In this kind of environment people that are rational either stick to their tribe or learn to keep their mouths shut because it's no longer safe to express a contrarian opinion (just like in China). You see already see this in comments sections throughout western publications and forums where questioning policy or taking the opposite side means you are a bot/stooge/unpatriotic/50 cent warrior, etc, etc, etc.
Then sit back and let China then make the first move. Might not work, but at this point I wouldn't put it past somebody in the White House having already gamed it.
There has never been a case in human history where one group of people voluntarily gave up their wealth, status and privilege to another group of people. Wealth transfer always leads to violence.
The problem here is that this is an obvious escalation with US as the aggressor and not all US allies are willing to follow the US into war as the current administration is seen as unreliable.
You even had the former and current (!) prime ministers of Australia warning of high likelihood of a war between China and the US within the next 3 months. Where the next 3 months of course is the period of the US presidential election indicating that they clearly see a connection between the US elections and increased China tensions.
What is more important is how it is being perceived amongst other countries around the south china sea. And as far as I can tell the US does not have the support it normally would have. Even from surefire allies such as Australia.
The "rules" were sovereign rules China applied and it's not as if other search engines or companies in China could get away without following those same rules... plus, such rules are now being applied to ByteDance and WeChat in the USA to make them "voluntarily" pull out as well and this of courses legitimizes China's past and present actions (which is fundamentally why I do not think we should be going down this route).
It's basically admitting defeat if we start using the same policies as China. China owns up to their policies of censorship and heavy-handed market control. They're not hiding that fact. If we start down that path too then we're just adopting their system and admitting we can't beat them with a free market and freedom of access to apps/information.
Keep in mind that Trump's rationale for blocking WeChat is that it is "allowing the Chinese Communist Party a mechanism for keeping tabs on Chinese citizens who may be enjoying the benefits of a free society for the first time in their lives." That's basically saying the people are too stupid and must have their information access controlled—which, as you may know, is exactly the communist part of China's modus operandi.
I don't see how US is the aggressor. The kind of control CCP has over these companies is well known and as someone who is not an American, I was surprised why the US admin had not taken stern measures till now. This standoff was initiated when China decided to kick out American companies for not subscribing to their censorship policies. And the way companies like WeChat feed into CCP's censorship framework is well known.
https://citizenlab.ca/2020/05/wechat-surveillance-explained/
I'm classing it as a certainty. Have a read of the Wolfowitz Doctrine and work out what it necessitates, and that to be done very soon.
Even so, I believe the US has 'missed the bus'. It needed to have initiated vigorous conflict earlier this year to be sure of victory in that coming war. It can't start anything worthwhile now until at least the next Spring-Summer campaign season. By then China will have had another 12 months of growth, and the US another 12 months of decline.
There is only one country in the world which is reliably able to afford being nuked, and has "surviving first, and second strike" as part of its many doctrines.
The only major country against which MAD is not so assured is China.
"Kill 300 million Chinese, still got a billion Chinese left. Kill 300 million Americans, no more America."
USA talks TikTak, but the world hears "the overall political arrangement of China"
But the Trump administration is very active in launching more attacks. If you follow the news on what they've been doing to Chinese companies, the past month has been absolutely insane. The attacks are only getting faster and faster, as the Trump administration gets increasingly desperate to win a reelection.
Another problem is that all these attacks leave behind permanent damage. It's not just a matter of ignoring the attacks. I fear that at some point, we get past some boiling point, and things erupt into a hot war.
Here is what he said two weeks ago about how much happened in the past two weeks. https://twitter.com/Tom_Fowdy/status/1285845346447499265
"As I noted a while ago, the US is on a roll announcing 2-3 anti-China measures a week. There has been one roughly every two days. It's just non-stop
-Closes the Chinese consulate in Houston
-Charges two nationals for hacking
-Adds more companies to the entity list over Xinjiang
-Bans federal contractors buying from Huawei
-Ups ante in the South China sea
-Blacklists officials
-Removes Hong Kong's special status
-Daily Cold War rhetoric from Pompeo
-Restricts Chinese student visas
-Ends fulbright scholar program Hong Kong
-Contemplating banning TikTok
Most of the above is in the past TWO WEEKS alone."
-Closes the Chinese consulate in Houston
>Allegedly caught spying
-Charges two nationals for hacking
>Conducting justice shouldn't be seen as a deliberate attempt to increase tension
-Adds more companies to the entity list over Xinjiang
>Black listing companies involved in perpetuating genocide against the Uighurs doesn't seem controversial to me
-Bans federal contractors buying from Huawei
>National security
-Ups ante in the South China sea
>Allowing China to claim that region puts a substantial amount of trade in jeopardy, due to many established shipping routes going through there. China is the aggressor here, regardless of what the media tries to portray.
