Cold-war-style suspicion of Chinese-American and Chinese academics | Hacker News Reader

Cold-war-style suspicion of Chinese-American and Chinese academics

scmp.com

118 pointschvid114 comments

All: the theme is divisive, but this is a substantive and interesting article and therefore on topic for HN. If you comment, take care to do so in the spirit of the site: thoughtfully and curiously. And if you haven't lately, would you mind reviewing the site guidelines to get a refresher? We've raised the bar a notch or two. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I hate to post these admonitions, but there has been an uptick of nationalistic flamewar everywhere, and that's a problem for HN. It's unwelcome here, unnecessary regardless of your views, and we ban accounts that post it, so please don't.

As I noted in another comment, state actors change the scale of incentives and disincentives in academic and corporate IP and data theft. A large corporation is a fearsome opponent. It never sleeps. It can avoid being tired for many decades at at time. It can hire an entire squad of private detectives to find you, and spending tons of money on lawyers is just normal operations for it. These also apply to large academic institutions, and often the IP and data are involved with academic/private consortiums. For these reasons, individuals are usually strongly deterred from such theft.

Add in state actors, however, and the potential cost/benefit equations change. A strong state actor has the power to shield a person from a multinational's wrath. It's not hard to steal such information. What's hard is getting away with it indefinitely.

Disclosure: I'm Asian and my wife was once a Chinese born academic in the US.

It is far more then that. State actor has people working for it who will serve as honey pots, it has people working for it who Will drug you stuff you in a box and send you back to the country. It has a huge capacity for physical violence of all kinds. Corps are innocent toddlers compared to nation states.

It is a dual approach, we can shield you and also you parents house will not burn down “accidentally” plus lenience for that wayward cousin who will get couple years in comfy prison instead of 9mm to the back of the head.

Replace most instances of "9mm to the back of the head" with a longer jail sentence at a more violent prison for the cousin, and you'd also have the US and other western powers.

Well I'd be fairly sure that there some cases of "X attended a meeting and then suddenly had a mysterious heart attack on the way home" which do happen within western powers...

Emigration tells the whole story here. There’s no need to quibble about who kills more of their citizens, or who is more repressive.

People are moving west, corporations with low moral standards are moving east.

The story is long and complex. I dont know anything about the Chinese side, but we in the US have amassed the largest prison population on earth, by percent and absolute numbers.

100 years from now, my kid's kid's will be embarrassed that their grandfather didn't do more to stop the oppression.

Also, it seems the US is pretty bad at counterintelligence whereas Russia (and USSR before) are good at ferreting our spies.

China is probably better than us at it if for no more reason than tracking their population better. Plus that incident a few years ago exposing double agents.

In an April speech in New York, FBI director Christopher Wray described the reason for the scrutiny of ethnic Chinese scientists. “China has pioneered a societal approach to stealing innovation in any way it can from a wide array of businesses, universities and organisations,” he told the Council on Foreign Relations. Everyone’s in on it, Wray said: China’s intelligence services; its state-owned and what he called “ostensibly” private enterprises; and the 130,000 Chinese graduate students and researchers who work and study in the US every year. “Put plainly, China seems determined to steal its way up the economic ladder at our expense.”

This has been going since long before the Trump administration, probably all the way back to the Clinton one.

The whole point of a research collaboration on global disease to "Yes! Please! Learn from, use, and improve our ideas!" The FBI framing this as a quasi-spy role is damaging human welfare for political purposes, which is their traditional role going back to their founding under Hoover. The environment in this country is getting progressively scarier.

There's also the broader question of whether it's morally right to push the US drug patent regime upon the rest of the world - in this case, before the patents or IP ever kick in from a legal perspective.

This isn't just a US-vs-China thing. It's also a US-pharma-companies-vs-sick-people-everywhere thing.

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

This man wanted to stay in the United States, was kicked out for fear of national security, and later kickstarted the Chinese space program.

I realize immigration policies are complicated and obviously political, but the US seems to be going about it in a pretty stupid manner.

Yes! When people want to come to your country to study advanced topics, it's asinine not to provide the easiest path to citizenship possible for them.

If they stay, you win. If obtain citizenship but return home, they now have a tie to your country. If they decline citizenship, you've lost nothing.

And from an economic perspective, they're more likely to create opportunities for those without advanced education.

Yet the historical "Are you willing to become American?" has turned into "Are you American enough to be American?"

I made friends with many people who came to Canada to study including Iran, India, China, many parts of Asia. I asked a lot of them over the years about their plans. A very common response was that they came to study but have grown to like it here and because of co-op (paid internships) they developed connections and want to stay. Of the five I'm still in touch with, four are still here on work visas and one of those four is weeks away from citizenship.

That analysis assumes that supply for academic opportunity is elastic. Is that a sound assumption?

Because otherwise, it's not fair to say you've lost nothing when a college graduate leaves your country.

Edit: Response to deleted comment: I didn't say anybody would leave the country because getting citizenship was too easy, that's ridiculous and not a very charitable read of my comment. I was addressing this in particular:

>If obtain citizenship but return home, they now have a tie to your country. If they decline citizenship, you've lost nothing.

