$100 billion is not unrealistic for typical defense budgets. Modern warfare is transitioning from lead to silicon. It takes 6 lines of VHDL to backdoor a CPU. Modern chips have billions of transistors. It would be irresponsible of any modern superpower not to ensure their nation's machines are secure. I am a US citizen, but if I were a Chinese national, I might be worried about things like Intel Active Management Technology. Maybe mutual defense is a good thing if it prevents escalation. I'm still outraged that members of my Congress proposed violent conflict with China as an appropriate reaction to a data breech, as if their own organization had never accessed Chinese systems without authorization. It's probably just theatrics of elected officials from states with large military presence, but how evil is it to propose killing people for sneaking into your computers which you failed to secure properly?
> I'm still outraged that members of my Congress proposed violent conflict with China as an appropriate reaction to a data breech, as if their own organization had never accessed Chinese systems without authorization
This +1. We are supposed to be intelligent adults but this behaviour is more like schoolyard bullies that behave one way and then cry foul when another does the same.
Psychology, naming & shaming, PR, politicking, and propaganda are important parts of any conflict. Just look at the cold war. It's not hypocritical; it's part of the game.
While defense is surely an important by product of an indigenous semiconductor industry the simply truth is that China is now on the edge of collapsing back on it self.
China became an economic superpower because it had a huge labor force to offer cheaply and provided an environment in which international corporations could exploit (not necessarily with a negative confutation but rather the direct dictionary definition of the word) it easily.
They are coming to the point in which they need to import a very large amount of the components which is ending up in the electronics which are being made in China even basic stuff (e.g. high quality capacitors are still primary made in Japan, same goes for thin film resistors and other high precision electronics).
With electronics becoming nothing more than system on chip China needs to be able to compete locally if nothing than at least to offer cheaper local alternatives (A Chinese MediaTek for example), if they'll fail they risk at severely cutting the profitability and hence the income from Chinese manufacturing and risking quite a bit of it being actually shipped overseas especially when your production can be highly automated and scaled up without the need for a large and cheap labor force.
Another lucrative aspect that China has been offering is it's "design and manufacturing engineering" expertise you could go with a rough idea and a sketch to China and get 50 engineers all of who are experts in various fields of manufacturing from injection molding to electronic assembly and get your product out of the way.
To maintain this capability China needs to be able to design bespoke silicon just as easily as they can design a bespoke plastic shell which will be injection molded and then ultrasonically welded.
This example is a memory inspector and poker. On a side note, I think using a LEON MCU would be smart for this kind of demonstration, the code is free and it's synthetisable in a lot of targets.
At minute 39:30, the lecturer demonstrates a snippet of HDL which will transition the CPU to ring 0 if a very specific instruction is passed to the processor core:
BTW, this kind of backdoor would be very visible in Bluespec. Bluespec is very concerned about resource use and you will have to make extra effort to bring (really unneeded) resources to be accessible during interesting stages of CPU pipeline.
Absolutely true, if you have the source code, which is trade secret. Correct me if I'm wrong, but Bluespec is like Haskell that compiles to Verilog? Seems pretty neat.
Any such thing as circuit decompilers? In my imagination, they look like as huge boxes with tunneling electron microscopes inside, where you input a chip and it outputs source code.
The closest I've seen to that are the guys that reverse engineered a 6502 at the transistor level and built a "perfect" emulator for it. http://www.visual6502.org/
I think even with modern computer vision techniques, it would be very very difficult to do this kind of thing automatically. If you were a big state with cheap labour, you could probably hire a load of people to do nothing but map traces all day.
Network controllers with DMA would also be prime targets that could even be tailored for a specific victim's network. They can sit passively and monitor for interesting network traffic as well as sift through memory unimpeded. And when something needs exfiltrating, it can send out packets undetectable by the cpu.
Edit- oh, and dropping code into memory for the CPU to run is not unpossible either.
>Modern warfare is transitioning from lead to silicon
For some reason - this really made it sink in...
The cold war WRT electronics in the next few years is going to be very interesting. The dystopian cyberpunk landscape we read about in the 80s was utopian vs the reality of what we will see in the future.
VHDL is used primarily in Europe (and in some academic classes in the US), while Verilog is used by the vast majority of businesses in the US, and most of the top schools for VLSI. I know that the vast majority of chip designers I know (which are 90% US based) much prefer Verilog.
