Alibaba Cloud says it cut Nvidia AI GPU use by 82% with new pooling system

History has shown that withholding technology from China does not significantly stop them and they'll achieve it (or better) in a small number of years.

In many senses there's hubris in the western* view of China accomplishments: most of what western companies have created has had significant contribution by Chinese scientists or manufacturing, without which those companies would have nothing. If you look at the names of AI researchers there's a strong pattern even if some are currently plying their trade in the west.

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* I hate the term "western" because some "westeners" use it to separated what they think are "civilized" from "uncivilized", hence for them LATAM is not "western" even though everything about LATAM countries is western.

> most of what western companies have created has had significant contribution by Chinese scientists or manufacturing, without which those companies would have nothing. If you look at the names of AI researchers there's a strong pattern even if some are currently plying their trade in the west.

While I don't disagree with your overall point, it's important to recognize that this is only a phenomenon of the last ~30 years, and to avoid falling into the trapn of Han racial chauvinism. E.g. there were ~no Chinese scientists in Germany in the 70s but they were heavily innovating nevertheless.

western is a cultural term derived from a geographic one. The US is also not 'western' strictly geographically as it is not in western europe, neither is australia. But they both originated from Britain's empire and share in it's cultural ancestry. It means "western europe and it's cultural derivatives". Spain and Portugal's empire fell away long before britain and france's and they don't have similar geopolitical relations like NATO, so it's hard to consider their former colonies/upstarts part of the same sphere of cultural influence.

China for sure will catch up, the question is what they will do with it. They're not ambitious like the US/West. The US wanted influence all over the world as an extension of the cold war and to keep economic interests safeguarded. But China just doesn't operate that way. They're more hands-off. They could be opening up alibaba cloud datacenters all over the US, offering it as an AWS/Azure alternative, funding tons of startups all over europe, the US,etc... to exert their influence, but they won't. They have a more long-term low-and-slow approach to global domination. The "100 year marathon" as they called it, which they'll win for sure.

China's greatest weakness is not just their lack of ambition,but their command-economy. They're doing capitalism but with central control of the economy. It intertwines government policy with corporate policy, making it harder to do business overseas (like with bytedance/tiktok).

Re: Western. A similar thing plays out when the term "international community" is used in news. It refers to the US and its major allies which means US, Canada, Western Europe, Japan, Australia and New Zealand more or less.

Absolutely. China obviously has a longer history with innovation but they like to make it seem everything was invented by them at some point in the past. I'd say newer technology is where China has had a bigger impact.

Consequently newer tech is precisely where global cooperation is most required so no country can really do it by themselves. We could even say no country, western or otherwise, has been doing it on their own for the past 500 years or so but alas...

> History has shown that withholding technology from China does not significantly stop them and they'll achieve it (or better) in a small number of years.

It's worked for a very long time for aircraft.

China has been pushing to build its own aircraft for >23 years. It took 14 years for COMAC to get its first regional jet flying commercial flights on a Chinese airline, and 21 years to get a narrow-body plane flying a commercial flight on a Chinese airline.

If for no technical reasons and purely political, COMAC may still be decades away from being able to fly to most of the world.

Likewise, in ~5 years, China may be able to build Chips that are as good as Nvidia after Nvidia's 90% profit margin - i.e. they are 1/10th as good for the price - but since they can buy them for cost - they're they same price for performance and good enough.

If for purely political reasons, China may never be able to export these chips to most of the world - which limits their scale - which makes it harder to make them cost effective compared to Western chips.

Nobody thinks the Japanese aren’t “civilized.” “Western” is just a euphemism for “rich and orderly.”

> China has been pushing to build its own aircraft for >23 years. It took 14 years for COMAC to get its first regional jet flying commercial flights on a Chinese airline, and 21 years to get a narrow-body plane flying a commercial flight on a Chinese airline

And both those planes have a strong dependency on "western" components that won't be overcome before the 2030s, and even then, they're around a generation behind.

Its more about democracy and adhering to the global (set up by America post WW2) system of laws and trade.

I think most people considered Spain a "western" country even in 1970 when it was controlled by Franco.

