
China Makes a Big Play in Silicon Valley - laurex
https://www.npr.org/2018/10/07/654339389/china-makes-a-big-play-in-silicon-valley
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coliveira
It is very funny to see the US media complain about behavior that has always
been the modus operandi of US around the world as if this was borderline
criminal. China is doing whatever they can to advance their industry, in the
same way the US does around the world. It is borderline ridiculous to read
this kind of news from American media.

~~~
jjeaff
I don't think it is the same. The US has always been open to outside
investment. But we have things happening right now where a large number of
major motion pictures coming out are from Chinese owned companies (like
Legendary). Notice how the hero is China in so many films now.

Chinese citizens are buying up media properties and tech stock at a dizzying
pace. Meanwhile, American owned media companies are heavily restricted in what
movies can be shown in China and what content those movies can have. There are
also restrictions of foreign ownership of Chinese companies.

The Trump administration is wasting time taxing trinkets imported from China,
when what they should be doing is matching the restrictive laws that China is
using to increase their soft power in the US and world.

~~~
malandrew
I'm curious which restrictive laws you have in mind that we should copy.

The only one I can think of that may be worth mimicking in some form is the
majority citizen ownership percentage requirement.

~~~
jjeaff
That's the one. Majority ownership ... But I'm not saying we should adopt it
as a rule for all cases. It should be a reciprocal law applying to China and
any other country with similar restrictions.

Same goes for chinese produced movies that they want to show in the US. Movie
must be pre-approved and pro USA.

~~~
malandrew
I love the reciprocity approach.

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abstractbeliefs
Something like half the comments so far are from newly created accounts that
probably aren't going to engage in the discussion honestly.

HN should always be open to new users, and the ability to create throwaways is
important, but I am a little concerned that these new accounts don't fit
either of those moulds - that they are created not by truly new users, nor as
alts for people wanting to bring hard truths they're not comfortable with
attaching their real identities with, but instead ~something else~.

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mogadsheu
As a co-founder of a China-focused startup this is fantastic news for me.

Finding good partners who you can personally trust has and will continue to be
the key to survival when interacting with China.

~~~
ridethetiger
You are making a grave mistake methinks. Those who sought power by riding the
back of the tiger, ended up inside.

What I am saying is I don't trust the Chinese government to respect the human
rights of my employees,the human rights of my customers, or my property
rights.

The chinese government is a repressive, totalitarian, arbitrary, capricious,
cruel regime; fundamentally incompatible with human dignity and freedom. The
foundations of the chinese government are mortared with millions of bodies.

you are willing to compromise whatever moral beliefs you have-in exchange for
what? for some money? for some prestige?

Is it worth it?

~~~
whorleater
why is it that any china related topic always springs up weird throwaways
dedicated to criticizing China in some form? I get that you want to criticize
China, and that's fine, but can you at least have the courage to do it on your
main account lol

~~~
ridethetiger
I deleted my main account recently-too much time spent on the HN/reddit.

I would not currently express beliefs like this on something that could be
tied to my meatspace identity. I am an academic in a department with lots of
international students and while I am not now prominent-I could become
prominent and anyone with both eyes open knows how the chinese government
responds to external or internal criticism.

I would be in the future be willing to accept that type of attack-but not over
an HN comment.

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wycs
The scope of engineering talent in China is hard to contemplate. Because of
the, on average, higher quantitative talent of Hans Chinese over gentile
whites and much larger population, China has, on average, at least 10 times
the number of people capable of high-level engineering. This is not a false
alarm like India. India's talent pool is proving much shallower than people
expected - though not to the people politically incorrect enough to keep an
eye on PISA scores.

This just is not the case with China. Chinese human capital is more plentiful
and of higher quality than that of any other country on earth. An additional
multiplier is an almost fanatical work culture that is comparable to that of
Japan.

Combine this with local governments that are as competent as the Bay Area
government is incompetent, and there is finally a threat to America's
domination of tech. My money is on China, or it would be if it was possible to
get exposure.

I sort of wonder what the comparative advantage of the west will be when this
all shakes out.

This old comment from nopinsight goes through the scores:

Key competitive advantages of China are their strength in quantitative skills
as well as huge population and the hard working and competitive culture of its
populace. An objective measure is PISA results [1]. When comparing with even
the best performing US state, Massachusetts, China has many more top
performers in Math, as a proportion of population [2].

(In 2015 only four provinces of China participated, but their combined
population was 230 million vs Massachusetts's 6.8 million. The math result of
Shanghai (24 million pop.) alone would show an even larger gap.)

Since PISA results are scaled such that OECD country's mean is 500 and
standard deviation is 100. China's 531 math score implies country mean at 0.3
SD above PISA mean, and US' math score at 470 implies 0.3 SD below mean. If
people capable of doing AI research or proper AI implementation need to have
math skills at, say, 2 SD above PISA mean, then there will be a tremendous
difference in proportion between two populations with 0.6 SD difference. My
back-of-the-envelope calculation, assuming above figures, is the difference in
proportion will be about five times. But China has more than 4 times the
population of the US, so the difference in potential numbers of AI-capable
natives could be over 20 times. (Since other provinces may drag down China's
mean, it could be a bit less. We'll see soon since China as a whole will
participate in 2018.)

