US did sanction all of China's space industry, defense dual use industries since the 1990s, and never let go ever since. That is pretty early. And this is what happens 30 years since the sanctions. But I have no idea what will happen in the future, plus the nature of industry and technology is also different.
As much as it's a waste of duplicate effort, it's likely good for humanity and geopolitics to have multiple nation-states each trying their own approaches.
Avoids path lock-in by exploring alternate solutions lines, and ensures that if one country decides to slow down (because politics) then the world doesn't lose its only leading-edge space program.
agree with this - duplication of effort, but not duplication of approach or method, which means actually it becomes a giant A/B test, which hopefully means faster progress for humanity as a whole.
Sanctions do not matter to China. They will just have their nation state backed hackers hack into aerospace and defense contractors and steal their R&D instead. Thats the Chinese way and MO. Anything to further the Chinese economy.
They have hacked nearly every F100 they needed to and steal hundreds of billions in IP annually already.
It seems unlikely that any country could monopolise any particular weapons technology for long. I assume the US also has programs to extract any innovations from China or Russia.
To be fair, it's not like the US didn't engage in heavy industrial espionage in Europe during the industrial revolution.
We tend to forget this since the US came into its own as an industrial power generations ago, long before China did. While China's form of government is quite different than most Western governments, in a way that gives them a reputation of being isolationist and secretive, that doesn't mean their path to technological advancement has been any more dishonest than that of other nations.
Put another way, we frown on China's technological espionage so much because we view them as an enemy from a government & "values" perspective, not because "we" have cleaner hands. I personally would prefer that China didn't have all the latest tech capabilities because I don't like the idea of increasing the global influence of authoritarian nations, but if China had a non-isolationist democracy, I might not be so upset about this.
You make it sound like that was a distinct Chinese tactic and not every country on earth, foremost one that abbreviates itself to three letters, is engaged doing industrial espionage.
Ah, so the chaos and lack of documentation in my company is really protection against chinese spies! Clever!
On a more serious note, I find it quite unfair that Western conoany go into China to take advantage of loose labour laws and child labour, and then they complain when loose IP laws hit them. Like you knew what the deal was from the outset.
Lastly not every society believes in the concept of intellectual property, it is not even clearly defined - for instance EU does not issue software patents.
You just took one angle. I find it unfair that Facebook is banned by China while China can deploy TikTok in the US market, for example, to demonstrate the opposite.
I mean that's the thing, that wasn't the deal. No company, at all, would sign that agreement. Usually there is an nda, some kind of business agreement that says they won't steal your idea etc. and then they do. It's not like a company goes to China or another lower cost to manufacture country and signs an agreement to give them their business.
Contracts and deals are subordinate to the laws of the country in which we'd like them to be enforced. It's not like a company goes to China and expects tight IP laws.
And hey, our (American) IP laws were a lot less strict when we were catching up to the British Empire.
Countries generally try to set their laws up to benefit their industries (to the extent possible).
I agree with all this. Where does all the ip theft via hacking fall into this view? By this logic hat should be held accountable to the laws of this country, no?
Lots of links to Wikipedia lists of examples in other threads here.
I don't think it is possible to simplify it down beyond what has actually happened. Hackers for China in the US fall under US jurisdiction and so they'll be treated pretty harshly. Hackers for China in China -- it's complicated, if they are doing something their government wants them to do, they probably won't be.
Then the US will try to incur some diplomatic cost for China, which does have a pretty bad reputation on this front... it's all part of the big game.
You are telling me giant conpanies with 100 people in legal did not study previous Chinese court cases and did not know that IP laws there are poorly enforced? I knew about this for 20 years and they didn't?
All developing nations, whether China or Russia or Somalia, don't enforce some laws. Sometimes it's lack of strong state, sometimes it's lack of beurocratic capacity, or a concious decision. Anyone going into these countries is aware of this.
IP, Labour laws and bribes in case of China.
Clearly western companies take advantage of the two latter, and cry foul about the former. Massive hypocracy.
Meanwhile western government dont enforce their own laws for any kindof accoutability of major business leaders. Chinese will answer for IP theft on the same day CEO of Nestle will go to jail for taking advantage of child labour and slavery in their supply chains.
So probably we will have to wait for judgement day
I agree Nestlé should go to jail for child labor. The thing is they're a European company. We can't just lump everything into "western governments". That's like half the world.
The thing is,anybody these IP theft cases are also against Chinese law, they his choose to ignore it when it benefits them.
Corruption is everywhere, it's not an excuse to strive for anything less than right and truth. "Bevause they did it" is not a good reason.
That's way too broad, because it depends what it is. Surprisingly, it seems to be easier to build a space station than to compete with Boeing and Airbus.
Because competing with Boeing and Airbus means building cost efficient aircraft in large volumes. Building cost efficient planes in large volume is way harder than building a singular space station with barely any cost concerns.
