TSMC plans to halt chip supplies to Huawei in 2 months

Under a normal president, sure. Under this one, who can’t decide if he hates China or loves Xi? All fucking bets are off

Well, my opinion is that the US government, and the US public, is unwilling and has been demonstrably unable to muster any kind of support for significant military force over any issue that is complex and intangible, for the last 15 years. Name one recent strategic issue aside from Iraq/Afghanistan that the US and allies haven't backed down from (involving military force)? If it doesn't involve weapons of mass destruction, an imminent danger, or American lives being threatened, our collective attention span doesn't care to cash in our chips. And unlike oil, semiconductors don't hit big conservative wallets and their motivations.

I don't think America (in the popular sense) knows or cares what Taiwan is, to be honest. We can't even get our shit together to defend our supply of toilet paper and cloth masks. So I have strong doubts that a conflict over such a technical / intangible issue would rile up America's political will enough to convince people to go to war. And especially not with this administration's political skills.

Exactly what do you mean by “nuclear options” here?

The Chinese didn't get to their current position via chip superiority. They got there by being a low cost producer of a whole pile of other things. Clearly chip superiority wasn't everything to them.

In fact also by definition most countries don't have chip superiority. Not the UK (home of ARM), not Japan, not Germany, not Canada, not Australia (who happens to be a medical powerhouse). Yet they all have dynamic successful economies.

It's a big world out there. Being master of one trade doesn't make you the master of them all.

[0] https://www.trade.gov.tw/english/Pages/Detail.aspx?nodeID=92...

Yet I think it's important to keep some perspective: this Chinese/US spat is not a championship where a winner will be declared at the end of the summer. There's no reason to believe that 50 years from now either China or US will have collapsed. Xi Jinping dictatorial inclinations [1] are a threat of course, as he might decide to consolidate his power at the expense of China. But US recent [2] trend of politicians running on the hate of the other half of the US population is also a tremendous existential threat.

In any case, assuming that both US and China still stand 50 years from now, the only way for TSMC, Samsung or even Intel to stay ahead is, well, to stay ahead. It's a never-ending marathon, and in that regard funneling Huawei money into SMIC sounds very counter-productive.

[1] Moreso than his predecessors IMHO, with the notable exception of Mao. And indeed, Mao was very good at keeping China poor, underdeveloped and starving.

[2] Is it really recent? I'm French, during my two stays in the US (first time 3 years, second time 5 years) I felt a major polarization of the population, but it might have been there all along and I simply didn't notice.

They've done it before (quite recently, too), whole tech supply chains inside China. I don't think the CCP would want to be seen as "begging" to lift the bans...

They won't. So, why do we give such a flak to US/EU protecting their interests?

It is pretty straight forward to me.

That also doesn't change the fact that long term, China is the biggest threat to liberal democracies. In terms of geopolitics, Russia is actually quite complementary to China due to its large area having an abundance of resources to feed Chinese factories and both countries being authoritarian governments.

They seem to be getting that part right...

But in reality, they are neighbors and China has (or is in the process of) replacing Russia as the #2 power. So, while US has a lot to be careful for, it does indeed make sense that Russia has a more immediate threat.

If China becomes more powerful, it will start flexing muscle as the Russia-China border also, just like it flexes its muscle at its every other border.

Now, if we add that to the whole conspiracy theory about Trump and Russia, then things will start to add up even more.

Interesting...

https://goo.gl/maps/npoRDeSFHKcXVKjQ6

Bonus story: My dad's uncle was scheduled to get out of the Army on December 8, 1941. He was on a ship from Pearl Harbor to San Francisco. When his ship got the news that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor, his shipped turned right around. He was in the infantry, and he spent the next 3+ years fighting in the Pacific, including storming 4 beaches (e.g. just like storming the beaches of Normandy in the first scene of Saving Private Ryan). His battalion had 250% turnover during the war, and by the end of the conflict, he and 1 other guy were the only original soldiers left.

