Chinese Intellectual Property Acquisition Tactics Exposed 398
hackingbear writes "In an interview published in Sina.com.cn, Chinese rail engineers gave a detailed account of the history, motivation, and technologies behind the Chinese high-speed rail system. More interestingly, they blatantly revealed the strategies and tactics used in acquiring high-speed rail tech from foreign companies (Google translation of Chinese original). At the beginning, China developed its own high-speed rail system known as the Chinese Star, which achieved a test speed of 320km/h; but the system was not considered reliable or stable enough for operation. So China decided to import the technologies. The leaders instructed, 'The goal of the project is to boost our economy, not theirs.' A key strategy employed is divide-and-conquer: by dividing up the technologies of the system and importing multiple different technologies across different companies, it ensures no single country or company has total control. 'What we do is to exchange market for technologies. The negotiation was led by the Ministry of Railway [against industry alliances of the exporting countries]. This uniform executive power gave China huge advantage in negotiations,' said Wu Junrong, 'If we don't give in, they have no choice. They all want a piece of our huge high speed rail project.' For example, [Chinese locomotive train] CRH2 is based on Japanese tech, CRH3 on German tech, and CRH5 on French tech, all retrofit for Chinese rail standards. Another strategy is buy-to-build. The first three trains were imported as a whole; the second three were assembled with imported parts; subsequent trains contain more and more Chinese made parts."
Savvy business dealings (Score:5, Insightful)
This sounds to me more like savvy business wheeling and dealing. It's no different than what the Indians, Japanese or Koreans would do.
I suppose (Score:2)
But what about the old fashioned way of exploiting the spoils of war? Between that and open immigration, we built atomic weapons and landed on the moon.
Its a bit unseemly to just purchase stuff and figure out how it works....
Re:I suppose (Score:4, Insightful)
Think of it like european scholars rediscovering ancient works from the muslims and eventually doing their own major works again.
Re:I suppose (Score:4, Insightful)
There weren't patent agreements between countries back then. China has agreed to abide by our IP laws to facilitate trade, then ignores them. It's one thing when individual inventors and engineers do it, it's quite another when it's state policy handed down to state run companies for state funded projects.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
IP on you... (Score:3)
IP agreements are the sad thrashing of the nearly dead; like the dinosaurs trying to escape the tar pits.
WIPO is all very polite and such, but sending soldiers to die for natural resources is one thing, sending them after "IP" is quite different. I hope I'm not proved wrong.
Re:I suppose (Score:4, Insightful)
Just goes to show the absurdity of IP law really. Those treaties are nothing but toilet paper if China can disregard them so easily without consequences. IP as currently envisioned basically doesn't work; it attracts rent-seekers like a flame attracts moths, and it can't be enforced on individuals (explosion of piracy) nor on nations who get no benefit from it (China).
Nobody can expect the Chinese government to go against its own national interest (and although its not a democratic government, in this case the interests of the CCP line up fairly well with their people - both want the most rapid economic development possible).
You can no more build an economy on vastly inflated claims of invention than you can build one on endlessly increasing house prices. Economies are build by extracting resources from nature and shaping them into goods and services that improve our quality of life. Anything that does not fall directly under that description should be treated with extreme skepticism.
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Physical economy has hard limits, but using financial instruments and bubbles to pretend those limits don't exist or can be indefinitely postponed is ridiculous.
There were two parts to what I said. Extracting resources can be done on a scale within the energy budget of the planet and using recycling to maintain a steady state - although at some point we are going to have to look outside Earth, but we aren't quite there yet. Utilising them can be made progressively more efficient thus giving us more 'stuff'
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Re:Savvy business dealings (Score:4, Insightful)
It really seems no different to how other industrialized countries work. Except we do it under the guise of "free market". I thought the whole idea of capitalism is to divide and conquer, modern colonialisation.
Re:Savvy business dealings (Score:4, Interesting)
It's actually very different from how other countries work because of the centralized acquisition program.
Still I think that this approach is only an incremental step. The Chinese may have the end technology, but it doesn't buy them the ability to develop new technologies. That is a whole different ball game.
giants (Score:3)
Newton in a letter to Robert Hooke in February 1676:
If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.
Re:Savvy business dealings (Score:5, Interesting)
Step back for a second and look at what's happening.
On one hand, the companies giving up their seed corn aren't being forced to literally at gun point. They're deciding that at this moment, they're better living another day and starving tomorrow. So in a sense it's a win-win scenario.
