They erected a firewall because of centuries of Western imperialism and foreign bullying.
As foreigner you might be fine with "free-trade" that allows you to freely sell opium, or take over cities on sovererign land, or to have foreign social networking companies plaster agenda driven poitical propoganda to people in your country (I'm talking about the facebook India snafu) because you have no investment or ties to the Chinese country, but they do have to think about national interest, and not foreign interest.
It's also not exactly a fair playground if foreign multinationals with decades of established dominance, experience, R&D, and human capital from the developed world compete against Chinese companies which most would be upstarts or recent companies, and with human capital from less developed sources. When none of the country has drinkable tap water, their people have a lot of things on their plate. They don't need foreign competition. It'd be like sending a fully armed US marine squad to duke it out with squad of high schoolers and blaming China for being unfair for erecting a wall around the high schoolers while they grow and train.
Protectionism is a valid strategy to help boost domestic economic development and it's fairly arrogant and imperialistic to assert that we as fully developed foreigners have any right to exploit markets in less developed areas. Any time there is a tariff, it's essentially being practiced.
Do you feel like the firewall is more about control of information and censorship or protectionism on the Internet?
Are you referring to general trade barriers (in which I can agree help nascent industries and even the country in the long term) or the firewall that blocks many foreign sites?
On the latter point, I'd be surprised if it is ROI positive for the country. One would expect it would cut off significant communication with the outside world, resulting in duplicate work needing to be done (can't find that open source package on github as github is blocked? that sucks). The censorship regime additionally introduces self-policing costs to Chinese firms.
>Protectionism is a valid strategy to help boost domestic economic development and it's fairly arrogant and imperialistic to assert that we as fully developed foreigners have any right to exploit markets in less developed areas. Any time there is a tariff, it's essentially being practiced.
What you are putting forward is essentially a rhetorically-colored version of this argument: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infant_industry_argument https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infant_industry_argument . It was dubious at best when it was first proposed and it's more dubious still now.
How is it dubious exactly? I just wrapped up Hamilton's biography and lengthy parts of it are devoted to Alexander Hamilton practising the "Infant industry argument" on America itself.
> On March 24, 1791, the U.S. government granted patents for Parkinson's flax mill, even though he had admitted that they were "improvements upon the mill or machinery ... in Great Britain". Clearly, the U.S. government condoned something that, in modern phraseology, could be termed industrial espionage.
> "The extreme embarrasments of the United States during the late war, from an incapacity of supplying themselves, are still matter of keen recollection"
> His opponents cited abundant land and deficient capital and labor as reasons that America should remain a rural democracy.
> Protectionism is a valid strategy to help boost domestic economic development and it's fairly arrogant and imperialistic to assert that we as fully developed foreigners have any right to exploit markets in less developed areas.
I agree with the majority of your point, as I think we can all agree that without the GFC Chinese internet users would instead be revenue chum for Google / FB / Uber / Apple. I can't argue that their instead having home-grown alternatives isn't beneficial to China as a country.
However, I think it becomes debatable when you look at best for Chinese users. I'd argue that the optimal privacy situation for any user tends to be an app built by a large company headquartered and infrastructured outside the user's legal jurisdiction.
Without strong extra-jurisdictional competition, internal competitors are all subject to the whims and designs of national government. As a American, I'm grateful the EU (for example) raised such a strong fuss about privacy concerns -- without which, I doubt we'd have some mostly-internal American companies making the same positive moves we do see.
> Protectionism is a valid strategy to help boost domestic economic development and it's fairly arrogant and imperialistic to assert that we as fully developed foreigners have any right to exploit markets in less developed areas. Any time there is a tariff, it's essentially being practiced.
Its been shown to be largely counterproductive domestically as it provokes trade wars that destroy domestic industries that rely on the import/export market.
You cherry pick examples of a handful of things that had nothing to do with free trade (free trade has nothing to do with banning goods domestically, such as a specific drug or restricting speech).
> They erected a firewall because of centuries of Western imperialism and foreign bullying.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/12/china-south-africa-imperialism-zambia-brics-globalization/ https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/12/china-south-africa-imperi...
