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This. A market being large isn't an excuse for bloody hands.

Furthermore, don't let Chinese companies trade on US exchanges if they participate in human rights abuses.

Everyone knows what the Chinese government is doing strategically with leveraging access to their markets in exchange for control and forced tech transfer. Other countries are well within their moral rights to insist upon a quid pro quo... or else do the same to Chinese companies (who are just starting to reach scales where international expansion is as important to them as domestic).




The problem for product companies is that the secondary market still exists, and people's perceptions of a brand can be affected by its secondary market just as well as they can by its primary market.

If Apple isn't in China, that doesn't mean that nobody will be able to sell iPhones in China. That just means that Apple won't be selling iPhones in China. But someone, somewhere will still be importing iPhones into China, and people will buy them, and people will associate the resulting product experience with Apple. Those people will then blog about that experience, putting their perceptions on the world stage, where people in other countries' perceptions of the product can be affected by that conversation.

Which means that, if Apple has no Chinese app-store, then people in America will end up thinking worse of Apple. The American zeitgeist will be touched by Chinese-Americans who read Chinese-language blogs written by people living in China, where the experience of having an iPhone will suck because Apple "doesn't support China."


This generalizes to "Apple should do business with everyone" though.

And it's not really moral high ground if you're taking it through no cost to yourself.




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