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Comment by jonathanlydall | Hacker News Reader

When I did customer service at Blizzard Europe back around 2010 one of my immediate colleagues who could speak Chinese and English was involved in the re-launch of WoW in China.

They explained that non-Chinese companies were not allowed to operate in China. What Blizzard had done was essentially a partnership, but legally they gave rights to a Chinese company to operate/use their IP in China.

I suspect this is the same here, this is a Chinese company with a right from Blizzard to use their IP, but isn’t actually Blizzard itself.

Blizzard probably can’t control what this Chinese company does in China except probably for terminating their license to use their Hearthstone IP, and even then I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s legally challenging.

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> They explained that non-Chinese companies were not allowed to operate in China.

I still find it fascinating how no-one was screaming "trade war!" at such terms. Yet respond to them with a few tariffs..

In China, nobody's allowed to complain about mercantilist policies.

In the US, nobody noticed until the US government started employing stronger mercantilist policies, then started complaining about it at home because they don't like that their own government is employing such policies.

That's probably why.

It's worth noting that punitive tariffs, in the end, are taxes on businesses in your own country, because it just raises the price of US businesses doing business (and often gets passed on to consumers, when demand for the product is strong enough to pass the cost on to consumers; otherwise, businesses just suffer and have to start cutting costs in other areas, such as by laying off workers).

Mercantilist policies hurt the local economy as much as they hurt foreign economies. Every act escalating a trade war hurts both sides.

> That's probably why.

Pretty much the entire media participated in the narrative that it was Trump that started the trade war - both in the US, and here in Europe. That's what I was referring to, not Chinese media.

> Mercantilist policies hurt the local economy as much as they hurt foreign economies.

So economists keep repeating. Yet China doesn't seem to have been hurt by their mercantilism. Because yes, in the short term, tariffs hurt, but they let local industry develop without being crushed by foreign competition. In fact, " ... none of the world's most successful trading regions, including Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and now mainland China, reached their current status by adopting neoliberal trading rules." [1]. But economic consensus remains untainted by contact with reality.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage#Criticis...

> but legally they gave rights to a Chinese company to operate/use their IP in China

Probably why there's a very blatant Chinese Overwatch ripoff game that Blizzard hasn't gone after.

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