I don't like most of these people, but they don't ring to me like the kind of people who could be bribed with a seat at a prestigious university's board.
Wrong. We just happened to have a president with those standards. Nothing about society then suggested we held politicians to any kind of lofty standards. A certain type had ambitions for higher office. Thats it.
Maybe they can’t be bribed with cash, but could they be bribed with a nice contract for the company they founded? Or threatened for access to a market?
I think a lot of people don't agree with you, talked with some people of Tibet just, last night ( 6 hours ago)
Let's say they hate China's forced influence, not earned.
We can put other places inside of China even on the list ( Taiwan and Hong Kong). The politicians didn't earn their spot. They got placed there by Beijing.
And now more and more countries want to remove the debt from China's debts, along the one road, one belt.
Also, that belt is not earned. It was pushed by Beijing through fake investment propaganda, since the investments are debt loaden.
Even their friend Russia is looking for closer ties with alternatives, since trading with China has been a one-way road only ( trade resources and that's it )
Let's face it, China has put itselve on the top because it could move 1,4 billion people into cheap labour, first in China and now across the one road and one belt. All the rest was lies ( market access), market protection ( can't get your money out, enter the market with a required 50% partner) and scams ( debt loaded colonisation, fake 20-year lasting WTO promises,..) and fake numbers ( only China knows the real growth number and value of business in our stock market, we don't have access to it)
Best thing is, while it's trying to colonise Africa/Asia. We still threat them as it's a developing country, with all the benefits ( for them) that come with it.
> We can put other places inside of China even on the list ( Taiwan and Hong Kong). The politicians didn't earn their spot. They got placed there by Beijing.
Taiwan (Republic of China) is not part of China (People Republic of China). It is a different and independent country. Politicians are elected by the citizens, Beijing as nothing to do with that.
>I think a lot of people don't agree with you, talked with some people of Tibet just, last night. Let's say they hate China's forced influence, not earned.
Well, try to talk to people about the US influence, and not just to their neighbors like Tibet, but all around the world.
At least they respect international rules, China just ignores them.
It's playing bully on a long-term basis, no need to look over the world for "a" example. Just look at all of China's neighboors in international waters.
I wouldn't put any money on that. There are too many things that just don't add up, and I don't think they have the numbers.
I think the impeachment process is a two-pronged attack: damage Trump (always a plus from the Democrat standpoint), and damage Biden enough that he's not a factor in the primaries.
>At least they respect international rules, China just ignores them.
Huh? The US has been famous for not respecting international rules. From toppling the legitimate government of Iran back in the day all the way to the Iraq war and further on (including things like not recognizing the war criminal court, and even threatening it, etc).
There’s no whataboutism at play here. You’re the one who drew this comparison; the poster you’re replying to is simply explaining why it’s an unintelligent comparison. That aside, what was it about a team of 0 Iraqis crashing a plane in New York that “forced” the US to “show some power”?
Yes, there is. Iraqi war and what China is going is totally different. Iraqi war is a consequence of 9/11. China's fight is against anyone that will not bend to their will.
That the US isn't afraid to retaliate, no more no less.
I think it is also important to mention Tsinghua Holdings [1], or a name commonly heard in Tech Circle Tsinghua Unigroup. And all the stories behind it.
> Since 2015, Tsinghua University has overtaken the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to top the list of Best Global Universities for Engineering published by the U.S. News & World Report.
You have to be brilliant to get into Qinghua. Same is true with MIT. However, having known Chinese students who got offers to both Qinghua and MIT, the choice for them was really a no brainer.
Tsinghua is highly respected and your peers is likely to be better ON AVERAGE than that of MIT. But the faculty and the resources you would be able to access is unmatched from what MIT can offer.
How do I interprit this list. As tit for tat or why else would a CEO join this board?
Tesla is one of the only companies that really seems to be successful in China.
Then you have Apple and others that are getting overtaken by domestic companies and not coincidentally a lot of financial companies ( that niche was pretty open in China, I thought)
Does this list also explain why Microsoft asked the White House to lift the ban on Huawei/trade war? Or is this not even close related.
Am I wrong? If so, please explain. I guess the profit is both in market access and some sort of personal gain?
> Tesla is one of the only companies that really seems to be successful in China.
> Am I wrong? If so, please explain.
GM has, over time, made an enormous business out of the Chinese market. They got in early and printed a lot of money there. Something like 1/3 of all their unit sales have been in China over the past decade. More recently it was closer to half. They went from 900,000 annual units in 2004, to 1.8 million by 2009. In 2018 they moved ~4 million units there, half their sales volume globally.
