The whole joint venture requirement of China is just another way for China to steal IP and money from other countries. Talk about China taking advantage of the US and EU.
The knowledge won't stay in a bottle. I doubt any treaty in the world could keep an automotive industry from developing in China. Maybe the only potential progressions are (a) let local clones develop while ignoring the market, watch hopelessly if those local clones then go on to innovate further than you or (b) do ventures like this to at least be directly exposed to any potential upside if the local folks surpass you?
There's also a side question here about the difference between physical goods and software. Something like WeChat faces a really steep uphill climb to conquer the west because the starting conditions are so different - I'd have to be convinced to change from our existing ways of doing the same thing, vs being one of the first to enable things in a new market. On the other hand, smartphone clones can sell everywhere with the same hardware (especially once Google gave Android away freely). Japanese/Korean auto manufacturing is more the example for that (and obviously for Tesla), and that happened on its own.
Thats not a meaningful way to conceptualize the event though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Slater
Samuel Slater (June 9, 1768 – April 21, 1835) was an
early English-American industrialist known as the
"Father of the American Industrial Revolution" (a phrase
coined by Andrew Jackson) and the "Father of the
American Factory System."
In the UK, he was called "Slater the Traitor" because he
brought British textile technology to America, modifying
it for United States use. He memorized the designs of
textile factory machinery as an apprentice to a pioneer
in the British industry before migrating to the United
States at the age of 21.You'll note that this was exactly the case with Samuel Slater; the Brits considered him a thief regardless.
There, it's even now.
The other side of this is takeovers in the West - sometimes they get blocked by government, like quite recently in Germany.
The West wanted cheap workforce, it came with a hefty price that will be paid years later after WTO admission, didn't you know?
The risk of ignoring a market isn't just the lost immediate revenue, it's that that market might develop in ways that are worse for you in the long run.
The canonical can't-argue-against example of pirating a movie or show is "I literally can't even pay to watch this in my country, right now." But once a substantial industry exists to satisfy the people with no legal option, the people in the countries with plenty of legal options have access to it too! And then it turns into "why pay when torrent?"
If Spotify had existed worldwide in 1998, would Napster have been big? If Netflix/Hulu/Amazon/iTunes purchases+rentals had all existed and been global in the year 2000, would movie/TV file sharing have taken off in the same way it did? Or would it be more like app store piracy - I'm sure it exists, but I don't know anybody who bothers, and those things were global and online from day 1.
The comparison to cars isn't direct, but it's not hard to find disruption of physical goods manufacturing sparked by lower-end-at-first competitors arising from a less-served market.
Not much diff than AirBus has join venture in China for some Airplane assembly works. But it certainly didn't share all the Jet Engine technology, Filght Control Software etc with the Join Venture in China.
China knows that it has big market and would like leverage to get more benefit from western companies who like to access that market.
It is just business.
I looked at the GM JV situation, and it appears that they do manufacture engines in China.