> it was thinking that investment in China would equal liberalization and democratic reforms...
That's a rewriting of history and a common misconception I've seen repeated ad nauseam both on HN and (what I assume is it's origin) Reddit.
The West (primarily the US and then-West Germany) began investing in China in the 1970s to 1989 explicitly as a bulwark against the USSR [0] due to the Sino-Soviet Split. The "economic democratization" argument was a 1990s-era framing to reduce opposition to the PRC joining GATT/WTO [1] along with to reduce the sanctions enforced following the Tienanmen Square massacre [2].
George HW Bush as well as Clinton's NSC Asia Director Kenneth Lieberthal were both massive Chinaphiles, and played a major role in cementing the position China is in today.
“The ‘economic democratization’ argument was a 1990s-era framing to reduce opposition to the PRC joining GATT/WTO” is what they’re talking about. American security analysts believed that making China richer would make it more like us.
Prior to that it was principally geostrategic. But prior to that, the argument was never made.
> American security analysts believed that making China richer would make it more like us
The NSC in the first Clinton admin and the HW admin was ambivalent-to-opposed to the "endogenous democratization" approach, as was seen with Clinton 1's decisions during the China Straits Crisis under Anthony Lake (who was canned in 1997) along with Bush 1's retrenchment of sanctions in response to the Tiananmen Square Massacre under Brent Scowcroft. Much of the shift happened in Clinton 2 due to personnel changes and a significant loss of political capital due to then ongoing controversies.
> But prior to that, the argument was never made
Yep. The "endogenous democratization" argument only arose in 1997 after Adam Przeworski and Fernando Limongi's paper "Modernization: Theories and Facts" was published back in 1997 [0].
I think that it's both a rewriting of history and a rationalization of the investment on some people's parts.
Nixon's opening of relations with China was definitely a move against the USSR, but that was nothing compared to the extent of investment that was seen after the fall of Communism in Europe. The fact that the CPC was still very much in charge while all of this investing was occurring had to be rationalized somehow in the minds of people who were less cynical, and "it'll help liberalization" was probably one of the rationalizations used. And in some ways, you can use investment as a way to leverage social changes within countries, and some people (though apparently not enough) thought that was the intention with China, but there was only a carrot, not a stick, and by the time there was a desire to use a stick, there was too much dependency on China as a market and producer for the West. That's where we're at now.
> but that was nothing compared to the extent of investment that was seen after the fall of Communism in Europe
Most of the capital investment and institution building that led to China Shock in the 2000s only happened due to the extreme degree of tech and capital transfer in the 1970s-80s, along with the visiting student program. Heck, Vietnam had a higher HDI [0] and GDP PPP per Capita [1] than the PRC until the early 2000s. The only difference was Vietnam was strictly in the Warsaw Bloc camp, and was negatively impacted by the collapse of the USSR, Czechoslovakia, and GDR while China was able to leverage ties with the US during that period.
Interesting point and pardon my naïveté but I’m curious, by “the west began investing” do you mean public sector investments? Or are you including people like jim rodgers long time China bull? I think private sector investment wouldn’t be done for anything other than profit. It seems like trade liberalism is an ideological thing that people seem to believe in above and beyond geopolitical concerns. Those who believe in trade liberalization (globalization) are sort of religious in their belief that it leads to liberalism in all spheres, not just the economic. I’m thinking of classic liberals, economists, Ayn Rand fanboys, etc.
Both public and private. Read my first citation - I don't feel like relinking dozens of citations on 1970s-80s US-China relationship.
Tl;dr - the Carter and Reagan administrations both heavily invested in building the PRC's R&D, military, and industrial capacity through a mix of public-private investments primarily as a bulwark against the USSR along with US Army boots on the ground in Xinjiang.
I’ve read the first 4 of those links and they don’t point to financial investment per se. They do cover liberalization in the diplomatic sense, and sale (not purchase) of US military tech, all of which is obvious given their location and the time period (peak Cold War), but I am curious about specifically financial investment in China, which is what the parent was discussing. I mean we weren’t buying their planes or submarines or anything. We were cozying up to them because that’s what was demanded by the defensive realities of the Cold War. That seems like a different thing than investing in China in the sense of financial investment during the post Cold War period of the late 90s onward. Again, sorry if I’m asking stupid questions but you seem to have a lot of knowledge and I want to learn more myself.
