Investing in local chip fabs is long overdue. These are incredibly important for geopolitical stability and should be distributed world-wide. We've centralized too many fabs in too few places in the search for low cost.
That was the main argument for global trade already in 1914. France was Germany's most important commercial partner, and vice-versa. All German rifles had stocks made from French walnut wood! All French locomotives had German-made tubing! This stupid mantra was repeated ad nauseam after 1991, too, with silly op-eds from Friedman and friends about how two countries with McDonald joints in both can't be at war and similar inanities. Surprise surprise, such wars happened many times since then (the latest being, of course, Russia vs Ukraine).
A connected world is not a guaranteed sufficient condition for peace. But that does not mean it's not a necessary condition for peace. One could argue that without economic interconnectivity, Europe could have fought WW1 much earlier, or would have had wars much more often.
While I ultimately believe you're correct (along with open borders and travel) I wish there were more rigorous proofs that this were the case.
I think about the line in West Wing: "Free trade is essential for human rights...the end of that sentence is 'we hope because nothing else has worked.' ...Chinese political prisoners are going to be sewing soccer balls with their teeth whether we sell them cheeseburgers or not, so let's sell them
cheeseburgers."
While war and human rights are different, they're also pretty correlated.
Human rights is more than just political rights or speech. Hundreds of millions of Chinese lifted out of poverty is a huge win for human rights. When you're poor, you're not free. Having grown up with dirty streets and beggars, you can't possibly imagine how big a deal it is for me to see my hometown transforming into a modern metropolis, and how my grandparents-in-law (in a different city, in a rural area) finaly have... Wait for it... A fscking toilet instead of a hole in the ground, as well as free health insurance. To me and millions of Chinese, these matters much more than being able to vote for the president.
A recent study by the Democracy Perception Index shows that Chinese feel that their country is democratic. But this is ludicrous, how can this be? It's because Chinese define democracy by whether they believe their government works for their interest and whether they yield good results, not by how their government is elected. It's not just propaganda; this result is consistent with earlier studies by Harvard and York University, as well as by my own experience on the ground.
The concept of 民主 is much more in line with the 19th century definition of democracy, when the concept was brought to China. It was only in the latter half of the 20th century that (in the west) democracy became synonymous with electorialism.
So, not commenting on any other countries. But in case of China, Chinese view democracy and human rights differently. I think we should let them.
Why the false dichotomy? Does political freedom automatically contradict with economic prosperity for some reason now? Born and raised in China, I fail to see how the last 10 years of erosion in freedom has yielded any better results economically.
Please don’t buy the government propaganda that legitimizes everything from stupid to evil as a price that has to be paid to raise people out of poverty.
Nowhere did I say that economic freedom and political freedom are mutually exclusive. What I do protest however is the idea that only political freedom can be considered a legitimate form of freedom. I am making the case that:
- economic freedom is an equally valid form of freedom.
- societies can make up their own minds on what sort of freedoms they value most.
As for "erosion of freedom in the last 10 years in China": this is the mainstream western narrative, but the Chinese people don't view it that way. By and large, they view China as way better off now than 10 years ago. All the data and on the ground talks show this. What else is there it argue about?
It sounds like you are like me, born and raised in China but having lived in the west for a long time. If you live in the west and all you hear is liberal thought and western ideas on political freedom, then after a while it seems like that is all there is that matters.
But I am saying no: what we think here don't matter at all, what the people there think is all that matters. We here can consider China's government illegitimate for whatever reason, but that doesn't make them illegitimate. The Chinese people have way more right to consider what sort of government is legitimate, for whatever reason they want, even reasons that we don't agree with.
> As for "erosion of freedom in the last 10 years in China ... the Chinese people don't view it that way
Really? My girlfriend and her friends would strongly disagree with that statement. From my understanding they grew up in a time when internet in China was a lot younger and they actually had an ability to discuss political discussions, or items that highlight the government in a negative manner.
Now everything that isn't the government's view is incredibly censored/filtered online. It might hard to not see the erosion of freedom when it's being prevented from being communicated online.
Fwiw I'm not disagreeing with your statement on economic freedom and I find the amount of people lifted out of poverty and the growth China has gone through in the last few decades to be incredible but it seems a bit disingenuous to say certain "freedoms" haven't been eroded in the last 10 years comparatively.
What I'm arguing is not whether freedom of speech in China has changed. What I'm arguing is that Chinese people, by and large, value different kinds of freedoms, assigning different priorities. It's like telling an average social media user about the erosion of the freedom to self-host and the erosion of Free Software values. The average user cares about very different things.
The data from decades of research is very clear on this. People like your girlfriend and her social circle, who value freedom of speech the most, are a minority in China. A decreasing minority even. By and large, people are happy with the direction of China. Even if various groups may disagree with specific parts of policy, overall satisfaction is quite high. Freedom of speech is considered a nice to have, not a must, and ranks below many other things such as freedom from poverty, freedom to get quality education, freedom from disease, freedom from anarchy, freedom of security, etc.
The "economic freedom" you describe is not freedom. A better description is "bread and circuses", after the way Roman emperors supposedly kept people happy. The West is familiar with societies like that, because it also describes most of our history. When the elites try to keep the people they depend on prosperous and happy, it's not freedom. It's just common sense for them.
Freedom is not about the freedom of the well-off and the majority. It's always about the freedom of the minorities, the oppressed, and the different. Only their opinions matter. You can only determine the degree of freedom in the society by asking those who don't fit in.
I know many people who come from small towns and rural areas. Places where everyone knows everyone, everyone is part of the community, and everyone helps those in need. Places that are toxic to people who are different. For many of those people, freedom started when they moved to a big city. A city where nobody cares what you are and what you do, where you can safely be yourself, and where you can find other people like you.
I'm sorry, having a toilet instead of a hole in the ground, having proper housing, not having a high chance of dying from poverty, having free healthcare, not having every other street in the city be a huge dumpster, etc. are not "bread and circuses". They are very real, very tangible improvements in quality of life. Your comment boils down again to the tendency to consider political freedom to be the only valid form of freedom.
The hard data from a decade of research is very clear about the fact that Chinese people are overall very satisfied about the direction of their country. No matter what rhetoric you employ, you argue purely from your own perspective and your values. That is fine — for your own country. The Chinese people should have a right to disagree with you on what they value in their own country.
> The Chinese people have way more right to consider what sort of government is legitimate
The Chinese people have no right whatsoever to consider what sort of government is legitimate. The CCP deliberately, systematically deprives of them of exactly that right. Hence the total censorship of thought and expression and the repression of any group that might remotely offer an alternative to the CCP, even non-political religions.
The CCP is like the Model T of political parties - "You can have any government you want, as long as it's the CCP."
i disagree, there's absolute nothing preventing an ordinary Chinese from taking a exam and become someone that actually has influence over domestic policies. Elections aren't the only ways a legitimate government can be formed.
