> As an international website building platform, obtaining an ICP license for China is very important to our users. The actual process of obtaining an ICP license though is quite complex. With Alibaba Cloud’s built-in and easy-to-follow ICP application process, it has helped with our user experience a lot.
Seems like it's killer feature is China ICP license made easy.
Gee, I wonder why a country with notoriously tight control of information would help funnel business to a single domestic cloud infrastructure provider...
Indeed, that would have been a killer feature for my employer a year ago.
Don't forget, however, that the ICP license might just be the START of the Chinese business license gauntlet! If you do business other than basically just serving content, assume there's other licenses that need acquiring. Always get local help with this.
As often in China, the killer feature will probably be that the Chinese government is going to make it even harder for all the companies except their own to get a license.
It's worth noting that, no matter where you go, the ICP licensing process is political.
We've had trouble with ours and essentially nobody has answers. The requirements can change without warning and no companies inside or outside of China have a surefire way to get, keep, and use an ICP license.
Does anyone have an explanation for why China is so successful? We have it pounded into our heads that we need globalization in the form of open markets with no protectionism for US companies and immigration, yet china almost completely locks out foreign businesses and takes next to no immigrants and is obviously a quickly growing global superpower.
> We have it pounded into our heads that we need globalization in the form of open markets with no protectionism
Because that is false. It works for developed markets with existing strong industries. Dieter Frisch - former Director General for Development at the European Commission says in his La politique de développement de l'Union européenne [1], on page 38 of the PDF:
"En effet, on ne connaît historiquement aucun cas où un pays au stade précoce de son évolution économique se serait développé via son ouverture à la concurrence internationale. Le développement s’est toujours amorcé au gré d’une certaine protection qu’on a pu diminuer au fur et à mesure que l’économie s’était suffisamment fortifiée pour affronter la concurrence extérieure. Mais un tel processus s’étend sur de longues années, sans parler du préalable que constituent, dans le cas des ACP, la mise en place et le fonctionnement de structures régionales."
Essentially, it means that there are no cases of a country that developed through opening its economy to international competition. It always required protectionism which reduces gradually overtime as it is able to grow and absorb and compete with external competition. Haven't you noticed third world countries that attempt to follow America's advice never escape the poverty trap? What works for America does not imply it'll work for other countries.
Consider Thailand and Malaysia, two neighbouring countries in SE Asia. In Thailand, they opened up markets to car manufacturers and suppliers, with the result that Thailand is now one of Asia's largest car manufacturing hubs. In Malaysia, they imposed protectionist barriers and tried to build their own cars. Ever heard of Proton or Perodua? No? There's a reason you haven't -- they're terrible.
Per Wikipedia [1] the successful Thai auto industry is a perfect example of using protective tarrifs to develop one's economy. They slapped huge tarrifs on imports, then shifted to taxing fully-assembled imports to grow their parts manufacturing, then gradually eased restrictions after they'd been able to develop a superior domestic parts manufacturing industry.
Protective taxes. Domestic growth. Expertise. Drop taxes and start telling everyone else how great free trade is.
This is exactly the playbook my country S. Korea used, enabling the "miracle on the Han". The "free trade" mantra is bullshit, it is literally kicking away the ladder that every developed nation climbed to get to the top.
It was definitely working for a good part of the time. Mismanagement in other areas does not imply the recession was caused by protectionism. Actually, there are several different reasons for the Brazilian recession, yet none of them has anything to do with a "closed" market.
> In Thailand, they opened up markets to car manufacturers and suppliers, with the result that Thailand is now one of Asia's largest car manufacturing hubs.
But thai car companies aren't building the cars. They are just building cars for foreigners.
> In Malaysia, they imposed protectionist barriers and tried to build their own cars. Ever heard of Proton or Perodua? No? There's a reason you haven't -- they're terrible.
Can you name a thai car company?
"According to Paul Bairoch, since the end of the 18th century, the United States has been "the homeland and bastion of modern protectionism". In fact, the United States never adhered to free trade until 1945. "
The US was protectionist. Korea, Japan are protectionist. Russia is protectionist. And even much of europe is/was protectionist.
You need protectionism to develop your own companies/industries. Otherwise, you become just a supplier for a company.
