China Briefing | Chinese must live with a dead Baidu, as Google’s return looks doomed
- As Trump teases us with a breakthrough in his US-China trade war talks with Xi Jinping, markets breathe a sigh of relief
- But any deal looks unlikely to break down that biggest barrier to China’s digital economy: the Great Firewall
While details of the agreement are wrapped in secrecy, Trump cited “substantial progress” on issues including intellectual property protection, forced technology transfer, agriculture, services, and currency.
Commentators in Chinese state media expressed optimism and started to prep citizens that those so-called “concessions” the government was previously reluctant to make were in fact the measures it would have to undertake anyway to move the economy forward and improve people’s living standards.
But the agreement, comprehensive as it sounds, is most likely to miss out one major area of contention: China’s Great Firewall and other barriers to the opening up of its digital economy.
Judging by media reports and official statements from both countries, the digital world has not been high on the agenda of Chinese and American negotiators, other than in relation to US allegations of cyber theft by the Chinese – an issue that was discussed alongside that of forced technology transfer.