The world has only gone downhill ever since medieval, centralised power structures disintegrated right? Are you following what you preach, and living in a non-democratic country?
You wouldn't be able to make any real policy changes unless you made it all the way up into to the 25-member Politburu (or maybe even its 7-member Standing Committee) [1]. All the other ~90 million CCP members are tasked with implementing the policies made there.
You might be able to become a social policy research professor or something, or where you study Communist/Marxist/Leninist/Maoist/Jinpingist/etc thought and try to develop new applications of it to the modern world. But you won't get to change anything from the Politburu, and could lose your career or worse if you try.
Correct that you have to climb up. But isn't it fine that the Chinese have a different philosophy on governance? They don't want just anyone to be able to make nationwide changes on a whim. They want leaders to prove themselves first by working for 30 years. This is meritocracy. They see the possibility of someone like Trump getting elected, as a huge risk. I think we should allow earth to have diversity in governance systems.
> It's because Chinese define democracy by whether they believe their government works for their interest and whether they yield good results, not by how their government is elected.
I'm going to be thinking about this sentence for the rest of my life
That sentence stuck out to me too. It makes me wonder if the nature of America's representative democracy lowers the threshold by which our elected officials actually have to do a good job / serve the will of the people.
They constantly fall short, even of the narrow interests of whatever their particular constituency is. But there's kind of a floor where we just throw up our hands and say "WELL THEY WERE VOTED IN"
Do our officials receive less psychic pressure? Does the Chinese government work harder to align the populous' desires with their actions?
Study: Congress literally doesn’t care what you think[0]
Their study took data from nearly 2000 public opinion surveys and compared it to the policies that ended up becoming law. In other words, they compared what the public wanted to what the government actually did. What they found was extremely unsettling: The opinions of 90% of Americans have essentially no impact at all.
I assume you are talking about a parliamentary system? Yes, I also prefer it. It is even better if there is a good mix of parties in power -- Germany, Netherlands, etc. It seems like 5-10 parties in parliament forces a good amount of compromise, which results in the most progress possible. I prefer what is loosely termed as a "weak prime minister" where the coalition is multi-party, over a "strong prime minister" where no coalition is required. (Please ignore the scenario of a _constant_ super majority, like Singapore's "People's Action Party".)
GP is probably referring to the electoral system itself: "first past the post" [1]. Essentially a winner take all style of voting which enforces a two-party system.
E.g. In such a system, if a state has 50 seats and a party manages to win 24 of them (while the second place only wins 23 seats), that first party gets all 50 seats of representation.
Dreadful. I don't understand the point of "first past the post" versus a (semi-)Presidential system. What is the _effective_ difference if the outcome is always two parties?
To be fair: My comment is mostly focused upon "Western" parliments, which includes two geographically non-Western places: Australia and New Zealand! If you look at the constant dominance of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in Japan... look _very_ closely... you realise there are many competing factions within the party. So LDP _acts_ like multiple parties and forces the Prime Minister to compromise to get things done. Not perfect, but many outsiders fail to understand this about the Japanese (national) political system.
There’s also weirdness like the electoral college and presidents getting elected despite getting fewer votes than their competitors (see Bush Jr. and Trump).
Except they have no recourse when the party doesn't work for their best interest.
It has been repeated a lot in the past decade because overall things improved but recently the population of Shanghai was put under a terrible lockdown, the government didn't have their best interest at heart and what happened? Nothing, because they can't change anything and because the party doesn't care about their best interest. The party only cares about itself.
Making the populace happy is a lever amongst many they use to stay in power but when their interest and the people's interest doesn't align they have other, brutal means to enforce their policy.
Nothing happened in Shanghai? No, people complained and the government made changes in policy. People complained and they fired corrupt or incompetent officials who screwed things up.
Yes the Shanghai mess was gigantic. But even so, by and large, the Chinese people are supportive of lockdowns even if they protest against specific logistical problems, fuck ups and the overall strain placed on their lives. The Chinese government doesn't lock down because they are an evil oppressive regime, they lock down because the public is at large still very supportive of lockdowns as a measure (especially given the fact that vaccination rates in China are relatively low, and that Chinese people fear COVID much more than people in the west do). If they don't lock down and they let millions of people die through COVID, that's when you will see mass protests and riots.
That "they don't have recourse" is false, this is a stereotype. Protests are commonplace in China. There are literally thousands of protests every year, and often the government is responsive to such protests. Not every single protest is respected, but many are. The Chinese government performs a lot of polls and surveys to elicit feedback and to gauge satisfaction. There's a reason why hard data from a decade of research has shown that Chinese people increasingly believe that the government represent their interest well.
All this stereotyping of the party "only caring about itself" doesn't even make sense when you consider that the party consists of 95M people, or about 5% of the population. Everybody has some extended family member that's a party member. That's a big amount of representation.
I'd say most of the ideas about China come from some sort of reasoning on what a stereotypical authoritarian regime looks like, as opposed to actual facts on the ground. Is China actually authoritarian? From a western perspective, I guess so. But even so, what's underappreciated is that China is a very atypical "authoritarian" regime with a lot more grassroots representation and feedback than one might expect from a stereotypical authoritarian regime.
Making the populace happy being a lever to stay in power — sure, agreed. That's not a bad thing, that's how it's supposed to work in China — the party derives legitimacy from doing good work, and if they stop doing good work then all hell will break lose and the country will plunge into a civil war, as China has seen time and again in the past 2000 years. The government knows this, the people know this, thus the government knows it better do a good job, or else their heads will roll.
I don't totally disagree with you here. There's certainly something to be said about systems that make people happier than no system at all or the wrong system entirely, e.g. the soft power of surveillance being better than a total lack of enforcement of certain rules or heavy-handed and expensive policing efforts that don't work or make people any more free.
That being said, I think there are limits to this philosophy. It's pretty clear by now that not everyone in China is getting a fair shake, to the extent that perhaps it is time for other countries to evaluate their relationships with the output of those in China who are experiencing something that goes beyond the pale in terms of human rights violations i.e. the Uyghur population and the work that they are being "voluntold" for as well as the "re-education" they are experiencing.
I think that for as much sense as it makes for China to do whatever it does, it makes sense for Western countries to do something about the obvious misalignment of values between the two groups. The West not accepting / becoming dependent on economic conditions that result from violations of their views on human rights or democracy is a very reasonable action to take from an ethical and moral standpoint, just as an example.
There may be limits to that philosophy (or any philosophy for that matter). There are no doubt inequalities in China. I just don't think the Xinjiang issue is representative of the problem you're thinking of, because the issue is heavily politicized by western mainstream media and governments, leaving out or mispresenting important facts (as is usually the case with China reporting), and/or representing allegations as final and proven facts even in the absence of evidence.
