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Chinese Intellectual Property Acquisition Tactics Exposed
hackingbear writes "In an interview published in Sina.com.cn, Chinese rail engineers gave a detailed account of the history, motivation, and technologies behind the Chinese high-speed rail system. More interestingly, they blatantly revealed the strategies and tactics used in acquiring high-speed rail tech from foreign companies (Google translation of Chinese original). At the beginning, China developed its own high-speed rail system known as the Chinese Star, which achieved a test speed of 320km/h; but the system was not considered reliable or stable enough for operation. So China decided to import the technologies. The leaders instructed, 'The goal of the project is to boost our economy, not theirs.' A key strategy employed is divide-and-conquer: by dividing up the technologies of the system and importing multiple different technologies across different companies, it ensures no single country or company has total control. 'What we do is to exchange market for technologies. The negotiation was led by the Ministry of Railway [against industry alliances of the exporting countries]. This uniform executive power gave China huge advantage in negotiations,' said Wu Junrong, 'If we don't give in, they have no choice. They all want a piece of our huge high speed rail project.' For example, [Chinese locomotive train] CRH2 is based on Japanese tech, CRH3 on German tech, and CRH5 on French tech, all retrofit for Chinese rail standards. Another strategy is buy-to-build. The first three trains were imported as a whole; the second three were assembled with imported parts; subsequent trains contain more and more Chinese made parts."
This sounds to me more like savvy business wheeling and dealing. It's no different than what the Indians, Japanese or Koreans would do.
The story is not that the Chinese are devious, acquisitive SOB's. It's that the west continues to be stupid enough to enable them. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704679204575646472655698844.html Frist post!
an ill wind that blows no good
This is Econ 101 shit and it's embarrassing that Western countries are selling out their high tech companies for a bunch of government debt, poisoned food and defective consumer crap.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
One of the points mentioned is the desire to design for a 10,000 meter curve radius! Now that takes aggressive land acquisition.
Seriously guys?
The only source of the article is a Mandarin to English machine translation?
I'm sure nothing will get lost in that translation...
But what about the old fashioned way of exploiting the spoils of war? Between that and open immigration, we built atomic weapons and landed on the moon.
Its a bit unseemly to just purchase stuff and figure out how it works....
Now instead having to learn how to manufacture parts for 1 consistent line type, they have to support 3. Awesome work China.
the greatest enemy capitalism has ever known throughout the history of economics is not communism or socialism, but corporatism. a corporation is a top down autocratic organization that seeks nothing but more profit, be damned any other concerns, like fairness or egaltarianism. when they get large enough, corporations dominate their marketplace by dirty tricks like undercutting competitors prices to destroy them, and rent seeking agreements once they own the whole marketplace by colluding with other large players. ideally, a government would regulate the marketplace and even the playing field for smaller competitors against larger players (oh, you believe no government regulation results in a cleaner more perfect capitalist marketplace? you're a naive idiot). unfortunately, in the west now, corporations corrupt the government and use the government's rules and regulatory powers to not bind them, but instead entrench their marketplace positions and their powers even more
so it is in the west: democracy corrupted by corporatism. but this is but a prelude for the coming truly insidious game. see, us silly westerners have championed capitalism for a long time, but us silly westerners also have this silly anchor around our neck called democracy, respect for the individual. the chinese have no such silly limitations: the citizens have no rights, they are slaves to the autocratic system. you know, autocracy: the corporate model of governance. the future is clear: the chinese autocracy will face the world as one monolithic internally cooperating perfect autocratic corporate behemoth. and it will simply devour the rest of the world. no one can compete with them in size, leverage, production capacity, capital reserves, anything: the chinese will dominate in all regards, and just destroy all else by dominating all marketplaces all over the world
and now that our oh-so-wise supreme court has made corporate donations perfectly legal (justice roberts, you are an asshole and the most anti-american person who has ever lived: protect citizens rights, not corporation rights, you scumbag), and now that there is no need for pesky inquiries like: where the source of the money comes form, the chinese will just buy our democracy outright. multinational corporations now gleefully use chinese workers without rights to make cheap crap. the chinese autocracy will simply buy these multinational eventually and those multinationals to do their bidding in the usa instead, in reverse. the professional prostitutes on the right who will spin anything for their corporate masters (scare us with government death panels when we talk about healthcare or government censorship when we talk about net neutrality): they'll just shill for the chinese owned mutlinationals by finding the right words to spin the complete sublimation of our democracy into corporatocracy as being a Real American (tm). and if the usa has no power against this, why and how would any smaller weaker country fare in the face of the ultimate corporate behemoth known as chinese autocracy?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._Federal_Election_Commission
welcome to the new world. chinese autocracy+capitalism=the ultimate corporate domination of the entire world
soon we will all be slaves to the power structure in beijing. soon we will all be like the typical chinese citizen: workers without rights, chattel to work the mines and factories, nothing more. our democracy flat out bought, sold, and desecrated by multimationals following orders form beijing
that's the future folks. isn't unregulated capitalism grand?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
China bought a number, with an agreement for Airbus to then build a number in China and not long after that the Chinese companies will have what they need from their relationship with Airbus and will then instead just build their own planes without Airbus making a cent.
