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YC China and Qi Lu

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: YC China and Qi Lu

#71

Post by jumelles »

dragonwriter wrote: post #53
jumelles wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Caring about human rights is silly?

Caring about human rights is not silly. Expecting capitalists (the economic class, not the ideological faction) to put human rights over returns on capital is, if not silly, at least naively optimistic.

That's why we speak out (like this!) and force them to do the right thing. As I've said elsewhere, there are things more important than profit. Companies that disagree ought to be boycotted.

Maybe that's naive. It's still the right thing to do. No amount of money can shift what's right and wrong.

Re: YC China and Qi Lu

#72

Post by jumelles »

shard972 wrote: post #52
jumelles wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Caring about human rights is silly?

If you want to make it in China then yea, you probably shouldn't be too hung up on human rights. It's not some universal concept that has applied throughout the world for our existence so it's quite rude to pretend like China has to bow to these systems of human rights we developed without china's input.

The very idea of a right is that it is universal.

Re: YC China and Qi Lu

#73

Post by seanmcdirmid »

echevil wrote: post #66
echan00 wrote: post #17

Key question: will Chinese startups be required to register as US companies :)

Nope. There’re tons of Chinese startups already with or without YC. Would US startups be required to register as Chinese companies if they receive Chinese VC money?

The US is open to arbitrary FDI so it doesn't matter. China's laws are more...complicated. For example, you can't give stock options to non-Chinese employees if your company is Chinese and not already listed, see https://www.chinalawblog.com/2018/03/china-scam-week-part-4-....

I'm not aware of any foreign funded startups in China currently. I mean, there must be some small players with private foreign funding, but it is so easy to get Chinese funding I'm not sure why anyone would even bother.

Re: YC China and Qi Lu

#74

Post by Analemma_ »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #18
curiousDog wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bing really is a pile of garbage though (perhaps a little better these days but no where near as good as Google). I'm surprised he wasn't fired sooner. Was he friends with Ballmer?

Qi was actually one of the better SVPs at Microsoft, I think he was even on the list for the CEO spot that Satya got. He was given an almost impossible task in competing with Google basically from scratch. Ya, he didn't completely succeed, but that isn't very surprising. What happened at the end, I'm not really sure. I was pretty surprised when I heard he was gone with Harry Shum taking over most of what he was in ch…

(I worked at Bing when this all went down.)

It was a strange departure. He apparently got in some kind of cycling accident and took medical leave from Microsoft for recovery, but then just a few months later he was a senior executive at Baidu. Not sure what was up with that.

But contra the GP, the general opinion both during and after Lu's tenure was that he did a good job. It took a while, but Bing is profitable now, and he did a lot to get that in motion. I imagine it can't be psychologically easy to run an unprofitable department for years with the eye on long-term strategy, especially in the Ballmer era, but he pulled it off. Bing is not the disaster money pit that a lot of HN assumes it to be.

Re: YC China and Qi Lu

#75

Post by jbigelow76 »

Leary wrote: post #5
jn1234 wrote: post #3

What will be the Code of Ethics? https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-monitoring-insight/...

Given the sensitive nature of this topic, I propose HackerNews be given the authority of drafting the Code of Ethics for YC China in order to ensure democratic accountability. Posters could nominate particular statues/principles they like and the community at large can vote on them.

The HackerNews crowd isn't even allowed to make comments on YC seeded company job postings, I wouldn't hold your breath on being able to craft a sister company's code of ethics.

Re: YC China and Qi Lu

#76

Post by shard972 »

jumelles wrote: post #69
shard972 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They wouldn't because most of the western democratic countries are now actively preventing China from stealing their technologies. Thats all kind of small considering the kind of information that has already been dropshiped out with no real punishments to the chinese government itself. All these efforts are is trying to plug the holes, not realizing the holes aren't just company buyouts but mostly espionage via chi…

This sort of whataboutism isn't helpful. We have the right to call out human rights abuses; further, I think we have an obligation to use that right lest we lose it. Are you aware that the average citizen in China simply cannot tell their government that it's wrong? It doesn't matter what abuses the US or other Western nations have or haven't done - the PRC is still in the wrong.

> the PRC is still in the wrong

Ill just leave it here by saying that to even label something in another culture as "wrong" you first have to understand that the word "wrong" is deeply entrenched in western culture and can't simply just be thrown around at other cultures who have constructed entirely different systems of morality and language to express them.

Re: YC China and Qi Lu

#78

Post by shard972 »

IntelMiner wrote: post #68
shard972 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to make it in China then yea, you probably shouldn't be too hung up on human rights. It's not some universal concept that has applied throughout the world for our existence so it's quite rude to pretend like China has to bow to these systems of human rights we developed without china's input.

The Chinese government is not the Chinese people I don't think the Chinese people approve of many of the things their government does. Though censorship makes dissent harder to "prove"

A lot of americans don't approve of many things the government does but we don't call them a dictatorship oppressing the people.

Plenty of western countries are involved in censorship on a smaller scale but that's not considered evil and suppressing the true views of the public.

One easy example being mega projects, here in the west we seem to wax poetic constantly about returning to the good old days where a nation could undertake mega-projects and yet china just keeps doing them faster than we can keep track.

I'm sure many westerners and chinese both want to see these things happen and yet they are doing it and we aren't? Is that some proof that we are suppressed citizens? Or maybe its a bit more nuanced.

Re: YC China and Qi Lu

#79

Post by nodesocket »

jumelles wrote: post #15

YC's got a very, very fine line to tread if they're serious about China - with its limits on human rights and authoritarian tendencies, the Chinese government is absolutely not to be trusted. I worry about what sort of concessions tech companies have made and will make to gain access to the Chinese market.

Not to mention their policies of stealing intellectual property and dumping steel and aluminum. Thankfully and as I expected the US tariffs have really hurt their stock market, meanwhile the US stock market is at near all time highs.

Re: YC China and Qi Lu

#80

Post by friedman23 »

dang wrote: post #77
friedman23 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doing business in China is unethical.

No flamebait or flamewars, please. Least of all nationalistic ones.

It has nothing to do with nationalism. The PRC is a dictatorship that currently has millions of people in concentration camps undergoing reeducation, suppresses freedom of expression for its citizens, and crushes minority cultures.
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