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> It will operate a space telescope; telescope can dock with the station for servicing and upgrades, and equipment uploaded by regular space station cargo ship.

The co-orbit strategy is excellent, a short trip for repairs and easy to fit into existing schedules if something goes wrong. It's no James Webb but was never intended to be, about the same size as Hubble but with 400x the field of view. Guessing it will be cranking out the discoveries.

It's a great way to have much higher quality microgravity than is possible with a habitable station, in a serviceable module. Low vibration is important for telescopes and some experiments (crystallography in particular). A co-orbiting module was also in the plans for ISS, but like many other planned features it was never implemented.

IIRC there were such plans for Space Statio Alpha, ISS or even the European space station plans - it just never got funded in the end.

"sanction" is one of the dumbest words on earth. "to give official approval" vs "impose a penalty".

Yep and I have no idea what the OP meant by this.

subject to sanctions or export controls, I think, so they can't use exported US products and have to develop their own

So for those wondering why no US collaboration, you can blame republican octogenarian Frank Wolf for introducting the Wolf amendment prohibiting any and all NASA collaboration with china that isnt expressly sanctioned by the rest of the geriatrics in congress. he even managed to fuck up the 2013 Kepler Science Conference which resulted in a mass boycott after two chinese scientists were banned.

We had every opportunity to collaborate with chinese scientists aboard the ISS before this crap. The man is a traitor to science.

> that isnt expressly sanctioned by the rest of the geriatrics in congress

Interestingly, you inadvertently (?) demonstrated OPs comment by using the opposing definition from GP.

I bet it was on purpose and I love it.

It's a little more nuanced than being a traitor to science given China's strategy in regards to acquisition of scientific research and technology. China doesn't collaborate, it just takes until it reaches scientific and technological parity. Once parity is reached, China cuts collaboration agreements and keeps further advancements within China.

Unlikely. This is more economic rivalry then actual worry that China is going to suddenly flip.

> Once parity is reached, China cuts collaboration agreements and keeps further advancements within China

I'd like to see sources backing up this claim. Huawei for example has 5G patents and research centers outside China. Hualong-1 nuclear plants are exported abroad.

Seeing that China is big on business and making money, it makes no sense to keep technology for yourself. There's so much money to be made by selling them!

1. backdoored surveillance

2. belt and road

As odious as that technology is, as far as I know China is a major supplier of surveillance technology to the world's authoritarian governments.

Belt and Road is an international infrastructure investment (and direct construction) project, not sure how its related to technology. It's also no different from all other nations' international aid programs, in that it both helps the receiving nation and makes them indebted to the originator.

And western equipment is totally not backdoored, and has open source hardware and firmware so that anyone can verify it?

Just one of many examples: The WIV BSL-4 lab in Wuhan was built as a French-Chinese cooperation (modeled after a similar lab in Lyon, France) with the explicit goal to do joint experiments. But once it was built, the French were kicked out.

Sources？

Many, e. g. https://www.mediapart.fr/en/journal/france/310520/strange-sa...

FRANCE INVESTIGATION The strange saga of how France helped build Wuhan's top-security virus lab MAY 31, 2020 BY KARL LASKE AND JACQUES MASSEY The maximum-level biosafety laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology was the first of its kind to be built in China, and has been the centre of huge speculation since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic which originated in that city. The laboratory, which is equipped to handle Class 4 pathogens (P4) including dangerous viruses such as Ebola, was built with the help of French experts and under the guidance of French billionaire businessman Alain Mérieux, despite strong objections by health and defence officials in Paris. Since the laboratory's inauguration by prime minister Bernard Cazeneuve in 2017, however, France has had no supervisory role in the running of the facility and planned cooperation between French researchers and the laboratory has come to a grinding halt.

> French experts and researchers have no say in the running of the top-level biosafety laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China despite the fact that France helped build the facility and that Paris and Beijing signed an agreement on future cooperation and collaboration, a Mediapart investigation can reveal.

