Section 1. (a) The following actions shall be prohibited beginning 45 days after the date of this order, to the extent permitted under applicable law: any transaction that is related to WeChat by any person, or with respect to any property, subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, with Tencent Holdings Ltd. (a.k.a. Téngxùn Kònggǔ Yǒuxiàn Gōngsī), Shenzhen, China, or any subsidiary of that entity, as identified by the Secretary of Commerce (Secretary) under section 1(c) of this order.
Similarly, and I honestly feel a bit silly asking this, but does this ban US investors from purchasing Tencent stock? It doesn't seem so - are these literally just bans on app transactions? Or does this also mean that, for example, WeChat couldn't host infra on Azure in Africa?
Tencent owns 40% of Epic Games, which owns Fortnite and the Epic Games store. This might be a symbolic move more then anything, because unless they intend to be rigorous about Tencent’s connections with all these companies (e.g Can’t buy anything on Epic’s store, or make micro transactions in games from companies owned by Tencent), they really are not stopping anything.
Your purchases through Epic or Riot (League of Legends, Valorant) are not seen as ‘direct’ transactions with Tencent.
Basically it’s exactly the kind of grandstanding Trump would partake in.
I think you're thinking of league of legends, unless they also have a controlling stake in Activision. I believe their stake a Activision is very much a minority position.
Did you edit in the quote from the EO after? It specifically says "any transaction that is related to WeChat". The TikTok/ByteDance order doesn't include a "related to" qualifier like that, the same section in it just says:
any transaction by any person, or with respect to any property, [...] with ByteDance Ltd.
It's still not clear what exactly that will mean, but the intention definitely seems to be to restrict it to WeChat and not hit everything from Tencent.
I don't think it was vague, the executive order stated:
> The following actions shall be prohibited beginning 45 days after the date of this order, to the extent permitted under applicable law: any transaction that is related to WeChat by any person, or with respect to any property, subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, with Tencent Holdings Ltd. (a.k.a. Téngxùn Kònggǔ Yǒuxiàn Gōngsī), Shenzhen, China, or any subsidiary of that entity, as identified by the Secretary of Commerce (Secretary) under section 1(c) of this order.
I've had a number of tik tok-ers tell me they don't care what app it is. They care about the community and creators, and they will find each other on whatever replaces TT.
I was intrigued by this sentiment, the idea that the conceptual social network is the thing of value, not the application one interacts with it through.
I do wonder if there's a deeper connection than Facebook simply having this feature ready to go and releasing it early. Was there cooperation of the sorts "you ban TikTok and we'll release Instagram Reels early to help distract upset users"?
Facebook has had a Tiktok competitor called Lasso for 2 years. It failed though. They are shutting that down and simply porting the features over to their existing Instagram app.
My comment wasn't about whether they already had it or not. It is obvious they were already working on it. No one could develop and release a feature so quickly. It is about the timing of the release, which could have very well been cooperatively timed.
AFAIK , tiktok's demographic (teenagers) is no way going to do the same things on facebook . It's probably going to be a new company (Franken-Vine maybe)
Didn't Pompeo say something this week along the lines of banning China Mobile servicing telephone calls to the U.S.? That means if you carry a cell phone from China to the U.S. you can't get roaming service anymore?
I am surprised Lenovo hasn't been singled out yet. They supply enterprises throughout the U.S. a lot of corporations that hand out laptops to their employees all use Lenovo.
Theres an incredible amount of foreign propaganda in western social media anyway. Twitter took down like a million CCP accounts the other month (they made an announcement about it) and thats just the ones they know about. This is a step thats at least in spirit probably makes sense but there are more larger issues. Reddit literally has an API to comment...you think all those policial default subs are real comments? Not a chance. Reddit doesnt care because it drives engagement.
I help mod a medium-sized subreddit (non-political). We get more mobile-app-based traffic than web traffic by a considerable margin, and I believe this is pretty typical.
Political PACs were openly bragging about manipulating reddit's political subs in 2016 with thousands of accounts and reddit did absolutely nothing. [1] [2]
That really depends. What if they require a login that uses a cookie based session? What about CSRF tokens? What if they put in a captcha cause your requests look funny. At some point it quickly goes from API to BOT.
Almost every CCP-owned channel on Facebook has bought fake subscribers, it's so visible they don't even try to hide it. As an example, CGTN French has 20M subscribers, more than any local French newspapers despite being virtually unknown in the country. If you go by subscribers count, it would be the most popular news platform of the country...
Well China does have a valid reason to outlaw Google et. al, because they publicly siphon your data and are not shy about it. Also if you're gonna downvote, provide a reason and counter-point. This isn't reddit and the downvote button is not for "I don't like this".
This is frequently an unreasonable request. To take an example from higher in this thread (not proving his claim), you can easily say that CGTN French does not have 20 million subscribers, but you can't easily say that any individual subscriber is fake.
The same can apply to social media, it can be pretty obvious based on commenting patterns that there is some propaganda going on in posts blatantly about China, without it being able to identify with any degree of certainty which comments are problematic.
(I take no stance on whether or not there is obviously propaganda here, the commenting and voting does strike me as suspicious, but not to the degree that I think it's a slam dunk that it's not just the result of a biased sample of HN users being interested in posts like this).
If you point to a comment that only has pro-China comments, then yes, it could be seen as propaganda.
But especially when it comes to China, when someone has an opinion that slightly goes against the general sentiment, it's marked as propaganda, or a paid troll, just as a way to invalidate their opinions.
Hence why I'm asking, because I don't see any obvious propaganda here. Just people with a different opinion trying to have a discussion about it. And I'm only asking because someone pointed it out without posting evidence.
Our 70s-era national security regime needs desperate Congressional overhaul. I take particular peeve with the prohibitions on judicial review of CFIUS actions.
An important note that nobody seems to be reporting on: this is only possible because Apple and Google have control over which apps are permitted on your device.
The US government has no legal authority to ban publishing (including apps) in the US. They do, however, have the ability to regulate trade between the operators of the App Store (Apple) and the Play Store (Google), and app publishers, which is what they're doing here.
Ban the business relationship, and they've effectively banned the publishing. It's an end run around the US constitution, and everyone should be up in arms about it: not just at the US government, but also at Apple and Google for creating a legal chokepoint for mass censorship by the US federal government.
This would not be possible if end users actually exercised control over their own devices. This is how the web works, and it's how everything else on your device should work, too.
I feel the same way! I can’t understand why there aren’t bipartisan calls for Trump to knock it off. Is it that most people aren’t fully comprehending what’s going on, or are those of us upset about this being dramatic?
What if the app publishers stop taking payments and ads from the US, in that case there may not be no longer cash transactions, so will the restrictions apply?.
It's not about money, it's about the contract itself. US companies are legally (criminally) prohibited from legally (contract/civil) engaging with a whole designated list of people/entities (the SDN list), as well as an entire list of countries (DPRK, Cuba, et c).
And this is why as a European I think that we should take a long and hard look at our dependency of US technology. Its becoming more and more clear that US is not a stable actor.
I think it would be prudent for us to force alternatives to apple and google app stores (and other software) that are housed and owned in Europe. I have no confidence that US intelligence is not accessing our data and setting up profiles on Europeans that could be used for nefarious purposes.
This is the likely result of what Trump is doing. Every major country/bloc will now look to create their own commercial internet/social network, etc. And the US will have no basis to complain because it paved the way (the Chinese did it first, but China doesn’t have the clout to lead other countries. The US does)
Setting aside how much of a step back this is from the global utopian internet I suspect the vast majority of posters on HN believed in even a few years ago, the economic impact is gonna be the greatest on the US, which is the biggest beneficiary of a global internet.
If every bloc builds its own siloed internet, its their companies that will benefit at the expense of American companies which currently dominate the entire planet.
I think a dependence upon US technology should be evaluated separately from US services/companies/staff.
There’s nothing wrong with US tech. There is a lot wrong with US persons, subject to capricious US military/law/spying, having real-time control over your device or the services it needs to run.
You can say the same about Chinese tech. Nothing wrong with the device, everything wrong with allowing a government far away real-time remote access/power.
It’s time to peel away software from services once again.
If we break off the control of software distribution, and disable automatic remote updates (which is manufacturer backform/RCE), hardware in the general case can become reasonably safe again.
On the bright side banning Chinese apps doesn't have an impact on the intentional users. By that I mean is that there seems to be a lot more app stores than just Play Store, and it's even common for Chinese apps to offer an apk download off their website. People who are unknowingly using Chinese developed apps are probably going to be the most affected because they're not familiar with side-loading applications and are just going to switch to their nation's version of the application which is probably the intention. It is kinda fair because as soon as a major country starts to practice protectionism then the rest have to or else they'll get unfairly exploited.
That isn't my impression of how the web works. The second your bits leave your LAN, they begin traveling over infrastructure that is owned and operated by another private entity. They could rescind your access at any time, especially if the government orders it so.
Eh, TikTok could set up some proxies on non-China non-US controlled shared infrastructure, and with modern https the US network carriers wouldn't be able to tell if the traffic was to them or someone else. The degree in invasiveness needed to enforce this policy via ISPs (prohibiting effective encryption) would probably end up violating the first amendment.
1. TLS is not the impenetrable black box it is made out to be. Every year there are about three papers published at the top tier computer security conferences about identifying applications within TLS. Check out the NDSS proceedings.
2. The EO prohibits conspiracies to evade the ban. This means anyone caught knowingly helping to evade the prohibitions would be subject to legal penalties.
1. Yes - but a law requiring US carries to perform cutting edge research to detect who you're talking to is... unlikely. It's also much more likely to violate the constitution than a law prohibiting trade.
2. Sure, but the entities involved in evading the ban wouldn't be US entities.
The (US-HQ'd) company I work for has a small but significant office in China. We are not a household name, even within tech, so I doubt we'd be a target of any retaliation by China.
However, my worry is this: Whilst we have a lot of really good people in China, we don't do any business in China (and there's no realistic prospect of us doing so). So at this point operating in China seems like a huge exposure to risk for relatively little reward in the long term.
But I don't see an alternative for us. Pull out of China and business continuity would take a huge hit; stay in China and accept the risks & uncertainty.
How bad of a hit would your business continuity take? Not to get dramatic, but, is it worth risking the lives of your employees over? Personally I won't step foot within PRC borders given my staunch pro-Taiwan sovereignty stance. It's a vicious state that has in the past indicated it will go to any lengths to protect its stature.
Your Chinese employees will be fine, but foreign personel coming in should indeed be very careful not to pique the party's attention as it will actively be seeking pawns.
Laws and law enforcement are the only sane ways to deal with espionage or whatever the accusation is. What Trump is doing here must be illegal, I hope it is challenged and defeated in court.
The stated motivation is to reduce misinformation from China in lead up to election.
Pretty wild that Facebook which was 100% proven to have been used for Russian misinformation in the last, and this election, somehow dodged a bullet on this...
My (totally personal opinion guess) is that this is just another way to poke the bear as part of the tit-for-tat with China and maybe a minor contributing factor that someone has got in his ear and blamed TikTok for his low campaign event turnout after there was a TikTok meme to RSVP to his events to make them sound like they were going to be huge, then embarrass him with low numbers.
Cynical perspective is that one of his friends with a stake in Facebook got in his ear about China using TikTok to make fun of him or something, and now Instagram Reels is right there to pick up the slack. Nothing would surprise me with this govt anymore. I mean the news is all talking about TikTok now instead of COVID-19... troop bounties... so on...
I don't see anything about misinformation or the election in the executive orders [1, 2]. It talks about data collection, e.g. "potentially allowing China to track the locations of Federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage" and " the application captures the personal and proprietary information of Chinese nationals visiting the United States, thereby allowing the Chinese Communist Party a mechanism for keeping tabs on Chinese citizens who may be enjoying the benefits of a free society for the first time in their lives".
Edit: okay, there is a bit, e.g. "This mobile application may also be used for disinformation campaigns that benefit the Chinese Communist Party, such as when TikTok videos spread debunked conspiracy theories about the origins of the 2019 Novel Coronavirus"
It's one of those American policies that has a triple motivation: it provides an opportunity for the GOP to look "tough" on foreigners, it provides the opportunity to protect the US tech sector's market position by outlawing a potential competitor, and it satisfies nationalist ("national security") factions in Washington that want to roll-back Chinese economic development.
Foreign policy initiatives that satisfy the needs of three or more power blocs in Washington DC tend to have extremely bad outcomes; the last major policy that had a triple motivation was the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
The GFW of China is to prevent its people to see outside. The GFW of America, at least for now, is to prevent China from peeking in. One is implemented as an allow list, the other one is a deny list.
It isn't the country directly collecting and analyzing data. It is a company. Chinese companies are required to share data, but so are U.S. companies.
If we focus on the companies, why is okay that U.S. companies are able to collect nearly arbitrary data on all U.S. citizens and participate in propaganda?
No it means US has a leader who is finally thinking rationally about China, instead of falling into the greed trap that most other politicians have been stuck in.
In my opinion, if China wants to be a part of the global economy, China must let the globe be part of its own economy. Facebook, Google, Twitter have been systematically forced out of China. Why should we let Chinese social media sites in our countries?
The specific act of banning TikTok seems petty and uncalled for, but we have to start somewhere.
I understand that this makes sense from a libertarian perspective, but I believe there are certain exceptions to be made when dealing with authoritarian, abusive, and dangerous regimes.
An example would be nuclear material and technology. US places a lot of restrictions on individuals' rights to trade these materials, but I believe it is necessary.
So not all restrictions on individual rights are incorrect, when it comes to trading with foreigners.
If by xenophobia you mean spine, sure you have one. What do you think will happen next? What’s the message that we, the rest if the world, can take from this?
you’re also ignoring that you’ve proved the rest of the world that investing in US is not as safe as everybody thought so. it may byte you in the near future (i don’t wish that, though).
At least in my social circles, this has been one of the few things trump has done that both dems/conservatives agree with. Why would you be ok with CCP collecting info on US citizens and spreading misinformation to benefit a foreign regime?
Please demonstrate that TikTok actually "collect[s] info on US citizens" for the CCP or "spread[s] misinformation to benefit a foreign regime". Please also compare to Facebook/Cambridge Analytica or RT Now.
This is a mercantilist stupid response to something that in no way is a "national security" issue.
Sure, ban apps on government/military phones. That's truly about national security.
But 13 year olds doing dance videos, or kpop fans DDOSing Trump's rally ticketing (ie actually an email fishing activity) is not national security.
This is the same sort of isolationist bullshit that has the US DOS currently grading travel to New Zealand as "Level 2" because of their 23 cases of COVID.
Sure, China and the CCP are nasty and infringe their own and other citizens human rights. But these so-called national security EOs are more like "waaaah, but he did it first!" response from a child than the mature response of the supposed lead nation of the Western world.
People share all kinds of private, exploitable information on social media platforms. And social media is a powerful platform for spreading propaganda. Sorry, it's just too dangerous to let the CCP, who are absolute experts in propaganda, have that much influence in domestic affairs.
The outcome of this ban has important implications for potential bans in the future that affect apps at odds with administrations. End-to-end apps like Signal come to mind.
The ban of an app like TikTok is absolutely unprecedented and is very atypical. This isn't par-for-the-course behavior by the US government, and the outcome of this ban will set a precedent for other apps the US bans on "national security" grounds.
The most recent example was Grindr which was first sold to Chinese company and the government had to force them to sell it back because the app contained location info of potentially sensitive military personnel.
How come? Clearly the app is used by the youth. Having gullible youth using the app of a country that's knows for its in-app propaganda is very clearly a national security risk.
I don't know that the US version has any. But there is a risk that algorithms get tuned to influence youth imo. I think all youth-oriented products have this problem, but China is a riskier actor in that regard.
There are a few video when you type "tiktok propaganda" on youtube. Not sure since I haven't used the app.
What are the national security concerns for these apps that are not present in the multitude of other apps such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Skype, Zoom, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Google, Gmail, iMessage, Facetime, Vine, Snapchat, YouTube, etc?
What about the suspicions that Trump is upset that TikTok users helped sabotage one of his big rallies and this is retaliation and thus an overextension of his powers and an exercise in authoritarianism (something he's already done many times anyway)?
> What are the national security concerns for these apps that are not present in the multitude of other apps such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Skype, Zoom, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Google, Gmail, iMessage, Facetime, Vine, Snapchat, YouTube, etc?
These are all American companies. Wechat and TikTok are controlled by Chinese companies.
> What about the suspicions that Trump is upset that TikTok users helped sabotage one of his big rallies and this is retaliation and thus an overextension of his powers and an exercise in authoritarianism (something he's already done many times anyway)?
