I was a PhD student at MIT CSAIL a few years ago and recall an incident where a visiting scholar from a corporation who had donated money had to be asked to leave because he essentially scraped every piece of internal data and code in the lab and sent it back home.<p>What was amazing to me was that he was allowed to return a few months later with the explanation “it was just a cultural misunderstanding”<p>I want to be careful not to point fingers at a particular country or culture, but that experience taught me that a grey-area version of corporate espionage is _very real_ in academia — an environment that operates with all guards down and no defenses against it.<p>[Edited to fix tappos]
Here's an anecdotal story.<p>My team was interviewing engineers last year. We had a Chinese engineer come interview with us. She was in the States on a work visa, and her first job here was for a state government project. She was on a team building a web application that had public-facing and internal-facing UIs, and she was apparently working on both of these.<p>Anyways, she comes in for the interview, and shortly after our conversation begins she pulls out her work laptop, opens up her work project, and start going through the code with us! I asked "is this open source?" and she said no. I could even see slack messages coming up from her team mates.<p>I honestly couldn't believe it. We asked her to stop. As you can imagine, she didn't get an offer from us.
This is what a commerce war looks like.<p>It's not about China being an oppressive state, spying, etc. The former didn't matter all these decades, and the latter goes on forever from all sides and nobody bats an eye.<p>It's about China catching up to (and surpassing in some cases) US tech, and not being content to be the mere "factory of the US" but sell its own stuff. Like Korea, Taiwan, and Japan each did in their own timelines decades ago (from laughed at copycats and cheap foreign manufactures, to competitive themselves).<p>Expect to see more of China as the "enemy du jour" going forward.
First off, I am not pro or anti USA or China. Just curious and hoping to have a constructive dialogue.<p>What moral high ground is USA on in the Snowden era? Why trust Cisco or Apple or Google or Facebook or Microsoft in USA's Prism? With the "Five Eyes", how to trust Nokia or Ericsson or Blackberry? What ethical high-ground are the tax evading tech giants on? Lets not forget how the pharma mobs are gaming the patent system to run an extortion ring on life saving medicines like insulin or the planned obsolescence when the world is rushing to reduce global warming.<p>Its sad to see a place of learning is getting into politics & business. How different is this from the patent battles between Oracle & Google or Apple, Microsoft & Samsung? Google is poaching chips guys from various sources to compete with Apple. Then all the poaching in AI & self driving & electric cars. Lets not forget the "borrowing" done my Jobs & Gates from Xerox PARC that founded the Silicon Valley.<p>As a consumer, due to Huawei & Mi. Samsung & other brands have started lowering the price. Hope Google poached the right team to make a better chip than what Apple has. Hopefully Apple also will start selling sensible priced devices. MIT should instead be working for growing an opensource culture in China. Which already seems to have something of that sort but limited due to all being in Chinese language.
Hmmm. From the article: "MIT is the latest top educational institution to unplug telecom equipment made by Huawei and other Chinese companies to avoid losing federal funding."<p>It seems like my government is pulling out all the stops trying to compete internationally against Chinese companies in the 5G market. I understand that other countries also pull out all the stops in trying to help their industries compete internationally.
I just finished reading 'AI Superpowers' and I hardly understand now if US has any single chance to compete with China's Tech fairly, openly, democratically, with respect.
It could be argued that if the news needs to introduce you as "an elite US school", you aren't really an elite school.<p>That's an odd conclusion to draw about MIT though. Who's the target audience here? MIT really is internationally known.
There has been a lot of fud and scaremongering on China and Russia with very little evidence and facts. This makes it look like the commitment to competition, free markets and due process is hollow and self serving and the moment it doesn't benefit you you try to change the rules.<p>China is now running into some of these invisible barriers and constraints that have been in place all along and this brings them into light and exposes the self serving hypocrisy of the current system to the rest of the world. There are global mechanisms to take complaints with evidence yet this 'war' is not being fought in the trade commissions but in the public press with innuendo and smears and political pressure on allies.<p>How do we then even talk about words like competition, free trade and innovation in neutral terms when companies like Qualcomm can succeed unhindered while others like Huawei are politically demonized and constrained in market access.