Huawei CEO: After September 15 No More Kirin Chips
sparrowsnews.com
sparrowsnews.com
> The initiative encourages production of high value products and services, like aerospace and semiconductors, to help achieve independence from foreign suppliers.[1]
As far as i am aware no country except for different eras of communism(specifically Soviet) have operated somewhat effectively on production output plans on the scale of entire economy.
I would be cautious about using history prior to the industrial revolution in any predictive capacity because the industrial revolution was a major shift in technology, economics, and societal organization. Yes, humans are still motivated by the same wants and fears, but many of the mechanisms that drove premodern events no longer exist today.
I don't know if that had such a large impact. How much quality innovation is either secret or patented? How many patents are simply low quality, low effort trash[1]? Seems like most groundbreaking research is published relatively quickly.
I don't see anything to win here. Probably every large company, including those from the US, have some kind of production facilities, storage or supplies in China. China applying similar restrictions would probably be a worse hit for the US than the current situation is for China.
They always planned to build up their own semiconductor industry and become heavily independent of foreign semiconductors.
They always planned to build up their own software industry and become heavily independent of foreign software.
They always planned to build up their own jet industry and become heavily independent of Boeing and Airbus.
They always planned to build up their military tech and become heavily independent of Russia.
Insert any given prominent technology here.
The more restrictive your thoughts may be as an adult. The less 'free wheeling', and therefore, more locked into tight, controlled paths.
Further to that, even if the above is not significantly true, there is still the entire "does the work I want to do, the research, threaten PRC dogma in any way?"
And worse...
"Will the work I do, threaten PRC dogma in the future."
On top of all of that, a reduction of international collaboration with others in the field, and so on.
Of course, I could be entirely wrong. But I do think that "restrictive environment" leads to "less creative output", at least in visible output.
TikTok's For You algorithm is pretty clearly based on YouTube and Netflix's published recommendation platforms, but I'm not sure why you're framing this so narrowly. The entire product is a Vine clone and they regularly steal content for marketing purposes (c.f. https://twitter.com/xTempex/status/1182185566999318529).
We don't really see this level of abuse from American or European firms who have ethnically Chinese executives. It's not really a matter of race; it's a corporate culture that is more common in highly-competitive markets with weak IP protections. Trying to frame it as racist isn't really productive, especially since the parent comment wasn't specifically talking about Han Chinese, but about the nation.
Those that decry 'racist', when one complains about China are indeed the true racists, for they think culture and race = the same thing.
This is true of virtually any recommendation system implemented anywhere and YouTube and Netflix most certainly did not invent any of the basic concepts involved. In fact the core algorithms for recommendations are very classic and the newest techniques can be credited to Microsoft research and Geoff Hinton.
From a competitive landscape, yes it sucks. But Huawei / China needs to be punished for its blatant IP theft, I think this is a great place to start.
China is despicable but I think that the moral ground of the US regarding this kind of issue is quite shaky.
China on the other hand if you don't support putting muslims in concentration camps, you end up there yourself
Yes China is quite flawed, but this attempt at maintaining the status quo really only serves to halt progress.
Please do not try to push the CCP's propaganda by knocking the United States, it only ends one way, and that is all of us being slaves to winnie the pooh
Not actually true since Bush lost the popular vote in the 2000 election.
“A majority of the electoral college, representing a second-place minority of the eligible individuals casting ballots for Presidential electors”, if you want to be accurate, but certainly not a “majority of the population” or even “a majority of voters in the general election”, and not even “a plurality of voters in the general election”.
You don't see any possibility that informed criticism of USA policy of undeclared and unprovoked war might lead to better policy? American pacifists shouldn't argue for peace? Shouldn't vote for peace? If that is your position, don't be surprised when we put an end to the Union... all of humanity will benefit, but 3.5% of humanity will be sad for a moment.
After all, if 150 million and one believe that killing a million civilians is acceptable and is able to support carrying out that activity that means that society is corrupt.
If 1 man believes that killing a million civilians is acceptable and is able to carry out that activity that means that society is merely incapable of enforcing moral will.
Isn't that what design-by-committee is? Or upper management hiring consulting firms to "validate" a plan they already had in mind?
