It's understandable though from China's perspective, that they aren't willing to give up important strategic sectors like social media or internet search to some US corporation. Especially so with their intention of being a rivaling global superpower to US one day. But it seems the economical aspect of increasing the revenues of Chinese companies has been as important or even more, which makes this practise more or less just cheating. Not that others are playing always fair, but China seems to be doing it considerably more than the others.
Just as an anecdote, AWS offers its Chinese region as a separately owned Chinese company, completely separate from other AWS regions. To me it speaks volumes how restrictive and hostile the Chinese market is to foreign companies, can you imagine having to do the same for each country? It would be a nightmare for global economy. https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/13/aws-exits-china/
"National Interest" is the key phrase, and the US has similar protective barriers in key industries. Food security is one such area that the US protects, and to that end, it provides a lot of agricultural subsidies preventing a lot of foreign farmers from entering the American market. The pearl-clutching when China does the same in their national interest is lacking in self-awareness.
The US agricultural subsidies have interesting first- and second-order effects (cheap corn syrup, obesity and corporate farm consolidation) - but I digress.
* Coke
* Starbucks (the largest one in the world is currently in Shanghai)
* KFC
* McDonalds
* Pizza Hut
* Domino's Pizza
* US movies regularly make as much money in China as they do in the US.
* General Motors sells more cars in China than in the US.
Part of the reason that AWS has two separate companies is because China, the US & the EU have laws like the CLOUD Act, GDPR and CDPR. It is easier to keep all companies seperate or at least siloed which is what most large companies do.
China is the most populated country on earth and an emerging superpower. They have every right to consider themselves exceptional, just the way the US considers itself exceptional.
To posit another angle: most international nations are smaller markets than the US (individually) so it doesn't make sense to customize things for every nation, which would be a goddamn nightmare. But this is a country of over 1.3 Billion people. China would need to be an exception anyway, and AWS having a subsidiary in China doesn't illustrate the unfairness of China's practices as much as the reality of how important that market really is.
What's an international nation?
Being highly populated and powerful is not really an exception in history. The USA got (? gets) its sense of exceptionalism from their innovative form of government/constitution that provided more freedoms than any government in history. The roots are based in a sense morality.
Hint: America is not about flag waiving, native pride that you betray in your statements ("can't stop visiting _our_ websties ")
Perhaps most America's problems are more internal than external and when the game is rigged in favor of one country we don't see them complaining. Maybe everyone is the same.
It's just like two people marry together for different intentions, just too hard to yield something good out of it to begin with.
This is both a democrats and republican making. Trump is right about this war even if it will cost some, in the long run we are better of.
I do remember how economists were lining up to shout their party line, that protectionism doesn't work and China was only hurting themselves. For some reason I don't hear so much of that these days, now that China's investments into local companies have started paying off.
That's absolutely absurd.
As for letting China continue to reap the benefits of being defined as a developing nation, yes, that's absurd, and also needed to stop 10-20 years ago.
20 years ago there was close to 700,000,000 people living on less than $2 a day and there was no underground subway in all of China. Do you really think this was developed?
A few cities (Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou & Shenzhen) are developed (~6% of the country) while the rest is still not very developed but improving.
Should it still be developing? Probably but not for much longer. How much is up for debate. Some say now. I expect it will happen sometime in the next 10 years.
Letting China win this with their mafia-like government, where there is no rule of law only rule of the party, is simply not an option.
Right now the biggest challenge is the western politicians who hate Trump so much they don't care if they help the Chinese. Anything to get him down.
But yeah I agree that it's definitely late in the game. We can still win this though.
Absolutely wrong. What do you think the TPP was meant to do?
The only thing Trump does is short term bluster and outbursts with no long term plan at all. Tariffs are short term plays. Long term strategic thinking requires creation of alliances and allies.
The fundamental difference always seems to be if you can persuade the world that your ideas and system is good, or you demand it by force. The latter is not a very effective long term strategy.
Politics isn't debate club. It doesn't work that way especially not when you are dealing with a mafia organization like Chinas ruling party.