As for Intel and ARM, both are primarily Verilog shops, but I know ARM provides both Verilog and VHDL models for the licensed components.
Thanks. Looking at wikipedia, Verilog stems from 1984. I'm wondering why Intel and ARM don't develop their own hardware compilers. I mean, if Mozilla can decide to start a new language, then certainly can those big companies.
Like most languages, they evolve over time. The latest version of the IEEE standard version of Verilog is Verilog 2005, but there are also offshoots, such as SystemVerilog. While most things distributed for interoperability and targeted for general understanding are written in Verilog, most actual designers use SystemVerilog, which was eventually made into its own IEEE standard. SystemVerilog adds a lot of object oriented features, and is a pretty clean addition to Verilog.
As far as why Intel, ARM, and everyone else mostly sticks to these languages is similar reason to why C is still used... it is because it works, and works good enough. After 20 years of just having Verilog, enough people agreed that it needed a update, and SystemVerilog developed. Another big reason is the fact that Intel, ARM, etc. all rely heavily on scripts and design flows that are common between pretty much every semiconductor company... all of the EDA vendors have united around these standards, and in a world where interoperability is required and very little innovation happens on the backend tools, people stick to what works.
It will be interesting to watch this play out in the context of the Chinese intellectual property policies and non-enforcement of US copyrights, patents and trade secrets. That might be enough money to reverse engineer Intel's 14nm chipsets. Will it accelerate humanity's technological progress, or will it stifle progress by removing incentives for inventors?
>will it stifle progress by removing incentives for inventors?
my guess is it will pressure companies who currently hold on to their secrets without innovating (because they are the incumbent) to start innovating. If your competitors are on an even playing field with you, the only way to survive is to innovate.
Edit: The context for the Chip Protection Act is actually in Intel's primary wikipedia page:
"During the late 1980s and 1990s (after this law was passed), Intel also sued companies that tried to develop competitor chips to the 80386 CPU.[32] The lawsuits were noted to significantly burden the competition with legal bills, even if Intel lost the suits.[32] Antitrust allegations had been simmering since the early 1990s and had been the cause of one lawsuit against Intel in 1991. In 2004 and 2005, AMD brought further claims against Intel related to unfair competition."
if they intend to sell to foreign markets, they sure do. RISC custom chips may be useful for homegrown tech, or embedded systems, but the consumer market cant possibly be like that - every one expects their software to work everywhere!
What's their market share for desktops in office, entertainment, and business sectors? Probably almost nothing in favor of mostly Windows and Mac OS X desktops running Intel or AMD processors. Legacy compatibility, both OS and popular software, is extremely important for marketing a CPU. Notice how iOS and Chrome OS specifically targeted a sector where that didn't matter.
Of course, now the effect applies to those two where people wanting iOS were stuck with ObjectiveC and ARM while people targeting ChromeOS had to support its ecosystem/model. Legacy effect just shifts here. Truly portable and self-contained software is rare these days. Mostly only OSS stuff.
and from my childhood too.. except people were talking about South Korea. I am pretty sure most people/countries started off mimicking and copying, before innovating.
Also the Chinese might catch up faster than people think. Two small examples:- Xiaomi's MIUI has really been one of the most innovative android ROMS out there balancing usability and functionality. Another one, we use multitouch IR-based components. Right now the top 2 most innovative and competitive providers are both founded by Chinese, although one is headquartered in the US.
Basically, the whole "Chinese know only how to copy" argument is an excuse to be complacent, made by people thinking their culture or genes or whatever will protect them.
it's ok to remain a copycat - generic pharmacuticals are cheap and make a drug plentiful and available. It's a balancing force in the competition, and is needed for innovation.
Sure, you can copy the designs, but will you have the knowledge to modify them? Just playing catch up all the time has a major cost.
Think about code. Sure, people copy designs and code, but it's still hard. And even if you have problem X, and Intel doesn't, it could be for many reasons apart from transistor Y they have in the same general vicinity that you don't.
In a way, the blatant copying is good because it means that the Chinese industry has to go through less iterations to get up to speed. Hopefully the end result is a healthy environment with multiple players trying to out-innovate each other.
