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This is a clown car reduction of a very complicated global issue starring a company who got to where they are now through brazen corporate espionage. It's "utterly foolish protectionism" when the West tries to protect their own, but "all's fair" when Western firms are left with no recourse while their IP is stolen and copied all over China because the CCP wouldn't ever rule in favor of a western company.

> It's "utterly foolish protectionism" when the West tries to protect their own, but "all's fair" when Western firms are left with no recourse while their IP is stolen and copied all over China because the CCP wouldn't ever rule in favor of a western company.

You make it sound like the western companies had no choice in the matter. I don't think anybody has ever forced a western company to move its production in China. Actually these western companies are making a lot of money by moving to China. And I think apart from industrial espionage , the rules were clear upfront.

Histotical examples usually don't work on the internet but I'll try anyway:

That's not the actual history of these types of of actions. Look at the 1982 IBM / Japan theft case (https://www.nytimes.com/1983/02/09/business/hitachi-guilty-i...).

IBM was aggressively protecting its mainframe market in the 80s so it would have a blossoming and prosperous future.

Even if we are to accept your premise AND all your arguments, it's still a bad idea as it actually led to a stagnation of technology.

There's plenty more historical examples of this. It doesn't work.

Take the Japanese automobile quota system for example (https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.csmonitor.com/layout/set/am...). This tried to protect encroachment of Japanese cars into the American market.

Not by increasing the quality but by suspecting the Japanese of stealing American know-how. A covetous and revanchist policy.

This only led to them internationalizing their markets more and working around the US in their supply chain. The US locked itself out of the market, became insular with its cars, stagnated and lost its place in the international market.

And now everyone is doing lean manufacturing which is from Toyota. Turns out they were just making better stuff and our policymakers were too racist to acknowledge the possibilities just like we thought Afghanistan was going to be easy, or Russia thought they'd easily defeat Japan.

The haughty racial superiority complex is alive and well.

I'm not downvoting but

1. Implying the downfall of mainframes was due to protectionist policies and not the _PC_ is an incredible leap.

2. Comparing Japan to China in this situation is bizarre.

3. Your reply does nothing to show that this situation is:

* cartoonish

* racist

* utterly foolish protectionism

We know today that Huawei has a history of IP Theft from American multinationals[1] and is suspected of building backdoors into networking infrastructure (from the article). You seem to advocate that the US should just take this lying down. This is a classic prisoners dilemma situation, and Huawei has been choosing "betray" for 20 years. I can't see, how after 20 years of playing nice, that the US response is cartoonish, racist or foolish protectionism.

[1] https://www.prosperousamerica.org/top_five_cases_of_huawei_i...

The very name of that website sounds like some sort of propaganda department. Notwithstanding that, the claims it makes are all of comparatively trivial offenses. The "top 3rd" one was awarded 10 million by a US court, peanuts compared to company revenue (e.g. a US judge awarded Apple 1 billion in damages from Samsung). The "top 2nd" one links to a blog by a Cisco officer whose only technically-specific example he could give was copying some code from strcmp.c - ooooo strcmp.c! That is going to really get an edge over the competition! LOL.

The PDF link describing details about the 1st one was broken, but it sounds like a standard case of employees leaving a company to work for a competitor (allowed under California law) and the old company going sour grapes.

Didn't bother reading 4 and 5, after how overblown 2 and 3 were.

I'm sorry I didn't analyze the source too hard before selecting. I'm only really familiar with Huawei's and Cisco's patent troubles (summarized on Wikipedia here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Huawei#Cisco_pate...)

The wikipedia article does not go into that much technical details. Do you have more? Given that the Cisco officer could only talk about strcmp and not something more substantial, I am inclined to believe the story was overblown.

On a separate note, I think the biggest most obvious question that any accuser has to answer is, if Huawei copied so much significant material, why are they ahead of everyone else? It takes time to digest copied technology, it is not a simple case of just copying your competitor's source code then racing ahead of them with a massive sales team and non-technical economic prowess. Given that intellectual property laws were constructed to (supposedly) encourage innovation, even if Huawei did get to where they are now by copying, doesn't that suggest that in fact it's a good thing, they have brought all this extra innovative technology to the world? Or are the monopolists simply going sour grapes because they are no longer at the the forefront?

>The wikipedia article does not go into that much technical details. Do you have more? Given that the Cisco officer could only talk about strcmp and not something more substantial, I am inclined to believe the story was overblown.

It's wikipedia man - that section alone has 8 cited sources. Healthy skepticism is a good thing, but I'm not going to spoonfeed you.

>it is not a simple case of just copying your competitor's source code then racing ahead of them with a massive sales team and non-technical economic prowess

But this is exactly what happened in Huawei's case. Huawei is known for being cheaper than Cisco and providing way better support than Cisco. It's easy to throw bodies at sales & support when you don't pay R&D. They aren't even ahead of everyone else - Cisco's hardware is still more performant and Ericsson is still more widely deployed. 5G simply provided a new ground where everyone would start from 0.

