You buy something, but you get value in return. That's why it's not called "donation". If the thing you bought is not valuable to you then why did you buy it in the first place?
Also, there is all this talk about "forced" tech transfers, but nobody forced US companies at gunpoint. US companies always had the choice to not enter the China market. They signed tech tranfer contracts, willingly, because they think the upsides (gaining a new market) are higher than the downsides, or that the downsides are manageable. The fact is, companies made a choice. And now the US government is making that choice for them?
From a national supply chain security or technology hegemony point of view it makes sense to deny certain transfers, but let's recognize that this is just geopolitics and not about ethics, fairness, etc. The rherotic about fairness just doesn't make sense upon further scrutiny. If the US government doesn't fully believe in free market, why not just go ahead and say so instead of all the mental gymnastics?
I am confused by your question. How is this relevant to anti-competitive behavior of the CCP?
> You buy something, but you get value in return. That's why it's not called "donation". If the thing you bought is not valuable to you then why did you buy it in the first place?
Again, what does your patronizing clarification have to do with competitive marketplace where all parties can play fair? I am genuinely asking instead of just raising rhetorical questions. Literally the first line on Free Trade wikipedia page [1] says:
"Free trade is a trade policy that does not restrict imports or exports."
I thought I was talking about "Free Trade" as in freely be able to compete in China just as local companies. Perhaps there was a misunderstanding?
We recognize that "fairness" in boxing and other sports requires things like weight classes. The same goes for trade between countries at very different levels of economic development. Developed, undeveloped and developing countries should not have identical policies. Most countries that are developed today got to where they are using protectionist policies.
Ha-Joon Chang explains his views in this talk: https://youtu.be/T5-ojv5-b3U
You talk about anti-competitiveness, but isn't that just a matter of perspective and not an absolute moral high ground? When Microsoft was accused of anti-competitive behavior, it was because Microsoft used existing cash and influence to squat smaller parties like flies and gain dominance. In the same manner, we can argue that Facebook could squat other smaller social media networks in China as flies because Facebook was already big, and thus Facebook would be the one being anti-competitive.
I won't argue with you about US interests. But I can't agree with taking the moral high ground.
> "Free trade is a trade policy that does not restrict imports or exports."
You can argue that China is not engaging fully in the free trade principle. But in my opinion it still doesn't make sense to turn this into a moral high ground thing, because all countries have import and export controls to some extent, because in the end all countries look after their interests.
And not everybody agrees that the free trade principle is a good thing (note: this is not my personal opinion). See the rise of populism in Europe, and the number of people who yell that the Poles or refugees or whatever are "stealing our jobs". Now that I think about it, don't you have the same issue with US people complaining about Mexicans?
Turning this into a moral issue is, in my opinion, a childish view of how the work works. I am saying: let's recognize that this is plain geopolitics and interests, and not about morals.
Having ideals is a fine thing but we need to stay realistic. Is it at all possible to create rules that benefit everybody, given that countries differ in development status, culture, values, etc? I have no idea. We can try, we should try, but don't get too surprised if things fall apart sometimes, and when things fall apart it's unhelpful to point fingers.
Particularly around IP law, which is what China is most flagrant about ignoring. Nothing in IP law comes from any sense natural principle. It is all arbitrary judgements.
It makes sense for America to claim IP is important since they own most of it, but it is wise for China to ignore their arguments as far as they can get away with it.
As you say, countries without IP have an interest in having weak IP enforcement, but China has significant IP now, and is enforcing IP rights (not just of Chinese firms, but also of foreign firms) much more rigorously than before.
Those in positions of dominance risk their power when they ignore these questions. Unfair practices can increase dominance in the short-term but what happens in the long-term when more and more people recognize the practice as unfair? What happens when we get to a point where most of the world consider western nations/corporations to be stewards/enablers of oppression and injustice?
Such hubris.
So the heads of two powerful nations are to decide the fate of humanity - where is the morality in that ?
And why does there have to be an endgame ? and who are we to decide ?
US does behave amorally tons of times, so does EU, so does everybody else. US slapping super massive tariffs on non-US products (airplanes for example) ain't fair to european manufacturers by any definition, and if we aren't allies anymore, then who is. US stealing trade secrets via NSA, spying on all foreign politicians, dissent, supporting dictators and so on.
The thing is, out there is mostly unrestrained capitalism - everybody for themselves, and help even between allies normally only comes if its mutually beneficial. US has very little moral ground if any in this topic.
Further consider the advantage US has from being the center of global finance, and having many generations of wealth accumation compared to India and China being recent colonies and having recent devastating wars.