The financial entities on that list (Blackstone, Goldman, Citi, JP Morgan, BlackRock) all want access to China. China has been - sort of - working to open access to foreign financial giants like JP Morgan and Goldman. There's wide debate on whether that's more plausibly China trying to sucker them into helping with their debt situation, or whether it's the financial firms that will benefit more (no doubt they arrogantly think they can wrangle China for a fat profit, famous last thoughts when the debt monster turns).
Walmart has been in China for a quarter of a century now. They have a thriving, growing retail business there and have done modestly well [1] whereas their peers have flailed.
Dell has had deep manufacturing relationships in China for a while. More recently they started manufacturing in Western China (Chengdu) in 2012 and Xiamen before that.
Henry Paulson has a strange, slightly Kissinger like relationship with China, dating to the financial crisis and before. He has a lot of personal relationships with authorities there. He wrote a book about China ("Dealing with China: An Insider Unmasks the New Economic Superpower") and seems to have a personal fascination with the country. He openly admires them, so it makes sense he'd want those ties.
As the world's #1 or #2 consumer market, it makes perfect sense for Anheuser-Busch InBev to be everywhere there (to the extent they can), given they're a global beverage giant. Their stated position is that China and the region in general represents a very large growth opportunity in the coming decades.
Microsoft has a real business in China, generating several billion per year for them. It's not what it should be, but it's essentially all gravy given the alternative is piracy in China. All the way back to when Bill Gates was running the company they were working with China to limit piracy of Windows and Office. Gates made early ventures to China repeatedly to try to convince Chinese authorities to crack down on piracy. There's an amusing quip [2] from Gates about this from 2007:
> Today Gates openly concedes that tolerating piracy turned out to be Microsoft's best long-term strategy. That's why Windows is used on an estimated 90% of China's 120 million PCs. "It's easier for our software to compete with Linux when there's piracy than when there's not," Gates says. "Are you kidding? You can get the real thing, and you get the same price." Indeed, in China's back alleys, Linux often costs more than Windows because it requires more disks. And Microsoft's own prices have dropped so low it now sells a $3 package of Windows and Office to students.
I don't know what Comcast (Roberts) is doing there. They're a large telecom company and there is, I suppose, prestige in that list. Plus Comcast is now also a media & content company. I'm sure they want their content to have access to China, today and in the future.
I would say it's absolutely based on China not being an open market, operating primarily by relationships and permission (which can be revoked at any time for any reason). If you want to do business in China at scale over multiple decades, you better cultivate extremely deep, enduring relationships with the highest tiers of power in their system. And you better constantly renew those ties as the power structures turn over across time.
Being on this board is the global business equivalent of reputation sharing, like giving China valuable IP in exchange for them letting you have market access. That's a list of highly respected global business titans, they're lending China and that University their reputation to warm ties and buy favor - absolutely.
Zuckerberg is the only one seriously on the outside in that list. He has seen effectively zero benefit so far to all his efforts on relationship building. Although they'll still take his reputation sharing (credibility enhancing; I know that seems absurd in the West right now, he's regarded as a respectable business titan in China). He has been wishing on a star for years now to get access to China. Amusingly, the Chinese authorities have (for their own purposes) thought better of it and know not to let FB in.
Yes. The fact that this is considered newsy enough to make it to the front page tells us more about the fever pitch China paranoia in these parts than about the actual news itself.
What do you call a publicly traded company that manufactures exclusively in China and expects more than 50% of their revenue to come from China within a short timeframe? Aren't they a Chinese company?
I've long questioned if Toyota is really a Japanese company, but at least they have significant manufacturing in Japan.
If Apple isn't already a Chinese company, they will be within a few short years.
I personally don't have anything against buying non-USA products, so I don't mean this as a condemnation of Toyota or Apple. Just an observation. I consider the local Chinese restaurant to be an American business. I consider Apple to be a Chinese business.
For the record, School of Economics and Management (SEM) of Tsinghua University has always been having high caliber business leaders, Nobel Laureate, central bank governor and government officials on their board.[1] e.g.
In fact, I doubt any school has a better advisory board than that of SEM of Tsinghua's, anywhere in the world.
Even Hardvard / MIT / Yale's school dean/provost are on Tsinghua's board. If as an CEO, you aren't invited to the board and you want to be global, you are doing it wrong.
Here is a partial list:
- Lord Browne of Madingley, Chairman of Huawei UK
- Henry M. Paulson, Jr., Former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, Former Chairman and CEO, The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc.
- H. Lee Scott, Jr., Former President and CEO, Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.
