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Comment by adrian_b | Hacker News Reader

It would be interesting to see some concrete examples of what is claimed in "Once parity is reached, China cuts collaboration agreements and keeps further advancements within China."

Whenever I search recent research articles about any topic, I see a very large number that are published by China, and which are freely available.

The quality of the Chinese research is quite uneven, there are many papers that are just garbage, but there are also many which are surprisingly creative and original, exploring promising alternatives to those that had already been studied by Western research.

I frequently see statements from naive Americans that all that the Chinese do is based on copying, but unfortunately for USA, that was true only in the past and it is no longer true today.

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Just one of many examples: The WIV BSL-4 lab in Wuhan was built as a French-Chinese cooperation (modeled after a similar lab in Lyon, France) with the explicit goal to do joint experiments. But once it was built, the French were kicked out.

And the French getting kicked out is only the second worst consequence of that project! Though for what it’s worth, I think there was Western collaboration with WIV as well.

The first-worst has thankfully not happened yet - China was lobbying that now they had a BSL-4 Lab, they should also have a sample of Smallpox. The consequences of that would have been disastrous.

At this point I would favor even the CDC destroying theirs.

> I frequently see statements from naive Americans that all that the Chinese do is based on copying, but unfortunately for USA, that was true only in the past and it is no longer true today.

Just because you don't follow them doesn't mean they don't exist. Plenty of ongoing IP theft cases show this is not true. This case closed a few years back that pretty much wiped out a Billion+ dollar US company: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/chinese-company-sinovel-wind-...

Wind turbines!

This example is immensely funny to me, since in the 90s the NSA stole trade secrets related to wind turbines from the German company Enercon and passed it on to the US company Kenetech, who then managed to get a patent in the US.

English sources are a bit scarce, but here's an article that references it:

> Some months later, a former NSA agent admitted that the organisation had secretly intercepted Enercon's data communications and monitored conference calls. The NSA passed all the information it gleaned on to Kenetech.[1]

There's also a report on ECHELON for the European parliament that mentions this case among others[2]. Some more cases became known through documents leaked by Snowden.

To complete this circle German intelligence services would now have to steal trade secrets related to wind turbines from China, but sadly they're explicitly forbidden from conduction industrial espionage - to the chagrin of German companies who are feeling disadvantaged.

[1] https://www.irishtimes.com/business/electronic-spies-torture...

[2] https://irp.fas.org/program/process/rapport_echelon_en.pdf

So the Chinese even stole the method of stealing, from USA!

They are indeed IP theft in their genetics!

Honestly, copying is what you are supposed to do with technology when you are competing from behind.

See: early space programme when the the US realised it was behind where Germany had been.

See: Samuel Slater sneaking out of Britain to Rhode Island after memorizing the construction details of Arkwright's water frame.

I wouldn't consider whispering German scientists away to the United States as copying, it seems more like theft.

> but there are also many which appear surprisingly creative and original

ftfy

I don’t claim there is no creativity in China. But to claim that everything that looks new to you is therefore original goes too far.

what is stopping those naive americans from going to china, buying those "stolen and improved but not shared with us legally" products and sell them on their own back home? its not like chinese businesses would sue them or anything so whats the big deal as you say?

they copy you, you copy their advances back and you are back in parity.

Not everyone wants to break the laws. Even of another country.

In China the repercussions for what you described may go way beyond the legal framework, you may be labeled a spy or something like that. This hasn’t applied to doing that in US / Western countries

> go way beyond the legal framework, you may be labeled a spy or something like that

I mean, a few hundreds years ago, the US continent was populated by Savages. They got educated and civilized now.

So give China another 1 hundred years. They'll be as civilized as US today. They probably would routinely threaten nukes for countries not practicing the "wholistic democracy" [1]; they'll also cut supply of key components from global supply chain when India is approaching their supremacy; and sanction Vietnam because they dont act like dogies...

[1] https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202208/1272926.shtml

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