And Germans call it "Heuchler", US IP law ain't "world IP law" no matter how much Americans insist it shall be.
But it's fascinating how consistently Americans can preach "Do as we say, not as we do!" without the slightest bit of self-awareness, any such shall be considered "propaganda".
Is't that pure reality? America was fighting against the Nazi regime when at home they had the most severe apartheid regime in an industrialized nation.
They have been using the argument exclusively against opposition, whether domestic or not. So, you have Havel or other dissident complaining about what is going on in Czech Republic and Russia ... and they get response about America instead.
The Soviet regime cared about those exclusively when using them as talking point. To shut up own critics and that is it.
It does make it incorrect. Argument is not "Americans lynch blacks and Americans should stop". Argument was "Americans lynched blacks in the past, therefore it is ok for us to jail internal opponents and ok to kick their loved ones from schools and work".
American lynching's are no more relevant then Tibet or ancient Sparta when Havel is talking about events in Eastern Europe.
Extending this logic, if the US said some state should stop trafficking in slaves you’d say “this smells of hypocracy! the US had slaves 160 years ago, so shouldn’t be expecting other states to not buy and sell slaves”.
Your argument sounds even more stupid. You are comparing something commonly recognized as a crime to some artificial concept forced down the throat of a country that was being exploited and was frankly in their right to use whatever means to get out of that subservient state. The west is patented everything by now. Expecting the rest of the world to serve that system and be poor forever is disgusting.
Hmmm, this argument would hold more weight if offshoring for cheap labor was not eerily like modern slavery. This is exactly what happens now - the West has laws, and corporations go abroad to ignore them and absolve responsibility, while lobbying for and supporting the lack of human rights.
Go ask random people on the street 'do you think slavery is morally right'.
Then go out on the street and ask 'do you think it's morally wrong that India does not respect our medical patents so that they can produce cheap generic treatments from cancer accesible to their people'
You will find that the number of people that believe these two situations are morally comparable is roughly ~0%
I think Cold War 2 has already begun. I just don't see how the pre-invasion state of affairs could be restored in any realistic scenario. To hit the undo button Putin would have to stop the invasion, profusely apologize, pay reparations and make other concessions like returning Crimea. And of course he will do nothing of the sort. There's no scenario that I see under which which Putin is still running Russia and it stops being an international pariah.
Not sure why you are being voted down. I think it's clear that Russia's invasion of Chechnya triggered NATO to join a bunch of ex-warsaw pact countries. That was a further escalation which then caused Putin to feel excused to invade Georgia and Ukraine.
Just my own prediction, but I suspect even after Putin is gone, the position of the Russian state vis-a-vis its buffer zones will remain unchanged.
I've seen this before on smaller scales in Iraq, and Afghanistan. We take out the leaders, but the perceived grievances remain unchanged. In fact I was a bit surprised because I thought that, at a minimum, the grievance would change to "you killed our leader". It didn't happen that way at all.
I bet the same thing happens in Russia. I honestly hope that our policymakers have more of a plan B in place than they have had with other conflicts. Just in case this turns out to be a concern that drives a leader and not a leader that drives a concern. Because though I'm sure we all would've lost friends or family in either case, at least there would have been a chance in hell of victory against the latter.
A far more likely case is that after seeing the discord sown by the DOJ, the Chinese authorities would try and entice the scientists.
The fact that Hu goes back to U of Tennessee to protect his reputation is a bit like battered spouse. I would have sued the university to repair all my equipment and never return to a place that gave shit advice, thrown me under the bus at the earliest opportunity, and didn't even offer an apology.
I don't see India becoming an enemy of the free world any time soon, and the second half of the 21st century is soon in a geopolitical sense (and looming in a my-lifetime sense).
An inward-focussed economic superpower, yeah. (The inward focus is the part of Modi's pitch for India that makes a kind of sense). An enemy of the free world? It's the world's largest democracy with more than one seventh of the population of the free world.
It might have taken Trump only four years to get really close to implementing the collapse of the rule of law in the USA, but the BJP has its work cut out achieving that in India; people will tire of the nonsense.
