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I'm sorry but please explain how any of those stops someone from getting on a train, bus, boat, or airplane in America?

If you get listed in China's social score system, you can still use (regular) train, bus, and boat; you cannot travel by airplane or high-speed train, so the article title exaggerates the situation. Such practice is not unique to mainland China; in Hongkong, long before the hand-over, a bankrupted person cannot take taxi for example. In China, there's no such thing as personal bankruptcy and things like jaywalking, evading debt, etc. are rampant. While their social credit system may be abused, so is the US legal system, e.g. ones who use drug are jailed for long time, whereas the drug users in China may just be banned from flying airplanes and taking high-speed trains.

Uhhh...we have been able to sue Chinese corps for how many decades now? And exactly what effect has that had on them? Oh yeah jack with a side of shit.

You can sue foreign powers all you want pal, doesn't mean they are gonna give a single flying flipping fuck what you think, not unless you are willing to go full on protectionist and stop trading with them cold.

How is this a loophole? The cryptocurrency exchange/system is working as envisioned.

This is a legit question because the answer is that it's a loophole for Chinese law. More specifically, China has several laws that are designed to empower the government to prevent money from leaving China (and thus it's economy). Cryptocurrencies enable people to convert their money into a form that can be electronically transferred then converted back into another currency, completely undermining their efforts to keep wealth inside China.

The most common ways that companies start doing business in China (legally) is by forming a WFOE (A Wholly Foreign Owned Entity) or by partnering with an existing Chinese business through some form of joint venture.

https://www.chinalawblog.com/2...

Being found to be subsidising, and actually subsidising is not always the same thing.
Dumping investigations are often more careful works of fiction with little basis in reality.
They are not careful forensic investigations of cost. Often they use rough guesses at what they think it would cost to make in an 'equivalent' open-market country.
http://www.chinalawblog.com/20...

"One of the things I have always found troubling about Westerners doing business in emerging market countries is that they sometimes take an almost perverse pride in discussing payoffs to government officials. It is as though their having paid a bribe is a symbol of their international sophistication and insider knowledge. Yet, countless times when I am told of the bribe, I know the very same thing could almost certainly have been accomplished without a bribe."
--Dan Harris, chinalawblog.com

Sure you can. You don't know Chinese law. Just another ignorant foreigner who thinks he can breeze into China and things will be just like they are back home. Nine times out of ten when you hear the "China screwed me" story it means "I couldn't be bothered to learn anything about local laws and just assumed I could do whatever I wanted." China has laws, but you have to use them, and most people don't bother to learn. Check chinalawblog.com for endless stories on this topic.

No they don't. I know tons of foreign companies here in China and nobody bribes anybody. This is a fallacy held by people who have just read about China from horridly biased Western news reports. Hey, don't believe me, read this from an attorney specializing in China law for foreign companies:

"One of the things I have always found troubling about Westerners doing business in emerging market countries is that they sometimes take an almost perverse pride in discussing payoffs to government officials. It is as though their having paid a bribe is a symbol of their international sophistication and insider knowledge. Yet, countless times when I am told of the bribe, I know the very same thing could almost certainly have been accomplished without a bribe."
--Dan Harris, chinalawblog.com

You should go read his blog. It's highly informative and is chock full of real-life situations. If you are stupid enough to bribe a government official and it becomes critical to your business, you're totally screwed whenever he retires or goes to jail for corruption (the only two possible outcomes to your relationship).

No, wrong. You don't need bribes to do business in China. Only fools conduct business that way.

"One of the things I have always found troubling about Westerners doing business in emerging market countries is that they sometimes take an almost perverse pride in discussing payoffs to government officials. It is as though their having paid a bribe is a symbol of their international sophistication and insider knowledge. Yet, countless times when I am told of the bribe, I know the very same thing could almost certainly have been accomplished without a bribe."
--Dan Harris, chinalawblog.com

2015 - intel/ms produce all goods in China - the computer sent to the US
2020 - intel/ms declare bankruptcy. Chinese companies produce all parts and software, computer sent to the US

The problem is not just the assembly cost, which is in fact marginal. The problem is the costs all down the supply chain. All the components inside, say, an Ipod are made in China. All the profits made producing and selling those items stay in China. I don't think you could even produce a computer in the US today. You'd have to get and ship all your parts from Asia. Hard drives, memory, displays, discrete components - all made overseas. The huge support base for producing all electronics have moved overseas. If a $200 Ipod costs Apple $150 in parts, $10 assembly/packaging/shipping and $40 profit, that's still $150 that flowed into Chinese economy - not the US economy.

