I'm not sure what anyone expected when we cut China off of chip IP. We did the same thing in the US, we had a policy of just straight up encouraging people to memorize patents before they immigrated over, and paying for their family to immigrate with them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Slater
I can understand the value of memorizing designs, plans, and technical drawings that are kept as proprietary information, but why bother memorizing a patent? Patents are public information and are only valid in the specific country granting the patent. Without additional local filings, foreign patents are not valid in America and vice versa.
Yes, this was the late 18th, early 19th century. A country's IP protectionism schemes obviously take a different approach now given modern communications media.
I contend that it's foolish to expect countries to not act in their own best interest. When you cut them off of technology because you're scared that they can reproduce it, you shouldn't be surprised that they actively go around your restrictions. It's the only sane move, the move that our own country took in their situation, and one aspect that led to our own economic greatness.
> I contend that it's foolish to expect countries to not act in their own best interest.
On one level absolutely yes, however best interest can sometimes mean co-operating and taking it in the shorts here for a win over there - this is largely how western countries have traded amongst each other.
The Chinese government is much less willing to play the co-operate and we all benefit game which results in other governments having to adjust to that.
It's somewhat similar to what Russia did with their technology industry over the last 10-15 years.
Can be defended as rational from the Chinese viewpoint since they I think are planning over the long term (decades) to forge enough relationships outside of the west to be completely self-sufficient (that has been their goal for a long time in terms of technology IP, they don't just want to be the factory, they want to be the design bureau)
It does seem like the world is polarising around new nexuses of power, the traditional west with the US on one side, China and it's allies (some would say debtors) on the other and the EU somewhere in the middle but much closer to the US than China.
Where it gets interesting is historically those power blocs have formed where the world was much less interconnected than now and so I think that'll change things in ways we can't expect.
COVID has been an interesting lesson in disruption on a global scale (even if compared to how bad it could have been and it was truly awful - it was comparitively minor) and how fast things fall apart, throw in climate change and we are headed for interesting times.
What the US - and others, see my related comment about my own country (Germany) in this sub-thread - was not "questionable" at all. Instead, the way we defend "IP" today is what is questionable.
You won't find the equivalent of a law of physics to support either hypothesis, in the end those are different paths for society to take and it's a choice. I'M presupposing here that there is no end goal for humanity, so there is no obvious way to weigh the different outcomes by some higher level objective measure.
China is playing the same game that the US used to try to get ahead of the UK. Seems like turn about being fair play. FWIW US lawmakers have the power to do something about this by creating trade blockades until equal market access is provided. Trump tried this & look how unpopular a trade war with China is. I don't think it was all just because Trump was doing it, although the US being schizophrenic about which side implements an otherwise popular policy is going to be an ongoing challenge.
For my country (Germany), you just have to look up the history of "Made in Germany". Which Britain introduced to defend against cheap knock-off products made in Germany, which was learning from (i.e. "stealing" in today's terms) by copying.
> The label was originally introduced in Britain by the Merchandise Marks Act 1887, to mark foreign produce more obviously, as foreign manufactures had been falsely marking inferior goods with the marks of renowned British manufacturing companies and importing them into the United Kingdom. Most of these were found to be originating from Germany, whose government had introduced a protectionist policy to legally prohibit the import of goods in order to build up domestic industry