Its unclear why Airbus made this deal with China. Could it be just shortsightedness?
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
How is that cheating? They're working by the philosophy of not putting all their eggs in one basket. That's just basic common sense.
The US uses governmental intelligence agencies to support corporations. That IS cheating.
"Another strategy is buy-to-build. The first three trains were imported as a whole; the second three were assembled with imported parts; subsequent trains contain more and more Chinese made parts."
In other words, the first were imported. The next were partially imported. The last are clones, without paying patent royalties. Nice.
Are they respecting patents on the technologies used to make those parts? And are they designing their own parts/machines or just making copies of the imported ones?
Click here to bribe our politicians, write our laws, and download our jobs.
What corporations are state owned US intelligence agency backed corporations? Name some.
In China, India, and those other countries.
Some?! How about naming a single one for starters. Maybe he meant France?
The Chinese have been doing it to the aircraft manuf. for years. They would buy some planes from the Boeing company then turn around buy from the Airbus to make sure no one company has the total market. They also do it with Russians when it comes to fighters development. They would buy one and make many copies and add new features to the copies.
It sounded like excellent business dealing and deserved to be discussed as part of MBA school class. It's captalism at its finest. Why are people bitching about it?
When it comes to business, the thinking has always been how the profit can translate to personal weath and what happens to others is their problem. The Chinese are known to be ruthless when it comes to business and banks, especially the Swiss are starting to feel the pain. I remember talked to one of my in-law who works for a Swiss bank. She hated dealing with the Chinese because the mentality is that if the business failed, they could always go to another city and start over. Who cares about the debts to be repaid to the bank? If there is a dollar worth of business to be made, they would try to get that dollar, but what happens to other people is not their concern.
It is more than just savvy business wheeling and dealing, since it's the Chinese government wheeling and dealing. Which means it's a monopoly: only the government agency can negotiate for that business inside China. And only the specific Chinese corps the government picks can get the business. Those picked corps are picked not necessarily for the best interests of China, but rather for whatever is in the best interest of the government officials with the power to pick them. Which might or might not be the best interests of China. That's Communism.
But it's also industrial policy, which is indeed savvy business wheeling and dealing. The US doesn't have anything like that, except for the corruption part where some industries have orgs that lobby our government to do business with foreign governments that require their government to mediate such international trade, or where the US government does occasionally require our government to play that role in foreign trade, where the orgs use some method other than competitive bids/RFPs to pick which members get the business. The US could have an industrial policy as effective in strategy as China's extreme one, but without requiring the government to actually conduct the negotiations. Just review the completed deals to ensure they comply with the policy, perhaps just random samples plus any over a large value threshold (which would pay in taxes enough to fund the review).
Instead, the US abandons industrial policy, and therefore industrial strategy. And watches China ascend at our expense. Though the top US capitalists have already invested in China's industries, so China's gain is their gain, while they've divested from US liabilities, so our expense is not theirs.
--
make install -not war
Could someone fluent in Mandarin comment on the translation? I'm especially interested in this translation: "The goal of the project is to boost our economy, not theirs." Is the implication that the Chinese gov't wants their trading partners to suffer, or that their partners' situation just isn't important?
China's economy benefits when their trading partners economies benefit. If it's the former (or even the latter, to a degree), that suggests they have other priorities in mind.
.... we find out what the
4) ?????
means.
Have gnu, will travel.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Oh, so they are acting in exactly the same manner as the US has in the past? And it was ok then, but not ok if yellow people are doing it?
The way I see it, the elephant in the room is xenophobia and racism (or, at the very least, rabid nationalism). The US companies subvert patents when they can. So do the Chinese. The only difference is the level to which they can get away with violations, not the goals or methods employed.
Learn to love Alaska
Not that I'm begrudging anyone success or prosperity, but it seems that the way the Chinese are operating in this respect screws everyone over in the long run. The buy-and-clone mentality can put Western manufacturers out of business, and since all the Chinese companies did was reverse-engineer, they don't really build up internal expertise of the level they just quashed. And just like Embrace,Extend,Extinguish, in the long run innovation doesn't happen as fast as it might have.
My understanding is yes to all. But likely not completely. I have family retired from GE loco, years ago they sold around 50 locomotives to China. First 5 were complete shipped from USA, next 20 were increasingly built in china. Last 25 were left to china. So they bought licenses, made changes, and likely wouldn't hesitate to go beyond the license if desired. GE is probably betting they will be ahead of china by the time the contact is done, and that it is beyond china to maintain the ability, let alone expand and compete. Exactly what patents are ment to be, a head start, but not a permanent monopoly (for the inventors).