Prototyping and design used to be done here. It's now easier to get the engineering talent overseas where engineers have access and contact with the people producing the actual parts they need to use in their own products. We've lost the production capability, we're about to lose knowledge about how to even create the devices we invented.

Erm, no. The margin is WAY more in Apple's favor (in this example) and way more in the favor of US companies in general. Here is an example with numbers: http://www.chinalawblog.com/2011/11/chinese_manufacturing_profit_margin_what_profit_margin.html. You are right, there is a lot flowing into the Chinese economy but markup on consumer goods is at LEAST 2x mfg costs, and in a lot of cases closer to 5x (to get to MSRP, where it gets whittled back down). But overall, don't expect that even if you get a "Deal" on some iThing or a big TV, you spent anything less than twice what it cost to manufacture, and that money stays right here in the good old US of A (and it pays nothing but engineers, accountants, planners, distributors, and shareholders, none of those messy type occupations to bother with.)

China (and S. Korea too) are also using a first-to-file patent law system (and trademarks work the mostly same way too!, first-to-file) and there is a nightmare over there with competitors filing for patents and then blocking sales and exports of various products because they infringe their newly-granted patents or trademarks

patents in China
http://preview.tinyurl.com/Chinese-Patent-doc

trademarks in China:
http://www.ipaustralia.gov.au/pdfs/general/trade_mark_protection_China.pdf

http://www.chinalawblog.com/2009/11/china_trademarks_the_apple_of.html
quote from China law blog:
China is a first to file country, which means that, with very few exceptions, whoever files for a particular trademark in a particular category gets it. So if the name of your company is XYZ and you make shoes and you have been manufacturing your shoes in China for the last three years and someone registers the XYZ trademark for shoes, that other company gets the trademark. And then, armed with the trademark, that company has every right to stop your XYZ shoes from leaving China because they violate its trademark. /quote

Huh? Huge parts of the Chinese economy are directly owned by the government. Sort of like how General Motors is owned by the US government. I suppose the Western media failed to inform the public of the recent unveiling of the Twelfth Five-Year Plan, which will guide China's development for the next half decade.

I really don't know how this idea got started, because it's not true at all. I see it so many places, though, so there must be some source of the contamination, like the Broad Street Pump.

Bzzt wrong. China is still capital-C Communist. They just released their new Five-Year Plan, for Pete's sake. The difference is that after Mao died, Deng Xiaoping hijacked the people's revolution onto the capitalist road. For those of you who didn't go to university and hence weren't exposed to Marxism, "capitalist roaders" are a heresy of Communism. They still want to achieve socialism, but by the wrong methods. According to Mao, the Soviet Union suffered this fate after Stalin died.

The Chinese government still directly controls huge swathes of the Chinese economy. Companies are owned by the state and operate for its benefit. Americans having trouble with this unfamiliar idea could perhaps think of Amtrak, or the conversion of General Motors into an arm of the federal government a few years ago. The baby milk scandals are due to a lack of enforcement mechanisms. In so many words, there are few laws and fewer inspectors. Moreover, Chinese culture places no value on people you don't know - they might as well not exist, so who cares if you poison them or not? This is how you get crowds of people standing around gawking at accident victims instead of rendering aid (first one to help has to pay the victim's hospital bills).

Unfortunately, there are those out there to whom socialism is an unassailable holy concept, and when a communist country takes the capitalist road, an attempt is made to classify the whole shebang as EEEVIL in order to make capitalism look bad. It's like old Soviet documentaries about the United States that focused on the poor and homeless, in order reinforce the conclusion that was preordained anyway.

Bzzt wrong. China is still capital-C Communist. They just released their new Five-Year Plan, for Pete's sake. The difference is that after Mao died, Deng Xiaoping hijacked the people's revolution onto the capitalist road. For those of you who didn't go to university and hence weren't exposed to Marxism, "capitalist roaders" are a heresy of Communism. They still want to achieve socialism, but by the wrong methods. According to Mao, the Soviet Union suffered this fate after Stalin died.

The Chinese government still directly controls huge swathes of the Chinese economy. Companies are owned by the state and operate for its benefit. Americans having trouble with this unfamiliar idea could perhaps think of Amtrak, or the conversion of General Motors into an arm of the federal government a few years ago. The baby milk scandals are due to a lack of enforcement mechanisms. In so many words, there are few laws and fewer inspectors. Moreover, Chinese culture places no value on people you don't know - they might as well not exist, so who cares if you poison them or not? This is how you get crowds of people standing around gawking at accident victims instead of rendering aid (first one to help has to pay the victim's hospital bills).

Unfortunately, there are those out there to whom socialism is an unassailable holy concept, and when a communist country takes the capitalist road, an attempt is made to classify the whole shebang as EEEVIL in order to make capitalism look bad. It's like old Soviet documentaries about the United States that focused on the poor and homeless, in order reinforce the conclusion that was preordained anyway.

