alt Hacker News> An interesting point is that it's important to have powerful China around because they're a capitalist competition to the US.
Semi-capitalist at best. They're good for cloning things invented in the West, but the problem is that that is much cheaper than inventing, so things get commoditised and the places that can do expensive R&D have to find other ways to make money all the time.
1. That's not true. More and more segments of technology are being dominated by China. China sells lots and lots of everyday objects that are wholly desgined in China, with quality beating western products. They're just small improvements over existing designs of relatively simple things, so nothing makes the headlines.
2. Lots of Chinese technology never leaves China for political reasons, rather than economic/technology ones.
3. If you want to buy a semi-professional machine as an advanced hobbyist, often your only option is China.
4. Apple is wildly known for taking existing designs and improving on them. Why is it good for Apple to do that, but bad for China to do that?