Who here also thinks that all of this, the entire Chinese economy for the last 3 decades, is just a ploy to start another World War? Sooner rather than later we will all wake up in America realizing that China has invaded the USA not through military means but through peaceful means, and then when we realize that, a massive Civil war will break out, then all hell will break loose when we realize on a collective whole that China is to blame for our lower standards of living, massive poverty, massive homelessness and widespread anarchy. From coast to coast.
excellent points
people can look at Russia and easily see kt as a failure of Communism. Why do people assume that the USA is a good example of a successful capitalistic government?
(perhaps if success is defined more broadly than GDP the point becomes more clear)
[is a student that graduates with a C average a success?]
GE probably doesn't care as long as they get their service contract. I'm not sure of locomotives fall into this catagory but a lot of the big GE items (tubines, medical equipment, etc.) are sold at cost or with extreamly slim margins. The place they make their money is on the service contracts. So if GE can somehow sell 25 service contracts without to build the locomotives they are probably thrilled.
fuzzer_timeline.txt OMG That's the best web site I ever saw on the WWW. Why are other websites not like this? No ads, no images, no crazy CSS. Just plain the information I need. I wish all links to articles on Slashdot would be like this site.
http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
That's a fallacy.
Walk through a grocery store or mall. Where are the non-Chinese goods? You can't find them no matter the price. And while I don't shop Walmart, it's common knowledge they strong-arm their suppliers into outsourcing in their fervor to shave a nickel off their costs. Electronics, textile, heavy machinery, even pharma is nearly entirely off-shore. We've only services, aircraft manufacture, and agriculture left.
As a consumer (we stopped being citizens long ago), show me where my power is? The only American thing left to purchase anymore is politicians and I don't have that kind of money.
-- Posted from my parent's basement
....We can just insist that we thought of it first, its our idea, so you can't have it anymore. How's that working for ya?
Its funny how originality only matters if everyone copies you.
"Trade secrets" is an oxymoron: Trade and Secrecy are not mutually exclusive. Its hard to own an idea after you show everyone what it is. Reality: What a concept!
No, what happens is that China buys the first 5 loco's for 5M/piece and as they progressed they kept paying the same money for less stuff. In the end they just paid 20M or so for all the licenses and tech expertise and the GE manager that made the deal got a promotion because he had a series of VERY good financial end-of-quarter reports.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Military Industrial Complex [AKA: Defense Industry], but I cannot agree with some criminal legal logic of "two wrongs making a right" expressed by others.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
Stop the presses!
Man bites dog!
The Chinese steal technology!
Is anyone really surprised?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
its a form of thread jacking meant to distract attention form any valid points the top parent had. IT IS OFTEN DONE WHEN THE POSTER IS ALL TO CORRECT, and the only way a person can argue logically is to look for any flaws in things like grammer, or way it was said or the person themselves. I find what he states to be quite true and i have an IQ of 160. IF I AM A RETARD WHAT DOES THAT MAKE YOU?
Ridiculous. The negative side of China's rise to power is not the color of their skin, but the dismissal of human rights by their federal government.
You are mistaken that a corporation must be state owned for a government to act on its behalf. There are numerous well known US examples: United Fruit (historically), Haliburton, Microsoft, RIAA/MPAA and the recent revelation (via Wikileaks) of US diplomats aiding manufacturers of genetically engineered products. In such a corrupt system, ownership is not required.
I am not a robot. I am a unicorn.
Ridiculous. The negative side of China's rise to power is not the color of their skin, but the dismissal of human rights by their federal government.
and what respect for human rights has the US government shown? Iraq war crimes, Afghanistan, Guantanimo, water-boarding of POW's, not to mention the level of spying on it's own citizens as well as now the mainstream humiliation of it's own citizens by the TSA and agent provocateur methods used by the FBI against muslim citizens. AK Marc is right. The elephant in the room is just a mix of xenophobia, rabid nationalism and a hatred of opposing political ideals.
The USA has nothing and never has had any right to boast about it's human rights record. It's bathed in the blood of other nations from it's birth. Sheesh the country can't even get it together enough to care for it's own poor, sick and elderly.
sudo mount --milk --sugar
Ok, I'm the first one to be paranoid about any country that calls itself communist but in reality is fascist, where so many people care about making money and literally screwing each other *completely* and not about democracy at all (Note: I'm not saying all Chinese don't care about democracy, just that not as many do as I would like to see...). All that being said:
I think it is GREAT for the world economy if China acquires technology and uses it in house. GOOD. If the Chinese can get around their country faster and more economically because they have a high speed rail line, then it's better for us because we're buying so much of the stuff they produce. We should want them to become as efficient as possible! Also, if they have SO much excess capacity that they can build so many things SO cheaply, then that's great too! We should be HAPPY that they can build trains at 1/2 the cost, or 1/10 the cost, or whatever. Let Them Build Trains!!! Look...if you were toiling cutting your lawn, and some guy came by and said he'd cut it for $1 and do a great job (and you knew he had a good reputation for doing this) then, if you can make $100 or even $50 or even $20 or even $10 in the same amount of time, WOULDN'T you accept that offer???? OF COURSE YOU WOULD. When it comes to cutting lawns or assembling cars or making trains or wind turbines or anything else, anything else at all (except for maybe things that are of importance to security, like missles), then you should be doing this all day long, all the time. My God, Wal Mart is such a hit with people because they offer LOW PRICES. People want lower and lower and the lowest possible prices for stuff they buy, and they want higher and higher and the highest prices for the stuff they produce. Yes, by outsourcing everything to China we have brought inflation down, and risk deflation, but I am quite confident that the currencies will correct (even with manipulation, since with currency manipulation comes higher than needed Chinese interest rates...) to bring inflation to a very lower level.