My country was a major producer of micro electronics in the Soviet bloc. All of it was stolen design. Stealing designs works only if you force your customers to buy.
Laugh away. The Tu-144 had superior handling and aerodynamics at each end of its speed range, and in the Tu-144D variant had non-afterburning engines and still cruised as fast as Concorde [0], despite having a wider five-abreast cabin. It was a first-generation SST done properly.
There was plenty of industrial espionage, but the Tu-144 is no more a copy than the DC-8 is a copy of the 707.
Innovation works very differently in China, where the culture promotes collectivism. It's far more encouraged to copy and build upon the work of others, so I think it'll be good for progress.
besides the technology to censor people at a grand scale, what piece of technology was invented in China that hasn't been ripped off from another company in another country?
I've been to China many times over the years for business and I haven't seen anything revolutionary.
China's lax IP laws will only get them so far. If they want to actually become a real tech. center, they need to have protections in place for inventors/companies (and actually enforce them).
The other problem is government corruption, but this is for another discussion entirely.
> That might be enough money to reverse engineer Intel's 14nm chipsets.
Intel's advantage isn't their design (which was always generally one or two generations behind the best). Consequently, there is no point is reverse engineering it.
Intel's primary advantage is their manufacturing has always been stellar.
Exactly and that is what the Chinese generally struggle with; the execution process is uncontrolled. Stuff gets delivered but it makes no sense. The process on top is far behind the west so far. Western companies manage to get brilliant things out of China but full Chinese companies struggle. Not sure how many generations it will take to get that trait into the people here but it will not be soon.
Intel was already forced to a joint venture and share technology (Atoms for time being) with Rockchip/Spreadtrum. It was either that or facing huge fines for price dumping (Qualcomm had similar troubles and paid >1B in fines). Of course officially its just a cost cutting measure and pure Intel win, they dont have to sell below cost and gain tablet SoC maker as a client, but you have to wonder.
btw this year Intel switched to selling radio modules below cost, so you can expect china forcing them to another deal in a year or two.
China will actually probably let Intel alone, instead go against other east asian tech firms from Taiwan or Korea, which is way easier to influence.
Whether it is a good thing or not, hard to say. If it succeeds, China will dominate the market, at least the chips will be become cheaper. But as asian tradition goes, those investments may never find its way back in face of next tech revolution, just like how Japan dominate the analogue electronics but fail to keep up with digital ones.
Look at how Intel stifled and basically destroyed AMD using various underhanded tactics. Please. Any country should try to beg, borrow, and steal its way to global parity. It's after all the American way.
Then when they have parity and we have real competition, it will accelerate progress.
China gets away with IP infringement by either 1) mostly keeping it internal or 2) by coping using fly-by-the-night companies creating knock offs. 1) Is hard to police no matter what. 2) Is hard to police because there aren't any deep pockets to sue. They import in small batches etc.
If China tried to knock off major chip designs Intel or AMD, they could be instantly found out and banned from import to major economies. And that would include any products that used those chips. So no major manufacturer would be interested in it.
China would almost definitely use some industrial espionage and trade secret misappropriation. But they couldn't just do a knock off version. But its not like other competitors in this space haven't been doing the same thing.
Plus, you can't fully reverse engineer semiconductor devices. A lot of steps in the fabrication process don't leave any clues.
Finally, China is starting to develop a robust IP system in their country. The number of Chinese patents is skyrocketing. As they try to transition from dumb factory of the world to a leading innovation center, they'll want IP protection.
American Superconductor vs. Sinovel seems to be a counterpoint to (1) and (2). Both are (or were) large companies. And now Sinovel is selling wind turbines using stolen tech back to the United States.
Intel's worth in $61B, I think buying Intel would be better option than reverse engineering Intel chips for that much money. But I do get your point.
I think that money would be waste. While money is important human potential is the far more important thing. If we look closely a lot of governments,people claim that they will build a world class university which will soon be among top 10. Rarely anyone succeeds and lack of money is not the reason.
Same is true for cities. A lot of governments and countries have tried to build next Silicon Valley or next NY but none has succeeded. I do not doubt China's potential to create amazing things, but this sort of plan probably wont work.
Heard about this few weeks ago. Supposedly there's a formula, 1:3:7, that Chinese firms are using to recruit South Korean engineers.
