The concept was that open exchange, trade, and information flow would result in open societies. In fact, the reverse happened — it strengthened the hand of the expansionist authoritarian governments. Now, the '-isms' (communism, fascism, etc.) have all been stripped, and it is literally open war on democracies by the authoritarian states. Russia is waging open genocide in Ukraine and threatening the Baltics, Poland and Germany, China is openly violating it's agreements on Hong Kong, militarily threatening Taiwan and everyone around it's "9-dashed-line", and brutalizing it's own citizens as they protest. Iran & North Korea similarly threatening. In the economic sphere, their entire repertoire is to steal as much IP as possible and cheat their way into the markets.
It is far past time to recognize that we are playing for a few quarters of better profits while they are playing to literally destroy the democracies to they can take what they want. The only proper response is to condition our economic engagement on the implementation of democracy. You want access to our markets? Fine, open your political systems, stop being a threat, and we'll trade. Until then, it's a full embargo.
Aside from the overt military threats, I literally don't go several hours at a time without seeing more stories of how people in democratic countries are being routinely and systematically cheated by the Chinese, or how they are maintaining "Chinese police auxiliary stations" in democratic countries (why is this permitted?) to threaten their own diaspora. There are surely good people in every country, but that fact does not make it worth the costs of interacting with those societies.
What you say is akin to saying it's amusing to see a chess player beaten in a game because the opponent just took all of his pieces and put them in his pocket, and bribed the judge to look the other way. What exactly is amusing about that? I really don't understand what kind of world people who make statements like this want to live in.
The exact same companies that were lobbying against consumer protection and antitrust laws, unions busting, and convicted of conspiracy to supress wages, are now asking for government to step in because Chinese competition is breaking the same laws.
Definately some hypocracy and now that the shoe is on the other foot, people they shafted previously are enjoying some shaudenfruede.
The US does this all over the world. They will just cut off entire countries if they don't follow their banking rules, for example.
We should stop with "you're either an X or a Y". That might be true on TV or on Twitter. It is not true in real life.
Read the first line, thought "How could they be so wrong?".
Then read the second line, thought "Oh... you got me, that was a funny joke".
And now thinking "Oh... maybe they're serious, which would make this an hilarious case of 'do what I (maybe?) say in real life, not what I do on TV, Twitter, or HN' "
If Amazon was threatened with closure if they don't fix this, you would see a change quickly.
I think there is more to their success than that though.