- WANG Qishan, Vice-President, People’s Republic of China
- Jim Breyer, Founder and CEO, Breyer Capital
- Mary T. Barra, Chairman and CEO, General Motors Company
- Lloyd C. Blankfein, Chairman of the Board, The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc.
- Carlos Brito, CEO, Anheuser-Busch InBev
- CHEN Jining, Mayor, Beijing Municipal Government
- Elon Musk
- Mark Zuckerberg
- Michael L. Corbat, CEO, Citigroup Inc.
- Michael Dell, Chairman and CEO, Dell Technologies
- Laurence D. Fink, Chairman and CEO, BlackRock, Inc.
- Geoffrey Garrett, Dean, The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania
- Nobuyuki Idei, Former Chairman and Group CEO, Sony Corporation
- Muhtar Kent, Chairman, The Coca-Cola Company
- Henry R. Kravis, Co-Chairman and Co-Chief Executive Officer, KKR
- Harald Krüger, Chairman of the Board of Management, BMW AG
- Ramon Laguarta, CEO, PepsiCo
- LIU He, yes the chief U.S.-Sino trade deal negotiator, Vice-Premier, State Council, People’s Republic of China
- Jack Ma, Executive Chairman, Alibaba Group
- Pony Ma, Core Founder, Chairman of the Board and CEO, Tencent
- Doug McMillon, President and CEO, Walmart Inc.
- Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft
- Nitin Nohria, George F. Baker Professor of Administration Dean, Harvard Business School
- Richard C. Levin Senior Adviser and Former CEO, Coursera President Emeritus, Yale University
- Brian L. Roberts
Chairman and CEO, Comcast Corporation
- Ginni Rometty Chairman, President and CEO, IBM
- David M. Rubenstein Co-Founder and Co-Executive Chairman, The Carlyle Group
- David C. Schmittlein John C Head III Dean, MIT Sloan School of Management
- Stephen A. Schwarzman Chairman, CEO and Co-Founder, Blackstone
- Risto Siilasmaa, Chairman, Nokia Corporation Chairman and Founder, F-Secure Corporation
- Kevin Sneader Global Managing Partner, McKinsey & Company
- Masayoshi Son, Chairman and CEO, SoftBank Group Corp.
- A. Michael Spence, Professor, Stern School of Business, New York University, 2001 Nobel Laureate in Economics
I mean, the problem isn't the university or the students or the people on the board. It's how the CCP uses its relationships to push its agenda and (incompatible-with-ours) values in an oppressive way on non-Chinese entities. This is just another example of how deep the rot is. (Yes, yes, the US does the "same thing", and I'll care when the US turns into a dictatorship that arbitrarily takes your job, livelihood and family for speaking out against it with zero recourse, transparency or accountability)
Network Theory 101. You want access to a network connect to the most important Hub. That is the quickest way to shorten the path to all other nodes in the network.
Tsinghua University has an interesting history. When the republican party lost the civil war against the communists, some scholars (including the university president) left and recreated the university in Taiwan.
That's why there is today the Tsinghua University [1] in China, and the National Tsing Hua University [2] in Taiwan, with really similar logo.
Genuinely wondering, how many more Uighur Muslims have to die before associating with the Chinese Govt. becomes bad optics? I understand this is a Chinese university but we all know all entities in China serve the agenda of the Chinese Govt.
Sadly it will take a LOT more. Public outrage has an increasingly high tipping point and a very short lifespan. Governments, Corporations, PR agencies all know this. Is the average person on the street even aware of the plight of the Uighur Muslims? Contrast that with the recent forest fires in Brazil.
You can call this a whataboutism, but if a million dead Iraqis hasn’t hurt the US reputation, then I doubt China is going to suffer too much of a hit to theirs.
Especially since they are mainly locked up in internment camps, which many countries have, so they can’t push too hard without looking hypocritical.
Between 0 and infinity. As long as the people are just making noise on twitter they will be ignored.
Problems require real struggle and sacrifice. So far nobody in the west is punishing those corporations by boycotts. Nobody is throwing all their made in China stuff on the street. Nobody is making million people marches on the Chinese embassies.
Why should they change? Uighur Muslims are the latest cause celebre to feel good about how virtuous we are, not really solve their problems.
That's...weird. Of all the boards Cook could serve on, or not on, he chooses to join a random Chinese business school? It's hard not to think there's a quid pro quo going on because it seems completely unnecessary otherwise.
Would be great to see Apple make further progress on manufacturing elsewhere.
Checking both of these universities' websites, I see that they have social networks listed on their footers. Tsinghua's Facebook and Instagram accounts have been inactive for 2 years, but Peking's are active, both with posts from today.