> If for purely political reasons, China may never be able to export these chips to most of the world - which limits their scale - which makes it harder to make them cost effective compared to Western chips.

Note that this happens at the same time the US is breaking up its own alliances, so as of this writing, there's no such thing as certainty about politics.

I find "western" is often used to disparage "western thought", as in it can't grasp the deep wisdom of those mysterious orientals that transcends normal logic and reason. Declaring such a split is the underpinning of a whole lot of woo-woo beliefs.

It’s helpful to think of westernism as a platonic ideal. Individually derived reason and virtue, superior to state and sometimes ‘gods’ as a tradition to drive up the total survivability, richness, and stability of the community.

Concepts that enable the individual should empower a chosen configuration of society not the other way around.

Contrast this with non westernism where either education of the individual is not valued or the state is the primary goal over the individual.

I’ve worked with states governments and individuals around the world for 20 years and find this very useful definition. What’s confusing is the nations who have half adopted westernism but don’t fully due to either caste systems or government dominated thinking.

It’s an arrow towards rationalism over tradition, individualism over collectivism, flatness over hierarchy, and future over past. But only the limit of the resources any given society has.

Essentially countries that were developed prior to 1990 or so , although South Korea is a tricky case today going by this definition, as are Taiwan, Hongkong and Singapore

Yes community refers to whose who participate in community.

How is this hard to understand?

Broadly speaking coast de ivory and the like is not a participant in the international community.

It’s more helpful to think of China as an accelerant rather than an innovator in this position.

False.

Westernism is broadly an extension of the academic notion of classicism, starting in Egypt and then Greece Rome and into Europe and the Americas.

this is true for anyone - create challenges, and you optimize efficiency elsewhere.

Also, isn't this the usual path to better computer science? Reducing computation needs by making better/more efficient algorithms? The whole "trillions of dollars of brute force GPU strength" proposed by Altman, Nadella, Musk et al just seems to reinforce that these are business people at heart, not engineers/computer scientists...

Name one thing China has invented first in LLMs that the “west” adopted as a standard

> look at the names

Why would I do that tho? If we look at the names of scientists/researchers/engineers/businessmen, the conclusion would be that the US has contributed nothing to the world. Europeans did all the hard work!

But at the same time they are fielding multiple new stealth aircraft and their jets and missiles outperformed western aircraft in the recent Pakistan India flare-up.

Another equivalent way to look at that:

Historically, top scientists/researchers/engineers/businessmen migrate from rest of the world to the US rather than to Europe or China.

Imagine if Europe or China were a bit more open with immigration and equally attractive, we would see the same pattern there too.

> A similar thing plays out when the term "international community" is used in news. It refers to the US and its major allies which means US, Canada, Western Europe, Japan, Australia and New Zealand more or less.

Wait, really? I thought "international community" meant all countries.

Disparage or exalt? It can also be used in an objective sense without conjuring insult.

So you'd think they'd be able to build a commercial jet liner, no?

Your silence is deafening, qwen bots

It is an odd category, and Japan is often considered to be "Western" - these days at least. That certainly wasn't the case even a few generations ago.

I think it's ostensibly supposed to be more about shared cultural values, but even that is a pretty weak way to divide countries. Perhaps "an ally of the United States" is a little more accurate?

Any societal dividing line like this is bound to hit on problems once subjected to the real world.

It can be both. From different people, and it often is.

In a way withholding a tech becomes a signal saying "Hey this is important" so the result is China dedicates more resources to researching it lol.

But commercial jet liners aren't as important to China for security. They have high speed railroads for that.

Ironically, the best way America could have prevented China’s rise in tech was by stapling green cards to diplomas of Chinese citizens who completed their higher education in the U.S. like the plan in the early 2010s.

It’s would be a result of where the money and resources go, I assume. Apparently they haven’t felt a need to manufacture their own commercial jets but they did for military jets. They definitely feel the need in the case of chips.

So… you'd think the USA would be able to built a nationwide, high-speed rail network?

See what I did there?

That's because you're reasonable.

Sometimes it's used in the expected way, but (more?) often, "international community" euphemistically refers to whomever is currently one of, or an ally of the above mentioned countries.

