and this is a reason why china with the current government can never truly be a world leader in anything: Your entire enterprise can be distroyed at the whim of a few unrestrained individuals. Sort of like apple's app store, but at a much bigger level.
Being from india, i have come to the opposite conclusion.
Chinese protectionism (aided by the language barrier) has served chinese entrepreneurs quite well.
They have their own google. Their own fb. Their own twitter. Basically all services that India doesnt have. The list goes on. These services may or may not be inferior to the original but from an economic standpoint, its good since the money and data flows within the economy instead of going abroad.
India has its own taxi service but they are getting severe competition from uber (with rumours floating of a possible buyout by uber). We have flipkart but they are getting pummelled by amazon (which just walked in late to the indian ecommerce market after flipkart laid all the groundwork) and was recently down-valued by investors.
China is also successfully exporting to india- chinese smartphones are doing very well, much better than Apple.
Totally agree with this. India is not an exception here though. In europe, we have the problem that all the main software is owned in US companies and much of the data resides there. Given US companies desire to mine user data at will, this is very much frowned upon. But sadly, there is no competition (whatever there was has already been killed).
The US companies (slack being perfect example) have the typical approach of:
1. Take capital and give out free stuff
2. Be everywhere
3. Now either show ads and mine user data and build user profiles. Alternately, they shutdown. All this churn causes a tremendous amount of loss in the local economy.
Served Chinese entrepreneurs but that isn't the same thing as served the Chinese people.
For instance, at the time when Google was kicked out of China essentially leaving their market a Baidu monopoly, Baidu lacked many useful features of Google especially if you wanted to search for non-Chinese websites (e.g. if you were a scientist wanting to do international research). The PRC didn't care. Having a pliable and controlled 'captain of industry' in the form of the Baidu founder was a more important goal to them, than the convenience of their own people.
Repeat that story a million times and you have an economy that looks superficially strong but makes its people miserable .... oh wait no it doesn't, because the censorship and language barriers ensure most people have no idea what they're missing out on.
You're being quite presumptuous in assuming the Chinese people served by local firms are miserable or worse off than their Western counterparts.
Not everything has to be seen through Western colored goggles. There is something quite admirable to me about China forcefully wanting their own local products front and center and frankly it's worked out well for their economy all things considered.
Yeah, i agree. Definitely good for the indian consumer at least in the short term. Amazon and uber are winning out largely because they offer better service at competitive prices.
But in long term i dont know. I am no econmist but If all your stuff is made abroad and little is made locally how will consumers find money to pay for the imported goods?
They won't. Their ability to afford the foreign products would be limited by how much they earn, same as anyone is.
Protectionism doesn't fix that though. If you can't afford sophisticated cheap foreign-made goods, you also can't afford the crappy expensive protected local made goods either.
The issue is that Trade agreements don't allow such a move. You either partake in global trade or not. Can't have it both way. For example India will export beef, clothes etc. but block Uber and Amazon. Doesn't work that way.
