The China-US tensions are not going to get better, and, in fact, will get worse as years go by. More and more nations will be forced to choose sides. It's not good and I'm not sure what a resolution even looks like.
But for at least Portugal and Greece, and maybe Italy and some eastern European countries, the ally is china since 2014?
While Obama made his move over SE Asia, the CCP applied the strategy they used in Australia with the PIGS. And while Trump very successfully destroyed what Obama tried to do in SE Asia, the CCP installed foreign military bases near center of trade in the Indian ocean while gaining political goodwill with middle east poorest countries. Most of Iraki oil is sold to China.
I'm not claiming i know what should be done, i'm just saying that China have already a lot of political allies and try to gain more, and now reached europe.
> As an European I don't what to think that the US seems so against kit from a Chinese company and completely fine with jit from an European company.
The US would of course prefer that American technology be available, but since it's not then I suppose a partnership with two trusted allies is preferable to one with an untrusted adversary.
Nokia and Ericsson also aren't arms of the state widely believed (fairly or not) to actively facilitate global industrial and military espionage activities on behalf of a hostile government, so there's that.
The only way this makes sense is abstract of any value judgements, and yes sure, if we in the west ignore that everything about the Chinese Communist Party and how it conducts itself is an affront to our values then it makes no difference. But we are humans, we have values, we make value judgements.
The UK left the EU so now it has no option but to be a big guy's bitch because it is too weak to face them by itself, and it has always been quite obvious that it would be a satellite of the US.
The EU by design is not a single unit with governing power that would counteract the US or China. It’s not a federation but a union, each member has to manage their own international relations.
France for instance is about to take the same steps as UK, and get out of Huawei deals within the next years.
One of the main goals of the EU is to counteract the US and China. Individual member states no longer manage their own international relations when it comes to trade and try to find a common position on other issues.
The issue of a deeper integration is an old one and evolving, but the trend is more integration.
It is becoming more and more important for Europe to stand on its own two feet and be independent in all aspects.
There are benefits in having the other superpowers locked in conflict if you can stay out of it as much as possible and further your interests while they are distracted.
The UK, on the other hand, is in a very weak position. China will feel comfortable retaliating strongly, and the US will probably extract a sweet trade deal from them.
I think it needs to be a stronger political entity in its own right for that. EU foreign policy is hamstrung by very different foreign policy objectives of member states.
A resolution is difficult. China is a totalitarian country and totalitarianism needs to be fought, but I doubt that a democratic China would be any different when it comes to their claims to the world. They'd want to expand just as they want to expand now. Just look at the various western colonial empires of history. Many of them were democracies in some form or fashion.
Any long term resolution to the conflict has to involve the realization that China has had 100 bad years and now has a giant comeback. And that the US has had 60 good years but now large parts of it decline.
Maybe the long term resolution involves recognizing that even if China is totalitarian, it's only within it's own borders. Unlike the cold war days, there's no race to convert countries to Communism or Democracy. China's main mode of interaction with other countries is through trade, it doesn't play the game of political/ideological proselytism. If democracy loses ground around the world, that's due more to it's own failings than a concerted push by China to replace it with totalitarianism. Spend more time and funds fixing the economic inequalities plaguing democratic society than wasting it on ineffective bogeymen like confronting China half a world away.
> A resolution is difficult. China is a totalitarian country and totalitarianism needs to be fought, but I doubt that a democratic China would be any different when it comes to their claims to the world.
I wonder about this. Why does totalitarianism in a sovereign nation need to be fought? For those of us considering a democratic China...why do we think the country would fare better as a democracy? The Chinese civilisation is goes back thousands of years. Could the system they have now be the cumulative effect of all they have gone through to date? In other words it has evolved and generally serves its people. It may evolve into something else (possibly resembling Western democracies) but it may not. I don't particularly think it has to.
What is the solution for totalitarianism? Destruction of the country, plunging millions into poverty, for it to be replaced by a sham democracy where all the levers of power are behind US interests? How did that work out in Iraq?
If you want China to stop being totalitarian, then you should wait until most Chinese citizens decide that they don't approve of the ruling party, and then let them decide what to replace it with. You cannot force democracy.
The idea is that if Chinese citizens are going to want democracy, they will have to take it. There is no way anyone else can give it to them. Least of any the US, and possibly the worst way to get a Marxist-Leninist state (this time, four times the size of the USSR!) to relinquish power is to create economic isolation in the midst of an upcoming crisis of capitalism as we have already cut off a sizeable chunk of the world.
In any case, you can rest assured that if the Chinese have to choose between Yeltsin and the CCP, they will choose the latter 100% of the times. Democracy cannot be forced.
I'm not sure it's just a China-US thing. I think Europe will increasingly find itself taking a role. India too.
To clarify, while US-China superficially seem like the 'sides'. Really, what I think is happening is that the values of many (especially Western) countries around human rights, democracy, freedom of religion and expression, are coming into conflict with a new kind of Chinese authoritarianism that really doesn't care for these things and is quite willing to subjugate large groups of people in doing so (Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, claims to Taiwan, etc.).
Enough of your nonsense. You don't have the higher moral grounds when it comes to human rights. How many Muslims have been killed during the wars in the middle east?
Stop smoking crack already and getting high on koolaid.
The annexation of Tibet was in 1951, claims to Taiwan have always been there, and the subjugation of millions is nothing new (Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution were in the 50s and 60s).
I think people are just waking up to the reality that the opening of China will not automatically lead to greater liberalism as was predicted.
The justification is that the equipment presents a national security risk.
If that's true, how is it reasonable to allow this equipment to operate in the UK for 7 more years? Doesn't that mean the UK is willingly under national security risk for 7 years?
Unless, of course, there was never a security risk...
Future-dating it is a sensible move to allow people to get used to the idea, to disseminate the news, and to allow time to obtain the necessary equipment. It will increase compliance compared to an immediate rule change. Bear in mind that only about 5%-10% of people in UK currently are wearing masks in shops (based on my own local observations).
Months ago there were massive shortages of PPE and UK was largely in lockdown with most people only going out to exercise and to shop, not going anywhere else, and not seeing famliy, friends etc.
Now the risk profile of things has changed because people are out and about more.
The masks normal people need to wear aren’t the same masks that medical staff need to wear — the former mainly stop you infecting others, the later keep you safe from others.
You're assuming everyone who must to go to a shop in the next 11 days already have in their possession an appropriate face covering; the definition of which is as yet unknown.
they could introduce the measure immediately for all but essential shops, with essential shops a week later to allow people to acquire appropriate face covering
Presumably it's about judging what is an acceptable degree of risk vs stripping out all Huawei equipment immediately and effecively crippling the nation's comms infrastrtucture.
Which does raise the question, why are we concerned about 5G when Huawei is presumably also behind much of the 4G and other existing infrastructure? What's the difference in terms of security risk?
I see you've never been in charge of risk mitigation measures. I do them as part of my job and am tasked with scoring risks and possible mitigation responses. Sometimes the mitigation is so effective that it can eliminate the risk but other times it is practically useless.
Decision makers then need to asses those risks and possible mitigations and weigh them against a million other factors.
That is exactly what BT have been saying. Moreover they rightly point out that losing access to software updates due to US sanctions is a security risk in its own right too.
This is a good example of the kinds of tradeoffs which must be made at the highest levels of public service.
> Doesn't that mean the UK is willingly under national security risk for 7 years?
No, and I'll come on to why in a second.
Huawei, just like any Chinese corporation operating overseas, is an attack vector for intelligence gathering. Anyone presenting a counter-argument to this is either a shill for the Chinese government, or totally uninformed.
China has a culturally distinct attitude towards intelligence and intelligence gathering to nearly every western country. The national emphasis on the collective good blurs the line between private citizens, acting in a personal or professional capacity, and the stereotypical impression of a "spy" perpetuated in the west: on the payroll, going to their cubicle at the CIA each day. China's voracious appetite for intelligence (and, particularly in recent years, industrial espionage), means that it is impossible to distinguish between the commercial interests of a Chinese company and the Chinese state furthering its apparatus.
Remember Crypto AG? The Swiss crypto company jointly-operated by the CIA and German intelligence?[1] That's newsworthy because it's unusual: western states are typically limited to publicly lobbying their corporations for backdoor access, or working around things like end-to-end encryption (e.g. I believe PRISM used a combination of vulnerabilities to exfiltrate data from Hotmail and MSN prior to encryption taking place).
In China, we must assume that the reverse is the norm: the Chinese government does not need to lobby its companies to provide it with data, or to build-in backdoors or exploits. A Chinese corporation can be compelled to turn over everything it has, silently, and to compromise users and products to benefit the Chinese government, silently.
Crucially this is not a criticism of China. China can best be understood by Westerners as a series of tradeoffs to benefit the collective good, at the expense of personal liberty and privacy. Literally the argument you might encounter would be: "If you have nothing to hide then why do you care?"
The information gathered is not always as exciting as you might imagine. It's not just deployed into military intelligence or kompromat. It might "just" be used as a means of preserving China's status quo as a leading manufacturing hub (and, therefore, China's position as a growing economic power).
So China a) has a vast appetite for intelligence of all kinds, and b) does not draw a distinction between private citizens/corporations and state actors/corporations.
To answer your question:
Huawei has been a cornerstone of the UK's telecoms infrastructure for nearly twenty years, and in order to gain its foothold committed to allowing GCHQ full access to its codebase (HCSEC)[2]. The stipulation from Britain's intelligence community was that Huawei must not be allowed to have a monopoly position, or even a significant market share beyond a certain level.
I am not familiar with the specific technical reason that Huawei at 70% vs. Huawei at 40% of the UK's telecoms infrastructure would represent a disproportionate increase in risk, but I believe it is likely to be related to resource constraints -- fuck me guys, GCHQ is having to actively monitor and review the code deployed across a double-digit % of our telecoms infrastructure from the starting position of "this is provided by a bad actor"! -- and the doomsday scenario that Huawei's position of market dominance would drive competition down, resulting in a choice to either have e.g. 7G with Huawei, or not at all (7G is a fictitious example, but you see my point).
The UK is balancing the very real ongoing nightmare of monitoring Huawei's involvement in UK telecoms with the fact that it's a cheap, high quality supplier, and the fact that our closest allies -- the United States -- have been on a warpath over Chinese inte...
Sorry, I'm not sure I understand what point you're making with this link.
The link states that Sir Andrew Parker (head of MI5) doesn't believe that the inclusion of Huawei in UK telecoms infrastructure will have a negative impact on the UK's relationship with the US.
>That's newsworthy because it's unusual: western states are typically limited to publicly lobbying their corporations for backdoor access, or working around things like end-to-end encryption
Isn't this contradicted by secret courts approving NAS warrants, loopholes like meta-data can is legal to collect, digital data is considered different that data you have on paper in your home etc. If CIA, NSA has some judge approval to ask Apple access to someone data and keep it secret do you think Apple(or Google) can challenge the secret orders?
What if a judge produces soem secret order so Apple and Google provide full access to everything do you think some manager or developer will make this public and suffer a fait similar or worse as Snowden? IMO we people in the west we sometimes forget how corrupt people in power are and how exceptions to laws and constitution can be found when national security is mentioned.
This is why the free press and personal liberty are vital components of most western civilisations: they act as a release valve for the sort of behaviours you talk about.
What you are broadly driving at is the necessity for many areas of intelligence gathering and espionage to be invisible to the public eye. There is necessarily a strong tradition of civilian oversight of intelligence agencies in nearly every democracy. For example, in the UK, domestic intelligence is overseen by the Home Secretary, the Intelligence and Security Parliamentary Committee, and the Investigatory Powers Tribunal.
Needless to say, a free press, whistleblowers, and civilian oversight do not exist in China.
I agree, and I am not trying to say West and China are the same - the point I am struggling to make is that we might not have it as good as we think and there are many things hidden from us. How many time we see old documents released where US or other government was doing crazy shit - I mean is insanity to think that for some reason they stopped doing same level of insane stuff.
I seen a video a few months back about US military considering internet as a new area of war and considering how to engage in such war , it is clear that not only China is trying to push their propaganda but the others are doing a similar thing (again I am not trying to say is the exact same thing just trying to prevent everyone focusing too muc in one direction and not noticing what is happening behind their backs at home)
I think I understand what you mean now - thanks for taking the time to explain it.
I understand your position to be that in the US (I'll use the US as an example but it's broadly interchangeable with any western democracy), privacy violations and acts of espionage which are directionally similar to those occurring in China do take place, and whilst you acknowledge that they are not as bad, you draw equivalence between the surreptitiousness of both.
I think the point is a meaningful one. Much of the content of the PRISM presentations was worrying because it made very clear the extent to which the US government has expanded its intelligence-gathering in the last few decades.
Introducing a point like this into a discussion focusing on China might seem like 'whatabouttery' to many people ("X is bad, but what about Y?"). On paper, NSA and CIA overreaching could have similar consequences (or even look identical) to Chinese state sponsored espionage, but provided there are avenues for whistleblowers and a free press, the two are not equatable.
> the point I am struggling to make
Your English is very good, and I enjoyed talking to you.
I think we just passed peak production in europe last year, i highly doubt we will be able to afford more energetically expensive devices anytime soon without overexploiting shell oil.
This kind of thing is going to play out a lot over the next few years. It's a tough question: how to marry globalisation with the political realities. When China was very poor, it didn't really matter, or perhaps the assumption was that China would liberalise more quickly than it has. But China, while increasingly mature economically, has not developed proper civil society, human rights, freedom of expression, democracy, and so on. Let us hope they do so as quickly as possible, not least for the sake of the Chinese people themselves. And let us work to improve our example and unity too in countries where we do have these things, however imperfectly.
This is a geopolitical clash of power. It's not about respective political regimes, it's about relative power and influence. If China liberalises tomorrow none of the fundamental issues will change and China will still be a threat to the US. The only thing that will change is that the US will have to find something else in order to label China 'evil'.
This is a good analysis. You aren't seeing a constant drumbeat of bad China news because the US suddenly cares very deeply about Muslim lives - otherwise we'd be hearing a lot more about India, for example. China threatens the US' global hegemony. To the extent people in power care about China's political system, it is used to rope in liberals to an anti-China stance and manufacture consent for various measures against them, military or otherwise.
i doubt you understand the "fact" you are talking about in person, rather than from some "news".
India is not re-educating anyone, but rules out muslim from citizenship? Not even mention the caste system, which is way worse than the color discrimination in US. When India became the 2nd biggest power in the world, all these will become target
Your arguments lack context. India isn't ruling out Muslims from citizenship. While the CAA is a very bad step forward, and has several problems, it is about what criteria satisfying refugees are available for quick citizenship, and doesn't apply to citizens of the country. India is certainly not running anything close to the camps China is running for Uyighurs.
India is actively trying to fix disparities caused by the caste system. It took the US 200 years to get civil rights, India had affirmative action from day one, and one of the biggest examples of affirmative action at that. The caste system is horrendous, but social change can never be brought so quickly ( atleast in a democratic way, we certainly don't want Stalin or Mao style quick changes)
The caste system, while bad, isn't in any way worse than color discrimination in the US. To quote just one example, India has very strong laws against caste based violence.
India has it's own shares of issues, but it's still an order of magnitude better than the Chinese Government.
> Your arguments lack context. India isn't ruling out Muslims from citizenship. While the CAA is a very bad step forward, and has several problems, it is about what criteria satisfying refugees are available for quick citizenship, and doesn't apply to citizens of the country. India is certainly not running anything close to the camps China is running for Uyighurs.
I could argue the same, the so-called reeducation camps only applies to xinjiang province, and for those could only get education from religion maniacs, rather than a normal school. And there were numbers of attack events were caused by it. Keep in mind Uyighurs are not only living in xinjiang, there are uyighurs living in rest parts of China and doing well.
> India is actively trying to fix disparities caused by the caste system. It took the US 200 years to get civil rights, India had affirmative action from day one, and one of the biggest examples of affirmative action at that. The caste system is horrendous, but social change can never be brought so quickly ( atleast in a democratic way, we certainly don't want Stalin or Mao style quick changes)
Aye aye, it took 200 years for the US to have civil rights for all (still problematic), and Inida takes 70+ years still working on the caste problems, when it reaches China, which was founded after India, we are suddenly asking for all equal society. Yes, unwillingly education is bad, but keeping them blank and poor is evil. Learning skills to fit into a society, even it doesn't fit into your propaganda, is not wrong.
> The caste system, while bad, isn't in any way worse than color discrimination in the US. To quote just one example, India has very strong laws against caste based violence.
US also has strong anti hate crime law, and is one of countries offers most assistance for anti-discrimination, law doesn't help unless vast majority are educated to do so, and vast majority has economy power to do so.
This is why the Chinese strategy is not to give in to US bullying but create an alternative order in the world. Either the US comes to terms with it or we see the US empire lash out even harder
An alternative where criticizing the CCP or that Pooh will end you up in jail? An alternative where China claim my country's ocean, far from its Mainland?
No thank you. Stop pushing "China is victim of bully" or "China is here to save you from evil West" rhetoric.
No it's not. The US isn't claiming the UK's 5G networks. The alternative solution providers such as Samsung, Ericsson and Nokia are not US companies.
China is using its military to forcibly steal territory the size of France from neighboring nations. That territory does not belong to China.
The US can rightfully sanction any nation that uses its technology and its currency. Those things belong to the US. The sea territory that China is stealing does not belong to it.
Other nations do not have to obey US sanctions. They're free to abandon all US technology and abandon the US dollar and its banking structures. Go for it.
> If China liberalises tomorrow none of the fundamental issues will change and China will still be a threat to the US. The only thing that will change is that the US will have to find something else in order to label China 'evil'.
Cite please. And won't the best way to debunk the "propaganda" be to just liberalize right? So ... everybody is waiting and has been waiting for decades, China should stop making excuses and get on with it.
The US destroyed Iranian democracy and replaced it by the Shah, a brutal autocratic leader whose abuse of power and violation of human rights led to the rise of the current far-right Islamic theocracy : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...
The US destroyed Bolivia, replacing an elected government that was legally found to be allowed to run, with a far-right nationalist military-backed junta that refuses to hold elections : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Bolivian_political_crisis
The US installed a brutal dictator in Chile, with the coup killing the legitimately elected president and overthrowing the liberal democracy, replacing it with dictatorship : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvador_Allende
No, it is entirely clear to anyone in the world that the US will destroy your country and kill you if you oppose, no matter how liberal it is, if it suits their geopolitical interests.
> The US destroyed Iranian democracy and replaced it by the Shah
Iran had no democracy. Mosaddegh was appointed Prime Minister by the Shah, he was not democratically elected by the people of Iran. The Majlis that nominated him were a collection of feudal lords that dominated Iranian politics, they were not democratically elected by the people of Iran, they co-ruled Iran as a feudal kingdom.
If Iran were a democracy the Shah wouldn't have been appointing the Prime Minister.
It has been 40 years, and just look at Iran today: zero human rights. You're going to try to blame the US for four decades of theocratic dictatorship? Laughable. The timer on that excuse has long since expired. Iran is responsible for the condition of Iran today, and the people that installed the theocracy are solely responsible for that too.
> The US destroyed Bolivia, replacing an elected government
That's an entirely false, invented claim. Which is why you didn't even try to support it.
> Iran had no democracy. Mosaddegh was appointed Prime Minister by the Shah, he was not democratically elected by the people of Iran. The Majlis that nominated him were a collection of feudal lords that dominated Iranian politics, they were not democratically elected by the people of Iran, they co-ruled Iran as a feudal kingdom.
The Majles was literally an elected body. Yes, he was appointed by the Shah after being nominated by the parliament. That's how constitutional monarchies work. Justin Trudeau also was elected by a parliament and then appointed by the Queen.
The fact that a lot of the people in the Iranian parliament had feudal land is completely orthogonal here. They were still elected. A lot of the people in the US Congress are also incredibly wealthy.
Mossadegh was elected fair and square. He was overthrown and replaced by a puppet when he went against Western interests.
As for Bolivia, Morales was a legitimate, elected president of Bolivia. Under US pressure and support, the OAS fabricated evidence that the election was illegitimate, and the US backed a millitary coup. It was a coup orchestrated and following the interests of the US. Here is my source: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/02/the-oa...
All of that information is also in the link I provided.
I'm not sure what you are trying to accomplish but the wiki articles you list don't support the point you are making.
The US isn't responsible for the 2019 Bolivan political crisis and certainly didn't destroy Bolivia. I have to believe you are just trolling with language like, "The US destroyed Bolivia". Unless you call supporting the second round of elections (along with the European Union) the cause of the crisis they had. I've been in Bolivia recently, they will be just fine.
Not sure what you are implying wrt the Chilean coup d'état - the US didn't like Salvador Allende but he was overthrown by his own military.
The UK support of the Iranian coup d'etat in the 1950 (post WWII) was due to a conflict with AIOC (a British corporation) and US supported in turn. Not a good look by any means but also not a pattern of machinations as you make it out to be.
So when the OAS [0] fraudulently, according to the Guardian, the New York Times, and every subsequent study, accuses the legitimate Bolivian elections to be fraudulent, after which a well-coordinated coup by the military and the far-right establishes a dictatorship that keeps postponing elections (Haven't seen that happen in Egypt before), that is also completely coincidentally the group supported by the government of the United States despite the press, academia and intelligentsia of the country recognizing that the elections were legitimate, that is not a US-backed coup?
Because it seems to me that it was a coup. That was backed by the US. Which makes it a US backed coup.
[0] The OAS is a cold-war era organization that was literally founded in order to instrumentalize the Monroe Doctrine. Moreover, the current chairman of the OAS publicly states his support for regime change, and the organization is largely funded by the US. It was designed in order, and still largely acts, to implement US foreign policy.
The CIA literally had a budget in order to remove Allende from power. One of their top priorities was to fund, cause, and instrumentalize a military coup in order to remove Allende, which happened exactly in the timeframe they planned, and was executed by the actors that they had counselled and financed for the past two decades in the goal of removing any left-wing president : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_intervention_in_.... It is absolutely certain that the US was instrumental in the overthrow of Allende, with the CIA even publicly taking credit for creating the conditions that led to the coup. After the coup, the US politically and economically backed the military dictatorship. So yes, the US caused, and backed the coup. He was overthrown by his own military, that were organized to perpetrate a coup by the US.
