Re: China, the short lived adventure
"How western CEOs could be so short sited to willfully blind to this is beyond me."
Because they were as (intentionally) short-termist in that respect as they are in others, knowing that, as with fall out from gutting the company and outsourcing most of the Western staff, they'll have enjoyed the short-term boost to the stock price, subsequent bonuses et al and be long gone before the sh*t hits the fan.
In other words, typical parasitic "leadership" of large Western companies allowed to get away with it because they're giving the equally short-termist, quarterly-focused markets the unsustainable short-term increases in share price they're looking for.
China has been playing the long game by allowing themselves to be used as an incredibly cheap manufacturing base for Western companies, building up their own infrastructure, skills, technological knowledge and OEM companies. Now they're at the point where those same OEMs that greed-blinded Western companies casually allowed access to their valued secrets and came to be reliant upon are large enough to start competing in their own right, cutting the now-hollow Euro and Yank "manufacturers" out of the loop.
But the ex-CEO has a nice fat bonus and a few more yachts for his retirement, so it's all okay.