Somewhat recently a head of Microsoft was asked about forgoing access to the Chinese market if it meant protecting American interests in the face of new threats. He unequivocally said, yes. He was willing to forgo their market.
I'm not sure Apple and others who either sell product there or have large manufacturing there are as willing to forgo the 'promise market', but it looks more and more we will have to. More or less the next Russia in terms of sanctions.
We'll see how Biden handles this. I'm sure it's a tough call.
Because we're arrogant. We thought that if we go down the road we went down, they'd naturally settle into their proper place as manufactory for the West without wanting a seat at the table.
Now they're a global power and, gasp, they act like one. Nobody could have seen this coming.
The US also believed that giving China an example of "the good way" via access to the US markets would cause them to open up and allow access in kind. Turned out that was a pretty naive belief.
The amount of allegations from both sides of US politics that the other benefitted in the personal capacity from trade with China is staggering.
At least some of them must be genuine.
It comes to a very simple explanation that communists have indeed been influencing US politics for decades with very crude means, and that they were successful in that.
This is an embarrassing admission US has to do first before any recovery can be started.
In other words, yes. I avoided stating it this bluntly for it being almost a cartoon trope.
But... but one can't believe into any other explanation as any much credible.
Do hundreds of US political insiders lobby for China in one voice just for nothing?
You don't have closet communists, just a lot of very greedy, amoral, and easy to exploit power holders.
American legal system prohibits jailing people for anything but being caught red handed in cases of political corruption.
I have no idea what you can do about that without doing political persecution, but on other hand if you leave it be it will keep being exploited like hell.
Indeed it does, doing it in a system that allows the economic elite to direct the government into geopolitical disaster because they are largely unconcerned with the common good of their nation is really quite unique to capitalism.
Actually, he just described people. Communist regimes have the exact same issues with corruption and greed.
Capitalism vs Communism is a useless debate if the will isn't there to hold the corrupt accountable and ensure that the average citizen is empowered (with said power secured both physically and legally.)
Nothing quite so dramatic. The US political system is rife with bribery/bribery-adjacent (ex: lobbying) activity and they are saying both sides have been influenced by this. For examples, see the 1996 Clinton campaign finance investigations and donations to Jeb Bush’s Super PAC. There is likely a lot more out there that we don’t know about hidden through donations funneled through non-profits.
Probably you are answering to a different comment, otherwise it makes absolutely no sense. In no shape, way or form have communists managed the internal or external American policy in the last 40 years, if ever.
This is pretty insane mental gymnastics to rationalize the free market taking control of the US political apparatus as communism.
Like, actually impressive.
It has nothing to do with infiltration or influence. It's simply the basic structure of the American political system that, since its very founding (who was able to vote?) oriented the government into the facilitation of profit above all else.
That is actually the realization the US has to do, but it seems somehow even more embarrassing than the conclusion that the US government is infiltrated by commies, for some odd reason.
Ross Perot knew the deal. Bush, Clinton and everyone else mocked him, critically, the media. The fourth estate; yeah, right! They don’t give a lick. They push whatever agenda is on tap. Trade Agreements, Gulf War II, etc.
You might be right, you might be wrong, but it would be nice if you could acknowledge that any argument about what people were thinking (rather than doing) is a shaky one and hard to state with any certainty. Bad outcomes can arise as easily from ill-conceived idealism as bad intent.
This. It's a pernicious temptation to infer motive, or make hostile generalizations about groups we disagree with, but this makes it impossible to cooperate or engage in good faith debate.
They were also trending towards being a relatively benevolent modern country under Deng Xiaoping when many restrictions were dropped. It's a bit unfortunate that under the present guy they seem to be returning to a Maoist dictatorship and I guess will stay that way for quite a while.
Because the people who own and control everything would rather build up a government like the CCP so they can better control the "useless eaters" (as Henry Kissinger put it).
"Made in China" is exactly the type of curse that the global elite like to put on people. It's plain as day what's coming next and yet, everybody has just accepted it since the 70s. China will be the world superpower to replace the US and apparently we're all fine with that.
China acts in China's interests. They as an institution are acting no different than they have throughout the dozens of empires before it. It's basically Ming 2.0.
You can’t have $5 T-shirts and also a $15 minimum wage and low unemployment. You can have $5 T-shirts and a $15 minimum wage and no jobs, but nobody actually wants that outcome.
- The US needs access to China's goods to be viable. For half a century US companies improved their efficiency/competitiveness by moving their process to China. They now have too many dependencies in the form of Chinese manufacturing and development capabilities and do not have the skills/knowledge/talents/infrastructure in the US. Because of this China can dictate their rules with zero pressure (though India and other countries will surely be a difficult competition at some point, or maybe already are).
- China owns more than 1 trillion of US debt. In the past the country bought a massive amount of US debt to inflate USD vs RMB and boost their own economy. Currently China has no reasons to sell their reserve as that would impact their economy negatively. If the US blocks them they may start massively selling US debt, which would impact USD and the US economy.
> The US needs access to China's goods to be viable.
No, it really isn't. The thing the US is indeed does very little for an economy of its size.
Washington can slam fist on the table, and US industry will be out of China by tomorrow, without much impact at home besides no iToys this season, and few percents off its stock market.
Lack of consumer goods would of course be upsetting, but people wouldn't die from lack of them.
You are correct, and this is America's, and West's predicament.
If you can't do this, you can't do this.
And you certainly wouldn't be able to do even more painful things which are truly needed for the West to have any chance to put the genie back into the bottle.
China, and Russia have effectively conditioned the NATO countries over the decades into "self-beneficial inaction." Now, seeing words like yours proves their strategy worked.
We just got done dealing with four years of leadership by a (possibly unwitting) agent of a foreign power, installed with the help of holes in our IT infrastructure. Our sovereignty and capacity for effective self-governance are severely compromised, at this point. That's more important than loss of territory or people, in the long run.
It's a matter of figuring out the process. You can swap sets of things based on how easy it is to achieve similar enough economics elsewhere or elsewise.
This isn't some insurmountable problem. Yes, there are scenarios where you go "too fast" and raise too many prices too quickly and piss people off. Or, you go slower and make it more palatable.
Equivocation. Gp means lack of specific consumer goods, for a set time.
Your comment makes it seem like this would lead to catastrophe or collapse.
It would more likely lead to industry rotation and employment change.
Yes, you can reduce any macro factor to a death count, but those are always trading off in all directions. It's meaningless to categorically single out a particular scenario of swapping production as more deadly than the others.
It would take a generation to build an electronics industry equivalent to shenzhen, and would require state involvement/investment that we're not capable of.
I'd like to regain industrial capacity too but we're missing an entire population base of expertise and relationships.
> Yeah, I think you're under estimating the interconnectedness of the supply chain there. Would definitely make the pandemic disruption look small.
Pandemic disruption is small. A disruption on this scale was nothing unheard of historically. Infectious diseases were taking millions of lives in the developed world before the advent of antibiotics, and to lesser extend until the bio-technological revolution of seventies.
What was unheard of was world's biggest power being rendered utterly impotent, and in complete stupor by such minor events.
I see a country like US being otherwise fully capable of dealing with a crisis on this scale easily.
> And you're assuming China won't retaliate. I wouldn't like to be a US national in China when that happened.
Of course they will! You will be cutting into personal coffers of their highest elites. It will be a very personal challenge to them. Having them eat watery gruel like lowly peasants will infuriate them.
That's exactly the POINT. You see a bad guy, you challenge him to beat him. You don't beat a bad guy by avoiding him.
I'm advocating for people to understand that not being ready for this will be their demise.
Tell me, what would've been a better solution for WW2.
Let Adolph, Stalin, Hirohito, or worse both of them together, have Europe, and then have their free way to use the completely overwhelming resource advantage to kill you, or go and fight to the bitter end before they have it?
The most logical action to do if you can't win, is to fight. One must be ready to fight, even if it is a completely hopeless battle.
Second, I want to make you guys understand that, for now, NATO has 100% genuine ability to do something about its adversaries. Wait just a few more years at the current pace, and it wouldn't.
Third, if you chicken out, your weakness will rile the beast(s) even more, and fire up its appetites. It's showing your back to the tiger, an invitation for disaster.
. . . So how many American and European cities has China bombed and invaded so far? No war was ever won with your mentality which makes the completely incorrect assumption that this is somehow a fight for survival or between good (uncle Sam) and evil (those commies). It's also putting the glory of battle over the survival of those that battle was supposedly done to protect. Maybe Hawaii and Puerto Rico should have fought to their last defending their shore from the American hordes by your logic?
Also, it's funny you bring up the Axis powers considering that America would have entirely sat out the entire war if it wasn't for Pearl Harbour and Japan constantly provoking a response with their actions in the pacific. I have also never seen the US ever go into a war where they did not have overwhelming power advantage over their enemies. By the time D-Day happened, the supply lines for the Axis were crippled beyond repair and the war was essentially already lost. It was just a matter of time before supplies ran out.
China has more than enough nuclear capability to cripple the entirety of NATO and they also are well aware that NATO has the capability to do likewise. Hence, neither parties are ever going to even contemplate an outright war with each other despite the wet dreams of war mongers from both sides.
> China has more than enough nuclear capability to cripple the entirety of NATO and they also are well aware that NATO has the capability to do likewise.
First, no it isn't. Second, in a few more years, China will be the only country in the world with material, and military capacity to take the second strike, and keep on offence.
Third, you haven't learned anything if you ever studied WWII. While Germany was running on vapours in the late war, it was still running. They had few years more of small arms supplies, and still some food, which was indeed better than what union's officers had even in reich's final days. Last reserves of fuel were enough for more than a year of low intensity warfare. And yes, Germany fought to the bitter end. Otherwise, where did you thing hundred of thousand American casualties came?
Please don't comment on this matter anymore. You don't know anything about war.
What isn't? That China has enough nuclear capability to cripple the entirety of NATO or vice versa? I'd like to see you justify that tall claim. Your second "point" just sounds like fear mongering without substance. If any country could develop that capability, it is Russia with the largest land area of any country.
Also, my point about the Axis having essentially already lost the war thanks to crippled supplies was incorrect because "they had a few years more of small arms supplies, and still some food" and enough fuel to "last more than a year of low intensity warfare"? That's just an inevitable loss but with extra steps in between! I might not know anything about war but clearly you don't know anything about my argument if you thought this was an actual rebuttal.