It means if a S Korean semiconductor engineer joins a Chinese firm in China, he's guaranteed to be paid 7 times of his current salary for 3 years.
So let's say you make $10,000 at current job in S Korea, you will be making $70,000 a year, for 3 years. That's supposedly 'guaranteed'.
I may be off with the formula. It may have been 1:3:9. But I am sure it was 1:3:x, so pretty sure that it was supposed to be for 3 years.
A few dozen engineers did accept the offer so far. In the story I heard some S Korean HR person commenting such poaching went on recently for Display engineers who were recruited away from S Korea to Chinese firms. But he claimed none achieved much success, which I took as their career in the industry didn't last longer or they didn't make the money they expected to make.
China also made massive investment in commercial airliner, resulting in Comac C919. I read however that the C919 mostly had US/EU components though.
The 3 in 1:3:x certainly sounds credible, as employment contracts in China typically last 3 years (after which, renewable, of course).
The reason for 3 years per contract? Seems to be a sweet spot. After 2 contract renewals an employee is 'permanent' and essentially unfireable. 5 years per contract seems a bit long and a big buy-in by the employer, and 1 year way too short to expect someone to have the level of assurance and employer buy-in.
So, the 7/9 sounds realistic because of the 3. But I honestly don't expect much to get done, even in 3 years. Someone coming from outside a firmly entrenched organisation has to be a management master to achieve anything.
I've been trying to encourage America and Europe to do this with EDA tooling and I.P.. To no avail. Idea is that the whole flow gets good tools, cell libraries, and info on processes that nearly guarantees first pass. Then, a whole platform of I.P., esp I/O or accelerators, are built on several nodes for easy integration and shrinking of third party designs. Multi-project wafers are streamlined for each of those nodes. You get all that free (except MPW's) if you use the host's tooling and fabs with local fabless getting a tax deduction potentially.
Such a setup could make for a HW equivalent of what's happening in embedded with Arduino's etc. A slower pace due to costs but still better than now. Plus, an existing SOC platform at 45nm and 28nm would be great for cloud datacenters that are investigating custom hardware for accelerators and cost reduction. We'd see shit cranking out constantly for that market.
So, it's now up to China. They can have that blueprint of mine for free. I'd also consult on the specifics since nobody here is doing it outside a few academics and smaller firms. Gotta create the end result somehow.
Note to Chinese involved reading: Also, do a FPGA at 28nm and 28SLP with open bitstream and free tooling at low cost. Make ASIC conversions easy with paid, Chinese I.P. as an upsell. Probably sell the heck out of those FPGA's and academics will do most of R&D on their EDA just for fun. Acquire Achronix while you're at it to do the same with their asynchronous stuff. Acquire eASIC and/or Triad for RAD hardware at a discount for Chinese firms. Same advice I give here should help there.
Countries with cutting-edge semiconductor manufacturing capability ban export of such technology to China. If I remember correctly, the Netherlands was the main exception and China's manufacturing equipment came from there. I'm surprised the article failed to mention this.
"[T]he home countries of major semiconductor companies ban the export of leading-edge manufacturing technologies to China."
China is budgeting this plan to catch up to the US' industry by about 2030. Is there any chance that within the next 15 years, traditional semiconductor chips will become replaced by something else (whatever that may be)?
For the time being, Silicon is not going anywhere. By that I mean, Si the element being involved in the semiconductor process.
For channel materials, Intel has been using SiGe as the channel of their pmos transistors for two generations now, so in a sense elemental Si has already disappeared from the channel.
The wafers are still made of Si, half the oxide stack is still Si-O-Ni. The rest is Hf-O.
Polysilicon is still used a resistor material.
The semiconductor industry has changed a whole lot in the past, there is no "Silicon is dead moment", rather gradual shifts toward different materials used for different purposes.
Satellite radio transistors (HEMTs) already use InP and GaAs and have been for decades.
If you want an actual prediction:
Gallium Nitride and Silicon Carbide are going to be the two actively worked on materials in the near future. Both have a higher bandgap than Si, which means less leakage current and lower static power but they both come with their own problems.
There is a lot of research going in semiconductor industry, people are well aware of the problems and there tons of possible avenues of improvements on current technology (such as better lithography).
