Article is behind paywall, is there alternative link?
https://outline.com/3kdJyy
That seems to be missing content. :(
How Chinese Officials Hijacked My Company
101–110 of 266 posts
Re: How Chinese Officials Hijacked My Company
#102Article is behind paywall, is there alternative link?
Re: How Chinese Officials Hijacked My Company
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
> IP includes trade secrets, industry know-how, and human expertise These are the hardest kinds of IP to reproduce or "steal", though. I can believe that direct infringement of formal IP rights might be an issue, but this sort of more 'tacit' knowledge is a different ballpark.
Trade secrets and human expertise are incredibly easy to steal, but in the US at least trade secrets are protected by law unless explicitly disclosed to the public and human expertise is constrained by non compete agreements. On the other hand, for a country, any company operating within its boarders using is ripe for exploitation. Unless a foreign company uses 100% foreign workers, and eschews all government inspect…
Non-compete agreements are quite weak in California, and yet that's where much of the U.S. technology industry is located. This suggests that weaker enforcement of such "protection" can actively promote growth, not just exploitation.
Re: How Chinese Officials Hijacked My Company
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because before giving lessons to others you should be irreproachable. What would you think of Dijkstra if you suddenly discovered that he still wrote goto infested spaghetti code after his notorious "Go To Statement Considered Harmful" paper ? So yes we should criticize China as the bad actor that it is, but let's not forget that the western world is hardly an example (a good one I mean ;)
Underneath any high-level programming language is a layer of goto-infested spaghetti code. Dijkstra lost the stomach for low level optimization and convinced generations of programmers that easy is better than efficient.
I think you missed my point : it was about hypocrisy not about gotos ;)
Anyway in my usecase, easy is better than efficient : I'm in my 12th year of coding desktop and backend apps in C# and my first time having to rethink my code because it was too slow was only last year where I had to use dictionaries instead of Linq for a project that manipulates a lot of data (yes using dictionaries instead of Linq is the extent of my "optimization" and it's enough).
In those 12 years I never thought "if only I had a lower level, more efficient language than C#" (quite the opposite in fact).
So IMO it all depends on what you do : of course if your code is deployed to something less powerful than an Arduino I understand that efficiency is paramount !
Re: How Chinese Officials Hijacked My Company
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or reciprocated. Chinese citizens have invested a ton in US businesses, which is sort of okay. They also bought a ton of land in the US, which led to skyrocketing housing prices, and in the long term, if it continues unabated, will lead to the US paying tribute to China in the form of rents on US land. There is no upside to this. We got cheap Chinese plastic trinkets. They got our real estate. Didn't we do this to th…
Land is just an export like any other. China produces lots of manufactured goods, and sells them to the US. The US produces tons of valuable urban real estate and exports it to China. (Similarly the US produces lots of higher education, and exports it in the form of international students)
Land can be viewed as an export, but it's not like any other.
Economically, there is a fundamental difference between finite, rent-generating resources like land, and value-added goods like Chinese trinkets or international students.
Exporting value-added goods builds the economy. Exporting rent-collecting resources results in significant long-term harm to the economy.
Re: How Chinese Officials Hijacked My Company
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I can't see an answer outside of decoupling Maybe stop relying on IP as your business strategy ? Always be innovating so that you always be one step ahead those who copying.
How do you out-innovate a country which has less regulation, more intrusive surveillance, more factories ready to churn out whatever you invent, more workers (and Uighur slaves) ready to do the labour for less, and no qualms about stealing anything and everything you come up with and copying it at a scale you can't possibly match?
Sabotage that the plans
Re: How Chinese Officials Hijacked My Company
#107The article gives several possible ways to improve the situation. However, one critical way is missing imho: China forces foreign investment to always come in the form of a joint venture with a Chinese company. This practice needs to be forbidden or heavily penalized in all future trade agreements and similar international contracts.
I just learned that Tesla in China does not have a local partner. Which surprised me.
Was Tesla an exception? Are there others?
Regardless, I'm absolutely certain that China is exfiltrating every morsel of IP. As state policy. It's what they do.
The only interesting wrinkle to me is that Elon Musk is probably okay with the knowledge transfer. A man on a mission. Whatever it takes to get humanity carbon neutral asap.
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I'm fine with developing economies doing their thing. The notion was to nurture the BRICS countries, allow them to mature, not crush them in their cribs.
No one can argue today that China remains a developing economy. We're past time for realpolitik.
Re: How Chinese Officials Hijacked My Company
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
Land is just an export like any other. China produces lots of manufactured goods, and sells them to the US. The US produces tons of valuable urban real estate and exports it to China. (Similarly the US produces lots of higher education, and exports it in the form of international students)
Land can be viewed as an export, but it's not like any other. Economically, there is a fundamental difference between finite, rent-generating resources like land, and value-added goods like Chinese trinkets or international students. Exporting value-added goods builds the economy. Exporting rent-collecting resources results in significant long-term harm to the economy.
China and Singapore recognize the importance of land due to its inherent scarcity, hence most land is held by the state and foreign ownership banned or discouraged. Frankly, most countries should recognize the importance of keeping land ownership under domestic control. However, this prevents existing wealthy land owners from exiting their holdings easily by selling to the global market instead of just the domestic market, and money speaks loudly in politics.
Re: How Chinese Officials Hijacked My Company
#109Re: How Chinese Officials Hijacked My Company
#110Not really off tangent: I won't be surprised if this attracts lots of comments along the lines "US/ WESTERN COUNTRIES did this before too and therefore no better than China". I just can't understand why when it comes to geopolitics, HN just can't keep the discussion related to the submission? Somehow US/ western countries have to enter the discussion as a bad benchmark...
No-one has yet, but what's the problem with it? America stole Britain's intellectual property for a leg up a century or two ago, now a different country is doing it to them. It's just the normal cycle, and America have long had a lot of artificial legal protections in place to try and stop it and limit the rest of the world's prosperity. The harsh copyright laws and IP agreements they've bullied the rest of the world…
Except they aren't saying "no", they're trying to have it both ways by violating both the spirit and letter of their agreements. The subtitle of the story points out that the Chinese were the ones doing the actual patent filing in this case.
And this story of western development as some kind of capital-hoarding process is completely off. A country is developed and wealthy if and only if it has skilled labor producing so much wealth constantly. In the US it was $20T last year, and it will be another $20T the next year (ok maybe a bit less this year). You could be nothing but hired guns producing for contract, and become the richest country in the world. I'm no fan of IP, but its a sideshow here. And if anything I'd say it's far worse for developed countries than developing ones.