I suspect that was actually his motive, and the national security reasoning is just a pretext. That said, a stopped clock is right twice a day.
This is hardly giving up freedom. It is literally the job of the government to be an interface between America and the rest of the world and it is within their purview to deem chinese companies that can collect data on americans a security risk.
Because many US companies have been at the receiving end of unfair trade practices, copyright theft and blatant IP violations from the mainland. It's good that we are finally doing something about that.
I dunno, it worries me to see popular narratives sinking back into nationalistic perspectives.
This entrenches us in the “they did A, so we will respond with B” logic, and from there, it only takes a few “reasonable” exchanges between nations “just looking out for themselves” for us all to end up in a situation nobody wanted.
I agree with you on the overall perspective. But I do think exceptions can and do exist.
This not just a case of “they did A, so we will respond with B”. It's a case of “they did A, B, C, etc. so we are responding with X after 10+ years“. To be fair, successive US administrations across party lines gave CCP a long enough rope.
> “they did A, B, C, etc. so we are responding with X after 10+ years“
It’s the same, reactionary logic, that fails to give first concern for the desired end state. Delaying reactionary measures is what many call patience.
And do you realize that, by imitating China's practices, the rest of the world now puts you in the same bucket as China?
A vindictive, capricious country where millions of dollars in investment can be wiped away under the flimsiest of excuses in one pen stroke, by a single petty man, desperately seeking domestic political approval.
I spent much of my life defending the USA's policies and practice, but this may well be the last straw.
>That happened in 2012, the only legal challenge to CFIUS since it was established in 1975, when Chinese-based Sany Group’s affiliate Ralls Corp. bought wind farms in Oregon. Then- President Barack Obama ordered Ralls to not only divest the wind farms, but also forced it to remove items added to the facilities, including concrete foundation, and barred employee access to the premises. Sany complied.
This is sad, we in the US are losing the little high ground we had and no longer lead by example to bring the world closer together by encouraging free markets and free people. I'm against this protectionist nationalism, it only leads to future conflict.
The US has been a champion of global free trade for more than a century.
Of course, the US wants to be top dog in this free trade Utopia, and the means employed to get to those free-trade ends have frequently been terrible.
But just as frequently the means have been a reasonable (and moral / amoral) push to encourage globalization, which has demonstrably helped reduce poverty and other negative stats the world over.
Certainly: CCP has been able to fool the world for long enough. US policy of hoping that China would open up in the long run has proven to be extremely naive.
If by policy you mean trade policy, yes. By any another metric, probably not. Certainly not policies on freedom for instance, if you value that sort of thing. It's time the United States levels the trade game with China.
A widely held belief is both that free trade is good, when both parties engage in it, and that when one party prohibits it the other party is correct in doing the same. This is why reciprocating sanctions and tarrifs is standard practice.
For example, Canada just today announced tarrifs on some US goods in response to the US putting tarrifs on some Canadian goods. That's not because we don't want free trade with the US, it's because free trade only works if it's reciprocal.
And this is where credibility matters. Do other countries believe that this is true, or do they believe that Trump is doing this because TikTok is full of teens & comedians that have made him look foolish?
Yes, by mirroring China’s authoritarianism and restricting the freedom of Americans. I’m living overseas and now my government is telling me I can’t use WeChat? Telling me who I can and cannot trade with, etc.
Restrictions on trade with China are attacks on our freedom.
It is absolutely within the purview of a Sovereign Nation to decide, within the confines of relevant statutes, what companies are allowed to operate within its borders. Trade restrictions are absolutely normal, and are well inline with established practices. What are economic sanctions, after all, but a restriction on the freedom to conduct commerce?
Removing unfair advantage these apps have by building their base in China and creating snowball effect when trying to communicate from abroad with Chinese users? Later you see your foreign contact has also Wechat to talk with Chinese, so why not to talk also with your nonchinese contact through WeChat.
Anyway the bigger issue here really is tax evasion through wechat payments or security threats thanks to unlimited access of Chinese gov to your phone storage.
EDIT: I see Chinese wumaos have field day in this comments section downvoting everything left and right.
Private chats can contain sensitive material that could be used to extort/blackmail government officials and/or business leaders, and in-app payments can be used for tax evasion, money laundering and bypassing sanctions. That in combination with the fact that TenCent or any large Chinese corporation is essentially an extension of the government means that WeChat can very plausibly become a threat to national security if it gains widespread adoption.
While I agree with your stance that this is infringing on personal freedoms of American citizens, and I too wish our leaders wouldn't always so eagerly infringe on personal freedoms in the name of national security, the national security claim itself does have merit.
The military and government officials can avoid use of the apps, without banning them for Americans. As they have before WeChat, and before the Internet.
I think the notion that WeChat is a threat to national security is honestly ridiculous. National security is a legal excuse to do things Trump otherwise wouldn’t be able to do in his pursuit of a trade war.
There's no way to predict in advance who's going to become a government official. When they do, and if they used WeChat before then, the damage is done. Material on those close to the officials can also be used against them in similar manner.
Again, not condoning the restriction of personal freedoms, but the national security angle is not totally without merit.
Yes, this. There are very few degrees of separation in social networks and people leak personal and private information to social networks all the time. It can and will be used against you. It can also be used as a propaganda outlet. Social media has already shown its impressive abilities to manipulate people's emotions and behaviors, in mass numbers.
You are refusing to look at the bigger picture. China is at a silent war with western countries -it has been for decades. Tech is the backbone of China. We have to hit them where it hurts in order to contain them, otherwise you lose much more than "your ability to trade". China just recently passed a law criminializing anybody outside China - of any nationality - criticizing China or its regime.
While people like you whine about your chat app, it can be a matter of life and death if China is allowed to continue.
My understanding is almost all countries have laws that apply to their citizens abroad. If you don't like it, you're welcome to renounce your American citizenship (at a price)
> no longer lead by example to bring the world closer together by encouraging free markets and free people.
It does not work very well if you are the only nice guy within a group of a--holes. You just end up being beaten up. Free Markets work well if pretty much everyone adopts the same rules of commerce, but China is way beyond that point.
Alan Kay has noted that vendettas are a human universal [1]: they arises naturally in any human society everywhere on the globe and in history. Rule of law is not a human universal, it requires conscious effort and continuous maintenance. I'm increasingly afraid that the relatively long period of peace in the West have lulled this generation to forget that war, not peace is the natural state of the world.
it's not only about protectionism, WeChat is also used for tax evasion through wechat payments, let alone security risks with Chinese gov having access to all photos, documents and videos of residents of US who have this spyware on their phone
The only thing that matters is long-term consequences. This could be war, but literally nobody wants that, least of all China. It also could be beating China down on its knees, and forcing it to free its people and its markets. That would be a remarkable outcome (not sure Trump can get there, though - I expected something in this direction in his dealings with North Korea, but he dropped the ball... I don't know, maybe he just got bored?)
Not really. There are other developing economies with serious tech sectors like India which operate according to the rules based open market system we have in place.
If the US doesn't take action against Chinese protectionism, why should other countries abide by the rules and give US access to their markets? The US provides China it's market even though China closes it down for everyone.
I think US being soft on China sets a bad precedent.
> I'm against this protectionist nationalism, it only leads to future conflict.
And unfortunately this is what the top comment preaches and I am very disappointed to see that the more-educated-than-the-average-person readers of HN fall into the trade war / retaliation fallacy.
Trade always benefits both parties. Otherwise they would not start trading in the first place.
Some people here are wondering about the implications of this. What this means IMO is that all Chinese investments in SV need to be liquidated at fire sale prices in the next 45 days. Regardless of how people here feel about China this is a huge escalation. The US is inflicting huge losses on Chinese companies for no clear violation of US laws on their part. The pandoras box is now open.
Do countries get to do this to each other whenever they feel like it now ? Can China force Tesla to sell its Chinese operations because Teslas data gathering poses a national security risk ? China has some pretty serious means available to it for escalation. China can ban Boeing from China forcing the US taxpayer to incur serious losses in keeping the company afloat.
The whole thing is pretty stupid overall. Most people don't realize that during the 2008 crisis it was Chinas 500 billion dollar stimulus that kick started demand and pulled the world out of a depression. China and the US are interdependent and hold up the global system upon which global growth depends. If China slows down as a result of all this that reduces global growth. Pushing China to the wall can make them take extreme steps like undercut the entire dollar based financial order leading to mass instability. The US might come out victorious anyway but its not worth the risks. Not to mention a war which if it breaks out could lead to WW3.
Previous attempts to contain China were much more tactful with things like the TPP and the Iran deal. Right now the world is hurtling towards the abyss and most people here don't even realise it.
A meta point I'd like to add is that currently 10 % of the earths population in the "Westosphere" controls 60 % of the worlds wealth. This is untenable in the long term and all this flailing about will not stop a reversion to a more balanced world. Its better that this happen gracefully than in a violent fashion.
China says if you want to set up a factory in China you need to transfer IP. They aren't forcing western companies to invest. Most companies invested voluntarily. And this was seen as mostly OK when the rivalry wasn't as heated.
What does this "open up" actually mean? A bunch of American companies have set up shop in China, which was not possible 50 years ago. Now it's common for huge entertainment properties like blockbuster movies and the NBA to get a massive share of revenue from China. Video game consoles are now legal. And of course, China is now essential in the production of most American products.
Open up means become a modern democratic state with respect for human rights, or at the very least, be on the road to one. The opposite has happened and the pundits from the 90s look pretty silly right about now.
Forget about pundits, Bill Clinton made this argument: "The American people support this agreement because they know it's good for jobs in America and good for human rights and the development of democracy in China." https://clintonwhitehouse4.archives.gov/textonly/library/hot...
Now, did he really believe that? Was he just selling the American people a bad deal? The end result anyway is that this is precisely the argument that was made, and thousands believed it.
Comparing the treatment of black people in the US to the treatment of Uyghurs (ethnic muslim Chinese) is not a realistic comparison at all. Currently Uyghurs in China are forced into prison camps for nothing other then being Uyghurs. They are then forced into labor or in some cases even have their organs harvested. Yes the US did enslave black people but that was stopped long ago and generally Americans agree that was wrong.
>Can you show me such a video of Uyghurs in China.
>I will answer it for you: no you can't.
All your doing is proving that China has no freedom of speech. The reason The reason I cant show you such a video is because of Chinese censorship. Such a video would never be allowed to circulate. The fact that a video of George Floyde being murdered can be shared in the US proves that in US we tolerate speech even when it shows the US in bad light. Also the cops who did this to Floyde are being prosecuted.
Even something as simple as a picture of Winnie the Pooh is banned in China because people compared Pooh, a children's cartoon to China's leader. Imagine the leader of a country having his feelings hurt by a child's cartoon so bad that he bans the cartoon.
The irony of these trite whataboutist responses is that China would be in such a better position as global leader if it were open or democratic. Unfortunately for the Chinese people, the Party is more interested in maintaining personal power than charting a good path for humanity.
> China would be in such a better position as global leader if it were open or democratic.
Certainly. And the CCP hinders that. But the point of my above comment is to illustrate that it's an open question whether China would be 'allowed' to be open and democratic.
I don't believe the West is actually concerned about CCP's human rights violations. They're simply concerned about China's rise as an economic and military power, we would not support the Saudi regime if human rights was a concern.
One of the major reasons the CCP got a foothold in China was because there was a sense that for over a century China was subservient to Western powers.
The CCP was fine as far as the west was concerned as long as it was primarily a dumb factory for us. But now they have ambitions to go beyond that.
I think that's the crux of the animosity towards China today, not human rights violations, as gross as they are.
I could imagine China being somewhat of an EU and democratic and as long as they buy enough western products, be left alone. But if they actually wanted a truly independent foreign policy for example, that would not fly. See the Iran Deal for how dependent EU foreign policy is on the U.S. one.
P.S. That does not mean the CCP is good. It's not. But pretending that western leaders actually care about its human rights abuses is silly.
I think this viewpoint is pretty one-dimensional and oversimplifies the complexity of geopolitics. The US is like any other country in that faces a constant struggle between its idealistic values and the realities of the world. To say that “the West doesn’t care about the human rights violations” is absurd, as if you could paint nearly a billion people (Europe plus US) with a single brush. The idea that by supporting one repressive state you forfeit your ability to critique other repressive states is also absurd. The world isn’t that simple.
To give you an example: in retrospect, keeping Saddam in power and not invading Iraq is considered a fairly reasonable opinion; i.e. even though we got rid of a dictator, the consequences were arguably worse.
The reality is that the West tends to not get involved politically if the state in question is insular enough to not affect other countries. This isn’t because they condone abuses in these countries, but because a long history of failed colonialism and wars has rendered the West extremely hesitant to get involved in any sort of ‘just’ war that isn’t provoked by the state in question (see Iraq and Kuwait for example.)
The contemporary populist rise of American hostility to China is also linked directly to offshoring jobs from the Rust Belt, so again, there are clearly groups of people who have issues with China that aren’t merely “crush the rising competitor.”
In any case I don’t disagree that the West has sunk democratic movements which were against its interests, but that to say all such attempts will be shut down is overly-simplistic.
Let's talk about human rights
There is an actual genocide going on in Yemen , and it's perpetuated by a Saudi dictator . The same dictator who dismembered an American journalist in foreign embassy.
Now Americans are selling weapons to the dictator to continue the genocide because human rights are selctive
> To say that “the West doesn’t care about the human rights violations” is absurd, as if you could paint nearly a billion people (Europe plus US) with a single brush.
It should be pretty clear from the context that I am talking about western governments, not people.
Also, as an European, it doesn't look to me like we have much in terms of independent foreign policy.
> The idea that by supporting one repressive state you forfeit your ability to critique other repressive states is also absurd.
One? Please. We support plenty of other dictators all across the world. Or is Egypt's Sisi not a dictator? What about the UAE, Qatar etc.?
What about human rights violations by democratic countries? We don't seem to care much about illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
> in retrospect, keeping Saddam in power and not invading Iraq is considered a fairly reasonable opinion; i.e. even though we got rid of a dictator, the consequences were arguably worse
The assumption that the goal at the start was to get rid of a dictator because he was one is fairly well established to not be true. Basically a bunch of neocons who were bitter we didn't dispose Saddam in the FGW wanted to settle scores.
> The reality is that the West tends to not get involved politically if the state in question is insular enough to not affect other countries.
Really, what about the likes of Venezuela/Nicaragua?
> I don’t disagree that the West has sunk democratic movements which were against its interests, but that to say all such attempts will be shut down is overly-simplistic.
His comment is in no way whataboutist or trite. It is providing counterexamples to the claim that the goal of US policy is to get countries to "open up", by citing countries that did start opening up until the US stepped in to prevent that from happening.
This is absolutely fair whataboutism because it shows the US's first priority has consistently been commerce over human rights. You couldd still say the US values "free people" a little bit, but values "free markets" more, and thus we get Deng Xiaoping > Mohammad Mosaddegh.
a)Allowing US Internet companies to compete fairly instead of using the firewall as an excuse to promote state controlled tech monopolies.
b) Having a fair and transparent judiciary to handle cases of intellectual property violations.
Open up would mean an open fiscal policy, namely allow money to leave the country. Companies and especially individuals can't invest and then pull the money back out of the country very easily.
Tolerated by whom? Those companies aren't owned by the public, or by the US government. The owners/executives of those companies tolerated the practice, because they believed that they could still be profitable and that the risk was acceptable. And profit they did. Do you think they care one bit about ideology?
I find it rather strange that so many people throw around the "tolerate in order for China for open up" rhetoric, as if companies invest in China for ideological reasons. Ironically, by forcing those western companies to not do business with China, you are infringing on those companies' freedom to choose for themselves, and violating liberal values.
Furthermore, as someone who came from China, that "China did not open up" is completely false. In the past 30 years, China opened up immensely. In the 70s, Chinese could not choose what to wear, could not choose to travel abroad, people could randomly be caught on suspicion of colluding with "the enemy". All of that has changed. Even the latter: the practice of being "reported by your neighbor for suspicious activities" no longer happens, the Cultural Revolution madness is over. Heck, even "not allowed to criticize the government" is no longer true: there are official channels for publishing constructive criticism (emphasis on constructive), and government officials post official replies in the public, and the criticism is listened to without getting you into trouble (the caveat being that you are not allowed to instigate mass protests, or call for overthrow of the government). Sure, it's not equivalent to western democracies, but it did change for the better even if there's still room for improvement. But for some reason, many western people completely ignore this fact and buy into the rhetoric that "China did not open up". It's not even a small fact, it's a huge boulder staring in your face, and people don't see it.