Edited as to Russia: are you sure it'll be a single, functioning state by the end of this year, let alone for the second quarter of the 21st century? It is heading towards (within weeks of) a kind of economic status that could only be survived by a country that has never experienced modernity, like North Korea.
"... would like a word with you" is hardly high quality discourse, but OK:
Kashmir is really an example of what I mean about the likelihood that the BJP will have trouble achieving things on the kind of timescale that Trump was working to. It's an awful, very-long-term conflict in disputed territory, is it not? Things move forward and backwards.
It does not surprise me that I was instantly downvoted for alluding to Trump when defending against the idea that India is going to become an enemy of the free world.
I guess it's because some readers think I am "politicising" it. But you surely shouldn't automatically get to other a democratic nation of 1.4 billion people without reference to the elephant in the room -- that the USA was very recently (perhaps even still is) only one presidential term away from becoming an enemy of the "international rules-based order".
You only have to look at how Trump proposed to deal with Tiktok, or how he mysteriously abruptly exempted ZTE from some sanctions, to understand what I mean -- let alone the even bigger elephant in the room, that he successfully downgraded GOP 2016 platform language about the defence of Ukraine and literally coerced Ukraine's leadership with the threatened withholding of congressionally-approved support.
The reality is that this discussion about potential threats to the free world or rules-based international order simply can't be one-sided like this. It's an absurdity.
"The two great enemies of the rules based international order & the free world in the first half of this century will be China & Russia.".
I'll join everyone else here in pretending that we upheld and didn't violate any rules let alone breaching multiple UN resolutions, supporting, funding, arming multiple repressive dictators and repressive regimes.
Being "repressive dictators and repressive regimes" is worse than having funded them sometime in the past. And I say this as someone whose country was harmed because of these activities
I notice that questioning the mainstream view here appears to be instantly responded with as "whataboutism". I fully understand when people don't want their faith questioned, but to then pretend it is consistent with verifiable data is a bit much. The reason I asked the question is because that's verifiable data. It is hard to claim to be free when one is incarcerated. Therefore, if a country has a high proportion of its citizens incarcerated then to describe that country as a free country is questionable in accuracy.
I disagree, toppling a democracy and setting dictators and repressive regimes somewhere else is much worse than being "repressive dictators and repressive regimes" inside your own borders. Don't get me wrong, none of those options is good, but the latter at least is somewhat contained.
What exactly is this? Who actually follows the rules?
> first half of this century
Trying to predict global politics for 5 years, let alone 50-100, is incredibly difficult. A prediction that with such a long time horizon is effectively nonsense.
I'm also not sure what you're trying to predict. Are you saying China and Russia will be the near-term invaders, and those other countries will be longer-term invaders?
That could easily be true, or it could be true that China and Russia dig themselves into an isolation hole and India becomes closer with NATO countries instead of more antagonistic.
This seems like an extremely broad accusatuon against literaly every non-western country.
It is especially egrigeous and baseless to include India, which is a proper democracy, contributes the most to UN peacekeeping missions, and takes in refugees.
Meanwhole 'the West' helped their rival, Pakistan aquire nuclear weapons and conventional arms, which were promptly passed on to Taliban/al quada and used against the West. All because India had the audacity to experiment with socialism.
> India, which is a proper democracy, contributes the most to UN peacekeeping missions
Hold your horses. My own country, Fiji, has since 1970 contributed more to UN Peacekeeping missions than any other country on earth. We've done that for half a century.
Rules are useless without a policemen capable of enforcing them. They are at best suggestions, if not simple propoganda for domestic consumption. This is made even worse when the supposed policemen break their own rules as well (Kosovo). I say all this as an ardent American nationalist.
States have always existed in a state of anarchy and act as you would expect them.
I'm surprised at the mention of Brazil as a future "great enemies of the rules based international order & the free world". Brazil is a very western country (although a poor one), with culture and institutions that are basically copies of various European/EUA counterparts (although not as stable/strong). It has a very liberal constitution, a very liberal "elite", and a people that looks up to USA and Europe (the left wants to become like Europe, the right like the USA, no-one wants to become Russia or China). So IF it ever grows to greatness, it will most probably be a great ally to the free world, no a great enemy.
