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521 points hd4 | 6 comments | | HN request time: 0.02s | source | bottom
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hunglee2 ◴[] No.45643396[source]
The US attempt to slow down China's technological development succeeds on the basis of preventing China from directly following the same path, but may backfire in the sense it forces innovation by China in a different direction. The overall outcome for us all may be increase efficiency as a result of this forced innovation, especially if Chinese companies continue to open source their advances, so we may in the end have reason to thank the US for their civilisational gate keeping
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dlisboa ◴[] No.45643770[source]
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.

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1. notepad0x90 ◴[] No.45643978[source]
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).

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2. tsunamifury ◴[] No.45644881[source]
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.

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3. notepad0x90 ◴[] No.45647435[source]
It's not an academic notion (at least not strictly), since virtually everyone uses it routinely.
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4. tsunamifury ◴[] No.45648318{3}[source]
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
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5. notepad0x90 ◴[] No.45649130{4}[source]
That's very reductive of you. "western" like "3rd world" is used very differently than what you or academics would like.
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6. tsunamifury ◴[] No.45651009{5}[source]
I feel like you didn't even grasp the base sentence meaning. "Classicism" is an academic concept