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Comment by freerangebat | Hacker News Reader

I think most mainlander Chinese like me would appreciate the vision of the politicians who chose to engage with the Communist Party—-We’re glad we don’t live in a West Korea as a result.

The real problem came when the Beijing model began to free-ride on the openness of the West: internet companies can go West but not East; same with some cultural exchanges, media and information. Trade rules failing to address unique tricks the Leninist party-state is able to pull. Failing to see the risk of the system generating mini-Mao-style dictators. To be fair before Xi we were on a somewhat benign track with regular transitions of power.

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The agreement was never a symmetric "free trade" agreement. Everyone knew China wasn't going to be as open to imports as the US was. Chinese consumers, in the late 70s, were so poor that it didn't matter anyway. Mcdonalds and Coke were symbolic outliers, but all the negotiators knew these things.

US negotiators did get what they actually wanted, US "FDI" investments in China protected by western style corporate laws.

Foxcon-Apple stuff is exactly what both parties had in mind. Foxconn (Taiwan is pax americana) invest in building the factory, funded by Western/US banks. Apple own the IP and gain most of the equity. China gets jobs, a trade surplus, and builds foreign currency reserves.

The game has been played for a while, and all parties got a lot of what they wanted. Foxconn really does generate a ton of equity for Apple. China really has built up a ton of foreign currency reserves. Etc.

I'm not saying this is good. China should stop being so surplus oriented and let salaries rise. The US should give some attention to domestic labour, etc.... That's my opinion though. It was not the opinion of negotiators in the 70s and 80s.

Trade agreements don't need to be symmetric to be beneficial for both parties. Even if China didn't buy a single American good, it is beneficial for US to sell to china.

Export is what you pay for import. If China sells goods to US they will get dollars in return. These dollars are worthless except for buying American goods.

Even if China can't buy American goods, they can buy some other country's goods using their newly acquired dollars. Eventually someone somewhere will use those dollars to buy American goods.

Those dollars aren't necessarily used to purchase American goods but rather to acquire ownership stakes in American assets.

Sure, the USD is the world's reserve currency. And, while it's also the currency of the international trade, the US's share of China's import isn't as significant -- in 2019, China imported over $2T, or $2,000B, worth of goods and services globally and, of that, only $163B, came from the US. In fact, the US is not even the biggest import nation, it's South Korea, followed by Japan and Taiwan.

This is one of the best HN comments I've read on the China issue. Finally a fair comment.

Cheers.

This topic actually really depresses me. The whole "crisis" is unnecessary. The US and China can easily, and probably should renegotiate trade terms amicably. It just seems to be politically impossible to say "we got what we wanted then, but now we have different priorities." It doesn't seem possible to actually spell out priorities, or admit that in a negotiation, the other party has priorities too.

Geopolitics, or humans rights issues are a different matter. There are real dangers at play, now that the two countries are equal rivals. China's way of disciplining companies (eg Nike when they made a Xinjiang, or John Cena's little speech) is directly at odds with the US' MO. It's quite zero sum. I don't see how that gets resolved, in a way that doesn't (for example) have the potential knock a whole $trn off Apple's market cap.

> Internet companies can go west but not east.

Also native Chinese here. I do not quite agree with your view on that. Yes, Facebook and Google were censored in China, but were eBay and Amazon blocked in China? Neither of them found a way to do business well in the China market.

I'm totally against censorship, too. But blaming all things on the GFW is unreasonable to me. I think the reason here is that most educated Chinese people CAN speak, or at least read, simple English, while very few western people can speak Chinese. Getting into a market that speaks a language you understand is much easier than getting into a market with different language.

Everything invented in the silicon valley will be shared and discussed in Beijing/Shanghai/Shenzhen in almost no time. There are even Weibo accounts just reposting HN headlines, arxiv papers, etc. Each of these accounts has a huge amount of followers. How many westerns can read Chinese and know what is happening right now in China? China is far behind the western world when it comes to science and technology, but with a 1.4 billion population, I'm sure there are a few great ideas. However, westerners are hard to get them not because of the "closeness" of the east, but for the language barriers.

When I see a technical post on HN, the comments are always meaningful and profound. But the comments in political posts are often too simple, sometimes even naïve. I wish we could think as hard as we do when discuss the newest technologies.

Too simple, sometimes naïve. I see what your did there ;)

I pointed out GFW as one example, and actually agree with you that it’s not the only reason exchanges are so limited.

However, I do notice that examples of failed Western attempts to penetrate China usually stops at Amazon and eBay: after these, popular platforms have been so pro-actively blocked that it’s impossible to know what outcome would be if they were given to chance to freely compete. And the internet turned social, which in nature runs against the Party’s grip on speech.

I personally think the GFW is a good thing, for now, that other developing countries may have an interest in copying. Free flowing mass communication in nations without fully developed public (security) services can be a disaster... the conflicts (and even genocides) that arose from poorer countries adopting FB come to mind.

Also a foreign entity with suspicious partners having direct access to naive citizens around the world should be viewed as an attack vector especially if the locally accepted values don't match those of foreign entity.

You can argue same thing for Korean/Japanese, but they have no GFW.

Could you expand on what you mean by "West Korea"?

Thanks!

A country as bad as North Korea.

Ok that would make sense. Thanks!

I was wondering if there was in some sense a hybrid of North and South envisioned that would be not desirable for Chinese citizens but my limited experience with China kinda makes me feel like it actually is somewhere between the two in some sense.

GP probably meant North Korea.

How common do you think your view on "the real problem" is amongst your peers on the mainland? From my view in HK, it's

a) hard to see many agreeing with your view, and b) also very difficult to form an accurate picture

Agree with you on both. Rare I think. And those who share it are becoming more and more afraid to express them.

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