Unfortunately the most probable scenario is that it won't achieve neither, instead it will probably crawl along in a middle ground fail to launch state, forever sort-of poor, sort-of irrelevant (but still mostly as a weak ally instead of a weak enemy).
Yes, the election of the current president temporarily pointed Brazil in a different direction (just like the Trump election in the USA), but it is just a blip that Brazil will soon leave behind (like the USA left behind the Trump presidency).
Edit: also, Brazil is 0% imperialistic, has absolutely no territorial ambitions, fairly good relations with all its neighbors. A military that is very defense/deterrence focused, with the only foreign deployments being a few official UN peacekeeping missions.
From what I read - he did not disclose his ties to Chinese researcher when applying for grant from NASA as he supposed to. He did it on bad advice from his university, but that came out later, during the investigation.
It seems his employer, the University, owes him something. In US government owes you nothing when they make an honest mistake. Even worse, government has disincentive to exonerate wrongly accused because, as some argue, need for finality of the judgement[0]
Administrators and researchers at a local cancer research hospital were fired for this, too. Could someone explain what the perceived harm is? I really don't understand - isn't cancer research published in accessible journals? Isn't disseminating this knowledge something we want both institutionally and personally for the researchers?
Like lying during an FBI investigation, even a non issue becomes an issue. Lying on a grant application can get you into serious issues.
You can always be upfront and say your not going to answer a question, or you can disclose connection which is normally fine for most kinds of research.
Should these questions be asked is a bigger issue than just what to do when people lie.
Yea, Hu was put in a very poor situation by disclosing a connection and then being told to hide it. He probably should have disclosed it anyway on the application, but I am glad he got free.
I found the wiki page on the China Initiative[0] enlightening:
> Of the indictments, the largest group, representing 38% of the cases, charged academic researchers and professors with fraud such as failure to disclose relationships with Chinese educational institutions. None of them have been found to have spied for China. Nearly half of these cases have been dropped.
The idea of criminal justice is really devolving into witchhunts at this point.
I'm surprised there isn't more pushback since there is an (unintended? intended?) chilling effect in what is otherwise branded as a free & open society.
TFA has one example where the university he worked at told him he shouldn't disclose. Another, Gang Chen was initially charged of failing to disclose, but it was later found that he was not required to disclose on the grant in question.
> Hu submitted a letter to the university in 2016 disclosing his collaboration with a researcher [...] in Hefei, China.
> A university employee requested that Hu remove the letter from the application because it would violate an assurance document the university was submitting stating that the proposal had no restricted ties to China, the court documents say. A 2011 US law prohibits NASA from funding collaborations with China or Chinese businesses.
So (allegedly) the "university employee" told Hu to cover up potential illegal behavior by the university, or to protect the university from its belief that the government would mis-apply the law about "restricted ties".
Considering the dropped cases apparently they didn’t all lie.
But to answer your question, bringing in funding is both one of the most important and difficult jobs for a professor or researcher. So I assume some lied to unethically get a career boost, thinking they could just casually omit disclosing a role in China to get a chance at more funding.
The vast majority of scientists just want to do their job (research), but they have to play the funding game which gets deeply entangled with political bullshit. China offers the carrot (thousand talents) while USA offers the stick (China Initiative)
> “The argument we’ll make is … he was involved with this Chinese university for years, and it was obvious he would have to disclose that,” McKenzie said.
They did this entire witch-hunt, and that’s the only charge they think will stick? None of the fraud or spying allegations - just a lack of disclosure in a single form? We can’t even get Congress to disclose insider trading…
I look forward to the day we have a true rule of law, and more accountability from law enforcers.
A university employee requested that Hu remove the letter from the application because it would violate an assurance document the university was submitting stating that the proposal had no restricted ties to China, the court documents say. A 2011 US law prohibits NASA from funding collaborations with China or Chinese businesses.