On the other hand, the enterprise benefiting from this exploits government backing to take a longer term view of the transaction than the companies developing the technology can afford. So in a different it's not a win/win scenario; it's a win/minimize-your-losses proposition.
So China wins here not by being more ingenious or creating new knowledge or technology, but by exploiting its ability to control the rules of the game. If you twist your vision enough, I suppose that what it is doing in this case might look like innovation.
China is a nation with tremendous human resources and ingenuity, but it *also* exploits the fact that it is the only major economic power on earth still pursuing a kind of mercantilist trade policy.
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"but by exploiting its ability to control the rules of the game"
Nah, they're not controlling the rules. They're playing by the same old rules. Capitalists *will* sell Communists (this time in name only) the rope to hang themselves with.
What important is this quarter. Fuck the future.
--
BMO
America for sale dot com. (Score:2)
Click here to bribe our politicians, write our laws, and download our jobs.
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Didn't like it then, and didn't like being called "an America hater" for being pissed off about the way a few executives were fucking over other countries' workers for short term gain.
Don't like it now, and don't like being called "an America hater" for being pissed off about the way a few executives are fucking over their own country's workers for short term gain.
Same shit, different decade.
Re:Savvy business dealings (Score:4, Insightful)
The key part not explained is whether the tech sellers asked for and obtained a licensing fee.
Just because China wanted to build in-country, doesn't mean anyone was ripped off.
Re:Savvy business dealings (Score:5, Informative)
Google "china wind turbine", then come back and see if you want to revise your statement
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Just because China wanted to build in-country, doesn't mean anyone was ripped off.
Assuming the deals cut were signed by both parties I fail to see how anyone was ripped off. If the sellers didn't like the T&C's then they were perfectly at liberty to let some other company sell them the wares.
This is surely just China flexing it's muscle as not just a huge market but, certainly at the moment, the huge market! All companies want a slice of the action because China is where the action is! A friend works for a large multinational company who ended up with a Chinese subsidiary due to a
Dishonest and brilliant (Score:3)
Typically how it goes is:
1.) China promises a foreign company lots of freedom of business, hundreds of billions in future contracts down the road
2.) China strong-arms the foreign company into a joint-venture 51% owned by a Chinese company (note, this is different from a Chinese subsidiary of the foreign company. The Chinese company is an independent rival to the foreign company). The foreign company must surrender all IP rights to the Chinese company that are developed as part of the 51% 49% relationship.
3.
Industrial Policy (Score:5, Interesting)
It is more than just savvy business wheeling and dealing, since it's the Chinese government wheeling and dealing. Which means it's a monopoly: only the government agency can negotiate for that business inside China. And only the specific Chinese corps the government picks can get the business. Those picked corps are picked not necessarily for the best interests of China, but rather for whatever is in the best interest of the government officials with the power to pick them. Which might or might not be the best interests of China. That's Communism.
But it's also industrial policy, which is indeed savvy business wheeling and dealing. The US doesn't have anything like that, except for the corruption part where some industries have orgs that lobby our government to do business with foreign governments that require their government to mediate such international trade, or where the US government does occasionally require our government to play that role in foreign trade, where the orgs use some method other than competitive bids/RFPs to pick which members get the business. The US could have an industrial policy as effective in strategy as China's extreme one, but without requiring the government to actually conduct the negotiations. Just review the completed deals to ensure they comply with the policy, perhaps just random samples plus any over a large value threshold (which would pay in taxes enough to fund the review).
Instead, the US abandons industrial policy, and therefore industrial strategy. And watches China ascend at our expense. Though the top US capitalists have already invested in China's industries, so China's gain is their gain, while they've divested from US liabilities, so our expense is not theirs.
Re:Savvy business dealings (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah, this is surprising because everyone expects the Chinese to be the sick man of Asia and a third world run by a regime. They actually did good business. They didn't let one supplier control their train systems while at the same time they built up an indigenous train industry realizing it is vital to their country.
What is surprising that those companies were not able to bribe the select chiefs and get an unfair position, or that some dictator didn't just buy the whole train system and charge it to some world bank loan but though of the future - far far into the future of developing a domestic industry.
And, I wish we had trains for long distance travel in the US. Traveling by car at 70mph for hours and hours is tiring and there is always the prospect of a problem with a car and being stuck somewhere. Airplane travel is marred by the security checks and delays and long wait times.
I guess this would be a stern counter-example to the service industry philosophy. China isn't content on being the factory workhorse while the US controls the technology. China would like to catch up on technical know-how as well and build their own industry.