I would argue that China opened access more than the US did. During the Mao era, it was basically impossible for US goods to enter the Chinese market. The converse was not true: Chinese goods could enter the US market. So during liberalization the Chinese opened up more than the US did simply because they had so much further to go.
The situation defacto is that china and the chinese has free access to our markets while we don't have free access to theirs.
The situation is that defacto china is benefitting from their developing nation status outcompeting western companies just on shipping prices.
Very few US products enter the chinese market plus those who do are forced to give over their IP.
US companies do very well for themselves in the Chinese market. The reason for the trade imbalance is not Chinese protectionism, but rather structural issues in the United States and the Dollar's role as global reserve currency.
Some American brands are everywhere....
Obviously some have been heavily restricted, most prominently internet media companies.
The US has a trade deficit with almost all of its trading partners. That is a structural issue.
> no IP protection
That's a crude caricature. There is IP protection in China. If that weren't the case, American microchip designers would not be making such large licensing fees in China. As far as I understand it, as a non-expert, IP protection in China is actually fairly good for a developing country.
> Thats not the same as China being open to western companies like the west is to china.
Western brands have much greater penetration in the Chinese market than vice versa. Moreover, much of the American trade deficit with China is actually made up of Western companies doing production in China.
But has nothing to do with what we are talking about here.
It's not a crude caricature. IP protection in china is non existing which anyone who even done a little business in china knows very well. It's litterally one of the biggest criticisms so I am not sure where you are getting your information from, none the less it's incorrect.
Chinese don't need their brands to western markets they just need to produce for our markets. The difference is that the west doesn't hinder chinese companies to compete on our markets, china does hinder us competing on theirs.
Rather than going back and forth with "Yes it is," "No it isn't," I'll provide some hard facts here.
China has been ramping up IP enforcement over the past five years or so. In 2014, China began establishing specialized IP courts in major cities, and over time, more and more have been created. These courts have been hearing a rapidly expanding number of cases. The number of IP disputes heard in Chinese courts has increased by 30-40% every year for the past few years. Last year, Chinese courts heard nearly 300,000 IP disputes. 10% of patent cases in China are brought by foreign companies, and they win 70% of cases.
There have been problems with the Chinese court system when it comes to IP. The penalties for IP infringement have historically been low, but they have been increasing. Evidence discovery has been difficult, but new procedures have been introduced to enable it. Foreign companies have felt that local companies are favored, but the central government has been pushing for stronger enforcement of foreign companies' rights, and the statistics show that foreign companies are now as successful as Chinese companies in their cases.
In light of all this, I think it's fair to say that the picture you're painting is crude. China is actually becoming one of the most active venues for IP litigation in the world, going just by the sheer volume of cases they handle now.
1. https://www.limegreenipnews.com/2018/09/china-ip-litigation-...
2. https://thediplomat.com/2018/01/chinas-progress-on-intellect...
3. https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2018/05/07/rapid-changes-chinese-...
4. https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3001407/jum...
Progress isn't the same as a satisfactory situation. Anyone who has tried working in China knows exactly what the problem is.
If not for Trump we wouldn't even be having this discussion and China would now have more or less complete domination on large parts of western infrastructure.
I have no idea what make you think that you are making any kind of argument here. It's a known fact even by the EU that china is not giving us access to their markets and har not actually securing IP and are in fact forcing it onto chinese hands.
That's not something I am just making up it's at the heart of the conflict.
What isn't a fact? Everything I wrote about the development of Chinese IP enforcement is detailed in the sources I listed at the end.
> It's a known fact even by the EU that china is not giving us access to their markets
That's not a known fact. American and European businesses not only have access to the Chinese market, but also have very significant presence there. China is the biggest market for Boeing and Airbus. It's the biggest market for General Motors and Volkswagen (and VW is the largest car brand in China), and the second largest market for Ford. I could go on and on like this. China is obviously still strongly export-dependent, but its consumer economy is growing quickly and foreign companies have a huge presence in that sector.