-Blacklists officials
>You need to be more specific, but I assume you are referring to more Uighur genocide related sanctions
-Removes Hong Kong's special status
>Following the terms of the Hong Kong special status trade agreement that hinges on it being a self-governed state. (It no longer is)
-Daily Cold War rhetoric from Pompeo
>Sabre rattling, but could be taken as aggressive action depending on whether Pompeo was talking about any of the points above. If so, then it's warranted.
-Restricts Chinese student visas
>The world is in lock-down. Even countries heavily reliant on chinese student spending, have temporarily restricted such visas.
-Ends fulbright scholar program Hong Kong
>Why continue such programs when the status of such a country changes? Those programs and trade agreements have to be renegotiated.
-Contemplating banning TikTok
>Reciprocal treatment of western social media. So far the first and only deliberate escalation of tensions against China, on this list. Justified... but certainly an escalation.
Or maybe, just maybe, he is doing something which he believes is the right thing to do and will help Americans? The ratcheting up could just be a tactic to force the next administration into a position to actually deal with the dysfunctional relationship rather than always rolling over and hoping things will be different like previous administrations.
Honestly I think China has very little to gain from interfering on either side of the US election, and potentially a lot to lose. Russia, on the other hand...
-- Vice President Dick Cheney, 2005-06-20
1. A thoroughly mendacious character 2. A moron
A lot of people ascribe malice to him, but it’s clear as day that he was in over his head with the entire project. Basically 0 of his goals have been achieved 17 years in.
So I would say that while the appearance of competent war games was there, it was a charade.
Like it or not, kicking out white people isn't just symbolism.
To be clear, I agree that transfer of power was a classic neoliberal failure, and the situation is a travesty.
The Velvet Revolution comes to mind. Of course there is a possibility/threat of violent escalation in negotiating these things, but rational actors can make the calculus that getting a good enough deal guaranteed is better than fighting and potentially loosing a better one. However, it requires a non-totalitarian view of the world (i.e. the others are not enemies no matter what and must be punished for their bad deeds doesn't really allow you to negotiate in a de-escalatory manner).
There was an interesting book published about two years ago (I'm too lazy to search for it) which showed that wealth "re-calibration" only really happened as a result of violent change. I know I wouldn't be here in front of a computer writing this comment if it hadn't been for WW2 that brought communist rule to my Eastern-European country, which communist rule brought forced industrialisation with the help of mass education (that was of course free, unlike before WW2). That benefited my parents who could make the "leap" from the countryside to the city. Probably a new war could similarly eliminate the wealth inequality in countries like the US.
Actually I looked for it and I'm 99% sure this is the book: "The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century" [1]
[1] https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691183251/th...
Perhaps just by destroying wealth. It’s unlikely that any violence could improve the US middle class since it’s already richer than the middle class in most other countries. Best you can do at that point is just try to eliminate the wealthy if you’re fixated on income inequality.
Not likely that Trump would inflict even more economic damage during his presidency just before the Election.
But almost did (Cuban Missile Crisis), and there were several wars* by proxy (some with China too).
*conflicts technically, as Congress hasn't declared war since WW2
because they couldn't win in Vietnam or Korea.
In the long term, the only thing going for the US are alliances with other developed countries and democracies. But the current administration doesn't seem to care very much about that.
The more important part is technological innovation, and so far, I remain unconvinced that a closed totalitarian system will have as much innovation as an open one, in the long term.
Otherwise, agreed that the US does need its allies, though I don’t necessarily agree that it has alienated them. If you look at the real events, and not merely the media talking heads, there is absolutely a growing sense of unity against China. See: India, Vietnam, Japan, Philippines, increased NATO budget commitments, to name a few.
It's better to characterize/qualify Chinese style of governance as a top-down meritocratic totalitarian government. Policymakers in China are theoretically able to make decisions that are optimal to achieve certain policy goals, say x% economic growth. In contrast, democracies set policy goals and make decisions through the messy process of achieving political consensus.
IMO, private innovation happens when a combination of factors align: free consumer choice, a large market under a common set of rules and stable political conditions. I don't think the Chinese style of governance prevents any of this.
Public innovation happens through well-funded universities and taxpayer-funded research grants. China pushes one step further at times by funding new technology/research directly through state owned/sponsored enterprises.
I think there are genuine fears within US policy circles that the stability afforded by economic growth under a meritocratic totalitarian government could give China an edge over countries like the US, which have to work with the overheads of a democracy. I believe observers in the future will agree that these fears were not unfounded.
I don’t believe that China can ever get remotely close to this cultural influence if it retains an authoritarian system. The artistic ecosystem will never form.
I can only think of Vietnam where a Chinese TV series got quite popular.
Now it may be true that you can quickly climb the ladder if you never challenge anything, but that’s a pretty narrow set of merit being recognized. It’s just barely an improvement over promoting family members. In both cases, no fundamental change can legitimately bubble up based on merit.
If only the US motives were actually that altruistic, but in reality US intervention in foreign regimes were mostly to protect its interests rather than any actual ideals.
