[starchild_3001]

If you're reading a tech news coming out of China, and aren't thinking about politics, you're doing something wrong.

Every tech company in China is in part owned or supported by the chinese government. Hard to talk about "independent tech". They're more like "national tech".

Today and the next 50 years in tech is being defined by the competition between the two superpowers. Their national objectives differ vastly. China: aiming to invade Taiwan; proving everyone that their totalitarian system is competitive with democracy; proving that they can lead the world. US aiming to stay a leader; maintaining the global stability; maintaining the economic & military supremacy. Both economies are trying to slowly decouple from each other, gain independence, and prove their superiority. This is the story of our ages.

[liuliu]

China exuberates when private sector exuberates. It is equally naive on both the West (like your comment) and the CCP side to think that being supported by the government and government-sponsored industrial espionage is / was the why of China's economic miracle.

In the past 3 decades, it was repeatedly shown in China that government subsidies was only useful to a extent and created incredible amount of waste. The state-owned enterprises never hired or supported the most vibrant part of the community (middle classes in urban areas).

The success of companies in China, like in the rest of the world, can be attributed to the wits and lucks of their founders.

TBH, that is why the future of China looks grim to me. The current leadership seems unable to properly recognize the contribution of the private sector.

OTOH, people in the West looked at China, and imagined all the private enterprises are secretly owned by the government and the government picked winners / losers. That was simply not the winning formula in the past 30 years.

I can have a longer essay to establish this with data and examples, but it is too late. Probably save it for another day.

[emodendroket]

I really do not think a Taiwan invasion is imminent, at least short of a huge provocation.

[simne]

Ha! I live in Kiev, Ukraine, and just 46 days ago I thought absolutely same about possible Russian invasion to Ukraine. Now I few days per week spend on finding products to eat, because we have real war and we have some problems with supply (I will not ask you to talk here about military needs, but they are also exists and they are very significant).

Now I thank to Gods, for my friends decisions, who where not agree with me and evacuated their families, before I change my mind.

[emodendroket]

Well, telling the future is always a hard business, but that situation has not really changed my thinking on Taiwan. The situations are too different. The US is not just going to sit back and watch one of their key waystations in Asia get bled out the way they have with Ukraine.

[simne]

I believe, we will both agree, that best for all world, if Ukraine will survive invasion, and Taiwan will also survive. Or if China will decide to not invade at all, considering what US sanctions are doing to Russia.

- For me one possible explanation of all these crazy things, that Russian officials in reality are puppets of Chinese, and this way China tests, what will happen if... And now Chinese have received dataset, an will decide, are possible consequences acceptable for them.

[chillacy]

For numbers, Metaculus collectively puts China annexing Taiwan by 2050 at around 50%: https://www.metaculus.com/questions/5320/chinese-annexation-...

30 years is a long time for forecasting though, afaik forecasting accuracy in tournaments drops as a function of time.

[AussieWog93]

>For numbers, Metaculus collectively puts China annexing Taiwan by 2050 at around 50%

I really don't see how that's any more accurate than tea leaves or bones...

One could just as easily argue it's 84%, because a crackhead gave him that number in response to a cheeseburger.

[chillacy]

This is the track record for Metaculus (the chart at the end) showing historically a 10% swing in predictions of 50% historically by aggregated forecasters on the site: https://www.metaculus.com/questions/track-record/

Granted this tells us nothing about the accuracy of any one particular question, but on aggregate Metaculus is pretty well calibrated.

That said, there is a longstanding academic debate between "forecasting can tell us useful things" (Telock) and "black swans will ruin your life" (Taleb).

[AussieWog93]

>Granted this tells us nothing about the accuracy of any one particular question

I think this is where my skepticism comes from.

Just because one can make certain predictions with reasonable accuracy (e.g. Scott Morrison will lose the upcoming Australian election, Joe Biden will die in office, Elon Musk will be the richest man in the world by 2030), it says nothing about their ability to predict other questions with far less information (such as if and when the CCP will invade Taiwan).

[chillacy]

That's a fair take. In research about forecasting, they do indeed find that timeline greatly impacts forecasting accuracy.

Even if we were to fix this particular bucketing issue with a large enough dataset of foreign policy predictions X months into the future... one could still say this tells us nothing about this specific question because... maybe even among the geopolitical questions, this question is somehow different in some way which makes it noncomparable.

Or by analogy it would be like we were flipping what we think are coins and someone snuck a dice roll on one of the tries. Maybe the Taiwan question is the dice roll and therefore not subject to comparison with other geopolitical questions X years out.

This is of course afaik an unknowable problem, and Taleb would agree that we should just assume these predictions are tea-leaves.

At the same time it may be a valuable source of info (certainly imo more empirical than pundits and the news)

For consideration:

https://english.elpais.com/science-tech/2022-03-26/is-it-pos...

[emodendroket]

It's a long time for forecasting and even if it's right it's far from "imminent."

[trasz]

>Every tech company in China is in part owned or supported by the chinese government.

So it’s exactly like the US.

>China: aiming to invade Taiwan

China hasn’t invaded anyone for decades. US had.

[starchild_3001]

>> Every tech company in China is in part owned or supported by the chinese government.

> So it’s exactly like the US.

Here's a bit of news for you. "China’s Global 500 companies are bigger than ever—and mostly state-owned" - Fortune https://fortune.com/2015/07/22/china-global-500-government-o...

