The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate Amazon and Apple

If forced at gunpoint to trust one person in my supply chain, I would instantly choose the Taiwanese-American in San Jose over the mainland-Chinese in Shenzhen, every time. Likewise, I think exactly the same Indian employee will be more productive if physically transplanted to Silicon Valley and surrounded by assimilated Indian-Americans than if set up in an office in Bangalore surrounded at all times by other Indians and Indian businesses. And equally likewise, I have noted a large difference in my own work productivity doing similar tasks under different employers, or even in different work groups under the same employer.

So it isn't even national culture, racial culture, or regional culture, but also corporate culture. Breaking news on the Obvious Channel: social apes found to be heavily influenced by their peers.

Ancestor post was obliquely referring to the oft-reported tendency of mainland-Chinese manufacturers to try to cheat their customers. They have been caught copying protected or trade-secret IP, counterfeiting, substituting cheaper out-of-spec parts, and inserting hidden hardware backdoors. Outside of China, engineering/construction companies tend to import Chinese subcontractors rather than use any local labor. That's all just PRC-Chinese business culture. If you pluck individual employees out of a Chinese firm, and hire them into a multinational based out of another country, they will be perfectly fine, aside from the slightly elevated possibility that PRC intelligence will aggressively recruit them as an asset to steal exploitable business secrets. If you can manage to pull everyone they care about out of the reach of the PRC, they will likely be a great investment for you.

Clearly, the national-political-business culture of mainland PRC China is hostile to businesses that have significant interests outside of China. The government there is racist, controlling, and mercantilist-protectionist, and the businesses with a physical presence have to fit in to that culture in order to exist, along with the traditional system of guanxi social capital. It makes them difficult to work with, but as long as the price is right, it's still worth it to try. You just don't give them access to any secrets, and make sure your QA department is full of no-nonsense hardasses. And as mentioned elsewhere in this topic, that means you may have to measure total mass and moment of inertia around multiple rotational axes in order to find any unauthorized modifications that might expose you to company-bankrupting liability in your business culture. You can't "trust, but verify"; you might just have to check every unit of every shipment.

As for culture culture--wushu martial arts, the action movies including it, silk, noodles, jadeite carvings, fine porcelain, traditional architecture, religions, herbalism, the woo-woo pseudo-religion attached to the medicine traditions, etc.--Chinese culture is indisputably great, especially considering that it's what's left after the PRC government tried to annihilate most of it as part of their revolution.