Obama himself named China as a data thief in a recent interview. This is the culmination of weeks of public focus on the issue. It also highlights the contradiction between China’s trade relationship with the US and it’s strategic relationship. In the long term, does it make sense for American consumers to reward a country that is actively undermining the US? My hunch is that the long road to this public acknowledgement has been made longer by an unwillingness on the part of Americans to embrace this truth. It seems like only yesterday (around 2000) that US businesses pushed for China’s accession to the WTO in the belief it would be a playground for US capitalism. Instead, the US has become a playground for Chinese authoritarian capitalism.