[tepidandroid]

When these great and venerable "International companies" you speak of exploited cheap Chinese sweat shop labor for decades, it wasn't a problem. Now that the Chinese want foreign companies who made (and continue to make) absurd profits from access to the Chinese market to share some benefits, it becomes a problem. Hopefully you had some moral outrage with regard to buying cheap consumer goods made in China during the former phase as well.

International companies in a rush to get access to the largest single market in the world made their own bed with their rampant and unconstrained greed. They outsourced all of their pollution and their manufacturing jobs to China, and now they turnaround and breathlessly accuse China of ripping them off. I can't accept this kind of blatant hypocrisy.

[riskneutral]

China is the world’s second largest economy. The decision to develop polluting industries and manufacture low cost goods was China’s to make. The subsequent (and likely ongoing) exploitation of Chinese labor was done by China’s system of government and capital. The same system has raised astounding Chinese numbers of people out of poverty and created enormous wealth for Chinese capital. Now that China is moving beyond the “emerging market” stage, it is entering the realm of great power conflicts. What we know is that most past great power conflicts have been terribly violent (Cold War, WW2/WW1, Napoleanic wars, etc). What we see so far is China waging a low intensity war in the Cyber warfare realm. This has the added bonus of paying for itself many times over, e.g. stealing billions of dollars worth intellectual property, eg semiconductor manufacturing trade secrets. The US has started responding with a trade war. I guess the next logical step in this escalation would be for China to become involved in violent proxy war (eg another Vietnam War or Korean War). Full scale warfare (ie nuclear war) is of course the worst-case scenario, which is always one button away from occurring.