Is that trade policy still unfair taking those variables in account
What you've described is simply - unfair. Another extremely unfair thing is different employment & environmental standards. If an EU company opens a Chinese factory just because they can make people work more hours and can pollute the environment more, I don't really see that as a "globalization benefit", but rather as "unlawful competition" which results in a race to the bottom (other EU/US companies being forced to open polluting exploiting factories abroad to compete on price).
That's why I strongly support tariffs on imported products, unless foreign companies/factories conform to strict standards and allow strict (and random) inspection that they do conform to said standards.
Consider Mongolia, perhaps they want to match EU employment standards but can't afford do. What are they suppose to do?
Suppose a democracy decided on different employment standards, should EU ban imports from US due to EU having higher standards of employee and environmental protection? How big does the difference have to be?
Does your free trade "fairness" account for the advantages US gets from being a global center of finance?
For disadvantages Vietnam has from being a recent colony and having a devastating war?
Does a country with loads of natural resources, or elderly population, or struck by natural disaster change the calculus?
Is this a robust rule you would like to see implemented, or is it just justifying current politics?
But in general, my argument isn’t about some specific countries, but instead about specific products. A company in Mongolia selling to EU could either not give their employees medical insurance and sell widgets to EU for €50 + 100% tariffs, or treat their employees by EU standards and sell widgets for €100 and no tariffs. The ideal tariffs would exactly balance that (while still allowing Mongolian widgets to be cheaper because of lower wages because of lower cost of living.)
there are ways to mitigate the growing pains of economic development but to prevent it completely is not a solution. nearly all industrial nations have, at some point in their history, gone through the whole process - discovering necessary safety standards, methods to encourage cooperation and where it fails, enforcement and legal repercussions remedies and punishment, etc... that really ought to be hyper-local and community-specific in their implementation. first world governments are fully complicit in preventing emerging nations from developing this themselves.
If a country pays its workers pennies and craps all over the environment, it sucks for the people that live there, but really it's fine, they're a sovereign nation, nobody's gonna send in the troops over it.
Let's simply charge them enough to take all the money they save / make from these practices out of their pockets. If they don't pay up, the goods can't cross the border.
What will happen when they will own all the supply chains and the buyers will have the choice between US tech, with their propension to want to rule the world, or Chinese tech; of course China may eventually do the same thing as the US, but strategically it is easy enough to not do it for long enough so that it is a major advantage to develop their market.
In (at least parts of) the EU, btw, we see this attitude of the US as a critical problem, more than a solution... As far as those kind of affairs are concerned, we don't view the US as a close ally but more as a distant cousin which is sometimes even a blatant economic enemy, especially when they attempt and do rule the world through $US and tech policies (and demonstrated, not only suspected, systematized world scale espionage). For example the embargo on Iran is particularly problematic. The China might be "worse" than the US in some dimensions, including critical ones, but there are some movement in the EU to guarantee/redevelop our independence from the US too, and this involves developing our own versions of more technologies which are for now originating from the US in a far too large proportion, given their policies and the risk they produce. (For some of those projects already existing, I suspect they initially won't be very successful, but that is another issue; if the problem becomes more pressing, there is no reason to not be able to do it: 10 or 20 years is an eternity in tech, but international equilibrium is a longterm affair)
It's a pretty much mafia move and has nothing to do with fair trade.
Somehow Korea managed to create best movie of the year without this mafia-style ruling. They use the weaknesses of regular people who want gains now.
For mobile network and services they have their own standard giving virtual monopoly to SK and KT telecom and local manufacturers. No foreign car manufacturer can setup easily in Korea, Samsung rebrand Nissan car as S5 and S7. Except high end German cars with high tariffs you will only see Korean brands.
Check any sector and you will find more hurdles. Doing business in Korea compared to China is harder, if you target local businesses.
These all are not visible or so pronounced because Korea is relatively small compared to China in terms of GDP and size. Actually Korea is more like China and unlike USA except for political systems.
U.S. needs to work on making its foreign policy self consistent. Recognizing Taiwan as a separate country would be a great start (logically and morally)
That's a mistaken interpretation and it has been clarified on numerous occasions.
There are two critical words to the context: recognize and acknowledge. And two separate entities to be considered as far as the US is concerned: China and Taiwan. The US has intentionally left the situation in limbo, to neither give in to China nor prompt a military confrontation between China and Taiwan.
The US does not officially recognize China and Taiwan as one. The US "acknowledges" China's position; specifically China's belief that they are one country.
