As Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo was visiting China earlier this week, a sea-green Chinese smartphone was quietly launched online.

It was no normal gadget. And its launch has sparked hushed concern in Washington that U.S. sanctions have failed to prevent China from making a key technological advance. Such a development would seem to fulfill warnings from U.S. chipmakers that sanctions wouldn’t stop China, but would spur it to redouble efforts to build alternatives to U.S. technology.

  • elouboub@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Tighten the restrictions again please. Back China into a corner so that they can innovate themselves out of it and we can have some proper competition. This is great news.

    What a dumb assumption to make that China would crumble without Western tech. Do they think the rest of the world would just return to the dark ages ? Do they believe non-Westerners can’t think? So dumb.

      • cnnrduncan@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        Yeah I reckon we need less authoritarian capitalism, not more of it in slightly different flavours!

      • loki@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        Competition is always good for the consumers. Having two authoritarian country competing means you can at least diversify where your data goes. Both will be trying to be at the top of the pyramid and products will get cheaper.

        People will figure out a way to use them without the backdoors. Like how people currently buy cheap chinese phones and install LineageOS, or how people de-google with e/os/ or Graphene OS. Hardware backdoors will be a problem as they always have been but even they can be reverse engineered and patched.

        If West or China is hostile to your country and threat model, use tech from the other side, and vice versa.

        The west and especially US likes to sanction countries that don’t bend over for them and everyone joins in because they are afraid of the same retaliation. Every country is realizing that it’s not in their best interest to be a lapdog for a single super power. This opens up opportunities for bargains and not be on chokehold as it is now.

        It’ll be worrying if a single entity becomes the sole global leader in tech.

    • AggressivelyPassive@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      A lot of opinion for so little knowledge.

      The assumption was never that China would “crumble”, but that its pace would slow down. Nothing more. And that also was what was publicly said.

    • MasterBuilder@lemmy.one
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      You assume too much, yourself. I think the point is the U.S. finally realized they were giving away critical technology to a nation that not so secretly plans to replace them.

      Unfortunately, I think they were asleep too long, and China has enough knowledge to press forward without stealing from Americans.

      Now, America must accept the fact they fucked up and have to compete as equals, which is much more difficult.

    • unix_joe@lemmy.sdf.org
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      1 year ago

      I am going to say the unspoken part out loud: it’s rooted in Hitler’s “Creators, Maintainers, Destroyers” view of race.

      The fact that this article exists at all shows how deeply rooted the sentiment is, even if 95% of the people regurgitating it don’t see themselves as racist or know that this is what their society has conditioned them to believe.

      Asians only get tech by copying and stealing from the West. So when the “free market” West gets bothered by a little bit of competition and enforces protectionist measures, Asians who aren’t willing to whore out their women to Westerners are supposed to come crawling back and accept sanctions as punishment for trying to be uppity. It’s a shock to the system that China was able to keep innovating independently in a different direction, that can’t easily be attributed to IP theft. It’s not about the 7nm process; it’s about the entire SoC.

      There are a lot of dogwhistles and things left unspoken in these articles and TikTok videos (where I saw it first) and I’m sure the “well ackshually nobody ever said that” jackasses are ready to pounce on this comment so it’s probably best to just leave it at this:

      Unilateral protectionism has been a fucking disaster for consumers. All we got out of it was increased prices. A maxed out iPhone in 2016 cost $949. A maxed out iPhone in 2023 costs seventeen hundred fucking dollars and Samsung has done the same increase over that period. Less choice meant less competition and the duopoly was able to further entrench in their positions. This phone would be competitive with flagships at half the price. Why is that a bad thing?

      • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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        1 year ago

        Lol no. Hitler has nothing to do with it, and the racism that far predates him is always a factor, but isn’t required in this case.

        Professional innovators are delicate creatures that don’t naturally do well in human societies. In the West, a rigid legal system has protected them from whatever established people they want to “disrupt” pretty much since WWII. In most other places, war and chaos (yes, thanks largely to the West) has disrupted that, and present day cronyism continues to hamper it.

        The historical USSR was the same, good engineers making brilliant use of basic technologies and concepts developed in the West. There were no Soviet startups, and on the occasion researchers invented something new it tended to kind of go nowhere because they weren’t appreciated fully by higher-ups. Their адрес programming language was invented 10 years ahead of C, but they finished the Cold War 10 years behind on computing.

    • donuts@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      If we pay China and Taiwan to manufacture all of our stuff they probably don’t even need to buy it from us as they can easily just copy it.

      • admiralteal@kbin.social
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        It’s absolutely bizarre that you grouped Taiwan and China together in this sentiment.

        Taiwan being a silicon powerhouse is literally part of a deliberate strategy by western nations, especially the US, to combat Chinese manufacturing. They were supplied with science and technology. They have the license agreements. They’re one of the cadre of nations that are currently waving protectionist flags against the “threat” of Chinese manufacturing.

        It’d be like putting the Dutch in the list. Except even weirder, because there is not any semblance of abnormal diplomacy/hostility between Amsterdam and Beijing.

        • donuts@kbin.social
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          I’m simply referring to things like this, which I believe (but can’t really prove, so I could be wrong) happens more often than we’d like.

          I’m probably wrong. I’m not claiming to be an expert, and I’m not trying to equate Taiwan with China.

        • MasterBuilder@lemmy.one
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          1 year ago

          So you don’t believe that Communist China could possibly get away with espionage against ethinic and cultural Chinese Taiwan?

          Interesting.

          You also don’t appear to consider the clear intention of Communist China’s plans to annex Taiwan.

          Also interesting. Do you know the history behind the creation of Taiwan? If there was a “clear plan”, I would say it was ill conceived.

          • admiralteal@kbin.social
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            1 year ago

            Are you legitimately saying that we should treat Taiwan as the same as China just because its citizens are the same race? Jesus fucking christ, dude. Take a deep breath, look in the mirror, and reconsider that racist ass position.

            Straight up Tankie shit, the rest.

            • MasterBuilder@lemmy.one
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              1 year ago

              No, but the fact you think that is telling. I’m saying it’s a wholevlot easier for Chinese to spy on Chinese. Just like it’s easier for Americans to spy on Americans.

              How did you come to the conclusion I’m Communist out of that? Again, your assumptions are telling. Spend some time with a mirror.

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                1 year ago

                Ah, who else does that logic apply to? We should treat South Korea the same as DPRK because they’re all Korean, right? It’s easy for Koreans to spy on other Koreans since they’re all the same. And DPRK intends to one day annex South Korea! Ditto for Ukraine and Russia. I bet we can do a lot of these, where we racially categorize nations based on western cultural ideas that have nothing to do with local political conditions and declare them to be the same.

                Fuck allll the way off you fucking racist fuck.

                • MasterBuilder@lemmy.one
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                  1 year ago

                  Are straw men all you have? When did I say we should treat Taiwan the same as China? I said they are the same culture and history. The same situation exists for Korea.

                  Anyway, you are just looking for a fight, so I’m disengaging since nothing I say will change your understanding of what I said.

          • P03 Locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            1 year ago

            Do you know the history behind the creation of Taiwan?

            Yes, the creation of Taiwan… in 1624. Or, if you want to talk about the China’s history of Taiwan, then it’s 1945.

            In either case, way too fucking far back to have any sort of diplomatic weight in a conversation, except as an excuse for racism.

            • MasterBuilder@lemmy.one
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              1 year ago

              Where does the racism enter the picture? This is about the civil war in China, in which the non-communists were driven out to Taiwan in 1949.

              The Communists took the mainland and intend to finally destroy their enemies.kind of the way north Korea wants to take over south Korea.