>The US is steamrolling us, because 1) they think and act strategic, 2) size-wise, they are not one country but many countries and city-states working as one and 3) they are beating us at our own game because we have a slavish devotion to WTO principles while they will use protectionism if it benefits them.
This is as true overall IMO. I'm not going anywhere special with this comment (and not bashing neither the US or PRC) but I though it worthwhile to keep in mind that China isn't doing anything others aren't too in similar ways. I don't think it will change though but we got a perfectly good litmus test of how it is now in the sale of ARM (though UK isn't in the EU of course). If it's sold we (as in Europeans) clearly haven't learnt yet.
You can knock the US however you want, but you can’t claim that it doesn’t allow it’s existing infrastructure (eg laws, courts, currency, etc) to be equally open to foreign companies. Unlike in China, foreign companies can sue US companies and win if they’re in the right, and no one doubts that ability based on nationalistic favor.
International free trade is profitable in the long term if everybody is buying your goods, which was the case for the US and UK a century ago. China is using the resulting situation to its great benefit.
I think the fundamental differentiation is the degree of state involvement, Han nationalism etc..
I don't want to use this word because it's a trigger and possibly misleading but 'Fascist' might actually be the best word to describe what China is right now. The economy is not centrally planned, but managed in coordination with major actors who often seem to want to participate in 'nation building'. There's a strong Han-nationalism among the people, very strong sense of national identity, mass propaganda, ethnocentrism. All of those later qualities are an important part of what is happening, but we in the West tend to think of them as 'cultural' issues. But really it's part of the overall picture. I think a lot of workers wouldn't be working quite as hard if there weren't some kind of national/cultural glory in it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xi_Zhongxun#As_Guangdong's_top...
... the father of Xi Jinping.
[1] https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-us-china-trad...
About Huawei: Getting a fair trial is impossible. The evidence is mostly "three letter agency said so". The US justice system is not going to let Huawei be Innocent until proven guilty. It's not even about courts but straight to Guilty as proven by politics. Cisco is at least as big a danger in any system but they aren't Chinese so that's a different matter. (Look at the massive amount of "accidental backdoors" Cisco keeps churning out for a great example of real danger to network security.)
If you believe hacking is one sided or lopsided I would recommend you read some books about the topic. There are some pretty good ones from former NSA people for example. The fact is the US is by far the one who does the most hacking. No-one should be in doubt of that and I don't think anyone are after Snowden. You just seem to believe that "your" hacking is more okay than theirs. It really isn't. Besides, the NSA and CIA steals trade secrets and IP too as whistleblowers have stated multiple times.
We didn't force businesses to enter IP transfer. They weighted the cost benefits of market access and made the decision on their own. And there were negotiations. We offered market access, what did they offer in exchange. And you can imagine there were complex rules and strings attached with the deals. And its not always about IP being exchanged or a full transfer of IP. Or IP used in their Chinese ventures are few generations old and no longer market competitive globally, but in China it still was. Obviously companies are not stupid, they operated with their best interest in mind. The fundamental point is these agreements are bilateral and consensual.
>not letting through many companies to give their own home grown a chance (eg Facebook, Google, etc) Inaccurate. To operate in China you need to adhere to Chinese laws and regulations. Notably the 互联网安全法, 网络信息管理条例. They state internet information service is responsible for the content and the content must abide by following rules. This results in the "censorship" people experience. The key point is these laws are not discriminatory. Whether its Chinese or US businesses, the service can operate if they abide by the rules. Google.com, Facebook.com etc chose not to adhere to them so they cannot operate. But Bing, LinkedIn for example is available. Internet services that deals with people saying stuff on the internet is the hardest to comply, others are easier. And a lot of internet services are available. Ex cloud computing (AWS, Azure, Office365 ), E-Commerce (Amazon, Kindle), icloud, app store, Airbnb, oracle and many others. Google does have business presence in China still, Ex Ads. Google could make different products available if they decide.
> inaccessible courts that never punishes IP theft. Not sure about how it is now. IP protection is getting a lot stronger these days. For Chinese government and the courts, its in their interest to protect IP, whether for Chinese or foreign companies. And any sizable Chinese company will have foreign markets, foreign companies can sue them in their home country. So these days Chinese companies have to take IP rights into consideration during their business development.
> Currency manipulation, artificially lower currency. I think the consensus from economists is that China is not artificially lower currency. In the past 12 months. RMB to USD went up by 10%.
