Nationalistic and ethnic flamewar will get you banned here. So will personal attacks and insinuated slurs.
People have been hounded off this site in the past by comments along these lines. That's shameful, and we want no more of it.
No, we're not defending communism or the communist party. We're trying to defend Hacker News against (a) mob behaviors and (b) self-immolation. Here are some recent comments about this, which include other links to plenty of past explanations.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
When will this meme die?
Zoom is NOT a Chinese company. It is incorporated in and headquartered in the US. Like any American company ever, it follows US laws in the US, and local laws in other companies where it operates. End of story.
Yes their culture certainly has stronger cultural internal ties to China, due to the number of Chinese employees, but what has that got to do with anything? At the end of the day, they're a public, profit-driven corporation trying to make lots of money across the entire world.
It's not like they're secretly and nefariously doing the CCP's bidding, which seems to be the veiled suggestion people keep making.
Seriously, every time someone brings up that Zoom is "really" a Chinese company, it comes across as borderline racism or conspiracy-mongering or both. And while I'd usually never comment on someone using a throwaway account, in this case when you're pushing these kinds of shady "stronger than the more-commonly-discussed" insituations, I think using a throwaway here is representative of exactly the kind of astroturfing that spreads malicious rumors without evidence.
https://news.sky.com/story/zoom-disables-accounts-of-chinese...
>The suspension targeted Humanitarian China, an organisation based in the US, after it held a call with roughly 250 people, including a number who dialled in from China.
They said it was wrong to do, reinstated those accounts, and are building the functionality to enforce those Chinese laws without ever impacting users outside China.
That's from their blog. https://blog.zoom.us/wordpress/2020/06/11/improving-our-poli...
They are actually admitting that they're going to prevent people IN CHINA from connecting to a meeting that is presumably hosted IN THE US. That doesn't make it better, it makes it WORSE. You're basically telling the world that China will dictate how you operate WOLRDWIDE not just in China.
There's a pretty big difference IMO.
The same would be if they blocked Gmail of US citizens because of discussions related to China.
What they aren't doing is actively blocking users from China getting to www.google.com, and they aren't censoring searches Chinese users do on www.google.com because those resources aren't hosted in China and aren't subject to Chinese law.
Zoom on the other hand IS blocking users from China accessing resources in the US and while they may have "undone" the ban, they banned US users from their platform for breaking a Chinese law that they aren't subject to. Namely talking about the Tienanmen Square massacre.
Unless you've got a magic bullet to give Wall Street a conscience, that wasn't going to happen.
By the way, in general my understanding is that the "beholden to their shareholders as a public company" (and thus forced to make the most remunerative decisions) belief is a myth, a public company is free to make ethical choices (if its major shareholders don't oppose them).
Based on a complaint from china regarding non-Chinese citizens with non-china accounts, zoom cancelled the non-china accounts.
Full stop. Let that sink in.
If you are wondering who zoom will accommodate you have your answer. This is a fact. This is what we are calling "racism"?
It's entire contents is an argument that Zoom is evil because Eric Yuan is Chinese-American. It doesn't say a single one of the things you're saying.
We can be upset at power structures and at their effects. Taking that further to make assumptions about groups of people is racist.
You'll get a Liu Xiaobo once in a while, but much more often you'll have people that, while easily wonderful as people per se, are disgracefully forced, or have been convinced to, do some things that they shouldn't do.
He is a naturalized American of Chinese ancestry.
In history, this kind of scapegoating was counterproductive.
Though I think the CEO is less relevant than the critical amount of developers Zoom relies on that are directly living under and subject to CCP malfeasance.
Could you give a few such cases?
That's definitely one area the Chinese system is vastly behind the international standard. But this has not been conscious to me.
When I was a child, we had horror stories of people sentenced to death penalty and were executed on superficial charges that sexual misconduct. And my parents have witnessed detained thief were beaten like wild animals by policeman, and the thief's scream was heart far in the then poor village.
These measures can even escalate during "Yanda", a nationally-coordinated clampdown on criminal activities. In [1], it was noted: "China's execution rate increases dramatically during Yanda campaigns."
Such brutal national campaigns are dying down, the most recent one [2] has much less cruelty. And historically such campaigns enjoyed universal domestic support.