It is literally a pattern of machinations. There aren't a series of dozens of coup d'états that mysteriously happen in countries with CIA activity that also happened to be against US interests, and that turned out exactly to further US interests. The CIA didn't make contacts in the militaries, in supranational organizations, and with local interest groups for fun.
I think the simplistic sort of thinking that capitalism and human rights are 'inseparable' from each other and can be 'exported' like Coca Cola or Blue Jeans is just a leftover from the Cold War. The reality is much more complicated unfortunately, together with the slowly growing realisation that the USA has quickly lost it's 'role model' status as the leader of the 'Free World' after the Cold War has ended.
The West needed 30 years to realize that (some are still working on this I think) because it thought that it had actually 'won' the Cold War through it's actions during the Cold War, when the reality was much more likely that the East had collapsed also without much 'help' from the West.
The countries on the 'losing side' in this battle of ideologies (like the Soviet Union and China) had adapted to this new reality much more quickly, both in different ways though, but none of them copied the 'obviously superior' model of the Free West.
Of course hindsight is 20/20, but sometimes I've got the impression that many people in the West still wear their rose-tinted Cold War glasses ;)
The US seems to be stuck in the 1950s, with much of the infrastructure and the attitudes in a similar state of stasis.
The US however hasn't lost its role model status, despite embarrassments like Bush (unless your definition is different). The petrodollar is just as powerful as ever, the dollar is the most powerful currency still, and US hedgemony is just as powerful.
The US government is stagnated by politics and the current political culture focuses on screwing over the opposing party above all else. On the surface it seems like the grumpy old men in charge are just being stubborn and exercising their power to ensure their opponents lose, but if you look at the legislation that does get passed you start to see something very different.
Most of the legislation passed revolves around redistribution of wealth, and it's not taking from the rich and giving to the poor but quite the opposite. Any and all amassed wealth is being extracted from the poor and being given out to businesses in the form of lucrative contracts or, more recently, bailouts. The companies that receive this money promise that it's going to trickle down while they fill Golden Parachutes, perform stock buy backs, and find other ways to funnel that money to their wealthy share holders.
The message for decades was that the government was inefficient and wasteful, and that private business can do it better. We've all heard the stories of the $300 hammer. But when things are privatized things generally get worse. Fewer workers earning lower wages doing more work but the overall product is worse and it's usually not cheaper. Any and all reductions in cost are just converted into profit margin.
The US is being sucked dry and when there's nothing left, the globalist in charge will just up and move on.
I don't think it's that cut and dry. If people are being oppressed, why don't they leave? The innovations and benefits must outweigh the problems. I'm happy to be a US citizen, with excellent buying power.
What product is worst and more expensive that you have in mind?
> If people are being oppressed, why don't they leave?
It's not that easy. Assuming they can afford to leave, most cannot, the fact that they've lived their entire lives here and their whole support system resides here makes it hard. Many people aren't upwardly mobile, and things aren't bad enough to make them desperate.
> What product is worst and more expensive that you have in mind?
Privatized utilities. The pitch in the 90s was that you'd have a bunch of providers competing to offer lower rates and the result would be lower prices. The reality is that you pay a very high base fee (no longer subsidized in the rate), and then you pay a service fee to your provider. Most rates are promotional so once a year you shop around or call up your gas provider to negotiate like you would your ISP. Switching providers usually results in activation fees and other costs.
This works great for large consumers (e.g. factories, businesses) who pay lower overall rates but the poor suffer. An example, I used $1.76 in natural gas last month but my bill was $36. I paid more in taxes ($2.04) than I paid for the gas. People in my state pay $32 a month in fees for the privilege of being able to pay for gas. That's on top of the deposit people with poor credit have to put down.
Community owned ISPs seem to outperform privatized providers in terms of customer value, even if achieving sustainable cash flow can prove challenging.
Considering the actions of these capitalist nations during Cold War it's pretty clear in retrospective that promoting human rights and democracy wasn't very high priority. Propping up dictators and terrorist don't seem very much in those lines.
America had to undergo a great amount of social change too before it came out the winner. With groups like the Black Panthers carrying around Mao's little red book, it seems to me that America had to (was forced to) become more inclusive to build allies and compete with the soviet union.
In the minds of the people at the time Communism was such a great evil and afront to personal freedom, that "propping up dictators and terrorist" was seen as the lesser evil and preferable.
It's perhaps easy to forget now, but during the 30s, 40s, and 50s the face and "leader" of communism was Stalin – not exactly a friendly chap – and things like China's Great Leap Forward left over 20 million dead (mostly due to incompetence, not malice), and let's not forget Cambodia.
Details differ per care of course, but in quite a few cases all of this was done in the name of "freedom and democracy", which was perhaps not entirely unreasonable too. I'm not saying that it was the right thing to do (many other issues like national sovereignty etc. which come in to play), but I do think it's a bit more complex than your comment. I'm not sure if idly sitting by and doing nothing would have been that great of an option either.
There's a reason that communist symbolism and the like is considered taboo in many formerly communist Eastern European countries, somewhat akin to Nazi symbolism.
There is, however, a pretty big gulf between the stuff the US has done and engaging in ethnic cleansing and running concentration camps as a matter of policy.
The difference is massive, and well known. Please don't try to falsely equate the two.
> There is, however, a pretty big gulf between the stuff the US has done and engaging in ethnic cleansing and running concentration camps as a matter of policy.
A big gulf. Hmm. A big gulf. Umm, maybe you mean the Gulf of Aden? That's kind of big, and it's right near where the US participating and supporting the ethnic-cleansing-level siege and bombardment of Yemen by Saudi Arabia.
Remember most states of the US were founded on ethnic cleansing. The US supported Pol Pot, a notorious cleanser (although more of a self-ethnic-cleansing); it carried out mass bombing and poisoning campaigns in the same region of SE Asia, which constitute ethnic cleansing; it starved out the Iraqi people for years, which is borderline ethnic cleansing; it's doing the same to Venezuela right now; it supports Israel, an ethnic/religious-supremacy state held up by keeping the indigenous people of the country outside of it, as refugees - to ensure a demographic majority for the privileged group; it has supported Myanmar/Burma, while it ethnically cleanses the Rohingya; it has supported and still occasionally supports Sunni fundamentalists who aim to cleanse non-Muslims, Shia etc.
As for concentration camps - the US is infamous for its concentration camps. Mostly in countries it occupies, but also for a significant fraction of its citizenry - over 1% if I'm not mistaken. They're more class-based than strictly race-based, but still.
> "Proper civil society and human rights" - like the ones afforded to Julian Assange? Or the treatment of the Grenfell tower victims' families?
Now imagine a society where every dissident is treated like Assange, and every poor nobody is treated like the Grenfell tower residents. And with no recourse. And no free media to spread the outrage. And no reasonable expectation of privacy to even discuss the matter privately as a third party with other third parties. And no way to even talk about voting out those responsible.
That's China. Take your false equivalence elsewhere.
> Now imagine a society where every dissident is treated like Assange, and every poor nobody is treated like the Grenfell tower residents
The British colonies over the years? Possibly Britain itself as far as the treatment of poor nobodies.
Look, China's a repressive regime, but: (1.) A bit less so than it's described by Western media, and (2.) Britain and the US are not categorically different, they're just, well, different in the contexts and degrees in which they oppress more and less.
Sure. I don't see anyone here defending that in this thread.
> Possibly Britain itself as far as the treatment of poor nobodies.
Currently? Are you serious?
> Look, China's a repressive regime, but: (1.) A bit less so than it's described by Western media,
"Western media" is such a large set as to be meaningless. If you mean the mainstream media, please provide an example of two of where they claim China is more oppressive than it actually is.
> and (2.) Britain and the US are not categorically different, they're just, well, different in the contexts and degrees in which they oppress more and less.
No. There is a categorical difference between being democracies with major flaws and being a totalitarian state, between having real struggles in their open and adversarial justice systems and having arbitrary arrests as the norm, between abhorrent detention of immigrants and outright concentration camps based on ethnicity.
Placing the dystopian hellhole that is China in the same category as Western democracies is an affront to those that suffer under CCP rule and highly unproductive with regards to fixing the serious problems we have at home.
> please provide an example of two of where they claim China is more oppressive than it actually is
I'll give you one. Pretty much every single mainstream media basically says religion is banned in China. However to my detriment, every time I go back to China to visit my paternal grandma (who is a catholic), I get asked to go to Sunday mass with her. So, where is religion banned in China? Let me know your thoughts about this, do you think religion is banned in China?
> adversarial justice systems
You do realise that "adversarial justice systems" only pretty much exist in Common Law countries right? Whereas Civil Law countries don't use an adversarial system, which is pretty much the legal system of the whole of the EU and pretty much all of Asia including China. I've even read arguments from British barristers that the adversarial system can be an inferior system. I mean, the adversarial justice system certainly didn't do too well for the incarceration rate of black people in America now did it?
CCP views religion just like any other technology. It can be useful, as long as it furthers the goals of the Party. Once it stops doing that - or becomes a threat - it's dealt with, and severely in the case of Uyhur Muslims[1].
It's also worth noting that the Catholic Church in China is actually a state sanctioned organization that is not in Communion with the Holy See. There exists an underground Catholic Church that is in Communion with Rome, but, for obvious reasons, it's much smaller.
>> please provide an example of two of where they claim China is more oppressive than it actually is
> I'll give you one. Pretty much every single mainstream media basically says religion is banned in China. However to my detriment, every time I go back to China to visit my paternal grandma (who is a catholic), I get asked to go to Sunday mass with her. So, where is religion banned in China? Let me know your thoughts about this, do you think religion is banned in China?
First of all, I can't remember ever seeing Western MSM saying religion is banned in China. Would you be so kind as to provide an example?
Second, while religion is clearly not banned in China, there isn't freedom of religion. I care very little about the rigmarole of religious people, but I do care about their freedom to keep those. China whitelists a set of religions, religious practices and religious institutions. As with so many other things in China, if you happen to find what you want within such an approved space, you enjoy freedoms. Outside of those preapproved boxes, there isn't freedom of religion in China.
You yourself bring up catholicism. I am not here to defend the catholic church (yuck!), but the approved catholic church in China is not allowed to have the same relationship with the Vatican as ordinary catholic churces elsewhere. This is not freedom of religion. And let's not even get started with islam, or let alone falun gong! You've got to be kidding me.
So, no, religion isn't banned in China. I've never claimed it is, nor do MSM tend to claim it is. The claim is rather that there is very little freedom of religion in China.
>> adversarial justice systems
> You do realise that "adversarial justice systems" only pretty much exist in Common Law countries right? Whereas Civil Law countries don't use an adversarial system, which is pretty much the legal system of the whole of the EU and pretty much all of Asia including China.
I'm sorry. As somone from a civil law country who usually gets quite annoyed by common law people assuming that common law is the system everywhere, I should have been a lot more careful with my wording. I should have said "justice systems where there is a true burden of proof on the prosecuting authority" instead.
> I've even read arguments from British barristers that the adversarial system can be an inferior system. I mean, the adversarial justice system certainly didn't do too well for the incarceration rate of black people in America now did it?
Here we go again. There's a lot that's wrong with the American justice system. The Chinese justice system is fundamentally flawed, to the point of being a worthless sham that merely rubberstamps the arbitrary "justice" of the CCP. If you cannot see that enormous chasm between these two, then I don't know how to get through to you.
Now imagine after you posted your comment some men bust down your door take you in, torture you. Not some sleep depravation, but hammer to your knees and electrodes to your testicles. See difference? Oh and yeah nobody will ever see you again, cause well you are just gone.
And no newspapers write about your mysterious disappearance, and your best friends and family can't even discuss it quietly among themselves without fear.
I disagree. Reports about China from many western media tend to exaggerate things about China, mostly influenced by western politics, not good at all. Also, western media tend to report selective facts to only show things they want people to hear and see.
The right to life is the first clause of human right, which I see they are violated in many western countries. They refuse to treat the poor and old. Do you hear China criticise? Maybe they are, but for sure western media choose not to report them.
Freedom of speech is a relative term in today’s world. I can say some of the things you shouldn’t say in China are equally not welcomed in many western countries. If you split US, see how many troubles could come to you?
On democracy, I’m not sure what to comment. China has ran 4000 years under one empire system, and it’s just the culture there. Why democratic society is better than the 1 party system? What’s more important is to have the party represent people’s interests. In many democratic countries, each party represents the interests from certain groups, that’s why it’s necessity to have multiple parties perhaps.
The downsides to democratic system is also quite obvious. There are countless debate on many small matters which waste tax payer’s money etc.. Also, the democracy can be manipulated, and if it is the case, it’s worse.
comments like this make me wanna reach 500 karma so that i can downvote :-)
man are you REALLY and seriously arguing that a single party empire system is better than democracy? dude please. It might be better if you like to live in your bee hive and play your assigned role. But what if you are different? what if you want to be something else than society forces you to be? what theb? you are screwed my friend.
and thats why i happily accept.that democracy might be slower and more expensive. because its for EVERYONE. in theory though ;-)
How is democracy working out in Arab spring countries or Eastern European countries? Most westerners have it wrong where they think Democracy --> Economic prosperity, where in fact it's quite the opposite. Economic prosperity --> Strong government --> Democracy. If you don't have a strong state, Democracy (or any political system) just leads to widespread corruption.
You've got it completely backwards. Strong government leads to the corruption of society and a reduction in freedom. If you have weaker government then there is more freedom for everyone and greater economic prosperity.
> It's a tough question: how to marry globalisation with the political realities.
Very simple explanation: it's impossible, unless the West can mow the rogue regimes left, and right, and is ready for a war with a nuclear power to do that.
> When China was very poor, it didn't really matter, or perhaps the assumption was that China would liberalise more quickly than it has.
Expecting a communist party to "liberalise" is effectively to expect it to kick itself out of power. The moment they loose power, their people will murder them. And if people wouldn't, then it would be their internal factions who will strangle each other without an iron handed big boss at the top maintaining internal order.
There is no way out for them. Their only way to avoid being torn apart alive is to stay in power, and their only way to stay in power is to exert, push, and expand it.
For them, to stop repressions, means to let their enemies to take the proverbial rifle from which barrel's the power grows, and to seal their fate, essentially to voluntarily chose death.
Any totalitarian system has an expiration date for this very reason.
In case of China, what that means is an instant gulag, or worse for 5 political dynasties:
1. Few remnants of Mao, and his wife's reign, and their confidants for, well, everything.
2. Deng Xiaoping's era communist billionaires, who will have to return millions they stole from the state in eighties.
3. Shanghai people, and Jiang, who will have to at least surrender their posts, and titles which they bought, and sold illegally, and all privileges coming with them.
4. Hu's clique, whose members will have to surrender their businesses, and stocks which they got through connections
5. And finally, Xi, and his friends, who managed to make a bigger mess in their 8 years in power, than the three previous dynasties combined.
Put it simply, do you expect a thief to voluntarily give a gun to the person whom he just robbed? An expectation that the West can share the planet with rogue regimes, is an expectation that a kleptomaniac, and a really rich person can live under the same roof. Even if the later can keep the former compliant under a gunpoint for some time, eventually the former succumbs to his urges, and the later has to shoot.
According to their report to the ministry of the interior, the KMT had more than 21 billion Taiwan dollars (more than 700 million US dollars) in 2020, which is maybe not a lot, but on the other hand Taiwan isn't that big and those are just the party assets. Individual party members had plenty of opportunity to turn their influence into cash as well. https://party.moi.gov.tw/pgms/politics/finance!partyList.act...
Percentagewise, China hasn't done any better than South Korea or Taiwan at lifting their populace out of poverty. So I don't see how that comes anywhere close to excusing China's human rights abuses. And while SK and Taiwan only became democracies relatively recently, their human rights abuses even before then pale in comparison to what China is currently doing to Uighurs, Tibetans, and religious minorities in general. So yes, if anything improper is putting things too lightly.
No, I'm saying that similar countries were able to lift their populations out of poverty without creating concentration camps for millions of political dissidents and religious minorities in the process. China's economic success isn't tied to its authoritarian regime, and it's actually pretty easy to argue that they would have lifted even more of their population out of poverty even faster if they hadn't had harebrained/genocidal schemes like the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and communism in general. China didn't begin to see any significant economic success until after they abandoned most of their communist policies and began liberalizing markets in the late 80's and early 90's.
Lifting 100 millions people out of poverty is totally different from lifting 1 millions people out of poverty. Moving a car involves much more engineering than moving a carpet.
If they haven't done great leap forward and cultural revolution it would be better, that is true. But by "abandoning all communist policies and began liberalizing markets", not all countries see economic success, ukraine, iraq and all recent "liberated" countries, and russian living quality in 90s was even worse than their late 80s.
And ironically enough, the fast developing era of taiwan, south korea, by today's standard, are not under any form of democracy.
> And ironically enough, the fast developing era of taiwan, south korea, by today's standard, are not under any form of democracy.
This is I think an under-appreciated point... Taiwan and SK both made the most economic gains under military dictatorships. Social liberalization followed economic growth.
Something similar might have happened in Singapore, they're technically a democracy but have been governed by the PAP forever and don't really subscribe to freedom of press in the way the US does (but have their own ways of building accountability).
All very fascinating stuff. 10 years ago I would have said that China would follow the same path but in that case social liberalization still hasn't come yet. Certainly the GDP per capita has not yet caught up but the PPP was pretty close last I checked.
I lifted myself out of poverty. You canmt exactly compare myself (population of 1) with the efforts to move a country of over 1 billion people out of poverty. It's not as if I have somehow figured this out and can scale this up to 1 billion people.
Surely this is a joke right? The white terror in Taiwan on a per capita basis was more brutal than anything in China. People were summarily executed, jailed, and robbed for even the slightest hints of anti-establishment sympathies.
From the numbers I can find from a cursory search, the upper estimates for deaths caused by the White Terror is ~32,000 (28k from the massacre that kicked it off plus 4,000 executed in camps). That's about .35% of Taiwan's then population of ~9 million.
By contrast, the Great Leap Forward alone killed 16 million, and that's at the lower end of estimates. The population of China at the end of this was ~665 million, meaning they killed 2.7% of their population just in the Great Leap Forward.
So even with the numbers most favorable to China and least favorable to Taiwan, Taiwan comes out ahead by an order of magnitude.
I had, in fact, heard of the White Terror, and the suppression of the island's indiginous people. I had not heard of the Gwangju Massacre.
There are two reasons why they aren't mentioned as much as Mao's atrocities. One is that those countries are our allies, and as a result we are more willing to overlook their faults. And I don't think that's necessarily right, but it's part of human nature to overlook the faults and flaws of friends and allies. But the second reason is that, even ignoring those effects, Mao killed far more of his citizens (and far more per capita), making it a much more interesting and disturbing event in history. The atrocities of Taiwan and South Korea come across as "run of the mill authoritarian leaders violently cracking down on dissent" while the atrocities of Mao's China are on a whole different level.
FWIW, as far as dictators and genociders go I think Pol Pot gets the least attention relative to the scale of his atrocities since he wiped out 25% of the population, and in extremely brutal and arbitrary ways.
It's a little bit disingenuous to compare the White Terror to the Great Leap Forward, no? As per your original post, we are comparing the brutality and political suppression of the respective regimes, not their governing abilities.
During Soviet times, a Russian man was arguing with a British man over whether their respective countries had freedom of speech. The British man said "I can go to the Houses of Parliament and call Margaret Thatcher an idiot". To which the Soviet man said "It's the same for us. I can go to Red Square and call Margaret Thatcher an idiot".
Jeez as a Chinese person who lives in USA I find this comment very condescending and offensive.
> But China, while increasingly mature economically, has not developed proper civil society, human rights, freedom of expression, democracy, and so on.
I don’t want to get into a whataboutism debate about all the human rights violations the USA has engaged in (yes Trump but Obama as well and W before him and etc). But really I’ll just focus on “proper civil society”. Jfc is the sinophobia getting overt around here.
Even if I take the good faith argument that “it’s commentary about CCP not Chinese people” as I often hear after racist remarks, I’ll just point out I’ve been hearing comments like this all my life in all sorts condescending ways. Most of the time in bad faith. So I don’t give a shit about how you “intend” it to be.
1. I agree that "proper civil society" is rather questionable as criticism of China goes, but do the others not apply? I think they clearly seem to be points of commentary on the Chinese political system, which isn't a reflection of a race/ethnicity. I have no trouble believing that comments that you have received throughout your life were in bad faith. I've heard similar (at least in sentiment) comments about the society in my parents' country of origin. However, I think the majority of those comments (as with the ones in question here) fit into the bucket of clearly criticizing a social structure that applies to but does not immutably define the people living in it, and certainly doesn't apply to you if you live outside of it.
2. On a slightly different note, I think that while whataboutism is generally neither productive nor relevant, in this case a small amount could be relevant because the implication is that some other countries have developed to a state of "proper civil society, [...] democracy, and so on" while China has not. If the claim relates China to some base standard in the author's mind, then pointing out failings in those places seems like an attack on the point itself, but I don't know whether the US was at the top of their mind when crafting that sentence.
Looks good to exibit tolerancy between like minded friends about accepted topics, abortion, sexual orientation, skin color and the like... But about a different political system other than western liberal democracy? No way!
And it's not like Chinas Communist Party (from Deng Xiaopin on) has not good credentials. It might be the more succesfull regime in the history of humanity if we talk about taking people out of poverty. Which system has improved the life of millions like the party?
But it doesn't matter. The aglosphere keeps with its cultural war against the new enemy. What are the signs that the Chinese want to export their way of life? Any recent war launched by China? Any attempt to force a Western goverment to accept their condicions? They are not the ones messing with other countries democracies.
Anyway, there are plenty of things not to like about the Communist Party, but seriously, the propaganda is out of control.
> What are the signs that the Chinese want to export their way of life? Any recent war launched by China? Any attempt to force a Western goverment to accept their condicions?
