Asking for a friend.

Don't worry.

Archive.today : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive.today

Archive.today wiki : https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Archive.today

https://archive.ph/ https://archive.is/ https://archive.li/ https://archive.vn/ https://archive.fo/ https://archive.md/

- Cloud

- Chinese e-commerce (taobao.com + others like 1688.com)

- Global e-commerce (alibaba.com + presumably some others)

- Digital mapping and food delivery (including ele.me, which has a large chunk of the Chinese food delivery market)

- Logistics

- Media and entertainment

Apart perhaps from the media business, these are all giant and highly viable businesses. And, even if they're spun off and managed separately, doesn't mean they won't work together -- Alibaba's new "Logistics" spin-off will surely do well by providing delivery services to the "Chinese e-commerce" spin-off.

This would include AliExpress, which is quite successful at linking Chinese sellers to a global customer base.

Like, do they need two or three separate accounts and the ability to process orders separately for each market, or will this complicate things for them?

> Alibaba's new "Logistics" spin-off will surely do well by providing delivery services to the "Chinese e-commerce" spin-off.

Unless the Chinese e commerce spin-off realizes it was much better when they had in house logistics and just starts building that again?

CCP (interrupting): Make sure to smile

Jack Ma: sweat...so, while I was gone, and totally unrelated to anything else, we decided on our own to break up and make sure I don't have too much power

CCP: Great news! We hoped you'd totally voluntarily come back and also wow what a great gesture

-----

I kind of would have preferred they just be strong about it but they are following the west's lead here in pretending like the government and major business isn't just the same thing

Actually very good, would be nice if a few Western companies were splitted this way.

The challenge the west has is keeping its democratic institutions strong enough to stand up to wall street the challenge China has is having anything to oppose the tight grip of the CCP.

This actually puts pressure on the west to look into inequality as a competitive disadvantage

You need to somehow motivate the best and brightest to actually perform and not just drown themselves in playing endless politics, otherwise there is no progress and soon you are poor weak punchbag for others. Its doesn't matter if its with camels, shells or cash, this accepts human nature with all warts and whatnot much better than some theories of spoiled kids who never had to work but felt they know it all (ie mr Marx, really one of more pathetic historical figures).

These are just power games of paranoid Chinese leader who removes all potential competitors (especially those with huge egos) before they can threaten him and establishment

My conspiracy theory is that the MSS posts a pic of some random dude who looks alike every year or so while the real Jack Ma is currently on the bottom of the Yangtze river.

Wo, this is a little too astute for HN, man. Tone it down, toe the line a bit more. China bad, remember? West good. Don't forget, bro

edit: well, -4's as low as it can go. So I could delete it, or I could just leave it. Hmmmm...hehehe cue snarky comments incoming in 5...4...

After I learned of the Uyghur genocide, I decided against having them manufacture my designed parts. Half of it was ethics, half of it was self preservation. Seeing what they did to Ma has convinced me it was the correct decision.

Now I just need to find a source of cheap electronics to run my device.

These two are not in the same category.

Censored because at least on reddit the bots will swoop in on any mention of it.

> And that feels like it’s against western ideals.

Well, FWIW, this is exactly the sort of crisis of conscious China is banking on.

Thankfully, the solution is simple - we don't have to let TikTok operate in America if we deem it's operation unlawful. And China ignores plenty of our regulations and market standards, so we've got pretty much free reign to accuse them here. Instead of pressuring them to acknowledge copyright/patent authority or adopt data accountability, we're sending a simple message - just sell the company. If China is truly only vested in the success of TikTok, this should be a no-brainer. It only looks like a complicated and frustrating deal if you intend to exploit TikTok down the road, which explains why China instantly shot down the idea.

So, it's weird. China thinks they have us in check, but we have a lot of sanctions and authority on the table yet unused. If you look at this from purely a domestic security angle, I think this makes sense.

In the US you can take the government to court and actually win.

