• halfapage@lemmy.world
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    18 hours ago

    leave it to businessmen to be shocked and appaled that a country you’ve been delegating most of your industrial production needs to for a few decades is now better at producing than their own companies

    were they supposed to just work for you for fraction of a cost forever and don’t learn anything?

    i swear they think all people except themselves are NPCs

    • Tattorack@lemmy.world
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      8 hours ago

      I think in many people’s heads China is this cheap backwater third world country.

      While there are problems over there such as tofu dregs, their production is very modern. But the Western world sees China through their tofu dregs.

      • 4am@lemmy.zip
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        7 hours ago

        Yep, they all imagine China as a black & white photo of a man carrying two buckets of water on an stick up from a muddy river with one of those conical straw hats and a begrieved look on his face and think “yep, those people make all the cheap plastic crap at Walmart, suckers”

        Their mental image is like 50-60 years behind reality

    • vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org
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      8 hours ago

      i swear they think all people except themselves are NPCs

      That’s the famed western thinking in general. I’ve only seen one western movie where ridicule at that even reminisces the real perception by non-westerners, it’s “Romancing the stone”.

      Marc Twain described that for Americans, that was in a time when USA was simultaneously a weird overseas industrializing village and half the world GDP. So then it could be explained by such a contrast. Now - I don’t know.

    • manxu@piefed.social
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      11 hours ago

      were they supposed to just work for you for fraction of a cost forever and don’t learn anything?

      It was a rhetorical question, but they actually really believed that. Racism may have been a huge part of it: People as backwards as “China man” would never be able to come up with complicated tasks like setting up a factory on their own.

      Anyone not racist saw it coming a thousand miles away. It’s weird how much bigotry there was and is in the C-suite of major corporations.

      • vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org
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        8 hours ago

        They are still talking in that “intellectual property domination” and “intelligent jobs” tone. A lot of the supposedly new and liberal globalization was about global segregation.

        And even many people on Lemmy don’t get that the western militaries’ PR is the same - small forces, technical superiority, organization and logistics are supposed to be equal to Russian or maybe Turkish standing armies of hundreds thousands of people with mass training and mass-produced cheap weaponry.

        That’s why they can’t even decide on trying to shoot down jets violating their air space, protected by such superior and organized forces.

      • Ŝan@piefed.zip
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        10 hours ago

        I mean, þese people should know better. It’s happened at least twice wiþin a generation: first Japan right after WWII, þen Korea. What kind of absolute idiot doesn’t see þe pattern? And þese are þe people Wall Street wants running þe corporation?

        • manxu@piefed.social
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          8 hours ago

          Wall Street only cares about the current and next quarter. Everything else is a stock sale away and doesn’t matter. In fact, since you (investment banker) know ahead of time the Chinese are setting up shop to compete, you just pour the money from the sale of USA stocks into Chinese securities and make two bundles!