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There is, of course, a difference between sovereign debt, which China has (though the ratio to GDP is exaggerated, because GDP is underrated), and external debt, which in China's case is minuscule. But okay.
You are indeed pondering the use of fairly underhanded means, except you don't need to steal «secrets» because most of that is your own IP, the main problem is skills. I think the gap is near entirely due to stronger US position in established technology (real and, even more so, arrogantly perceived), not any moral preference.
I'm really not, I'm talking about third parties, mainly the EU, but extremely high levels of automation on some timeline <20 years seem to be the modal scenario for me.
When Xi grows tired and steps down, like Deng did (Deng, importantly, kept manipulating his successors). Personally I think he'll nominate Ding Xuexiang on merit of overseeing the EUV project, assuming that it succeeds. Ding doesn't have the required track record of governance, but Xi broke rules himself, and this is more important than boosting KPIs in some province.
I think the good news was about the technical possibility of zero Covid, or at least drastic slowdown of the spread with full lockdown and tracking measures. The bad «news» was overestimation of potential costs of Covid, and once we reached Omicron, it took too long for Xi to notice both failure and good news of Omicron's relative mildness.
I think you're failing to model him. This boilerplate grasping autocrat theory is about as lazy as your theory of Huang, too. More generally I guess you're biased against and uncharitable towards «rulers», both CEOs and personalist dictators, they must be irrational, petty, and shooting themselves in the foot. Because otherwise it's not clear if «uh, but we'll stop electing boomers one day» suffices as a defense of a structurally compromised, easily corruptible universal suffrage 2-party democracy. I seriously believe that your succession system is straight up inferior to the CPC's one, both morally and technically. You impose no filter besides "graduated from a good school", you ask for no virtues except popularity and political instinct, your checks and balances and «institutions» are revealed to be hot air, you reward clientelism, and so on it goes. It's a very good system for ensuring non-violent successions and popular buy-in, but that's all it has going for it – insurance for elites who want to play the game of power without skin in the game. It's a complete profanation of the idea of democracy, which was designed for a different people, of different class, in a different context. Chinese system was at least designed for modern-ish China.
Other nations can't, at least not yet. Only China and the US have a serious shot. It's a very valuable goal when you have a powerful enemy that wants you to be technologically behind and vulnerable to trade disruptions because it considers your self-directed development morally wrong, or inherently a threat.
I tire of this debate about autarky. It's a somewhat recent discovery for the Western public that China is doing that, overwhelmingly the complaints were about gross trade imbalance, IP theft, «military applications» and sectoral competition, you're one of the few who's talking about autarky as a problematic philosophical position. Though notably, Neal Stephenson predicted this dynamics in Diamond Age, see Seed vs Feed (no relation to Sneed).
No, that's not the argument. I'm just listing their options. On the margins, yes, total compute denial might drain some more brains. I think that your bias is preventing you from noticing that they're not desperate like Indians, they're already pretty nationalist, and such blatantly hostile effort may backfire. I know that some OpenAI folks proposed stalling Chinese AGI project by granting O1s to top DeepSeek researchers, who privately said they are not interested in this garbage (several of them are returnees, and I guarantee you that they can easily 5x their income anytime by switching sides again).
Your society is just increasingly losing attractiveness. There are costs to vice, to dysfunction, to casual racism, to smug forgiveness of your every demerit, and to antagonism. There are also costs to having low sexual market value, frankly. How much is it worth in $$$ or H200s for a 20 year old nerd with 3400 CodeForces ranking to justify living in a place where you get Chinese women, rather than in Hangzhou? I think this detail is often underrated in analyzing people's choices.
Anyway, the argument was more about the difference between freely working on the best hardware they can get, and working in a shitty Soviet-style sharashka with a commissar. If the latter is implemented, the US does win on freedoms, values etc. Xi does not want to fold frontier private companies into a SOE and destroy them, in AI and otherwise. So he's navigating a fine line here in permitting Nvidia with caveats.
This may seem naive and romantic to you, but that's my view. They are invested in their research projects, their companies, their mission, their nation, these companies are currently culturally healthier than American ones. You can't change that with some bans, but Xi can, and he has to weigh the costs.
my 95% interval is 1 to 5 years. You really overrate how plug and play it is. It's comparable to the problem of chips as such. They were designing chips on par with Nvidia back in 2019, they still don't have an equivalent to CUDA. In 2026 they'll tape out chips on par with Nvidia from 2022, and still won't have an equivalent to CUDA. I'll change my mind if I see any non-garbage model trained on Ascends, there's definitely more than enough raw compute for that already. Last time Huawei tried, it was an obfuscated DeepSeek V3 with a switched tokenizer.
Well, that's the spirit. But there's a difference between being a heroic man at home and a brainy bugman in a foreign land. You've got to offer better deals if you want to keep them, because some top performers are going back. This guy, for example. New top performers are often skipping the US stage altogether. I see 5 IOI Gold winners on DeepSeek team. Graduated PKU and went straight for <$200K compensations at home. I think Zuck would be eager to pay multiples of that.
That's a fair concern, and yes of course the Party shares it. I don't think it's an existential concern, because thermodynamics is more important than financial flows. If you really can produce everything cheaply in terms of energy and labor, you can lose 90% of your trade surplus and pivot to subsidizing demand, it'll be a politically costly but technologically straightforward adjustment, and yes you can survive an implosion of your companies. If you cannot produce much of anything cheaply, you can try to subsidize supply but you'll probably be flailing for years. And speaking of debt, you can do the arithmetic here. Even their most involuted industries are not in such a gutter.
China cannot fully implement Dual Circulation. That's largely a failure. That's also largely a product of tradeoffs that make sense under their assumptions about long term competitiveness and security, which I believe are not paranoid and in fact more rational than American assumptions were and are. Too many of their exported goods cannot be replaced in the short term, so they can currently afford this model. Notice, for instance, how they've shrugged off the decline of exports to the US market, fully offsetting it with Asia. The developing world has much need of cheap high quality goods, particularly capital goods, and will have for a while yet.
Going forward, we'll see.
Are they? My impression is that the US intends to monopolize the top-tier product for national security purposes. They'll get open source Chinese versions or some nerfed American stuff.
But that's my idea of how your AGI race narrative would actually develop. Personally I think that everyone gets their sovereign AGI, sooner or later, so we'll indeed see a large reduction in non-commodities trade, shoring up of critical industries, and have to live with that.
I believe in individual responsibility for shared delusions, and I do think that your analysis is strongly influenced by an implicit belief in racial hierarchy, which is why you are not curious to learn more than tropes and some macroecon about this system your nation is in competition with. But fine, I won't insist.
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