Nobody mentioned Adrian Zenz—you brought him up as a straw man. The genocide label is based on forced sterilisation, induced abortions, extrajudicial kidnapping and execution, et cetera. These observations are supported by a wide range of sources [1]. The spectre of crimes against humanity has been formally raised by the UN [2].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyghur_genocide#References

[2] https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2022/08/un-human-rig...

This AP article for instance, listed in the wikipedia references under the sterilization, https://apnews.com/article/ap-top-news-international-news-we...

"The hundreds of millions of dollars the government pours into birth control has transformed Xinjiang from one of China’s fastest-growing regions to among its slowest in just a few years, according to new research obtained by The Associated Press in advance of publication by China scholar Adrian Zenz."

From the UN report: "Prior to 2017, ethnic minorities such as the Uyghurs were allowed to have one more child than Han Chinese, meaning that urban Uyghur couples could have two children and rural Uyghur couples could have three children, while urban Han were allowed one child and rural Han were allowed two children respectively. Overall, the Government reports that the population of XUAR grew from 12.98 million in the 2010 census to 14.93 million in the 2020 census, and that the Uyghur population grew from 10 million in the 2010 census to 11.6 million in the 2020 census, an annual average of 1.52 per cent. 106. In 2017, XUAR amended its regional family planning policy to permit people of all ethnic groups to have two children in urban areas and three in rural, thus equalizing the policy and allowing Han Chinese couples to have equal numbers of children as ethnic minorities.240 The amendments also enhanced enforcement, including through a threefold increase in the “social maintenance payment” payable by persons who violate the policy.241 In June 2021, in line with the new national policy, XUAR introduced the three-child policy for all ethnic groups. 107. Official population figures indicate a sharp decline in birth rates in XUAR from 2017.242 Data from the 2020 Chinese Statistical Yearbook, covering 2019, shows that in the space of two years the birth rate in Xinjiang dropped approximately 48.7 per cent, from 15.88 per thousand in 2017 to 8.14 per thousand in 2019. The average for all of China is 10.48 per thousand."

The UN Report has no mention of Executions or Kidnapping.

All of the reporting on this comes from groups such as the Heritage Foundation(Far-right think tank). I've gone down this rabbit hole. It was a propaganda stunt.

Nothing you have mentioned makes him critical. Out of 537 sources, you picked one that mentions Zenz. There may be a handful more. There are hundreds of others independent of his work.

> UN Report has no mention of Executions or Kidnapping

Nobody said they did. The UN documented concentration camps, sexual violence, and induced sterilisation, among other atrocities, that brought it to raise the spectre of crimes against humanity. That is the most they can do since China refuses to be investigated. The kidnapping and execution is documented by the other sources, including those based on leaked Chinese documents.

> gone down this rabbit hole. It was a propaganda stunt

The UN has discussed crimes against humanity three times this century: in Gaza, Myanmar and China. Arguing this is a propaganda stunt because some people exaggerated their findings is like denying the Holocaust because someone lied about Hitler having horns.

What on earth does this mean?

The Marvel movies were a mistake.

I don't expect this to happen again.

Really? My memory of the event was that the news broke in Minecraft servers [0] before it was expanded to all Java apps that used log4j.

[0]: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/12/the-l...

> The vulnerability had existed unnoticed since 2013 and was privately disclosed to the Apache Software Foundation, of which Log4j is a project, by Chen Zhaojun of Alibaba Cloud's security team on 24 November 2021. Before an official CVE identifier was made available on December 10th, 2021.

your Link dated 12/13/2021 says:

> Log4Shell is the name given to a critical zero-day vulnerability that surfaced on Thursday when it was exploited in the wild in remote-code compromises against Minecraft servers.

Which would have been around the 9th of Dec.

(To be clear the obligation is not they have to report to Chinese government first. They just totally forgot to tell the government agency for coordinating these kind of security incident cross companies)

... and oh hi are you the same fancl20 on <that mostly-defunct Chinese Twitter-clone> some 15 years ago?