> have no say in the running of the top-level biosafety laboratory > Beijing signed an agreement on future cooperation and collaboration

These are far from what was claimed by the OP

It seems to me research centers outside of China are used to recruit willing experts from other companies whose knowledge of proprietary information can then be unethically harvested and absorbed by Huawei.

That sounds like... How other research centers also work? If you're not hiring someone for their knowledge and experience on a topic, then what are you hiring that person for?

And when these people leave, they take their experience at Huawei with them. Now some other company benefits from Huawei's experience.

People hire me for my 10 years of DevOps experience so that I can help them implement practices. They don't hire me to reinvent DevOps from first principles without using any of my previous experience.

Just what part of hiring people for their experience is "unethical harvesting"? If there's evidence of people being specifically hired to diverge trade secrets of a previous employer, in violation of NDAs, then you'd actually have a case.

It would be interesting to see some concrete examples of what is claimed in "Once parity is reached, China cuts collaboration agreements and keeps further advancements within China."

Whenever I search recent research articles about any topic, I see a very large number that are published by China, and which are freely available.

The quality of the Chinese research is quite uneven, there are many papers that are just garbage, but there are also many which are surprisingly creative and original, exploring promising alternatives to those that had already been studied by Western research.

I frequently see statements from naive Americans that all that the Chinese do is based on copying, but unfortunately for USA, that was true only in the past and it is no longer true today.

Honestly, copying is what you are supposed to do with technology when you are competing from behind.

See: early space programme when the the US realised it was behind where Germany had been.

See: Samuel Slater sneaking out of Britain to Rhode Island after memorizing the construction details of Arkwright's water frame.

I wouldn't consider whispering German scientists away to the United States as copying, it seems more like theft.

Just one of many examples: The WIV BSL-4 lab in Wuhan was built as a French-Chinese cooperation (modeled after a similar lab in Lyon, France) with the explicit goal to do joint experiments. But once it was built, the French were kicked out.

And the French getting kicked out is only the second worst consequence of that project! Though for what it’s worth, I think there was Western collaboration with WIV as well.

The first-worst has thankfully not happened yet - China was lobbying that now they had a BSL-4 Lab, they should also have a sample of Smallpox. The consequences of that would have been disastrous.

At this point I would favor even the CDC destroying theirs.

> I frequently see statements from naive Americans that all that the Chinese do is based on copying, but unfortunately for USA, that was true only in the past and it is no longer true today.

Just because you don't follow them doesn't mean they don't exist. Plenty of ongoing IP theft cases show this is not true. This case closed a few years back that pretty much wiped out a Billion+ dollar US company: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/chinese-company-sinovel-wind-...

Wind turbines!

This example is immensely funny to me, since in the 90s the NSA stole trade secrets related to wind turbines from the German company Enercon and passed it on to the US company Kenetech, who then managed to get a patent in the US.

English sources are a bit scarce, but here's an article that references it:

> Some months later, a former NSA agent admitted that the organisation had secretly intercepted Enercon's data communications and monitored conference calls. The NSA passed all the information it gleaned on to Kenetech.[1]

There's also a report on ECHELON for the European parliament that mentions this case among others[2]. Some more cases became known through documents leaked by Snowden.

To complete this circle German intelligence services would now have to steal trade secrets related to wind turbines from China, but sadly they're explicitly forbidden from conduction industrial espionage - to the chagrin of German companies who are feeling disadvantaged.

[1] https://www.irishtimes.com/business/electronic-spies-torture...

[2] https://irp.fas.org/program/process/rapport_echelon_en.pdf

So the Chinese even stole the method of stealing, from USA!

They are indeed IP theft in their genetics!

> but there are also many which appear surprisingly creative and original

ftfy

I don’t claim there is no creativity in China. But to claim that everything that looks new to you is therefore original goes too far.

what is stopping those naive americans from going to china, buying those "stolen and improved but not shared with us legally" products and sell them on their own back home? its not like chinese businesses would sue them or anything so whats the big deal as you say?

they copy you, you copy their advances back and you are back in parity.

Not everyone wants to break the laws. Even of another country.