As of today, the Chinese government has a high degree of popular endorsement to use whatever not-too-out-of-line measures to bring back the corrupted businessman or former government officials, who are prosecuted by the public attorneys. Thanks a grain of national pride, i.e., "those corrupted bastard not only embezzled our money, and they escape to the country that is unfriendly and can be benefited from those fortune".
[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/23639486?seq=1 [2] https://www.economist.com/china/2019/02/28/china-is-waging-a...
I will say... it's curious to me that you seem to be well aware of such practices but still challenged the parent to provide examples (the implication being, that they were misinformed).
Why did you ask the parent to provide examples if you knew of some already? What's your motivation?
#2 I was not aware of the details of harassing on corruption suspects' relatives.
#3 I think it was reasonable to not able to link these 2 facts automatically together as self-evident.
https://www.businessinsider.com/china-uses-family-members-to...
Just to be clear, I'm not suggesting that China is unique in doing this. They are simply much more openly aggressive and nonchalant about it.
EDIT: I also think it was both reasonable and correct for you to ask for examples. Superpowers do enough sketchy things that we don't need to be muddying the waters with made up claims.
Do you not understand the racism behind assuming someone is a CCP agent based on nothing more than their race?
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/11/technology/zoom-china-tia...
Edit: Let me also state that I'm not entirely sure what OP's argument was, considering the comment was deleted. I'm merely stating that there seems to be some cooperation with the CCP and Zoom.
What we have here is going from "CEO was born and raised in China" to "No wonder why they have to play party with CCP" and "inevitable ties and implicit subservience to the CCP". I can't see the logical connection in the absence of other information. Don't you see a problem with assuming someone's motives purely from their country of origin?
1. zoom's application is sending data to Chinese servers separate from the application functionality servers.
2. the CEO is from china, I'm going to assume he has relatives in china.
3. we know CCP is a completely fucked up government with an absolutely horrible history of civil rights violations, genocide, etc.
I wouldn't put it past CCP to be pressuring the CEO by threatening relatives who live in china. this wouldn't be unheard of for CCP.
add the the unnecessary data transfer to chinese servers makes it look really bad.
its a fairly reasonable conclusion to draw that the CEO is compromised if all the above holds true.
more extreme conclusions could just as easily be drawn from that same data that he is literally a foreign agent for china.
It'd be one thing if there are actually some nefarious ties between Eric and CCP, but all we are going by is he's originally from China and there could be influence by CCP on people from China. It's not bad to point out a connection, it's bad to point out a possible connection based on nothing more than where the guy is from.
It is best to focus on these sorts of links rather than someone merely being from China.
The issue is national origin, not ethnicity. Japanese Americans were thrown into camps for the same reason, but we're not talking about jailing anyone here. We're talking about avoiding a specific product.
Another difference is that Japanese Americans were put into camps regardless of how many generations removed from being Japanese they were. No one is arguing that CCP has control over Chinese Americans whose ancestors immigrated here in the 1800s. It's about people who literally grew up in China and/or still have close family there for CCP to threaten.
EDIT: Also sounds like you're saying that it's ok to avoid doing business with someone based on national origin, which I also find problematic.
Sure, it can be problematic. I've seen articles about how Russian people in the software industry are having a very hard time because of what Putin's regime does. It's not fair for the people who have nothing to do with Putin and no exposure to him.
But what is the alternative? Putin and Kim have assassinated dissidents in Western countries. Do we assume people can't be coerced just because they left the borders of the authoritarian country?
Should the US government also remove its nationality restrictions for security clearances?
I mean overall you really don’t find it an issue to blankedly judge an entire class of people based on what some people within that population does or could do?
It absolutely is not a protected class. There are no protected classes when I am deciding whom I trust with my personal data. I can discriminate for any reason, including national origin.
> I mean overall you really don’t find it an issue to blankedly judge an entire class of people based on what some people within that population does or could do?
I would find that an issue if anyone (including me) were proposing it. We are not. You're attacking a straw man.
Here are the facts, regardless of Yuan's citizenship, race, etc:
1. Yuan grew up in China. He still has Zoom employees and family there.
2. China is controlled by a regime that has no qualms about using physical threats and violence to maintain control.
That's it. That's all I need to decide that I don't trust Zoom, if all of their extreme dishonesty and malware installations weren't enough. They haven't shown good judgment, and even if they did, it would be easy for CCP to put pressure on Yuan (or any other employee living in mainland China).