The problem as I see it is that people who screech about how "just following orders isn't a defense" when people they don't sympathize with violate this or that regulatory compliance statute without harming anyone are acting as though it's a valid defense when it's someone they sympathize with.
This behavior is made doubly odious because a large subset of these same people are often in favor of strict enforcement of somewhat arbitrary rules (like a disclosure requirement on an application) against people they don't sympathize with.
This inability to have principals and be consistent with them is going to bite our country a lot harder than the occasional foreign scientist lying on a grant application or the occasional foreign scientist getting wrongfully prosecuted.
To be clear, I sympathize with Mr Hu. I think the organization should be getting punished here. He brought the issue to their attention and they advised him to do exactly the wrong thing and the feds screwed him for it. People, especially foreign nationals who cannot be expected to be well versed in US law, need to have a reasonable expectation that they can follow orders from HR/Legal/their boss in matters of mundane statutory compliance without getting personally screwed when the actions they took in confidence violated the law. UT is responsible for what happened to Mr. Hu and in a perfect world that would be a slam dunk tort. But his plight is just a drop in the bucket of a much larger societal problem.
Quite apart from anything else, there should absolutely be someone asking Hard Questions about the role of the university administration here. If lying on a grant application is a fraud, then asking someone to lie on a grant application is procuring a fraud etc.
That said, I have to say that if anyone asks me to lie or omit relevant information on a document that I'm sending to the government, my first response to that is going to be "let me check with my lawyer on that".
It is important to remember that, in general, individual faculty members do not submit grants; the institution (typically through some Office of Sponsored Programs) submit the grants. Ultimately, it is that office that has final say on what is included in the grant and what assurances are made.
That's odd. The university advised him to not submit his association with chinese laboratory and university, because it wasn't allowed for the position he was interviewing for? Wouldn't that be fraud?
This stuff scares me a bit. I'm of Chinese descent (Taiwanese actually). It's conceivable that if China and US enter some Cold(er) War 2 that my US assets could be frozen or worse, because ethnicity.
Similar things have happened in history and I don't doubt for a second that it can't happen again or that we've progressed. Especially with rising wealth disparities leading to all sorts of political tension.
93 comments
[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 154 ms ] thread[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON#Examples_of_industrial...
[1] https://apnews.com/article/b40414d22f2248428ce11ff36b88dc53
But it's fascinating how consistently Americans can preach "Do as we say, not as we do!" without the slightest bit of self-awareness, any such shall be considered "propaganda".
The Soviet regime cared about those exclusively when using them as talking point. To shut up own critics and that is it.
American lynching's are no more relevant then Tibet or ancient Sparta when Havel is talking about events in Eastern Europe.
We've had to warn you about being aggressive with other users many times in the past. This is a pattern:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27401192 (June 2021)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19534285 (March 2019)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17734563 (Aug 2018)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16059003 (Jan 2018)
If you keep this up we're eventually going to have to ban you. I don't want to ban you, so please don't keep this up!
Our companies sets up production in China to take advantage of loose labour laws and abuse workers, but cry foul when they get hit by loose IP laws.
Also the US stole textile technology from the British Empire to launch it's own industrial revolution.
Also your regular reminder that intellectuall properly is legal fiction that some cultures do not recognise, or see differently.
See how stupid that argument sounds?
You compared "intellectual property" to slavery. Try again.
Your argument sounds even more stupid. You are comparing something commonly recognized as a crime to some artificial concept forced down the throat of a country that was being exploited and was frankly in their right to use whatever means to get out of that subservient state. The west is patented everything by now. Expecting the rest of the world to serve that system and be poor forever is disgusting.
Then go out on the street and ask 'do you think it's morally wrong that India does not respect our medical patents so that they can produce cheap generic treatments from cancer accesible to their people'
You will find that the number of people that believe these two situations are morally comparable is roughly ~0%
That said, this man isn't a spy - the fact that the government couldn't rig a jury in Tennessee makes very clear that he is innocent.
I would also guess that Chinese authorities could easily "trigger" the DOJ to punish a Chinese national. Once paranoia sets in, it benefits China too.