In China the repercussions for what you described may go way beyond the legal framework, you may be labeled a spy or something like that. This hasn’t applied to doing that in US / Western countries

> go way beyond the legal framework, you may be labeled a spy or something like that

I mean, a few hundreds years ago, the US continent was populated by Savages. They got educated and civilized now.

So give China another 1 hundred years. They'll be as civilized as US today. They probably would routinely threaten nukes for countries not practicing the "wholistic democracy" [1]; they'll also cut supply of key components from global supply chain when India is approaching their supremacy; and sanction Vietnam because they dont act like dogies...

[1] https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202208/1272926.shtml

> Once parity is reached, China cuts collaboration agreements and keeps further advancements within China

Any such actual event happening?

I have heard this stated repeatedly, but my Google search reveals no actual reporting, other than the ones where the foreign party voluntarily exited or being forced aware from their own political pressure (that is not from Chinese side).

Asked and answered. WIV was one.

Not satisfactory though

I think describing China as one monolithic block in that way is problematic and denies the agency of Chinese people. It is tempting to look at the different political system and lump everything together. You have to distinguish between the government, researchers, and Chinese companies. I know many Chinese researchers who are collaborating fairly, and they have very similar interests and - mixed - incentives as western scientists do.

It is true that Chinese companies do what you described, I think at some point there was even an offical slogan for it. But this is just as much due to the "capitalist" side as to the "communist" side. I'm pretty sure if an American company was behind technologically they would do the same. I recall Tesla poaching battery and car manufacturing specialists for example. Not saying that is great, but it would be naive to assume they would do otherwise.

What agency do Chinese people have?

The people have independent ideas and wills - and not a hive mind - is what I'm saying.

> China doesn't collaborate, it just takes until it reaches scientific and technological parity. Once parity is reached, China cuts collaboration agreements and keeps further advancements within China.

Regardless of what strategy the government is pursuing, I know personally that many Chinese researchers do collaborate on an honest basis. They have to put a lot of effort into dispelling the prejudice that they just want to leech technology for their government.

Think for a moment how ridiculous it is to assume Chinese individuals have no free mind.

Good for him. Collaborating with the CCP regime is not in the best interest of the US or other Western countries, and in fact, US policy would be better served in the long run by isolating and decoupling from China even more.

There’s a few other self antonyms just in English. “Cleave” immediately comes to mind

Inflammable?

Not an autoantonym; that word only has one meaning.

Its problem is that it appears to mean the opposite of what it means, not that it has two contradictory meanings.

“The mighty sequoia, protected by thick bark and with its foliage typically high above the flames, was once considered nearly inflammable.” — Brian Melley, Anchorage Daily News, 23 July 2022

That’s just misuse of the word.

Sure but by now every rational and reasonable reader must understand that whenever they come across the word "inflammable", the author might have misused it and they need to search for additional signals to identify whether it means "inflammable" or "uninflammable". This is not different than how the rational and reasonable reader treats the use of an autoantonym.

There's a difference between misusing a word, and a word that has two accepted meanings.

Brian Melley needs to be acquainted with the word nonflammable, which is the one he really wanted to use.

There's no need to use a single word; that sentence is trying to sound impressive, not concise.

Try "The mighty sequoia, protected by thick bark and with its foliage typically high above the flames, was once considered nearly impervious to fire."

That only means "to split". I don't think it can mean "to join together" can it? Unless you mean "cleave to" which is rare and not really the same word.

Cleave can definitely mean to adhere to. Its not a word I hear everyday but I wouldnt necessarily call it rare

If I say "I cleaved a log" there is no chance of you thinking I meant "I cleaved to a log".

And if I say I cleaved the halves together, you’d have no chance of thinking that I meant I cut them apart. It’s English, you need context to tell what definition is being used for any word with multiple definitions

> I cleaved the halves together

I would say what are you talking about? That makes no grammatical sense.

It does? One definition of cleave is to join or adhere things together. It’s not a new slang definition, you can look it up in any dictionary.

I did look it up in a dictionary.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cleave#Etymology_2

> (intransitive, rare) Followed by' to or unto: to adhere, cling, or stick fast to something.