Here is a good explanation:
> The United States did not, however, give in to Chinese demands that it recognize Chinese sovereignty over Taiwan (which is the name preferred by the United States since it opted to de-recognize the ROC). Instead, Washington acknowledged the Chinese position that Taiwan was part of China. For geopolitical reasons, both the United States and the PRC were willing to go forward with diplomatic recognition despite their differences on this matter. When China attempted to change the Chinese text from the original acknowledge to recognize, Deputy Secretary of State Warren Christopher told a Senate hearing questioner, “[W]e regard the English text as being the binding text. We regard the word ‘acknowledge’ as being the word that is determinative for the U.S.” In the August 17, 1982, U.S.-China Communique, the United States went one step further, stating that it had no intention of pursuing a policy of “two Chinas” or “one China, one Taiwan.”
> To this day, the U.S. “one China” position stands: the United States recognizes the PRC as the sole legal government of China but only acknowledges the Chinese position that Taiwan is part of China.
https://www.csis.org/analysis/what-us-one-china-policy-and-w...
The problem starts when there is massive asymmetry in those countries in terms of human rights, worker protections, and environmental regulations.
Criticize the US all day (I certainly can), but compared to the Chinese single party dictatorship the US is massively better in all those areas. The EU is even better than the US in some.
Occupational safety, environmental laws, and a free and open society imposes costs on business in the form of higher wages and overhead. It's impossible -- repeat, impossible -- for businesses in countries that operate to those standards to compete in a "free trade" regime with businesses in countries that do not. It's even worse when said countries (like China) also subsidize their industries and implement protectionist asymmetrical trade policies of their own.
I am all for free trade between free countries to within some reasonable minimal standard for "free." Trade with totalitarian and lawless regimes should be heavily taxed.
The free world should form a trade pact among its members with heavy tariffs for imports from non members.
One way of implementing it would be penalties for wages below domestic median, carbon emissions, and human rights violations. Use those factors to calculate a score and impose tariffs accordingly.
I have a friend who worked in Tencent an iconic Chinese IT company that owns WeChat. They work from 9 to 9, six days a week. This is not an option. It's mandatory.
She literally escapes to the US because been a single woman in the early 30s considered a very bad misdo in their society. The same rule doesn't apply for man btw. So you as young female pushed to work 9-9-6 and do a very bad choice very early because you have to do it before 30, otherwise you're considered a renegade. Their society is an extremely racist and sexist to the point where their own parents don't want to talk to you if you're a woman who doesn't want to mary a Han-Chinese person( a title nationality in China).
I don't believe that scientists of the western world that put their life for a breakthrough in Computer science, agriculture, medicine, etc... dedicate their life for this kind of society where humanity is just a bio-mechanism that has one day off to clean the room and recover a bit. No social life... nothing. It's a huge gap. While the western world is debating about 4 days of work week china is double down on 9-9-6 which anti-human. You might remember GitHub issue with software developers complains about it and how china tried to stop this "leak" So no matter how stupid it's sound. It's a free world with the neo-feodal country as it is.
You vote for that with your money. Right now is a tipping point they either slow down and the CCP will collapse in a natural way or they will be ruling the world means their way to do business one day might apply to you.
I'm not trying to idealize US or any other country. EU seems to be much more socialistic, Canada seems to be much more inclusive ( at least Toronto). EU is putting so much more money into green energy compared to the US. But this competition is a much better direction rather than what Chinese leadership offers. Racism, sexism, neglecting ecology impact, no human rights, no socialism in any form, no rule of law. Don't get messed with US wrong things.
You have so many reasons to hate Donald and what he's doing but that doesn't automatically make his opponents saint. In fact, Donald will disappear in 0.5 or 4 years. And the threat to the middle-class people's lifestyle because of China and CCP will not.
China has experienced grinding poverty for over a century, and have its work ethic to thank for pulling it out. 996 is enabled because of that history, rather than being a control plot. Even school kids have that kind of schedule.
Chinese people are very focused on the lower tiers of Maslow's hierarchy, and survival of the family is somewhat on the line if one of your only grandchildren is female and isn't married at 30. That's her life you say? Equally the parents can feel like all their sacrifices were for naught.
It's getting a bit tangential but the pattern in all societies is that women have the choice in mates and men have to be more willing to look abroad. So any racist sentiments would judge women harsher.
Regarding your other points, China has been much better about including minorities in its country than the West. It has furthered environmental controls vs. Trump reversing them, and most of the greening in the last decade occurred in China (and India). It has sensible universal healthcare and supported its citizens during Covid-19, unlike the US which passed legislation that supports big business, letting small ones fail and charging its own citizens for evacuation flights.