I've seen this before on smaller scales in Iraq, and Afghanistan. We take out the leaders, but the perceived grievances remain unchanged. In fact I was a bit surprised because I thought that, at a minimum, the grievance would change to "you killed our leader". It didn't happen that way at all.
I bet the same thing happens in Russia. I honestly hope that our policymakers have more of a plan B in place than they have had with other conflicts. Just in case this turns out to be a concern that drives a leader and not a leader that drives a concern. Because though I'm sure we all would've lost friends or family in either case, at least there would have been a chance in hell of victory against the latter.
The fact that Hu goes back to U of Tennessee to protect his reputation is a bit like battered spouse. I would have sued the university to repair all my equipment and never return to a place that gave shit advice, thrown me under the bus at the earliest opportunity, and didn't even offer an apology.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Development_Bank
An inward-focussed economic superpower, yeah. (The inward focus is the part of Modi's pitch for India that makes a kind of sense). An enemy of the free world? It's the world's largest democracy with more than one seventh of the population of the free world.
It might have taken Trump only four years to get really close to implementing the collapse of the rule of law in the USA, but the BJP has its work cut out achieving that in India; people will tire of the nonsense.
Edited as to Russia: are you sure it'll be a single, functioning state by the end of this year, let alone for the second quarter of the 21st century? It is heading towards (within weeks of) a kind of economic status that could only be survived by a country that has never experienced modernity, like North Korea.
Kashmir is really an example of what I mean about the likelihood that the BJP will have trouble achieving things on the kind of timescale that Trump was working to. It's an awful, very-long-term conflict in disputed territory, is it not? Things move forward and backwards.
It does not surprise me that I was instantly downvoted for alluding to Trump when defending against the idea that India is going to become an enemy of the free world.
I guess it's because some readers think I am "politicising" it. But you surely shouldn't automatically get to other a democratic nation of 1.4 billion people without reference to the elephant in the room -- that the USA was very recently (perhaps even still is) only one presidential term away from becoming an enemy of the "international rules-based order".
You only have to look at how Trump proposed to deal with Tiktok, or how he mysteriously abruptly exempted ZTE from some sanctions, to understand what I mean -- let alone the even bigger elephant in the room, that he successfully downgraded GOP 2016 platform language about the defence of Ukraine and literally coerced Ukraine's leadership with the threatened withholding of congressionally-approved support.
The reality is that this discussion about potential threats to the free world or rules-based international order simply can't be one-sided like this. It's an absurdity.
I'll join everyone else here in pretending that we upheld and didn't violate any rules let alone breaching multiple UN resolutions, supporting, funding, arming multiple repressive dictators and repressive regimes.
Wow. Just wow.
What exactly is this? Who actually follows the rules?
> first half of this century
Trying to predict global politics for 5 years, let alone 50-100, is incredibly difficult. A prediction that with such a long time horizon is effectively nonsense.
I'm also not sure what you're trying to predict. Are you saying China and Russia will be the near-term invaders, and those other countries will be longer-term invaders?
That could easily be true, or it could be true that China and Russia dig themselves into an isolation hole and India becomes closer with NATO countries instead of more antagonistic.
It is especially egrigeous and baseless to include India, which is a proper democracy, contributes the most to UN peacekeeping missions, and takes in refugees.
Meanwhole 'the West' helped their rival, Pakistan aquire nuclear weapons and conventional arms, which were promptly passed on to Taliban/al quada and used against the West. All because India had the audacity to experiment with socialism.
Hold your horses. My own country, Fiji, has since 1970 contributed more to UN Peacekeeping missions than any other country on earth. We've done that for half a century.
States have always existed in a state of anarchy and act as you would expect them.
Unfortunately the most probable scenario is that it won't achieve neither, instead it will probably crawl along in a middle ground fail to launch state, forever sort-of poor, sort-of irrelevant (but still mostly as a weak ally instead of a weak enemy).
