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Comment by 3pt14159 | Hacker News Reader

...Shouldn't they?

China is great in many ways, but it's IP / Copyright protection is abysmal and is used by the state as propaganda / propaganda control.

Portray China negatively in a film? Oh look, no sales the few theatres that are showing it have the scenes altered and of course don't pay royalties.

Neutrally portray China? Oh look about 1% of the royalties you were supposed to get.

Portray China positively? Blockbuster Chinese release. Unprecedented sales, collect nearly 80% of the royalties you were supposed to.

They have the same Real Politik handle on technology. They're not going to respect American Patents until it suits them. Not to say we're blameless; but if it is too asymmetrical I could see the west imposing levies to rectify the imbalance.

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The US needs to set some ground rules with our Chinese rivals...

Start with requiring occupancy of all homes held by foreign nationals, trusts or investment groups, or you pay enormous property tax increases.

Then you require all US businesses selling consumer products to staff at least 1 US resident inspector for each stage of the supply chain from raw goods to finished product. If the host country doesn't like it, then you can't do business with that host country. This inspector may be called before Congress to answer personally (with jail time) for any human rights abuses not reported in the supply chain.

On the first point, can't that be achieved by the municipality which (presumably) also assesses those property taxes? That just seems like an issue of the city needing to not whore themselves out to foreign speculators in the name of growth.

On the bright side, I've heard from some realtors that the previously-common occurrence of Chinese nationals patrolling for houses to buy with cash has dropped off substantially in 2016.

Yeah but the world is not a pretty place, at home we have monopolistic unicorns, and abroad we have unfair business practices... I'm not shedding any tears for Apple, screw'em.

Even if the US is a relatively "clean" place to do business today, when we were the up and coming upstart, we stole plenty of ideas from abroad, and even within: the whole reason synecdotal Hollywood is in literal Hollywood is, movie producers snuck out there from the East Coast so they could infringe on Edison's film patents and get away with it.

Relatively poorer economies are never going to sit by and let large foreign industries dominate their economies if they can do anything about it. And we shouldn't expect relatively poorer economies to have deeply embedded free market economists explaining the theory of comparative advantage to every populist politician.

If demanding humane working conditions is globally anti-competitive call me Mr. Monopoly.

> The US needs to set some ground rules with our Chinese rivals...

Unlikely to work. China knows what works in their country. I think the TPP approach where we just lay ground rules with people who actually respect us (ie: Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam) and try to get these countries to work with us instead of China... this is a better approach.

I mean, what is the US supposed to say to China? Stop doing things... in your country? That we don't like?

It's China's country. They can do whatever they want. Especially since US Companies are so enamored with the hope of making profits over there.

I'm just tired of hearing, "but we didn't know working conditions were so bad!" from US owned businesses. You damn well should have.

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