Lastly I think any trade related issues are negotiable between China and US governments. For example, we opened financial markets after US phase 1 trade deal. The EU and China investment deal has lots of provisions on market access, no IP transfer, fair treatment and competition, rules on state subsidies, rules on state owned firms and non-discriminatory commerce etc. The deal also creates an arbitral tribunal framework for settling disputes.
We are not looking to dominate US or the west. We are looking for an equal, cooperative and win-win relationship. Both the US and China can be prosperous. It doesn't have to be zero sum game. Only one can win and the other must fail. Any trade related issue is always up for negotiations. The question is whether US will want to negotiate or seeks to destroy china.
Germany is taxing companies and people too much (40-50%) so capital is leaving the country.
Actually, the same can be said about most of the western Europe.
The specific problem with chip manufacturing is that this is a dirty business requiring lots of chemicals and lots of water. There is simply no way anything like that can happen in Western Europe now. You will have millions of sanctimonious kids with nothing more meaningful in their lives than marching with signs about saving the ground, etc, and then angry politicians will get on soapboxes and denounce the greedy-ground-polluters in order to win elections, and so Europe will continue to buy their chips from factories located in East Asia or America, where there are jurisdictions in which people have other things to give their life meaning.
Manufacturing has been pouring into East Asia not because asians are better at manufacturing, but because they value it enough to make systematic efforts to attract and promote it. It's about values and worldviews much more than a simple thing like tax rates (although East Asia has reasonable business tax rates, they have phenomenally cheap credit for manufacturers, good infrastructure, and very stable regulations.)
The tariffs should match the cost of said overhead.
The combination of rigid environmental/labor practices in the developed world with an equally fanatical devotion to unfettered cross-border capitol flows and 'trade' is systematically immiserating the West and leading to massive net environmental damage even though both of these goals: cosmopolitanism and environmentalism, are individually the darlings of western elites.
It’s caused numerous cultural and environmental problems.
Look at the sad state of the US today.
We didn’t even have the production capability to make n-95 masks.
Meanwhile, company spokesmen tell us that if we want change we should push our legislators; while having wholesale monopolies on lobbyists who do everything they can to ensure offshoring is extremely profitable.
Which grows the warchest of those screwing us over that much more.
Moreover the environment is not some fragile thing that is "destroyed" by a chip plant. So here, too, there is a lack of understanding about what is happening so that people can make claims of personal righteousness (and the "environment" is just a place-holder that can and is swapped out for other concerns that yield more self-righteousness credits per unit effort at the drop of a hat).
Of course there is Ireland, but that's a fundamentally different situation -- Ireland exists as a type of corporate welcome mat and shouldn't be categorized with "europe" when you are talking about business climate/regulations.
What are you thinking of?
Has it though? The West is up against governments. TSMC is part owned by their government. SMIC is part owned by their government. Samsung's share of South Korean GDP is so large that it might as well be the government.
In the face of such organized and concentrated competition, what's so sad about some private businesses falling short?
I think the sad thing they were talking about is those businesses not getting the support they needed, because of an incompetent lack of strategic vision on the part of their governments'. It's like sending your army to a gunfight only armed with knives.
Kernels, on the other hand, is something we have a huge advantage over everybody else. Amazon with its FreeRTOS and L4 based companies are here. Xen is from here. And tons of embedded. With chinese chips and sensors and german kernels.
Their GDP should be 3 times larger than EU of US, and they are doing things to make that true
We should never be a factor to them but our egos require us to imagine they are thinking about us at all
The only time they acknowledge us is to placate our egos. Reassure us that it isn't a big deal that their economy is about to be larger, and reassure us that they wont do the same things we all did with the rest of the world (and hope we ignore what they do internally, they aren't sending drones for our domestic rights abuses either).
Let’s just zoom out for a second and admit Europe has done this for centuries already, with just about everything.
It is really sad how the domestic/western production became irrelevant. We lost it just like we lost our lead in solar energy (which was also based in the Dresden area by the way). And (at least solar) in my opinion for completely stupid reasons. The supposedly business-friendly German government went yolo, free trade and slashed the subsidies. And now they are turning around and trying to create industries from nothing? For solar, the ship has sailed, and for chips I think it is also way too late. Why didn't we support the industry we had?
China is steamrolling us, because 1) they think and act strategic, 2) size-wise, they are not one country but many countries and city-states working as one and 3) they are beating us at our own game because we have a slavish devotion to WTO principles while they will use protectionism if it benefits them. The thing is: Europe could have done most of this, too.