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throwaway4589

Isn't that how Samsung grew during the 90s?

Japanese companies outsourced to them, and basically trained their competitors.

Manufacturing in Korea during the 90s just accelerated the rate of IP theft.

It was like that in Japan during the 80s too.

I wonder which country will be after China.

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No. Samsung grew during Japan's trade row with the US in the 80's. The trade hostility between the two nations gave opportunity for Samsung to jump in the DRAM business, just in time for their 64K and 256K breakthroughs ahead of competition in 1984. By 90's, Samsung was already ahead of most Japanese competitors.

Now, stop making stuff up to rationalize China's IP theft.

There's obviously a bit more to the story. Japan used Koreans as labor force in the occupied territories. For that to have been possible they must have built factories there.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-southkorea-japan-laborers...

Whatever Imperial Japan built in Korea, they weren't certainly smartphone factories. The Imperial Japan didn't really build a lot of industrial base in Korea and what little they built were in the North and destroyed during the Korean civil war.

Also remember that most Korean forced laborers were forced to work in mines and factories on the ground level, not weren't brought in to develop their products or run their businesses.

It's also how the US grew in the 18th century, by stealing IP from the global technological leader, Britain (who stole a great deal from India).

I know Britain exploited the hell out of India as a colony, but what IP did they steal?

Or did you just mean stolen resources?

Stolen resources.

India had advanced steel making, ship making and textile technologies which were taken by the British.

Huh, I am Indian and have never heard it said like this. Do you have any sources to back this up, apart from the rockets and textile industries?

For the steel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wootz_steel

I think I stumbled upon that a while back. Thank you!

I don’t have a reference, but high quality steel making would be one.

You don't have a reference, because high quality steel was invented in the U.S.

I'm talking about an earlier time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wootz_steel

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

Huh.

It's the source of the rockets red glare.

Huh. So this is why Indian civilization gets a gunpowder boost in Age of Empires 2

India had 25% of world's before Britishers arrived and sucked all the wealth to bring it down to 4% when they left. That's some serious exploitation.

Considering we're all just going to end up "stealing" each others' technology in the end anyway, it strikes me that it might be much easier if we all just collaborated in the first place.

Europe was after China last time. For example, Marco Polo. Opium War was pretty much China to Europe as well. Brits stole tea and gave it to the Indians as a cash crop.

There was an effort to help Japan develop during these years in order to ensure they were a stable democracy in the east during the red scare. Yes there was a lot of IP theft but a lot of their growth came from many different political aids and economic perks we gave to them. So we cant come down on Japan too hard.

Just guessing that after China will be portions of Africa in terms of economic growth for cheap labor production. However, I'm not sure that cartel warlords (also an issue elsewhere) will be worse or better than the PRC govt.

This is an essential force for transfer of tech. Ideally, it should be India given that many MNCs from chip fabrication to military hardware have set up shop and base here.

However, India doesn't seem to have learned to use this model, as is evident from decades of buying foreign weapons without learning to make them ourselves.

China built its military industrial complex by copying Russia. The only thing India has copied so far is an anti-materiel rifle.

Who exactly outsourced to Japan?

The US.

I think you will find it went the other way around. Japan even had foreign currency quota and ownership limits just like China does today.

Frontline: Coming From Japan [The Fall Of The US Television Industry] (1992) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aesJTsZqm6c and sadly now paywalled article https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1990/09/30/j...

"September 30, 1990. HOW DID Japan destroy the American television industry? The secret history of that strategy reveals how Japanese manufacturers and the Japanese government first created an anti-competitive cartel ..."

also https://www.jstor.org/stable/43294946

This reeks of whataboutism. IP theft is problematic and nobody has ever engaged in it to the extent that China has. The Chinese intelligence apparatus is actively engaged in IP theft as well.

It's how innovation happened throughout human history. The entire oh so celebrated age of enlightenment happened this way.

Nobody would come to the conclusion to call that IP theft though.

The entire US Industrial Revolution was kicked off by Francis Cabot Lowell stealing the designs of British power looms. Alexander Hamilton, as treasury secretary, adopted an actual policy of stealing technology and sent spies to Britain as well.

This is how it works. Countries without technology steal it from those that do. It's basically a market force- if you don't make it available at something approaching a reasonable cost then it will be duplicated through research or just directly stolen.

Context:

The two countries were still enemies at the time and on the verge of war. If I recall my history correctly, the trade routes collapsed when Britain stopped selling America textiles, stopped buying American cotton and then tried to blockade the entire country.

Yes stealing the loom filled a void in the American market, but in this case Britain isn't exactly blameless.

It wasn't really the same market forces that we see today, unless I'm missing something. China's not stealing IP to fill any market void.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enercon

See Patent Dispute.

I’m not saying US does this as much as China. It would be hard as US is the tech leader in many fields.

But whenever US is not a tech leader they happily engage in government sanctioned industrial espionage (Not Officially Officially sanctioned but wink and nod whoopsie kind of). Thus the complaints about what China is doing ring hollow.

> nobody has ever engaged in it to the extent that China has

Translation: what about all the countries that aren't as bad as China?

A certain amount of "whataboutism" is unavoidable if you attempt to make any comparative statments, or believe inductive reasoning is possible.

I also think 'whataboutism' is critical to maintain logic consistency and try to avoid bias. For instance imagine I dislike group X, and and I use a condemnation of action A (which they engage in) as part of the justification for that dislike. If my condemnation of A is valid and genuine supportive evidence of my rationale for disliking X then A should be bad in contexts other than when X is engaging in it.

And so comparing A when done by actors other than X is absolutely critical in determining whether it's actually indeed a bad action, or whether I'm simply clouded by bias and calling it bad because of my dislike of X.

In searching Google Trends it's somewhat unsurprising to find that 'whataboutism' as a term didn't even really exist until around 2017 [1] when partisan driven bias and antagonism started to exponentially skyrocket. It's quite an insidious term since it helps deflect potentially logical critique of irrational views, but has a paradoxical connotation of legitimacy and intellectual authenticity.

[1] - https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=w...

It is whataboutism I agree, whenever something about China comes up the very first comment is usually a "what about... "

IP theft does not exist. IP is an invalid concept and can not exist in a free society.

Agreed. The whole 'IP theft' story is bullshit and founded on an intellectual fiction (that ideas can be property).

> This reeks of whataboutism ... nobody has ever engaged in it to the extent that China has.

I hope you see the irony (hypocrisy?) in this statement.

>This reeks of whataboutism

Yes, aka "putting things in perspective" and "not doing one-sided criticism"...

Why don't all these whatabouters don't just let us blame whoever we want, and keep mum for shit ourselves or our friends did/do?

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