Depends on where in India you are from. Winter solstice times with chillai kalan [0] which is treated as a headache. Everything basically shuts down in the Western Himalayan regions of India around this time - from Ladakh to Kashmir to Upper Himachal and Uttarakhand [1], though it has gotten much drier/warmer compared to the stories my parents or grandparents told.
The EU is so much more civilized by bribing Turkiye [0], Libya [1], Morocco, Mauritania, Tunisia [2], and other nations to shoot and/or indefinitely detain them for you guys instead.
Yet we as Americans are the savages.
European civil society needs to drop this charade of moralizing and being "rules based". The reality is EU policymakers are equally as mercurial and open to making deals with devils. The issue is a subset of you guys have a weird form of "white saviourship" and sense of exceptionalism.
Finally, a plurality of us Americans either never had or no longer have blood ties with Europe. As an Asian American who used to work om the Hill, I myself and my peers increasingly ignore or overlook Europe despite having went to college with a number of your up-and-coming decisionmakers. In 2025, the majority of us Americans are Latino, Black, Mixed, Asian, or multi-generational White American.
Any positive historical ties we had with Europe (in reality, a fluke from 1939-2011) was because of 1.5 gen Central and Eastern European immigrants turned NatSec Advisers like Kissinger (German), Albright (Czech), and Brzezinski (Polish). From a soft power perspective, when we don't look inward we increasingly look to Latin America or Asia. And economically as well - our total trade with all of Europe is barely $975B compared to $1.5T with all of the Americas and around $2-2.5T with Asia.
Statistically, you're correct. That said, the thing about statistics is that outliers exist.
Also, imo the "Ivy" advantage is moreso a "family background" advantage - traditionally high social prestige and high entry barrier vocations were gatekept by Ivy and Ivy-adjacent membership.
The rise of competitive salary and low barrier of entry vocations like Software and Accounting helped dampen the value of that "Ivy" premium.
I guarantee (as I have before and you’re well aware) every Yale 2017/2018 grad in CS (or likely any quantitative degree) out earns me and my public school undergrad from 2018 and likely has a multiple of my net worth if they decided to pursue private sector employment instead of academia (though exit opportunities for the academic track are pretty lucrative too)
> I guarantee (as I have before and you’re well aware) every Yale 2017/2018 grad in CS (or likely any quantitative degree) out earns me and my public school undergrad from 2018 and likely has a multiple of my net worth if they decided to pursue private sector employment instead of academia
What "public school" did you attend?
I can assure you that if you did some form of STEM at a top/mid UC, UIUC, UWash, GT, UT Austin, UMich, UNC Chapel Hill, and other similar caliber public schools in 17-18 you would have had the exact same opportunities and earning potential as a Yalie or Harvard grad. Most CS/ECE departments offer salary data for you to look at, and at least for my HS peers who attended Cal and UCLA their outcomes were the exact same if not better than my HS classmates at Yale.
I understand layoffs can be traumatic, but I've noticed a persistent negative streak in your comments here on HN and this mindset isn't going to help you.
The accept rate of my university was 50% a full tier below UNC
The only people getting Yale like outcomes from my undergrad is one person with exposure to the SpaceX ipo, one that’s a principal eng at Broadcom, and one that’s a senior or perhaps staff at Facebook. That’s 3 people.
> The accept rate of my university was 50% a full tier below UNC
So is UIUC, but UIUC CS/ECE placements are the same as Yale if not better.
> The only people getting Yale like outcomes from my undergrad is one person with exposure to the SpaceX ipo, one that’s a principal eng at Broadcom, and one that’s a senior or perhaps staff at Facebook
Most CS Yalies aren't getting hired at SpaceX, Broadcom, and FAANG. Heck, circa 10 years ago, CS@Yale was dependent on MIT, Harvard, and UConn's CS departments for classes and on-campus recruiting for CS roles.
---------
As such, my question is
1. Are you located in the Bay Area/Seattle/NYC? - if not, you need to find a way to end up working there even if you have to take a hellish commute.
