The China Cultural Clash(stratechery.com) |
The China Cultural Clash(stratechery.com) |
> Stratechery is written by me, Ben Thompson. I am based in Taipei, Taiwan, and am fully supported by my work at Stratechery.
I think it's important to know the perspective of the author, being situated in Taiwan:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwan,_China
"the People's Republic of China (PRC) ― which is widely recognized by the international community as the legitimate representative of "China" ― does not currently exercise jurisdiction over areas controlled by the Republic of China (ROC)."
I think the much bigger story here is how China's state capitalism is being used to probe structural weaknesses in Western free market capitalism. Under free market capitalism, the private sector and the state are fundamentally opposed. The government's proper role is to act as a guardian of the system and establish the rules of play so that the "free market" can flourish and the role of companies are to compete to the maximum extent inside the constraints of regulation. State capitalism comes from a totally different set of first principles, under state capitalism, the private sector is a collaborator with the state and the work in concert to further the goals of the nation. Companies are allowed to compete when it would be beneficial to the state that they compete and forced to co-operate when it's beneficial to the state that they co-operate. Both systems start from a very different set of first principles and they each have their own pros and cons but China knows how to exploit the cons of free market capitalism much better than the US knows how to exploit the cons of state capitalism.
One structural weakness of free market capitalism is that it has intrinsic difficulty dealing with co-ordination problems arising from prisoner's dilemma situations. Take the recent "Taiwan, China" airline thing. China announces that all airline websites must list the destination as "Taiwan, China" or risk losing rights to access the Chinese air market. Now, this risk is a total paper tiger, any sober minded analysis could demonstrate that China would be hurt way more than losing flight volume than they would gain from words on a webpage. If all US airlines stood up in unison and said they opposed the change, China would rapidly back down, the whole "hurt feelings" stuff is just window dressing for political negotiation. However, if all but one airline caved, that airline would get all of China's flight volume, China would not be meaningfully hurt but every other company would be damaged.
The problem is, there's no effective mechanism under free market capitalism to do that. The "right" mechanism would be for the government to simply pass a law saying all US airlines must not refer to Taiwan as Taiwan, China and China would have immediately backed down. The problem is
a) The US is utterly incapable of passing legislation these days.
b) Even if it were capable, this would be something considered a massive overreach by the state and would be dragged into lawsuits for years.
c) Absent legislation, such co-operation would be arguably even illegal as it would run afoul of anti-trust as cartel like behavior.
So, as China predicted, you had airlines folding one by one over an utterly trivial issue because the fundamental bedrock assumptions of free market capitalism do not allow them to do otherwise.
The difference with the Houston Rockets case is that the NBA does exist as a mechanism for there to be a unifying voice of the league. China initially played this the same way it always does, by performing a surgical culling of the Rockets specifically, they were expecting the rest of the league to be cowed and force the Rockets to back down. What they didn't realize was that professional sports in the US are run as a socialist collective and sports leagues are one of the only areas of American life which are explicitly sanctioned to run as a cartel. Thus, the NBA has the freedom to say fuck you to China in a way that movie studios and airlines cannot because they realize China needs the NBA more than the NBA needs China.
I was with you right up until this point. How is that?
There's a common misconception in the West that because China is an authoritarian state, it doesn't need to care about happiness of its citizens which couldn't be further from the truth. The CCP's legitimacy derives from the consent of the governed and the Chinese people know that.
RTHK is the public broadcaster in Hong Kong: https://www.rthk.hk/?lang=en
SCMP is owned by Alibaba Group: https://www.scmp.com/
HKFP is funded by donations: https://www.hongkongfp.com/
My support has changed, and I can’t help but think that this is about the ego of Chinese leadership, since it seems like they are making some poor decisions. Perhaps even stupid decisions.
I also wonder what the effect of President Trump has had in the poor decision making process of Chinese leadership since Trump also makes a lot of bad decisions and has lowered the bar on skill in diplomacy.
This is a sad situation since I really hope for lots of trade, travel between countries, and respect for other countrys’ rights to their own culture and autonomy.
It is and isn't. I grew up in China and I think the Chinese government is overacting to this NBA statement. If the Chinese fans decide to boycott NBA that's their choice and rights, but the government should not ban NBA in China.
At the same time, I am frustrated to see so much misconception and lack of empathy in the discussions here. The territorial integrity of China has a very important place in the minds of many Chinese citizens if not all given the recent 100 years of Chinese history. HK is globally recognized as part of China but yet we have seen all western media's efforts to spread anti-HK police sentiment and turn a blind eye on the violent activities carried out by so-called protestors.
I've lived in the US for over a decade. Before coming here, I had no idea how sensitive racial comments are. Over time I learned about the history and never made a racial joke in public or private occasions. It's not the best analogy, but I want to point out that Morey's HK tweet is out of line and doesn't deserve NBA's endorsement.
We'll be probably seeing more of that rather than less: http://arnogruen.net/the_need_to_punish_--_article_by_arno_g...
Which part of freedom of speech is still unclear even after supposedly you've "lived in the US for over a decade"???
"and doesn't deserve NBA's endorsement."
The NBA did not endorse nor reject Morey's words.
And the western world has been incredibly naive and uncoordinated when it comes to dealing with China. We've all accepted the incredibly one-sided deal, in some kind of idealistic hope that the Chinese would latch on to "western" values of democracy etc just by trading with us.
Edit: World -> Western world.
This is like many things in the current world, vicious cycles, the more unsympathetic ordinary Chinese perceive outside China, the more they will embrace the CCP and strongmen, the more powerful the party will be.
And solution seems don't exist. Xi said "You don't eat the meal then break the wok", So there's only one question:
Who's next?
> Who's next?
Well, Blizzard, already. So more like, who's after that :-)
The rules serve to further US diplomatic and corporate interests, not openness or trade.
Communism is not a culture. This isn't a
> “We are strongly dissatisfied and we oppose Silver’s claim to support Morey’s right of free expression. We believe that any speech that challenges national sovereignty and social stability is not within the scope of freedom of speech,” CCTV said in its statement in Chinese, which was translated by CNBC.
Hate speech is off the table in the US because historically it's been used to stoke ethnic tension in a diverse society, people get hurt and die, and breaks social cohesion.
Is it fair to say that criticizing the government is off the table in China because historically revolutions have caused so much death and destruction, and breaks social cohesion?
This is true.
>much right-winged content is associated with hate speech and violence.
I guess this is also true, but I think its more subtle than that.
I think it depends on who you identify as being "canonical representation" for the right-wing. Popular media would lead you to believe that it is the people that appear on 8chan or went to the Unite the Right rally. They are certainly a very vocal group among that representation, but I don't quite think they accurately represent that group. If you buy into the idea of a "silent majority" (a typically conservative notion), then you might agree that it would be difficult to find an accurate "representation" of said group.
time to break up, on all fronts.
To be clear I don't support China or Eastern imperialism in (significantly) Africa, the ME, or the US. But if you want to fight it you have to be informed, history repeats itself.
By this logic, should Israel have a moral right to put half of German population into gas chambers today because of Hitler?
For example, in Charlottesville 2017 [1] the local government tried to prevent Neo-nazis from using a park for a protest but ACLU sued the gov and got approval. From there the police actively protected their right to protest.
Which really highlights the massive gap between the US and China. It's not just 'don't silence them' but they have a right to speak and be protected while protesting on public grounds by the state from violence by other government organizations and citizens who disagree with them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unite_the_Right_rally#Permits_...
I normally find the "hate speech is free speech" argument to be pretty tiring, but it's also true that once you start carving exemptions to free speech you can easily carve one out that says "criticizing the government is like hate speech", and then you can justify anything.
(Of course it's always under the guise of "harmony". F*ck, we're beginning to resemble the PRC.)
If the foreigner doesn't feel it, they'll at least find it funny.
To expand on this, the history of economic and democratic development were thought to go hand in hand. Not only had it borne out in Western Europe, it also showed traction in post-war Japan and India. So the hypothesis, that a wealthier China would become more stable and democratic wasn't insane.
That hypothesis has been proven false. Part of this is the reduced number of people required to hold on to power in our age of digital surveillance. Part of it is the unique culture Mao's Cultural Revolution left behind.
The moment of reckoning came when Xi installed himself as dictator for life. Prior to that, China had been lurching towards mastering peaceful transitions of power under intraparty politics. There was legitimate hope it would think and plan for the long term. With a dictator, however, short-term political survival dominates all else. And so we get the absurdity of a billion peoples' productive power being channeled into stamping out Winnie the Pooh imagery.
I think it's a little early to definitely say that this hypothesis has been proven false in China. Keep in mind that China's growth has really only taken off since the mid-to-late 90's. That's less than one generation. Look at the path that comparable economies in Asia took who developed much earlier. Korea's economic miracle took off in 1960, but it was basically ruled by military dictatorships in all but name until 1987. Taiwan saw it's main burst of economic growth in the 60's and 70's, but it was also ruled as a dictatorship by the KMT since they lost the Chinese Civil War. In fact, the first opposition party was not formed until 1986, and martial law, which had been in effect since 1949, was not lifted until 1987, a year before Chiang Ching-kuo, Chiang Kai Shek's son and successor, passed away. Singapore's government all during its economic miracle was famously authoritarian.