Bonus bonus story: He told me about a time when the Japanese were shelling US soldiers from the top of a hill with an artillery piece. The artillery was hiding behind some pretty thick trees, and was hard to target, so the US decided to have soldiers run up the hill in a direct attack. I guess it's smarter to charge artillery that's shooting at you if you have no place to hide? Anyway, it was a trap. As most of the soldiers got close to the top of the hill, the Japanese fled. It turned out the Japanese had stuffed the hill with explosives, and they blew that hill up big time. My dad's uncle was towards the rear of the charge, and he got knocked out from the shockwave of the explosion. When he awake, he was buried up to his waist in dirt and surrounded by the body parts of his fellow soldiers. Holy crap :P

TSMC was founded by a "returnee" as well. Obviously he and his family were rather anti-communist (his father was a ROC official) so he fled from mainland China to Hongkong then the US during the Chinese Civil War. He built a career at TI then returned to China (Taiwan) and founded TSMC when the government was investing in the development of hitech industries. [1]

There are quite a few similar examples on both sides (communists and nationalists). For example, and that's quite a twist of history, the 'father' of the PRC missile and space program was an MIT professor, Caltech professor, co-founder of JPL and was even involved in project Manhattan... Then he returned to mainland China in 1955 [2].

These days there are many more mainland Chinese in the West and Taiwan who work in the semiconductor industry and it's not uncommon for them to return to mainland China to take key positions.

There is no doubt that they'll catch up. The only question is how fast.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_Chang [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qian_Xuesen

US has not prevented Intel, AMD, or Qualcomm from selling their chips to China. Why it would prevent Taiwanese companies doing so?

The way China has developed and the growth potential still there, I can totally see Chinese expats moving back there.

I think he's referring to Han people studying/working overseas returning to their ethno-state. I can't imagine many non-Chinese would move to China instead of choosing to live in a fairer, rule of law Western democracy where the work is often better paid.

So this idea that it is not that secure/free because of a minor uptick in racism is ridiculous. China is routinely kidnapping and torturing anyone who disagrees with them - citizen or not. And we still don’t know where many missing journalists have ended up.

He swam from Kinmen, a small island about 2 miles from the mainland.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin_Yifu_Lin

I was also dubious. The swim was from Kinmen to Xiamen (~6 km)

It's only a couple of kilometers from the Kinmen to Xiamen:

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

No, it's not. This is a flaw of using nominal GDP which doesn't take into account currency differentials, and therefore costs of production.

China's GDP(PPP) is already bigger

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)

Furthermore, compensation for technically skilled individuals is significantly lower in the rest of the world than in the US: visa barriers are definitely holding US tech salaries up. Although China has even stronger restrictions on foreigners, for those who can get into China but not the US it may be a good deal.

First, a lot of Westerners hold anti-Western views—for whatever reason. This leads them to pro-China positions as a matter of tactics—the enemy of my enemy etc.

Second, a lot of Westerners hold anti-US views. That's similar to category 1 but different. We see this from some Canadian, Australian, and European users, and of course even from some American users—again, for whatever reason; people are complicated. This sort of user will also take China's side in a China/US conflict, for reasons of their own that have nothing to do with being Chinese communists.

Third, there are Westerners of Chinese background, either immigrants or children of immigrants, who have pro-China views because they identify with the Chinese dimension of their family history. Sometimes the children of immigrants have more strident views on these things than their parents. Where the parents naturally sought to fit in as immigrants in the West, the next generation tries to balance the two worlds by leaning back towards the country of origin. This group is the most likely to sound like "CCP propaganda" because they have deep knowledge of the culture and usually the language. And of course, if they're first-generation immigrants, their English may not sound native.

Fourth, there are Westerners of non-Chinese background who have spent a lot of time in China, usually for work (less often for travel), who developed pro-Chinese views, or complex/ambivalent views, simply by the natural process of having spent time there. This sort of user often feels like their fellow Westerners have a cartoonish and ignorant view of China, and wants to educate them. Sometimes they 'educate' them by insulting their ignorance, which is unhelpful. These users have native English and can sound like ardent propagandists as well, but actually their motive is to correct what they perceive as a distortion in Western public opinion. Their own views tend to be critical of the CCP, but they dislike what they regard as ignorant anti-Chinese views, and so will argue a pro-China position out of contrarianism. They tend to favor friendly trade and political relations with China, and since the trend of the last few years has been clearly against that, they can come across as rather aggrieved.

