There may be valuable political conclusions to be drawn from the current tiff between Google and the Chinese government, but there certainly isn’t anything new on the economics or business side. Perhaps the main reason the PRC wants foreign technology and know-how is to drive foreign (and some domestic) companies out of business.
Google’s threat to stop its China service entirely has prompted broad discussion of the struggle of many multinational firms in the PRC. The discussion is well summarized by James McGregor, “There’s a sense China is saying, ‘We have your technology and your capital – and now we have control of the market.’”
The remarkable thing here is not China’s behavior but the fact that anyone didn’t know this years ago. The Chinese government has long been explicit about increasing intervention to promote state enterprises and using foreign companies in that quest. As Heritage noted in 2008:
. . a model of national champions—large corporate groups consciously created with the idea that size is necessary to compete globally. An unspoken corollary is often that neither domestic nor foreign competition with these champions can be tolerated. China has been enamored of the champions concept for at least a decade, but the restructuring process was accelerated in 2002 . . .
In fact, Chinese policy has been clear since at least 2003. That we have companies and analysts discovering it in 2010 is news about them, but not news about China.
President Obama recently nominated one of the biggest missile defense critics, Philip Coyle, to a high-level advisory position- the Associate Director for the National Security and International Affairs, Office of Science and Technology Policy. In this role, Coyle will be advising the President on national security issues. Coyle told Reuters last year:
Missile defense is the most difficult development the Pentagon has ever attempted and if it (the threat) were real, the proposed missile defense systems couldn’t deal with it anyway.
This soon-to-be-adviser will be whispering misleading conclusions like this in the president’s ear, contradicting experts such as General Henry “Trey” Obering, former Director of the Missile Defense Agency.
As Obering stated when speaking about missile defense testing in The Heritage Foundation’s 33 Minutes documentary, “Our testing has shown not only can we hit a bullet with a bullet; we can hit a spot on a bullet with a bullet.”
President Obama has made his approach towards national security and missile defense very clear: he wants to lessen the defense against long-range ballistic missiles and concentrate on defenses against short to medium range missiles, and now he is appointing people who will help support this trend shifting away from comprehensive missile defense.