I'm reading a book named Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology.
When I reading below paragraph：
Jerry Sanders : Founder and CEO of AMD; Silicon Valley’s most flamboyant salesman; an aggressive critic of what he saw as unfair Japanese trade practices in the 1980s.
I want to accurate understand what meaning of "as" at here, so I look dictionary at Cambridge Dictionary.
It seems that interpret "as" to "because" is better. Is it right?
In that context, the closest definition I can find in a reliable dictionary is this one from Oxford:
preposition
1 used to refer to the function or character that someone or something has
it came as a shock
With this function, it means Jerry Sanders characterized Japanese trade practices in the 1980s as unfair.
It does not mean "because". If we replace "as" with "because", the sentence makes no sense:
*an aggressive critic of what he saw because unfair Japanese trade practices in the 1980s.
This grammar is impossible because the word "because" is a conjunction, but it joins two clauses together, not a clause ("he saw ____") and a noun phrase ("unfair Japanese trade practices in the 1980s").
Only a preposition fits there, and "because" is never a preposition.
