On Fri, 02 Oct 2015 11:54:40 -0500, dpb wrote:

On 10/02/2015 10:20 AM, Ed Huntress wrote:
...

I was simply pointing out that much of what countries like China do
isn't nearly so much in the spirit of trade/countertrade as it is simply
overt industrial espionage--if we've got the manufacturing on our soil
it's now quite simple (relatively, anyway) to now move that technology
to other fields. Russian PWRs somehow looked essentially identical to
the W design built in France--in fact it turned out that engineering
drawings in some cases even still had some circle-W stamps on them that
hadn't gotten covered over on copies or yet redrawn...despite, of
course, in those days USSR being on the "no-fly" zone for the technology.

Well, it's both, but I wouldn't call this industrial espionage. In
these big trade deals it's common for the buying country to demand
some domestic production, and it's just as common for them to specify
technology transfers. These are negotiable points but they're a common
part of trade at that level.

And if you think the mainland Chinese are bothered at all by whatever
restrictions there are on that "technology transfer"...

I think you misunderstand how that kind of trade works. The Chinese
government owns 51% or more of manufacturing investments in China. If
you don't want some part of your technology leaving the US, don't send
it to China. Send them the finished parts.

This, too, is a common thing. Mostly they want the manufacturing
know-how from these deals, more than the science or
product-engineering secrets. They get those through standard types of
industrial espionage. The Japanese used to do the same thing. They
once made me a pretty good offer to "report" on new materials
developments at a handful of US companies. I respectfully declined.

Boeing, Caterpillar, etc. have a good idea of what they want the
Chinese to see. There are a lot of things you could show them that
they couldn't do anything about. For example, P&W could set up a
single-crystal turbine-blade casting operation in China, and, for some
technical and resource reasons, they couldn't do a damned thing to
duplicate it.

By the time the Chinese are able to duplicate many of these things,
they will be obsolete in competitive global markets. So the issue
isn't so much long-term competitiveness. It's mostly a matter of
getting what we can from the Chinese market now and in the short term,
assuming that they'll eventually be able to make something competitive
on their own.

But at their productivity rates (abysmally low) and with their rising
wage rates, that could take a long time.

--
Ed Huntress