Quote:
Originally Posted by kato13
IMHO lots of things work against this.
Too few ports, too many borders, too many ethnicities, too paranoid, too confrontational, too proud, too isolationist, too expensive for foreign manufacturing, and too corrupt (Which compared to China is saying something).
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China is also exceptionally corrupt, but they are corrupt in different ways.
The Chinese would court foreign investment, the foreign company/companies would move money into a China to build a factory in China to build widgets in the factory. The Chinese would keep the factory running on the 2nd and 3rd shift and sell the product under another label (and/or replicate the factory). In the end, the Chinese got factories and goods out of the deal.
The Russians would court foreign investment, the foreign companies would move money into Russia, and the Russians would steal the money. In the end, Russian government and mobsters (and government mobsters) got money funneled into Swiss bank accounts out of the deal.
Foreign capital investment also had a ~20 year head start in China, and it was in the West's best interest to prop up China as a bulwark against the USSR while it was in the best interest for the West for Russia to partially collapse.