I am not sure exactly to what degree, but "I hate the term 'western' because some 'weste[r]ners' use it to separated what they think are 'civilized' from 'uncivilized'" is definitely a bit of an antiquated perspective at this point; almost like a justification to hold on to other older perspectives about "racism". I have started resorting to using terms like European Cultural Block because of it in certain communities that understand contemporary topics and have an advanced understanding of the world.

Your first statement is not likely unique to China though, even though they have demonstrated that in about the last 40 years, which I don't really think qualifies as "history". What it does demonstrate is that societies that have a certain kind of ethnic self-respect and can cast off the detrimental influences of foreign, hostile, and even enemy elements to pursue their own self-interest and survival will succeed, regardless of hurdles placed before them.

It's really just a story of personal development and either escaping, evading, and avoiding detrimental, toxic people and their behaviors. All of humanity that all has to currently still share a single planet with ZERO save spots, would be better off if we all not just allowed each other to be ourselves in our won places without others subverting, subjugating, infiltrating, dominating, poisoning, or polluting any other people on the planet. Then everyone can decide if we want to be friends or not friends with each other, collaborate and be friendly or simply avoid each other. We do not have to like each other to get along if everyone agrees on a base understanding that no people can parasitize and abuse and manipulate any others.

Is that the best way? China's rise had already happened by the 2010s

Preventing that could have been prevented in the 70s, 80s, 90s by stopping offshoring, blocking student visas, and prosecuting IP theft.

>the same time the US is breaking up its own alliances

This isn't happening. The US is driving a harder bargain with our allies. No one serious thinks anyone is walking away from alliances with the US.

C919

Those students would have just gone to other countries, written their PhD dissertations there, advanced another country’s tech sector, and the US would have found the pain of isolationism that much sooner.

It is not possible to keep core IP secret. HN folks, of all people, should know this. Anything that thousands of people know is de facto public knowledge.

Eh? They are a country with a culture that values education like a few other asian countries. They were set back by the colonial bullshit of Europe, devastation of WW2 and communist revolutions and so. They would have gotten to the same point as they are today, just longer if anything if any attempt was made to hamper it.

The US has become unreliable and erratic. Countries aren’t cutting ties or anything, but certainly investing to reduce exposure to capricious US leadership. Much of Europe is increasing domestic military production rather than just buying more from the US precisely because the US has publicly discussed leaving NATO and/or not honoring its guarantees.

The inclusion of China in the WTO is what changed everything.

The elites thought they'd set up shop in a new, gigantic consumer market and reap the rewards. So they got Clinton to spend his last days in office lobbying very aggressively for China's inclusion into the WTO.

China had different plans. Keeping the plunderers out (this time) was one of the smartest moves any nation has made in recorded history. Then the same elites slowly pivoted against China, post realizing they wouldn't be allowed to own China. If we can own you, you're our friend; if we can't own you, you're our enemy. And this is quite obviously not a defense of China's human rights record or anything else, that's not the point. China only mattered (in the enemy sense) when the elites realized they were going to be locked on the outside of the rise.

Keeping core IP secret is not the issue. The issue is allowing the Chinese to steal IP and then compete in our markets with that stolen IP.

>students would have just gone to other countries, written their PhD dissertations there, advanced another country’s tech sector,

which other countries specifically? No other country has a tech sector. It's the US hegemony or the China hegemony.

The whole “China copies everything” narrative is becoming less and less true.

It’s funny - it’s at the point with Chinese manufacturing for niche electronic goods (e.g rooftop van air conditioner) where some Chinese brands are more trustworthy - more value for your money and sometimes even better overall quality. With American brands you gotta make sure you’re not overpaying for dated tech that is inefficient. Maybe the same will happen with LLMs.

Roughly speaking, an aircraft must fulfill a certain amount of economy (cheap, low cost to operate), safety, and performance.

If you compromise on safety, you get something that is still suitable for the military. If you don't care about economics you can participate in the space race.

But for commercial air travel, you don't have the luxury to pick just two; a competitive commercial airliner has to perform exceedingly well in all three regards.

