But China is doing things no one else is doing. Requiring a local partner, giving up your IP to them and/or “security reviews”, not letting through many companies to give their own home grown a chance (eg Facebook, Google, etc), currency controls, currency manipulation, exploiting the global postal system to facilitate being export-oriented, inaccessible courts that never punish IP theft and abuse, the list is quite extensive and very asymmetric.

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.

In short, they are playing the Mercantilist card which Britain played about four centuries ago, and US, a couple of centuries ago.

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.

Germany is trying to do the mercantilism thing as well.

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.

One thing I plan to do is to read "The doctrine of fascism" and compare it to the Lee Kuan Yew book about the building of Singapore, and with some good accounts of China's current policies. There must be a number of parallels, but also divergences.

Deng Xiaoping admired Lee Kuan Yew, visited Singapore, and copied his approach in reforming the Chinese economy, starting with the Special Economic Zone in Guangdong, which included delegating substantial power to the local secretary, later governor, Xi Zhongxun ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xi_Zhongxun#As_Guangdong's_top...

... the father of Xi Jinping.

I wouldn't count on the fairness of US courts for strategic industries. They're unlikely to rule in favor of Huawei or against Boeing.

First, Lion Air successfully sued Boeing and that’s just from recent high profile memory. I seriously doubt that legitimate lawsuits wouldn’t go through. And regardless, you’re naming two very specific entities. Good luck with any lawsuit for IP theft in China… they’ve pretty much all lost [1], and often the theft is either explicit policy for the gov or the gov itself providing the hacking and supplying their industries for the data. Further keep in mind China is a place where the conviction rate was 99.965% in 2019 and 99.969% in 2018. This is not exactly where you ever want to end up in court.

[1] https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-us-china-trad...

Is that Chinese IP law being broken or US IP law? I don't know how Chinese IP laws work but of course Chinese should follow Chinese law and Americans American law. Anything else is completely irrelevant.

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.

> local partner, ip transfer. This was a thing 30 years ago in certain industries, ex cars. Now, we have enacted a foreign investment law that uses a negative list to manage market access. And any foreign entity in China is equivalent to a Chinese entity, so equal access to government regulations, law, legal facilities, etc. Today car, industrial, health care, and many industries can fully operate on their own. I know Tesla and BMW fully owns its operation in China. Tesla enjoys the same EV subsidies as Chinese EVs. The phase 1 deal with the US also opened up stock market, banking, other financial services. JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley all have businesses in China today.

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.