Anyway, the point is that once we understand the history we need not paint China as the malevolent entity that is common in media.
Up until a few years ago, there was a massive asymmetry, but in the opposite sense to the asymmetry that Americans usually complain about. Because China was a developing country with very little capital but a huge labor pool, there were huge investment inflows into China. Western companies took advantage of cheap labor in China, setting up factories to produce for Western consumers. Chinese consumers were almost completely out of the picture. China did not have the capital to invest in foreign countries, so the investment was almost entirely unidirectional.
That began to change as China's workers began to earn more, and Western companies jumped into the Chinese consumer market (Starbucks has thousands of locations in China, VW sells millions of cars in China a year, and so on for countless Western companies). Whereas you would see almost no Chinese brands in Western consumer markets, the Chinese market was awash with Western brands.
Now, Chinese brands are starting to enter Western markets, and China also has capital to invest abroad. The relationship is becoming more bidirectional. To the United States, which was happy to exploit cheap Chinese labor and to sell airplanes to the Chinese market, the idea that China might be transforming into a serious economic and political competitor is alarming. That's why there are suddenly these myopic complaints about the relationship being one-sided.
> China has completely blocked US services from Google to Uber
Google is blocked in China for political reasons. Uber was allowed, and indeed operated in the Chinese market for a number of years. It failed there, because there was strong competition from companies that understood the local market and local consumer preferences better. Let me ask a simple question to test if the relationship really is asymmetric, and in which direction the asymmetry points: Do Chinese brands have a larger presence in the US than American brands have in China?
I find it pretty difficult to blame China for this "asymmetry in trade," when that asymmetry was exactly what foreign governments wanted. They wanted China to open up its labor market, so that foreign companies could exploit cheap labor in China. The consumer market in China was tiny, whereas the American and European consumer markets were huge, so the relationship could not be symmetric.
Now, China's consumer market is actually quite large, and foreign companies play a huge role in that market. I didn't just mention Starbucks. I also mentioned VW, but I could equally have mentioned Boeing, Apple, Intel, Qualcomm or Micron. You'll notice a trend here: the US exports high-value-added products to China (including IP licenses and services). Most of what you have in your living room that's actually manufactured in China is lower on the value chain.
Over time, in other words, the US trade relationship with China is becoming more symmetric. Huawei's development into high-value-added products is a sign of that. It's actually this symmetry that the United States wants to avoid, because it means China becoming a peer-level competitor.
The US trade relationship with China will never become fully symmetric, though, because the US runs a net trade deficit with the rest of the world, for reasons that appear to me to have to do with the United States' unique financial position in the world.
I really don't agree.
Were I ungenerous, I could interpret "I see no reason to pay more so you can make money off the rest of us" as "If local conditions permit me to loot someone else's future for my own present benefit, I will do so."
Furthermore, "trade is always beneficial to both sides" is clearly false, unless you define trade as "that which is always beneficial to both sides."
(I agree as a matter of fact that free trade and free markets are in general the most effective way to allocate capital, decide prices, maximize the realized value of goods, and provide individual economic autonomy. I do not, however, see them as end-goals in and of themselves. I do not see them as infallible in fulfilling personal or human values. I do not see them as especially resistant to having their function subverted.)
Both are wrong, Google quit from China, and Uber sold its China division to a rival company.
And it's ironic for you to say the CCP wants keys to iCloud, because your government literally forces American companies to hand over the keys[1].
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud-exclusiv...
There is this thing called knowledge transfer, and you do this when you change jobs. Are you suggesting that the employee work in the same company indefinitely?
> well...then the US should block all Chinese services from exploiting users[1] and their data
Which is exactly what China is doing to you.
A secret court issued nearly 100% of requested warrants. Some of the warrants that have come to light were blatantly unconstitutional, but because the entire system was hidden from the public, nobody could complain. Even now, legally challenging this surveillance is almost impossible, because nobody can prove standing - the list of surveillance targets is secret after all.
The very existence of this system was secret. It wasn't democratically legitimized. Nobody voted for the system, and the voters were kept in the dark about the system's existence.
This isn't to say that China and the US are identical. They're bad in different ways. You'll be spied on in both countries, but you have legal avenues to protect yourself from imprisonment/etc. in the US. Then again, China doesn't drone strike its own citizens abroad, as far as we know.
China blocked Google, but not Uber
People also invent false lies like "China blocked Amazon, eBay, Yahoo" etc.