If you're an airline using expensive aircraft you will go bankrupt. If your aircraft is too slow then your competitors will eat your lunch, and if you have a reputation of being unsafe then your customers will run away or the government will pull the plug (likely both).

IMHO affordable commercial air travel is one of the biggest marvels of 20th century engineering.

5 years behind becomes 3 years behind. China is expanding their manufacturing abilities faster than the US. Soon they will surpass the US. Look no further than their generic consumer electronics manufacturing.

I think Japan likely shares more values culturally with China than USA outside of political systems. In any aspect outside of that Japan is not western.

It's not an academic notion (at least not strictly), since virtually everyone uses it routinely.

The whole "western" or "the west" always makes me laugh. Half the time it's a dog whistle for "white". Like many right-wing commentators love saying "Western Values" to avoid saying "white, Euro-centric, Christian values".

Mexico is a modern country, an industrialized country, a country that is exactly as "western" as the US or Canada. They have the same religious beliefs, speak a dialect of a European language. They have European style cities, a long history of cultural contributions. Yet they're not white enough to be part of "The West".

I think at this point we should be honest with ourselves in it's usage. 90% of the time it's a racist dog whistle.

But why would anyone want to do that?

You do realize that antagonizing people with nuclear weapons and the largest economies in the world rarely results in positive results, right?

> History has shown that withholding technology from China does not significantly stop them and they'll achieve it (or better) in a small number of years.

Really? How long has China been attempting to build their own jet engines? How long have they been attempting to build competitive CPUs?

History has shown withholding tech successfully keeps them at least a generation behind the west.

In some fields like CPUs they “make up for it” by just building larger clusters, but ultimately history does not show what you’re claiming. The only thing it shows is that we need to be even more diligent in protecting IP because a large portion of their catching up is a direct result of stealing the tech they were cut off from.

Why the framing of alliances like it’s a boolean?

The question of “can we trust the American government” is now being asked more often. Existing alliances and new potential alliances face that question, whether or not you personally believe that they should trust America.

Even if no concrete actions are being performed with asking that question, the fact that question is even being asked is a major drop from where we were.

But they didn’t do it, because the current administration can’t get it through their thick skulls that the key advantage the US can have in this world is a monopoly on all the really smart people.

>"...The issue is allowing the Chinese to steal IP..."

I do not think they need permission. There is no force that could order country to recognize IP. Do you really expect all world forever pay rent to few giant corps?

No one is going to walk away from that kind of alliance tomorrow, sure. Stuff like "we're going to remotely disable military equipment we've sold you" is going to have consequences though. It's not walking away from alliances, it's just focusing on more stable countries.

Massive vector for theft of trade secrets and intellectual property.

It’s notable that China did not adopt the same policy during the period you are associating with their rise. Indeed, they’ve taken the opposite stance in recent years and (now that they have stolen American IP) have moved to seize control of assets and expel the superfluous foreigners.

There is a lesson to be learned there, but it’s contrary to the argument you are trying to make.

You're 100% correct. "Prevented" is too strong of a word (that I borrowed from GP).

I would characterize my recommendations as things that could have been done for the US to not fund or encourage the re-rise of China.

Bad reading comprehension.

You're talking about recognizing IP, I am talking about stealing IP AND selling stolen IP in our markets.

1st: yes force can be used to discourage the theft of IP. This is merely an obstacle, not a total blocker 2nd: yes force can be used to block IP from our markets. This is actually incredibly trivial and would have been very easy 40-years ago.

Increasing domestic military production is actually a great outcome.

Obviously Wall Street would have preferred purchasing from US-listed/owned arms companies, but from the perspective of a military alliance, having well-armed allies is the main point.

It's really hard to argue with Trump's methods if they led to Europe finally spending on their own defense.

You're right, alliances are not boolean.

From the US perspective, we have been asking ourselves "can we trust Europe's military capacity" for a very long time and the answer (prior to 2025) was: NO.

With Trump on one side and Russia on the other, it seems like the answer has shifted to: MAYBE.

There was a particularly memorable use of this sense some time ago, when the UK representative to the UN explained that they abstained from a vote in the General Council that passed with something like 200+ members voting for it because "the international community is still divided on the topic".

