Why is China smashing its tech industry?

> Facebook and Netflix are excellent examples of companies that contribute greatly to our GDP whilst simultaneously draining our reserves of actual capital and mental health.

It's not so clear to me that this is true. The fundamental question is - if not this, then what? If you accept that people can only work a certain amount, then a "perfectly" "productive" society involves people working just that amount, and then going home and entertaining themselves the amount that is necessary to recharge, safely, and then repeating. If not Netflix, then what? Alcohol and drunk driving?

I'm not saying watching Netflix is what we should aspire to, but compared to the alternatives, it seems reasonably likely to contribute to economic growth. A passive workforce works.

China's investment into hard-tech (semiconductors, etc) doesn't not mean it can't also allow for the growth of consumer tech. For instance, we subsidize farming to keep it state-side but we don't prevent food processing companies from growing and consolidating.

Maybe the point here is that the government in china wants to always be between the consumer and the service, which makes a lot more sense. Maybe Alibaba and the like have a connection to every person and the gov'ment is threatened by that relationship.

There are many possibilities but I don't necessarily agree with the conclusion of the author: that to grow their hard-tech industry, they have to punish consumer tech.

Those speeches usually contain about as much actual information as a corporate PR statement: they, at best, tell you why the dictator wants others to think they are doing something.

The only logical way to interpret the intentions of political leaders is to look at their effects. Anything else, even personal diaries, are likely full of interested reasoning and outright lies.

The tech is less visible and more boring but I'm doubtful that this is true:

> I don't think it's created anywhere near the amount of value that's come out of e.g. space race

The space race gave us a lot of tangible, physics/materials/hard-engineering related tech. Software gives us a lot of internet infrastructure, communications, algorithms, etc. that are incredibly useful for the average consumer. Lots of people in this thread complaining about the negative value of ads and such, but the communications infrastructure, knowledge sharing, social change due to marginalized people being able to communicate things far and wide ... there's a lot of intangible benefits that have come as a direct result of focusing heavily on consumer internet.

The U.S. has been in the process of delisting Chinese companies.

I personally suspect that China wanted to get a jump on the effort and in turn force U.S. pension & hedge funds to lose $400B.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/investors-rethink-china-bets-af...

That's a huge amount of money and will dramatically and negatively impact the public pension funds.

It's not about the tech, it's about the economic war between China and the United States. At the same time, the CCP is exerting it's authority over these companies to tighten it's control.