I can understand if it's the sheer inertia of legacy policies, since we managed to sanction Cuba for no good reason. The people that end up getting hurt from these policies set by average people thousands of miles away are just average citizens.
The USA sends military forces half way around the globe to interfere in Iran's backyard and then accuses Iran of being belligerent?
Then again according to Trump Iran also is a big supporter of Al Qaeda where it doesn't make any ideological sense (shia versus...) only if you take the all the muslims/brown people are the same approach.
Don't get me wrong Iran don't have nice leaders but this whole situation really stinks and does nothing to improve the security of us all.
Seeing as how there was Iran deal on the table that Obama pushed for, then that means reducing/removing sanctions is not as crazy as you are proposing.
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4053221-top-10-semiconducto...
note that in its response to BIS 's notice of proposed activation of suspended sanctions and in making its case for leniency, ZTE acknowledged that it had submitted false statements, but argued that it would have been irrational for ZTE to knowingly or intentionally mislead the U.S. Government in light of the seriousness ofthe suspended sanctions. The heart ofits argument is the question, posed by the company in rhetorical fashion, asking " why would ZTEC risk paying another $300 million suspended fine and placement on the denied parties list, which would effectively destroy the Company, to avoid sending out employee letters of reprimand and deducting portions of employee bonuses?" ZTE argued that BIS should not act until the company completed an internal investigation so that ZTE could answer such questions.
Reliance on other countries now looks risky. If you manufacture in China, you're crazy if you don't have a backup plan for your operations being shut down as an outcome of government action on one side or the other.
1. how they evaded the sanction against Iran (destroying documents, re-export through a third country, deliberately removing logos from cargos, etc)
2. rewarding, rather than disciplining, staff involved in the evasion of sanction, an outright violation of the agreement they signed with Doc for a probationary punishment instead of a full-blown one
3. the resumption of sanction-evasive behaviors, while fully aware they are under active investigation
Did I mention ZTE had prepared another document detailing exactly how their competitor Huiwei does the same?
You really must be extremely naive to think that this has pure to do with not following the rules after all the different arguments Americans/British have produced why companies like Huwaei/ZTE/... (because America is so trustworthy) are bad. I have the feeling that they just found a stick to beat the dog.
Their leaders are basically negligent at this point.
But likely you are right for different reasons than you think?
US government can put US executives in jail. I'm sure it would put them in jail. You have to remember what happened here: ZTE was caught, paid penalty and promised to be nice, then they reneged on their promise, lied about it, and got caught again.
Feds in fact just recently put VW executive in jail for even lesser offense. US government has no such jail-time leverage with Chinese companies, there is no extradition agreement, so the only leverage US has, it used.
China will probably just develop more stuff locally, further reducing US influence.
But when it comes to consumer products the US still has an innate understanding of how to build products for the world. And China may be great at building and duplicating but they haven't yet demonstrated how to do this from scratch.
They already have all the staff and the tech. They just need to rebrand, and since the new company won't be ZTE, they'll just start buying American components again.
Replace all ZTE ads with ads for the new company, and never explicitly say that this is the rebirth of ZTE, while still making it very obvious to the consumer.
This will all be a blip on the radar.
For those who remember the TechTV/G4 merger - remember when The Screen Savers was "cancelled" and then a "new show" called Attack of the Show started airing in the exact same timeslot, with the exact same people, on the exact same set - but the branding was different?
That's what the Chinese government is going to do to ZTE and all its assets.
If ZTE is liquidated and Chinese government controlled companies buy its assets and start production again, private investors lose billions.
Even if China is not isolated from the global trade the same way as Soviet Union once was, it must duplicate several industries if it want's to act independently from the global order.
Also, this motivates China to produce more components domestically, which will permanently sway Chinese companies away from US suppliers, so in the long-term, this could do tens of billions of dollars in damage to the US.
(ZTE Firefox Phone. Still works too, I powered it up the other weekend... Might have to put a SIM in it - I bet nobody's targeting _that_ with zerodays...)
Unfortunately the truth doesn't make good headlines like "TRUMP STARTING TRADE WAR", but I think this best sums up what's happening and why.
It does look to me that the US is really at its best here in applying the rule of law, and following the contract it had with ZTE to the letter.
But others will find it hard to believe, especially with Trump at the helm.
https://www.commerce.gov/news/press-releases/2018/04/secreta...
Bloomberg for whatever reason has started having more and more misleading headlines and articles, ironically right as they head to a subscription model. The WSJ I still subscribe too, mainly because it's more business and less politics related though the comment section unfortunately resembles only a slightly more dignified version of a Breitbart commenter.
https://www.exportcompliancematters.com/2016/07/25/secondary...
However, this gets most important with ITAR and EAR which are items with military or "dual use" applications...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Traffic_in_Arms_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_Administration_Regulati...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdul_Qadeer_Khan#Proliferatio...
Yes. We run the international world order. Our sanctions are pretty much an international edict that all nations/companies have to adhere to. It's a perk of being the sole economic and military superpower and being the leader of the international world order since ww2.