In the scenario where somebody obtains or declines a citizenship and returns home, then you've lost something. Whether they take or pass up the citizenship isn't the matter. Whatever their motivation happens to be for accepting or declining the citizenship, in either case you've lost something if they leave the country.

My heartburn with "people who want to come to this country to study advanced topics" is a bit more parochial. They're generally good people trying to improve themselves. Good for them.

My parochial issue is that people perform better in an environment they perceive as nurturing. When international applicants have a higher admissions rate than in-state applicants and non-California domestic applicants, it sends the signal to citizens of this country, and this state that our own universities, and thus our government, are deeply ambivalent about our success, or in my case, the success of my children. I understand this borders on a call for paternalism, but, ah, I'm a concerned parent.

Something dramatic happened in 2009 which caused in-state admission rates to drop by over 20 points while foreign admissions increased by 20 points. Ostensibly, the Academic Senate reduced the "guaranteed admission rate" for in-state high schools from the top 12.5% to the top 9%, and "widened the applicant pool". The observed effect on the campus population mix has been stunning. I can provide the graphs (I'll note the downvoters haven't asked for the data), or you can get the data yourself here (2) with a bit of querying (look all the way back to 1994 so you can see that we're not talking about recency bias spikes).

Interestingly, the reported "ethnicity" numbers omit the ethnicity of international students, just lumping them all into "international". Even more interesting is the counterfactual of who isn't crying foul about that. Generally, repressed minorities try to break out their numbers and the CCCP cries foul wherever they aren't winning (this is an observation about foreign policy behavior that dates back to the Korean War, not a comment on the Chinese people). But they aren't making much ruckus about the UC system. Nevertheless, it takes a hot second on campus to see that this international segment is primarily ethnic Chinese.

I'd be interested to see the financial portfolios of the folks who voted for this. One has to wonder what the UC Academic Senate's incentives are in supporting a de facto pro-China, anti-US agenda when you have reports like (3-10).

(1) https://www.sfgate.com/education/article/Regents-panel-OKs-b...

(2) https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/infocenter/admissions...

(3) https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jun/30/political-pres...

(4) https://techcrunch.com/2010/01/12/google-china-attacks/

(5) https://www.nbcnews.com/news/china/education-or-espionage-ch...

(6) https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/03/07/chinas-long-arm-reaches...

(7) https://edition.cnn.com/2019/01/11/asia/university-californi...

(8) https://www.wired.com/story/china-spy-recruitment-us/

(9) https://edition.cnn.com/2019/02/01/politics/us-intelligence-...

(10) https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/apr/25/china-uses-...

They pay full tuition (which is a lot of money). U of Illinois even has an insurance that if the number of international students declines too much (so it gains significantly less money from tuition), it would get compensated by the insurance company.

> U of Illinois even has an insurance that if the number of international students declines too much...it would get compensated by the insurance company.

Whoa. I had no idea this was a thing.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/11/29/university-il...

You can generally get insurance on anything, if you're large enough and the risk is somewhat quantifiable.

The issue with abnormal insurance policies is that the buyer may have more knowledge about the actual risk than the insurance seller. I believe this has burned Lloyd's of London a few times on their more esoteric policies.

This, again, has nothing to do with the fine students of Chinese extraction. This has everything to do with the wealthy, powerful, and connected people at the top of the UC system and California state government opting, in true dictatorial fashion, to suppress the education of their own populace (by making in-state access more difficult) in the pursuit of short term monetary gains (from those sweet full-tuition dollars you mention, and probably some other incentives that were discussed over steak dinners). And, indeed, overlooking the negative effects on their own economy and long-term welfare (via espionage, lost education, etc).

>I realize immigration policies are complicated and obviously political, but the US seems to be going about it in a pretty stupid manner.

You should see the EU then.

I remember there was metaphor in China that this man was “equivalent” to 100 deployments of 101st Airborne Division. And if I remembered correctly my middle school history textbook(China) mentioned US government was willing to pay him millions of dollars to stay....

I feel like the problem is just the way power is distributed to nation-states with money. We've got to start working towards a world where nation-states aren't forced to compete with each other economically--instead where they are incentivized to work together economically and compete over citizens. Nation-states serve a purpose, as religion did/does. But the scope of that control must change as civilization does. I feel in a couple years they may look back on this age as we do now with the crusades.

"A month after resigning, she left her husband and two children in the US and took a job as dean of a school of public health in Shanghai."

Where does her family now live? This seems to say she got a divorce and moved to China?

I'm pretty sure this just means she moved to China but her family didn't. It's a bit of an awkward phrasing as it includes "she left her husband" but adding "in the US" means she just left him behind rather than divorcing him.