If China or India or Angola or Egypt or the US or Indonesia or anyone else has such fantastic levels of excess capacity that they can produce stuff for 1/2 the cost, then by all means lets use them! So long as they are not exploiting people in a bad way, I really don't see the problem with this. Where is the problem? They take technology and use it, great! If some company is willing to give them technology then that is that company's decision. If you think it's a bad one, then short the fuck out of said companies stock. If you're right, you win, if you're wrong, you'll lose an infinite amount of money before you realize you're being an idiot.
The translation states that the technologies were all adapted to the Chinese line system, by the western companies. That means they only have to support one line type, but get access to 3 different technologies. They don't have to deal with adapting them to their own system anymore because they bought them adapted already. They are the only country right now that has the luxury of being able to choose, mix and match from all high-speed trains in the world. I'd say that's pretty awesome indeed.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
This isn't about how the government acts in regards to human rights, but how corporations act (in China's case, owned by the government, and in the US's case, they own the government). There's nothing China did that the US didn't. Though those in the US quibble about degrees.
But, since you bring it up what human rights have been dismissed by the Chinese government that haven't been dismissed by the US government? I'm sure there is some room to quibble about degrees, but can you name a right they don't recognize that we don't infringe either?
Learn to love Alaska
The colonialists ate Chinese lunch. The current regime isn't serving.
Guess there's not going to be a sequel to the Opium Wars.
It's interesting that the people who criticize centralized economic planning always point to the failures of that model in Eastern Europe, ignoring its early successes, or the more obvious recent successes in China. It goes to show that there's more than one way to organize a political economy, and that the Chinese model has some strategic advantages.
As far as this strategy goes, the thing I find to dislike about it is that it's emphatically nationalist: the goal is to benefit China, at the expense of competing economic powers. But, the criticisms I read here are also at least implicitly nationalist.
are setting the Africans up for a giant ass raping. They get a pass for that just because they aren't western?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
On a recent trip to China I witnessed a certain level of brutality I haven't seen in too many places (maybe Mexico). They seem to push and fight for everything, like food at a market, or a chance to kill their unborn girl, or to kick a guy out of a factory after suffering an accident and having his arm sawed off by mistake. I gotta say, any society that does this kind of stuff, kills peaceful protesters, etc, has got it made! The Chinese, being as nationalistic as they are, must be really proud! It kind of remainds me of the idiot muslims extremists who say the West is the enemy, and yhrn proceed to blow up the rival mosque! LOL. LOL @ stupid fuckers.
Sorry, but the difference is that here in the US, if you have enough money you can take the people who stole from you to court. In China, the government owns the key businesses. Good luck taking them to court at all!
China already owns 20% of all foreign USA debt (Japan also owns 20%). The USA government can't do anything "funny" or the Chinese will devaluate the US dollar so much that the average Nigerian 419er won't even be interested in US citizens anymore. With the USA foreign debt as high as it is today, they have effectively lost the power over the US national markets completely to Japan and China. Forty years ago, they found out that this would be a bad thing, when the oil crisis started and it turned out that most of the dollars payed for foreign oil were used to buy US companies and real estate. I guess by not allowing the Chinese to buy into companies and real estate, they tried to protect their economy from anything like that happening again. However, if you need foreign money to fund your own economy, because it's basically tits up, you end up being owned anyway.
The only real solution for this for the USA would be to stop exporting war and start producing their own goods again, instead of importing everything from "cheap" countries. Those goods aren't cheap, they just make them appear cheap because you pay the rest through your foreign debts. Stop importing and start producing, even if the price appears to be higher. Everything you make yourself, you save money going abroad.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
But would the west be happier if China play lapdog and just be eternally beholden to the whims of western multi-nationals?
The French aristocracies lost their heads in the Guillotine for similar attitudes.
The Chinese are just doing what you and I would do in these situations, namely to stand on your own two feet.
This is textbook import substitution industrialization, just on a rapid time frame. Nothing new here. Move along...
Short-term planning + unhealthy greed is why Adam Smith is crying.
JAGga.me ----> Producing video games addressing emotional health and wellness issues affecting teens.
China forced all foreign willing to take a piece of cake in China to form with China's company. Not just train, but all the automobile players in China...