It was subsequently found that a full state recount would have given the result to Al Gore. Less debatably, a Gore win would have been the certain result if there had been no racial bias in disallowed votes, and also if the voting machines had simply worked properly.
IMO a Gore win would have prevented 9/11, avoided the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, set the scene for a less adversarial relationship with China, and pushed the global economy towards sustainability with time to spare - and possibly also avoided the economic bubble that eventually caused the recession in 2008.
As a consequence, if those in control of both parties want something (which was the case for the Iraq War), there is absolutely no way for the people to vote against it.
This is without even talking about how consent is manufactured.
How are they comparable? The black incarceration rate in the US is around 2.3%[1], meanwhile the incarceration rate for Uyghurs is estimated to be around 10%-15%[2][3].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_St...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_re-education_camps
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_China
Funny you mention whataboutism, because there's a distinct lack of it here. No one here is justifying America's incarceration rates by saying "the other side" does the same.
I agree that the US prison industrial complex should be reformed. However it is in no way equivalent to locking people up for political reasons. Political reeducation camps and forced harvesting of organs from prisoners cannot be compared to work release programs or paid prison labor.
Why are so many comments seeking to establish equivalence?
There's also Apple doing high performance ARM, but only for their own stuff.
They are quick to learn and adapt, though, not least when the Chinese state throws its whole weight behind something, so I'm thinking that after this initial shock, in a few years the result will be a decline of the relative importance of the Taiwanese semi industry because mainland China will have its own, with all the potential strategic consequences that this might mean.
And here I thought US would like to recognize Taiwan as an independent country. But then it goes ahead and tells a Taiwanese company that they can't make their own decisions on who to do business with?
You can have all the will in the world, but that is not necessarily going to win out every time.
"Oops, looks like there's a bad fire in that Taiwanese fab. Pity about that. They'll be out of production for years."
By then of course, that fab would have been so obsolete that it's really not worth fixing.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/08/06/china-deploys-am...
It is obvious that the US would have a problem if the mainland took over Taiwan. But short of that happening they don't because Taiwan is reliant on them.
Taiwan's geography makes it a natural fortress, and even Taiwan's own military can defend the island pretty well entirely on its own. A mainland invasion will be very, very expensive, so it won't happen that easily.
Economically, Taiwan is in decline. China basically doesn't need Taiwan for economic reasons. So the only reason to invade Taiwan, would be to appeal to the nationalist sentiment of reunification. But the chances of that happening is less than what many think, both because of the military cost, and because the CCP are actually moderates; there are many Chinese people who are far more radical, and if it's up to them then they would have launched an invasion a decade ago.
This probably sounds unbelievable, or even propagandistic, to many people here on HN. You don't have to take my word for it. See Kishore Mahbubani, ex-Singapore diplomat & ex-head of UN Security Council, who wrote a book on China.
Also, regarding "communist"... they're not really communist, haven't been for a long time now. 80% of the businesses in China are privately owned, and people have private property. Though socialist elements still exist; my wife's grandparents recently received new houses from the government, as reimbursement for tearing down their old houses (which were in much worse shape than the new ones) for redeveloping the land. As Mahbubani says, the CCP is more accurately described as the Chinese Civilization Party.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-congress-companies/...
But that really has got nothing to do with ownership. It has got to do with national security, and ensuring that the company does not conflict with public interests. Whether you agree with such reasons is another matter: the point is that it's not about ownership.
Private individuals may own a company on paper, but the party will dictate what is done with it. Look at the case of Jack Ma.
Right, but communism has never been communism where it has been tried, that's the paradox of communism. trying to continually redefine the term to fit your narrative to that it's still pure is a boring exercise in bike-shedding.
It seems more like that you are redefining communism to mean whatever system China is using today.
Chinese Civilization Party might be over-doing it a bit, don't you think? Unless you use a circular definition that Chinese civilization is whatever the CCP says it is. Normally the meaning of civilization is defined by the people in it, rather than via edict.
The notion of state ownership vs private property is indeed more capitalist, as long as it's actually meaningful. For private property to mean something, it must mean that the government can't or won't override your choices about how that property is to be used. In China there's a lot of private businesses and private property, but the government is still very willing to control the details of how that property is used, for example, by insisting that party members are installed in powerful positions when the company becomes important, or restrictive capital controls, or requiring a wide variety of licenses to do business. The control is still there, it's just done via different bureaucratic means than "state ownership". For instance a company won't remain your private property for long if you criticise the government, or allow other people to criticise the government. It's a rather weak notion of private property.
