Protectionism only works in specific situations. For example you have a competent workforce and instead of making them work in a foreign country because that's where the multinational companies are, you introduce protectionist policies to keep them in your country. Getting to this point requires decades of focused efforts. You don't just introduce protectionism and get results automatically. Protectionism doesn't work because you have to make it work.

It's a bait and switch. Get foreign investors to build companies in your country. Let them pay for training. Children can now go to school and university. They become adults and gain experience during their job. They now want to leave the country for higher incomes (jackpot). Then finally give them a reason to stay. The Chinese government has amassed an insane amount of money and growth during their business friendly periods and is now able to deploy it for protectionist measures.

The reason why protectionism is a bad idea is that it's commonly used in incompetent governments that are prone to corruption before the country is ready. They instate the protectionism before the country has formed a competitive industry. The end result is that consumers have to pay hefty tariffs on foreign products that are almost impossible to replicate domestically like GPUs or CPUs. Alternatively consumers are stuck with inferior domestic products because there is no reason for the domestic monopoly to improve without competition.

> The Chinese government has amassed an insane amount of money and growth during their business friendly periods and is now able to deploy it for protectionist measures.

Saying this, you need to mention just how fast they burn that money.

I once did a contract for a company that participated in a $1.9B OBOR project, where $600M managed to vanish into thin air, $150M was outright stolen, and the remaining $1B never materialised.

The procurator office of the country managed so far to recover $460M from all over the world from the missing $600M.

The most shocking out of the whole story was how the Chinese side reacted. Their stance was like "You "lost" $600M, and so what? We have more"....

Protectionism doesn't work as well as more open policies. That doesn't mean that it doesn't work. For China the open policy includes things that are against their other goals and so isn't an option.

> Let them pay for training

Mind you they are making a profit, not running a charity

Protectionism works when you're weak and try to develop your own industry (all East Asian countries followed that path). Protectionism hinders you if you're strong and try to penetrate other countries' markets. Protectionism is often detrimental to consumers.

Nothing is black and white.

East Asian development was not based on protectionism, it was based on providing goods/services for export (even when "weak") which requires openness to competition on a global scale. Protectionism was tried in Latin America and even in India prior to the 1980s and 1990s, and it has consistently been a failure.

Please read your history, protectionism enabled the US to rise out of the dirt and become an industrialised nation at the time when British Empire dominated world stage. This is not even a subjective matter.

Tariff rates were used for government revenue at that time, that's why they had to be high. It had nothing to do with endorsing protectionism per se, and the U.S. got an income tax later on to fix this issue.

Are you arguing protectuonism was unintentional, or that it was ineffective?

Exporting relies on the destination markets being open, not yours.

Domestic markets were kept relatively closed in order to foster development of local industry and companies.

Yes. Import substitution protectionist policies have been an ongoing disaster for Brazil and Argentina for nearly a century now. What countries like South Korea did was quite different.

The great firewall of China came because China wanted to police US social media operating in China but weren't able to. That it acted as a major enabler for China's own social media boom is (at least initially) an unintended side-effect.

It is certainly not unintended.

Even without their will to control information for political purposes they would have not allowed such a key industry to be controlled by foreign players, and they have a strategy of creating a strong national industry in all sectors.

The ban of Facebook in 2009 was clearly a result of the Chinese authorities not being able to stop the spread of "misinformation" which they saw as a major factor in the Xinjiang riots of that year.

It's part of a comprehensive strategy that includes creating domestic companies.

It works a lot better when your domestic market is a billion people and your local companies can feasibly improve their manufacturing capability fast enough to serve it adequately.

Why did India have to open its market to The Coca Cola Company and PepsiCo? I think Indian market is big enough. Moreover, we know the nature of these companies (there was a recent post where the comments said all the local brands dissolved into the multinational corporations once the multinationals entered the market.

Is it simply that The Coca Cola Company and PepsiCo have better lobbying than Google/Amazon?

The Indian market is evidently big enough for homegrown cola brands (as in much smaller countries) but ultimately you have to question how much the Indian economy would benefit from special legislation to force its consumers to buy cola owned by a local oligarch rather than a foreign plc. Since the manufacturing and distribution jobs for the Indian supply chain are all in India either way and making sugary carbonated water isn't something which takes time to learn offering massive future opportunities, the argument for protecting fizzy drinks isn't very strong. Protecting your own industries can keep some domestic spend within the country, but it also tends to reduce foreign investment, lower the product quality/choice and deter exports, unless and until you start developing major strengths in the areas your govt protects.

India's present economic strengths and growth opportunities are in its ability to carry out work in the English language and IT sector for a wealthier multinational market: it's not a good bet especially not in the short run to sacrifice those opportunities to try to get Indians to mainly use Indian manufactures. Which is also why you have Google India and Amazon India. China didn't really have that same level of opportunity even if they'd pursued complete economic openness that's entirely alien to their political culture. And most countries smaller than China have been highly selective about which industries and resources they protect and for good reason.

They don't have to, but it saves them the bother of learning to make their own.

Check out the book - Bad Samaritans. Most economies need degrees of protectionism to develop industry.

Something working fine for the Chinese government doesn't mean it's working fine for the citizens too. Their technology model is completely void of privacy. Many in the West won't consider it as working fine.