Foreign companies face a reckoning in China as the risks of staying are generating diminishing returns.
Illustration by Valeria Petrone
In a call that lasted just three minutes this August, executives at tech giant IBM told employees it was shutting its research and development operations in China — closing two labs and cutting more than 1,000 jobs.
“It’s the end of an era,” an IT specialist who had spent 18 years at the company wrote on the social media platform Xiaohongshu in late October.
The layoffs at IBM, which first entered China in 1984, are part of a wider trend of multinationals across sectors pulli
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