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)
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.