China's state-sponsored IP theft has been called the largest transfer of wealth in history. I'm honestly curious what the best diplomatic strategy is to combat it, other than declaring war.
It’s nothing new though. IP theft has a long and honorable history. It’s only recently that we have decided that it’s such a terrible thing, now that we own so much of the IP in question.
There's no good way of combating it that doesn't end in war. Sanctions will lead to more Chinese public support for that war. Perhaps this leads the CCP to become complacent and fight us before they can win. That's probably the best conventional scenario (for the West)
Unconventional scenario: We steal traditional Chinese medicine and deny we took it. It achieves pretty much nothing but hopefully some Chinese people will understand why we did it and realise their government was naughty.
We can just start stealing back Chinese IP. They're inventing and designing a lot of their own stuff now -- fabs, for example. Let's just do industrial espionage and use it to build up domestic production!
The same way the MPAA sues single mothers for quintillions of dollars.
Copyright, patents, and trademarks are all just customs to facilitate creation. They run counter to the obvious Schelling point of information being easily propagated. Bundling these customs up into "IP", attempting to cement them into some iron-clad property regime, and then complaining when that is not respected is mostly just a symptom of western corruption.
The immediate remedy is tariffs that compensate for the lack of royalties for goods imported back into the western market. The longer term solution is to accept the reality, and hope that as China develops they will want to buy into the paradigm.
