The way the Chinese roughshod foreign companies is blatantly anti-WTO and anti-trade. I witnessed this while working at a large Canadian company. China has on

The way the Chinese roughshod foreign companies is blatantly anti-WTO and anti-trade. I witnessed this while working at a large Canadian company. China has one leader and they speak with one voice - and they have divided and conquered the West, which speaks with a thousand voices i.e. politicians, businesspeople, academics to the point wherein if anyone tries to say anything against China, they are shut down. Remember when 'Tibet' was all the rage in Hollywood at the turn of the Millennium? Well they shut up pretty quick, didn't they? This has happened everywhere. You just don't find a lot of critical voices about China because someone is always applying pressure (i.e. advertisers etc.) China is acting in rational self interest, and the number of people being brought out of abject poverty there (and elsewhere) is a very good thing, but because they've been able to do this since the dawn of the new era i.e. 1980's, things like IP theft, and direct governmental support of competitive entities is 'normative'. I personally loathe Trump, but trade issue with China have to be resolved, and it's really sad that he's the only leader in the world it seems that is in a situation to do at least something about it. The West has to work together to end particularly the IP rip-off scenarios, or it's not going to work. I actually think China, during this current period of transition would be better off in a more level playing field, one suited for their participation in the world economy, as opposed to the current setup, which is suited to them being a 'developing economy' of previous decades. There should definitely be a tit-for-tat tax on goods from China given some practices there, I very well understand the ostensible damage from tariffs, but as soon as you have to 'internalize' all those things that are externalized in China, many tariffs make sense. The great risk is that China could actually be truly damaged (likely worse for regular folks than for the elite), worse, go into a recession, which would burst the fragile 'rest of the world' situation and we'd have a global problem. In the grand scheme of things, it's better that China 'blinks' in this game, and uses the opportunity to institute some reforms that simply have to happen if they want to play on the global stage. You see this happening more formally with currency; because currency issues are more directly measurable, China has no choice but to reform of they want the RMB to be used in certain ways globally. But on trade ... it's more grey. Now that Trump has fired a volley, it's possible that the EU may find a way to do the same thing, in a more politically nice kind of way - funny enough even though the US is in a 'trade war' with Canada, Europe, UK etc., behind the scenes, they are all already working with Trump on the China file, it's just not highly publicized for obvious reasons.