Almost all of those "gains" came from stolen western IPs and labor exploitation.
Yeah, but that's capitalism in general, which is what people mean when they say "free market".
USA's brand of capitalism has IP protections, such as patent, copyrights, and trademarks. None of which China actually follows.
China is well known to conduct significant corporate espionage. (IE: hackers targeting corporations like Microsoft or Sony, not really people with "critical national secrets" but instead software they'd rather keep secret). China also hacks for national-security purposes too I'm sure.
I mean, still better than the Russian hackers or North Korean ones that focus on randomware. China at least is trying to get economic benefits out of it, but... its clearly built up on a lot of stolen tech.
And currency manipulation
First two are communication platforms with direct spying concerns and the car industry always was a proxy for Tank production.
Yeah. If China is a better country at manufacturing EVs than the USA, that means they can make more war material than us. That's absolutely a national security threat.
The 3rd case is more of honest competition. But it's a huge concern to any warfighter. USA won WW2 by making more vehicles than the Nazis and Japanese. If China can out-manufacture us, we absolutely have to consider the new realities of the modern battlefield
It's a well known fact that Nazi tanks were a lot better than American tanks. We just outnumbered the shit out of the Nazis.
I don't think EV production will lead to tanks like how WW2 did. But EV production almost certainly is a modern drone / Li-ion battery.
Actually EVs collect a huge amount of information including video and audio of the participants. It's a huge privacy issue regardless of manufacturer country but you obviously should distinguish the difference between a foreign country collecting information on your citizens compared to your own. Neither is good but one clearly has more authoritarian tendencies and less scruples about finding and coercing compliance with any means at their disposal.
Honestly why should I care if China has more military power than the U.S. It's not like the USA is doing going things with our military power. We can't even stop a genocide.
Because China is about to attack Taiwan, which has 60%+ of the world computer chips.
That means no iPhones, no Snapdragon (Android phones), no XBox, no PS5, no AMD (Servers), no AMD/Xilinx (aka: F35), no NVidia GPUs if that attack goes off successfully. It'd be a major effect on the US technology sector, which is where I'm employed (and where many others are employed). This is a vital economic and technological issue.
If we lose the upcoming China vs Taiwan fight, its not just like "Oh I feel bad" like the Ukrainian situation (trust me, I'm hugely supportive of the Ukrainians). But Ukraine doesn't have a major economy / export tied to the USA's economy like Taiwan does.
China has made something like 400 nuclear weapons in the past 5 years or so. They're preparing for something. The current bets are on a Taiwan invasion, which has been a sorespot for them for the past century.
I don't think China is going to use those nukes per se, they just want nuclear parity with "somebody". So its clear they're likely planning to attack USA (or some other major nuclear power), which would coincide with a Taiwan attack (USA would almost certainly rush to protect this vital economic center for us, leading into a China vs USA war). The nukes are the just-in-case option for China, its likely going to try to stay conventional.
with direct spying concerns
Bruh...
A federal employee installing any social media app on a work phone is a big deal. With a foreign app it's probably a bigger deal, but an American developer would still sell the same data to the highest bidder.
Banning tiktok just means China has to pay an American company for the data.
It wasn't like tiktok has some super secret spy mode, it collects the same as all the others.
Which is why we need real data protection laws regardless of where the home office is.
The 3rd case is more of honest competition
...
Have you looked at domestic automobile manufacturing in the last, I dunno, 3-5 decades?
We don't make shit anymore, but home offices are based here, so their profit is GDP.
So every American gets shafted and can't buy the insanely cheap EVs that are better than what's sold in America.
A cynic would say what also factors into that, is for the past 6 years we've had record breaking fossil fuels production. And those giant corporations don't want cheap EVs, and also make up a large chunk of GDP
A federal employee installing any social media app on a work phone is a big deal
Huawei makes phone servers. Its not a social media app. That 5G network is literally the thing that routes phone calls to each other. You're grossly underestimating the threat at play in this meme.
Whenever a cell phone makes a phone call, it goes to a cell-tower, and inside of a cell-tower is a "phone server" so to speak. I don't know the full details, but 5G, 4G, (etc. etc.) are the different generations of phone servers available.
That's every phone call, every text message, every packet, everything that goes to your cell phone goes through that cell-phone tower / 5G network. And for "some reason", China has dumped the prices of Huawei equipment and highly encouraged the USA to buy their phone equipment and servers. Uhhhhhh.... yeah.
If you're looking at the "Tik Tok" ban whatever, that's peanuts. Huawei was brought up by the meme. So lets talk Huawei. Dumbass meme doesn't understand how telephones work. Its a serious national security concern for good reasons.
Have you looked at domestic automobile manufacturing in the last, I dunno, 3-5 decades?
Have you literally heard of the United Auto Workers?
I think you're bullshitting me. Last I heard, UAW pointed out huge productivity gains for their union and make a shit-ton of cars across hundreds of factories across the USA. Like, what the fuck man, do you even know America?
China didn’t even let US apps and sites in in the first place though. Hell they don’t even have TikTok but a different app. They straight copied Google with Baidu, Amazon with Alibaba, and same for so many others. Never allowed Facebook nor Twitter. Then they complain when the US debate whether to limit theirs operating here a decade or more later. Meanwhile china has hacked and stolen an insane amount of IP including full on fighter jet designs. And are the highest source of hacking by far, as they have been for a decade.
This is a weak argument based in ignorance. I guess that’s to be expected from a self proclaimed token boomerIgnorance, huh?
Long before the United States began accusing other countries of stealing ideas, the U.S. government encouraged intellectual piracy to catch up with England’s technological advances. According to historian Doron Ben-Atar, in his book, Trade Secrets, “the United States emerged as the world's industrial leader by illicitly appropriating mechanical and scientific innovations from Europe.” Source
Maybe use facts and sources instead of personal attacks, they tend to hold up better over time.
Welcome to geopolitics 101. Is your main legitimate rival gaining a ton of power across the world due to aggressive gains in technology? Slow their access to the market until you have time to catch up.
It's not like anyone should feel sorry for China during all this, unless you just want to forget their active genocide and all the horrible things they've done to Tibet and Hong Kong.
The USA has never had a free market and doesn’t really claim to, certainly not internationally. It’s the people who get a boner when looking at a snake on a yellow background that claim the USA has a free market.
This ad brought to you by US-MIC - the impasse of a 60's shift to venture capital and the treason of offshoring. The mouth has found the asshole after eating its own tail and it doesn't like the smell. Just you wait...
I wont go into the fact that China blocks foreign services or their theft of IP. Other commenters have covered these point already.
China (or rather the CCP) is an adversarial and imperialistic state that seeks to gain influence over other nations through various means, including espionage and PSYOPs. I'm not saying other nations don't do that, but it is what it is.
It is in our best interest to mitigate the harm done by this adversary through any practical means. Of course this upsets the Chinese government, but that's expected, and may be a sign that we are on the right track.
