
Xi Jinping's colleagues rejected an 'unequal' trade deal - 1PlayerOne
https://asia.nikkei.com/Editor-s-Picks/China-up-close/How-Xi-Jinping-s-colleagues-rejected-an-unequal-trade-deal
======
AnimalMuppet
The part I find most interesting is about the strength of Xi's grip on China.

Either _Xi_ has rejected this (at least for the moment), and has directed his
puppets to "reject" it (to give the appearance of them stopping him from doing
something he was reluctantly willing to do)...

Or Xi is not as firmly in total control of China as various events had led me
to believe.

His thought is enshrined in the constitution. He's breaking precedent by
remaining in charge for life, not just for ten years. But he can't approve a
trade deal if others don't like it? Is this "you can be dictator as much as
you please, but mess up the economy and you're gone"?

I also find it telling that "you can't keep taking our IP just because we're
doing business" is termed "unequal". Interesting idea of "equality" there...

~~~
pinkfoot
You will then be horrified to learn that US intelligence has a written mandate
to obtain foreign technology that the US lacks and make it available to US
industry.

A well-kept little dirty secret.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
Classic what-about-ism.

And I deeply resent you putting words in my mouth (or at least attitudes in my
brain). It's a dishonest, cheap rhetorical trick.

And apparently you can't see the difference between the government trying to
take it by spying, and the government forcing you to give it away by contract
as a condition of doing business. Hint: One you can take countermeasures
against; one you can't.

And, like others, I would like to see your source.

~~~
dang
Please keep the whataboutism cliché off HN (see
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19862258](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19862258)
for more).

Also, please keep deep resentment off HN. If that's how you're feeling, find
some other way to process it before returning to comment here. (Edit: I know
that's not easy, but it's necessary for this place to not burn.)

~~~
AnimalMuppet
What I'm trying to fight is this trope: "If you are in favor of A, then you
must also favor X", where X is something almost-but-not-quite-completely
different from A. (That's why I picked X instead of B.)

And that's usually the end of the comment. There's no explanation of why X and
A are like each other in any way that matters. There's no conclusion, like
either "Since I presume you're not in favor of X, you can't consistently be in
favor of A either", or the opposite, "Since you're in favor of A, you really
ought to reconsider your position on X".

What there is, though, is what feels to me like an attempt to put words in the
other person's mouth. This feels to me like a step beyond whataboutism. It's
not just "what about X", it's "You must also agree that X is true".

I've been seeing this pattern increasingly over the last 6 to 12 months.
(Alternately, I've become more sensitive to this pattern in the same time.) I
consider it to be... let's just say it's not a positive contribution to the
discussion.

So: How should one respond to this? Flag every instance? Ignore? Simply
respond "Non sequitur" and leave it at that?

You don't like how I responded. Fine; you have the right. But what do you
think I should do instead?

~~~
dang
I'll give you two answers, one specific and one general. The specific answer:
your post above already contained a good reply. The trouble was that it also
broke the site guidelines. One can turn it into a good comment by editing
those bits out. If I do that, this is what I get:

 _There 's a difference between the government trying to take it by spying,
and the government forcing you to give it away by contract as a condition of
doing business. One you can take countermeasures against; one you can't._

That cuts not only the first two paragraphs, but also the flamey bits from the
third ("Apparently you can't see" and "Hint:"). Doing all that yields a
substantive, respectful reply. (I'm not considering whether it's a good
argument here—just whether it's offside or not.) And of course it's fine to
ask politely for the other person's source, or how they know what they claim.

The general answer: one good way to reply to a comment of the form "If you are
in favor of A, then you must also favor X" is to mention significant
difference(s) between A and X that show why A doesn't imply X. For example,
something favorable in A that X lacks; or something unfavorable in X that A
lacks. And to show why the difference is strong enough to break the assumed
arrow from A to X.

There's an aspect to this that is unfair. pinkfoot's comment was pretty lazy
(opting for snark and a drive-by rather than giving the reader enough
information to really establish anything). If you're going to reply to a
comment like that, the temptation is also to take the path of least
resistance—for example, to vent, rather than to put much thought or work into
a reply. The other person didn't put much thought or work into theirs, so why
should you?