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... In China, it's no problem! You simply confiscate the land and build. Progressivism is alive and well in China.
See also France's TGV network ... We Brits are looking to put a new HST line from London to Birmingham (and thence to Leeds and Manchester) but the arguments over who's back yard it must go through mean it'll probably never be built, which is a crying shame for the country (though possibly good for the un-blighted countryside! - funny if you look back at the initial spread of the railways and see the building work done for them - tunnel entrances built to look like stately homes and the most wonderful bri
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yeah, in the US its called eminent domain. The above poster is full of shit, the US government, along with the government can take your land (with compensation). Hell in the US they've done it because some corporation wants to build an office building. They do it all the time for highways and railroads.
Besides that they already have land being use by the existing rail network that they could use to build high speed networks. The problem is that the US just doesn't have the will to embark on large scale proj
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This sounds to me more like savvy business wheeling and dealing. It's no different than what the Indians, Japanese or Koreans would do.
It sounds like savvy business practice, and to some degree it is, but it is not at all the same as what the Indians, Japanese or Koreans do.
The Chinese Government has a great deal more control over their economy than other countries. Well, more to the point, they're willing to exert far greater control over their economy than most other nations are.
This is nothing new. Some of us have been trying to sound the warning about the myth of the China Market [imagicity.com] for years.
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Are they respecting patents on the technologies used to make those parts? And are they designing their own parts/machines or just making copies of the imported ones?
Re:Like college and grad school (Score:4, Interesting)
My understanding is yes to all. But likely not completely. I have family retired from GE loco, years ago they sold around 50 locomotives to China. First 5 were complete shipped from USA, next 20 were increasingly built in china. Last 25 were left to china. So they bought licenses, made changes, and likely wouldn't hesitate to go beyond the license if desired. GE is probably betting they will be ahead of china by the time the contact is done, and that it is beyond china to maintain the ability, let alone expand and compete. Exactly what patents are ment to be, a head start, but not a permanent monopoly (for the inventors).
Re:Like college and grad school (Score:5, Insightful)
No, what happens is that China buys the first 5 loco's for 5M/piece and as they progressed they kept paying the same money for less stuff. In the end they just paid 20M or so for all the licenses and tech expertise and the GE manager that made the deal got a promotion because he had a series of VERY good financial end-of-quarter reports.
Re:Like college and grad school (Score:5, Interesting)
Ridiculous. The negative side of China's rise to power is not the color of their skin, but the dismissal of human rights by their federal government.
Re:Like college and grad school (Score:5, Insightful)
Whatever fault and atrocity US may have committed, anyone in the world is free to criticize and any US resident is free to discuss and lobby for change. The same cannot be said for China and that is fundamental difference between China and the rest of the free world.
I disagree strong with the Patriot Act, the use of torture and the Iraq War, but even I know that those actions pale in comparison to the tens of millions if not hundred of millions of Chinese that perished in the last 50 years due to the ineptness of an authoritarian regime.
While China certainly has achieve spectacular economic growth in the last 50 years, but I would argue that the US civil rights movement that continues today has far more importance than avoiding starvation.
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Re:Like college and grad school (Score:5, Interesting)
What corporations? (Score:3)
What corporations are state owned US intelligence agency backed corporations? Name some.
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When you lose your job thank your enemies. (Score:3)
In China, India, and those other countries.
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You did? So will jiggering with the statistics some more.
FWIW, I don't believe it when CNN says it either. If you do, well, that's a fair comment on your understanding of the situation.
I *suspect* the current real unemployment is over 20%, possibly over 30%. That's not the official statistics, of course, but those are "managed" in many ways, and have been "adjusted" repeatedly over a period of at least decades to make the current administration look good.
There's really only two ways to improve the balanc
Re:Savvy business dealings (Score:5, Insightful)
You're right about the benefits to the US having a rival that makes the US recognize some limits. But you ignore the problems that come from the rival being a country like China, which is a mafia state. Especially when China gets its way instead of the US getting its way. While the US can be pretty bad, China can be much worse.
You also somehow ignore that Westerners have been fucking with China for at least 600 years, which until the last few decades effectively set China back about 600 years. And even China's rise has been through Westerners fucking with China, which has left China a polluted, exploited wasteland atop which some rich and powerful Chinese people hold total power in partnership with the Westerners who moved their manufacturing and banking there.
When Kipling wrote the lines you quote, the West was at the peak of fucking with China. There are far more Easterners buried wherever Westerners hustled, or invaded, the East. Don't be so complacent about the harmlessness of either China or the West.
