Warning: Hong Kong Is Kinda Dangerous Now
Cold War 2.0 was the narrative du jour on Friday.
As tipped several days previous, Joe Biden is warning businesses (and, by extension, individuals) about the perils of operating in Hong Kong.
The advisory isn't an order, per se. No one is required to beat a hasty retreat from the city. Rather, the White House is stating the obvious. Namely that Hong Kong is no longer an open society and the judiciary isn't independent. Companies (and the people who work for them) are subject to the capricious
Lenin, in his delusion, used to believe that capitalists would sell him the rope he’d use to hang them… I feel China has a better chance of pulling that off. As H says, we have problems resisting the lure of a 1.4B people market undergoing rapid growth… Too bad they’re engaged in internal ethnic cleansing and external aggression but the Kingdom of Mammon waits for no man…
Xi has already been largely successful with this. All of their tech companies have grown by leaps and bounds over the past decade and a half by stealing the IP of the very companies that outsourced manufacturing to them. To the point they are now on equal footing with them and able to innovate on the same, if not better, level. The fact that we’re still outsourcing so much manufacturing to them demonstrates that we are either arrogant or just don’t care.
Much of the “theft” of IP by Chinese firms was due to weaker foreign companies voluntarily signing technology agreements with a Chinese firm. An outstanding and early example was when the weakest of the three Japanese firms in the railroad equipment business agreed to such a deal after the two stronger Japanese firms refused the deal. Now the Chinese firm is a world leader. A similar stories were often repeated in subsequent years.
No one forced US, EU & Japanese companies to enter into those deals. There were no Chinese troops in their board rooms. It was all done in the name of shareholders. Capitalism is not patriotic.
Amen! Thank you derek for overstating the obvious in your second paragraph.
In response to cdameworth’s assertion that “… we are either arrogant or just don’t care.”, I must say that the decision makers were and are arrogant AND just don’t care. In fact, they don’t care much for democracy, equality and the rights of all men. They would very much prefer a Putin or Xi and their autocracies to our messy democratic republic. My biggest worry is that they grow ever closer to getting what they think they want.
Predatory capitalism has no qualms about eating its or any others own.
Something to keep an eye on is when China stops the ‘theft’ of their competitors new technology. They already have something better.
In the age of data mining where the Internet and access to the same via wireless devices is ubiquitous (n addition to untold numbers of closed circuit cameras in public and private space around the world) anyone who imagines that they aren’t surveilled is fooling themselves.