The answer is that you don't owe it to the other person, but to the general
reader and the community. Your reply to such a comment will either raise the
quality of the site or lower it. (Responding on the same level is lowering.)
The two good options are: put in the thought and work to come up with a
specific reply—cutting any flamey bits because by then you don't need them and
they weaken your case anyhow—or, if you don't have the time and energy to do
so, simply not to post.

------
mishafre
China manipulates world currencies, does not enforce or respect copyright and
trademark law and finds other ways to bend international laws around IP. This
is holding them to account and in so far as that is concerned, this seems in
the long-term interests of America since China just rips the tech and
localizes/monetizes while restricting access to their domestic markets from
the foreign players that developed the tech in the first place.

------
dmix
> These cries came not only from the party's conservative left but also from
> the rank and file -- from the core of workers and management at state-owned
> companies, from industries that rely on subsidies for survival and from the
> bureaucratic institutions that protect them. The proposed deal threatened
> their interests.

That might not sound good to these particular special interests but this
sounds good for China as a whole.

------
chvid
This is largely the same story as can be read here:

[https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3010456/wh...](https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3010456/what-
killed-us-china-trade-talks-tale-two-texts)

I find it amazing that this deal appearantly was close to coming through.

~~~
m0zg
Why is it so "amazing"? They're between a rock and a hard place. Their economy
is guaranteed to collapse if the US keeps erecting trade barriers. The US is
much less dependent on them than they are on the US. It will hurt here (with a
nice side-effect of import diversification), but it will be totally unbearable
over there. They know this perfectly well. The US has a tremendous leverage in
this negotiation. China's main sticking point is they want to remove this
leverage and make the deal unenforceable. Yeah, that might have worked with
Obama (who was, IMO, too eager to please), but the current administration
knows better than to sign something like that.

~~~
chvid
The article really explains it well.

It is USA, a foreign power, dictating detailed law in China; that digs deep.

~~~
m0zg
Um, yeah, trade deals tend to "dictate law" in other countries. TPP would have
done a lot of that. What's so bad about not forcing industrial espionage on US
companies if they want to operate in China? No one is forcing China at
gunpoint to take the deal. If they have another market they can sell to, they
should consider doing that.

~~~
chvid
"No one is forcing them at gunpoint to take the deal."

The Trump administration did choose the "nuclear option" just one day later.

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-16/trump-
s-h...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-16/trump-s-huawei-
threat-is-the-nuclear-option-to-halt-china-s-rise?srnd=technology-vp)

I think the above bloomberg article explains just how extreme an action it is;
and also sprinkle it with comments from american politicians which seem to
reveal that this is about more than "reasonable guarantees".

------
paganel
I could never understand why export subsidies are bad for the importing
countries, I mean, we have the Chinese taxpayer directly putting their money
in the pockets of their foreign clients (this point about subsidizing exports
was made by Jean-Baptiste Say two centuries ago). And while the Chinese are
kind enough to help us pay for their products with their own money we can
focus instead on other stuff which we’re really great at building/providing as
a service.

~~~
marcell
It hurts domestic industry in the other country. The negative effects are
concentrated while the benefit is diffuse.

Example: China subsidizes solar panels to the point where all US solar panel
companies go bankrupt. The US solar panel industry is badly hurt, even if the
rest of us get 40% cheaper solar panels.

~~~
mcny
> It hurts domestic industry in the other country. The negative effects are
> concentrated while the benefit is diffuse.

> Example: China subsidizes solar panels to the point where all US solar panel
> companies go bankrupt. The US solar panel industry is badly hurt, even if
> the rest of us get 40% cheaper solar panels.

What is the end game in this example for China? Do they expect to subsidize
now and raise prices to exorbitant levels once there is no competition? That
can't possibly last for a long time. If prices go high enough, surely the
industries in the US will spring back up. The pain is temporary at worst.

