be rediscovered. Chinese steel is now high-quality enough to produce the ballpoint tips, but building up R&D is important for reasons beyond pens; the responsible state-owned-enterprise developed several new techniques, and is (apparently) the only company in the world able to produce e.g. http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201904/24/WS5cbfc4a9a31048422...

Materials engineering is also where China is trying to make progress so they can produce viable competitive jet turbines.

> Everyone uses equipment from the Netherlands (ASML).

This is funny, because besides ASML, Europe is very light on the chip manufacturing. Sure, there's ARM, but they don't have foundries. All this talk about geopolitics and computing, chips, foundries, and every single company and thus country is dependent on this one equipment vendor from a tiny and otherwise unimportant country, and nobody seems to bat an eye.

It makes me wonder whether maybe all this geopolitical scheming and fearmongering is way overblown. Why does it matter if country Y can make chips themselves or buy them from country X? What is this, a world full of little soviet unions? I mean, we have trade, and trade works! I think in the long run trade will always win over protectionism.

High precision, high volume, low labor input manufacturing is much harder than you'd think and not exactly what China's economy specialized in until it became an explicit focus of the central government. The electronics and computing world outsourced everything to Asia back when those sectors were dirty and labor intensive. Manufactured items such as ballpoint pens (particularly the ball and tip which we the biggest stumbling block for China) were made with processes so highly automated and done so with decades of gradual refinement that there was no natural incentive for existing companies to invest in Chinese production facilities. Certain manufacturing niches were so competitive and easily optimized in the decades before global outsourcing became the rule that there were practically no benefits to moving production overseas and without the sort of "free" knowledge transfer that comes with such a move, there was no economic case for Chinese industrialists to try and build native capabilities from scratch.

Techniques involved in producing pens are unrelated to producing silicon chips. You can easily have one without the other, one is not a condition to have the other.

I guess you mean China didn't have the technological framework to produce hightech products. I am not sure I agree, but I don't have numbers to support any claim.

If you show up with bags of money, ASML will sell to you.

So yes, it's a major achievement and there's a lot of knowledge layered on top of that equipment, but it's not like they need to reinvent everything from scratch.

They're worried about foreign influence and subversion. They know chip making is a critical activity underpinning all sorts of other activities. They want to build the tech it depends on themselves so it's in their control. Maybe backdoor-free, too.

Bags of money? You need to bring the whole bank. Their state of the art machines sell for $125,000,000. Each.

https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1257963#

That was ten years ago...

I think this is where the difference between state and private funding come in.

Amazon's revenue is about USD$240b.

For context, the US DoD SPENDS about USD$100b on research, development, test, and evaluation activities alone.

So if a G20 government decides they want top of the line gear, they can afford it.

Genuinely curious - equipment-wise how much beyond the photolithography gear that ASML will sell you do you need to set up a cutting edge fab? Or are the ASML offerings pretty much one-stop shopping?

As far as I know (and anyone in the field please correct me), ASML focuses on photolithography equipment. Which leaves where you put it, how you feed it, and how you validate the output.

In a sense, it's kind of like a nuclear plant -- you can't not consider the site and physical structure as part of the operation.

I wouldn't be surprised if those parts are the secret sauce for a lot of cutting edge fabs. How do you isolate your space while moving materials about? What do you clean, when, and how?

We gave industrial engineers crap at my school, but for semiconductor fabrication the holistic approach seems necessary.

(Would love to hear more details from someone)

I remember a case study from the 90s where a Canadian company was able to export chopsticks to China, and undercut the domestic competition on price.

The Chinese juggernaut is based on cheap labour (or until very recently at least), if you automate something enough, they cant make an inroad. Chopsticks and pen tips are examples of things that are very highly automated.

they couldn't manufacture ballpoint pens _cost-effectively_ until 2017

ftfy.

they had to import the balls and points because they couldn’t manufacture those components

Are we talking about different ballpoints here?

My bic byros have not particularly precise balls, made from not particularly hard balls. If you pop one out and wash it, you can see the surface roughness and imperfections. Some other brands of pen use glass balls!

I think the claim in this thread is false...

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-38566114

The article seems to confirm that the issue is not, in fact, an inability to produce a ballpoint pen (tip). Rather, they could not produce a competitive high-end one:

"A year ago Premier Li Keqiang went on national television and bemoaned the failure of his country to produce a good quality version of this seemingly-simple implement.

Locally-made versions felt "rough" compared to those from Germany, Switzerland and Japan, Mr Li complained."

here is a slightly earlier article saying they were unable to manufacture them entirely:

>https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2016/01/26/china-ca...

> Premier Li Keqiang recently made a shocking revelation about the industrial capabilities of China on national television: despite the fact that the country is widely known as the “world’s factory” and produces everything from iPhones, aircraft carriers, high-speed railways to spacecraft. Until now there is not a single manufacturer in China that is able to produce the tiny rotating ball fitted to the tip of a ball pen that disperses ink as you write.

> Each of these tiny metal balls has to be imported by Chinese pen manufacturers from overseas suppliers.

Here's an even earlier article claiming that close to 90% of the balls were imported: http://www.cqn.com.cn/news/zgzlwlx/1114936.html

I assume the 90% figure was rounded up to "all of them", potentially by Li Keqiang himself, who was probably not interested in low-quality ballpoint pens that could be made without high-precision manufacturing equipment.

I can't find an original source for that. Maybe he said it, maybe there have been several misquotes. More anecdotally, we all know how much people like to mock Chinese manufacturing as purely copy-cat and low quality. You can almost see the glee dripping off the articles about the ballpoint. I'm pretty sure you can imagine someone with a failed ball-point saying "probably made in China". This doesn't mean it's untrue, but it does mean there's likely a bias.

It's not entirely unbelievable that they couldn't do this to a sufficient standard at all. I'm just saying it's more believable that they could, but couldn't do it to an excellent standard.

Processors are more important than ballpoint pens.

Fun thought experiment. You have to extend it to all writing implements, but what would happen if no contracts could get signed, laws get signed etc.

The housing industry would grind to a halt pretty quickly.

You'd get actual paperless offices though!

"We can put a man on the moon, but"

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