Seems more like a tactical lawsuit, if they win they kill of competition, if they lose - they end up delaying competition and in a market in which things move fast, it may well end up killing this competition.
Given that rule of law does not exist in China, it's safe to assume this is politically motivated. Who in the government wants him out of business, and why?
Lobbying in the US is a kind of corruption, but I don't think there's any way to lobby to have someone arrested, unless that's in slow motion, where you'd pay lobbyists to press for a law that could be used to arrest your opponent.
Lucky 10000: Lobbying in the USA is constitutionally-protected free speech. [0] It sure does feel corrupt, doesn't it? But it's part of the right to demand that the government listen to and consider our grievances. You can try lobbying today: Pick something that you care about, and write a letter about it to somebody in the government who represents you.
“Dear constituent, after reading your carefully written letter and thinking long and hard about the merits of each position of this tricky issue I have decided to side with the people who donated the most to my re-election campaign. Thank you for writing to me, your voice has been heard”
It wouldn't be the government but the CCP. The CCP pretty much has ultimate authority on everything, so there's probably some close ties between people in Bitmain and people in the CCP that don't exist with MicroBT. Also a lot of it is based around favors more generally not just money.
There is rumor Bitmain (creaters of Antminer, see Ant Financial aka Alipay) was really owned by Jack Ma. Now everything that was Jack Ma is now owned by CCP I would bet Bitmain is the CCP.
These kinds of characterisations frustrate me. It's a horrible simplification that leads one to a whole set of conclusions that are probably way off target. No complex society runs without rules. By and large, if members of the society do not follow those rules then the result is chaos. Clearly, China is not a lawless state where people do whatever they choose and the strongest one wins. It is a country with real laws and and vast majority of people need to follow those laws. These laws are, of course, not applied universally. However, we can point to examples of this non-universality of law in every single country on Earth. The question is the extent of that non-universality.
The other thing that's important to realise is that the Chinese government is incredibly complex internally. There isn't some Bond-like villain stroking his white cat all day and issuing decrees. It's a massive beaurocracy. Politics are crazy. The totalitarian state does not act as a single will -- it's a massive system of infighting and people trying to get the upper hand. Within that system, each of the players will be using their legal system against one another. It really isn't the case that there is any one entity that's just making up the rules as they go along and that can do whatever they want with impunity (as your posting implies to me).
So, I'm inclined to lean towards believing a more complex reality than "they forced him to say that".
I think you're totally wrong. China is not a nation of laws the way the US or European countries strive to be. It's a different philosophy. They have laws, but the laws are not supposed to be supreme over the rulers.
And there are TONS of examples of official lies, especially on the subject of the ownership and control of large enterprises.
Here in NL our laws are also not supreme of the rulers. Frustrating but true and as much as I would like to believe that in a court of law our king would be held to the same standard as I would be I'm just about 100% sure that that would not be the case.
Worse still, there is this file called 'crimes committed by the royal family' that is classified until 100 years after their death.
This is why to this day we don't know the exact details of Bernhard van Oranje's many escapades and crimes, some of which were quite significant and yet ended up covered up.
When I've heard people question or say there is no rule of law in China, usually it's followed up with how their court system isn't independent of their political system by design, not that it's lawless/a free for all for the CCP.
Not that I disagree with a large chunk of what you said either, but it's just not hyperbole that China has no rule of law per a common definition of the word because of party and worker judicial supremacy.
Rule of law definition:
the restriction of the arbitrary exercise of power by subordinating it to well-defined and established laws.
That's an interesting distinction. I don't know how this is expressed in English, but the Norwegian language has a term called "the principles of a state that follows law/rights", (the word 'law' is the same word as 'right', as in French - full term "rettsstatsprinsippene").
This term is commonly translated as "the rule of law", but strongly implies the distinction that you're saying the English term does not.
Central parts of "rettsstatsprinsippene": Everyone is equal in the eyes of the law, laws cannot be reteroactive, the accused is innocent until proved guilty, the arrested must be presented to a court within 24 hours, the accused have a right to a state-appointed defender.
There's a reason all of the big western companies left China.
I'd bet money China's economy could be growing 10x faster if it had independent courts and foreign companies who become successful weren't treated like criminals.
