
China Is Nationalizing Its Tech Sector - adventured
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-04-12/china-is-nationalizing-its-tech-sector
======
watertom
All tech companies need to re-think manufacturing in China, it was always a
risky proposition, but not, you'll really be handing your IP over to the
Chinese Government, and they'll be collecting IP from every company.

It's time for tech manufacturing to move.

~~~
pm90
Where will it move to? Tech manufacturing is till pretty labor intensive, at
least for the consumer electronics that I believe we are talking about. India
probably has better IP laws on paper, but they're hardly ever enforced.

The only real alternative seems to be that we reach such a level of automation
that these factories can be viable in the West. Still, China's integration
into the supply chain of global manufacturing is breathtaking. Not saying it
can't be done, but it would take some amount of determination, deliberation
and a lot of Capital and skilled labor force.

~~~
kchoudhu
Come to South Asia -- Bangladesh, India, Pakistan. Weak institutions and
governments concerned solely with infighting mean that your IP is probably
safe from marauding governments.

All your clothes are already made there, why not your electronics?

~~~
selimthegrim
Terrible vocational education system. Everyone wants to do a BCom or BTech and
be a manager.

~~~
contingencies
Also: Unreliable power supply and internet. Corrupt customs officials. Petty
crime.

------
dalbasal
The "trade war" thing has been the most/only interesting ideas to come from
trump, to me.

It was interesting in that he did recognized (fluked into?) an actual shift in
public/expert position. China is the pro-trade side. They'll be willing to
make concessions, do the work, etc. It's the beijing consensus now, not
washington.

Large american companies _are_ still on the pro-trade side, being
multinationals. They also have pretty obvious interests. They want market
access, american IP protection, they want freedom to operate mostly
independently of the CCP.

Market access is a typical request. This has been the basic definition of free
trade for a while. They probably _can_ get this protection. Independance is a
trickier one. I'm not sure it's realistic. Imagine a Chinese company operating
in the states, with an a fully imported senior management and all "c-level"
discussions in chinese. I dunno. I doubt they'll get what they say they want.

The "IP" point is interesting. Why does the american economy want US IP rules
everywhere so bad? Same reason Disney does. They have the biggest IP
portfolio. A pharmaceutical company's value (for example) is mostly IP. IE,
the market cap _is_ the IP portfolio.

Why would china want to use this IP system, where they start with fewer chips
than the US? I'm not sure. Who says a fake Gucci is a crime, if the buyer
knows it's fake. Why should a US drug patent grant a worldwide monopoly. This
one would be a concession.

Anyway, it's not just pharmaceuticals that need IP. The economy is ethereal
these days. Capital isn't building and machines. It's intellectual property of
one sort or another, whether or not it's legally formalized as such.

..

PS: I'm Irish, not American. Realize from the wild votes in both directions
(didn't think) that I've obviously waded into live american politics. I wasn't
trying to make any political points. Just musing and bullshitting on the
shifting world of political interests after reading the morning paper. I'm not
against anyone, nor do I mean anything too seriously.

~~~
barrkel
> _Who says a fake Gucci is a crime, if the buyer knows it 's fake._

It's not enough for the buyer to know it's fake, everyone who sees it must
also know it's fake, or else the fake is freeriding on the cachet generated by
Gucci's marketing.

People buy prominently branded fashion objects for their signalling value more
than their utility value. Signalling which is easy to fake isn't very
valuable.

It's perfectly possible to think that social signalling using fashion objects
is wrong and should be eliminated, but signalling appears biologically
determined and is common across many species, it's unlikely to be eliminated
without committing greater wrongs.

~~~
stickfigure
It's worth having a dialogue about this. This specific type of signaling
(flashing brands) is enforced by social rules that prevent chameleons. It
would be pretty easy to imagine relaxing this - allowing products to appear
externally in any form, as long as their nature is always recognizable to the
owner (to prevent fraud). It's not clear this would be bad for society.