Low intensity warfare? The Allies had enough bombers to collapse entire cities! Even the hundreds of thousand Americans dead were minor compared to the millions of Germans that perished.
That's kind of why we don't engage in these kinds of large scale ground invasion type wars anymore (at least without one side being completely overwhelmingly more powerful) - the costs are so astronomically high, both in money and in causalities.
The US does not need access to or business with China to be "viable". That's a caricature.
Some replacements might be slower and more expensive to spin up than people and industries have wanted or been willing to do, but there's literally nothing unique in China.
The cost advantage, at this point, has eroded greatly and is on trajectory to continue doing so (especially if they are to meet their own stated and industrial policy goals).
Also, China is dependent on lots of thing from other countries, including the US, so the notion that they can dictate rules "with zero pressure" is wrong.
Finally, the debt piece is not something I understand well, but I almost exclusively see that addressed by experts as a faulty notion. At least, the notion that all China has to do to cripple the US suddenly start selling tons of US debt or dollars is total fantasy.
$1T of US debt sounds like a lot, but it's less than 4% of US debt. It's not an insignificant amount, but they don't own a lot to impact the US economy. Japan owns more ($1.25T) and the UK and Ireland get up to $0.75T.
Realistically, what would china do? If you "start massively selling US debt", what does that mean? Someone has to buy it. You're increasing the supply while demand probably stays pretty constant. But realistically, I don't think it could go below 90-cents on the dollar. I mean, who wouldn't take US government debt at a 10% discount? Compared to commercial debt from a company with way more risk than the US government, that's way better. So, are we talking about raising the US government's cost to borrow by a few percentage points for a few months?
China can't really disrupt the US economy via its debt holdings. Actually cutting China off from the US would have a far greater impact. Heck, Trump's tariffs were a tiny move and created intense disruption in a lot of industries like bicycle sales. That's not even cutting off China or anything. Imagine if smartphones couldn't be imported into the US for a year or two?
But I don't think the original poster is talking about "cutting China off" in whole. I think the issue in question is about a company like ByteDance/TikTok getting to operate in the US while Google, Facebook, Clubhouse, etc. get blocked from accessing China. If TikTok doesn't need to compete with US companies in China, but Twitter/Instagram/Clubhouse need to compete with TikTok in the US, it means that Chinese companies will have double the market to sell into.
China's GDP is around $24T and the US's is around $21T so a service like TikTok can get access to all $45T while a US-based company like Facebook can't get access to the Chinese market. If you're able to service both countries, your investment in software, infrastructure, etc. goes further.
I don't think it's about cutting China off, but rather wanting a more level playing field. When we're talking about something like smartphones, Apple, Samsung, and others sell into the Chinese market a lot and while China might do things to help its own companies like Huawei, it's open enough to placate a lot of people. That's very different from Facebook and Twitter which are banned in the country. Apple is 20% of the Chinese smartphone market.
If a US company makes the Next Big Thing in social networking, a Chinese company gets to copy it for the Chinese market. If a Chinese company makes the Next Big Thing, they can launch it in the US market as TikTok did.
I don't think this is about cutting Chinese manufacturing off. I think this is a question of whether firms like ByteDance/TikTok should be allowed to come into the US while US firms like Facebook or Twitter can't enter China.
You may have a valid point but on a technical note TikTok does not operate in China either because they don't conform with China's content censorship policy.
Isn't Douyin a separate service offered by ByteDance directly (or a separate subsidiary from TikTok), not a local name for TikTok, which is offered by the company of the same name which is a subsidiary of ByteDance?
The original post I replied to was implying economy of scale because he based his claim on competitive advantages coming with a larger addressable market. However if the market is actually divided (firewalled really), with no sharing of brand recogniton, content creation, marketing, infrastructure, customer service etc, where does the economy of scale come from? Even source codes are now developed separately. There is some sharing of business model and basic technology, but is that truly formidable? There is certainly no network effect (between TikTok and Douyin) which would have been the most significant barrier.
Well, the economies of scale come from capital concentration. Since the money all flows through the parent, they have capital to use to improve their likely hood of success. Not just financial capital, but human capital too.
Google and Facebook have more access to capital, financial or human, than any of their competitors. If anything they are at a strong competitive advantage in this respect.
This thread was about the unfairness of asymmetrical market access, not who is worth the most right now. Side note, in all likelihood, ByteDance would be worth a lot more if they were an American company, even if nothing about their business and revenue changed, because there would be less perceived systemic risk. That being said, the capital difference between them and Google in terms of PPP isn't huge because of lower costs in China.
I merely refuted your claim of where the competitive advantage came from. It is clearly from the network effect of the first movers. China blocked Google and Facebook so they could not exploit their first mover advantage in China. If US wants to do the same to TikTok for the same reason I am totally fine with it. It is just kind of lame to attribute it to unrelated issues. Of course there is a reason for obfuscation here, at least from the government's point of view. If it becomes the norm in the world to block companies from exploiting their first mover advantage due to network effect across national boundaries, US companies would suffer more.
>who wouldn't take US government debt at a 10% discount?
Better question, who wants to be the guy that goes, "I have a great idea. It'll really piss off those yanks. It'll just cost us about $100 billion (the price of like 7 Gerald Ford class carriers) along with the interest payments. A small price to pay to piss them off and have their private corps and allies buy their debt at a discount."
That's borderline a scenario like that comic meme at a board meeting for ideas and the dude gets thrown out the window.
Treasury bonds are issued and put on the bond market. When purchased, those funds are the "money printer go brrrr". It's not so much printing money, just getting deeper into debt. Call it what it is, so it can be approached properly. Calling a tiger a duck isn't going to save you from getting mauled to death.
> Treasury bonds are issued and put on the bond market. When purchased, those funds are the "money printer go brrrr".
No, they aren't.
You are confusing fiscal deficits with monetary expansion. Worse yet, seem to be complaining that GP is failing to confuse monetary expansion with fiscal deficits, when suggesting use of the former to deal with the adverse effects of a particular source of constraints on the ability to leverage the latter.
This reveals great confusion about how assets are priced and how treasuries are issued.
All of these treasuries are sold to primary dealers and the secondary market transactions are of little interest to any macro variable. Some treasuries are held by China in its Federal Reserve account. Should China sell the treasuries to another buyer, they will be transferred to a different account in the same bank. The nationality of the account holder makes no difference to the price of the asset.
The real issue is can China force the price of treasuries to be lower than it is? The answer to that is, maybe a little on the margin. Treasuries are priced as the expectation of average short term rates which are policy decisions by the Federal Reserve. So the real question is can China force the Federal Reserve to raise short term rates over a prolonged period? The Fed does this as part of an inflation fighting policy so this is a question about inflation and has nothing to do with China "dumping" anything.
Trying to guess the inflationary effects of something is hard, so I will throw out some theories and you can decide which one you like:
1. To the degree that US (and global) corporations have been outsourcing manufacturing to China to avoid paying higher wages to first world workers, then this results in driving down wage increases which could create an inflationary spiral, depending on your theory of inflation. Old school people thought inflation was the result of wages being too high. So if they are right, then yes, a very tight labor market could increase inflation more than expected and perhaps the Fed would need to keep rates a bit higher, but again to fight inflation, not because nation X no longer wants access to the US capital markets. I think most Americans would welcome this greatly, although stock prices would take a hit.
2. At the same time this would create an economic shock and the Fed may lower rates to stimulate the economy during the shock. So the short run effects are really mixed.
3. But there is another aspect here, which is that the trade deficit with China creates a loss of income for the US, which is made up for by increased government spending, whether disability payments to laid off workers, or welfare payments or other costs. Thus a reduction in the trade deficit will drive a reduction in the government deficit and thus a reduced demand to sell treasuries that moves in lockstep with the reduced demand to buy treasuries. So if you are of the newer school that says euler consumption trade offs are going to control investment demand, and sticky prices cause nominal interest rates to generate inflation, then once you adjust for the reduced government deficits created by trade deficits, you end up with a model that predicts higher short run rates and then stable long run rates.
4. There is the issue of international capital flows. Let's say we block China from purchasing dollar assets, so investment demand for the dollar decreases, therefore the dollar itself depreciates against the global basket, which causes US exports to be more competitive and we export more, which increases domestic income, which threatens an increase in inflation, which causes a small increase in rates as the economy is booming, up until the higher rates offset the depreciated dollar and things are back into equilibrium. This is why nations such as China intentionally devalue their dollar when they want to stimulate the economy.
Note that financial market beauty contests has zero impact on the US risk-free rates and thus on the price of treasuries. US treasuries are priced by arbitrage against the time path of future short rates, not by how popular the US is or whether some nation wants to hold treasuries.
You can pick among all of these or make your own scenario, but the bottom line is that rates go up only because the Fed raises rates in response to inflation. They do not go up because China decides to give away a bunch of its dollar assets.
Dumping treasuries is figurative. The real action for China is to stop running a trade surplus and start importing and consuming more physical goods. This is widely claimed as a really desirable situation. It will be interesting to see if that is actually the case when it happens. I have a feeling that it will be something more akin to the proverbial 叶公好龙.
These debt am purchased only tiny share in total debt. We are spent 2 more trillions in one bill more only just now. Chinese are use currency basically stole from world for to purchase these debt: https://twitter.com/adamscrabble/status/1094717028009689089
We need in total embargo China. She are largest threat among existence for continuing America.
> China owns more than 1 trillion of US debt. In the past the country bought a massive amount of US debt to inflate USD vs RMB and boost their own economy...If the US blocks them they may start massively selling US debt, which would impact USD and the US economy.
I think you have this backwards. China bought US treasuries to weaken their currency and increase demand for their goods. If they now sell, they will face significant appreciation of the yuan and become uncompetitive. At the same time the US would become more competitive. There would be short term disruption but China would suffer more.
That’s what I mean, yes. I don’t see the difference between my comment and yours.
I was answering to someone talking about cutting China off the US market (or at minimum adding strong restrictions). In that situation China’s economy is already suffering.
Because the US in large part is ruled in the interest of the international capital and the ruling elites, not in the interest of its general populace. It was more profitable to deindustrialize the US.
We need blocking foreign direct investment for America by any Chinese from 20 years previous. Today we need grand incentives for tax reducing to make repurchasing of China investments in America. No Chinese should have owningship on any asset of America. Chinese is hostile power to good things all in world. Need containment to until collapse of government it have now.