People couldn't figure that out that China is "learning" the technology along the way? Very much similar to Japan back in 50's I guess?
This is the only reply this story needs. Thanks and kudos!
The funny thing is that the Chinese government already considers itself in a competitive "war" with you, and has done for several decades. They will do whatever it takes to "win", primarily for nationalistic reasons (they certainly don't do it for the ordinary citizen, although it is sold as that). Just because you didn't notice it doesn't mean they weren't thinking in those terms. This is quite different to the US where the government funds innovation itself rather than a systematic program of stealing (corporations are trans-national and another thing entirely).
IP agreements are the sad thrashing of the nearly dead; like the dinosaurs trying to escape the tar pits.
WIPO is all very polite and such, but sending soldiers to die for natural resources is one thing, sending them after "IP" is quite different. I hope I'm not proved wrong.
I work for Motorola in Poland. I visited the Chicago facility (actually 2 of them) about 2 years ago, maybe a little more. At the time, there was this Chinese national arrested at O'Hare, she had a one-way ticket to China, a ton of cash, and something like 4 suitcases of Motorola confidential high-tech documents & source code.
Watch the video here: http://abclocal.go.com/wls/story?section=news/local&id=6228552
Apparently companies like Google & Microsoft are extremely concerned about loss of IP from their Chinese offices. This story (in the video above) indicates that it can even happen with Chinese employees planted in American companies. God only knows what's walking out the door from the Beijing office.
Yes! Great indeed is the Land of the Brave and the Free. Where the government has an agenda to fund innovation for innovation's sake, and protect the citizenry for the sake of their firm belief in freedom and prosperity for all. We need to recognize that we, the free world, is at war with the evil Chinese, who will stop at nothing to "win" this new cold war with us. They want to steal our technology, our ideas, and dammit, our very souls.
Help me! I can't swim in sarcasm!
But try telling the Chinese that: they simply won't accept it. The CRH2 is Chinese innovation through and through, it was built from blueprints up by Us Good Chinese People. Same as the Shanghai maglev. Tell any resident of Shanghai that the maglev was built by Germans and they'll turn their brains off.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
What we do is to exchange market for technologies
true and true. its a basic trade. they gave technology, chinese gave them the money. (as market).
Read radical news here
they high-speed trains are generally seen as being a failure. They run half empty, cost too much money, and represent missalocated resources which from my observation is out of control in China.
Newton in a letter to Robert Hooke in February 1676:
If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.
This is not a signature.
Not a lot, but that doesn't prevent China from being worse. Sure there is the dubious foreign policy of the US, but China has a dubious foreign policy all of it's own. It makes territorial claims on basically everyone of it's neighbors (e.g. India, Japan, Taiwan) it supports the worst regimes in the world (e.g. Burma, North Korea) and it's approach to exploit Africa is even more unscrupulous than that of western countries. There is plenty of room to criticize China
... China had been known for doing this for years now. Take, for an example, the way how they built J11 jet fighter, rip-off of Su-27. The problem with Chine, unlike, let say, Japan who is also know for purchasing foreign know-how, is that they do it semi-paid - they pay until the goods are delivered. After that, they just say it does not comply with their standards no more. It's great to have you in WTO, China ...
Whatever fault and atrocity US may have committed, anyone in the world is free to criticize and any US resident is free to discuss and lobby for change. The same cannot be said for China and that is fundamental difference between China and the rest of the free world.
I disagree strong with the Patriot Act, the use of torture and the Iraq War, but even I know that those actions pale in comparison to the tens of millions if not hundred of millions of Chinese that perished in the last 50 years due to the ineptness of an authoritarian regime.
While China certainly has achieve spectacular economic growth in the last 50 years, but I would argue that the US civil rights movement that continues today has far more importance than avoiding starvation.
‘Knavery seems to be so much the striking feature of its (America's) inhabitants that it may not in the end be an evil that they will become aliens to this kingdom.’ - King George III
but I cannot agree with some criminal legal logic of "two wrongs making a right" expressed by others.
But two Wongs can make a right.
Posting Anon for good reason and I have to be quite vague, but here's my anecdote:
I am employed in a sector of the Chemical Industry that has pretty much been under seige for the past 10 years from cheap generic Chinese "versions" of our products. We have been shedding customers like Fall leaves and we cannot compete in either price or volume (we kick their ass on quality though), we used to store one particular product for a customer and ship it for them when required, then one day they told us what price they would pay and if they didn't get it they would go Chinese, we told them to go. So, they built their own warehouse, at considerable expense, and went Chinese.
The warehouse burnt down after receiving their first large shipment of this product.
You see immediately after manufacture this product had to be very carefully stored or it exhibited an oven-like effect and self ignited, obviously the Chinese knew the destination but didn't fully understand the journey. Whatever this ex-customer saved I hope it covered the cost of the two warehouses they had to build, oh and the loss adjuster (iirc) asked our advice on the correct way this product should have been stored, and on the information gleaned advised the insurance company not to pay out.
