Naive question here: why China is able to close its market to foreign companies? Same thing for trade sanctions on Iran which impacted European companies but not China (if I'm not wrong). Seems they don't play by the same rules as anybody else.
As an individual country, blocking or tarrifing imports from China isn't very effective because it hurts consumers and industry that rely on importing products and raw materials/commodities/industrial inputs from China more than it hurts China who can often export to other countries instead.
Blocking exports to China is tricky because one the one hand, China doesn't import too many things, but on the other hand, for those things they do import, they're a large portion of the global market, so a country that cuts off those exports will leave their exporters will a large surplus, often of perishable goods, that will be difficult to deal with.
So, trade controls are tricky. Most western countries don't have much in the way of laws that could restrict foreign ownership of land or businesses except in exceptional cases. And military intervention would be wholy inappropriate and probably disasterous. Really just not a lot of options.
palatable
From "palate", roof of the mouth, and by extension taste.
This isn't really true. If there is a tariff on importing iPhones from China, in the short term iPhones become more expensive by the amount of the tariff, but also the US taxpayer pays lower taxes for the same level of government services because the tariff money is going to the US government. So to US citizens in the short term it's net-zero.
In the longer term, Apple builds an iPhone factory in India or Mexico. The US iPhone customer doesn't even really notice the difference from this, but China obviously does.
> Blocking exports to China is tricky because one the one hand, China doesn't import too many things, but on the other hand, for those things they do import, they're a large portion of the global market, so a country that cuts off those exports will leave their exporters will a large surplus, often of perishable goods, that will be difficult to deal with.
Nobody really even wants to block exports to China. Gaining fair access to the Chinese market is kind of the point, and for things like soybeans or something like that, "fair access" mostly just means they're buying your products.
It's more complicated when you start talking about tech companies and censorship, because then it's about more than just "they're buying it from you."
Moreover, where export restrictions hurt isn't necessarily for things where they're paying a lot of money. It's for things they can't get elsewhere.
> Most western countries don't have much in the way of laws that could restrict foreign ownership of land or businesses except in exceptional cases.
That wouldn't be that hard to change. Especially for ownership of land, the change would be locally popular because it would make housing more affordable, and the foreign interests who would have to sell their holdings don't get a vote in US elections.
Also, the fact that exporting manufacturing to the east let to a lot of short-term profits for western companies.
The question is at what costs, looking at climate change, the current shortage of nearly anything manufactured right now and the destablisation of society thanks to the dropping of quality of life of many people in the west.
That's not a bug.
Because we assumed that prosperity would lead to liberal democracy. That underwrote complacency while profit motivations took root.
A quite foolish assumption given the 20th century counterexamples of capitalism + authoritarianism - Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Imperial Japan.
In the 90s, Wall St. and corporate America bankrolled the largest ever lobbying campaign to open US markets and the WTO to China, and got it by 2000.
Just two decades later and the result is massive inequality, a decimated middle class, vulnerable supply supply chains, and rising authoritarianism again.
The US has stupidly snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in the Cold War.
This was never argued by anyone of prominence in the debates on China's WTO accession. Raising living standards through trade was the pitch. The faulty assumption was wealthier Chinese would demand more freedom. That didn't happen.
Edit: As far as economic theories of the "Third Reich" are concerned, there was (quite naturally) a fascination with Fordism.
this might be a formal narrative, but the simple truth is that we did it because it made powerful people rich and entrenched specific factions in both parties
I don't think this is true. When these policies were first enacted upon, the revolution had just ended in China and Mao had just taken over. The population of China was large, but nothing like today, and cheap labor was plentiful all around the world. In short, there was nothing in particular that made doing business in China more lucrative than any other developing nation at the time.
The belief was that doing trade and business with the new Chinese government would encourage the developing nation to embrace western ideals... which it clearly did not.
Today, doing business in China is lucrative only because they have well over a billion people to buy products and use services... it's clearly short-term profit-driven thinking that has the likes of Apple bending over backwards to stay in the CCP's good graces, all the while the CCP steals Apple's IP, forces Apple to bend their morality, aid in censorship, unwittingly employ slave camps and more.
To be fair, Imperial China has a history of developing vassal states in its sphere of influence, so what goes around, comes around.
Main thing is that China used to have greater influence and I think the current generation of Chinese citizens see no reason why China shouldn’t be a superpower, even if they have to share it with the US.
How can they get away with it? They have powerful people lobbying with foreign governments on China's behalf. Take Apple for example: they contract out iPhone manufacturing to Foxconn in China. Due to the low cost of manufacturing they are able to generate astronomical profits.
Every measure against China will directly or indirectly impact some US multinational corporation and it's natural for the corporation to lobby Western governments to put the brakes on such measures.
On the contrary, if you look at Iran or Russia, multinational corporations don't have a similar deep-seated interest or supply chain infrastructure as they do in China. How did this come to be? A lot of it can be attributed to Deng Xiaoping's setting the tone for China's relationship with the West: “stabilize the position, observe calmly, take all in stride, never take the lead, and hide our capacity to bide our time.”
More on that in this essay: https://www.hoover.org/research/china-us-relations-eyes-chin...
Why shouldn't they? It's their market. Do you propose we do like the British, which bomb them and opened it by force to have them buy opium?
For perspecive, and to answer the "seems they don't play by the same rules as anybody else", part, the US has historically had tons of tarrifs on its own, it's how it got big - they only switched to "free trade" when Europe was devastated from WW II, and the US was already top dog dictating this "free" trade terms:
"The United States pursued a protectionist policy from the beginning of the 19th century until the middle of the 20th century. Between 1861 and 1933, they had one of the highest average tariff rates on manufactured imports in the world." [1].
Even so, US still has tarrifs and protectionist policies in many areas, not to mention the whole "yield the power of our military and diplomatic power to enforce favorable deals making a mockery of the free market we pay lip service to" thing.
Not to mention selectively targeting countries they don't like to close their markets via embargos, and using their force to force adherence to those embargoes to other countries around the world, something which no country dares do back (and can't anyway). Talk about "not playing by the same rules as anybody else".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariff_in_United_States_histor...
China has twice the tariff rate of the US, *in addition* to directly stopping foreign companies.
The finger pointing to that is a "I kicked the ladder after I've climbed" thing (or "do as I do now that I'm on top, don't do what I did to get on top, I don't want competition up here" kind of advice).
Also it's not like there's some supreme world government that can actually enforce these rules...
It is not though, many foreign companies do business in China. Even Facebook and Google retain part of their Ad business.
> Same thing for trade sanctions on Iran which impacted European companies but not China (if I'm not wrong). Seems they don't play by the same rules as anybody else.
First, EU doesn't like the idea that US sanctioned their companies because of Iran oil, that's why they rolled out some law that protect against it recently. Second, it's just US (and part of other western countries' as they have to eat it) rule, regarding the Iran oil example. China is not playing by that rule simply because so far there is not enough push from US.