> In addition, the interaction of neoliberal capitalism and often oppressive labor practices has complicated attempts to secure elite assent. In 2006, a Zambian minister wept when she saw the environment in which workers toiled at the Chinese-owned Collum Coal Mine. Four years later, eleven employees were shot at the site while protesting working conditions. (After widespread outrage, the state eventually took control of the mine.)
> Scarce jobs, incidents like the Collum shootings, and poor working conditions at Chinese-owned companies sparked “anti-Chinese” riots in Zambia and some other countries on the continent. Despite some resistance, however, China — as well as other countries and companies — hasn’t been cut off from market and investment access. How has it been able to do so?
> However, the current configuration is not auspicious for economic diversification or for tackling inequality and poverty in countries like Zambia. In a 2011 speech at the third BRICS leaders meeting, South African President Jacob Zuma said, “We are now equal co-architects of a new equitable international system.” But the reality couldn’t be more different. South Africa’s current “sub-imperial” role (both dominated by external powers and transnational capital and dominating the Southern African region itself) is the one it has historically played. The main difference now is that China is the emergent potential hegemon, rather than Britain.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2016/02/10/dispatches-bangladesh-should-stand-chinas-bullying https://www.hrw.org/news/2016/02/10/dispatches-bangladesh-sh...
> As a result, it shouldn’t be surprising to hear that Ma Mingqiang, China’s ambassador to Bangladesh, objected vehemently last week after visiting the Dhaka Art Summit that featured facsimile images of handwritten notes written by some Tibetan self-immolators, among other subjects.. But what is surprising – and alarming – is that the organizers of the Dhaka Art Summit didn’t respond to the ambassador’s diatribe by defending the works. Worried that China might even prevail and force the Bangladeshi government to shut down the summit altogether, the exhibit’s artists, Tenzing Sonam and Ritu Sarin, chose another unique form of protest: covering the images. In a statement, the artists said their actions were intended to “draw attention to the unreasonable demands of the Chinese Embassy on an event taking place in another country and at the same time further highlight the nature of censorship and oppression inside Tibet.”
Where is your moral outrage on behalf of nations bullied by China?
it's amazing you're a founder from a YCombinator company. Just, shocked.
I used to believe that smart people would share my political views, too.
By now I have accepted that different people may value vastly different things.
When you notice that someone is so disconnected from your own values, the only use of arguing is for the audience.
it's just amazing how someone can harbor deep hatred for things that happened 100 years ago, and then proceed to integrate that with his views today, and then somehow gets accepted into ycombinator, and still have hatred for the country that accepted you. Just....speechless.
Having spent years in China, I think this accurately describes Chinese reasoning. It omits the drama of lobbying, corruption and paranoia about control.
Well, don't forget that China has been ready and willing to take the benefits of global trade when it suits them. 'We don't want aggressive imperialistic foreign multinationals coming in and bullying our poor domestic companies...', but sure, we'll take all of yor technology, programming languages, operating systems, do literally nothing to stop piracy of Microsoft software...
It's protectionist for sure, but please don't frame it in moral terms of exploitative foreigners. China has played a viciously exploitative game the last 30 years or so.
Plus let's not forget the other major reason for the firewall and other government barriers to foreign market access have been to restrict free flow of information to the Chinese population for purposes of control. It's very righteous to bring up Facebooks occasional gaffe, but you don't consider the CCP to have any devious political slant of their own?
What the real purpose of their firewall is for is debatable. You can't just assume it's purely for control. Control of course is also justifiable in some times and unjustifiable in others, much like how the Democratic National Committee instituted Super Delegates when they found out straight up voting threatened the party leadership's hold on power.
> Well, don't forget that China has been ready and willing to take the benefits of global trade when it suits them. 'We don't want aggressive imperialistic foreign multinationals coming in and bullying our poor domestic companies...', but sure, we'll take all of yor technology, programming languages, operating systems, do literally nothing to stop piracy of Microsoft software...
If you're talking about one-sided business deals, well, it's pretty stupid for multinationals to do that isn't it? They certainly aren't forcing multinationals to do that, but those multinationals obviously calculated the cost-benefits and determined they'd still benefit to doing business under the sovereign rules China imposed.
