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Comment by lizardactivist | Hacker News Reader

It also reads quite accusatory, and with that faint smell of arms rally and crazy dictator speech.

I wonder why we here in the West just can't let China have their microchips.

You speak as if China and the West are hermetically sealed-off from each other. The West is worried because, just like every other strategic industry, China will try to take over the global market.

Yes, that's exactly what the West also tried. That doesn't mean it doesn't imperil the West to be on the receiving-end of these tactics.

“The West” (US mostly) is worried China will _compete_ on the global market. Which is currently owned by the West.

Taiwan annexation would probably happen as soon as China has independent chip production, so a little worry is understandable. Also the stories like hostile takeover and appropriation of the Chinese ARM office doesn't paint them as "oppressed" by the "evil west".

What’s the point of producing chips when you can’t sell them? China invading Taiwan would mean embargoes, which in turn would crash Chinese economy.

Invading Taiwan just doesn’t make any sense.

Neither did invading Ukraine, and yet here we are.

And China already trashed the treaties guaranteeing a certain level of autonomy in Hong Kong.

Of course it doesn't make any sense. Cooperation is always more beneficial to both sides than isolationism. But Emperor Xi has decided to rule forever, so in a case of severe internal economic crisis he may decide to wage a Small Victorious War (tm), just like every dictator did since the beginning of times. Also I read that they have a doctrine which says that Taiwan need to be occupied, but I may be wrong about exact details here.

And embargo is not a given thing, just see ruzzia today. Critical exports are allowed because they are simultaneously critical imports for others. I think any Chinese military action would show immediately just how impotent "world organisations" really are. I bet there would be close to no real consequences for China after annexation of Taiwan.

“Emperor Xi” needs to win elections to keep ruling, and destroying country’s economy isn’t particularly good way of achieving that. Embargo is a given; US is just waiting for opportunity. Sure, it wouldn’t be a total embargo, but it would be crippling anyway. Look at how China dropped their strategic cooperation with Russia, including areas that aren’t explicitly sanctioned. I don’t think Russia can survive their current war, and that serves as a nice example to others.

Russia is very different from China. Comparing a superpower to “Nigeria with nukes” is a bit pointless, but one of the crucial differences is that Russians know they can’t expect anything good from their mafia state. Chinese - quite the opposite, they expect sustained rapid growth, like the past five decades. Another difference is that Chinese don’t seem very enthusiastic about wars, compared to Russians - or Americans.

And no, they don’t have occupation of Taiwan in their doctrine. China has been repeatedly explaining they seek peaceful unification. And they seem fine playing the long game, ready to wait a couple of generations for it to happen.

> China has been repeatedly explaining they seek peaceful unification.

If that was true they wouldn't have introduced the Anti-secession Law.

After the Russian invasion of Ukraine I don't think China would be dumb enough to invade Taiwan. They are already crumbling on the inside and depend too much on imports to survive. Russia has more export than import so it has a better chance to survive when cut off from the rest of the world. And China is pissing off too many neighbours trying to extend its borders.

Xi would "win" "elections" this year, this would be a simple confirmation of his desire and not a problem for him. After that he will rule permanently, because no dictator can rescind power without facing a reaction from the successor. Taiwan occupation can happen at any time in the future, so elections, real or staged, won't interfere with it.

Yes, invasion would cause recession, but it won't be framed like that in the media. The recession (maybe) would start before the invasion, then invasion will happen to cover it up and blame outside force (USA of course) for the economic hardships, and this actually works every time.

And of course occupation would be peaceful. At least for the first 5 minutes. It would be a totally peaceful blockade on sea and air with a totally reasonable and peaceful demand to surrender all control of the island, disarm army and so on. And when treacherous evil Taiwanese will dare to treacherously attack the blockade forces, then China will be forced to a totally justified self defense. Just like ruzzia today is "defending" from imaginary Nato. They really believe that btw. You underestimate ability of authoritarian state to twist words and invent doublespeak.

Maaaan, I just love reading what people think of my country on western-centric states. All those vague and generalist statement, it just really shows the level of insight and competence of foreign cultures.