Minecraft servers were one of the most accessible places to use the exploit and at the same time, some of the ones that are least likely to patch updates rapidly.

The "all hell broke lose" starts with that comment.

Note that the LDAP part wasn't sufficient to fully excise the security vulnerability.

    Nov 24 - Wednesday - Report of issue
    Nov 25 - Thursday  - Thanksgiving
    Nov 29 - Monday    - Work done
    Nov 30 - Tuesday   - PR submitted
    (review as if nothing special)
    Dec  9 - Thursday  - "Is it a security vulnerability?"
    Dec 10 - Friday    - All hell breaks loose (Log4j 2.15.0 released)
    Dec 13 - Monday    - Java devs updating libraries furiously (Log4j 2.16.0 released)
    Dec 18 - Saturday  - Wait? there's more (Log4j 2.17.0 released)
    ...
    Dec 27 - Monday    - Enough already (Log4j 2.17.1 released)

The Tianfu Cup, on the other hand, exists primarily because Chinese researchers kept disclosing valuable bugs at Pwn2Own[1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pwn2Own#2018

Imagine all the cross selling and tricks they can pull off having all this inhouse.

And within the IT segment as a whole they for sure are dominant. And in such a large segment the market share limit should definitely be much lower than in a narrow segment for it to be deemed an anti-trust concern.

Microsoft will reportedly get a 75% share of OpenAI's profits until it makes back the money on its investment, after which the company would assume a 49% stake in OpenAI.

- Facebook: social media monopoly with whatsapp, instagram, and facebook. These should be independent companies.

- Amazon: This is the biggest offender on this list: AWS, ecommerce, twitch, whole foods, logistics, etc... these should also be independent companies.

- Microsoft: After Amazon, MS should be broken up decades ago.

- Google: If it wasn't for Ads, google would have probably be in turmoil each year. Google cloud is good (we use them as our cloud provider), but reality is they are far away from AWS in terms of market-share.

- Apple: This one is interesting since we know they are big but there's room to compete (to a certain extent).

In short, at least MS and Amazon should be on the radar and be broken up within this decade.

Facebook is not a monopoly on anything (and under threat from TikTok). If having multiple products was a criteria for breaking up companies, there would be too many eligble.

Amazon: Neither retail or AWS nor whole foods nor logistics are a monopoly.

I'm sure the companies with the potential to be broken up by such a law would be very much against it and spend whatever it took to defeat the law. They might also try to convince the public that they have to be allowed to be gigantic in order to compete with similar entities from other countries that don't have a limit on size.

Facebook should never have been allowed to acquire Instagram or WhatsApp. If competition is key to a free market, what distortion happens when rich companies can simply buy competitors, ensuring they don't have to actually compete?

Google should never have been allowed to buy DoubleClick for the same reason.

Some of the others are tougher, simply because blocking acquisitions is easier and more popular than breaking up divisions that appear to be developed in-house. To say Amazon shouldn't be allowed to buy Whole Foods wouldn't raise a lot of ire, but to say Amazon should be a separate company from AWS flies in the face of how many people think things ought to work.

The Agricultural Adjustment Act was a terrible system of quotas to create artificial scarcity to boost prices. I'm glad the Supreme Court shot it down.

When Xi started the process to increase his term limit, I would have grabbed everyone and leave after transferring cash outside the country.

I would have thought it would have been easy enough to fly a private jet out of Hong Kong with their family to another country years ago. Now I wonder if they are even allowed to fly on private jets these days.

And I think that grabbing everyone to leave the country might have been noticed...

HKers that say they appreciate Chinese culture they come from but not the CCP doesn't engender very positive reactions in mainland China.

or more precise they would never have had a chance to reach where they did without becoming a party member

through being a party member in the end isn't the same as being a politician of the party or working for them (just saying because some people seem to not be aware about this)

People did went much further then bowing to their Governments oppression in a way which still leaves them wealth to be able to live at home.