"One of the things I have always found troubling about Westerners doing business in emerging market countries is that they sometimes take an almost perverse pride in discussing payoffs to government officials. It is as though their having paid a bribe is a symbol of their international sophistication and insider knowledge. Yet, countless times when I am told of the bribe, I know the very same thing could almost certainly have been accomplished without a bribe."
--Dan Harris, chinalawblog.com

Isn't it funny that China's government recognizes the role the internet plays in culture? And wants to direct it in a positive way that benefits everyone in society? The entire idea is anathema to Westerners, isn't it? China does face some very real language problems and separatist tendencies, Mandarin is the common language that glues all of society together. Without a common language, the country would fragment along ethnic and regional lines and it would be back to the warlord civil war era from the 1920s. The government doesn't want this to happen and is enlightened enough to try to keep the country together in order to save millions of lives. Altruistic, eh? In China, the government really is made up of The Smart People. Not just anyone can join the CCP. It's rather like the US State Department or maybe Harvard, where you have to be really smart or have family connections to get in. If you're a redneck (laobaixing) who loves your country and wants to serve they'll just sneer at you, ridicule your hillbilly Mandarin accent that doesn't sound like a newscaster, slam the door in your face, and tell you to join the Army like all good peasants and hicks are supposed to do. Because if there is one cross-cultural idea that all The Smart People agree on worldwide, it's that lesser intellects (or those not from good families) should be ridiculed and rejected from having their ideas seriously considered in government.

As opposed to, say, America, where the government's idea of benefiting everyone is running up a $223 billion deficit in March 2011 alone, more than all of 2007. The role the internet plays? The internet allows Americans to utterly and completely convince themselves that they live in a real-live functioning fascist police state. And then use that same internet to organize protests against their own government. Inconvenient truths are a bitch, ain't they?

1. The solution isn't more energy usage. The solution is less energy usage, period.

Energy is cheap and there really isn't that much to be gained from energy conservation. Else we would be doing it already.

2. This is because USA still stupidly has an unregulated economy that does whatever it wants.

There are two obvious errors. First, the US economy is far from unregulated. Second, what is left that needs to be regulated? Virtually everything that people claim needs to be regulated is already regulated.

Sane countries, like China, let The Smart People plan their economic growth in accordance with scientific principles.

Do you know what the purpose of a "five year plan" is? Emergency toilet paper. The people implementing the plan don't have a clue. They can't make serious decisions. Second, do you know what's far better than "scientific principles" for running an economy? Markets.

Third, "scientific principles" are a case of the "appeal to authority" fallacy. Please recall that macroeconomics is unusually resistant to scientific principles precisely because of the remarkable difficulty of falsifying any hypotheses about it.

Just imagine if USA had similar policies, and could actually implement them. Ownership of General Motors to advance state economic policies was a good start, but needs to expand to more sectors of the US economy. Letting the market decide is, frankly, irresponsible and a proven recipe for disaster, time and time again. Just look at history.

The US merely had to let GM go through bankruptcy court. No action required. The Obama administration screwed that up by rescuing it at the expense of everyone but the unions, and mocking the laws of the land.

It'll be a long time before I buy another GM or Chrysler (or for that matter any banking product from one of the "too big to fail" banks) product and I know that's going to be the case for a lot of other people too. We don't like thieves.

1. The solution isn't more energy usage. The solution is less energy usage, period. Nuclear reactors will kill us all with radioactive pollution. "People must have come not only to distrust the safety of the technology but also the authority of those who have assured them so confidently that nuclear power is safe. In this sense people distrust the entire nuclear enterprise -- not only its technology, but the public and private organizations, the political parties, and those often prestigious scientists who advocate and assist in the development of nuclear power."

2. This is because USA still stupidly has an unregulated economy that does whatever it wants. Sane countries, like China, let The Smart People plan their economic growth in accordance with scientific principles. An excerpt: "Promote energy saving and environmental protection.
Currently, for every 1% increase in GDP, China's energy use increases by 1% or more. If this rate continues, China will need to increase its energy consumption by 2.5 times to achieve its 2020 economic goal. To put this into perspective, this would mean increasing the current consumption of coal from the current 3.6 billion tons per year to an astronomical 7.9 billion tons a year. No one in China thinks this can be done. One major way to reduce the amount of energy required for the Chinese economy is to implement energy saving practices throughout the economy. A second way to reduce is to shift from hydrocarbon based energy to alternative energy sources. The new plan advocates an all out program in this area."

