Elon Musk’s recent one-day visit to Beijing confirmed his status as China’s fair-haired American capitalist. Tesla, the Chinese government said, has become the only foreign-owned company that is fully compliant with their data security laws. Accordingly, it has given Musk the go-ahead to build lots and lots of self-driving cars in the company’s Chinese factories.
Musk’s next move, The Wall Street Journal reports, is to get Chinese government approval to transfer the data that its cars collect, with the help of the Chinese search-engine company Baidu, to the U.S. in order to upgrade its self-driving-car technology here. That may just lead to U.S. security concerns similar to those which led officials to ban companies from using technology from Huawei here in the States. ….more
