That benefit overlooks a lot of human cost involved. And if you're being real, you'd know the major beneficiary is Apple. The American companies aren't quite the saviors that folks might think they are.
What was China going to do, warp straight to having an economy with $60,000 GDP per capita? If things actually worked that way, countries as diverse as Romania, Indonesia, India, Vietnam, Pakistan, Mexico - they'd all do it too. It doesn't work that way. You have to move up, gradually, through a very long and grinding road of progress and persistence.
Subtract the companies that provide the jobs for developing nations, and you have nothing. And you can't give a single other example throughout modern industrial history for an alternative path, because there can't be one. The capital investment has to come from outside, it has to be incentivized (otherwise why bother), and or you have to very slowly build it up from development internally + foreign trade (and that internal development will be accomplished by corporations just the same, just as it also was in China by domestic companies that behave just like Apple or worse).
Name a country that has skipped from poor and developing to affluent and developed without going through it (specifically without relying overwhelmingly on natural resources like oil, those are extreme outliers).
They have a geographic advantage too, but no one had to make Singapore a central shipping hub, it could have been anywhere else.
This is how you do it. There’s no other way. Eastern Europe is an interesting work in progress at the same thing. But the Ukraine war has really put a spanner in the works.
That's a really poor excuse for punching down when conditions and wages havent really improved.
But also, we are moving (slowly) in the direction you'd likely prefer: Norway and Germany are now doing supply chain due diligence[2]. Hopefully we continue moving in that direction so we can push the floor up and perverse human rights violations become more of a thing of the past.
[1] https://gfintegrity.org/press-release/new-report-on-unrecord...
[2] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/business-and-human-r...
I wish sometimes folks could see past their paychecks, privilege, and holier-than-thou attitude. That's too much to ask. I mean, better chances at holding Apple accountable than dealing with its notorious fanbois.
But thank you for pointing out that Communist governance is awful, we're in agreement there.
> then try to reason about it all (including the profits going back into the american coffers).
Apple's profits come from their customers giving them money, not the Chinese employees, who took profits as well.
That could have happened without humans being treated like cattle. I don't think that's hard to compute? If it is, no amount of 'what else could the american capitalists do if not leverage lower wage structures to their advantage' justifies that, I am sorry.
> Apple's profits come from their customers giving them money, not the Chinese employees, who took profits as well.
Employees took the profits? The profits trickled down from one mega corp to another; the line workers had to pay for it with their health. Answering "why wouldn't Apple build iPhones in the US" makes the capitalist designs plenty clear (which isn't a bad thing, and there are all kinds of ways to make money, but after a reaching a certain scale and seemingly bottomless capacity to generate revenue, it should start to matter just how it is made, as well).
Wouldn't you expect workers to be better off in treatment when the end customer has high margins, as Apple did, compared to low margins, as the next best employer would have?
> Employees took the profits?
Yes, that's why they got jobs -- the money.
And they took more at other companies, too, because having Apple do manufacturing in China also drives up wages at competing employers.
Replying to worker abuse concerns with "well, I'm rich and don't have to work!" is really, really weird.
This argument didn't survive the 2010s, the elephant graph argument has since been thoroughly trashed as the rentier-class propaganda it always was.
China is not some meek recipient of Western wealth but instead a canny operator to the benefit of their upper classes and rulers, outsmarting the rest of the world for not the first time in human history. The West is the tail, not the dog here; foreign investment was there for the taking in a shortsighted race to the bottom.
That said, in the second-half of that comment (which might come off as argumentum ad hominem), I was speaking in generalities, and not about one particular person.