The difference between thailand and malaysia is that malaysia want their own "Ford/Toyota/etc". Thailand just wants to be a low-end supplier on the bottom of the supply chain.
And I've never heard of any Thai auto manufacturers either. Yet S. Korea, another SE Asian country which went full on gov't interventionist/protectionist from the 60s through the 80s, is home to Samsung and Hyundai etc. These conglomerates would never have survived in direct competition, nascent industries require protectionism until they can compete. Completely "free trade" means each country focuses on industries where they have comparative advantage--S. Korea would still be weaving linen.
Well it is in the South East of Asia. Nation groupings aren't exactly scientific taxonomies.
A better comparison: S. Korea, Thailand, Indonesia, and Vietnam all started with sub $200 GDP/capita in 1960. As of last year, S. Korea's has exploded to ~27k, while Thailand and others are below $6k.
"In common usage, the term Northeast Asia typically refers to a region including China.[2][3] In this sense, the core countries constituting Northeast Asia are China, Japan, North Korea, and South Korea."
Exactly. You can't industrialize a country without protection. Just think how USA, Germany, Japan, South Korea accomplished it.
When the IMF and others advice against it, it's because they are not thinking in the welfare of the country in question in the first place.
The other side of the coin is that it's very difficult (or inefficient) to develop a country without access to knowledge and technology from outside, so you need foreign currency.
In order to get foreign currency, you need to sell something or investment from outside that bring what is necessary, but you need a way for the benefits to stay in the country. Navigating this dichotomy is something that the Chinese are doing very well.
Aren't the Chinese essentially just playing on foreign greed for access to their domestic market, in an era of saturation in most of the rest of the world?
They've been dangling the "access" carrot on a stick in front of myopic shareholders and corporate management for 30 years, without ever delivering.
It's great if they want to grow their internal economy. But call a duck a duck: it's done at the expense of freedom for anyone who chooses to engage.
"Aren't the Chinese essentially just playing on foreign greed"
Sure they are.
I'm not an expert but my perception is that China is using two carrots: cheap labour and big markets.
If you are foreign capital, in order to profit you need to create a "mix enterprise" with local capital. The result is that they get the know-how and knowledge and they diminish the chance of relocation to cheaper places.
When they sell their products abroad, they also get foreign currency that allow them to import technology and expertise.
That is very well done.
If you think this is morally wrong (even if every developed country did it), considered the following:
"according to the World Bank, more than 500 million people were lifted out of extreme poverty as China’s poverty rate fell from 88 percent in 1981 to 6.5 percent in 2012"
(from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_China)
500 million people. That justify a little trickery I think.
Compare that to the morality of people in IMF and other institutions that advice poor countries (in collusion with corrupt local authorities) to open totally their markets.
@RobertoG, do you have some book to recommend about what you said "You can't industrialize a country without protection."
I don't like the protecting laws of my country, avoiding cheaper and better products coming here. I would like to understand more about this, I hope I am wrong disliking this.
It didn't even work for the USA! We built our power on conquest, slavery, and industrial piracy. Don't know much about protectionism, but even without it, that seems like plenty.
Pre-WWII, the US absolutely taxed the hell out of foreign imports to protect northern industry. It only switched to a free-trade policy after the war wiped out most of Europe's industrial capacity.
Yeah, one of the arguments I heard to why India couldn't accomplish any rapid economic development was their lack of protectionism until recent years, then again protectionism alone is not enough.
To add a thought, invitations to foreign companies and investments can drown out local cultures with foreign personalities. This can be detrimental to what makes the country special and reduces the purpose of why they should ever prosper.
Essentially: if you turn your country into {other country, except with cheaper labor}, then you kill the uniqueness of your national identity. Which is one of the biggest assets you ultimately have in international trade, if all countries were economically alike.
You say "that is false", but all you have is a quote in French, and a link to a paper in French that most of us can't read. Can you make your case in a more accessible way?
We shouldn't be surprised that most emerging economies have gone from high protectionism to low because they started from a position with high protectionism, and lowered it under advice and pressure from the first world--with very good results. Meanwhile, many countries in South America and Africa are doing things the protectionist way, with very poor results.
