China Makes a Big Play in Silicon Valley
npr.org
npr.org
Chinese citizens are buying up media properties and tech stock at a dizzying pace. Meanwhile, American owned media companies are heavily restricted in what movies can be shown in China and what content those movies can have. There are also restrictions of foreign ownership of Chinese companies.
The Trump administration is wasting time taxing trinkets imported from China, when what they should be doing is matching the restrictive laws that China is using to increase their soft power in the US and world.
https://www.lawfareblog.com/foreign-investment-risk-review-m...
The only one I can think of that may be worth mimicking in some form is the majority citizen ownership percentage requirement.
Same goes for chinese produced movies that they want to show in the US. Movie must be pre-approved and pro USA.
HN should always be open to new users, and the ability to create throwaways is important, but I am a little concerned that these new accounts don't fit either of those moulds - that they are created not by truly new users, nor as alts for people wanting to bring hard truths they're not comfortable with attaching their real identities with, but instead ~something else~.
Finding good partners who you can personally trust has and will continue to be the key to survival when interacting with China.
What I am saying is I don't trust the Chinese government to respect the human rights of my employees,the human rights of my customers, or my property rights.
The chinese government is a repressive, totalitarian, arbitrary, capricious, cruel regime; fundamentally incompatible with human dignity and freedom. The foundations of the chinese government are mortared with millions of bodies.
you are willing to compromise whatever moral beliefs you have-in exchange for what? for some money? for some prestige?
Is it worth it?
Chomsky points out that going to work in America is akin to walking into a Communist Dictatorship where you lose all of your rights [1].
[1] https://taibbi.substack.com/p/preface-an-interview-with-noam...
nice tu quoque.
I would not currently express beliefs like this on something that could be tied to my meatspace identity. I am an academic in a department with lots of international students and while I am not now prominent-I could become prominent and anyone with both eyes open knows how the chinese government responds to external or internal criticism.
I would be in the future be willing to accept that type of attack-but not over an HN comment.
Your concerns are valid, but the idea of simply doubling down on Silicon Valley's US companies doesn't ring true.
The US has built its empire on the foundations of Chinese manufacturing, and now there's the panic coming because that foundation will enable China to build it's own tech industry that will likely outcompete the USs.
Is there really much hand wringing going on about China building their own stuff? They've been copy catting for decades.
Have you ever experienced anything of the like? How is beind involved in Chinese startups as a non-native? (I’m assuming based on your post)
This just is not the case with China. Chinese human capital is more plentiful and of higher quality than that of any other country on earth. An additional multiplier is an almost fanatical work culture that is comparable to that of Japan.
Combine this with local governments that are as competent as the Bay Area government is incompetent, and there is finally a threat to America's domination of tech. My money is on China, or it would be if it was possible to get exposure.
I sort of wonder what the comparative advantage of the west will be when this all shakes out.
This old comment from nopinsight goes through the scores:
Key competitive advantages of China are their strength in quantitative skills as well as huge population and the hard working and competitive culture of its populace. An objective measure is PISA results [1]. When comparing with even the best performing US state, Massachusetts, China has many more top performers in Math, as a proportion of population [2].
(In 2015 only four provinces of China participated, but their combined population was 230 million vs Massachusetts's 6.8 million. The math result of Shanghai (24 million pop.) alone would show an even larger gap.)
Since PISA results are scaled such that OECD country's mean is 500 and standard deviation is 100. China's 531 math score implies country mean at 0.3 SD above PISA mean, and US' math score at 470 implies 0.3 SD below mean. If people capable of doing AI research or proper AI implementation need to have math skills at, say, 2 SD above PISA mean, then there will be a tremendous difference in proportion between two populations with 0.6 SD difference. My back-of-the-envelope calculation, assuming above figures, is the difference in proportion will be about five times. But China has more than 4 times the population of the US, so the difference in potential numbers of AI-capable natives could be over 20 times. (Since other provinces may drag down China's mean, it could be a bit less. We'll see soon since China as a whole will participate in 2018.)
Why stay in China where you face pollution, a salary depressed job market, and increasing authoritarianism when you can come to the Bay Area and make 10 times the salary you could otherwise? Of course not everyone can make it with the bar set so high, but the people who do end up coming are the ones you really don’t want to be losing.
Let’s be generous and say 500,000 yuan/year. I highly doubt in reality that anyone gets offered that much, but even with my outrageous rounding, that’s still only about ～$83,000 in USD. The mean new grad offer, some higher and some lower of course, from an equivalent American tech company (Google/Facebook/Amazon/etc.) is around $200,000/year. So even disregarding sociopolitical variables in addition to things like environmental pollution, there is absolutely zero chance that a new grad offer from mainland China outcompetes an equivalent American offer.
This isn’t to say that it’s just China that deals with this problem. It’s sort of a global thing really, just purely due to the fact that the Bay Area is wholly unique in the circumstances it evolved from that has made it almost completely divergent from the rest of the world. An average software engineering salary in Europe for example is around 30,000 Euros, such that it’s possible one might be able to get a better offer from an equivalent Chinese company than from a European one these days. So I’m not saying you can’t get a decent lifestyle working in a major city in China. It’s just that in some places in America, primarily the Bay Area and spreading out from there, there is a more than order of magnitude difference such that the gap isn’t something which can arbitrarily be closed.
The same is true for the Chinese. They go back to China because they feel it is truly their home.
But based on my anecdotal experience, the majority of my international peers want to stay in the Bay Area after they graduate, or at least somewhere comparable like Seattle, New York, etc.
Also it’s not just them either, their parents also want them to stay in America. There’s a reason why they’re willing to pay exorbitant amounts of money every year to fund their children’s education here. This is true by the way for pretty much the entirety of the world, not just singling out China.
They shape the way the public perceives them in foreign countries in ways that sometimes read like a spy novel.
Google “sharp power” for some insights into these tactics.
I think it’s easy to fall into the trap of conspiracy theories, and honestly I wouldn’t be surprised if the Chinese government has tried to overtly influence university students, considering how blatant their attempts at intellectual property thefts are, but the spy novel you think is real life really isn’t.
I believe the reporter was simply trying to describe the competition between the US and China in the race to develop technology, and the measures both sides are taking.
There is indeed a race. In fact, there are many races at once. On some fronts, the US is not moving very fast because of the way the government procures and invests in technology. Simultaneously. China is looking for ways to transfer technology. The CFIUS law limited the ways in which they can do so legally. Both countries are acting in their national interest, but they're starting from different points, which different advantages and disadvantages.
While the US is leading in many ways, China is catching up in others. If the US is complacent, or if it takes the wrong measures in over-regulating the tech industry, it will increase the likelihood that it will lose the race(s) and slowly become a secondary power.