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Comment by micaksica | Hacker News Reader

In case you assumed that corporate responsibility is actually taken to heart by those making corporate strategic decisions, let this show you that it is not. Corporate responsibility moves are little more than good PR, a product selling point, and a way to avoid fines in some jurisdictions. Money matters more than morals. These corporations want access to the Chinese market. To gain access (and profit from) to the Chinese market, you must play ball with the state.

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Maybe there's a middleground? You've still got to pick your battles and understand the scope of them. It's also entirely reasonable for a company to not to choose to follow a particular fight because it's too expensive or would have to much of an impact on the strategy of the company.

If a company decides to not fund healthcare for everyone in the US, even if that aligned with their values and CSR, there's no need to take a cynical look at that.

Definitely a middle ground but that's not what is being occupied here.

Aiding Chinese censorship for a quick buck is your idea of a "reasonable middleground"?

Apple's been 'aiding Chinese censorship' in hundreds of ways to the tune of billions of dollars for well over a decade and you were ok with it all until they took VPN's off the app store? Lol.

If increased awareness isn't a reason to change our minds and we stubbornly stick to ideas we had a decade ago we're in trouble.

"We're" already in trouble. Just like HN commenters wisely advise not to build your company on top of someone else's service, the entire planet has built their service on China's manufacturing. The thinking (if there even was any, I personally doubt it) was that we'd just use them for labor intensive but low intellectual assembly work, but it seems no one considered if China was happy to continue being the servant of the West indefinitely.

China seems like a country happy to play the long game, but I don't think they're even going to have to.

Amazon's Cloud services aren't made in China - it's the Chinese market they want, not Chinese factories. China depends on foreign markets for its factories output, but generally isn't as keen on having its (huge) market buying foreign goods and services. Having saturated their other markets, Western companies are desperate to tap into China to keep their growth numbers.

> Western companies are desperate to tap into China to keep their growth numbers

Yes they are, and China isn't stupid enough to allow that, and there's nothing the west can do about it without sinking the ship they are in. With the west being a democracy with most major decisions being made by individual corporations, to me it looks like a near certain checkmate for China, provided they don't have something like a major financial crisis.

What's missing here is context. The reason we are seeing a spate of similar news on this is because China recently changed the law, and so companies are making sure they comply with the law as a first step before figuring out further strategies.

Now maybe they take no further steps, but it's unreasonable to expect companies to entirely end their entire China operations based on a new law whose implications are not fully understood.

Instead they are making sure they are in compliance and seeing the specifics of what that entails before deciding what if anything to do next.

So they should have just defied the Chinese government, had all their manufacturing facilities cut off, and just closed up shop and called it a day?

Of course they don't agree with it, but they don't have the power to effectively ignore their demands right now. Yes, this sucks, but it means they get to live and fight another day, hopefully when they do have a bargaining chip.

Yes. There's no bargaining with communists, there is only wiping them from the earth.

When has that ever been in doubt with regard to China? To do any major business in China you have to partner with a local company --which typically have ties to the CCP.

This is nothing new. Is there a difference btwn opening factories in China and legally outsourcing work to local cos which may or may not comply with even local labor and environmental laws and bowing to their local mores when it comes to softer areas like western ideas about civil liberties? That in no way means I agree with their view --I'm just asking are the two not different sides of the same coin and we (the "west") pretty much fully accepted the one side a long time ago.

I remember reading about this decades ago in "One World, Ready or Not" by Greider: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/285435.One_World_Ready_o...

Well worth the read to understand the different forces tugging on global corporations.

Agreed. In China, the government controls the flow of money. Sadly, there's a saying among us Chinese netizens: "China is now powerful/rich enough, that no one can actually save us from it."

China is a giant corporation-like kleptocracy, the product of which is the labour of Chinese people. Now that the population that output cheap labour wanes as the demographic data deteriorates. Situations will change.

Unlikely. Even now China has a surplus of 300 to 400 million people that work as subsistence farmers. There's nothing else for them to do. China's manufacturing is no longer expanding meaningfully. They have a truly massive supply of inexpensive labor still accordingly; however those people working as impoverished farmers have nowhere to go, and are held in place by the government, with no rights to property ownership of the farming land (which is also why China's farming productivity is so horrendous, it's intentional).

They have hundreds of millions of people living on less than $5 per day still. It's one of the greatest supplies of available cheap labor on the planet, and it's not disappearing any time soon.

Now that China has built up immense wealth domestically (along with the productivity, economic capability and infrastructure linked to that step-up), which is very tightly contained within its borders by law, the Communist Party's position is cemented. They have unlimited reach within their borders, they can use any of their industrial might for anything they want at any time, and they can seize any assets they want to at any time. That wealth isn't going away, and their ability to use/abuse it at will is also not going away. Their eventual population decline will do nothing more than than raise the median standard of living.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hukou_system

Exactly, everyone who says China is doomed due to demographics overlooks the huge pool of under-utilized labor. People are looking at percentages when they should be looking at raw numbers.

With a shrinking demography, one problem is that the size of pool of elite is also shrinking. Physics professors in top universities of China has complained on social media that the younger generation lacked both dedication and intuition, that he had to lower the bar for his final exam to extremely easy.

An older guy complaining young people are lazy?

I am shocked. Absolutely shocked.

Not only lazy but weak in academics.

You really can't imagine how hard working were the older generation of China. It was even kinda brutal from young people's points now. Srsly, an Asian's "lazy" (remember an A- is a F there)?

Pretty sure the "extremely easy" exam will fail 90% of the class if moved to US

> the size of pool of elite is also shrinking.

China has a bench of hundreds of millions of people they can call on. With their track record, I don't think Chinese leadership needs to take advice on how to develop a country from anyone.

That is exactly the same way i see it after a few trip to China. And its GDP per Capita will grow once these older generation pass away.

China is playing the long game here. And I dont see it getting any real trouble for the next 10 - 13 years. (2030).

Perhaps one of the more accurate analysis of China, but I disagree with Communist party's position is cemented. Just like the US is having a Coasts vs Hinterland clash, China is having that clash on steroids. The whole silk road program is basically trying to move some of the coastal wealth to interior to placate the populations etc. Their wealth is certainly not going away, but it will contained in Coastal, added to that a trade war with USA is brewing and a real war in Korean peninsula, will certainly shock their system.

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