> Human rights is more than just political rights or speech.
> When you're poor, you're not free.
I appreciate someone 'qualified' making this point. Whenever I tried to argue this in the past, I inherently got dismissed as being in a privileged European position not knowing what I am talking about, (even as an Eastern European), so thanks for your post.
> It's because Chinese define democracy by whether they believe their government works for their interest and whether they yield good results, not by how their government is elected.
And here is the crux of China's zero-covid policy. Follow the Western lead and run covid run its course? That would be millions of deaths even with Omicron being not as deadly, simply because Sinovax is nowhere near as effective as the mRNA vaccines are. It's too late (and politically unwise, given how CCP propaganda praised its selfmade vaccine) to mass-rollout mRNA vaccines, so the only option that prevents millions of deaths (and so, keeps the "social contract" of freedoms vs. wealth) is to brutally suppress Covid.
The interesting thing will be when the Chinese public deems the zero-covid policy "not good enough"...
The "Chinese vaccine don't work" talking point is a bad faith myth created by western mainstream media, which misrepresented this study by comparing single- or two-dose Sinovac with 3-dose Pfizer. This sort of misrepresentation is unfortunately common practice in mainstream western media.
What is true however is that Chinese population has less immunity against omicron due to lower vaccination rates, especially among the elderly. For one, the Chinese don't see vaccination as really necessary because lockdowns work. Second, the Chinese worry a lot more about vaccine side effects. Here in the Netherlands, vaccines are sold as "100% safe, everyone should get it", whereas in China doctors would recommend against getting a vaccine if you have another medical problem such as heart problems. My other grandparents in law choose not to get vaccinated because they have many other health problems due to old age.
Finally, the Chinese public is by and large very supportive of lockdowns despite the Shanghai mess. Rather than "don't lock down" they now just believe "lock down earlier, don't turn into the next Shanghai".
> This sort of misrepresentation is unfortunately common practice in mainstream western media.
Unlike mainstream Chinese media, which always represents facts objectively and doesn't use a headline generator to deflect attention whenever there's some trouble in the country.
I always see this amusing sentiment of "evil Western xyz doing things and stuff", meanwhile it's just something that happens all around the world, and usually even more so in other, less developed places. Maybe the main difference is that I don't get much media from, say, Zimbabwe, but I sure do from the US and even Canada, even if I don't particularly care about the happenings in either place.
Nowhere did I say anything about how Chinese media behaves. This is whataboutism. Even if Chinese media behaves badly that doesn't excuse mainstream western media from behaving badly. This is especially so because western outlets and commentators like to present themselves as morally superior because they have "democracy", "freedom of speech" etc. Well, then practice freedom of speech responsibly by representing things fairly!
Freedom of speech has absolutely nothing to do with representing things fairly. It's about being able to express ideas and thoughts without fears of censorship or retaliation. In fact, being able to misrepresent things is in itself a test of freedom of speech. People have been wailing about the moon landings being faked for decades without disappearing mysteriously. Don't think people in North Korea can afford to spread conspiracy theories about Kim Jong-Un, however.
The cry over whataboutism is funny when you're sharing a paper funded by the Chinese CDC, and taking that as gospel. I'm not excusing Western media anywhere, I'm simply saying "Western" is a pointless qualifier when the problems you are describing apply to media driven by profits and/or vested interests, which is almost every news source.
You are throwing "Western media" under the bus, but in contrast to what? Not Chinese media, which the discussion was about, so I'm curious what your reference point for good media is in this case, that happens to be better than "Western media". Keep in mind that quality levels differ, and if you only follow Murdoch rags, obviously you're not getting quality reporting of any sort.
> The "Chinese vaccine don't work" talking point is a bad faith myth created by western mainstream media, which misrepresented this study by comparing single- or two-dose Sinovac with 3-dose Pfizer. This sort of misrepresentation is unfortunately common practice in mainstream western media.
This isn’t true, and if you look at table 2 in the paper you link it is obvious. With equal dosing, SinoVac is less effective than Pfizer in basically all categories.
SinoVac doesn’t start to have _any_ protection against mild/moderate disease until 3 doses, and even then, it’s significantly worse than Pfizer. It’s hard to know how that relates to disease transmission, but it’s probably fair to guess that less protection against mild/moderate disease means increased viral loads and faster disease spread.
Yes with equal dose before the third dose it's less effective, but why would one compare the two vaccines based on number of dosis to get effective?
Back when there were fewer variants, the Janssen vaccine only required 1 dose; was Janssen "better" than mRNA, and did "mRNA vaccines not work very well"?
Here in the Netherlands, once Omikron arrived, the Dutch CDC advised everyone to get a booster (third dose). Nobody here counts on Pfizer having enough protection with just 2 doses. Why would anyone then compare 2-dose Pfizer with 2-dose Sinovac?
What matters is the eventual efficacy after sufficient boosters. Besides, we already live in a "booster subscription" reality. Here in the Netherlands, the elderly are encouraged to get a booster every 3 or 4 months. In light of all this, I'd say it's very disingenuous to compare based on number of dosis instead of eventual efficacy.
And you say "even [after 3 doses] it's significantly worse than Pfizer". Where in table 2 do you see that?
Severe/fatal disease:
- Three-dose BNT162B2: 99.2 for 60-69 yr, 99.5 for 70-79 yr, 95.7 for >= 80 yr
- Three-dose Coronavac: 98.5 for 60-69 yr, 96.7 for 70-79 yr, 98.6 for >= 80 yr
Mortality:
- Three-dose BNT162B2: 98.9 for 60-69 yr, 96.0 for >= 80 yr
- Three-dose Coronavac: 98.7 for 60-69 yr, 99.2 for >= 80 yr
I'm sorry, these numbers look nearly identical to me? They're all >= 96% for the elderly.
I think you're looking at the "mild/moderate" section. Yes the numbers there are lower for Sinovac. But so what? Protection against severe/fatal disease and mortality is the most important. That it's less effective at mild/moderate disease prevention doesn't make "Chinese vaccine don't work very well".
Heck if we go back in time before there were so many variants, various studies showed Sinovac as having roughly 70% protection against mild/moderate COVID (depending on country; efficacy is context-dependent). That 70% was then branded by western media as "Chinese vaccines are junk, they don't work at all, because our mRNA vaccines provide 90%+ protection against mild disease". And now Pfizer has only 70% protection against mild omikron but it's still represented as "mRNA vaccines are much superior, the Chinese are fscked until they get their hands on mRNA". Yes, what's wrong with that narrative?
For some reason, outside of the context of comparisons with China, everybody agrees that Pfizer works kinda "meh" against omikron; it's merely "good enough to get the job done". But when comparing with China, all sorts of people are suddenly inclined to represent mRNA as the holy grail that can end the pandemic, which the Chinese unfortunately don't have.