There are two distinct reasons I see:
1. Some people read recent actions like "investing in a deepwater navy", "setting up economic relations with Africa", and "forcing trading partners to not recognize Taiwan" as doing exactly those things.
2. Even if you ignore those things, if you believe the western powers have done these things already in the 20th century like "investing in a huge carrier fleet and naval bases around the world", "setting up colonies and promoting democracy around the world, sometimes through force", and "forcing trading partners into labor standards including pay and hours, bundled into a package we call human rights", then it's probably easier to assume others are capable of doing similar.
It's not sinophobia. I've got _zero_ issue with Chinese Americans as long as their English is good enough that their primary news sources still don't still sit in China (for example second generation or greater Chinese Americans). It's the legitimate concern about China pushing remote spying into its software and hardware that is sold overseas as well as the manipulation of people through companies like TikTok aka ByteDance.
There’s no way defend against your accusations. It essentially boils down to “you’ve been brainwashed.” You’ve already decided your viewpoint is right and anything against it has read too much Chinese language news (whether true or not).
The “manipulation” you speak of is more hypothetical. If anything Facebook has done more manipulative harm thus far.
One way to think about this is what exactly would TikTok have to do to satisfy your accusations of them “manipulating” people? How does Huawei stop spying on Americans? If there is no answer then you can see not only how it is pointless to argue, but that your primary motivation is actually to prevent the shift of power, rather than based on any actual infractions by Huawei or TikTok. So should the Chinese just sit out of global economics because they could threaten US dominance and potentially spy on or manipulate US people? The current dialogue is centers on future power, not on any actual abuse of power by these companies. Not like the US actually spying on Angela Merkel.
> One way to think about this is what exactly would TikTok have to do to satisfy your accusations of them “manipulating” people?
Set up a subsidiary that's subject to US law and rather than Chinese law and also has majority ownership in America. It's what the China enforces on foreign companies, so fair is fair.
> So should the Chinese just sit out of global economics because they could threaten US dominance and potentially spy on or manipulate US people?
I have no problem with Chinese companies participating in global economics as long as they're not based on stolen technology. Also it's not "potential", this has already happened extensively. China rose to prominence by extensive state funded industrial espionage and US companies were too blinded by greed to counter it. The US needs more laws in place to prevent this type of behavior and more retaliatory action when it's committed.
So many Chinese people I see online seem to think that the US is scared of China becoming more powerful economical or some other nonsense. The US created current Chinese economic prosperity through extensive work by Nixon and others in that era. That was all a massive mistake based on the mistaken idea that if China became more economically powerful they would become more democratic and more freedom oriented. That has failed to be the case and it's time to rethink how the US has handled China historically.
Chinese Americans are cool because they can read English, which is real news. I won't bother reading anything in Chinese or learn Chinese values, but I can judge them according to my beliefs because the English one is far superior.
Really this is a war of value systems masquerading as a trade war masquerading as national security concerns.
I would much rather the west comes out and say this has nothing to do with national security concerns or trade or economics, but that there is no way the west can tolerate how the Chinese Communist Party conducts itself, regardless of how many people get rich from their immoral actions.
At the risk of attracting the ire of the whataboutism nerds, value-systems are only 'values' and a 'system' when they are well-defined and consistently applied.
So most of the planet will only buy thise elaborate line when Saudi Arabia and Pakistan get told to keep their riches.
> value-systems are only 'values' and a 'system' when they are well-defined and consistently applied.
I get what you are trying to say but definitely a value system requires neither of those things.
> So most of the planet will only buy thise elaborate line when Saudi Arabia and Pakistan get told to keep their riches.
There is hypocrisy but the threat posed by China to the liberal world order is much more serious than the thread posed by Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, and in both those cases there is a bit of a deal with the devil.
If the Saudi and Pakistani regimes fall we will probably see much worse things popping up.
The date is a compromise between security concerns from the government and its allies, and business concerns from telcos that have already shelled out the cash to buy Huawei infrastructure.
Except that it's already been decided the towers will be removed, which is counter to your example. My analogy was meant to highlight the delay in action against something that has been deemed a risk.
Almost every safety regulation does this; few are effective immediately. Manufacturing plants need retooled, workforces need retrained, new equipment needs to be acquired and implemented, compliance measure must be implemented, etc.
>Except that it's already been decided the towers will be removed, which is counter to your example.
Grandfather clauses are implementation grace periods that are equal to the expected lifetime of the device. This is not counter to the example -- this is an example that sometimes these grace periods are very generous even for things we are very sure are unsafe.
Risk is a continuum and we accept many risks on a daily basis as a compromise to cut costs. The deadline is that compromise. Grandfather clauses, deadlines, and phased approaches are exceedingly common in regulatory requirements around the world for this reason.
Or maybe the idea is to put it far enough out that no one actually has to start replacing equipment until the US has a new administration and they can see where that administration stands on China.
If Trump gets reelected this year that will be his second term which is the limit, and so there will be a new administration in January 2025. If he doesn't get reelected there will be a new administration on January 2021.
I'm constantly seeing westerners whine about Chinese human rights violations while simultaneously ignoring the HR violations occurring everywhere else, especially in the west. American cops routinely kill people. Yet, how many people have died in Hong Kong because of their protests?
The notion that China lacks 'proper civil society' is in my mind rooted in a western sense of orientalism and good old fashioned racism. I'm no defender of China, but let's recognize that the same nations trying to punish China because 'human rights'(US, UK) are the same ones responsible for killing close to 1 million Iraqis and creating the largest humanitarian crisis on earth(Yemen).
China is literally running concentration camps to persecute religious minorities. This is happening at a huge scale and without any oversight on human rights.
Your point is? Every nation does this with their indigenous population. Yet you don't seem to be outraged at the fact native americans are raped and murdered almost everyday in america.
> Every nation does this with their indigenous population.
And it is always wrong.
> Yet you don't seem to be outraged at the fact native americans are raped and murdered almost everyday in america.
Not under sanction of the state, and Non native americans are also raped and murdered almost every day in america. These things are crimes in USA regardless of the victim, where in China the state is sanctioning it and doing it.
Yes it wrong. But we aren't punishing africa for their genocide of muslims and christians and we arent doing it our own ally israel. So isn't it a bit weird that its mentioned with china every other day? Do you know what they call concentration camps in israel? The gaza strip.
It is a bit weird that there are whole movements like BDS setup against Isreal, a wholly democratic and liberal country where people of all religions enjoy the same rights and nobody is placed in concentration camps, while every time someone mentions that China is a bad actor we get asked why does BDS not exists.
BDS does exist, and China is a bad actor and should be opposed.
Yea I'm just pointing out it doesn't work in the slightest. I agree with you for the most part. Especially in the case of China which for the most part is self sufficient. While israel relies on american intervention to even run sufficiently. But I also want to point out the groups perpetuating this in america are the republicans who dont actually care and are doing for xenophobic reasons not for the best interest of the people in these camps especially when they run their own.
I assume you are referring to the Democrat controlled US House passing a resolution with bipartisan support and a 398-17 vote which condemns BDS[1].
BDS is still allowed to operate and the condemnation has no state-actionable consequences against BDS. And there are members of the US congress who openly support BDS.
Individual US states is not the same as the "The US". And what you are linking to is not sanctions and again has no state-actionable consequences against BDS that I can see. It is a condemnation.
> It seems as if. Everyone in the us who does not support the bds movement.
Good they have some sense, even so BDS is still allowed to operate in the US. How will BDS ever survive now that it has been made clear that nobody likes them, while they are still allowed to operate. I mean they are entitled to everybody's support no?
I don't understand how you can give 'American cops routinely kill people' as an example of human rights violations that are being ignored.
Is change lacking? Yes. Is there outrage? Also yes.
Of course, had you were to make the point that Western politicians are complete hypocrites then I would wholeheartedly agree. Although, I also don't think that's a uniquely Western phenomenon.
When mass uprisings are necessary for even a serious discussion of the problem (intention to resolve it is nowhere in sight) - then, yes, killing by cops is being ignored and has been ignored.
_You_ aren't ignoring it - your representative have been ignoring it (and effectively and mostly, still are; they're just making a bit of noise in the hope that the protest goes away.)
The group that was being attacked was something like 'Westerners who criticize China' (I can't find the exact quote since the OP is no longer visible to me). I'm part of that group and that is why I replied.
Your point that "they're just making a bit of noise in the hope that the protest goes away" is true regarding the establishment. I don't see how anyone would disagree with that.
But we have a right to vote and a right to loudly voice our disagreement. And that's different from China. Right now in HK the government is now basically saying that voting against legislation proposed by the establishment 'might be' a violation of the national security law. That's insane.
You’re completely ignoring the fact that protest and speech are exactly how things change in a free democratic society. Try that in China and you’re likely to find yourself in a “re-education” (concentration) camp. It’s not apples to apples comparing the US to China in terms of human rights and civil society... China is truly an authoritarian regime.
China puts their own citizens in concentration camps. They're using machine learning to generate social scores. If you don't like America or the UK, you can leave. Try doing that in China. Dying in a free zone is preferable to the enslavement that the Chinese are subjected to. Freedom has a price, and it's not racist to not like these horrible cultural values or to go against them.
A prison is not a concentration camp, US has a justice system with the right to trial and appeal, and if the people in prison actually committed crimes then I'm not sure what the problem is.
Many people in prison in the US did not commit the crime they were accused of; thanks to wildly inflated sentencing, many people choose a 1-year plea bargain over a 10-15 year roll of the dice.
> Many people in prison in the US did not commit crimes;
By all means cite %, and still does not make it a concentration camp.
Further the DAs are themselves elected locally in many jurisdictions or appointed by locally elected officials and people can vote for change if they want it.
> You can always tweak law to make criminal out of anyone inconvenient.
And this would be immoral and if you are suggesting the US is doing this you would need to actually back that up.
> Wasn't Assange's consensual sex relegated to rape?
Even if it was, that is not an example of tweaking the law to make a criminal out of anyone inconvenient, it is a case of tweaking the truth to fit the definition of something which is a crime, and should be a crime.
When a fifteen year old can be put into prison for years in some U.S. states for some weed it hardly makes makes the U.S. look like it values human rights. It’s more akin to the U.S. being ‘the skinniest kid in fat camp.’ Congratulations on being better than China and Saudi Arabia I guess...
> When a fifteen year old can be put into prison for years in some U.S. states for some weed it hardly makes makes the U.S. look like it values human rights.
Would like to see some examples of this, and numbers of this. I really doubt this is widespread.
And further, if it does happen, it would have to get through prosecutors, jury, governors, etc - all of who will completely eaten alive by the press if the kid could even be misinterpreted to be a minority in the USA and the whole world would know about it. Where if someone mentions China is not exactly a good actor we get a whataboutism shitstorm.
There were judges that were convicted of sending black kids to for profit prisons they held stock in. Believing there isn't systemic racism in the prosecutorial system at this point is the same as believing there isn't systemic racism in policing. Just because you aren't personally affected doesn't mean a problem isn't wide spread.
This has nothing to do with the topic at hand and was another whataboutism off shoot from the main topic.
There's also indefinite detention and family separations at temporary immigration detention facilities.
Most of the people in the US who make a stink about the Uighurs and forget about US human rights transgressions would quickly forget about the Uighurs if they moved in next door.
Gui Minhai was a Hong Kong bookseller who had become a Swedish citizen. He was kidnapped while in Thailand and was moved to China. There he was denied consular access.
The US certainly flirts with this kind of politics too.
However:
- Snowden was an American citizen. Gui Minhai is Swedish.
- Snowden didn't get kidnapped abroad. The possibility seemed real but, for whatever reason, that line did not actually get crossed.
I certainly wouldn't defend the US in this (let's not pretend that the US has a good reputation regarding world politics). But the things the US does pale in comparison what China does.
Then give examples where they actually did far exceed what China does.
Snowden was just an example. The only reason why he didn't get kidnapped abroad is because the US failed. They were absolutely attempting to do so.
In any case, the CIA has an entire program devoted entirely to kidnap people abroad, move them in jurisdictions where they can be tortured, and then deal with them. It's called "extraordinary rendition".
I chose Snowden as an example specifically because he was a US citizen. If you want examples of non-US citizens, there are literal hundreds.
There is pretty much nothing that China has done, that the US hasn't in living memory. From internment camps, slave labour at the industrial level, censorship, extrajudicial execution, systematic torture at home and abroad, ubiquitous and total surveillance, and so much more.
There are, however, things that the US has done that China hasn't, such as, I don't know, functionally annexing an entire island of a foreign country in order to torture prisoners held without due process. Or maybe systematic destruction of dozens of countries under false pretenses, killing millions, in order to accumulate power. Neither has the US shied away from imposing economic systems that essentially damn billions of people to poverty and cause millions of easily preventable deaths a year.
There is no country in contemporary history that has exported as much pain, suffering and death abroad as the US.
Now, I don't think that this is because the US is somehow fundamentally worse than China. In the same geostrategic situation, China would likely have acted largely in the same pattern. However, your claim that "the things the US does pale in comparison to what China does" is really, really absurd. There simply is no international force that exports and maintains atrocities to the scale of what the US does, because of the US position as the global hegemon and what it takes to maintain it.
I don't think debating counterfactuals is a productive way to have this discussion.
I also want to point out that the reason I mentioned Gui Minhai was to counter the claim that escaping the grip of China was a simple matter of moving abroad.
With respect to this original topic, there are also various examples where Chinese who moved abroad are threatened either by phone calls from China (with reference to their family) or by Chinese agents (presumably) in the new country. (I could list some if you want, but I assume you're familiar with them.)
These are things that the US does not really do.
But, yeah, US's track history in foreign policy is terrible. But China has its own take on terror and it's not pretty by any means. If you care about things like democracy or freedom of speech I will assert that China is emerging as the bigger threat by far.
(I take terror to refer to the systematically frightening people with the threat of violence, to make them behave in a certain way.)
The context of the chain is that you can leave the US or the UK, but you can't leave China. The original comment literally said - if you don't like the US, you can leave, but if you don't like China, you can't leave.
If you are an enemy of the USG, you can't leave the US. If you are an enemy of the Chinese State, you can't leave China. I fail to see the difference.
I assure you that US citizens that move abroad and act in ways that conflict with the USG are also surveilled. The tactics are different, because the US has sufficient power to surveil you without needing any threatening. If ever the threat of violence is judged effective that is what will threaten you. First under the threat of extradition (which is violence), if that fails the US will make phone calls to the government of the country where you live in, and if that fails and you're still worth it then it's covert action.
Maybe if you live in the Anglosphere China is a bigger threat, but in that case it's not a big threat at all. But for people that live anywhere else in the world or have done so the US has done enough terrorizing and threatening to see that the US is a bigger threat to your freedom. What good is democracy when the US controls your economy and defence? What meaningful freedom do you have of acting according to your interests when that boot is against your neck? Both China and the US are exactly the same threat. It is absurd to give more power to the US to isolate China. If what you care about is freedom, the best scenario is actually to have both China and the US in economic competition.
> Wow all my US expat friends who constantly complain about having to pay US taxes despite living here in the UK must have things totally wrong then.
If you are a US citizen, you are expected to pay a certain amount of US taxes even while living abroad. Presumably, this is because you still benefit from bring US citizen while living abroad.
> No it's racist to ignore the injustices we commit in the west while condemning Asian countries for doing the same thing with different branding.
No, that's hypocrisy, which is a totally different thing from racism.
Or the fact that most people are inclined to look upon the actions of their own country with rose colored glasses, where they are less likely to do so for other countries. There's nothing racist about that.
> Wow all my US expat friends who constantly complain about having to pay US taxes despite living here in the UK must have things totally wrong then.
This is not the same as being physically restrained from leaving, and they would find these stop if they renounce US citizenship.
> The argument isn't "China is good actually." It's "We do most of the same stuff you are accusing them of."
But we don't, neither to the same scale nor intensity.
It's not racist to criticise the actions of another country, even if your own isn't perfect. You can criticise both, and you can call out which is worse.
In this case it is the undemocratic nation suppressing speech and political expression, while commiting racist, demographic genocide within its own borders.
> Is putting other countries citizens in concentration camps somehow morally superior?
No, but since a country usually has jurisdiction over most of its citizens, concentration camps for those is a tool that is readily available. Putting other countries' citizens in concentration camps isn't morally superior, but it's a tool that usually has enormously bigger repercussions in international politics.
Or if you're very bothered with the actual wording, how do you feel about a phrase like "he murdered his own neighbor"? Does it, to you, try to communicate that murdering non-neigbhors is morally superior? I don't think most people read it like that.
> America also has this they just call it a "credit score" or "klout".
Except these aren't systems explicitly constructed by the state that you are not allowed to speak out against. I, too, am worried by the diminishing power of the common worker in capitalist systems, but at least that worker can speak out against the system. And if he says "fuck the president", it doesn't affect his credit score. Nor does jaywalking. Etc.
> Wow all my US expat friends who constantly complain about having to pay US taxes despite living here in the UK must have things totally wrong then.
Indeed, the US system of worldwide taxation is pretty insane. That is, however, uniquely American, and does not apply to the West as a whole. Moreover, you can leave by renouncing the citizenship. Yes, that is a ridiculous demand – trust me, I know – but it's nowhere near needing government permission to leave the country.
> No it's racist to ignore the injustices we commit in the west while condemning Asian countries for doing the same thing with different branding.
Are you conflating "ignoring western injustices" with "not explicitly bringing out western injustices in every piece of writing about Chinese injustices"? I would claim that discourse in the West is pretty good at debating the injustices of Western societies.
> The argument isn't "China is good actually." It's "We do most of the same stuff you are accusing them of."
We do not. Here are some of the worst "stuff" China is being accused of:
* Concentration camps for an ethnic group (do not mix this up with another injustice, like the immigrant detention camps at the US southern border)
* Arbitrary punishment (do not mix this up with another injustice, like police violence).
* No protections of privacy whatsoever (do not mix this up with another injustice, like expansion of surveillance powers)
* No protection of free speech
* The lack of democracy (do not mix this up with another injustice, like the erosion of democracy in some Western countries)
Hi, sorry I am not sure what you consider nationalistic, or a flamewar. I am not solely criticizing the east, in another post I consider the US stuck in the 50s. I have family in China+HK and do not like the cultural values now. What would have been a better way to post that? I think the comment is relevant in a thread about Huawei and 5g and why people are pushing back against China.
Classic whataboutism. China has more Uighurs in "re-education" camps than Nazis did in WWII. And plenty of people in HK have disappeared Stalin style. Its disingenuous to say "nobody died" just because you can't find the bodies.
Middle east is a mess for a number of reasons and 40+ years of civil wars. You can't directly point the finger at one nation like you can for the human rights violations in China.
And might as well throw the racism card in there too. Anyone who thinks China is ruining Hong Kong and imprisoning millions of innocent people, its because they're racist.
With zero sympathy for Chinese ethnic cleansing, Nazi concentration camps were perhaps a different league. Maybe people never even got to stay there: unloaded at the rail terminal, ushered into gas chambers, then burned in the crematoria.
If you think Adrian Zenz is some kind of fraud there's nothing I can post that will convince you so sources are pointless. Google "China re-education camps" and you'll find hundreds of articles on the subject from news organizations all of the world
You aren't dealing with China. You dealing with CCP ruling China with ironhand.
Recently they even failed to honour their fallen soldiers in recent clashes with India and you think they will let you know how many they killed in Hong Kong.
> and you think they will let you know how many they killed in Hong Kong.
In the case of Hong Kong, there is no need to rely on the CCP to tell us how many they killed. Hong Kong has much higher levels of press freedom than China, and deaths would likely be made known in other ways.[1]
If you don't have anything to add to the conversation besides "but what about what the rest of the world is doing", then why bother to comment? I don't know why any post mentioning China makes you people come out of the woodwork to argure that the rest of the world is just as bad.
I'm very sympathetic to your criticisms of the UK/US, but I think you are taking for granted the great many freedoms you enjoy (I assume you are from one of these countries but apologies if not) and are being naive (or just perhaps it's driven by cynicism) over the very real differences here.
> I'm constantly seeing westerners whine about Chinese human rights violations while simultaneously ignoring the HR violations occurring everywhere else, especially in the west. American cops routinely kill people.
There has been protests for more than a month in the USA and the west because one black man was murdered by police. The police officer that murdered him will be charged and brought to justice.
There has been nowhere near this level of outrage against the actions of China, and nobody will bring the perpetrators there to justice.
To suggests that HR violations in the west is being ignored is laughable and dishonest and is evidence of your ulterior motives.
I don't think it has been ignored in the west, but at the same time we need to be honest to say that it has never been tackled properly either
And limiting the problem to only US is pretty much denying that HR violation is present also elsewhere in the west (look at the condition of the migrant in Europe as example)
Yes the USA commits human rights abuses. But this is a thread about China, and we shouldn't stop criticising China just because the US does something bad too.
PRC does lack proper civil society, and it all started with Mao and his cultural revolution. Compare PRC and Taiwan the difference is night and day in their respective governments' respect for human rights. It has nothing to do with orientalism and everything to do with authoritarianism.
Yo "Andy", you have nothing to offer by way of why huawei should not be banned. You go on a rant about racism and western war crimes which even if true don't imply that huawei is innocent and should not be banned.
You my friend are a nut case or more likely a CCP sympathizer if not an bloody agent.
> The notion that China lacks 'proper civil society' is in my mind rooted in a western sense of orientalism and good old fashioned racism.
And this is good, old fashioned bullshit.
Chinese citizens do not have the same rights and protections westerners do, nor a democratic system. They don't have the right to speak freely, congregate as they wish, protest or foment change in their own society.
Western societies are imperfect, those rights are not protected or executed perfectly there. But they do exist, and the problems with them are orders of magnitude smaller than their total lack in China.
> I'm constantly seeing westerners whine about Chinese human rights violations while simultaneously ignoring the HR violations occurring everywhere else, especially in the west. American cops routinely kill people.
Say what? Haven't the previous months' worth of protest illustrated quite well that exactly the HR violations you use in your example are very much not ignored?
