Singapore Urges U.S. to Accept China's Rise, Spare Other Nations

The world might be a better place if everyone stole and remixed IP

That's a great way to copyright reform right there!

If you open your economy when you are relatively undeveloped and weak then foreign companies will immediately occupy your economy and you can forget about creating national 'champions'.

China is not a closed market but they are careful not to fall into that trap.

That's a big big stretch. It's more open than a big part of Western countries.

  1. There is a blanket ban on anything media related
  2. Select heavy industries
  3. Defence
  4. Agriculture *production*

On the second point, I disagree.

IP is not some basic, natural law. It's a relatively recent invention, ostensibly invented to promote certain economic incentives. Why is china morally obligated to respect it?

At any given point in time, the biggest effect of an IP system is how it affects the current portfolio of patents & copyrights. That's what tends to dictate the rules. When copyright law is updated, it's the impact on Disney's IP asset portfolio that's considered... not future works that will be created. It's a similar dynamic for patents.

Why should china (or any country) have to subscribe to an IP system under which they don't own as many patents.

Meanwhile, the benefits of a patent system are contraversial, even dubious (imho). Lots of intelligent peoe think they do more harm than good. The billions spent by tech companies on patent lawyers are a case-in-poiny.

I do not think we (globally) are best served by a global IP monolith. This is one area where we can benefit from a diversity of rules.

If the companies are willingly going to the Chinese markets on their own accord under an IP sharing agreement, you can no longer use the term "force". They have a choice to not share it by not entering the market. You can critique this as an inherent weakness of capitalism, but China is not forcing anybody in this situation.

And why would they have to steal it if its already shared? This doesn't even make any sense.

Absorbing global manufacturing has made Americans the richest people with the highest purchasing power on the planet, has subjected American companies to competition that no other country has experienced, and has made them more productive as a result. Why would any American want their government to give in to the same mercantilism that China practises, at the expense of their own people? To maintain jobs that pollute the local environment and are largely going to be automated away anyway?

The central issue which makes this call for retaliation so intuitive (but mistaken) is that the plight of people who lose their jobs to trade is tangible. The steel worker is a person we can picture. But the collective welfare we all gain by the cheap imports from a country like China is invisible. Industries have lobbies, consumers don't.

I.e. the kind of trade that they dictate and call "free", creating banana republics that cut them special deals, toppling governments when they don't like their decisions, using humanitarian and development funding (even from supposedly independent sources, like the IMF) as bribes and pressure to secure special treatment , insisting on the dollar being used in major trade as opposed to the euro or the yuan (and punishing those states that make the opposite "free" decision), getting their hands on oil producing countries, and so on.

And of course using protectionism whenever they like for themselves ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protectionism_in_the_United_St... ).

Some free trade...

I am a free trade believer but you must be stupid not to see that US doesn't want free trade. It wants free trade where it works for them, their "free trade", in US dollars of course. If you compete with the US you become a foe, an enemy.

"We must protect our country and our workers. Our steel industry is in bad shape. IF YOU DON’T HAVE STEEL, YOU DON’T HAVE A COUNTRY!"

"I think the European Union is a foe, what they do to us in trade. Now you wouldn't think of the European Union but they're a foe"

"There's a lot of anger at the fact that Germany is paying Russia billions of dollars."

Even the EU has many import tariffs to protect its own industries from unfair competition from China and others.

Why should someone who makes bikes in the EU compete with someone who does it for $0,50 an hour in Vietnam or who knows where?

Protecting your own markets is the sensible thing to do. Any country with a decent industrial policy does it.

Have you noticed who is in government over there right now?

TPP-agreement would have tied pacific countries and US tighter together while leaving China out until it improves. CPTPP and it's TPP without the US.

Monopolies?

Capitalists?

If we had the same rules everywhere and effectively one global government then we could have free trade. But we have sovereign nations with their own national interests.

Therefore trade always has to be a deal. Either the deal is a good one or it is not. We have had problems before with Japan, for instance they like to grow their own rice rather than just ship in 'Uncle Ben's' rice from Uncle Sam. Rice grown in Japan by real Japanese people on real rice terraces is much more expensive than rice churned out by U.S. agri-business. But do the U.S. agri-businesses have a right to demand free trade, pushing the Japanese small farmers out of business?

What sense does it actually make to do that? The product - rice - can be locally sourced with a lot of human effort gone into the production of it. This keeps people in Japan gainfully employed in agriculture. Japanese consumers also prefer the local product, it is more to their tastes.

Should this protectionism go on forever? Well, yes, it is not as if the local rice farmers in Japan are going to be competing for global exports.

So we have something similar with China and every other nation. I think that China are doing very well in tech thanks to the Great Firewall of China, they have versions of Wikipedia, Facebook, Google and Amazon - the world is richer for this diversity.

What is wrong with the U.S. approach to protectionism? They could be honest about Huawei and state that they wish to have domestic companies do 5G just because they have national interest to do so. They could be honest about their own 'Great Firewall' which is what the NSA is and be up front that the government feels it needs to spy on the citizens lest any of them get revolutionary thoughts.

The rest of the world is fine about U.S. protection of the pickup truck market. We get it - the U.S. needs Detroit and Detroit needs pickup trucks as they can't make competitive cars.

If the U.S. was claiming that Toyota and VW trucks were unsafe that would be wrong, that is what is going on with the Huawei situation, there are these allegations that are not substantiated by facts.

It is ridiculous that the U.S. is struggling with trade given how rich the country is from a land/resources point of view, how the U.S. owns the world's reserve currency and how almost all oil/energy has to be traded in USD. No other countries have these perks.