No, is terrible plans. We ought make open our border for any Chinese who desier for come to America. No person ought forced to be in such places as China. And also we are wanting good people desirous for liberty.
China, generally speaking, gives US companies full access to the Chinese market.
When that is not the case, it's usually in sectors where Chinese companies don't have full access to the Chinese market either. If Facebook or Google were Chinese companies but hosted the same content, do you think they'd be allowed inside the Great Firewall? Actually, we don't need to guess: when Qihoo 360 tried to provide censored access to Western social media, they were quickly shut down: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/12/chinese-app-that-let-users-a...
Western companies who don't operate in China aren't shut out because the government treats them differently. On the contrary, the government would treat them like Chinese companies, and some aren't willing to put up with that. Chinese companies don't get a choice.
In 2015, the SEC reached a settlement with the Chinese branches of the Big Four accounting firms on non-compliance with the PCAOB’s regulation, and the administrative proceeding against these firms was dismissed for four years.[15] Now, four years have passed, and the conflict of regulation remains unresolved.
> The CCP doesn’t allow the us companies the same.
Many of the biggest companies in China are from the US. This is a Fox News tier talking point that gets mindlessly parroted without any logical scrutiny.
Hundreds of billions are earnt yearly by US domiciled companies. Google alone brings in $50 billion from China to the US and they have been "banned" there for years.
Some others: Nike, Intel, GM, Walmart, Coke, KFC, McDonalds, Proctor and Gamble, Qualcom, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, 3M, Texas Instruments, Starbucks, Nvidia, AMD, the list goes on and is extensive.
Starbucks has around 70% marketshare. Have any of the people commenting here even step foot inside China before making comments like "US companies can't compete there"?
Who exactly in the us(sic) is locked out again? Garbage social media companies like Facebook and Twitter? Who cares? The world in general needs less of them.
> He unequivocally said, yes. He was willing to forgo their market.
US is a corporate republic. The republic that founders dreamed of has waned and frailed from generations of corporate sellout political, legal, media, and business conglomerate establishments. Shareholders will come first and will continue to do so. With 33 trillion dollars debt there is not really any other option left now other than to continue to sail the sinking ship the same way.
> We'll see how Biden handles this. I'm sure it's a tough call.
He won't. He is just the face of the same old thinking that brought us here. Just like all of his predecessors in last 40 years.
China needs a new political system before we can talk about anyone being their allies. The CCP have made it clear they are only interested in total power.
More likely than it seems imo. Seeing the huge amount of discontent and dissent during the initial covid outbreak in Wuhan points towards the system being very fragile with no pressure release (such as democratic elections) in place. This can only go on so long before it implodes.
They could be more easy going without actually dropping the CCP. Vietnam for example is being quite easy going in spite of still having their communist party.
I have nothing against Communist parties (though I disagree with any philosophy that requires authoritarianism to enforce it, I still believe that Communists become Communists mostly with good intentions) and I agree they could evolve but the CCP has a culture problem. They are currently incapable of changing this from within through negotiation and are instead doubling down on it (see Xi's President for life vote for example). Any change in the CCP will come from within but if it happens in the next decade I can't see it being an evolution.
All the lives lost across the world to COVID and the economic impact of the previous year has demonstrated that "make peace" with CCP is not a good idea. I am, by no means, advocating war. But the rest of the world has to take measures to ensure bidirectional access to information. Here's what I am advocating: If a country wants free flow of goods, people, and money, there has to be free flow of information too. If it means curbing economic activities in hostile governments, while the decision must not be taken lightly, it needs to be taken sometimes.
> All the lives lost across the world to COVID and the economic impact of the previous year has demonstrated that "make peace" with CCP is not a good idea.
The US has been the origin for not only the literally largest pandemic in the history of humanity [0], but also responsible for the last pandemic before COVID-19 [1].
Would you be okay with holding the US similarly responsible for disease emerging in it's sphere of influence, or is that something you only reserve when looking for why "evil countries be evil"?
Microsoft is a crucial pillar in the US's political and industrial espionage, they won't let that happen. It wouldn't protect the US from threats, it would protect China.
> We'll see how Biden handles this. I'm sure it's a tough call.
I don't see how he can. I don't see how the next 2-3 US administrations can.
If the current level of China's "scare power" is enough to paralyze the US, you will have less, and less options on the table with each year as you go.
So china's aggression in the past few years isn't out of position of strength, it's from a position of extreme weakness. And with Biden continuing Trump's china strategy in economic sanctions/stopping tech transfers/getting companies to move out of china, as well as now forming alliances to combat china, the continuing overall trend for china is decline and withdrawal, and for democratic countries is unity and strength. some recent events include:
- Lowest approval ever of China from US citizens (20%). similar decline/rates in other democratic countries this year. That means people are boycotting "made in china" goods.
- Japan self defence force, UK aircraft carrier, France submarines, and Germany frigates are now (and will be) patrolling south china sea along with US carriers.
- UK and Canada offering citizenships to Hong Kong citizens
- QUAD alliance (Japan, India, Australia, US), as well as 4 out of the 5 eyes alliance, increasing activities
- Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, US and other countries offering continued incentives for companies to move back from China
- Apple moving iPhone, iPads and MacBook productions out of China
- Even Angela Merkel, China's most important ally in europe, has openly warned China to open up its markets or suffer. Also, she will be stepping down later this year (THANK GOD), and anti-China sentiments are rising in Germany
BUT. An encircled crazed maniac will do strange things. It will probably do something ridiculously stupid like attacking Taiwan. The attack will fail, and china will be sanctioned by the world just like russia.
You're not wrong about any trends you mention. I don't know if my level of confidence in seeing all these things through is as high as yours (especially wrt democratic unity). But the doom and gloom outlooks have certainly gotten ahead of themselves.
Increasingly, companies like Tesla also need to figure out how they will adjust to an adversarial China and the corresponding shift in Geopolitical reality. I remember reading that China may derive 40% of its revenues from Chinese market soon. Also wonder if this is already priced into Tesla's stock. That being said, I am also sure Elon and Co. are not sitting idle and twiddling their thumbs. In any case, it will be interesting to see how they deal with this.
the next hack will be using one of these Microsoft Exchange Servers most likely at a government or contractor's facility/account, and intelligence agencies will say Putin signed off on it himself. its all the information they have, just erase the idea about their omniscience. they are doing the same traceroute's that you are doing.
Yeah that sounds like a great idea. Ensure even more that no one inside of China will have access to information about human rights. And then the Chinese government can get to use propaganda against their own citizens even more effectively. There’s no way that could backfire. And there are no ethical problems with what you are suggesting either!
Who is 'we'? Chances are you live in a country founded in democratic principles. This means after each election, priorities change, based on the politicians that are voted into office.
Take the USA as a good example. The priorities of the 2008-2016 administration were undermined by the 2017-2020 administration, and the priorities of the 2017-2020 administration are being undermined by the 2021-now administration.
Both sides think they're right, and were doing what was right for the country. Both sides think the other was an existential threat to the nation, and use similar rhetoric to justify their actions.
Our Pentagon certainly doesn't change tactics every new president but hey you got this nice reality going for you where you think one person is in charge of the whole country, I am over here still waiting for a clear picture of Sasquatch. Sucks to see but it's what happens when our voters only get their news from Elite Western MSM. No sarcasm on the elite part, just look at this fairy tale world we got.
If the only alternate is status quo, then it's not working very well is it for:
1) Tibetans, Uighurs and other minorities
2) Taiwan, India, and basically any country that shares a border which China, since China has border issues with every country that it shares a border with
3) US, and Western world whose IP is being stolen everyday and is being constantly under attack from China
I really have no idea where this narrative comes from. Chinese government is evil, hostile, and cruel even to (some of) their own citizens. However, China as a nation are people - just like you and me. Why should we treat them as "hostile"? It makes no sense at all. This kind of crooked reasoning and blurred thinking is one of the main causes of all wars in the history of mankind.
Is anyone really of the view that most Chinese are evil? I don't think that's what calling them a hostile nation is meant to mean.
The problem is that the Chinese government, who ARE hostile, take advantage of the fact that we treat most Chinese as non-hostile. Nobody knows how many Chinese students and workers in the West are essentially spies for the Chinese government, but we do know it is enough to be worried about.
I'm not sure what we can do about that but I don't think we can pretend it's not an issue.
>Nobody knows how many Chinese students and workers in the West are essentially spies for the Chinese government
But we do know how many of them are contributing domestically. A growing percentage of American PHD graduates came from China and the vast majority of them are planning to stay.
Maybe the word evil should be thought of as “characterized by a value system of sufficient difference as to be in conflict with our own, either mutually or asymmetrically.”
If you believe that most Chinese citizens are in support of their government then calling the government evil is an indirect attack on them. If you don’t believe the Chinese support their government then that’s an entirely different topic you may have to educate yourself on.
Yes, I'm sure every workers' love of the CCP is genuine...
Actually, their outward support is partly a function of how well the government treats them and partly a function of pressure to conform, of which there is quite a lot in China.
Yeah, this. Chinese culture is much older and more widespread than the CCP. The Chinatown here in San Francisco is older than the state of California. We had our first Chinese New Year Parade in 1851.
The Communists are the problem, and even then not unqualified: the CCP has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of relative poverty to economic prosperity, even as they do terrible things to Tibetans, Uighurs, and Falun Gong, among others.
This is the hardest part about discussing this issue, for sure. The rapid technological and economic expansion achieved by CCP is the most impressive in all of human history in terms of numbers. It’s brutal, for sure, but that achievement means a lot of Chinese people are willing to look past the bad things, and look forward towards goals of further technological development.
The important difference between the “West” and China is that everyone knows CCP is going to look out for China. It’s not immediately clear that governments in the west do the same for their own.
I think you can argue the US government at least looks out for its own stakeholders, but one thing for sure is that the US government isn’t looking out for the interests of people of other countries. So when you stare wide-eyed wondering why some foreign nation doesn’t just do what the US says don’t be amazed.
An equal, by some metrics greater, growth in living standards occurred in Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Vietnam. The great success of the CCP was getting out of the Chinese people’s way.
By that logic at WW II, Germany was also a nation of German people, so am assuming per the above definition Germany was not a hostile nation?
