Just a month after China pledged to overhaul its foreign investment laws to be more "open, fair and transparent", an Australian company has discovered that elevated talk in Beijing is very different from practical implementation in the provinces. In a case likely to feed into global concerns around China's trade practices, the ASX-listed Orcoda has lost its court battle to have China Mobile, a giant state-owned enterprise, pay a $4.1 million trade debt. The case stems from an agreement Orcoda, previously known as Smartrans, had to supply games and other products to China Mobile. Under the revenue-sharing agreement Orcoda expected to receive around half of the money generated from its products, with the remainder going to China Mobile for access to its platform. In practice Orcoda was paid around 20 per cent of the revenue generated and so initiated legal action last year at a court in Nanjing, the capital of Jiangsu Province. The court found in favour of China Mobile earlier this month, even though it failed to mount any substantive defence against the arguments advanced by Orcoda, according to chief executive Brendan Mason. "When the defendant in a court case, a state-owned enterprise, fails to provide the evidence requested by the court, and yet still wins the case, there has clearly been a fundamental breakdown in the process," Mr Mason said. "The decision appears to be in violation of a number of the articles in the recently released draft of the Foreign Investment Law." Mr Mason, a former head of Cochlear in China, said the company will appeal the decision and is being assisted by the Australian Embassy in Beijing. While China's courts are notoriously biased against those who threaten the Communist Party, there had been some movement towards making commercial disputes more independent. Growing criticism The complication for Orcoda is that China Mobile, while listed in Hong Kong, is controlled by the party and therefore any judge would be brave to rule against it. Orcoda, a software company with a market value of just $18 million, is not the first Australian company to have difficulty getting paid in China. The ASX-listed gas producer Sino Gas & Energy had long periods of not getting paid by its state-owned customers and then last year accepted a $530 million takeover bid, partly due to the risks of doing business in China. In response to growing criticism around the difficulty for foreign companies operating in China, Beijing released new draft laws late last year. Under the proposed legislation the government pledged to provide equal treatment for foreign investors while providing greater intellectual property protections. The laws pledged to "set up and improve the mechanism facilitating foreign investment" and to create an "open, fair and transparent" business environment for foreign companies. The changes are part of Beijing's efforts to avert further US tariffs on Chinese goods, as US President Donald Trump threatens to step up his trade war. He has accused Beijing of stealing intellectual property from US companies and forcing them to hand over the technology in order to access the mainland market. "We have been ripped off by China for a long time," Mr Trump has often said. https://www.afr.com/news/world/asia...ina-mobile-pay-41m-trade-debt-20190121-h1aauh
I've heard of other companies doing business in good faith in China, spending months or years to come up with a commercial agreement, doing the deal, but only to find weeks later that the deal has been "changed" and nothing could be done - accept it or leave. Western-value morals are hard to find there. I fear China will be the next mafia overlord of humanity and the space-race to colonize/harvest asteroids will be the next wild west. Watch "The Expanse" (now sponsored by Jeff Bezos) for a future view of humanity but substitute China into the mix.
Well the West will just have to be more careful with China from now on especially that China doesn't really need the West that much anymore and China sees the West needs more from China now.
Not _really_ true. OK if China stops shipping their underpriced shit to us, we'll suffer for a bit, but so will they. What other country or group of countries is willing to consume at that level? None. In the meantime, we can rebuild our own capacities.
Deglobalisation and Automated 3D Printing is the end game for most countries, but to China it is the death blow and likely to never recover peak... They are by far world's largest manufacturer and exporter. By 2030, already 15-25 % of jobs will be eliminated in China, numbers can be argued to be slightly higher or lower, but concept is intact... End 2017 data showed workforce of 776 Million, 20 % job loss would represent 155 Million people without jobs, in a country where cost of life has gone up substantially due to non stop QE and quality of life rise, will be hard for government to contain considering inflation is climbing at a fast rate there https://www.houstonchronicle.com/bu...ollow-out-the-American-workforce-13543295.php
Well India as soon as we start to train them to become the next world factory for them to get richer. China basically became rich by providing cheap labour and that role can be fulfilled by any country that has a sizeable population. And besides once we establish the robotics technology, we won't even need cheap human labour anymore.
That is my point... Take this example, If you have 50 % unemployment on 100 Million people, 50 Million not working... If you have 50 % unemployment on 1.4 Billion people, that is 700 Million people not working. We are entering era of joblessness, AI, automation and robotics, smaller countries with much smaller servicing will be advantageous I believe, easier to control poverty on a small scale then a India/China scale Unemployment and social servicing will cost China a lottt of money, considering there insane debt levels of today, along with this financially retarded reluctance of slowing down a notch to reel it in and regroup. They are flooring the printing presses, crazy how there leadership is destroying there economy by incompetence, considering they are severely nationalists... Fed is leeching country on purpose, when you look closely how wealth gets extracted. In China, it's plain stupidity by financial planners, I don't think there out to wreck it on purpose, just clueless and now only realizing
That is turning out not to be the case any more. Plenty of other Southeast Asian countries are stepping in to the cheap labor/shipping arbitrage game. China does not have a healthy, organic technology development and transfer infrastructure. Without State sponsored financed and coordinated intellectual property theft they are just another cheap labor center. Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan each have far greater organic technology development ecosystems than China. By far. Chinese wages have been growing for the past several years. In fact, since 2010 the three largest beneficiaries of lost Chinese manufacturing jobs has been Vietnam, Mexico, and the United States.