> Sorry but that isn't a replacement for Silicon, not by a long shot. You are not getting 14nm plastic transistors anytime soon.
You missed the point. The point isn't to replace 14nm transistors.
The point is to allow engineers to do VLSI design like PCB design.
There are lots of interesting things that can even be done with 5um or 10um transistors, but we can't get there because the non-recurring expense is too high.
Here is an example: guitar pedals--specifically the analog delay ones. These pedals all use an ancient MN3205 bucket brigade CCD chip. The chip is dead simple to make, but since the volume is too low to offset the NRE, nobody is willing to make it.
If, however, you could design that chip with an NRE of $1,000 instead of $100,000, you could make a tidy profit. In addition, you would probably pull all of the other functions of the pedal into the chip as well.
There are also other nice benefits to using older and larger transistors. One of them is voltage tolerance. Modern transistors can't take voltages at even 3.3V in many cases, while the old 10um transistors could go to 18V (old school 4000 series CMOS was specified from 3V-18V for most chips).
The point isn't to replace silicon transistors. It's to create a completely separate market at a different volume point.
In terms of conventional chip design, GaAs is faster. It's also toxic, there are a lot of dimensions to "better"
Like the singularity, quantum computing is always around the next corner, I think it's more than 15 years off and there are a whole lot of questions.
At a glance, China seems like they could excel at fabrication. You need to invest a lot to get going but it's been repeated, there are models to bootstrap that process. there are also more fabless chip makers than ever and they want to build stuff as efficiently as possible. As for design, that seems more competitive and there are more factors on its success (like the actual software and developers adopting your stuff) their schedule seems aggressive but there are so many middle areas. License power or arm and tweak it some, who designed that? Do a couple generations and it starts to be original work, nobody in the west will think that but I don't know if that matters
I think it is likely that if silicon is not the best (whatever the measure is) material then it will lead technology to a local maximum that is hard to escape. Another technology would have to catch up in cost and functionality at a tiny fraction of the total R&D cost that went into silicon.
We may hit the scaling limit; within our lifetimes we'll either hit 1 atom transistors or as close to it as you can physically get. At that point there's nowhere to go.
You can stack chips, make architectural improvements, etc but the exponential scaling from moore's law will be over.
Quantum Computing is not a replacement for general purpose computing. No one is going to watch 4k video on a quantum computer. They aren't useful or built for that.
And my personal curiosity is whether the current government system in China will stay the same until 2030 or go through some sort of change, like moving away from 1-party rule.
It boggles my mind that China went communist because of perceived gap between haves and have-nots. But now, the gap is even greater and severe, under a communist government. The more I learn about history, the more I find how history is full of ironies.
Blowing billions on getting to that 7nm PTM seems like a good move.
That being said, someone should re-invent the antiquated world of EDA, electronic design automation software, the software that you can use to design chips.
Several major problems of Cadence/Synopsis....
* No Forking of designs(not easily)
* Min Cost is too high. --Should be browser based solution.
* Version Control is lacking in chip design teams today.
It's hard to get single digit cost licenses for chip design.
Why, oh why? Browser is a crappy environment and its unsuitable for any kind of bigger application. It's too bloated and too constrained. Google is barely able to make WordPad equivalent run in the browser - I don't see any actually usable EDA as a browser solution any time soon.
If you thought Encounter was slow, wait until you see the browser version!
I've actually been in an EDA startup. The problem is that changing the toolchain is percieved to increase design risk, and you have to overcome the usual problem that the people paying for "enterprise" software aren't the users. It's quite hard to make headway in this environment.
Please no. That's exactly the type of suggestion I would expect to see a startup looking to do things "differently" to get attention, without bringing any really value to the overall system.
People use ICManage quite frequently, which is essentially a Perforce fork.
Agreed that Synopsys/Cadence tools are severely outdated and terrible.
They need to be rewritten from scratch and designed by actual UX/UI designers for the front end. Their backend algorithms are already state of the art for the most part (e.g. Place and route and simulation).
A huge hurdle in making a Virtuoso or Encounter replacement is that foundries are not going to work with you because they already have such deep relationships with Cadence/Synopsys. It's an extremely nontrivial task to get that up and running.
Intel spends about $10 billion per year on R&D, and a single fab costs about $10 billion (they build one every few years).