The distinction that is muddied up in the article as well as by many anti-Trump voices is that, while research in academia is published and open and supposed to be shared, there is a gray area that spills over into commercial research into applications of scientific discoveries where the IP is no longer destined to be openly available, and this research constitutes trades secrets that could be stolen and monetized by foreign entities at the expense of the United States. It is this research that has to be protected, and because of the gray area, many scientists have access to both types of research. It is very unfortunate that the lines are blurred in the interest of attacking a president that wants to keep our country's edge in technological advancements. The article went as far as claiming that Trump's administration might round up Chinese Americans and Chinese aliens as the Japanese were rounded up and sent to internment camps during WW2. The whole point is to make Trump into Hitler at every step, and although this was a more well-written hit piece, it is still click bait and attacks on the Trump administration. I hate that this political climate spills over into scientific articles now. The Chinese have been watched and accused of theft of IP for more than two decades, but it's only now open season on the current administration because the media loves to hate Trump. I'm sick and tired of it. The Chinese have stolen plans for fighter jets, been banned from buying Xeon processors, have been accused of directly copying the AMD Zen chips via masks instead of producing copies based on specs like AMD intended during the sale, and many other such things which either happened or started to happen before Trump took office. To claim that the increased enforcement of laws and regulations against economic espionage as a matter of discrimination against Asians which could eventually lead to WW2-style detention of Chinese nationals and Chinese Americans is purely incendiary nonsense aimed at attacking a President that aims to secure our worldwide economic and technological leadership. Anyone who believes this ought to be ashamed of themselves for falling for this garbage sensationalist journalism.

If this research takes public funding, why the hell are it's proceeds not public?

Why am I paying tax dollars to fund the competitive advantage of private firms?

So, if a research project takes $3M in funding, and a private company takes that primary research and spends $300M to produce a derivative product and takes it to market they should not profit? The National Renewable Energy Lab has an entire portfolio it is begging private companies to productize.

Taking a product to market is very difficult and raw research is not usable by the populace in most cases.

This is fine, so long as the $3M funded research is still open and available to anyone to productionise.

Is that how it works or are private companies funding some of the 'open' research phase to then privatise (i.e. make secret) the outcomes?

If you spend 300$ million in secret research you can realize 1.5 billion in profit.

The numbers for research where you're forced to make the production research public mean your competitors can get to market faster and it may mean an investment of even 3 million isn't worth it.

There are some medicines/procedures/devices where this is the only way to make the numbers work to sell it.

I’d like to add that the FBI has been happy to sit idly by and watch the theft of consumer data for more than a decade.

Now that they have found a political ally in the trump administration and have something to gain in the way of budget and powers they are suddenly concerned about this, “new heightened threat”

Opposition to anti-China hysteria isn't anti-Trump. If there's anything Trump has done that Democrats have enthusiastically backed, it's his policies against China. Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi have given full-throated support to tariffs against China.[1][2] Even Bernie Sanders has taken a hardline stance, criticizing Joe Biden for being weak on China.[3] To his credit, Biden is one of the few prominent Democrats to have spoken out against the anti-China hysteria.[4]

> The Chinese have been watched and accused of theft of IP for more than two decades, but it's only now open season on the current administration because the media loves to hate Trump. I'm sick and tired of it.

We must be watching very different media. The media loves to beat up on Trump for other issues, but his measures against China seem to be one of the few things that receive widespread support across the political spectrum.

> The Chinese have stolen plans for fighter jets, been banned from buying Xeon processors, have been accused of directly copying the AMD Zen chips via masks instead of producing copies based on specs like AMD intended during the sale, and many other such things which either happened or started to happen before Trump took office.

I'm sure the Chinese government could make a very good "national security" argument for stealing fighter-jet plans. That excuse seems to work pretty well for United States government on all sorts of issues. All these claims of IP theft should be tried in court, and if there's something to them, the courts can impose penalties. What is not okay is hysteria and generalized suspicion of Chinese people. What happened at MD Anderson, and has happened elsewhere,[5] looks very ugly.

> Anyone who believes this ought to be ashamed of themselves for falling for this garbage sensationalist journalism.

I think that quite the opposite, a lot of people are going to feel ashamed of how far this hysteria went, and how innocent people's lives were turned upside-down because of American political angst, just as people felt shame after the Red Scare.

1. https://twitter.com/SenSchumer/status/1125143336837206016

2. https://pelosi.house.gov/news/press-releases/pelosi-statemen...

3. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/02/sanders-slams-bidens-china-t...

4. https://www.scmp.com/news/world/united-states-canada/article...

5. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/05/terminated-emory-res...

Also discussed 17 days ago, when this article appeared in Bloomberg Businessweek (I guess SCMP has a sharing agreement with them?): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20178100

There was also a Science Magazine news story

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/06/nih-probe-foreign-ti...

Good grief. After all that, it turned out to be a dupe. I had no idea!

Talk about throwing the baby out with the bath water. With all the advanced data collection and analysis, can't American intelligence agencies distinguish spies? Why not leave it to them rather than repeating the same historical mistakes?

American intelligence agencies can't reliably distinguish spies, especially not without doing the kind of rigorous background check required for a security clearance. The FBI and NSA aren't omnipotent.

Also to add to this, it's kinda hard to detect if someone was indoctrinated and trained in their home country and then sent here with crystal clear, mid to long-term, instructions on what to do and how to report back.