China enacted a new foriegn investment law. It no longer require joint venture, IP transfers. Tesla is able to use this law to built an wholly owned subsidiary and factory in China. A lot of big autos in China are now buying back their ownership in joint venture, previously they were 50% 50%. BMW now fully owns all their operations in China. Also for 50% 50% joint venture, it actually has benefits for foreign companies because it reduced their capital expenditure and split the risks when Chinese market was not a known factor during the early 2000s. For IP transfers, they would most likely be evaluated against the risk and rewards. It's basically buying market access with IP. Companies don't transfers their best IP, but an outdated version. But for Chinese at that time it's still valuable.
It might have been seen as OK on the business community, but people in the national security community have been freting over it for a long time. For reasons good and bad those views are now in the ascendancy in the political sphere.
The difference between west and CCP is that you follow rule of law, everyone is free until you're proven guilty. If you just replicate what CCP is doing you're admitting that their ideology is superior.
This thread is about the US govt banning foreign companies for no justifiable reason. China sees the US abandon due process to screw over its companies and...? Somehow that leads to improved international legal norms. It doesn't make any sense.
It makes complete sense, its tit for tat, China can can arbitrarily impose their rules on foreign companies and now US is doing the same.
Either Chinese businesses can lobby the Chinese Govt to make peace with US or the Chinese govt wont listen to them and have a more aggressive stand, only time will tell.
“Intellectual property”. What a joke. Throughout school how many times was I excited by a solution I devised until I realized my same exact approach was already discovered, published, and well known? These problems we are solving first dont entitle is to exclusive right over the solution.
We want to kick down the ladder after we climb it. That’s what this is about.
Out of curiosity, how many American companies have Chinese patents (NOT USA patents) that get don't get relief after suing the violator in a Chinese court.
No, but they certainly could if it suited their interests. What I find interesting in this thread is this assumption of both proportionality and rationality from the other party. China isn't, and hasn't, followed the same rules as the rest of the West. Why would we expect them to now? Moreover, from a game theoretical perspective it seems suicidal to act like they will, and then do nothing but complain about them "not following the rules".
Software is generally harder to pin down than other things when it comes to IP theft, but even so there is still a clear distinction between "stealing" a feature and stealing the actual code that enables that feature. China / Chinese companies have been consistently caught doing the latter. They also do the former but that is not what anyone is complaining about.
> Do countries get to do this to each other whenever they feel like it now
No, but wake me up when the US does this to another free and open country, rather than one that has a history of aggressively doing this to Western countries.
Don't they prevent some of our companies from operating there though? And then developed their own competing solutions free from competition. That's not exactly a free market, is it?
Which companies? If you mean Google search, they decided it wasn't worth complying with Chinese laws and left. You may not agree with the specific laws but complying with local laws is a bare minimum requirement for entry into the market of every country. Google even made a second attempt to reenter China, but shut down due to criticism from employees and the US government.
When the laws are vague and broad and applied arbitrarily, they are basically the same as American laws like the IEEPA which give Trump the power to ban those companies. By the same argument, you may not agree with IEEPA but it exists and ByteDance and Tencent have to deal with it. It is not a good argument though.
Good examples. AirBnB operated fine in China even has a China BU last time I checked. Uber sold it's operation in China to local competitors as they were losing any way.
No AirBNB was/is getting CRUSHEd in china because the monopoly power of the companies already present. You have to understand that competition in China is like a childrens playground, with the CCP being the parents.
They will choose the winners and losers, but they will do so by balancing their own metrics, which has China's economic power as no.1 priority.
Only know is Airbnb doing more OK, after moving servers to china, making local joint ventures, changing their name to a chinese one etc. etc.
AirBnB would still get crushed like most other American companies when they face strong local competitors even if they have full support from CCP. These companies are usually terrible at localization and what works in America won't just work in China. Doesn't mean it's not possible for them to succeed, LinkedIn for example, did fairly well in China so far.
AirBnB moved server to China because their website would be terribly slow if not, they need local joint ventures or otherwise they would have little idea in how to navigate in Chinese market. Of course they need a Chinese name, how else would you expect users to know what "Airbnb" is? Nobody would remember. They can change their name to a series of numbers and that would still work better than "Airbnb"
Neither of which are banned in China. It isn't allowed to offer cab services with a privately owned car in China, but this is also true in most of the EU.
All Google services are banned, IIRC. And the legality of anticompetitive practice is hardly a justification. This executive order is, after all, entirely legal.
"Operation Aurora was a series of cyber attacks conducted by advanced persistent threats such as the Elderwood Group based in Beijing, China, with ties to the People's Liberation Army.[2] First publicly disclosed by Google on January 12, 2010, in a blog post,[1] the attacks began in mid-2009 and continued through December 2009.[3]
The attack was aimed at dozens of other organizations, of which Adobe Systems,[4] Akamai Technologies,[5] Juniper Networks[6] and Rackspace[7] have publicly confirmed that they were targeted. According to media reports, Yahoo, Symantec, Northrop Grumman, Morgan Stanley,[8] Dow Chemical,[9] and BlackBerry [10] were also among the targets."
I think we are already passed the point of any of this mattering. Increasingly the rhetoric seems to me to just be: what matters isn't who is in the right or what is just or fair. Increasingly the only thing that matters is which side you are on. Are you with us or are you against us? It's just dogma at this point.
In this kind of environment people that are rational either stick to their tribe or learn to keep their mouths shut because it's no longer safe to express a contrarian opinion (just like in China). You see already see this in comments sections throughout western publications and forums where questioning policy or taking the opposite side means you are a bot/stooge/unpatriotic/50 cent warrior, etc, etc, etc.
I might get downvoted for this but I think it's a very real possibility. Withdraw the embassy from Beijing, recognize Taiwan and force a embargo of all Taiwanese/Korean and Japanese semiconductor supplies and components to Mainland China.
Then sit back and let China then make the first move. Might not work, but at this point I wouldn't put it past somebody in the White House having already gamed it.
There has never been a case in human history where one group of people voluntarily gave up their wealth, status and privilege to another group of people. Wealth transfer always leads to violence.
Respectfully- have you not been paying attention? The dude doesn’t make decisions with a long-term outcome in mind. He did this so he can send a tweet tomorrow morning about how he’s sticking it to the commies. That’s where the plan ends.
that dude's team actually call China a state capitalist country, that is pretty different from "commies".
just look at all the handouts from the US federal government, that is what commies do. to the max of my knowledge, in capitalist China, no one gets unemployment support for COVID-19.
> Then sit back and let China then make the first move. Might not work, but at this point I wouldn't put it past somebody in the White House having already gamed it.
I doubt it, there is not a single person of competence in the white house capable of gaming it. They are reactionary, not proactive. The President does not understand causality, and I sincerely doubt that anyone in his inner circle does either (because everyone with a brain has left or been fired). Your strategy here has two moves more than anyone in the Trump whitehouse is capable of fathoming.
> There has never been a case in human history where one group of people voluntarily gave up their wealth, status and privilege to another group of people. Wealth transfer always leads to violence.
I mean involuntary != violence. There have been plenty of peaceful cessions of power.
Banning wechat feels like pure Pompeo. Trump probably doesn't even know what wechat is. The craziest bat shit tier China-hawk already got purged, but this is still Pompeo, and if anything hes... good at manufacturing consent.
I'm classing it as a certainty. Have a read of the Wolfowitz Doctrine and work out what it necessitates, and that to be done very soon.
Even so, I believe the US has 'missed the bus'. It needed to have initiated vigorous conflict earlier this year to be sure of victory in that coming war. It can't start anything worthwhile now until at least the next Spring-Summer campaign season. By then China will have had another 12 months of growth, and the US another 12 months of decline.
What does victory mean in the era of mutually assured destruction? I don't see how a shooting war between the US and China could not end in both sides getting nuked.
Which is why nobody will push the button, even if they're being invaded, they'll just accept being occupied and mount a resistance. MAD always relied on a fiction of natural insanity that doesn't actually exist. I don't think any tactician takes widespread nuclear exchanges seriously as a likely outcome to any contemporary global conflict.
> I don't see how a shooting war between the US and China could not end in both sides getting nuked.
There is only one country in the world which is reliably able to afford being nuked, and has "surviving first, and second strike" as part of its many doctrines.
The only major country against which MAD is not so assured is China.
Invasion on Iraq led to many deaths and was based on false premises and similar "disagreement in management styles". War with China would be a terrible calamity. I don't understand why, but the US is turning into a bad actor, and the most scary thing is that it's convinced it's a good actor.
White House, no, but no doubt there are career officers and civilians in the Pentagon who have gamed this out in excruciating detail. I'm sure this was done even before the current administration came into power.
A lot of people ascribe malice to him, but it’s clear as day that he was in over his head with the entire project. Basically 0 of his goals have been achieved 17 years in.
So I would say that while the appearance of competent war games was there, it was a charade.
He was involved in a war of aggression, and his company made a bit of money both for destruction and rebuiling, did it not? And we can't even begin to guess how many "buddies" profited. At any rate, he's not in jail, and I think that is way too much success than is acceptable. He may be a moron, he certainly is a fool, but then what does that say about the ~300 million people in whose name he did his crimes, to live happily and smugly ever after?
> There has never been a case in human history where one group of people voluntarily gave up their wealth, status and privilege to another group of people. Wealth transfer always leads to violence.
The Velvet Revolution comes to mind. Of course there is a possibility/threat of violent escalation in negotiating these things, but rational actors can make the calculus that getting a good enough deal guaranteed is better than fighting and potentially loosing a better one. However, it requires a non-totalitarian view of the world (i.e. the others are not enemies no matter what and must be punished for their bad deeds doesn't really allow you to negotiate in a de-escalatory manner).
China could also just wait 3 more months until the election and decide action after that. If the presidency changes they are able to deal with a more rational player.
A more realistic scenario is that US have a 3 months deadline to fix their political system, as rationality need an empiric and humane system to work within.
Go and read John Bolton's book, Xi made it clear to Trump in person that he wants Trump to have two more terms. An irrational US president undermining the US credibility in all possible aspects is good for China. Why Chinese would possibly want this trend to change?
Bolton has many strong opinions that are not necessarily shared with the rest of the world -- not that he's wrong, but do use critical thinking. There are pros and cons here, like Trump causing short-term trade losses with China while they're dealing with political instability back home. Is economic stability worth more than relative world influence? Hard to say. Also, Xi telling Trump that he should have more terms is a classic way to play to a narcissist; it shouldn't be interpreted as anything more than flattery.
Honestly I think China has very little to gain from interfering on either side of the US election, and potentially a lot to lose. Russia, on the other hand...
China is already being very patient in waiting until the reelection. The US military is flaunting its military hardware near the mainland, and all this time China is basically ignoring the threat.
But the Trump administration is very active in launching more attacks. If you follow the news on what they've been doing to Chinese companies, the past month has been absolutely insane. The attacks are only getting faster and faster, as the Trump administration gets increasingly desperate to win a reelection.
Another problem is that all these attacks leave behind permanent damage. It's not just a matter of ignoring the attacks. I fear that at some point, we get past some boiling point, and things erupt into a hot war.
>Conducting justice shouldn't be seen as a deliberate attempt to increase tension
-Adds more companies to the entity list over Xinjiang
>Black listing companies involved in perpetuating genocide against the Uighurs doesn't seem controversial to me
-Bans federal contractors buying from Huawei
>National security
-Ups ante in the South China sea
>Allowing China to claim that region puts a substantial amount of trade in jeopardy, due to many established shipping routes going through there. China is the aggressor here, regardless of what the media tries to portray.
-Blacklists officials
>You need to be more specific, but I assume you are referring to more Uighur genocide related sanctions
-Removes Hong Kong's special status
>Following the terms of the Hong Kong special status trade agreement that hinges on it being a self-governed state. (It no longer is)
-Daily Cold War rhetoric from Pompeo
>Sabre rattling, but could be taken as aggressive action depending on whether Pompeo was talking about any of the points above. If so, then it's warranted.
-Restricts Chinese student visas
>The world is in lock-down. Even countries heavily reliant on chinese student spending, have temporarily restricted such visas.
-Ends fulbright scholar program Hong Kong
>Why continue such programs when the status of such a country changes? Those programs and trade agreements have to be renegotiated.
-Contemplating banning TikTok
>Reciprocal treatment of western social media. So far the first and only deliberate escalation of tensions against China, on this list. Justified... but certainly an escalation.
> as the Trump administration gets increasingly desperate to win a reelection.
Or maybe, just maybe, he is doing something which he believes is the right thing to do and will help Americans? The ratcheting up could just be a tactic to force the next administration into a position to actually deal with the dysfunctional relationship rather than always rolling over and hoping things will be different like previous administrations.
You can be sure that "war games" are being played out routinely.
The problem here is that this is an obvious escalation with US as the aggressor and not all US allies are willing to follow the US into war as the current administration is seen as unreliable.
You even had the former and current (!) prime ministers of Australia warning of high likelihood of a war between China and the US within the next 3 months. Where the next 3 months of course is the period of the US presidential election indicating that they clearly see a connection between the US elections and increased China tensions.
Is it really the US making the first move? Facebook is blocked in China as are several other big countries. Granted, this is a ban after the company made inroads, but it seems that China has been doing this for a long time now and in many industries.
Who made the first move is kind of a philosophical question. And the tech war is part of a bigger "war" that is currently unfolding going from rhetorics to trade to military maneuvers.
What is more important is how it is being perceived amongst other countries around the south china sea. And as far as I can tell the US does not have the support it normally would have. Even from surefire allies such as Australia.
China has been doing moves like this for a long time so I don’t know how the US is the first aggressor here. Several US tech companies have been banned in China for a while at this point.
So what are we China now? Also I'm not sure it's quite true those companies were banned. Google voluntarily pulled out of the Chinese market, and re-entered.
So how do you explain the re-entering the market by Google?
The "rules" were sovereign rules China applied and it's not as if other search engines or companies in China could get away without following those same rules... plus, such rules are now being applied to ByteDance and WeChat in the USA to make them "voluntarily" pull out as well and this of courses legitimizes China's past and present actions (which is fundamentally why I do not think we should be going down this route).
It's basically admitting defeat if we start using the same policies as China. China owns up to their policies of censorship and heavy-handed market control. They're not hiding that fact. If we start down that path too then we're just adopting their system and admitting we can't beat them with a free market and freedom of access to apps/information.
Keep in mind that Trump's rationale for blocking WeChat is that it is "allowing the Chinese Communist Party a mechanism for keeping tabs on Chinese citizens who may be enjoying the benefits of a free society for the first time in their lives." That's basically saying the people are too stupid and must have their information access controlled—which, as you may know, is exactly the communist part of China's modus operandi.
> The problem here is that this is an obvious escalation with US as the aggressor and not all US allies are willing to follow the US into war as the current administration is seen as unreliable.
I don't see how US is the aggressor. The kind of control CCP has over these companies is well known and as someone who is not an American, I was surprised why the US admin had not taken stern measures till now. This standoff was initiated when China decided to kick out American companies for not subscribing to their censorship policies. And the way companies like WeChat feed into CCP's censorship framework is well known.
Well yes that's how these things usually go, but haven't a bunch of white people left? Doesn't make the economic wrong right, but does at least crudely function as justice.
Symbolic appeasement without an actual change in living conditions for the majority of the populace who suffered the brunt of the exploitation is not justice
Punishing the perpetrators and undoing the damage are two different things. Absolutely more of the second is needed. But what I mentioned functions as a crude form of the first.
Like it or not, kicking out white people isn't just symbolism.
To be clear, I agree that transfer of power was a classic neoliberal failure, and the situation is a travesty.
> There has never been a case in human history where one group of people voluntarily gave up their wealth, status and privilege to another group of people. Wealth transfer always leads to violence.
There was an interesting book published about two years ago (I'm too lazy to search for it) which showed that wealth "re-calibration" only really happened as a result of violent change. I know I wouldn't be here in front of a computer writing this comment if it hadn't been for WW2 that brought communist rule to my Eastern-European country, which communist rule brought forced industrialisation with the help of mass education (that was of course free, unlike before WW2). That benefited my parents who could make the "leap" from the countryside to the city. Probably a new war could similarly eliminate the wealth inequality in countries like the US.
Actually I looked for it and I'm 99% sure this is the book: "The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century" [1]
> Probably a new war could similarly eliminate the wealth inequality in countries like the US.
Perhaps just by destroying wealth. It’s unlikely that any violence could improve the US middle class since it’s already richer than the middle class in most other countries. Best you can do at that point is just try to eliminate the wealthy if you’re fixated on income inequality.
