Dealing with China Isn’t Worth the Moral Cost

In this light of recent heat up of issues with China, I want to share a positive story to contrast: I had a daily driver in Chengdu for over 1 month who spoke no English, zero, none at all - not even &quot;yes&quot; or &quot;no&quot;. We communicated via Google translate (on VPN). He would play Chinese music and then some days I would play some American rock and roll. We bonded in inexplicable ways. I had always commented on how I love the carved wooden letter that hangs on the taxi&#x27;s rear-view mirror. The ride was almost 1 hour in the morning and 2 hours in the evening back to the Hotel. We became friends. On the last day, he took the wooden ornament off, cupped it in his palm, held it against his chest, gave it to me with a glimmer in his eyes. Fuck, that was the most amazing human connection I&#x27;ve ever made.<p>I&#x27;ve worked in China in the semiconductor business, stayed there and absorbed some of the things the west does not even know. I recommend reading &quot;Poorly Made in China (2011)&quot; by Paul Midler. It is <i>surprisingly</i> good - factual, objective look of deep issues with China&#x27;s way of doing things. I resonate with the book with my personal experience.<p>Diplomacy is about being able to negotiate well, build trust and foster long term relationships, acknowledge mutual interests, differences and work towards solutions to problems. China has lost the brand image, probably forever. Despite a few positive experiences on the individual level, I hate working with Chinese businesses and would never want to go there. Fuck the Chinese government and its tentacles (Chinese corporations). The Chinese leadership does not understand that leadership is about inspiring others, taking care of the weak, keeping your promises and being able to independently think, innovate and set an example for other nations to follow. The way it is going, I can guarantee with certainty that they can have all the financial leverage, moral leverage is what you need in the long term; they can never become a superpower.<p>Edit: grammar

One of the surprising things to me is how much China seems to have played their hand too early (and too strongly). People have been sounding alarms about China for a while but if they had played it cool everything likely would’ve ticked along as it was. Everyone would still ignore the human rights abuses, and IP theft, and creeping influence in our institutions around the world, etc. Instead China has managed to really put it right in front of every average persons face and now there’s a real chance things could shift away from China. And what for? Ego? On the one hand I think the CCP bought a dud with Chairman Xi. But maybe that’s good for the rest of us.

Everyone is only talking about the issue from a moral standpoint (which is of course important), but there are real financial risks as well. The government controls every aspect of business in the country. Deals can be altered or nullified at any time without recourse. No contracts can be enforced since the government will always be on the Chinese business&#x27;s side. There is zero IP protection.<p>You could invest a billion dollars in the country and be kicked out for no reason without seeing any returns, as the NBA just found out. Yes there is a lot of opportunity in China, but relying on the goodwill of an authoritarian government is always a mistake in the long term.

Hindsight 20&#x2F;20? Xi has only been a leader for 7 years. The trajectory that China was on previously was markedly different - more openness, more freedoms. Xi&#x27;s turnaround hasn&#x27;t been immediate either. The fact that businesses went into China a decade ago shouldn&#x27;t be taken for shortsightedness — the future did look very different back then.

It&#x27;s scary how effective the US and China are at propaganda warfare. It seems like only yesterday everyone was on friendly terms, now we hate each other.<p>As someone with family all across Asia and the West I really hope the US and China can resolve their disputes soon. This is really not a nice position for us to be in.

If China paid the CEOs of these companies to stay quiet we’d call that bribery and corruption. Add in some market separation in the transaction and people just say that China is too big to ignore. CEOs get a free pass.

Thanks to South Park. I really credit them with changing minds.

Surfacing one of the comments from the article here since HN commenters (being primarily US&#x2F;European) seems to exhibit similar views --<p>The thesis here bespeaks of the very arrogance we have regarding &quot;dealing&quot; with China. China is a major world power. Its existence and growing economic prowess are not dependent upon our acceptance, investment or &quot;good will&quot;.<p>We continue to deal with China in an extremely condescending manner. To &quot;deal&quot; with China means we have to accept China for what it is; including that its political system is different from ours. It is not going to bend to our system of liberty and individual civil rights because we think that&#x27;s the natural order of things. And in all frankness, our current political morass is hardly a paragon of virtue to which other should strive.<p>We can choose to ignore China and attempt to isolate it. But that didn&#x27;t work out so well when we tried it after 1949 did it?<p>All these tariffs are accomplishing is incentivizing Chinese corporations to rapidly expand their production capabilities in facilities located in other nations. So in fact, we are financing China&#x27;s increasing power and influence over both its neighbors and within the global economy.<p>We&#x27;re now at a point where China doesn&#x27;t &quot;need&quot; us. So we simply have to decide whether we want to interrelate with another major world power as it is or move towards confrontation and chaos.

