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Comment by jorblumesea | Hacker News Reader

Given the Western way of doing business, it does come as a shock when China spins up a complete clone of your business with government money, including IP and R&D. It's malicious intent. They have no motivation to see the business succeed.

It's not like it's spelled out in the contract: "we will use free loans from the Chinese govt to take your tech, undercut your markets and put you out of business. We have no intentions of letting your business thrive and survive."

We're getting smarter about it but this is way of doing business is very foreign to the West. The West sees investors as capital assets and not active market players. When Peter Thiel invests in a company he is not looking to spin up his own competing clone. He wants the business to succeed. Not so in China, who has a vested interest in running US businesses into the ground.

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Should other countries cede sovereignty and do exactly what others dictate to them? The West needs be smarter about how to compete and deal with the global landscape rather than crying about it incessantly and childishly trying to divert blame. Nothing illegal happened in the examples above, Western CEO's willingly handed over their property knowing full well what happens. And they did it to profit.

India flagrantly walks all over IP too. They have a massive export business stealing new pharmaceuticals and selling generics to the world. This is the reality of the world.

Either get smarter at how to manage this stuff or give up. The US is hardly in a position to suddenly want an international arbiter deciding who is playing fair or not given the history of torn up treaties and general aversion to international governance.

It's not a game of baseball, countries are free to make their own rules and decide whether they respect yours or not.

As a Westerner I fully agree with this. US seems to have this conceit that China, India and other emerging economies will play by the post-WW2 global trade rules we set up, if we just continue to nudge and pressure them in that direction. But it's been obvious for a while now their intent is to play by their own rules. US whinging about something so blatantly obvious, unsurprising and foreseeable is pretty lame.

> It's not like it's spelled out in the contract

I mean, it is, just not in those words. What we're talking about here is a vulnerability in the contract, in the software-security sense. Everyone should be reading contracts the same way they read source code during a security audit: under the assumption that all parties involved have malicious intent and are trying to destroy one-another 100% of the time. So when a contract says "we can do X", it must be read as "we can do X to make us succeed at your expense." Just like when code says "this module can do X", it must be read as "an attacker having gained control of this module can do X to succeed at your expense."

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