Techno-trade war update: American companies want to stay in China

A new survey from the U.S.-China Business Council is out, and its key findings show that the rhetoric in Washington over the past couple of years is pretty far out of step from the reality on the ground in China, at least according to the members of the U.S.-China Business Council:

• Eighty-seven percent of American companies do not plan to leave China, and of those who have moved or plan to move operations outside the country, they are three times more likely to move to a third country rather than back to the U.S.
• Profits are healthy: “The number of respondents reporting a profit margin rate for their China operations that is higher than that of their overall operations jumped from 38 to 46 percent in 2019.”
• Companies unanimously said that intellectual property protection had either stayed the same or improved, though they also overwhelmingly had concerns about the enforcement of intellectual property protections.
• “Technology transfers…ranked 24 out of the 27 possible top challenges companies face in the China market.”
• “Made in China 2025 (MIC 2025), has reportedly had limited impact on the majority of American companies surveyed. In a shift of sentiment, the number of companies indicating that MIC 2025 offered positive opportunities for their business in 2019 has nearly doubled since 2018.”

Just two other updates to note related to the trade war:

There was a big fentanyl bust in Virginia: Per the AP, “Law enforcement officials in the US state of Virginia said on Thursday that they had taken down a multi-state drug ring and seized enough cheap fentanyl from China to kill 14 million people… One of the 39 people charged is accused of ordering fentanyl from a vendor in Shanghai.”

The Fujian Jinhua case is moving slowly: “10 months after the U.S. Justice Department unveiled the case amid an escalating trade war, a trial is still long way off for the Chinese company, a Taiwan-based firm and three Taiwanese nationals jointly indicted for stealing secrets from Idaho-based Micron Technology,” Bloomberg reports via Yahoo Finance.

Photo: Freeman Zhou, Unsplash