Apologies for unstructured reply:
There are other real events too, like how trade between China and ASEAN increased throughout covid and and the general trend is more integration. The real events you outlined are also still filtered through FVEY talking heads. People are misattributing increased militarily budgets in the region as growing hint solidifying US coalition when many of these increases are because these countries no longer see US as a reliable partner in SCS, a pattern that started under Obama. See Australians increased military budget citing specifically so, or how their foreign minister upheld US position on SCS but publicly distanced herself from Trump/Pompeo bellicose China policy. Philippines just bailed SCS drills. Half of Vietnamese military acquisitions capabilities target Malaysia, like wise for other countries in the region. It's not all to challenge China - people forget SCS is a 6 party dispute with various overlapping claims. Like when Taiwan AND China both sent ship to assert their claims after PCA ruling. BTW their increased funding and capabilities is directly a result of increased growth from China's growth. Or that China puts more warship tonnage than the entire region combined every year, by multitudes. Or how US military experts want access to Japanese basing to spreadout US asset risk against Chinese strike, but rampant covid in Japanese US bases just made sure that will never happen. Or this meme [1] that explains India's geopolitical situation, China is not the only big country with nervous neighbors.
Or how moving manufacturing out of China is still an ongoing experiment and ultimately one first started by China herself, where China gets to decide winners and losers. Months after Samsung closed their last phone plant in China, they outsourced their low-end models under a Chinese ODM. Also Vietnam is full, all their infrastructure including human capital are at capacity and will take years to cultivate. Or how people celebrate Foxconn recently moving 1B iphone manufacturing to India but don't mention they've invested 8B into IC packaging in China the same week. Or most of final assembling happening in India is still completely reliant on Chinese supply chains. Or how India basically needs 30 years of Chinese reforms to reach comparable development status as China and China could only achieve that due to authoritarian government structure... does India's messy democracy stand a chance? History and past attempts at reform suggests no. Or how automation + ASEAN competition means India will only get to grab a fraction of Chinese manufacturing before they get another 300M unemployed, angry youths because they don't have one-child policy. China still has that many in "poverty" even after peak manufacturing phase. IMO there's just not enough global demand for India to ever replicate China or reach parity. And that demographic boon of of youth is going to turn into a curse. Rest of ASEAN is the same, if you divide all of Chinese manufacturing at peak, with minimal automation, that fed entire world, ~400M jobs, there's simply not enough to go around. Again, China controls the supply chain, she will decide winners for the next 10 years (this number is important), not the west. She simply hasn't enacted extreme policies like US entities list, but could literally cripple many sectors in any country it chooses if she does.
The geopolitics of the region is complex, and everyone in the region is hedging between US and China for posturing, everyone is building up - through growth enabled by China - because they doubt US commitment under current admin that will take years to fix. Except US analysts thinks unless they start a war with China by 2025-2030 latest (that 10 years), Chinese advantage in SCS will be insurmountable. Incidentally, it will take a few years for TSMC to finish their Arizona plant, otherwise no one gets 7nm chips for a while. At the end of the day, only US China-hawks wants a war, everyone else in region has too much to lose, Chinese economy and supply chain feeds the entire regions growth, especially post covid just like post 2008 GFC. And in the south, literally by controlling mekong water supply in down river countries. And even if there is a war where China loses, unless China is completely dismantled, she'll have the industrial capability to destroy any SCS infrastructure via missiles for perpetuity. The future of SCS is already decided in a sense. China has too much industrial capital now to ever not be a geopolitical reality in the region - industrialization is why North Korea can't feed their people but still build inter-continental ballistic missiles. China will always have the capability to shutdown ASEAN and turn everyone into losers. This holds true even if China is blockaded from all outside resources, China is not Japan in WW2, it doesn't have enough domestic resources to maintain huge economic growth, but it has more than enough to be completely self sufficient on a war economy, even if everyone has to ride bikes and eat rice. It could literally revert to a hermit kingdom and lob missiles forever, in which case the entire region loses while US wins. Everyone knows this.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/KireMama/comments/hda8kq/south_asia...
As I said, we will likely see a Cold War scenario of two separate spheres of economic influence. The divestment process is already underway.
Lack of stability in the Pacific Rim is now more expensive long term than US labor costs.
Also, I recently watched a documentary on the start of Nazi Germany. The parallels with current political movements are astounding. Fake news, discrediting experts, ignoring protocols, validating xenophobia, using disasters to grab more power - we've seen it all before.
You would have thought the US would have developed a bit since then. But apparently it hasn‘t.
I'm just listening to the "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" audiobook; a bit dated now (written in the '70s) but also written by someone who was in Germany during the whole time. There are a lot of parallels, but according to him, there are a lot of key differences (caveat -- haven't independently checked these characterizations):
* Germany did not have a strong democratic history; unlike both England and France, which had strong movements towards democracy hundreds of years before, Germany was a functional military dictatorship up until the end of WW I. Hitler could openly say that democracy was a bad idea, and lots of rank-and-file Germans agreed with him.