The paper says specifically that the data is for Omicron.
Not sure why you call it "security theater". The lockdowns in China work, even against Omicron, even if it has become way more difficult. Shenyang, Guilin, Shenzhen, Guangzhou all defeated omicron without the Shanghai mess.
As for why they don't push vaccines more, that I don't know. Possibly because they are more cautious about vaccine side effects than we are. As I said, doctors in China recommend against getting vaccinated if you have other health problems. The same elderly in the Netherlands would just get a recommendation to get vaccinated because "vaccines are very safe", as we are officially told here.
I think you've got it backwards. Lockdowns existed before vaccines did. So people in China tend to think "you don't need vaccines (and risk side effects) when lockdowns work".
A similar notion existed in Taiwan until they got overwhelmed by Omicron. Lockdowns worked and they were able to keep COVID out of the island, so people weren't interested in vaccines hence low vaccination rates.
Western societies view lockdowns as draconian human rights violations, and don't take COVID very seriously relative to "freedom", but not all societies look at things that way. Chinese people are very afraid of COVID, much more so than westerners, and see lockdowns as an inconvenient but absolutely neccessary measure. Chinese society values responsibility more than freedom.
I'm open to any system of government that systematically tries to pass John Rawls' veil of ignorance[0] test. In theory, it doesn't even have to be democratic. In practice though, I haven't yet seen any non-democracy get even close.
Yes, the Chinese state has made some remarkable positive material achievements for most Chinese. No, it does an absolutely shit job for many of them. Imagine being Uyghur, critical of Xi, religious, lgbti+, black or a combination of the above.
What would it take for a national government to get more passable results on the veil of ignorance test? Try the thought experiment!
> I'm open to any system of government that systematically tries to pass John Rawls' veil of ignorance[0] test. In theory, it doesn't even have to be democratic. In practice though, I haven't yet seen any non-democracy get even close.
What about somewhere like Singapore (nominally democratic, but with a single party in power for decades and widely seen as authoritarian)?
> Imagine being Uyghur, critical of Xi, religious, lgbti+, black or a combination of the above.
Those are very visible examples, but if you're applying the veil of ignorance test you have to weight by how many people they actually apply to. (I wouldn't be surprised if all of them put together represented a smaller proportion of the population than incarcerated Americans, say). Every government system has some fraction of the population that it "gives up on", that much is unavoidable.
> Those are very visible examples, but if you're applying the veil of ignorance test you have to weight by how many people they actually apply to. (I wouldn't be surprised if all of them put together represented a smaller proportion of the population than incarcerated Americans, say). Every government system has some fraction of the population that it "gives up on", that much is unavoidable.
I am deliberately applying an individual level test to the social level. This is not fuzzy utopian everything-should-be-perfect idealism though. Think of it as an extensive test suite to run against a government's policies.
> What about somewhere like Singapore (nominally democratic, but with a single party in power for decades and widely seen as authoritarian)?
> I am deliberately applying an individual level test to the social level. This is not fuzzy utopian everything-should-be-perfect idealism though. Think of it as an extensive test suite to run against a government's policies.
OK, but that doesn't answer the question. What's the pass/fail criterion for your test suite? For China to be such a particularly bad case, it seems like you must be focusing on those particular groups and weighting them more highly than in the actual veil of ignorance test (where one assumes an equal chance of being anyone), no?
This is interesting to read, I'm curious how this diverges/converges from the observation that:
In the West the words for referring to someone formally are words that used to refer to the nobility exclusively (Mister, Misses in English comes from 'Master, Mistress', Monsieur, Madamme in French, Señor, Señora in Spanish, derive from 'My Lord, My Lady' respectively).
So in the West, the cultural transformation was more than mere equality of political voice, but more, that 'we are all nobles', and (domestic?) political history in the West is the ever expanding circle of this inherent nobleness of all (arguably right down to trends in current American social issues).
'Rights' was something that, in the West, was first contested between the nobility and the King, then in the modern period between the wealthy merchant class and the nobility/royalty. James Madison, one of the American Revolution leaders, writes explicitly about how the masses are incapable of the requirements of absolute democracy. So there's definitely something to it when you point out that 'Democracy' in the West wasn't immediately interested in conferring a voice onto every Tom, Dick, and Harry (we'll just set aside the status of women and slaves)
You might be off about 'latter half of the 20th century' bringing electorialism to bear, rather the late 19th century/early 20th century was when, finally, the proletariat started demanding its rights, e.g. The Mexican Civil War that saw the establishment of collective farming lands, the struggle of labor and unions in America and Europe to secure worker's conditions backed by the threat of socialism (which, from Marx himself, is about endignity [ennoblement] of everyone's time), all of which, funny enough, have been desolving since the 90s (NAFTA eradicatd collective farming in Mexico).
Democracy in the West is more than a mere political configuration, its also the cultural precept (however divergent in interpretation), in stark contrast to what you're describing is the history of this idea in China, where, dare I say, the idea of ennoblement stops at a hard boundary unlike in the West.
P.S. I don't know a Chinese language so it may be that the words for formally addressing someone also share this genealogy of descending from terms formerly meant exclusively for nobility.
> Democracy in the West is more than a mere political configuration, its also the cultural precept (however divergent in interpretation)
This was a hard concept for my Thai wife to grasp at first. I described it this way.
In America, each person represents their own kingdom. The government exists to serve (and be subservient) and protect us to keep the peace. I always try to remind myself that government by the people, for the people means that the balance of power lies solely with the people.
This is all fine and good until the Chinese government is leading China down a path of aggression abroad or to a genocide such as in Xinjiang.
As a German believe me if I tell you that being under a totalitarian regime can backfire pretty quickly. It took Hitler only 6 years. Putin took longer but hundreds of thousands are dead for just this year alone.
Interconnectedness means that there's additional price everyone pays for (even a small) conflict erupting, and social ties that can disarm smaller conflicts before they get large.
On the other hand, the cost of significant armed conflict is already very, very high.
The market is unfalsifiable like a religion now. Free trade is captured by rent seekers who believe past success in one special context makes them the best person to handle any context. The memes are no longer based in historical religion, but the lack of critical challenge and blind allegiance to normal humans self aggrandizing story, being dictated at by they who live privileged lives far away is as traditional as it gets.
Coddling certain sensibilities and foisting nostalgia driven politics on the masses, tacit ageism towards youth through hand me down gossip and schooling of industrialist owners who need cheaper labor, are hardly hallmarks of a free society.
We moved manufacturing into rural areas a century ago seeking cheaper labor, then overseas for the same reason. Human agency is dictated by financiers empowered by political tradition. There’s no theory I know of that concludes they are absolutely making sound choices for anyone but themselves. The blind faith in grand schemes thing has got to go.