Just imagine how many of us would be moving to China to start companies and how much more VC money would be flowing in. And all of the global HQs and products and innovation that would be happening there.
China's growth has been massive but it's a shadow of what it could be. Their growth rate should have been closer to SK, Singapore, and Taiwan by now. But they decided to go backwards:
Having a bunch of US companies making profits in China isn't necessarily good for China.
If the choice is between, say letting AWS in and building their own. Building their own would put 5000 of their own people to work, the broad technical demographic it will take, and build up all the surrounding industries like servers, networking etc. All the profits stay within China, and they now have more skilled people who can start other companies etc. IMO its clearly a better long-term strategy, even though it will cost more in the short term.
Its so weird how there were no complaints about China for the past decade or two while they were just making your iPhones, but the second they put their own interests ahead of the US all I hear & see is about how crooked & corrupt they are...
There has been plenty of criticism of China's authoritarian policies and human rights abuses, from all of the Western world, for decades. Someone better versed on the topic could probably describe it better than me, but everything from communist policy, the great leap forward, the Tiananmen Square massacre, Falun Gong persecution, the lack of rule of law and so on, has been criticised since it first happened.
US authorities seem to have only stepped up the criticism recently as China has become more of a viable adversary on the global stage though. The US government doesn't particularly care about the ethics of most countries, and will mostly criticise it when it's in their own interest. There's also stuff that's only come to light in the last few years. Chinese authorities flexing their power in ways that directly affect US interests is one of these.
Of course im sure there have always been critics but the bar is not any instance of criticism - thats an awfully low bar. its the wide shift from being nowhere in mainstream consciousness to pervasive.
As an uniformed reader of mainstream media and social networking sites, China was just not on the radar a few years ago. Politicians didn’t talk about it, people didn’t talk about it, news didn’t talk about it.
This doesn’t reflect my impression as a Northern European. The criticism and sentiment has certainly stepped up in the last year, probably in part due to focused efforts by US authorities, but it’s been quite vocal all along. Famously, Norway was in the doghouse of China for 7 years after giving the Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo, and government officials discussed human rights issues with Chinese officials up until that point. The media covered this in detail, along with the human rights abuses in question.
Maybe what you’re describing is true for the United States. I wouldn’t know.
Gotta say, that's straight up wrong. China has always been a huge issue. Mostly from a sympathetic view for the deeply exploited people getting poisoned and dying from recycling our plastic and electronics.
But also the large buddhist community in America will never forget China invading Tibet and murdering the successor to the Dalai Lama. That still gets talked about a lot.
I'm not sure what you have been reading, but that is simply not true. There has been an increase of coverage in the last couple of years, but China was certainly on the radar a regularly discussed in mainstream news for a long time.
Literally like 99.9% of all economists who don't work for the Trump administration would disagree with this, and 100% of the ones who study the effects of international trade.
I don't think you are right but if you are then I don't think those economists are right. There is a balance to strike. If your country is behind them protectionism can be powerful.
My consulting company does business in China, and when we do, we (out of self-interest, since we don't speak Chinese and it's hard to do logistics without that) partner with Chinese companies. My company has some of the leading experts in a very niche thing. In the current state, the companies we partner with get to learn from us and gain expertise. The alternative if protectionist policies stop us from doing business in China isn't for those people to become experts on their own -- that's not possible. The alternative is for them either not to gain expertise at all or to have to get it in a more difficult and expensive way.
Protectionism can benefit a fledgling industry (not a whole country) in the short term in a limited set of cases (at the expense of dragging down the rest of the economy), but in most cases the protected industry is going to fall behind even more without the information transfer that comes from business leaders doing business there.
Yes, of course. Your protectionist and nationalist knee-jerk reaction and gut feeling is certainly more trustworthy than all of the world's economists.
Non-democratic, non-free China's economy has been growing 5 times faster than democratic, free India's.
This is despite both countries starting from the same, largely rural, highly impoverished starting point 60 years ago.[1]
So, yes, they'd rather be the absolute leaders of a faster growing economy, than the non-leaders of a slower-growing one.
[1] China was even worse off, actually, since it spent the first half of the twentieth century torn apart by civil war, European colonialism, civil war again, a brutal Japanese invasion and occupation, and then some more civil war, followed by two decades of self-inflicted political purges and repression. India only had to contend with two of these problems!
