Take Zuckerberg for example. He went in front of congress and spouted as much anti-china rhetoric as he can. He obviously does not want competition from Chinese social media companies such as TikTok. He wants TikTok banned. Meta even admitted that it hired a PR agency to try to connect TikTok to CCP.
Take Elon for example. He definitely wants Trump in office because he knows if Chinese EVs ever make it to American shores, Tesla would have fierce competition. Trump wanting massive tariffs on Chinese goods matters little to Elon. Elon doesn’t care if he has to pay $5 for a Chinese good at Walmart instead of $2.50. Only commoners will suffer. But as long as Elon gets extremely high tariffs on Chinese EVs, he’ll be happy.
For Schmidt, it’s clear that he has big ownership stakes in American tech companies. Chinese tech companies are a real threat to them in competition.
For what it's worth, we in the UK have pretty good labour laws and welfare systems, minimum standards, environmental protections etc. All of this has evolved over time as a way to ensure no race to the bottom happens and most people can lead a decent life.
Now, some people may disagree with this on a philosophical level (libertarians for example), but it is what it is.
If you now just mass import anything and everything from a country with much lower "standards" (I use the term to encompass all of the above and whatever else), then it means your own working population get cheaper stuff, but suffer from the loss of jobs. Not only that, but it creeps into everything. Where once you were high value design, even that starts leaking out of society into a country willing to undercut you on "standards".
This is all very well known, so I don't really think it is much of a surprise that there is a push back. I'm just surprised that it hasn't happened more and sooner.
Take Zuckerberg for example. He went in front of congress and spouted as much anti-china rhetoric as he can. He obviously does not want competition from Chinese social media companies such as TikTok. He wants TikTok banned. Meta even admitted that it hired a PR agency to try to connect TikTok to CCP.
Take Elon for example. He definitely wants Trump in office because he knows if Chinese EVs ever make it to American shores, Tesla would have fierce competition. Trump wanting massive tariffs on Chinese goods matters little to Elon. Elon doesn’t care if he has to pay $5 for a Chinese good at Walmart instead of $2.50. Only commoners will suffer. But as long as Elon gets extremely high tariffs on Chinese EVs, he’ll be happy.
For Schmidt, it’s clear that he has big ownership stakes in American tech companies. Chinese tech companies are a real threat to them in competition.