Interconnectedness exposes your countrymen more to other countries cultures - it is much harder to war against a people who you can't paint as a demonic "other". I don't really think that the private industrial sourcing concerns have any real pressure to apply against war - those industries aren't the government and, even with modern supply chain minimalism, it'll take a while for one or two industry sectors to really cause widespread pain to an economy. Those personal connections across borders, though, those are the best defense against war.
There are ethnic rivalries today in France. I’ll spare you the list, but lowly are paying with their life for some, and girls with their intimacy. It’s systematic in most big cities, anyone who hasn’t been bullied isn’t really living the diversity (spare me the “I know a guy and he’s very nice” – you haven’t lived the real diversity, the unchosen one).
Sometimes, when it doesn’t touch you, you have some fancy theoretical poetry about it; the closer you are, the more you notice how the other is, indeed, wow, gruesome.
You can and should have both. It's a form of defense at depth.
The theory of comparative advantage (David Ricardo) means it's worth specializing. But the counter argument (local resiliency) is also important -- but it may mean less efficiency in the short run, as a kind of investment against risk.
All that is fine, but it opens up the opportunity for short-sighted decisions (basically a mercantilist view that exports = good and imports = bad) like tariffs to protect local mfrs (which removes incentives for them to be efficient).
In short, like everything in life, there's not a sharp decision.
Entering war in 1914, one of the French traditional soldier costume included bright red pants (that made them easy to spot and shoot into on the field). The dye came from Germany. And it was very cheap!
And in 1812 the UK was the US's biggest trading partner. And that created major tensions in the US, with New England almost threatening secession over it. But the war still happened.
The economic relationship between New England and the UK had historically been adversarial up to this point in time. New England was in direct competition with the UK, as both regions were industrial and educated. The monarchy did everything in their power to starve New England of the resources and tradesmen they needed to succeed. This is in contrast to the rest of the USA, which was supplying raw resources for industry.
Friedman launched what I call Friedmanism: The belief that vapid and banal observations are the best way to understand the world. His McDonald's observation launched a thousand opinion writers to imitate him
The economic sanctions against Russia really do seem to be creating quite a lot of internal pressure to stop the war in Ukraine which is not going so well.
Without those sanctions, it is quite conceivable that a troubled war effort would not be nearly so much of a problem, but because of the trade dependency Russia feels quite threatened by the consequences of war. Not enough to have prevented it in the first place, but they overreaced.
Its the same for Ukrainians since EU big powers want the end of war because of economies even if it means Ukraine giving away their territories. You could argue without globalism and a lot of trade that pressure wouldn't exist.
The McDonald's leaving thing was always totally absurd to me for this reason. There are real examples of economic dependence that could and do cause problems. The owners withdrawing ownership though is a pure benefit to Russia. Threemployees get paid by the customers and get supplies from suppliers and all of that is totally unaffected. The only thing that changes is they pay less money to American buisness owners, so if anything, pay might go up or prices might drop as less is skimmed off the top.
How is it a benefit? I somehow doubt that with the supply chains interrupted, the new owners will be anywhere as efficient at their business as their predecessors.
Your analysis is incomplete at this point. We do not know what will be the outcome of war. How long will sanctions and general isolation of Russia hold and what that might result in.
Perhaps it will(as it seems now, also) be seen as catastrophic mistake. Like Russia selling Alaska to US. My point is, it is way to early to tell and even if we knew the outcome: we have to have few events/outcomes like that for them to become an example of mistake to not make.
Generally countries can do whatever, despite all. It is more important we deter them and have tools to do that as broader "world" community. Otherwise we would have to forcefully own "other" countries to secure such peace.
I'd like to think, though, that today's economic connections are less replaceable than wooden stocks or steel tubes. Try replacing modern electronics with local resources when you're Russia, for example.
What evidence do you have to make this claim? A simple thought experiment proves the counter. Let's say there is a population on one island, and another population on another island, and these populations have no way of reaching each other or even knowing of each others existence. These not-connected populations are guaranteed not to go to war. However, give one of them the means of reaching the other population, and most assuredly the chance of war has gone up not down.
If you like ad absurdum arguments: if you connect the countries together so much, they eventually decide to become one country and the chance of war goes down, not up (excluding civil war)
Austria, World War II. Some people saw annexation, others saw reunification, others still saw a bunch of cowards surrendering without firing a single shot.
With all of these things, context matters. If memory serves, Austria being an independent state was one of the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, so if that had been the last act instead of the opening chapter, there still would have been hell to pay. Perhaps not on a par with Caesar crossing the Rubicon, but definitely starting something that requires a resolution.
I don't think they like ad absurdum arguments. But without systematic evidence, there is not way to determine if if such an argument is actually any less valid then the initial claim.
It is actually pretty easy to provide a proof of effectiveness for vaccines. The theory of peace through interconnected and colonies is more complicated. All we have are arguments, and these are not even that convincing. Every trade connection requires compromise, and risks one party feeling taken advantage off. Often rightfully so.
See, that's the problem with franchises. If every McDonald's was run directly by McDonald's HQ, then surely McDonald's would have pressured Putin not to attack Ukrainian cities with McDonald's restaurants in them.
If Taiwan didn't have the world's most advanced semiconducter industry, which China (and all other nations) rely on, China would have long ago attacked it.
So that's an easy example of how trade helps keeps peace.
I think the problem is, decision makers need to understand what interconnectedness means, and not just on an abstract level. If you make things, you're intimately familiar with just how many components come from China. You're deeply aware of the fact the machines you use are made in basically every country in the globe. That the materials you consume come from literally every corner of the planet.
People tend to think about globalization as a matter of buying discrete commodities from different places: bananas from panama. They don't understand that essentially all products today are amalgams from different factories scattered across the globe. That leads to crazy weird decisions like Brexit, silly trade wars, etc. People don't realize that cutting a country out of the system is less like not talking to somebody, and more like cutting out a big chunk of one of your organs.
This is also the problem with something like the Buy American Act. I recently heard about a case where pipes(?) had to be pulled back out of the ground because it was discovered that the steel for the bolts had come from China. All this creates enormous overhead and worsens inflation, not make it better.
I used to believe that but have started to serious doubt it. Some counter-arguments:
1. It's reasoning a'la "It's economically inefficient therefore it's less likely to happen". In my opinions, governments are absolute experts in implementing economically nonsensical policies, international conflicts included.
2. Any link between nations can be weaponized, i.e. imposing tariffs, banning imports/exports, and so on. The greater your dependency on me the more ways I have to harm you.
3. Such weaponization will naturally harm your own citizens but you, as a decision maker, will bear very little cost.
4. The easier it is for me to replace you with an alternative the more likely I am to use that against you -- this is classic BATNA. You don't like my export quota? So what, I've got more interest than I can handle and you can build your batteries without lithium if you don't like that.