I think the jury is still out. China has a long way left to develop and a huge populace still toiling without the benefits of that wealth. And some of the ways the economic development has happened are IMO temporarily and not durable.
> There was legitimate hope it would think and plan for the long term. With a dictator, however, short-term political survival dominates all else. And so we get the absurdity of a billion peoples' productive power being channeled into stamping out Winnie the Pooh imagery.
In fairness, I'm not sure that's a huge fraction of the billion peoples' productive power. ;P
Is it the world vs China or the parts of the world we typically listen to vs China?
Some of us were paying attention in the '90s and we're still paying attention.
Here are some interesting items to review:
1 - McDonnell Douglas (yep the same gang that ruined Boeing): https://www.nytimes.com/1992/06/29/business/mcdonnell-dougla...
2 - "Pentagon Blessing" https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB832727883654550000
3 - https://www.nytimes.com/1999/10/20/us/us-indicts-mcdonnell-d...
4 - https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/how-bill-clinton-and-amer...
5 - https://www.military.com/defensetech/2013/12/24/report-israe...
6 - https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/why-tech-transfe...
"naive and uncoordinated"
It has always seemed rather coordinated to this observer. No comment regarding "naive".
"We've all accepted the incredibly one-sided deal"
Who is this "We"? Did we take a vote on this? This was decided on high up per some undisclosed calculus like everything else substantial while the corporate media beguiles "Us" with peripheral, low brow, histrionics.
(And yeah, I feel like I have been personally aware at least during the past ten years or so. Things move slowly.)
Don't misunderstand me, I'm certainly on US side in this one - but Russia, India, Brazil, and many, many other world powers aren't particularly opposed to China on this one. They're trying to implement the same domestic capabilities, and indeed agree with China's opinion on national sovereignity and limitations of speech.
It was a great time, when US could dictate the world it's values and the world listened - as much as HN public loves to bash US government (I guess, a concious person is always critical of his own country), it's still one of the best democracies in the world. But that time is gone. Liberal consensus is not "the world"'s opinion anymore.
China's not the first nation state to be at the butting end of this debate and they won't be the last.
Is that really so idealistic though? Like most folks I'm sure, I've worked with a ton of chinese nationals and expatriots over my career. And not one of them was ignorant of this nonsense. They all know it happens. They agree in principle that it's bad, they just tolerate it as part of the cost of growth. And that's not even arguably a bad trade given China's history over the past century.
As the PRC's growth slows and it reaches parity with the rest of the world, we'll start to see more tension in this space (arguably that's exactly what's happening in Hong Kong right now). And there's danger there, obviously.
But the problem isn't one of "ideals", "values" or "free speech". The values are already there.
The biggest threat is the cult because the cult will cause conflicts. Keep it for yourself would be good. Spread it all over the world and claim it's universal so you have right to judge others inferior "value" and even try to enforce your "value" when the other countries are weaker , literally is the same pattern as ISIS.
Trust me, most Chinese people believed the same thing when they deal with other nations.
You either need to label all of them being stupid and naive; or you are saying Chinese are so smarter than anyone else...
The deals are never one-sided...
This is liberalism vs totalitarianism. Totalitarians are successfully using the tools of liberalism against itself. It's time that we in the free world wake up to what's happening and fight back.
Please don't include the majority of the world that is benefiting from a new benevolent economic actor on the block.
Can you explain what behavior you consider "benevolent"?
What people don't understand is that Western democracy is the only and best way to run the world. I mean look at public transport infrastructure in the United States. Public transport in the United States is so fair and democratic that it's been over two decades and they still haven't been able to ring the Bart around the bay or build a high speed rail thanks to the government being fair and balanced.
I mean look at chinas lack of human rights. They throw a few people out their homes to build an entire high speed rail network across the entire country. More people may benefit from this but it is a serious violation of human rights to move a couple people to another place. Literally borderline evil. Lifting an entire population out of poverty isn't worth giving up a fair and balanced democracy where everyone can fairly debate about a policy for 20 years before anything gets done.
I'm not saying that the US is perfect. But china needs to take a good hard look at the US and realize that their way isn't the only way of doing things. I mean people in the United States aren't so biased as to insult china on every opportunity as an economic rival. People in the west are actually unbiased and have a fair and balanced outlook on the world just like the parent poster. Literally china is like a small child saying that it's the entire world against the United States. This is an immature way of solving a problem or working together.
First, criticism, or rather, speech welds actual power in China and can effect real change in the power structure, unlike that in the West where freedom of speech is like freedom of wild animals - free, but powerless. And second, the CCP is actually totalitarian in the reverse sense that it is the total responsibility of the CCP to run every aspect of the country, listen to all the people, and solve all grievances and problems, because if they don't, they lose legitimacy and heads will roll, starting from the highest place then millions. This is coming from both politically Leninist vanguardism and culturally the notion of the Mandate of Heaven.
Now we can argue this form of government lacks checks and balances and likely produces extreme outcomes, but it can also be argued that it is truly held accountable to the people to deliver what the people want in contrast to the west where the government is merely responsible to the strongest lobbies.
That is: The (implied) claim is that criticism could lead to the fall of the government of China (I wish!) or at least to social turmoil, in which a lot of people could die. Given China's history with respect to social turmoil, fearing a bunch of people dying in such circumstances is completely warranted. And thinking about the consequences of your words is never a bad idea.
But when I look at the way China is treating the Uighurs, "people might die in social turmoil" doesn't look like that much of a change from the status quo. In particular, it doesn't look like enough to keep me from saying the criticism of the Chinese government that seems so clearly warranted.
It would be wise for many organizations to take that idea and apply it to countries of origin for their things. That way instability in a region doesn't threaten things back home.
This doesn't help things like the NBA whose revenue model is based on bodies and eyeballs. But, it can help some industries break control... as long as they have goals other than to gain all the money.
The Winnie the Pooh thing is amusing because we like watching powerful people be insecure about childish things.
The dirtier side is senior CCP members using the country's wealth for personal gain to a level not seen since the Soviet Union [1].
[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/936509...
Short-term thinking and people missing the forest for the trees after some emotional event is far too common for it to be trusted in the hands of the average politician.
And I am certain there ARE lots of efforts to delegitimize the protestors. However, it's also true that the vast majority of US media choose to not report on the unimaginable violence activities carried out by many protestors on daily basis.
A few friends of mine in HK (not trying to generalize it but a valid argument) feel frustrated that they are the ones to suffer all the short and long term consequences while the "friends of HK" western media would be more than ok to watch HK burn in the fight for the true democracy that's so important and HK never had under both UK or China's governence.
You're just doubling down on it. The protests were completely peaceful for months, and even then police already were displaying wanton brutality. To blame this on the victims is expected as it is invalid.
> If HK police have the same protocol as US police, many extreme violent protestors would have already faced a much more serious consequence.
For what, for singing?
https://www.reddit.com/r/HongKong/comments/ddmk54/police_cap...
https://www.reddit.com/r/HongKong/comments/d1b4kg/hong_kong_...
https://www.reddit.com/r/HongKong/comments/dccy0s/hong_kong_...
https://www.reddit.com/r/HongKong/comments/ddllcl/statement_...
Just a bunch, there's hundreds more. And yes, I'm also are of violent excesses of protesters, these do not ever justify what the cops are doing. And even with all the issues US police has, this isn't even remotely in the same ball park.
> while the "friends of HK" western media would be more than ok to watch HK burn
You're right now excusing police brutality, you don't get to point fingers like that. Nobody wants to see HK burn, I want to government to react with something OTHER than violence to what are perfectly reasonable demands, and I want the supporters of said violence to stop with the sophistry, while pretending they're the ones against violence*, against HK being a depraved place where the elderly and children get brutalized just because other people have no backbone.
They provide access to loans from an alternative world bank at competitive rates with less strings attached.
Adding depth/liquidity to global markets is beneficial to participants.
What foreign infrastructure projects? Surely not the ones where they lend money to foreigners but then China owns them? That's just investment, it's not benevolent.
The same for providing loans.
Neither of these are benevolent - they are financial tools to gain traction and influence on the world stage, as well as to make money. I don't think we can attribute any positive intent (towards the rest of the world) to these behaviors.
Yes the west and china are economic rivals. This does not mean China has zero economic benefit to the world. To not see this is utter blindness.
Either way it wasn't done for the benefit of the world. China started manufacturing because they wanted to gain economic power and arrive in the 21st century.
Thank you, Ben, for this honest appraisal which involves sticking out your neck and perhaps even harming your ability to travel to China or expand your business.
Regarding this comment about Apple:
And then there is Apple: the company is deeply exposed to China both in terms of sales and especially when it comes to manufacturing. The reality is that, particularly when it comes to the latter, Apple doesn’t have anywhere else to go.
