TOKYO, April 25, 2023—Chinese consumers’ ranting and calls to boycott BMW cars following the ice cream giveaway discrimination incident at this year’s Shanghai motor show is a familiar montage of Chinese uproars against the foreign dominance having reverberated in other consumer products and likely to continue until Chinese products command critical mass global market shares – like solar panels.
Smartphones sold in China had been those assembled in China or imported from mother countries of Japan, South Korea, European nations and the United States. Save Apple’s iPhones, Samsung, SONY, Google and probably others folded their Chinese manufacturing operations by around 2020, deciding that they cannot compete with their Chinese rivals that had for years did manufacturing work on a so-called ‘original equipment manufacturing’ arrangement that enabled Huawei, Xiaomi, OPPO, Vivo, and others to acquire western proprietary smartphone technologies.
If smartphones are the latest high-tech area that China is gaining its and global market shares (though it’s being hamstrung by the U.S. chip sanctions), it has expanded into television, encroaching world markets for low-cost LCD products. Chinese OEM companies had effectively stole manufacturing tech from Panasonic and SONY, for example, by letting workers produce Chinese brandname TVs at night after daytime manufacturing of Japanese products.
And decades earlier, China was given critically-vital steel-making technology at Baoshan integrated steel plant built with Japanese government foreign aid as part of Japan’s war compensation in the 1980s, when China lagged decades behind western countries in making much-needed steel products.
China also acquired solar panel making technology from Japan’s Sharp, Sanyo and other makers that aggressively set production facilities in China – only to be pilfered by Chinese businesses through joint venture requirements that favored the Chinese, diplomacy, and industrial espionage.
Now, it has steel – though still far from conquering the world market; solar panels, EV batteries (n-but not controlling tech because it cannot access to advanced chip technologies), while its space program is set to set human foot on the Mars as the first humans.
So the Chinese are resolved to be No. 1, dominate Planet Earth, managing the population of 6 billion from the center of the universe (which is China’s country name). So it was not surprising to see the BMW ice cream incident. ‘Don’t underestimate the Chinese! Kowtow to us! Tienamen Square is the center of the world!’
###