And if you’re looking for industrious, ambitious people who will definitely not be in China’s pocket, Vietnam is a great place to look.
Vietnam's head of state and head of party can serve just as many terms as Xi Jinping has so far.
Vietnam's system as all the same trappings as China's when it comes to political dissent or anything that can "undermine the territorial sovereignty and unity", an idea that can be used to control all facets of life. There are major human rights violations and concerns occurring there as well.
The general lack of trepidation about Vietnam, from the West, is solely due to Vietnam's irrelevancy, and Vietnam playing their own irrelevancy as friendliness for their own protection, it makes sense and they have no reason to do otherwise.
My only point here is that the primary issues we have with China is not their system, just their market power.
Manufacturing is moving to Vietnam because it is politically, economically and militarily weak enough that it can easily be bullied into compliance/submission by the US in case it ever decides to go rogue and threaten US investments, or have the audacity to spin it's own domestic champions to compete with US players.
China was also like that 30 years ago but has now become strong and influential enough that it can not longer be bullied into just being the submissive sweatshop of the world it once was.
I recommend you watch the video that aged like fine wine: 'Meet King Joe - 1949 - Cold War Era American Propaganda Cartoon': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-6YQQ779YM
You can tell none of this is going to happen because of the zero times it's happened.
But even then, if you want a partner who is close to China but not beholden to China, and for historical reasons will probably never be, then Vietnam is a great choice.
Is there any evidence that Vietnam would be as belligerent as China, were it only a little richer?
Taiwan hasn't always been the little democracy victim. They were quite totalitarian until like a couple decades ago. They have a competing claim to the shape of China that makes a mockery of the entire nation state concept. Its fun to imagine a democracy version of China, but a lot of the border disputes would be the same, the status of tibet would still be the same, and so on. Its the same people, they just lost. Its very similar to the story of the Hunger Games and realizing the liberated 13th district was the same as the status quo. Once we get stateside semiconductors this stops being our problem.
Next, debt-traps. The IMF and World bank do the same, I cant create a separate higher standard for China. These approaches are far superior to colonialism by force, which is an inferior model that the west/US also does. The US’ colonialism currently undermines its own national security by its approach to the middle east. China’s approach completely exempts it from Jihad and allows it trade and growth. Sorry, cant take the US perspective on this one.
Totalitarian norms: I disagree about China’s expansionist ambitions. I think this is once again projection from the west. China’s norm extension occurs when interacting with China, so if you want movies there you have to change the movies, and they monitor their citizens and students around the world. Their business, I wouldnt want to grow up in that environment but its their business.
But everything you wrote reads like projection. Its not just about how hypocritical the west is, our main disagreement is in the scope of China’s political aims. I think culturally they are quite contained, they want a unified China and enhanced trade, thats it. This will be at the expense of Taiwan and fishing zones, and thats it. Countries might even do trade in their currency, omg oh noes.
For Western consumers and companies we have learnt the lesson that if we want to keep the flow of cheap products, we need to diversify the pool of labour we draw upon and to keep them dependent instead of building them up to be competitors in the supply of products as well as competitors as consumers of those products.
The crucial moment in the China strategy was in 2008 when we should have started on/friend shoring rather than leaving it until now. Instead with the West facing economic calamity at the time, we wanted the economically easy solution of letting China continue its integration into the global supply chain.
Nothing's as expensive as a product that doesn't work.
They can, but to date, they don't: the Politburo holds the power and the head of state rotates regularly. Aside from Ho Chi Minh (who's long dead), there is no cult of personality in Vietnam, you won't find a single poster of the current leader anywhere.
That said, China also tried very hard to prevent another Mao by building in all sorts of safeguards, only for Xi to come along and stomp all over them.
- China's government's unprecedented and nationally coordinated audit on Foxconn's taxes and real estates in China. You could say that it is politically motivated, given the ceo of Foxconn was at one point running for president in Taiwan. However, he has since stepped out of the race, yet the audit is still ongoing. No doubt this has scared many Taiwanese firms to quickly move out of China, since this is just part of recent trend to try to squeeze money out of any capitalists (foreign or homegrown) since China is very very broke. (no, their now dwindling $800B dollar reserves is smaller than the dollar debt they owe abroad)
- a ton of recent arrest and prevention of foreign executives from leaving China. For example Japanese https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/how-an-executives... and American https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/24/business/china-business-c.... This has prompted many companies to pull their employees out of China. Recently Moody downgraded China's rating, and Moody issued warnings to its employees in China https://www.businessinsider.com/moodys-staff-in-china-wfh-du...
- Russia's recent nationalization of foreign company assets. Being that China is allied with Russia in war against Europe and US, supplying Russia, and has the same dictatorship quality, it is very likely China will walk down the same path of nationalizing Apple's assets
There are a lot of straws breaking the camels back but Tim Cook juiced profits centralizing in China but eventually, and it did take a while, having all of Apples fruit in one basket became untenable.