My grandfather ran a company that designed sawmills. During the 70s and 80s, he did a lot of business in the USSR and he has told many stories from that crazy time. I don&#x27;t know if he ever was involved in bribery (he has alzheimer&#x27;s now so even if I asked him I don&#x27;t know if I&#x27;d get an answer that makes sense, and my grandmother has no idea) but he did however experience the corruption of the communist party first hand. Some of the people he did business with became the oligarchs of modern day Russia, leveraging the power and influence they gained from the forest industry to move in on the energy industry.<p>I&#x27;m a bit conflicted about what my grandfather did. As a child and teenager, I always heard the stories as bringing propserity to a poor country, one sawmill could supply tens of thousands of jobs. However, the people he did business with was some of the most dishonest and bad people ever, and my grandfather went into great lengths to make sure that they were never too dependent on the Soviet market and always travelled to Moscow with a lawyer. He never trusted them, and in the 90s and 00s when it surfaced that some of his old clients had become wealthy off the breakup of the Soviet Union, and was now using that wealth to suppress and gouge working people, my grandfather just reacted with &quot;yeah, that sounds like something a shifty guy like him would do&quot;.<p>I still don&#x27;t know how I should view my grandfather&#x27;s role in this. The deals he made supplied the USSR with jobs which helped the people, but it also empowered really bad people. I think the same way about business in China, on the one hand the billions of Chinese deserve global abundance just like the rest of us, on the other hand fuck the CCP.

just another propaganda brought up by trade war

Is dealing with the US worth the moral cost?

Is depending heavily on China for critical business functions such as manufacturing seen as a risk by big companies?

It&#x27;s interesting to see the zeitgeist of this evolve. Just 6 months ago much of the public was very blasé about China, but experts in many realms were sounding alarm bells. A few months later, now look at it.

Should China split into smaller localized manageable regions?

In a perhaps humorous way to look at a difficult situation, this was all started because of some memes about Pro Basketball. It&#x27;s sort of snowballed from there, but maybe this is a good cultural touchstone to comment on. American culture permeates <i>a lot</i> of world culture. It dominates pretty much everything. China thought it could import some of it, and then export some of theirs back when the taste of what they&#x27;d brought in started to sour. Not so, it seems. Americans like their crass free speech and their memes.<p>...<p>I&#x27;m actually fairly amenable to arguments about national sovereignty and am willing to hear ones about how we (read: the West) need to back off about Hong Kong because, well, we made that deal and China wants to follow through with integrating them into the Mainland. That has been the plan since 1990s. But is <i>this</i> the price I have to pay? Importing Chinese cultural norms to <i>my</i> country? <i>My</i> pro sports stars literally kowtowing to insistence that we &quot;respect&quot; the wishes of an authoritarian Communist government? Fans at games getting kicked out for waving Hong Kong flags? Well fuck that, and fuck anyone who thinks that&#x27;s just &quot;the cost of doing business&quot;. We&#x27;ve let this charade go on long enough. Since the 1990s we&#x27;ve pretended that the more their economy &quot;liberalized&quot; the more they&#x27;d become &quot;open&quot; to &quot;democracy&quot;. This is a rhetorical ploy, used by elites to mostly just enrich themselves in the process of selling out the rest of us - via IP theft or moving the manufacturing base elsewhere to save some basis points. Free Trade Maximalism is what got us here, and yeah you get cheap goods from China ... but is it really worth it. No really. Is it worth <i>this</i>?<p>Here&#x27;s what this is really about, and what people who are upset about this are really getting at: we&#x27;re pretty dissatisfied with how US corporations (and our own government, frankly) have behaved for the last ~30 years or so. It&#x27;s manifesting with the NBA and video games in China because that pulls in a lot of cash right now and it&#x27;s run by a lot of characters we don&#x27;t really like (video games more so than the NBA, if I&#x27;m being fair). So, yes, people should be mad at the behavior of Chinese corporations and the Chinese government (but I repeat myself) ... who they should <i>also</i> be mad at is leaders of US corporations who haven&#x27;t had anything else as a goal but maximizing shareholder returns on a time horizon that matters for no one but themselves.

Nobody cares about wonk trade policy<p>Nobody cares about economic spreadsheets.<p>People do care about the NBA, like in a real way. The average American will not allow a beloved American institution to cowtow to ChiComms.<p>China has overplayed and has done it with the wrong President in the office. Trump is looking for anything to move the needle for him on China and they just gifted him something amazing.

I’m having a hard time reconciling this uproar when everyone is fine with the sanctions on Cuba, Iran, and Venezuela.<p>I do find it interesting that all of this is happening during thr president’s possible impeachment along with the recent ruling that Americans were illegally spied on.