Having said that, fleeing isn't the only option. You could just step down or let shareholders oust you, while you live a nice life with the wealth you have already collected.

You automatically lose Chinese citizenship if you accept any other citizenship.

but oversimplified from Chinese POV it's like they still having all the authority over you as a citizen but you having forsaken all the rights you have as one

They’re also happy to lean on your relatives who stay behind.

Totalitarian governments are the devil.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/hong-kongers-say-they-re-being...

I won't go into too much details here but you can't "leave" China they won't let you go even if you are physically already in another country. Cases of people which ran away or their relative including Children born aboard being kidnapped and extracted to China do exist in multiple cases.

Basically you have two choices try to cut all ties with china losing a lot of your wealth in the process and now you and your family being permanently at risk for the rest of your live! Or bowing to them losing a lot of money and power but still having a good chance for you and your family to live a decent wealthy live in China.

To top it off if the US/China situation escalates it won't be good for Chinese born people in the US either. E.g. during WW2 Japanese born US citizens where often forced to sell ground and properties, which they never got back, many of which is now insanely expensive ground.

One needn't resort to the kind of marxist leninist tactics that were at play here to achieve the same outcome, but all we'll get is more talk, or if things go really well, 5 mini googles just in time for openai, bing or someone else to become the next search monopoly.

So, Democracy? Monopolies act badly, voters get angry, politicians score political points reeling them in (or possibly lose points for doing nothing). It's a good system and mostly works.

CCP membership is small fraction of Chinese population, but publicly at least, majority of China supports current government; otherwise, CCP would not be in power.

You forgot Xi publicly escorted someone out to show his dominance?

Ps. There were more non white presidents then female "white" presidents in the US.

Non popular opinion, if i look up the most dangerous areas in the US ( => Detroit). It is a mostly non-white area. There are probably more historical reasons for that, but let's just say that we have a similar issue in the capital of my country.

My observation is that's more related to culture than ethnicity ( not trying to be rude here, just trying to explain my observations. My observations are not facts, feel free to give counter arguments).

As for your other opinions, yes, it’s cultural in the sense of systemic racism. Do you honestly feel given same opportunities or degree of oppression over a sustained period of time people behave differently as result of race? That’s nonsense.

Eg. Explain Europe wide riots of Marocco football match ( fact) to me without sounding like a racist.

Riots are response to systemic racism:

https://dw.com/en/world-cup-why-do-morocco-fans-keep-clashin...

As are the issues Americans are facing.

Here an article actually of Belgium about it, even in their own community where they say they are tired of the youth rioting: https://www.hln.be/video/productie/marokkaanse-gemeenschap-i...

Additionally, same behavior over Europe...

It is common to destroy whole nations in China (uyghurs, tibetan). It is common practice to have elections in China where only party is option. Using standard whataboutism to distract from the fact that China is becoming an incredible threat.

> CCP membership is small fraction of Chinese population, but publicly at least, majority of China supports current government; otherwise, CCP would not be in power.

That would be the case if China was democratic. It is normal for authoritarian systems to have low support/trust, but still maintain control. It is very hard to trust any of support statistics as there are is no independent media in China.

Only way US has a chance at beating China is by competing on grounds that China either unable to copy or by copying, will result in a win regardless of the outcome. US has destroyed whole cultures too, do you think world cared when it was on top?

Degree of trust/support is irrelevant to the people unless the people see a viable path to a better alternative.

The difference is that China is doing these things today. Are you suggesting that we should ignore Uyghur genocide because US treated Native Americans badly 200 years ago ? Do you seriously think that China is competing fairly with US? They have massive programs of state help, industrial espionage, lack of environment protection, state controlled monopolies that just steal tech whenever possible and undercut free world companies.

Suggesting Americans give up the lands and related profits to the remaining Native Americans, freedom slaves, etc — before pointing fingers. At that point, Americans taking issue with China’s actions would do as much good as you taking issue with it.

