[dasil003]

My wording was ambiguous, I should have said of any significant size.

Anyway, "some economic benefit" is the understatement of the year. A multinational simply can not do business without secure communications. History is irrelevant; Wells Fargo wrote out every transaction on a slip of paper and manually reconciled it every night 50 years ago, but to do so today would be utterly impossible. In todays global economy, countries need to be able to do business with foreign companies or they will be a backwater plain and simple. China certainly makes some of the tradeoffs you are talking about, but do they outright ban secure communications? Of course not, because that would be suicidal.