McKinsey-led think-tank advised China on policy that fed US tensions
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Secondly, McKinsey offices in each country (and even within the same country) are independent of each other, and only share the same branding.
McK's US practice is firewalled from McK's Indonesia practice, as the Partners for both are different.
In this case, McK China's managing partners (a number of whom were Canadian and American citizens but naturalized) worked with the Chinese government on this tender. And in reality, it was junior McK associates who did most of the work, and I guarantee you those associates were all Chinese nationals and Chinese educated.
India's "Make in India" and the India Century initiative from the same year was a collaboration between the Indian govt and BCG India for example (https://web-assets.bcg.com/img-src/Make-in-India-Nov-2014_tc...) and done independent of BCG US.
Edit: thanks for the downvotes. I'm not even a wumao and have been very critical of the Chinese govt on here.
First you got tech-millenarians posting on here, then wumaos and the associated China bears, and then SWEs who think they know best.
Screw this platform.
In Denmark McKinsey consultants advise the government at a fairly high level. Most of the consultants are Danes and had they not worked for McKinsey they would work for another consultancy (or the government itself) doing the same government work.
Made in China 2025 is an industrial policy aiming for Chinese companies to move up the value chain. This was going to happen regardless of McKinsey.
On contrary the US congressmen are foolish for bullying McKinsey into not doing business in China as it will decrease the US's ability to understand what is going.
Playing both sides against the middle is a legitimate concern, despite your inability to see it as such, in addition to being the oldest trick in the book. That works like this:
1. Supply adversary A for conflict
2. Supply adversary B for conflict
3. Trigger conflict (note the lack of question mark typical in examples of this meme)
4. Profit
> that McKinsey & Company was "the most well-known, most secretive, most high-priced, most prestigious, most consistently successful, most envied, most trusted, most disliked management consulting firm on earth".
Or, in other words, they help shape policy for business and governmental organizations in the US and the larger western world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKinsey_%26_Company
They can make money or gather power based off the mutual distrust between China and the Western world, which is an example of the Prisoner's dilemma or a "divide and conquer" strategy.
It's a bunch of independent practices that share the same logo, and have extreme autonomy between each other and "governed" by a committee of senior/managing partners from all the McK offices.
A McK practice can go rogue and it's hard for the others to push back otherwise.
That's how all consultancies are.
Consultancies gives advice, but it's individuals who are giving that advice.
If the advice is really really wrong, you don't want liability to taint the rest of the organization.
For example, look at what happened to Arthur Andersen after Enron and WorldCom even though majority of the partners were not in on it.
It's the same story of accountancies, auditing, and law firms as well.