If they want to catch Intel, they will want to at least spend as much as them, and also benefit from IP-leakage. So I guess it depends on how far you think they are behind the state of the art?
They already have fabs, many fabless companies, and plenty of cheap engineers. This is likely money that will go into R&D improving existing tech, I.P. to steal more market, and possibly EDA if they're smart. They don't need to drop $10 billion if they build on what's already out there and do it smart. My plans for a platform SOC were expected to cost somewhere between $10-50 million for 45nm and 28nm by carefully leveraging MPW's and cheap engineers. I could kill whole markets with $1-10bil. My imagination looses detail at the $100bil point.
But once you start making semi-conductors you start making money. The 100 billion is the seed capital. Semi-conductors pay for themselves once they're rolling. See samsung's balance sheet.
This is not a play against Intel, it is a play against TSMC which is the backbone of the Taiwanese economy. They very much haven't exited the foundry business and are very profitable ($7bn a year or so in net income), and are stealing away even the iDevice SoC business from Samsung these days...
Yup, my first thought when I saw the headline was "this is a non-military attack on Taiwan due to the KMT (pro-Beijing party) getting annihilated in the polls two weeks ago".
Can't we even achieve more in China with the same amount of money as in the US, thanks to lower cost of living? Also, creating a $10bn fab is not as hard as Intel inventing it for the first time.
Was thinking about this whilst watching Marco Polo on Netflix the other day. China gave the western world so much of it's tech, science and culture within the last millennium. How the tables have turned. I'd put it down to karma.
In general I think it will accelerate humanity's technological progress. Looking on an individual level the most impactful inventors weren't motivated by monetary reward (e.g. Tesla). If you are a true inventor it is a tap you cannot turn off. If you are a bro who is in it for the money chances are you will not invent anything particularly ground breaking. The major concern here is that it's the bros who control the capital.
If you are a true inventor it is a tap you
cannot turn off.
Maybe so, but if your invention is some clever semiconductor design or process, you'll need a few million dollars for prototyping. And even if inventors will do their thing for zero return, investors won't.
I sincerely disagree because the return will likely be greater than zero. I'm amazed how entrepreneurs and investors think that 100x is their birthright. it is perfectly fine to me that works changing innovations only make 1.2x return if it means we as a society watch each other's back the other 90% of time when we fail to produce.
It's all about allocating capital. Even if you only take a 1.2X return (which depending on the length of investment might be a loss), that doesn't mean someone else gets the other 98.8X for other investment. By default it would create positive externalities for customers, competitors, etc.
You would need a mechanism to catch that extra value and redistribute it to real R&D. I'm not saying its impossible, but it's not as easy as just saying lets do it.
I completely agree. However, I propose we put a serious damper on growth. Now, I know I cannot effectively or efficiently dictate how capital is allocated but we can do something almost as good. We can try to disassociate risk and reward.
It is my sincere beliefs that the inventions, the discoveries, and the creation of useful arts will take place sooner or later even without the motivation of the 100x gains. It might take a few years, decades, or centuries but we will get there. Yes, the plan requires a hint of central planning but I think it is acceptable.
The more I think about this the more I am convinced that an effective maximum yearly individual income is pivotal to the success of our society going forward. If adding the value of perks would amount to the annual maximum income would push someone over the maximum individual income then they should rightfully pay the correct income tax on the sum over the maximum income (which I tentatively set at 100 * 2000 * minimum wage per hour, it ought to be lower but we need to be pragmatic).
The reason we need to spend so much money on everything and we need 100x gains is that our enterprises have become too top heavy. The only "simple" way to curtail it that I can think of is to impose a maximum personal income (above which we tax away a large part, lets say 90% of the income). We can make it something more palatable. We have the ability to do it. We just need the will power to effect this tweak in the way our society rewards people.
Now this idea isn't perfect. Right away I can think of a way people will try to game the system by "packing" the board of directors with nephews, nieces, children, grandchildren, butlers, and maids of the corporate officers. I don't have a solution to this yet but I am sure we can fix these bugs as we see them in production. The idea is to get the ball rolling and iterate as we go.
This is true but because it is inbuilt into our current system and not a universal truth. There are mechanisms we could use to change the narrative from all or nothing to a lot or enough.