IANAL, but it seems to me that plastering logos all over a handbag is an abuse
of trademark _functionality doctrine_. The function of the pattern is to make
the owner appear wealthy, not to prevent buyers from being misled.

~~~
pm90
The purpose of brands and high fashion is not to be functional in the
utilitarian sense. They are meant purely for signalling and their utility is
an afterthought at best. See for e.g. women's jeans which have fake pockets.

For people who care about such things, its more important for their outfit to
be congruent to some fashion principles (color, fit etc.) rather than the
actual utility that such things provide.

------
thisisit
> Tencent Holdings Ltd., with nearly 1 billion users, reported that its net
> income almost doubled in the last quarter, to $3.3 billion. Alibaba Group
> Holding Ltd., which dominates online retail, is expecting growth of 55
> percent this year. Investors may worry about Chinese debt, but they're giddy
> about Chinese tech.

Anyone knows the SEC equivalent site for pulling revenue numbers for Chinese
companies? If possible, direct links for Tencent and Alibaba will be even more
helpful.

The reason I am asking is Alibaba has been investigated for their creative
accounting:

[https://www.thestreet.com/story/14277425/1/alibaba-still-
coo...](https://www.thestreet.com/story/14277425/1/alibaba-still-cooperating-
with-sec-probe-as-it-forecasts-45-to-49-sales-growth.html)

And, I recently watched "The China Hustle" documentary. Discussed here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16726355](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16726355)

One of the highlights in the documentary was the financial reporting. There
was a huge gap between revenues western Media and US markets was seeing vs
what was being reported in China. The whole idea being accessing financial
data for Chinese companies was hard.

~~~
jk2323
> Tencent Holdings Ltd., with nearly 1 billion users

Sounds reasonable. I would start wondering if they claim 20 Billion users, but
hey, you never now.

Alibaba is also an outstanding company:

[http://brontecapital.blogspot.de/2015/10/alibaba-yeah-
right-...](http://brontecapital.blogspot.de/2015/10/alibaba-yeah-right-
jack.html)

[http://brontecapital.blogspot.de/2015/09/job-interview-
quest...](http://brontecapital.blogspot.de/2015/09/job-interview-questions-
size-and-scope.html)

~~~
justicezyx
Well taobao pretty much is the majority of buying for many people. The blog
posts are roughly as baseless as what it claims Jack Ma is.

~~~
jk2323
44% of income? Wow. I think total online sales in the US are something like 7%

~~~
justicezyx
The people shopping on taobao and the whole population are different

You cannot derive 40% from that.

Also there is obviously a fraud transaction business to boost the number.
Alibaba, by not cracking down them, acting to benefit from that too.

As I said, data are not accurate. But that should be be drawn from wrong
facts.

------
reeedom
Actually this is not even close to nationalization.

The article's title is misleading even by the standard's of the article, which
goes on to call it, "quasi-nationalization".

But even that is misreading the situation.

The objective is not "control" of the tech sector as the article pretends, it
is just greater collaboration. So the state and tech companies can both
benefit.

The state doesn't want the burden of taking control. Plus they don't want to
interfere and slow things down. They want to learn from tech to better their
own ogranizations and also to teach tech how they can benefit from working
with the state more closely.

It's about greater integration, not control. And since China is so successful
at organizing and governing more than 1 billion people already, the more they
work with cutting edge tech, the better things will get.

You can say they are making a police state, but at least they can maintain law
and order, and are willing to keep thinking long-term and keep innovating even
in government. The government wants to support its nation's tech companies. If
Chinese tech companies can become the best / most valuable in the world, it
will be more advancement toward the great rejuvenation of the Chinese people
that China is pursuing.

In the drive to find any negative spin to put on Chinese progress,
commentators frequently miss important points, and mischaracterize / misread
significant developments. Finding fault is easier, and perhaps more satisfying
for someone who is really desperate to feel good about themselves without
other reasons to, but seeing what's really going on is more useful.

~~~
dunpeal
You claim:

> The objective is not "control" of the tech sector as the article pretends,
> it is just greater collaboration.

From the article:

> This quasi-nationalization applies to China's startup scene, too. One recent
> report found that 60 percent of Chinese unicorns have either direct or
> indirect investment from the BATs. China's venture-capital sector is
> dominated not by traditional tech dealmakers but by the state: There are
> more than 1,000 government-owned VC firms in China, controlling more than
> $750 billion.

So the Chinese government buys stakes in most Chinese startups, through its
wholly-owned VCs and other vehicles.

These stakes give the Chinese government control over these startups.

You further claim:

> You can say they are making a police state, but at least they can maintain
> law and order, and are willing to keep thinking long-term and keep
> innovating even in government.

Which frankly sounds like PRC propaganda.

~~~
mistermann
> These stakes give the Chinese government control over these startups.

Does it? Any more than it already has, what with China being communist and
all.

I don't see why the general ideas /u/reeedom discusses _can 't_ be true, and
_can 't_ turn out to in fact be a perfectly workable way to successfully run
an economy. This isn't to say it's not risky and scary, with so much power in
the state, all it takes is one tyrant to come along and screw everything up,
but this is something altogether different than believing it is _impossible_
to govern a society successfully in this form, for a very long period of time.

