> Let me spell it out: Chinese companies are extensions of the state.
Where this comes to a head, and where western capitalistic governments seem ill equipped to handle it sufficiently, is in how China itself can and does act like one giant super conglomerate company and uses that to bully smaller companies because they are bigger than anything around. Western governments are loathe to intervene in business dealing when they don't have to, because their systems are based on a fairly hands off approach with the free market. The one place they sometimes do step in is when there's a monopoly or some other anti-competitive practice. The problem here is that the anti-competitive practice is being enabled by a foreign state that's working under the illusion of separate corporate entities.
What's a country like the US or UK to do? Tell it's local companies that want to and are totally willing to shift IP to China to access the market "No, sorry, you aren't allowed to, even though you own that information and it's not a state secret"? That may be what's needed, but it's a large difference in thought in how they've treated their markets to this point.
>What's a country like the US or UK to do? Tell it's local companies that want to and are totally willing to shift IP to China to access the market "No, sorry, you aren't allowed to, even though you own that information and it's not a state secret"?
Yes, that is literally what the US has always done. The government can ban you from exporting anything it wants, which explicitly includes tech transfer.
China isn't just taking tech IP. They're taking everything. They localized and took a bunch of train IP from German company they partnered with in the past. They've been doing it for decades.
You can say we do that all the time, but have we really been prohibiting experienc and technology for diesel engines?
Like you say, maybe we should, but it will be an interesting argument to have with companies that really want access to the market, and view this specific aspect of the contract as none of the governments business.
Stuff like train IP is actually included in tech, same as rockets would be. My understanding is this is a legal definition of technology which can include basically anything (especially anything you might ever patent or have patented).
I also didn't mean to imply that the US has done a lot of this. I don't think they have in the free trade era. I just meant to point out that it has always been done for some stuff (one of the most controversial and what introduced me to this many years ago was the crypto export ban). The last few years have already seen an explicit expansion of much more general purpose tech being restricted, with China being a known bad actor for forced tech transfer, so it doesn't seem like a stretch that we'll see more of it.
> one of the most controversial and what introduced me to this many years ago was the crypto export ban
Yeah, I'm well aware of that ban, which is what I was alluding to originally with the "even though it's not state secrets". Crypto isn't really a state secret, but it's classified as munitions, which is equally as weird and convoluted, and probably only really accepted because they were able to make a case about it being a national defense issue.
Controlling what companies can and can't do with their own property gets weird fast. So maybe some laws go in place to prevent China from cooercing IP from companies that want to work in their market. What if China just wants to outright pay for the technology and buy the IP? Is that okay? What if that purchase price is based on some other stipulation that they don't follow through on? The whole problem here is that some Chinese companies are willing to just say "screw it, your laws don't apply here and our prior agreements don't matter, and my government will back me up" and there's not a lot of recourse at a company level to stop that. The only way to actually stop any abuse is to disallow all business with China unless they adhere to the rules, but that's a hard sell when it looks like it's a nationwide ban because of a few bad companies, which is definitely how China would spin it and how it would be disseminated through specific media campaigns.
And actually banning business with China would be so disruptive and so unpopular for some companies (and companies that would be willing to push against that legislation) that it really would be extremely disruptive internally, and be presented as an issue of over regulation and big government intervention and racist and everything we've already seen before, just turned up to 11. And honestly, China might see that as a win no matter what happens, because it either exposes the dysfunction in our economic model or it moves it closer to their economic model, which would be a vindication of their path.
Where this comes to a head, and where western capitalistic governments seem ill equipped to handle it sufficiently, is in how China itself can and does act like one giant super conglomerate company and uses that to bully smaller companies because they are bigger than anything around. Western governments are loathe to intervene in business dealing when they don't have to, because their systems are based on a fairly hands off approach with the free market. The one place they sometimes do step in is when there's a monopoly or some other anti-competitive practice. The problem here is that the anti-competitive practice is being enabled by a foreign state that's working under the illusion of separate corporate entities.
What's a country like the US or UK to do? Tell it's local companies that want to and are totally willing to shift IP to China to access the market "No, sorry, you aren't allowed to, even though you own that information and it's not a state secret"? That may be what's needed, but it's a large difference in thought in how they've treated their markets to this point.