Which came from the US sanctioning Huawei because Huawei was making better chips than Qualcomm and Cisco.

US was posturing to ban China access to Arm. Ultimately, it led to a ban on using TSMC for Chinese companies instead. There is no real justification to do a blanket ban on all Chinese companies except a state-sponsored way to to slow China down in AI race.

Not better, just cheaper copies. And all it took was mining Nortel to death and then moving on to mining Cisco itself.

Not true. Huawei's HiSilicon was even or ahead of Qualcomm Snapdragon as early as 2018 in phone SoCs.

How long until we're all learning Chinese in order to better understand their datasheets.

It must have slipped by me at the time - what happened with China and ARM?

The Arm China CEO went rogue and spun it off as its own company. ARM HQ were unable to fire him, as he had physical possession of the company's seal stamp. Reading between the lines, the Chinese government chose not to intervene for multiple years.

This stuff constantly happens to foreigners in China and just seems to be mostly due to having bad local legal teams. If your CEO can run off with the company stamps and screw you over.. then it just sounds like amateur hour and you have no idea what you're doing.

The legal system there is fundamentally very bureaucratic - there are rules, but they're very different from the West. You need local help - and a lot of it. You see similar bureaucratic insanity in Japan, though I'm guessing there is just a lot more legal infrastructure for guiding foreign companies there.

If it’s constantly happening, does that sound like an attractive market to work in? I’m very open to the idea of companies screwing up, but day-to-day operations shouldn’t look Kafkaesque.

It's attractive enough that people keep going despite it "constantly happening."

So you're saying that ARM just went there to open an office without knowing what they're doing?

We're talking about the same ARM...?

Can't you say the same for the West though? This news is about a Chinese company's control being taking over by a Western government.

In no way this is comparable, come on.

When you run your business in China, China runs the copy of your business for you ;)

I do understand that we want to try to see "the same" in the stupidity of our politicians that let all of this happen just like that for many years, but we are different.

I can see what both of the above commenters are saying. Here is my synthesis:

In the US, the powers-that-be are often content to let markets, popular forces, and regulation shape foreign companies. In China (I'm no expert, please weigh in [1]) it seems that the CCP is very motivated to make foreign firms serve its industrial agenda while staying under Party control. That usually means insisting on Chinese ownership stakes or joint‑venture structures, so the state always has a foothold in the business.

In this way, politicians of both countries do find ways to "get what they want" from a foreign business -- even if they go about doing it differently.

[1] I'm not ignorant of geopolitics; I do read about China, but focusing on it is not part of my job nor education.

In this situation I disagree. This is a blatant seizure of the control of a foreign owned company for political reasons. This is straight out of China's playbook.

I agree that the West is in general different, as in this is more an exception than the rule. But being in the semiconductor industry, I'm fed up with the stupid rules we are dealing with since the 1st Trump admin. Even more stupid is the US foreign policy affecting EU companies much more than US companies.