Re:Savvy business dealings (Score:4, Interesting)
You can't blame the West entirely. China could have been the preeminent naval power in the 15th and 16th centuries if it had wanted to, but it was even then rotting from the inside and the regime yanked Zheng He back. China had everything it needed to do what Europe did in turn; ships, merchants looking for new markets and ways to avoid the ancient inland trade routes, gunpowder and lots of money. But for whatever reason it went into a tragically-timed period of navel gazing that allowed the Europeans to catch up. Yes, the Europeans did damned rotten things to China, but China has to take some responsibility for the initial weakness.
Re:Savvy business dealings (Score:5, Interesting)
I recall a Marxist argument that the key difference between Europe and China in the period was that in Europe, the bourgeoisie succeeded in resisting the aristocracy and winning a measure of independence -- chartered towns and so forth -- whereas in China, the aristocracy succeeded in keeping the bourgeoisie subordinate. The unsettling implication is that if a ruling class is too powerful, it can enforce stagnation, to the detriment of everyone.
The Marxist interpretation implies that in the present, you need to establish the independence of the working class from all other classes; of course, it's hard to miss that an alternate interpretation is that the independence of the bourgeoisie is the critical issue.
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Racism was an explicit justification for European and American colonialism, so racism does not adequately explain Chinese isolationism.
If the history of Maoism wasn't so horrible, I'd find it funny that Maoism could reject, in theory and in practice, the elementary principles of Marxism, and still be referred to as Marxist.
Re:Savvy business dealings (Score:4, Insightful)
Marx's economic notions were wonky, but Marxism had a pretty huge influence on historical analysis. I'm sure this is a new concept for you, but there's this idea floating around that because a guy was wrong about one thing doesn't necessarily mean he's wrong about everything.
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... You also somehow ignore that Westerners have been fucking with China for at least 600 years, which until the last few decades effectively set China back about 600 years...
Just to keep the facts straight: Westerners were engaged in fucking China for some 150 years - from 1781 to 1933, Easterners (Japan) started participating in 1894 and then did all the fucking from 1933 until 1945 (which was by far the worst that China got), so Japan gets credit for doing it for 50 years. From 1948 on (more than 60 years) China had been in command of its own policies - nobody has been forcing anything on them and any suffering and ruin has been with the approval of the Chinese government.
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No, you're editing the facts. The Portuguese had already taken over a fort in Hong Kong to defend colonies supporting their trade shortly after they arrived in 1513. All that is "fucking with China". The Opium War represents a peak of fuckery, not the beginning. The West didn't stop fucking with China when Japan invaded in the 1930s - leaving China twisting in the wind was a big part of the fuckery. And though the Western fuckery since the Communist government hasn't been forced, that's not all to fuckery: the pollution and labor exploitation of China and its people is largely Western fuckery, without which China's native masters wouldn't have the grist for the fuckery mill. There have been plenty of other fuckers of China other than Western, including thousands of years of Chinese aristocracy of one ideology or another. But that doesn't discount the half-millennium of Western fucking.
Sorry, but this is a gross misrepresentation - preposterous in fact. The Portuguese did indeed attempt to set up a trading colony by armed force in the early 16th century - but they got their asses handed to them in short order and then were gone. China was well able to defend itself - it was at the same technological and economic level as Europe until the industrial revolution (starting about 1780). China was a gigantic and powerful state, with twice the wealth of all of Europe (due to its size) and not so
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At the moment high speed rail is faster then a plane for shorter ( 4 hours I guess) flights, and goes from center to center of the city, saving even more time. Car cannot compete, as it takes at least 3-4 times longer to drive the same distance.
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Just a heads up...
China already owns most of the US economy. (This next bit has been mushed around a bit in my memory, so the facts are incorrect. But the idea is still correct.) In fact recently when a reporter asked a Chinese official if they were planning an attack on Wall Street she received the reply "Why should we. We already own most of it."
China could sink any US policy it cared enough about by calling in some of it's foreign debt. This would cause the US economy to tank as much as China cared t
This is news? (Score:5, Insightful)
Fail (Score:3, Insightful)
This is Econ 101 shit and it's embarrassing that Western countries are selling out their high tech companies for a bunch of government debt, poisoned food and defective consumer crap.
Re:Fail (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Fail (Score:5, Informative)
> this is the difference between a state that has long term goals of improving it countr[y] vs.
> corporations that can't see beyond the next quarterly report.
