The amount of institutional knowledge baked into our industries is simply mind-boggling. The only reason we can get away with outsourcing manufacturing in the first place is because this knowledge is so amazingly thorough.
If you're ever around the Beijing airport, you'll notice a mushroom patch of well-known non-Chinese companies' facilities. The one constant? More security around the buildings than a military base.
I'm not one to beat the US / European nationalistic gong, but it's a fact that the Chinese government has specifically targeted foreign industries to force into tech transfer. And foreign governments generally haven't done anything meaningful about it.
The Chinese have a long view on this stuff. If you put out an engineering RFP, you can be sure that Chinese companies and government are probably the biggest web consumers of your content.
And as for who is forcing foreign companies to do this? Hilariously enough, capitalism. Multinationals can't afford to miss selling to the Chinese market, or their board / shareholder's vote them out. So they're left to strike the best deal they can get, given that the outcome is already known by both parties. (Exceptions like Google exist, but it does have an atypical stock structure)
From the Minneapolis Fed (2016), https://www.minneapolisfed.org/research/economic-policy-pape... (the first authoritative source I could find):
"China’s quid pro quo policy also helps account for the unusual global investment flow. Chinese policy requires multinational firms that want access to China’s huge market to transfer partial property rights to their technology, often through R&D centers or joint ventures with Chinese firms (Holmes, McGrattan and Prescott 2015a, 2015b)."
I think it's got more to do with having decade long focus under a single leadership than have politicians floundering to get reelected every 5 years.
Because the indian government didn't demand it as a condition of entry like the chinese government did.
Have you never wondered why western companies have to engage in 50/50 ventures with chinese companies into china instead of just entering china like they do every other country?
Look up Hero Honda, Maruti Suzuki etc. What happened was that the MNCs weren't interested at all. India followed with liberalization and removal of such "license raj" in 1991. Economy has done much better since.
DJI hires high quality Chinese engineers. Their software is better than what American consumer drone companies manage to push out, and they can push the latest tech to market insanely quick, as GoPro learned the hard way when they found out DJI was a half generation ahead of them on drone tech.
DJI has great customer service, an amazing insurance plan that provides piece of mind, and bullet proof build quality.
They do have a major advantage of being in China, so they can work with suppliers much more directly. It doesn't feel like they are using the grey technology market though. A lot of the lower priced drones are obviously put together from Shenzen part bins, but DJI just feels good all around.
That said, their Android mobile app is a bit janky at times. Then again, lots of stuff on Android is a bit janky...
Go read the DJI hardware/software support forums.
Never. Again.
To be fair, from what I understand the no fly zone restrictions thing actually does require geolocation lookup and I think those no fly zones can change, so pinging a server and checking in makes sense.
From just a pure telemetry perspective, knowing where people are flying the drones at is useful for product development and marketing.
(In response, DJI did release a privacy mode that doesn't need internet.)
A sizable % of websites visited want geo-location data, which, at times, gets sold on the open market!
Then there are background phone apps that grab location data. Even when rate limited, once every half an hour is plenty enough to figure out where Military Secret is at.
Infosec, it is a thing for a reason.
Not exactly. Issue a map file with the no-fly zones as shapes (as easy as possible to save on space) and embed it with a creation timestamp. Force an update every 30 days - have the app download the file and upload it to the drone. Manipulating the drone time won't work as it gets its time directly from GPS.
Also these patch files should not clock in too much - the entirety of Europe's streets can be squeezed into ~3 GB (download size of full Navigon EU map set)... I'd assume a 512MB flash chip would be sufficient to store all the world's no fly zones.
Bootstrapping a tech economy gets a lot easier when people hand you the keys to the kingdom in exchange for short-term profits, without even requiring equal access to your domestic market in return.