China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and many many other countries that are very active members of the international community are not counted among members of THE "international community". Hell, much of Europe isn't either, including some of the former colonial empires, on some topics.

I observe serious financial commitments towards walking away from US tech:

The EU is pumping money into what they call "digital sovereignty" left and right. Germany just cancelled their Microsoft subscriptions and replaced them with self-funded Open Source for Schleswig-Holstein, which is roughly 5% of all government employees. That's one hell of a trial run. Germany's "OpenDesk" and France’s "La Suite numérique" even made into the new "Franco-German Economic Agenda 2025", which self-describes as "bilateral coordination to full swing for a more sovereign Europe".

Oddly since I got many downvotes with this statement, it's clear the average hacker news reader knows very little about world history or common knowledge

Are you sure?

I mean, the current administration has repeatedly threatened to invade militarily two of its allies. Also, it has repeatedly threatened to not honor military agreements with most others, and both the current president and vice-president have insulted the leaders of several allied countries to their face.

Oh, and if that weren't sufficient, the current admin has unilaterally broken all trade treaties (alongside most intellectual property treaties) it held with its commercial partners.

The EU is slow at it, but it's no accident that everybody is doing their best to move away from US tech and military dependencies.

Frankly, this sounds like you're repeating propaganda.

When the US called its allies to its wars, NATO responded. Now that the rest of NATO is being threatened, the US is playing neutral, trying to see which side will bid highest for their help.

> China may never be able to export these chips

While you type this, the rest of the world is already using Chinese cars, something that was unthinkable a year or two ago.

The US has closed the market off from this for its auto industry to survive.

To clarify: it's not exactly "remotely disable".

It's "block everything that depends on US clouds", which is a considerable downgrade (because you can't upload all mission parameters to an airplane without going through the cloud, and you can't use self-diagnosis features), but not entirely a kill switch. Close enough, though.

>You're talking about recognizing IP, I am talking about stealing IP ..."

If country does not recognize IP then "stealing" is not a theft in their eyes.

As for using force to prevent "theft": what force? Military? You might get burned really bad.

> From the US perspective, we have been asking ourselves "can we trust Europe's military capacity" for a very long time and the answer (prior to 2025) was: NO.

NATO's mutual defense clause has only been activated once: after 9/11, when the United States declared war on the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Out of the 3621 deaths of coalition soldiers, 1160 of them were from nations other than the United States, including 457 from the UK, 159 from Canada, and 90 from France.

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

It is less exclusively true.

>History has shown that withholding technology from China does not significantly stop them and they'll achieve it (or better) in a small number of years.

I don't think you can really produce a definite counterfactual that they would or wouldn't have taken longer or shorter without it, but certainly they were pushing for self sufficiency long before technology restrictions. But we're not going to be handing our technologies to our competitors on a silver platter, and it's also best for businesses to start weaning themselves off the Chiinese market. Virtually every market reliant on them today is in big trouble.

As for hubris, I think that's more a projection of your part if you want to start bringing up race cards with regards to contributions, that kind of argument would be applicable to everyone. And AI research is highly diverse and international, Chinese names don't dominate the list more than Turks, Greeks, Malaysians, etc.

How are you going to gain core IP research if you don't have experience or access to leading edge researchers to pass you knowledge in the first place?

Talent is proportional to population, but that only matters if society and state has the infrastructure to raise that talent up. Otherwise Nigeria or Indonesia would be scientific powerhouses, and Iran would have modern fighter jets.

China, Russia, India are certainly referred to when using this term. Iran and Saudi Arbia may or may not be. Usually not Pakistan, so I really dont know what in the hell you are saying.

> Stuff like "we're going to remotely disable military equipment we've sold you" is going to have consequences though.

Proof of this happening or even having the capability of happening? There is none.

A military controlling the flow of goods into its own borders isn't going to "burn bad", it's called customs controls.

That's very reductive of you. "western" like "3rd world" is used very differently than what you or academics would like.

It's just straight up low expectations and underestimation derived from racism in the assumption that Americans are smarter and more capable, and Chinese are only good for copying designs and making things we come up with. The idea that they can't do that like we can is pervasive.

