When you say "greedy US corporations" do you mean that these US corporations are uniquely greedy, or that all corporations are greedy, and this is bad for the ones in the US? Do you think that corporations in China, which in many cases are subsidized by the government, are also greedy?
all for profit companies are greedy by their nature, but US companies are on a different level because you can 'buy' the government by lobbying or supporting their election campaigns or break the law and eventually make sure law is changed to fit your business (e.g. first taxi medallions adjusted the law for themselves, and then Uber)
Same is very difficult to do in China (look what happened to Jack Ma) or in Europe, because you have to follow some regulations
> all for profit companies are greedy by their nature, but US companies are on a different level because you can 'buy' the government by lobbying or supporting their election campaigns
How would you call decades of chinese state-sponsored industrial espionage of western IP? Benevolent act?
> How would you call decades of chinese state-sponsored industrial espionage of western IP? Benevolent act?
I want to share 3 things here, to think out loud:
1. lets not go too far to the past, because I will say industrial espionage is less harmful than imperialism. Imperialism costed millions of lives across India, Pakistan, African nations, Indonesia and even in China, we are talking about how the West got extremely rich, which allowed it to live in prosperity, when everyone else were struggling (impact of it is still ongoing for some nations). I am fine with lesser of 2 evils, which is an industrial espionage in this case.
2. I didn't say 'benelovent act'
3. this is not baked by a science, just a personal preference, I prefer if country supports companies to advance the country, rather than allowing companies get too rich and bail them out with taxpayer money if they fail because of their dumb actions. (not saying one is better than other, I like how CCP elevated China from 3rd world country to a level, even the US companies are scared, in very short time, without invading and extracting resources from other countries. But it obviously has its own problems (e.g. how competitive is the life in China for kids and so on), I am not saying China is perfect, but China became superpower in the last 30-40 years, which is an impressive accomplishment.
Sure, but not the way West conducted it, by going and killing generations of people. Look at India, before British colonization they accounted for almost 25% GDP of the world (~1700s), now it is around 3-4%
Or lets look at China itself, before the opium wars and British colonization, it accounted for ~30% of the world GDP, by 1970s it dropped to 4-5%, now climbing back to 20%.
Indonesia would be another example.
You keep defending the West, even though its actions were much worse than "industrial espionage", because you probably live in the West and feel nice about your day to day life and regular things like education feels granted, and not seeing the enormous impact of the West's evil actions to the lives of billions of people around the world in the last 200 years. (US hasn't even stopped yet, see Cuba, Middle Eastern countries)
> Sure, but not the way West conducted it, by going and killing generations of people.
Ridiculous statement. China is doing it today — uighurs are actively erased bit by bit.
> Look at India, before British colonization they accounted for almost 25% GDP of the world (~1700s), now it is around 3-4%
This statement is rooted in “zero sum” logic, and based on the assumption that without colonization India should have stayed with its 25% or more share. Hypotheticals are hypotheticals, and nothing more.
> You keep defending the West,
I’m not defending anyone. I find it ridiculous that you are so high on “the west is bad, China good” horse and completely oblivious to so many things that China does, which are objectively worse.
> I find it ridiculous that you are so high on “the west is bad, China good”
Can you read what I have written? if not, let me copy what I wrote earlier here:
> I am fine with lesser of 2 evils
> But it obviously has its own problems (e.g. how competitive is the life in China for kids and so on), I am not saying China is perfect
I am not saying China is good, I am saying it is lesser of 2 evils with much less negative impact to the lives of human beings around the world, in my opinion.
I am not sure we are arguing here on the merit of the argument itself. You are fine with China’s genocide TODAY because China is the “lesser of two evils”?
I do not understand this. It sounds like a cultist/religious position.
> Sure, but not the way West conducted it, by going and killing generations of people.
But they did. Look at Xinjiang, Tibet, and the history of Manchuria, among others. They did it to themselves as well, like most backwards dictatorship. And "the West” does not really do genocide anymore, either. This is more a consequence of it being a terrible strategy than Chinese benevolence (or anyone’s, really). At some point we realised that direct administration is a burden and that it’s much more cost effective to bribe nominally independent governments without having to deal directly with local populations. China does this a lot, just like evil western imperialist countries. Empires look different in the 21st century than in the 19th, that’s all. And where would you put Russia in a neat west-rest of the world dichotomy?
> You keep defending the West, even though its actions were much worse than "industrial espionage"
“The West” is not a monolith. It’s made of several countries, some of them better than others, and each one of them with its good and bad sides. It is not useful to work with generalisations like that. It obscures any information or lesson we could get and leads to wrong conclusions. It’s also counter-productive because for all its evil, there is nothing “the West” did that is unique. Except in scale, but then it’s more a quirk of history than something being intrinsically evil in “western” people.
I would say that saying about anything “whataboutism” is a cheap way out.
China does industrial espionage for the same end goals as American companies work on new things: market domination. So, I find it funny when someone is mad about American companies but not Chinese, while both pursuit the same goals.
