Business
Putting nearly all production in one country is efficient until that country decides to use it. Once a firm's output depends on a single place, the host government gains a power it can wield against the firm, and against the firm's home country too.
When a buyer sends its own engineers to teach suppliers how to make advanced parts, that know-how doesn't stay with the buyer. The suppliers take what they learned and sell it to local competitors, who then build rival products. Here, suppliers taught to perfect multi-touch glass and thousands of internal components went on to serve domestic phone makers.
A big enough buyer doesn't just find an existing manufacturing base; it creates one. Its investment in upgrading factories, training workers and raising quality can lift a whole national industry, so the supplier country ends up shaped by the customer as much as the reverse.
A company that can't leave a country stops challenging that country's government. Even a firm that built its identity on rebellion drifts into passively cooperating with an authoritarian regime, because its fate now rests in that regime's hands.
A company can operate in a country for decades while dealing only with a few private suppliers, never engaging with the government or the country itself. That narrow view hides the political reality until the state steps in, forcing a sudden scramble to understand its culture, politics and people.
Foreign firms that bring know-how into a country are gradually squeezed out once local companies have learned from them. The host country's goal of homegrown innovation turns the foreign teacher into a temporary scaffold.
A foreign company that behaves as if its commercial weight puts it above local politics gets seen by the government as overbearing. That resentment marks the point where the state starts asserting control and the company must work to placate it.
A company may move production abroad simply after failing to manufacture well elsewhere and being drawn by plentiful cheap workers. What starts as a cost decision grows, step by step, into a tie with consequences for trade, technological rivalry and national security.
Efforts to improve factory workers' lives get crushed from two directions: the buyer's relentless demands on volume and speed, and a government cracking down on civil society. Even well-meaning reformers inside the company can't hold out against both.