* Germany had a very strong army that was authoritarian, more or less an independent political entity, and sympathetic to Hitler's aims
* Germany had a very biased judiciary. While leftists were sentenced to death for treason for simply reporting violations of the Versailles Treaty, Hitler ended up spending only 9 months in jail for actually attempting a violent coup. This wasn't just because Hitler was popular or charimatic: loads of nationalists / authoritarian rightists had similarly soft punishments.
The US has a strong cultural affinity for democracy; the military is not, at the moment, sympathetic to a dictatorship; and while according to some reports, some police departments are more sympathetic towards right-wing demonstrators than left-wing demonstrators, the judiciary is not.
In other words, we have a lot more institutions that would need to be subverted before we were in the kind of danger Germany was in the 1920s. Still, better to be aware of the dangers and do what we can to oppose them sooner rather than later.
With respect to the biased judiciary, the way the courts are being stacked in the US may well result in something similar. The AG appears to be already fairly biased (compromised?).
Yes, there are differences still, even in the situations I describe above, but the similarities are worrying.
The key difference for me (at least based on my own anecdata from speaking with people from China) is that Chinese people are not blind to the problems within their politics and government. Especially, the youth recognise the oppressive nature of the regime.
In the West, however, there is a subset of people for whom certain populist political figures can do no wrong. These people are happy to tolerate any "eccentricities", and perhaps don't understand what they might be enabling. And, unfortunately, the enablers are not a small minority.
For example, one guy even claimed he could shoot someone on 5th avenue and not lose a single vote; his supporters applauded in agreement.
I the only difference between China and Nazi Germany from a human rights perspective, is that China hasn't declared any war.
Still, here in the west Nazis is the greatest evil ever, while China is complicated, and even some communist genociders are loved.
I'm not defending Nazis, I'm just staing that their evil is not unparalleled, and there exists a current nation that reeks of the same evil, and there doesn't seem to be a way to stop it.
Sure, the west is a mess with all the political tensions, but all that is just blinding to what is happening outside.
I think the unfortunate explanation is that many Americans are now quite vindictive against the whole concept of China and would not mind any action that seem to damage it. Instead of looking at the issue objectively they simply want to believe whatever hurts must be wise. It's making me wonder if unthinkable disasters may actually happen out of sheer stupidity and irrationality.
Why would they? Less than equally free trade over the last ~30yr has driven a lot of blue collar voters into the arms of people who make crude promises to bring jobs back.
Many people would like to see more tactful foreign policy by the US but you'd be hard pressed to find people who think the status quo with regard to China was not in serious need of adjustment.
You mean, what matters to the political and economic elites in the US, perhaps. In the rest of the world, most of us (IMNSHO) don't share this outlook, nor would we like to be on any one of the two sides.
China can force any company out of the country for any arbitrary reason whatsoever. As far as I know, they are still banning Houston Rockets games because Morey supported Hong Kong in a tweet.
Tesla was one of the first US companies to operate with the level of autonomy they have in China. Perhaps there is some retribution from the CCP, but such is the consequence of doing business with a totalitarian state.
Our country is founded on a free market economy and competition. If a Chinese company outcompetes US companies... well that means our system is working.
If we decide that rounding up Muslims is a no good very bad idea it follows that we should probably try to do less business with those who do or at the very least do business on terms less favorable to them.
I think the scope and actions matter. Responding to tariffs with tariffs makes perfect sense, for instance. Punishing individuals makes less sense (eg. if china decided to send all expat americans in china to concentration camps, doing the same to chinese americans wouldn't make sense).
>If a Chinese company outcompetes US companies... well that means our system is working.
It's a good sign that a US company can outcompete a chinese company, even with a handicap, but it's a not a desirable situation.
Some say yes, specifically some in the current administration... But ignoring my glib & pointless attack at a few powerful racists: this tangent of the tangent has very little to do with that the previous posters were saying.
The comparison would only be valid if rounding up the Muslim population has some effect on commercial interests specifically the giving commercial interests in the country doing the rounding up an advantage over those in the other country.
We've been accusing China of "unfair tariffs" when in reality we actually benefit from exploiting their cheap labor and sell them back the same iPhone they assembled for something like 10x the markup. Trying to say this is a reactionary tariff is disingenuous, when the trade balance has been in this state for decades, and the only real reason we're starting to ban their tech exports is because it's getting dangerously competitive with our own. It's shaking our foundational beliefs that our system is destined to win, and now we're resorting to the tactics of our rivals in a moment of insecurity.
Giving up the moral high ground is not a move of a superpower, and aides in destabilising the geopolitical playing field.
At the core of it, the kind of protectionism China has engaged in is defecting in a prisoner's dilemma. If you play always cooperate against a defectbot, you're going to lose eventually, even if you start very far ahead.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24079115 for more.