2. How long has your career gap been? - if it's been more than 6 months you need to find a way to spin unemployment and the bad job market into an opportunity (eg. Worked on my own bootstrapped startup, active contributor to OSS projects, attended grad school - highly recommend GT's OMSCS because it's cheap and lets you transfer to on-campus if you so wish)
3. How do you present your career? - Resume and LinkedIn writing/designing is an art
4. Are you picky about salary? - any white collar job is a good job in a bad white collar job market. A bad white collar job is better than being structurally unemployed
For the record, I was never laid off from Amazon despite what my username says. I've always been employed, I just switched jobs. I work remote and make about 15% more than the average Google E5 SWE and maybe 85% of a FB E5 SWE according to levels.fyi. We'll see how long that lasts given Google's stock trajectory.
-----
The UIUC comparison feels a bit misleading given that CS at UIUC has a <10% or lower accept rate, no different than getting into Yale or Duke or whatever generally.
If CS Yalies aren't working at SpaceX or Broadcom or FANG I'm genuinely unsure of where they'd be working. I'm imagining most work at HRT, Jane Street, Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI getting $750k-$1.5m at 29. The "average" ones work at Google and Facebook. If you go to Yale's LinkedIn, Google is the 3rd highest employer of alumni, after Yale and Yale SOM. That is _not_ the case at my undergrad.
I know they aren't working at IBM or Amazon or GE or GM or other lower tier companies.
> work remote and make about 15% more than the average Google E5 SWE and maybe 85% of a FB E5 SWE according to levels.fyi
You're making on par if not higher than most Ivy League grads.
> you go to Yale's LinkedIn, Google is the 3rd highest employer of alumni
Look at their profiles. The overwhelming majority did the terminal Yale MSCS [0]. Back when Yale CS was in a tailspin a decade ago [1], they were admitting almost anyone with a pulse in the terminal MSCS to help rebuild the alumni network. Penn did something similar with Wharton SF 20 years ago when they missed the biotech train.
> If CS Yalies aren't working at SpaceX or Broadcom or FANG I'm genuinely unsure of where they'd be working. I'm imagining most work at HRT, Jane Street, Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI getting $750k-$1.5m at 29
Not really. They end up doing the same jobs as you. Yale has a similar amount of grads at Amazon.
Also, based on the hiring practices of portfolio companies and my friend's startups - the plum jobs end up going to CS/ECE/EECS alumni from Stanford/MIT/Cal/UCLA/UW/UIUC/UT Austin/CMU or regionally well connected programs like SJSU, CalPoly SLO, and mid-tier UCs.
It's the same way if you did decent in accounting or finance at StevensTech or Baruch, you can end up in high finance in a couple years.
> Broadcom
I am intimately aware of their hiring practices. I can safely tell you that Broadcom is not hiring new grads from Ivies (or the US at all). Broadcom is following a strict "fire-and-move-to-India" strategy and paying $90k-140k TCs in Hyderabad, or bringing talent on L1/2s.
Have you tried going back 80% ap articles, some opinion columns, classifieds and sports with a lifestyle section.
We are living in an era of more news, different formats more in depth. I think our expectations are misaligned we expect everything to be one click away and social media to present it to us in a doom scroll. The articles shared just here on hn you would never find in a newspaper. If you are lucky you discover a zine like phrack or 2600 and wait months for the next issue.
I read the newspaper, just like you described, in the 90s and 2000s as a kid. It was really interesting and valuable. Honestly, yeah, that sounds amazing.
Yeah. This is the tech world making everything better. Sure the news is biased, poorly-written garbage, but you can have a lot of it, instantly, for like no money!
The Internet is not devoid of good quality media. Yes, some of it you have to pay for. The free papers we had before the Internet were never bastions of great journalism (though I'll admit that national TV news once was once pretty decent, and free).
And all news is biased. The only thing is, you can only see the bias towards your ideological enemies. When it's your bias, it's called "the truth."
You can publicly list in exchanges despite not being domiciled in the exchange's host country.
For example, Chinese and EU domiciled companies IPOing on the London Stock Exchange (LSE) due to a mix of easier access to liquidity and simplified rules and regulations.
The issue is, that rate of growth globally is not enough to sustain the capex spent on building EV manufacturing capacity in 2019-24.
Much of that growth was itself due to China, where EV sales growth is starting to taper down making the financials difficult [0].