India's massive bureaucratic system runs far deeper and more local than China ever has. The amount of paperwork and payoffs for even basic stuff in India is insane.
China on the other hand is mostly free and liberal up until you start being successful.
Acting like India isn't engage in authoritarian mass intervention, even though its in a more decentralize fashion is totally wrong. The only benefit is they have more independent courts and you can succeed with influence buying without the top-down threat that the CCP does to cripple foreign competitors in domestic firms favours.
India has a different sort of economic interference - but also one that's far easier to fix. Something Modi repeatedly promised and keeps failing to do.
The assertion was not that China is growing slower than India, but that the current Chinese economy is growing slower than a more liberal Chinese economy.
Where did you get "China enjoys greater freedom than America" from "I can do this one thing in China more easily than in SF"?
It's true, by the way. I was in SF for a week a few months ago and the constant need to watch what I say was exhausting. I couldn't even joke around with my gay friend because people were getting offended on his behalf, much to his dismay.
Chinese markets do have greater freedoms up until the point you start making money and noise. Then the gov-backed vultures start swooping in and pull their mafia moves.
Without fair representation in the courts and judicial independence this problem will never be resolved and China will always be taking 1 step back for every 2 steps forward.
Hong Kong is a better example, they consistently rank #1 in the world in economic freedom and their economy skyrocketed as a result.
Also remember China does not have a real bail system. If you get arrested, you are very likely end up in prison directly. You also can be disappeared (better than be suicided) during the process.
Edit: No. I wasn't referring to the Epstein case.
Also, Chinese police has a habit of using force to rob the corpse of the victim from the family who want to send the corpse to the 3rd party for examination. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shishou_incident
I didn't even think it was an Epstein reference; the CCP has had a number of people "commit suicide" in a suspicious manner itself, well before the Epstein thing.
Don’t flaunt your ignorance like this. Suiciding is a well documented phenomenon that has been going on for ages. Your ignorant belief that it only happened to one person ever is extremely cringey.
Why? Why should we just move on from the world’s most powerful men indulging in child rape and killing off threats to their continued access to children to rape?
I guess, what can we as ordinary citizens do about the world’s most powerful people, Presidents, princes, CEOs, billionaires, in a giant child rape ring going unpunished? Just shake our fists at the sky? What can we do?
Present evidence in a court of law. I'm sure there are enough detectives, prosecutors and FBI agents eager to make a career out of bringing a case if there's solid evidence.
75 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 141 ms ] thread[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobbying_in_the_United_States
... But it also doesn't equal null.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guanxi
https://www.wsj.com/articles/alibabas-jack-ma-denies-beijing...
Of course, conspiracy theorists would say 'of course he would say that'.
That comes with the territory when you're a totalitarian state with no rule of law.
The other thing that's important to realise is that the Chinese government is incredibly complex internally. There isn't some Bond-like villain stroking his white cat all day and issuing decrees. It's a massive beaurocracy. Politics are crazy. The totalitarian state does not act as a single will -- it's a massive system of infighting and people trying to get the upper hand. Within that system, each of the players will be using their legal system against one another. It really isn't the case that there is any one entity that's just making up the rules as they go along and that can do whatever they want with impunity (as your posting implies to me).
So, I'm inclined to lean towards believing a more complex reality than "they forced him to say that".
And there are TONS of examples of official lies, especially on the subject of the ownership and control of large enterprises.
Worse still, there is this file called 'crimes committed by the royal family' that is classified until 100 years after their death.
This is why to this day we don't know the exact details of Bernhard van Oranje's many escapades and crimes, some of which were quite significant and yet ended up covered up.
https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernhard_van_Lippe-Biesterfeld...
The combination of politicians and structural lying is unfortunately not limited to China either.
Not that I disagree with a large chunk of what you said either, but it's just not hyperbole that China has no rule of law per a common definition of the word because of party and worker judicial supremacy.
Rule of law definition: the restriction of the arbitrary exercise of power by subordinating it to well-defined and established laws.
Three Supremes: http://chinamediaproject.org/2010/11/12/three-supremes-%e4%b...
This term is commonly translated as "the rule of law", but strongly implies the distinction that you're saying the English term does not.