&gt; Clinton began his term believing that trade sanctions could pressure China to improve human rights conditions. But after a year of debilitating debate, he was forced to reverse his policy of link- ing trade to human rights. &gt;He was right to do so. By continuing to grant MFN to China, Clinton will help advance the $38 billion trading relationship which the U.S. now enjoys with the world&#x27;s fastest growing economy. Moreover, by increasing prosperity in China through greater trade, the U.S. can help to create the economic freedoms that are the foundation upon which political freedom will someday emerge.<p>&gt;Clinton began to end this spectacle of confusion last week when he decided to renew MFN almost with- out condition. Perhaps the most important aspect of his decision is philosophical; the President has now adopted the view that trade relations must be separated from U.S. political goals with China. Moreover, he has endorsed the view that increased U.S.-China trade can promote economic freedoms, which in the long run will spur the growth of political freedoms in China.<p>&gt;This step alone will help to reassure Asian friends and adversaries that Clinton plans to get a better grip on foreign policy.<p>&gt;Now that Clinton has reversed his policy, he should move quickly to exact a price-of Beijing&#x27;s cooperation in two areas of critical concern to the U.S. They are:<p>* Ending North Korea&#x27;s nuclear threat...<p>* Better treatment for Hong Kong and Taiwan... -<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.heritage.org&#x2F;report&#x2F;the-collapse-clintons-china-.." rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.heritage.org&#x2F;report&#x2F;the-collapse-clintons-china-...</a>. June 3, 1994

The communist is using profit to control the capitalist, the irony is painful.

It only took 3 paragraphs for capitalism to end up under the bus. Which - sure. There’s much to dislike in the inhumanity of extreme consumerism. But that same consumerism has transformed that nation. Even the NYT has extolled the virtues of China’s rise.<p>“The world thought it would change China, but China’s success has been so spectacular that it has changed the world.”<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;interactive&#x2F;2018&#x2F;11&#x2F;18&#x2F;world&#x2F;asia&#x2F;china-rules.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;interactive&#x2F;2018&#x2F;11&#x2F;18&#x2F;world&#x2F;asia&#x2F;ch...</a><p>Yes. We should stop giving them a pass. Who is going to be first to give up their iPhone?

Wow. Now that&#x27;s a heavy worded article. I recommend watching <i>The Coming War with China</i> documentary on Al Jazeera for a more balanced perspective.

It’s not a bad thing that American citizens are heavily armed. If everyone in HK owned a firearm I think the situation would be far different - or at least give the government a second thought before acting.

Morality is a complicated thing.<p>More people die of murders by gun in the united states then in china.<p>Is it moral to deprive man of his right to own a gun in order to allow another man to keep his right to life?<p>There&#x27;s hatred raging against China due to hong kong, but the truth is far more complex. A hundred times more complex than even the example I gave.<p>Centralized control has a cost, but it also has a benefit.

While I&#x27;ve always respected the West&#x27;s stance on their own judgment of values, and the continual holding of it, I&#x27;m saddened by any narrative that it&#x27;s in the face of morality.<p>Morality is an entirely subjective concept, and should not be used as a weaponry. The West has developed for many years and have ascended through times from ancient religious principles to the notion of modern basic human rights. However, I&#x27;d like to address that by saying the notion of &quot;basic human rights&quot; isn&#x27;t universal, it&#x27;s a standard of the West. The East doesn&#x27;t do it perfect, but neither does the West. This whole affair is an eventual reality that happened to spark in the era of our existence, due to an inherent ideological difference. This is no right or wrong here, only a side to take, but to attack the opposite side of being immoral based on one&#x27;s own judgmental system is simply not constructive.<p>As humans, the least we can do is to be aware of the situations and stay open minded and be respectful of each other, and our differences. That&#x27;s how we can together evolve to a possibly harmonious future, at least to the extent of the upper-bound of humanity. There isn&#x27;t a single standard of morality, and a heavy indulgence on one single side will eventually run yourself into a corner of being seen as practicing double standard.<p>Let&#x27;s call it for what it is, a challenger to the current supremacy and that&#x27;s that. Conflicts arising due to ideological differences is hard to resolve, but to only address the other party as immoral is an extremely short-sighted strategy to addressing any differences between the two. It&#x27;s a greatly sad affair to see the propaganda machine on both ends flexing their muscle. Either the challenger will be defeated and we accept a new reality, or the existing supremacy loses and accept itself as a second. Bringing in a self-righteous morality to the mix is only going to incur permanent damage to humanity as a whole by prolonging the battle between ideals.

Yet more propaganda by people itching for war.<p>Call me when they write an article warning of the moral hazards of dealing with a country that invaded Iraq without provocation, causing hundreds of thousands of people to die; which overthrew the government of Libya, plunging the country into chaos; which armed Sunni extremists in Syria; which has backed Israel&#x27;s occupation of Palestine for decades; which ran a global kidnapping and assassination program; which operates a vast, unaccountable global surveillance network; where tens of millions of people go uninsured or under-insured because profits are paramount. Once the NY Times publishes that Op-Ed, maybe I&#x27;ll consider their moral posturing as something other than propaganda.