When you learn a bit more about geopolitics, you realize that there's more to these things than initially appears. Tiananmen Square was pretty bad. But when you look at the utter collapse of Russia after it tried to Westernize, and the poor shape of America because of her own economic policies, someone not living in the Anglo/American news bubble would really have to wonder.
To that end, companies that have an easier time skirting around the dirty politics – like Tesla, Ford, and GM – have been able to have successful and profitable operations in China. As the parent points out, there's a pandora's box that's being opened. And if you are led to believe that it's a normal comment, it's the same nationalistic stuff you've being trained to fall in line with.
Sure, but by that same argument, this executive order bans ByteDance/Tencent under American laws and directives (specifically, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act).
Obviously not the case - this is an out-right ban. There has been no evidence of TikTok violating any laws, and furthermore, no new laws have been issued to which TikTok could adhere to avoid a ban.
Companies operating in China can adhere to Chinese law to operate in the country, but the Trump administration hasn't even issued any laws.
This is unprecedented.
One of those laws is China's National Intelligence law which requires all companies to cooperate with and aid national intelligence.
https://fortune.com/2014/08/11/china-western-companies-monop... (China vs. Western companies: Best defense is a strong offense)
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/28/1-in-5-companies-say-china-s... (1 in 5 corporations say China has stolen their IP within the last year: CNBC CFO survey)
https://money.cnn.com/2018/04/05/news/economy/china-foreign-... (How China gets what it wants from American companies)
https://money.cnn.com/2018/03/23/technology/china-us-trump-t... (How much has the US lost from China’s IP theft?)
As far as I know, you trust media reports more than a random search on Chinese video sites.
https://weibo.com/tv/show/1034:4534875236007949
It's the Rockets vs Trail Blazers math on 4th Aug.
https://www.scmp.com/sport/basketball/article/3092980/nbas-c...
Even assuming they revoked the ban, I also don't see how it's particularly relevant to the point I was making; they still banned the entire franchise for months because he wrote a single message on Twitter. Censorship isn't somehow acceptable if it only lasts ~8 months. It's perhaps the definition of arbitrarily abused power.
Yes? Are you unaware that China has been doing exactly this for many, many years?
Just as two examples, AWS was forced by China to sell off its Chinese operations to a Chinese company because of arbitrary national security reasons. Blizzard Entertainment was forced by China to go through a Chinese intermediary who controls and publishes all Blizzard games in China.
The Chinese government sets their (extremely authoritarian) rules on censorship for companies to legally operate in China but the rules apply to everyone equally.
Chinese companies of course have to comply, but foreign companies have the choice to comply or not. Google chose to comply initially but decided to pull out later on. Microsoft/Apple choose to comply and are still operating in significant ways in China.
In contrast, US is proposing to ban TikTok, Huawei, DJI without clear rules: the reason to ban these companies is that they are Chinese companies. In other words, Chinese companies are "born a crime" to the US in the current climate, without the need to show what rules are violated or evidence of wrongdoing.
China also doesn't have the monopolistic power in tech that the US does: forbidding Google to operate in China it's not the same as forcing app stores to de-list certain apps globally.
It's even more absurd to force ByteDance to sell their US business to a US company. If the US feels justified that this could be done on "national security" ground, why shouldn't EU do the same to US tech companies?
I do hope that US citizens see that for much of the world, US is no longer the champion of free market, promoter of free-speech or guardian of world-order. All that matters is if these values benefit US economically or politically.
The US lost it when Japan was economically sanctioned for its competitive auto/electronic sector in 1980s. China is taking the same heat today and India would be the next target if India were to want to play its role on the international stage. The best outcome for the world would be to have multiple strong economies globally that keep each other in check; rather than one country having monopolistic power over all globally significant online forums.
If US were to decide that all telecom equipment used in the US must be produced by domestic companies then that's fair enough.
Going after one specific privately owned company, influencing ally states' purchase decision, banning foreign companies globally from supplying chips is outright bullying and sets the unfortunate precedent that a country could leverage its monopolistic position in tech to stifle competition.
Isn't that exactly what the Chinese laws do? Everything I've read seems to say that they prevent foreign companies from being able to fairly compete against local Chinese. companies.
When Google entered the Chinese search market it was competing fairly with local players: both Baidu and Google have to accept the (authoritarian) rule that they need to censor their search if they want to legally operate in China.
You could argue if the rule itself is good (I think it's not), but the point is that there are clearly stated rules that Google could choose to comply with or not.
Which "rule" did TikTok, Huawai, Wechat violate other than the fact that they are born Chinese companies?
The US could also decide that all social networks that operate in the US must be owned by American companies and subject to congressional inquiries. That would be fair enough, though that's an even more extreme version than what the Chinese government has been demanding.
