The site’s author, Dan Harris, compares the mood in China today with the situation in Russia in the 1990s, when outside businesses would get repeatedly ripped off by their Russian partners, and would go away mystified that these partners would take the short term payouts of burning a foreign partner, at the expense of the much larger upside they could realize from an ongoing arrangement. For these Russian entrepreneur/bandits, Harris says, “They do not believe they will be able to operate freely five years or even one year from now. So though you see them as having irrationally sacrificed massive long term gains for much smaller short term rewards, they see themselves as having quite rationally grabbed what they could while it was still there.”
Dan Harris in BoingBoing
