I'd bet money China's economy could be growing 10x faster if it had independent courts and foreign companies who become successful weren't treated like criminals.
Just imagine how many of us would be moving to China to start companies and how much more VC money would be flowing in. And all of the global HQs and products and innovation that would be happening there.
China's growth has been massive but it's a shadow of what it could be. Their growth rate should have been closer to SK, Singapore, and Taiwan by now. But they decided to go backwards:
https://croakingcassandra.files.wordpress.com/2019/07/ip-1.p...
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/scr...
If the choice is between, say letting AWS in and building their own. Building their own would put 5000 of their own people to work, the broad technical demographic it will take, and build up all the surrounding industries like servers, networking etc. All the profits stay within China, and they now have more skilled people who can start other companies etc. IMO its clearly a better long-term strategy, even though it will cost more in the short term.
US authorities seem to have only stepped up the criticism recently as China has become more of a viable adversary on the global stage though. The US government doesn't particularly care about the ethics of most countries, and will mostly criticise it when it's in their own interest. There's also stuff that's only come to light in the last few years. Chinese authorities flexing their power in ways that directly affect US interests is one of these.
As an uniformed reader of mainstream media and social networking sites, China was just not on the radar a few years ago. Politicians didn’t talk about it, people didn’t talk about it, news didn’t talk about it.
Maybe what you’re describing is true for the United States. I wouldn’t know.
But also the large buddhist community in America will never forget China invading Tibet and murdering the successor to the Dalai Lama. That still gets talked about a lot.
My consulting company does business in China, and when we do, we (out of self-interest, since we don't speak Chinese and it's hard to do logistics without that) partner with Chinese companies. My company has some of the leading experts in a very niche thing. In the current state, the companies we partner with get to learn from us and gain expertise. The alternative if protectionist policies stop us from doing business in China isn't for those people to become experts on their own -- that's not possible. The alternative is for them either not to gain expertise at all or to have to get it in a more difficult and expensive way.
Protectionism can benefit a fledgling industry (not a whole country) in the short term in a limited set of cases (at the expense of dragging down the rest of the economy), but in most cases the protected industry is going to fall behind even more without the information transfer that comes from business leaders doing business there.
If you think I'm kidding: https://blog.samaltman.com/e-pur-si-muove
Without fair representation in the courts and judicial independence this problem will never be resolved and China will always be taking 1 step back for every 2 steps forward.
Hong Kong is a better example, they consistently rank #1 in the world in economic freedom and their economy skyrocketed as a result.
It's true, by the way. I was in SF for a week a few months ago and the constant need to watch what I say was exhausting. I couldn't even joke around with my gay friend because people were getting offended on his behalf, much to his dismay.
It's an article about how he feels stifled by SF culture.
He is saying groupthink is bad.
I don't think the economic growth benefits outweigh their priorities.
This is despite both countries starting from the same, largely rural, highly impoverished starting point 60 years ago.[1]
So, yes, they'd rather be the absolute leaders of a faster growing economy, than the non-leaders of a slower-growing one.
[1] China was even worse off, actually, since it spent the first half of the twentieth century torn apart by civil war, European colonialism, civil war again, a brutal Japanese invasion and occupation, and then some more civil war, followed by two decades of self-inflicted political purges and repression. India only had to contend with two of these problems!
China on the other hand is mostly free and liberal up until you start being successful.
Acting like India isn't engage in authoritarian mass intervention, even though its in a more decentralize fashion is totally wrong. The only benefit is they have more independent courts and you can succeed with influence buying without the top-down threat that the CCP does to cripple foreign competitors in domestic firms favours.
India has a different sort of economic interference - but also one that's far easier to fix. Something Modi repeatedly promised and keeps failing to do.
This video is a good overview of how the Indian gov cripples business: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVwIZzGHxwc
"Competition is bad, arrest him immediately!"