Not a lot, but that doesn't prevent China from being worse.
We export our suffering. We get a share of the responsibility for China. There is plenty of room to criticise China, but to suggest that China is more evil than the USA is to stick your fingers in your ears and shout LALALALA WE'RE NOT EVIL. Remember, forces in the USA profit from Chinese imperialism and slavery; by putting money into the system they fund its continuance. Citizens of the USA patronize these abstracted enslavers and murderers, making us responsible for their behavior, in turn making us murderers in the third place.
Before we were doing it with dollars we were doing it with guns, and United Fruit (among others) exists only because American military forces were used to force such a situation.
You're a deluded rube if you think that the powers that run China are more evil than the powers that run the USA.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Big business looked at the Chinese market and cheap goods which they could sell back home and licked their lips. They didn't care about working conditions or human rights. They pushed the politicians to open up the import export controls and the politicians, being obedient, did so. They had to pretend it was all about bringing democracy to the commie world but that was never true. It was about getting cheap goods and access to a huge new market place in order to screw you and me. Sure we got cheap CD players but many of us also lost our jobs or had to take a pay cut.
Now look what has happened. China has become the second largest economy and soon will be the largest. Their armed forces are expanding faster than those of any other nation and their influence around the world is rapidly expanding while that of the US is diminishing.
We haven't exported democracy. We've provided funding for dictatorship and tyranny (it has long since ceased to have anything to do with communism).
Look around your home. Take a close look at everything in it and note where it was made. You have been funding a corporate state over seas and spending your own country into inconsequence.
There is no happy ending to this story except for despots.
Typically how it goes is:
1.) China promises a foreign company lots of freedom of business, hundreds of billions in future contracts down the road
2.) China strong-arms the foreign company into a joint-venture 51% owned by a Chinese company (note, this is different from a Chinese subsidiary of the foreign company. The Chinese company is an independent rival to the foreign company). The foreign company must surrender all IP rights to the Chinese company that are developed as part of the 51% 49% relationship.
3.) Having initially imported products form the foreign company, China presses the foreign company to move more and more production to China.
4.) After the foreign company has invested huge sums of money and time into the Chinese market, China changes the law and forces the foreign company to manufacture a set percent (e.g., 40%) of all of the production of their product in China by a domestic Chinese company (again, we're not talking about the Chinese branch of a foreign company, we're talking about a completely separate domestic Chinese company).
5,) In order to meet the strict Chinese-domestic-manufacturing limits, the foreign company has to trade huge amounts of technology to some random state-back domestic Chinese company. Even though some small amount of technology sharing was agreed upon prior to entering the Chinese market, the reality is that in order to produce 40% or so of something (e.g., a bullet train) in China by a Chinese company that was previously built 0% in China, you have to give huge amounts of technology to that company and spend tons of resources to train that Chinese company's engineers. All this technology gifting by the foreign company to the Chinese company is done outside of the technology agreement framework in order to meet the strict 40% Chinese manufacturing quotas.
6.) After the domestic Chinese company has received sufficient advanced technology and training from the foreign company, the Chinese government simply stops making new contracts with the foreign company, starts manufacturing whatever the product was (e.g., a bullet train) 100% in China courtesy of the now-advanced Chinese company, and the government buys exclusively from the Chinese company. The foreign company finds themselves having given all of their technology to a Chinese company as a part of "doing business" in China, and then they find themselves discriminated against and completely forced out of the entire Chinese market. They also find themselves having a new Chinese rival selling what is essentially an identical product for significantly less. And, of course, the Chinese company has an unlimited budget and shapes the laws courtesy of the Chinese government.
No, most free countries do NOT work like this. The Chinese government entices foreign companies to come to China, then changes the laws once they are there in order to strong-arm the foreign companies to give up all of their secrets. Don't get me started on corporate espionage by the Chinese which is at or even greater than the level and frequency of the Soviets during the Cold War, and all of that espionage is state-backed and goes straight to up-and-coming Chinese companies (because Chinese business and Chinese government are intertwined, after all)
Of course, I don't blame China. What they're doing is brilliant--exploitative and dishonest, but brilliant. I blame the greedy short-sighted companies and their selfish executives, and I also blame my own government for creating the business conditions that make this possible.
to resist too much capitalism. I live in China right now, and though it's a tough, competitive, developing society, the streets are generally safe, and the peoples` only real grievance with us, that I can see, is that we're generally not as devoted to our families as they are. I don't know about the Chinese government, that's another matter. I'd say they're somewhat already very politically active. Confucianism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confucianism gives you an insight into the people. But that's not necessarily the government as we know only too well in the West.
Whoosh! I think he refers to the lack of critical analysis regards the reports of dissidents being re-trained. Any one who exercised their first amendment right to defend Marxism in the U.S. got a bit of free market re-training as well, don't forget. [Godwin requires reference here to democratic election of Hitler...]