I find this interesting given the Chinese censorship of these sites. Sure, a VPN would work, but I would be pretty amused if Chinese educational institutions are actually bypassing the censors.
With high probability, the links on the website are outdated. I'm an international student at Tsinghua, and a lot our lot of English web presence is stale. Both of the official instagram [1] and facebook [2] accounts have posts from within the last 24 hours.
On-campus IPV6 gets you a connection to most "banned" sites. Imagine trying to do research without google scholar? Aside from "sensitive" times (anniversary of tiananmen, 70th anniversary, etc.), it's relatively easy to hop the GFW from campus.
The Schwarzman building has unrestricted internet without needing to jump through any hoops--just connect to the wifi and you're good to go. I don't _know_ that the uni is shipping a vpn, but...
PKU also. I think the cool kids mostly prefer PKU over more utilitarian Qinghua. I never really like the latter’s campus, way more sprawling and nowhere as nice as PKU across the street, but I’m biased.
Because China is important. And, unlike the Arab oil producers, China actually has the human capital to create a university that competes with Harvard for prestige. Get used to stuff like this. Tim Cook is about 10 steps ahead of everybody who gives him a hard time for how Apple deals with China.
Tim Cook is 10 steps behind if you look at the rest of the board members list. Elon Musk, Zuckerberg, Nadella, all have already found a spot on the board.
It's mutually beneficial. The university gains the prestige of having the CEO of one of the world's largest companies on their board. And it allows Tim Cook to be on the board of one of China's most prestigious university. See my other replies down thread for why doing this in China specifically is important.
Can you elaborate on the importance and how that factors into Apple’s strategy? Saying that China is important and Tim Cook is Very Smart doesn’t make for a very enlightening comment nor a suitable rebuttal. If you’re onto something, I’d like to know what! :)
China is already Apple's second largest market. Right now China's GDP per capita is about $9,600. South Korea has a GDP per capita of about $31k and Japan has a GDP per capita of about $39k. Assuming that China reaches those levels at some point in the not too distant future (which seems likely given cultural and genetic similarities), China will be Apple's largest market. And they will be where Apple manufactures most of its products. At that point, China will be as important to Apple as the U.S., possibly more so. This is the long game that Tim Cook is playing.
Arguably serving on the board of a very powerful education institution can have way more positive influence on future generations than trade wars and sanctions.
Now whether it will, that's a different story.
A lot of countries rewrite their own history first in school and then elsewhere.
It's hard to deny the influence Harvard has on US foreign and internal policy.
You don't even need to influence many people to have lasting change on the world in the right education institutions. A handful is enough.
>It's hard not to think there's a quid pro quo going on
"The day before the advisory board meeting, Cook met with Xiao Ya-qing (肖亞慶), director of China’s State Administration for Market Regulation in Beijing. According to the bureau’s official website, "The two sides have conducted in-depth exchanges on expanding investment and business development in China, protecting consumer rights and fulfilling corporate social responsibility."
Having recently watched how the Soviet Communist party worked in HBO's Chernobyl (one official showing the scientist the "Hero of the Soviet Union" award that he'll get if he testifies the way the party wants in Vienna), this stinks to me.
But oh well, they didn't make him CEO of Apple to save the world (Hongkong specifically), they made him CEO so he cam maximize profits. Fuck Apple...
http://www.sem.tsinghua.edu.cn/en/aboutsem/advMem.html
Henry M. Paulson, Jr. Chairman, Paulson Institute Former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Former Chairman and CEO, The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc.
Mary T. Barra Chairman and CEO, General Motors Company
Lloyd C. Blankfein Chairman of the Board, The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc.
Carlos Brito CEO, Anheuser-Busch InBev
Michael L. Corbat CEO, Citigroup Inc.
Michael Dell Chairman and CEO, Dell Technologies
Jamie Dimon Chairman and CEO, JPMorgan Chase & Co.
Laurence D. Fink Chairman and CEO, BlackRock, Inc.
Doug McMillon President and CEO, Walmart Inc.
Elon Musk CEO, Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) CEO, Tesla, Inc.
Satya Nadella CEO, Microsoft
Brian L. Roberts Chairman and CEO, Comcast Corporation
Ginni Rometty Chairman, President and CEO, IBM
David M. Rubenstein Co-Founder and Co-Executive Chairman, The Carlyle Group
David C. Schmittlein John C Head III Dean, MIT Sloan School of Management
Stephen A. Schwarzman Chairman, CEO and Co-Founder, Blackstone
Mark Zuckerberg Founder and CEO, Facebook