~~~
lawrenceyan
All the smartest people come to America though by and large. The brain drain
is real, and I don’t think that will change anytime soon.

Why stay in China where you face pollution, a salary depressed job market, and
increasing authoritarianism when you can come to the Bay Area and make 10
times the salary you could otherwise? Of course not everyone can make it with
the bar set so high, but the people who do end up coming are the ones you
really don’t want to be losing.

~~~
vernon99
Proof? My empirical evidence suggests the opposite, multiple engineers with
Chinese origins I personally know moved back to China because it already
provides compensation rewarding enough to compete with SV lifestyle. Plus
really SV is a village comparing to Shangai, Shenzhen, etc

~~~
lawrenceyan
Let’s compare using hard numbers. We have person A working at
Baidu/Tencent/Alibaba/etc., the best of the best that China can offer to an
enterprising new graduate who for the sake of this example, let’s say has
graduated from the best university in China. What compensation can this person
expect being in the top 1% of their graduating pool?

Let’s be generous and say 500,000 yuan/year. I highly doubt in reality that
anyone gets offered that much, but even with my outrageous rounding, that’s
still only about ～$83,000 in USD. The mean new grad offer, some higher and
some lower of course, from an equivalent American tech company
(Google/Facebook/Amazon/etc.) is around $200,000/year. So even disregarding
sociopolitical variables in addition to things like environmental pollution,
there is absolutely zero chance that a new grad offer from mainland China
outcompetes an equivalent American offer.

This isn’t to say that it’s just China that deals with this problem. It’s sort
of a global thing really, just purely due to the fact that the Bay Area is
wholly unique in the circumstances it evolved from that has made it almost
completely divergent from the rest of the world. An average software
engineering salary in Europe for example is around 30,000 Euros, such that
it’s possible one might be able to get a better offer from an equivalent
Chinese company than from a European one these days. So I’m not saying you
can’t get a decent lifestyle working in a major city in China. It’s just that
in some places in America, primarily the Bay Area and spreading out from
there, there is a more than order of magnitude difference such that the gap
isn’t something which can arbitrarily be closed.

~~~
true_religion
It's not really compensation. Lots of Americans won't be enticed to move to
Germany for higher compensation when they don't speak the language well, and
their entire families are in the USA.

The same is true for the Chinese. They go back to China because they feel it
is truly their home.

~~~
lawrenceyan
Fair point. As someone who grew up here in America, I’m sure my perspective is
somewhat different compared to my international student counterparts.

But based on my anecdotal experience, the majority of my international peers
want to stay in the Bay Area after they graduate, or at least somewhere
comparable like Seattle, New York, etc.

Also it’s not just them either, their parents also want them to stay in
America. There’s a reason why they’re willing to pay exorbitant amounts of
money every year to fund their children’s education here. This is true by the
way for pretty much the entirety of the world, not just singling out China.

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vonnik
I was quoted in this piece, and I think people are interpreting it wrong.

I believe the reporter was simply trying to describe the competition between
the US and China in the race to develop technology, and the measures both
sides are taking.

There is indeed a race. In fact, there are many races at once. On some fronts,
the US is not moving very fast because of the way the government procures and
invests in technology. Simultaneously. China is looking for ways to transfer
technology. The CFIUS law limited the ways in which they can do so legally.
Both countries are acting in their national interest, but they're starting
from different points, which different advantages and disadvantages.

While the US is leading in many ways, China is catching up in others. If the
US is complacent, or if it takes the wrong measures in over-regulating the
tech industry, it will increase the likelihood that it will lose the race(s)
and slowly become a secondary power.

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rmkoek
Main reason the American government takes its sweet time to selectively choose
which startup to help is lack of knowledge by the old cronies in charge. They
simple are scared of it due to the lack of understanding and overwhelming
desire to maintain status quo. If they are reinsured something is going to be
used to benefit commerce, then good. If it's going to be used to allow younger
citizens to combine, organise and execute ideas- bad. Simple as that. China
sees the idealistic trend of the America youth and wish to embrace it, where
old cronies what to stifle it.