~~~
smallnamespace
> but this is something altogether different than believing it is impossible
> to govern a society successfully in this form, for a very long period of
> time.

The West seems to have forgotten its own political history, which was based on
the divine right of kings _far longer_ than the current populist democratic
consensus, which only has a 100-year history.

As for China——well, it's had something like 2500+ years of cycling between
Imperial dynasties. China (along with India) was the world's pre-eminent
economic power for the majority of that period.

The hubris of the West is that anything it does necessarily represents a
permanent form of progress, rather than a single swing of the pendulum. That's
_not_ to say that societies that are more rooted in common law and popular
representation aren't desirable, but blithely assuming that the 'end of
history' has arrived is a bit silly.

------
baybal2
Comparison

Baidu - Google

Baidu is horrid, even in Chinese. Baidu doesn't have nearly as big stronghold
on advertising in Chinese market as Google has in every market outside of
China. End of discussion.

Alibaba - Amazon

On commercial side, Alibaba steamrolls Amazon with some margin remaining.
Tech-wise, Alibaba sucks big time. Their search algo is something horrid.
Alibaba has a relatively big part of Internet ads pie in comparison to Amazon.

They need more competent tech people, or better to say let more competent
people to lead, and less talking big. I personally knew the person who nearly
single-handedly created half of all business Alibaba group has outside of
China, yet he did quit the company because he was denied promotion and never
given recognition for his efforts. Moreover, his superiors were intentionally
keeping quiet of his existence and appropriating credit for his work.

Tencent - Facebook

Company-wise Tencent is way better on focus and management quality. People
there are very well conscious what the company needs and for what. They don't
have much random RnD initiatives or "see what sticks to the wall" internal
startups.

Their money cow are their horrid mobile games, and WeChat wallet.

While they are unquestionably a social network company, they are almost
invisible as such. WeChat team prides themselves on their "Zero popups"
experience.

Their idea is plain - solidly done, undisturbed by ads social side of the
ecosystem must be kept as such so that users will have less impediment to use
value added services from the commercial side of the ecosystem when they want
to. This is what FB can't do.

~~~
petra
Amazon vs Alibaba - to simplify, this game will be won by the best supply
chain, And sure Amazon leads by far. But what happens when the "one belt one
road" railroad is finished ? Will Alibaba get a preferential treatment ? And
if so, could Amazon handle that ?

~~~
adinobro
Have you tried Amazon outside of the USA? It sucks. In the UK I've been told
it is ok. In Australia, Thailand and China it is not a great experience. In
China Tmall is an amazing experience. In their home markets they both seem to
be entrenched but globally I'm not sure if either will win.

~~~
sho
> In Australia [..] it is not a great experience

I am certain that almost all the issues you experienced are due to the chain
from the plane to your house - mainly customs, who are the laziest, most
incompetent stereotypical govt employee jobsworths you can imagine. I've had
tiny camera lenses sitting at Sydney Airport for a week. You call their
contact numbers and no-one answers. Clearance times are slow to begin with and
spike wildly. They make AusPost look like hyperefficient geniuses.

Probably the same for the other countries. In the US, SG and (local store)
Japan it's been stellar.

------
abhiminator
It's interesting to observe how China has managed to fuse together, almost
seamlessly, the major functional modules of it's government -- Communist Party
committees, for example -- with the tech sector.

As other commentators in various publications have pointed out, this deep
integration coupled with massive investments in auxiliary sectors, a culture
of scientific inquiry and a heavily STEM focused primary education[0] will
only keep the scale of the momentum tipped in China's favor going forward.

[0]
[https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/education/what...](https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/education/what-
shanghai-can-teach-us-about-teaching-math/article17835021/)

~~~
rayiner
Seems like premature celebration. The Soviet Union was incredibly successful
(turning a backwater into a superpower in a few decades) until it wasn’t.

~~~
diego_moita
The first catastrophic failure of the Soviet Union was agriculture. When the
West was beginning Borlaug's Green Revolution they were deep into Stalin's
great famine, the Holodomor. Their inability to put bread on tables is at the
root of their collapse.

Most tragedies in China's recent history also have their cause on failure to
produce food.

I wonder how China is prepared to handle the impact Global Warming will have
on agriculture.

