Posted on 02/02/2007 12:34:50 PM PST by MinorityRepublican
SHANGHAI -- "I know you don't know that you don't know."
Those insulting words, thrown out by a Chinese man to a Westerner, are the punchline of an Internet commercial that ends with a beautiful Chinese bride jilting her confused Western fiance for the Chinese hero.
The wildly popular video was created by Baidu, a Chinese search engine, to poke fun at its U.S. competitor, Google. It is but one of the growing signs that China is rethinking its stance on foreign companies and investment within its borders.
Since the mid-1990s, China has aggressively courted foreign investment, crediting capital from abroad with helping it become a world economic power. In recent months, however, the Chinese government, saying it needs to protect homegrown companies from unfair competition, has thrown a multitude of new regulations at foreign firms seeking to do business in China.
While some believe the new restrictions -- which affect several sectors, including real estate, retailing, shipbuilding, banking and insurance -- may be only temporary measures to control growth, others worry that there's a larger political issue: that economic nationalism or even protectionism is rising.
"A mood of self-questioning has swept over China," said Barry Naughton, an economist at the University of California at San Diego. In a report published in the China Leadership Monitor, Naughton said he believes the regulations are a response to government fears of a "loss of economic sovereignty."
China's shifting policies on foreign companies have prompted several U.S. firms, which complain that the new rules are too restrictive and overly complex, to reassess their plans in China.
Last month, eBay said it would close its Web site in China, saying it was facing difficulties because Chinese regulations limit the types of financial transactions foreign companies can conduct.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
"We've leached you for all the money we can, now we are going to go back on our supposedly good word and close up our markets to your goods and investments."
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"If we let you get any further involved in the trade within our borders, your messy democratic freedom of thought might start to interfere with the way we bully and threaten our people into submission."
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That little video thing could also be related to their shame that Europeans surpassed them in the 1800's, and in some ways practically took over their country. Now that they are on the rise, they might want to bring a little shame to Europeans (and by extension, the West). In any case, it's rather petty. Europeans and Westerners today aren't responsible for what their countries' governments did more than a century ago.
But remember that they are our friends, just like the Muslims are.
They will be the World's Superpower in 25 years or less.
I won't be surprised to see the Chinese start colonizing Africa.
The video ad was mostly a word play on word boundaries. Chinese writing doesn't use spaces for separate words (Ancient Latin didn't either), so it's difficult for computers to identify word boundaries unless it could understand the full context.
Google search isn't optimized for the Chinese language, so often gives nonsensical results, particularly when there are conflicts and ambiguities in the partitioning of a word.
That's the main reason why most Chinese use Baidu for search. The Chinese prefer Baidu because it's better for the Chinese language, it has really nothing to do with economic nationalism. Most Chinese in the cities use Crest toothpaste.
Hahaha an chinese chick dump a westerner for a small sausage?No way. I think they got a complex. ;)
Conventional wisdom is that China pegs their currency to the U.S. dollar in order to maintain it at an artificially low level (in order to be competitive in terms of labor costs). The reality is that China's currency is over-valued, because these restrictions on foreign ownership of Chinese assets make their currency completely worthless.
It's not overvalued nor undervalued if it's pegged. It just doesn't really exist. The Chinese essentially are using US dollars, the yuan is just a proxy currency for USD right now. But to say that it's completely worthless is misleading too. Once they cut the peg, it wouldn't be worthless anymore. Would you say the Euro is worthless now? no.
China is quite an enigma, isn't it?
At every turn, they are doing the exact opposite of what the free trade lobby tells us is good for us and yet as a nation they continue to grow their economy and prosper.
An interesting dillema which begs the question "if manufacturing is so last century, why do the Chinese seem to want it so much in this one?"
That's somewhat of a racist comment, wouldn't you say?
Facts and intelligent analysis takes half the fun out of these discussions... ( On a more serious note: thanks for the insights!)
I doubt it. While China has a lot of people, the average age is increasing and that's not the demographic that seeks to colonize.
But China will have a lot of unmarried men by then, which is the perfect demographic that seeks to colonize.
I doubt the Chinese could stomach colonizing Africa though. There are 740 million Africans on the continent. It would take the entire population of China to assimilate them.
The same can be said for that commercial and the mainland chinese mentality toward their race as a whole. Sorry the PC stuff doesnt fly here.
If China cut the peg tomorrow, their currency would be worthless. With all of the restrictions on foreign ownership listed in this article, who in their right mind would ever accept Chinese yuan in payment for their products?
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