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Comment by edm0nd | Hacker News Reader

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> Yeah, it's real easy when you employ an army of nation-state hackers

No it's not, even if it were true. Is it really that hard to admit that the Chinese people are industrious, smart, ambitious and have extremely high education level? And that the state has directed the development of the country wisely in the past 40 years?

This sounds like official Chinese propaganda. This was truer at some point, but things have started turning bad for China with the advent of Xi Jinping. 20-25 years ago, the country was hopeful, developing fast, opening up. Foreigners started moving there, seeing it as a new land of opportunity. Much of that is gone. The economy is in bad shape, youth unemployment is massive, the country is a dictatorship, nobody wants to move there (and China doesn't want you to anyway). I'll quote the Economist: "When Mr Xi took over in 2012, China was changing fast. The middle class was growing, private firms were booming and citizens were connecting on social media. A different leader might have seen these as opportunities. Mr Xi saw only threats."

> This sounds like official Chinese propaganda

Go to any top-N American University, pick a random STEM faculty and count the number of Chinese (nationality) post-grads, post-docs and faculty. Alternatively, look at the trajectory of science publications coming out of Chinese universities vs the US. Underestimating China's brain-trust is doing oneself a disservice.

and on the flipside, the Chinese government routinely uses this same route for espionage and theft of American academia and STEM research.

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

I don't need to be convinced that China has lots of bright, hard-working individuals. I just want to point out that China faces immense challenges and that we should see beyond, and push back against, the propaganda. There is a massive asymmetry between China and democratic nations in this regards.

This is a fair assessment. However, I think there is propaganda or self-delusion in the west that leads some people to believe that free markets and/or democracy are preconditions for any number of desirable outcomes like creativity, economic success, product innovation, etc. That may have empirically been true against the Eastern Bloc/Soviet Union during the cold war, but is not obvious to me regarding China today. AFAICT, China has produced companies that can go to to toe with the best in the west - occasionally winning outright[1]. We can argue whether that's because of subsidies, espionage, innovation or fundamental research

1. DJI, CATL, BYD, ByteDance, HighFlyer/DeepSeek

Future might tell. But while it's tempting, I wouldn't bet against democracy and freedom just yet.

Unfortunately, it is true.

Why spend a decade researching something when you can just hack into American companies and steal their R&D about the same topic and then build from that? Saves a ton of time.

It's a pretty great strategy (for them) and works well.

About 20 years ago it was well-known that the cheap Cisco stuff on eBay was authentic in that there were say, two shifts worth of running the production line for Cisco and a partial shift for unofficial production sold outside of Cisco authorized channels and with no profit going to Cisco.

Isn't that basically the AliExpress business model?

I actually think this kind of supports the point you're responding to. HN used to have a battle cry about startups where "the idea doesn't matter, it's all in the execution" (mostly because we're tech-ies, and not those business folks coming up with the silly ideas).

Well, to some extent that's the case with manufacturing. You're bemoaning the loss of IP, which is catastrophic when that's all you have and your wealth is built on a gentleman's game of words and paper.

China, meanwhile, has built out factories, a knowledgeable workforce, and an extensive supply network. Back to startup terminology, there's a "network effect" in manufacturing of all the little parts that make up bigger things. You can drive around town and try out different parts, and make an invention here or there and improve things incrementally. There used to be a thriving ecosystem around the big U.S. domestic car manufacturers, not just for the cars themselves, but all the thousands of parts that go into them.

In other words, like many older hackers who grew up in the "information just wants to be free, man" world that spawned open source, the dig that China is "stealing IP" doesn't really hit me that hard. I'm impressed that they've gone to the next step of actually using it to make physical stuff, and I wish we did that more.

> Yeah, it's real easy when you employ an army of nation-state hackers to break into and steal R&D and tech from US Fortune 500 and aerospace companies to then use it internally and give to private industry in China.

All of this is old, tired news. They're leading in many areas now, so at least in the fields where they lead and innovate, they couldn’t have "stolen" anything.

If you would like to get more up to date:

1. "China has become a scientific superpower"

https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2024/06/12/...

2. "China Is Rapidly Becoming a Leading Innovator in Advanced Industries"

https://itif.org/publications/2024/09/16/china-is-rapidly-be...

3. "How Innovative Is China in Nuclear Power?"

https://itif.org/publications/2024/06/17/how-innovative-is-c...

Imagine that, Chinese hackers breaking into energy companies and stealing blueprints to nuclear power plants (2014).

https://money.cnn.com/2014/05/19/technology/security/china-h...

>The kind of spying China is accused of can yield valuable information and give the country's businesses a much-needed boost. Westinghouse spent a significant amount of money designing the special pipes that are the defining feature of its AP1000 pressurized water reactor. Stealing those plans means that a Chinese nuclear plant builder might be able to skip costly research and development.

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

>In 2016, the U.S. Justice Department charged China General Nuclear Power Group (CGN) with stealing nuclear secrets from the United States.[36][37] The Guardian reported: "According to the US Department of Justice, the FBI has discovered evidence that China General Nuclear Power (CGN) has been engaged in a conspiracy to steal US nuclear secrets stretching back almost two decades. Both CGN and one of the corporation’s senior advisers, Szuhsiung Ho, have been charged with conspiring to help the Chinese government develop nuclear material in a manner that is in clear breach of US law."[38]

Just two instances of many.

They play the long con and have pretty much stolen from every industry to further their own.

Do you really think that the US doesn't engage in industrial espionage too?

Certainly it does, but not nearly to the same degree (anymore).

You do understand that Chinese Companies can easily just hire people from abroad?

You also do know how many companies moved their knowledge to China on purpose right?

The knowledge on how to build things, is learnable even if you don't just 'hack' everything.

And there is a lot of signaling happening, that china has surpassed American and European companies in R&D. CATL for example.

Whatever China did or still does, its a land with 1.4 Billion people vs. 340 Million.

Also we achieved, around the globe, a level of expertise around so many topics, that we do not talk about huge differences. If an engine from china is a few % less efficient than the high techv ersion from germany, but the labor cost is fundamental different, than you just loos.

And the prices are significant different. So significant, that if USA doesn't change, it will not be able to compete.

Even a 104% tarif does not change the competitivness of China in a lot of areas.

All of this is only a problem in capitalism btw. and with the upcoming robot revolution, the 'richness' of manufacturing will never again go to the workers ever. This time is over. We need to figure this out

You do understand that Chinese government can (and does) easily just instruct their nation-state hackers to steal from abroad?

They have been caught doing this for decades.

Espionage and fundamental research are not mutually exclusive. The latter reduces the need for the former, and China is doing more of the latter now than it did before.

Infringement is good for the economy. Even our nations have progressed at a time when none of that was enforced, and are only strolling since then (or, as you may aptly say, rent-seeking).

PS: For those of us in software who wonder whether an economy without IP could exist, entire software industries exist without copyright protection, one trick for example is to provide the service behind the cloud, so customers never have access to the source code; meanwhile OSS, which is based on preventing restrictions on sharing, is the eighth wonder of the world, which has proven that IP is unnecessary to software.

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