Economics is relative. If you go to war and win, you are wealthier than the enemy who lost. If you are confident of victory, the "cost of war" thus matters less, because you get on top anyway.
Of course this only applies in a vaccuum. If there are any nations you don't attack and win, they can just build up their economy while you tank yours fighting and then swoop in to defeat you on the cusp of your victory.
Basic strategy in the game of Civilization. The rest of the world gangs up against a warmonger and unless they can promptly achieve world domination, ultimately self-destruct.
Interconnected yes, centralized somewhere out of your control? preferably no.
In this case, you don't want to be dependent on one geopolitically unstable island. If there is a war, it won't be the EU's decision to start/stop it. You'd want China to be dependent on EU and vice versa, to make it costly to start a war. But if China has nothing to loose by attacking Taiwan and the West would loose all advanced electronics... This is not going to bring any kind of stability. You might only be forced to buy those chips from China, giving the potential aggressor even more leverage (and money)
Given the recent news I think that there is no correlation. Russia and the EU are giving each other the finger and no amount of mutual trade changed Russia's long standing attitude of taking all they can get (of course all global powers do that.) Actually, no trade at all between Russia and the EU would have made that area of the world more stable: the EU won't have to scramble to replace energy providers and no sanction could harm Russia. There would still be a war but nothing else.
For generic trade, yes. But 2020-2022 taught us about what happens to supply chains in emergencies.
In March 2020, I made the following predictions:
1) National governments will do what it takes short to provide for their citizens, even if they have to print money to do so, and risk inflation. Check.
2) Supply chains will be shaken up, costs for most goods will go up. Check
3) National governments in Western countries will seek to have strategic industries moved back to domestic or friendly territories. Check.
4) International trust will detoriate, and international conflict will become more likely. Check.
5) As inflation goes up, central banks will try to raise interest rates, but too slowly and too little. Check.
6) At some point, interest rates will rise to a level that causes a severe recession, with rising unemployment, even though inflation still remains higher than the interest rate. As people take to the street, central banks are forced to lower the interest rate, and possibly resume QE. Still open.
7. As interest rates go down, inflation goes even higher than before step 5. It will remain like this for the best part of 10 years (with high volatility), before some countries are willing to take the Volcker medicine for real.
8. As the economic forest fire ends, debts are erased, retirees have lost their savings and the next super-cycle begins.
It’s also very good at securing international ossification, creating a stultifying society of sameness, with the same few billionaires, multinationals, and technocrats running the show, pushing societal and international stability in service of profits.
I don’t think the result is a net positive. It looks more like keeping a lid on justified dissatisfaction while preventing any upset of the status quo.
You have a little feedback loop here because if you optimize only at a global scale and ignore local scale, you could create unstable local scale systems which destablize the global system as well. Hence the many current failures of neoliberalism.
And of course, as you point out, if you only optimize on the local scale and ignore the global scale, you'll also create an unstable system. Hence the failures of extreme nationalism we've seen historically.
Both cases can lead to instability because of their relationship to one another (the global system is composed of localized systems). You need to look at balance across the entire picture, which means you can't just ignore your own country and its people but you also can't ignore the rest of the world, either. It's tough trying to create a good stable global system that isn't disenfranchizing some large segment of the population.
Up to a point. Like anything, there’s trade-offs that have to be considered. Globalization, at its maximum, would centralize the production of resources to places that are most efficient. As we’ve seen, this causes huge problems when the production and/or distribution systems go down. We finally got a taste of that and are paying the price for it. Some level of decentralization will be good, but hopefully we don’t overdo it and end up too far in the other direction.
I think the parent makes a better point in concrete terms. Geopolitically interconnected trade is all well and good in theory, but putting two superpowers at odds over the consolidation of oxygen right off the coast of one of them, with a long-standing grudge between them into the bargain has obvious implications for stability.
All of economics looks great on paper until basically any little happenstance quirk utterly breaks the whole thing.
> Geopolitically interconnected trade is all well and good in theory, but putting two superpowers at odds
one impression i get is that perhaps economists and leaders thought they could just leave everything to the market - interconnectedness economically through world-wide ("free" market) capitalism - and then they could politically hang up their hats so-to-speak (everything would take care of itself) because everyone would reach great prosperity
obviously, as we have seen in the past 40 years, both within and without there has been alot of economic turmoil (economic crisis) instead of pure prosperity and it turns out politicians couldn't outsource their jobs to the market
countries and regions need to politically strive for peace, cooperation and friendship, the market and trade isn't enough imo
A system that doesn't rely on perpetual tension in the search for ever expanding profit would be far better for stability. It's typically been the case that the ones who have the most influence in government know how to make huge profits from instability and conflict. Take a look at the companies making huge profits from the current instability.
Multiple single points of failure is an oxymoron. Either there is one point of failure and it's "single", or there are multiple and by definition no longer "single".
You are being pedantic. The expression "multiple points of failure" is commonly used to refer to a single system that can be disrupted in multiple ways. They are are clearly referring to multiple independent systems where each system has its own singular point of failure.
There's no contradiction in interconnected economies being both better for global stability and more volatile to global instability. On a populist level, these kinds of questions are always presented as either-or, when in reality it is a pretty delicate balancing act. No, we shouldn't be completely reliant on potentially adversarial states for our basic well-being, but intertwined economies change the cost-benefit-analysis of a lot of adversarial geopolitical actions, and that has led to a lot less war in the world.
The USSR and United States had zero trade and never went to war. And since the fall of the USSR the number of conflicts has not gone down. Ukraine and Russia were very interconnected, but that did not prevent the invasion.
If you’re talking about global supply chain disruption, isn’t that more about lack of robustness than it is about interconnectedness? I don’t see how preemptively reducing global trade in the years leading up to this pandemic would have helped, unless you just mean that we would have gotten used to doing without certain things earlier.
Nah, this is a bargain. Rather than chasing the technology for 50 years, they just waited until it's already mature (2nm may be the end of the road?) and spend a few billion after all the development has happened elsewhere. BTW Germany is already home to some fairly advanced non-EUV fabs with Global Foundries.
>However, it has been shown that access to quantum memory in principle allows computational algorithms that require arbitrarily small amount of energy/time per one elementary computation step.[6][7]
I don't think this is why fabs were centralized. I think this is because when you start to decrease node size, the fab costs go up astronomically so to keep the cost in check you need economies of scale and with the current manufacturing techniques you can achieve this by centralizing manufacturing.
The cutting edge of software that mostly uses these advanced process node sizes is not horribly inefficient. The new applications enabled by, for example, GPU-accelerated ML are not the same as running 400 chrome tabs on an M1.
The hot paths in most important high-end computing are mostly quite efficient.
