In his column for Salon.com, Andrew Leonard (’91) contemplates what it means for an Indian outsourcing giant to start up a branch in China:

Tata Consultancy Services, India’s biggest software outsourcing company, is planning a big push in China, reports the Financial Times. “If any country has the potential to scale up like India, it’s China,” N. Chandrasekaran, TCS global head of sales and operations, told the F.T.

When a U.S. company sets up shop in China, it is often accused, sometimes correctly, of sacrificing the interests of American workers for the benefit of its bottom line. But what do we say when an Indian company opens for business in Shanghai, with plans to hire Chinese software engineers to handle operations for Fortune 500 multinationals? The exploitation dynamic isn’t quite as crystal-clear. TCS isn’t moving to China because programmers are cheaper there, but because that is where the action is.

Read the full piece here.