That may be true of manufacturing now, but will it be true 5 years from now? Surely Cook et al saw the writing on the wall years ago when it articulated some of its core values around privacy. Conflict is inevitable, and the risk associated with having all your manufacturing eggs in one basket is too great. We saw the announcement of Apple's manufacturing initiative in Texas, and there are other locations for electronics sourcing and assembly throughout Asia. How much of Apple's supply chain could be relocated elsewhere?
Apple assembles iPhones in Brazil and I believe India now, but these are mostly for high tariff reasons. Much of what goes into an iPhone isn’t made in china (and what is made in China can easily be made elsewhere), but they are mostly made in east Asia, so having assembly done somewhere in the region. Apple could always go to Taiwan (labor is more expensive, but they could maybe rely on automation more) or Vietnam. However, whatever they would do would cost them, a cost they could pay if needed but probably not one they want to pay right now.
A few years ago, I was surprised to learn that Taiwan actually has low-cost but high-end (university-educated) labor. Ph.D. graduates abound.
It is an advanced economy yet wages are surprisingly low due to its export-focused strategy and various other structural causes. Cost of living in Taiwan also appears to be pretty low, which makes low wages bearable. It is a low-growth economy and it doesn't have the glitziness of Hong Kong, but everything feels 1st world (clean, technically advanced, efficient) so I'm not sure how the balance sheet there actually works out.
(that said, I understand many recent TW graduates tend to seek their fortunes in mainland China, where the pay is better.)
For the last years a lot of Apple's supply chain companies were getting visits from their Chinese C-level, with a question if they can think of relocation somewhere else. It's not a secret at all in SZ that Apple is leaving, and not only mainland China, but possibly Foxconn as well. For that reason, it's said that Foxconn now tries to lure them back to Taiwan with "incredible offers."
I know a fair lot of engineers working in both Foxconn plant, as well as Apple itself. It's funny to hear that it would be a company like Apple who would completely ignore the risk of supply chain dependence. From what I heard, for the last 10 years, Apple didn't do anything, but hope for bad things to not to happen.
Their screen glass, a surprisingly high tech product, is made in China by an American company. Their PCB's are locally made. Bodywork and plastics has been outsourced by them since Iphone 4. Some passives are made locally, some come from Taiwan. Most importantly, a point Apple doesn't like to be public about, is that they heavily rely on outsourced and captive engineering in China.
Maybe a few people who just gotta have the newest, latest, and greatest gadget will switch to a Flagship android because they can't wait for the new iPhone. But most people are pretty loyal / trapped into their mobile ecosystem.
I doubt it would materially affect Apple's market share or their revenue long-term. Isn't the entire manufacturing cost of an iPhone $9? Even if it doubled, their profit on iPhones would only drop by like 5%...
I think their latest pricing experiments have shown that there really is a limit to how much people will pay for a new iPhone, and they've found it, so I don't think they could pass the price onto the consumer. But it's only $10 on a $900 phone...
Apple probably should pay. They aren't a hardship case and being so dependent on an authoritarian regime isn't a good look right now [1]. Plus geopoltical risk is a thing and it would be smart for them to mitigate it.
[1] I have the world's smallest violin right here if they want to complain about screw manufacturing again. Didn't they setup all kinds of specialized factories in China already? They can build all the a screw factories they need.
Not even a wildest guess can tell now. As for Vietnam, it's the closes substitute.
Demographically, Vietnam is incomparably better off than China. On the level of technical capability it's late nineties China. The few manufacturers venture there only for abundant skilled workforce. Big players like Foxconn and Samsung can build entire cities housing a big part of the supply chain inside, but I don't see even Samsung being that committed at the moment. Samsung's plant in Vietnam imports all components, assemblies and etc, from outside, including Samsung parts factories in China.
A lot of young bright Vietnamese are travelling for work to... China — something unimaginable even 10 years ago. In SZ, there is a serious talk going on about China importing foreign workforce by millions — again, something unthinkable 10 years ago.
The biggest appeal of China as a manufacturing destination now is its domestic industry, not Foxconn and Flextronics megaplants.
To get manufacturing appeal, Vietnam will need at foremost develop its domestic manufacturing — and that's easier said than done, in comparison to just inviting Foxconn and have them do everything for you.
To the point above, there is quite a twist now: more and more Chinese manufacturing SMEs are migrating to Vietnam, along with their customers. Even though, they outright loose cost wise, they believe that Vietnam is a better bet on demographics, and immediate gain from "trade war refugees'" clients is big enough for now.
Good part is (ironically) China won't lost control because of its one party system. It's also powerful enougth that US and Western countries can not bomb it like they did in Middle East.
Yes. Apple is never going to leave China. They've already expanded assembly to other countries like Brazil and India to get around protectionist barriers, but there's never going to be a time in the next 5 or 10 years where no assembly takes place in China. The scale Apple is operating at is just too big. And just like Brazil or India, China can implement its own protectionist barriers at any time so there'd still be a reason to do assembly locally.
Apple doesn’t have anywhere to go is a comment on the consumer market, not manufacturing. They are heavily dependent on revenue from China.
exactly, i've read somewhere that they are trying to move further to south/south east Asia, like India , Philippines etc..
It will most definitely be true 5 years from now. It may not be true 15 years from now if Apple start investing heavily elsewhere today.
However westners themselves are not aware of the issue. They believe that's a human rights and freedom of speech issue.
Free trade is a two way street. If a trading partner is engaging in unfair practices then it's reasonable to support sanctions and tariffs and other means to get them to stop, even if you're a free trade supporter.
In fact this is the whole premise of the WTO, which supports free trade. If you don't engage in free trade, you get slapped with tariffs.
Culture in China is about unity. If you look at Chinese history, and if you watch Chinese movies, this is a recurrent theme. Unification through blood and war. This is the goal and China will get stronger and more stable over time. At what cost? Tiananmen, xinjiang, hk, the gfw, and so on... people know about it but are willing to ignore them for the greater goal.
Why this shocks us so much, as non-mainlander, is that our Overton window is much further left (the window of what is considered “normal” or “accepted” public discourse). We have lived through slavery, camps, revolutions for human rights. So there’s definitely a human asymmetry here, which makes it harder for any of us to find common ground.
I don’t think there are much solutions here, and I think that in time Chinese people will learn the same lessons we have learned.
I also think most of their distrust in western media is not because they necessarily disagree with it, but because it doesn’t promote their greater goal. And eventhough they know weibo, wechat, et al. Are heavily censored they continue to obtain their news from there, never ending the cycle.
Having grown up as a Chinese immigrant, I think this is true in ways that I wish the more fervent Americans could appreciate.
By that I mean I wish Americans respected the more general principle of enfranchisement more, but these days in practice that's just a straight up criticism of the GOP and anyone who votes for them, due to their gerrymandering and voter suppression practices.
This is well said and something everyone in tech should remember. Unintended consequence is a law with teeth.
If we could only "dissolve" all those parts of society and culture that are mostly pure friction, and spin the wheels 100x faster to the future...
Reduction of friction is not clearly beneficial! That's exactly the point. Superficially it appears to be, but it absolutely isn't the case. Reducing friction lets things happen faster. Both good things and bad things. And since the meaning of 'good' depends on where you sit, you can't claim that it's purely beneficial.
Reduction of friction accelerates harms as well as benefits, it's not “clearly beneficial” without further knowledge of context.
Sure, it makes scientific progress faster, but it also makes genocide faster.
Sometimes in conversation I hear people talk about how we have to save the world, interfere with other countries, etc. I think this should never be done unilaterally. If something really bad and evil is going on in the world then many countries should agree and cooperate to try to fix things.
The trouble with unilateral intervention is that it can so easily devolve into just serving the needs of special interests.
I think of the current regime in China as more an authoritarian single party regime. We have tolerated or been allied with authoritarian single party regimes in earlier decades such as Taiwan under the KMT, Japan under the early LDP, and South Korea under Rhee.
China places a higher priority on enforcing social harmony than the US, but China has a history where there have been multiple periods of severe social disturbance causing 10s of millions of deaths, such as the Taiping Rebellion. In actual practice most people have quite a lot of freedom on most subjects most of the time since, "Heaven is high, and the Emperor is far away."
> Twitter is banned in China.
I didn't even realize until now. They are simply censoring (mainly)American social media posts. On the internet.
Foreign companies are sanctionned by the US for dealing with Iranian entities even if their countries have no issue with Iran. (Huawei's executive was even arrested in Canada on behalf of the US for that).
My point is, why should we hold companies accountable for enforcing a certain national policy when A, companies have always done awful things in the name of their owners/shareholders and B, the US itself uses companies as a proxy for its policies?
First, to your question. Ostensibly the executive order is due to an illegitimate leader refusing to cede power and causing a humanitarian crisis. This is not dissimilar to how countries sanction North Korea. I would absolutely have preferred such actions to be passed in a democratic manner, and in fact the whole executive order mechanism needs serious rethinking, but the underlying concept is different.
