Arm China Has Gone Rogue

> Do electronic devices using quantum effects in solid state materials count? There you have the whole semiconductor industry.

That was invented by Jagadish Chandra Bose in Bangladesh, who built working millimeter-wave radios using Schottky diodes in 01894. Of course, he didn't understand the quantum effects, but then, semiconductor diodes were in wide industrial use (mostly in the rich West) for decades before Shockley's Equation in 01949.

The quantum theory was largely a Western discovery during those 55 years, but also included significant contributions from non-Western people like Shinichiro Tomonaga, Yoshiro Nishina, Leo Esaki, Tsung-Dao Lee, Hideki Yukawa, and Hantaro Nagaoka, and of course since 01949 quantum theory has been a field of investigation dominated by non-Western people. As you may be aware, there have been significant improvements in solid-state electronics since 01949, including full-color LEDs that permit LED lighting (due to Shuji Nakamura) and the switch to MOSFETs (due to Mohammed Atalla and Dawon Kahng, who were not from the West but were in the West) which eliminated the power consumption barrier that restricted 01960s electronics to dozens of transistors on a chip.

China in particular has had a pretty bad couple of centuries, in between being invaded by the US, England, Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Belgium, the Austro-Hungarian empire, Russia (twice), and Japan (three times), having two of the most ruinous civil wars in human history, and having the worst famine in human history. So it's been innovating a bit below par, though it seems to be doing okay now.

> What about exploiting the behavior of charge carriers in vacuum? There you have the whole vacuum tube industry.

It does seem that the whole cathode-ray thing was a Western discovery, but it was built on the Hindu ayurvedic techniques of mercury distillation that formed the basis for Arabic and then Western alchemy (necessary for the Sprengel pump, which was for decades the only source of a hard enough vacuum); also, building the apparatus drew on the Mesopotamian techniques of glassmaking, which are usually considered to hail from Asia Minor, though some believe they originated in Egypt.

(It's possible that the Hindus imported the techniques of mercury distillation from China, but that is far enough back that it's difficult to know. At any rate, the Europeans got them from the Arabs, who got them from the Hindus.)

Taiwan is not China.

I agree with your first two paragraphs but I don't necessarily agree with the rest. The CCP is clearly effective at letting you see what it wants you to see because no matter what you think of our media, even the most biased right-wing or left-wing sources are more open than theirs and criticism of everything that goes wrong in the US flows freely. We're more like a reality TV drama that frequently airs our dirty laundry. Taking news from China at face value is like looking at someone's Instagram feed, you are only seeing the highlights. Some Chinese people got to go movie theaters and eat at restaurants in contemporary urban middle class sense. Hundreds of millions in the interior cannot afford the aforementioned middle class lifestyle. You can see the large gap in per capita GDP for provinces here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_administrative...

Also, if you were under the impression that they locked down once and beat the virus, then you'd be surprised to find out that they've had to do multiple recurring region-wide lock-downs all throughout, even up until now.

August 2021 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/02/millions-under...

June 2021 https://www.scmp.com/coronavirus/greater-china/article/31380...

January 2021 https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/13/world/asia/china-covid-lo...

I don't know what state youre from; I went through lockdowns too but I've gone to restaurants and movie theaters and traveled to other places freely as well. If you didn't, that's on your state, just like there were times that people in Shanghai had more freedom than people in Shenzhen, and vice versa.

Your third paragraph is hard to comment on briefly and partly subjective, I can't comment on 1/6 because it's still an ongoing investigation with the FBI reporting a lack of evidence that it was some centrally coordinated plot. Sometimes riots get out of hand, we should be thankful that unlike a certain riot in 1989 we didn't roll out the tanks and run them over. Instead we arrested them all and they are going through due process. The foreign engagement failures of Afghanistan and Iraq don't exist in a vacuum. We've been in Germany, South Korea, and Japanese for decades and those are going quite well - you win some you lose some. When South Koreans went under repressive rule by Park Jung Hee, you could've said our nation building failed, but we held on and now it's a thriving country that exports its culture worldwide. As for social mobility, I'm an ethnic minority and no matter how bad you think social mobility is, and it's not easy, you do not have better chances anywhere other than the US and Europe. Make of that what you will, I've experienced it. First in my family to go to college, got a job in tech and all that. Believe me if you want. I appreciate the social mobility here and acknowledge that my family couldn't have done it without the civil rights movement of decades prior. I also understand why Americans look down on their own history, but the thing is contemporary Chinese folks do not look down on theirs. They are proud, they want their country to be the best, they want to win. More power to them, but the "Chinese Dream" is only for them. You can go there as a student, be an expat, but it's almost impossible to become a citizen. They are not a nation of immigrants. At best you can be a permanent resident, preferably if you have a western passport. Africans there are not treated as kindly:

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3079497/us-w...

https://news.yahoo.com/no-blacks-evicted-harassed-targeted-1...

They didn't get the support of allies mass protesting police brutality in every city like Americans did. People like me don't appreciate the self-defeating sentiment that China's ascension is inevitable and well deserved because of our bad history. I don't mean to detract from your points too much. We do need better education, better healthcare, a more prudent foreign policy and all that. I'm just adding more context and my input that all hope is not lost and that western values are inferior to Chinese ones. All hope is not lost. We don't want to get to the point where we say "welp that settles it the only way to improve our standard of living is to become repressive authoritarian regimes too"

> Are you sure about that? It's the norm in Europe. E.g. you can't work for UK security services (MI5, MI6) unless one of your parents was also British, you lived in the UK for a while and you might be required to give up dual citizenship.

I think it's actually similar for US security clearances, though not explicitly codified like that.

IIRC, if you're a dual citizen, you have to renounce the non-American one. Apparently it's not good enough to say "I'll renounce it if you ask," since that's conditional (on them requesting it). You have to renounce it unconditionally. I think that even applies to allied countries (e.g. no US-Canadian dual citizens).

I think the US would also reject a clearance if the applicant had relatives that were in a situation that could be used to exploit them (e.g. foreign nationals, living in a non-friendly country, etc).

Basically, the idea is that you shouldn't have any (discoverable) competing loyalties, and you shouldn't have anything in your life that makes you vulnerable to manipulation.

Disclaimer: I have no actual expertise in this area, but I did spend an afternoon browsing the government website where they described security clearance rejection appeals.