> The hot paths in most important high-end computing are mostly quite efficient.
it’s hard to determine the lower bound on a lot of these things. in scientific computing (e.g. physics sims) i still run across a lot of runtime branching that could easily be compiled out if we were using languages that had stronger type systems/templates. we use linear approximations for a lot of things, but it’s been shown that smarter interpolation can let you decrease your resolution without losing accuracy/stability. there’s an easy 2x or more perf gain every time you do that successfully. there’s also the boundary conditions: we always simulate more volume of space than we’re actually interested in so as to avoid certain types of distortion (reflections from the boundary of the simulation). over time we’ve learned tricks for reducing those reflections: we’ve applied a lot of general-purpose optimizations, but there’s evidence that we can go further if we encode more simulation-specific information at these boundaries. this whole area has just been slow, steady, compounded optimizations.
i don’t work in ML, but i find it very unlikely that (a) optimizing neural networks is a completely solved problem or (b) that you all know how to train them using the fewest iterations.
you make sweeping statements that just aren't obvious to me.
You seem to be arguing against "optimal", while quoting parent's "mostly quite efficient". The reality is that while everything is converging to a locally optimal point on the tradeoff curve, a _lot_ of software out there runs in the "hardware is my driving cost" locale. This makes companies squeeze epsilons out of their servers. There's also the "selling hardware is my profit centre", which end-users get to pay for.
> If push came to shove we might just consider making better software?
as you say, "a _lot_ of software out there runs in the 'hardware is my driving cost' locale." if something changed -- say, we lost access to high-end fabs -- then my argument is that we have room to focus higher on the stack to make this far less impactful than it would otherwise be. in most places, software is not "optimal", as you seem to agree. in very few places have we even calculated a bound of what optimal _is_. the HPC example was to highlight the latter part: we shift from something like a linear gradient descent to some different descent algorithm and it works better in practice. ML training techniques are always changing to get faster convergence. very, very few of these HPC areas have actual, well-defined performance bounds. it's just a tradeoff of "how much do we invest in algorithms" v.s. "how much do we invest in hardware". i read GP as suggesting otherwise, based on the content of the comment they were replying to.
i'm not even sure there's a disagreement between you and i. maybe not even between me and sneak. i kinda wonder if all of us here just have a different number in mind for what qualifies as "mostly quite efficient". i'm completely confident we have at least 2x perf gains sitting around in just about any computational area that's presently dominated by hardware costs (e.g. HPC, but not e.g. packet-switching/networking). 10x perf gains in many of them: not by micro-optimizing things like memory allocations, but by being inventive with algorithms. that kind of gain is meaningful to me in this area: enough that i wouldn't dismiss it as "mostly quite efficient" as a rebuttal against that original "if push came to show we might just consider making better software".
It's depressing how bloated and slow some software is despite running on way faster machines. The software engineering accomplished in the 90's was nothing short of astonishing.
Software is bloated and slow to make it faster to develop mostly.
Look at your average website with 85 megabytes of JavaScript and Bootstrap for the UI.
TreeShaking in theory can get rid of all that unneeded JS - and there should be something that can do it for CSS, too.
But most people aren't using it. And even if they did, there would still be a lot of bloat left over from using the libraries to make life a little bit easier.
Go to average midsize startup and the amount of this going on is multiplied exponentially by the number of developers.
There's not really a cure here.
There's not enough engineers that know how to do things absent these frameworks - that even if you do know - it's still not worth it because the people you'll be working with probably don't.
Right now, the raw material will come from China because that's where the resources are developed. But once a fab is in place, it makes sense to push more to develop local resources, or at least among more diverse allies.
It doesn't make sense to do that now, because you'd just be shipping local resources to a foreign fab, so that's still a bottleneck. But I think having a local fab is the tipping-point.
copper, silicon, gold, aluminum are sourced from many countries so they wouldn't need any raw materials from any particular country. Also the machines used to make the Fabs are sourced right next door in the Netherlands
"ASML has five manufacturing locations worldwide. Our lithography systems are assembled in cleanrooms in Veldhoven, the Netherlands, while some critical subsystems are made in different factories in San Diego, California, and Wilton, Connecticut, as well as other modules and systems in Linkou and Tainan, Taiwan."
And you can assume those factories depend on sub-assemblies from lower tier factories which are made in even more places.
ASML's core IP was developed and is owned by the US government, that's why they can't ship anything to China without the US's permission. ASML has some fancy stuff but is entirely dependent on the US at the end of the day
There is no alternative. Without EUV machines (produced solely by ASML), anything below 10nm is infeasible until we find a different way that works at scale.
That's really interesting, I had not heard those names in this space before. I would have expected Applied Materials. Maybe Nikon and Canon are suppliers of optics to the more industry specific companies?
Nikon actually supplied the machines for Intel through their 10nm debacle. Canon has completely retired into the low end market, but used to be massive. You're right that I forgot about Applied Materials.
I think historically it's been a challenge mostly related to precision optics, given that semi production is more or less like exposing photographic paper from a negative, through a lens using a light source.
With EUV the challenge is the crazy difficulty of generating the required light source at the right intensity and focusing it. At that wavelength things behave differently, to say the least.
Intel
FLIR
DeBeers
Westinghouse for nuclear stuff
Lots of specialty suppliers for aerospace where there is only one or two companies that do a particular thing.
It took decades for ASML to successfully develop EUV lithography. It was widely thought to be impractical prior to that. No one else was willing to even try.
ASML is not a leaf in the dependency tree of the global semiconductor fab supply chain. It does in turn rely on several other highly specialized partners to supply them with custom-developed components for lithography machines, well-known ones are for example Zeiss and Trumpf (both based in Germany). These partners probably duplicate a significant amount of knowledge necessary to build EUV machines, considering that their components were developed in tight partnership with ASML.
ASML is prohibited from shipping its newest machines to China by the Dutch government, because of heavy US pressure. I'm sure China would love ASML to be fully based there.
May have had something to do with these tweets [1] from Emily Haber @GermanAmbUSA German Ambassador to USA:
>> "The current geopolitical situation and its impact on supply chains has triggered a discussion about “technological sovereignty” in the US and Europe. For us, it means being able to help shape future technologies in line with our values. We see the USA as natural partners in this."
>> "It's one reason our Minister for Education and Research is visiting Washington. Welcome, Minister @starkwatzinger
. Your visit will deepen our cooperation as we face intense global challenges! 2/2"
Why is the local fab specifically important? They're still going to fly the wafers to Malaysia or wherever for packaging, right? And the tools and chemicals will all be made elsewhere, won't they? It's not as simple as having a steady supply of apples from your local orchard.
I'd imagine it won't replace the entire supply chain in one go (although I think quite a bit of semiconductor tooling is already manufactured in the EU), but I think it's a step on the path towards that. Which is probably a good thing considering how fragile it appears some of our hyper-efficient globalised supply chains can be
(1) German BASF is one of the manufactures for "semiconductor chemicals".
