You wouldn’t think I’d be reading this one: “China Inc.: How the rise of the next superpower challenges america & the world”

Seems like it’d just be Dobbs-ian barking about trade, right? Well, if that kind of crap is its goal then I’d have to say it fails, and fails gracefully. It actually ends up informative about just how China operates. Some of the info is the usual stuff for an authoritarian country:

  • Since ownership of all land in China is under the Communist party, they can obliterate entire neighborhoods on as little as a week notice for new projects. No compensation, they just declare it & kick you out.
  • The government-run banks there — meaning pretty much all banks — are legally barred from lending to private businesses, so many shops are under-the-table partnerships with local authorities.

Others are, shall we say, more amusing:

  • VCDs (the precursor to DVDs) took off there mainly because they didn’t feel like paying for the liscensing to get VCR technology imported. In poor areas, a video player would be shared among the entire neighborhood.
  • Speaking of DVDs, they actually sell a kind of DVD player in China designed for playing poorly-made bootlegs.
  • The bootleg software market is so big that Microsoft came to an agreement where they’d give away software as part of a program to train chinese software developers.
  • Even cars are bootlegged: one auto factory there exports knockoff luxury-model Jeep Cherokees — with leather seats & DVD players — to the middle east for between 8 & 10 grand.
  • Eastern China is running its maintenance & construction of expressways like the US runs local utility companies, as businesses with monopoly ownership grants. One province actually makes a “profit” off of its roads & uses the money for other things.
  • If Wal-Mart was a nation, it’d be the 5th largest export market for China

Millions of dirt-poor people who’d accept anything to get out of a state-mandated extreme poverty, the entirety of land permanently under Eminent-Domain Plus status, a government that is eager to sacrifice human rights in the name of short-term rapid economic growth…”China Inc.” is an appropriate title: in many ways, it’s paradise for corporate statism. What’s interesting though is how in other ways they (unintentionally, of course) actually defy restrictions that other countries put on the market. The commonness of piracy & the blatant ignoring of patents shows how little that patents & brand names actually mean compared to the US-led fuss over them: if someone can make, for example, clothing with a Ralph Lauren logo, or a watch that resembles a Rolex, well enough that most people can’t tell the difference other than price, then it begs the question of just what the price premium on the “real” one is paying for.

Weird world we live in, folks…