Growth alone is not enough - what matters is margins. If the rate of growth cannot sustain COGS, then production is right-sized.
Heck, even back in China a major reason BYD has been so successful is because it was able to subsidize it's initial foray into EV vehicles by becoming the primary smartphone battery vendor for Apple, Samsung, and other vendors in the 2000s.
Traditional automotive majors lacked similarly high margins businesses to help cushion the upfront cost of building out capacity.
This isn't to say EVs are "dead", but the transition will not happen overnight. It took Hybrid cars 10-15 years to go mainstream, and imo EVs today are in the same position where Hybrid cars were in the 2013-16 period.
A lot of shifts are happening in battery chemistry (eg. solid state battery manufacturing capex becoming mainstream) along with component manufacturing (eg. Capex for mass producing EESMs). I remain optimistic, but the histrionics some EV fanatics make is equally as grating/annoying as ICE fanatics.
That's how it's already done, and has been done since 2014.
Most Indian states have multiple dedicated manufacturing clusters and SEZs for specific industries ranging from the megaclusters like NOIDA and Hosur to smaller ones like Kashipur IIE in Uttarakhand for electronic components or Baddi SEZ in Himachal Pradesh for generic pharma.
The OSAT that is being considered is part of an electronics+automotive SEZ that Micron, Mitsubishi, Hitachi, and Tata are members of (Sanand SEZ).
Most manufacturing in India has shifted to Tier 2/3/4 towns because of land availability and single-window policies, and in my opinion this is a better strategy as it helps build out regional economies. Heck, my ancestral village has had a wind turbine and battery storage factory for a decade now.
The development of this industrial strategy is underreported in non-Asian media (imo due to a lack of on-the-ground reporting in India), but is starting to be analyzed in the NatSec space [0]. I remember seeing a similar blindness to "Make in China" during it's early years.
Thanks for the explanation! I used to live in Gurugram and thought it was so strange where the Maruti Suzuki plant was - I've seen the trucks sluggishly trying to get around local (residential) traffic as the area around the plant has developed quite a bit, which is where my above anecdote originated.
I was better aware of these types of clusters from Dubais free zones, which I found were marketed in a more understandable way. Cool to learn about Sanand which _seems_ like it has pretty good road access to the ports?
(yes, more on the ground reporting in ANY country would be wonderful for western news to do, but we have to spend all the reporting budget on white house shenanigans now... we're cooked)
Oh whoa. That's pretty wild! What years out of curiosity?
> I thought it was so strange where the Maruti Suzuki plant was - I've seen the trucks sluggishly trying to get around local (residential) traffic as the area around the plant has developed quite a bit, which is where my above anecdote originated
That's because Manesar didn't have an Inland Container Depot (dryports that provide direct rail access to ports) until recently [0] - the Delhi NCR ones were in the eastern (Palwal/Faridabad, Tughlakabad/Delhi, Dadri/Noida) or western side (Bawal/Rewari).
Also, depending on when you were in Gurgaon, Manesar has now basically become part of Gurgaon, with all the farmland in between now becoming China-style high rises. It reminds of how outer-ring Beijing began to transform 15 years ago.
> Cool to learn about Sanand which _seems_ like it has pretty good road access to the ports?
India tends to use rail freight for most exports. A 1 hour cargo truck drive to an ICD and then a 7 hour freight rail to a major terminal port ends up being more efficient than trying to build capacity near a port in a lot of cases in India.
> more on the ground reporting in ANY country would be wonderful for western news to do, but we have to spend all the reporting budget on white house shenanigans now... we're cooked
It's because of the economics of journalism. The GFC and Jihadi John led to margins falling [1] and insurance rising [2], which means most on-the-ground journalism is done by freelancers. But purchasing news from an aggregator like Reuters or Bloomberg gets very pricey very quickly.
At this point, for English-language India news, I'd recommend following Reuters, Bloomberg, or Nikkei Asia simply because they have the right mix of on-the-ground reporters, relationships with policymakers, and journalistic standards. There is a good ecosystem of policy/wonk oriented reporting in India as well (eg. The Print, The Secretariat, Policy Circle) that is similar in style to "The Wire China" but they can be pretty obtuse if you don't have the domain experience.