I don't know why you are being downvoted but your questions don't seem relevant. What does it matter that monopolists are going sour grapes? If I steal from you, and use that money to buy a fancy car, and get thrown in jail, will any lawyer use the defense "infinity0 was jealous of my fancy car"?

I checked the sources - they are either inaccessible or don't go into technical detail, and basically just repeat what the sentence on the wikipedia article says. So no, they are not sufficient to actually get to the details of the case. If you are "familiar" with the case as you claimed, surely you can answer one simple question of mine rather than make me tree-search through all these links? Additionally, I am coming from a background of having the media spew these accusations at me all day without actually backing them up, so I am not inclined to want to tree-search through yet another probably-unsubstantive source being thrown in my face.

When your officer mentions "strcmp" on a public blog post, as one of their key examples of "theft", that is extremely telling.

> But this is exactly what happened in Huawei's case. [..] providing way better support than Cisco [..] They aren't even ahead of everyone else

Providing better support is not helped by copying technology, but you have to train large numbers of non-technical support staff to be competent at supporting that particular technology. Sure "ahead" depends on your measure, but they are certainly ahead in some key areas such as coverage.

> If I steal from you, and use that money to buy a fancy car

Stealing money is different from copying technology. If I steal your money, you no longer have the money. But if I copy your technology, you still have the technology. By the time it takes me to understand your technology, you have had enough time to innovate further upon it. So attributing Huawei's success primarily to this, is extremely biased. Given than there have been much more substantial lawsuits with widely-covered technical evidence (Apple vs Samsung, Google vs Oracle) as well as heavier fines involved, I cannot put any strong belief in these Huawei accusations. Huawei being singled out for something less substantive than what other companies have already done, this stinks of some sort of prejudice, and anyone reasonable can see this. If it's not racism, it is ideological - that a company from a country run on an entirely different set of principles, is doing as good or better than you.

We can't do a counterfactual. Perhaps the technical superiority of mainframes could have been maintained with greater competition and investments in the "right" pursuits instead of focusing on being litigious and covetous.

Seagate also had some 80s theft but instead they chose to focus on their next technologies and making better products. "They can't steal our quality" is the quote I remember.

Corporate espionage happens a lot. I've had it happen to me, at companies I've been involved in, multiple times. Of course we are supposed to ignore how common it is and focus on China and then assume everyone else are honest moral angels getting hoodwinked. Nonsense.

The accusations are framed as if because something is Chinese we cannot trust it. There's suspicions, hunches, and feelings. You even used "suspected". As if "well we can't trust those shifty Asians". This will get us nowhere. Build better stuff.

Also you can't down vote replies, but thanks anyway. Your nonsense is entertaining

> Perhaps the technical superiority of mainframes

I don't understand the point you are trying to make. I mean, the PC killed the mainframe because it was a superior concept, because it catered to an incomparably larger market (personal computing) and, due to its massive economies of scale allowed to develop solutions that ate away the mainframe market.

I mean, think about it: why so you think a massively successful company like Google, with very deep pockets and total freedom to pick and choose the best technology money can buy, decided to found their whole business not on mainframes but on massive clusters of COTS PCs? And why do you think Google doubled-down on PCs, and not on mainframes, even after they started to design and build and operate their own computers?

> The accusations are framed as if because something is Chinese we cannot trust it.

China's regime can't be trusted because it has a very long track record of fraud and abuse and deceitfulness, not to mention human rights violations. You'd be hard-pressed to find any nation that developed a trusting relationship with China due to the way China's totalitarian regime engages with the whole world, specially their neighbors.

> I don't understand the point you are trying to make. I mean, the PC killed the mainframe ... and build and operate their own computers?

Because in the early 80s and late 70s, IBM, Honeywell, CDC, Unisys, Burroughs, nobody focused on the right things.

That's why it's a counterfactual. Virtual machine first started on VM by IBM and then on VM/ESA. The parallel multi core processor was also a mainframe innovation.

If in a different world where they ran it like a brutal startup instead of a post ww2 government contractor relying on legislation to secure profits, the past 40 years could have played out differently.

Just like CP/M could have been on the IBM PC if Digital Research returned the phone calls faster or we could all be running Xerox desktops today if they had dealt with Parc differently or we'd all be in a post nuclear apocalypse if the people in charge of launching them didn't defy orders.

Please stop assuming I'm profoundly incompetent, this is counterproductive

Surely we can disagree without calling well-intentioned comments "nonsense."

but it's clearly not. it's a "call in the troops" brigading.

I said essentially the same things here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24101407 which was outside their thread of interest so it didn't go in the deep negatives. Same message, different parent, radically different results.

So it's not good faith, it's some dumb bad faith psychological game. It's an Ash conformity test. I'm supposed to think "hrmm, maybe 'Chinaman is evil' race-baiting IS correct, look at all the people who think that!" Nope. Not happening. I know the scam.

I know I'm not the crazy one, there's groups of racist internet lunatics that go around and do attacks like this ... that's why I dropped it. They can have their fun. I have other things to do with my time, but I'm retracting absolutely nothing. They can try to move that overton window somewhere else.