Second, your B) question is a tu quoque fallacy, as you're appealing to hypocrisy. Just because the U.S. does it doesn't mean we should accept it from China. We also should be (and many are) angry at the US' actions.
If the NBA was blocked, would passionate Chinese NBA fans (of which there are many) fall in line? Or not?
I do have to take issue that this is a cultural problem. I don't regard the Communist Party of China to be guardian of culture in China. The country did rather well for thousands of years before it's existence and will no doubt do well for thousands more after it's demise.
Here’s the deal - China is a totalitarian state bent on reclaiming what they see as their rightful place in the world. They will stomp on anyone they have to, friend or enemy, real or imagined, foreign or domestic, to make that happen.
At the same time, the rest of the world, including the West and its allies, have the ability to force China to abide by international norms and the right to defend themselves from China’s aggression.
You may think it hypocritical, but from where I’m sitting the US and its allies have the moral high ground in this instance and no amount of bleating about everyone’s historical crimes is going to distract everyone from the realities of China’s ongoing atrocities against its own people, it’s Nine Dash Line, it’s blatant political and economic attacks on the free world and its disrespect for and undermining of centuries of international laws and norms.
For what it's worth, I know of multiple Chinese companies that are themselves moving manufacturing overseas, primarily to South East Asia. I'm not convinced that the multinationals have nowhere else to go.
Samsung is making most of their phones outside of China. It's clear you can push most multinational manufacturing back out of China. There are several dozen countries to redistribute that manufacturing to. I've probably read 50 or 60 articles in the past year that touch on the varied types of companies moving out of China, from bicycles to bathroom fixtures to clothing to tires.
The far bigger Apple issue, is that they don't want to lose the consumer side of the Chinese market. It's trivial for the Chinese authorities to snap their fingers and make Apple persona non grata in China. It wouldn't even take very long, a short duration of total disruption would be enough to wipe out Apple's market share. They'd never get it back, there are plenty of good domestic alternatives.
For a company the size of Apple, losing half their position in China could mean losing half a trillion dollars in revenue over the next ~20 years. Beyond the hardware, China's extremely large consumer market is no doubt perceived to be very important for Apple's services shift over time.
Musical.ly was a Shanghai-based company targeting the western market, once considered as a case study for similar types of companies.
This was all inevitable, and it's going to lead to siloed-off, separate internets for every region in the world. I always find it amusing and a bit sad when people condemn the Great Firewall, and then immediately turn around and demand their country get one too. Neutrality is impossible; no platform can please everybody.
That's not at all what people are asking for here.
The primary purpose of this is to enforce security for connections. Not every large organization employs content filtering, and those that do mostly only enforce a minimal standard of what is acceptable for work.
It all started a few months ago when someone committed a crime in Taiwan and fled to Hong Kong. To prevent HK from becoming a safe haven for criminals, the Chief Executive of HK proposed a new law to facilitate extradition of these crime suspects from HK to various jurisdictions in the region, including Taiwan and mainland China.
The proposed law even explicitly stated that it's not applicably to crimes political in nature. But some HK people were nevertheless concerned that it might be abused by China to target political dissidents in HK.
So they have taken to the streets to protest that law. As a result, the law was quickly suspended before it had a chance to pass, and a few weeks ago the HK Chief Executive officially announced the withdrawal of the law.
However, despite the concession from the HK government, the protesters pressed on, demanding four more concessions from the government, chief among them universal suffrage, or the direct election of the HK Chief Executive, who up to this point have been nominated from a narrow pool of Beijing-approved candidates, then voted on by a committee.
It's not entirely clear that China even had anything to do with the proposal of the law which started this ordeal. But the protesters have been shrewd to paint a picture, to great effect, of big bad China stomping on the poor helpless people of HK.
What I cannot stress enough, is the rampant violence and destruction from these protesters, which has done this great city, and many innocent citizens, unimaginable harm. Feel free to support their peaceful protests, but please don't simply pile on and encourage these violence and destruction.
(EDIT: If anything I said is untrue, please correct me. Use the truth to argue your side, don't be a coward and hide behind your downvote.)
And not speaking on something does not mean you support it.
He's donated to both sides of the aisle, including a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton last election: https://fortune.com/2016/08/24/apple-tim-cook-fundraiser-cli...
But, the U.S. companies like this equation - don't they? It helps them generate more profit to their shareholders and give them access to that scale of manufacturing. This led to the growth of the US economy. Now, you have a new player in the game who doesn't like to play by the old player's rules and the old player doesn't like it.
The US of course doesn't need to like it, but it seems a tad silly to expect that a country that is very much still developing to act like a free-trading developed nation.
China in its current totalitarian form needs an "Enemy" to survive, without it, it has to deal with difficult internal questions which will force it to adapt and change - and this what scares them.
Totalitarian governments rely on distraction and misdirection of the populace in order to survive. Without it to use as ammunition to unify the people against a commonly perceived "enemy", the very nature of its limiting rule forces the populace to start questions to try and improve their own condition. Questions like "freedom" and "censorship". Totalitarian governments are not equipped to satisfy difficult questions like this and will either adapt or crumble.
Thus the best way "oppose a government that is the sworn enemy of values you regard as precious" is to allow it to face its internal discord without giving it the "enemy" it so desperately needs as ammunition to use against you.
EDIT: There are many comments that I think are misguided attacking this concept, here is rebuttal to them:
Proposition: If China wants to make the west an enemy, it will do so with or without us by the total control it has over its populace.
Rebuttal: So the best counter plan is to help them in doing so?
Proposition: So the solution is don't speak out about real issues because you don't want to piss off Chinese citizens and make them think you are the enemy?
Rebuttal: Obviously not, but rhetoric implying war or xenophobia is hardly the answer either.
Proposition:Most totalitarian governments fail on the battlefield. Think of Genghis Khan, Napoleon, the empires that fell during WW1, or the Axis powers in WW2.
Rebuttal: Just because totalitarian regimes have fallen on the battlefield before, does not mean they will do so in the future. Not only is this proposition utterly foolish and dangerous but its not even remotely true in the nuclear age.
Proposition: Even if you watch or read the heavily controlled Chinese media, it's never about fighting anyone or pointing the finger at anyone.
Rebuttal: This is almost categorically untrue and uninformed. In fact, in times of political tension anti-west and anti-Japanese sentiment in the government controlled media is used almost without fail. No protests are allowed, but anti-west and anti-japanese protests are manufactured by the state.
Proposition:Should we allow economic coercion and suppression of political speech in the US by a state power? Can we not speak out in favor of those protesting in Hong Kong that were promised 50 years of "one country, two systems"?
Rebuttal: Of course NOT! But we should act on the defensive, and prudently, with our own best interests in mind.
Proposition:This theory has proved wrong. China has been welcomed into the WTO over the last 20-30 years and it has not reformed. It is now extending it's economic superpower into political and cultural power. It's not about making an enemy, it's about limiting this unwanted influence.
Rebuttal: To say the theory has proved wrong is premature, China took advantage of one sided trade agreements that created a competitive advantage for itself, subsidized by us. Limitations of its political and cultural power should be in the form of leveling out this competitive economic playing field, and not escalation into xenophobia or coercion.
No wonder they're getting results completely unrelated to basketball.
The US started off the game with a lot more technology, knowledge, and power than the Chinese. I'm kind of iffy that developing nations should open their markets entirely to the largest multinational corporations especially if that means steamrolling the local companies. A lot of Chinese companies would not have been able to start if they instantly got out marketed by large American ones.
Statements, yes. Conversations, no. It's just a bunch of echo chambers, when people occasionally come out of their favorite chamber they simply yell at each other with their ears covered.
Go ahead and downvote because facts make you angry.
Similarly, after WW II, the US was dominant and free trade served us well. However, as other nations develop their competitive advantages, free trade is not so popular in the US.
The only reason this fight has come at all is because of a bunch of displaced factory workers (and areas that did manufacturing) that have been hurt by this trade, and their government had failed to redistribute any of the eggs from the golden goose to them.
As a layperson watching from the sidelines in the software world, but fascinated by welding, electrical/electronics, mechanical engineering, CNC, machining, etc., it is incomprehensible to me why US business leaders would so willingly cede manufacturing to competitors (Chinese in this thread's context, but could be anyone really, even within the same nation). As a dilettante, I'm seeing parallels in manufacturing to what I experience in software, but maybe I'm just not seeing what those leaders see, so perhaps someone can help clear up my misunderstanding.
To think you can divorce yourself cleanly from manufacturing and adopt a "throw it over the fence" mentality, and expect to maintain industry leadership, seems to me as misguided as thinking you can divorce yourself from coding and operational support as a software company, "throw it over the fence", and expect to stay a software leader. That might work for one or three iterations of product lifecycles over a few decades, but there are crucial insights into customer needs and market directions that come about from knowing about what those trenches deal with, that disappear in the fenced-off abstraction layer. You gradually disconnect from your market, your sales and marketing teams lose a critically-grounded, no-bullshit feedback loop from those areas, you lose understanding of the complexities to properly analyze the business problems, you lose metrics those areas gather to inform sales and marketing analytics.