***China is an elephant that can fly!***
This planet has never seen such an _economic_ rise, not post WWII Europe, not even 20th century USA with its post-war advantage of a devastated first world manufacturing base whilst its own plant was ascendant.
The USA's economic orthodoxy is that attenuated (save Tea Party, Rep. Ron Paul, right wing Republicans) laissez faire, minimal market regulation, minimal market interference, no industrial policy will lead to maximum national economic gains. Since Deng Xiaoping's 1972 market/China opening China has amalgamated Japan's MITI approach (industrial policy) with the West's form of capitalism. In essence they are _demonstrating_ that there is more than one form of capitalism. And their form kicks ass, to the chagrin of western economists and politicos. These Chinese market tactics are if not identical wholly descendant from 1980's Japan Golden Age[1].
BTW, contrary to your quote above, Japan is an economy legendary for putting the long term above ALL ELSE. Yet since 1990 Japan has been in an economic depression that shattered the once indomitable, invulnerable, invincible myth that once was a nation of "Samurai businessmen." I frankly am very surprised at how low Japan's business savvy has sunk. Once upon a time called the 1980s, Japan would do the same sort of thing as in the OP, it would diversify its supply of commodities (1.) to eliminate supplier supremacy and (2.) to achieve lower prices and (3.) gain influence. So, if it needed iron ore, copper ore, petroleum, aluminium, whatever it would set rival nation suppliers against one another---say, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Chile, the USA! whomever---for fractional supply quantities. Thusly, low economies of scale would lead to higher cost for Japan, initially, but no one supplier had a stranglehold on Japan. Two, Eventually suppliers would plead for bigger market shares with lower prices for the booming Japanese economy. Three, nations would enact laws beneficial to Japan, nations' indigenous corporations would lobby their governments for infrastructure projects in an effort to ingratiate themselves for future Japanese business or to supply the commodities needed for said infrastructure projects, etc. But now I see that Japan, like the rest of teh globe is a decade away from weaning themselves away from and is presently on bended knee kowtowing to China for rare earth exports. THAT! gentlemen would never have happened to the 1980s Japan. The master is getting tutored!
So I remind you that ***China is an elephant that can fly!***
The planet has never seen a nation rise from so low ECONOMICALLY to so high. Mind you the Middle Kingdom (China) is a nation of deep cultural depth. Reaching back millenia! They are not they were not ignorant not last century, not two three centuries ago either. Think of the Communist Party as the last in a succession of Emperors. China has had them all along its history, some have lasted centuries, some have lasted fifty to ninety years, some have not even been Chinese but barbarian. The communist nation is only sixty-two years old. Their modern ascendancy is thirty-nine years old. Will it last? Will it keep flying? Will the Chinese subsume their liberty to the Party for another sixty-two or thirty-nine years? Even Japan looked unstoppable. Once. It makes an omelet out of our American, western, libertarian, Tea Party, Austrian Economic school orthodoxy.
[1] "Dogs and Demons: tales for the dark side of Japan", Alex Kerr, 2001. A never seen analysis (by a long time nipponophile) in the western press on the cultural, economic, spiritual, ecological malaise of Japan.
10,000m curve radius (Score:4, Interesting)
One of the points mentioned is the desire to design for a 10,000 meter curve radius! Now that takes aggressive land acquisition.
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To be fair, Chinese property rights are slowly improving [wikipedia.org], and compulsory purchase (in one form or another) is fairly common worldwide. After all, you've got to build bypasses...
Re:10,000m curve radius (Score:5, Informative)
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You also have to realize that the "corruption" offense is often just a way for internal factions to get rid
Google Translate as the source? (Score:3)
Seriously guys?
The only source of the article is a Mandarin to English machine translation?
I'm sure nothing will get lost in that translation...
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There are other articles elsewhere regarding this methodology.
The goal is fairly straightforward, trade IP for allowing the foreign company to dip into the local market. As they noted, the initial purchase is a flat purchase with some rights and eventually it progresses into full blown production. I was under the impression they were now deploying modified variants as their own brand and attempting to sale abroad. However, companies such as Kawasaki only agreed to such practices as long as their traded IP w
capitalists take note (Score:2, Insightful)
the greatest enemy capitalism has ever known throughout the history of economics is not communism or socialism, but corporatism. a corporation is a top down autocratic organization that seeks nothing but more profit, be damned any other concerns, like fairness or egaltarianism. when they get large enough, corporations dominate their marketplace by dirty tricks like undercutting competitors prices to destroy them, and rent seeking agreements once they own the whole marketplace by colluding with other large p
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Okay. Can you clarify something for me? How do you distinguish corporatism from capitalism? You imply that there is one, but you don't expand on that. Please do.
