Is this just whataboutery, or can you please explain how your argument is supposed to work?
IP is the ultimate human creation, it has no basis in the physical world. If pretending ideas are property puts China at a disadvantage there isn't a moral or practical reason to do it.
The US can also choose to place massive tariffs on any goods coming out of China, making them highly uncompetitive. Their choice, it looks like.
Only in a hypothetical scenario where it's a battle of equals.
But China has worked itself into a corner now for several reasons:
1. It imports so little from the U.S. that it's almost out of stuff to put tariffs on.
2. Most of the things it imports from the U.S. are used in manufacturing in China, and then sold back to the U.S. as a finished product. So China's own tariff makes Chinese goods more expensive and less attractive in the U.S.
3. China still needs to import a metric ass-ton of soybeans from the U.S. It tried getting them elsewhere, like Brazil, but every other soybean-growing country saw the opportunity and raised prices. So putting additional tariffs on American soybeans will make food cost more in China, and there's nothing China can do about it.
I've heard there's additional pressure on China in regards to the soybean situation because harvest is already over for soybeans in the southern hemisphere. And you know who's sitting on a ton of soybeans ready for export? The U.S.
I don't know enough about soybean growing cycles to say if that last paragraph is still true or accurate, though.
IP theft is illegal in pretty much the entire industrialized world. China's big, but it's not bigger than everyone else combined.
There are dozens of supposed reasons to start a trade war with China, but most of those "reasons" are just saber rattling.
If we aren't going to start a trade war (or a real war!) Over things like Tibet, or the humans rights violations, or the million people that China has put into camps, then I don't see how something morally silly such as IP laws would be the tipping point.
I wasn't intending to use that comparison as a real justification of China's infringement; your point is a much better one as far as that goes. I brought up U.S. history in response to the characterization of China's culture as particularly disrespectful of "the rules and customs of other cultures."