Besides, HR violations in a free and open society can be talked about and acted upon. China is a dystopian hellhole where even raising the plight of the Uyghurs in concentration camps, or the lack of free speech, or arbitrary arrests, or …, is dangerous. Full stop. For all its problems, the West is in a completely different league where it comes to HR violations. For sure we have problems, but China's are orders of magnitude bigger. So no wonder we "whine".
You did serious damage with this post. Please do not use HN for nationalistic or ideological flamewar, or other flamewar. This comment is exactly what we don't need here, and led to a whole bunch more of exactly what we don't need.
You've broken the site guidelines egregiously before (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23639749). We ban accounts that do these things repeatedly, so please stop that and follow the rules: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. The idea is: if you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; if you don't, please don't comment until you do.
Given we've found zero proof that China has ever put backdoors in hardware.
And the devastation to their economy if we did find backdoors which would forever poison Chinese electronics is a far greater security risk to them, than any advantage they may possibly get from implementing backdoors.
I assume it's actually because 5G has to be found causing the Coronvirus and they are covering it up?
You're right about back doors, but this is about (like it or not) supporting the US and sanctioning China without saying so (likely a good think because of coronavirus, HK, minorities, democracy, etc).
Your questions aren't about telecoms hardware, but about politics and the international flow of power. China is slated to take over the world economically. Their political model has the potential to spread around the world. These are attempts to limit China's capacity to grow as fast while inhibiting their capacity to knock out, intercept, or backdoor critical infrastructure.
Yeah, this I get and, well, sympathise in a way. There is no war, but an ongoing struggle for staying ahead economically, and if this is a part of it, at least there is a logic to it.
I’m asking, is there really a security risk that Huawei might listen in on telecoms. Is traffic at the low level more vulnerable somehow? Is it the prevalence of unencrypted communications? Is it leaking of metadata that people are worried about?
Yes, the risk is real. Imagine the US made phones for Russia during the Cold War, and the phones were so complicated and full of microcontrollers that reverse engineering and ensuring that a backdoor wasn't in place was impossible. Do you really think the US wouldn't have taken advantage of that?
The specific technical risk is unknown, though. There are thousands of microcontrollers in a modern advanced electronic device. It's nearly impossible to inspect each one and see what exactly is backdoored and how.
The phones have access to the raw data. The towers shouldn't have access to the raw data, because presumably it's encrypted. If it isn't, it's game over anyways. Not really comparable.
You could make an argument about metadata, which is much more questionable from the get-go.
I think the parent comment wasn't talking about intercepting traffic and being able to know what your enemy is talking about.
The parent comment was talking about being able to take advantage of the situation by making the enemy use your devices and then incapacitating their infrastructure at the perfect moment by activating the killswitch on those devices.
The solution for that isn't to boycott Huawei, it's to have multiple networks with many providers.
A country using Nokia, Ericsson and Huawei is much better protected to such an attack than a company using only Nokia or only Huawei or only Ericsson, or both Nokia and Ericsson but not Huawei.
Sure, I am not arguing one way or another regarding whether this ban is good or not. I am just saying that the cold war analogy had nothing to do with encryption, unlike what the post I am replying to is attempting to imply.
Is there no war? Or has the nature of it changed due to MAD and such that it is just a cold war taking on a new form with the battles being fought over economies, politics, infrastructure, and culture as the opening salvos?
There's more to it than merely listening in or gathering metadata. In the future we'll all be used to widespread 5G, and increasingly dependent on it - it's already commonly touted as enabling self-driving cars, IoT etc. and even replacing WiFi.
People are concerned that Huawei / the Chinese could effectively shut down important chunks of infrastructure that would cause chaos in a city like London, and many other places, and furtermore that the implied threat of such a mishap, might be used as a form of coercion.
Frankly their political model is already spreading, since blocking foreign companies from local markets, mass surveillance, extra-legal imprisonment of suspected terrorists, war on encryption, is something the US has been more and more adopting.
On this thought, why is the concern about 5G rather than existing mobile networks and existing fixed-line networks (Huawei kit is common in both)? Is something different about 5G or the UK implementation of it?
You probably wouldn’t see a browser as a security risk either. In a recent example, all the big Chinese browsers blocked or rewrote the content on GitHub’s 996 repo. Imagine if Chinese browsers became mainstream, then they could rewrite Wikipedia articles, insert their own links/propaganda in google results, Facebook feeds, change download links to include a version bundled with spyware, etc. They already demonstrated that they’re willing to do it with the GitHub repo.
It's worth noting that Qihoo 360 owns the Opera Web Browser, which incidentally offers a Free VPN to protect your privacy. The Qihoo 360 Browser, Tencent QQ Browser and Xiaomi smartphone's native browser all reportedly blocks the GitHub "996.icu" repository [1]. It seems likely such client-side censorship also reports the attempted access to the Chinese government authorities for further investigation.
Other than the risks of using Opera (and other software like AirDroid, TikTok, WeChat etc), the main way I currently see users outside China being affected by similar issues is if they use Chinese Android devices, including grocery store smartphones, or those popular HDMI android dongles.
China's export of technological-enabled totalitarianism and surveillance states (especially to developing countries) is accelerating.
Even if everything was encrypted (which is not the case) and that encryption could not be downgraded by a mitm (which is not the case - cf starttls), it can still be used to track whereabouts, or disrupt the connectivity or utilise any mitm zero day.
But a good question would be why 5g, and not every other computer chip in any computer and network equipment, which could be backdoored, and I doubt anyone verified the conformity of the chip to the blueprint sent to the factory.
5G is the line in the sand. It's basically the point of no return, we're fully and firmly in the "cyber era" or whatever we want to call it. Where (when) even the backup and disaster recovery plans are (at least partially) Internet dependent.
Going forward this kind of infrastructure will probably be more important than any other kind (because this will control all the others too).
Will this finally move the cost-benefit needle toward verifiable computing (open chips, open fabs, open *ware)? Who knows. But so far it seems the power brokers of the old era (eg. countries) are trying to maintain control.
You can't encrypt "metadata" that the machine needs to know to do its job, and with enough of that, you can de-anonymise any public posters. And you'll have metadata on (some of) their contacts too.
Plus, if it's your tower, you can just switch it off, at an opportune moment.
Turning aside concerns about current and future provider interoperability (which is also a common reason for concern when using huawei hardware for core network purposes and would get worse as you expect them to integrate with several different vendors)...
Wouldn't traffic run through many parts of the network exposing data to even more providers? Wouldn't you be subject to any portion of the chain breaking, or being turned off?
You're missing one of the largest risk vectors in the whole 5G game.
5G operates on higher frequency and requires a larger density of base stations. If you can identify individual devices -- even without cracking the encryption they use -- then you can track them them geographically, and also conduct traffic analysis.
5G presents a potential security risk because it allows far greater granularity of device localization, even without GPS.
I don't know if I want 5G. It sounds like wimax but faster. I don't think it gives that much benefit, triangulation already was able to bomb a terrorist in Russia in the 90s. How much worst could it get?
My understanding is that the difference between 5G density/localization and that of previous technologies is quite substantial, especially in urban areas.
"The extension of spectrum range has an impact on the network architecture. mmwave cells will employ shorter ranges of around 100-to-200 meters which will require extreme densification to provide high coverage. 3G networks reached densities of fourto- five base stations per km², 4G networks eight-to-ten per km², while 5G networks could reach densities of 40-to-50 per km²."
I'm wondering how much worst it is since we already can track people pretty well with cellular data now. Sorry if I didn't make that clear, seems like they can already do all those things. How much worst can it be?
I got my own room in my house with it, back in the 3G/4G days. I'm not sure what modern software and hardware can do it now, but I'm pretty sure it's even more accurate even without 5G.
I am sure they were able to do it without it, but others can interfer. Triangulation was already a thing in the courts.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/06/victory-supreme-court-... It's in Carpenter vs US, for deducting he robbed a store from just the cell phone signals.
> 5G operates on higher frequency and requires a larger density of base stations
No that’s not required, 5G uses the same old frequencies as 2/3/4G for the bulk of the traffic, it only uses the >1Ghz frequencies for microcells in malls and other dense areas where appropriate.
I assume in order to be able to decide to serve those 1Ghz frequencies, all the phones are going to ping the local towers regardless, so it doesn't matter.
That'll no doubt be down to the configuration of the terminal device. It'll likely only TX on the available bands allowed in the devices home region for licensing/compliance issues.
Back on the tracking side of things...
AFAIKR 3G and above do not leak their IMEI/IMSI unencrypted. Of course nearly zero phones show or warn if encryption is used or not (though I think that's a setting in the SIM card).
> 5G uses the same old frequencies as 2/3/4G for the bulk of the traffic, it only uses the >1Ghz frequencies for microcells in malls and other dense areas where appropriate.
That's simply not true. 5G cannot achieve its advanced speeds without higher frequencies, which cannot be deployed without greater density of base stations. Higher frequencies beget faster signal falloff and greater susceptibility to obstruction. "5G needs spectrum across low, mid and high spectrum ranges to deliver widespread coverage and support all use cases. All three have important roles to play." [1]
Microcells use high-band, not mid-band, spectrum. High-band may not be useful outside of dense areas because of its reduced range, but it is essential to 5G and the FCC is releasing about 5GHz of spectrum for this purpose. Mid-band (1GHz-6GHz) is the bread and butter of 5G, and the FCC has pushed to open this part of the spectrum as much as possible for 5G to work as intended. This part of the spectrum is the most versatile, but it is in short supply [2].
Part of the challenge of 5G involves more frequent handoffs between base stations versus past generations of mobile phone radio. Similarly, 5G devices use various mitigation techniques to deal with interference from nearby base stations. For both of these reasons, there is a substantial amount of interaction between a single handset and nearby base stations that may not be presently serving it.
It’s unlikely to be rolled out fully throughout the entirety of the providers network. So you’ll see it in high density areas where people are mostly outside. As I said, malls etc.
Also higher speeds at the regular sub-ghz frequencies are achievable through beam-forming.
To send more data per second, you either need a carrier wave of higher frequency (which 5G is doing), or an increased number of simultaneous data streams at the present frequency (which 5G is also doing).
Beamforming can't overstep the physical limitations of a carrier wave, it just adapts the radiation pattern of the antenna array to improve range and reduce interference. This is useful to extend the range of high-band signals, because they operate in object-dense space with a high density of clients. It is also useful at the lower frequencies, because it allows an improvement in spectrum efficiency in an otherwise crowded part of the spectrum.
You are basically saying that beamforming allows more single-user MIMO to improve the data speed of an individual user's connection at the lower frequencies. I agree with that. However, you still need more base stations because (A) you won't see the massive advertised 5G speeds without sub-6GHz and mm-wave, and (B) you need more antennas as you improve MIMO to serve more simultaneous data streams to each individual user at sub-GHz.
The spectral efficiency of Massive MIMO grows monotonically
with the number of antennas [28]. Thus, we can expect a
future where hundreds or thousands of antennas are used to
serve a set of users. There are, however, practical limits to
how many antennas can be deployed at conventional towers
and rooftop locations, for example, determined by the array
dimensions allowed by the site owner, the weight, and the
wind load. [...] Nevertheless, the spatial multiplexing
capability of these two dimensional planar arrays in our
three-dimensional world is far from what has been demonstrated
in the academic literature, where large one-dimensional arrays
are often considered in a two-dimensional world. In many
practical deployment scenarios, the user channels are mainly
separable in the horizontal domain [35] since the variations
in elevation angle between different users and scattering
objects are relatively small. [...] However, to deploy more
than a few hundred antennas per site and to obtain a truly
massive spatial resolution in the horizontal domain, we need
new antenna deployment strategies.
Instead of gathering all the antennas in a single box,
which will be visible and heavy, the antennas can be
distributed over a substantially larger area and made
invisible by integrating them into existing construction
elements.
Also, you're going to see mid-band (sub-6GHz) rolled out in a lot of places where mm-wave wouldn't be appropriate.
> And if it is encrypted, does it really matter who is listening?
If your argument here is “who cares if we can trust the hardware if the encryption works” I’d encourage you to think about how you know that the encryption “works” if you can’t trust the hardware. A lot of the encryption is out of necessity far removed from the end user, it’s not exactly PGP over email. And everything is never encrypted, the operations of mobile networks require a lot of extra metadata about the operations that is still sensitive even if you completely disregard the traffic over the network.
There isn’t really an argument, only a question. As in, a basic tenet of cryptography is that we can communicate over unsafe channels, so long as we trust the cipher, the final recipient and our own hardware. Maybe I don’t trust the 5G but I do trust the cipher and my computer, is that ok then?
As for metadata, is there no cryptographic schemes that make metadata extraction impossible? I’m thinking like with Covid tracking apps, you can find out whether you were in contact with someone infected, without sharing any identifiable info.
Data headers, Routing, Physical Location, and some kind of user / device identifier (e.g. Hardware ID); would already make an incredibly powerful data set. And those are things that governments around the world mandate that ISPs must log for law enforcement activities. If it's logable, one must assume that any bad actor with a backdoor can obtain a copy too.
National security includes things such as the prevention of over-reliance on a foreign supplier working with a foreign subversive government hell-bent on their unfair mercantilist policies. It's economic security they worry about first, which could lead to a whole host of other security issues due to lost of leverage later on.
What a short-sighted, backwards knee-jerk, racist reaction. If Huawei's 5G infrastructure had leaks allowing Chinese control it would more than likely be spotted by UK engineers. The application of controls as simple as IP whitelists or air-gapped systems helps ensure no leakage. Transparency of schematics and specifications means both Chinese and UK engineers get to see what's going on.
U.S. is just concerned that China, and not them, will get an edge in spying and the next industrial revolution. Speaking of human rights it should be noted that U.S. not only wantonly attacks or bullies other countries, but it also has the highest incarceration rate in the world - in absolute terms the number of inmates is comparable to that of China and India combined.
Regarding your first point, yes, that’s an interesting take. Regarding the criticism of the US, yes you’re probably correct, but this is a “what about” argument that doesn’t really aid the discussion in my opinion.
Whataboutism gets brought out too fast to dismiss discussion. Democratic systems project their values by demonstrating them. A democratic state that cannot show that its values work will have no ability to demand of others to emulate it.
In that context the failures of the US (as it is de-facto the standard-bearer of political liberalism in a broad sense), have real influence.
When the Chinese look around the world and they see the state of the US on imprisonment, racial conflict, failure during the current covid crisis and so on, this strengthens the domestic control of the party and the alternative autocratic system the government is advocating.
We're discussing why the UK might not want a Chinese state-allied (if not owned) actor embedded in its comms networks, and here everyone is saying "buh buh buh America!"
And frankly if you look at what's happening with BLM (mass protest in the US over a pattern of racist police murders, significant parts of the country vocally criticising the apparatus of state) and consider that somehow worse than the semi-secret genocide of millions, with all discussion suppressed, going on in China....
nobody is saying that that is worse than literal concentration camps, what people are saying is that failures to live up to racial justice at home weaken your ability to authentically criticize violations abroad, and that's a very valid point.
And as far as communications infrastructure is concerned it's relevant too. In countries like Germany or Eastern Europe in particular the behaviour of espionage among allies over recent years has created an atmosphere of "well everyone is spying on us anyway" substantially weakening the case against Huawei, say.
Also as far as discussion here is concerned, most people here are from Western countries, so at the end of the day discussions will mostly be about our own behaviours.
But it is whataboutery when it's used to deflect and minimise the original criticisms of what the Chinese regime are doing, which is what we are seeing here.
What people are saying, pretty straight out and literally in some comments, is "Stop whining about China, the West is just as bad".
>weaken your ability to authentically criticize violations abroad
It does no such thing. Being a hypocrite does not impact the correctness or incorrectness of what you're saying (which is why the tu quoque fallacy is a fallacy), doubly so when we're talking about entirely different categories of abuses that invalidate the hypocrisy charge anyways.
correctness isn't what's relevant in (geo)politics. What matters is being able to influence others and get your interests across. And on that front being a hypocrite matters, both domestically as well as internationally.
Listing off fallacies is great in internet discussions, but it's not how the world works. To be honest it's also not really how internet discussions work any more because everyone's grown sick of it.
The US has certainly lost a lot of moral standing, and yes it makes it harder to criticize others, and it strengthens autocratic hands abroad to be able to point to the US' failures.
That said, the parent poster isn't the US government, but a private citizen raising a valid criticism of another country. So why can't it stand on its own, without a big show of self-criticism first? Can we not criticize others until our own house is in order? Once that happens, the discussion turns into an argument over moral equivalence or lack thereof -- ie. "the US' crimes are just as bad as China's!" versus "No these things are of completely different degrees!".
This line of argument quickly becomes tiring and, I think it completely muddles the original point, which is often what is intended when hurling "what about...!" into the discussion.
I hear what you're saying here, and no, our country doesn't have to be perfect before criticizing someone else.
But still, we should wonder if the criticism is motivated by something other than pure concern for human rights. You expect me to believe that Americans are mad at China strictly because they really, really care about the rights of muslims? With our record and our allies' records?
Or is it possible that this is just motivated by geopolitical interest?
I believe that people who claim to be mad at Chinese human rights abuses are mostly genuine in their feelings. They also have a blind spot for the abuses of their own country and their allies. That blind spot probably comes from the part of ourselves that's very tribal, as well as a social and political environment that ignores and minimizes self-criticism.
Now, if we're talking about the US state department, then absolutely they're doing it for geopolitical interests. However, they're also reflecting the concerns of at least some of their citizens.
I'd also like to note that there's a moral equivalence argument to be made here. It's possible that China's abuses are actually worse than our own. Or maybe not. I just want to acknowledge that aspect of this argument, but I don't want to get into it because I'm not really informed enough to make it, and I'm certain that 80% of that impression is formed by skimming headlines and whatnot, which is not really a proper basis for debate.
A consequentialist analysis would say that attacking China when it is almost impossible to influence while ignoring the abuses of your own government is even worse than inaction, because you are giving even more power to a state that is pretty much as bad.
I would be much more amenable to agreeing with the people that claim to be mad at China in the US if the solutions they proposed didn't give more power to US, that has no fundamental difference in foreign policy than China. Economically isolating China, for example, does absolutely nothing to help the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but gives a lot more power to the United States. But if the solutions that were being talked about changed the balance of power towards entities that didn't wantonly abuse human rights, I would entirely agree.
Therefore, I don't think it's whataboutism. It would be whataboutism if the claim was that China actually respects human rights because the US is worse. But the question is different - it's whether we should economically isolate China on the pretext of their human rights abuses, or not. Saying that the party that benefits from this and that is pushing it is fundamentally just as disrespectful of human rights is not whataboutism, it's a question of whether the proposed actions will do anything for human rights at all.
Effectively US is pulling US-made chip design tools from under huawei’s manufacturing process. Seems that the political calculus is that this will damage huawei’s standing, at the expense of global technological cooperation. But to what end? It falls short of providing Huawei (and the state behind it) with incentives to be more transparent with their technology, and at best creates a necessity for them to become wholly independent in their process. I guess the US is betting they can’t pull this off, but if they do, this policy has bought US nothing but a few years of suppression and a fiercer competition.
>It falls short of providing Huawei (and the state behind it) with incentives to be more transparent with their technology, and at best creates a necessity for them to become wholly independent in their process. I guess the US is betting they can’t pull this off...
Bingo. It seems like this is more a bet that they can't become wholly independent without the tooling itself, or can't become independent for a long while. I doubt it has much to do with "setting up incentives for transparency". I think the "will China become transparent about its actions" question is pretty much settled at this point.
Re-posting a nested comment at top level for those who see incongruity in "national security risk" and "seven years to phase out Huawei":
This is a good example of the kinds of tradeoffs which must be made at the highest levels of public service.
Huawei, just like any Chinese corporation operating overseas, is an attack vector for intelligence gathering. Anyone presenting a counter-argument to this is either a shill for the Chinese government, or totally uninformed.
China has a culturally distinct attitude towards intelligence and intelligence gathering to nearly every western country. The national emphasis on the collective good blurs the line between private citizens, acting in a personal or professional capacity, and the stereotypical impression of a "spy" perpetuated in the west: on the payroll, going to their cubicle at the CIA each day. China's voracious appetite for intelligence (and, particularly in recent years, industrial espionage), means that it is impossible to distinguish between the commercial interests of a Chinese company and the Chinese state furthering its apparatus.
Remember Crypto AG? The Swiss crypto company jointly-operated by the CIA and German intelligence?[1] That's newsworthy because it's unusual: western states are typically limited to publicly lobbying their corporations for backdoor access, or working around things like end-to-end encryption (e.g. I believe PRISM used a combination of vulnerabilities to exfiltrate data from Hotmail and MSN prior to encryption taking place).
In China, we must assume that the reverse is the norm: the Chinese government does not need to lobby its companies to provide it with data, or to build-in backdoors or exploits. A Chinese corporation can be compelled to turn over everything it has, silently, and to compromise users and products to benefit the Chinese government, silently.
Crucially this is not a criticism of China. China can best be understood by Westerners as a series of tradeoffs to benefit the collective good, at the expense of personal liberty and privacy. Literally the argument you might encounter would be: "If you have nothing to hide then why do you care?"
The information gathered is not always as exciting as you might imagine. It's not just deployed into military intelligence or kompromat. It might "just" be used as a means of preserving China's status quo as a leading manufacturing hub (and, therefore, China's position as a growing economic power).
So China a) has a vast appetite for intelligence of all kinds, and b) does not draw a distinction between private citizens/corporations and state actors/corporations.
To answer your question:
Huawei has been a cornerstone of the UK's telecoms infrastructure for nearly twenty years, and in order to gain its foothold committed to allowing GCHQ full access to its codebase (HCSEC)[2]. The stipulation from Britain's intelligence community was that Huawei must not be allowed to have a monopoly position, or even a significant market share beyond a certain level.
I am not familiar with the specific technical reason that Huawei at 70% vs. Huawei at 40% of the UK's telecoms infrastructure would represent a disproportionate increase in risk, but I believe it is likely to be related to resource constraints -- fuck me guys, GCHQ is having to actively monitor and review the code deployed across a double-digit % of our telecoms infrastructure from the starting position of "this is provided by a bad actor"! -- and the doomsday scenario that Huawei's position of market dominance would drive competition down, resulting in a choice to either have e.g. 7G with Huawei, or not at all (7G is a fictitious example, but you see my point).
