The "cult of apple" doesn't break down barriers on anything except Chinese people's ability to not spend huge amounts of money for a phone their neighbour made for pennies...

Bullshit. Every ounce of cross culture exposure helps. Every bit of it. And of course, if Apple alone pulls out it makes no difference. What if every western company did the same? Apple carries a relatively large influence for one company, but even they don't make a noticeable difference on their own. But all of them? All of those western franchises and companies doing business, all the products and advertisements, the films and communications?

Insinuating (if not outright stating) that Chinese people need to introduced to basic common decency?

Yes, let's just take what I said to mean that the Chinese are cavemen and not that it's about getting some progressive western ideas to take root. And certainly not that maybe some of the better parts of Chinese culture might start to take root here. Nope, clearly I meant that every single Chinese citizen was a neanderthal who would eat his own mother if they didn't get an iPhone.

Have you ever been to China? The Chinese people aren't backwards hillbillies living in caves...

Yes, several times. And I have often remarked that I feel that their culture, as foreign as it is, has much more in common with the US than the numerous European communities I have visited. Especially their work ethics. Of course, 4 or 5 trips to the south of China don't make me an expert on the whole country.

Let me give you a specific example, albeit one concerning south Korea (and don't get all pissed off as if I'm insinuating or downright stating that they are the same thing, as if there's no difference between different Asian countries).

In the late 90s I took a long business trip over there while working for an American company that made equipment for Korean chip manufacturers (LG, Samsung, couple others not as well known). My coworker was a Korean woman who moved to Queens when she was 12, and had an engineering degree from Michigan.

We get to our Korean offices... How many of the 120 employees are woman? Six. How many of them are engineers? Zero. All 22 year old secretaries. The guy selling magazines in the building lobby makes obscene suggestions to my coworker because there's so many women working for this company, they must be whores.

We go to a bar at night and they assume the Korean girl with the white guy is a prostitute.

In meetings at these companies, every person not making coffee for us is a man. They ignore the women who speaks Korean and only speak to the man through their translators. Nevermind that she's brilliant and i couldn't handle this on my own anyway.

At the LG factory, engineers wear blue bunnysuits and operators wear pink. My friend in her blue jumpsuit walks into the women's room in the fab and we hear screams- they had never seen a woman in blue before and assumed a man was in their bathroom.

In short, the misogyny that I encountered in 1997 in South Korea was like watching an early Mad Men episode.

But honestly, do you not think that just having those women on the assembly line at the LG plant see, for the first time, a woman in an Engineer's jumpsuit didn't have any impact at all? Zero? That none of the dozens of people we interacted with took away an infinitesimal piece of women's lib? Do you think that I personally didn't take anything back with me (good or bad)?

Of course there was something. And with every other business trip, every other product interaction and western company that does business there makes a tiny change too. Drops off a few grains of sand.

I haven't been back to South Korea in 18 years, so I can't say if things are the same. I can say, unequivocally, that the companies i worked with in China from 2003-2005 appeared to have women integrated into the engineering roles more completely than I have seen here in the US (all the assembly workers were poor, young Chinese girls "from the countryside" as explained to me, but the engineering staff, secretaries and management were all really well integrated).

I had some great discussions with my counterparts in these countries; political discussions, social discussions, technical discussions.

Every interaction is a chance for transfer of ideas. Every product, every film, etc. No one single company or person is going to make a difference, no. But little by little?

So, does Apple get out of their specific business dealings than the Chinese people? Probably. But are we trying to balance the trade here? Or are we trying to get two cultures exposed to and eventually embrace the *better, more progressive ideals (relatively speaking) * that each other has to offer?