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Comment by DiogenesKynikos | Hacker News Reader

Given how openly hostile the United States is to the European Union (and will continue to be for at least the next 4 years), it would be extremely foolish for the EU to continue to go along with the US' chip war against China.

What does the EU stand to gain from trying to kneecap China's technological development? The US' motivation is clear: the US wants to maintain its hegemonic position. But the EU has no such position to defend.

Instead of acting as a mere pawn of the US, the EU should formulate its own foreign policy that maintains relations with both the US and China, and which avoids getting sucked into one or the other side of the US-China rivalry. The ASML CEO's statement on this is right:

> Referring to the Dutch government’s willingness to follow America’s lead on export bans, Mr Fouquet says that Europe must “decide for itself what it wants” and “should not be dictated to by anyone else”.

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> Given how openly hostile the United States is to the European Union (and will continue to be for at least the next 4 years), it would be extremely foolish for the EU to continue to go along with the US' chip war against China.

China is just as much a threat to European companies and European interests as it is to American interests.

Trump and his foolishness aside, it's high time Europe wakes up and realizes China is already at war with us - in fact, it has been at war with us for well over a decade. China systematically undercuts our industries with slave labor and sharting on their environment (not that I'd care too much about smog in China, that's their business, but I do care when our industry can't compete because we actually want to protect our environment), China deploys organized hacker campaigns against us or outright buys up our companies to extract knowledge and know-how - and we've bent over for way too long. We haven't even ever insisted on reciprocity in market access ffs!

> China systematically undercuts our industries with slave labor

By this argument isn't America undercutting Europe by taxing companies less and being ok with less worker rights?

> China is already at war with us

Who is us here? Because you are threatening a takeover of Greenland and giving up Ukraine to Russia. Not to mention tariffing and threatening your closest allies.

> and sharting on their environment

Per capita co2 emissions

USA: 14.21

China: 8.89

> By this argument isn't America undercutting Europe by taxing companies less and being ok with less worker rights?

We, at least until Trump, got the US military keeping Russia out of Europe and dealing with a whole lot of other bullshit we were too frugal to deal with on our own on the global stage.

> Who is us here? Because you are threatening a takeover of Greenland and giving up Ukraine to Russia. Not to mention tariffing and threatening your closest allies.

Europe, that should be obvious from context.

> Per capita co2 emissions

CO2 is one thing, but the time that the Western world had smog events like China had up until their Olympic Games is decades in the past. Besides, China's per-capita emissions are driven down by the fact that they still have a lot of utterly poor people that barely cause any emissions.

> We, at least until Trump, got the US military keeping Russia out of Europe and dealing with a whole lot of other bullshit we were too frugal to deal with on our own on the global stage.

Well we have Trump now.

> Europe, that should be obvious from context.

There is no "we" if you threaten to invade land and treat us like enemies. I thought the sarcasm was obvious.

> CO2 is one thing, but the time that the Western world had smog events like China had up until their Olympic Games is decades in the past.

How many decades of pollution did the USA emit developing through the last century while Asia didn't because they were insanely poor because of war and colonisation?

> Besides, China's per-capita emissions are driven down by the fact that they still have a lot of utterly poor people that barely cause any emissions.

Germany has a per capita co2 emission rate of 8.01 so even lower than China. The USA is at 14.21.

> the time that the Western world had smog events like China had up until their Olympic Games is decades in the past.

China has actually made very significant efforts to reduce smog, and there's been a huge improvement in the last 10 years. There's still way more smog than in the US or Western Europe, but it's gotten dramatically better, and it will probably continue to get better.

TikTok, YMTC, DJI, DeekSeek, ZTE, Huawei, SMIC, BYD use ``slave labour''?

Have you been at recent top conferences in computer science? Every year the number of top papers coming from China increases. A direct consequence of the sustained investment into education. China also leads most European in EV adoption.

You man know Kübler-Ross's Five Stages Of Grief [1]. Like most Europeans, you seem to be stuck somewhere between denial and anger regarding European relative decline vis-a-vis China. I suggest flying over there and taking a look for yourself.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_stages_of_grief

Your war rhetoric is false and dangerous, because if we are at war, then acts of war against them are justified. Should we bomb them because they work too long hours?

> Should we bomb them because they work too long hours?

No, but respond tit-for-tat. In this case, tariffs or import bans would be an appropriate response. In the case of hacking, either hackbacks or cutting China off from the Internet.

China's threat is different from the US'. But anyway, the real threat to EU is in EU itself, as for all major organizations.

Is it China undercutting or is it US been hurting itself in inflation for decades?

>What does the EU stand to gain from trying to kneecap China's technological development?

Same reason it's a thereat top the US. Because China's technological development is a threat to the profitability of EU companies, meaning it's a threat to the EU citizens standard of living. Because who would buy anything made in EU if products from China cost half as much at the same quality?

Why do you think they're putting so high tariffs on Chinese EVs despite the EU's push for zero carbon environmentalism. If they cared so much about the environment they would import cheap Chinese EVs to accelerate the switch to EVs, but they care more about preserving jobs and profits in the union which is what every country prioritizes, because otherwise profits would collapse, unemployment would skyrocket.

This is shortsighted. A lot of EU businesses can, and do, benefit from partnering with China. Most EU countries willingly and intentionally de-industrialized in the past decades (see Dutch disease) and moved the production to China.

European countries also willingly and intentionally outsourced their technological edge to the US. This didn't end up in disaster either. Why should it be any different with China?

When Japanese or Korean cars came we had almost the same reactions. Nobody complains now. Why should it be different with China?

Most of the chips are produced in Taiwan. There is no way EU can catch up. What does, economically, change if this moves to China!

Treating technology and economy as a zero sum game is simply wrong.

Indeed. And this is not only valid for ASML and chips but also for Ukraine. Europe doesn't know where its interests are, cannot defend them, and in fact is even unsure about its own identity- EU countries make strategic deals with non-EU ones (eg. Macron involving the UK in defence plans) while trying to isolate other EU members (Hungary, Slovakia). In the European media there is a constant confusion between EU and Europe, as if the political union and the geographic expression were interchangeable terms.

In this scenario it is absolutely trivial for the US to impose their own will on the EU. We act selflessly not out of a sense of responsibility or altruism but out of an actual lack of sense of self. And the current administration is so sure of the persistence of this state of things that has no trouble whatsoever antagonising the EU with threats and demands- they know we'll never get our acts together in any case.

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