Something can cleave to another thing, but you can't cleave two things together. It's grammatically the same as the word "cling". You can cling to something but you can't cling two things together. It doesn't make sense.

"table" is an antonym depending upon your location. For Americans, in the context of a discussion, the verb "table" means to set it aside and stop discussing it. For Brits, it means to bring up a topic and discuss it.

yes! It not only has a double meaning, but those meanings are actually opposite of each other

The phenomenon isn't all that rare. Both senses of "sanction" derive from its original sense of "decree" - you can decree that something is allowed, or that it's not allowed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto-antonym lists several similar pairs, in which two contradictory senses developed from one older sense. (Along with many more pairs that are the results of different patterns.)

It's pretty rare for it to be ambiguous though. Probably only "table" from that list is also ambiguous. Dust could be from a grammatical point of view but it's always going to be obvious from context what is meant.

> Solar panels smaller in area than ISS but produces similar amount of power, indicating much more efficient solar panels

I should hope so after over a decade. AFAIK they haven't changed the solar panels since the last one was installed in 2009 and the design was probably fixed well before the first one was installed.

> A robotic arm similar to ISS that walk along the joint points on the station. It has expandable attachment system, allowing not only astronauts to attach, but also a smaller more precises robotic arm to attach that can manipulate external experiments

Canada Arm also walks along the ISS too using alternating ends that astronauts can be attached to.

I think you missed the recent delivery of new roll-up solar panels to the ISS.

Also I don't think the CanadaArm can roam to the Russian segment, but there's a new European arm that does.

I've tried and can't find a list of the positions of the grapple fixtures CanadaArm uses on the ISS but I think it could reach pretty far over the Russian segments from the other half of the station.

I did forget about those but they did only cover one small part of the array iirc. Most of the original array is still active.

Just imagine all that effort and resources being spent on the International Space Station instead. I wonder were we, the combined humanity, could have been in terms of space exploration, if we just could have been bothered to work together.

Then you imagine, if two groups in a company bothered to work together.

I still think there's room for competition, though. Two groups can want to cooperate but have reasonable and valid differences of opinions on how do do things that are large enough to warrant going their separate ways.

And perhaps some of the things China's station can do are just not feasible to tack onto the ISS, at least not without pushing timelines back past what China might consider acceptable.

Not saying that's what's happened here; certainly China's independent efforts here are largely fueled by isolationism and protectionism. And NASA is prohibited by US law from collaborating with China, unless they get prior approval from Congress and the FBI for each collaboration[0]. But I think, as a general sentiment, sometimes competition can be healthy and push the state of the art forward faster.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_Amendment

Timing wise, ISS is at end of life, and replacement plans are a decade off. So, in a way this produces needed overlap (from a humanity standpoint).

Thanks for the super informative reply. I am hoping as there is more activity on the space station, that more information will be coming out. It would be nice to be able to see something similar to the ESA, NASA and even Roscosmos launch feeds and Q&A sessions.

Plenty coverage exists in Chinese from children shows to academia, and you can also show up on Hainan island to watch a launch.

However it doesn’t get much coverage in western media beyond a Cold War / environmental risk angle.

This is a clip together from the live tv coverage of the latest launch:

https://youtu.be/81Ova5fo0vM

Reminds me of the coverage of the US launches I watched as a kid.

There's this clip showing some experiments for the benefit of schoolchildren: https://reddit.com/comments/y2kjmi

I'm guessing this is an ongoing thing, and since the clip popped up on Reddit it seems at least ‘social media’ pick up on such output.

So then maybe a little late to sanction their tech to keep them from being peer competitors.

US did sanction all of China's space industry, defense dual use industries since the 1990s, and never let go ever since. That is pretty early. And this is what happens 30 years since the sanctions. But I have no idea what will happen in the future, plus the nature of industry and technology is also different.

As much as it's a waste of duplicate effort, it's likely good for humanity and geopolitics to have multiple nation-states each trying their own approaches.

Avoids path lock-in by exploring alternate solutions lines, and ensures that if one country decides to slow down (because politics) then the world doesn't lose its only leading-edge space program.