~~~
anoncoward111
>Stalin's inability to put food on tables = cause for USSR's failure

I need to clarify something on this point. Stalin's famine was deliberately
engineered to kill Ukrainians.

It was not a failure of central economic planning, but actually, shockingly, a
triumph.

Stalin confiscated Ukrainian citizens' guns and land, and forced them to work
180 days per year on centrally planned crop attempts. The product of their
labor- grain- was then placed on a train and sold abroad at bargain prices.
This money was then directed back to Moscow only, and the Ukrainians were left
to starve.

I am against central planning. I am against totalitarianism. But the Holodomor
was no accident of central planning.

Shockingly, it was the desired outcome.

~~~
crdoconnor
This is pretty much how the Irish potato famine happened, too - they grew
enough food, it was just exported - along with the wealth it generated.

The English justified it by invoking the divine right of the free market.

In the Soviet Union's case the money derived from exporting the grain abroad
supposed to be to help industrialize - which it did.

It's a bit hazy whether or not it was _deliberately_ engineered to kill off
the Ukrainians. It hit every grain producing area of the Soviet Union - it
just hit Ukraine the hardest.

Stalin may have simply been indifferent to their plight rather than actively
trying to kill them.

~~~
detritus
'The English' were responsible, or 'Protestant Irish Landowners'? Seems like a
key detail if you're going to attribute genocide to the English.

~~~
crdoconnor
The English, who were ruling Ireland at the time, who gave most of that land
to absentee landlords, justified perpetuating the famine by invoking the
divine right of the free market:

"Laissez-faire, the reigning economic orthodoxy of the day, held that there
should be as little government interference with the economy as possible.
Under this doctrine, stopping the export of Irish grain was an unacceptable
policy alternative, and it was therefore firmly rejected in London."

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/victorians/famine_01.sh...](http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/victorians/famine_01.shtml)

I honestly don't see much difference between Ireland and the Holodomor except
size. Both famines were caused by foreign occupiers exporting food during a
period of bad harvest.

Whether you call it a genocide is another debate.

~~~
iguy
Is there anything analogous to potato-driven growth & potato blight in
Ukraine?

I thought the two stories were completely different because of this. Ireland
had a spectacular mono-crop boom, followed by a crash, and I think it's
uncontroversial that this was triggered by a disease, whatever the view of the
response. I don't know of any similar boom in the Ukraine prior to the famine,
nor any trigger besides what the guys with guns in Moscow wanted done.

------
TheRealmccoy
Provide incentives and support to local companies to become multi-unicorns
(BATs etc).

These companies start investing in other leading startups, scross the globe
and have substantial stakes in them.

Then, nationalise these companies and you have then indirect control/semi-
control/access over vast majority of leading startups across the globe.

This seems to be a nice move by Chinese government.

~~~
jorblumesea
But, where does the next wave of innovation come from? More startups?

Just seems like China's steal/nationalize everything doesn't create true
innovation centers.

~~~
adrianN
China has a billion people and produces vast and rapidly growing numbers of
highly skilled academics, both in their local universities and by sending
students abroad. Many of the smartest people I know are Chinese and have
returned to China after completing their degrees and collecting experience in
western companies.

~~~
chillacy
I don’t want to take a side but the parent is almost certainly going to point
out that academic papers != innovation (especially with the news that lots of
papers from China have falsified data, paper mills, etc).

What are actual innovations made by China in the past 20 years? On demand
bikes comes to mind as one example.

~~~
adrianN
I'm no expert on the matter, but I hear that they have excellent supply chains
and extremely flexible assembly lines.

------
phyalow
A picture is worth a thousand words.

The sculpture outside the front of Tencents Shenzhen HQ.
[https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DXRIsWrVQAAJgjl.jpg](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DXRIsWrVQAAJgjl.jpg)

~~~
alehul
As someone with parents who experienced the USSR, this is what really
terrifies me about China's rise, and the reason I can't say I'm against a
trade war if it hinders them more than us.

Imagine a world in which China holds more control... a country with little
legal or social respect for individualism, where your fate is 'centrally
planned' by how impressive your maths skills are. By contrast, ~30% of
American billionaires are dropouts. We highly value ambition in the U.S., and
we attract (and reward) people who have it; those people, upon coming here,
largely have the freedom to create and build and be in charge of their own
future.

It just seems like the U.S. will self-select for the ambitious and the
inspired and those who desire freedom, and it would be immensely worrying if
this model we have appears wrong.

~~~
qweqw123
arent's you romanticizing the US a bit much? the country was built by slaves.