French is not particularly inaccessible; nowadays particularly I find Google Translate always at least gives the gist of the meaning. Here's my translation, made by taking Google's and retranslating the bits it took liberties with to be a bit more literal. (Note that I have very little knowledge of French, but this translation was relatively straightforward.)
> In effect, one cannot historically find a single case where a country at an early stage of its economic development would have developed through its opening to international competition. Development has always been attracted [lit. "baited to consent"] with a certain degree of protection that has been diminished as the economy has strengthened sufficiently to face external competition. But such a process extends over many years, not to mention the prerequisite which consists, in the case of the ACP [I believe this is the "États d'Afrique, Caraïbes et Pacifique", parties to the Cotonou Agreement], of the putting in place and operation of regional structures.
IMHO, quote the authentic language and a translation is the best you can do.
FWIW, I actually less trust a translated version from main stream media outlets, which 1) unlikely to report this type of narrative; 2) highly likely to cut out of context and interpret creatively.
I could ask the reverse: "why isn't China more successful?"
It's such a complicated issue that you could argue almost anything. I think any discussion must acknowledge Hong Kong, however, as an important data point.
My opinion is that the Communist party, even despite its "GDP obsession" [1], has gotten in the way more than anything.
As an (admittedly, very rough) estimate, if you take Hong Kong's GDP per person and multiply it by China's population, you get $58 trillion.
Compared to what? to a contra-factual or to a real country?
Because 500 million people out of extreme poverty sounds pretty successfully to me. Specially if we compare it to any other country following more "open" strategies.
Compared to South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore or Hong Kong, which started just as poor as mainland China 60 years ago but leapt way ahead. And if the response is that China faced more difficulty due to the larger population, then surely the best approach would have been to split it up into multiple smaller countries?
I don't even know how to address such a naive argument. Split the country into pieces? It doesn't take a political scientist to see how impractical this is. I didn't realize economic growth became a goal of such paramount importance to the government, that it should consider willingly breaking itself apart to achieve it.
Just one counterargument I can see - China floundered economically under Mao, and only in the late 70s did real economic reform under Deng Xiaoping happen. An effective timeframe of <40 years, not 60-70. I'm sure other Asian countries experienced poor leadership at times, but to this degree? To stagnate as heavily as China did under Mao?
Lastly, size definitely matters, in terms of both geography and population. Even today a huge number of the population is dispersed across the rural regions. How can economic prosperity reach them? Much easier in other Asian countries for growth to accumulate in centralized economic centers and start improving the welfares of the population at large.
The argument for trade hinges on competitive advantage. Each country should produce what it is most efficient at producing based on its resources.
In this way China has indeed rode the wave of globalization because its bountiful cheap labor made it suited to manufacturing small goods for richer economies.
The capital accumulated through these activities were reinvested so that Chinese companies could move into more value added industries like electronics, automobiles, aerospace, and services, which is possible because China has a deep well of human capital (i.e. people) who have a strong work ethic and are eager to learn new skills.
Moreover, because China has both a gigantic internal market and vast human resources, it's possible that Chinese suppliers can have a competitive advantage in virtually every industry, making the benefits of external trade less obvious. (This was China's attitude towards Europeans during colonial times too - that trade was unnecessary because they had nothing of value to China).
Or if Chinese suppliers currently don't have a competitive advantage in terms of price or quality, the government can use protectionist policies to shield those industries until they do have an advantage.
You might say that China has played all the right cards in the game of globalization. Donald Trump had been saying it for a long time.
Two major factors of China's apparent success are cheap labor and creative reporting.
The country's problems, aka the price paid for the industrial success, are a bit less prominently seen. Western countries faced the same problems (pollution, bad work conditions, etc) at the time of their first industrial revolutions, but by now are totally unwilling to pay such a price any more.
We need globalization for the larger markets and the exchange of goods from other countries that have a comparative advantage. China has one of the largest markets within its own borders so it can afford to be protectionist. (this will quickly change)
Also to mention, the biggest bottleneck to US economic growth during the Ford era was was the lack of workers which is why opening our doors to crowded Europe gave us a boost.
China on the other hand still has plenty of workers to fill its mills.
