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Why does this require putting stuff on boats? If a Chinese retiree purchases an iPhone or gets a US-developed biologic drug or watches a Marvel fillm, much of that value flows back to the US without putting anything on a physical boat. They may fly a plane with a GE90 engine on it or use an AI assistant running on Nvidia GPUs.
I agree that they are entitled to sell their T-bills and spend the money, my disagreement is whether most of those purchases will be physical goods (let alone from the US, rather than from a third country) rather than services/IP.
Is there any practical reason why China couldn’t simply pirate all of the entertainment IP they wanted? As if we won’t soon have AI capable of turning a shitty camrip into a feature-quality product?
That AI will almost certainly run on a GPU fabricated in Taiwan.
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China is a party to the Berne Convention and WIPO treaty and at least in theory has corresponding treaty obligations. I'm not aware of treaty-defined sanctions for violations, but they probably exist. Although "the West considers Chinese copyrights and trademarks void" probably isn't as large a punishment as the reverse today.
spits to remove foul taste of voicing support for current copyright system
American pirated versions of gacha games that give everything for free and have all the girls say 'Long Live Great President Donald Trump' would be a cultural victory similar in impact to the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Would people still play gacha if they got everything for free? I thought half the addiction was like "gotta roll 500 more times to get enough teddy bears and parfaits to marry Ibuki!"
Maybe I just hang out with too many weird Blue Archive players.
Highly doubt it. Everyone I know who plays gacha is motivated by the resources from the daily/weekly missions rather than the feats of completing a particularly difficult mission or the joy of the gameplay.
Langrisser is great for F2P challenge accounts with a deliberately gimped roster. Arknights is also good in that regard.
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I think he would agree with you. He put the obligatory "...and services" in several places, but did happen to omit it in that one blockquote. I don't think it was intentional.
Fair.
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The Chinese are still importing turbines for now. But iPhones are down to third place behind vivo and huawei. It's harder to find concrete figures on movies, but every article agrees that the sale of Hollywood movies in China is in steep decline (absolutely, not just proportionally to domestic sales)
So at this rate in another decade we may have very little left to sell China that those retirees actually want. Other than land, of course.
That doesn't mean that a third country that wants US goods/IP/brands won't have something to offer them.
The beauty of free trade is that you can set up arbitrary such chains of trade -- China wants something from X who wants something from {Y,Z} who want Coca Cola and Levis and RTX4080s
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