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Quite the opposite: it creates huge demand for local copies of foreign services that are unreachable from within it. It's the protectionist's dream. Foreign we
by nothrabannosir 12y ago
Quite the opposite: it creates huge demand for local copies of foreign services that are unreachable from within it. It's the protectionist's dream.
Foreign websites are, as a rule, very badly reachable from within the country. I don't even want to use them personally, let alone build a business on them.
- bigphishy 12y agoAn obvious perspective that I had not realized..
- adventured 12y agoThis is a non-issue. As an example, the rest of the world hasn't mass-adopted Baidu and isn't going to. The same has and will go for most of China's services. Baidu is heavily shielded from external competition due to both nationalism and government controls (censorship etc). A protectionist's dream? No, a trapped nightmare, they can never compete properly with Google on a global scale. Seeing as China represents about 10-12% of global GDP, Baidu will never derive a meaningful business from perhaps 3/4 of the global economy accordingly. Live by censorship, die by censorship.
- rgbrenner 12y agoa trapped nightmare I can access Baidu from the US... but they clearly aren't trying to get my traffic -- the site is in mandarin. So I don't understand why you think they're trapped... if they wanted to, they're free to expand outside of China.. there are few countries that have similar censorship.
- soperj 12y agoYeah but they may never have had a business to begin with without the protectionism. Case in point; where is all the other search engines from other countries that have no protectionist schemes?
- IndianAstronaut 12y agoYandex and Naver deserve a mention. In some cases, localism does triumph even without very heavy handed censorship.
- jorgecastillo 12y agoDon't forget Seznam!
- tlb 12y agoBaidu doesn't have an english-language site. That's different from trying to address the global market and failing.
- LiweiZ 12y agoFrankly speaking, it's just "肥水不流外人田" in Chinese, which probably means keeping profitable things in one's own farmland in English. We always presume the higher orders have almost the same goals with the country. However, it is not the case every time. Also, state-run investment in such a large scale will simply lead to just another massive misallocation of the investment. For many officers, it's another opportunity to wash those money and put into personal accounts.