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. Per

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.