Actually, it's more like Nike, Apple and every other 'fake' company that likes to lie to its own public and act all rah-rah social justicy... that invested in China. And it wasn't for GOOD reasons. We all know that they were simply trying to exploit workers there for slave wages, and knowing the output will be doubled down in slave-hours. Even children are forced to work there and all sorts of punishments delivered to Chinese slavers that were banned in America (and Europe) generations ago. And before anyone defends the blue-chips, I worked for Apple on the inside, and seen it all. They are NOT innocent in any of this.
It's not just the blue chip companies, any business looking to stay competitive set up shop in China where labor cost and operational efficiency surpassed anything we could do in the West. But this is why 300 million Chinese came out of poverty; it took accommodating government policies and foreign investments to get there and that's commendable. Did this transfer impoverished the West? Absolutely. We lost manufacturing know how and jobs, but we gained jobs in services and lower cost consumer goods. Our consumer goods companies made huge profits, the stock market made many investors rich, the financial sector and real estate markets did very well, etc. The mistake of the West was to think that China would remain a docile and supportive engine of our economies.
In the 1990s, the allure of the China market was irresistible and missing it can be fatal. How now? If it's total iphone ban in China, Apple will take a 15% hit on revenue. Huge!
Let's remember that the ball started in the US with their Huawei ban, then expanded to other companies like drone manufacturers and companies accused of working with the Chinese government, then expanded again to all tech capable of being used for military purpose. I'm actually surprised that China hasn't been more aggressive but they are stuck between a rock and a hard place if they start constraining their exports.
Even so, that slave wage was enough at the time for most Chinese to live off of comfortably. It's wrong IMO to be looking at the world using the same metric that we use. Nobody's defending the blue chips. But knowing how dire the Chinese economy was at the time and how much progress has been made since, it's mind boggling how ungrateful the Chinese are towards America and the West.
Ungrateful? Shouldn't western businesses be grateful towards China because it provided cheap, efficient labor to produce the goods that made them rich? Not one western company went to China to help raise the Chinese standard of living. That came as a consequence of the then Chinese government policy to open their country to foreign businesses.
Listen, before China, there was South Korea. Before that, there was Japan. They all provided cheap labor and, as a result, they all prospered. Without the outside investment, none of them would be who they are today. In that regard, I believe the US offered more than they received from those countries. You know how poor China was in the 70s or the 80s? It wasn't "Chinese government policy" that allowed outside world to access their market, but rather trading legislation like NAFTA that allowed Chinese to offer their services to the outside world. "Not one western company went to China to help raise the Chinese standard of living." Did I read that correctly? If you employ more than 10,000 workers, which many western companies have done, that alone is enough to raise the standard of living.
I would say that’s for the mutual benefit. No one is an altruist in this world. Another political reason was the US wanted ally with China to counter Soviet Union.
No it didn't!!! It started when China began illegally on expanding its 9 dash line in South China sea, reclaiming atolls/reefs belonging to the contested waterways of Phillipines/Taiwan/Vietnam/Malaysia/Brunei/Indonesia, but the major alarm bell rang when China placed missile silos and an airstrip and deployed a fishing fleet to harras other claimant nations. Militarizing the peaceful region for no reason is what got everyone's back up. Then they thought to bully Australia because it wanted an inquiry into the origins of Covid. So none of this bs "....it started with US"!. It started with asshole china who became money rich , got power to the head then got visions of grandeur about its own importance and decided to flex muscle. So the West went, "uhh ohhh, we need to stop being nice".
Yeah, just like Russia is stuck between a rock and a hard place. Act the idiot and see where that gets you.