[FooBarWidget]

> China is explicitly against [unfettered access].

They are not "explicitly against that". They don't allow full access at the get-go, true, but it's a big overstatement to say that they are against the concept. If you look at what they've done in the past 20 years, you'll see that they're opening up to foreign business more and more.

For example, joint ventures used to be required. A couple of years ago, that requirement has been dropped. And now with RCEP, they're reducing tariffs for many Asian countries.

Walk down the street in China for 10 minutes and you'll see tons of western companies.

Western countries also don't fully adhere to the free trade principle. There are countries that blocked investment from China for political reasons, way before the "but China is unfair for not allowing access into their markets" started.

[vlovich123]

Proof? They still require joint partnerships [1] and IP transfer in high tech industries. Sure they don’t require it in others where they’ve already built up domestic competitors and obtained all the IP they need (ie manufacturing).

Granted maybe you have updated information here so open to reading about it. Claiming that “but western countries do it too” is unhelpful whataboutism. I didn’t claim Western countries don’t do crappy shit. In terms of market access and competition, that shiftiness is more about established players and regulatory capture rather than outright pseudo-fascism whereas China seems to have adopted fascism quite aggressively (ironic considering they call themselves a socialist party but I guess all authoritarian regimes end up looking very similar).

Saying “I see western logos when I walk around in China” is missing the mark when I talk about what is required of companies when they enter China (and as I said not all industries, but the ones strategically important to China somehow, especially high tech)

[1] http://voxchina.org/show-3-115.html

[FooBarWidget]

I've heard of Tesla owning 100% shares in China. Does that count as high tech?

>×Claiming that “but western countries do it too” is unhelpful whataboutism.

Wait a minute... Many people are saying that the west should ban China for not allowing full access. The whole premise was literally about whataboutism. Saying that we shouldn't engage in whataboutism when the whole thing was based on whataboutism in the first place, is a bit odd.

[vlovich123]

> I've heard of Tesla owning 100% shares in China. Does that count as high tech?

Yes and it was a news story when it happened 2 years ago [1]. It could be that Trump’s tariffs were sufficient. Or there could be other agreements not wifey disseminated that allowed for that. Or China made this allowance strategically because electric car manufacturing in-country is easier to infiltrate with spies to exfil the technology you need (whereas non-electric car manufacturers don’t get this because China knows how to make those and getting a cut and building up the knowledge and expertise how to run those businesses is more important than the manufacturing itself).

Re whataboutism, I should have been clearer. Saying that we should meet China’s strategic and intentional aggressiveness in kind and why it’s a problem, to me, is 100% on topic and not “what about X” where X is unrelated to addressing the problem being discussed. An example of this would be like “sure China has concentration camps but what about Americ’s death penalty” - you have shifted the conversation away from the problem of China’s concentration camps to the problem of America’s death penalty. Both are problems but bringing up the latter in the context of a discussion about the former is generally unhelpful unless you’re making some kind of specific point/analogy.

What I was proposing is that a more effective way to go after China (rather than a trade war or targeting individual products of China) was “if these are the rules China wants Western companies to follow to have access to their domestic markets, then China gets the same rules just for them in foreign markets while competitors don’t get that restriction”. That’s literally how trading should be done. It’s the same reason I’m against allowing countries with poorer worker protection access to American markets without accounting for the costs that American workers create due to the enhanced protections.

What I was suggesting was whataboutism was the parent’s reply that “well sure China does unfair things in their market but the West does other unfair things too”. That’s totally unrelated and unhelpful. A fairer analysis would realize that most things in Western markets happen organically and aren’t unique to the West as regulatory capture and crony capitalism happen in China too and appear to be (at least to me) endemic to most economic activity humans are involved in. There are exceptions but to me China is following America’s playbook in large part for how they beat Great Britain at the technology game (the parallels are just uncanny). What’s intolerable is that the US government isn’t addressing this in any way.

[1] https://money.cnn.com/2018/07/10/news/companies/tesla-china-...