PART I: My take on current China US relations
China has setup such a brutal maze for foreign companies in the domestic market. From forced partnerships, to forced technology transfer (hear the sucking sound of US avionic technology going to COMAC?) to not allowing insurance companies to get the licenses they need to be legal in China. It’s an endless maze where foreign insurance companies need to ‘partner’ with license holders to be legal or to cover larger areas of China.
On the other end, education teaches China’s youth that foreign nations have humiliated China endlessly. TV propaganda endlessly enforcing building on traditional themes (updating as things arise) motivates individual citizens to steal technology much like ISIS propaganda motivates lone wolf attacks. So it starts from the Central gov to local gov, to local hoodlums demanding foreign companies compensate for noise etc (privately ask anyone with a brick and mortar biz in China about this).
It finally ends up as a free for all and individual people feel justified and sometimes compensated (in the case of scientists stealing seed or bio technology from universities abroad) in the form of ‘if you bring valuable stolen technology back to China you will be setup for life. A modern lab. Access to university research facilities, endless cheap loans and so on. So the propaganda is backed by bribes that reward theft of foreign technology.
It’s such a crushingly successful system that foreign companies, even with the largest lead in technology and patents eventually fall to local Chinese competitors such that the US has very little to lose by playing hardball and much to gain.
So, what Im saying is the it’s too successful and that in itself it it’s weakness. And it will come to bite them in the backside. All the hollering aside, the US has almost nothing to lose by playing serious hardball with China. Now is the opportunity to change the game.
I’m very pro China in many ways but this simply is unbalanced and cannot continue. I’m sure China will rebalance and recover in a more sustainable way when this is all over but it’s time to reevaluate everything very carefully (listening intently in private to business owners who have operations inside China) and take swift, action that has a clear goal and is not vindictive.
The goal is win-win trade and a balance in the era of a rising China. The goal is not to hurt or stop China. That is important. But much has been left unsaid and it needs to be drawn out; if even in private) All the dirty tricks, underhanded tactics that have been deployed. It’s time to face up to the hacking and massive theft that has been called the ‘greatest transfer of wealth in history’.
Until now foreign companies and even the US military has been very deceitful about how bad they have been hacked. Everyone is afraid to tell how bad it was. The reasons include possible lawsuits in the case of private data. Fear of being seen as having poor security (lapse of judgement) or in the case of the US military the massive lack of ability to protect secrets which will haunt them for the next 100 years as China builds on the research and technology developed by DARPA and others. We need to put it all out there and come up with a realistic strategy whose goal is future growth and prosperity for all nations.