>> Do you seriously think that China is competing fairly with US? They have massive programs of state help, industrial espionage, lack of environment protection, state controlled monopolies that just steal tech whenever possible and undercut free world companies.

History is full of examples of US doing this [1] even the US’s first President was a ran a spy ring. Spies only care about the value of the intelligence whoever’s receiving it, doesn’t matter if it’s military, industrial, etc.

[1] https://www.history.com/.amp/news/industrial-revolution-spie...

[2] https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Culper_Ring

What happened in China was that the government passed extremely authoritative legislation, then felt threatened and changed course to avoid the prospect of major civil unrest. This is like force-feeding your friends with ramen every day and stopping just before it seems like they're going to beat you up.

It's not. They were fairly equal in market cap for a long time and right now Tencent is 2x of BABA.

———

Company: Alibaba

Market Capitalization: 246.17B USD

Source: https://www.google.com/finance/quote/BABA:NYSE

———

Company: Tencent

Market Capitalization: 461.15B USD

Source: https://www.google.com/finance/quote/0700:HKG

Tencent’s HKD to USD market cap

https://www.google.com/search?q=3.62+trillion+hong+kong+doll...

To be honest this really lowers the credibility of your claims.

There’s no need to be so combative.

Did you reply to the wrong comment?

I didn't argue against their position.

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

Source:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Alibaba's market cap is 245.69B USD Tencent's market cap is 461.15B (3.62T HKD)

Very true. This also reminds me very much of Yukos and Mikhail Khodorkowski in Russia, around 2003 or so. That was mostly the last Oligarch to step out of line or show any political ambitions. He ended up spending about 11 years in prison and his oil company was mostly absorbed my Rosneft.

Such a big price for lesson learned.

More competition is not necessarily a good thing. However, you can regulate said companies, and limit their abilities to exploit people. E.g. Place limits on product pricing so it does not get to expensive - very important for life saving medication.

You have to understand, there are some very motivated political ideologies that want us to believe that breaking up companies is going to protect consumers. It will not. And in fact, it can be quite devastating for technological innovation. So is regulation, but to an lesser extent, and I'd pick the lesser evil of the two any day.

In practice, by breaking up a company, you are basically stealing from shareholders, forcefully taking their property and selling it at a huge discount. The owners (shareholders) may end up owning shares of both halves of a company that is being split, but it will not be the same company, and the new companies ability to make money may have been destroyed or significantly harmed in the process. Then government has to pay some sort of compensating dividend, and I do not see that realistically happen, because it is impossible to accurately determine the damage caused by splitting a company.

In another ownership structure, companies could be broken up on paper, but still operated in a sort of partnership, hence the breaking up might not even make any sense in the first place.

Perhaps you can compare it to a bee hive where the individual bee is more or less considered worthless on its own, but the entire hive, working together on a goal dictated by the top government is all that matters. Political opponents are suppressed, and threatening neighbors with wars is normal. E.g. China is practically in war with India at the border, and they are currently threatening Taiwan, all while being allied with Putin, a psychopathic mass murderer.

No one has to blindly copy anyone. However, nuance seems to missing in western discussions these days (I say western because these are the discussions I'm mostly aware of). Nuance is difficult. When everything becomes hyperbole, it gets harder to learn best practices from other countries.

Not truthfully, they can't.

Has any of that ever happened in the US in the past to break up monopolies?

You would think the distinction between "rule of law" and "leader knows best" type of approaches would be clear at this late date. Apparently not.

Their FX reserves are running perilously low. They are looking for ANYTHING they can do to get foreign cash. I'm hearing rumors that they are the ones who tapped out the FIMA facility. Could get ugly.

I know somebody is going to @ me with the 3T number, but the only data I trust is China's holding of Treasuries. That's been falling quickly.

> the only data I trust is China's holding of Treasuries

- Do you not trust China's holding of US Federal Agency bonds? like Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac/FHA/SBA? China holds $1.2 Trillion of these, slightly higher interest rates than T-bills.