Kishore coined the term as a way to clear up people’s misunderstanding of what the CCP is. His point is that people misread the CCP’s goal as advancing communism world wide, whereas in actuality its goal is to advance the interests of the Chinese nation. This misread results in nonsensical China policy, which is why he promotes the term, to help people deal with China as it is and not what people think China is.
As for control of private property: interventions are possible, for sure. But I am not sure whether the existence of interventions is a meaningful point in this discussion. Here in the Netherlands there are a ton of interventions too. I can’t even park a bike on my own parking lot without getting into trouble! Yet nobody will argue that private property in the Netherlands is weak. The fact is that for the most part, property in China really is private. That large companies have to cede some control is an exception to the rule, because most companies are not large.
“Taiwan’s ‘silicon shield’ makes it the 51st [US] state,” FT quoted Dan Hutcheson, a chip analyst and chairman of VLSI research, as saying. He stressed the need for the U.S. to protect Taiwan, saying “it can’t afford to lose it to China.”
An example (unrelated to semiconductors) is China's failure to manufacture a decent jet engine even though they've been trying for 30 years. It turns out that the metallurgy required for a jet engine is more complicated than what is needed for household appliances. They aren't even dealing with incomplete stolen information, they have a license from Russia and the full technical information and still can't do it (although Russia isn't sharing their most modern designs, but China still struggles to make an engine with 1980's tech).
Western nations would be smart to try and decentralise some of that production capacity (also easier said than done) before that could come to be, but does anyone think the Western nations current or foreseeable leadership really have the strategic foresight to do so?
At the moment it is in everyone's interest that Taiwan's foundries stay up and running. But in the future, in case of a hypothetical conflict it might even be in the mainland's interest to bomb them and create havoc for Western companies.
TSMC actually plans to set up shop in Arizona: https://www.tsmc.com/tsmcdotcom/PRListingNewsArchivesAction....
The US getting cut off from TSMC supply by a China move was unacceptable economically and politically. On the other side, the political relationship with the US has all sorts of economic ties for TSMC and Taiwan.
So you can plainly see, the economics of it are connected all up and down the context. They cannot be separated.
So, this ban gives Taiwan and US businesses some breathing space to keep that lead. How its leveraged, is upto the governments and business's .
I would guess the new TSMC facility in the US is part of this compensation - they'll probably be receiving very favourable tax treatment for everything manufactured there.
That said, TSMC is too successful for it's own good. Once their Arizona plant opens on US tax dime, Taiwan will loose security guarantor. I suspect they'll delay for as long as they can. SMIC is basically sufficient to make IC for Chinese military use in any case. The main, and huge problem, is being commercially competitive.
Ugh. The West has had the tail wagging the dog for so long. Arrogant transnational corporations and the rich think they can control China like everything else. It's the same arrogance on display with coronavirus: they play by very different rules and don't care who you are.
By all accounts TSMC didn't want to open plant in US. They were denying it for months / weeks / days before. And TSMC has invested so much capex in new Taiwan plants that it makes no fiscal sense for them to open low capacity plant in US unless heavily subsidized, and US wouldn't subsidize unless it was for MIC. As for Taiwan's future, really depends on how election goes. I'm skeptical China will allow TSMC / Taiwan to cooperate with US unfettered in semi. Right now there's mediatek buffering Huawei. And other Chinese brands can still sell phones with qualcomm. But if US manage to coerce all Taiwanese semi from working with China... well glitter bombs are going to blow up in Taiwanese fabs before real bombs. I think it's semi is a much more dangerous situation than most people realize. If Trumps over November, there's a few years before Arizonal TSMC comes online to form a useful Chinese semi containment strategy. Or TSMC will delay the play until after Trump term 2. Otherwise, stock up on graphics cards now.
However, at the same time, unfortunately the Chinese government doesn't play fair, and they are ramping up state sponsored industry espionage and hacking of American and Taiwanese semi-conductor firms to speed up the process.