China is a revisionist power whose values are antithetical to the US. Its rise almost assures instability.

And more generally, no incumbent superpower is going to make it easy for another to challenge it.

Made in China 2025 is an explicit blueprint for how China will supplant America in high technology. Why would you expect America to aid and abet them in this undertaking?

That's what this is though. It's forcing their hand to develop their own alternatives and making sure the Americans have no place at the table.

It accelerates the process.

It's the latest brilliant policy by the same people who outsourced everything there and gave them the ball to begin with.

This is essentially the US automakers play of the 80s. It only accelerated the sunsetting of the American car industry. The policy doesn't work when a bunch of other places can replace you

Seriously?

You don’t find the million people (the Uighurs) in concentration camps “outlandish”?

How about the thousands of students rolled into smithereens by tanks in Tianamen Square? Too “cartoonish” for you?

smh

I don't really want to enter this discussion, since it usually quickly devolves to less than stellar levels. However, on the topic of the 1989 protests, I feel like Westerners often have a very superficial understanding of what happened back then, and in turn cannot understand chinese civil society and government today.

There's one documentary on the topic that I can wholeheartedly recommend, the Gate of Heavenly Peace.[1] It is quite long, but goes into incredible detail and also interviews a lot of organizers and politicians first hand.

The Tiananmen Square massacre was a turning point in chinese politics, ending a decade of increased freedom and open calls for reform. In civil society, people kept their heads down and went to work. In politics, almost all the reformers and politicians sympathetic to the students were isolated, demoted or even imprisoned. Still the last 30 years have been the best China has had in hundreds of years, and it is always much harder to argue with success. A lot of chinese people know what happened back then, and a lot of those accept it as something shitty that happened, but ultimately the country and people were still able to progress. Chinese people, by and large are not against their own government, even if they don't always agree with everything that happens.

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Gtt2JxmQtg

If you blindly believe Western media, sure. There is no actual proof of either narrative.

Try at least hearing the other side.

https://thegrayzone.com/2019/12/21/china-detaining-millions-...

https://youtu.be/BjgSOYRZqIo

https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/89BEIJING18828_a.html

The problem with hearing the other side is of course that most people are more concerned with reaching the correct value judgment (imprisoning innocent Uyghurs is bad, killing innocent protesters is bad) than with reaching it based on accurate information.

If you tell someone who believes that thousands of people died directly on Tiananmen Square and were crushed to pieces by tanks, correcting them by pointing out that actually

> ALTHOUGH HE DID NOT ACTUALLY WITNESS ANY LARGE SCALE SHOOTINGS ON THE SQUARE PROPER, GALLO SAW MANY CASUALTIES BROUGHT INTO THE SQUARE AND DID NOT DOUBT THAT HUNDREDS OF PEOPLE IN BEIJING WERE KILLED BY THE ARMY ON JUNE 3 AND 4.

that's not going to affect their value judgment (the numbers are smaller, people weren't killed on the square itself but elsewhere, who cares, it's still bad) and most likely they'll soon forget those details and keep telling their original story, because, well, it's just a much more visceral image.

It's also the the information about these events is so hidden. The govt admits no wrong and hides all evidence to the contrary. For that alone I prefer to err on the side of these events being pretty bad.

Also having known an eye witness to Tiananmen square, I'm confident it was bad. Really bad. If he were to get caught talking about it, things would be really bad for him too. So you won't find many witnesses willing to talk.

No one claims there were no deaths. US-backed counter revolutions often involve violence, regardless of the self-restraint of the state being attacked. What exactly should the army do after several of its unarmed soldiers were killed by the “protesters”?

Every global power becomes one by exercising power, globally.

Claiming the existence of problems justifies these types of policies is an argument of convenience where the policy is fixed and someone is just fishing for reasons.

We ignore it when it's Saudi Arabia or the child slave driven mines of Central Africa and bring it up when there's a possibility of encroachment.

The world is terrible, we should do better. But carving out Chinese manufacturers of smartphones isn't how you'll get there.

You can’t look at history through modern lenses. Just because Germany, the US, or Europe did something bad 80-150 years doesn’t make it right today!

If those actors really thought what they did was bad they would be trying to revert the outcomes of their actions. Do you see the US moving non-native descendants out of vast swaths of American to set up native-american countries, or paying native survivors the fair land value of all the lands they were driven from? Talk is cheap, watch the hands.

Again, every large power gets there by exercising it, continually, throughout the duration of their existence.

Look at standing rock, America's war against the indigenous isn't over.

> Look at standing rock, America's war against the indigenous isn't over.

By your measuring stick, where do you place Tiana men's massacre?

Kent State was barely 50 years though, and sending Predator Drones after anyone suspected to even tangentially be related to terrorism is current policy.

If the US still had an ethnic minority that lived predominately in one area and has been active in terrorism and islamist extremism, I don't think they'd handle it gracefully. Abu Ghraib gives us an idea about what the US would do in a similar situation and it's not been that long.