That isn't a side of their rise to power at all. It's much older.
bickerdyke
Right; for example nobody nobody suggested harming Julian Assange for publishing anti USA information. Nobody suggested arresting for treason a man who isn't even American. C'mon; pull the other one.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
The Ames brothers stole their technology from the English, but then they innovated. That's what put the colonies on the map, so to speak.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
that this is social Darwinism at its best...
"Another strategy is buy-to-build. The first three trains were imported as a whole; the second three were assembled with imported parts; subsequent trains contain more and more Chinese made parts."
Uhhh, that's how *all* heavy industrial projects work. Most contracts specifies local-build parts because otherwise your trade balance goes whacky and currencies get mashed. Remove all references of "China" and you have the story of practically any train built in the last 50 years.
The Toronto streetcar fleet is a Swiss design, by SIG. We bought three and then made the rest in Thunder Bay. The ICTS was originally a German maglev, but they pulled out and we got the design work for free. The Amtrak Turboliners are the same, as are most civilian aircraft.
Another "yellow scare" story.
Maury
... which isn't entirely unlike those of American industries in the late 1800 and early 1900. The "humane treatment" of employees were won through bloody confrontations with employer and unionization. Let's be fair here; employers are the same everywhere -- they exploit their employees to the maximum extend the local laws permits, and then some... when enforcement is lacking. We can hope that in time, Chinese will develop the same... sensibilities that we do toward labor relations. But to expect immediate conformity to the west is just ludicrous.
What I'm saying is; WTF? What sort of mental defect do the Chinese possess that could prevent them from besting the Americans?
Certainly the US has a long history of imperialism and genocide, criticizing that is reasonable. It's not reasonable to use that as an excuse for China to do the same now. If it was evil then, then it's important to stop it from happening again.
It's an interesting observation that they run half empty. Why is that? Are the routes poorly planned, so that there are simply not enough people wanting to travel to the other destinations along the lines? Do Chinese people simply not travel much because it is not part of their culture, but over time ridership may increase as people get more comfortable with travel and interested in visiting other cities in China? Are the fares too expensive for most Chinese to afford to be able to ride? Do the people just not trust the technology and are afraid of accidents?
As long as they sell it only to the People's Liberation Army, no law is broken.
American business == wake up. its time to realize that your US citizens jobs are being exported. Soon you guys will export your businesses (as IBM has done). Then Americans, you will have to find work in China, and become Chinese citizens. Global economies mean global citizenship. Sadly, the USA is truly on the downward slope.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
You were once a devoted advocate for the military dissemination of freedom, democracy and the american way of life.
Now you seem to have lost all faith in the military–industrial complex.
Also, you left kuro5hin for good.
What's happened?
Post tenebras lux. Post fenestras tux.
Back in November, a blogger named Rod Adams, who runs the Atomic Insights blog, ran a story about how the Chinese acquired Nuclear Reactor technology which U.S. taxpayers had pay Billions of dollars on R&D to create, for the Westinghouse AP1000 series of nuclear reactors. China convinced Westinghouse to sell them the design info by promising the purchase of a small number of reactors, and after that, the Chinese will make their own. Even export it to other countries and compete with Westinghouse over the design.
If a company decides to make such a bargain, in the *general* case, I figure that's their business. But, when they take tech that U.S. taxpayers subsidized the R&D, I think that's crossing a line. Basically, we pay the bills, and China gets the profits. That's insane. Of course, a big driver of that dynamic is how screwed up U.S. policy and private investment regarding nuclear technology has become - basically, it's become about impossible to get nuclear plants built in the U.S., the industry died here, so our nuclear engineering and manufacturing companies have struck whatever bargains they have to with places like China which *will* build reactors.
The last hope I have with regards to U.S. nuclear innovation is with fast-breeder reactor technology (such as the GE-Hitachi PRISM). I *really* hope we can keep that for a little while and make some money off *that* U.S. taxpayer expenditure (the PRISM is the result of a U.S. DOE project called the Integral Fast Reactor), in the coming decades.
I wouldn't expect it to be reasonable for a country to hold on to 'exclusive' rights to any technology forever, but it would be nice to at least realize a reasonable level of benefit/profit from our taxpayer expenditures on technology before it becomes "public domain".
Is this much different than essentially the route of every industrialized nation?
The most recent one was probably Japan (who were the quintessential butt of copycat jokes even just a few decades ago).
The US bought alot of products from Britain and Germany before, I presume, "getting the hang of it".
Comon now, the west is just making itself look like a hypocrite...again.
No, they don't. Well, for any reasonable value of "you." They don't want to see the fall of the USA, nor the death of the citizens thereof. They are at war with companies, and I own shares of plenty of companies in investments and retirement funds. But that's not a war with me, and they aren't interested in making me dead.