Here's top 500 companies in USA. Do you know how many of them are state owned? I think that number is zero. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_S%26P_500_companies

Are chinese tech companies really state owned? Well they're mostly funded by the government based on this news article (venture capital), so they're at least in part state owned. https://www.businesstimes.com.sg/technology/in-china-tech-is...

"An executive at a Chinese search engine recently summed up the new dynamic: We're entering an era in which we'll be fused together. It might be that there will be a request to establish a Party committee within your company, or that you should let state investors take a stake, you know, as a form of mixed ownership. If you think clearly about this, you really can resonate together with the state."

Us government spending and support compared to these effort is miniscule. Yes, they have some green energy initiatives (e.g. Tesla, Solar City benefited from those). But in the big scheme of things, us public investment in tech is about zero.

Learn some capitalism, my friend :) Remember Chinese (state owned and controlled) capitalism isn't what we call capitalism around here. Chinese capitalism is a bit like "chinese democracy". Not quite the real thing :)

>> China: aiming to invade Taiwan

> China hasn’t invaded anyone for decades. US had.

Not every invasion is wrong. The world needs a police, otherwise bad guys create chaos. China? They think Taiwan belongs to them. Which is crazy if you ask 26M Taiwanese.

[simne]

> China hasn’t invaded anyone for decades

Do you know history? There where at least two big open struggles - against USSR and against India. Also there where lot of hidden interventions - to Vietnam, to Korea, to Afghanistan, where China don't look as main hero, but without their intervention, world will be totally different.

For example, without China intervention, we wouldn't have North Korea; probably capitalist South Vietnam would have survived and would be very strong player on world markets; we wouldn't have Taliban, which destroyed civilization level historical monuments; etc.

[trasz]

I don’t have a problem with “struggles”; every country has those. What I do have a problem with is wars. As in, when actual people die.

Without US we wouldn’t have North Korea either - the only reason it exists is that this prevents US from placing military bases there. Taliban was literally funded and trained by CIA; not sure what Chinese involvement was?

[simne]

You have very strange look on history.

North Korea appears because of Russian intervention, lead by Joseph Stalin.

Taliban was toy movement, nothing serious, before Russian intervention to Afghanistan in 1978.

You should understand one thing - US, Britain, France, even modern Germany are really strong players, but Russia after 1917 becomes small player with inadequate ambitions, so Russia could not play solo. And because of this, Russia constantly tried to break games of strong players, or as it named now - they try to break world game.

US after WWII becomes something what Russian named world gendarme (this is direct translation), so US have to spend resources and send military to other parts of world, to keep peace there.

BTW answer question (yes, this is test) - why do you think, mostly US military was in Yugoslavia (center of Europe), not European?

[trasz]

I’m not talking about why North Korea was created in the first place - I’m talking about why it’s still there.

As for Russia or Yugoslavia - you are doing the same thing Putin’s shills like to do, which is changing the subject. We were talking about China.

[simne]

It is impossible to understand, why North Korea still exists, without understanding, why it is appear - these things tightly coupled, unfortunately.

[hungryhobo]

are you really gonna pin Taliban on the chinese? I'm sorry but your version of history isn't actually accurate either.

[simne]

BTW I found exact quote from Sherlock Holmes: "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_Holmes

[simne]

Have you read Sir Arthur Conan Doyle? I mean Sherlock Holmes.

I become fan of these books unfortunately after phenomenal Russian series (unfortunately, because Vasily Livanov, who played Holmes, in last years become involved in Russian politics, and was supporter of Putin course, even when all respectable intelligent people began to criticize).

So, Sir Arthur, said by mouth of his heroes - if you see something, which could not explain by common sense, that is - you just have opportunity, to see another or NEW reality.

In this new reality, Russia is small country, which have not enough resources to compete with big players, but Russia have huge ambitions. So what it have to do? - It switches to espionage, to propaganda, to support terrorists. What it got with such activities? - It make active interference for Western policies, and like child, happy that so small, but have success breaking activities of adults.

Sure, my version is not accurate, but reality is cruel - just cup days after US left Afghanistan, Russian authorities said on official channels, that they will try to find common language to speak with Taliban leaders.

You may ask, where is China in this equation? Ok, are you really sure, that Russian have not speak about this with Chinese authorities before such statement?

- Look on map, where is China, where is Afghanistan. - Look in wikipedia, compare sizes of economy and military of Russia and China. - Look for Russia-China economy relations in news, look who pay and how much.

Are you still sure, Russia could make independent from China statements in such circumstances?

[starchild_3001]

Re: Chinese real estate bubble. It's been almost 10 years since news outlets and finance people have claimed a RE bubble in China. Nothing happened. Buyer (of RE and the bubble hype) beware.

"60 mins" from 2013: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxjwhk1ktNw

[seanmcdirmid]

It’s been almost ten years since the same people first starting claiming that Evergrande was insolvent. The government is just able to prop things up for amazing amount of time, but $1 million dollar 2 bedroom apartments in third tier or worse cities aren’t sustainable.

[ncmncm]

By report their economy is facing imminent collapse as a real estate bubble pops. I don't know whether this makes invasion of Taiwan soon more or less likely.

[iforgotpassword]

"experts" have been seeing this imminent collapse for 20 years now. It will eventually be true, but that's true for a lot of things if you keep claiming them for long enough.

[simne]

Sure, slowing of China economy will make invasion to Taiwan more likely, for same reasons for which Hitler and Putin invades neighbors - all empires need to constantly show their people wins, or they will collapse.