Playing fair with China just doesn't work. They'll rourt, cheat, and manipulate every aspect of the system to their advantage. It's very disappointing the system doesn't combat this, but as a few people here have said. If Amazon gets paid they don't care.
It is getting way past time to recognize that the Great Experiment has failed, and failed miserably.
The concept was that open exchange, trade, and information flow would result in open societies. In fact, the reverse happened — it strengthened the hand of the expansionist authoritarian governments. Now, the '-isms' (communism, fascism, etc.) have all been stripped, and it is literally open war on democracies by the authoritarian states. Russia is waging open genocide in Ukraine and threatening the Baltics, Poland and Germany, China is openly violating it's agreements on Hong Kong, militarily threatening Taiwan and everyone around it's "9-dashed-line", and brutalizing it's own citizens as they protest. Iran & North Korea similarly threatening. In the economic sphere, their entire repertoire is to steal as much IP as possible and cheat their way into the markets.
It is far past time to recognize that we are playing for a few quarters of better profits while they are playing to literally destroy the democracies to they can take what they want. The only proper response is to condition our economic engagement on the implementation of democracy. You want access to our markets? Fine, open your political systems, stop being a threat, and we'll trade. Until then, it's a full embargo.
Aside from the overt military threats, I literally don't go several hours at a time without seeing more stories of how people in democratic countries are being routinely and systematically cheated by the Chinese, or how they are maintaining "Chinese police auxiliary stations" in democratic countries (why is this permitted?) to threaten their own diaspora. There are surely good people in every country, but that fact does not make it worth the costs of interacting with those societies.
It's only amusing if you don't really believe in the rule of law. If the allegations from the article are true, there was probably tortuous interference, bribery, criminal threats, as well as a whole slew of broken consumer protection laws at the very least.
What you say is akin to saying it's amusing to see a chess player beaten in a game because the opponent just took all of his pieces and put them in his pocket, and bribed the judge to look the other way. What exactly is amusing about that? I really don't understand what kind of world people who make statements like this want to live in.
> It's only amusing if you don't really believe in the rule of law
The exact same companies that were lobbying against consumer protection and antitrust laws, unions busting, and convicted of conspiracy to supress wages, are now asking for government to step in because Chinese competition is breaking the same laws.
Definately some hypocracy and now that the shoe is on the other foot, people they shafted previously are enjoying some shaudenfruede.
> What you say is akin to saying it's amusing to see a chess player beaten in a game because the opponent just took all of his pieces and put them in his pocket, and bribed the judge to look the other way. What exactly is amusing about that?
The US does this all over the world. They will just cut off entire countries if they don't follow their banking rules, for example.
We're all capitalists here, I suspect - I mean does anyone in this message thread - a single person - advocate for state ownership of all means of production and then centralised controlled distribution of goods and services? I didn't think so. I think the term you're looking for is laissez-faire capitalists, of which there could be a few. Most people support some degree of regulatory control.
We should stop with "you're either an X or a Y". That might be true on TV or on Twitter. It is not true in real life.
Read the first line, thought "How could they be so wrong?".
Then read the second line, thought "Oh... you got me, that was a funny joke".
And now thinking "Oh... maybe they're serious, which would make this an hilarious case of 'do what I (maybe?) say in real life, not what I do on TV, Twitter, or HN' "
Sorry, you only yet to be a capitalist if you actually own the means of production. Otherwise you're just a wage slave with Stockholm Syndrome. And yeah, there is at least one person in this thread that unambiguously supports state ownership of production. If that isn't you you get to rationalize the consumption of non-renewable resources in a finite system for production of utterly fatuous bullshit like the fitbit-for-your-dong (I can't be assed to look it up).
Except it really isn't. US-led multinationals and their investors were all dead-ass certain that they were going to devour China economically, totally ignoring the culture has a track record of swallowing invading armies and ideologies whole that spans thousands of years.
The problem is that law enforcement doesn't work. If instances of fraud were actually investigated and properly policed, then this wouldn't have happened.
If Amazon was threatened with closure if they don't fix this, you would see a change quickly.
They don’t even need to be threatened with closure. You just need to be able to eliminate the “it wasn’t us it was our partner merchant” defence for liability on their site and the whole thing would collapse like a house of cards.
China may be communist by branding, but they're economically capitalist, and on a governmental front, mercanalist. Common ownership is not a thing, and it's all about pushing locally made and exporting as much as possible by all means necessary.
I don't disagree on any particular point, I'm just old enough to remember when none of what you mention was the case, and American corporations were gleefully eyeing China as their next market expansion target. Without exception they got out-played at their own game.
Sure, and the IP transfers required to make that happen played a huge role in modernizing the Chinese tech/fab industry. So even that represents a phyrric victory from a nationalist-industrialist perspective.
No, most people are wage labourers who work for capitalists. In the same way that most people in 12th century Britain were serfs who worked for nobles. The difference is that capitalists have managed to convince workers that they somehow occupy equal positions in the socioeconomic hierarchy.