Central parts of "rettsstatsprinsippene": Everyone is equal in the eyes of the law, laws cannot be reteroactive, the accused is innocent until proved guilty, the arrested must be presented to a court within 24 hours, the accused have a right to a state-appointed defender.
I'm starting to think despotic regimes are bad.
"Competition is bad, arrest him immediately!"
I'd bet money China's economy could be growing 10x faster if it had independent courts and foreign companies who become successful weren't treated like criminals.
Just imagine how many of us would be moving to China to start companies and how much more VC money would be flowing in. And all of the global HQs and products and innovation that would be happening there.
China's growth has been massive but it's a shadow of what it could be. Their growth rate should have been closer to SK, Singapore, and Taiwan by now. But they decided to go backwards:
https://croakingcassandra.files.wordpress.com/2019/07/ip-1.p...
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/scr...
If the choice is between, say letting AWS in and building their own. Building their own would put 5000 of their own people to work, the broad technical demographic it will take, and build up all the surrounding industries like servers, networking etc. All the profits stay within China, and they now have more skilled people who can start other companies etc. IMO its clearly a better long-term strategy, even though it will cost more in the short term.
US authorities seem to have only stepped up the criticism recently as China has become more of a viable adversary on the global stage though. The US government doesn't particularly care about the ethics of most countries, and will mostly criticise it when it's in their own interest. There's also stuff that's only come to light in the last few years. Chinese authorities flexing their power in ways that directly affect US interests is one of these.
As an uniformed reader of mainstream media and social networking sites, China was just not on the radar a few years ago. Politicians didn’t talk about it, people didn’t talk about it, news didn’t talk about it.
Maybe what you’re describing is true for the United States. I wouldn’t know.
But also the large buddhist community in America will never forget China invading Tibet and murdering the successor to the Dalai Lama. That still gets talked about a lot.
My consulting company does business in China, and when we do, we (out of self-interest, since we don't speak Chinese and it's hard to do logistics without that) partner with Chinese companies. My company has some of the leading experts in a very niche thing. In the current state, the companies we partner with get to learn from us and gain expertise. The alternative if protectionist policies stop us from doing business in China isn't for those people to become experts on their own -- that's not possible. The alternative is for them either not to gain expertise at all or to have to get it in a more difficult and expensive way.
Protectionism can benefit a fledgling industry (not a whole country) in the short term in a limited set of cases (at the expense of dragging down the rest of the economy), but in most cases the protected industry is going to fall behind even more without the information transfer that comes from business leaders doing business there.
I don't think the economic growth benefits outweigh their priorities.
This is despite both countries starting from the same, largely rural, highly impoverished starting point 60 years ago.[1]
So, yes, they'd rather be the absolute leaders of a faster growing economy, than the non-leaders of a slower-growing one.
[1] China was even worse off, actually, since it spent the first half of the twentieth century torn apart by civil war, European colonialism, civil war again, a brutal Japanese invasion and occupation, and then some more civil war, followed by two decades of self-inflicted political purges and repression. India only had to contend with two of these problems!
China on the other hand is mostly free and liberal up until you start being successful.
Acting like India isn't engage in authoritarian mass intervention, even though its in a more decentralize fashion is totally wrong. The only benefit is they have more independent courts and you can succeed with influence buying without the top-down threat that the CCP does to cripple foreign competitors in domestic firms favours.
India has a different sort of economic interference - but also one that's far easier to fix. Something Modi repeatedly promised and keeps failing to do.
This video is a good overview of how the Indian gov cripples business: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVwIZzGHxwc
If you think I'm kidding: https://blog.samaltman.com/e-pur-si-muove
It's true, by the way. I was in SF for a week a few months ago and the constant need to watch what I say was exhausting. I couldn't even joke around with my gay friend because people were getting offended on his behalf, much to his dismay.
He is saying groupthink is bad.
Without fair representation in the courts and judicial independence this problem will never be resolved and China will always be taking 1 step back for every 2 steps forward.
Hong Kong is a better example, they consistently rank #1 in the world in economic freedom and their economy skyrocketed as a result.
It's an article about how he feels stifled by SF culture.
Are we on the same page, here?
Name two.
Edit: No. I wasn't referring to the Epstein case.
Also, Chinese police has a habit of using force to rob the corpse of the victim from the family who want to send the corpse to the 3rd party for examination. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shishou_incident