USSR was isolated from the American economy. USA is doing everything in its power to destroy top tier Chinese companies and exploit local political situations.
China is a lot more stable, both economically and politically, than the Soviet Union. While it's not quite par with the United States yet, China has a population 4x the size of the United States, which gives them unprecedented scale to build out and deploy new tech that can easily leapfrog any edge the United States has right now.
In the long term, the only thing going for the US are alliances with other developed countries and democracies. But the current administration doesn't seem to care very much about that.
I don’t think raw population numbers are as useful as they seem. Most ruling political states have been comprised of a fairly small group of elites. Think Britain in India, or even the Mughals before them. We should also consider that Canada and Mexico have been/can be more integrated into a single economic unit.
The more important part is technological innovation, and so far, I remain unconvinced that a closed totalitarian system will have as much innovation as an open one, in the long term.
Otherwise, agreed that the US does need its allies, though I don’t necessarily agree that it has alienated them. If you look at the real events, and not merely the media talking heads, there is absolutely a growing sense of unity against China. See: India, Vietnam, Japan, Philippines, increased NATO budget commitments, to name a few.
> The more important part is technological innovation, and so far, I remain unconvinced that a closed totalitarian system will have as much innovation as an open one, in the long term.
It's better to characterize/qualify Chinese style of governance as a top-down meritocratic totalitarian government. Policymakers in China are theoretically able to make decisions that are optimal to achieve certain policy goals, say x% economic growth. In contrast, democracies set policy goals and make decisions through the messy process of achieving political consensus.
IMO, private innovation happens when a combination of factors align: free consumer choice, a large market under a common set of rules and stable political conditions. I don't think the Chinese style of governance prevents any of this.
Public innovation happens through well-funded universities and taxpayer-funded research grants. China pushes one step further at times by funding new technology/research directly through state owned/sponsored enterprises.
I think there are genuine fears within US policy circles that the stability afforded by economic growth under a meritocratic totalitarian government could give China an edge over countries like the US, which have to work with the overheads of a democracy. I believe observers in the future will agree that these fears were not unfounded.
I agree with most of what you’re saying. I would just add that much of the US’s power comes from cultural capital. New York, Hollywood, the widespread use of English, tech companies that rely on free speech (e.g. Twitter or YouTube), and so on. I’d argue that it is impossible to separate culture from technology.
I don’t believe that China can ever get remotely close to this cultural influence if it retains an authoritarian system. The artistic ecosystem will never form.
That's directly contradicted by the success of media exports from China lately, already in Asia but it's beginning to cross the language barrier into English Youtube, despite the firewall. In fact it shows it's money and competition that matter, and there is plenty of both in China.
Links? Examples? Some obscure series on YouTube isn’t particularly relevant. My narrative will be “directly contradicted” when the Chinese equivalent of Brad Pitt, Disney, NBA, MLB, NFL, Warner Brothers, etc. are household names in America and the world.
Chinese restricts thought which by definition will take a whole range of creative ideas off the table. They're limiting their tool set in ways that can't be overcome within their governance system.
That’s not meritocratic in the normal sense of the word. Nobody is allowed to ignore CCP policy goals hoping to prove that they are flawed with data later. You’ll be in a re-education camp long before then.
Now it may be true that you can quickly climb the ladder if you never challenge anything, but that’s a pretty narrow set of merit being recognized. It’s just barely an improvement over promoting family members. In both cases, no fundamental change can legitimately bubble up based on merit.
A system that does not respond well to criticism will inevitably fail on its own... in which case they don't need their apps to be banned for that to happen.
History has shown that countries can suppress dissidents for hundreds of years. This current rendition of the Chinese government could easily survive decades while suppressing criticism (which they obviously do).
So you are justifying American imperialism in "helping countries along" by forcibly collapsing unfavorable regimes?
If only the US motives were actually that altruistic, but in reality US intervention in foreign regimes were mostly to protect its interests rather than any actual ideals.
>See: India, Vietnam, Japan, Philippines, increased NATO budget commitments, to name a few.
Apologies for unstructured reply:
There are other real events too, like how trade between China and ASEAN increased throughout covid and and the general trend is more integration. The real events you outlined are also still filtered through FVEY talking heads. People are misattributing increased militarily budgets in the region as growing hint solidifying US coalition when many of these increases are because these countries no longer see US as a reliable partner in SCS, a pattern that started under Obama. See Australians increased military budget citing specifically so, or how their foreign minister upheld US position on SCS but publicly distanced herself from Trump/Pompeo bellicose China policy. Philippines just bailed SCS drills. Half of Vietnamese military acquisitions capabilities target Malaysia, like wise for other countries in the region. It's not all to challenge China - people forget SCS is a 6 party dispute with various overlapping claims. Like when Taiwan AND China both sent ship to assert their claims after PCA ruling. BTW their increased funding and capabilities is directly a result of increased growth from China's growth. Or that China puts more warship tonnage than the entire region combined every year, by multitudes. Or how US military experts want access to Japanese basing to spreadout US asset risk against Chinese strike, but rampant covid in Japanese US bases just made sure that will never happen. Or this meme [1] that explains India's geopolitical situation, China is not the only big country with nervous neighbors.
Or how moving manufacturing out of China is still an ongoing experiment and ultimately one first started by China herself, where China gets to decide winners and losers. Months after Samsung closed their last phone plant in China, they outsourced their low-end models under a Chinese ODM. Also Vietnam is full, all their infrastructure including human capital are at capacity and will take years to cultivate. Or how people celebrate Foxconn recently moving 1B iphone manufacturing to India but don't mention they've invested 8B into IC packaging in China the same week. Or most of final assembling happening in India is still completely reliant on Chinese supply chains. Or how India basically needs 30 years of Chinese reforms to reach comparable development status as China and China could only achieve that due to authoritarian government structure... does India's messy democracy stand a chance? History and past attempts at reform suggests no. Or how automation + ASEAN competition means India will only get to grab a fraction of Chinese manufacturing before they get another 300M unemployed, angry youths because they don't have one-child policy. China still has that many in "poverty" even after peak manufacturing phase. IMO there's just not enough global demand for India to ever replicate China or reach parity. And that demographic boon of of youth is going to turn into a curse. Rest of ASEAN is the same, if you divide all of Chinese manufacturing at peak, with minimal automation, that fed entire world, ~400M jobs, there's simply not enough to go around. Again, China controls the supply chain, she will decide winners for the next 10 years (this number is important), not the west. She simply hasn't enacted extreme policies like US entities list, but could literally cripple many sectors in any country it chooses if she does.
The geopolitics of the region is complex, and everyone in the region is hedging between US and China for posturing, everyone is building up - through growth enabled by China - because they doubt US commitment under current admin that will take years to fix. Except US analysts thinks unless they start a war with China by 2025-2030 latest (that 10 years), Chinese advantage in SCS will be insurmountable. Incidentally, it will take a few years for TSMC to finish their Arizona plant, otherwise no one gets 7nm chips for...
> China is a lot more stable, both economically and politically, than the Soviet Union.
That is not at all clear right now.
You have effectively a dictator in charge. It doesn't matter what is good for China, just what is good for Comrade Pooh. The longer Xi Jinping stays in power, the more those two diverge.
In addition, China still has a surplus of unmarried men with no prospects--that's an explosion waiting to happen. I personally think Xi Jinping wants a shooting war somewhere so he can throw a couple million men into the meat grinder.
While I loathe President Cheeto, I would say that most of the Western powers are fed up with China, at this point. So, while Trump is acting like a petulant child, I don't see any major European powers rushing to China's defense--engagement has obviously failed. Some of them are probably more than happy to see this happen.
Finally, while Trump is a lightning rod, the big issue is that ALL the Western powers seem to be struggling with a very resurgent, nationalist right wing--not just the US. The rank and file are pissed off that the corporatocracy has exploited and then abandoned them, and nobody is producing a good answer. The US can fix Trump--whether it can fix the underlying problems that produced Trump is a different question.
I dismissed it as mere hyperbole in 2016 when people suggested this to me. Now I feel it has a significant probability of actually happening.
Also, I recently watched a documentary on the start of Nazi Germany. The parallels with current political movements are astounding. Fake news, discrediting experts, ignoring protocols, validating xenophobia, using disasters to grab more power - we've seen it all before.
How should they? The average person has no clue of Nazi Germany, let alone what factors made it possible. Many (young) Americans today think everyone in Germany is still a Nazi.
China already has concentration camps, heavy censorship, its a dictatorship and forcefully controls the population, and it's not just he "one child policy", its the sterilization of Uyghur men, and the forced marriage of their woman. All evidence points to china treating Uyghurs worse than Nazis treated Jews pre-war (Final solution was during WW2)
I the only difference between China and Nazi Germany from a human rights perspective, is that China hasn't declared any war.
Still, here in the west Nazis is the greatest evil ever, while China is complicated, and even some communist genociders are loved.
I'm not defending Nazis, I'm just staing that their evil is not unparalleled, and there exists a current nation that reeks of the same evil, and there doesn't seem to be a way to stop it.
Sure, the west is a mess with all the political tensions, but all that is just blinding to what is happening outside.
I think they are both close to it. China is more obvious about it, and their iron-fist approach is perhaps a little less scary than the west's "normalise the atrocities" approach. China is a somewhat stagnant regime, perhaps somewhat set in their ways, yet the west comes across as an accelerating regime, becoming scarier faster.
The key difference for me (at least based on my own anecdata from speaking with people from China) is that Chinese people are not blind to the problems within their politics and government. Especially, the youth recognise the oppressive nature of the regime.
In the West, however, there is a subset of people for whom certain populist political figures can do no wrong. These people are happy to tolerate any "eccentricities", and perhaps don't understand what they might be enabling. And, unfortunately, the enablers are not a small minority.
For example, one guy even claimed he could shoot someone on 5th avenue and not lose a single vote; his supporters applauded in agreement.
> The parallels with current political movements are astounding. Fake news, discrediting experts, ignoring protocols, validating xenophobia, using disasters to grab more power - we've seen it all before.
I'm just listening to the "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" audiobook; a bit dated now (written in the '70s) but also written by someone who was in Germany during the whole time. There are a lot of parallels, but according to him, there are a lot of key differences (caveat -- haven't independently checked these characterizations):
* Germany did not have a strong democratic history; unlike both England and France, which had strong movements towards democracy hundreds of years before, Germany was a functional military dictatorship up until the end of WW I. Hitler could openly say that democracy was a bad idea, and lots of rank-and-file Germans agreed with him.
* Germany had a very strong army that was authoritarian, more or less an independent political entity, and sympathetic to Hitler's aims
* Germany had a very biased judiciary. While leftists were sentenced to death for treason for simply reporting violations of the Versailles Treaty, Hitler ended up spending only 9 months in jail for actually attempting a violent coup. This wasn't just because Hitler was popular or charimatic: loads of nationalists / authoritarian rightists had similarly soft punishments.
The US has a strong cultural affinity for democracy; the military is not, at the moment, sympathetic to a dictatorship; and while according to some reports, some police departments are more sympathetic towards right-wing demonstrators than left-wing demonstrators, the judiciary is not.
In other words, we have a lot more institutions that would need to be subverted before we were in the kind of danger Germany was in the 1920s. Still, better to be aware of the dangers and do what we can to oppose them sooner rather than later.
While I think there are differences, the similarities are striking enough to be of concern. For example, the deployment of a paramilitary-like force in Portland makes me think back to what I've read about the early days of the SS.
With respect to the biased judiciary, the way the courts are being stacked in the US may well result in something similar. The AG appears to be already fairly biased (compromised?).
Yes, there are differences still, even in the situations I describe above, but the similarities are worrying.
China is likely playing the higher ground to see who wins in November. Biden will undo all of this and go back to ceding America’s prosperity to the dictatorship of China.
That’s the thing, I hate trump badly but he is at least partially right in China. The problem is working alone doesn’t work even if you are the US. And trump has no friends left so there is just him going alone. This was one of the reasons for the TPP.
I think increasingly over the last year, dogmatic thinking and fantastical thinking related to several important topics are becoming mainstream, chief among them China. What's disheartening to me is that not only are neocons and Steve Bannon type ideologues pushing hard on this, it seems the majority of "liberals" do not really object to their views or actions on China. Ask yourself this: if you believe the Trump administration is corrupt, inept and acting out of self interest, how can you possibly think their strategy against China (the one foreign policy they pursued with most of their resources) is sound or good for American interest? So Trump botched covid responses that badly but he just got China right out of sheer luck?
I think the unfortunate explanation is that many Americans are now quite vindictive against the whole concept of China and would not mind any action that seem to damage it. Instead of looking at the issue objectively they simply want to believe whatever hurts must be wise. It's making me wonder if unthinkable disasters may actually happen out of sheer stupidity and irrationality.
>it seems the majority of "liberals" do not really object to their views or actions on China
Why would they? Less than equally free trade over the last ~30yr has driven a lot of blue collar voters into the arms of people who make crude promises to bring jobs back.
Many people would like to see more tactful foreign policy by the US but you'd be hard pressed to find people who think the status quo with regard to China was not in serious need of adjustment.
> Increasingly the only thing that matters is which side you are on
You mean, what matters to the political and economic elites in the US, perhaps. In the rest of the world, most of us (IMNSHO) don't share this outlook, nor would we like to be on any one of the two sides.
Can China force Tesla to sell its Chinese operations because Teslas data gathering poses a national security risk ?
China can force any company out of the country for any arbitrary reason whatsoever. As far as I know, they are still banning Houston Rockets games because Morey supported Hong Kong in a tweet.
More importantly, China has acted unilaterally in the past to inflict pain on western companies in preference of domestic firms. What’s new is the US doing it back.
Tesla was one of the first US companies to operate with the level of autonomy they have in China. Perhaps there is some retribution from the CCP, but such is the consequence of doing business with a totalitarian state.
Why is this downvoted? It’s true. Everything the US is doing, China has been doing for decades one thousand fold. Whether that’s right or wrong is a different issue.
Geopolitics is a little more complicated than phrases we tell children.
At the core of it, the kind of protectionism China has engaged in is defecting in a prisoner's dilemma. If you play always cooperate against a defectbot, you're going to lose eventually, even if you start very far ahead.
The correlation of free trade with civil liberties strikes me as missing the forest for the trees. I can’t imagine the average citizen thinks of “free trade vs. protectionism” in moral terms.
Except that the comment at the head of the thread was the one arguing that two wrongs make a right - that if the US does this, then all of a sudden China could start doing the same thing to US companies. The reply is just pointing out that this ignores the fact China already does this, on much vaster scales, and has done since forever. (Given that China is about the closest thing we have to a second superpower, this fits interestingly with your argument.)
Because it's false? Companies are banned in China for not following Chinese laws or directives. Like... how they report on Tiananmen Square, for example.
When you learn a bit more about geopolitics, you realize that there's more to these things than initially appears. Tiananmen Square was pretty bad. But when you look at the utter collapse of Russia after it tried to Westernize, and the poor shape of America because of her own economic policies, someone not living in the Anglo/American news bubble would really have to wonder.
To that end, companies that have an easier time skirting around the dirty politics – like Tesla, Ford, and GM – have been able to have successful and profitable operations in China. As the parent points out, there's a pandora's box that's being opened. And if you are led to believe that it's a normal comment, it's the same nationalistic stuff you've being trained to fall in line with.
It is well known China has stolen IP from western companies and strong armed them into partnership agreements if they wanted to operate in China, as well as using illegitimate anti-monopoly crackdowns to handicap them.
> Companies are banned in China for not following Chinese laws or directives.
Sure, but by that same argument, this executive order bans ByteDance/Tencent under American laws and directives (specifically, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act).
Obviously not the case - this is an out-right ban. There has been no evidence of TikTok violating any laws, and furthermore, no new laws have been issued to which TikTok could adhere to avoid a ban.
Companies operating in China can adhere to Chinese law to operate in the country, but the Trump administration hasn't even issued any laws.
The IEEPA is literally a law. (Also, PRC laws are vague/broad and often applied arbitrarily, just look at the new Hong Kong security law. Not saying this isn't true for US laws, but it's disingenuous to point at the laws when the effects and implementation of those policies matter more.)
CCP bots and troll accounts, coupled with everyone who is downvoting because they equate agreeing with anything that is done during the Trump administration as "Trump supporting".
It's rather surprising that US policies are blamed for the current standoff instead of China's Great Firewall, which has been getting stronger by each year due to lack of a stronger opposition.
Our country is founded on a free market economy and competition. If a Chinese company outcompetes US companies... well that means our system is working.
