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Comment by aurizon | Hacker News Reader

deleted, the comments revealed the flaws

Instead of shooting down satellites and causing an international incident, along with risking Kessler syndrome, why not just prevent people from owning Starlink Terminals? You can enforce it fairly easily with import bans, and find smuggled devices by triangulating their radio signals (worst case equip a couple planes to fly over the country to look for Starlink radio signals). Or just strongarm SpaceX into not providing service to terminals in mainland China.

Or just jam it.

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

Aren’t the current terminals quite large? They’d be hard to smuggle.

It would never happen. Musk wants to sell cars in China, Tesla has important factories there as well. The Chinese government has a lot more leverage when it comes to these companies, they could simply shut them down without warning and crash the shareholder's stocks.

They will do it. The 100-year-CCP discourse of Xi clearly stated that he wants CCP to be self-sufficient. He will simply take control of all the West assets in China once he considers that the West cannot do anything against the takeover.

West: in the sense everything but China.

Well, you certainly underestimate Mr. Xi. He wants his state-owned enterprise to be so efficient and innovative that, it's useless to own the worse foreign assets. After all, Mr. Xi believe that his state owned enterprise will produce the best and the most desirable products on the market. Without foreign assets, the world would not open their market to Mr. Xi then. The same capitalism logic...

I tend to agree with this line of thinking though Tesla has some leverage too.

The factory complex Tesla has built in Shanghai has been funded with several billion dollars of local debt. If China were to seize the factory then Tesla would simply stop servicing that debt.

I don’t know if this is true, especially in the case of Tesla.

The fact is, China prevents money from leaving their country, so any western company in China is kind of a farce, because they can’t actually take their money out if they make any. What they do hope to get out of China though is intellectual property, which can pass boundaries without taxes.

If Musk really has a utopian goal of decreasing emissions, he couldn’t care less if China took over Tesla China, because he won’t be making actual money from Tesla China anyway. Instead, he hopes that manufacturing innovations and ideas can be shared to his other factories.

If china took over tesla China and didn’t share innovations, that would just be stupid on their part, because the rest of the world would be working together and sharing innovation without them.

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