Thread:

Something to say about Western businesses lobbying their own governments to go easy on the CCP because those businesses have or are seeking risk exposure in Communist China.

The China opportunity isn’t something that every entrepreneur missed & that giant corporate boardrooms spotted because of their edgy ahead of the curve vision. No, the China opportunity is something we all saw. I decided very early it was not worth betting on, I’ll tell you why.

In 1989, I watched two events unfold. Earlier that year we saw the crack down and massacre at Tiananmen Square. That November we saw the Berlin Wall come down while East German troops stood back & Soviet troops stood down.

All of this happened, & in 1991 the Baltics regained their independence, all with relatively little bloodshed. It was clear enough these governments were not going to set out to rob freedom & if they weren’t going to do that, they probably wouldn’t be as inclined to rob property.

Meanwhile, in China, the same ruling class that butchered the students on Tiananmen Square clung to power. You had to know the history of the Communist Party, and in particular Mao to know that those with power that survived his era were the worst. Bad people were still in charge

But these bad people were also the most two faced & cunning. They knew that the route to compromise the West was to addict her large corporates to the CCP’s power to grant access to China’s population. That the CCP would gradually rob & strip those corporates wouldn’t matter.

It wouldn’t matter because these corporations, though large, aren’t incentivised to think beyond the next decade. No one on ‘Wall Street’ gives a crap about what the value of something will be in 25 years, it will make no difference to them personally.

In the West, our large corporations can’t think of the Communist Party of China being ‘bad’ or run by ‘bad people’. That is a value judgement & they’ve no way to account for that. They respond to organised lobbies that tell them the monetary value of ‘values’ & which ones to have

It used to be leaderships of the West’s larger corporates had their corporate culture permeated through with generations that had served in or were hugely affected by World War 2, the darker days of the Cold War & so on. They instinctively knew Communists couldn’t be indulged.

We lost that institutional knowledge, the ‘street smarts’ to know that the CCP were and are out to defeat the West and intend to leverage our own corporates as a means to that end. The CCP knows that the incentives & instincts of those leading those corporations have changed.

And they have changed in a way that suits the CCP. Make sure that ‘corporate values’ focus on issues only outside China and that they at least ‘do no harm’ to the CCP’s plan to extend its global power. If they can help advance those plans, so much the better for the CCP.

Don’t think for one second that the EU’s new deal with Communist China was rammed through over the Christmas holidays without the immense lobbying power of two sets of interests. A handful of large corporates that want to protect their China interests & of course the CCP.

My point is this. Many of us that made the decision early on, not to go to China, knew we could make a fortune there, but also knew we’d be ‘captured’ by the CCP & that was not a trade we were willing to make. Those that made it must stop trying to change us at the CCP’s behest.