The UK is balancing the very real ongoing nightmare of monitoring Huawei's involvement in UK telecoms with the fact that it's a cheap, high quality supplier, and the fact that our closest allies -- the United States -- have been on a warpa...
Is there a reason why something reasonably substantive like this which addresses both a specific query from users (nested) and apparently at top level to shouldn't be allowed? I guess upvotes are an imperfect measure but this post appears to be contributing more than many other top-level comments.
(Thanks for taking the time to explain! Either way consider me corrected.)
You aren't helping your case by citing the Supermicro article, which was denied by both Amazon and Apple, led to widespread criticism of Bloomberg, and no source came forward.
Bloomberg is not to be trusted when it comes to technology news. Seriously, they're absolutely incompetent. They called Telnet a secret backdoor. Their articles about China are annoying because they're either without any tangible proof whatsoever or simply factually wrong.
This is fallacious thinking, if you already have biases that confirm or deny information in accordance with your conclusion. If you continue to apply different standards of proof you will end up with a distorted perception of the world. Maybe not in this subject (but maybe so), though certainly in many more.
The cost of that victory, according to the BBC, is a 1 year delay in the rollout of 5G tech.
That's a pretty large economic cost. Bob can't watch his medical lectures on the train, so ends up behind in class, Mary's company looses a contract to a foreign competitor because she got frustrated with her bad VPN and didn't read over the bid one last time, Fred couldn't afford the cost of the new 5G contracts so didn't get much data and ended up losing touch with his friends who were all group video calling eachother.
All these socio-economic costs cascade for decades or more. Do they really outweigh the theoretical ability for another nation to disrupt network traffic for a few hours until a mitigation is put in place?
Existing 4G LTE connections work well enough for those use cases you listed; users will hardly notice any difference on 5G. The real benefit of 5G will be in the new types of applications it enables.
Not sure if you are being sarcastic, but assuming you aren't. No consumer is asking for 5g, and I don't think any consumer will realise the difference. And not sure that 5g can do much good on a train, unless the train circles around inside a big city and never goes in the countryside where what matters is antenna with long range.
but your wifi is unreliable and slow. Instead of buying a good AP, buy this 5G modem for only $5 and get your nice, capped 20MBit/s for $200 a month. Isn't this just what you need, when every site is slowly just getting a fibre-connection theoretically allowing a community hosted mobile mesh-network in any city which deserves the name.
upselling it to everyone not satisfied with shitty wifi from their shittiest telco-modem/router/AP-abomination. And squeezing the lemon in the process.
My understanding is that 4g requires a lot more effort to provision more or less capacity as need arises. I've been to a few brownbags on the topic and I didn't fully understand it (it's not my area of expertise by many hops), but the big selling point the engineers were explaining to us was that they can effectively put telco equipment in cloud-like datacenters and spool up or spin down capacity much simpler than they can now. And then something about the tower-edge being far more advanced and able to be spooled up or down as need requires.
I live on an island near a metro with a lot of traffic when the ferry from the metro arrives, then it disappears. Every single ferry that comes in knocks out 4g responsiveness (or takes it down entirely) while the ferry disembarks until everyone moves away from that area.
So, for me, 5g has a projected material benefit (presuming my understanding of their brownbags were sufficient). I'd love to hear any actual cellular network engineers fully explain it because between words I didn't understand and trying to balance a salad and eat it without a table, I'm sure I misunderstood _something_.
lately, more and more articles appear, which outline what's the real and actual economic cost of 5G: local area, decentral, unlicensed Wifi-networks should get replaced with a centrally managed and tunable (for $$$ or power) alternative. I suspected this for a long time, but now, more and more people are openly acknowledging it. While this is good for surveillance capitalism, it's not good for anyone else... (I'll happily add some refs, if I'm off the commute).
Honest question. Can someone explain why the comment below was flagged? I can see why some might disagree but I fail to see any problematic about any of the statements made. I think of HN as one of the few places were people can have open discussions where everyone is free to state their opinion and have it up for debate/rebuttal.
"I disagree. Reports about China from many western media tend to exaggerate things about China, mostly influenced by western politics, not good at all. Also, western media tend to report selective facts to only show things they want people to hear and see.
The right to life is the first clause of human right, which I see they are violated in many western countries. They refuse to treat the poor and old. Do you hear China criticise? Maybe they are, but for sure western media choose not to report them.
Freedom of speech is a relative term in today’s world. I can say some of the things you shouldn’t say in China are equally not welcomed in many western countries. If you split US, see how many troubles could come to you?
On democracy, I’m not sure what to comment. China has ran 4000 years under one empire system, and it’s just the culture there. Why democratic society is better than the 1 party system? What’s more important is to have the party represent people’s interests. In many democratic countries, each party represents the interests from certain groups, that’s why it’s necessity to have multiple parties perhaps. The downsides to democratic system is also quite obvious. There are countless debate on many small matters which waste tax payer’s money etc.. Also, the democracy can be manipulated, and if it is the case, it’s worse."
Because it is false equivalence of the highest order.
- Yes, the US has a police brutality problem. (Though not near as bad)
- Yes, the US has a government corruption problem. (Though not near as bad)
That acknowledged:
* At no point will you disappear in the US for criticizing the government.
* At no point will you be placed into a concentration camp and tortured.
* At no point will you be barred from participating in society because you lost points on a "social score" calculated on things such as following the wrong religion or criticizing the government.
* At no point will you be subject to ethnic cleansing.
* This list could be many times longer.
The US is not a totalitarian police state and it is fundamentally dishonest, to the point of mendacity and/or trolling, to equate the two. There are no countries on this planet with entirely clean hands. All have committed abuses, all have fallen short. With the binary 1 and 0 off the table, that leaves us with a matter of degrees, and some countries objectively have worse human rights records than others.
On top of all that, most of the posts like the one you quoted amount to whataboutism, or the tu quoque fallacy. This is an ancient trope. Soviet-era Russia tried it[1] too. The response to "China puts people that disagree with them into concentration camps" is not "But the US..", or "that's not fair because.. (it's not as if these accusations are unsubstantiated by fact)", the answer is "that is wrong and should be condemned".
> Yes, the US has a government corruption problem. (Though not near as bad)
I don’t know about this. the U.S. is corrupt to its core.
Highest bidder for PPEs during a pandemic?
Millions of small business loans go to Kevin Nunes’ vineyard?
President allowing bounties set on its own Troops?
> Reports about China from many western media tend to exaggerate things about China, mostly influenced by western politics, not good at all.
Whether or not that is true is not really relevant here unless the author can argue that what is being discussed is an exaggeration.
> Also, western media tend to report selective facts to only show things they want people to hear and see.
Western media don't "tend" to do anything. That's way too diverse a set to make a sweeping statement like that. It's just spreading FUD.
> The right to life is the first clause of human right, which I see they are violated in many western countries. They refuse to treat the poor and old.
This is ridiculous. "Many" Western countries "refuse" to treat the poor and old? That's blatantly not true. At best it's a colorful way to say that many western countries have problems with poverty and care of the elderly. Indeed, I would agree if that is so. That doesn't begin to compare with the intentional and desired violations of human rights of the Chinese regime. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the elderly and poor are not sent to "reeducation camps". Uyghurs are. For being Uyghurs. Full, fucking, stop.
> Do you hear China criticise?
Sometimes. Is that really relevant though? You'd think that the worst kid in the class would sit very quietly when one of the better students is caught screwing up.
> Maybe they are, but for sure western media choose not to report them.
Huh?
> I can say some of the things you shouldn’t say in China are equally not welcomed in many western countries.
This is completely broken logic. I'm sure lots of murderers equally agree that you shouldn't steal candy from a small child or push an old grandma. So what?
> If you split US, see how many troubles could come to you?
I really don't follow.
> China has ran 4000 years under one empire system, and it’s just the culture there.
Are you seriously suggesting that the impressive history of a country should preclude its citizens from enjoying more recent human rights?
> Why democratic society is better than the 1 party system?
I'm sorry, it's becoming pretty obvious – both from what you write and the sentence structure of that writing – that you are a shill for the CCP.
> What’s more important is to have the party represent people’s interests.
And nobody has ever found a way to do that except for subjecting the powers that be to the will of the people through democratic elections. Please let me know if you have found a way; the Chinese way definitely isn't one.
> In many democratic countries, each party represents the interests from certain groups, that’s why it’s necessity to have multiple parties perhaps.
… yes?
> The downsides to democratic system is also quite obvious. There are countless debate on many small matters which waste tax payer’s money etc..
Of course there are plenty of downsides. Proponents of liberal democracies are usually just arguing that democratic systems are the least bad one (in this thread the major point of discussion is that the current Chinese system is absolutely horrible). I know it's a tired quote for many, but: "Democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."
Security flaw, sometimes may not root in technology side, but politics side.
China is treating everything they own as a politics weapon now. 5G contract is a perfect weapon in this view. Telecom infrastructure is huge, and almost monoplied by the base infrastructure builder due to compatibility issues. Once Huawei finished the 5G base infrastructure, China can coerce UK by attach extra terms for maintaining, upgrading or selling 5G equipments.
China has already used this approach on loans of asia investment bank. The countries which supports HK Security Law coincidentally matches with the countries which receives loans from
investment bank.
Some may still remains to be conspiracy theory: China increased production of hydroxychloroquine, in their reports (http://tn.china-embassy.org/chn/dtxws/t1787078.htm), they already used Chloroquine in treating their patients. However, WHO, FDA and even Lancet banned or announced inefficiency of hydroxychloroquine, and people died from this misinformation. What role did China play remains suspicious and mysterious.
If the last few years mismanagement of Brexit, privatising the NHS, "universal" credit, historic immigration renegs, the perpetually delayed reaction to Covid19, PPE procurement contracts going to zero-asset companies monetarily linked to Tory members and donors...
Well... A large part of me hopes it's mere incompetence.
But the bigger picture seems to be a party that —starting with May as Home Secretary— has been pushing harder and harder at knowing everything about everybody. Kicking out incumbent foreign hardware providers seems like a bloody good way to plant your own hardware in its place and achieve another level of control.
I think this is the most practical realization - That everyone is doing it, and will probably continue doing it until the end of time. If you accept this, then you can quickly constrain the things you should actually worry about to a much smaller list.
The first thing that pops into my mind here is the importance of end-to-end encryption. If you cannot trust anything in the middle (presumably because the internet goes everywhere), perhaps we can at least trust the networks and devices under our immediate control. This is still not perfect because these devices can be compromised at the factory too, but it's still a much better position to be in. I can't make my ISP install core routers that I am comfortable with, but I can make sure that I install network hardware and use computers & phones that I trust on both ends (or convince my counterparties to do the same).
This (and parent) is interesting to read considering the effort France has been putting into transitioning various government services to matrix in order to take advantage of the end to end encryption it offers. Seems they probably agree with a lot of these points!
They transitionned to Citadel, which is a Thales product based off Matrix which made technical decisions which will drive the product off the Matrix dev flow (namely the authentication).
I've wondered how EU people feel about things like this. Euros have been inundated with "Americana" for the last 40 years or so. They watch TV shows about Americans, movies about Americans. They use American social media networks. It's like a culture-overload like USA is always "in your face". USA never had any problem with Skype as a Danish company being used by a significant number of Americans. But TikTok, a Chinese company, is stirring up national security issues.
I think the issue is that the United States – for all its faults and Snowden leaks and whatnot – can still be trusted, somewhat, to do the right thing. There clearly are trust issues (for good reasons) but I would sure trust the US gov't more to not install backdoors in equipment private companies deliver to befriended foreign nations.
China, on the other hand, has no clear separation between the state and large private companies, and has a state which does not acknowledge basic human rights in a myriad of ways. Again, the US is not perfect here either, but it sure is better.
Personally, I wish Europeans would use more, well, European equipment for this kind of stuff. This isn't out of some nationalistic sentiment (I have no problems using foreign equipment as such), but given the state of the world's affairs and the direction I fear it might be heading, a strong and independent Europe will probably be more important than ever in the coming decades.
One lesson from Snowden's leaks is that the US is engaging in surveillance on supposed allies - not just enemies. This includes intercepting and modifying network equipment during delivery (Tailored Access Operations), and intercepting internal government communications of allies during trade negotiations. The consequences of the latter are quite significant, since knowing the other side's strategy and bottom line gives the US a serious leg up in negotiations.
I do not think we are particularly influenced by American culture, mostly breveté we belive that ours is truly extraordinary and should radiate on the whole world :)
We do watch US movies and series, but probably less the ones that decpit US everyday life and more the well known ones (say, Westworld - but not to start to live like them. Or Avengers).
One of the huge successes of the past was Dallas. Everyone was watching it but there was zero influence on normal life, it was a tale of aliens on another planet.
It is increasingly appears that the CCP government wants to confront every countries at the same time. First, I thought this was just the power struggle/grab between US-CCP economically. Then, it spread to the political issues like the South China sea claims which pisses off Viet Nam, The Philippines , Taiwan. The CCP even manages to engage India into its territorial issue resulted in sanction from Indian gov. In the north-east side, the CCP is irritating Japan to a point Japan is considering ramping up its army.
If the CCP wants conflicts at least it needs to find allies, right? So why then it tries to piss off just about every countries it's surrounded by?
No shortage of Chinese allies - 70+ countries supported China's recent change to Hong Kong's laws (https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1193422.shtml). Certainly none of these countries are bastions of freedom - North Korea, Venezuela, Chad, Myanmar, Cambodia, Kyrgyzstan. But all of them support China to the hilt. Tanzania didn't even stop with an endorsement of the HK law, they also felt it necessary to mention that Taiwan is a part of China. Turns out Chinese loans go a long way in creating a sense of gratitude.
All countries barring the US need China more than China needs them. And China only needs the US until it has semiconductors of it's own.
The US and EU were asleep at the wheel these last 30 years - allowing China to grow powerful without also creating a counterweight like India. Now the world's dependence on Chinese manufacturing and Chinese consumption means that no one dares to criticise China, and there's no shortage of countries lining up to praise every action of Comrade Xi's.
That's why China can screw over every neighbour, taking what they please. Who's going to stop them? Is Vietnam or Malaysia suddenly going to stand up to China? No, they will merely grumble. Is India willing to provoke an actual war? No, they will merely ban TikTok and call it a day.
> That's why China can screw over every neighbour, taking what they please. Who's going to stop them? Is Vietnam or Malaysia suddenly going to stand up to China? No, they will merely grumble.
ah yes, exactly the same logic that resulted in World War 2
The world is much more inter-connected than it was then. The cost of a war with China is orders of magnitude more than the cost of a war with Germany. In fact, for the first several months of WWII, British and French citizens barely noticed the war.
War with China would be extremely painful, every single item that modern life depends upon apart from food will suddenly become scarce. That acts as a powerful deterrent.
> The world is much more inter-connected than it was then. The cost of a war with China is orders of magnitude more than the cost of a war with Germany.
"economic interdependence prevents wars" was commonly accepted to be true in the 1910s, right up until the outbreak of World War I
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 306 ms ] threadAs an European I don't what to think that the US seems so against kit from a Chinese company and completely fine with kit from an European company.
They should be worried about both. We also have a long term world domination plan (version 2.0)... ;)
While Obama made his move over SE Asia, the CCP applied the strategy they used in Australia with the PIGS. And while Trump very successfully destroyed what Obama tried to do in SE Asia, the CCP installed foreign military bases near center of trade in the Indian ocean while gaining political goodwill with middle east poorest countries. Most of Iraki oil is sold to China.
I'm not claiming i know what should be done, i'm just saying that China have already a lot of political allies and try to gain more, and now reached europe.
Maybe financially, but not ideologically. Not sure how far this "allegiance will hold".
The US would of course prefer that American technology be available, but since it's not then I suppose a partnership with two trusted allies is preferable to one with an untrusted adversary.
Nokia and Ericsson also aren't arms of the state widely believed (fairly or not) to actively facilitate global industrial and military espionage activities on behalf of a hostile government, so there's that.
It’s like being caught in a fight between your drunk uncle and your berserk cousin.
Europe does not have to align with either side. It is a superpower in its own right if it gets its shit together (one can dream).
They’re giving up a partnership they entered after independently reviewing the equipment, I can’t see how it is a good outcome for them.
This is not the same situation for the EU.
France for instance is about to take the same steps as UK, and get out of Huawei deals within the next years.
The issue of a deeper integration is an old one and evolving, but the trend is more integration.
It is becoming more and more important for Europe to stand on its own two feet and be independent in all aspects.
There are benefits in having the other superpowers locked in conflict if you can stay out of it as much as possible and further your interests while they are distracted.
The UK, on the other hand, is in a very weak position. China will feel comfortable retaliating strongly, and the US will probably extract a sweet trade deal from them.
Let's hope Europe makes the moral choice here though and aligns against China.
Any long term resolution to the conflict has to involve the realization that China has had 100 bad years and now has a giant comeback. And that the US has had 60 good years but now large parts of it decline.
If it was not for china North Korea and possibly Pakistan would not have had nuclear weapons now. So no, it is not just in it's own borders.
I wonder about this. Why does totalitarianism in a sovereign nation need to be fought? For those of us considering a democratic China...why do we think the country would fare better as a democracy? The Chinese civilisation is goes back thousands of years. Could the system they have now be the cumulative effect of all they have gone through to date? In other words it has evolved and generally serves its people. It may evolve into something else (possibly resembling Western democracies) but it may not. I don't particularly think it has to.
If you want China to stop being totalitarian, then you should wait until most Chinese citizens decide that they don't approve of the ruling party, and then let them decide what to replace it with. You cannot force democracy.
In any case, you can rest assured that if the Chinese have to choose between Yeltsin and the CCP, they will choose the latter 100% of the times. Democracy cannot be forced.
To clarify, while US-China superficially seem like the 'sides'. Really, what I think is happening is that the values of many (especially Western) countries around human rights, democracy, freedom of religion and expression, are coming into conflict with a new kind of Chinese authoritarianism that really doesn't care for these things and is quite willing to subjugate large groups of people in doing so (Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, claims to Taiwan, etc.).
Stop smoking crack already and getting high on koolaid.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful.
I think people are just waking up to the reality that the opening of China will not automatically lead to greater liberalism as was predicted.
If that's true, how is it reasonable to allow this equipment to operate in the UK for 7 more years? Doesn't that mean the UK is willingly under national security risk for 7 years?
Unless, of course, there was never a security risk...
In 11 days' time.
They are just panicking because of the economy (latest figures show a 20% crash).
(Also: do people really need more than one week?)
Now the risk profile of things has changed because people are out and about more.
But 11 days does seem a bit long, sure.
Decision makers then need to asses those risks and possible mitigations and weigh them against a million other factors.
> Doesn't that mean the UK is willingly under national security risk for 7 years?
No, and I'll come on to why in a second.
Huawei, just like any Chinese corporation operating overseas, is an attack vector for intelligence gathering. Anyone presenting a counter-argument to this is either a shill for the Chinese government, or totally uninformed.
China has a culturally distinct attitude towards intelligence and intelligence gathering to nearly every western country. The national emphasis on the collective good blurs the line between private citizens, acting in a personal or professional capacity, and the stereotypical impression of a "spy" perpetuated in the west: on the payroll, going to their cubicle at the CIA each day. China's voracious appetite for intelligence (and, particularly in recent years, industrial espionage), means that it is impossible to distinguish between the commercial interests of a Chinese company and the Chinese state furthering its apparatus.
Remember Crypto AG? The Swiss crypto company jointly-operated by the CIA and German intelligence?[1] That's newsworthy because it's unusual: western states are typically limited to publicly lobbying their corporations for backdoor access, or working around things like end-to-end encryption (e.g. I believe PRISM used a combination of vulnerabilities to exfiltrate data from Hotmail and MSN prior to encryption taking place).
In China, we must assume that the reverse is the norm: the Chinese government does not need to lobby its companies to provide it with data, or to build-in backdoors or exploits. A Chinese corporation can be compelled to turn over everything it has, silently, and to compromise users and products to benefit the Chinese government, silently.
Crucially this is not a criticism of China. China can best be understood by Westerners as a series of tradeoffs to benefit the collective good, at the expense of personal liberty and privacy. Literally the argument you might encounter would be: "If you have nothing to hide then why do you care?"
The information gathered is not always as exciting as you might imagine. It's not just deployed into military intelligence or kompromat. It might "just" be used as a means of preserving China's status quo as a leading manufacturing hub (and, therefore, China's position as a growing economic power).
So China a) has a vast appetite for intelligence of all kinds, and b) does not draw a distinction between private citizens/corporations and state actors/corporations.
To answer your question:
Huawei has been a cornerstone of the UK's telecoms infrastructure for nearly twenty years, and in order to gain its foothold committed to allowing GCHQ full access to its codebase (HCSEC)[2]. The stipulation from Britain's intelligence community was that Huawei must not be allowed to have a monopoly position, or even a significant market share beyond a certain level.
I am not familiar with the specific technical reason that Huawei at 70% vs. Huawei at 40% of the UK's telecoms infrastructure would represent a disproportionate increase in risk, but I believe it is likely to be related to resource constraints -- fuck me guys, GCHQ is having to actively monitor and review the code deployed across a double-digit % of our telecoms infrastructure from the starting position of "this is provided by a bad actor"! -- and the doomsday scenario that Huawei's position of market dominance would drive competition down, resulting in a choice to either have e.g. 7G with Huawei, or not at all (7G is a fictitious example, but you see my point).
The UK is balancing the very real ongoing nightmare of monitoring Huawei's involvement in UK telecoms with the fact that it's a cheap, high quality supplier, and the fact that our closest allies -- the United States -- have been on a warpath over Chinese inte...
The link states that Sir Andrew Parker (head of MI5) doesn't believe that the inclusion of Huawei in UK telecoms infrastructure will have a negative impact on the UK's relationship with the US.
The US has been emphatic that it could: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-51581095
Isn't this contradicted by secret courts approving NAS warrants, loopholes like meta-data can is legal to collect, digital data is considered different that data you have on paper in your home etc. If CIA, NSA has some judge approval to ask Apple access to someone data and keep it secret do you think Apple(or Google) can challenge the secret orders?