Re:capitalists take note (Score:4, Informative)
capitalism is the competition between equals in the marketplace. corporatism is the abuse of and domination of the marketplace by its largest players
to maintain a truly capitalistic marketplace, you need government regulation to level the playing field between the large and the small (despite what some deluded naive fools will tell you otherwise). the unfortunate reality is that currently in the west corporations simply corrupt the government's regulatory laws and enforcement apparatus to entrench their position, rather than oppose their position, as the government naturally should
i'm not saying getting corporate corruption out of our government is easy, but i am saying that it is the only way we can move forward. because unfortunately, the chinese government will simply use our own corporate corruption against us, in the form of multinational corporations interfering with our internal politics with their money. if we don't fight corporate influence of our democracy, we are facing the ultimate victory of autocracy and corporatism over capitalism and democracy in the form of the rise of china, which will use our own unfortunate collusion with corporations against us eventually, as beijing becomes the eventual master of multinationals
Re:capitalists take note (Score:4, Insightful)
You're distinguishing between "capitalism we want" and "capitalism we don't want" (corporatism). Corporatism is capitalism, it's just a kind of capitalism: an extreme one. Just as Chinese Communism is a kind of socialism, that has some extremes of capitalism along with some extremes of capitalism. But capitalism is simply the assignment of the highest value to capital (property), typically at the expense of devaluing either or both of labor and whatever's left that's not property (eg. the environment, ethics, capital in the public domain). Corporatism is indeed an extreme development of capitalism, though it's not very different from protocapitalist systems like feudalism.
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it's hard to maintain the balance. however capitalism unleashes a productivity that simply doesn't exist in other systems. we need capitalism, but we need to harness and muzzle it, or the negative side effects of capitalism will eat your society alive. capitalism is a beast, but a necessary beast. it must be controlled, but it must not be destroyed or ignored. or some other society will grow in power through capitalism and warp yours. you need to use capitalism. you just need to make sure it doesn't use you
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It's the same distinction between fascism and capitalism.
In capitalism, the market players are small and numerous, and have little to no effect on the political or regulatory environment as a single polity.
In fascism, there are few large players that control the markets, and controls in-effect the political and regulatory environment.
That's how it works, from a economic point of view.
Re:capitalists take note (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been debating this with myself for a long time and I've come to the following (admittedly infantile) conclusion:
Capitalism - Getting capital by providing a good or service.
Corporatism - Getting capital without ever providing anything.
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Just to give an example, I can remember a large corporation, I won't say the name because that will drag in a whole lot of baggage, who complained about a tax on a service they provided. The tax passed and the company complained that big government had wronged them and the consumer. A couple months later I saw the tax on my monthly invoice along with 5 other charges for "processing" this tax.
After a little digging into who had lobbied for it, lo-and-behold, it was the company who had spent the most money tr
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In capitalism by definition you don't need to provide anything, you just own the means of production and make money from other people providing the goods and services.
Re:capitalists take note (Score:5, Insightful)
Also one reason that large corporations dominate more and more is because the barrier in many fields are very high. For example, nobody can start a petro or pharmaceutical companies easily without billion dollars of investments to meet all the safety and quality requirements. There are actually large number of small businesses in China now, resulting in intense competition and quality problem. People, with consumerist minds, don't understand that high safety, environmental and quality standard tend to cause consolidation of suppliers and resulting corporations will have more control over the market. They will complain one way or the other.
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surely you can agree that the oligarchy (you are correct, better terminology needed) of the grumpy old men in beijing is a natural fit for corporations. and that the natural trajectory of our economic future is the eventual consolidation of multinationals under their control. the chinese are rapidly coming to own them. that is the threat i am worried about. does it bother you? or do you think this isn't the future?
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only do business with corporations that abide by certain standards of behavior in regards to their workers. you don't need unions if the law of the land represents worker's interests
now obviously it will be very hard to get those rules in place and to enforce them and abide by them. but it's the only way forward
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--edfardos
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that really is how you do it. you expect standards for the companies and countries who wish to do business with in your country, or you don't trade with them. that's really how to do it. unfortunately, the free flow of money in our politics means the opposite will happen: our standards will be destroyed under the corruptive power of corporate money, soon to be under the control of beijing
it will be very hard to fight the corrupting influence of money in our politics (thanks roberts court, you fucking antiam
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Likewise China's rise is largely due to a billion people working as hard as they can to make the country (and their own lives) the best it can be. If Americans (speaking in generalities) had the same resolve/objective world politics would
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"Consumers have a ton of power as well, they could have chosen at any point simply not to buy cheap imported goods and it would've ended right then and there"
LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL
you're a funny person
Consumers have very little power (Score:4, Insightful)
That's a fallacy.