To report back they don't even necessarily need to transmit data or meet someone in front of 37 security cameras with a big envelope that says "secret stolen plans" in screaming red letters. They can slowly lift data over the course of weeks, months or years from whatever they are here to learn about and use a dead drop... go to the Goodwill a mile from their apartment and leave an SD card behind the third row of records between 2 and 2:05pm, or upload encrypted fragments via a different public WiFi once a week, or mail an SD card to a series of memorized addresses disguised as eBay purchases.

Old school tradecraft makes you effectively invisible in a digital world as long as you are cautious in how you collect data and get around any security measures at the school/employer you are attempting to steal data from. If you're in a position to be accessing the data as a student/researcher/employee, especially if you are in a position to actively manipulate that data as part of your role, unless you are being stripped searched and all USB ports have been rendered inert, if you're patient you can take all the data you want and unless you go telling people, you're probably not going to get caught, especially by some federal agency that can't read your mind.

If you were a young Chinese person, why would you study in an American university?

Under normal circumstances you would want to see America. You would want to be with the best to get a bit of paper at the end from a top notch place. The world would then be your oyster. You would know people, you would know what America is like and how nice American people are (under normal circumstances).

But what happens if you know you won't be welcomed? What if you had got wind of this hysteria going on?

You go somewhere else.

It might not be America but at least you could do your degree without people muttering 'Chinese Whispers' (!) about how you are there just to harvest people's IP and steal their state organs.

If English is the language to learn then there are plenty of universities in England that will gladly take Chinese money. The hysteria hasn't sullied the atmosphere in the UK yet. Then there are Scandinavian countries, Germany and other places where you get English going on in science subjects. Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Canada are good options too.

Then there are the non-English speaking countries that roll the red carpet out for China. Anything belt and road. Russia. There are plenty of places. Now there are options and the idea of studying in the U.S. is not really looking that exciting. Plus, the more you look into it there can be better places to get a particular degree than one of the Ivy League big names.

This could precipitate a serious decline in the international standing of U.S. universities. If departments are not getting the big bucks coming in from Chinese admissions they will have to get students from elsewhere. The bar gets lowered in the process and it becomes a downward spiral.

The only American cars of interest internationally are the ones by Tesla. Nobody wants an American car. In Europe we used to imitate American cars albeit cut down to cheap size. But, nowadays, Tesla aside, nobody in Europe would consider an American car as a serious proposition. And there isn't anything Detroit can do to change that.

If American academia gets to go in a similar downward spiral then there is no way back out of it. American universities could become the preserve of American rich kids with no intake from Asia or elsewhere. Then the ambitious U.S. students would have to be studying in Europe to get an education that was a cut above, or, even in China!

This is a slippery slope that we are on, all because of a minority that want to forego hospitality, trust, warmth and international spirit and succumb to fear, nationalism, hysteria and rumour-mongering.

For undergraduate studies, it would be very surprising if American universities would begin to jeopardize the cash cow of udnergraduate Chinese students over IP concerns, considering their refusal to do so over student integrity violations. For their professors and administration, American universities have a serious problem with conflicts of interest. From what it sounds like in the article, Wu Xifeng was already working for someone else, and collecting a paycheck from MD Anderson by the time she left.

This reminds me of Nazi era exodus of Jews. Strategically, it's not smart to marginalize or eliminate a large portion of your engineering/scientist class. It certainly contributed to Germany losing the war. Escaped German and European European scientists and engineers were crucial to the Manhattan project and later to ICMB and NASA rocket development. Indeed, without their Jewish and non-Aryan scientists, German nuclear efforts were almost comically bad. We couldn't have done it without the Nazis...

Discrimination of Chinese scientists could have the exact opposite effect of preventing supposed Chinese IP theft. It risks pushing out top Chinese talent who will return to China and develop atomic bomb- level breakthroughs.

Much better alternative - offer them top jobs with excellent pay and recruit from top Chinese university programs.

Wernher von Braun and the 1600 Germans who were taken out of Germany by the US in Operation Paperclip to do 'ICMB and NASA rocket development' were also (and it seems you're implying exclusively) 'Jewish and non-Aryan scientists'? That's not what I'm seeing in the wiki, correct if it's wrong instead of downvoting please.

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

They escaped the Soviet army

You shouldn't be getting downvoted as it's the much more accurate representation of the history that led to the rocket programmes.

As near as damn it the whole Nazi V2 team, equipment and production was shipped to the US. Wernher von Braun, the scientists and engineers, and hundreds of train wagons filled with everything they could carry; engines, components, fuel, tools, you name it.

Japan's Unit 731 got the outrageous end of war deal to get some information to the US though.

Many of those German scientists involved in the rocket program came as refugee (voluntary or not) after the war, not very related to the exodus of Jewish scientists during and before the war.

A significant part of America’s tech industry was built by Chinese scientists who escaped Mao’s China. There was one is who was stupidly forced to go back during the red scare who restarted the PRC’s rocket/missile program during the Sino Soviet split.

An Wang, the founder of Wang Computers and the guy who essentially invented RAM (really core memory) came via this route: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Wang

Your part on history is just wrong.

