Slashdot Mirror
China In the Habit of Copying and Redirecting US Sites?
Want to know why US web companies have trouble making it in China? gaz_hayes passed us a link to the blog commiepod, which suggests that successful US websites are targeted by 'Chinese government backed companies.' "These companies copy the site, deploy it on a .cn domain, and then DNS poison or forcefully lower the bandwidth the US site. Just a few weeks ago google.com and google.cn were DNS poisoned across the entire Chinese internet and were being redirected to their Chinese competitor Baidu. This probably explains Google's 3rd quarter market share in China." This is a fairly serious accusation; anyone else have first-hand experiences that would back this up?
China proves that Fascism, not Socialism, works. China is a vindication of everything the post-Socialist Fascist movement thought was in need of change in Socialist ideology to make it work. As a result, China has many of the benefits of capitalism, but has the state control of the means of production that Socialism provides. If it's mostly high-ranking aparatchiks and military officers who own most of the corporations in China, it is only semantically different from the corporation, known as the "Communist State" in China, from owning it in its name.
Of course this would be a surprise to the morons who think that Fascism is just a dirty word you throw at someone you disagree with. Most people forget that Fascism was a movement with a clear-cut platform, that was a true hybrid of Socialism and Capitalism. It is "right-wing" in the sense that it is "to the right of Socialism and Communism." It is, in essence, where the "left and right" meet up on the spectrum. If you look at the Fascists' planks, you will see that they had many left-wing tendencies, such as seizing the war profits of the military industrial complex, heavy taxation of income, and strong government **control** of the means of production through counsels of industry and regulations.
Communism is utopian. It is built on 19th century pseudo-science, and it ought to be no more respectable to be a Communist than to be a Phrenologist.
I am not surprised at China doing this. It make perfect sense from the economic nationalism of Fascist policy.
oh please, how can you even compare the US to the Chinese...
Native Americans? African Americans?
Every empire has to crush a few people to establish itself. Enough of the double standards already.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Honestly, the more I hear about China, the more it sounds like the (stereo)typical massive corruption scenario.
I.e., no need to assume that there's some government hand behind it, or some meaningful form of protest against the west. It can be simply that some guy running their DNS servers/proxies/great-firewall/whatever got a nice bribe to redirect the lookups to someone selling the same kind of product, or an importer, or really whoever was willing to pay.
The way the kleptocracy/corruption scenario goes is, basically, it doesn't matter how much you're paid, it only matters how much you can steal/embezzle/get-as-bribes. Whole hierarchies are formed where any job worth anything (in loot/bribes/whatever) is essentially either given to party leaders' relatives or auctioned to the highest bidder. And then it's considered pretty much normal and expected that you'd get your money back, and a nice profit, by stealing/embezzling/demanding-bribes/etc. Whatever works, really.
My favourite example of what corruption _can_ do, and incidentally also is (A) about China, and (B) nicely illustrates that there is no need for it to even be motivated by some higher ideals or nationalism, is the Battle of the Yalu River in 1894.
Among various surrealism of it all, many shells used by the Chinese fleet were filled with sawdust or cement, because some enterprising souls in the navy had embezzled the funds for cordite and split the loot with the manufacturer. Or stuff as monumentally surrealistic as that a battleship was missing two main guns, which again had been stolen and sold on the black market. Yep, you've read that right: big f-ing guns off a battleship, simply dismantled and sold on the black market.
You also find such surrealistic stuff, as that the fleet's second in command -- no doubt, some fellow with either high placed relatives, or who bought the job fair and square -- deliberately didn't relay the order to deploy into battle formation. The formation where the big ships could fire at the Japanese was also the formation where the Japanese could fire at the ship he's on, and, you know, he wasn't going to do stupid stuff like risk his own life for his country. At any rate, someone felt protected enough to ignore a direct order, even if it cost the country a humiliating defeat.
That's the kind of thing that corruption can do. Someone didn't give a fuck about their country or about sticking it to the foreigners. They just cost their country a humiliating defeat, simply because, you know, there was something to steal or he had bribed someone powerful enough to ignore a direct order.
So, regardless of whether you wish to see a continuity of that in China or not, well, that's how far corruption can go.
And you don't even have to look one century back, the (ex)communist block provides a ton of more recent examples. And not even just the commies. Just about anywhere where some people were given enough unchecked power, some enterprising souls proceeded to sell their influence for cash. With similar results.
The more devastating result being that they invariably destroyed a whole country's culture in the process. The little guys were allowed to steal or get a bribe worth maybe 1$, so they wouldn't mind when the party leaders stole a million bucks in one fell swoop.
So now look at this particular incident, and you tell me if you really need some higher reason or motivation than bribe to explain it.
It's freakin' sad, that's what it is.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
You have to be joking. Aside from Tibet, how many countries has China invaded in the last 50 years? The US has thrown it's weight around enormously more than China, right from installing Dictators (e.g. Shah of Iran) to direct invasions and much of this has been about securing access to resources and markets. The US even engineered the overthrow of the Guatemalan government just so that United Fruits could avoid paying taxes. China's brutality is mostly internal, in contrast to the US which is free internally but brutal externally.
The EU is not throwing it's weight around on a US level, but there are a few nasty examples. Britain was of course involved in the installation of the Shah of Iran (to secure access to the oil) but France has been waging a secret war in the mineral-rich Central African Republic for decades. Right now they have "peace keeping" troops there, but they used to control it directly and basically used the population as slave labour.
I'm sure that if/when China starts overthrowing governments all over the Middle East and in South America, we kill kick up a huge fuss and be on the brink of World War 3, but western countries have been doing this sort of thing for the last 50 years or more. We don't complain about it too much because we are rarely on the receiving end of all the violence but if we were, we would probably be just as angry as people like Chavez and Ortega.