Always talking points and slogans, like people can't even tell the difference between nuanced and complex reality and a simplistic cartoonish impression of it. Comical.

What is the nuance for this?

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-62744522

China may have committed crimes against humanity in Xinjiang - UN

That you have linked a propaganda state media, instead of an actual UN report :D

Srsly though, you clearly aren't dumber than an average journalist, so why not cut the middleman and read UN reports by yourself?

You'd be surprised how stuff gets rephrased to have completely different interpretation. Or, even better, gets omitted. E.g you won't see BBC reporting on UN report A/HRC/24/52/Add.1, much less under the headline "Britain may have committed crimes against humanity towards POC - UN"

Do you have a point?

...do you?

You've randomly thrown out some random article on BBC, totally unrelated to the context of previous discussion.

What "point" were you expecting exactly? (:

You aren't really giving me much substance to work with, apart from the fact that you've linked a propaganda state media. So, as there is nothing else to address, I addressed that.

So my point is: don't link propaganda state media as it's all two minutes hate and no substance, elaborate on your point so that it is somewhat clear what exactly you want to discuss, and bring some reference example/benchmark on which you would base your comparisons.

The nuance is that US is worse in that regard, yet you’re shilling for it.

That’s a nice description of your prejudices, but you failed to show any facts that would support it. For starters - why do you assume the elections, which essentially work the same way as presidential elections in US, would be staged?

Again, China is not Russia. Mentality-wise, USA is closer to Russia than China is.

They may be not "staged" but pointless instead. I once real some long text about their high party politics, and the gist of it was that previously they had a tradition that every decade or so current chairman selects his successor. And that successor brings up his own team, mostly renewing high government posts. It seems that Xi is breaking that tradition and decided to continue ruling forever. Thus he will freeze any political successions in the country. And to do that he would be forced to tighten regulation and control over everything, which will mean even more emphasis on the loyal subordinates and so vicious autocratic circle will continue.

Also USA presidential elections are joke, and definitely not a good benchmark to look at. Whole world somehow understands that simple vote by every single citizen is the best way to elect a leader, if you prefer democratic process in general. Also USA is definitely not even close to the ruzzia. I wouldn't evaluate China here, but ruzzia and USA are pretty much on the opposite spectrum in mentality, until Orange-man at least.

Can we agree that both China and US are… somewhat flawed democracies then? The thing about chairman choosing their successor has been provably false a couple of times (search for Gang of Four), at the same time it was provably true a couple of times in US too.

As for Russian and American mentality - there many similarities, from glorifying their army, to feeling that they have god-given right to invade anyone, shielding war criminals, being skewed towards religious fundamentalism, to assuming there’s nothing good coming from the government… to a surprisingly short history of their country.

China is in no way, shape, or form a Democracy. I actually laughed out loud when I read this.

China had several changes of power since Mao. It's probably fair to say it's at risk of becoming a dictatorship, but you can't take it as a given without at least adding some arguments.

Yes, I read that they had an interesting and it seems effective tradition of appointing successors who bring new teams into high ranking posts. The issue is that Xi is on the verge of breaking that tradition as far as I understand. And stagnation and gentrification of country government always ends badly. Sometimes very badly. We will get a change to observe China's course in real time so to say.

Not “appointing”, but voting. Just like in US. Unless you want to maintain that eg displacing Gang of Four was Mao’s idea.

But yes, if Xi held power despite losing support that would be… fairly bad.

> Not “appointing”, but voting. Just like in US.

No, not like in the US. When someone is allowed to run who is not a member of the CCP (and who is running against the CCP), then that's getting close. When the chairman loses an election and has to leave office, replaced by someone who is not from the CCP, then that's elections like the US.

Your response suggests you either don’t have a clue about US and their presidential requirements (from official, like being born in US, to de facto, like belonging to one of two approved parties), or about China, in particular what what CPC is and how the “party” here is essentially a mistranslation.

So, rather than speculate about my level of ignorance, maybe you could bother to supply some information?

For the record: Yes, I absolutely have a clue about US presidential requirements.

Okay. It is a bit hard, because on one hand there isn’t anything similar to CCP in the western world, on the other hand my understanding of all this is quite poor, and on the third hand China, being some five times the population of US, is adequately more complicated.