> It certainly definitely contributed to Germany losing the war

There were no jewish nazi scientists in significant numbers after Wannsee? Like, what do you learn in school?

It's great to provide corrective information, but please do it without taking personal swipes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

WWII refugees aiding US atomic efforts: https://www.atomicheritage.org/article/scientist-refugees-an...

> There are more than a few people, especially among the cultural élite, who still publicly regret the fact that Germany sent Einstein packing, without realizing that it was a much greater crime to kill little Hans Cohn from around the corner, even though he was no genius.

-- Hannah Arendt

The actual title is “Chinese scientists guilty of ‘researching while Asian’ in Trump’s America”. It was also submitted with that title. Pretty slimy of the admins to change it just to rationalize keeping the submission up. The title is obvious bullshit because no one in Trump’s administration would have a problem with Japanese scientists “researching while Asian”, because Japan is our ally. Fronald Toompf destroyed yet again, right guys? Stop fucking turning this site into reddit please.

We changed the title to the subtitle. That is routine moderation when titles are baity, as they frequently are.

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

It's not like it's hard to see either, there's routinely news of Chinese scientists and engineers caught with some kind of industrial secret stolen from their employer trying to go back to China in a hurry. Every time it's mentioned people on HN react like some grand conspiracy theory was unveiled while it takes 15 seconds on google to find examples like:

https://www.biospace.com/article/-jc1n-second-scientist-plea...

https://www.straitstimes.com/world/united-states/ex-coca-col...

it's pervasive and it's stupid to think it will stop on its own. China has been at war with us for quite a while, we just failed to recognize it because it is convenient for many not to do so, but we should behave accordingly.

Edit: since my comment was called "inflammatory and nationalistic" I'm going to add a link to a book that explains the war ongoing between China and the US, from an author that's very much not either of those things:

https://www.amazon.com/Cool-War-United-States-Competition/dp...

None of those links work. Do you mind reposting ones that do below?

It seems that you copy pasted the links from a different comment, but since HN will automatically shorten long links when presenting them, the links you copied end up cut off.

fixed.

Thanks!

https://www.biospace.com/article/-jc1n-second-scientist-plea...

https://www.straitstimes.com/world/united-states/ex-coca-col...

This is inflammatory and snarky and exaggerated ("China has been at war with us") enough to count as nationalistic flamebait. As I said above, we don't want that here. Please make your substantive points without it.

You've pinned a comment at the top arguing against "nationalistic flamewar" type comments. Fair enough, however your own moderating choices seem to paint you as biased in this regard. Why is there an implied double standard for those who post vs. those who moderate/admin?

Moderator bias is the perception the mind leaps to when running into moderation one dislikes. But people's views of moderator bias are as varied as their feelings on the underlying topic. Actually, they're identical to their feelings on the underlying topic—simple introspection will reveal that to anyone. If it helps at all, I can tell you that when we see flamebait going the other way we try to moderate it just as much.

Moderation work has a weird side-effect that is elusive to describe but is relevant to this question. When you routinely have to moderate angry arguments, where neither side will concede so much as a grain of sand or a drop of water to the other, you often end up in an intense position where one or both sides turn their frustration onto you instead and decide that you are the problem. Sometimes it seems as if that's the one thing they agree on! The side-effect is that over time, this seems to gradually change how your brain functions. You start to think less in terms of agree/disagree and more in terms of the container as a whole.

People often make claims about our personal biases and views, but from my perspective they're always curiously off, because they miss this weirdness of how moderation changes a person over time. I've compared it to having one's brain sandblasted (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16361266). Dwelling in the crossfire has altered how I see many of these high-energy topics. My views have become more friable—smaller in scope and less welded to the infrastructure of the major positions. For example—speaking personally now, not as a moderator—it seems obvious to me that there's no factual dispute in the current thread. That is, there's no contradiction between state infiltration of corporate and academic environments being a thing, and misguided persecution of honest researchers also being a thing: not only could both of those be true, it's actually hard to see how they wouldn't go together. Yet people each pick one of those two and use them as spears to joust with.

What's happening is that our loyalties keep us from widening the frame enough to incorporate all available information. Instead we try to exclude any information that 'helps' the other side and block it when they try to bring it up. Most heated arguments now appear to me to be of this nature. At root, we can't and won't hear each other's stories. In this way the gruntwork of moderation has turned out to be a protracted exercise in forcible frame-widening—something that is painful in its little steps but also has an expanding effect that may (or may not) be worth it.

Are there any meta discussion threads of moderation on HN?

From my perspective there have been zillions.

That's your opinion, you're free to have it but calling mine "inflammatory and nationalistic" doesn't make your better.

I happen to believe (and most of our intelligence does too) that China has been studiously and purposefully stolen everything they could get their hands on for the last 20 years or so with the clear objective of gaining a military advantage. That's what a war is, and it's a very well substantiated position.

Also pretty funny you call me a nationalist, I wasn't even born in the US.

There's a bit of confusion here. The opinion I'm expressing isn't about China, or you; it's only about your HN comment.

