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Comment by AsyncAwait | Hacker News Reader

I am not Chinese and do think that the amount of accusations is much larger than the body of evidence to support them, I'd guess there are others of similar opinion, some of them Chinese, others not.

What I dislike is people generally assuming that I somehow agree with every single thing Huawei, or the CCP for that matter, has ever done.

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The body of evidence that Huawei steals intellectual property is quite substantial. If you want to read about it, you can start with these:

https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1124996/downl...

https://blogs.cisco.com/news/huawei-and-ciscos-source-code-c...

https://amlawdaily.typepad.com/motorolahuawei.pdf

https://www.mpegla.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/FINAL-Huaw...

I am looking for extensive evidence that they backdoor their equipment and feed data to the CCP. As far as the "intellectual property" goes, it is used by the winners to kick down the ladder they themselves climbed.

The U.S. used to steal from Europe while it was developing, now suddenly IP matters a lot.

The Japanese used to steal quite a bit of IP, yet Nintendo is now super hawkish to protect its own.

Chinese companies will get overly protective of its own IP once they sufficiently develop.

All in all, is a well known circle that may signal it's time to rethink how IP is currently structured and enforced around the world.

Would you mind pointing me to some specific cases of US technology companies stealing IP from European companies as the US was industrializing, or Japanese technology companies (including Nintendo) stealing IP? It is often more informative to speak about specific cases, rather than generalizing based on inexplicit information.

Businesses use IP laws to protect their own property rights. Whether you call the property owners "winners" is up to you, but that doesn't change the spirit or letter of IP laws.

We Were Pirates, Too

>The ship carrying Francis Cabot Lowell and his family home from England in the summer of 1812 was intercepted by a British war squadron, which held the passengers and crew for some days at the British base at Halifax, Canada. Lowell’s baggage was subject to several intensive searches, for his captors had been warned that he may have stolen designs for power textile weaving machinery, a serious crime in England. Lowell, indeed, had done just that — but, aware of the risk, had committed the designs to memory.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2012/12/06/we-were-pirates-too/

Wait, weren't the US and England at war in the summer of 1812? Wartime hardly seems like a reasonable comparison. Britain had been impressing American navy personnel (making them slave soldiers) for years by that time.

Interesting paper and I think anyone should read if only for the stories told, but if the only cases happened in the 1800s, then I don't think this is particularly relevant for deciding whether we should enforce consequences on foreign companies for IP infringement or not. The US also permitted racial slavery in that era - we ceased commerce both voluntarily and in an official manner with South Africa over their racially stratified society in 1990. Why would we treat China differently than Apartheid South Africa because of something that happened 200 years ago?

The US has been dominant economically since the late 1800s, when their incentives switch to protecting IP. If the theory of the above poster that IP is used to pull the ladder up is true then it does make sense.

Incidentally, US Foreign policy (as well as that of any nation) even in 2020, when you take justifications, stunningly aligned with US national interest. Make of that what you will.

The US has become a very developed market since then, though certainly not the "dominant market", but regardless should we as actors in the current legal system advocate for something that gives preferential treatment of Chinese businesses OR an entirely different system with very little protections for IP?

I don't think so, and would actually prefer we take on something closer to the Chinese approach of leasing land in the same way we encourage people to put ideas in the public domain for a guarantee of a period of market monopoly. Though there are many reforms about current US IP law that I would love to see.

>US Foreign policy (as well as that of any nation) even in 2020, when you take justifications, stunningly aligned with US national interest.

I disagree - most nations advocate for their self-interests, otherwise we would be the United States of the World right now rather than the United States of America. Similarly, many countries have a foreign policy favorable to China because of economic incentives with a voluntary relationship between them. Are all countries or localities as equally 'autonomous' as China or the US when deciding with whom their most beneficial economic relationships are? No, though I don't think "dropping IP law" is a particular benefit to increasing that autonomy either.

Asides from Afghanistan and Iraq, are there any states you can name that are advocating for almost objectively US aligned policy?

I meant that most nations action's align with their interests, not their rhetoric or ideology.

I'm not making a claim as to what we should do, I'm just saying that our current IP system has nothing to do with morality and everything to do with Western power and interest.

Personally I think a system such as the one you described is preferable too, but I'm just explaining the Realist (and by extension Materialist in the Fuerbachian sense, and thus Marxist, and thus Chinese) perspective on why laws are the way they are (which is incidentally correct), by contrast with the Idealist narrative that States tend to use to justify their interests.

> our current IP system has nothing to do with morality and everything to do with Western power and interest.

Property rights are neither a question of morality nor a question of realpolitik. They are an economic construct. Property is the only so-called natural right that does not exist at birth. We are born with life, and we are born with liberty, but we are not born with property.

I never understood this line of argument. Economics is 100% inextricable from realpolitik. Whether you have a socially constructed economic right or not is 100% a question of realpolitik.

Also, private property simply isn't a natural right, not even by the definition of Hobbes. The right of exclusion of something you don't use is neither natural nor universal in most early human civilizations, it just simply isn't a natural right.

And intellectual property in particular is perhaps the opposite of a natural right.

Locke ran with Life, Liberty, and Estate but even the American founding fathers went with the idea that Estate is an socioeconomic construct for the purpose of "freedom".

Famous case in Japan is Hitachi/Mitsubishi stole IBM's property.

https://www.nytimes.com/1982/06/23/business/japanese-executi...

Huawei doesn't need "backdoors" for the CCP, because they are CCP. The higher-ups are undoubtedly all party members.

I’m sure a lot of normal employees are CCP members too. CCP has 90 million members after all. Statistically, 1 in 5 Chinese has family members that are CCP member. So I’m not sure what you’re getting at. Are you proposing that we ban 20% of the Chinese population?

I actually think you are Chinese. Why lie to make your point?

We've banned this account for breaking the site guidelines egregiously.

Personal attacks are not ok. Smears like this are particularly not ok. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They are at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The truth is that the HN community is diverse and divided, with plenty of people on all sides of this issue. Attacking people personally (let alone nationally, ethnically, or racially) simply because they disagree with you is the epitome of what we don't want here. This is not a China issue, it's a Hacker News issue, an internet issue, and frankly a human issue.

Plenty of past explanation here:

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&type=comment&dateRange=a...

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

Chinese people are allowed to have opinions and argue their beliefs as well, so your suspicion here is immaterial.

You should assume good faith. I know several non-Chinese both on HN and in real life who defend these same points.

This is already known. Yes, they might have expropriated technology from 30 years ago, when they first started out. So what? They were caught, and they paid up the price for their malfeasance. They settled outside of court with Cisco.

Cisco doesn't even complain about this anymore, since they got a pretty penny from Huawei for it.

And they are not the only company that started out doing something shady. There are plenty of other examples of American companies that have done things in their past that are also shady.

Why don't you start with something more recent? Like, their 5G technology? Unless of course, your premise is that they also have a time machine and traveled into the future, and stole this 5G technology from Cisco as well.

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