I find myself in the most unusual position of agreeing with Attorney General William Barr. Barr believes that major tech companies are making serious compromises in order to get access to the Chinese labor and consumer market.
"The Chinese Communist Party thinks in terms of decades and centuries, while we tend to focus on the next quarterly earnings report,” Barr said. “America’s big tech companies have also allowed themselves to become pawns of Chinese influence.”
In the article, one of the tech companies named, Apple, declined to comment. How could they offer any explanation? They are at the mercy of China for the products that are made almost entirely in that country.
With human rights abuses becoming more and more apparent and egregious in China, how long can US companies continue to pretend not to notice? It’s difficult to ignore trains full of blindfolded, shaved prisoners. They may be less obvious, and harder to document, but reports from the concentration camps where those prisoners go are even more gruesome.
Chinese labor and manufacturing will continue to be integral to the Apple supply chain for the foreseeable future. It’s unfathomable to imagine any other scenario. In the worst case, China will always be the source of Apple hardware. As Steve Jobs famously said to then-president Obama ten years ago, “those jobs aren’t coming back.”
