Kicking and Screaming to Dinner

The Financial Times has a good article about the kind of diplomacy the Chinese have when visiting.
[ Geoff Dyer and Richard Waters, High-tech diplomacy, 12 September 2015 ]  The article is complete with a picture of Presidents Obama and Xi, where both look like they are giving religious blessings to the masses.

The companies invited to dinner with the leaders are bracketed between differences over "cyber crime, intellectual property rights, spying, market access, and governance of the internet" and they don't much like being caught in the middle.  One described it as 'not far short of a summons' from the Chinese, yet they are not anxious to be a part of it.  They don't like having China steal from them, but they are not fond of the sanctions which the Obama Administration has proposed and may start implementing before Xi touches down in the U.S.  Businesses hate this kind of tension, especially global ones operating in both China and the U.S.

These are leaders who believe we can out-innovate China and continue to make money at the same time.  They are willing to compromise with new regulations in China which make it impossible to keep secrets from the Chinese government, which then plows stolen technology back into competition for these same businesses.  Tell me the logic of this.

Where are the shareholders of these companies - the IBMs, Microsofts, Apples and Ciscos of the world?  Can they justify letting the Chinese have a long term technology pump sucking out the trade secrets and intellectual property of their companies for short term profits?  Don't the shareholders see this as a losing proposition?  We were able to beat the Russians at this Cold War game, but the Chinese are a lot different than the Russians were.  When the Russian Party Chairman said the United States would sell him the rope he used to hang them, he was not far wrong.  The Russians were just far from being adaptive at using the technology they stole.  The Chinese are not.