Author’s argument in a nutshell:
Beijing’s economic policies are actually quite typical of a country at its stage of development. Like many regimes in the developing world, Beijing fears the “middle-income trap,” in which rising wages undermine its advantage as a center of low-cost manufacturing before it develops the capacity to produce higher-value goods. China worries that unless it moves from assembling iPhones to inventing them, economic growth will stagnate and popular unrest will follow.
China therefore erects tariffs to protect industries it hopes will help it make that leap. So did the United States when it was industrializing. “Give us a protective tariff,” declared Abraham Lincoln in 1844, “and we will have the greatest nation on Earth.” So do many developing nations today. China has a lower trade-weighted average tariff than Argentina, Brazil, India, South Korea, Indonesia, South Africa, Turkey, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Mexico.
Regarding STEALING OF AMERICA’s INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY, Author defends China by this argument:
According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which last year ranked countries on how well they protect the intellectual property of foreign companies, China scored fairly well among developing nations: just below Mexico and Malaysia but above Turkey, Brazil, South Africa, and the Philippines.
A 2017 study of cases in which foreign companies sued for patent infringement in Chinese courts by Renjun Bian of the University of California at Berkeley School of Law found that foreign companies actually prevailed at higher rates than did Chinese litigants.
In other words, China isn’t doing anything that other developing countries aren’t.
Well then it’s even MORE important TO #### THEM NOW because they are communist monsters.
We all have seem to forgotten that because they let their people earn some money.
#### em.
Bury em.
Keep em there.
The federal government of the USA should do everything in it's power, INCLUDING PROTECTIVE TARIFFS, to stop the offshoring of industry outside of the USA. Alas, it does not. It allows corporations to offshore industry to China and elsewhere and re-import duty free just to sidestep having to pay Americans. This is a travesty and will have profound, very bad consequences. It already has.
Adam Smith never envisioned multi national corporations closing factories in England( applies to any industrialized country) and moving production to the third world to exploit cheap labor and then re importing the same product back into England duty free! Smith would have been hung for even suggesting that. That is not Free Trade. That is screw the worker trade.
Put in an even smaller nutshell:
China is worried about the middle-income trap. It needs to make the leap away from mere manufacturing into innovation. The way they are doing it is by stealing IP of other countries. But hey, everyone else is doing it, so it’s ok.
Author is a fool. Other than that, great read if you want to consider the time you took to read it something you’ll never get back.