"the US will self-select for the ambitious and the inspired and those who
desire freedom" this is just hogwash

~~~
alehul
Sorry if you found it offensive.

I'm definitely romanticizing the U.S. quite a bit. At the same time, that
romanticization is inspiring (at least to me) and largely true today when you
compare us to countries like China, where you have much less control over your
future. Also, moving to a country that provides greater freedom and
opportunity at the cost of less of a social net and lower taxes will almost
definitely self-select for the ambitious.

Slavery also continued in practice in China until at least 1949 [1]

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_China](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_China)

~~~
pm90
Forced labor camps still exist in China, to this day
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laogai](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laogai)

~~~
arcticbull
What do you call a US prison farm? [1] Even Wikipedia acknowledges that "the
concepts of prison farm and labor camp overlap." Labor camps are even
explicitly permitted by the 13th amendment "... which ended slavery,
specifically perpetuated the concept of penal servitude – i.e., unfree labor
as a punishment for a crime."

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison_farm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison_farm)

~~~
pm90
There is a difference between political prisoners and criminals. There is a
rule of law in the US which means you cannot arbitrarily imprison anyone;
there is due process and a trial. That is missing from the Chinese Judicial
System which makes it much more akin to Slave Labor.

------
motohagiography
Would a more accurate description be that China is "militarizing," its tech
sector instead of "nationalizing" it?

When we think of nationalization, we tend to think of centralized control by
committee, removal of competition, five year plans etc. But militarization of
an economy, like that of Britain during WWII, means working toward and pricing
based on a shared (if mandated) national objective.

Western aviation is largely militarized in this sense, and looking at
communications tech in China the way we look at aviation here is probably a
better simile.

There is a tendency to portray the Chinese communist party as a farce of
clumsy peasants toeing the party line and driving their economy into ruin, as
though they were the bolsheviks or Stalin's apparatchiks. Those tropes do a
disservice to those of us who really do need to be aware of the sophistication
and hyper-aggression of Chinese economic warfare.

Viewing China as an "emerging," economy and society presumes the end state
will evolve to something resembling western democracy and a free market
economy, which is the very hubris they are exploiting to consolidate and
militarize their industries and territories for global expansion.

It would be helpful to everyone to elevate the quality of discussion of these
topics, as CFIUS will only protect us so much.

~~~
sah2ed
You make an excellent point about nationalization being an inaccurate
metaphor.

China sees it tech industry as a strategic asset the way the US and Russia see
their defence industries as strategic towards advancing their goals as
super/regional powers, so in a sense, militarization is probably a better
metaphor.

------
state_less
If you tend toward optimal decisions, having your mind made up for you seems
like it could be a real drag.

------
perpetualcrayon
Some threads are discussing Chinese companies, at C-level, doing business in
Chinese language in US.

I'm curious to know opinions folks around the world have about the likelihood
that Chinese language will somehow become an important international language?
In my (perhaps biased) mind it appears the world is already well on its way to
adopting English as THE international language.

~~~
chillacy
I’d just like to point out that no Lingua Franca has lasted forever. It was
French before English, till post WW2.

Also this doesn’t matter as much, but, English is one of the more difficult
languages (compared to Spanish say) due to all of its spelling inconsistencies
and large phonetic possibilities. I don’t know if a tonal, character based
language will be any easier though.

I say it doesn’t matter because it doesn’t seem to be the difficulty of
learning the language that matters, only the strength of the language in terms
of economic opportunities.

------
bdavisx
Well that's good for everyone else competing with China. It will slow
innovation. Imagine if you had to worry about doing something that pissed off
someone on your companies "Communist Committee" (or whatever the article
called them). Yes, in general a company in China has to be careful how it
treads with respect to the national communist party, but now they'll have to
worry about the lower level people that are inside their company. And those
"party" people will have ambitions, and when the company does good, they will
do good. BUT, those (at least some of those) same party people will be risk
averse, probably a lot more risk averse than a typical tech innovator. Think
about politicians here in the US and how long it takes them to embrace things
that are already popular with the general public (marijuana legalization for
example). That's what these companies will be up against, and it will slow
them down.

------
neves
The greatest problem of the article critiques is that China economical politic
is working. They aren't just the almost slave workers now, there are tech and
innovation.

------
wei2012
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbM2F-cfN0A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbM2F-cfN0A)

------
Jerry64545
Does it covers software companies ? Does this mean a software engineer will be
an government employee ?