If Yuan had no family in China, no employees, and enough bravery to speak against CCP, I would not feel this way. I am not judging an "entire class" of people.
By the way, every firm that requires security clearance does judge entire classes of people as security risks. The question I asked, which you didn't answer, is whether you think that's also inappropriate.
You listed 2 things. First is where he's from, the second is the politics of the country. You are then basing your judgement (at least in this comment) purely on those factors. The implication here is you wouldn't trust your data to anyone that was born, grew up and has family and / or employees in China. I mean most of the large tech companies have some employees in China. How is this not judging an entire class (or group if you'd like) of people?
As far as security clearance, they are at least in theory assessed based on established facts about a particular person. e.g. being born in China doesn't automatically disqualify you as far as I'm aware. If you know otherwise or can point to examples, I'm open to being corrected.
I mean if it's been established that Eric has connections to the CPP then that's a different matter and we can look at that. My objection is with "Eric is a Chinese-American billionaire businessman so we shouldn't trust him".
Yet.
At the risk of a slippery slope fallacy, institutional xenophobia ain't controlled by an on/off switch. Dehumanization is a gradual process, and establishing an attitude that people associated with an enemy are aligned with that enemy is part of that process. At first those associations might seem reasonable, going for officials and other important figures, and then perhaps their family, and so might the actions against them, like added scrutiny and surveillance of their communications and travels. The problem is that both ends of that are prone to scope creep - the target set broadens ever so slowly (citizens, ex-citizens, descendants of (ex-)citizens, their descendants, and so on, almost always excused with "well we need to be sure that $CURRENT_TARGET is not part of $PREVIOUS_TARGET"), while the actions worsen ever so slowly (surveillance, profiling, travel restrictions, property confiscation, imprisonment, sterilization, execution) as the rhetoric heats up from "we just want to make sure these people aren't the enemy" to "these people are the enemy and shall be treated as such".
Personally, I'd prefer to nip that in the bud rather than watch 1800's-era sinophobia reenact itself at the expense of my Chinese-American friends and colleagues. I also have enough self-awareness to know that if I would be upset by people writing me off as "will probably help oppress minorities and political dissidents if his government tells him to do so" simply because I happen to be a citizen of a country with a track record for oppressing minorities and political dissidents, then I should refrain from doing so to a citizen (let alone ex-citizen) of a different country with those same tendencies, even if those tendencies are, in my opinion, much stronger.
``` Of 127,000 Japanese Americans living in the continental United States at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, 112,000 resided on the West Coast.[9] About 80,000 were Nisei (literal translation: "second generation"; American-born Japanese with U.S. citizenship) and Sansei ("third generation"; the children of Nisei). The rest were Issei ("first generation") immigrants born in Japan who were ineligible for U.S. citizenship under U.S. law.[10] ```
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_America...
What do you suggest?
Should there be a upper limit on the generations to be considered not originated from a nation state? According to what happened to WWII Japanese ethnic Americans, that number seems have to be > 3?
And remember that what happened in WWII Japanese internment camp is an evidence that "national origin" as an association was plainly wrong, from the same wiki page:
``` In 1980, under mounting pressure from the Japanese American Citizens League and redress organizations,[30] President Jimmy Carter opened an investigation to determine whether the decision to put Japanese Americans into concentration camps had been justified by the government. He appointed the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC) to investigate the camps. The Commission's report, titled Personal Justice Denied, found little evidence of Japanese disloyalty at the time and concluded that the incarceration had been the product of racism ```
Emphasis on the last statement: `the incarceration had been the product of racism`.
It explicitly argues that he's evil because he has a Chinese name and Wikipedia describes him as Chinese-American. There's no equivocating about the software being China-based, or him having close family in China for the CCP to threaten.
And discriminating against people for national origin is considered so bigoted it was explicitly included in the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Your reasoning is sound, but you should seriously reconsider your basic ethical principles.
Not to justify atrocities happening in China or getting into Whataboutism, but just to give an analogy, would it be fair to consider any US expat an accomplice in or a proponent of separating migrant children from their families at the border?