Comment by avidiax
3 hours ago
According to the book, Apple had a special team to prevent divorces among the engineers sent to Asia. That's how long they were over there training.
An argument can be made that Apple nearly singlehandedly advanced China's consumer electronics manufacturing by 20 years, and hastened the decline of U.S. manufacturing while doing it.
China doesn't allow key AI engineers and scientists to go overseas. They literally have exit bans and confiscated passports. The west could have ordered companies like Apple to stop sending engineers, banned companies like Boeing and Rolls Royce from building factories in China, and retained massive wealth, expertise, and national strategic advantage, but allowed it to be pissed away for quarterly profits.
> The west .. Boeing and Rolls Royce
Boeing is a US company. RR is, last time I looked, a UK company. "The West" isn't a coherent political unit.
Besides, this is the exact opposite of the FDI strategy of past decades. How far should the ban on overseas FDI go? Ban on investing in South America? Full capital controls? As you mention, passport confiscation (!) for key nationals? I don't think any of this would have worked for "the west" at any point past about 1970, or even post-WW2.
Airplane and jet engine manufacturing are literally defense industries.
Corporations operate at the discretion of the local government. Corporate charters could be revoked or threatened to be revoked to preserve national interests.
I'm not saying that I agree with or recommend the mechanisms that China uses. I'm saying that the West actually does have alternative mechanisms if it wanted to try.
As it stands, we are now under a ticking clock before China creates competitive, commercial and military airplane industry and begins to massively undercut Airbus and Boeing, and it was our own companies that wound the clock.