I think what it shows is a fatal flaw in democracy. I think I read somewhere
that if there is an issue that at least about five percent of the population
care deeply enough (I don't know the numbers but for example the fanatical
religious people in the middle east or pro-birth or pro-gun people in the US)
to be single-issue voters, they will have an outsize effect on policy even
though their position is bad for a majority of people.

~~~
carlosdp
How is the US supposed to even develop the technology effectively if the
companies keep going under? Solar technology isn't a commodity, it's high-tech
R&D, I don't think it's a temporary pain.

~~~
paganel
Memory chips used to be high tech RD until not that long ago but afaik the US
isn’t producing any of them anymore and one of the biggest players in this
market is South Korea through Samsung, a conglomerate which 100% receives
State subsidies in one way or another. My perception is that no-one in the US
is losing any sleep over this because the people who could be potentially
upset by this state of affairs are pretty busy investing their money and time
resources in other, more lucrative endeavors.

But trade wars have always relied on demagogy and plain nationalism, and
saying stuff like “we should build our own solar panels” when it has been
rationally proved that the best course of affairs is to take the money handed
on a silver plate to your own consumers/tax-payers and move on to other
economic tasks is plain nationalism bordering on isolationism.

~~~
coolspot
Micron produces DDR4 memory in the US.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabric...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabrication_plants)

------
Leary
Sounds like entrenched interests in SOEs forced Xi and Liu's hands. It's not
necessarily about IP protection, but state subsidies then.

~~~
kolanos
Agree. Wonder which (if any) subsidies the U.S. is willing to drop in return.

------
mncharity
Let me try to write something that may permit and generate fruitful
discussion.

Do you think the repeated US copyright-term extensions, widely attributed to
Disney, have been good public policy? Patent IP (Industrial Policy;) has lots
of knobs and dials (duration, obviousness, scope, FRAND, etc) - do you think
their current settings, nailed down by US pharma, are well adjusted to support
innovation in other industries, like say tech? Do you think California's
severe limits on non-compete employment agreements are bad for innovation? No?
Neither do some other countries.

For example, TPP was spun as a free-trade treaty. But it was also sometimes
described as bag of multiple treaties. One, free-trade. But also "IP"
(copyright and patents). And ISDS. Let's leave the mess of ISDS aside. When
the US dropped TPP, it was continued by other countries as CPTTP, keeping the
free trade parts, and dropping IP and ISDS. After a time, the US came back
with USMCA, forcing their inclusion. Canada was forced to agree to change its
laws, to extend its copyright term. Something the US had long tried to force,
and Canada had long resisted. The canadian press described it as arm twisting,
and coercion. Here are US trade negotiators, acting, at root, on behalf of
Disney. Why pay for regulatory capture piecemeal, country by country, when the
US provides one-stop shopping for world-wide regulatory capture?

If Russia, with declining oil revenue and growing trade imbalance, but having
nukes and bioweapons, forced the United States to permit the mass importation
of Russian-provided narcotics, dwarfing the current opioid epidemic, would you
be pissed? Yes, the Chinese still are.

But this isn't some vague "trigger" similarity. US trade negotiators, on
behalf of the subcultures in which they're embedded, and the interests which
determine their positions, _are_ trying to coerce them. As with Canada and
others. Maybe China will fold too. Or maybe not. Canada did push back on ISDS.

Call it a conflict of two cultures of corruption. In one, large incumbents do
regulatory capture, and use it as moat, to avoid a threateningly competitive
and innovative market. In the other, everyone pays off the government, and
there's lots of other ugliness, but... there's a ferment.

Current US press coverage of China repeated reminds me old regime Europe
writing about the US in 1800's. The US economy and governance and society were
really corrupt and messy. And they changed the world. And the world is perhaps
fortunate, maybe, that the dismal stagnation of Europe was unable to stifle
that.

[Fyi, I'll likely not follow up on comments - sorry, I lose days that way. And
this isn't the kind of topic HN does well. But there seemed some significant
bits absent from the discussion, at least as of when I started writing this.
So I toss it out there, FWIW.]

------
tibbydudeza
I think people forgot about China's experience at the hand of the West in the
past i.e Opium Wars and how it affects their moves today.

------
neonate
[http://archive.is/KagEm](http://archive.is/KagEm)