- Even at their peak, T-bills only formed <7% of China's USD reserves. You really think China only needed $200 billion of FX reserves and everything else is probably faked?

Source on china Treasury holdings - https://ticdata.treasury.gov/Publish/mfh.txt

Source on offical China reserves - https://tradingeconomics.com/china/foreign-exchange-reserves but as I mention, I don't trust this

This is huge news for me. They were always swimming in export profits / probably still are / travel limits since COVID means that obvious leak of travelling and spending abroad is plugged.

How could they run out of cash?

...

In any case, Yuan is the new foreign currency. And China has, well, all of it...

Higher reward, similar risk, still perfectly reasonable USD FX reserves.

Economically, demographics are insanely against China and it is not clear that immigration is a viable way for them to close that gap.

Finally, their unique political system has not been tested during a period of low growth. It is not clear they have the political stability to be a reserve currency. Again, the US has been pushing their luck.

But this kind of reality-disconnected arrogance is not new - the British public has shown the same kind of behavior during the Brexit debacle. They deny the existing reality if they dont like it, they create false realities that appease them, and they even go far enough to publicly insult anyone who provides evidence contradicting that reality.

Its not a surprise that this kind of behavior can also be observed in certain segments of the American public. But, granted, at least that American segment does not insult people when they are provided contradictory evidence like how the Brexit Britainers do. Much more agreeable.

But this is the kind of freedom (absolute de-regulation) that nullifies the freedoms of others (agency in the market). Overall the first is more deleterious than the others, and removing it causes far fewer victims and far more upsides.

The run-on consequences and hidden contradictions of libertarianism make the whole thing fall apart, but the definition of the system, in its own language, isn’t aware of itself.

Are you able to discuss without using buzzwords made up to delegitimize any non-bourgeois government?

Words don't have meaning anymore, China is an "authoritarian regime" that breaks down monopolies and imprisons corrupt billionaires, while in France there is a brutal crackdown against working class protesters, the USA spies on everyone and everything, the UK is a mass surveillance state, and so on.

Yes, Jack Ma had the audacity to criticize his government. That is why he and his company are being targeted, and not larger monopolies like Tencent. Anti-corruption drives in China are just thinly disguised political purges.

There are plenty flaws and problems with modern democracies, but they still serve the people’s interests better than authoritarian dictatorships.

But I will grant that Maoists and trotskists in China (or in any other country for the matter) lack power, but that's because they are considered ultra-leftists, and in the Chinese materialistic analysis, that's not the correct path to socialism right now.

We can (and do) criticize some actions by China (or any other government) without calling them "authoritarian", or denying any other of the positive policies that are unique to them. No Western government controls billionaires and mega corporations like China. In fact, they are run by them.

But how about a few student activitists disappeared, beaten to confess in a video clip, and two of them still missing even today?

From the Wikipedia:

> In January 2019, police summoned several activists and showed them an allegedly "forced confession" video in which four activists (including Yue and Qiu) claimed to renounce labor radicalism. Some activists later wrote blog posts criticizing the police's action, saying it was a "ridiculous performance put on by the police". Seven more people were taken away again.

> Several organizers and student activists remain missing, including Yue Xin and Zhang Shengye.

Apologize for the confusion, I didn't read en wiki before post, apparently this isn't emphasized in the en version.

And yes, I'm a native Chinese speaker.

In your case it looks like you've actually been using HN exclusively for this. That's definitely not ok. I don't want to ban you without a warning, so can you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use HN as intended going forward? You've been breaking other guidelines too, I'm afraid, so if you'd please familiarize yourself with the rules of this site and stick to them in the future, we'd appreciate it.

They just want to get back at something they don't like. Unfortunately this is the basis of too many policies, regardless of whether they are a net positive or not.

I'd love to be able to order some of these, not for resale but personal use, but since I am not a corporation they are closed to me.