What the article is talking about is the forced joint-ventures. Do you want to open up a factory to make your product in China? In many industries, that is not legal. You have to find a Chinese partner to do a joint venture with. You can't just pick any company to do the joint venture with either. Practically it needs to be one that has politically connected owners, so that you don't have endless problems with permits and inspections.
Even though the law states that technology transfer is not a condition of the JV, any politically connected JV partner is going to do what politicians ask of them, which is demand technology transfer. Therefore to do business in China, you're forced to transfer your tech.
Meanwhile in the U.S. if you want to start a business, you fire up Stripe Atlas and you're done in ten minutes.
Some of my friends that are the most angry about this topic, will on the other hand, defend American companies who pay low wages saying no one is forcing the workers to take those low paying jobs.
Fine, China is a Sovereign country and can do what it wishes, but so is the U.S.
Needing that translated, stamped and signed on fancy paper is irrelevant. The message is loud and clear to anyone wanting to do business.
Sovereign nations are allowed to make laws. They are under no obligation to make things easier for foreign multinationals.
I wouldn’t go into China with any proprietary tech as a foreigner.
This assumption that it's alright for communications infrastructure to rely on trusting black boxes as long as those black boxes were designed by "allied" companies is madness. It doesn't particularly matter whether the gear is made by Qualcomm, Cisco, or Huawei - it's all suspect.
The ultimate path forward is for mobile nodes to stop trusting the network, entirely. But that's a long row to hoe with regards to access authorization without leaking identifiers.
How about if you didn't own the company outright but were only a senior executive, and your pay was directly linked to YOY profit increases, ignoring the risk of having that technology stolen and used against you 5-10 years down the road?
It seems to me that people mostly have problems with tech transfer because it appears to be the government mandating it. Maybe the right solution is for everyone else to start doing tech transfer, too.
Tech transfer to a limited extent for drugs in particular sound like a pretty good idea.