There are parties in China other than CCP (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_parties_in...), and those are kind of like parties in the west. CCP is different though - it’s less of a party and more part of the government, with “sub parties” inside it. This means that on one side it’s privileged - as described in the constitution - but on the other hand, being part of the government, it’s controlled by govt mechanisms, unlike the “do whatever you wish” western parties. You could draw analogies with what the Church used to be in Middle Ages - except Church ended up being fundamentalist, while CCP keeps adjusting to society’s preferences.

It’s a part of government, essentially. Expecting China to be ruled by someone outside is like expecting US to be ruled by someone who’s not a citizen - both are fundamentally arbitrary rules, but both exist for complicated historical reasons.

Of course in US there are also hard rules that aren’t in constitution, eg you need to be a member of one of two ruling parties, you must not have left-wing views, and you have to be wealthy and Christian. But I’m pretty sure there are similar quirks in China too.

Good reply, thanks.

But I notice the very first sentence of that link: "The People's Republic of China is a one-party state ruled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)."

So, yes, there are other parties that are allowed to exist. (If you want one that doesn't include "Socialism with Chinese characteristics" as part of the platform, you're out of luck, though.)

But some of those parties actually have people who have won elections and have seats, which is more than I thought was the case. That's slightly less "one-party state" than I thought.

Still... there's also a list of banned parties. I'm trying to remember when the last time was that the US banned a political party. So China lets there be alternate parties, as long as they don't stray very far from the CCP orthodoxy. That's more than I thought, but it's considerably less than political freedom.

At the process level, I don't think it's a good idea to work on particular implementation traits when comparing very different systems. One will complain that in China parties are banned, the other will complain that in US third parties can't win anything anyways and so on.

I think it's better to look at more broad goals. Can ideas or people get represented in each system? The actual mechanisms may be very different, but I think comparing the end results would be more interesting.

An anecdote from my country. We have a left-leaning party that constantly wins the poorer areas. At first glance, this means they're popular. In practice, it's a bit different - since they already have a stable majority, and they have an old tradition of only supporting their own people when it's their turn to govern, what happens is that each individual potential candidate simply decides to go with this party instead of swimming against the current. So the real election is inside the party, then their candidate wins in 70-80% of the cases.

Is this a good system? Well, this strongly depends on the process to select the party candidates. It's surprisingly non-shitty on average, in that it tends to select competent people. It's shockingly shitty on occasion, when it fails basic integrity checks. Judging the end results is far from straightforward.

Btw, I'm definitely not advocating for more of this inside the existing western democracies. It's definitely a horrible idea, because we definitely do NOT have the institutional processes to select consistently good candidates inside each party. China is not mixing them.

Banned parties - eg those promoting fascism - are a thing in Europe. We've learned the hard way what happens if you don't do that.

I doubt that is the reason they are banned.

> you must not have left-wing views

Not trying to start something, just want to say I chuckled here - saying this in the middle of debt forgiveness for democrat voters is pretty ironic.

And thank you for the comment.

Democrats are not left-wing - they are merely less right-wing than Republicans.

To have a domestic supply for the largest market on the planet?

To me, US and Europe funding semiconductor capacity also looks like a decoupling strategy aimed at Taiwan.

I thought the register article was way more pragmatic than that.

They agree with the praise the CCP gives itself, but just add a dash of reality.

Because limiting the growth of silicon is in the interest of national security due to AI takeoff risk.

And I got downvoted for this yet this is on the front page today: https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/1045810/0001... lol

Why AI specifically?

The Rebellion Of The If Statements of 2030. The "for" and "while" loops would be outlawed and humanity would be forced to use Fortran and GOTO for all task Skynet will allow us. :)

Lol. And bit shifts would be strictly prohibited!

How can you not understand the implications of AI to ask that question at this point in our shared reality? Are you a technical user? Are you new to HN? Why do you think AI isn't a security issue?

I work in cyber security. Threat analysis. So far, AI has offered a moderate boost to defenders, and absolutely nothing to attackers.

I suspect this trend will continue - moderate defensive advantage, and no offensive advantages.

That's if you can even detect it.

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