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by toomuchtodo 3089 days ago
China’s ambitions prohibit the US and China from being partners (such that the US is with the UK and France).

As a US citizen, I’d prefer we not sell off all of our assets for short term gain, only to be sharecroppers to China in the long term.

Warren Buffet warned us about this years ago: https://youtu.be/vx5XPvQO4pI

1 comments

I think this economic us vs them mentality is backwards. I'm a US citizen, but both China and the US are populated by humans. In a fair world, Americans should be able to make money in China while Chinese make money in America. If I sell AMC theaters to a Chinese citizen, and use that money to start a self driving car company, is that sharecropping or is it just a deal that both parties found personally advantageous? Does it make any difference to AMCs investment and hiring in the US? Is that Chinese citizen even that much less likely to spend the profits from AMC on US goods and services than an American citizen? Human innovation is not a zero-sum game and separating the world into competing nation-teams actually just holds both parties back, in my opinion.
Your premise would hold water if the Chinese government was not so entrenched via state sponsorship in its corporate entities, but that’s not the case. China exerts its influence thorough these economic activities, and I argue that the US government does not to the same extent.

These are not traditional M&A activities. It’s an economic Cold War. The US is not innocent entirely, but we do not pour government dollars into the Rand Corp and go about buying influential concerns in other countries.

Edit: thisisit mentions this is a comment further down:

“> In a document, the US Government Accountability office specifically singled out the rise of Chinese companies with state ties as worthy of more scrutiny, noting that some acquisitions might ultimately be bad for competition.”

Yes, that's true. What i'm describing is a perfect world but what we have in reality is the largest scale market intervention in human history, most likely. An economically and politically free China would reshape the global economy.