China has no territorial ambitions beyond Taiwan. This is benign, a bit like Ireland wanting Ulster back rather than Britain wanting to enslave India. They may peg their currency and have this Great Firewall, however, who is to say that they are wrong in not wanting their great nation to be ravaged by global capitalism? We just need to strike actual trade deals with China in the West, affording the Chinese people and their leaders some respect.

Free markets have always come thick with caveats to suit whatever goals the authors/negotiators had at the time. The US, for example, generally prioritized investment access and largely got it. They also prioritized economic infrastructure, like the dollar standard and globalising the US patent system.

Meanwhile, agricultural markets were kept outside of the mix, which is a huge deal to many politically/economically weak countries. The line between a bad faith exploitation of the system (as you characterized china) and an acceptable exception was determined by political interests and power dynamics, not by principles.

What I'm saying is not that china "plays fair" or that the US does. What I'm saying is that it's a game where rules get made on the fly and power matters. There's a tendency to see your own priorities (patents stand out to me, in the US-China context) as obvious non-issues and rivals' priorities as huge compromises. I think it's wise to limit the moral reasoning which leads to finger pointing and conflict.

Meanwhile, there's always a lot of dirty dealing on all sides. Putting up trade barriers on national security pretexts or whatnot.

I think the Singaporean minister has the broad point right. The US had an incredibly central role in creating the current global trade setup. This reflected their power (and prestige, especially in Europe) at the time. The system wasn't a bad one and China has been a great beneficiary of it. A lot of the non-economic reasoning did come to fruition too. China is a far more open-to-the-world society today.

But... The size of China's current economy changes the political balance. They will demand a US-like role and unless that's accepted by the US, politically & emotionally, we're headed for a recessive period.

Unfortunately, to the current US administration, confronting China is not a means to change China's behavior for better, but an end itself.

Are the sanctions against countries like Cuba, Iran or North Korea also a part of "fair" and "free" trade?

Of course, US is free to choose with whom they want or don't want to deal; just don't call it "free" trade please.

Fast forward to 2018, China and USA already agreed to WTO rules with China considered as a developing countries and thus granted special rights such as protection of its industries. Then USA unilaterally breaks WTO rules with tariffs with an arbitrary interpretation of "national security" and wants a signature of a one way deal where USA gets all the rights and controls but doesn't give anything. I'm sorry but history teaches you that kind of deals will get your citizens subjugated by foreign powers or foreign corporations.

I doubt if low inflation enviroment is high on current administration list. On the contrary. Some inflation could stimulate economy.

> The US may have fewer friends in Asia than it assumes.

Isn't Singapore political system famously authoritarian capitalist and its people ethnically Chinese? It might be a mistake as viewing it too much of a representative of the rest of Asia. It sounds very similar to contemporary China, in many respects, so it may have an unusually strong affinity to it.

https://www.hrw.org/asia/singapore:

> Singapore’s political environment is stifling. Citizens face severe restrictions on their basic rights to freedom of expression, association, and peaceful assembly through overly broad criminal laws and regulations. In 2017, the country tightened the already strict limits on public assemblies contained in the Public Order Act, which requires police permits for any “cause-related” assembly outside the closely monitored “Speakers’ Corner.”

> Allowing East Asia to become China's vassal territory?

Sure, in much the same way that it was in the past, and in much the same way that all of North and South America are vassals to the United States.

It is not realistic for East and even Southeast Asian countries to care more about what the US thinks than what China thinks; I don't understand how people can advocate for this goal with a straight face.

For more information, see https://www.gov.sg/factually/content/is-it-fiscally-sustaina....

These observations about imprisoning minorities always fail to include information about past terrorist attacks and militant activity in the region. Most of the people in the reeducation centers were sent there for things such as spreading Islamic propaganda glorifying suicide bombings.The reality of the situation is more nuanced than the depiction by western media. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_China

In December 2016 in Xinjiang, Islamic militants drove a vehicle into a yard at the county Communist party offices and set off a bomb but were all shot dead. Three people were wounded and one other died.

In July 2011, At least 18 people died in a series of alleged terrorist attacks in the city of Kashgar. According to state-run media accounts, the violence began when two Uyghur men hijacked a truck, ran it into a crowded street, and started stabbing people, killing six. The attack ended when the assailants were overpowered by the crowd, which killed one attacker. On the second day, state media reported that a "group of armed terrorists" stormed a restaurant, killed the owner and a waiter, and set it ablaze. They then proceeded to indiscriminately kill four more civilians. Armed clashes then reportedly ensured, ending with police capturing or killing the attackers. The Turkistan Islamic Party later claimed responsibility for the attack. One of the suspects appeared in a TIP video training in Pakistan.

In March 2015 in Guangzhou, three ethnic Uyghur assailants with long knives attacked civilians at Guangzhou train station, 13 injured.

In November 2014 in Xinjian, militants with knives and explosives attacked civilians, 15 dead and 14 injured. 14 of the 15 deaths were attackers

In May 2014 in Ürümqi, Xinjiang, Two sport utility vehicles (SUVs) carrying five assailants were driven into a busy street market in Ürümqi. Up to a dozen explosives were thrown at shoppers from the windows of the SUVs. The SUVs crashed into shoppers then collided with each other and exploded. 43 people were killed, including 4 of the assailants, and more than 90 wounded.

There are many more. Again, I'm not making of value judgement here but I think everyone should think critically and really understand what's going on from multiple points of view.

I noticed a pattern few month ago: you have a lot of bashing during East coast morning hours, followed by much more conciliatory toned wave of comments few hours after, when East coast wakes up.

BTW, your comment on moderation is interesting.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18297494-one-man-s-view-...

It's very concise, written in fairly casual tone and in my opinion, spot on for the most part. One point he kept making throughout the book is Singapore will not stop working with a superpower because another superpower don't like it.