This seems kind of naive for many industries at the moment as for the most part it would translate to "Don't do cost-effective manufacturing".
But also yes, directly, don’t let a difference in cost compromise your moral compass.
Slavery is also cost effective, would you argue for that too? (of course that is indeed one of the issues of doing business in china too)
At what point do you have to do the right thing as a startup? Slavery? Child labor? Genocide?
Clearly there must be a line where morality becomes more important than money, where exactly should that line be and how should it be different for small companies and big ones? New ones and old ones?
Or are morals just important when they no longer compete with dollars?
As a matter of ethics.. they've lifted a billion humans out of back-breaking subsistence farming and have invaded zero countries in the last 30 years.
The lifting of millions of Chinese out of poverty has been one of the greatest humanitarian achievements in human history and shouldn't be understated, but it doesn't justify the human rights violations that are being committed by the CCP today.
This concern is a mirage of a geostrategic struggle.
We can never know for sure, but my belief is that if the other side had won the civil war, this would have happened several decades sooner
We in the west could have stopped screwing them over a couple centuries earlier as well. Might have avoided the whole civil war ever happening.
EDIT: Was being light-hearted about the "holding a grudge". Been a while since Mao is all.