> I happen to believe (and most of our intelligence does too) that China has been studiously and purposefully stolen everything they could get their hands on for the last 20 years or so with the clear objective of gaining a military advantage

The US (NSA) has been stealing secrets from a significant percentage of the world population for years. Snowden showed us that. China stealing from a few corporations makes them angels in comparison. Further, the US slaughters hundreds of thousands in ACTUAL wars in the middle east over the past 20yrs to gain a military and economic advantage over the rest of the world.

Stop making it seem like China is some big bogeyman when the US has been the bogeyman all along.

As I explained at the top, please do not cross into nationalistic flamebait here, nor post in the flamewar style to HN generally.

(Also, while I have you: can you please not use allcaps for emphasis? The guidelines include that, and explain what to do instead. I know it sounds trivial, but doing that is the online equivalent of yelling.)

My apologies. And thanks for the reminder about the allcaps.

From a US perspective, US misdeeds don't make China any less of a threat. Is the US supposed to react as "Oh they're waging a bit of a trade war on us, but we've sinned as well, so lets let them keep it up"?

It would be nice if we’re going to claim the moral high ground, that we actually were capable of inhabiting it. As it is, both the US and China appear to be on a muddy slope, flinging whatever comes to hand.

No, of course not. I'm not talking about how the US govt should react. I'm saying that armchair critics on the sidelines (referring to the grandparent) painting China as evil for some corporate espionage is pretty naive given that the US is guilty of far worse.

China is "evil" for a whole series of different reasons, its blatant disregard for human rights and life on a massive scale is a good start.

I have my gripes with US policies (may I remind you I'm not even a citizen by birth?) and we're definitely seeing a slide towards an even more overt fascism than ever before, but it's still an avoidable risk compared to the very present danger a stronger China poses to all democracies.

To be blunt, I don't want to live in a world where China has any more power than it has right now, because we're MUCH better off in any version of what we have in the west than anything China has to offer.

I like my civil liberties, I like to be able to express dissent and to protest without being ground into a pulp by a tank, and I like to express politically antagonistic opinions without having my organs harvested after a summary execution.

It's not what a war is, but I don't expect most people living in first world industrialized countries to understand what a war is, it's been completely outsourced to third world countries. This isn't even about nationalism, you're just wrong. If we were at war with China you'd know, because every major population center in both countries would have been leveled before you even knew it was happening.

That's preposterous, you know full well that not every war is fought with weapons of mass destruction, not all the time at least.

The Cold War is a perfect example, and very similar to the situation we are in now with China. Are you suggesting the Cold War wasn't a war either?

The Cold War was far from cold. The Korean war, Bay of Pigs and then the various proxy wars that each side supported whilst pretending not being part of. Like the Soviet-Afghan war where the US funded, trained and supplied $billions of munitions to the Taliban. Or the rush to get influence of every revolutionary or post-independence third world nation (hence the coining of third world). Sustained hostile military stand off to keep that containment. Constant cat and mouse in the air and at sea. Every frigate, "research vessel" or "fishing" trawler, backfire or bear bomber got a scrambled escort, every exercise a response. Any one of which could have turned it hot. It got close often enough. However much it seemed like a game watching it on the news twice a week throughout my teens and beyond.

None of which are really comparable with today.

Today? A minor trade war, and some considerable industrial espionage, proven or not. There's barely even minor mention let alone posturing over Taiwan, Hong Kong or the airfields being built on China Sea islands. There's no stand off, aside from the N/S Korea border that's remnant of the Korean war stalemate. It's going to take a huge escalation to go hot (or cold war).

You really see them as comparable? I don't, not even slightly close, except only for the few shades of McCarthyism in the feature article.

I think we're in the opening chapter of something that will, over time, become comparable. I think you're downplaying the situation, the scuffles, China testing airspace and maritime laws, heavy investment in Africa, that's all from the soviet's playbook. I would be shocked if China didn't play a part in the Russian (successful) attempt to influence our elections and get poor leadership installed in the oval office.

You've consistently ignored our moderation requests. If you keep doing that, we will ban you. Please stop and don't do this on HN again.

We probably should have banned you with the every-Chinese-person-is-an-enemy slur, but I like to give people multiple chances.

Assuming you were right, there'd still a big flaw in your logic: trying to gain a military advantage does not make you at war. With that kind of logic, you could argue that the US, with its massive military budget, is at war with every country in the world (it's obviously not).

That's not flamebait, it's the crux of the matter.

It comes across as a dry description of reality to me. Apparently some people can't read it without thinking it's some kind of knock against China.

It can easily be both. In such a case the flamebait is the higher-order bit.

Preserving the container here matters more than rightness or wrongness. Indeed, nothing will burn this place down faster than flaming rightness.

I added more to my comment while you replied. The comment in question isn't flaming rightness at all.

I'm of the same mind, that the statement is factual. It's even more valuable, because it's information which has the potential to alter mental models.

I think dang's point in this thread should be interpreted as: "Such mental model breaking information around delicate subjects needs to be treated with the most care, precisely because it's the most valuable while it's the most likely to be lost to emotional jamming of the discourse."