Walk through a grocery store or mall. Where are the non-Chinese goods? You can't find them no matter the price. And while I don't shop Walmart, it's common knowledge they strong-arm their suppliers into outsourcing in their fervor to shave a nickel off their costs. Electronics, textile, heavy machinery, even pharma is nearly entirely off-shore. We've only services, aircraft manufacture, and agriculture left.
As a consumer (we stopped being citizens long ago), show me where my power is? The only American thing left to purchase anymore is politicians and I don't have that kind of money.
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There is a movement dedicated to forwarding what you identify as corporatism.
- Fascism -
When corporations take over the government of a nation-state, what we get is a fascist state.
Re:capitalists take note (Score:4, Interesting)
you have to use your terms more precisely. fascism is a nice scare word, but what you describe as an accepted ideology died in failure in world war ii. you need to update your terminology. i am not interested in debate about how and why fascism is corporatism, i am interested in defeating corporatism. as such, fascism, is just a bugaboo, a scary word, and not a useful intellectually valid concept
what we are really fighting is corporatism, and corporatism alone, corrupting our democracy. the oligarchy in beijing, which will eventually come to own all multinational corporations as their economic power becomes the greatest in the world, will wield their influence through corporations to subvert our democracy
that's the danger
fascism, communism: these are dead terms from the previous century. i will not use those terms because i wish to be taken seriously, and no one serious thinks of the idea of fascism or communism as valid ideologies anymore. one died in 1945, one died in 1990. the year is 2011. update your terminology please. i'm interested in intellectually useful terms, not scary boogeyman words from the dustbin of history
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no, they really are dead. i'm not talking about conspiracy theories, i'm talking about widespread public support. widespread public support existed for communism before 1990, now no more. widespread public support existed for fascism before 1945, now no more. that makes these ideologies dead. no one can plausibly or credibly call themselves a communist or a fascist and appeal to a large swath of the population ever again. and that is a permanent sea change
Re:capitalists take note (Score:5, Interesting)
That couldn't happen, it's bribery by a foreign power! It would be just like President Ford getting a large donation for the Republican Party in person in Jakarta on the day Indonesia invaded East Timor, and the USA reversing their policy on East Timor on that day, even calling them (the same party that runs East Timor today) Communists! Oh wait. When the papers were released in 2005 we found out that was EXACTLY what happened.
Time to start learning Mandarin.
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show me where i am wrong and you have effectively opposed my points. however, just attacking me personally means you have nothing to say against my points, and therefore my points are correct
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ok
and yet i am still waiting for a refutation, and not hearing any
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like what country?
Re:capitalists take note (Score:5, Interesting)
intellectual property IS a joke. as you can see, the chinese have proven to you what a joke it is. the way to fight the chinese is to only do business with them and only allow their business into your country, as long as their business abides by certain standards, such as worker's rights. supporting intellectual property is not an effective strategy
furthermore, intellectual property is a concept that the chinese will just as happily wield against those in the west when their power is entrenched enough. the very idea of intellectual property is exactly the sort of anti-capitalist rent seeking monopolistic practices autocratic corporations like the chinese government engage in, that should be opposed, in the NAME OF capitalism and free markets
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your use of the words fascism and anarchy are completely laughable. you don't understand these terms, so your thoughts are without probative value and need not be answered
Yep, and look at the Airbus A320 (Score:3)
China bought a number, with an agreement for Airbus to then build a number in China and not long after that the Chinese companies will have what they need from their relationship with Airbus and will then instead just build their own planes without Airbus making a cent.
Its unclear why Airbus made this deal with China. Could it be just shortsightedness?
Re:Yep, and look at the Airbus A320 (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Yep, and look at the Airbus A320 (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Yep, and look at the Airbus A320 (Score:5, Insightful)
Well everyone in the 1980s thought Japan would rule the world and own everything but internal problems proved that there were limits to their power... just as any nation has limits. We in the US often forget our own limitations because we're used to having our own way.