Healthy competition for the betterment of all!

One says "duplicate effort", someone else says "independent implementation".

Some cooperation would be great, of course. Like the US / USSR space cooperation in 1970s, despite bitter ideological and military rivalry.

agree with this - duplication of effort, but not duplication of approach or method, which means actually it becomes a giant A/B test, which hopefully means faster progress for humanity as a whole.

Sanctions didn’t stop China from carrying out one of the most successful research and technology exfiltration campaigns in history.

Kind of ironic?

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

I assume I’m getting downvoted in the parent because there’s some implication that I’m judging them for it?

But I’m not. I was simply saying that the sanctions have nothing to do with their ability to obtain western tech.

Also the guy who memorized how to build a power loom during the industrial revolution

https://www.history.com/news/industrial-revolution-spies-eur...

I don't see irony; the US government knew the importance of these efforts first hand which is why they attempted the sanction at all.

The sanctions are pretty irrelevant when China has one of the best hacking groups in the world and every US corporation of relevance is strongly connected to the Internet.

Yeah, because they are only this advanced because they stole US technology. Chinese people can't be as intelligent as american.

Actually, yes. That's accurate.

Why would they waste time and their own money researching things when they can just steal it and then give that information to private and public Chinese industries? That is their entire MO. The Chinese are also responsible for $200-600 Billion worth of IP theft against the US every year.

They will do whatever it takes to make China #1 and see nothing wrong with doing this.

- https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/02/politics/china-hacking-espion...

- https://www.cbsnews.com/news/chinese-hackers-took-trillions-...

- https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/10/16/china-intellectual-prop...

> Why would they waste time and their own money researching things when they can just steal it and then give that information to private and public Chinese industries?

Because this way you'll always be behind.

Or you do both. Start from the point of known technologies and reverse engineering and improve from there. China bootstrapped their high-tech industry with not just spying, but also licensing technology, join-ventures, training students/employees abroad and then bringing them back as experienced researchers/engineers. No need to start from first-principles. Plus even when you do have tech-specs on something, that doesn't mean you know how to manufacture it, or it may need modification to address broader system tradeoffs.

If you start from behind and are trying to execute from first principals you'll usually lag behind too just because you have to relearn all the things countries like the US did on your own.

Well or by capturing nazi scientists

I guess the modern equivalent of that would be espionage which afaik China has not been shy about executing. Operation Paperclip was somewhat of a fluke historically speaking for the explosion of nation-less (ish) scientists. The next one in rocketry would have been the fall of the USSR I guess.

Intelligence is irrelevant. The US government would do exactly the same thing if they were way behind some other country in anything strategic.

The Chinese would be supremely unintelligent if they didn’t use that advantage.

I mean, american people is as intelligent as anyone else. By the sheer number, is not rare to think that they should have more people of high training on difficult areas to master.

What happens to the US is that they "borrow" a lot of intellectual capacity from abroad, and they have been doing that for a lot of time.

Also, stealing IP and resources has been the eternal strategy of empires to build themselves, US and Europe included.

You got this very wrong. Read up Art of War written before Jesus. Espionage is a very important chapter. Americans are rather weak academic these days. You go to any American university and see how many "Asians" there. You will find a lot of Chinese. It is common for Americans not able to speak English well or just English. It is very uncommon not to find Chinese that can read and write Chinese AND English. There are about 4x more Chinese than Americans population. You do the math, one society has more people and higher ratio of hardworking people and very educated vs Americans that twerks more on TikTok (which is an app by China....and possibly Chinese Military). Heck even westerner GoT series are written based on Chinese history. Look up war of seven princes and Cersei equivalent during Jin dynasty. Americans themselves stoled Nazi Germany tech too. USA days are very numbered (this is foretold in many Eastern prophecies even those in Russia). The great west superpower will get destroyed very similar to Atlantis (perhaps explosion of Yellowstone volcabic activities) mentioned in many of these prophecies.

