Smithfield's success begs question how many win-win deals have been forestalled

Smithfield Foods, the largest pork producer in the United States, has turned losses into gains over the past decade after it was purchased by a Chinese company. Yet even the fast development of the Virginia company has not spared its CEO Shane Smith the trouble of spending time in Washington explaining to US government officials and lawmakers that the company's cooperation with its Chinese parent company WH Group is no different from that between other US companies and their investors.

As a story on the company published in The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday indicates, the company's sales revenue has risen from $13 billion to nearly $18 billion, and it now employs 3,000 more US workers than a decade ago to increase its processing capacity.

But although, as Smith stressed in 2021, the company is "as American today as we were in 2013", the circumstances now are drastically different from how they were 10 years ago thanks to the anti-China sentiment in Washington.