I witnessed first hand an entire mobile engineering department at a major US company dissolved. Managers, QA, software engineers, a total of 20 hardworking, dependable people, were shown the door in favor of Chinese contractors who would do their job for a quarter of the price.
Empathy, it seems, is often a cherry picked virtue.
Try to put yourself in the shoes of someone who sees their country selling out to the highest bidder. Can you not understand their fear?