John Minnich

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268 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 6 Aug

John Minnich’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Unhedged · The Economics Show: China wanted western tech. Now, the tables have turned. · 6 Aug 2026 podcast

Great to be here.

Thank you for having me.

I would say the core idea, I would give an 8 or a 9.

You know, one of the things I've learned from my research on China and technology transfer policies in China is that technology transfer policy alone is seldom the only or decisive factor that's going to get you from 0 to 1.

But an 8 or a 9 because I think that this should absolutely be an integral part of any policy package that European or the American government in the future pursue.

if they want to get technology transfer from China.

I'd say where I'm a little bit more skeptical in the case of advanced industrial economies, especially liberal democratic governments, is when it comes to execution, because getting it right, so to speak, requires a real tolerance for waste and efficiency, a lot of failure, but also a capacity to sort of iteratively improve along the way.

And with that, a kind of flexibility that honestly, at this point, I don't know, but I'm not

particularly confident in Western government's capacity to do.

Yes, and my own interest in technology transfer policy really did begin with the – I guess what we would now call the first U.S.-China trade war that began in 2018.

And I think like a lot of people who follow U.S.-China relations and who study China, I found myself at that time wondering how on earth we got here.

And what I realized was that despite Trump's rhetorical emphasis on the trade balance, if you actually looked at the documents that outlined the U.S.

government's rationale for imposing trade sanctions on China in 2018 –

the Section 301 investigation report that was published in March of 2018, what you see is that that entire document, I think the word trade imbalance comes up maybe once in a footnote.

But the entire document is about so-called forced technology transfer and intellectual property theft.

Now, I say so-called not because there wasn't on some level a coercive element to this.

There absolutely was.

But the reality and one thing that I explore in my research is that many of the tech transfer arrangements that Western multinationals entered into with Chinese counterparts…

during this period, in particular, following China's accession to the WTO, were basically consensual.

Foreign companies were desperate to gain access to the Chinese market and were very glad to hand over technology in return.

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