The whole thing is an overreaction especially by the Chinese government. As you said yourself, not everything is under the purview of the Chinese government. If a private company wants to sell, then why shouldn’t it? (if assets are not inside China) A company is trying to reduce its exposure to risk. Hutchinson already lost a contract in Israel in 2020 thanks to US shenanigans.
In your later scenario, if Blackrock blocked Chinese ships, no country would allow this. Conversely if Hutchinson blocked American ships, do you think this would work out well?
Killing his whole family? wtf is this? Just ridiculous. Did they kill Jack Ma’s family when he made the comments with regards to Ant IPO? He probably created a worse situation than this at least in terms of media exposure. Just subject his company to more regulation, this is not bandit country India…
Let me offer a more mundane example. SharkNinja was separated from the Chinese parent company and IPO’ed basically to limit the risk exposure. Now the CEO says they will try to source from outside China. Does the chairman (Wang Xuning) need to be murdered? Would you merely cut his ear off if the goods are assembled in VN and Thailand of Chinese parts?
This is a national security issue. He is a traitor, and the punishments for treason is well known. If he thinks that just by being old and he doesn't care about punishment, China has long long time ago figured out a way to combat such thinking.
This is hugely damaging. If the transaction is completed, Blackrock will have room to operate economic coercion such as imposing docking fees on Chinese ships and restricting shipping. Or it might even start applying Trumpian regulation of requiring non-Chinese built ships to dock there
Big L for China if this deal passes through.
As for what America will smear China about this. Just use HK anti-monopoly or whatever random bs. Better to suffer soft power damage than suffer hard power loss. We aren't talking about words and shit here, this is real physical critical importance stuff for BRI
A lesson for Chinese Gov to be more careful next time. And also a lesson for China to even more rein in on its billionaires and their families. If you are a random Chinese billionaire, congratulations, your life has just gotten x2 harder due to this