Maybe all those factors simply don't matter, or I'm simply wrong about them being factors at all in manufacturing business? In which case, I put on my value investor's hat and ask, what precisely is the defensible moat about giving up in-house manufacturing knowledge (and often accompanying core support functions) and only specializing in design, sales, and marketing for a manufacturer? I've never been able to figure that one out, either. Seems to me in-house manufacturing secrets are easier to come up with (see Japanese electrolytic caps) and protect than this year's trends and important customer segments, but again, I'm just a layperson, so I'm just left wondering what I'm missing.
AFAIK the culture is more like loyalty to your family and village, and "Heaven is high and the emperor is far away". Heck even the languages of china are mutually unintelligible. Maybe in the end, china should split up into several separate countries, like the khmer region split up into thailand, cambodia, laos and vietnam. Maybe it should be split up into beijing-land, shanghai-land, guangzhou-land, tibet and xinjiang-land.
This is because the governments (ROC and PRC) deliberately construct and promote this ideology. The idea of Chinese nation 中华民族 did not exists until roughly 100 years ago.
You probably didn't shed a tear when Alex Jones was deplatformed, because he's a scoundrel, and if this really did escalate to a full block of the NBA (which seems unlikely), by that point many Chinese citizens would probably think the same of the NBA.
Deplatforming is deplatforming. If one supported the deplatforming of Alex Jones, and doesn't also support China on this, then they are a hypocrite engaging in severe cognitive dissonance.
Freedom of speech is not some "loophole" that allows people to say nasty things. It's a bulwark against authoritarianism. The ones who forget that need to study world history when it comes to freedom of speech and expression.
As I said in a different comment, Alex Jones is not that relevant to this discussion unless somebody can show that the United States government had a role in the deplatforming.
Between harmony and human rights, it's absolutely clear to a westerner which one is more important.
From your tone, it is also absolutely clear which one you would choose.
> If anything I said is untrue, please correct me
It's possible to only say true things and still be biased. This is probably the most common way of spinning a story for "fake news". Some major events I would definitely include are:
- The 2015 Causeway bay disappearances which justified the fear of extradition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causeway_Bay_Books_disappearan...
- Carrie Lam doesn't actually have autonomy and needs confirmation from beijing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOft2Y6mH_g
- Escalation of force, hiring triads to attack citizens, blinding journalist with rubber bullets, shooting live ammo at students in the chest, etc etc.
There are a lot more I can add but halfway through I realize the details don't really matter. The difference in cultural values will make the interpretation of these events irreconcilable anyway.
To an individualist, the only fact that matters is that at least 2 million in a city of 8 million want the right to their own destiny. To a collectivist, the only fact that matters is that the government is building a more harmonious society so the ends justify any means.
What have been the human rights violations from the government, aside from responses to protester violence?
Labeling yourself "human rights" does not automatically make you right.
> It's possible to only say true things and still be biased. This is probably the most common way of spinning a story for "fake news".
Certainly. And you are immune to biases and spinning "fake news" ... how?
> Escalation of force, hiring triads to attack citizens, blinding journalist with rubber bullets, shooting live ammo at students in the chest,
"triads"? "fake news" much?
What else from this list is anything but a response to protester violence? Or do you think the policy should just stand still and take the beating?
> To an individualist,
Keep throwing labels around all you want, it doesn't make you right.
Your freedom to shine your laser light ends where another person's eyes begin.
Plenty of people in the US hate the current government, but you don't get protests to this degree (i.e. widespread violence) in part because some degree of accountability exists.
If the CCP wants to make the US out as China's enemy, they'll make us out to be their enemy, even if they have to lie and distort to do so. The CCP has near-total control of the PRC's domestic media can easily block foreign media if it doesn't already, so there's little stopping them. For instance, IIRC, they're currently pushing a false theory to domestic audiences that the HK protests are just a CIA orchestrated plot.
> EDIT: There are many comments that I think are misguided attacking this concept, here is rebuttal to them:
Why don't you post your rebuttals in replies to the comments in question?
> Proposition: If China wants to make the west an enemy, it will do so with or without us by the total control it has over its populace.
> Rebuttal: So the best counter plan is to help them in doing so?
You misunderstand: if they're going to do it anyway, it's foolish to try to constrain you actions in an attempt to control them. You gain nothing and only give them more control of the situation.
For instance: the CCP tries to blur the lines between the CCP, the PRC government, and the Chinese nation. An action against the CCP could be presented as an action against the nation in Chinese domestic media, do you think that should stop actions against the CCP? Similarly, the CCP will interpret actions to support Taiwan as hostile to it, does that mean the US should abandon (democratic) Taiwan to avoid some kind of censure in Chinese state-controlled media?
Not at all. The whole premise of Chinese policy and the key to the Party's survival is not about fighting enemies. It's simply about developing the country and putting it on an equal footing with the other superpower(s).
Even if you watch or read the heavily controlled Chinese media, it's never about fighting anyone or pointing the finger at anyone. When that happens it usually in response to a perceived attack.
They know they have enough to do without inventing themselves enemies to fight against. Their policy is to avoid clashes as much as possible.
I should also point out that the condition of the Chinese 'populace' has massively improved over the last 40 years and they are actually quite proud of it.
This backsliding to authoritarianism under Xi is sure to lower GDP per Capita growth over the medium and long run -- you need inclusive economic institutions for economic innovation and creativity to be fostered.
This isn't historically accurate. China mostly been under a centralized authoritarian government since antiquity. In fact, there is a strong argument that China (literally "Center Kingdom" or "Middle Kingdom" in Chinese) became authoritarian because it had no rivals for thousands of years.
By contrast, European nations always were in a community of relatively equal rivals - a society of nations if you will. This rivalry forced nations to be somewhat competitive in terms of meeting the needs of their population, and adapting to new methods or technologies developed by their neighbors since they were always in danger of being overtaken by a rival.
If anything, the existence of strong rival nations weakens the cultural Chinese claim of being the center of the world.
Every media organization aligned against Saddam when the intelligence agencies (US govt) signaled it, with 0 evidence.
I suspect you're thinking specifically of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact nations during the 90s. There's a conflating factor there though: communism breaks up under internal pressures without an external enemy. (This is a pattern also replicated within many Latin American countries, as well as within smaller-scale communes within the United States.) Communism is one form of totalitarianism, but it's not the only one, and it's not the one currently practiced by China (which switched over to state capitalism in the 70s).
Most of modern China's advances came in times of freewheeling Jiang-Hu era, and Xi mostly coasts on inertia. Domestic electronics manufacturing has been on retreat for the last decade, being supplanted by government pushed initiatives. Billions are being bamboozled on "O2O," "AI," "5G," "Big Data" by people who don't have even a remotest idea of what those are besides nice CG animations.
Industrial parks that made local makes famous during Shanzhai era are being bulldozed year after year to be replaced by campuses of firms brandishing current tech fashion trend buzzword. This severely impacts the output of local original products. Things like cheap LED lighting, battery banks, vapes, selfie sticks, hoverboards, quadcopters, stick computers, damn fidget spinners, portable audio amplifier, loads of bluetooth gizmos, tons of cellphone accessories, and so on — all that stuff was originally a product of Chinese garage industry. I can not imagine anything like this coming in such amounts in current cultural and business climate.
Some of you genuinely care about us and I can appreciate that, but as a whole, I find the Westerners' altitude towards us disturbing.
Reasons:
1. Knows very little about China except from cherry-picked news by Western media, but pretending to know everything about us, better than us. This makes many of your arguments baseless and extremely annoying to the eyes.
- How many of you have lived in China for more than 1 year and know the language and the culture? I have been in the US for 9 years, by your logic I am so qualified for the next POTUS.
- When was the last time you saw bad news about Taiwan on your media? Does this mean Taiwan is heaven on earth?
- Have you read Henry Kissinger's On China? Do you know who Edgar Snow is? Have you heard of the 1938 Yellow River flood and know its cause? If you answer no for all three questions, it is unlikely that your opinion about China worth a read.
- I saw one HNer wondered if any of us mainlanders know what's happening in HK. Excuse me? HK is physically connected to other parts of mainland China, Luohu port alone served 83.2 million passengers in 2015.
2. Double standard in just about everything.
- Terrorist attack in Paris, everybody mourns; terrorist attack in Kunming, freedom fighters!
- US fights with {UK, USSR, North Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Libya, China, whoever-it-is-this-week}, we are just spreading freedom; China fights with the US (with no blood shed), you are just hiding your own problems.
- Care to explain why are Francis Cabot Lowell and Samuel Slater your hero if you care so much about intellectual property and fair trade?
- I see at least one post about HK on HN every single day, since June. So either the people from Kashmir don't deserve your attention, or being your ally means one can get away with this.
