John Minnich

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

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

So China was incredibly dependent on exports during this period.

And what that meant is that foreign shipmakers were in a relatively strong bargaining position vis-a-vis the Chinese government, where they could push back on any demands that Beijing would make to share technology, and they could mobilize their allies and local governments, which were also very dependent on the export growth that they generated, to help them lobby the central government to remove or to refrain from introducing these policies in the first place.

there absolutely are numerous cases where foreign firms made these kinds of threats or communicated that if the Chinese government were to introduce stringent technology transfer requirements, that they would be forced to find options elsewhere.

And this was a very live threat for China, especially in the early 2000s, because we weren't yet at the stage then that we are now, where China has something approaching a monopoly on

various forms of manufacturing such that foreign firms essentially can't leave the Chinese supply chain.

That wasn't yet there in the early 2000s.

So I think from Chinese authorities' perspective, they were very cognizant of these kinds of threats.

And for them, people I've interviewed have talked about how these are people who worked at major American semiconductor companies that were involved in these kinds of negotiations in China in the early 2000s, that they were very aware, that the

basically had nothing but the export engine, and they were very reticent to do anything that would upset the growth and vitality of that export engine.

Apple is a really great case and I think in many ways is actually an extension of the broader logic of the role that from China's perspective being embedded as an intermediate processing hub in these value chains, the ways that that constrains the Chinese government's bargaining power or policy space.

And in a sense, when I talk specifically about semiconductors, we can think about that applying more broadly to many parts of electronics manufacturing because that was, of course, where China was very deeply embedded in these supply chains as an export processing hub.

The Apple case is really interesting, though, because –

I think it actually speaks to some of the dynamics that begin to shift over time in the semiconductor or broader consumer electronics industry, which is to say in the early post-WTO period, because most of what foreign firms were doing in China wasn't selling to the Chinese market, but using China as a production base to service customers elsewhere.

And that gave these foreign firms a lot of leverage vis-a-vis China.

Well, what we see is over the course of the 2010s in particular,

With the growth of a domestic consumer electronics market in China, some of that bargaining power begins to shift back in China's favor.

And in fact, by the middle of the 2010s, we see China beginning to put really significant pressure on a lot of electronics companies and chip makers specifically to begin to share more technology.

So in 2016, Qualcomm enters into a joint venture with a Chinese company in response to an antitrust action, but it was effectively canceled.

A backdoor technology transfer policy.

We begin to see Intel, Western Digital, various other chip makers form these kinds of partnerships largely under duress or under pressure from the Chinese government.

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