ByteDance, Oracle at loggerheads over terms of TikTok agreement

Trump is trying to put an end to TicToc because he is afraid that China is gathering information about American kids who put their infantile videos there. I know there are skeptics who will say that TicToc is about the level of Trump's understanding of the world. But face the facts. The whole reason for Trump's decoupling with China is he and many others realize that the US can no longer compete with China. Now Chinese companies can't buy US electronics, but that will just motivate China to make the stuff itself. It may take 5 or 10 years, but China will succeed because it plays a long game. The US is the past, China is the future.

The whole reason for Trump's decoupling with China is he and many others realize that the US can no longer compete with China. Now Chinese companies can't buy US electronics, but that will just motivate China to make the stuff itself.

China has to either buy or steal technology because it doesn't have the cadre of experienced senior engineers and scientists who run the big tech development projects or who come up with advanced manufactured goods that one finds in the best western companies. Mao and the Red Guards either killed or ran off a whole generation of educated Chinese teachers and scientists who today should be that senior cadre of scientists and engineers in China. They are simply not there. We know this because the Red Guards did it to our family so we know this first hand. On top of that while Chinese universities graduate lots of engineers, a Chinese university operates like everything else in China. Money talks and if you want good grades your parents need to cough up "red envelops" for the professors. The main reason my own wife did not attend a Chinese university was after the Red Guards ran her mother out of the classroom and off to the countryside for "re-education" they didn't begin to have enough money to bribe the admissions department to get her in and then bribe the professors for good grades. She was a grown adult before the authorities would even let her return to her mother's original home city of Shanghai from their exile in the countryside. You have to have a residency permit to legally live anywhere in China. China can't do it on its own. They have to steal western technology to get ahead and their young seek an education in the west because it is a much better education where grades do not depend on bribes. The west had every reason to cut China off from their best technologies. In fact the west would be supremely foolish not to.

@desert tortoise And yet, Huawei, for example, has more than 5,000 US patents. Somebody must be doing something right.