If we decide that rounding up Muslims is a no good very bad idea it follows that we should probably try to do less business with those who do or at the very least do business on terms less favorable to them.
We may want to start with that as the official reason then instead of "national security." Trump is clearly not even trying to pretend to care about that issue.
Some say yes, specifically some in the current administration... But ignoring my glib & pointless attack at a few powerful racists: this tangent of the tangent has very little to do with that the previous posters were saying.
The comparison would only be valid if rounding up the Muslim population has some effect on commercial interests specifically the giving commercial interests in the country doing the rounding up an advantage over those in the other country.
My point is that we shouldn't be copying the tactics of our competitors if we believe and accuse them to be wrong in the first place.
We've been accusing China of "unfair tariffs" when in reality we actually benefit from exploiting their cheap labor and sell them back the same iPhone they assembled for something like 10x the markup. Trying to say this is a reactionary tariff is disingenuous, when the trade balance has been in this state for decades, and the only real reason we're starting to ban their tech exports is because it's getting dangerously competitive with our own. It's shaking our foundational beliefs that our system is destined to win, and now we're resorting to the tactics of our rivals in a moment of insecurity.
I think the scope and actions matter. Responding to tariffs with tariffs makes perfect sense, for instance. Punishing individuals makes less sense (eg. if china decided to send all expat americans in china to concentration camps, doing the same to chinese americans wouldn't make sense).
>If a Chinese company outcompetes US companies... well that means our system is working.
It's a good sign that a US company can outcompete a chinese company, even with a handicap, but it's a not a desirable situation.
Even assuming they revoked the ban, I also don't see how it's particularly relevant to the point I was making; they still banned the entire franchise for months because he wrote a single message on Twitter. Censorship isn't somehow acceptable if it only lasts ~8 months. It's perhaps the definition of arbitrarily abused power.
Anytime you do business with China your essentially doing business with the CCP.
We would all like China to be a positive part of the global community but the fact of the matter is you can't ignore their overall policy. A possible genocide against the ethnic Uighurs, aggressive expansion in the South China Sea, normalization of censorship and suppression, treatment of Hong Kong & Taiwan: all of which are a complete contrast of Western values.
Could China force Tesla to sell Chinese operations? Absolutely. I don't think any one would be surprised. Companies that enter the Chinese market (if they can in the first place) are subjected to getting a smaller piece of the pie from the start.
Facebook has relentlessly tried to tap the Chinese market but are blocked by the CCP. So why does TikTok get a free pass to the American market? Why does __any__ Chinese company get a pass?
I think we need to continuously evaluate our relationship with China.
> US tech firms still have a harder time operating in China.
It's entirely hard to believe this considering the obscene amounts of profits that US companies make by just "designing in california". Our whole era is enabled and defined by cheap chinese labor.
Clearly many companies benefit from outsourcing manufacturing to China. But they don't own the manufacturing process, they're basically using contract labor and supply chains. Software and design has proven harder to outsource or I'm sure that would be gone, too. The point is that our software apps are not freely allowed to exist there. The firewall is a thing, information is tightly controlled, and they can't allow freedom of speech so they typically ban or limit many American applications.
it's a tit for tat. chinese labour market isn't exactly a free market, and its state controlled policies is precisely the reason why the world chose china in the first place
> It's entirely hard to believe this considering the obscene amounts of profits that US companies make by just "designing in california". Our whole era is enabled and defined by cheap chinese labor.
Labor is fungible, if it wasn't in China it would be somewhere else.
Google, fb, Twitter doesn't comply with internet security law in China, which requires servers in China and content regulation. The same law applies to everyone. If you follow it by the letter, you can operate. Case in point, Apple iCloud, Amazon, Microsoft azure etc. Yes the law itself is highly controversial. I for one would want this law changed. But at least the path for market access is documented. In tiktok case, it didn't break any existing us laws. It has an American office and hires Americans to do security and content monitoring. All data is stored on US soil. It promised to let outside review of data practices and how the algorithm works. There is no clearly spelled out procedure to follow to be allowed operating in the US. I am sure tiktok people are searching in the air for ideas to get themselves allowed to operate. I think thats the difference between fb in China and tiktok in the US.
It's become clear over the past year or so that US policy is essentially to ban Chinese tech companies from the US. ZTE, Huawei, ByteDance, WeChat, and surely more to follow as the election approaches and Trump tries to escalate tensions with China further.
On the other side, American tech companies do massive amounts of business in China.
The relationship is very lopsided, and at some point, China is sure to take action against American tech firms in China.
> Do countries get to do this to each other whenever they feel like it now ? Can China force Tesla to sell its Chinese operations because Teslas data gathering poses a national security risk ?
Yes? Are you unaware that China has been doing exactly this for many, many years?
Just as two examples, AWS was forced by China to sell off its Chinese operations to a Chinese company because of arbitrary national security reasons. Blizzard Entertainment was forced by China to go through a Chinese intermediary who controls and publishes all Blizzard games in China.
But the big difference is that Amazon still controls aws in China, the product, the brand, the IP. And aws is developed employees in Seattle. It's just operated by the Chinese company. The Chinese company deal with servers, deployment, accesses to the servers and stuff. Amazon also get a significant share of revenue from that market. That is totally different from US gov forcing Bytedance to sell tiktok. Bytedance will no longer own tiktok. It's will have 0 shares. Zero control and no revenue sharing. Technically Microsoft can do whatever they want with tiktok in the future.
The Chinese government sets their (extremely authoritarian) rules on censorship for companies to legally operate in China but the rules apply to everyone equally.
Chinese companies of course have to comply, but foreign companies have the choice to comply or not. Google chose to comply initially but decided to pull out later on. Microsoft/Apple choose to comply and are still operating in significant ways in China.
In contrast, US is proposing to ban TikTok, Huawei, DJI without clear rules: the reason to ban these companies is that they are Chinese companies. In other words, Chinese companies are "born a crime" to the US in the current climate, without the need to show what rules are violated or evidence of wrongdoing.
China also doesn't have the monopolistic power in tech that the US does: forbidding Google to operate in China it's not the same as forcing app stores to de-list certain apps globally.
It's even more absurd to force ByteDance to sell their US business to a US company. If the US feels justified that this could be done on "national security" ground, why shouldn't EU do the same to US tech companies?
I do hope that US citizens see that for much of the world, US is no longer the champion of free market, promoter of free-speech or guardian of world-order. All that matters is if these values benefit US economically or politically.
The US lost it when Japan was economically sanctioned for its competitive auto/electronic sector in 1980s. China is taking the same heat today and India would be the next target if India were to want to play its role on the international stage. The best outcome for the world would be to have multiple strong economies globally that keep each other in check; rather than one country having monopolistic power over all globally significant online forums.
In the AWS case, the law that AWS was breaking was that they were operating telecom equipment while not being a Chinese company. So I think there’s more symmetry there (though one could argue that there’s at least a uniformly enforceable rule on all foreign companies, unlike the ByteDance case).
Yes, the closest example would be Huawai in this case but the lack of uniformly enforced rules is deafening.
If US were to decide that all telecom equipment used in the US must be produced by domestic companies then that's fair enough.
Going after one specific privately owned company, influencing ally states' purchase decision, banning foreign companies globally from supplying chips is outright bullying and sets the unfortunate precedent that a country could leverage its monopolistic position in tech to stifle competition.
> ...sets the unfortunate precedent that a country could leverage its monopolistic position in tech to stifle competition.
Isn't that exactly what the Chinese laws do? Everything I've read seems to say that they prevent foreign companies from being able to fairly compete against local Chinese. companies.
When Google entered the Chinese search market it was competing fairly with local players: both Baidu and Google have to accept the (authoritarian) rule that they need to censor their search if they want to legally operate in China.
You could argue if the rule itself is good (I think it's not), but the point is that there are clearly stated rules that Google could choose to comply with or not.
Which "rule" did TikTok, Huawai, Wechat violate other than the fact that they are born Chinese companies?
The US could also decide that all social networks that operate in the US must be owned by American companies and subject to congressional inquiries. That would be fair enough, though that's an even more extreme version than what the Chinese government has been demanding.
I think it's important to clear up why Google left China. Google was complying with Chinese rules. They left China because of a state-sponsored attack on Google[1]. Trying to play the high road with CCP, while leaving this out, is whitewashing American tech history in the state.
Given that the Chinese state elected to hack an American firm that was operating in it's borders, you could make any sort of excuse to prevent Chinese firms from owning American infrastructure for any sort of national security reasons. TikTok doesn't have to break any rules. If I see my roommate get mauled by a tiger, that doesn't mean I have to sit around and wait to get mauled before I take an action.
FWIW AWS basically skirted this by having the chinese companies they contract with be the official "seller of record"/"operator"/"owner" but the regions are de-facto operated by western AWS engineering teams under a complicated contracting scheme.
WAL-MART, Starbuck, Ford, General Motors, GE, Microsoft, Apple, Tesla, UnitedHealth, HP, IBM, JPMorgan, Pepsi, CocaCola... all these companies are easy targets of China. But the Chinese government is not likely to make any move unless really cornered.
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If you want more explanation, you'll find years' worth at these links:
China has been doing this for a very long time to US companies. I'm not sure what pandora's box is being opened here. They just didn't selectively to two companies, they do it to all of them (other than Tesla who was the exception to the rule).
a) Fair enough. But I reserve some doubts it will be that easy. If it gets to the point that China bans Boeing, I'm convinced many EU companies would also be in the firing line of US sanction regulators and China.
b) Cormac cannot even produce jet engines after 25+ years of state backed R&D.
"China does not have the capacity to build a jet engine yet alone a commercial plane in service."
My point was that they are building a commercial plane (not with Chinese fans yet), as your usage of "yet alone" expressed some kind of dependency or sequence, at least to my non native speaking ears.
EU gave $200+ billion, plus each country did their own thing.
Ask FB or Google about their Chinese websites. How are they doing? This should have been done long time ago, tit for tat.
As for the rest, I doubt China can resort to stupid stuff. US and EU are not happy with them for a lot of things, including Covid, and China desperately needs them. China allowed manufacturing not to help us, but to gain taxes, employment and to steel IP.
This is nothing new; it's geopolitics. The big boys have been doing this since the dawn of time.
Think of it like a playground: Everyone generally gets along, but the big kids can and sometimes do monopolize things they think are important at the time. The smaller kids make way for the bigger kids, and every now and then there's a fight between the bigger kids when they disagree strongly enough. They exchange words, jostle and block each other, or maybe it even comes to blows, and then things return to the status-quo for awhile.
That's how geopolitics work, except that it's usually a LOT more subtle or at least hidden from the public eye. Trump isn't a member of the political elite and is completely lacking in tact, so it's a lot harder to keep an appearance of calmness when he's in the room. Expect a much cleaner appearance of normalcy once he's out of office.
> A meta point I'd like to add is that currently 10 % of the earths population in the "Westosphere" controls 60 % of the worlds wealth. This is untenable in the long term and all this flailing about will not stop a reversion to a more balanced world. Its better that this happen gracefully than in a violent fashion.
That has been the case since at least the start of colonialism, so something like 200 years now. It depends on what you mean by long term, but that is already a long time. (And it has been sort of non-violent since the de-colonization wars in the 60s).
I'd prefer we reference CCP instead of China to differentiate the Chinese people from their tyrannical rulers.
The laws in America not outright making it illegal for tyrannical organizations who operate concentrate camps and partake in genocide (Uighurs) to have access to our democratic societies and benefit economically doesn't mean it's not something you should stand for - and where the laws likely should exist for that.
Likewise, the CCP would likely just takeover Tesla's operations - maybe paying them, maybe not. The difference in the US, currently at least, is TikTok has options: 1) they don't sell and the ban comes, they don't receive any $x billions compensation, or 2) they understand a ban is likely in the US (and growing other democratic nations) and they make the smarter economic decision of selling for $x billions - maybe at fire sale pricing, however there are many competitors who could still compete and be capable of taking over operations, so perhaps not as low as otherwise it could be.
We're not hurtling towards the abyss, that's fear mongering; you may be right that SV startups may have to divest their China based investors, however that may or may not hurt them - and that would be the result of countering external costs to supporting and allowing CCP that we haven't been adequately accounting for for decades.
This is a strategic political-economic pressure decision to put pressure onto the CCP - notice that we're paying attention and won't stand for the level of abuse and tyrannical behaviours of the that we're becoming more and more aware of.
Economic pressure and preventing access to democratic societies for economic gain IS the graceful way to go about this, rather than allow CCP to gain more reach, access for propaganda for intelligence gathering and manipulation, to then spoil politicians further and become more entrenched in our societies economically and via investments in the most popular apps, etc.
And finally, the CCP isn't suicidal - their $500 billion stimulus you reference was for their own survival as well; they also wouldn't want this system they've been creating getting its fingers strongly into the rest of the world economy (which they depend on to maintain) to collapse, the collapse of which would mean things would shift greatly and more likely away from their own benefit.
Here's a diff between the two orders, if anyone else is curious about the specific changes. I used the TikTok/ByteDance order as the "original", so removals and additions are relative to changing that one into the WeChat/Tencent one: https://gist.github.com/Deimos/8fcb95ec4017cf1a28e32f6057a91...
Are we witnessing the end of free markets? Or the growth of decentralization? These sorts of moves are making a very strong case for decentralized platforms.
More likely the end of one-sided free markets. There's no suggestion that the US is about to pull the same shit on countries that don't try and hobble US tech companies.
The EU will probably start to tax tech companies that avoid taxes by registering in tax havens within the next few years. If that's the US' sole motivation, it seems like a receipt for disaster.
I don't have a problem with this. US companies haven't been bringing foreign revenue home because the tax rates are too low in other countries. If EU taxes them then they'll bring the revenue home.
I have two of their drones. Hope I can continue to fly. It’s helped me a lot since this pandemic started, being able to take a fun distraction. I’m able to just zone out from all those meetings, calls, reports, emails, code etc. etc.
It’s kind of hilarious that Trump claims to be worried about the possibility that disinformation campaigns might be funded by these sources, while consistently ignoring the disinformation campaign that has been investigated and proven by his own intelligence forces and his own party’s committees setup to investigate it.
The ongoing anti China circus through executive orders is arbitrary and draconian to say the least... and while I've been mostly ignoring it so far, a lot of Americans live in China and have money on Wechat. Are they now violating this week's "law"?
I just managed to move part of my money to friends. Try in smaller amounts. Sending a bunch of hongbaos works up to a point as well (then it requires SMS verification which I can't do right now)
After fooling around with it, I was able to move or otherwise give away the balance in my account. I had to do in a combination of smaller hongbaos, transfers and business transfers. I triggered face verification with the first transfer I tried, but some how it reset after a while.
I’m mixed about this. On one hand the US as the most powerful country should lead and be an example of the free world. On the other hand China is playing an asymmetric game with foreign companies and has banned many US companies from entering their market.
Now they’re still a developing country, so this would be fine by me, except that the Chinese government is committing crimes against humanity and getting more and more powerful at the same time. This is really dangerous, and the only thing I can think of is germany pre-WWII where Hitler had huge approval ratings. Chinese people are extremely pro-CCP even in the US, this is frightening imo. And most countries are doing nothing about the xinjiang and hongkong situations. So maybe this is a good move...
1,371 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 497 ms ] threadHas the USA not been doing that all over the world since forever?
Hell, they usually just change governments directly, without even bothering with public opinion.
1) Not all influence is equal. USA owns Australia but I wouldn't trade that for China.
2) Just because USA has spies elsewhere doesn't mean they'd tolerate spies on their soil.
https://opensource.tencent.com/en/about
Tencent owns 40% of Epic Games, which owns Fortnite and the Epic Games store. This might be a symbolic move more then anything, because unless they intend to be rigorous about Tencent’s connections with all these companies (e.g Can’t buy anything on Epic’s store, or make micro transactions in games from companies owned by Tencent), they really are not stopping anything.
Your purchases through Epic or Riot (League of Legends, Valorant) are not seen as ‘direct’ transactions with Tencent.
Basically it’s exactly the kind of grandstanding Trump would partake in.
Edit: Tencent related gaming companies apparently not impacted.
https://twitter.com/SamAugustDean/status/1291576813685108736
"White House official confirmed to the LA Times that the EO only blocks transactions related to WeChat"
https://twitter.com/SamAugustDean/status/1291576813685108736
> The following actions shall be prohibited beginning 45 days after the date of this order, to the extent permitted under applicable law: any transaction that is related to WeChat by any person, or with respect to any property, subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, with Tencent Holdings Ltd. (a.k.a. Téngxùn Kònggǔ Yǒuxiàn Gōngsī), Shenzhen, China, or any subsidiary of that entity, as identified by the Secretary of Commerce (Secretary) under section 1(c) of this order.