Yeah. In particular the comment isn't denigrative of China at all. In fact, making opposite statements would arguably be more denigrative.

You make these sorts pro-China comments a lot. Why?

I haven't made any pro-China comments, only pro-HN comments. If they seemed pro-China, that's a reflection of your views, not mine.

Any criticism of China is marked as flame bait.

That's far from true.

Your recent comments to HN have nearly all been using the site for ideological battle. We don't allow that, regardless of which ideology you're fighting for or against, because it destroys the intellectual curiosity HN exists for. Would you please stop now?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Guess I’ll resign myself to free speech jail...

I took another look at your account history and got quite a jolt. You've been breaking the site guidelines flagrantly and frequently, including with nasty personal attacks.

Since it's clear you don't want to use HN as intended, we've banned the account. If that changes at some point, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.

Nasty personal attacks? Give me a break!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20321085

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20316869

Containers have little value as ends in and of themselves. Containers' purpose is to contain something of value.

Of what value is wrongness?

Thanks, Dan. It's nice to have a concise statement on record to the effect that HN would rather be wrong than be right and risk offending anyone. Truth is not a goal here.

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

First of all, let me offer a sincere, hearty and belated thanks for all the hard work you do to keep HN’s quality up.

That being said, I hope you don’t mind a bit of input here. The parent comment didn’t seem snarky at all, and while his language about “war” might not have been exactly literal, that doesn’t make it exaggerated. China has been extremely aggressive about acquiring Western technology and IP. Furthermore, Chinese students have been a significant avenue of this theft. These facts are not in dispute (except perhaps by Chinese’s government spokespeople). Not only has this been in the news repeatedly, but I have specific professional experiences to this effect.

All that being the case, it’s difficult to understand why you would have described the parent poster’s quite accurate description of the current state of affairs as “nationalistic flame bait.” To be honest, this is the one time I’ve witnessed where your contribution lowered the discourse instead of raising it.

I called it snarky because "people on HN react like some grand conspiracy theory was unveiled while it takes 15 seconds on google" is typical internet snark, complete with supercilious posturing over the rest of the community. I called it inflammatory because "China has been at war with us for quite a while" is a gross rhetorical escalation. Even your comment does a bit of that: being "extremely aggressive about acquiring Western technology and IP" is, however true, not being at war. (Actually, your comment is otherwise so reasonable that I doubt you'd have put it that way if you weren't specifically defending the GP's phrasing.) Do these gradations matter? Yes they do. War is not a place from which people find it easy to climb down, find common ground, or do anything but destroy each other. That's true in internet threads too. And I called it nationalistic because the comment depicted the situation only as a conflict between nations in which one is the aggrieved and the other the aggriever.

Of course those are merely my interpretations. Maybe I'm wrong, though seeing the commenter post later that every Chinese person should be seen as an enemy makes me pretty sure I wasn't wrong. Either way though, this call wasn't particularly different than the others we make, and I didn't make it because I secretly favor the opposite side of the argument, however much it may feel that way to passionate readers. And I'm certainly not denying your or anyone else's professional experience.

"people on HN react like some grand conspiracy theory was unveiled while it takes 15 seconds on google" is garden-variety internet snark

Such a factual situation is often the subject of such snark. In this age of search bubbles and personalized (read algorithm distorted) views of information the observation is often true. Such reactions are exhibited by one group even to factual information. This results in frustration on both sides of the statement, creating the state of "War," which, "is not a place from which people find it easy to climb down." This is particularly bad because such information is particularly valuable. It's precisely such mental model breaking information which is the most valuable.

It's very easy to see how a group like, the Flat Earthers, or Anti-vaxxers have such model-breaking information blindness. Throughout history, we've seen that it's particularly hard for privileged knowledge workers -- who have been validated by society through high pay and social status -- to see the model-breaking information. (Witness the struggle to get germ theory recognized by gentleman doctors.) In short, we tech folks need to acknowledge that there are factors acting to make us the most blind.

In 2019, we all have it. We've always all had it. The question is how do we communicate this without being in the mental state of "war."

It descends logically from my position: if we are at war with China, Chinese nationals are the enemy.

Not every war is fought with guns, not all the time. We are in a period that's equivalent to an asymmetric version of the Cold War.

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

Would you refute that the United States has been at war for decades with the Soviet Union?

You seem to have an issue with my ideas, not with my language. I welcome the debate about those ideas, but it doesn't seem appropriate to throw the weight of your status as moderator to win an argument against ideas you don't like. Isn't that exactly the opposite of what the spirit of HN is?

Dang is trying to cool your jets.

I think America is an idea where most countries are based on genetics and history. I get where you are on this, but it should be realized illiberal people will take advantage of liberal people. It's a price worth paying if you stick with it to the end.

I was going to post a similar response but I chose not to after a little research. I think there is a clear difference between engineers at private industries and academics at a public university. Not sure if this is the best comparison. It seems the Trump administration was targeting academics at public universities.... which doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

They are all part of the same plan. You can't let your enemy infiltrate your academia, it's just bad strategy.