3. General arrogance towards us.
- For you internal affair, clearly there are always multiple parties involved, people should make observations from different perspectives and critical thinking is required. When it comes to us, well, you Chinese are all borgs that think and act alike. Apparently all the 90 million members of the CCP share the same brain, there cannot possibly be any conflict inside the party which affects its actions.
- I have witnessed multiple times, on HN, where people say that they can't wait to see a revolution happen in China or a joint military action that overthrows our government. Yes, millions of Chinese are more than welcome to die ASAP just so you can be more confident about Western values.
- When it comes to battling the climate change. The US citizens should do nothing and keep their current life style. How dare the Chinese want to eat beef like we do, owning big houses and lawns like we do, and drive pick-ups like we do. Per capita carbon emission and meat consumption is the wrong metric to use!!!!!!1111 You Chinese should just stick with bicycles and eat more rice.
(HN is especially bad in these regards. Seriously, even the 4chan folks are much more adorable than HNers, at least they know they are shit talking.)
The CCP treats us like shit. But when I see Westerners have discussions about China, I don't feel like you want to help us because your discussions are almost always filled with Western propaganda, misinformation, and utter ignorance. All I see is a massive circlejerk based on half-truth, half-misunderstanding. I know some of you fantasize that if more and more Chinese come to the West or see online discussions like this one, they will accept Western value and the CCP will collapse in no time. But the reality is, based on the reasons above, you only humiliate yourself and push us further away from you. Feel free to deny all your faults and blame the CCP for brain-washing us into disagreeing with you (as you have always did), but more and more mainlanders are agreeing with me.
Yes I registered to post this, yes I am a Chinese, yes I am saying something bad about you Westerners. I know some HNer can't wait to point these out and accusing me of being a wumao, sorry I took you chance :P
You may down vote me now.
Instead of letting contention escalate to coercion and violence we should focus on setting mutually agreeable rules of economic competition, and let whichever system is more successful in producing value succeed.
Important side point regarding intellectual property - our system here is also messed up and copyright/IP laws will no doubt be changed soon. The important part regarding that is setting common rules of engagement, and allowing those that are responsible for development of new methods and ideas to capture some part of the value that they created, without enforcing through the coercion of law an arbitrary monopoly. Such rules are in both of our interests, as Chinese people should also be able to capture the value that they create through innovation - perhaps why some think the innovation curve is so low in China is because there is not enough incentive for there to be more (There would be if we formed some kind of rules for innovators to be allowed to capture some value from the product/services they create).
I hope you realize, I am NOT anti-china, I am anti-Totalitarianism, because I think its not in both of our long term best interests. But I also think that if some are happy to live under what I would call "totalitarianism" I am 100% okay with that as long as I am allowed the same prerogative to chose what system I want to live with.
You are purporting a collection of statements from just one side of the argument, seemingly on purpose.
I am asking you, if you truly want this issue to progress to a healthier path, do not continue to push adversarial position, even though many in the west might do so.
Do you have the faintest idea how many European countries talk shit about Germany and Germans 24/7? Only German Neo-Nazis pay close attention to any of that, nobody else would use it as excuse to vote for the extreme right-wing. Reason is not suffering from an inferiority complex, other than said right-wingers.
And trust me, as a German there's a lot to feel shit about, and not much to be proud of. But I still can laugh when people trash talk Germany, and nothing a foreigner says about Germany could make me angry, so I don't have to invent things about them, either. If you want to see me angry, have a German deny the Holocaust, or say that might is right, I'll be teetering on the edge of what is legal to say in no time, certainly on the edge of what the rules of any online forum would allow.
> I know some of you fantasize that if more and more Chinese come to the West or see online discussions like this one, they will accept Western value and the CCP will collapse in no time
With those cherry picked straw men about all Westerner you haven't even scratched the surface. As has been written decades ago, totalitarian revisionism requires control of the whole planet. The CCP is demonstrating it really wants to try going for that. It doesn't want just to bullshit you and leave us alone, it wants to silence us, as well, so we'd rather fight back.
We care about our own freedom, from that follows solidarity of all people who want to be free, too, but our own is the bedrock driving force here, and I don't think you fully grasp it, it's not merely buzz words because you've seen a bunch of hypocrites or people paying mere lip service. And the main question isn't so much how the CCP treats obedient or harmless citizens, anyway, but rather how it treats dissidents. One innocent person who gets tortured outweighs even a thousand billion people who look the other way. Until that is clear to you as well, you have understood little about the lessons of the 20th century from the perspective of serious Westerners. No words can change anything. Not even military force could. You can kill us, but not change this.
If you don't want solidarity, that's fine, but you can't give it back on behalf of others. Those dissidents still have it, and we will speak freely.
> blame the CCP for brain-washing us into disagreeing with you (as you have always did)
What precisely are you even disagreeing with? You agree the CCP treats you like shit, but you haven't said whether you agree with supporting resistance against being treated like shit. Being offended so deeply seems to override everything else, but that is essentially blackmail, not an argument.
There is not a way to help China deal with their internal questions; it is now a matter of pushing back.
At the same time, is passive opposition ethical? Should we allow economic coercion and suppression of political speech in the US by a state power? Can we not speak out in favor of those protesting in Hong Kong that were promised 50 years of "one country, two systems" and just want to cash that check? What about the Uyghurs in camps?
I suspect that a rational, measured response to these issues is enough to be the boogeyman interfering in internal affairs that China wants.
I agree that the tenths article on the same topic that doesn't really add new information and produces largely identical comments isn't too interesting, but I don't believe that it's coordinated in any way. People like outrage, and they like to signal to each other that they are part of the same group, so they upvote and comment "I too am outraged".
And then there's just the randomness of the NBA, South Park and Blizzard happening yesterday/today, had those happened a week apart, it would have looked differently.
StackOverflow's PR disaster that unfolded over the last two weeks or so was similar in amount, but it was stretched over 10 days so there would only be one or two posts on the front page (granted: they did get flagged down and/or were removed by mods more quickly than the topics about China, possibly because there's more flame-war-potential in StackOverflow's actions than in "The West's" reaction to Chinese outrage).
Iraq was destroyed not only because of WMD as a lie but the biggest factor is that Westners as human rights activits collectively supported their government based on the belief that they own truth and have "moral responsibilty" meaning they are the judge but not god to decide other peoples fate by liberate them from evil human right abuser i.e. Saddam and Gaddafi. They are able to do that because western countries have more bombs while the "evils" can not defend themselves.
In today's world, Hitler doesn't create threat because it's obvious wrong and will be easily destroyed. The real threat is mobs of human activists that believe they stand on a high moral ground. They are more deceptive. They create chaos around the world. They show no remorse for the suffer of Iraq and Libya people because they don't think they cause the disaster.
Blaming the lie of WMD is another lie. The Western people collectively supported their countries to bomb Iraq and Libya that evetually created the chaos and disaster. That's the real root cause.
Human rights and democracy is the last cult in the world after communism collapse. I'm not saying HR and democracy themselvs are bad. But because the believers have done a lot of damages without knowing it's their crime that cause millions of death. The stupidity of mordem human only recognizes direct killing as a crime but never admit bigger scale crime indirectly caused by their "good" intention
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21200971
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21199884
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21195089
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21195898
More comments on this at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
I've tried asking through official channels for a couple months, so I thought I'd ask casually here.
I don't care about my old accounts. This one is fine.
Probably censorship, but including "篮球" in the query would make it a lot more obvious whether the Houston Rockets are suppressed intentionally or not.
Considering that TSMC is the only 7nm fab lab in large scale operation, I'm not surprised.
TSMC, and Taiwan, have always been on the cutting edge, and have even out-competed the US recently (Intel getting stuck at 12nm, GloFo giving up the race entirely).
The USA needs to give a good, long, look at what Taiwan is doing and needs to wonder how we lost our chip supremacy to them. I hold no malice against them... they just did it better than we did. Fair and square. #2 in the race btw, is probably going to be Samsung (South Korea). Intel is "almost done" with 10nm (which should be competitive vs Samsung/TSMC 7nm), but they're definitely lagging behind.
It was described at the time as "out-sourcing your design and sales". Companies that could not get behemoths like Intel or National Semiconductor or T.I. or the like to manufacture for them, who also couldn't afford to build and run a modern semiconductor fab, could get competitive manufacturing of their designs done. It was a brilliant strategy, and it allowed them to be less dependent on any one design working/selling well, since they had many different companies competing to fill their factories for them.
Now what nearby place needs highly skilled labor in exactly the areas Taiwan is very proficient at? Shenzhen is just around the corner.
Of course there is a still a huge cultural disparity of going to mainland china. But money is a strong motivator to change your values.
https://www.quora.com/Why-has-salary-growth-stagnated-in-Tai...
- Using the murder in Taiwan as a pretext to introduce the bill when it could easily have been handled ad hoc with Taiwan.
- Claiming it was a loophole left over by the British when it was very clearly by design.
- Initially refusing to suspend the bill in the face of huge opposition.
- Taking months to fully withdraw the bill and proudly ignoring the protestors.
