This is William C. Kirby, easily one of the most knowledgeable Western experts on the topic. He is Professor of China Studies at Harvard University and Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. He serves as Chairman of the Harvard China Fund, and Faculty Chair of the Harvard Center Shanghai. In other words, when it comes to business and China, there are pretty much no academic figures in the West more qualified than he is.

Here the gist of what he says:

On each country’s openness to business, he says that “actually China is more open to foreign investment than maybe it’s ever been under the People’s Republic and the United States has become remarkably less open. […] Right now if you’re looking at regulatory risks as an American multinational or a Chinese multinational, thinking to do business in both markets, your biggest risk comes from Washington. Because you don’t know when the next set of regulations or public hearings are going to come down. China has become bizarrely but significantly more predictable in this regard than the United States.”

He gives a few examples of companies he’s been working on.

The first one being TikTok, with this comment: “It is absolutely a low point in the history of diplomacy and of international relations that the two greatest powers of the world are at odds over a teenage video app.”

Another example he gives is CATL (the EV battery maker): “The Ford Motor Company, which has been around a long time by adapting to times, wanted to partner with [CATL] so that Ford could have competitive EVs in this country. And yet that becomes politically impossible, so their sustainability goals are certain to be set back and so are those of the United States.”

Or again, “right here in Cambridge, MA, [for our subway system] the cars are made in Springfield, MA by CRRC [a Chinese company]. [CRRC’s] is the biggest industrial investment in Springfield in a half century, overseen and brought to fruition by Republican governor Charlie Baker. And yet Senator Schumer says on the Senate floor that we should not have Chinese cars on the red line because there might be spyware, and people could find out what you’re reading, if you’re reading…”

Last example he gives, that of “a 4th generation textile company that dates back to the 1910s in Shanghai called Esquel, they make half of the high-end men’s woven shirts in the world, their largest market being in North America and Europe. A leader in sustainability in the otherwise highly polluted textile industry. They’ve been caught in the political crossfire because they rely on Xinjiang cotton and they were accused in a very sloppily written report by a graduate student at the Center for Strategic and International Studies [CSIS] of using forced labor in their Xinjiang spinning mill. A mill that I have actually visited and it is entirely automated. So they’ve lost their North American market and 30,000 employees, and the Xinjiang cotton farmers, the private farmers from whom they bought their cotton in recent years, have less of a market for their cotton.”

There you go. China is systematically presented as becoming “more repressive”, less friendly to business, etc. but those who actually know the topic in considerable depth – like Kirby – know full well that the bulk of the instability and risks associated with doing business in or with China actually comes from Washington.

Sequel’s Xinjiang story is particularly interesting because it illustrates how Washington uses “human rights” claims to decouple from China, even when it has no basis in reality and results in the impoverishment of Uyghurs farmers in Xinjiang, denying them a substantial share of their income.

Vir: Arnaud Bertrand