Take Driscoll’s, a grower of fruit—blueberries in particular here—that chose to expand into the People’s Republic of China. Driscoll’s invested in the PRC in a big way, sending experts over to expose PRC farmers and consumers to blueberries, to help the farmers learn to grow them, and to set up Driscoll’s own growing facilities, based on a modern, technologically based hydroponics method.

The intellectual property underlying those techniques and Driscoll’s proprietary plants were bought under false pretenses, propagated, and spread across a plethora of PRC farmers for them to grow unlicensed blueberry bushes.

Even though PRC courts do often rule against domestic growers in many of the cases Driscoll’s, and others, have brought, the damage has been done, and it’s permanent. The intellectual property associated with the berries and with growing them has been stolen and cannot be given back. The proprietary berry plants have already been proliferated without licensing and cannot be eradicated.

Competing growers, both using stolen intellectual property and unlicensed plants and those using legally obtained technologies and plants, are heavily subsidized by the PRC government and by local governments. The artificially low prices resulting from those subsidies, driven even lower by that exploding competition, have begun crowding out foreign growers like Driscoll’s, even though the latter, in particular, still thinks it can successfully chase the chimera, now by growing off-season blueberries.

Until PRC growers start using inexpensive state-backed financing to scale up—and sometimes play fast-and-loose with intellectual property regulations in this off-season venue, too, to enter the game.

Count me entirely unsympathetic.

Other American businesses, large and small, need to take this lesson to heart. It’s a big world. There’s no need to do business with the PRC. Africa beckons. South America beckons. Non-PRC Asia beckons.