------
contingencies
Public private partnerships are quite de-rigeur in the west, what's so special
about China that the same is somehow not-so-subtly construed as a demonic plan
to debase capitalism and instill the vicious vector of bogeyman communism in a
Chinese community near you? Frankly IMHO the media on China coming out of the
US - Bloomberg, NYT and Washington Post especially - reeks of xenophobia and
tabloid hype.

America's journalists may do well to visit the museums of Chinese in LA and
New York, as I did, and take a long deep look at the China side of their
country's nasty and continuous history of whipping up anti-foreign sentiment
at all levels of government and society then conveniently sweeping racism
under the rug. Disgusting.

------
andrewclunn
And thus the brain drain from China will commence at full speed (more than
present). Seems government regulators in China don't understand market forces
either. Good to know.

~~~
AmericanChopper
Central planning has always proven to be an inefficient way to allocate
resources, so I’m not sure why free markets would be worried about China
implementing more central planning.

~~~
kome
> Central planning has always proven to be an inefficient way to allocate
> resources

Amazon seems pretty efficient. ;)

~~~
andybak
Hmmmmm.

I've often wondered about the contradiction wherein it's argued that the
economy thrives on competition and yet corporations larger than many nation
states never apply the same model internally.

(I'm aware there are efforts in some companies at creating "internal markets"
but never close to the scale of market forces that exist externally to the
company)

~~~
AmericanChopper
Resource allocation is the single hardest problem to address in large
organisations, and there’s numerous cases of companies withering and dying
because they failed to properly align their resource allocation with market
forces.

Except withering and dying for a company is not a humanitarian crisis, but it
is for a country. A company can also fire an underperforming team member, or
ditch an entire department. Where as terminating underperforming citizens, or
unneeded communities is generally frowned upon.

~~~
bad-joke
This is why some strains of socialism advocate a regulated market wherein
businesses can freely experiment, then the optimal path is nationalized.

Free market or centralized economy, at the end of the day _someone_ is making
an executive decision about how resources are allocated. Whether you believe
that executive person (or committee) should be acting in the best interests of
the public or a group of shareholders is a matter of principle, not logistics.

~~~
AmericanChopper
This creates exactly the same set of problems. A CEO has to compete with other
CEOs, if they don’t do so efficiently they will fail and another will take
their place. A government committe doesn’t have to compete with anybody, if
they fail, you just end up with a society that gradually deteriorates. A CEO
also has to deal with market forces, a government committe does not. A
government committe doesn’t have to produce goods that people want, they only
have to align their resource allocation with the central plan, as their
country is gradually eroded underneath them. Your argument is trying to have
its cake and eat it too, it doesn’t resolve any of the inefficiency of central
planning, it just shifts it down the road a bit.

~~~
smallnamespace
> A government committe doesn’t have to compete with anybody

In theory, a failing government is replaced by a different government. In
practice, whether voters successfully identify problems and pick a better
winner is an open question.

~~~
AmericanChopper
Even if they did, this proposal is simply a much less efficient alternative to
free market competition.

------
dogruck
Could someone please list the top 10 technological innovations that originated
in China?

~~~
unmole
How about top four?

Paper, printing, gunpowder and compass.

~~~
purple-again
I downvoted the parent comment but your response is also disengenuous. Unless
I’m allowed to claim credit for Rome’s victories the ‘China’ that invented
those things shares nothing with the China being discussed right now.

~~~
manjushri
>shares nothing with the China being discussed right now.

Seems like apples to oranges, assuming the implied comparison is with western
post-industrial age nations, which began industrializing centuries ago, as
compared to decades ago with China.

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myth_buster
The tech sector in the west can breath a sigh of relief.

It's no surprise the power grabbing politicians would want to control the
booming tech sector. But I naively thought that their affair with quasi-
capitalism would run longer. We have been here before and know how
nationalization affects innovation. Being a leader of a communist nation gives
you perhaps more opportunity to run these kinds of massive experiments while
thinking this time things will be different. Capitalistic (Darwinian) society
wouldn't be as forgiving.

/rant

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ihsw2
It seems tech companies in the US could definitely benefit from increased
oversight on operations and stronger compliance with privacy laws, not only
that but the establishment of integration with state-owned firms could boost
domestic consumption of tech services that don't revolve around ad and social
media consumption.

~~~
tobltobs
What state-owned firms do you mean with: "... but the establishment of
integration with state-owned firms". Amtrak, USPS, National Parks or one of
the Federal Loan Banks?

