AxleHub
Elite Member
Reverse engineering and theft to trade secrets are certainly areas of significant concern, but they are a lesser priority when it comes to export control issues. I worked this area for years and can say on a factual basis that lack of capability is what drives the majority of export control rules when it comes to China (and others) and items that are ITAR or EAR controlled. I said "factual basis" because the standards for ITAR and EAR are readily available and they make it pretty easy to tell which is which.
There are certainly times when it's not a lack of capability, in an absolute sense, but a lack of capability right now. In other words, we know that if they set out on a path, they can develop a certain item, but it's going to take them many years to do so. We don't allow that item to be shipped there because it would shorten the development time from decades to years or months.
The carrot China uses is big contracts for the China market. In the 60 minutes piece I referred to earlier, 1.5 billion dollars of windmills were needed for china . . . Very high tech windmills. So American Semiconductor in the U.S. was providing the secret software and China eould build tbe actual windmills. Then they bribed an employee of American Semiconductor to give them the source code. Real cold war spy type stuff except about trade secrets not military . . . But conducted by thr Chinese military.
Net result is American Semiconductor went from 900 employees to terminating 600 and losing almost a billion in shareholder value. Then when they started a huge lawsuit . . China hacked yheir computers to find out the lawsuit focus and mess with the company too.
Now Massachusetts recently did a state contract with China using U.s. government tax dollars fir a big pile of windmills with the stolen state of the art software.
This is not only a tragedy . . but its not an isolated example either. Its called "The Great Brain Robbery" for a reason. A country 5 times our size is attacking individual businesses in big quantities for billions and maybe evengually trillions of loss . . our jobs, our efforts, our ideas, our money, our futures.