And even you note that corporations are another thing entirely, but I assert they are not, and thus we are "at war" with them (and ourselves) and have been longer than they have been at war with us. Both China and the US are on a path headed to the same place. They have the State owning the corporations. We have the corporations owning the State. But our paths are converging. And the differences aren't nearly as vast as people make them out to be and are closing rapidly.
Learn to love Alaska
1) The reports seems to say that they *are* respecting the patents.
2) Patents are national law. If a country doesn't like them, it doesn't need to have laws about them.
3) The US respect for foreign patents isn't a record we'd want anyone else to emulate. (Check out the patent on, e.g., Neem tree oil. Then tell me that the US even follows it's own laws. With a straight face.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Federal Government?
China doesn't have a federal government. Just goes to show how valid your argument really is.
And US has never supported 'worst regimes in the world' right?
Nope. We're simply as responsible. When you participate in a thing you lose the moral high ground, and you have to share the low area with the rest of the scum.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Here in the US you can take just about anybody to court and, if you have enough money you can still win. Either in court or out of court. Please dont use the compromised legal system as a crutch for your argument.
I can't help feeling that the only beneficiary of your logic is the baker (or China respectively).
They will do whatever it takes to "win"
Stupidest fucking thing I have read on slashdot in a long time. The Chinese government wants to remain in power above all else. This is completely at odds with a liberal market based economy.
Of course being one of the last countries to build high-speed rail they get to pick and choose tech from other nations. But remember, Chinese people in the countryside live at bronze age level of technology.
http://shanghaiist.com/2009/03/24/sht_happens_sometimes_twice.php
For reasons too numerous to list here the Chinese will not take over the Western world.
The problem is: The 800 Millions (more than the doulbe of Europe) find that policy good enough and so nothing will change... almost forever.
Oh yeah? Is that why US politicians have openly called on Assange to be illegally assassinated?
I don't think that makes sense. Would you apply the same criteria everywhere else, or is that specific to China? Let's say there is a baker in your town - he sells his goods cheaply, but you happen to know that he beats his wife. You are purchasing your baked goods there. Who carries the main responsibility there - you or the baker?
It's time to stop thinking like that. You both carry the responsibility equally. Assigning fractions of blame is ridiculous. Either you are to blame or you are not. The degree is only a curiosity.
Is it a sensible course of action to stop shopping there - what's the result, will he stop beating his wife?
Probably not, but at least you're not funding it.
Should you try to do something about this situation,
Yes! You should. We all should. None of us should sit by while we know someone is being subjected to violence.
or should you sit on your ass doing nothing, because by buying his bread you are just as responsible, so you don't have the moral high ground required to act?
I think you already knew how I feel about that before we began this conversation. You stop buying his bread, and if that doesn't do the job, then you step in and do something. But certainly there is no room for us to complain about human rights abuses in China while we fund human rights abuse in China.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I'll put it another way: if China gets too annoying and the EU+US slap a 50% tariff on Chinese imports who do you think will blink first? The consumers who have to pay $5.99 for that plastic toy instead of $2.99?
the consumer will keep paying the ca. 6$ for the toys, because they have been raised as CONSUMers, and brain-washed into buying useless shiny plastic things by the marketing department of multinationnal corporations (mark.deps. which reside on the very western soil)
some consumers will complain. And someone will come with a brilliant plan to subsidise some import (the riight to own a wireless phone is a fundamental right) or save some corporation (their survival depends on imports and they are too big to fail).
meanwhile,china will still sell their goods to other markets (inland, rest of asia, south america, and the ultra-cheap stuff into emerging markets in africa) and not even notice that something is happenning with one among their many custommers.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
since all the Chinese companies did was reverse-engineer, they don't really build up internal expertise of the level they just quashed
in the very long term, perhaps yes.
but in the middle-long term, they have an advantage: the rent seeking behaviour that has been rotting our IPsystems, giving the rise of patent trolls and business infight (as seen in the massive multi lateral suits)
just like copyright laws stiffles some interesting forms of art (remixes and mashups), patent law is blocking some forms of innovation (combining technologies from several different sources to create more feature rich products).
while Apple, Microsoft, Nokia, Motorola and Google are all happily suing each other and putting bans on product imports, china will happily sell in its other markets (Inland, Asia, etc...) "oPhone" clones with lots of features (like Dual SIM), crappy interfaces, and dead cheap prices.
also,you under estimate the knowledge one can gather while reverse engineering, and that no matter what, among a so big population, there are bound to be a couple of brains, who can make through university and get into R&D doing other things than pure reverse-eng.
last but not least, China suffers less from brain drain. Chinese student go to foreign universities to study, but then go back to china to put at use the accumulated knowledge.
While China certainly has achieve spectacular economic growth in the last 50 years, but I would argue that the US civil rights movement that continues today has far more importance than avoiding starvation.
"Economic growth" is only about 30 years, especially the recent 10 years, not 50 or 60 years.
I think you've never experienced real starvation in your life. "Living without food" is much more terrible than "Living without freedom". That was the exact reason that why Deng started the reform 30 years ago.