I was intrigued by this sentiment, the idea that the conceptual social network is the thing of value, not the application one interacts with it through.
https://techcrunch.com/2020/07/01/lasso-facebook-tiktok-shut...
Meanwhile the president threatens to ban facebook's biggest competitor...
I am surprised Lenovo hasn't been singled out yet. They supply enterprises throughout the U.S. a lot of corporations that hand out laptops to their employees all use Lenovo.
[1] https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/09/david-brock-hil...
[2] https://www.thedailybeast.com/hillary-pac-spends-dollar1-mil...
You can compare that with the top newspapers of the country:
https://www.facebook.com/lemonde.fr https://www.facebook.com/lefigaro
> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.
From the guidelines
Downvoting because you disagree has also been acceptable on this site, since basically forever https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171
The same can apply to social media, it can be pretty obvious based on commenting patterns that there is some propaganda going on in posts blatantly about China, without it being able to identify with any degree of certainty which comments are problematic.
(I take no stance on whether or not there is obviously propaganda here, the commenting and voting does strike me as suspicious, but not to the degree that I think it's a slam dunk that it's not just the result of a biased sample of HN users being interested in posts like this).
But especially when it comes to China, when someone has an opinion that slightly goes against the general sentiment, it's marked as propaganda, or a paid troll, just as a way to invalidate their opinions.
Hence why I'm asking, because I don't see any obvious propaganda here. Just people with a different opinion trying to have a discussion about it. And I'm only asking because someone pointed it out without posting evidence.
The US government has no legal authority to ban publishing (including apps) in the US. They do, however, have the ability to regulate trade between the operators of the App Store (Apple) and the Play Store (Google), and app publishers, which is what they're doing here.
Ban the business relationship, and they've effectively banned the publishing. It's an end run around the US constitution, and everyone should be up in arms about it: not just at the US government, but also at Apple and Google for creating a legal chokepoint for mass censorship by the US federal government.
This would not be possible if end users actually exercised control over their own devices. This is how the web works, and it's how everything else on your device should work, too.
I feel the same way! I can’t understand why there aren’t bipartisan calls for Trump to knock it off. Is it that most people aren’t fully comprehending what’s going on, or are those of us upset about this being dramatic?
I imagine such bans will carry similar force.
I think it would be prudent for us to force alternatives to apple and google app stores (and other software) that are housed and owned in Europe. I have no confidence that US intelligence is not accessing our data and setting up profiles on Europeans that could be used for nefarious purposes.
Setting aside how much of a step back this is from the global utopian internet I suspect the vast majority of posters on HN believed in even a few years ago, the economic impact is gonna be the greatest on the US, which is the biggest beneficiary of a global internet.
If every bloc builds its own siloed internet, its their companies that will benefit at the expense of American companies which currently dominate the entire planet.
There’s nothing wrong with US tech. There is a lot wrong with US persons, subject to capricious US military/law/spying, having real-time control over your device or the services it needs to run.
You can say the same about Chinese tech. Nothing wrong with the device, everything wrong with allowing a government far away real-time remote access/power.
It’s time to peel away software from services once again.
If we break off the control of software distribution, and disable automatic remote updates (which is manufacturer backform/RCE), hardware in the general case can become reasonably safe again.
1. TLS is not the impenetrable black box it is made out to be. Every year there are about three papers published at the top tier computer security conferences about identifying applications within TLS. Check out the NDSS proceedings.
2. The EO prohibits conspiracies to evade the ban. This means anyone caught knowingly helping to evade the prohibitions would be subject to legal penalties.
2. Sure, but the entities involved in evading the ban wouldn't be US entities.
Has Google ever unilaterally removed sideloaded apps from Android?
However, my worry is this: Whilst we have a lot of really good people in China, we don't do any business in China (and there's no realistic prospect of us doing so). So at this point operating in China seems like a huge exposure to risk for relatively little reward in the long term.
But I don't see an alternative for us. Pull out of China and business continuity would take a huge hit; stay in China and accept the risks & uncertainty.
Basically, I'm torn about the whole situation.
My (totally personal opinion guess) is that this is just another way to poke the bear as part of the tit-for-tat with China and maybe a minor contributing factor that someone has got in his ear and blamed TikTok for his low campaign event turnout after there was a TikTok meme to RSVP to his events to make them sound like they were going to be huge, then embarrass him with low numbers.
Cynical perspective is that one of his friends with a stake in Facebook got in his ear about China using TikTok to make fun of him or something, and now Instagram Reels is right there to pick up the slack. Nothing would surprise me with this govt anymore. I mean the news is all talking about TikTok now instead of COVID-19... troop bounties... so on...
[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/executive-or... [2] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/executive-or...
Edit: okay, there is a bit, e.g. "This mobile application may also be used for disinformation campaigns that benefit the Chinese Communist Party, such as when TikTok videos spread debunked conspiracy theories about the origins of the 2019 Novel Coronavirus"
Foreign policy initiatives that satisfy the needs of three or more power blocs in Washington DC tend to have extremely bad outcomes; the last major policy that had a triple motivation was the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
(final paragraph edited for clarity)
If we focus on the companies, why is okay that U.S. companies are able to collect nearly arbitrary data on all U.S. citizens and participate in propaganda?
In my opinion, if China wants to be a part of the global economy, China must let the globe be part of its own economy. Facebook, Google, Twitter have been systematically forced out of China. Why should we let Chinese social media sites in our countries?
The specific act of banning TikTok seems petty and uncalled for, but we have to start somewhere.
...
sigh
An example would be nuclear material and technology. US places a lot of restrictions on individuals' rights to trade these materials, but I believe it is necessary.
So not all restrictions on individual rights are incorrect, when it comes to trading with foreigners.
This is why you have no other retort other than "XENOPHOBIA!". Grow up.
you’re also ignoring that you’ve proved the rest of the world that investing in US is not as safe as everybody thought so. it may byte you in the near future (i don’t wish that, though).
This is a mercantilist stupid response to something that in no way is a "national security" issue.
Sure, ban apps on government/military phones. That's truly about national security.
But 13 year olds doing dance videos, or kpop fans DDOSing Trump's rally ticketing (ie actually an email fishing activity) is not national security.
This is the same sort of isolationist bullshit that has the US DOS currently grading travel to New Zealand as "Level 2" because of their 23 cases of COVID.
Sure, China and the CCP are nasty and infringe their own and other citizens human rights. But these so-called national security EOs are more like "waaaah, but he did it first!" response from a child than the mature response of the supposed lead nation of the Western world.
There are a few video when you type "tiktok propaganda" on youtube. Not sure since I haven't used the app.
I guess. I don't know.
What about the suspicions that Trump is upset that TikTok users helped sabotage one of his big rallies and this is retaliation and thus an overextension of his powers and an exercise in authoritarianism (something he's already done many times anyway)?
These are all American companies. Wechat and TikTok are controlled by Chinese companies.
> What about the suspicions that Trump is upset that TikTok users helped sabotage one of his big rallies and this is retaliation and thus an overextension of his powers and an exercise in authoritarianism (something he's already done many times anyway)?
I suspect that was actually his motive, and the national security reasoning is just a pretext. That said, a stopped clock is right twice a day.
This not just a case of “they did A, so we will respond with B”. It's a case of “they did A, B, C, etc. so we are responding with X after 10+ years“. To be fair, successive US administrations across party lines gave CCP a long enough rope.
It’s the same, reactionary logic, that fails to give first concern for the desired end state. Delaying reactionary measures is what many call patience.
A vindictive, capricious country where millions of dollars in investment can be wiped away under the flimsiest of excuses in one pen stroke, by a single petty man, desperately seeking domestic political approval.
I spent much of my life defending the USA's policies and practice, but this may well be the last straw.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-tiktok-trump-breaking...
Of course, the US wants to be top dog in this free trade Utopia, and the means employed to get to those free-trade ends have frequently been terrible.
But just as frequently the means have been a reasonable (and moral / amoral) push to encourage globalization, which has demonstrably helped reduce poverty and other negative stats the world over.
Does this mean the policies of the CCP are superior to US policy to date?
A widely held belief is both that free trade is good, when both parties engage in it, and that when one party prohibits it the other party is correct in doing the same. This is why reciprocating sanctions and tarrifs is standard practice.
For example, Canada just today announced tarrifs on some US goods in response to the US putting tarrifs on some Canadian goods. That's not because we don't want free trade with the US, it's because free trade only works if it's reciprocal.
Restrictions on trade with China are attacks on our freedom.
Anyway the bigger issue here really is tax evasion through wechat payments or security threats thanks to unlimited access of Chinese gov to your phone storage.
EDIT: I see Chinese wumaos have field day in this comments section downvoting everything left and right.
It’s not an actual national security issue like selling China nukes or something.
While I agree with your stance that this is infringing on personal freedoms of American citizens, and I too wish our leaders wouldn't always so eagerly infringe on personal freedoms in the name of national security, the national security claim itself does have merit.
I think the notion that WeChat is a threat to national security is honestly ridiculous. National security is a legal excuse to do things Trump otherwise wouldn’t be able to do in his pursuit of a trade war.
Again, not condoning the restriction of personal freedoms, but the national security angle is not totally without merit.
While people like you whine about your chat app, it can be a matter of life and death if China is allowed to continue.
It does not work very well if you are the only nice guy within a group of a--holes. You just end up being beaten up. Free Markets work well if pretty much everyone adopts the same rules of commerce, but China is way beyond that point.
Excluding self defense, I wonder if this can be applied to nations too.
[1] http://billkerr2.blogspot.com/2008/08/what-alan-kay-said-abo...
You are saying Europe is behaving like China?
If the US doesn't take action against Chinese protectionism, why should other countries abide by the rules and give US access to their markets? The US provides China it's market even though China closes it down for everyone.
I think US being soft on China sets a bad precedent.
And unfortunately this is what the top comment preaches and I am very disappointed to see that the more-educated-than-the-average-person readers of HN fall into the trade war / retaliation fallacy.
Trade always benefits both parties. Otherwise they would not start trading in the first place.
Do countries get to do this to each other whenever they feel like it now ? Can China force Tesla to sell its Chinese operations because Teslas data gathering poses a national security risk ? China has some pretty serious means available to it for escalation. China can ban Boeing from China forcing the US taxpayer to incur serious losses in keeping the company afloat.
The whole thing is pretty stupid overall. Most people don't realize that during the 2008 crisis it was Chinas 500 billion dollar stimulus that kick started demand and pulled the world out of a depression. China and the US are interdependent and hold up the global system upon which global growth depends. If China slows down as a result of all this that reduces global growth. Pushing China to the wall can make them take extreme steps like undercut the entire dollar based financial order leading to mass instability. The US might come out victorious anyway but its not worth the risks. Not to mention a war which if it breaks out could lead to WW3.
Previous attempts to contain China were much more tactful with things like the TPP and the Iran deal. Right now the world is hurtling towards the abyss and most people here don't even realise it.
A meta point I'd like to add is that currently 10 % of the earths population in the "Westosphere" controls 60 % of the worlds wealth. This is untenable in the long term and all this flailing about will not stop a reversion to a more balanced world. Its better that this happen gracefully than in a violent fashion.
The might have some notion of "big bad central state", and China was and remains that.
In any event, some rhetoric to grease the wheels politically absolutely was in order.
Now, did he really believe that? Was he just selling the American people a bad deal? The end result anyway is that this is precisely the argument that was made, and thousands believed it.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2020/03/05/china-move...
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/china-forcefully-harvests...
You see, I can show the video in which George Floyd was brutally murdered in daylight yelling his mama.
Can you show me such a video of Uyghurs in China.
I will answer it for you: no you can't.
All your doing is proving that China has no freedom of speech. The reason The reason I cant show you such a video is because of Chinese censorship. Such a video would never be allowed to circulate. The fact that a video of George Floyde being murdered can be shared in the US proves that in US we tolerate speech even when it shows the US in bad light. Also the cops who did this to Floyde are being prosecuted.
Even something as simple as a picture of Winnie the Pooh is banned in China because people compared Pooh, a children's cartoon to China's leader. Imagine the leader of a country having his feelings hurt by a child's cartoon so bad that he bans the cartoon.
Iran tried that in the 50s. Latin America tried that in the 70s.
Got overthrown by CIA every time.
Clearly that's not what it means.
Certainly. And the CCP hinders that. But the point of my above comment is to illustrate that it's an open question whether China would be 'allowed' to be open and democratic.
I don't believe the West is actually concerned about CCP's human rights violations. They're simply concerned about China's rise as an economic and military power, we would not support the Saudi regime if human rights was a concern.
One of the major reasons the CCP got a foothold in China was because there was a sense that for over a century China was subservient to Western powers.
The CCP was fine as far as the west was concerned as long as it was primarily a dumb factory for us. But now they have ambitions to go beyond that.
I think that's the crux of the animosity towards China today, not human rights violations, as gross as they are.
I could imagine China being somewhat of an EU and democratic and as long as they buy enough western products, be left alone. But if they actually wanted a truly independent foreign policy for example, that would not fly. See the Iran Deal for how dependent EU foreign policy is on the U.S. one.
P.S. That does not mean the CCP is good. It's not. But pretending that western leaders actually care about its human rights abuses is silly.
To give you an example: in retrospect, keeping Saddam in power and not invading Iraq is considered a fairly reasonable opinion; i.e. even though we got rid of a dictator, the consequences were arguably worse.
The reality is that the West tends to not get involved politically if the state in question is insular enough to not affect other countries. This isn’t because they condone abuses in these countries, but because a long history of failed colonialism and wars has rendered the West extremely hesitant to get involved in any sort of ‘just’ war that isn’t provoked by the state in question (see Iraq and Kuwait for example.)
The contemporary populist rise of American hostility to China is also linked directly to offshoring jobs from the Rust Belt, so again, there are clearly groups of people who have issues with China that aren’t merely “crush the rising competitor.”
In any case I don’t disagree that the West has sunk democratic movements which were against its interests, but that to say all such attempts will be shut down is overly-simplistic.
Now Americans are selling weapons to the dictator to continue the genocide because human rights are selctive
It should be pretty clear from the context that I am talking about western governments, not people.
Also, as an European, it doesn't look to me like we have much in terms of independent foreign policy.
> The idea that by supporting one repressive state you forfeit your ability to critique other repressive states is also absurd.
One? Please. We support plenty of other dictators all across the world. Or is Egypt's Sisi not a dictator? What about the UAE, Qatar etc.?
What about human rights violations by democratic countries? We don't seem to care much about illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
> in retrospect, keeping Saddam in power and not invading Iraq is considered a fairly reasonable opinion; i.e. even though we got rid of a dictator, the consequences were arguably worse
The assumption that the goal at the start was to get rid of a dictator because he was one is fairly well established to not be true. Basically a bunch of neocons who were bitter we didn't dispose Saddam in the FGW wanted to settle scores.
> The reality is that the West tends to not get involved politically if the state in question is insular enough to not affect other countries.
Really, what about the likes of Venezuela/Nicaragua?
> I don’t disagree that the West has sunk democratic movements which were against its interests, but that to say all such attempts will be shut down is overly-simplistic.
I hope you're right.
His comment is in no way whataboutist or trite. It is providing counterexamples to the claim that the goal of US policy is to get countries to "open up", by citing countries that did start opening up until the US stepped in to prevent that from happening.
But regardless of if we do that, we still still engage in retaliatory trade actions against china.
He wants to be a hero that fights for people's rights unless there's money involved.
I find it rather strange that so many people throw around the "tolerate in order for China for open up" rhetoric, as if companies invest in China for ideological reasons. Ironically, by forcing those western companies to not do business with China, you are infringing on those companies' freedom to choose for themselves, and violating liberal values.
Furthermore, as someone who came from China, that "China did not open up" is completely false. In the past 30 years, China opened up immensely. In the 70s, Chinese could not choose what to wear, could not choose to travel abroad, people could randomly be caught on suspicion of colluding with "the enemy". All of that has changed. Even the latter: the practice of being "reported by your neighbor for suspicious activities" no longer happens, the Cultural Revolution madness is over. Heck, even "not allowed to criticize the government" is no longer true: there are official channels for publishing constructive criticism (emphasis on constructive), and government officials post official replies in the public, and the criticism is listened to without getting you into trouble (the caveat being that you are not allowed to instigate mass protests, or call for overthrow of the government). Sure, it's not equivalent to western democracies, but it did change for the better even if there's still room for improvement. But for some reason, many western people completely ignore this fact and buy into the rhetoric that "China did not open up". It's not even a small fact, it's a huge boulder staring in your face, and people don't see it.
