Edit: I probably didn't phrase that well - how would this happen, is it a nudge and a wink thing to the board, or the board is clueless and the CEO / execs just decide etc?

Public shareholders have absolutely no loyalty to any company they extract wealth from, and they can move their capital elsewhere in seconds. And CxO/execs are typically awarded bonuses on share price movements.

So any action that moves the needle on the share price is a good thing. If this has bad long-term consequences, CxO/execs can always try to bail if they see incoming. They don't always succeed, but they have a fair chance. Employees are more likely to be left without lifeboats in the sinking ship.

What happens if we move all the profits and manufacturing capacity to markets Western investors are locked out of?

John Sterman used to say something very similar going back to at least the 2000 and the trend has only accelerated since then.

At the time I remember him giving lectures on System Dynamics models to demonstrate the effects.

Having recently seen this first hand, i.e. great developers being shuffled around and questionable business decisions carried out without a strong engineering buy in, it sucks.

why is this the responsibility of the engineer (presumably, with no real equity in the company)?

You can see this in Silicon Valley as well with the number of startups that are absolutely worthless but have exorbitant valuations because because they came up with a metric that everyone fell for.