- Blanket refusing an independent enquiry and unwaveringly supporting police no matter how brutal and unprofessional they've become.
- Seeking permission from Xi to withdraw the bill.
- Introducing an anti-mask law instead of attempting serious reform.
- Threatening internet lock downs instead of attempting serious reform.
- Not criticising the central government for threatening military violence and flagrantly manipulating coverage of HK on the mainland.
Those are just a few that stand out to me though I'm sure there are more I've missed.
They might not even have to do that... from what I understand, they are working with Foxconn to move some production out of China. Both companies can benefit from spreading some of the political risk around.
Do you realise that there would be no shortage of customers for them in China after Apple leaves? The biggest problem as I wrote in a post below is that Apple may leave China, but Foxconn can not. It will still have an absolutely mammoth manufacturing capacity that will be sold to Apple's competitors the moment they leave.
The biggest shock to me in recent days was seeing an advertisement for a humongous amounts of manufacturing machinery being pretty much liquidated by Foxconn. With the amount of stuff being sold, it can possibly be a double digit of Iphone production capacity.
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/hardware/foxconn-i... https://www.cultofmac.com/131295/a-visit-to-foxconns-not-so-...
A few hundred million or even a few billion isn’t going to hurt Apple in the long run, sure, but it will definitely hurt in the short.
What truth? The protestors don't actually need that much funding [1], and the help they need actually comes from older Hongkongers who are sympathetic to them:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/you-dont-have-to-face-it-alone-...
[1] Seems like their equipment typically consists of: an umbrella, a household respirator like the ones used for painting, protective googles, a hard hat, and bottled water. None of that is expensive.
1. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/is-the-prime-minister-a-p...
2. https://www.economist.com/bagehots-notebook/2010/07/23/brita...
From my perspective, they seem to be basically cut off from the rest of the world. So how can I differentiate between the chinese government and the individual, when for all I know most of the individuals support everything their government is doing?
They most certainly do, but that's not their fault. They've grown up with the CCP and aren't given the freedom to learn about the world from a broader perspective. They live in total ignorance of their government's control over them. Everything they know and understand is blessed by the CCP.
That's the fault of the CCP, not the individual.
As for totalitarianism - it's complicated, since totalitarianism in pre-modern societies looked very different. He would generally allow people in captured territories some degree of self-rule, as long as they sent the requisite taxes to support his war machine and didn't threaten his rule. But that's not all that different from the status of ordinary people in China: pay the requisite taxes and don't threaten the ruling party and you have a fair amount of latitude to go about your business unhindered. It's also very different from the degree of freedoms we're used to in the U.S, where threatening the ruling party is practically a national sport.
It's human nature and nothing you or me can do will change it. (I mean, the need for antagonists is embedded into our brains, just look at the popular movies)
Yes, I totally agree that some of us did stole your stuff, and the fact that you also did it in the past doesn't justify our actions. Lack of innovation is indeed a big problem in China and it absolutely should not be mitigated by stealing others' innovations. Healthy, fair competition is what moves things forward and creates value. But many Westerners are acting like they have the moral high ground. Don't you love your bible? How about that story about throwing stones at some poor girl?
Like I said, I know many of you have good intentions (except the ones who want to see a war in China). But the gap between our cultures is way too big, misunderstandings are inevitable and you can't expect the average person to learn all the differences.
You say our government is totalitarianism and it's bad. I say we treat the government as our parents and it's part of our multi-thousand year culture.
You say democracy is the only right choice. I say not everyone has enough knowledge to make informed decisions and that's why you have a madman president.
You say the CCP is an evil dictatorship that uses the book 1984 as a manual. I say I am very thankful for their tremendous efforts in maintaining a stable, independent country, even if we are surrounded by hostile countries (Yes, Russia is a potential enemy and we all know it. No, North Korea is not our puppet state.)
Very few of us can stay calm and agree to disagree, the rest writes the history.
When people say something is “evil” what they mean is they don’t believe it’s in our long term best interest. Meaning even though paternalism got you to where you are today, doesn’t mean it will get you where you want to be in the future.
Finally you imply that those that stay calm and agree to disagree won’t write the future, while I won’t disagree, I would caution that if you let disagreement evolve into coercion and conflict without a channel for resolution besides violence, there will not be a future for someone to “write”.
I have no interest in causing friction. I am here to nerd out about AI and Lumen. E.g. https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1169798426088939520
> ... equating Americans with all Westerners
In the context of China-related issues, I don't see the problem. The Europe usually just repeats what the US says, or stays quiet. You should be thankful that the US drew most of the fire, and most Chinese still have very good impressions about Germany.
> ... nobody criticized the US wars of aggression
I didn't say that, don't put words in my mouth. Also, a few people criticizing them for a while is far from enough. The US even made movies to whine about how invading other countries and killing those people makes their soldiers mentally sick, and I didn't see many Westerners boycotting these movies.
> ... talk shit about Germany and Germans ... nothing a foreigner says about Germany
Oh, so the West has never done any actions that upset us, in our face? The trade war is just a hallucination. The US has never bombed our embassy in Belgrade, send their aircraft carriers roaming around China and deploy missiles around China that aim at us. Do I really need to give more examples of these actions? Can you still stay so calm if China does these to Germany? Also, I still remember vividly how you Germans welcomed and supported Rebiya Kadeer. Imagine if China did the same to Osama bin Laden.
Even if I take a step back and only talk about what you say about us, you privileged Westerners can never imagine how we feel when all the mainstream media go against you, and how upset it is when it's perfectly OK to keep making jokes about how we have tiny penises even in the PC culture. Speaking of PC culture, I thought you agree that words hurt? Either that's a lie, or it's acceptable to hurt the Chinese using words.
> ... control of the whole planet
Bourgeoisies will lick anyone's butthole, as long as this person or entity is powerful and rich. I thought you are proud of your superior capitalism? Also, it is hilarious that a Westerner is accusing China for wanting to control the planet, could you please remind me how many oversea military bases does the US and China each have?
> ... I don't think you fully grasp it
I don't think you fully grasp how much we fear about your "freedom" either. I mean hey, the best CCP propaganda in what the West has done to the Middle East, your governments are all secretly pro-CCP ;)
> One innocent person who gets tortured outweighs even a thousand billion people who look the other way.
Well said! Now tell me what sanctions will the EU implement against the US for all the innocent people tortured by the US? I must remind you that I didn't say what the CCP did are fine, I just hate your double standard.
> ... perspective of serious Westerners
If you really are serious, you would have tried to learn more about China and made a lot fewer questionable actions. I mean, you put yourself in the position of a doctor, so it's your responsibility to get to know the patient.
> What precisely are you even disagreeing with?
I was referring to the fact that whenever I say anything good about the CCP or something that contradicts with what the Western mainstream media claims to be true, someone will jump out and say I have been brainwashed and I know less about China than they do. For what I am disagreeing with, if the three reasons I listed above still doesn't sum it up, let me give you a metaphor:
Say your friend is sick, this person is sneezing, has a running nose and is unhappy. You are worried about this but you have a solution: whenever you are unhappy, you play some video games and it cheers you up. So you skipped the first two symptoms and start to tie your friend's hands to a video game controller using duct tape. Your friend isn't denying the illness but is probably disagreeing with your solution.
You're just talking to yourself, this is a complete waste of time.
Human rights violation by china are well documented. You can look them up yourself assuming you have access to an uncensored internet. I cited disappearing people as the example that I thought was most relevant for the extradition bill.
The triad attacks are definitely real (we are in the age of smartphones after all): https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-49071502
I don't think you realize how much the difference in cultural values is making it hard for us to communicate here. Westerners consider what you call "violence and destruction" to be a fair price to pay to have rights guaranteed. Fighting is necessarily ugly but shining laser in eyes is laughably tamed compared to the lengths democratic societies have historically gone to protect their freedoms.
I do understand that some people just want to go on with their daily lives and ignore the atrocities going on in the background as long as it doesn't happen to them. I am not even arguing that's necessarily wrong either, just very different from western thought.
> Human rights violation by china are well documented.
That may have been the case. But we are talking about human rights violations by the Hong Kong government here, and I don't think you have a case here.
> The triad attacks are definitely real
We can certainly demand an independent investigation into this once the violence and destruction stops.
> Westerners consider what you call "violence and destruction" to be a fair price to pay to have rights guaranteed.
I believe the bill was quickly suspended after initial peaceful protests. There's no reason to believe the bill wouldn't be withdrawn if peaceful protests persisted. That's why I believe the violence has been unnecessary and may have even been harmful to the cause.
FWIW, I oppose the bill and support the peaceful protests against the bill.
> shining laser in eyes is laughably tamed
Have you tried that on yourself? Maybe you'll have more empathy for the policy if you had. It looks deceptively benign but is in fact incredibly aggressive.
> I do understand that some people just want to go on with their daily lives ... just very different from western thought.
I doubt it's very different in the west.