A nation is generally its government, CCP in the example of China and yes it is hostile against every non-China nation. Chinese are people just like every other people.
This is exactly the argument I object to. As per definition, "A nation is a community of people formed on the basis of a common language, territory, history, ethnicity, or a common culture." Keeping this distinction (between the government and the citizens) is crucial because the discourse influences actions.
The people of China don't control espionage; the government does. So you'd better think about the government when the topic is espionage, which it is in this discussion.
It's possible you have a custom, non-standard understanding of the term. According to Merriam Webster, it has 5 meanings, and none of them refers to the government.
Of course the nation as a community of people in 1b also includes the government, but you can hardly say the nation understood in this sense is hostile. What you can say is that the government is hostile - we have proofs of that. We can also say that some minuscule percentage of the population is hostile - we can see some evidence of that. But to say that a nation is hostile is really crossing a red (no pun intended) line.
I'm discussing this apparently insignificant issue ad nauseam only because repeated conflation of government and citizens in discourse, media, and ultimately our minds are not without consequences.
Read the news. You see headlines like "US sends two carriers to Persian Gulf". Not "Government of the US", but "US". That is, in external affairs - military and diplomatic and espionage - it is a normal, customary usage to refer to the government of the country by the name of the country. It's used that way, whether you agree or not.
Now, the point you're making - that there is a difference between the government and the people, and we need to remember it - is a valid point, and an important one. But you're splitting the wrong hair to make that point.
> it is a normal, customary usage to refer to the government of the country by the name of the country.
And this is more or less fine. Not just in the news, in normal conversation we do the same. Not just "China is doing this" but also "Chinese are doing this." That's also logically true, because some subset (however big or small) of Chinese is doing this.
However, I object to this particular expression - "China is a hostile nation." I don't know why it's even a point of contention. Maybe when people use the term 'nation' they actually mean 'state'? Because 'nation' by and large refers to people the country consist of.
> Maybe when people use the term 'nation' they actually mean 'state'?
Yes, they do.
> Because 'nation' by and large refers to people the country consist of.
No, it doesn't. We keep telling you this, over and over and over, and you keep not listening, but I'm going to say it one more time: No, it doesn't. When you're talking about international things - things between countries - "nation" by and large refers to the government, not the people.
Sanctions lead to widespread suffering & even death among the civilian population. Why do you want the Chinese people to suffer or die? Sanctions are scarcely less psychotic than bombing a school or hospital. The violence is just hidden in life expectancy reduction & many other metrics instead of "N civilians' bodies ripped apart by bombs".
Oh, and targeted sanctions - aren't. Entities will view any sanctions as a legal risk and find it easier to just stop trading with the country at all. See Iran with medical supplies during the pandemic.
This idea that sanctions are a peaceful or nonviolent alternative to bombing things needs to die. In the 90s the sanctions against Iraq led to the deaths of half a million civilians and caused multiple successive UN humanitarian coordinators in Iraq to resign, calling the sanctions regime "genocidal". How anyone can continue to view sanctions as a favorable option is beyond me.
Why must there be alternatives? Why do anything at all? This bias toward a manufactured vague "do something!!!" feeling has just led to the deaths of countless civilians around the world.
The ethnic tensions were created by western interference in the first place. Perhaps intervention could have mitigated the scale of the tragedy, but it also could have made it worse by prolonging it.
Actually it's quite easy to predict! We can simply look at the track record of Western intervention since WW2, see that it comes down so squarely on the side of "please USA just leave the world alone, my god" that it achieves the platonic definition of a square, then call it a day.
I'm assuming you're saying this because you want to compare China to Nazi Germany, which is strange when the USSR is a much more apt comparison that existed in the postwar period.
Maybe you shouldn't assume. Maybe you should take Rebelgecko's question at face value, and actually answer it. If you're going to claim that the rest of the world just wants the US to leave it alone, why exclude World War II?
Has more suffering and death occurred in China before or after China opened up to the rest of the world? If they remained closed off to this day, they would much more closely resemble North Korea.
>Oh, and targeted sanctions - aren't. Entities will view any sanctions as a legal risk and find it easier to just stop trading with the country at all. See Iran with medical supplies during the pandemic.
The sanctions on Iran aren't targeted. They're blanket sanctions with specific exceptions. The problem there is asking international companies to do a bunch of stuff otherwise forbidden by the sanctions (financial, logistical, etc) which I assume is either a pain to get approved ahead of time or frightening to justify after the fact.
A better example of targeted sanctions is what's happening in response to the poisoning of Navalny. Specific Russians were sanctioned. That doesn't hurt uninvolved citizens nearly as much.
It's not my intention to make this political, but it's odd to me that the current administration sanctioned the Saudis over the murder of a journalist, but has little more than stern words towards China over the Uyghur situation and cyber espionage. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt that they'll eventually do something.
I love the world we live in: everyone has an opinion on severely complex matters and proffers it in an absolutely confident way that their opinion is the truth.
I don't like China's behavior (toward us and it's own). I don't believe for a minute that I know how to solve the problem, because every solution is bound to have unintended side effects, some which may be worse than the original problem.
Your opinion is also problematic, specially when politicians hold it (which is not uncommon), as in "This problem is way too complex, let's do nothing and pray that it will fix itself"
If I were a politician, which I am not, I would do this:
Gather the experts in the fields (there are likely more than one field at play) and manage their discussion. I would ask them questions and observe how they discuss. If I felt that one or both were not intellectually honest, I would replace them with other people, and repeat.
Once I felt an intellectually honest discussion had reached a conclusion, then I would act (vote, provide legislation, etc).
It is sad to me that we are moving away from a process like this and not toward it.
Too funny to hear this when there is a hostile nation that has fought wars that lead to millions of deaths since ww2 in the name of freedom, a nation that uses exactly the same methods to spy on absolutely everything - the US has accessed the secret communication of the Soviet Union for many years -, a nation that has led to chaos in the middle east and in post soviet republics.
Sorry, but it is time that the world is sanctioning the united states in the way that you propose to sanction China that is finding back to its old strength.
best regards from a white person from europe, not a chinese.
A curious side effect of globalization is mutual dependence, which prevents wars. Full scale hot wars might not happen because of nuclear deterrence, but cold wars attacking financial systems or utility grids could be prevented... Actually, that’s what’s happening, so maybe it doesn’t deter cold wars at all? I came here to write one thing and now I’m doubting it.
Please don't assume that "we" are all the same people. "We" include a lot of people from outside the US, including China. I imagine our fellow hackers in China would feel pretty alienated reading this comment.
I guess that is the modern way of deflecting blame away from yourself for security incidents. Blame the russians, chinese or just "state level actors".
Where is the proof that this was a Chinese hacking group? I certainly don't trust Microsoft to provide it. In fact, it's very concerning that Microsoft seems to be in some quasi-governmental role in this. It's literally a giant security hole in their software, why should we trust what they say?
The White House acting as a PR unit for MS (or is it vice versa?) is a serious problem.
How are we to trust you're not a paid Putin or CCP propagandist? Arguably Microsoft has far more credibility than you - my point being there are ways people orient for trusting individuals and organizations.
If you think the current White House administration and Microsoft aren't on the more trustworthy side of the trust spectrum, then who in your opinion is more trustworthy?
I think Microsoft and the current White House are on the extreme side of untrustworthy. What has MS ever done that was trustworthy? Their entire existence has been based on abusing a monopoly. The US government is also extremely untrustworthy (c.f. the 20th century). The combination of these two entities pushing the same story is a huge red flag.
Who would I trust? I’ll start with someone providing some sort of proof. Which is entirely absent here.
That's a fantasy burden you've constructed. What would even count as "proof"? Anything that incrementally changes the field of possibility? Or something that definitely proves what happened?
Microsoft has done untrustworthy things. They've also build the most successful (esp. in the longer view) commercial computing ecosystem because it hit the right balance between stability/robustness/usability. Many elements of that include proving some minimum burdens of trustworthiness (not to be confused with earning absolute trust).
The US government... cf the 20th century? You mean the greatest secular advancements in the human condition in history? And as for the age of "American Empire" (post WW2? Post Cold War?)... are you referring to the relatively most peaceful, humane, self-effacing hegemon that has ever been known the planet (not to be confused with a perfectly peaceful and human hegemon)?
This flippant stance combined with absolutely no countervailing context and fantasy burdens of proof... please.
I mean, it's no secret that Microsoft has a $10 billion contract with the US Government. And it's also no secret that attributing blame to cyber attacks is a hard problem. You can study the tools/exploits used, the files modified, the associated IP addresses, all of which can be easily obfuscated or used to scapegoat.
I don't really doubt the allegations, as the motive makes sense, but I'm hoping there will be a good postmortem.
The word "relatively" served a purpose in that statement. Can you name a hegemon that was more peaceful and humane? Which European colonial power at its height, which Chinese dynasty, which Mongol khanate would you prefer?
Maybe America wouldn't be top of the list but the point is made in distinction to other regimes that achieved remotely similar power differentials.
> relatively most peaceful, humane, self-effacing hegemon that has ever been known the planet
The US murdered massive amounts of people in East Asia and the Middle East during that time period. Napalm, Agent Orange, war crimes... We were as bad as any hegemony. Much worse actually, due to technical superiority. We also have the largest prison population of any country (per capita and in total) due to the "war" on drugs.
So yes, I'd say we're near the bottom of the list. Especially if you go back past the 20th century (slavery, genocide).
It's difficult to find hard proof to support or against the claims. However there are invisible human natures lead people tend to believe one or the other. Here in HN the majority belief is China is evil. The dissidents against the belief will be downvoted. But the world is much bigger than HN. A lot of contents are just not in English.
Here's a community that contains minority beliefs but in English. I've pasted in another post. Judge by yourself they are rational people or not.
Replace "China" with "CCP" - and yes, however it's obvious as to why that is - the control systems, the censorship systems, the confirmed genocide [by definition, cultural genocide] of Uighurs, and things like not allowing the UN to go into China to investigate claims directly are a few examples; it's not to say different administrations in the US have been part of bad/unacceptable behaviour as well, however the CCP is a different - "permanent" leadership/hierarchy that isn't voted in by the general population, so it's not comparable.
I don't actually think the Chinese government is trustworthy, for all the reasons you state. However, I find the US/MS less trustworthy for us. I've been the target of US propaganda far more often than Chinese propaganda, since I'm a US citizen.