I think that's unlikely, Yellowstone is monitored and I think it's more likely that US programs to prevent population decline/demographic collapse would work than Chinese programs of the same nature. I think it's reasonably probable that China will level out under a billion real population (not including migrant workers), even if you think the current official figures are real. Russia has massive HIV rates and is shipping a not insignificant portion of it's reproduction age males to Ukraine, and that's not good for it population in general, and may be catastrophic for it's more rural populations.

> I think it's reasonably probable that China will level out under a billion real population (not including migrant workers)

99.99% of china’s migrant workers are Chinese. I don’t understand what not including migrant workers gives you unless you assume china will import labor from other countries someday?

Careful with that copium, you might OD on it.

The problem is that Chinese mentality results in corruption, denialism and other attributes what makes working on R&D almost impossible. For that you need free minds, room for mistakes, no strong hiarchy. All things you won't find in China.

So how did they manage to complete this space station at all when R&D is 'almost impossible'? There is no doubt that China did not develop everything from the ground up, but to disregard the progress that they have made on top of existing technologies is rather shortsighted and disingenuous.

The CCP couldn’t have said it better themselves

Ah, it’s worse than that, we basically gave them their rocket and missile program via xenophobia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qian_Xuesen

Eh, unclear. Nobody was trying to stop China from building space stations. The goal was to limit jet and ICBM tech.

China isn't 60s us or ussr, it's a country countless time richer and more technologically advanced, has all the means to produce all the ICBMs they want.

What do you think the difference is between an ICBM and a LEO launch vehicle like the Long March 5B described in the article?

That's way too broad, because it depends what it is. Surprisingly, it seems to be easier to build a space station than to compete with Boeing and Airbus.

Space stations do not need to comply to international aviation requirements. Also, they may have fewer economic constraints, because they are not operated by something like commercial airlines.

BTW competing with Lockheed-Martin and even Sukhoi seems to be harder, too.

It is indeed much easier.

Because competing with Boeing and Airbus means building cost efficient aircraft in large volumes. Building cost efficient planes in large volume is way harder than building a singular space station with barely any cost concerns.

Rocket engines are simpler than jet turbines, actually. It take a lot of material engineering to get something with both performance and economy. As for the rest, it’s just avionics that china hasn’t developed yet, and that really “just” software.

By that logic, scramjets are the simplest of all!

But really, there’s an order of magnitude more engineering that goes into so many facets of rockets and rocket engines. On paper they’re similar, but the stresses and constraints are much, much higher.

Rocket engines point up and ignite the fuel. They don’t need air intakes, nor can they benefit from them. They don’t need to be reused (SpaceX’s strategy isn’t common). Rocket engines came a few decades before jet turbines for good reason. Heck, there is a good argument they were invented during the Tang or Song Dynasty in some kind of crude but representive form.

It depends. SRBs are pretty simple (yet still incredibly hard to make remotely safe).

Orbital rocket engines are not “point up and ignite fuel.” You’re right, they don’t need air intakes - they need cryogenic liquid oxygen and all the support equipment involved in using it! Jet engines have it easy being able to harvest the oxidizer as they fly.

There are many, many, points of failure in modern rockets . You could argue that jet engines were the precursor to modern turbo pump design.

edit It’s also worth noting that the turbopump environment is dramatically more hostile in rockets. LOX is really nasty stuff at those temperatures and pressures.

Sanctions do not matter to China. They will just have their nation state backed hackers hack into aerospace and defense contractors and steal their R&D instead. Thats the Chinese way and MO. Anything to further the Chinese economy.

They have hacked nearly every F100 they needed to and steal hundreds of billions in IP annually already.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_intellectual_pr...

- https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/09/china-state-backed-hackers-c...

- https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/02/politics/china-hacking-espion...

Yup, precisely.

I find it very naive to think other countries do not have state-backed technological spying.

Ah, so the chaos and lack of documentation in my company is really protection against chinese spies! Clever!

On a more serious note, I find it quite unfair that Western conoany go into China to take advantage of loose labour laws and child labour, and then they complain when loose IP laws hit them. Like you knew what the deal was from the outset.