A) It’s very difficult to distinguish false-flag violence from hooligans
B) Once violence starts, it’s hard to stop it, but that doesn’t mean that the government should automatically get its way because a small minority of hooligans/false flag operatives got involved
C) Protesting for universal suffrage from an uncontrolled slate of candidates seems eminently reasonable from a western perspective; what do you think is bad about this?
Tyrant, bully, abusive - there are many terms for that sort of relationship. Is it any wonder that someone is upset about it, and advocating that the U.S. gets out of it?
We had a lot of sanction happy presidents and the American population barely bat an eye-lid as millions died from the fallout.
Only thing lost in this case is money, so far.
America still has a lock on a lot of technical know how that will take the Chinese decades to replicate (eg semi conductor and jet turbine production).
This is the part that makes absolutely no sense to me. The farther you move up this value chain, the fewer and fewer people you can find that can actually do those jobs. They require advanced degrees and highly technical specialization and experience. Not everyone can do that. Unless you have a parallel plan to, perhaps magically, mint more and more PhDs every year what is everyone else supposed to do who was just a "low level unskilled dirty manufacturing" worker?
>American business people were happy to...
You're sure right about that! I think what people are questioning is if, as a state and society, that was a long-term good strategic choice. For the bottomline it absolutely was - for those businessmen and their company's earnings reports.
Yep. But that is a problem better solved via some kind of wealth redistribution, rather than maintaining low value jobs that couldn’t pay enough to keep up anyways. China was just the first thing to suck away low value jobs, eventually automation will be much much worse.
Okay, odds are good that as a manufacturing layperson, I'm just a dummy for not seeing this, but the "climb up the value ladder" implementation in American business has never made sense to me. Especially with automation.
Here is how I see it as a value investor, so please tell me where I'm wrong.
"Climb up the value ladder, and let someone else occupy all those pesky 'low-value' rungs."
That's what I see many American management subscribe to. The part I didn't understand: those rungs are your "innovation feedstock", the raw material if you will, where you find your next innovation iterations. It's like saying, "meh, I'll let someone else deal with those pesky metallurgy details, and churn out jet turbines with the latest in metallurgy advances". It's a belief that innovation is a "home-run", "big bang" phenomena, and not Edison's "99% perspiration", daily grind-it-out, fight-for-every-inch iteration, that sometimes accretes into an edifice taken as a whole that is only much later celebrated as an "overnight success". If I rely upon general metallurgy advances to inform my design team of what's metallurgic-ally possible, then aren't my competitors availed of the exact same advances at the same time? Whereas, if I have my engineers, materials scientists, and "dirty" forging plant workers come together, asking themselves, "if we need a turbine that has these qualities, it must have a metal with those properties, then what will it take to come up with the materials science and forging techniques to reach that design goal", that's a trade secret that no trivial or even modest amount of reverse engineering is going to ever reveal.
It certainly has been this way for me personally in software and coding, so maybe I'm mistakenly ascribing and generalizing that experience with high-complexity endeavors to manufacturing. I certainly concede that for investors, the numbers show innovation is best modeled as a home-run, big-bang phenomena, and it doesn't make sense to invest in accretion. That's how the entire VC business model is presented, at least. But startups are a tiny fraction of the overall business universe. The successful stories in startups are the highest growth for sure, and the most exciting-shiny-chrome, but for index-investing boring-but-certain-profits level moats of defensible businesses, I see more opportunities in a model where I vertically integrate the value ladder, so the value ladder strategy is instead stated as:
"Climb up the value ladder, and vertically-integrate the entire value chain to capture all accretion benefits to a value equation greater than the sum of all its parts."
The above was my thinking since the 80's when I first heard about the value ladder approach of abandoning "low-value" rungs, when automation wasn't the big deal it is today. With automation now on everyone's mind, now I'm left wondering if the accretion benefits aren't amplified many-fold: exactly who is positioned with the expertise and knowledge base to actually automate, the organizations doing the manufacturing, or the ones who are focused on design (including "high-end" manufacturing), management, sales, and marketing (DMSM)? The growth during the onrushing automation ramp-up is likely in the automation and not the DMSM activities. If I am only junior-grade with my DMSM but I have figured out automation, then my COGS drops to the floor and I have a window of time during which I plow my profits into learning and getting my DMSM story straight to out-compete conventional DMSM shops, and take over their market niches. That window can be a hell of a long time if that automation is nearly perfectly opaque to outsiders, because it isn't "just" code, but data that drives the automation around machine learning, data that you can't get unless you actually were doing the original manufacturing at scale (ruling out replicating the automation by building a pilot plant, which only yields automation-delivering-unacceptable-quality).
Strong privacy is the "security by obscurity" solution to being free.
When analogous statements are found offensive in the US, US citizens, US tech companies, and the US media can act with astonishing speed and coordination to stamp them out. That doesn't mean that the US government is directing all of it.
You have a track record of China using the heavy hand to dictate the messaging of corporations and individual citizens.
No coordinated message in China goes through without the explicit or implicit consent of the government, even if it starts "from the people". It's not hard to make the connection here.
I find it truly stupid that Chinese government intervened, but if you think this move wasn't popular in China you're dead wrong.
I feel no cognitive dissonance, but maybe you can explain more why I should.
> "Blizzard Entertainment is a private company and can deplatform whoever they want".
I haven't seen anyone saying Blizzard's actions should be illegal. The common response seems to be "boycott", which Alex Jones' supporters were free to do as well
Would you feel the same way if the deplatforming was done by, say, AT&T, Verizon, or T-Mobile? Because Twitter and Facebook specifically get the same protection as if they are communication pipes (as opposed to being publishers).
On the other hand, the Chinese government has stepped in to block the NBA because of the NBAs stance on free speech of players, staff, etc.
How do you get a platform when it is the defacto platform?
Private banning of speech doesn’t prevent the individual from stating those claims elsewhere. Government mandated banning of speech does prevent that speech from being used elsewhere.
If I don't want someone to speak at my event and ban them, that's not the end of the world. There are probably others who would allow them to speak.
If the government bans someone from speaking, there is no recourse.
This is the state of the world in the USA and one of our cornerstone negative freedoms.
Those jobs?
It's a unique aspect of tech-people that the disappearance of a class of work that was actually able to support people at a reasonable standard of living is cause for advocacy of "more wealth redistribution, please". Where I come from this is viewed as both naive and insulting. I don't mean to imply you were trying to come across that way - but realize that it can. "Look I know we took your dirty disgusting low skilled manufacturing job and shipped it overseas ... but here's a welfare check from Uncle Sam" has not exactly done well as a political strategy for the last few election cycles.
If capital continues to become much more valuable than labor (via robotics, automation, etc...), then eventually we have to decide what to do with all the obsolete humans who we don’t need labor from anymore. We can hand them welfare checks, give them a basic income, have them do pointless jobs (eg move dirt back and forth, or make rubber dog poop that doesn’t justify their paychecks), or...just throw them away. Some of those choices are more moral than the others.
You're just wrong about tariffs closing factories. Some factories have closed (and the media makes sure we all know about those), but more have opened (and the media never tells us about those), and in total the number of manufacturing jobs in the US has increased since Trump's tariffs.
Okay, perhaps. But that could also be them jumping on a popular bandwagon.
I'm just raising this doubt because I've seen, many times on sites like this, enormous panics over supposed Chinese government actions, which actually boil down to totally innocuous actions from individuals. The most common cognitive bias when the West discusses the East is to think of it as a giant collective -- not being able to "tell them apart".
If someone in the US makes politically questionable speech, the fallout is stretched over days, and generally products aren't pulled immediately from retailers, etc. Here, we had many commercial actors respond at once (Alibaba, Tencent, Li Ning, China Basketball Association, etc.).
It reeks of state coordination and pressure, especially when Chinese government entities are making related contemporaneous statements. Even if it wasn't, it's overly reactionary; elsewhere, one tends not to immediately kill commercial relationships over a controversial statement by one executive, but instead see how the organization as a whole will react to concerns first.
How could there be a bandwagon when twitter is banned in China (so no one could have ever seen the tweet), and immediately after the tween all Chinese social media blocked any posts related to the Houston Rockets? There was zero way for anyone in China to even know it was a thing or to be angry.
If it were Beijing, you'd have comprehensive action occur within a day or two and it would be a strict policy enforced by the government. All Chick-fil-A locations would be shut down immediately and whatever was upsetting would be removed (or the chain would never reopen); and while the authorities are at it, they might go ahead and engineer a forced ownership transfer for good measure.
I'll note that Chick-fil-A is booming in the US. It's now the third most successful chain in the US by sales behind McDonalds and Starbucks. That's despite their non-PC position on gay rights.
The image of English-speaking westerners talking about "liberate hong kong" is a bit triggering for the average Chinese person, due to Hong Kong and England's history. It must be incredibly easy for CCTV to point at that and say that it's just the western imperialists trying to take HK away.
China promised 50 years of "one country, two systems"-- people in Hong Kong want to cash that check.
The topic was whether the outpouring of sentiment from mainland China could be 'organic' rather than some immediate government dictate.