Remember Bush/The New York Times falsely claiming that Iraq had WMD? A lesson we shouldn't quickly forget. Especially when the current admin has already initiated illegal military action. I'm weary of war hawks and the propaganda that supports them.
As a Dane I wonder what’s behind using Hafnium as the name of the Chinese organization?
(Hafnium is an element, named after the latin name of Copenhagen - Hafnia).
It would be cool if USDS set them up with something open source and self hosted like Jitsi, branded for the US gov. They’ve already got GovCloud for compute needs.
What blows my mind is everyone is so concerned about Huawei and friends, and yet they still use Windows and other Microsoft products. Now _that_ is a true national security threat.
Microsoft and Google provide the government access to most homes and businesses. They are effective tools the government will keep close to the chest. Each and every keyboard input gets collected as technical telemetry data. It's the global version of the more upfront Workplace Analytics your empowered employer is scanning constantly as dwellers in shadows. All parties play Good cop Bad cop but are eating the fruits of the globalist technological emporia.
The first half of the article refers without exception to this "Chinese operation." Only in this sentence in the middle of the article do they point out that there's only circumstantial evidence to attribute it to China:
> But as with the Russian SolarWinds hackers, investigators have yet to identify who exactly the Hafnium hackers are—beyond Microsoft's assertion that they're state-sponsored and operate out of China—or to pin down the full extent of their motivations.
Obviously, countries do this kind of thing all the time. And an operation of this scale is likely to come from someone with government resources. But it continues to bother me that the requirements for attribution of these attacks never rise above the level of hearsay.
Is nobody even slightly skeptical of Microsoft? The company that eagerly collaborates with the alphabet soup agencies gets to write off an exploit in its own software, courtesy of Chinese state hackers, when we all know _for a fact_ that the NSA pays these companies to keep such exploits around for their own use.
It's one thing to acknowledge that one explanation is likely; it's another thing to give up on skepticism entirely.
I'm sure there's some of that, but I suspect that even if there wasn't we'd see much the same results. In the US, the state and the mainstream media are essentially the same thing. The people who run the state and the people who make up the mainstream media are part of the same social circles, they go to the same restaurants, they tend to have the same worldviews.
The equivocation of hatred for the Chinese and hatred for it’s government is itself Chinese government propaganda.
Any time criticism comes up of the actions of their government, the deflection method is to say it’s just hatred for the Chinese. This is done to prevent the Chinese people from realizing that people in the West are on their side and they are not their government.
funny that you say this as we are witnessing an uptick in anti-Asian hate crimes. you can't seriously think that nobody conflates the two?
and people in the West assuming they know best is as much of a problem as anything else. you're not on their side, you're speaking as if you're above them
> you're not on their side, you're speaking as if you're above them
This is a common sentiment with American conservatives. They think liberal people look down upon them from their ivory towers. Honestly, they do. Your average conservative is malnourished with a fox news media diet and isn't educated enough to critically think about their own positions, you can't even engage in a rational conversation with most of them. The GOP at large is a bad faith party who rules for power and dominance, not for the improvement of peoples lives. Rhetoric is their weapon not reason.
While liberals are not in favor of white supremacy, religion, or "easy fixes" they do favor policy that would benefit the average conservative person. In the sense that liberals want to see conservative peoples lives meaningfully improve, liberals are on the side of conservatives. In the sense that liberals want to preserve conservative culture and reinforce their world views, liberals are clearly not on the side of conservatives.
China has it's own Han supremacy problem (just like America has a white supremacy problem), and while the west is not interested in supporting Han supremacy, I think the average [educated] westerner does want to see the average chinese persons life improve, just not at the cost of Taiwanese lives, Uigher lives, Tibetan lives, or Hong Konger lives, and not at the cost of our own prosperity.
> This is done to prevent the Chinese people from realizing that people in the West are on their side and they are not their government.
Currently there are more than 919.14 million CPC members in China (data point circa 2019), and this does not include the people working for 事业单位 (gov. funded public institutes).
So for a random Chinese citizen, Western people have a, like, 3% chance of hate and 97% of love?
If we propagate one hop further to the relatives/friends (let's say it knows 100 people in his/her life), the number goes to 4% of love and 96% of hate.
The overwhelming majority of Chinese people stand by their government, with levels of approval and satisfaction way higher than Americans' for theirs (95% vs 38%) [1]
All this talk of "the CCP" is just a very thin veil of self-deception, allowing you to pretend that you are "on the same side" of the Chinese people. You're not. The best future for China is to become the dominant world power, and you don't want that in any form or shape, am I wrong?
Do you really think it's safe to give an honest negative answer when asked your opinion of the CCCP in China?
Personally I doubt it, and I imagine that the average Chinese citizen understands this reality very well indeed as they give their positive answers to the nice poll agent with the sincerest smile they can muster.
Do you really think the people involved in this 13 year survey are so stupid they didn't think of the issue you could identify in a good 5 seconds of thinking before writing your comment?
> The overwhelming majority of Chinese people stand by their government, with levels of approval and satisfaction way higher than Americans' for theirs (95% vs 38%) [1]
And guess which country disappears citizens for “re-education” if they speak out against said government. You’d have to be daft to respond to those surveys negatively in China if there was any kind of chance your response could be traced back to you.
> The best future for China is to become the dominant world power, and you don't want that in any form or shape, am I wrong?
Yes, you are wrong. Becoming “the” dominant world power has little to do with the good of the people. Norway’s citizens are better off than US citizens on average and Norway is irrelevant on the global power scale.
Regardless, you are still confused about what people are against. It’s not China becoming a world power (it already is). It’s literally the abusive way the CCP treats dissidents. Look at the Muslim camps, look at Honk Kong, look at Winnie the Pooh.
Let it sink in that most people are happy the Chinese lives are improving. The issue is with the fascists at the top.
Unfortunately, i don't think anyone is that dim to conclude that the accusations against the Chinese government is out of pure empathy for the Chinese people.
If it was the case that your empathy stretches across the pacific ocean for the Uighurs, then why does it not stretch for the Palestinians? I think the actions taken by Israel is way worse of a human rights violation than China is doing, but because the West supports Israel, it turns a blind eye against the Palestinians?
Moreover, one can formulate and theoretically, yes accusations should not equivocate as hatred for the Chinese.
The intelligence community has been known to direct and cultivate media assets. [0]
Less directly, much of news reporting is dependent upon access to exclusive and sometimes anonymous sources. There's little to prevent some of those sources from being honeypots meant to indirectly manipulate reporters into parroting a given narrative.
Even so, I doubt that antipathy towards China's being driven by any centralized authority. We're entering an era of great power competition with the country, its (ostensible) ideology has historically existed in opposition to the US, and many still see it as the poster-boogyman for the hollowing out of American industries.
There's always been tension, and ever since the Trump administration began imposing tariffs and clamping down against Chinese IP and technology theft, it's incidentally become more present in the public's consciousness.
Is there an English language website that tracks (ostensibly) state-sponsored hacks throughout the globe? I hear about Western targets getting hacked by Russian and Chinese actors, but other than big things like stuxnet, I almost never hear about what's going on in the other direction. Or about attacks that have nothing to do with the U.S. one way or the other.
We are in for a bumpy ride, just heard from a security person that Amazon is inadvertently selling iot devices that must call home (to China) or they stop working.
My title company and me by association are victims of this hack. They stole important information regarding my home purchase to send fraudulent wiring instructions. I’m now out the deposit $130,000.
240 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 258 ms ] threadhttps://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56304379?xtor=AL-72...
https://news.yahoo.com/microsoft-hack-white-house-warns-1207...
https://abc17news.com/politics/national-politics/2021/03/05/...
I'm not sure Apple and others who either sell product there or have large manufacturing there are as willing to forgo the 'promise market', but it looks more and more we will have to. More or less the next Russia in terms of sanctions.
We'll see how Biden handles this. I'm sure it's a tough call.
The CCP doesn’t allow the us companies the same.
Why our government let that happen. Letting so much business leave to the CCP will be one of the greatest failings of the us government.
Now they're a global power and, gasp, they act like one. Nobody could have seen this coming.
I read a dozen books on post-Nixon US politics.
The amount of allegations from both sides of US politics that the other benefitted in the personal capacity from trade with China is staggering.
At least some of them must be genuine.
It comes to a very simple explanation that communists have indeed been influencing US politics for decades with very crude means, and that they were successful in that.
This is an embarrassing admission US has to do first before any recovery can be started.
But... but one can't believe into any other explanation as any much credible.
Do hundreds of US political insiders lobby for China in one voice just for nothing?
You don't have closet communists, just a lot of very greedy, amoral, and easy to exploit power holders.
American legal system prohibits jailing people for anything but being caught red handed in cases of political corruption.
I have no idea what you can do about that without doing political persecution, but on other hand if you leave it be it will keep being exploited like hell.
Lol you’ve just described capitalists.
Capitalism vs Communism is a useless debate if the will isn't there to hold the corrupt accountable and ensure that the average citizen is empowered (with said power secured both physically and legally.)
Invasion to Grenada
Invasion to Panama
Invasion to Iraq
Bombing of Serbia
Bombing of Somalia
Invasion of Iraq
Invasion of Afghanistan
Bombing of Libya
Trickle-down economics
Iran-Contra
24 years of Republican presidents out of the last 40 years.
This is the kind of high-quality comment that this site is well known for.
Here's what lead me to come back to HN:
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2021/03/is-china-hacking-rando...
Like, actually impressive.
It has nothing to do with infiltration or influence. It's simply the basic structure of the American political system that, since its very founding (who was able to vote?) oriented the government into the facilitation of profit above all else.
That is actually the realization the US has to do, but it seems somehow even more embarrassing than the conclusion that the US government is infiltrated by commies, for some odd reason.
Anyone who was critically thinking saw this coming a long way out.
No one with half a brain thought anything else would happen. Even if China was a liberal democracy, this would still happen.
It was just arrogant and short term thinking.
"Made in China" is exactly the type of curse that the global elite like to put on people. It's plain as day what's coming next and yet, everybody has just accepted it since the 70s. China will be the world superpower to replace the US and apparently we're all fine with that.
You can’t have $5 T-shirts and also a $15 minimum wage.
with $15 minimum wage there is no need for $5 T-shirts.