> and har not actually securing IP and are in fact forcing it onto chinese hands.
In my last comment, I cited to you the figures on the rapid growth in the number of IP disputes heard by Chinese courts. I told you about how specialized IP courts have been set up in major Chinese cities over the past five years, about how penalties for IP violations have been significantly increased, about how evidence discovery has been made easier, and about how effective foreign companies are in winning patent disputes in China (a 70% win rate). Those are facts.
I find that people outside China often have an image of the country that lags 10-20 years behind reality. The image you're painting would have been more accurate in 2009. In 2019, it's woefully out of date.
China has no excuse for not enforcing IP rights and no excuse for their forced technology transfer. There is no defacto improvement in China thats the reality you apparently refuse to understand.
You keep missing the point of this discussion and thus the point of the conflict with China.
China doesn't protect IP exactly because of the way they operate. Why do you think they don't want to enforce IP rights in China?
The idea that China doesn't protect IP is a cliché one hears in the West, but it's not accurate. Developing countries generally have much weaker IP enforcement than developed countries. But as far as developing countries go, my understanding is that China actually has pretty strong IP enforcement now. There have been massive changes to the Chinese legal and regulatory system as part of its entry into the WTO, but a country that had a GDP/capita of just hundreds of dollars a generation ago is not going to become Western Europe overnight.
How is that so? The US people brought all those products in exchange of what exactly?
China strongly discouraged their citizens and companies from buying US products and making the US stronger, but the US encouraged their citizens to buy from China, making China stronger.
This worked out well for China.
In the past, virtually none of them had enough money to buy products made in the high end (The US generally makes high quality but expensive products)
What's happened since the 1960s is more that the Republican party has been charging madly off into the far right (and, in some cases, simply into looney-land), while the Democratic party has shuffled nervously rightward after them.
You'll note that it's far from true now to say that the Republicans are doing much of anything that the Democrats would have done in the 1960s (aside from things that were prevalent across the board at that time, like racism and sexism).
>Eric Rauchway, professor of American history at the University of California, Davis, pins the transition to the turn of the 20th century, when a highly influential Democrat named William Jennings Bryan blurred party lines by emphasizing the government's role in ensuring social justice through expansions of federal power — traditionally, a Republican stance.
The article[1] goes on the state both parties started changing stances to try and win the new Western states.
[1]https://www.livescience.com/34241-democratic-republican-part...
I will note that this isn't a complete slam dunk of an argument, I would say the left in the 60's was motivated more by the general principle of free speech, whereas I would say the right today is more motivated by self-benefit. And also I suppose it doesn't go without saying: the first amendment and the general principles of free speech / censorship are similar but distinct ideas.
In other words, protecting freedom of expression by politely tolerating hate speech has the effect of making the targets of hate speech less free to express themselves in practice. Like a heckler's veto, the presence of hate speech dissuades minorities and the less powerful from engaging at all. It's not freedom from being offended that the left wants, it's a less corrosive public sphere that doesn't demand that the weak struggle through a painful headwind in order to be heard at all.
Having a extremism-based standard for measuring freedom of expression creates a requirement that participants tolerate the material harm of extremist expression. The left wants to shift the standard of measurement to tolerating more speakers of different kinds, rather than more subjects of varying extremism. The left still believes in maximizing freedom of expression, they just recognize that there are different metrics that may apply.
It is an example of the paradox of tolerance: If a group believes in tolerance, absolutely, to the point that they tolerate intolerance, then over time, those who are intolerant will tend to gain power within the group and the tolerance will be eroded (except, of course, the tolerance of those intolerant beliefs that usurp them).
Absolutism of any kind is generally going to lead to problems in our imperfect, non-absolute world. Free speech maximalism is just one example of that. If we put people and their genuine needs before abstract principles, that will tend to be a better guide for how to make a society that serves everyone—and, indeed, allows the greatest freedom for the greatest number.
Another is the saying "tolerance isn't a virtue, it's a peace treaty", which I think really cuts through the apparent dilemma you highlight.