Traditional Confucian Exams were more of elite dispute resolution mechanisms. The idea of practical education is largely introduced by the West.

China currently can't make the high-performance, efficient, long-life jet engines that US & Europe make. The commercial market is heavily cost-sensitive, so they can't compete there currently as a result.

This doesn't matter so much for military purposes: they can easily eat the cost of a higher maintenance and replacement schedule on a smaller number of military jets with fewer hours on them.

This gives them more iteration cycles, speeding their building up of experience. They're catching up. Industrial espionage will help them along too, but not as much as the experience from engineering their own designs.

Jet engine since at least 2011. CPU since 2000

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACAE_CJ-1000A

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

Which reminds me of this article about the origin of the research university by the Germans:

https://asteriskmag.com/issues/10/the-origin-of-the-research...

> Otherwise Nigeria or Indonesia would be scientific powerhouses, and Iran would have modern fighter jets.

The reason why these statements are not true is because of colonization, delayed industrialization, and Western intervention post-independence. Getting out of this “quicksand” is exceedingly difficult.

China did well to industrialize quickly and keep intervention at bay - in fact, you could argue that it making the rest of the world reliant on its industrial capacity helped address the intervention problem.

>Jet engine since at least 2011

Huh? Did you read your own link? The jet engine that was shown at an aviation show as a non-functioning prototype in 2011, with hopes they'd have a functioning version by 2016, and in service by 2020 (it wasn't in service in 2020). Notice at the very top of your own article it says "still in development".

>CPU since 2000

That isn't remotely competitive, and at least a full generation behind.

What 'since at least 2011' you don't understand?

>"The issue is allowing the Chinese to steal IP and then compete in our markets with that stolen IP"

That was the original message. My understanding of "our markets" was customers of the US which include the US itself, China and many other countries. Sure the US can prohibit importing of China's goods. It can not control what happens in the rest of the world to the degree that it once could.

This world view is just wrong from top to bottom. Between 1945-1970, China was in a much worser state that any of those 3rd world countries in many aspects. Are you saying post 1970, the reason why these countries did not develop as fast as china is because of colonialism and intervention? You can apply the same arguments to Japan in 45 and Korea in 50. But but but aid? Ok and we send billions to countries all around the world every year.

But I just pointed out that China is an exception? Also, China had access to human capital at a scale that no African country had.

Japan pre-45 was a world power, and had industrialized by the early 1900s. WW2 was a mere setback.

Korea is more of a “miracle” than Japan was, but they also did well to industrialize ASAP. They also didn’t face the brunt of European colonialism.

What part of "a non-functioning prototype" don't you understand?

Literally anyone can make a prototype jet engine. The metallurgy and process to make a functioning one is several orders of magnitude more difficult. Which is why... China still buys the vast, vast majority of their jet engines from Russia for military use. And their commercial passenger jets use engines from CFM.

The leaders of Japan during the Meiji era (starting 1868) will be sad to learn that their attempt to thoroughly Westernize Japanese society failed even though it enabled Japan to dominate China (and most of the Western Pacific) for decades.

China wasn't beholden to neoliberalism and the World Bank and IMF.

China made the right choice to dump a ton of resources into different industries without the expectation of immediate RoI or any RoI at all. Anyone or anything that got in the way of their goals were dealt with.

Yes I served with those people so I am not denigrating their sacrifice when I say:

2001 was 24 years ago. A lot has changed since then. Europe's militaries are much degraded and the threats are much enhanced.

Which NATO ally is being threatened?

Sorry no. If you can't imagine how one country couldn't use force to stop another country from stealing IP then you are either not intellectually up to this conversation or not arguing in good faith.

I did specify the 70s 80s and 90s.

You think our alliances are Microsoft Office licenses?

Aid is the single largest barrier to development and progress over the long term.

It’s absolutely fascinating and mystifying (and dismaying) to see educated and otherwise smart people in engineering in the US hold an opinion that two countries with over a billion people each can’t accomplish anything in engineering or science without “us”.

Despite ample and repeated evidence that they can and, in China’s case, that they’re the best in the world in several areas of manufacturing.

