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Of Mao and markets in China - May 24, 2007

Nick Kristof has a provocative op-ed [sub. req.] in today’s NYTimes on China, DVD piracy and trade sanctions.

The money graf: “Sure, China pirates movies and software—but the U.S. was even worse at this stage of development (when we used to infuriate England by stealing its literary properties without paying royalties).”

Through much of the 19^th Century, in fact, English authors and publishers had no legal recourse at all, since the U.S. did not recognize foreign copyrights.

Kristof, who was Beijing bureau chief for the Times during the Tiananmen Square massacre, goes on to describe a visit he recently paid to a DVD shop in the Chinese capital, comparing the shopkeepers’ ingenuity favorably to the street corner sellers of bootleg DVDs in Manhattan.

“Then the two saleswomen…tugged at a bookshelf, which rolled forward on wheels. Behind was a door; one of the saleswomen whisked me into a secret room full of pirated DVDs” of American movies.

“That’s piracy,” Kristof acknowledges, “but also capitalism at its harshest and hungriest. There are plenty of reasons to put pressure on China, including its imprisonment of journalists and its disgraceful role in supplying the weaponry used to commit genocide in Darfur. But whining about the efficiency of Chinese capitalism is beneath us.”

Whining about the efficiency of Chinese capitalism. An interesting way to describe Washington’s recent legal action against China in the World Trade Organization over piracy.

For decades since the victory of the Chinese Communists in 1948 [$$], the U.S. has pressed China to adopt a market economy and open itself to the system of global commerce.

Now it is doing that, with a vengeance, but we’ve decided we don’t like what their new market-based system is so efficiently churning out.

Yet another reason to be careful what you wish for.

 

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