Comment by lenerdenator | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lenerdenator | Hacker News Reader

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They aren't "giving out for free", though. If you're not paying for something from a US tech company, unless it's explicitly a non-profit, it's fairly safe to assume that you, dear reader, are the product.

You pay with your data.

This could very well be the long-term plan with DeepSeek, or it could be the AI application of how China deals with other industries: massive state subsidies to companies participating in important markets.

The profit isn't the point, at least not at first. Driving everyone else out is. That's why it's hard to get any real name brands off of Amazon anymore. Cheap goods from China undercut brand-name competition from elsewhere and soon, that competition was finding it unprofitable to compete on Amazon, so they withdrew.

I used to get HEPA filters from Amazon that were from a trusted name brand. I can't find those anymore. What I can find is a bunch of identical offerings for "Colorfullfe", "Der Blue" and "Extolife", all priced similarly. I cannot find any information on those companies online. Given their origin it's safe to assume they all come from the same factory in China and that said factory is at least partially supported by the state.

Over time this has the net effect of draining the rest of the world of the ability to create useful technology and products without at least some Chinese component to the design or manufacture of the same. That of course becomes leverage.

Same here. If I'm an investor in an AI startup, I'm not looking at the American offerings, because long-term geopolitical stability isn't my concern. Getting the most value for my investment is, so I'm telling them to use the Chinese models and training techniques for now, and boom: it just became a little less profitable for Sam Altman to do what he does. And that's the point.

>They aren't "giving out for free", though. If you're not paying for something from a US tech company, unless it's explicitly a non-profit, it's fairly safe to assume that you, dear reader, are the product.

In this case it's open source, and with papers published. So any US company can (way more cheaply than ChatGPT and co iiuc) train their own model based on this and offer it as well.

No one ever explains how it's possible for China to simply give "massive state subsidies" and take over the entire global economy from a starting point of Haitian-level GDP per capita 25 years ago. It sounds extremely easy though - I assume it should be in econ 101 textbooks and India, Indonesia, Nigeria, etc will soon follow this playbook?

It's called capitalism. Take one billion times Haiti's GDP per capita, pour it all into a few blocks in Shenzhen, and reinvest the profits.

Haven't seem to have worked for the EU, despite having a decidedly non Haitian level GDP per capita.

After WW2 Europe was in ruins. There was literal starvation in Germany.

There was literal starvation in the US in the Great Depression too (which was 1929 all the way to the late 30s, pretty close to WWII). The US got over it after a couple of decades.

Similarly the EU of 2025, has nothing to do with WW2-era starvation, that has been over half a century in the past.

And of course there was literal starvation in China as well after WWII, and much more poverty there than in the EU 30 years ago (even including Eastern Europe).

After WW2 China was in another civil war, their economy was worse than Ghana's and they also were trying to build a nuke at the same time.

And you think China, which had started for a very poor place after their civil wars, and had been ravaged by the Japanese invasion and occupation (including the only mass scale biological warfare in modern times), weathered WWII better than Europe?

EU taxes exorbitantly and does not reinvest in people. Instead wastes money on expanding bureaucracy and making the Government fatter. Passes asinine laws that stifle companies from innovating. If a company is wasting more time trying to be compliant with crazy regulations and avoiding ridiculous fines, it won't have time to focus on innovation.

First, the EU (well, governments of EU member countries, not the EU itself, which anyway doesn't tax citizens) invests far more into people than China does; civil services, from sanitation to healthcare to schools to social security, are all much better in the EU countries than in China.

Secondly, China also has extremely high bureaucracy, and extreme levels of government regulation - a classic problem for dictatorial regimes, especially ones spanning huge spaces (where direct control is physically impossible, even in the information age).

The big difference is that EU governments have drunk the coolaid on modern economical theories, and don't generally pick winners and losers in the market (beyond few key companies with deep ties to the ruling elites, mostly in banking), don't invest massive amounts to prop up companies doing price dumping, and generally play within the rules of world trade.

Of course, those rules are made up specifically to prevent any state from using its power to out-compete incumbent companies, many of which are US owned, but also German, French, Spanish etc owned.

Also, there is little appetite for EU level strategic decisions, EU member countries are far too divided. For example, Finland probably didn't have the power to prop up Nokia's phone division when Apple and Samsung started eating its lunch with smartphones, and France or Germany wouldn't have wanted to invest EU resources into doing it either. France is likely not going to be ok with propping up a German rival to BYD using massive funds, or vice versa for a French company.

So, while collectively the EU easily rivals China on money antld the USA on population, it is far too divided to pool those powers together, and the EU population mirrors this sentiment - there is not a strong EU identity that would see a Belgian person deeply proud of a major tech company based in Slovenia, or a Czech person cheering for a massive new investment in Portugal.

1.x Billion people + hyperfinancialization + strategic currency devaluation + American patrol of shipping lanes.

I get the impression that China wouldn't mind picking up the bill if the US stopped patrolling shipping lanes.

They don’t have the navy for it. They’re also bordered by the First Island Chain, a string of countries they have been pissing off for a thousand years.

They don't have the navy for it yet.

Give it ten years.

In ten years China’s population decline will go from “moderate” to “accelerating,” and we will be a decade into the collapse of globalization. It’s doubtful they will have the expertise or even raw materials to float a navy capable of even regional patrol, much less world patrol.

Patrolling shipping lanes is a peacetime operation, so I don't see how the First Island Chain matters. They're not going to halt Chinese naval ships going on patrol missions. It just means the patrols won't be secret.

Patrolling shipping lanes is a power projection, one that US allies and non-allies alike enjoyed or tolerated due to the demonstration of the US’s impartiality and commitment to free trade. China projecting such power will not be seen as impartial, especially given the never-resolved territorial disputes in the region.

> No one ever explains how it's possible for China to simply give "massive state subsidies" and take over the entire global economy from a starting point of Haitian-level GDP per capita 25 years ago

The biggest purchaser of technology and goods and services is the US Government. It spends over $760 billion annually on products and services.

But if any other country does the same it would classify as "massive state subsidies".

I would take it a step further and say that the biggest employer in US is the US Federal Government.

It's a very good question. We used to hear that subsidies resulted in lazy inefficient companies that couldn't compete in global markets. How did they become a cheat code for success?

When they enabled price dumping.

Around the time of Deng the CCP realized that strict collectivization wasn't a recipe for economic success. Also around that time, a far more sociopathic strain of executive was coming into the boardrooms of American companies, one who wanted things as cheap as possible, externalities (like the American social fabric and economy) be damned. Tienanmen Square proved that the Chinese were willing to crush rabble rousers who desired political and economic reforms.

So American investors dumped a metric crapload of money into the Chinese economy for things like manufacturing. The labor was cheap, and anyone who wanted better outside of the status quo was going to be turned into hamburger under the treads of a tank. No longer would they have to deal with the labor unions of the Midwest and Great Lakes regions, or have to deal with American environmental, corruption, and labor laws. The investment was the seed money for the startup we know as modern China.

> If you're not paying for something from a US tech company, unless it's explicitly a non-profit, it's fairly safe to assume that you, dear reader, are the product. You pay with your data.

They extract the very same data from paying users. And even with data factors in, they give products away at loss explicitly to undercut the competition.

Yes, for a lot of mature tech companies. But loss-leaders are still a thing (in tech and non-tech)

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