You've moved the goalposts

> The elites thought they'd set up shop in a new, gigantic consumer market and reap the rewards.

So... Seems that's exactly what they are getting.

Mexico isn’t as “western” as the west. Mexico isn’t the first world. It’s not part of the exploiting Global North.

The stuff you bring up ignore the power dynamics which are arguably the most important part.

Arguably the sample size for that is 0 though; but even if we are generous, it’s only about 1 so far.

I feel like you didn't even grasp the base sentence meaning. "Classicism" is an academic concept

The number of nuclear armed countries with large economies that will get worked up if you call them racists for being ‘the west’ is waaaay larger than zero.

lol this is a joke right? Ask any Canadian if they think America is driving a hard bargain or pushing away its closest ally.

This statement doesn't make a lot of sense. 40-50% of vehicles are foreign-made already[1]. I would strongly wager it's vastly more likely that these Chinese vehicles do not meet US safety standards - which are quite high.

[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/03/fact-sheet-pr...

Much higher standards than European ones? Because the cars do sell there as well.

Yes. The EU focuses on safety of pedestrians, and the US focuses on safety of occupants. That's not to say a vehicle cannot do both well (see the many European vehicles sold in the US), but that is to say Chinese vehicles may not meet the US standards. The US has a lot of vehicle regulations that significantly differ from the EU market.

It's most notable to me in mid level manufacturing equipment. Once upon a time you would never touch a chinese made CNC, lathe, mill etc. Now they're totally fine, and offer significant value for your dollar. Sometimes outperforming other countries offerings while being cheaper to boot. Especially in new industries and processes, suggesting innovation is not the differentiator it used to be.

Enterprises often prefer having US based support and so can prefer US or European machines that have that supply chain setup.

They didn't keep the foreign corporations out. Having them as on-shore competitors is what keeps their own companies from merely seeking rents. Foreign companies also didn't bring their best products in the beginning out of the fear of getting copied, but that strategy is not sustainable over time as Chinese companies get better at making things.

Do you mind providing sources for that?

Because, as a EU citizen, I have never in my life seen any tests that carmarkers are advertising with that focus on pedestrians. I am regularly seeing tests that focus on occupants though, e.g. the Euro NCAP. But I am by no means an expert.

It would be hard to focus on pedestrian safety from a carmaker standpoint except for adding software features that recognize people in front of you and auto-brake or smth, which definitely is not the focus of the tests here. It may be a requirement though. The more I think about it, the more sure I am that you just made this up, sorry.

> Yes. The EU focuses on safety of pedestrians, and the US focuses on safety of occupants.

How can a car focus on the safety of pedestrian? Does it detect a pedestrian and fly away like a drone?

The tests include tests for the safety of the people hit by the car vs just for people inside the car.

That's not true, it's just that the Chinese NCAP is modeled after the EU one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-NCAP

> They also didn’t face the brunt of European colonialism.

But they faced the brunt of Chinese & Japanese colonialism, and a full-blown civil war after which their GDP per capita was in the same ballpark as Kenya's.

Yes.

Imperialism (as a system of extracting wealth from poor countries) continues to exist, but China has a working countermeasure. You can see similar with Vietnam.

“Those who come with wheat, millet, corn or milk, they are not helping us. Those who really want to help us can give us ploughs, tractors, fertilizers, insecticides, watering cans, drills and dams. That is how we would define food aid.” ― Thomas Sankara

Pedestrian impact design has been a thing in the European market for a while. One example: the pop-up hood that detects a pedestrian impact, it's a pyrotechnic device that makes the hood pop up to give more of a cushion for the pedestrian to land on. Also I think pedestrian safety is one reason modern BMWs and Audis have the timing chains (very annoyingly for maintenance) fitted at the back of the engine, to give more space for pedestrian impact. Stuff like that. Also the automated emergency braking systems, more recently.

https://www.euroncap.com/en/car-safety/the-ratings-explained...

> [T]he key advantage the US can have in this world is a monopoly on all the really smart people.

Dream on ...