And how much more would we have gotten from Tesla if he hadn't been in financial ruins? He's probably proof positive that without the financial incentive/backing, the world loses out on countless inventions.
Nikola Tesla was a great engineer and innovator—and showman—who's been mythologized beyond all reason.
Even at the time, Tesla's greatest contributions were being simultaneously discovered by contemporaries like Galileo Ferraris. Discovery marches on, and is more a product of the existing body of scientific knowledge than of any one man.
There have been too many other great minds in physics and electrical engineering for it to be remotely plausible that we've missed out on "countless inventions" that would be available to us today, if only Tesla had more money for his experiments.
And west is trying to return the favor a few centuries later by trying to introduce basic human rights and/or democracy in China but so far, with not much success...
Kinda. The Chinese government has been trying to mix sitting on a powder keg and rapid economic growth. They do not want to become a second USSR by opening up all the floodgates at once. Also, considering how they got to their position, I don't think that any of them have preconceptions of a gentle fall if things go south.
What seems to be the case is that they're shooting for slow incremental improvement, moving from less touchy areas to more touchy areas. They've gone from not talking about corruption to cracking down on it higher and higher up the ranks. It's a very slow sleigh of hand, with the distraction being economic growth, and various distinctly communist tasting programs (the current one should be 中国梦(Chinese Dream), if I recall correctly).
But their fear doesn't seem unjustified. There are still spontaneous uprisings which are usually nipped in the bud before they can escalate by means of information and communication monitoring. That's what they care about. Expats in China using VPNs? They don't give one.
Whilst I'm all for democracy, introducing it to China right now would work about as well as introducing it to the Middle East. Groups feeling under-represented would fraction off, there would likely be civil war, widespread devastation to one of the most populous countries of the world, and worst of all, whilst Iran getting nuclear weapons seems like a looming threat, China does have them. The sheer pandemonium would make Syria look like a backwater stand-off. I may be exaggerating, but then look at the bloodshed of the cultural revolution.
I grew up in Germany, so it's not like I'm opposed or unfamiliar with the idea of democracy, it's an incredible system. But for China right now? Well meant, but not practical. It'd be a less bloody affair to turn the US into a monarchy (to make a comparison). In 20 years, maybe, though it might take longer.
Thinking China can be fixed with a fair heaping of democracy and human rights ignores a lot of very significant details in a country that works contrary to a lot of accepted wisdom in the west.
/rant
PS: There's lots of interesting things going on here, playing churned lover with western ideals is literally the least interesting thing to talk about. The day before yesterday they announced changes to the Visa regimen, coming into effect in March. 72-hour visa free visit in 4 yangtze river cities, and some streamlining of visa/green card programs for tech people and entrepreneurs working in China. Maybe I should have chosen a less ironic user name, because this is starting to sound like a sales pitch.
The new visa regimes are interesting, but it hasn't seem to trickle down yet to us tech PhD people's. Really, China doesn't like foreigners, and they merely tolerate us, making us register at police stations after every trip, making us renew our visas yearly, not giving us access to the same services as natives.
Yes, the registration thing is a nuisance. They do seem to be working on ironing out the bugs in the current visa laws though, and there's reason to believe they'll become a lot more lenient, especially to y'all tech PhD people's.
The regulation I'm referring to seems like a pilot program in scope. It allows foreign students to work for and start tech businesses in the Zhongguancun area, as well as allowing people that have worked for 4 years or more for a technology company here to receive a residency permit. That's been exciting me the last 3-4 days since I heard of it, since I've been playing with the thought of doing exactly that.
It does feel like people well versed in technology are the bottleneck for startups over here. Investment is plenty, people with ideas are a RMB a dozen, but tech people knowing more than some PHP or how to set up Bootstrap? Not nearly as many, at least where I'm hanging out.
It's certainly an interesting couple of years ahead, as long as they keep tolerating us here.
Thank you for your very insightful comment. Reading your comment it reminded me of how you cannot just give regular food to a starving person [1], it would kill them.
Is that true though? Sure it happens but it also still happens in the US and other democratic countries. Maybe less but things progressed a lot. You keep reading things about oppression etc but Chinese colleagues I talk to in Shanghai and surrounding or Bejing and surrounding notice nothing of the sort. Maybe you have to actively oppose the gov to get kicked down?