A reputable quote please for who, and when was forced to do an IP transfer
When you reciprocate it’s not because of a superior ideology but because you won’t accept a one-sided transaction
no
Either Chinese businesses can lobby the Chinese Govt to make peace with US or the Chinese govt wont listen to them and have a more aggressive stand, only time will tell.
We want to kick down the ladder after we climb it. That’s what this is about.
Have you not heard of a patent?
Anyone have numbers?
I would like to see for myself.
Still no mention of "Chinese patent number CNyyyyy (being a registration of US patent USyyyy) has been violated by Chinese company XXXX"
Are you sure you guys aren't just making this up?
[1]https://www.theverge.com/tech/2019/3/22/18275884/apple-qualc...
Do countries take to banning Boeing, if they find problems with PepsiCo?.
Actually, the forced acquisition of TikTok by MS and its Instagram copy are instances of the US copying from the Chinese.
"Good artists copy; great artists steal" - Steve Jobs
No, but wake me up when the US does this to another free and open country, rather than one that has a history of aggressively doing this to Western countries.
They will choose the winners and losers, but they will do so by balancing their own metrics, which has China's economic power as no.1 priority.
Only know is Airbnb doing more OK, after moving servers to china, making local joint ventures, changing their name to a chinese one etc. etc.
AirBnB moved server to China because their website would be terribly slow if not, they need local joint ventures or otherwise they would have little idea in how to navigate in Chinese market. Of course they need a Chinese name, how else would you expect users to know what "Airbnb" is? Nobody would remember. They can change their name to a series of numbers and that would still work better than "Airbnb"
"Operation Aurora was a series of cyber attacks conducted by advanced persistent threats such as the Elderwood Group based in Beijing, China, with ties to the People's Liberation Army.[2] First publicly disclosed by Google on January 12, 2010, in a blog post,[1] the attacks began in mid-2009 and continued through December 2009.[3]
The attack was aimed at dozens of other organizations, of which Adobe Systems,[4] Akamai Technologies,[5] Juniper Networks[6] and Rackspace[7] have publicly confirmed that they were targeted. According to media reports, Yahoo, Symantec, Northrop Grumman, Morgan Stanley,[8] Dow Chemical,[9] and BlackBerry [10] were also among the targets."
Why force to sell when you can do the above?
0. A popular narrative in China holds that the US trapped France to sell Alstom in 2014. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alstom#Acquisition_by_General_... and https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2019/06/07/an-unlikely-...
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba-Kongsberg_scandal
In this kind of environment people that are rational either stick to their tribe or learn to keep their mouths shut because it's no longer safe to express a contrarian opinion (just like in China). You see already see this in comments sections throughout western publications and forums where questioning policy or taking the opposite side means you are a bot/stooge/unpatriotic/50 cent warrior, etc, etc, etc.
Then sit back and let China then make the first move. Might not work, but at this point I wouldn't put it past somebody in the White House having already gamed it.
There has never been a case in human history where one group of people voluntarily gave up their wealth, status and privilege to another group of people. Wealth transfer always leads to violence.
Not likely that Trump would inflict even more economic damage during his presidency just before the Election.
just look at all the handouts from the US federal government, that is what commies do. to the max of my knowledge, in capitalist China, no one gets unemployment support for COVID-19.
communism is a cancer, sadly US has it.
I doubt it, there is not a single person of competence in the white house capable of gaming it. They are reactionary, not proactive. The President does not understand causality, and I sincerely doubt that anyone in his inner circle does either (because everyone with a brain has left or been fired). Your strategy here has two moves more than anyone in the Trump whitehouse is capable of fathoming.
> There has never been a case in human history where one group of people voluntarily gave up their wealth, status and privilege to another group of people. Wealth transfer always leads to violence.
I mean involuntary != violence. There have been plenty of peaceful cessions of power.
I'm classing it as a certainty. Have a read of the Wolfowitz Doctrine and work out what it necessitates, and that to be done very soon.
Even so, I believe the US has 'missed the bus'. It needed to have initiated vigorous conflict earlier this year to be sure of victory in that coming war. It can't start anything worthwhile now until at least the next Spring-Summer campaign season. By then China will have had another 12 months of growth, and the US another 12 months of decline.
There is only one country in the world which is reliably able to afford being nuked, and has "surviving first, and second strike" as part of its many doctrines.
The only major country against which MAD is not so assured is China.
USA talks TikTak, but the world hears "the overall political arrangement of China"
"Kill 300 million Chinese, still got a billion Chinese left. Kill 300 million Americans, no more America."
-- Vice President Dick Cheney, 2005-06-20
1. A thoroughly mendacious character 2. A moron
A lot of people ascribe malice to him, but it’s clear as day that he was in over his head with the entire project. Basically 0 of his goals have been achieved 17 years in.
So I would say that while the appearance of competent war games was there, it was a charade.
The Velvet Revolution comes to mind. Of course there is a possibility/threat of violent escalation in negotiating these things, but rational actors can make the calculus that getting a good enough deal guaranteed is better than fighting and potentially loosing a better one. However, it requires a non-totalitarian view of the world (i.e. the others are not enemies no matter what and must be punished for their bad deeds doesn't really allow you to negotiate in a de-escalatory manner).
Honestly I think China has very little to gain from interfering on either side of the US election, and potentially a lot to lose. Russia, on the other hand...
But the Trump administration is very active in launching more attacks. If you follow the news on what they've been doing to Chinese companies, the past month has been absolutely insane. The attacks are only getting faster and faster, as the Trump administration gets increasingly desperate to win a reelection.
Another problem is that all these attacks leave behind permanent damage. It's not just a matter of ignoring the attacks. I fear that at some point, we get past some boiling point, and things erupt into a hot war.
Here is what he said two weeks ago about how much happened in the past two weeks. https://twitter.com/Tom_Fowdy/status/1285845346447499265
"As I noted a while ago, the US is on a roll announcing 2-3 anti-China measures a week. There has been one roughly every two days. It's just non-stop
-Closes the Chinese consulate in Houston
-Charges two nationals for hacking
-Adds more companies to the entity list over Xinjiang
-Bans federal contractors buying from Huawei
-Ups ante in the South China sea
-Blacklists officials
-Removes Hong Kong's special status
-Daily Cold War rhetoric from Pompeo
-Restricts Chinese student visas
-Ends fulbright scholar program Hong Kong
-Contemplating banning TikTok
Most of the above is in the past TWO WEEKS alone."
-Closes the Chinese consulate in Houston
>Allegedly caught spying
-Charges two nationals for hacking
>Conducting justice shouldn't be seen as a deliberate attempt to increase tension
-Adds more companies to the entity list over Xinjiang
>Black listing companies involved in perpetuating genocide against the Uighurs doesn't seem controversial to me
-Bans federal contractors buying from Huawei
>National security
-Ups ante in the South China sea
>Allowing China to claim that region puts a substantial amount of trade in jeopardy, due to many established shipping routes going through there. China is the aggressor here, regardless of what the media tries to portray.
-Blacklists officials
>You need to be more specific, but I assume you are referring to more Uighur genocide related sanctions
-Removes Hong Kong's special status
>Following the terms of the Hong Kong special status trade agreement that hinges on it being a self-governed state. (It no longer is)
-Daily Cold War rhetoric from Pompeo
>Sabre rattling, but could be taken as aggressive action depending on whether Pompeo was talking about any of the points above. If so, then it's warranted.
-Restricts Chinese student visas
>The world is in lock-down. Even countries heavily reliant on chinese student spending, have temporarily restricted such visas.
-Ends fulbright scholar program Hong Kong
>Why continue such programs when the status of such a country changes? Those programs and trade agreements have to be renegotiated.
-Contemplating banning TikTok
>Reciprocal treatment of western social media. So far the first and only deliberate escalation of tensions against China, on this list. Justified... but certainly an escalation.
Just wow
edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes#Organisations
Or maybe, just maybe, he is doing something which he believes is the right thing to do and will help Americans? The ratcheting up could just be a tactic to force the next administration into a position to actually deal with the dysfunctional relationship rather than always rolling over and hoping things will be different like previous administrations.
The problem here is that this is an obvious escalation with US as the aggressor and not all US allies are willing to follow the US into war as the current administration is seen as unreliable.
You even had the former and current (!) prime ministers of Australia warning of high likelihood of a war between China and the US within the next 3 months. Where the next 3 months of course is the period of the US presidential election indicating that they clearly see a connection between the US elections and increased China tensions.
What is more important is how it is being perceived amongst other countries around the south china sea. And as far as I can tell the US does not have the support it normally would have. Even from surefire allies such as Australia.
The "rules" were sovereign rules China applied and it's not as if other search engines or companies in China could get away without following those same rules... plus, such rules are now being applied to ByteDance and WeChat in the USA to make them "voluntarily" pull out as well and this of courses legitimizes China's past and present actions (which is fundamentally why I do not think we should be going down this route).
It's basically admitting defeat if we start using the same policies as China. China owns up to their policies of censorship and heavy-handed market control. They're not hiding that fact. If we start down that path too then we're just adopting their system and admitting we can't beat them with a free market and freedom of access to apps/information.
Keep in mind that Trump's rationale for blocking WeChat is that it is "allowing the Chinese Communist Party a mechanism for keeping tabs on Chinese citizens who may be enjoying the benefits of a free society for the first time in their lives." That's basically saying the people are too stupid and must have their information access controlled—which, as you may know, is exactly the communist part of China's modus operandi.
I don't see how US is the aggressor. The kind of control CCP has over these companies is well known and as someone who is not an American, I was surprised why the US admin had not taken stern measures till now. This standoff was initiated when China decided to kick out American companies for not subscribing to their censorship policies. And the way companies like WeChat feed into CCP's censorship framework is well known.
https://citizenlab.ca/2020/05/wechat-surveillance-explained/
Like it or not, kicking out white people isn't just symbolism.
To be clear, I agree that transfer of power was a classic neoliberal failure, and the situation is a travesty.
There was an interesting book published about two years ago (I'm too lazy to search for it) which showed that wealth "re-calibration" only really happened as a result of violent change. I know I wouldn't be here in front of a computer writing this comment if it hadn't been for WW2 that brought communist rule to my Eastern-European country, which communist rule brought forced industrialisation with the help of mass education (that was of course free, unlike before WW2). That benefited my parents who could make the "leap" from the countryside to the city. Probably a new war could similarly eliminate the wealth inequality in countries like the US.
Actually I looked for it and I'm 99% sure this is the book: "The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century" [1]
[1] https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691183251/th...
Perhaps just by destroying wealth. It’s unlikely that any violence could improve the US middle class since it’s already richer than the middle class in most other countries. Best you can do at that point is just try to eliminate the wealthy if you’re fixated on income inequality.
As I said, we will likely see a Cold War scenario of two separate spheres of economic influence. The divestment process is already underway.
Lack of stability in the Pacific Rim is now more expensive long term than US labor costs.
But almost did (Cuban Missile Crisis), and there were several wars* by proxy (some with China too).
*conflicts technically, as Congress hasn't declared war since WW2
because they couldn't win in Vietnam or Korea.
In the long term, the only thing going for the US are alliances with other developed countries and democracies. But the current administration doesn't seem to care very much about that.
The more important part is technological innovation, and so far, I remain unconvinced that a closed totalitarian system will have as much innovation as an open one, in the long term.
Otherwise, agreed that the US does need its allies, though I don’t necessarily agree that it has alienated them. If you look at the real events, and not merely the media talking heads, there is absolutely a growing sense of unity against China. See: India, Vietnam, Japan, Philippines, increased NATO budget commitments, to name a few.
It's better to characterize/qualify Chinese style of governance as a top-down meritocratic totalitarian government. Policymakers in China are theoretically able to make decisions that are optimal to achieve certain policy goals, say x% economic growth. In contrast, democracies set policy goals and make decisions through the messy process of achieving political consensus.
IMO, private innovation happens when a combination of factors align: free consumer choice, a large market under a common set of rules and stable political conditions. I don't think the Chinese style of governance prevents any of this.
Public innovation happens through well-funded universities and taxpayer-funded research grants. China pushes one step further at times by funding new technology/research directly through state owned/sponsored enterprises.
I think there are genuine fears within US policy circles that the stability afforded by economic growth under a meritocratic totalitarian government could give China an edge over countries like the US, which have to work with the overheads of a democracy. I believe observers in the future will agree that these fears were not unfounded.
I don’t believe that China can ever get remotely close to this cultural influence if it retains an authoritarian system. The artistic ecosystem will never form.
I can only think of Vietnam where a Chinese TV series got quite popular.
Now it may be true that you can quickly climb the ladder if you never challenge anything, but that’s a pretty narrow set of merit being recognized. It’s just barely an improvement over promoting family members. In both cases, no fundamental change can legitimately bubble up based on merit.
If only the US motives were actually that altruistic, but in reality US intervention in foreign regimes were mostly to protect its interests rather than any actual ideals.
Apologies for unstructured reply:
There are other real events too, like how trade between China and ASEAN increased throughout covid and and the general trend is more integration. The real events you outlined are also still filtered through FVEY talking heads. People are misattributing increased militarily budgets in the region as growing hint solidifying US coalition when many of these increases are because these countries no longer see US as a reliable partner in SCS, a pattern that started under Obama. See Australians increased military budget citing specifically so, or how their foreign minister upheld US position on SCS but publicly distanced herself from Trump/Pompeo bellicose China policy. Philippines just bailed SCS drills. Half of Vietnamese military acquisitions capabilities target Malaysia, like wise for other countries in the region. It's not all to challenge China - people forget SCS is a 6 party dispute with various overlapping claims. Like when Taiwan AND China both sent ship to assert their claims after PCA ruling. BTW their increased funding and capabilities is directly a result of increased growth from China's growth. Or that China puts more warship tonnage than the entire region combined every year, by multitudes. Or how US military experts want access to Japanese basing to spreadout US asset risk against Chinese strike, but rampant covid in Japanese US bases just made sure that will never happen. Or this meme [1] that explains India's geopolitical situation, China is not the only big country with nervous neighbors.
Or how moving manufacturing out of China is still an ongoing experiment and ultimately one first started by China herself, where China gets to decide winners and losers. Months after Samsung closed their last phone plant in China, they outsourced their low-end models under a Chinese ODM. Also Vietnam is full, all their infrastructure including human capital are at capacity and will take years to cultivate. Or how people celebrate Foxconn recently moving 1B iphone manufacturing to India but don't mention they've invested 8B into IC packaging in China the same week. Or most of final assembling happening in India is still completely reliant on Chinese supply chains. Or how India basically needs 30 years of Chinese reforms to reach comparable development status as China and China could only achieve that due to authoritarian government structure... does India's messy democracy stand a chance? History and past attempts at reform suggests no. Or how automation + ASEAN competition means India will only get to grab a fraction of Chinese manufacturing before they get another 300M unemployed, angry youths because they don't have one-child policy. China still has that many in "poverty" even after peak manufacturing phase. IMO there's just not enough global demand for India to ever replicate China or reach parity. And that demographic boon of of youth is going to turn into a curse. Rest of ASEAN is the same, if you divide all of Chinese manufacturing at peak, with minimal automation, that fed entire world, ~400M jobs, there's simply not enough to go around. Again, China controls the supply chain, she will decide winners for the next 10 years (this number is important), not the west. She simply hasn't enacted extreme policies like US entities list, but could literally cripple many sectors in any country it chooses if she does.
The geopolitics of the region is complex, and everyone in the region is hedging between US and China for posturing, everyone is building up - through growth enabled by China - because they doubt US commitment under current admin that will take years to fix. Except US analysts thinks unless they start a war with China by 2025-2030 latest (that 10 years), Chinese advantage in SCS will be insurmountable. Incidentally, it will take a few years for TSMC to finish their Arizona plant, otherwise no one gets 7nm chips for...
That is not at all clear right now.
You have effectively a dictator in charge. It doesn't matter what is good for China, just what is good for Comrade Pooh. The longer Xi Jinping stays in power, the more those two diverge.
In addition, China still has a surplus of unmarried men with no prospects--that's an explosion waiting to happen. I personally think Xi Jinping wants a shooting war somewhere so he can throw a couple million men into the meat grinder.
While I loathe President Cheeto, I would say that most of the Western powers are fed up with China, at this point. So, while Trump is acting like a petulant child, I don't see any major European powers rushing to China's defense--engagement has obviously failed. Some of them are probably more than happy to see this happen.