What if a judge produces soem secret order so Apple and Google provide full access to everything do you think some manager or developer will make this public and suffer a fait similar or worse as Snowden? IMO we people in the west we sometimes forget how corrupt people in power are and how exceptions to laws and constitution can be found when national security is mentioned.
What you are broadly driving at is the necessity for many areas of intelligence gathering and espionage to be invisible to the public eye. There is necessarily a strong tradition of civilian oversight of intelligence agencies in nearly every democracy. For example, in the UK, domestic intelligence is overseen by the Home Secretary, the Intelligence and Security Parliamentary Committee, and the Investigatory Powers Tribunal.
Needless to say, a free press, whistleblowers, and civilian oversight do not exist in China.
I seen a video a few months back about US military considering internet as a new area of war and considering how to engage in such war , it is clear that not only China is trying to push their propaganda but the others are doing a similar thing (again I am not trying to say is the exact same thing just trying to prevent everyone focusing too muc in one direction and not noticing what is happening behind their backs at home)
I understand your position to be that in the US (I'll use the US as an example but it's broadly interchangeable with any western democracy), privacy violations and acts of espionage which are directionally similar to those occurring in China do take place, and whilst you acknowledge that they are not as bad, you draw equivalence between the surreptitiousness of both.
I think the point is a meaningful one. Much of the content of the PRISM presentations was worrying because it made very clear the extent to which the US government has expanded its intelligence-gathering in the last few decades.
Introducing a point like this into a discussion focusing on China might seem like 'whatabouttery' to many people ("X is bad, but what about Y?"). On paper, NSA and CIA overreaching could have similar consequences (or even look identical) to Chinese state sponsored espionage, but provided there are avenues for whistleblowers and a free press, the two are not equatable.
> the point I am struggling to make
Your English is very good, and I enjoyed talking to you.
This is a geopolitical clash of power. It's not about respective political regimes, it's about relative power and influence. If China liberalises tomorrow none of the fundamental issues will change and China will still be a threat to the US. The only thing that will change is that the US will have to find something else in order to label China 'evil'.
India is not re-educating anyone, but rules out muslim from citizenship? Not even mention the caste system, which is way worse than the color discrimination in US. When India became the 2nd biggest power in the world, all these will become target
India is actively trying to fix disparities caused by the caste system. It took the US 200 years to get civil rights, India had affirmative action from day one, and one of the biggest examples of affirmative action at that. The caste system is horrendous, but social change can never be brought so quickly ( atleast in a democratic way, we certainly don't want Stalin or Mao style quick changes)
The caste system, while bad, isn't in any way worse than color discrimination in the US. To quote just one example, India has very strong laws against caste based violence.
India has it's own shares of issues, but it's still an order of magnitude better than the Chinese Government.
I could argue the same, the so-called reeducation camps only applies to xinjiang province, and for those could only get education from religion maniacs, rather than a normal school. And there were numbers of attack events were caused by it. Keep in mind Uyighurs are not only living in xinjiang, there are uyighurs living in rest parts of China and doing well.
> India is actively trying to fix disparities caused by the caste system. It took the US 200 years to get civil rights, India had affirmative action from day one, and one of the biggest examples of affirmative action at that. The caste system is horrendous, but social change can never be brought so quickly ( atleast in a democratic way, we certainly don't want Stalin or Mao style quick changes)
Aye aye, it took 200 years for the US to have civil rights for all (still problematic), and Inida takes 70+ years still working on the caste problems, when it reaches China, which was founded after India, we are suddenly asking for all equal society. Yes, unwillingly education is bad, but keeping them blank and poor is evil. Learning skills to fit into a society, even it doesn't fit into your propaganda, is not wrong.
> The caste system, while bad, isn't in any way worse than color discrimination in the US. To quote just one example, India has very strong laws against caste based violence.
US also has strong anti hate crime law, and is one of countries offers most assistance for anti-discrimination, law doesn't help unless vast majority are educated to do so, and vast majority has economy power to do so.
No thank you. Stop pushing "China is victim of bully" or "China is here to save you from evil West" rhetoric.
China is using its military to forcibly steal territory the size of France from neighboring nations. That territory does not belong to China.
The US can rightfully sanction any nation that uses its technology and its currency. Those things belong to the US. The sea territory that China is stealing does not belong to it.
Other nations do not have to obey US sanctions. They're free to abandon all US technology and abandon the US dollar and its banking structures. Go for it.
Cite please. And won't the best way to debunk the "propaganda" be to just liberalize right? So ... everybody is waiting and has been waiting for decades, China should stop making excuses and get on with it.
The US destroyed Bolivia, replacing an elected government that was legally found to be allowed to run, with a far-right nationalist military-backed junta that refuses to hold elections : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Bolivian_political_crisis
The US installed a brutal dictator in Chile, with the coup killing the legitimately elected president and overthrowing the liberal democracy, replacing it with dictatorship : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvador_Allende
No, it is entirely clear to anyone in the world that the US will destroy your country and kill you if you oppose, no matter how liberal it is, if it suits their geopolitical interests.
Iran had no democracy. Mosaddegh was appointed Prime Minister by the Shah, he was not democratically elected by the people of Iran. The Majlis that nominated him were a collection of feudal lords that dominated Iranian politics, they were not democratically elected by the people of Iran, they co-ruled Iran as a feudal kingdom.
If Iran were a democracy the Shah wouldn't have been appointing the Prime Minister.
It has been 40 years, and just look at Iran today: zero human rights. You're going to try to blame the US for four decades of theocratic dictatorship? Laughable. The timer on that excuse has long since expired. Iran is responsible for the condition of Iran today, and the people that installed the theocracy are solely responsible for that too.
> The US destroyed Bolivia, replacing an elected government
That's an entirely false, invented claim. Which is why you didn't even try to support it.
The Majles was literally an elected body. Yes, he was appointed by the Shah after being nominated by the parliament. That's how constitutional monarchies work. Justin Trudeau also was elected by a parliament and then appointed by the Queen.
The fact that a lot of the people in the Iranian parliament had feudal land is completely orthogonal here. They were still elected. A lot of the people in the US Congress are also incredibly wealthy.
Mossadegh was elected fair and square. He was overthrown and replaced by a puppet when he went against Western interests.
As for Bolivia, Morales was a legitimate, elected president of Bolivia. Under US pressure and support, the OAS fabricated evidence that the election was illegitimate, and the US backed a millitary coup. It was a coup orchestrated and following the interests of the US. Here is my source: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/02/the-oa...
All of that information is also in the link I provided.
Oh, it’s totally fine then.
The US isn't responsible for the 2019 Bolivan political crisis and certainly didn't destroy Bolivia. I have to believe you are just trolling with language like, "The US destroyed Bolivia". Unless you call supporting the second round of elections (along with the European Union) the cause of the crisis they had. I've been in Bolivia recently, they will be just fine.
Not sure what you are implying wrt the Chilean coup d'état - the US didn't like Salvador Allende but he was overthrown by his own military.
The UK support of the Iranian coup d'etat in the 1950 (post WWII) was due to a conflict with AIOC (a British corporation) and US supported in turn. Not a good look by any means but also not a pattern of machinations as you make it out to be.
Because it seems to me that it was a coup. That was backed by the US. Which makes it a US backed coup.
[0] The OAS is a cold-war era organization that was literally founded in order to instrumentalize the Monroe Doctrine. Moreover, the current chairman of the OAS publicly states his support for regime change, and the organization is largely funded by the US. It was designed in order, and still largely acts, to implement US foreign policy.
The CIA literally had a budget in order to remove Allende from power. One of their top priorities was to fund, cause, and instrumentalize a military coup in order to remove Allende, which happened exactly in the timeframe they planned, and was executed by the actors that they had counselled and financed for the past two decades in the goal of removing any left-wing president : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_intervention_in_.... It is absolutely certain that the US was instrumental in the overthrow of Allende, with the CIA even publicly taking credit for creating the conditions that led to the coup. After the coup, the US politically and economically backed the military dictatorship. So yes, the US caused, and backed the coup. He was overthrown by his own military, that were organized to perpetrate a coup by the US.
It is literally a pattern of machinations. There aren't a series of dozens of coup d'états that mysteriously happen in countries with CIA activity that also happened to be against US interests, and that turned out exactly to further US interests. The CIA didn't make contacts in the militaries, in supranational organizations, and with local interest groups for fun.
The West needed 30 years to realize that (some are still working on this I think) because it thought that it had actually 'won' the Cold War through it's actions during the Cold War, when the reality was much more likely that the East had collapsed also without much 'help' from the West.
The countries on the 'losing side' in this battle of ideologies (like the Soviet Union and China) had adapted to this new reality much more quickly, both in different ways though, but none of them copied the 'obviously superior' model of the Free West.
Of course hindsight is 20/20, but sometimes I've got the impression that many people in the West still wear their rose-tinted Cold War glasses ;)
Most of the legislation passed revolves around redistribution of wealth, and it's not taking from the rich and giving to the poor but quite the opposite. Any and all amassed wealth is being extracted from the poor and being given out to businesses in the form of lucrative contracts or, more recently, bailouts. The companies that receive this money promise that it's going to trickle down while they fill Golden Parachutes, perform stock buy backs, and find other ways to funnel that money to their wealthy share holders.
The message for decades was that the government was inefficient and wasteful, and that private business can do it better. We've all heard the stories of the $300 hammer. But when things are privatized things generally get worse. Fewer workers earning lower wages doing more work but the overall product is worse and it's usually not cheaper. Any and all reductions in cost are just converted into profit margin.
The US is being sucked dry and when there's nothing left, the globalist in charge will just up and move on.
What product is worst and more expensive that you have in mind?
It's not that easy. Assuming they can afford to leave, most cannot, the fact that they've lived their entire lives here and their whole support system resides here makes it hard. Many people aren't upwardly mobile, and things aren't bad enough to make them desperate.
> What product is worst and more expensive that you have in mind?
Privatized utilities. The pitch in the 90s was that you'd have a bunch of providers competing to offer lower rates and the result would be lower prices. The reality is that you pay a very high base fee (no longer subsidized in the rate), and then you pay a service fee to your provider. Most rates are promotional so once a year you shop around or call up your gas provider to negotiate like you would your ISP. Switching providers usually results in activation fees and other costs.
This works great for large consumers (e.g. factories, businesses) who pay lower overall rates but the poor suffer. An example, I used $1.76 in natural gas last month but my bill was $36. I paid more in taxes ($2.04) than I paid for the gas. People in my state pay $32 a month in fees for the privilege of being able to pay for gas. That's on top of the deposit people with poor credit have to put down.
-- https://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:34623859
-- https://www.law.upenn.edu/live/files/6611-report-municipal-f...
It's perhaps easy to forget now, but during the 30s, 40s, and 50s the face and "leader" of communism was Stalin – not exactly a friendly chap – and things like China's Great Leap Forward left over 20 million dead (mostly due to incompetence, not malice), and let's not forget Cambodia.
Details differ per care of course, but in quite a few cases all of this was done in the name of "freedom and democracy", which was perhaps not entirely unreasonable too. I'm not saying that it was the right thing to do (many other issues like national sovereignty etc. which come in to play), but I do think it's a bit more complex than your comment. I'm not sure if idly sitting by and doing nothing would have been that great of an option either.
There's a reason that communist symbolism and the like is considered taboo in many formerly communist Eastern European countries, somewhat akin to Nazi symbolism.
In the UK we haven't got past the rose-tinted WW2 glasses (especially those born from 1940-1970 who grew up with tales of WW2 as kids)
Glass houses etc.
There is, however, a pretty big gulf between the stuff the US has done and engaging in ethnic cleansing and running concentration camps as a matter of policy.
The difference is massive, and well known. Please don't try to falsely equate the two.
A big gulf. Hmm. A big gulf. Umm, maybe you mean the Gulf of Aden? That's kind of big, and it's right near where the US participating and supporting the ethnic-cleansing-level siege and bombardment of Yemen by Saudi Arabia.
Remember most states of the US were founded on ethnic cleansing. The US supported Pol Pot, a notorious cleanser (although more of a self-ethnic-cleansing); it carried out mass bombing and poisoning campaigns in the same region of SE Asia, which constitute ethnic cleansing; it starved out the Iraqi people for years, which is borderline ethnic cleansing; it's doing the same to Venezuela right now; it supports Israel, an ethnic/religious-supremacy state held up by keeping the indigenous people of the country outside of it, as refugees - to ensure a demographic majority for the privileged group; it has supported Myanmar/Burma, while it ethnically cleanses the Rohingya; it has supported and still occasionally supports Sunni fundamentalists who aim to cleanse non-Muslims, Shia etc.
As for concentration camps - the US is infamous for its concentration camps. Mostly in countries it occupies, but also for a significant fraction of its citizenry - over 1% if I'm not mistaken. They're more class-based than strictly race-based, but still.
Now imagine a society where every dissident is treated like Assange, and every poor nobody is treated like the Grenfell tower residents. And with no recourse. And no free media to spread the outrage. And no reasonable expectation of privacy to even discuss the matter privately as a third party with other third parties. And no way to even talk about voting out those responsible.
That's China. Take your false equivalence elsewhere.
The British colonies over the years? Possibly Britain itself as far as the treatment of poor nobodies.
Look, China's a repressive regime, but: (1.) A bit less so than it's described by Western media, and (2.) Britain and the US are not categorically different, they're just, well, different in the contexts and degrees in which they oppress more and less.
Sure. I don't see anyone here defending that in this thread.
> Possibly Britain itself as far as the treatment of poor nobodies.
Currently? Are you serious?
> Look, China's a repressive regime, but: (1.) A bit less so than it's described by Western media,
"Western media" is such a large set as to be meaningless. If you mean the mainstream media, please provide an example of two of where they claim China is more oppressive than it actually is.
> and (2.) Britain and the US are not categorically different, they're just, well, different in the contexts and degrees in which they oppress more and less.
No. There is a categorical difference between being democracies with major flaws and being a totalitarian state, between having real struggles in their open and adversarial justice systems and having arbitrary arrests as the norm, between abhorrent detention of immigrants and outright concentration camps based on ethnicity.
Placing the dystopian hellhole that is China in the same category as Western democracies is an affront to those that suffer under CCP rule and highly unproductive with regards to fixing the serious problems we have at home.
I'll give you one. Pretty much every single mainstream media basically says religion is banned in China. However to my detriment, every time I go back to China to visit my paternal grandma (who is a catholic), I get asked to go to Sunday mass with her. So, where is religion banned in China? Let me know your thoughts about this, do you think religion is banned in China?
> adversarial justice systems
You do realise that "adversarial justice systems" only pretty much exist in Common Law countries right? Whereas Civil Law countries don't use an adversarial system, which is pretty much the legal system of the whole of the EU and pretty much all of Asia including China. I've even read arguments from British barristers that the adversarial system can be an inferior system. I mean, the adversarial justice system certainly didn't do too well for the incarceration rate of black people in America now did it?
It's also worth noting that the Catholic Church in China is actually a state sanctioned organization that is not in Communion with the Holy See. There exists an underground Catholic Church that is in Communion with Rome, but, for obvious reasons, it's much smaller.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/11/16/world/asia/ch...
> I'll give you one. Pretty much every single mainstream media basically says religion is banned in China. However to my detriment, every time I go back to China to visit my paternal grandma (who is a catholic), I get asked to go to Sunday mass with her. So, where is religion banned in China? Let me know your thoughts about this, do you think religion is banned in China?
First of all, I can't remember ever seeing Western MSM saying religion is banned in China. Would you be so kind as to provide an example?
Second, while religion is clearly not banned in China, there isn't freedom of religion. I care very little about the rigmarole of religious people, but I do care about their freedom to keep those. China whitelists a set of religions, religious practices and religious institutions. As with so many other things in China, if you happen to find what you want within such an approved space, you enjoy freedoms. Outside of those preapproved boxes, there isn't freedom of religion in China.
You yourself bring up catholicism. I am not here to defend the catholic church (yuck!), but the approved catholic church in China is not allowed to have the same relationship with the Vatican as ordinary catholic churces elsewhere. This is not freedom of religion. And let's not even get started with islam, or let alone falun gong! You've got to be kidding me.
So, no, religion isn't banned in China. I've never claimed it is, nor do MSM tend to claim it is. The claim is rather that there is very little freedom of religion in China.
>> adversarial justice systems
> You do realise that "adversarial justice systems" only pretty much exist in Common Law countries right? Whereas Civil Law countries don't use an adversarial system, which is pretty much the legal system of the whole of the EU and pretty much all of Asia including China.
I'm sorry. As somone from a civil law country who usually gets quite annoyed by common law people assuming that common law is the system everywhere, I should have been a lot more careful with my wording. I should have said "justice systems where there is a true burden of proof on the prosecuting authority" instead.
> I've even read arguments from British barristers that the adversarial system can be an inferior system. I mean, the adversarial justice system certainly didn't do too well for the incarceration rate of black people in America now did it?
Here we go again. There's a lot that's wrong with the American justice system. The Chinese justice system is fundamentally flawed, to the point of being a worthless sham that merely rubberstamps the arbitrary "justice" of the CCP. If you cannot see that enormous chasm between these two, then I don't know how to get through to you.
The right to life is the first clause of human right, which I see they are violated in many western countries. They refuse to treat the poor and old. Do you hear China criticise? Maybe they are, but for sure western media choose not to report them.
Freedom of speech is a relative term in today’s world. I can say some of the things you shouldn’t say in China are equally not welcomed in many western countries. If you split US, see how many troubles could come to you?
On democracy, I’m not sure what to comment. China has ran 4000 years under one empire system, and it’s just the culture there. Why democratic society is better than the 1 party system? What’s more important is to have the party represent people’s interests. In many democratic countries, each party represents the interests from certain groups, that’s why it’s necessity to have multiple parties perhaps. The downsides to democratic system is also quite obvious. There are countless debate on many small matters which waste tax payer’s money etc.. Also, the democracy can be manipulated, and if it is the case, it’s worse.
man are you REALLY and seriously arguing that a single party empire system is better than democracy? dude please. It might be better if you like to live in your bee hive and play your assigned role. But what if you are different? what if you want to be something else than society forces you to be? what theb? you are screwed my friend.
and thats why i happily accept.that democracy might be slower and more expensive. because its for EVERYONE. in theory though ;-)
If you're interested in learning more about how China, America, UK, etc were able to rise to power, I recommend checking out this paper: https://s3.amazonaws.com/real.stlouisfed.org/wp/2015/2015-00...
Very simple explanation: it's impossible, unless the West can mow the rogue regimes left, and right, and is ready for a war with a nuclear power to do that.
> When China was very poor, it didn't really matter, or perhaps the assumption was that China would liberalise more quickly than it has.
Expecting a communist party to "liberalise" is effectively to expect it to kick itself out of power. The moment they loose power, their people will murder them. And if people wouldn't, then it would be their internal factions who will strangle each other without an iron handed big boss at the top maintaining internal order.
There is no way out for them. Their only way to avoid being torn apart alive is to stay in power, and their only way to stay in power is to exert, push, and expand it.
For them, to stop repressions, means to let their enemies to take the proverbial rifle from which barrel's the power grows, and to seal their fate, essentially to voluntarily chose death.
Any totalitarian system has an expiration date for this very reason.
In case of China, what that means is an instant gulag, or worse for 5 political dynasties:
1. Few remnants of Mao, and his wife's reign, and their confidants for, well, everything.
2. Deng Xiaoping's era communist billionaires, who will have to return millions they stole from the state in eighties.
3. Shanghai people, and Jiang, who will have to at least surrender their posts, and titles which they bought, and sold illegally, and all privileges coming with them.
4. Hu's clique, whose members will have to surrender their businesses, and stocks which they got through connections
5. And finally, Xi, and his friends, who managed to make a bigger mess in their 8 years in power, than the three previous dynasties combined.
Put it simply, do you expect a thief to voluntarily give a gun to the person whom he just robbed? An expectation that the West can share the planet with rogue regimes, is an expectation that a kleptomaniac, and a really rich person can live under the same roof. Even if the later can keep the former compliant under a gunpoint for some time, eventually the former succumbs to his urges, and the later has to shoot.
KMT is a way different fruit than the CPC.
They're not perfect, but over the last 30 years they lifted half a billion out of poverty and didn't wage war all over the world.
Not everything needs to be wrapped in our style of propaganda, sometimes it can be wrapped in other brands instead.
If they haven't done great leap forward and cultural revolution it would be better, that is true. But by "abandoning all communist policies and began liberalizing markets", not all countries see economic success, ukraine, iraq and all recent "liberated" countries, and russian living quality in 90s was even worse than their late 80s.
And ironically enough, the fast developing era of taiwan, south korea, by today's standard, are not under any form of democracy.
This is I think an under-appreciated point... Taiwan and SK both made the most economic gains under military dictatorships. Social liberalization followed economic growth.
Something similar might have happened in Singapore, they're technically a democracy but have been governed by the PAP forever and don't really subscribe to freedom of press in the way the US does (but have their own ways of building accountability).
All very fascinating stuff. 10 years ago I would have said that China would follow the same path but in that case social liberalization still hasn't come yet. Certainly the GDP per capita has not yet caught up but the PPP was pretty close last I checked.
By contrast, the Great Leap Forward alone killed 16 million, and that's at the lower end of estimates. The population of China at the end of this was ~665 million, meaning they killed 2.7% of their population just in the Great Leap Forward.
So even with the numbers most favorable to China and least favorable to Taiwan, Taiwan comes out ahead by an order of magnitude.
Why is that? How come some things are marketed extensively to the American public but others are never mentioned?
(Also, if the goal is to criticize maoist China, I'd go with the cultural revolution instead of the great leap forward)
There are two reasons why they aren't mentioned as much as Mao's atrocities. One is that those countries are our allies, and as a result we are more willing to overlook their faults. And I don't think that's necessarily right, but it's part of human nature to overlook the faults and flaws of friends and allies. But the second reason is that, even ignoring those effects, Mao killed far more of his citizens (and far more per capita), making it a much more interesting and disturbing event in history. The atrocities of Taiwan and South Korea come across as "run of the mill authoritarian leaders violently cracking down on dissent" while the atrocities of Mao's China are on a whole different level.