- The US needs access to China's goods to be viable. For half a century US companies improved their efficiency/competitiveness by moving their process to China. They now have too many dependencies in the form of Chinese manufacturing and development capabilities and do not have the skills/knowledge/talents/infrastructure in the US. Because of this China can dictate their rules with zero pressure (though India and other countries will surely be a difficult competition at some point, or maybe already are).
- China owns more than 1 trillion of US debt. In the past the country bought a massive amount of US debt to inflate USD vs RMB and boost their own economy. Currently China has no reasons to sell their reserve as that would impact their economy negatively. If the US blocks them they may start massively selling US debt, which would impact USD and the US economy.
No, it really isn't. The thing the US is indeed does very little for an economy of its size.
Washington can slam fist on the table, and US industry will be out of China by tomorrow, without much impact at home besides no iToys this season, and few percents off its stock market.
Lack of consumer goods would of course be upsetting, but people wouldn't die from lack of them.
People barely making ends meet aren't very interested in those kinds of political statements.
You could, of course, try to lie to them about what the consequences of your policies are going to be.
If you can't do this, you can't do this.
And you certainly wouldn't be able to do even more painful things which are truly needed for the West to have any chance to put the genie back into the bottle.
China, and Russia have effectively conditioned the NATO countries over the decades into "self-beneficial inaction." Now, seeing words like yours proves their strategy worked.
What has the US really lost? No territory, no people; there's no stream of refugees to the "winning" Chinese side.
Trump was anything but. Your writing just makes no sense.
This isn't some insurmountable problem. Yes, there are scenarios where you go "too fast" and raise too many prices too quickly and piss people off. Or, you go slower and make it more palatable.
Lack of consumer goods means lack of jobs for people who transport, warehouse, and sell consumer goods.
Lack of jobs means lack of money to pay for things like food, shelter, medical care, etc, only some of which the US has adequate safety nets for.
People will, indeed, die from lack of consumer goods.
Your comment makes it seem like this would lead to catastrophe or collapse.
It would more likely lead to industry rotation and employment change.
Yes, you can reduce any macro factor to a death count, but those are always trading off in all directions. It's meaningless to categorically single out a particular scenario of swapping production as more deadly than the others.
I'd like to regain industrial capacity too but we're missing an entire population base of expertise and relationships.
Yeah, I think you're under estimating the interconnectedness of the supply chain there. Would definitely make the pandemic disruption look small.
And you're assuming China won't retaliate. I wouldn't like to be a US national in China when that happened.
Pandemic disruption is small. A disruption on this scale was nothing unheard of historically. Infectious diseases were taking millions of lives in the developed world before the advent of antibiotics, and to lesser extend until the bio-technological revolution of seventies.
What was unheard of was world's biggest power being rendered utterly impotent, and in complete stupor by such minor events.
I see a country like US being otherwise fully capable of dealing with a crisis on this scale easily.
> And you're assuming China won't retaliate. I wouldn't like to be a US national in China when that happened.
Of course they will! You will be cutting into personal coffers of their highest elites. It will be a very personal challenge to them. Having them eat watery gruel like lowly peasants will infuriate them.
That's exactly the POINT. You see a bad guy, you challenge him to beat him. You don't beat a bad guy by avoiding him.
Nobody wins a fight without fighting it to the end. Escalate until you win.
The old Cold War was very clear that final victory involved civilian deaths in the millions. Be very clear: are you advocating for that?
I'm advocating for people to understand that not being ready for this will be their demise.
Tell me, what would've been a better solution for WW2.
Let Adolph, Stalin, Hirohito, or worse both of them together, have Europe, and then have their free way to use the completely overwhelming resource advantage to kill you, or go and fight to the bitter end before they have it?
The most logical action to do if you can't win, is to fight. One must be ready to fight, even if it is a completely hopeless battle.
Second, I want to make you guys understand that, for now, NATO has 100% genuine ability to do something about its adversaries. Wait just a few more years at the current pace, and it wouldn't.
Third, if you chicken out, your weakness will rile the beast(s) even more, and fire up its appetites. It's showing your back to the tiger, an invitation for disaster.
Also, it's funny you bring up the Axis powers considering that America would have entirely sat out the entire war if it wasn't for Pearl Harbour and Japan constantly provoking a response with their actions in the pacific. I have also never seen the US ever go into a war where they did not have overwhelming power advantage over their enemies. By the time D-Day happened, the supply lines for the Axis were crippled beyond repair and the war was essentially already lost. It was just a matter of time before supplies ran out.
China has more than enough nuclear capability to cripple the entirety of NATO and they also are well aware that NATO has the capability to do likewise. Hence, neither parties are ever going to even contemplate an outright war with each other despite the wet dreams of war mongers from both sides.
First, no it isn't. Second, in a few more years, China will be the only country in the world with material, and military capacity to take the second strike, and keep on offence.
Third, you haven't learned anything if you ever studied WWII. While Germany was running on vapours in the late war, it was still running. They had few years more of small arms supplies, and still some food, which was indeed better than what union's officers had even in reich's final days. Last reserves of fuel were enough for more than a year of low intensity warfare. And yes, Germany fought to the bitter end. Otherwise, where did you thing hundred of thousand American casualties came?
Please don't comment on this matter anymore. You don't know anything about war.
What isn't? That China has enough nuclear capability to cripple the entirety of NATO or vice versa? I'd like to see you justify that tall claim. Your second "point" just sounds like fear mongering without substance. If any country could develop that capability, it is Russia with the largest land area of any country.
Also, my point about the Axis having essentially already lost the war thanks to crippled supplies was incorrect because "they had a few years more of small arms supplies, and still some food" and enough fuel to "last more than a year of low intensity warfare"? That's just an inevitable loss but with extra steps in between! I might not know anything about war but clearly you don't know anything about my argument if you thought this was an actual rebuttal.
Low intensity warfare? The Allies had enough bombers to collapse entire cities! Even the hundreds of thousand Americans dead were minor compared to the millions of Germans that perished.
That's kind of why we don't engage in these kinds of large scale ground invasion type wars anymore (at least without one side being completely overwhelmingly more powerful) - the costs are so astronomically high, both in money and in causalities.
Some replacements might be slower and more expensive to spin up than people and industries have wanted or been willing to do, but there's literally nothing unique in China.
The cost advantage, at this point, has eroded greatly and is on trajectory to continue doing so (especially if they are to meet their own stated and industrial policy goals).
Also, China is dependent on lots of thing from other countries, including the US, so the notion that they can dictate rules "with zero pressure" is wrong.
Finally, the debt piece is not something I understand well, but I almost exclusively see that addressed by experts as a faulty notion. At least, the notion that all China has to do to cripple the US suddenly start selling tons of US debt or dollars is total fantasy.
Realistically, what would china do? If you "start massively selling US debt", what does that mean? Someone has to buy it. You're increasing the supply while demand probably stays pretty constant. But realistically, I don't think it could go below 90-cents on the dollar. I mean, who wouldn't take US government debt at a 10% discount? Compared to commercial debt from a company with way more risk than the US government, that's way better. So, are we talking about raising the US government's cost to borrow by a few percentage points for a few months?
China can't really disrupt the US economy via its debt holdings. Actually cutting China off from the US would have a far greater impact. Heck, Trump's tariffs were a tiny move and created intense disruption in a lot of industries like bicycle sales. That's not even cutting off China or anything. Imagine if smartphones couldn't be imported into the US for a year or two?
But I don't think the original poster is talking about "cutting China off" in whole. I think the issue in question is about a company like ByteDance/TikTok getting to operate in the US while Google, Facebook, Clubhouse, etc. get blocked from accessing China. If TikTok doesn't need to compete with US companies in China, but Twitter/Instagram/Clubhouse need to compete with TikTok in the US, it means that Chinese companies will have double the market to sell into.
China's GDP is around $24T and the US's is around $21T so a service like TikTok can get access to all $45T while a US-based company like Facebook can't get access to the Chinese market. If you're able to service both countries, your investment in software, infrastructure, etc. goes further.
I don't think it's about cutting China off, but rather wanting a more level playing field. When we're talking about something like smartphones, Apple, Samsung, and others sell into the Chinese market a lot and while China might do things to help its own companies like Huawei, it's open enough to placate a lot of people. That's very different from Facebook and Twitter which are banned in the country. Apple is 20% of the Chinese smartphone market.
If a US company makes the Next Big Thing in social networking, a Chinese company gets to copy it for the Chinese market. If a Chinese company makes the Next Big Thing, they can launch it in the US market as TikTok did.
I don't think this is about cutting Chinese manufacturing off. I think this is a question of whether firms like ByteDance/TikTok should be allowed to come into the US while US firms like Facebook or Twitter can't enter China.
If Facebook created a similar sibsidiary social network for China, and called it '脸书' would China care about the distinction?
Better question, who wants to be the guy that goes, "I have a great idea. It'll really piss off those yanks. It'll just cost us about $100 billion (the price of like 7 Gerald Ford class carriers) along with the interest payments. A small price to pay to piss them off and have their private corps and allies buy their debt at a discount."
That's borderline a scenario like that comic meme at a board meeting for ideas and the dude gets thrown out the window.
We just printed four trillion dollars out of thin air and the sky didn't fall.
What makes you think that printing one quarter of that amount in order to sterilize a dump of treasuries will cause the sky to fall?
Treasury bonds are issued and put on the bond market. When purchased, those funds are the "money printer go brrrr". It's not so much printing money, just getting deeper into debt. Call it what it is, so it can be approached properly. Calling a tiger a duck isn't going to save you from getting mauled to death.
No, they aren't.
You are confusing fiscal deficits with monetary expansion. Worse yet, seem to be complaining that GP is failing to confuse monetary expansion with fiscal deficits, when suggesting use of the former to deal with the adverse effects of a particular source of constraints on the ability to leverage the latter.
All of these treasuries are sold to primary dealers and the secondary market transactions are of little interest to any macro variable. Some treasuries are held by China in its Federal Reserve account. Should China sell the treasuries to another buyer, they will be transferred to a different account in the same bank. The nationality of the account holder makes no difference to the price of the asset.
The real issue is can China force the price of treasuries to be lower than it is? The answer to that is, maybe a little on the margin. Treasuries are priced as the expectation of average short term rates which are policy decisions by the Federal Reserve. So the real question is can China force the Federal Reserve to raise short term rates over a prolonged period? The Fed does this as part of an inflation fighting policy so this is a question about inflation and has nothing to do with China "dumping" anything.
