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Comment by mips_avatar | Hacker News Reader

I don’t really see how a return to dispersal of innovation and r&d spending is supposed to help the United States against China. It’s just another way for the US to pay for China’s gains. Huawei built its business on stolen American intellectual property. It’s routers instructions manuals have had the same spelling mistakes as the Cisco models they cloned. Huawei is now at the forefront of telecom innovation but they got into this orbit using a boost from stolen American intellectual property. The biggest change that China is forcing on the United States is a closing of America. When American openness is abused by the Chinese government America must change. But how will we change, and what does that mean?

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I think your conflating a few different issues here.

IP stealing is a problem. However, IP stealing is a little orthogonal from 1) entities in the U.S. economy being small enough to create/take advantage of innovation and 2) entities being sufficiently small such that their 'bigness' does not create misaligned incentives that then hurts the U.S. economy in the long run.

In fact, the author of this article makes zero commentary on IP theft. However, just because it's not mentioned doesn't mean that the author's points are invalid as well -- rather, all of these issues are problems that need to be addressed.

(Or in other terms -- inclusive or, not XOR. :) )

It is worth remembering that the USA became what it is today by stealing British designs and patents wholesale until it had caught up technologically.

https://stratechery.com/2015/xiaomis-ambition/

>And, I might add, from my perspective it’s not a big moral problem either: the truth is the United States ran just as roughshod over intellectual property during its rise to power as China does today, and I’m more than sympathetic to the developing world’s position that the West is attempting to pull up the ladder behind it: no one was holding Europe or American to task for pollution or intellectual property or workers’ rights the way the West does the rest of the world. That doesn’t make it “right,” it just makes “right” a whole lot more gray than “Xiaomi-are-copycats” complainers are apt to admit.

Not only British, Nazi scientists were welcomed too.

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