Also in some societies the idea of intellectual property is not widely accepted, and obviously their laws and behaviour will reflect that.
Good luck convincing the average consumer (voter) to do without for a while and then pay more after that. They'll lynch you if they can't get the latest iTurd for 499.99 plus tax.
Also, as long as the CCP run China, they'll be stronger than the west (consumerism and short-termism and Chinese abuses of them aren't just US issues). We need them to democratise, consumer domestically and sort out other issues (wet markets, treatment of minorities). That's the long term win here. Convincing them to treat Google and Uber fairly is nice but it's not going to make them reasonable partners in 2,5,10,50 years time...
Wet markets exist are all over the world with similar setup like the one in China.
Maybe it's better to go even vaguer though: "food hygiene standards so low they keep causing pandemics".
Covid19 spread faster, unfortunately. There are quite a few viruses/infectious diseases spreading in Asia that didn't made it big-time like Covid19.
Western social media platform are welcome to participate in China if they follow local laws - in this case onerous censorship requirements, which every domestic company comply to. That's what project Dragonfly was for, but internal Google politics killed it. Bing still operates fine in China while Google and Facebook still makes billions off Chinese adsales. For some reason people find it appalling that US companies have to operate by foreign laws when operating abroad. As far as I know, TikTok keeps US data on US servers. I'm not sure about Europe, but data siloing regulations is becoming the norm as countries realize the importance of domestic information control. So yes, the US/EU should do the same and if Chinese companies don't want to comply they should get booted from the market.
Uber's story is more complicated. At the end of the day, Uber and many Chinese rideshare startups got out competed by Didi Chuxing. One narrative is various local and national regulations on ride sharing made gave domestic entrants and unfair competitive advantage, but Uber had a strategic partnership with Baidu (to circumvent Google Map block) which had every interest in Uber succeeding.
I heard that they relaxed those restrictions a bit to appease the WTO but in practice are often still denying basic permits for foreign companies until they can show to have a ≥51% Chinese share.
It varies by industry. And loosened quite a bit since the trade war.
The most recent case:
Exxon Mobil starts building $10 billion China petrochemical complex
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-exxonmobil-china-petroche...
Now Shanghai FTZ allows foreign Internet services operate without the ICP licence. Interesting times.
This has been explained like hundreds of times on HN. If you truly believe such nonsense, there are one simple question to ask - what Chinese business entity is control Microsoft/Apple/Intel when they enjoyed all those revenues from the Chinese market.
Wikipedia says regarding Volkswagen in China:
> In 1984, Volkswagen signed a 25-year contract to make passenger cars in Shanghai. Since, at that time, vehicle manufacturers could not own a majority stake in a manufacturing plant, Volkswagen's venture took the limit of 50 per cent foreign ownership.
I'm glad that someone else answered my comment sincerely instead of making a snarky comment that turns out to be wrong.
How come people are not aware of this? Did Tesla have to give up controlling ownership to set up a plant in China?
https://europe.autonews.com/article/20180417/COPY/304179943/...
* Azure is provided by 21Vianet
* AWS is provided by Sinnet and NWCD
Generally speaking, serving the Chinese market is rather difficult as a foreign entity. My understanding is that unless you export more than 50% of the production value, you need to have a local partner. And even that's only allowed in certain industries.
Sure, that is the reason why people were appalled - some reason -can't clearly put a finger on it.
The problem starts when there is a massive asymmetry in the trade. China has completely blocked US services from Google to Uber, and gladly accepts manufacturing investment - Tesla Shanghai factory, Intel's Chengdu factory, etc. because the CCP knows that they will gain tremendously by having IP physically based in China. It leaks like a sieve. I've seen it first hand (in semiconductor industry).
America should protect its own interests and interests of other democratic nations before they get eroded, dismantled and sold off to CCP's interests. If China doesn't want American software services running and fairly competing because of CCP surveillance requirements, well...then the US should block all Chinese services from exploiting users[1] and their data, may be EU should block Chinese services from running there until there is strict GDPR requirements and the data is located in EU datacenters. There should be independent datacenter security audits just like CCP wants keys to iCloud datacenters. That would just get us to the fairness level and that's still not enough - there should be a reverse asymmetry to make up for last 20 years of damage - incentivize US/EU services and manfuacturing while simultaneously imposing sanctions and import duties on goods/services made in China. Why not? Can someone tell me why the US/EU shouldn't do the same? I should not be able to buy $1.99 USB cable including shipping from China.
[1] https://citizenlab.ca/2020/05/we-chat-they-watch/