Chinese hi-tech researchers ‘told not to travel to US unless it’s essential’
scmp.com
scmp.com
https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/traveladvisories/...
I've worked for years at companies that had corporate policy to either wash or destroy phones/computers taken into China.
That is to say, it's unsurprising that any 2 countries engaged in a trade war (hot or cold) would take these precautions against each other.
The US got away with it because countries like the UK couldn't police it during the industrial revolution. Whoops.
The Chinese got away with it because the US couldn't police it on the global stage. Whoops.
---
But the US might've found a way to police it effectively now... soooo why would we not? Why would we permit it because others historically got away with it? Without civility, you only own what you can defend.
That's just the thing though right?
I mean, if the Chinese are engaging in IP theft in a fashion that is both broad, (across all industries), and brazen, then how effective can our policing methods be?
The only thing we can really do is stop trading with them. Which is really not going to stop them stealing ideas, nor will it stop their domestic market from growing.
The reason every great power in history engaged in blatant IP theft, is because it really has been extremely difficult to prevent it throughout human history. (Greeks were really smart, so Romans and Egyptians stole metallurgy from them.) IP theft is just a hard problem.
That naturally asks how to keep trade secrets better? Manufacture domestically, air gapped servers, better pentesting etc. etc.
Because IP law is morally wrong and makes the world a significantly worse place? Anything that underminds IP law is good, in my book, no matter who benefits.
There are lots of horrible things in the world that would be economicly beneficial to the offending party, that we don't do because they are wrong.
eh...really? Like how?
You really think IP theft got halted because one guy was arrested?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrodollar_warfare
https://ustr.gov/trade-agreements/free-trade-agreements/tran...
Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash
Before anyone feels too complacent about that fact - trade doesn't have a great track record of preventing actual wars. WWI was considered unthinkable, because of how tightly the two sides were entangled in trade.
Firstly, somebody has to make a move either at parity which is respected or below, and the "you blinked first" message has to be ignored.
Secondly, there are always collateral damages. You can't afford to expel Russian diplomatic staff so you expel east Germans. You don't want to risk core staff so you send friendly nations into harm's way.
Canada was thrown into harm's way to avoid a bigger problem. The question is: who is willing to de scale the tit-for-tat response first?
That's just the reality of large markets looking to de-link themselves from global carbon energy resources. Long term, if we're all intent on ending the age of oil and coal, there's just nothing to keep everyone cooperating with each other.
Trump does not have a unified national intent behind him. I don't agree with him or his policies, in this or any other regard but trying to think dispassionately, I think appointing Bolton to signal strength of will demands having somebody more flexible to negotiate the real outcome.
For example, Trump is probably going to lose the trade war over Iran. They need Boeing spares but if he continues to blackball Iranian trade the future air fleet will be Airbus with loans from Germany and France.
Trump is going to lose a trade war in China because China holds far more US debt than Americans hold Chinese debt and China has far more market reach into emerging markets in Africa since the decision to decouple trade and local politics was made clear: you can trade with China and continue to repress your own people or trade with America and have to clean up your act.
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/economy/article/2160270/why-...
There are also many mitigating factors that the US can deploy:
https://www.cfr.org/blog/what-would-happen-if-china-started-...
https://www.quora.com/What-would-happen-if-China-sold-all-of...
Who cares what "Trump" loses? This is about the USA and Trump will be long gone before any of these situations are measured. The USA is not starting a trade war with Iran (first time I've ever heard sanctions called a trade war), the US is enacting sanctions to hurt Iran without scaring allies like Saudi Arabia.
> China holds far more US debt than Americans hold Chinese debt
That's intentional and good for the US. If you don't understand this, I really think you need to understand why we sell it to foreign powers at all.
> China has far more market reach into emerging markets in Africa
That's a real problem which the USA is losing out on potentially. It won't be apparent for some time, since people who are industrialized enough to get out of self-oppressive warlord control will not handle foreign occupation very well either. The US answer is always to enable the counter-revolutionaries anyway until the US has someone they want to deal with.
The trade war is with the EU and Russia. Iran is a huge potential future market, alongside the rest of the non saudi aligned Middle East. After Iraq the contracts for rebuild and repair went to classic US interested parties in trade retaliation for prior diplomatic posture in the m.e. by France and Germany.
Please explain to me what I don't understand about china holding US debt,and what it means tactically regarding the trade war.
Pretty happy in Europe. China, Russia and America all seem dodgy AF lately. Overtly so...I shudder to think what happens behind the scenes.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Breda_(1667)
Mea culpa.
A lot of us think U.S. IP law has seriously overextended itself these days. I'm not sure I entirely blame China for not going along with it.
Sound logic
And those that still benefit from the heads-tart due to their country/ancestors having done so, shouldn't play it holier than thou either.
