China has won the data war without stealing any. We have given them to them

Despite the bodies that are usually tried to attribute in that sense, at least much more disproportionately than on the other side of the Pacific, China has not needed to steal secrets or technological secrets of the West.

We have given them to them in a silver tray.

Why is it important. There are several cases that do not mean much but united form a puzzle. For example, Apple and Its accumulated investment of 55,000 million dollars in China to “form” in advanced manufacturing.

Or bytedance accumulating billions of hours of video labeling – and western– To train the most sophisticated recommendation algorithm we know. And now Apple can repeat the pattern with AI.

The context. The dominant narrative points to Chinese industrial espionage as a cause of its technological boom. It is not so simple: Western companies have been the greatest facilitators of technological transfer in modern history, and did it voluntarily.

The promise in return: margins. In the short term.

The panoramic. Apple was one of the great responsible for China’s change, which went from manufacturer Low Cost A superpower of manufacturing in just two decades.

Bytedance has converted western behavior data – hours and hours deciding what we like and what is not based on Scroll– In algorithmic supremacy for a five years. Tesla accelerated the Chinese ecosystem of electric vehicles and now he has turned against him. DJI dominated civil drones by processing Western Maps.

• The pattern is repeated: West delivers knowledge, China absorbs it and begins to overcome it.

Terry Gou, founder of Foxconn, understood that it was better to sacrifice immediate margins in exchange for tie up a company like Apple to get free training by US engineers.

Between the lines. China applied what we could call “reverse Trojan horse.” Instead of infiltrating, it attracted Western companies to come voluntarily.

Apple’s is a paradigmatic case: for years he thought it was she who was conquering China, but the reality seen with perspective is that It has been China who has conquered Apple. Examples:

• The progressive assignments of sovereignty. Apple has accepted content restrictions or Mandatory storage on local serverssomething that led many hands to many heads at the time just for the EU to end up demanding something very similar.
• Logistics dependence without turning. There is no plan B, leaving China would be a slow, expensive movement that would require many years and many dollars.
• The massive transfer of knowledge. The aforementioned formations to millions of Chinese workers, the investments of more than 7,000 million in own equipment for foreign factories. China has absorbed that know-how.

Yes, but. Apple generated thanks to this a company of 3 billion dollars. In 2000 it was around 4,000 million. Thousands of times less. That growth could not have happened investing elsewhere. Tesla would have taken much longer to master the electric car without Chinese industrial capacity.

The problem is the aforementioned: there is no medium -term plan can not have it. Without China, Apple cannot manage its complex logistics, its millions of daily components. Nor access engineers to dominate them.

And now… Apple is working with Alibaba to take Apple Intelligence to China for legal imperative. Is being more complicated than it seemed. And bytedance I would prefer to close Tiktok in the United States rather than sell its valuable algorithm.

• The employer is also repeated here: Western companies seek to access the Chinese market delivering their most valuable technology.

The threat. China is increasingly dominating the massive adoption of AI with models mainly open source. Tencent has already integrated Depseek in Wechat For its more than one billion users.

In China, AI is not a separate application, but is integrated into what is already widely used. Possibly the next generation of intelligent agents will repeat the pattern of Apple and Foxconn. But in the field of software.

• China is not winning the data career spying on the West. He is winning for having opened the door for the West to teach him everything he needed to know in exchange for greater quarterly benefits.

Today the student has become a teacher and is the one who puts the standards.

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