Fifth, there are many people who grew up in China, who came to the West for school (or work) and stayed here. Often they are caught between two worlds—having to defend the West and their choice to stay there to their families back home, and at the same time struck painfully by the ignorance, misunderstanding and hostility that they encounter about China here. HN has such users and they are in a difficult position: vastly outnumbered on intense, divisive questions that they happen to have deep personal experience of.

Sometimes these categories also intersect: for example there are Canadian children of Chinese-Canadian immigrants who speak Mandarin and have spent time working at tech companies in China. Their views come from having grown up in a Chinese-Canadian family and having spent time in China itself, and they feel demeaned and even slurred by the generalizations about China that they see on Western internet forums. They show up in the threads with counterarguments, and their counterarguments are often intensely detailed because they have so much personal experience with the topics.

Can you see how complex this situation is? Each of these categories is a minority on HN, but HN is big enough that 'minority' can still mean thousands of people, any of whom may comment in a thread like this—and no doubt there are additional categories that I didn't list (edit: here's another: Westerners with Chinese spouses). Any of these users can post what seem like absurdly pro-CCP comments in a HN thread, for complicated reasons that come from their own life experience. When they do that, other users run into their comments with no idea of the background that would lead someone to post that way, and it creates a shock experience. (For more on the shock experience, see [1] and [2]). Basically, they go 'WTF?' and wonder how anyone could possibly post like this.

Now here comes the pivot in the whole business. When you experience that 'WTF?', you have two choices. First choice, you can say "wow, I wonder how different our experiences must be that you would post what seems to me like such an obviously wrong and evil comment!" That fork leads to curious conversation in which people get to know each other better. Second choice, you can say "You must be a communist party shill! No one would post like this for any other reason! How much are they paying you?" Which percentage of HN users makes the first choice vs. the second choice? Exercise for the reader.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098

What happened in Singapore? I moved here earlier this year but haven't heard much beyond the usual grumbling about long hours.

GFW by itself is no small engineering feat either. It's technology is widely relevant in many technical areas related to traffic control and network management. For example, deep packet inspection was applied in GFW, and had been quite useful in intrusion detection. Of course now with the popularity of encryption, DPI is no longer very relevant. But that's the example of it being advancing technology.

If you have doubt, search "1992 Consensus".

At some point it would be extremely hard to say "this is still Huawei".

The US gov should've banned all major Chinese companies, because that seems like a big loophole to me. Even then it still seems like just a temporary measure.

That doesn't mean national interests cannot coincide with good outcomes, though.

Or is it the case that the only time that human rights actually enact change is when there is an underlying material interest, making them little more than a veneer?

It is fairly evident that the U.S. is worried about China putting it in a position where it's not as easy/effective to go around the world, exploit foreign natural resources under false pretenses and sanction "non-compliant" nations to the brink.

It has absolutely 0 to do with human rights and all to do with economic power.

As for Chinese domestic human rights, the thing is doing coups etc. as was done so many times in i.e. the Middle East and Latin America won't lead to a better outcome because a coup is a forceful, violent and sudden, unnatural event that requires forces usually as bad if not worse than the current regime to pull off and denies the chance for long-term institutions to develop that adopt naturally by increasing human rights, however slowly.

It's the same problem with introducing modern economic theory, manufacturing, technology to a nation that did not had that trickle in at least somewhat continually over a period of time. It's a shock to the system in a way that rarely leads to better long-term outcomes.

By any measurements one can imagine, this was true since 1970s: China were rapidly liberalizing.

In 1970s Chinese cannot choose what they wear each day. That's how authoritarian it was.

Like 3000+ anti Trump stories on NYTimes. Try that in China?