Just imagine if USA had similar policies, and could actually implement them. Ownership of General Motors to advance state economic policies was a good start, but needs to expand to more sectors of the US economy. Letting the market decide is, frankly, irresponsible and a proven recipe for disaster, time and time again. Just look at history.

Today, however, China is "an acclaimed global leader in air safety" with fatal-accident rates lower than America's and Europe's.

Taken from here.

Not exactly. http://www.chinalawblog.com/2010/01/terminating_your_china_employe.html

Chinese labor laws are not the same as those in the US or Europe.

http://www.chinalawblog.com/2010/01/terminating_your_china_employe.html

Quote:
One of the things I have always found troubling about Westerners doing business in emerging market countries is that they sometimes take an almost perverse pride in discussing payoffs to government officials. It is as though their having paid a bribe is a symbol of their international sophistication and insider knowledge. Yet, countless times when I am told of the bribe, I know the very same thing could almost certainly have been accomplished without a bribe.

Source: Chinalawblog.com.

I think Danwei is a good place to start :
http://www.danwei.org/

Then you will have a lot of blogs on specialized topics, like for example :
http://www.chinalawblog.com/
http://www.cleanergreenerchina.com/
http://www.chinaenvironmentallaw.com/

Well, I came for some insight, and instead there are eleven posts above me trashing the United States. So here's some actual thinking instead of the usual Two Minutes Hate.

China does indeed make very little from its manufacturing. The Chinese bemoan the fact that they're making so much for the world and getting so little in return. The reason is lack of brands - Chinese people just don't see brands as being important. They don't trust anything that they can't hold in their hands, and you wouldn't either if you had just emerged from fifty years of enforced poverty under a radical leftist government. Another problem is the rampant theft of IP and cutthroat domestic competition. Foreign brands have much of the high end, and Chinese companies are forced to viciously compete on price at the low end. And hey, if you do invest in R&D, Chinese IP laws are so weak that you'll get ripped off - why make money for someone else?

Suppose there was a phone that did everything the iPhone did, but didn't have the Apple logo on the outside. It wouldn't be nearly as popular, because there are plenty of people willing to pay $$$ for anything with that logo on it. Indeed, American companies come to China to make money, and make it they do. Apple is making money hand over fist with the iPhone. The Chinese get the scraps. Companies like KFC and Nike are kicking ass in China's domestic market.

The part about innovation is spot-on: the Chinese simply don't have that culture of "fixin' things" like we do. The usual attitude is to wait around for the government to do something. I've had my product copied so many times when it would have just been easier (and more educational) for the company to make its own damn product. Who knows, they might have made a better one instead of an inferior copy. But they'll never know because they just can't see past the end of their noses.

Here's an interesting link on branding if you want further reading, and here is another.

"One of the things I have always found troubling about Westerners doing business in emerging market countries is that they sometimes take an almost perverse pride in discussing payoffs to government officials. It is as though their having paid a bribe is a symbol of their international sophistication and insider knowledge. Yet, countless times when I am told of the bribe, I know the very same thing could almost certainly have been accomplished without a bribe." --Source

China is *hugely* inefficient, which is mostly masked by their huge growth. One thing that you have to remember is that the Chinese economy has *never* gone down in living memory. It's all up, up, up since Mao died and the national nightmare ended. This results in things like people opening businesses with no idea what they're doing, and the business succeeds anyway due to runaway demand. I see small shops open and close all the time, and it's the same story - no plan, no strategy, no marketing. It's just 'I'll open the doors and people will flood in.' The Chinese are geniunely shocked when they don't, and can't figure out what they did wrong. Really. Massive inefficiency is a hallmark of a prolonged boom (more annoying facts again - don't worry, I won't include any math) and China has been a boom (14%+ growth) for 30 years.

The Chinese don't invent new things, which is going to really start hurting in a few years when all their low-cost manufacturing isn't low-cost any more. I see it every day, a lot of people really don't know how to solve problems except for copying someone else, even to the point of investing huge efforts into it. Just think of how much better off China would be if they had developed their own indigenous computer systems instead of just pirating Windows. And no, I have yet to see a single installation of this "Red Flag" linux that someone always spouts off about. China does in fact have IPR laws, and they do work, but you have to actually follow them. Speaking of laws, there is a new anti-monopoly law in effect this year, and it's going to be used by the government as a club to bash foreign enterprises. Of course, Chinese monopolies are safe. Remember, cheating foreigners is patriotic.

Anyway, that's just my personal experience. Feel free to keep wishing hard for America to fall and China to rise. For further reading, for those of you who made it this far, check here (true today as when it was written) and Danwei and China Law Blog. Sorry to inject facts into the fantasy exercise - I realize it's a downer.