Chinese effort to steal IP to industrial dominance

[Arthur Hanson]

China has shown their propensity to steal technology over the years, but this is an effort to leapfrog the west by blatant theft of IP on a massive scale across the entire industrial sector. With semi/tech IP being very expensive in time, money and resources this presents a real threat to the tech sector among others for they will relieved of the major costs in time, resources and money giving them a competative edge. This has the abiltiy to severely damage the economies of the west just as a military war will do. Any thoughts or political, commercial ways of dealing with this growing threat would be appreciated. This is being done through their construct called Winnti. This organization has been operating on a massive scale since 2019. The IP theft has been estimated to be in the trillions, not billions. It also includes getting information that can be used for blackmail. source CNBC

 

[tooLongInEDA]

Can you "leapfrog" by simply stealing and copying ? You also need a good amount of real innovation. The more China cheats its way forward (your thesis - I have no direct insights into this, though I assume it's correct to some extent), the less innovation there is and the less need for innovation there is. We can add to this the risk of copying bugs and limitations from existing designs without being aware these are there (one reason to avoid blindly copying software).

I do wonder if we should be more worried if China had got to where it is today with a proper "clean room" effort.

As it stands, we can't be certain what their real capabilities are. We do know that autocratic countries where free-thinking is not encouraged and mistakes can be career limiting are not great innovators. The gut response is such places is usually to cover up mistakes rather than try to learn from them.

It would also appear that they have "borrowed" more stuff from Russia than the US in developing their military jets.

Need to be a bit careful what I'm saying next and not wishing to over-generalise from one experience. At university, it was noticable that Hong Kong students (there were no Chinese students back then) tended to work more "collectively", while British students never collaborated on things like lab work. That may have been the pressure of overseas student fees (there were no home student fees in those days), but I suspect there is also a real cultural difference behind this and they viewed "the rules" differently. I've read suggestions that China just doesn't take the same basic legal view on IP protection. If the Chinese want to take a fundamentally different view on how IP protection should work in their own market (the groundrules), should we expect to overrule that (assuming - may not be true ! - that is is universally enforced for all players) ?

 

[coldsolder215]

IP theft was a huge part of how America gained dominance over Great Britain, it was crucial to jump starting our own industrial revolution and ultimately winning WWII. In copying other people's work you forgo the opportunity to develop an organic understanding of the problem and thus remain dependent on others for future advancements, but eventually things will start to click and they'll start to surpass us in new technologies like drones and 5G.. oh wait we're already at this point.

China just doesn't take the same basic legal view on IP protection.

They've had no input to the current system, and do not adhere to the neoliberal zero-sum ideology that produced the current system. Heck, the legal roots of IP date back to dark ages, when Kings needed a mechanism to separate Guilds from their trade secrets and limit their power. It probably needs a good shakedown if it's proving to be so dated and ineffective.

 

[tooLongInEDA]

IP theft was a huge part of how America gained dominance over Great Britain, it was crucial to jump starting our own industrial revolution and ultimately winning WWII. In copying other people's work you forgo the opportunity to develop an organic understanding of the problem and thus remain dependent on others for future advancements, but eventually things will start to click and they'll start to surpass us in new technologies like drones and 5G.. oh wait we're already at this point.


They've had no input to the current system, and do not adhere to the neoliberal zero-sum ideology that produced the current system. Heck, the legal roots of IP date back to dark ages, when Kings needed a mechanism to separate Guilds from their trade secrets and limit their power. It probably needs a good shakedown if it's proving to be so dated and ineffective.

Yes, fundamental redesign of the patent and IP system is long overdue. With Chinese input.

You're right that it was introduced by kings to encourage innovation. But even back then it was used to favour chosen individuals by creating monopolies.

The US was overtaking us (UK) without the IP theft. Whether things "eventually start to click" depends on whether a culture really supports innovation.

I would not be so pessimistic. Remember how quickly the US overtook Russia in the space race. It's really a question of getting focused and organised. If Ukraine doesn't wake us all up, nothing will.

 

[Paul2]

IP theft was a huge part of how America gained dominance over Great Britain, it was crucial to jump starting our own industrial revolution and ultimately winning WWII. In copying other people's work you forgo the opportunity to develop an organic understanding of the problem and thus remain dependent on others for future advancements, but eventually things will start to click and they'll start to surpass us in new technologies like drones and 5G.. oh wait we're already at this point.

Did it really gained that dominance? For example, the Merlin engine was unreproducible by US engine maker into fifties. First generation of jet engines was copied from British ones, and Britain held into sixties, when it was the economy which really made money flows to change directions.

US got aerospace, and semiconductors in the long run, and it held it up until nineties, but once in a generation change of money flows is happening again now.

We had a false start in late nineties 200X, where money started to chaotically flow into Asia riding low rates in the West, but it only lasted less than a decade until people started to write off China, and put the rest of Asia into doubt.

Now rates are to go up in the West, but we now see, counter intuitively, that they are leaving the West, despite USA itself seemingly gaining FDIs. The later is easy to understand if we big beyond the statistics. The giant amount of money going in, and in between developed economies are not really investments, but an interest rate arbitrage disguised as one.

What we see going into Asia these days though is very different that what we seen during the Asian crisis. It's Asians expats, and n-th generation migrants taking their money back home, or at least some part of it.

 

[Arthur Hanson]

The US actually has been in a race with the UK for hundreds of years. When I vacationing in London I had the pleasure meeting the an ex British military attache to the US who was a director of their naval museum in Portsmouth and we spent hours discussing the different technologies between the US Constitution and the HMS Victory. Totally different technologies and approaches, but we had the lead. Anything the Constitution couldn't out fight, it could out sail. It also had a shallower draft that allowed it to escape more heavily armed ships.

 

[hist78]

This kind of thing can only happen in PRC.

Arm China says its ousted CEO Wu is refusing to pack up

Arm China said on Thursday its former CEO Allen Wu was refusing to relinquish his role despite being fired last week and that it would overhaul its communication system to protect against its misuse by Wu and his supporters.

www.reuters.com