China has severe internal issues; a massive property bubble that makes the US housing crisis seem tame by comparison; local governments are addicted to land sales to fund their massive infrastructure projects, loaded down with loans from the state banks. Unless you truly believe that empty apartment blocks or even empty cities are a good investment and property prices will always go up that game has to end at some point and when it does China won't be able to hide the pain. Plus massive corruption and cheating (how can you make decisions at the top when all your stats are based on outright falsified data?). Official government statistics say that about 40% of the academic papers published from Chinese Universities contain falsified research and that's just what they will admit.
Did I also mention the leadership/succession problem? How many times in world history has some political succession BS thrown a wrench into a country's previously bright future?
I'll put it another way: if China gets too annoying and the EU+US slap a 50% tariff on Chinese imports who do you think will blink first? The consumers who have to pay $5.99 for that plastic toy instead of $2.99? Or the communist authorities in China facing millions of unemployed laborers with no job prospects, nowhere to go, and nothing to do? The political situation in China is far less straightforward and stable than people suppose.
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Unless you truly believe that empty apartment blocks or even empty cities are a good investment and property prices will always go up that game has to end at some point and when it does China won't be able to hide the pain.
Here are a bunch of satellite photos of these "ghost cities" [businessinsider.com] - I can't say if the commentary is accurate or misleading, but at the very least there are practically no cars visible on any of the streets which suggests that most of it is true.
Re:Yep, and look at the Airbus A320 (Score:4, Informative)
Russia recently got dinged on the same issue with regard to the Su-27, which they allowed the Chinese to manufacture under license but that the Chinese then copied, and now they're refusing to manufacture [washingtonpost.com] the Su-35 in China as a result.
Re:Yep, and look at the Airbus A320 (Score:5, Insightful)
You're looking at the whole thing from the wrong angle. The CEO won't care what happens to the company 10 years down the line. By then he'll have taken his golden parachute and cashed in his stock options.
The only thing that matters is the next few bottom lines. So the answer is to get as much money NOW, then run away before the shit hits the fan.
Buy to build? (Score:2)
"Another strategy is buy-to-build. The first three trains were imported as a whole; the second three were assembled with imported parts; subsequent trains contain more and more Chinese made parts."
In other words, the first were imported. The next were partially imported. The last are clones, without paying patent royalties. Nice.
Give a man a fish, teach a man to fish (Score:4, Insightful)
Gotta Appreciate People Who Learn (Score:4, Insightful)
The colonialists ate Chinese lunch. The current regime isn't serving.
Guess there's not going to be a sequel to the Opium Wars.
Centralized planning has some advantages (Score:3)
It's interesting that the people who criticize centralized economic planning always point to the failures of that model in Eastern Europe, ignoring its early successes, or the more obvious recent successes in China. It goes to show that there's more than one way to organize a political economy, and that the Chinese model has some strategic advantages.
As far as this strategy goes, the thing I find to dislike about it is that it's emphatically nationalist: the goal is to benefit China, at the expense of competing economic powers. But, the criticisms I read here are also at least implicitly nationalist.
I've been on the CRH2 (Score:3)
But try telling the Chinese that: they simply won't accept it. The CRH2 is Chinese innovation through and through, it was built from blueprints up by Us Good Chinese People. Same as the Shanghai maglev. Tell any resident of Shanghai that the maglev was built by Germans and they'll turn their brains off.
So ? Problem is ? (Score:3)
What we do is to exchange market for technologies
true and true. its a basic trade. they gave technology, chinese gave them the money. (as market).
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Could someone fluent in Mandarin comment on the translation? I'm especially interested in this translation: "The goal of the project is to boost our economy, not theirs." Is the implication that the Chinese gov't wants their trading partners to suffer, or that their partners' situation just isn't important?
China's economy benefits when their trading partners economies benefit. If it's the former (or even the latter, to a degree), that suggests they have other priorities in mind.
As a native speaker, my only comment after RTFAing is that the phrase doesn't exist in the article. The entire article is about how they use strong handed methods to limit negotiating power of their trading partners. The wording is something along the lines of "With government officials leading the project, we leave them very little bargaining power. Either they give in and offer up their IPs, or they get out. And in the case of Siemens railway, even though negotiations broke down once, they came back for
Re:Can a Mandarin speaker comment on translation? (Score:5, Informative)
The way it's worded doesn't cast those "higher ups" in a bad light (considering every country would prioritize their own economy), but I think it's not entirely unreasonable to also read that as an implicit request to achieve a balance in maximizing Chinese economic benefits while minimizing foreign economic benefits -- that would be the way I'd understand it if I were a shrewed political underling.