Given that the Chinese state elected to hack an American firm that was operating in it's borders, you could make any sort of excuse to prevent Chinese firms from owning American infrastructure for any sort of national security reasons. TikTok doesn't have to break any rules. If I see my roommate get mauled by a tiger, that doesn't mean I have to sit around and wait to get mauled before I take an action.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_China#2010%E2%80%932016...
Telecom thus involves anything with a computer, and any "com," being applied with arbitrary eagerness.
Do countries take to banning Boeing, if they find problems with PepsiCo?.
Actually, the forced acquisition of TikTok by MS and its Instagram copy are instances of the US copying from the Chinese.
I find it rather strange that so many people throw around the "tolerate in order for China for open up" rhetoric, as if companies invest in China for ideological reasons. Ironically, by forcing those western companies to not do business with China, you are infringing on those companies' freedom to choose for themselves, and violating liberal values.
Furthermore, as someone who came from China, that "China did not open up" is completely false. In the past 30 years, China opened up immensely. In the 70s, Chinese could not choose what to wear, could not choose to travel abroad, people could randomly be caught on suspicion of colluding with "the enemy". All of that has changed. Even the latter: the practice of being "reported by your neighbor for suspicious activities" no longer happens, the Cultural Revolution madness is over. Heck, even "not allowed to criticize the government" is no longer true: there are official channels for publishing constructive criticism (emphasis on constructive), and government officials post official replies in the public, and the criticism is listened to without getting you into trouble (the caveat being that you are not allowed to instigate mass protests, or call for overthrow of the government). Sure, it's not equivalent to western democracies, but it did change for the better even if there's still room for improvement. But for some reason, many western people completely ignore this fact and buy into the rhetoric that "China did not open up". It's not even a small fact, it's a huge boulder staring in your face, and people don't see it.
Iran tried that in the 50s. Latin America tried that in the 70s.
Got overthrown by CIA every time.
Clearly that's not what it means.
Certainly. And the CCP hinders that. But the point of my above comment is to illustrate that it's an open question whether China would be 'allowed' to be open and democratic.
I don't believe the West is actually concerned about CCP's human rights violations. They're simply concerned about China's rise as an economic and military power, we would not support the Saudi regime if human rights was a concern.
One of the major reasons the CCP got a foothold in China was because there was a sense that for over a century China was subservient to Western powers.
The CCP was fine as far as the west was concerned as long as it was primarily a dumb factory for us. But now they have ambitions to go beyond that.
I think that's the crux of the animosity towards China today, not human rights violations, as gross as they are.
I could imagine China being somewhat of an EU and democratic and as long as they buy enough western products, be left alone. But if they actually wanted a truly independent foreign policy for example, that would not fly. See the Iran Deal for how dependent EU foreign policy is on the U.S. one.
P.S. That does not mean the CCP is good. It's not. But pretending that western leaders actually care about its human rights abuses is silly.
To give you an example: in retrospect, keeping Saddam in power and not invading Iraq is considered a fairly reasonable opinion; i.e. even though we got rid of a dictator, the consequences were arguably worse.
The reality is that the West tends to not get involved politically if the state in question is insular enough to not affect other countries. This isn’t because they condone abuses in these countries, but because a long history of failed colonialism and wars has rendered the West extremely hesitant to get involved in any sort of ‘just’ war that isn’t provoked by the state in question (see Iraq and Kuwait for example.)
The contemporary populist rise of American hostility to China is also linked directly to offshoring jobs from the Rust Belt, so again, there are clearly groups of people who have issues with China that aren’t merely “crush the rising competitor.”
In any case I don’t disagree that the West has sunk democratic movements which were against its interests, but that to say all such attempts will be shut down is overly-simplistic.
It should be pretty clear from the context that I am talking about western governments, not people.
Also, as an European, it doesn't look to me like we have much in terms of independent foreign policy.
> The idea that by supporting one repressive state you forfeit your ability to critique other repressive states is also absurd.
One? Please. We support plenty of other dictators all across the world. Or is Egypt's Sisi not a dictator? What about the UAE, Qatar etc.?
What about human rights violations by democratic countries? We don't seem to care much about illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
> in retrospect, keeping Saddam in power and not invading Iraq is considered a fairly reasonable opinion; i.e. even though we got rid of a dictator, the consequences were arguably worse
The assumption that the goal at the start was to get rid of a dictator because he was one is fairly well established to not be true. Basically a bunch of neocons who were bitter we didn't dispose Saddam in the FGW wanted to settle scores.
> The reality is that the West tends to not get involved politically if the state in question is insular enough to not affect other countries.
Really, what about the likes of Venezuela/Nicaragua?
> I don’t disagree that the West has sunk democratic movements which were against its interests, but that to say all such attempts will be shut down is overly-simplistic.
I hope you're right.
Now Americans are selling weapons to the dictator to continue the genocide because human rights are selctive
His comment is in no way whataboutist or trite. It is providing counterexamples to the claim that the goal of US policy is to get countries to "open up", by citing countries that did start opening up until the US stepped in to prevent that from happening.