Rocket engines are simpler than jet turbines, actually. It take a lot of material engineering to get something with both performance and economy. As for the rest, it’s just avionics that china hasn’t developed yet, and that really “just” software.
But really, there’s an order of magnitude more engineering that goes into so many facets of rockets and rocket engines. On paper they’re similar, but the stresses and constraints are much, much higher.
Rocket engines point up and ignite the fuel. They don’t need air intakes, nor can they benefit from them. They don’t need to be reused (SpaceX’s strategy isn’t common). Rocket engines came a few decades before jet turbines for good reason. Heck, there is a good argument they were invented during the Tang or Song Dynasty in some kind of crude but representive form.
It depends. SRBs are pretty simple (yet still incredibly hard to make remotely safe).
Orbital rocket engines are not “point up and ignite fuel.” You’re right, they don’t need air intakes - they need cryogenic liquid oxygen and all the support equipment involved in using it! Jet engines have it easy being able to harvest the oxidizer as they fly.
There are many, many, points of failure in modern rockets . You could argue that jet engines were the precursor to modern turbo pump design.
edit
It’s also worth noting that the turbopump environment is dramatically more hostile in rockets. LOX is really nasty stuff at those temperatures and pressures.
Space stations do not need to comply to international aviation requirements. Also, they may have fewer economic constraints, because they are not operated by something like commercial airlines.
BTW competing with Lockheed-Martin and even Sukhoi seems to be harder, too.
China isn't 60s us or ussr, it's a country countless time richer and more technologically advanced, has all the means to produce all the ICBMs they want.
The sanctions are pretty irrelevant when China has one of the best hacking groups in the world and every US corporation of relevance is strongly connected to the Internet.
I mean, american people is as intelligent as anyone else. By the sheer number, is not rare to think that they should have more people of high training on difficult areas to master.
What happens to the US is that they "borrow" a lot of intellectual capacity from abroad, and they have been doing that for a lot of time.
Also, stealing IP and resources has been the eternal strategy of empires to build themselves, US and Europe included.
Why would they waste time and their own money researching things when they can just steal it and then give that information to private and public Chinese industries? That is their entire MO. The Chinese are also responsible for $200-600 Billion worth of IP theft against the US every year.
They will do whatever it takes to make China #1 and see nothing wrong with doing this.
> Why would they waste time and their own money researching things when they can just steal it and then give that information to private and public Chinese industries?
Or you do both. Start from the point of known technologies and reverse engineering and improve from there. China bootstrapped their high-tech industry with not just spying, but also licensing technology, join-ventures, training students/employees abroad and then bringing them back as experienced researchers/engineers. No need to start from first-principles. Plus even when you do have tech-specs on something, that doesn't mean you know how to manufacture it, or it may need modification to address broader system tradeoffs.
If you start from behind and are trying to execute from first principals you'll usually lag behind too just because you have to relearn all the things countries like the US did on your own.
You got this very wrong. Read up Art of War written before Jesus. Espionage is a very important chapter. Americans are rather weak academic these days. You go to any American university and see how many "Asians" there. You will find a lot of Chinese. It is common for Americans not able to speak English well or just English. It is very uncommon not to find Chinese that can read and write Chinese AND English. There are about 4x more Chinese than Americans population. You do the math, one society has more people and higher ratio of hardworking people and very educated vs Americans that twerks more on TikTok (which is an app by China....and possibly Chinese Military). Heck even westerner GoT series are written based on Chinese history. Look up war of seven princes and Cersei equivalent during Jin dynasty. Americans themselves stoled Nazi Germany tech too. USA days are very numbered (this is foretold in many Eastern prophecies even those in Russia). The great west superpower will get destroyed very similar to Atlantis (perhaps explosion of Yellowstone volcabic activities) mentioned in many of these prophecies.
I think that's unlikely, Yellowstone is monitored and I think it's more likely that US programs to prevent population decline/demographic collapse would work than Chinese programs of the same nature. I think it's reasonably probable that China will level out under a billion real population (not including migrant workers), even if you think the current official figures are real. Russia has massive HIV rates and is shipping a not insignificant portion of it's reproduction age males to Ukraine, and that's not good for it population in general, and may be catastrophic for it's more rural populations.
> I think it's reasonably probable that China will level out under a billion real population (not including migrant workers)
99.99% of china’s migrant workers are Chinese. I don’t understand what not including migrant workers gives you unless you assume china will import labor from other countries someday?
The problem is that Chinese mentality results in corruption, denialism and other attributes what makes working on R&D almost impossible. For that you need free minds, room for mistakes, no strong hiarchy. All things you won't find in China.
So how did they manage to complete this space station at all when R&D is 'almost impossible'? There is no doubt that China did not develop everything from the ground up, but to disregard the progress that they have made on top of existing technologies is rather shortsighted and disingenuous.