Sometimes, policies that follow from abstract ideas do harm to some people, in the interests of helping others (hopefully more), or do harm in the short term, in the interests of helping in the long term. Sometimes, these tradeoffs are good to make; other times, they are not.
There is no hard and fast Golden Rule that can serve as your bedrock if you treat it as something to be applied in all situations without critical analysis. The closest I can come is "care about people", but even that requires careful application, because there are situations when you must do things that hurt some people—even people you do care about—in order to do what is best for all.
This is what happens with religion. Everyone is welcome and encouraged to believe these truths and questioning them will get you kicked out or ex-communicated or at best ignored and re-educated.
Some issues I see with this perspective:
- a very small percentage of people, regardless of where they fall on the political spectrum, think about these matters in anything approaching the level of complexity displayed in your comment. This thread is absolutely full of people who seem to have lost the ability to distinguish between reality itself and an extremely lazy interpretation of reality. I can appreciate the frustration that's brought them to this point, but the ability for a small percentage of people like you to skillfully articulate a steel-manned version (that may not actually be technically accurate let's not forget) of the beliefs of an emotional mob doesn't give me a lot of comfort
- not all powerful actors are behaving in a completely honest or as well thought out manner, or may believe that censorship "overreach" is strategically justifiable, from an "ends justify the means". And this may very well be a reasonable and even correct belief, at this snapshot in time, and under these particular circumstances - but what about the future? What if we get another Trump-style leader in the future exploits well-intended limits of free speech toward an undesirable end?
- by not extending any effort towards understanding the real and extremely psychologically complex motivations that are actually behind the emotional lashing out of people (that we all know very well happens with humans, that can be observed throughout history, and on this very forum), often along "racist" lines, those who propose to curtail free speech may be acting in an overly enthusiastic manner (not to mention, if people can't be bothered to even consider calming down and making a serious effort to understand what is actually going on, why should I trust they have the mental capacity to make wise decisions on something as important as free speech?)
The world is incomprehensibly complex, and getting worse at a rapid pace. I think extreme caution is warranted on any matters related to something so fundamentally important as free speech. If some of these ideas are really so bad, why can good ideas not win out in the marketplace? I have this constant feeling that there is a lack of serious effort, and that there are often not-easily-seen reasons why such an effort cannot be made (Thomas Frank, Jonathan Haidt, and Mark Blyth would be a few people worth listening to if one was interested in starting to get some depth in this perspective).
Trying to find sources on my own has turned up nothing conclusive, nor clear enough to say that a "flip" occurred in any short period.
Does anyone have decent sources for this?
Johnson’s push of civil rights in the 60s simply destroyed the southern democrat wing of the party, who were welcomed into the Republican Party via Nixon’s southern strategy, and the pro-union Northern Democrats became the sole power source of the remaining Democrats.
Now with Trump and his rust belt base, Republicans are losing a bit of their economic liberalism (being more against free trade).
Why is that crazy? Economic-liberals in the US have mostly been Republicans historically.
> Economic-liberals in the US have mostly been Republicans historically.
> <...> people are allowed to rethink their ideas.
Of course people can change their minds and opinions. But that's what is ironic and funny - to completely change your long time historical behaviour.
As Democrates have become more global and open to free trade they lost the poor/uneducated.
The poor/rural/uneducated are not represented in hollywood. So people forget they exist. Everyone seems to run a magazine / is a doctor/lawyer/firefighter. It creates this fake viewpoint that these other people don't exist in the numbers they do.
The Trump administration's stated goals are to obtain concessions for some American industries. Precisely the ones that funded his rise (Coal, Steel, Agribusinesses etc.) or where most of his ardent loyalists are employed.
(The canonical example of exploitative "free" trade is the banana republics, sponsored by the US for the United Fruit Company)
What's crazier is that the strategy of economically integrating China with the world was a Rebublican economic-liberal one to start with. The plan was to make the rest of the world look like America and be trading partners, providing markets for American companies. Someone forgot the last bit.