Finally, while Trump is a lightning rod, the big issue is that ALL the Western powers seem to be struggling with a very resurgent, nationalist right wing--not just the US. The rank and file are pissed off that the corporatocracy has exploited and then abandoned them, and nobody is producing a good answer. The US can fix Trump--whether it can fix the underlying problems that produced Trump is a different question.
Also, I recently watched a documentary on the start of Nazi Germany. The parallels with current political movements are astounding. Fake news, discrediting experts, ignoring protocols, validating xenophobia, using disasters to grab more power - we've seen it all before.
You would have thought the US would have developed a bit since then. But apparently it hasn‘t.
I the only difference between China and Nazi Germany from a human rights perspective, is that China hasn't declared any war.
Still, here in the west Nazis is the greatest evil ever, while China is complicated, and even some communist genociders are loved.
I'm not defending Nazis, I'm just staing that their evil is not unparalleled, and there exists a current nation that reeks of the same evil, and there doesn't seem to be a way to stop it.
Sure, the west is a mess with all the political tensions, but all that is just blinding to what is happening outside.
The key difference for me (at least based on my own anecdata from speaking with people from China) is that Chinese people are not blind to the problems within their politics and government. Especially, the youth recognise the oppressive nature of the regime.
In the West, however, there is a subset of people for whom certain populist political figures can do no wrong. These people are happy to tolerate any "eccentricities", and perhaps don't understand what they might be enabling. And, unfortunately, the enablers are not a small minority.
For example, one guy even claimed he could shoot someone on 5th avenue and not lose a single vote; his supporters applauded in agreement.
I'm just listening to the "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" audiobook; a bit dated now (written in the '70s) but also written by someone who was in Germany during the whole time. There are a lot of parallels, but according to him, there are a lot of key differences (caveat -- haven't independently checked these characterizations):
* Germany did not have a strong democratic history; unlike both England and France, which had strong movements towards democracy hundreds of years before, Germany was a functional military dictatorship up until the end of WW I. Hitler could openly say that democracy was a bad idea, and lots of rank-and-file Germans agreed with him.
* Germany had a very strong army that was authoritarian, more or less an independent political entity, and sympathetic to Hitler's aims
* Germany had a very biased judiciary. While leftists were sentenced to death for treason for simply reporting violations of the Versailles Treaty, Hitler ended up spending only 9 months in jail for actually attempting a violent coup. This wasn't just because Hitler was popular or charimatic: loads of nationalists / authoritarian rightists had similarly soft punishments.
The US has a strong cultural affinity for democracy; the military is not, at the moment, sympathetic to a dictatorship; and while according to some reports, some police departments are more sympathetic towards right-wing demonstrators than left-wing demonstrators, the judiciary is not.
In other words, we have a lot more institutions that would need to be subverted before we were in the kind of danger Germany was in the 1920s. Still, better to be aware of the dangers and do what we can to oppose them sooner rather than later.
With respect to the biased judiciary, the way the courts are being stacked in the US may well result in something similar. The AG appears to be already fairly biased (compromised?).
Yes, there are differences still, even in the situations I describe above, but the similarities are worrying.
If last 4 years are any example, the same leadership will destroy everything that America stands for in the next 4 years.
We will be a country of thugs, no friends and all bankruptcies.
I think the unfortunate explanation is that many Americans are now quite vindictive against the whole concept of China and would not mind any action that seem to damage it. Instead of looking at the issue objectively they simply want to believe whatever hurts must be wise. It's making me wonder if unthinkable disasters may actually happen out of sheer stupidity and irrationality.
Why would they? Less than equally free trade over the last ~30yr has driven a lot of blue collar voters into the arms of people who make crude promises to bring jobs back.
Many people would like to see more tactful foreign policy by the US but you'd be hard pressed to find people who think the status quo with regard to China was not in serious need of adjustment.
You mean, what matters to the political and economic elites in the US, perhaps. In the rest of the world, most of us (IMNSHO) don't share this outlook, nor would we like to be on any one of the two sides.
China can force any company out of the country for any arbitrary reason whatsoever. As far as I know, they are still banning Houston Rockets games because Morey supported Hong Kong in a tweet.
Tesla was one of the first US companies to operate with the level of autonomy they have in China. Perhaps there is some retribution from the CCP, but such is the consequence of doing business with a totalitarian state.
Giving up the moral high ground is not a move of a superpower, and aides in destabilising the geopolitical playing field.
At the core of it, the kind of protectionism China has engaged in is defecting in a prisoner's dilemma. If you play always cooperate against a defectbot, you're going to lose eventually, even if you start very far ahead.
When you learn a bit more about geopolitics, you realize that there's more to these things than initially appears. Tiananmen Square was pretty bad. But when you look at the utter collapse of Russia after it tried to Westernize, and the poor shape of America because of her own economic policies, someone not living in the Anglo/American news bubble would really have to wonder.
To that end, companies that have an easier time skirting around the dirty politics – like Tesla, Ford, and GM – have been able to have successful and profitable operations in China. As the parent points out, there's a pandora's box that's being opened. And if you are led to believe that it's a normal comment, it's the same nationalistic stuff you've being trained to fall in line with.
https://fortune.com/2014/08/11/china-western-companies-monop... (China vs. Western companies: Best defense is a strong offense)
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/28/1-in-5-companies-say-china-s... (1 in 5 corporations say China has stolen their IP within the last year: CNBC CFO survey)
https://money.cnn.com/2018/04/05/news/economy/china-foreign-... (How China gets what it wants from American companies)
https://money.cnn.com/2018/03/23/technology/china-us-trump-t... (How much has the US lost from China’s IP theft?)
Sure, but by that same argument, this executive order bans ByteDance/Tencent under American laws and directives (specifically, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act).
Obviously not the case - this is an out-right ban. There has been no evidence of TikTok violating any laws, and furthermore, no new laws have been issued to which TikTok could adhere to avoid a ban.
Companies operating in China can adhere to Chinese law to operate in the country, but the Trump administration hasn't even issued any laws.
This is unprecedented.
One of those laws is China's National Intelligence law which requires all companies to cooperate with and aid national intelligence.
It is all getting beyond stupid at this point.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24079115 for more.
Our country is founded on a free market economy and competition. If a Chinese company outcompetes US companies... well that means our system is working.
If we decide that rounding up Muslims is a no good very bad idea it follows that we should probably try to do less business with those who do or at the very least do business on terms less favorable to them.
Some say yes, specifically some in the current administration... But ignoring my glib & pointless attack at a few powerful racists: this tangent of the tangent has very little to do with that the previous posters were saying.
The comparison would only be valid if rounding up the Muslim population has some effect on commercial interests specifically the giving commercial interests in the country doing the rounding up an advantage over those in the other country.
We've been accusing China of "unfair tariffs" when in reality we actually benefit from exploiting their cheap labor and sell them back the same iPhone they assembled for something like 10x the markup. Trying to say this is a reactionary tariff is disingenuous, when the trade balance has been in this state for decades, and the only real reason we're starting to ban their tech exports is because it's getting dangerously competitive with our own. It's shaking our foundational beliefs that our system is destined to win, and now we're resorting to the tactics of our rivals in a moment of insecurity.
I think the scope and actions matter. Responding to tariffs with tariffs makes perfect sense, for instance. Punishing individuals makes less sense (eg. if china decided to send all expat americans in china to concentration camps, doing the same to chinese americans wouldn't make sense).
>If a Chinese company outcompetes US companies... well that means our system is working.
It's a good sign that a US company can outcompete a chinese company, even with a handicap, but it's a not a desirable situation.
As far as I know, you trust media reports more than a random search on Chinese video sites.
https://weibo.com/tv/show/1034:4534875236007949
It's the Rockets vs Trail Blazers math on 4th Aug.
https://www.scmp.com/sport/basketball/article/3092980/nbas-c...
Even assuming they revoked the ban, I also don't see how it's particularly relevant to the point I was making; they still banned the entire franchise for months because he wrote a single message on Twitter. Censorship isn't somehow acceptable if it only lasts ~8 months. It's perhaps the definition of arbitrarily abused power.
No, countries get to do this to each other whenever they feel like since the dawn of mankind. "Now" isn't any different.
We would all like China to be a positive part of the global community but the fact of the matter is you can't ignore their overall policy. A possible genocide against the ethnic Uighurs, aggressive expansion in the South China Sea, normalization of censorship and suppression, treatment of Hong Kong & Taiwan: all of which are a complete contrast of Western values.
Could China force Tesla to sell Chinese operations? Absolutely. I don't think any one would be surprised. Companies that enter the Chinese market (if they can in the first place) are subjected to getting a smaller piece of the pie from the start.
Facebook has relentlessly tried to tap the Chinese market but are blocked by the CCP. So why does TikTok get a free pass to the American market? Why does __any__ Chinese company get a pass?
I think we need to continuously evaluate our relationship with China.
> A meta point I'd like to add is that currently 10 % of the earths population in the "Westosphere" controls 60 % of the worlds wealth.
True wealth is really hard to measure. Stocks and dollars and euros are not wealth. They are mediums of exchange no different then dogecoin.
When I am hungry, I can’t eat them directly, I can only trade them for food. And the amount of food I will get varies based on supply and demand.
It's entirely hard to believe this considering the obscene amounts of profits that US companies make by just "designing in california". Our whole era is enabled and defined by cheap chinese labor.
Labor is fungible, if it wasn't in China it would be somewhere else.
On the other side, American tech companies do massive amounts of business in China.
The relationship is very lopsided, and at some point, China is sure to take action against American tech firms in China.
Yes? Are you unaware that China has been doing exactly this for many, many years?
Just as two examples, AWS was forced by China to sell off its Chinese operations to a Chinese company because of arbitrary national security reasons. Blizzard Entertainment was forced by China to go through a Chinese intermediary who controls and publishes all Blizzard games in China.
Telecom thus involves anything with a computer, and any "com," being applied with arbitrary eagerness.
The Chinese government sets their (extremely authoritarian) rules on censorship for companies to legally operate in China but the rules apply to everyone equally.
Chinese companies of course have to comply, but foreign companies have the choice to comply or not. Google chose to comply initially but decided to pull out later on. Microsoft/Apple choose to comply and are still operating in significant ways in China.
In contrast, US is proposing to ban TikTok, Huawei, DJI without clear rules: the reason to ban these companies is that they are Chinese companies. In other words, Chinese companies are "born a crime" to the US in the current climate, without the need to show what rules are violated or evidence of wrongdoing.
China also doesn't have the monopolistic power in tech that the US does: forbidding Google to operate in China it's not the same as forcing app stores to de-list certain apps globally.
It's even more absurd to force ByteDance to sell their US business to a US company. If the US feels justified that this could be done on "national security" ground, why shouldn't EU do the same to US tech companies?
I do hope that US citizens see that for much of the world, US is no longer the champion of free market, promoter of free-speech or guardian of world-order. All that matters is if these values benefit US economically or politically.
The US lost it when Japan was economically sanctioned for its competitive auto/electronic sector in 1980s. China is taking the same heat today and India would be the next target if India were to want to play its role on the international stage. The best outcome for the world would be to have multiple strong economies globally that keep each other in check; rather than one country having monopolistic power over all globally significant online forums.
If US were to decide that all telecom equipment used in the US must be produced by domestic companies then that's fair enough.
Going after one specific privately owned company, influencing ally states' purchase decision, banning foreign companies globally from supplying chips is outright bullying and sets the unfortunate precedent that a country could leverage its monopolistic position in tech to stifle competition.
Isn't that exactly what the Chinese laws do? Everything I've read seems to say that they prevent foreign companies from being able to fairly compete against local Chinese. companies.
When Google entered the Chinese search market it was competing fairly with local players: both Baidu and Google have to accept the (authoritarian) rule that they need to censor their search if they want to legally operate in China.
You could argue if the rule itself is good (I think it's not), but the point is that there are clearly stated rules that Google could choose to comply with or not.
Which "rule" did TikTok, Huawai, Wechat violate other than the fact that they are born Chinese companies?
The US could also decide that all social networks that operate in the US must be owned by American companies and subject to congressional inquiries. That would be fair enough, though that's an even more extreme version than what the Chinese government has been demanding.
Given that the Chinese state elected to hack an American firm that was operating in it's borders, you could make any sort of excuse to prevent Chinese firms from owning American infrastructure for any sort of national security reasons. TikTok doesn't have to break any rules. If I see my roommate get mauled by a tiger, that doesn't mean I have to sit around and wait to get mauled before I take an action.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_China#2010%E2%80%932016...
"We should not be this hard with China, let's keep doing what we were doing in the past."
Your post history also looks very interesting, for anyone investigating state-actor social nets.
"Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This community is vastly more diverse than the people making up accusations of astroturfing imagine that it is. If you don't have evidence, you can't sling such insinuations around. Someone advocating for a view you disagree with does not remotely clear the bar for evidence of astroturfing or foreign spies.
If you want more explanation, you'll find years' worth at these links:
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&type=comment&dateRange=a...
That would be a first now would it.
Not if they don't want an airline industry. China does not have the capacity to build a jet engine yet alone a commercial plane in service.
b.) https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Aircraft_Corporatio...
b) Cormac cannot even produce jet engines after 25+ years of state backed R&D.
My point was that they are building a commercial plane (not with Chinese fans yet), as your usage of "yet alone" expressed some kind of dependency or sequence, at least to my non native speaking ears.
unlikely. That much doesn't move the needle, world economy right now is $140+ TRILLION. USA gave out over $700 Billion for that matter in 2008-2009 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Recovery_and_Reinvest...
EU gave $200+ billion, plus each country did their own thing.
Ask FB or Google about their Chinese websites. How are they doing? This should have been done long time ago, tit for tat.
As for the rest, I doubt China can resort to stupid stuff. US and EU are not happy with them for a lot of things, including Covid, and China desperately needs them. China allowed manufacturing not to help us, but to gain taxes, employment and to steel IP.
Think of it like a playground: Everyone generally gets along, but the big kids can and sometimes do monopolize things they think are important at the time. The smaller kids make way for the bigger kids, and every now and then there's a fight between the bigger kids when they disagree strongly enough. They exchange words, jostle and block each other, or maybe it even comes to blows, and then things return to the status-quo for awhile.
That's how geopolitics work, except that it's usually a LOT more subtle or at least hidden from the public eye. Trump isn't a member of the political elite and is completely lacking in tact, so it's a lot harder to keep an appearance of calmness when he's in the room. Expect a much cleaner appearance of normalcy once he's out of office.
That has been the case since at least the start of colonialism, so something like 200 years now. It depends on what you mean by long term, but that is already a long time. (And it has been sort of non-violent since the de-colonization wars in the 60s).
The laws in America not outright making it illegal for tyrannical organizations who operate concentrate camps and partake in genocide (Uighurs) to have access to our democratic societies and benefit economically doesn't mean it's not something you should stand for - and where the laws likely should exist for that.
Likewise, the CCP would likely just takeover Tesla's operations - maybe paying them, maybe not. The difference in the US, currently at least, is TikTok has options: 1) they don't sell and the ban comes, they don't receive any $x billions compensation, or 2) they understand a ban is likely in the US (and growing other democratic nations) and they make the smarter economic decision of selling for $x billions - maybe at fire sale pricing, however there are many competitors who could still compete and be capable of taking over operations, so perhaps not as low as otherwise it could be.
We're not hurtling towards the abyss, that's fear mongering; you may be right that SV startups may have to divest their China based investors, however that may or may not hurt them - and that would be the result of countering external costs to supporting and allowing CCP that we haven't been adequately accounting for for decades.
This is a strategic political-economic pressure decision to put pressure onto the CCP - notice that we're paying attention and won't stand for the level of abuse and tyrannical behaviours of the that we're becoming more and more aware of.
Economic pressure and preventing access to democratic societies for economic gain IS the graceful way to go about this, rather than allow CCP to gain more reach, access for propaganda for intelligence gathering and manipulation, to then spoil politicians further and become more entrenched in our societies economically and via investments in the most popular apps, etc.
And finally, the CCP isn't suicidal - their $500 billion stimulus you reference was for their own survival as well; they also wouldn't want this system they've been creating getting its fingers strongly into the rest of the world economy (which they depend on to maintain) to collapse, the collapse of which would mean things would shift greatly and more likely away from their own benefit.
The actual executive order: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/executive-or...
It's quite short and just adds a lot of FUD
Now they’re still a developing country, so this would be fine by me, except that the Chinese government is committing crimes against humanity and getting more and more powerful at the same time. This is really dangerous, and the only thing I can think of is germany pre-WWII where Hitler had huge approval ratings. Chinese people are extremely pro-CCP even in the US, this is frightening imo. And most countries are doing nothing about the xinjiang and hongkong situations. So maybe this is a good move...