FWIW, as far as dictators and genociders go I think Pol Pot gets the least attention relative to the scale of his atrocities since he wiped out 25% of the population, and in extremely brutal and arbitrary ways.
Like you said, it's all about which side people are on. And I agree on pol pot. The only self-genocide I'm aware of in the record.
During Soviet times, a Russian man was arguing with a British man over whether their respective countries had freedom of speech. The British man said "I can go to the Houses of Parliament and call Margaret Thatcher an idiot". To which the Soviet man said "It's the same for us. I can go to Red Square and call Margaret Thatcher an idiot".
> But China, while increasingly mature economically, has not developed proper civil society, human rights, freedom of expression, democracy, and so on.
I don’t want to get into a whataboutism debate about all the human rights violations the USA has engaged in (yes Trump but Obama as well and W before him and etc). But really I’ll just focus on “proper civil society”. Jfc is the sinophobia getting overt around here.
Even if I take the good faith argument that “it’s commentary about CCP not Chinese people” as I often hear after racist remarks, I’ll just point out I’ve been hearing comments like this all my life in all sorts condescending ways. Most of the time in bad faith. So I don’t give a shit about how you “intend” it to be.
2. On a slightly different note, I think that while whataboutism is generally neither productive nor relevant, in this case a small amount could be relevant because the implication is that some other countries have developed to a state of "proper civil society, [...] democracy, and so on" while China has not. If the claim relates China to some base standard in the author's mind, then pointing out failings in those places seems like an attack on the point itself, but I don't know whether the US was at the top of their mind when crafting that sentence.
Looks good to exibit tolerancy between like minded friends about accepted topics, abortion, sexual orientation, skin color and the like... But about a different political system other than western liberal democracy? No way!
And it's not like Chinas Communist Party (from Deng Xiaopin on) has not good credentials. It might be the more succesfull regime in the history of humanity if we talk about taking people out of poverty. Which system has improved the life of millions like the party?
But it doesn't matter. The aglosphere keeps with its cultural war against the new enemy. What are the signs that the Chinese want to export their way of life? Any recent war launched by China? Any attempt to force a Western goverment to accept their condicions? They are not the ones messing with other countries democracies.
Anyway, there are plenty of things not to like about the Communist Party, but seriously, the propaganda is out of control.
There are two distinct reasons I see:
1. Some people read recent actions like "investing in a deepwater navy", "setting up economic relations with Africa", and "forcing trading partners to not recognize Taiwan" as doing exactly those things.
2. Even if you ignore those things, if you believe the western powers have done these things already in the 20th century like "investing in a huge carrier fleet and naval bases around the world", "setting up colonies and promoting democracy around the world, sometimes through force", and "forcing trading partners into labor standards including pay and hours, bundled into a package we call human rights", then it's probably easier to assume others are capable of doing similar.
At that point it's a clash of values.
The “manipulation” you speak of is more hypothetical. If anything Facebook has done more manipulative harm thus far.
One way to think about this is what exactly would TikTok have to do to satisfy your accusations of them “manipulating” people? How does Huawei stop spying on Americans? If there is no answer then you can see not only how it is pointless to argue, but that your primary motivation is actually to prevent the shift of power, rather than based on any actual infractions by Huawei or TikTok. So should the Chinese just sit out of global economics because they could threaten US dominance and potentially spy on or manipulate US people? The current dialogue is centers on future power, not on any actual abuse of power by these companies. Not like the US actually spying on Angela Merkel.
Set up a subsidiary that's subject to US law and rather than Chinese law and also has majority ownership in America. It's what the China enforces on foreign companies, so fair is fair.
> So should the Chinese just sit out of global economics because they could threaten US dominance and potentially spy on or manipulate US people?
I have no problem with Chinese companies participating in global economics as long as they're not based on stolen technology. Also it's not "potential", this has already happened extensively. China rose to prominence by extensive state funded industrial espionage and US companies were too blinded by greed to counter it. The US needs more laws in place to prevent this type of behavior and more retaliatory action when it's committed.
So many Chinese people I see online seem to think that the US is scared of China becoming more powerful economical or some other nonsense. The US created current Chinese economic prosperity through extensive work by Nixon and others in that era. That was all a massive mistake based on the mistaken idea that if China became more economically powerful they would become more democratic and more freedom oriented. That has failed to be the case and it's time to rethink how the US has handled China historically.
Sounds kinda sinophobia to me.
I would much rather the west comes out and say this has nothing to do with national security concerns or trade or economics, but that there is no way the west can tolerate how the Chinese Communist Party conducts itself, regardless of how many people get rich from their immoral actions.
So most of the planet will only buy thise elaborate line when Saudi Arabia and Pakistan get told to keep their riches.
I get what you are trying to say but definitely a value system requires neither of those things.
> So most of the planet will only buy thise elaborate line when Saudi Arabia and Pakistan get told to keep their riches.
There is hypocrisy but the threat posed by China to the liberal world order is much more serious than the thread posed by Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, and in both those cases there is a bit of a deal with the devil.
If the Saudi and Pakistani regimes fall we will probably see much worse things popping up.
Their values are far more regressive than China’s. (Women’s rights, religious freedom)
How is Saudi Arabia less of a threat?
That equipment is everywhere it will take years and cost billions to remove and replace.
And yes there has been already pushback around it both in terms of demands to lower the time frame to 3 years and to increase it to 10.
>Except that it's already been decided the towers will be removed, which is counter to your example.
Grandfather clauses are implementation grace periods that are equal to the expected lifetime of the device. This is not counter to the example -- this is an example that sometimes these grace periods are very generous even for things we are very sure are unsafe.
If Trump gets reelected this year that will be his second term which is the limit, and so there will be a new administration in January 2025. If he doesn't get reelected there will be a new administration on January 2021.
The notion that China lacks 'proper civil society' is in my mind rooted in a western sense of orientalism and good old fashioned racism. I'm no defender of China, but let's recognize that the same nations trying to punish China because 'human rights'(US, UK) are the same ones responsible for killing close to 1 million Iraqis and creating the largest humanitarian crisis on earth(Yemen).
China is literally running concentration camps to persecute religious minorities. This is happening at a huge scale and without any oversight on human rights.
Anyways
Here is the reason i'm pissed: (I am user SeriousHyena in this thread) https://www.lipstickalley.com/threads/black-girl-sent-to-juv...
There is no comparison. Relativism... is a way to 'cleanse' somebody's crime, with saying: but x, and y, or doing something bad
We see China bots doing this over and over on forums, (reddit being a prime target)
Lets make it clear: by saying china is not doing anything worse than the west, you are clearly supporting genocide and concentration camps...
Please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules.
And it is always wrong.
> Yet you don't seem to be outraged at the fact native americans are raped and murdered almost everyday in america.
Not under sanction of the state, and Non native americans are also raped and murdered almost every day in america. These things are crimes in USA regardless of the victim, where in China the state is sanctioning it and doing it.
BDS does exist, and China is a bad actor and should be opposed.
BDS is still allowed to operate and the condemnation has no state-actionable consequences against BDS. And there are members of the US congress who openly support BDS.
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/23/us/politics/house-israel-...
But I assume all you did was a quick google search to confirm your bias.
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/anti-bds-legislation
Hmm, It seems the majority of the states to ratify resolutions have been overwhelmingly republican.
It seems as if. Everyone in the us who does not support the bds movement.
Individual US states is not the same as the "The US". And what you are linking to is not sanctions and again has no state-actionable consequences against BDS that I can see. It is a condemnation.
> It seems as if. Everyone in the us who does not support the bds movement.
Good they have some sense, even so BDS is still allowed to operate in the US. How will BDS ever survive now that it has been made clear that nobody likes them, while they are still allowed to operate. I mean they are entitled to everybody's support no?
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Is change lacking? Yes. Is there outrage? Also yes.
Of course, had you were to make the point that Western politicians are complete hypocrites then I would wholeheartedly agree. Although, I also don't think that's a uniquely Western phenomenon.
The set of 'Westerners' does not exclude the protesters.
The group that was being attacked was something like 'Westerners who criticize China' (I can't find the exact quote since the OP is no longer visible to me). I'm part of that group and that is why I replied.
Your point that "they're just making a bit of noise in the hope that the protest goes away" is true regarding the establishment. I don't see how anyone would disagree with that.
But we have a right to vote and a right to loudly voice our disagreement. And that's different from China. Right now in HK the government is now basically saying that voting against legislation proposed by the establishment 'might be' a violation of the national security law. That's insane.
The usual counterpoint here is the US incarceration rate.
By all means cite %, and still does not make it a concentration camp.
Further the DAs are themselves elected locally in many jurisdictions or appointed by locally elected officials and people can vote for change if they want it.
This whataboutism really needs to stop.
You can always tweak law to make criminal out of anyone inconvenient. Wasn't Assange's consensual sex relegated to rape?
And this would be immoral and if you are suggesting the US is doing this you would need to actually back that up.
> Wasn't Assange's consensual sex relegated to rape?
Even if it was, that is not an example of tweaking the law to make a criminal out of anyone inconvenient, it is a case of tweaking the truth to fit the definition of something which is a crime, and should be a crime.
Would like to see some examples of this, and numbers of this. I really doubt this is widespread.
And further, if it does happen, it would have to get through prosecutors, jury, governors, etc - all of who will completely eaten alive by the press if the kid could even be misinterpreted to be a minority in the USA and the whole world would know about it. Where if someone mentions China is not exactly a good actor we get a whataboutism shitstorm.
This has nothing to do with the topic at hand and was another whataboutism off shoot from the main topic.
Most of the people in the US who make a stink about the Uighurs and forget about US human rights transgressions would quickly forget about the Uighurs if they moved in next door.
Can you though?
Gui Minhai was a Hong Kong bookseller who had become a Swedish citizen. He was kidnapped while in Thailand and was moved to China. There he was denied consular access.
However:
- Snowden was an American citizen. Gui Minhai is Swedish.
- Snowden didn't get kidnapped abroad. The possibility seemed real but, for whatever reason, that line did not actually get crossed.
I certainly wouldn't defend the US in this (let's not pretend that the US has a good reputation regarding world politics). But the things the US does pale in comparison what China does.
Snowden was just an example. The only reason why he didn't get kidnapped abroad is because the US failed. They were absolutely attempting to do so.
In any case, the CIA has an entire program devoted entirely to kidnap people abroad, move them in jurisdictions where they can be tortured, and then deal with them. It's called "extraordinary rendition".
I chose Snowden as an example specifically because he was a US citizen. If you want examples of non-US citizens, there are literal hundreds.
Anyways, here is an overview of the US extraordinary rendition program : https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13642987.2017.1...
There is pretty much nothing that China has done, that the US hasn't in living memory. From internment camps, slave labour at the industrial level, censorship, extrajudicial execution, systematic torture at home and abroad, ubiquitous and total surveillance, and so much more.
There are, however, things that the US has done that China hasn't, such as, I don't know, functionally annexing an entire island of a foreign country in order to torture prisoners held without due process. Or maybe systematic destruction of dozens of countries under false pretenses, killing millions, in order to accumulate power. Neither has the US shied away from imposing economic systems that essentially damn billions of people to poverty and cause millions of easily preventable deaths a year.
There is no country in contemporary history that has exported as much pain, suffering and death abroad as the US.
Now, I don't think that this is because the US is somehow fundamentally worse than China. In the same geostrategic situation, China would likely have acted largely in the same pattern. However, your claim that "the things the US does pale in comparison to what China does" is really, really absurd. There simply is no international force that exports and maintains atrocities to the scale of what the US does, because of the US position as the global hegemon and what it takes to maintain it.
I also want to point out that the reason I mentioned Gui Minhai was to counter the claim that escaping the grip of China was a simple matter of moving abroad.
With respect to this original topic, there are also various examples where Chinese who moved abroad are threatened either by phone calls from China (with reference to their family) or by Chinese agents (presumably) in the new country. (I could list some if you want, but I assume you're familiar with them.)
These are things that the US does not really do.
But, yeah, US's track history in foreign policy is terrible. But China has its own take on terror and it's not pretty by any means. If you care about things like democracy or freedom of speech I will assert that China is emerging as the bigger threat by far.
(I take terror to refer to the systematically frightening people with the threat of violence, to make them behave in a certain way.)
If you are an enemy of the USG, you can't leave the US. If you are an enemy of the Chinese State, you can't leave China. I fail to see the difference.
I assure you that US citizens that move abroad and act in ways that conflict with the USG are also surveilled. The tactics are different, because the US has sufficient power to surveil you without needing any threatening. If ever the threat of violence is judged effective that is what will threaten you. First under the threat of extradition (which is violence), if that fails the US will make phone calls to the government of the country where you live in, and if that fails and you're still worth it then it's covert action.
Maybe if you live in the Anglosphere China is a bigger threat, but in that case it's not a big threat at all. But for people that live anywhere else in the world or have done so the US has done enough terrorizing and threatening to see that the US is a bigger threat to your freedom. What good is democracy when the US controls your economy and defence? What meaningful freedom do you have of acting according to your interests when that boot is against your neck? Both China and the US are exactly the same threat. It is absurd to give more power to the US to isolate China. If what you care about is freedom, the best scenario is actually to have both China and the US in economic competition.
Is putting other countries citizens in concentration camps somehow morally superior?
> They're using machine learning to generate social scores.
America also has this they just call it a "credit score" or "klout".
> If you don't like America or the UK, you can leave.
Wow all my US expat friends who constantly complain about having to pay US taxes despite living here in the UK must have things totally wrong then.
> it's not racist to not like these horrible cultural values or to go against them.
No it's racist to ignore the injustices we commit in the west while condemning Asian countries for doing the same thing with different branding.
The argument isn't "China is good actually." It's "We do most of the same stuff you are accusing them of."
If you are a US citizen, you are expected to pay a certain amount of US taxes even while living abroad. Presumably, this is because you still benefit from bring US citizen while living abroad.
> No it's racist to ignore the injustices we commit in the west while condemning Asian countries for doing the same thing with different branding.
No, that's hypocrisy, which is a totally different thing from racism.
This is not the same as being physically restrained from leaving, and they would find these stop if they renounce US citizenship.
> The argument isn't "China is good actually." It's "We do most of the same stuff you are accusing them of."
But we don't, neither to the same scale nor intensity.
It's not racist to criticise the actions of another country, even if your own isn't perfect. You can criticise both, and you can call out which is worse.
In this case it is the undemocratic nation suppressing speech and political expression, while commiting racist, demographic genocide within its own borders.
Our credit system is bad and theirs is worst. Next topic?
They can at any point renounce their citizenship, but they don't and continue to pay their taxes.
I grew up with cultural values, and I don't like the Chinese ones. Does that mean the US is perfect? Of course not.
Whataboutism is cushioning the evil creeping, instead of trying to stop the incoming flood, you're busy mopping up the puddle.
No, but since a country usually has jurisdiction over most of its citizens, concentration camps for those is a tool that is readily available. Putting other countries' citizens in concentration camps isn't morally superior, but it's a tool that usually has enormously bigger repercussions in international politics.
Or if you're very bothered with the actual wording, how do you feel about a phrase like "he murdered his own neighbor"? Does it, to you, try to communicate that murdering non-neigbhors is morally superior? I don't think most people read it like that.
> America also has this they just call it a "credit score" or "klout".
Except these aren't systems explicitly constructed by the state that you are not allowed to speak out against. I, too, am worried by the diminishing power of the common worker in capitalist systems, but at least that worker can speak out against the system. And if he says "fuck the president", it doesn't affect his credit score. Nor does jaywalking. Etc.
> Wow all my US expat friends who constantly complain about having to pay US taxes despite living here in the UK must have things totally wrong then.
Indeed, the US system of worldwide taxation is pretty insane. That is, however, uniquely American, and does not apply to the West as a whole. Moreover, you can leave by renouncing the citizenship. Yes, that is a ridiculous demand – trust me, I know – but it's nowhere near needing government permission to leave the country.
> No it's racist to ignore the injustices we commit in the west while condemning Asian countries for doing the same thing with different branding.
Are you conflating "ignoring western injustices" with "not explicitly bringing out western injustices in every piece of writing about Chinese injustices"? I would claim that discourse in the West is pretty good at debating the injustices of Western societies.
> The argument isn't "China is good actually." It's "We do most of the same stuff you are accusing them of."
We do not. Here are some of the worst "stuff" China is being accused of:
* Concentration camps for an ethnic group (do not mix this up with another injustice, like the immigrant detention camps at the US southern border)
* Arbitrary punishment (do not mix this up with another injustice, like police violence).
* No protections of privacy whatsoever (do not mix this up with another injustice, like expansion of surveillance powers)
* No protection of free speech
* The lack of democracy (do not mix this up with another injustice, like the erosion of democracy in some Western countries)
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Middle east is a mess for a number of reasons and 40+ years of civil wars. You can't directly point the finger at one nation like you can for the human rights violations in China.
And might as well throw the racism card in there too. Anyone who thinks China is ruining Hong Kong and imprisoning millions of innocent people, its because they're racist.
Recently they even failed to honour their fallen soldiers in recent clashes with India and you think they will let you know how many they killed in Hong Kong.
In the case of Hong Kong, there is no need to rely on the CCP to tell us how many they killed. Hong Kong has much higher levels of press freedom than China, and deaths would likely be made known in other ways.[1]
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Press_Freedom_Index
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-52765838
There has been protests for more than a month in the USA and the west because one black man was murdered by police. The police officer that murdered him will be charged and brought to justice.
There has been nowhere near this level of outrage against the actions of China, and nobody will bring the perpetrators there to justice.
To suggests that HR violations in the west is being ignored is laughable and dishonest and is evidence of your ulterior motives.
And limiting the problem to only US is pretty much denying that HR violation is present also elsewhere in the west (look at the condition of the migrant in Europe as example)
PRC does lack proper civil society, and it all started with Mao and his cultural revolution. Compare PRC and Taiwan the difference is night and day in their respective governments' respect for human rights. It has nothing to do with orientalism and everything to do with authoritarianism.
Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules.
And this is good, old fashioned bullshit.
Chinese citizens do not have the same rights and protections westerners do, nor a democratic system. They don't have the right to speak freely, congregate as they wish, protest or foment change in their own society.
Western societies are imperfect, those rights are not protected or executed perfectly there. But they do exist, and the problems with them are orders of magnitude smaller than their total lack in China.
Say what? Haven't the previous months' worth of protest illustrated quite well that exactly the HR violations you use in your example are very much not ignored?
Besides, HR violations in a free and open society can be talked about and acted upon. China is a dystopian hellhole where even raising the plight of the Uyghurs in concentration camps, or the lack of free speech, or arbitrary arrests, or …, is dangerous. Full stop. For all its problems, the West is in a completely different league where it comes to HR violations. For sure we have problems, but China's are orders of magnitude bigger. So no wonder we "whine".
You've broken the site guidelines egregiously before (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23639749). We ban accounts that do these things repeatedly, so please stop that and follow the rules: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. The idea is: if you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; if you don't, please don't comment until you do.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23831071.
And the devastation to their economy if we did find backdoors which would forever poison Chinese electronics is a far greater security risk to them, than any advantage they may possibly get from implementing backdoors.
I assume it's actually because 5G has to be found causing the Coronvirus and they are covering it up?
Any worthwhile Internet traffic should be encrypted in 2020, and if it isn’t, Huawei probably isn’t the most immediate concern.
And if it is encrypted, does it really matter who is listening?
Comments welcome, I know zilch about telecoms hardware.
I’m asking, is there really a security risk that Huawei might listen in on telecoms. Is traffic at the low level more vulnerable somehow? Is it the prevalence of unencrypted communications? Is it leaking of metadata that people are worried about?
The specific technical risk is unknown, though. There are thousands of microcontrollers in a modern advanced electronic device. It's nearly impossible to inspect each one and see what exactly is backdoored and how.
You could make an argument about metadata, which is much more questionable from the get-go.
The parent comment was talking about being able to take advantage of the situation by making the enemy use your devices and then incapacitating their infrastructure at the perfect moment by activating the killswitch on those devices.
A country using Nokia, Ericsson and Huawei is much better protected to such an attack than a company using only Nokia or only Huawei or only Ericsson, or both Nokia and Ericsson but not Huawei.
People are concerned that Huawei / the Chinese could effectively shut down important chunks of infrastructure that would cause chaos in a city like London, and many other places, and furtermore that the implied threat of such a mishap, might be used as a form of coercion.
Care to expand that thought? I don't particularly see how their communist-capitalism system would be ever accepted by EU or NA.
These infrastructure plans usually come with some kind of hand over of power to China.
Or maybe the higher density of 5G kit makes the attack cross-section larger somehow?
Other than the risks of using Opera (and other software like AirDroid, TikTok, WeChat etc), the main way I currently see users outside China being affected by similar issues is if they use Chinese Android devices, including grocery store smartphones, or those popular HDMI android dongles.
China's export of technological-enabled totalitarianism and surveillance states (especially to developing countries) is accelerating.
[1] https://www.scmp.com/abacus/culture/article/3029260/chinese-...
But a good question would be why 5g, and not every other computer chip in any computer and network equipment, which could be backdoored, and I doubt anyone verified the conformity of the chip to the blueprint sent to the factory.
Going forward this kind of infrastructure will probably be more important than any other kind (because this will control all the others too).
Will this finally move the cost-benefit needle toward verifiable computing (open chips, open fabs, open *ware)? Who knows. But so far it seems the power brokers of the old era (eg. countries) are trying to maintain control.
Plus, if it's your tower, you can just switch it off, at an opportune moment.
Wouldn't traffic run through many parts of the network exposing data to even more providers? Wouldn't you be subject to any portion of the chain breaking, or being turned off?
5G operates on higher frequency and requires a larger density of base stations. If you can identify individual devices -- even without cracking the encryption they use -- then you can track them them geographically, and also conduct traffic analysis.
5G presents a potential security risk because it allows far greater granularity of device localization, even without GPS.
