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Comment by adi2907 | Hacker News Reader

China never allowed unfettered access to global firms. Since Deng Xiaoping opened up, the rule for a foreign firm to gain access was 1) to tie up with a local company which will have significant stake and 2) ensure technology transfer to the local company over a period. This was a pre condition for market access, and basically how electronics components makers were built. The recent stars like Huawei, Xiaomi and Lenovo could only be built once the supply ecosystem was local. You will not find a single example of any country becoming developed following free trade except for island nations like Singapore

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" You will not find a single example of any country becoming developed following free trade except for island nations like Singapore"

Canada, Australia, New Zealand and in reality, the US as well.

The US has always been pretty open.

But yes, if a nation is in shambles, it may very well make sense to make major strategic investments for the national good, but ultimately, it can't last.

Korea, Japan etc. would be much poorer today if they had continued to manage their economies in a post-war fashion.

The US being open is mostly the postwar period. Tariffs were huge pre-WWII, in fact the Great Depression was probably exacerbated by rounds of tariff retaliation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariff_in_United_States_histor...

New Zealand has fallen further and further behind its nearest neighbor over the time it's taken a hard-line free-trade position.

That's not a very critical look at the situation.

Australia has major advantages when it comes to natural resources and geographic proximity to Asia. There's also major structural issues with the Australian economy with significant agitation at present for major taxation and industrial relations reform.

As I said, China is now able to afford protectionism because of a much more foreign investment minded policy than India. It's weird to only focus on protectionism being a positive when almost all of the more protectionist countries are way behind economically. China has been the most successful when it has had the least closed economy and it didn't start producing Lenovo laptops because of protectionism. If that was the case, why don't we have Indian or Argentinian laptops by now?

Arguing that protectionism is good because you are producing beverages when the downside is literal decades lost to anemic growth and poverty is just missing the forest for the tree. India was at a similar but better place than China was, but China embraced foreign investment, liberalization, low friction to trade. And india got totally leapfrogged. Things are changing now, but for a while China was definitely much safer to invest in than India since the whole country was hellbent on not interfering with foreign investing. You were (and still are) much more likely to get your investment made worthless by aggressive "local at all costs" policies in India than in China. Look at what happened to Walmart recently. India wants desperately to skip the "industrialization" and foreign ownership phase and go directly to where china is now, but that's ignoring 30 years of smart policy in China.

Keep in mind, free trade and free international markets still allow for a very regulated economy and socialist policies. So protectionism, by reducing prosperity and investment actually cripples social programs. Scandinavia is known to be "social democrat" but still has a very open economy. Prosperity has been mostly induced by free movement of goods. Of course, China does not want to keep being a manufacturing only economy, and is moving towards a service oriented one. But that's what always happens

I agree with your comment. First you want to drag your country up to the same level everyone is at. Usually this is done by letting investors into your country because they will do the same thing they did at home. Only once the investors have established a profitable and self sufficient industry it is time to kick them out.

Someone also mentioned that Brazil is putting tarrifs on foreign goods. This is fine but there should be an exemption for foreign companies operating within the borders of your country. The exemption would apply to products assembled within Brazil. That way Apple could decide to build a factory in Brazil and provide job opportunities.

> You will not find a single example of any country becoming developed following free trade except for island nations like Singapore

So you will.

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