Outside of these kinds of sources, reporting about much of Asia is easily 3-5 years behind in most "mainstream" American media
> I was better aware of these types of clusters from Dubais free zones, which I found were marketed in a more understandable way
A lot of that was because back when Dubai was building out it's logistics network, it depended on Western capital. Indian manufacturing and logistics FDI opportunties are primarily marketed to Asian (Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese, and before 2021 Chinese) or Gulf investors, because in most cases "American" companies like Apple or funds like Blackrock let OEMs or SDFs respectively take the lead.
Outside of R&D/Services FDI, India is fairly disconnected from the West, and the recent push in electronics exports to the US is largely thanks to Asian players slowly shifting to India from China+Vietnam during COVID Zero.
2018-2021 (yes, those years :o). I was also in one of those high-rises (golf course road area). Not the stereotypical time in India I expected. I don't want to say posh, but safe and most things were taken care of by the society.
I'll have to keep an eye on Nikkei Asia. NYTimes seemed to have an OK local bureau, but I noticed they seemed to lag on the Sri Lanka story pretty hard, so I'm definitely curious how empowered they are to get close to the stories. I do have a great deal of curiosity for the region, and wish I had better local news org to follow, but the remembering the famous early 2020 "keep it positive" meeting between central gov and news helps keep me grounded and realistic. Al Jazeera seems interested in reporting, and their biases are pretty easy to understand and work around.
You're incredibly knowledgable about all this! Appreciate you taking the time to teach a random guy on HN!
> NYTimes seemed to have an OK local bureau, but I noticed they seemed to lag on the Sri Lanka story pretty hard, so I'm definitely curious how empowered they are to get close to the stories
They are completely out of the loop.
Their bureau is small (around 10 people covering all of South Asia), their bureau chief is viewed as an out-of-touch Westerner who was shifted to Delhi after the fall of Kabul, and they have been frozen out (along with the BBC) because the PIB disliked their reporting on the 2019 election, Shaheen Bagh, and the CAA protests.
When Indian Policymakers meet with American stakeholders at events like the US-India Business Conference at Stanford [0] or the India Study Tour [1], NYT reporters or affiliates are not invited but WSJ [2], The Economist [3], FT [4], or Nikkei [5] are given the red carpet.
Since you were in India during 2018-21, you must have watched Season 1 of Paatal Lok - their B-story about media consolidation is eerily close to the truth.
There's a reason India's press freedom rankings aren't the greatest.
I mean, the reduction of industrial subsidizes for EVs globally [0] along with recent supply chain scares [1] have made the economics for EVs much more difficult recently [2].
This should not be construed as "EVs are dying" but as I keep saying, EVs are going thru the same cycle that Hybrid ICE went thru 15 years ago.
Assuming a 0 to 100% EV transition would happen globally in a handful of years is dumb. Heck, even Chinese automotive manufacturers primarily export ICE vehicles globally [3]. The transition will happen both slower than EV fundamentalists and faster than ICE fundamentalists assume.
Delhi's issues are severe due to the coordination problem - you have 6 state governments, 1 municipal government, the central government, and SOEs all with overlapping or competing responsibilities.
Hanoi has the exact same coordination problem as Delhi for the exact same reasons as well - 8 tinhs and 2 TPTTTWs all with overlapping and competing governments.
Beijing had a similar problem both Delhi and Hanoi, but because it was just surrounded by Hebei and Tianjin (a fellow 直辖市) it made coordination easier.
That's a rewriting of history and a common misconception I've seen repeated ad nauseam both on HN and (what I assume is it's origin) Reddit.
The West (primarily the US and then-West Germany) began investing in China in the 1970s to 1989 explicitly as a bulwark against the USSR [0] due to the Sino-Soviet Split. The "economic democratization" argument was a 1990s-era framing to reduce opposition to the PRC joining GATT/WTO [1] along with to reduce the sanctions enforced following the Tienanmen Square massacre [2].
George HW Bush as well as Clinton's NSC Asia Director Kenneth Lieberthal were both massive Chinaphiles, and played a major role in cementing the position China is in today.
[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46264332
[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/1994/12/20/opinion/IHT-america-needs...
[2] - https://www.nytimes.com/1993/07/14/opinion/forget-the-tianan...
reply