Trying to guess the inflationary effects of something is hard, so I will throw out some theories and you can decide which one you like:
1. To the degree that US (and global) corporations have been outsourcing manufacturing to China to avoid paying higher wages to first world workers, then this results in driving down wage increases which could create an inflationary spiral, depending on your theory of inflation. Old school people thought inflation was the result of wages being too high. So if they are right, then yes, a very tight labor market could increase inflation more than expected and perhaps the Fed would need to keep rates a bit higher, but again to fight inflation, not because nation X no longer wants access to the US capital markets. I think most Americans would welcome this greatly, although stock prices would take a hit.
2. At the same time this would create an economic shock and the Fed may lower rates to stimulate the economy during the shock. So the short run effects are really mixed.
3. But there is another aspect here, which is that the trade deficit with China creates a loss of income for the US, which is made up for by increased government spending, whether disability payments to laid off workers, or welfare payments or other costs. Thus a reduction in the trade deficit will drive a reduction in the government deficit and thus a reduced demand to sell treasuries that moves in lockstep with the reduced demand to buy treasuries. So if you are of the newer school that says euler consumption trade offs are going to control investment demand, and sticky prices cause nominal interest rates to generate inflation, then once you adjust for the reduced government deficits created by trade deficits, you end up with a model that predicts higher short run rates and then stable long run rates.
4. There is the issue of international capital flows. Let's say we block China from purchasing dollar assets, so investment demand for the dollar decreases, therefore the dollar itself depreciates against the global basket, which causes US exports to be more competitive and we export more, which increases domestic income, which threatens an increase in inflation, which causes a small increase in rates as the economy is booming, up until the higher rates offset the depreciated dollar and things are back into equilibrium. This is why nations such as China intentionally devalue their dollar when they want to stimulate the economy.
Note that financial market beauty contests has zero impact on the US risk-free rates and thus on the price of treasuries. US treasuries are priced by arbitrage against the time path of future short rates, not by how popular the US is or whether some nation wants to hold treasuries.
You can pick among all of these or make your own scenario, but the bottom line is that rates go up only because the Fed raises rates in response to inflation. They do not go up because China decides to give away a bunch of its dollar assets.
China, of course, can sell the t...
We need in total embargo China. She are largest threat among existence for continuing America.
I think you have this backwards. China bought US treasuries to weaken their currency and increase demand for their goods. If they now sell, they will face significant appreciation of the yuan and become uncompetitive. At the same time the US would become more competitive. There would be short term disruption but China would suffer more.
I was answering to someone talking about cutting China off the US market (or at minimum adding strong restrictions). In that situation China’s economy is already suffering.
My response was that such an act by China would actually help the US economy, not hurt it (while simultaneously hurting China).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Exclusion_Act
When that is not the case, it's usually in sectors where Chinese companies don't have full access to the Chinese market either. If Facebook or Google were Chinese companies but hosted the same content, do you think they'd be allowed inside the Great Firewall? Actually, we don't need to guess: when Qihoo 360 tried to provide censored access to Western social media, they were quickly shut down: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/12/chinese-app-that-let-users-a...
Western companies who don't operate in China aren't shut out because the government treats them differently. On the contrary, the government would treat them like Chinese companies, and some aren't willing to put up with that. Chinese companies don't get a choice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holding_Foreign_Companies_Acco...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EQUITABLE_Act
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-12-03/China-slams-new-audit-...
https://journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/CBLR/announc...
In 2015, the SEC reached a settlement with the Chinese branches of the Big Four accounting firms on non-compliance with the PCAOB’s regulation, and the administrative proceeding against these firms was dismissed for four years.[15] Now, four years have passed, and the conflict of regulation remains unresolved.
Many of the biggest companies in China are from the US. This is a Fox News tier talking point that gets mindlessly parroted without any logical scrutiny.
Hundreds of billions are earnt yearly by US domiciled companies. Google alone brings in $50 billion from China to the US and they have been "banned" there for years.
Some others: Nike, Intel, GM, Walmart, Coke, KFC, McDonalds, Proctor and Gamble, Qualcom, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, 3M, Texas Instruments, Starbucks, Nvidia, AMD, the list goes on and is extensive.
Starbucks has around 70% marketshare. Have any of the people commenting here even step foot inside China before making comments like "US companies can't compete there"?
Who exactly in the us(sic) is locked out again? Garbage social media companies like Facebook and Twitter? Who cares? The world in general needs less of them.
US is a corporate republic. The republic that founders dreamed of has waned and frailed from generations of corporate sellout political, legal, media, and business conglomerate establishments. Shareholders will come first and will continue to do so. With 33 trillion dollars debt there is not really any other option left now other than to continue to sail the sinking ship the same way.
> We'll see how Biden handles this. I'm sure it's a tough call.
He won't. He is just the face of the same old thinking that brought us here. Just like all of his predecessors in last 40 years.
And it's a good thing. Only Trump was bold enough to entertain the idea of a commercial war with China.
I live in the US, but I don't want that. I want peace and freedom. China and the US are natural allies given the complementarity of the industries.
Let's make peace not war.
The US has been the origin for not only the literally largest pandemic in the history of humanity [0], but also responsible for the last pandemic before COVID-19 [1].
Would you be okay with holding the US similarly responsible for disease emerging in it's sphere of influence, or is that something you only reserve when looking for why "evil countries be evil"?
[0] https://academic.oup.com/emph/article/2019/1/18/5298310
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_swine_flu_pandemic
I don't see how he can. I don't see how the next 2-3 US administrations can.
If the current level of China's "scare power" is enough to paralyze the US, you will have less, and less options on the table with each year as you go.
Time works against the US, and the West at large.
You know, the one that went over like a lead ballon and likely cost Hillary the 2016 election?
Likelihood that this kind of treaty coming into force now is essentially nil.
They have a very anti immigration culture, and the one child policy means they’ll have more retirees than working age in a decade or two.
And it’ll only get worse as given their less than replacement birth rate and substantially more males than females.
A slightly aged China will still be able to field more military age men than the whole of Western bloc combined.
In the age of nuclear weapons having a large population might actually be a liability since you have more civilians that need to be defended.
You probably never heard of Mao's most famous catchphrase, reflecting perfectly on the thinking of people like Xi Jinping.
- Lowest approval ever of China from US citizens (20%). similar decline/rates in other democratic countries this year. That means people are boycotting "made in china" goods.
- Japan self defence force, UK aircraft carrier, France submarines, and Germany frigates are now (and will be) patrolling south china sea along with US carriers.
- UK and Canada offering citizenships to Hong Kong citizens
- QUAD alliance (Japan, India, Australia, US), as well as 4 out of the 5 eyes alliance, increasing activities
- Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, US and other countries offering continued incentives for companies to move back from China
- Apple moving iPhone, iPads and MacBook productions out of China
- Even Angela Merkel, China's most important ally in europe, has openly warned China to open up its markets or suffer. Also, she will be stepping down later this year (THANK GOD), and anti-China sentiments are rising in Germany
- US to build anti-China missile network along first island chain on Japan, Taiwan https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/International-relations/Ind...
BUT. An encircled crazed maniac will do strange things. It will probably do something ridiculously stupid like attacking Taiwan. The attack will fail, and china will be sanctioned by the world just like russia.
the next hack will be using one of these Microsoft Exchange Servers most likely at a government or contractor's facility/account, and intelligence agencies will say Putin signed off on it himself. its all the information they have, just erase the idea about their omniscience. they are doing the same traceroute's that you are doing.
1) sanctions against China
2) a Greater Firewall outside China, right on all fiber cables, blocking/filtering all traffic from China.
China is a hostile nation and we need to treat it as such.
Given the amount of suspicious Chinese devices and traffic, you'd imagine we should be doing something though?
Who is 'we'? Chances are you live in a country founded in democratic principles. This means after each election, priorities change, based on the politicians that are voted into office.
Take the USA as a good example. The priorities of the 2008-2016 administration were undermined by the 2017-2020 administration, and the priorities of the 2017-2020 administration are being undermined by the 2021-now administration.
Both sides think they're right, and were doing what was right for the country. Both sides think the other was an existential threat to the nation, and use similar rhetoric to justify their actions.
If the only alternate is status quo, then it's not working very well is it for:
1) Tibetans, Uighurs and other minorities
2) Taiwan, India, and basically any country that shares a border which China, since China has border issues with every country that it shares a border with
3) US, and Western world whose IP is being stolen everyday and is being constantly under attack from China
That ship sailed long ago.
I really have no idea where this narrative comes from. Chinese government is evil, hostile, and cruel even to (some of) their own citizens. However, China as a nation are people - just like you and me. Why should we treat them as "hostile"? It makes no sense at all. This kind of crooked reasoning and blurred thinking is one of the main causes of all wars in the history of mankind.
The problem is that the Chinese government, who ARE hostile, take advantage of the fact that we treat most Chinese as non-hostile. Nobody knows how many Chinese students and workers in the West are essentially spies for the Chinese government, but we do know it is enough to be worried about.
I'm not sure what we can do about that but I don't think we can pretend it's not an issue.
But we do know how many of them are contributing domestically. A growing percentage of American PHD graduates came from China and the vast majority of them are planning to stay.
https://cset.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/CSET-Trends-i...
The Communists are the problem, and even then not unqualified: the CCP has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of relative poverty to economic prosperity, even as they do terrible things to Tibetans, Uighurs, and Falun Gong, among others.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overseas_Chinese
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Chinese_New_Year...
The important difference between the “West” and China is that everyone knows CCP is going to look out for China. It’s not immediately clear that governments in the west do the same for their own.
Right, and increasingly those "stakeholders" don't include the actual citizens of those nations.
A nation is generally its government, CCP in the example of China and yes it is hostile against every non-China nation. Chinese are people just like every other people.
This is exactly the argument I object to. As per definition, "A nation is a community of people formed on the basis of a common language, territory, history, ethnicity, or a common culture." Keeping this distinction (between the government and the citizens) is crucial because the discourse influences actions.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/nation
Definition 1.b. in your link includes the government explicitly.
None of them exclude the government, and they can all reasonably include the government.
I'm discussing this apparently insignificant issue ad nauseam only because repeated conflation of government and citizens in discourse, media, and ultimately our minds are not without consequences.
