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Comment by anonporridge | Hacker News Reader

The rise of China has done a lot to destroy the neoliberal, globalist dream.

Letting them cheat the globalist system (e.g. violating IP laws, human rights violations, Uyghur/Tibetan genocide) may have been fine when they were desperately poor, but there was always an implicit assumption that they would eventually start playing by the rules and culturally liberalize. But they're not. How can we hold onto ideals like "diversity is our strength" and open borders are good when China is kicking ass and threatening the balance of power as an insular ethnostate with one of the lowest rates of immigrants on the planet?

And now they're growing to a power level that threatens to rival the US and its authority to police this global system we've created. That isn't stable, and the west would be insane to not shut China out and take a step back from our open, globalist ideals until we sort out this geopolitical game of thrones.

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But the IP laws are visibly stupid, their role in the system is prevent success stories like China where some plucky upstart vaults to the forefront of the industrial world and drags a billion people out of poverty. The response to China achieving such success by ignoring IP laws should be to recognise the laws have been disasters and then to release the limits worst of the limits they impose on Western innovators.

A huge part of the software industry is there because of explicit GPL-style agreements defang the intent of IP laws while working inside the legal requirements they impose. The west should allow good ideas to be deployed in its own industrial processes.

> Letting them cheat the globalist system

They didn’t cheat, we did.

China didn’t force the west to make them their workbench.

China isn’t the first authoritarian country the western industry loved as workforce.

No human wasn’t a negative, it was one of the main selling points.

So this shows how much the West considers liberalism and open markets to be its "values" when they throw that completely away when they're economically threatened. This tells me that in hardship is when people show their true colors. The money is the true "value", everything else is just a side show.

No, it's just game theory.

When you're playing prisoner's dilemma games, and your co-player is consistently defecting, you can only play cooperate for so long. Tit for tat is the only way you don't get majorly screwed by the defector over time.

Its quiet easy to understand, you can be liberal and free so long as wealth keeps flowing into your part of the world. What are you going to do make fun of becoming more wealthier.

The liberalism and freedom stops once too much money flows out of your part of the world, hence companies like palantir popping up like mushrooms. No one likes to be made fun of when they are in a declining trajectory.

No, just no. I get where you’re coming from, but I disagree in the strongest terms that copying China is the way forward. Closed, centralized models can scale quickly, as China did, but open models generate more frontier innovation and resilience. Iirc, nearly half of our unicorns have immigrant founders.

Sure, let’s harden IP and other trade laws, and punish China for violations (start treating them as an adult, a nation peer, instead of a rowdy child). But giving up our strategic advantage because China was able to semi-copy-us without having that advantage would be a huge mistake imo. I’m not saying America doesn’t need major changes, but I don’t think the way forward is to close our borders to global talent. Instead, let’s take advantage of our superpower status to implement UHC and UBI, to make our nation even more attractive to talented immigrants.

this is what most WEIRD people do not understand: (Western-Educated-Industrial-Rich-Democratic) - by today it looks like that the Chinese system may proof to be more "performant" on most/several (all?) levels. Its hard to accept for libertarian minds, i guess.

Once here on HN someone wrote like: "democratic systems seems to be too slow to adapt in world changing at our current speed".

China did some vey wise decisions from their perspective; think about this joint-venture thingy that foreign companies need to have a JV partner which always holds at least 50.1% - very clever! Why did no western state do this? Its one of the by far smartest decision that you could do.

This JV obssession is weird, China basically admitted that they can never compete on ICE cars and bet on EVs instead, either this JV model doesn't actually work or what was transferred do not have much value.

Now people claim they stole their IPs through JVs and that's why they are good at making EVs, this theory doesn't add up.

Also, what China offered is a vast untapped market, no one forced these companies to go to China to set up JVs and start picking up gold down the street, this was way before WTO and China was not at all obligated to open it's market, let alone for free.

Now ask one question, what the EU has to offer to "force" China to set up JVs? Guaranteed billion dollars profit?

EU car market is crowded and full of incumbents, Chinese cars represent a low single digit market share despite the weekly "China is taking over the EU car market" news article.

As said: They made clever decissions while the greedy western company went into their trap :-)

China bet on EVs because of national security. China has less reliable access to oil than many other countries and the US can choke off delivery of oil to China through bottlenecks if it comes to war. Investing in solar, wind and nuclear makes sense in their predicament. "Green energy" and "saving the planet" are secondary and mostly marketing by comparison.

Countries hitting their industrialization stride have a bloom of real world applicable talent that they can direct to these things in a way that is a little harder for others. Especially when you have a huge population.

It isn't just the US, Russia has oil and shares a land border with China. However, Russia isn't always friendly with China, nor is the middle east, and anyways, it just seems like a headache to deal with them + the petro dollar when they have plenty of energy to tap at home.

Air pollution was also a huge problem, aside from national security. China's empahsis on STEM and the fact that they've been a huge source of engineering/science/tech talent meant China could just tap its own human resources rather than making them go abroad for decent jobs. The fact that they also know how to build things and have set up all the infra for that is just another bonus.

China is willing to play ball in less developed countries, and the deals they setup is not just Chinese companies coming in and dominating the market, they are also partnering with and trying to raise local companies as well. That won't work in Europe or the US, at least for now.

It's true that Russia and China share a border, but the infrastructure to move oil across it at large scale barely exists and I got the impression the geology is very unfavorable for it. It's probably easier to ship it, but future pipeline expansions may still happen.

The whole Belt and Road initiative seemed to mimic a Korean style labor export to increase the inflows of currency into the country while keeping people employed, but I also kind of figured it was aimed at reducing the friction of future resource transportation between the countries.

Remember 10 foot tall Ivan? Apart from eugenics experiments on the basketball court, neither are the Chinese. In light of gross over-spending on showcase infrastructure projects, and overbuilding housing where people don't want to live, over-praising the CCP's system for training and promoting leaders is not going to make assessments of China more accurate.

I agree that our system (America’s, specifically) is too slow, but it’s not inherent to democracy, it’s the fact we only have elections every few years, because these rules were written in the 1700s when holding an election / voting in an election was difficult. No snap elections when the government is about to shut down (would’ve prevented all the nonsense of the last month and a half).

This isn’t cope. China has virtually no cultural exports of note compared to its size, except some gacha games (that are still mainly voiced in Japanese, which does have cultural exports). Every time I visit, I have to accept that my internet is going to be ridiculously unreliable and throttled and flaky.

I’m not saying China is “wrong”, but it’s not the obvious winner to me. Nor is it to my Chinese-born spouse who moved here for the greater opportunities and freedom.

>>China has virtually no cultural exports of note compared to its size,

++1

It's difficult to export culture when the receiving cultures don't speak the language, don't share religion, etc. US has a big benefit of being part of the Anglophone world going back to it's founding and more recently with Western European dominance from WW2 where basically everyone there knows some level of English. Also, don't forget China has suffered from great "humiliation" for the last few hundred years and hasn't been in much of a position to export much of anything until recently. Furthermore, the main reason the US has absorbed some SK and Japanese cultural things is we brought them into our neoempire.

It is also the way we keep score in America.

Kids in America are hopelessly addicted to Tiktok but that doesn't count as a cultural export.

Most the items in people's homes are made in China but that doesn't count either.

Chinese rappers could be dominating the pop charts and we would just say rap was invented in America so that doesn't count.

All the American kids could be learning to play the guzheng and we would just say we invented a new American style of playing the guzheng, doesn't count.

K-pop from Korea, Anime / mangas from Japan, are example of asian cultural worldwide successes

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