The difference when multinationals or foreign nationals wanting China to open up to their terms is that these terms are forced upon China and dictated. Fortunately for China it's powerful enough to simply ignore these demands.
> They erected a firewall because of centuries of Western imperialism and foreign bullying.
What a crock of shit.
While the rationale may not be justification, some reading of the history of China (and Japan) and Western nations is very, very highly recommended.
In particular the Opium Wars period, though I'd give a good 100 years on either side of that.
There is a bit of truth in that. Leaving aside the frankly odious history of Western imperialism in China, it -- along with the historical memory of constant civil war and the aftereffects of Maoism -- has left a kind of pervasive paranoia and nationalistic hypersensitivity in the Chinese political mind, where every event is exhaustively scanned for evidence of bias, slights, and conspiracy, and presented in the media as such. This, of course, coexists with a more positive and open attitude within the culture and people, but it shouldn't be underestimated as a driving force of Chinese policy and politics.
Nice job channeling Mao. I didn't make any normative statements, but merely pointed out that China's trade policy is emphatically different from America's.
Personally, I think the costs of Chinese protectionism (to China) outweigh its benefits. Yes, you can definitely make the infant industry argument and it has merit—after all, most of the West used mercantilism to develop. However, I think there are 3 major ways that it is counterproductive these days:
1. Chinese consumers simply have less access to the best tools and products. Yes, there are Chinese versions of everything but frankly they are often inferior to the foreign alternatives.
2. Incomplete access to world tools can cripple Chinese startups—especially if they're trying to expand abroad. This isn't a theoretical point: every time I've been in China, entrepreneurs have complained about the difficulties in using basic international tools like GitHub or Slack. If you don't have access to the best tools, it's harder to build a globally competitive tech company.
3. Companies are insulated from competitive pressure. The firewall gives plenty of insulation to build a company on the Chinese market, but once it's ready to compete internationally
> It's also not exactly a fair playground if foreign multinationals with decades of established dominance, experience, R&D, and human capital from the developed world compete against Chinese companies which most would be upstarts or recent companies
This is a really flimsy argument. Many of the companies being shut out of China aren't huge multinationals with decades of experience or capital—they're startups trying to quickly expand. It's not like China doesn't already have a domestic goliaths which are being competed against. WeChat shouldn't need protection from Line to succeed—Tencent has plenty of money to throw around.
The rest of your comment reeks of decades-old propaganda. Revenge for the opium wars and anti-imperialist dogma hardly have a very encouraging history.
I make no comments to the effectiveness of China's political or country policies or their agenda. I'm simply pointing out that as a country they have a sovereign right to dictate their own rules.
It could be ineffective, but if you believe so you should go join the Communist party and start advising them. Certainly if foreign multinational companies cry foul, it's fairly obvious they are biased as they have a corporate and legal agenda to push profits.
I don't understand your comment about channeling Mao... Sovereignty and protectionism are the rights of any country, not just China. This includes Japan, which is also heavily protectionist, and even the US, when it comes to their inane corn subsidies.
You'd probably support the TPP (https://www.google.com/search?q=tpp&oq=tpp&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i60l5.598j0j1&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 https://www.google.com/search?q=tpp&oq=tpp&aqs=chrome..69i57...) which aims to limit country sovereignty in favor of shifting power to global multinationals under the guise of "free" trade. Not really free when you consider the foreign multinationals have had a head start (the exact same problem China faces). Such an agreement is designed to take advantage of smaller countries and reduce their power when battling foreign multinationals that exploit those countries. This is essentially at least part of the battle China faces when employing protectionist policies—primarily against foreign multinational corporations.
grow up. Americans don't blame England for things that happened 300 years ago. Taiwanese doesn't blame Japan for things that happened 70 years ago. Vietnamese doesn't blame France for things that happend 100 years ago
> or to have foreign social networking companies plaster agenda driven poitical propoganda to people in your country
As an American, I don't have a problem with the news website RT being accessible in my country, despite the fact that it's a blatant propaganda arm of the Russian government aimed at Americans. If we allow our government to censor sites like RT, then we run the risk of anything that disparages the government being censored as well.