> It's really hard to argue with Trump's methods

On the contrary, his methods are ridiculous. He could have achieved similar ends without kowtowing to Russia, without squandering the opportunity to further weaken Russia’s military capacity, and so on. Something similar applies to pretty much everything else he’s done. He incurs collateral damage on everything even when it’s completely unnecessary to do so. It’s a definitional example of egregious incompetence.

The EU focuses on both aspects of safety.

You can look at the Euro NCAP ratings for the 2023 BYD Seal, for example: https://www.euroncap.com/en/results/byd/seal/50012. They break down the rating based on safety for adult occupants, child occupants and pedestrians. These ratings are based on many different crash tests.

Poland[1, 3], Latvia [2], Lithuania [3]

1. https://apnews.com/article/russia-nato-members-borders-airsp...

2. https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russian-drone-that-cras...

3. https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/lithuania-says-russian-...

Among other events, like drones being spotted near commercial airports.

Are you suggesting repeated airspace intrusions and acts against civilians are merely acts of innocence?

Chinese companies make cars with 5-star European crash ratings. They are perfectly capable of meeting US safety standards.

It's not 5 years behind, engine tech is more on a ~15 year cycle, or even more.

CFM LEAP, latest short-to-medium-haul airliner engine from CFM (GE+Safran) is from 2013 (first run). Its predecessor, CFM56, is from 1974 (first run) and saw a few evolutions, including as late as 2009.

> Yet they're not white enough to be part of "The West".

In many contexts, Mexico and other LatAm countries are included in the Western Civilization grouping. For instance: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/western-c...

Earlier in your comment you say “half the time” while you end with “90% of the time” the phrase “western” is a racist expression, undermining your argument that is already flawed, emotional, and anti-constructive.

Sure if you water down the term of imperialism then yes. It is then incumbent on you to prove "imperialism" among the worst performers economically. What imperialism plagues liberia and ethiopia and honduras and papua new guinea

Lots of miracles and exceptions in a working theory

>I would strongly wager it's vastly more likely that these Chinese vehicles do not meet US safety standards

This was correct a few years years ago.

It's actually the opposite nowadays, most of these cars are safer than the typical 2.5L 4 cylinder American car. Both the EU and Australia has been completely flooded with these cars, to an extent that you'd have to see it to believe it.

"closest ally" that doesn't fund their army despite having a huge land mass or their navy despite having a huge coast line and despite being located adjacent to our two biggest threats (China and Russia)

sorry nope. I said that we haven't broken up an alliances and that our allies are now investing in their own defense.

Papau New Guinea was ravaged by imperialism, invaded by imperial Japan and then was a meat grinder warfront in WWII. It was controlled by Australia since then.

Similarly in WWI, it was invaded by Australia and only gained independence in 1975.

Before that, it was split between Germany, the British and Dutch.

Before that, its population was impressed and blackbirded by European traders.

Like cargo cults literally developed there lol

Lots? There are 100 or so countries between Asia and Africa. And we are talking about a handful of East Asian countries.

Yes, they did well given the odds.

That’s moving the goalposts.

The fact that they are doing this because they don’t trust the US to honor its commitments is a very different proposition from “maybe it’s for the best”.

And if you’re familiar with world war 1 and 2, you might doubt that significant increase in domestic military production is a wholly good thing.

But point stands: it’s an example of formerly-strong alliance that is no longer trusted.

So what, china in 1975 was a completely destroyed country, comparable to north korea

I wonder if there are some other factors here considering the geographical clustering.

You asked what imperialism affected Papau New Guinea and I answered you. I'm not making an argument or addressing anything other than that from your post.

What term would you prefer? When you say "western view of China", do you mean to include or not include Latin American countries as part of the group of countries you claim has a hubristic view of China's accomplishments?

I mean, they're different industries, so I'm not sure how strong that analogy is.

OP: "So you'd think they'd be able to build a commercial jet liner, no?"

Sigh, the OP chucked out a casual insult at the Chinese because - unlike the USA and EU - their society is unable to (to date) build an international airliner business.

I deftly pointed out that the USA - despite is historical achievements - cannot build a high speed rail network and industry.

Once cannot cherry-pick the data one likes.