(2) More important: Getting parts from Malaysia (etc) is no issue as I don't think they plan to attack any neighboring countries in the next decade. Also, they did not start a trade boycott against Lithuania just over the name of an trade office.
If there is a conflict with China, maritime routes will become much less reliable than they are now, after 75+ years of peace and 30+ years of a unipolar international system.
Plus, I suspect that in a The West vs China war a country like Malaysia will think twice before choosing a side, and I'm afraid they won't choose the West by default.
Malaysia can still be a partner, however this is a big step that opens the door for replacing labor in distant countries with another EU neighbour. This is good for the entire EU.
Yep. Accelerate the global warming for inefficient waste on local fab and pollute the environment globally. For the national security, we could sacrifice all countries including ourself. Hillarius.
Doesn't feel to me like microchips are in such short supply that any more would significantly contribute to the economy. Am I just unaware of the crisis going on all around me?
That wasn't the parent's argument. But, incredibly enough, there really is a shortage in microchips that has lead, among other problems, to shutdown of whole production lines for cars.
It doesn't necessarily matter to have local fabs: at least in the current situation, the worldwide chip production is still a mostly free market with products being sold to the highest bidder independent of location (as long as it's not Russia). But the confidence of this state continuing is certainly lower than it was a few years ago.
> When China attacks Taiwan, the 1st world is fucked.
China would be shooting themselves in the foot by invading, because it would equally fuck them. I've read in may places that as soon as China invades, Taiwan will blow up all the fabs and supporting supply lines. So even if China takes control of Taiwan, the semiconductor industry will be a smoldering pile of nothingness.
This article[1] does a great job in describing why this would be the case. Even if China prevents the destruction of those fabs and factories, there would still be tons of obstacles.
We just have example of another country shooting itself in the foot and attacking Ukraine despite a wealth of widely known arguments against doing this. Unfortunately logic and common sense sometimes take back sit in politics.
Especially when it comes to despotic life-long leaders. After 2018, Xi no longer has to worry about the pretense of term limits. We can only hope the state of Russia after the Ukrainian conflict is a convincing enough lesson.
Invading Taiwan...the risks are substantial and the gain is legacy. Hardly a convincing for a nation, but potentially convincing for a man facing mortality.
> We can only hope the state of Russia after the Ukrainian conflict is a convincing enough lesson
We can also hope that the US refrains from creating another conflict to try to provoke China the same way they have been doing in Ukraine for the last 8 years. This "Pacific NATO" is the next thing. I am very pessimistic because the US is not going to allow China to overtake them in any way, and they have been behaving like that in their entire history.
I've heard the "TSMC self-destruct" story a lot, but I haven't found a source. All I can find are people repeating the claim. Is there a source anywhere?
It's been internet meme for few years when TSMC node lead was evident, and recently someone at US Army War College picked up on concept and wrote a paper suggesting TW should blow up their own fabs to deter PRC invasion when PRC had eyes on invading TW before semiconductors even existed. I guess TW media saw this as serious traction and pushed some articles basically saying "leave TSMC alone". The idea is flawed because preserving TSMC is the only barginning chip for TW, especially post war reconstruction. It's the difference between rebuilding from a advanced/developed economy to rebuilding from a agrarian one. Even with chip act and all the expansion on going, TW is projected to hold onto 90% of advanced node production for a while. It's not in TW/US interest to burn this. Nor PRC but direction of profits and reliant industry means it affects west more. Imagine being the TW leadership asking to be evacuated to US for protection after destroying supply chains of US companies worth trillions. Guessing in 5-10 years when PRC has semi sufficient domestic production, even if a few nodes behind, the meme will be PRC will preemptively destroy TSMC to make TW less desirable to protect.
>> China would be shooting themselves in the foot by invading, because it would equally fuck them. I've read in may places that as soon as China invades, Taiwan will blow up all the fabs and supporting supply lines. So even if China takes control of Taiwan, the semiconductor industry will be a smoldering pile of nothingness.
That sounds incredibly stupid. If China invading is shooting themselves in the foot, then Taiwan blowing up their (worlds most advanced) fabs would be suicide. Nobody ever won a conflict by doing that.
What makes Taiwan inherently better than somewhere else ? If it's just for historical and/or economical reason I don't see why Europe or the US couldn't build their own chemical plants.
You have to start somewhere, it took us decades to delocalise everything to Asia, it'll take decades to build these industries locally.
You have just asked why we can't "just move manufacturing out of China:"
There are no individual chemical plants, there are huge chemical complexes owned by many companies with own well guarded know hows. There may be 2-4 suppliers in a row producing some intermediary product used in making of only 1 output.
Just to make the semiconductor grade hyperpure propanol you need ultrapure catalysts, ultrapure sulphuric acid, ultrapure water, and ultrapure input hydrocarbon stock. Ah, forgot, you also needs an ultrapure tare manufacturer, because bottles you ship ultrapure materials are single use.
You need decades just to replicate this. Now you need to move 100+ of such material chains.
> If it's just for historical and/or economical reason
Simple answer, yes! Taiwan has quietly swallowed near an entirety of the wider precision manufacturing industry.
It been consistently swallowing very capital intensive industries producing exportable niche products one after another simply because nobody else been taking such hard, and risky ventures. Yes, their profitability is not high, but their "moat" is gigantic.
Taiwan been an industrial titan for 20+ years, and the US only finds out about it now.
> You need decades just to replicate this. Now you need to move 100+ of such material chains.
I think decades is a stretch. Keep in mind most of these chains sprung up in the last 3 decades organically in Taiwan and China (and many of them are still elsewhere-- e.g. BASF is still a titan.)
If it's a national priority, you can get some production going a lot faster than this.
> If it's a national priority, you can get some production going a lot faster than this.
Defeating CoVID was too a national priority. Did they manage to build a single new mask manufacturing line?
No, but they actually tried really hard. Dozens of companies were recruited for the effort, and they just gave up after realising that they can't even get a single part in the blowing machine to be made in the US.
> Defeating CoVID was too a national priority. Did they manage to build a single new mask manufacturing line?
I don't think this is a fair representation of what happened. US capacity existed and some additional came online, but then largely failed because of overseas product still coming in below their cost. Semiconductors after a shooting war with China would be a different picture: an imminent return to normalcy wouldn't be in everyone's economic calculations.
Your argument sounds like one for local investment in fabs. The point is that you develop industry (with subsidies) and the ancillary industries follow and then you (and the rest of the world) are not dependent on a single source.
Of course it's not enough to just pay Intel to open a fab you have to compete successfully with places like Taiwan and have a growing industry, otherwise that won't happen. That's the main risk here.
Resource extraction and refinement are much lower capital-cost infrastructure than a chip fab. If, God forbid, all the eggs in that one basket get smashed, it's far more feasible for that infrastructure to be developed elsewhere.
