Many people were not aware of China’s continuing theft of US intellectual property until Trump put the issue in the forefront.
China has a long history of stealing U.S. technology secrets. This is not a “competition” between powers as President Joe Biden suggests, but a deliberate and serious violation of U.S. intellectual property rights (IPR) by the CCP. This was evident and worsened during the Obama era.
Beijing even incorporated such thefts, including the Thousand Talents Program, into its strategies for China’s economic rise and world dominance.
Trump had responded to these thefts and signed a memorandum accusing the Chinese regime of “unauthorized access to intellectual property, trade secrets, or confidential business information,”.
Subsequently, Trump placed the U.S.-China economic and trade dispute on the negotiating table, with trade deficits and IPR being the focus of Washington in bargaining with Beijing.
At the beginning of the 2018 U.S.-China trade talks, the CCP said it could negotiate with the United States on both trade and IPR, but in fact, it was unwilling to budge on either, and Beijing was coaxing and pestering the Trump administration at the negotiating table.
During the lengthy negotiations, the CCP negated all the accusations entirely. Obviously, the CCP would rather bear high U.S. tariffs than actually end its IPR infringement activities; at the same time, the CCP has been confining the U.S.-China trade negotiations to trade as much as possible, hoping to use trade concessions to divert U.S. attention from the CCP’s theft of technology secrets.
For the CCP, the U.S.-China trade talks could only be a “trade war,” and if the talks went beyond trade and investment issues, they would have touched China’s red line, which was the issue of technological espionage.
For Trump, theft of IPR must be dealt with and violators must be prosecuted. As a result, no progress could be made in the negotiations between the two sides.
If there is no system to protect the safety of innovation results, and any innovation may be arbitrarily plagiarized by other enterprises, then who is willing to invest a lot in R&D and end up with no return on the investment?
What China lacks is a system to ensure the safety of innovations, and it is a common practice of Chinese enterprises to plagiarize for profit.
I am not confident that Joe Biden (or people in his administration) will deal seriously with this issue at all. It is going to be a long 3 1/2 years.
Get Trump out and help CCP is one reason that China and Dems may have colluded to create and import the Wuhan virus and rig our election for China Joe. The other was to underhandedly stop without need for excessive CCP authoritarian attacks on Hong Kong freedom protesters.
Maybe all that is a minor issue and pales in comparison to disasters the government might cause.