Now, did he really believe that? Was he just selling the American people a bad deal? The end result anyway is that this is precisely the argument that was made, and thousands believed it.
The might have some notion of "big bad central state", and China was and remains that.
In any event, some rhetoric to grease the wheels politically absolutely was in order.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2020/03/05/china-move...
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/china-forcefully-harvests...
All your doing is proving that China has no freedom of speech. The reason The reason I cant show you such a video is because of Chinese censorship. Such a video would never be allowed to circulate. The fact that a video of George Floyde being murdered can be shared in the US proves that in US we tolerate speech even when it shows the US in bad light. Also the cops who did this to Floyde are being prosecuted.
Even something as simple as a picture of Winnie the Pooh is banned in China because people compared Pooh, a children's cartoon to China's leader. Imagine the leader of a country having his feelings hurt by a child's cartoon so bad that he bans the cartoon.
But regardless of if we do that, we still still engage in retaliatory trade actions against china.
He wants to be a hero that fights for people's rights unless there's money involved.
A reputable quote please for who, and when was forced to do an IP transfer
We want to kick down the ladder after we climb it. That’s what this is about.
Have you not heard of a patent?
Anyone have numbers?
I would like to see for myself.
Still no mention of "Chinese patent number CNyyyyy (being a registration of US patent USyyyy) has been violated by Chinese company XXXX"
Are you sure you guys aren't just making this up?
[1]https://www.theverge.com/tech/2019/3/22/18275884/apple-qualc...
no
Either Chinese businesses can lobby the Chinese Govt to make peace with US or the Chinese govt wont listen to them and have a more aggressive stand, only time will tell.
"Good artists copy; great artists steal" - Steve Jobs
When you reciprocate it’s not because of a superior ideology but because you won’t accept a one-sided transaction
No, countries get to do this to each other whenever they feel like since the dawn of mankind. "Now" isn't any different.
> A meta point I'd like to add is that currently 10 % of the earths population in the "Westosphere" controls 60 % of the worlds wealth.
True wealth is really hard to measure. Stocks and dollars and euros are not wealth. They are mediums of exchange no different then dogecoin.
When I am hungry, I can’t eat them directly, I can only trade them for food. And the amount of food I will get varies based on supply and demand.
It's entirely hard to believe this considering the obscene amounts of profits that US companies make by just "designing in california". Our whole era is enabled and defined by cheap chinese labor.
Labor is fungible, if it wasn't in China it would be somewhere else.
On the other side, American tech companies do massive amounts of business in China.
The relationship is very lopsided, and at some point, China is sure to take action against American tech firms in China.
That has been the case since at least the start of colonialism, so something like 200 years now. It depends on what you mean by long term, but that is already a long time. (And it has been sort of non-violent since the de-colonization wars in the 60s).
That would be a first now would it.
Not if they don't want an airline industry. China does not have the capacity to build a jet engine yet alone a commercial plane in service.
b.) https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Aircraft_Corporatio...
b) Cormac cannot even produce jet engines after 25+ years of state backed R&D.
My point was that they are building a commercial plane (not with Chinese fans yet), as your usage of "yet alone" expressed some kind of dependency or sequence, at least to my non native speaking ears.
They will choose the winners and losers, but they will do so by balancing their own metrics, which has China's economic power as no.1 priority.
Only know is Airbnb doing more OK, after moving servers to china, making local joint ventures, changing their name to a chinese one etc. etc.
AirBnB moved server to China because their website would be terribly slow if not, they need local joint ventures or otherwise they would have little idea in how to navigate in Chinese market. Of course they need a Chinese name, how else would you expect users to know what "Airbnb" is? Nobody would remember. They can change their name to a series of numbers and that would still work better than "Airbnb"
"Operation Aurora was a series of cyber attacks conducted by advanced persistent threats such as the Elderwood Group based in Beijing, China, with ties to the People's Liberation Army.[2] First publicly disclosed by Google on January 12, 2010, in a blog post,[1] the attacks began in mid-2009 and continued through December 2009.[3]
The attack was aimed at dozens of other organizations, of which Adobe Systems,[4] Akamai Technologies,[5] Juniper Networks[6] and Rackspace[7] have publicly confirmed that they were targeted. According to media reports, Yahoo, Symantec, Northrop Grumman, Morgan Stanley,[8] Dow Chemical,[9] and BlackBerry [10] were also among the targets."
Why force to sell when you can do the above?
0. A popular narrative in China holds that the US trapped France to sell Alstom in 2014. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alstom#Acquisition_by_General_... and https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2019/06/07/an-unlikely-...
"Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email [email protected] and we'll look at the data."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This community is vastly more diverse than the people making up accusations of astroturfing imagine that it is. If you don't have evidence, you can't sling such insinuations around. Someone advocating for a view you disagree with does not remotely clear the bar for evidence of astroturfing or foreign spies.
