The year-end invites lots of ‘Season’s Greetings’ cards in my mailbox. And this one was a cute twist. It said ‘Sweden’s Greetings’ and was an invitation from the Volvo car company asking me to buy or lease one of their vehicles. But wait, Volvo is not a Swedish company anymore; it is a Chinese company! Ford Motors of the US bought Volvo Car Corporation in 1999 and sold it to China’s Geely Automobile in 2010. Geely probably thinks that continuing to highlight its Swedish roots will help its sales more than letting on that it is a Chinese car company.

China knows a thing or two about nationalism and its connection to business. Its industrial policy has for years required foreign companies to have a local partner if they want to operate in China. This was particularly so in the automotive sector — both GM and Volkswagen have the Shanghai Automotive Industries Corporation, a government-owned company, as their partner in China.

Chinese nationalism has expanded its business scope in recent years. Uber wanted to grow big in China but kept running into its local rival, Didi Chuxing Technology which was being backed by all the national tech giants including Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu. It reportedly got the regulators to write very favourable regulations, so much so that Uber decided to exit and sold its operations to its rival.

Wang Jianlin, a wealthy Chinese industrialist, is driven by nationalism. His publicly stated mission is to make China dominant in the entertainment business. This includes buying chunks of Hollywood, which now includes AMC Entertainment, and Dick Clark Productions. A more recent example makes even more interesting reading. McDonald’s has sold 80 per cent of its Chinese operations to a group, majority held by Citic, a Chinese government owned company. McDonald’s has been facing declining sales in China, and the reason it gave for the recent quarter is that nationalist consumers keeping away from McDonald’s as a protest against US stance against China’s expansion in the South China Sea. But does Citic, a finance company, know what to do? Perhaps it doesn’t matter!

Other countries have begun to react to Chinese nationalism with their own versions. When a Chinese fund wanted to acquire a German chip maker in November last year, the German government intervened to halt the process, fearing the acquisition on grounds of losing control of valuable technology.

With Trump winning the White House with the slogan ‘Make America Great Again,’ we can possibly see more activity in the nationalism front. His threats to companies not to move manufacturing abroad is sending a signal. The idea of supporting national companies has not had much traction here in the past. A ‘Made in the USA’ foundation has been pushing us to buy local. Only now we have large economies that were once forcefully arguing for international trade trying to withdraw into their shells because that same trade has presumably come to hurt them.

Voting your nationalism with your wallet has not been very popular, unless you live in a country like China. The average free market consumer is looking to minimise her cost of purchase and even organisations striving to awaken people’s conscience about working conditions under which the product was made have only had limited success.

The writer is a professor at Suffolk University, Boston

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