If China in the future decides to behave like any normal country I don't see an issue with having cordial relationships again.

I don't get why an academic researcher in the United States who has contributed to our body of medical research is the enemy.

So every Chinese person in a US university is the enemy?

That seems more than a little sweeping, not to mention inaccurate.

At the moment, it should be assumed that's the case. That's an unfortunate side effect of conflicts.

Literally racism

It is literally not. Here is a definition of racism:

prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one's own race is superior.

I don't believe Chinese nationals are inferior in any way to me.

I do believe they are (currently) the enemy of western democracies and more specifically to the country where I currently reside.

Intellectualizing racism for the sake of obfuscation is very common in Western history, I hope we aren't falling into the same habits again.

Note that you're just saying a generality, without addressing the comment you're replying to at all.

Sweeping atrocities under the rug is also very common, then trying to project one's own failure to speak out against them as some kind of moral failing of those who do.

> Every powerful state relies on specialists whose task is to show that what the strong do is noble and just and, if the weak suffer, it is their fault. In the West, these specialists are called "intellectuals" and, with marginal exceptions, they fulfill their task with skill and self-righteousness, however outlandish the claims, in this practice that traces back to the origins of recorded history.

-- Noam Chomsky

Just the fact that this discussion was barely penalized, is bursting with accusations of "hysteria" (that also has tradition) and "racism" and "flamebait", while these for example were very harshly penalized, speaks volumes:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20318279

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20315905

I think grotesque is a good word for it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsoImQfVsO4&t=33m27s

> One of the greatest advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive.

-- Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism"

This is exactly the tactic, and the pattern in hundreds of HN discussions: make accusations one doesn't need to prove, and the accused cannot disprove. "You just say this because you hate X", or "you don't say this because you think it's true, and despite it possibly offending someone, no... this is flamebait, my inability to address your argument on its merits is actually your intention". But of course it's verboten to be offended by any of that.

"dampers, mutes, and hooded executioners".

> He watched on. Now that he had changed sides to the SS, he admired the strength of Fritz and the police man even more. He finally had left the camp of those who were wretched enough to let themselves be bludgeoned like that. He was glad to have made his choice. He did no longer have to fear the suspicion of the masters. He was on the side of good. The beatings the men received hardened his consciousness to embody good. One cannot receive beatings and be right, one cannot be dirty, eat garbage and be right.

and

> They know what they are doing, they know what is done to us.

-- Robert Antelme, "The human race"

This is far off topic and well into the generic ideological bucket that we don't want on HN. Would you please stop posting like this?

Well, it's a comment on the notion that action, be that votes, sophistry, lies, censorship, violence -- which all are in a bucket separate from discussion -- can bolster an argument. But sure, I will. Not pointing out the dual use of votes and flags because it's not allowed is something I can live with.

Unfortunate side effect?

Do you realize some of those Chinese are naturalized US citizens like you? Do you realize that you're advocating treating a portion of your fellow citizens as enemy or second-class citizens?

I hope your country of origin will never be at odds with US.

(Expletive deleted)

there's routinely news of Chinese scientists and engineers caught with some kind of industrial secret stolen from their employer trying to go back to China in a hurry.

tl;dr - State actors make getting away with it much easier.

State actors providing cover is one of the serious issues with corporate security today. I was discussing this with coworkers over a decade ago when I was consulting inside a petroleum multinational. We could all see how we could exfiltrate valuable trading data. That would have been trivial. What was anything but trivial was the notion of getting away with it afterwards. None of us would seriously consider touching that with a ten foot pole. Even back then, however, we were talking about someone with the cover of a foreign state. That lowers the bar for "getting away with it" by a large margin, primarily by reducing the time for evading detection and capture from the rest of your life to a few weeks or months.

Disclosure: I'm Asian and my wife was born in China and has multiple degrees, including one PhD. She was once a foreign born Chinese academic.

And it's going to stop by doing what exactly?

The West has had a head start in science and tech. But China and soon India will catch up. It's a simple numbers game. They both have a billion MORE people each than the entire American population. You can't fight that and remain king of the hill forever. Archimedes, Pythagoras and Euclid weren't born in the US. Maybe the Greeks should have thought like you declared Geometry a national security matter and hidden it away from the rest of the world.

Most people understand why Greeks don't rule the world today and most people understand the more interconnected everything gets the less one country is going to dominate anything. The best strategy is to actively push for more and more multinational collab till it gets harder and harder for anyone country to dominate anything.

But ofcourse that requires balls and imagination.

This seems to be a relatively simple case of tit-for-tat. Chinese scholars were welcomed in the US, but a significant minority of them have abused their welcome (defected). It is not all of them, but it was systemic enough to lose a lot of the US technological edge. In order to cut its losses, the US is now defecting on educating those students and researchers. You may say this is very unfair to the students, but in Chinese culture it is not uncommon to punish the family members for crimes of their relative.

Actually, having read the Science Advances article, it seems simpler than this. Institutions are being asked to warn their foreign researchers (not just Chinese) to be open about other contracts and commitments,and firing those who are deceitful. Seems to be a very clear case of breach of contract being remedied.

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