This best describes China's perspective towards "technology acquisition"
“They want technology by hook or by crook. They want it now. The spy game has always been a gentleman’s game, but China has taken the gloves off,” said John Bennett, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s San Francisco office, which battles economic spies targeting Silicon Valley. “They don’t care if they get caught or if people go to jail. As long as it justifies their ends, they are not going to stop.”
See:
https://www.wired.com/story/chinese-hackers-taiwan-semicondu...
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-basf-espionage/basf-worke...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/taiwans-technology-secrets-come...
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/08/inside-...
https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-china-economic-es...
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/prc-state-owned-company-taiwa...
Until the general U.S population realizes that china's end goal is to eat them alive and unanimously supports putting china in its place, nothing will change and by then I fear it will be to late.
The Chinese might be playing by different rules than those “established” over the last few decades by the west; but no one is playing “fair”.
"In 1994, Airbus lost a $6 billion contract with Saudi Arabia after the NSA, acting as a whistleblower, reported that Airbus officials had been bribing Saudi officials.."
This may really just mean Xiaomi or Oppo gains an advantage over Huawei and takes the top crown.
US restrictions are all about Huawei’s ability to use U.S. technology and software to design and manufacture semiconductors abroad. BIS made targeted rule "to impose a new control over certain foreign-produced items, when there is knowledge that such items are destined to a designated entity on the Entity List."
> (i) Items, such as semiconductor designs, when produced by Huawei and its affiliates on the Entity List (e.g., HiSilicon), that are the direct product of certain U.S. Commerce Control List (CCL) software and technology; and
> (ii) Items, such as chipsets, when produced from the design specifications of Huawei or an affiliate on the Entity List (e.g., HiSilicon), that are the direct product of certain CCL semiconductor manufacturing equipment located outside the United States. Such foreign-produced items will only require a license when there is knowledge that they are destined for reexport, export from abroad, or transfer (in-country) to Huawei or any of its affiliates on the Entity List.
https://www.commerce.gov/news/press-releases/2020/05/commerc...
I don't get it, if the U.S. wants to cripple Huawei why would they let you buy SoC that way? The whole point I thought was that any company dealing with Huawei that used some material proportion of U.S. originated technology to deliver goods to Huawei had to stop. Which means in order for Huawei to build chips it needs a supply chain that is almost completely independent of the U.S.
The closets analogy I can think of is like building nuclear submarines. They are notoriously hard because its not possible to globalize the supply chain, everything in its design must be sourced within the country thus requires a specialized supply chain.
Even in close to lawless Trump era there WTO exists and sanctions can be challenged and ignored by other countries if they are excessive.
Ultimately, a big part of the US/China tech war is due to the structure of high tech R&D, which is to sink a massive amount of capital at the beginning in hopes of getting a global monopoly and being able to sell to everyone in the world to recoup that initial cost. While China was a consumer and assembler of US technology, the US could rest easy knowing that it had a captive global market for high tech products to fuel its future R&D costs and stay ahead. But when China starts developing and selling alternatives, there's not enough buyers and sales volume to support both Chinese and US cutting edge tech companies, and some of them will go under in the decades following. We saw this happen with Taiwan's TSMC becoming the only real vendor of the latest semiconductor process nodes after decades of US fabs falling out of the race. But Taiwan is under US military influence, China isn't. Ultimately, this is about keeping China on a leash as a consumer instead of a producer of technology as much as possible because there isn't enough customers and capital in the world for two high-tech R&D superpowers to siphon at the same time.
Also: https://www.theepochtimes.com/chinas-neighbors-in-the-indo-p...
Here is the same story from Gizmo China:
https://www.gizmochina.com/2020/08/07/huawei-mate40-last-fla...
Huawei still needs license from BIS to use Snapdragons but it should be easier to get.
Now the US has provided an (essentially infinite) price support for domestic production and all the infrastructure and supply chain that go along with it.
also what are they gonna use for smart watches, TV and their other products which are powered by kirin chips? you can't replace those that easy
And taking over Taiwan will cripple TSMC's ability to provide to anyone. The moment they invade Taiwan, 100% of its population becomes anti-China (right now a portion of Taiwanese are still sympathetic to the idea of reunification). TSMC employees will revolt and the island will turn into a perpetual guerilla war zone. How do you produce chips in such an environment?
I still think WWIII could plausibly happen, just not because of TSMC.