Yes, the election of the current president temporarily pointed Brazil in a different direction (just like the Trump election in the USA), but it is just a blip that Brazil will soon leave behind (like the USA left behind the Trump presidency).
Edit: also, Brazil is 0% imperialistic, has absolutely no territorial ambitions, fairly good relations with all its neighbors. A military that is very defense/deterrence focused, with the only foreign deployments being a few official UN peacekeeping missions.
It seems his employer, the University, owes him something. In US government owes you nothing when they make an honest mistake. Even worse, government has disincentive to exonerate wrongly accused because, as some argue, need for finality of the judgement[0]
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpYYdCzTpps
This was discussed previously, and the form made no requirements for any disclosure. This is a sub-thread from the last time this this was discussed:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30113895
See perihelions' comment:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30116046
My apologies everyone.
You can always be upfront and say your not going to answer a question, or you can disclose connection which is normally fine for most kinds of research.
Should these questions be asked is a bigger issue than just what to do when people lie.
From the article at least it looks like the University was most responsible, yet they did not support him nor apologize to him.
It’s very much a situation you don’t want to be in.
> Of the indictments, the largest group, representing 38% of the cases, charged academic researchers and professors with fraud such as failure to disclose relationships with Chinese educational institutions. None of them have been found to have spied for China. Nearly half of these cases have been dropped.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Initiative
I'm surprised there isn't more pushback since there is an (unintended? intended?) chilling effect in what is otherwise branded as a free & open society.
> A university employee requested that Hu remove the letter from the application because it would violate an assurance document the university was submitting stating that the proposal had no restricted ties to China, the court documents say. A 2011 US law prohibits NASA from funding collaborations with China or Chinese businesses.
So (allegedly) the "university employee" told Hu to cover up potential illegal behavior by the university, or to protect the university from its belief that the government would mis-apply the law about "restricted ties".
But to answer your question, bringing in funding is both one of the most important and difficult jobs for a professor or researcher. So I assume some lied to unethically get a career boost, thinking they could just casually omit disclosing a role in China to get a chance at more funding.
The vast majority of scientists just want to do their job (research), but they have to play the funding game which gets deeply entangled with political bullshit. China offers the carrot (thousand talents) while USA offers the stick (China Initiative)
[1] https://www.knoxnews.com/story/news/crime/2021/06/14/federal...
They did this entire witch-hunt, and that’s the only charge they think will stick? None of the fraud or spying allegations - just a lack of disclosure in a single form? We can’t even get Congress to disclose insider trading…
I look forward to the day we have a true rule of law, and more accountability from law enforcers.
A university employee requested that Hu remove the letter from the application because it would violate an assurance document the university was submitting stating that the proposal had no restricted ties to China, the court documents say. A 2011 US law prohibits NASA from funding collaborations with China or Chinese businesses.
<<<<<<<<<
So this is fraud ? What's the problem?
This behavior is made doubly odious because a large subset of these same people are often in favor of strict enforcement of somewhat arbitrary rules (like a disclosure requirement on an application) against people they don't sympathize with.
This inability to have principals and be consistent with them is going to bite our country a lot harder than the occasional foreign scientist lying on a grant application or the occasional foreign scientist getting wrongfully prosecuted.
To be clear, I sympathize with Mr Hu. I think the organization should be getting punished here. He brought the issue to their attention and they advised him to do exactly the wrong thing and the feds screwed him for it. People, especially foreign nationals who cannot be expected to be well versed in US law, need to have a reasonable expectation that they can follow orders from HR/Legal/their boss in matters of mundane statutory compliance without getting personally screwed when the actions they took in confidence violated the law. UT is responsible for what happened to Mr. Hu and in a perfect world that would be a slam dunk tort. But his plight is just a drop in the bucket of a much larger societal problem.
That said, I have to say that if anyone asks me to lie or omit relevant information on a document that I'm sending to the government, my first response to that is going to be "let me check with my lawyer on that".
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/04/us/the-making-of-a-suspec...
Similar things have happened in history and I don't doubt for a second that it can't happen again or that we've progressed. Especially with rising wealth disparities leading to all sorts of political tension.