> Also to mention, the biggest bottleneck to US economic growth during the Ford era was was the lack of workers which is why opening our doors to crowded Europe gave us a boost.
Actually during the Ford era, we went on an anti-immigration phase.
Assuming the Ford era began in 1900, we could say this was towards the end of the Ford era. I guess we had overdone on immigration and started regretting it.
China's GDP per capita is still somewhere between #70 and #80 in the world[1]. It just happens to be a big country with lots of people.
If the US or most other western countries had same number of people is China, they would be doing much better. Also to go out on a limb a bit, you could probably draw a graph which shows a correlation between China relaxing its protectionism and its GDP increasing at a faster rate as a result.
It seems to me that hypothetical graph would be one of GDP increasing and, as a consequence, relaxing protectionism in selected sectors.
If you don't have a development plan, capital just create bubbles and then left the country in search of bigger profits. What is important is the creation of infrastructure and knowledge in the country that will work for its citizens. I don't know why this is a proposition so disputed. It seems that having a plan is always good except if we talk about economy.
Almost all the increment in the world reduction of poverty are due to China, but it's sold to us as a consequence of less protectionism.
Maybe, at the end of the day, what make China successful is that is too big to be bullied.
> We have it pounded into our heads that we need globalization in the form of open markets with no protectionism for US companies and immigration
That's because we went through a neoliberal shift after ww2. Prior to ww2, we were leaders of protectionism.
"According to Paul Bairoch, since the end of the 18th century, the United States has been "the homeland and bastion of modern protectionism". In fact, the United States never adhered to free trade until 1945."
We needed protectionism in order to protect our much younger companies/industries so that they can develop and grow and compete against more established british/european companies.
> yet china almost completely locks out foreign businesses and takes next to no immigrants and is obviously a quickly growing global superpower.
They need protectionism in order for their own companies or industries to develop. Otherwise, western corporations would just flood in and own the chinese market.
The problem is when chinese industries mature and their own markets get saturated, they are going to be in the same situation as the US/West. They are going to want to open up markets a round the world to sell their goods to and invest their excess capital.
I believe China's strategy is to allow foreign business to operate to a certain extent to provide a competitive impetus to their local favored companies. Basically I think their strategy is, inside China the foreign company will be allowed to have a market share of 20% to 50%, if it exceeds that they will create obstacles, as their own preferred (i.e. Chinese controlled) companies figure out how to compete.
Once it is competitive they will subsidize it (via. redistribution from financial repression of lower & middle class individuals to below market financing of businesses, and compliant regulation i.e. no unions, lax pollution) to give it an advantage to gain market share globally.
Regarding immigration, they already have a huge labor supply and if they need more I think they will prefer to do it by exporting their political and managerial apparatus, rather than importing bodies. For example their investments in Africa, and Australia: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/06/world/australia/china-pol... .
I'm curious, I'm a bit ignorant but what kind of novel things has china produced?
Has there ever been a huge advance in either software or hardware where the western world copied China? A brand new amazing programming language, a world changing battery technology, a cure for a big disease, etc?
I've seen a few interesting CS papers, but I don't keep up to much. As far as I can tell, all the biggest advancements are being done by companies here.
China is quite impressive in how they keep up in their own little bubble with their 1B people, but it's one thing to reimplement Google/Youtube, it's another thing to create new world changing technologies.
Recently? Lots of research, of course. The big recent medical one would probably be artemisinin, an important malaria drug. In terms of novel consumer products, I think the major one is the e-cigarette.
The US has never had or been a free market. "Free trade" is propaganda used to forcefully open foreign markets to US businesses looking for further growth.
This a false equivalence. The internet was designed from ground up to be borderless and untrammeled. Free trade was an initiative to tear down barriers around trade. The US government never had to request any other government to link up to the internet which is why their involvement in Google was not necessary.
Otoh, if you look at an state visit, every head of state brings along a trade delegation whose goal is to ease trade.
> As an international website building platform, obtaining an ICP license for China is very important to our users. The actual process of obtaining an ICP license though is quite complex. With Alibaba Cloud’s built-in and easy-to-follow ICP application process, it has helped with our user experience a lot.
Seems like it's killer feature is China ICP license made easy.