this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2023
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Genuinely interested. Can you provide some context on this?
I don’t have a specific example at hand right now but ever since we moved to fully globalized capitalism around the end of the 90s China has pursued an explicit policy of forcing every single foreign company who wanted to produce in China to do so in collaboration, meaning they have to allow their Chinese partners access to industry secrets, patents, workflow, and so on. This obviously works well to keep short term profits up, so everyone went along with it, blindly disregarding the long term implications we have to deal with now.
The economic power of China is built on coercing western corps into sharing their developments. Also one of the reasons why chinese products were (and in many cases, still are) shoddy, inferior imitations.
I really find it hard to empathise with a company that outsources it's manufacturing to China in order to exploit cheap labour and poor environmental protections. It feels like having your IP ripped off by the people you're exploiting in order to save a buck is fair comeuppance.
Oh don’t get me wrong, I don’t empathize with the corps who moved our labor overseas for profits, and threw their technological advantage - their true long-term capital - after them as well, for a few years of quarterly gains. Fuck them. Shortsighted greed is the essence of capitalism.
That doesn’t make me like china’s strategy any more though. Exactly because they understand how to instrumentalize the corrupt greed of the capitalist class to their advantage are they so dangerous to us.
Our governments are powerless to protect national economic interests because they are all beholden to the short term profiteers of destroying our long term prosperity.