It is not there yet but not much success is too negative imho. Looking at Apple and other western brands here I think it even went too far. Mao would not be happy.
There was a front page story here, on HN, about a guy that made some component to make VPNs work in China, stopping all work because the secret police threatened his life.
I don't see how that's remotely comparable. In the US, state officials simply don't threaten your life for writing software.
Despite leaking state secrets, Snowden's life was never threatened by US officials. Yes, he's a whistleblower, but his actions are far more serious than developing software. Even then, US officials talk of imprisonment at worst.
Your first link is Ron Paul worrying out loud. There are no actual threats being made there.
Your second link cites Buzzfeed as a source, and the Buzzfeed article[1] claims some unnamed low-level officials would like to kill Snowden. Yet these anonymously-quoted people also admit that they wouldn't do it unless they had approval from higher up. Pretty close, but still not a threat.
Your last link is about a retired government official making a joke in very poor taste.
None of these are actual threats, let alone by US officials. They're either idle musings, or bad jokes, or "I want to, but I'm not going to." I certainly don't agree with the people making these despicable statements, but they're qualitatively different from, "If you don't stop leaking state secrets, you will die."
> Maybe you have to actively oppose the gov to get kicked down?
You mean kind like you're free to go wherever you want in prison, as long as you don't try to walk out of the door of your cell? :P
Here's a really sobering thought though:
> You can have a lot of political 'change' in the United States, but will it really change that much? Will it change the amount of money in someone’s bank account? Will it change contracts? Will it void contracts that already exist? And contracts on contracts? And contracts on contracts on contracts? Not really.
> So I say that free speech in many Western places is free not as a result of liberal circumstances but rather as a result of such intense fiscalization that it doesn’t matter what you say. The dominant elite doesn’t have to be scared of what people think, because a change in political view is not going to change whether they own their company or not; it is not going to change whether they own a piece of land or not. But China is still a political society, although it is rapidly heading toward a fiscalized society. And other societies, like Egypt, are still heavily politicized. Their rulers really do need to be concerned about what people think, so they expend proportionate efforts on controlling freedom of speech.
A bit ironic to quote Julian Assange in this case considering his current predicament. Free speech exists in the west only for those who don't say anything important. As soon as you say something important you end up in Julian's shoes.
"... Wang and her husband, human rights attorney Bao Longjun, were detained July 9 and accused of inciting subversion of state power. In early January, they were formally arrested, their lawyer told the New York Times on Jan. 13. The pair have been incommunicado since July, when they began languishing under “residential surveillance”—a status sometimes interpreted to be the equivalent of house arrest but that is actually akin to a “black jail.” There, detainees are held in solitary confinement and subjected to extreme interrogation, forced confessions and even torture. Family members, friends and colleagues have been denied access or even knowledge of their whereabouts.
In April 2015, three months before she disappeared, human rights lawyer Wang protested against expropriations of farmland and properties in Suzhou, northwest of Shanghai.
The arrests of Wang and Bao are just the tip of the iceberg. By mid-November, more than 300 people had been swept up in what human rights monitors describe as an unprecedented crackdown on Chinese lawyers. Those detained or questioned include not only some of the most active rights lawyers but also their support staff, associates and even family members. At least three have seen their children’s passports confiscated and their movements curtailed."
But again. They do things differently. There is unjust percsecution of Lawyers in China (I am not surprised). There are are unjust invasions of countries by "The West" (also, not surprised).
My point is, there is no moral superiority, just political agendas and sides to be chosen/avoided. I think reading news about china (especially if it's in english) is to realise that fact. (Same advice goes to chinese reading news about anything if it's in chinese ;) ).
When my arguement is about moral superiority, then hypocrisy is completely relevant.
When someone says "spreading human rights" they are appealing to a moral superiority. I'm pointing out there isn't one. But if the sand is comfortable by all means keep your head in there.
Also solitary confinement, too much power to the police etc.
Topics like this are not black and white. It is just a waste of time (unless one is a politician making noises to get elected) talking about these topics without solid proof and even then it should be case by case basis, instead of broad generalizations.
The American response will be funding more food delivery app startups and playing more games empowering female CEOs of remaining real hardware companies such as HP, IBM or GM instead.