> do we really expect to keep all our goods from making it there by way of third-parties?
Yes. Not only that, our national interests trump foreign countries'/companies' interests. We blocked a german company from selling itself to a chinese company.
http://www.scmp.com/news/china/economy/article/2051421/obama...
China did the same thing, and now Chinese industry is advanced enough that we will see innovation coming from China. They are already there in software -- WeChat/WePay is a really big deal and it outcompetes payment systems from American tech companies. I suspect we will soon see successful Chinese innovations in AI, semiconductors, and automobiles.
It's a forgone conclusion that China was always going to push to accelerate their local semi-conductor industry irrespective of what happened to ZTE or not. Not enforcing violations of US sanctions (and the subsequent plea agreement) would have just shown China that you can piss all over any deals made with the US commerce department (further reducing their respect) -- it would not have detracted in the slightest from China's mandate to replace their dependency on foreign technology at all!
"These are all things that China is working on.
America’s use of its new weapons simultaneously demonstrates its power and will hasten its relative decline."
[1]https://www.economist.com/news/business/21741556-there-are-a...
Trade agreements limit the size of import tariffs that can be imposed and this bypasses those limits nicely. (Not that ZTE weren't stupid to do this in the first place).
On the other hand if it suits the right company they can do what they want. For example massive amounts of vanadium were shipped from the Congo to the US during sanctions for use by the US aircraft industry.
They have however been fighting a trade war and somewhat of a cold war for years against the US.
But it's not just skateboards: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_and_state-sponsored_terro...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_Iran#Capital_pu...
People have been saying this forever and we're still waiting for any sign of it. People love to over-simplify economics and make the big assumption that the historical progress seen in the west in previous eras is a repeatable system on a simple arc trajectory of advancement. But I personally believe it is as much a product of the local (work) culture, politics, and economic systems... not simply just a side-effect of the creation of a middle class.
Just look at Japan. They had a great period of innovation within a particular period of chaos where the old cultural rules weren't being imposed and whole new industries were developed. Which later became crippled by a variety of forces, including most notably culture and how 'elders'/successful companies are treated like gods, while upstarts became marginalized as the larger firms became politically entrenched. Now that the systems are in place the creative class has largely been stamped out.
That had little to do with Japan's particular position on some growth model but a variety of distinct local forces.
This type of thing is also not just a product of industry but also academically, which we've also seen a lack of larger sweeping innovations coming out of China, instead mostly just narrower progress within existing western thought. It's entirely possible that what China is best at is these type of things, mastering these individual existing categories, optimizing them, and working harder than anyone else at them. Rather than developing the more creative innovations which bring together disparate pieces from other areas into new ones.
That too seems to be a result of cultural and economic system... not simply their position within some predicable growth model which worked in the west.
If you are into AI you can looks up recent papers. Most of the authors are Chinese.
And yes most of the authors are studying in the US, but Trump administration are making them very difficult to work in the US, so they will all gradually return to China someday.
Is there any evidence this is true yet? I thought they were only going after 'chain migration' which has nothing to do with skilled workers? Or do you mean the rumblings about cracking down on those H1b mill companies gaming the system?
For this reason, I think we'll see some relaxation of control in China, as there has been previously.
But I guess the real challenge is having a culture of risk tolerance, and investment infrastructure etc to support it.
I used to think that as more Chinese people entered the middle class, they would demand more political rights. It's generally the bourgeoisie that does this -- they aren't poor anymore and they want respect, they resent being looked down on and the monopoly on political power held by the entrenched aristocracy (which in China would be the powerful families in the party), and so on. But that hasn't happened as far as I can tell. Maybe it's because the people in a position to successfully demand political reform aren't staying in China.
Go buy a copy of the Three-Body trilogy by Liu Cixin.
Does it? I think American payment systems are winning outside of China/USA. Of course it won the Chinese market because China makes it extremely difficult for foreign tech companies to compete.
I can't speak to the factual accuracy, and it can be difficult to separate revolutionary from evolutionary, since even the greatest of leaps have antecedents and stood on the shoulders of giants (e.g. Newton)... but with such a huge population, a large proportion educated, there would be many extremely smart people capable of great work. But the only such Chinese people I know of are not in China (one famous e.g. https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence_Tao). So, maybe, as you say, there's a brain-drain.
And maybe I just don't hear about the ones in China (and maybe the very best work on sensitive commercial and government/military projects - e.g. CPU designers).
I would guess foreign owned patents would not fare well, because it's not in China's interest (USA did the same thing some time ago), but that reasoning doesn't apply to domestically owned patents.
Apparently, in 2014 patent owners won about 80% of their cases BUT the damages granted are "maddeningly" low. The article isn't clear if that's also true for domestically owned patents. http://maxhamfirm.com/patent-litigation-china/
One mechanism is that it's harder to prove damages under Chinese Law, though people say it's changing. Though none of the cases are about real technological progress, more design/trademark like designs (I guess it's the same in the west though too) https://www.limegreenipnews.com/2018/03/calculating-larger-p...