Not to mention the whole hypocrisy, since the US has used corporate espionage and actual spying on supposed "allies" corporations since forever and still does, plus using their military and diplomatic might to ensure cheap resources, control of trade routes, use of its currently, and bending "banana republics" to its will and installing friendly lackeys to the detriment of their peoples. Case in point, this vintage gem posted today:
I think that until maybe 70 years ago, countries did whatever they could to get ahead. If it was possible to accomplish, and it provided an advantage for the country, the country would do it. Nowadays, countries mostly do what they can get away with. The amount of things they can get away with has shrunk over the years, but there's still a hell of a lot of unexpected leeway, particularly if you have something someone else wants. For example, you can infer that Europe having cheap natural gas is more important than doing something about the Ukraine-Russia conflict.
Ultimately, that's it: in 2018, countries can enforce IP law a bit better than 300 years ago, and as a result they are going to. I don't think there's any American campaign to be more lenient on China for IP theft and I don't see such a campaign gaining traction. It certainly is interesting to watch the whole thing play out though.
Cool, so you have no issues with China, India, Africa accelerating their use of fossil fuels.
I think this is my favorite article on the subject.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/08/08/china-is-cheating-at-a-...
And unless anything changed since the Snowden revelations, the US is still conducting (or attempting to conduct) industrial espionage to this day.
In some cases they were in direct violation of agreements they had with other countries concerning such espionage[1].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_espionage#Germany
So can you blame China or the US... Not really everyone is playing the hand they were dealt the best way they know how.
IP is the ultimate human creation, it has no basis in the physical world. If pretending ideas are property puts China at a disadvantage there isn't a moral or practical reason to do it.
The US can also choose to place massive tariffs on any goods coming out of China, making them highly uncompetitive. Their choice, it looks like.
Only in a hypothetical scenario where it's a battle of equals.
But China has worked itself into a corner now for several reasons:
1. It imports so little from the U.S. that it's almost out of stuff to put tariffs on.
2. Most of the things it imports from the U.S. are used in manufacturing in China, and then sold back to the U.S. as a finished product. So China's own tariff makes Chinese goods more expensive and less attractive in the U.S.
3. China still needs to import a metric ass-ton of soybeans from the U.S. It tried getting them elsewhere, like Brazil, but every other soybean-growing country saw the opportunity and raised prices. So putting additional tariffs on American soybeans will make food cost more in China, and there's nothing China can do about it.
I've heard there's additional pressure on China in regards to the soybean situation because harvest is already over for soybeans in the southern hemisphere. And you know who's sitting on a ton of soybeans ready for export? The U.S.
I don't know enough about soybean growing cycles to say if that last paragraph is still true or accurate, though.
IP theft is illegal in pretty much the entire industrialized world. China's big, but it's not bigger than everyone else combined.
There are dozens of supposed reasons to start a trade war with China, but most of those "reasons" are just saber rattling.
If we aren't going to start a trade war (or a real war!) Over things like Tibet, or the humans rights violations, or the million people that China has put into camps, then I don't see how something morally silly such as IP laws would be the tipping point.
I wasn't intending to use that comparison as a real justification of China's infringement; your point is a much better one as far as that goes. I brought up U.S. history in response to the characterization of China's culture as particularly disrespectful of "the rules and customs of other cultures."
https://eh.net/encyclopedia/an-economic-history-of-copyright...
They started allowing non-citizens to get U.S. patents earlier:
"Americans could not obtain patents for imported discoveries, but the earliest statutes of 1793, 1800 and 1832, restricted patent property to citizens or to residents who declared that they intended to become citizens. As such, while an American could not appropriate patent rights to a foreign invention, he could freely use the idea without any need to bear licensing or similar costs that would otherwise have been due if the inventor had been able to obtain a patent in this country. In 1836, the stipulations on citizenship or residency were removed, but were replaced with discriminatory patent fees: foreigners could obtain a patent in the U.S. for a fee of three hundred dollars, or five hundred if they were British. After 1861 patent rights (with the exception of caveats) were available to all applicants on the same basis without regard to nationality."
https://eh.net/encyclopedia/an-economic-history-of-patent-in...
Sam Slater moved to the US in 1789 and partnered with a textile manufacturer to recreate the technology from memory. (Amusingly what he did may not have even been a violation of IP law by today's standards)
https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2017/07/05/americas-industrial-re...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Slater
I think that US publishers, especially sheet music publishers, would copy British music and and publish it in the US, since I don't think that the US honored British copyright (at least some subset of it), but I can't think of good search terms to find any sources.
ultimately, neither of these efforts succeeded.
but it is evidence that people and industries in China truly do understand the notion of protecting trade secrets, IP, etc.