"The extension of spectrum range has an impact on the network architecture. mmwave cells will employ shorter ranges of around 100-to-200 meters which will require extreme densification to provide high coverage. 3G networks reached densities of fourto- five base stations per km², 4G networks eight-to-ten per km², while 5G networks could reach densities of 40-to-50 per km²."
https://www.newtec.eu/article/article/choosing-the-right-con...
>The average for Boston is 21 meters; New York 27 meters; Austin, TX, 28 meters; Washington 29 meters, and Chicago 38 meters.
https://www.mobilemarketer.com/ex/mobilemarketer/cms/news/re...
I got my own room in my house with it, back in the 3G/4G days. I'm not sure what modern software and hardware can do it now, but I'm pretty sure it's even more accurate even without 5G.
>The average for Boston is 21 meters; New York 27 meters; Austin, TX, 28 meters; Washington 29 meters, and Chicago 38 meters.
>A number of factors can impact location data accuracy, including its source, which can include GPS signals, Wi-Fi and cell tower triangulation.
Seems like the figures they're giving is with wifi/gps signals, not just cell tower alone.
No that’s not required, 5G uses the same old frequencies as 2/3/4G for the bulk of the traffic, it only uses the >1Ghz frequencies for microcells in malls and other dense areas where appropriate.
Back on the tracking side of things...
AFAIKR 3G and above do not leak their IMEI/IMSI unencrypted. Of course nearly zero phones show or warn if encryption is used or not (though I think that's a setting in the SIM card).
That's simply not true. 5G cannot achieve its advanced speeds without higher frequencies, which cannot be deployed without greater density of base stations. Higher frequencies beget faster signal falloff and greater susceptibility to obstruction. "5G needs spectrum across low, mid and high spectrum ranges to deliver widespread coverage and support all use cases. All three have important roles to play." [1]
Microcells use high-band, not mid-band, spectrum. High-band may not be useful outside of dense areas because of its reduced range, but it is essential to 5G and the FCC is releasing about 5GHz of spectrum for this purpose. Mid-band (1GHz-6GHz) is the bread and butter of 5G, and the FCC has pushed to open this part of the spectrum as much as possible for 5G to work as intended. This part of the spectrum is the most versatile, but it is in short supply [2].
Part of the challenge of 5G involves more frequent handoffs between base stations versus past generations of mobile phone radio. Similarly, 5G devices use various mitigation techniques to deal with interference from nearby base stations. For both of these reasons, there is a substantial amount of interaction between a single handset and nearby base stations that may not be presently serving it.
[1] https://www.gsma.com/spectrum/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/5G-...
[2] https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-363622A1.pdf
It’s unlikely to be rolled out fully throughout the entirety of the providers network. So you’ll see it in high density areas where people are mostly outside. As I said, malls etc. Also higher speeds at the regular sub-ghz frequencies are achievable through beam-forming.
Beamforming can't overstep the physical limitations of a carrier wave, it just adapts the radiation pattern of the antenna array to improve range and reduce interference. This is useful to extend the range of high-band signals, because they operate in object-dense space with a high density of clients. It is also useful at the lower frequencies, because it allows an improvement in spectrum efficiency in an otherwise crowded part of the spectrum.
You are basically saying that beamforming allows more single-user MIMO to improve the data speed of an individual user's connection at the lower frequencies. I agree with that. However, you still need more base stations because (A) you won't see the massive advertised 5G speeds without sub-6GHz and mm-wave, and (B) you need more antennas as you improve MIMO to serve more simultaneous data streams to each individual user at sub-GHz.
I am not familiar with the authors of this paper (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1902.07678.pdf), but it offers a good explanation with some images:
Also, you're going to see mid-band (sub-6GHz) rolled out in a lot of places where mm-wave wouldn't be appropriate.However I don’t think for one minute that you’re going to get that super fast data everywhere. :-)
If your argument here is “who cares if we can trust the hardware if the encryption works” I’d encourage you to think about how you know that the encryption “works” if you can’t trust the hardware. A lot of the encryption is out of necessity far removed from the end user, it’s not exactly PGP over email. And everything is never encrypted, the operations of mobile networks require a lot of extra metadata about the operations that is still sensitive even if you completely disregard the traffic over the network.
As for metadata, is there no cryptographic schemes that make metadata extraction impossible? I’m thinking like with Covid tracking apps, you can find out whether you were in contact with someone infected, without sharing any identifiable info.
National security includes things such as the prevention of over-reliance on a foreign supplier working with a foreign subversive government hell-bent on their unfair mercantilist policies. It's economic security they worry about first, which could lead to a whole host of other security issues due to lost of leverage later on.
If that was true, no foreign country would be buying from US companies.
In that context the failures of the US (as it is de-facto the standard-bearer of political liberalism in a broad sense), have real influence.
When the Chinese look around the world and they see the state of the US on imprisonment, racial conflict, failure during the current covid crisis and so on, this strengthens the domestic control of the party and the alternative autocratic system the government is advocating.
We're discussing why the UK might not want a Chinese state-allied (if not owned) actor embedded in its comms networks, and here everyone is saying "buh buh buh America!"
And frankly if you look at what's happening with BLM (mass protest in the US over a pattern of racist police murders, significant parts of the country vocally criticising the apparatus of state) and consider that somehow worse than the semi-secret genocide of millions, with all discussion suppressed, going on in China....
And as far as communications infrastructure is concerned it's relevant too. In countries like Germany or Eastern Europe in particular the behaviour of espionage among allies over recent years has created an atmosphere of "well everyone is spying on us anyway" substantially weakening the case against Huawei, say.
Also as far as discussion here is concerned, most people here are from Western countries, so at the end of the day discussions will mostly be about our own behaviours.
What people are saying, pretty straight out and literally in some comments, is "Stop whining about China, the West is just as bad".
It's not, and it's pure distraction.
It does no such thing. Being a hypocrite does not impact the correctness or incorrectness of what you're saying (which is why the tu quoque fallacy is a fallacy), doubly so when we're talking about entirely different categories of abuses that invalidate the hypocrisy charge anyways.
Listing off fallacies is great in internet discussions, but it's not how the world works. To be honest it's also not really how internet discussions work any more because everyone's grown sick of it.
That said, the parent poster isn't the US government, but a private citizen raising a valid criticism of another country. So why can't it stand on its own, without a big show of self-criticism first? Can we not criticize others until our own house is in order? Once that happens, the discussion turns into an argument over moral equivalence or lack thereof -- ie. "the US' crimes are just as bad as China's!" versus "No these things are of completely different degrees!".
This line of argument quickly becomes tiring and, I think it completely muddles the original point, which is often what is intended when hurling "what about...!" into the discussion.
But still, we should wonder if the criticism is motivated by something other than pure concern for human rights. You expect me to believe that Americans are mad at China strictly because they really, really care about the rights of muslims? With our record and our allies' records?
Or is it possible that this is just motivated by geopolitical interest?
Now, if we're talking about the US state department, then absolutely they're doing it for geopolitical interests. However, they're also reflecting the concerns of at least some of their citizens.
I'd also like to note that there's a moral equivalence argument to be made here. It's possible that China's abuses are actually worse than our own. Or maybe not. I just want to acknowledge that aspect of this argument, but I don't want to get into it because I'm not really informed enough to make it, and I'm certain that 80% of that impression is formed by skimming headlines and whatnot, which is not really a proper basis for debate.
I would be much more amenable to agreeing with the people that claim to be mad at China in the US if the solutions they proposed didn't give more power to US, that has no fundamental difference in foreign policy than China. Economically isolating China, for example, does absolutely nothing to help the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but gives a lot more power to the United States. But if the solutions that were being talked about changed the balance of power towards entities that didn't wantonly abuse human rights, I would entirely agree.
Therefore, I don't think it's whataboutism. It would be whataboutism if the claim was that China actually respects human rights because the US is worse. But the question is different - it's whether we should economically isolate China on the pretext of their human rights abuses, or not. Saying that the party that benefits from this and that is pushing it is fundamentally just as disrespectful of human rights is not whataboutism, it's a question of whether the proposed actions will do anything for human rights at all.
It seems pretty clear to me that they won't.
Should nobody have fought the Nazis?
https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/blog-post/a-different-future-for-tel...
- Churchill (I think)
Bingo. It seems like this is more a bet that they can't become wholly independent without the tooling itself, or can't become independent for a long while. I doubt it has much to do with "setting up incentives for transparency". I think the "will China become transparent about its actions" question is pretty much settled at this point.
[1] https://www.huawei.com/uk/facts/huawei-uk
This is a good example of the kinds of tradeoffs which must be made at the highest levels of public service.
Huawei, just like any Chinese corporation operating overseas, is an attack vector for intelligence gathering. Anyone presenting a counter-argument to this is either a shill for the Chinese government, or totally uninformed.
China has a culturally distinct attitude towards intelligence and intelligence gathering to nearly every western country. The national emphasis on the collective good blurs the line between private citizens, acting in a personal or professional capacity, and the stereotypical impression of a "spy" perpetuated in the west: on the payroll, going to their cubicle at the CIA each day. China's voracious appetite for intelligence (and, particularly in recent years, industrial espionage), means that it is impossible to distinguish between the commercial interests of a Chinese company and the Chinese state furthering its apparatus.
Remember Crypto AG? The Swiss crypto company jointly-operated by the CIA and German intelligence?[1] That's newsworthy because it's unusual: western states are typically limited to publicly lobbying their corporations for backdoor access, or working around things like end-to-end encryption (e.g. I believe PRISM used a combination of vulnerabilities to exfiltrate data from Hotmail and MSN prior to encryption taking place).
In China, we must assume that the reverse is the norm: the Chinese government does not need to lobby its companies to provide it with data, or to build-in backdoors or exploits. A Chinese corporation can be compelled to turn over everything it has, silently, and to compromise users and products to benefit the Chinese government, silently.
Crucially this is not a criticism of China. China can best be understood by Westerners as a series of tradeoffs to benefit the collective good, at the expense of personal liberty and privacy. Literally the argument you might encounter would be: "If you have nothing to hide then why do you care?"
The information gathered is not always as exciting as you might imagine. It's not just deployed into military intelligence or kompromat. It might "just" be used as a means of preserving China's status quo as a leading manufacturing hub (and, therefore, China's position as a growing economic power).
So China a) has a vast appetite for intelligence of all kinds, and b) does not draw a distinction between private citizens/corporations and state actors/corporations.
To answer your question:
Huawei has been a cornerstone of the UK's telecoms infrastructure for nearly twenty years, and in order to gain its foothold committed to allowing GCHQ full access to its codebase (HCSEC)[2]. The stipulation from Britain's intelligence community was that Huawei must not be allowed to have a monopoly position, or even a significant market share beyond a certain level.
I am not familiar with the specific technical reason that Huawei at 70% vs. Huawei at 40% of the UK's telecoms infrastructure would represent a disproportionate increase in risk, but I believe it is likely to be related to resource constraints -- fuck me guys, GCHQ is having to actively monitor and review the code deployed across a double-digit % of our telecoms infrastructure from the starting position of "this is provided by a bad actor"! -- and the doomsday scenario that Huawei's position of market dominance would drive competition down, resulting in a choice to either have e.g. 7G with Huawei, or not at all (7G is a fictitious example, but you see my point).
The UK is balancing the very real ongoing nightmare of monitoring Huawei's involvement in UK telecoms with the fact that it's a cheap, high quality supplier, and the fact that our closest allies -- the United States -- have been on a warpa...
Please don't. Duplicating lowers the signal/noise ratio. If you want to refer to what was posted elsewhere, a link is a perfectly good tool.
Is there a reason why something reasonably substantive like this which addresses both a specific query from users (nested) and apparently at top level to shouldn't be allowed? I guess upvotes are an imperfect measure but this post appears to be contributing more than many other top-level comments.
(Thanks for taking the time to explain! Either way consider me corrected.)
So yes, this is a small victory in a massive war.
There are other, better sources.
That's a pretty large economic cost. Bob can't watch his medical lectures on the train, so ends up behind in class, Mary's company looses a contract to a foreign competitor because she got frustrated with her bad VPN and didn't read over the bid one last time, Fred couldn't afford the cost of the new 5G contracts so didn't get much data and ended up losing touch with his friends who were all group video calling eachother.
All these socio-economic costs cascade for decades or more. Do they really outweigh the theoretical ability for another nation to disrupt network traffic for a few hours until a mitigation is put in place?
Those 'new applications' will be old applications with a few thousand more JavaScript libraries bundled with every page load...
5g is just another white rabbit big Multinational are chasing to justify/force infrastructure replacement.
4g is everywhere in NL. it just works great whereever you are. so i really wonder where the immediate need for 5g is.
I live on an island near a metro with a lot of traffic when the ferry from the metro arrives, then it disappears. Every single ferry that comes in knocks out 4g responsiveness (or takes it down entirely) while the ferry disembarks until everyone moves away from that area.
So, for me, 5g has a projected material benefit (presuming my understanding of their brownbags were sufficient). I'd love to hear any actual cellular network engineers fully explain it because between words I didn't understand and trying to balance a salad and eat it without a table, I'm sure I misunderstood _something_.
Guess I’m on team Huawei now!
She is usually writes some messages to Bob, but probably couldn’t afford 5G plan and decided to end the relationship.
"I disagree. Reports about China from many western media tend to exaggerate things about China, mostly influenced by western politics, not good at all. Also, western media tend to report selective facts to only show things they want people to hear and see. The right to life is the first clause of human right, which I see they are violated in many western countries. They refuse to treat the poor and old. Do you hear China criticise? Maybe they are, but for sure western media choose not to report them.
Freedom of speech is a relative term in today’s world. I can say some of the things you shouldn’t say in China are equally not welcomed in many western countries. If you split US, see how many troubles could come to you?
On democracy, I’m not sure what to comment. China has ran 4000 years under one empire system, and it’s just the culture there. Why democratic society is better than the 1 party system? What’s more important is to have the party represent people’s interests. In many democratic countries, each party represents the interests from certain groups, that’s why it’s necessity to have multiple parties perhaps. The downsides to democratic system is also quite obvious. There are countless debate on many small matters which waste tax payer’s money etc.. Also, the democracy can be manipulated, and if it is the case, it’s worse."
If your opinion is not following the sentiment of the majority then you can get down votes.
- Yes, the US has a police brutality problem. (Though not near as bad)
- Yes, the US has a government corruption problem. (Though not near as bad)
That acknowledged:
* At no point will you disappear in the US for criticizing the government.
* At no point will you be placed into a concentration camp and tortured.
* At no point will you be barred from participating in society because you lost points on a "social score" calculated on things such as following the wrong religion or criticizing the government.
* At no point will you be subject to ethnic cleansing.
* This list could be many times longer.
The US is not a totalitarian police state and it is fundamentally dishonest, to the point of mendacity and/or trolling, to equate the two. There are no countries on this planet with entirely clean hands. All have committed abuses, all have fallen short. With the binary 1 and 0 off the table, that leaves us with a matter of degrees, and some countries objectively have worse human rights records than others.
On top of all that, most of the posts like the one you quoted amount to whataboutism, or the tu quoque fallacy. This is an ancient trope. Soviet-era Russia tried it[1] too. The response to "China puts people that disagree with them into concentration camps" is not "But the US..", or "that's not fair because.. (it's not as if these accusations are unsubstantiated by fact)", the answer is "that is wrong and should be condemned".
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_you_are_lynching_Negroes
I don’t know about this. the U.S. is corrupt to its core.
Highest bidder for PPEs during a pandemic? Millions of small business loans go to Kevin Nunes’ vineyard? President allowing bounties set on its own Troops?
Whether or not that is true is not really relevant here unless the author can argue that what is being discussed is an exaggeration.
> Also, western media tend to report selective facts to only show things they want people to hear and see.
Western media don't "tend" to do anything. That's way too diverse a set to make a sweeping statement like that. It's just spreading FUD.
> The right to life is the first clause of human right, which I see they are violated in many western countries. They refuse to treat the poor and old.
This is ridiculous. "Many" Western countries "refuse" to treat the poor and old? That's blatantly not true. At best it's a colorful way to say that many western countries have problems with poverty and care of the elderly. Indeed, I would agree if that is so. That doesn't begin to compare with the intentional and desired violations of human rights of the Chinese regime. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the elderly and poor are not sent to "reeducation camps". Uyghurs are. For being Uyghurs. Full, fucking, stop.
> Do you hear China criticise?
Sometimes. Is that really relevant though? You'd think that the worst kid in the class would sit very quietly when one of the better students is caught screwing up.
> Maybe they are, but for sure western media choose not to report them.
Huh?
> I can say some of the things you shouldn’t say in China are equally not welcomed in many western countries.
This is completely broken logic. I'm sure lots of murderers equally agree that you shouldn't steal candy from a small child or push an old grandma. So what?
> If you split US, see how many troubles could come to you?
I really don't follow.
> China has ran 4000 years under one empire system, and it’s just the culture there.
Are you seriously suggesting that the impressive history of a country should preclude its citizens from enjoying more recent human rights?
> Why democratic society is better than the 1 party system?
I'm sorry, it's becoming pretty obvious – both from what you write and the sentence structure of that writing – that you are a shill for the CCP.
> What’s more important is to have the party represent people’s interests.
And nobody has ever found a way to do that except for subjecting the powers that be to the will of the people through democratic elections. Please let me know if you have found a way; the Chinese way definitely isn't one.
> In many democratic countries, each party represents the interests from certain groups, that’s why it’s necessity to have multiple parties perhaps.
… yes?
> The downsides to democratic system is also quite obvious. There are countless debate on many small matters which waste tax payer’s money etc..
Of course there are plenty of downsides. Proponents of liberal democracies are usually just arguing that democratic systems are the least bad one (in this thread the major point of discussion is that the current Chinese system is absolutely horrible). I know it's a tired quote for many, but: "Democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."
China is treating everything they own as a politics weapon now. 5G contract is a perfect weapon in this view. Telecom infrastructure is huge, and almost monoplied by the base infrastructure builder due to compatibility issues. Once Huawei finished the 5G base infrastructure, China can coerce UK by attach extra terms for maintaining, upgrading or selling 5G equipments.
China has already used this approach on loans of asia investment bank. The countries which supports HK Security Law coincidentally matches with the countries which receives loans from investment bank.
There may be more under water. Some may already exposed: (China's evil virus plan) https://www.foxnews.com/world/chinese-virologist-coronavirus...
Some may still remains to be conspiracy theory: China increased production of hydroxychloroquine, in their reports (http://tn.china-embassy.org/chn/dtxws/t1787078.htm), they already used Chloroquine in treating their patients. However, WHO, FDA and even Lancet banned or announced inefficiency of hydroxychloroquine, and people died from this misinformation. What role did China play remains suspicious and mysterious.
If the last few years mismanagement of Brexit, privatising the NHS, "universal" credit, historic immigration renegs, the perpetually delayed reaction to Covid19, PPE procurement contracts going to zero-asset companies monetarily linked to Tory members and donors...
Well... A large part of me hopes it's mere incompetence.
But the bigger picture seems to be a party that —starting with May as Home Secretary— has been pushing harder and harder at knowing everything about everybody. Kicking out incumbent foreign hardware providers seems like a bloody good way to plant your own hardware in its place and achieve another level of control.
Maybe for spying, maybe because QA failed.
Huawei is on the US radar but somehow when Cisco left a backdoor on some routers it was "just a mistake".
Every country is guilty of stabbing in the back others (occasionally or all the time), it has been the case for centuries and is not likely to change.
I am French, we do not have our own tech so we get stuff from everyone around - we are probably in the worst spot from that perspective.
The first thing that pops into my mind here is the importance of end-to-end encryption. If you cannot trust anything in the middle (presumably because the internet goes everywhere), perhaps we can at least trust the networks and devices under our immediate control. This is still not perfect because these devices can be compromised at the factory too, but it's still a much better position to be in. I can't make my ISP install core routers that I am comfortable with, but I can make sure that I install network hardware and use computers & phones that I trust on both ends (or convince my counterparties to do the same).
China, on the other hand, has no clear separation between the state and large private companies, and has a state which does not acknowledge basic human rights in a myriad of ways. Again, the US is not perfect here either, but it sure is better.
Personally, I wish Europeans would use more, well, European equipment for this kind of stuff. This isn't out of some nationalistic sentiment (I have no problems using foreign equipment as such), but given the state of the world's affairs and the direction I fear it might be heading, a strong and independent Europe will probably be more important than ever in the coming decades.
We do watch US movies and series, but probably less the ones that decpit US everyday life and more the well known ones (say, Westworld - but not to start to live like them. Or Avengers).
One of the huge successes of the past was Dallas. Everyone was watching it but there was zero influence on normal life, it was a tale of aliens on another planet.
So no culture overload for us.
If the CCP wants conflicts at least it needs to find allies, right? So why then it tries to piss off just about every countries it's surrounded by?
No shortage of Chinese allies - 70+ countries supported China's recent change to Hong Kong's laws (https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1193422.shtml). Certainly none of these countries are bastions of freedom - North Korea, Venezuela, Chad, Myanmar, Cambodia, Kyrgyzstan. But all of them support China to the hilt. Tanzania didn't even stop with an endorsement of the HK law, they also felt it necessary to mention that Taiwan is a part of China. Turns out Chinese loans go a long way in creating a sense of gratitude.
All countries barring the US need China more than China needs them. And China only needs the US until it has semiconductors of it's own.
The US and EU were asleep at the wheel these last 30 years - allowing China to grow powerful without also creating a counterweight like India. Now the world's dependence on Chinese manufacturing and Chinese consumption means that no one dares to criticise China, and there's no shortage of countries lining up to praise every action of Comrade Xi's.
That's why China can screw over every neighbour, taking what they please. Who's going to stop them? Is Vietnam or Malaysia suddenly going to stand up to China? No, they will merely grumble. Is India willing to provoke an actual war? No, they will merely ban TikTok and call it a day.
ah yes, exactly the same logic that resulted in World War 2
War with China would be extremely painful, every single item that modern life depends upon apart from food will suddenly become scarce. That acts as a powerful deterrent.
"economic interdependence prevents wars" was commonly accepted to be true in the 1910s, right up until the outbreak of World War I