Lastly not every society believes in the concept of intellectual property, it is not even clearly defined - for instance EU does not issue software patents.

I mean that's the thing, that wasn't the deal. No company, at all, would sign that agreement. Usually there is an nda, some kind of business agreement that says they won't steal your idea etc. and then they do. It's not like a company goes to China or another lower cost to manufacture country and signs an agreement to give them their business.

Contracts and deals are subordinate to the laws of the country in which we'd like them to be enforced. It's not like a company goes to China and expects tight IP laws.

And hey, our (American) IP laws were a lot less strict when we were catching up to the British Empire.

Countries generally try to set their laws up to benefit their industries (to the extent possible).

I agree with all this. Where does all the ip theft via hacking fall into this view? By this logic hat should be held accountable to the laws of this country, no?

Lots of links to Wikipedia lists of examples in other threads here.

I don't think it is possible to simplify it down beyond what has actually happened. Hackers for China in the US fall under US jurisdiction and so they'll be treated pretty harshly. Hackers for China in China -- it's complicated, if they are doing something their government wants them to do, they probably won't be.

Then the US will try to incur some diplomatic cost for China, which does have a pretty bad reputation on this front... it's all part of the big game.

You are telling me giant conpanies with 100 people in legal did not study previous Chinese court cases and did not know that IP laws there are poorly enforced? I knew about this for 20 years and they didn't?

All developing nations, whether China or Russia or Somalia, don't enforce some laws. Sometimes it's lack of strong state, sometimes it's lack of beurocratic capacity, or a concious decision. Anyone going into these countries is aware of this.

IP, Labour laws and bribes in case of China.

Clearly western companies take advantage of the two latter, and cry foul about the former. Massive hypocracy.

Meanwhile western government dont enforce their own laws for any kindof accoutability of major business leaders. Chinese will answer for IP theft on the same day CEO of Nestle will go to jail for taking advantage of child labour and slavery in their supply chains.

So probably we will have to wait for judgement day

https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2016/feb/01...

I agree Nestlé should go to jail for child labor. The thing is they're a European company. We can't just lump everything into "western governments". That's like half the world.

The thing is,anybody these IP theft cases are also against Chinese law, they his choose to ignore it when it benefits them.

Corruption is everywhere, it's not an excuse to strive for anything less than right and truth. "Bevause they did it" is not a good reason.

You just took one angle. I find it unfair that Facebook is banned by China while China can deploy TikTok in the US market, for example, to demonstrate the opposite.

It's not the opposite, it's the same problem: globally dis-harmonised legal systems.

Looking at how Facebook was fucking with UK elections and brexit, maybe it should be banned everywhere

I was surprised at how long this list was:

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

It seems unlikely that any country could monopolise any particular weapons technology for long. I assume the US also has programs to extract any innovations from China or Russia.

> surprised at how long this list was

And those are only the ones who’ve been caught

You make it sound like that was a distinct Chinese tactic and not every country on earth, foremost one that abbreviates itself to three letters, is engaged doing industrial espionage.

For example, reported here

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32834502

To be fair, it's not like the US didn't engage in heavy industrial espionage in Europe during the industrial revolution.

We tend to forget this since the US came into its own as an industrial power generations ago, long before China did. While China's form of government is quite different than most Western governments, in a way that gives them a reputation of being isolationist and secretive, that doesn't mean their path to technological advancement has been any more dishonest than that of other nations.

Put another way, we frown on China's technological espionage so much because we view them as an enemy from a government & "values" perspective, not because "we" have cleaner hands. I personally would prefer that China didn't have all the latest tech capabilities because I don't like the idea of increasing the global influence of authoritarian nations, but if China had a non-isolationist democracy, I might not be so upset about this.

> telescope can dock with the station for servicing and upgrades,

"Quick, wind it back in, I need to change the SD card!"

Sanctions on parts for particular purposes are trivial to bypass, you just buy the parts abroad or for a different purpose. Having said that, I wouldn't be surprised if they tried to go as indigenous as possible to reduce dependency on foreign components. They've definitely made impressive advances in the last decade or so.