Also the UBS pig incident: https://fortune.com/2019/06/17/ubs-china-pig-paul-donovan/ https://fortune.com/2019/06/17/ubs-china-pig-paul-donovan/ That one wasn

Also the UBS pig incident: https://fortune.com/2019/06/17/ubs-china-pig-paul-donovan/ https://fortune.com/2019/06/17/ubs-china-pig-paul-donovan/ That one wasn't even anything apparently political, just absurd snowflake-scale sensitivity on the part of a whole country: Donovan made the “Chinese pig” comment on Wednesday as he attempted to explain why the country’s swine flu outbreak shouldn’t concern investors eyeing the international inflation outlook. “Does this matter? It matters if you are a Chinese pig,” Donovan said. “It matters if you like eating pork in China. It does not really matter to the rest of the world. China does not export a lot of food. The only global relevance would be if Chinese inflation influenced politics and other policies.” Somehow the second sentence got interpreted as an insult - or was it just part of a trend of throwing weight around, as you suggest? One of China’s biggest state-owned infrastructure companies excluded UBS Group AG from a bond deal after the bank’s global chief economist sparked a furor with his use of the phrase “Chinese pig.” The comment was condemned by two Communist Party publications and by trade groups representing Chinese brokerages. Haitong International Securities Group, which competes against UBS for China-related business, said on Friday that it had suspended its activities with the bank. Honestly, having watched this sort of stuff for years my own business interest in China is dead. Yes, it's a big market. But you can live very comfortably serving the rest of the world. Facebook and Google are banned there, they still mint more money than they can spend. Ignoring that market completely seems like a recipe for a much simpler life.