China is quietly rewriting rules that run the world | Hacker News Reader

China is quietly rewriting rules that run the world

bloomberg.com

I wonder if same approach was used by the West in the past and China is just copying what worked.

You're probably right, perhaps this happens as a natural extension/maturity of a development cycle. Since China appears to be the nation creating many of the new things at this time, they begin to become the ones to attempt to set the standards. This seems quite foreign to us in the west, since we have been doing it for so long now - however, at our current point in our development cycle, we are no longer creating as much as we did in the past.

Of course it was. Setting standards involves competing interests, bargaining, power dynamics... Obviously the stronger party will have the upper hand.

It's also funny how the article praises the freight container standard as kind of ideal, while in fact it was the product of "committee work worthy of the Bolsheviks":

"Being an ISO standard, the text is a little dry, but to me it’s a thing of great beauty, because of the collective effort it enabled. Naturally, I expected the process of creating such beauty to be a virtual Platonic Symposium of engineering prowess and disinterested advocacy. Nothing could have been further from the truth."

It seems the entire article can be reduced to: China has their own railway standard. And they are pushing it when they build railways as part of the belt and road initiative.

Read the article, this is a good TL;DR. There was a China Standards 2035 linked but I didn't try to read a translation of it. Does anyone know if it says anything specific other than for rail or transportation?

The article also seems confused:

> On the domestic front, “the idea is to set technical standards high, essentially forcing manufacturers to upgrade their processes whether they want to or not,” Matt Sheehan, Marjory Blumenthal and Michael Nelson of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace wrote. (China’s scientific research in the Arctic also plays a role in encouraging advanced industrial development.)

A grade standard (like military spec environmental ICs) is quite different than an interoperability standard (like pin spacing on ICs).

On one hand China sounds like a train wreck. Overheated economy, faked growth numbers and insane Covid policies. On the other hand they sound like they are outsmarting the world and taking over.

An omnipotent bumbling enemy, now where have we seen this playbook before

Multiple standards are a good thing. They’re a great check against any one entity wielding inhibited power and control. The authors of a standard usually have manufacturing/production capability to deliver equipment/systems that meet these standards, very unlike new countries adopting these standards. It makes it incredibly dangerous for the adopter to think and speak differently from the author-manufacturer. We all saw how payment networks tried to cripple Russian citizens when they suddenly took Russia off the grid. Such economic assassinations should never be allowed to happen, and I don’t see any other way out than a proliferation of standards, with different authors.

For example, I’m currently thinking of how to create multiple, (in)compatible internets. As far as information exchange goes I’m not sure any country can have true sovereignty, security, or independence without a very custom setup. And I put national sovereignty and security above anything else.

So economic assassinations wouldn’t be allowed by regular ones are fine?

What the heck is going on with the grammar of the title? A possessive apostrophe followed by “is”?

too poor to afford editors, I suppose.

It’s called Saxon genitive.

I'm still not getting this application of it, is there a word-wizard willing to condescend us some further explanation? Pretty please ...

It’s not a Saxon genitive, it’s a grammar mistake.

The “possessive apostrophe” is the Saxon genitive. I was replying to that part but I admit that it was confusing. I should have quoted the part I was replying to

Yeah, but apostrophe-s followed by ‘is’ is just wrong.

In the title of the article it's a spelling mistake but it is not "just wrong" in general. "China's is more advanced than Russia's" is a valid sentence, for instance, we just lack context to know what it is comparing.

https://archive.ph/YsRLN

Has Bloomberg retracted their chip hack story from 4 years ago?

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