If you want more explanation, you'll find years' worth at these links:
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&type=comment&dateRange=a...
The laws in America not outright making it illegal for tyrannical organizations who operate concentrate camps and partake in genocide (Uighurs) to have access to our democratic societies and benefit economically doesn't mean it's not something you should stand for - and where the laws likely should exist for that.
Likewise, the CCP would likely just takeover Tesla's operations - maybe paying them, maybe not. The difference in the US, currently at least, is TikTok has options: 1) they don't sell and the ban comes, they don't receive any $x billions compensation, or 2) they understand a ban is likely in the US (and growing other democratic nations) and they make the smarter economic decision of selling for $x billions - maybe at fire sale pricing, however there are many competitors who could still compete and be capable of taking over operations, so perhaps not as low as otherwise it could be.
We're not hurtling towards the abyss, that's fear mongering; you may be right that SV startups may have to divest their China based investors, however that may or may not hurt them - and that would be the result of countering external costs to supporting and allowing CCP that we haven't been adequately accounting for for decades.
This is a strategic political-economic pressure decision to put pressure onto the CCP - notice that we're paying attention and won't stand for the level of abuse and tyrannical behaviours of the that we're becoming more and more aware of.
Economic pressure and preventing access to democratic societies for economic gain IS the graceful way to go about this, rather than allow CCP to gain more reach, access for propaganda for intelligence gathering and manipulation, to then spoil politicians further and become more entrenched in our societies economically and via investments in the most popular apps, etc.
And finally, the CCP isn't suicidal - their $500 billion stimulus you reference was for their own survival as well; they also wouldn't want this system they've been creating getting its fingers strongly into the rest of the world economy (which they depend on to maintain) to collapse, the collapse of which would mean things would shift greatly and more likely away from their own benefit.
Think of it like a playground: Everyone generally gets along, but the big kids can and sometimes do monopolize things they think are important at the time. The smaller kids make way for the bigger kids, and every now and then there's a fight between the bigger kids when they disagree strongly enough. They exchange words, jostle and block each other, or maybe it even comes to blows, and then things return to the status-quo for awhile.
That's how geopolitics work, except that it's usually a LOT more subtle or at least hidden from the public eye. Trump isn't a member of the political elite and is completely lacking in tact, so it's a lot harder to keep an appearance of calmness when he's in the room. Expect a much cleaner appearance of normalcy once he's out of office.
We would all like China to be a positive part of the global community but the fact of the matter is you can't ignore their overall policy. A possible genocide against the ethnic Uighurs, aggressive expansion in the South China Sea, normalization of censorship and suppression, treatment of Hong Kong & Taiwan: all of which are a complete contrast of Western values.
Could China force Tesla to sell Chinese operations? Absolutely. I don't think any one would be surprised. Companies that enter the Chinese market (if they can in the first place) are subjected to getting a smaller piece of the pie from the start.
Facebook has relentlessly tried to tap the Chinese market but are blocked by the CCP. So why does TikTok get a free pass to the American market? Why does __any__ Chinese company get a pass?
I think we need to continuously evaluate our relationship with China.
unlikely. That much doesn't move the needle, world economy right now is $140+ TRILLION. USA gave out over $700 Billion for that matter in 2008-2009 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Recovery_and_Reinvest...
EU gave $200+ billion, plus each country did their own thing.
Ask FB or Google about their Chinese websites. How are they doing? This should have been done long time ago, tit for tat.
As for the rest, I doubt China can resort to stupid stuff. US and EU are not happy with them for a lot of things, including Covid, and China desperately needs them. China allowed manufacturing not to help us, but to gain taxes, employment and to steel IP.
Do countries get to do this to each other whenever they feel like it now ? Can China force Tesla to sell its Chinese operations because Teslas data gathering poses a national security risk ? China has some pretty serious means available to it for escalation. China can ban Boeing from China forcing the US taxpayer to incur serious losses in keeping the company afloat.
The whole thing is pretty stupid overall. Most people don't realize that during the 2008 crisis it was Chinas 500 billion dollar stimulus that kick started demand and pulled the world out of a depression. China and the US are interdependent and hold up the global system upon which global growth depends. If China slows down as a result of all this that reduces global growth. Pushing China to the wall can make them take extreme steps like undercut the entire dollar based financial order leading to mass instability. The US might come out victorious anyway but its not worth the risks. Not to mention a war which if it breaks out could lead to WW3.
Previous attempts to contain China were much more tactful with things like the TPP and the Iran deal. Right now the world is hurtling towards the abyss and most people here don't even realise it.
A meta point I'd like to add is that currently 10 % of the earths population in the "Westosphere" controls 60 % of the worlds wealth. This is untenable in the long term and all this flailing about will not stop a reversion to a more balanced world. Its better that this happen gracefully than in a violent fashion.