I don’t see how you can make this claim so strongly.
The government is not independent of the people even if it is authoritarian.
Any hostility enacted by the government will necessarily involve the people. Governments need people in order to do anything.
A government without people can speak hostile words, but can’t be hostile, because by definition it can’t do anything if it isn’t governing anyone.
You will need to explain.
Now, the point you're making - that there is a difference between the government and the people, and we need to remember it - is a valid point, and an important one. But you're splitting the wrong hair to make that point.
And this is more or less fine. Not just in the news, in normal conversation we do the same. Not just "China is doing this" but also "Chinese are doing this." That's also logically true, because some subset (however big or small) of Chinese is doing this.
However, I object to this particular expression - "China is a hostile nation." I don't know why it's even a point of contention. Maybe when people use the term 'nation' they actually mean 'state'? Because 'nation' by and large refers to people the country consist of.
Yes, they do.
> Because 'nation' by and large refers to people the country consist of.
No, it doesn't. We keep telling you this, over and over and over, and you keep not listening, but I'm going to say it one more time: No, it doesn't. When you're talking about international things - things between countries - "nation" by and large refers to the government, not the people.
Oh, and targeted sanctions - aren't. Entities will view any sanctions as a legal risk and find it easier to just stop trading with the country at all. See Iran with medical supplies during the pandemic.
This idea that sanctions are a peaceful or nonviolent alternative to bombing things needs to die. In the 90s the sanctions against Iraq led to the deaths of half a million civilians and caused multiple successive UN humanitarian coordinators in Iraq to resign, calling the sanctions regime "genocidal". How anyone can continue to view sanctions as a favorable option is beyond me.
So does doing nothing.
The sanctions on Iran aren't targeted. They're blanket sanctions with specific exceptions. The problem there is asking international companies to do a bunch of stuff otherwise forbidden by the sanctions (financial, logistical, etc) which I assume is either a pain to get approved ahead of time or frightening to justify after the fact.
A better example of targeted sanctions is what's happening in response to the poisoning of Navalny. Specific Russians were sanctioned. That doesn't hurt uninvolved citizens nearly as much.
And they are quite ineffective.
I don't like China's behavior (toward us and it's own). I don't believe for a minute that I know how to solve the problem, because every solution is bound to have unintended side effects, some which may be worse than the original problem.
Gather the experts in the fields (there are likely more than one field at play) and manage their discussion. I would ask them questions and observe how they discuss. If I felt that one or both were not intellectually honest, I would replace them with other people, and repeat.
Once I felt an intellectually honest discussion had reached a conclusion, then I would act (vote, provide legislation, etc).
It is sad to me that we are moving away from a process like this and not toward it.
they came for the Tibetans first and no one spoke up, so then came the Uighurs, and then Hong Kong ...
Next, everyone else in the neighborhood..
Sorry, but it is time that the world is sanctioning the united states in the way that you propose to sanction China that is finding back to its old strength.
best regards from a white person from europe, not a chinese.
How do you propose to coordinate hundreds of countries to cut one country off the internet?
The White House acting as a PR unit for MS (or is it vice versa?) is a serious problem.
If you think the current White House administration and Microsoft aren't on the more trustworthy side of the trust spectrum, then who in your opinion is more trustworthy?
Who would I trust? I’ll start with someone providing some sort of proof. Which is entirely absent here.
Microsoft has done untrustworthy things. They've also build the most successful (esp. in the longer view) commercial computing ecosystem because it hit the right balance between stability/robustness/usability. Many elements of that include proving some minimum burdens of trustworthiness (not to be confused with earning absolute trust).
The US government... cf the 20th century? You mean the greatest secular advancements in the human condition in history? And as for the age of "American Empire" (post WW2? Post Cold War?)... are you referring to the relatively most peaceful, humane, self-effacing hegemon that has ever been known the planet (not to be confused with a perfectly peaceful and human hegemon)?
This flippant stance combined with absolutely no countervailing context and fantasy burdens of proof... please.
I don't really doubt the allegations, as the motive makes sense, but I'm hoping there will be a good postmortem.
Millions of bombed, displaced and otherwise sanctioned to oblivion might disagree with this level of modesty and humility.
Maybe America wouldn't be top of the list but the point is made in distinction to other regimes that achieved remotely similar power differentials.
Sorry you honor. I am the nice guy here. I've only raped few thousands. Lemme off.
The US murdered massive amounts of people in East Asia and the Middle East during that time period. Napalm, Agent Orange, war crimes... We were as bad as any hegemony. Much worse actually, due to technical superiority. We also have the largest prison population of any country (per capita and in total) due to the "war" on drugs.
So yes, I'd say we're near the bottom of the list. Especially if you go back past the 20th century (slavery, genocide).
Here's a community that contains minority beliefs but in English. I've pasted in another post. Judge by yourself they are rational people or not.
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2021/03/is-china-hacking-rando...
Remember Bush/The New York Times falsely claiming that Iraq had WMD? A lesson we shouldn't quickly forget. Especially when the current admin has already initiated illegal military action. I'm weary of war hawks and the propaganda that supports them.
Insinuates some grand conspiracy. Part I take issue with.
"Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> But as with the Russian SolarWinds hackers, investigators have yet to identify who exactly the Hafnium hackers are—beyond Microsoft's assertion that they're state-sponsored and operate out of China—or to pin down the full extent of their motivations.
Obviously, countries do this kind of thing all the time. And an operation of this scale is likely to come from someone with government resources. But it continues to bother me that the requirements for attribution of these attacks never rise above the level of hearsay.
Is nobody even slightly skeptical of Microsoft? The company that eagerly collaborates with the alphabet soup agencies gets to write off an exploit in its own software, courtesy of Chinese state hackers, when we all know _for a fact_ that the NSA pays these companies to keep such exploits around for their own use.
It's one thing to acknowledge that one explanation is likely; it's another thing to give up on skepticism entirely.
If so, is it possible that the mass accumulation of hatred for the Chinese is a byproduct of state driven media?
I'm sure there's some of that, but I suspect that even if there wasn't we'd see much the same results. In the US, the state and the mainstream media are essentially the same thing. The people who run the state and the people who make up the mainstream media are part of the same social circles, they go to the same restaurants, they tend to have the same worldviews.
The equivocation of hatred for the Chinese and hatred for it’s government is itself Chinese government propaganda.
Any time criticism comes up of the actions of their government, the deflection method is to say it’s just hatred for the Chinese. This is done to prevent the Chinese people from realizing that people in the West are on their side and they are not their government.
and people in the West assuming they know best is as much of a problem as anything else. you're not on their side, you're speaking as if you're above them
This is a common sentiment with American conservatives. They think liberal people look down upon them from their ivory towers. Honestly, they do. Your average conservative is malnourished with a fox news media diet and isn't educated enough to critically think about their own positions, you can't even engage in a rational conversation with most of them. The GOP at large is a bad faith party who rules for power and dominance, not for the improvement of peoples lives. Rhetoric is their weapon not reason.
While liberals are not in favor of white supremacy, religion, or "easy fixes" they do favor policy that would benefit the average conservative person. In the sense that liberals want to see conservative peoples lives meaningfully improve, liberals are on the side of conservatives. In the sense that liberals want to preserve conservative culture and reinforce their world views, liberals are clearly not on the side of conservatives.
China has it's own Han supremacy problem (just like America has a white supremacy problem), and while the west is not interested in supporting Han supremacy, I think the average [educated] westerner does want to see the average chinese persons life improve, just not at the cost of Taiwanese lives, Uigher lives, Tibetan lives, or Hong Konger lives, and not at the cost of our own prosperity.
Currently there are more than 919.14 million CPC members in China (data point circa 2019), and this does not include the people working for 事业单位 (gov. funded public institutes). So for a random Chinese citizen, Western people have a, like, 3% chance of hate and 97% of love? If we propagate one hop further to the relatives/friends (let's say it knows 100 people in his/her life), the number goes to 4% of love and 96% of hate.
:-(
All this talk of "the CCP" is just a very thin veil of self-deception, allowing you to pretend that you are "on the same side" of the Chinese people. You're not. The best future for China is to become the dominant world power, and you don't want that in any form or shape, am I wrong?
[1] https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/07/long-term-sur...
Personally I doubt it, and I imagine that the average Chinese citizen understands this reality very well indeed as they give their positive answers to the nice poll agent with the sincerest smile they can muster.
Everyone knows how the game is played.
And guess which country disappears citizens for “re-education” if they speak out against said government. You’d have to be daft to respond to those surveys negatively in China if there was any kind of chance your response could be traced back to you.
> The best future for China is to become the dominant world power, and you don't want that in any form or shape, am I wrong?
Yes, you are wrong. Becoming “the” dominant world power has little to do with the good of the people. Norway’s citizens are better off than US citizens on average and Norway is irrelevant on the global power scale.
Regardless, you are still confused about what people are against. It’s not China becoming a world power (it already is). It’s literally the abusive way the CCP treats dissidents. Look at the Muslim camps, look at Honk Kong, look at Winnie the Pooh.
Let it sink in that most people are happy the Chinese lives are improving. The issue is with the fascists at the top.
If it was the case that your empathy stretches across the pacific ocean for the Uighurs, then why does it not stretch for the Palestinians? I think the actions taken by Israel is way worse of a human rights violation than China is doing, but because the West supports Israel, it turns a blind eye against the Palestinians?
Moreover, one can formulate and theoretically, yes accusations should not equivocate as hatred for the Chinese.
But in practice, this isn't true at all.
What are you referring to? You mean articles that attribute hacking to actors with connections to the PRC?
Less directly, much of news reporting is dependent upon access to exclusive and sometimes anonymous sources. There's little to prevent some of those sources from being honeypots meant to indirectly manipulate reporters into parroting a given narrative.
Even so, I doubt that antipathy towards China's being driven by any centralized authority. We're entering an era of great power competition with the country, its (ostensible) ideology has historically existed in opposition to the US, and many still see it as the poster-boogyman for the hollowing out of American industries.
There's always been tension, and ever since the Trump administration began imposing tariffs and clamping down against Chinese IP and technology theft, it's incidentally become more present in the public's consciousness.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird
Some recent ones that e remember seeing in the news:
https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2021-03-01/chines...
https://www.livemint.com/news/india/chinese-hackers-targeted...
Great foundation being laid.
//Why a state-sponsored hacker group did this?