Well, if we're going to be pointing fingers, let's not forget ourselves here: consumers. We gladly look away when consuming these cheap products. The attractio

Well, if we're going to be pointing fingers, let's not forget ourselves here: consumers. We gladly look away when consuming these cheap products. The attraction is that it's cheap, nothing else matters. If it were cheap whilst the country was democratic, we'd still take it. So authoritarian is not the requirement, being low cost is. That said, yes it's a fair point that cheap correlates with an authoritarian regime with lax regulation. But it's not the only reason for being low cost, it can also be a result of a surplus of labor and the lack of an internal market. Regardless, the recent insight is that moving all manufacturing into a superpower with nukes that changes alliances at a whim might have been a mistake. Hence another sizable country like India behaving unreliably isn't exactly looking attractive as the next destination.