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Can the US Stop China From Controlling the Next Internet Age? (nytimes.com)
Tech executives worry China will turn to tit-for-tat arrests of Americans in response to the detention of Meng Wanzhou. And the worries don't stop there. Kara Swisher, writing at The New York Times: Imagine, if you will (and you should), a big American tech executive being detained over unspecified charges while on a trip to Beijing. That is exactly what a number of Silicon Valley executives told me they are concerned about after the arrest this week of Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of the Chinese telecom company Huawei, in Canada at the behest of United States officials. "It's worrisome, because it's an escalation we did not need," one executive said, referring to the already tense trade talks between the two countries. "What China will do, given all the existing tensions, is anyone's guess."
No one I spoke to would talk on the record, out of fear of antagonizing either side and also because no one knows exactly what is happening. But many expressed worry about the possibility of tit-for-tat arrests. While everyone focuses on the drama of the arrest -- Ms. Meng was grabbed while changing planes at the airport -- and its effect on the trade talks and stock prices, to my mind there is a much more important fight brewing, and it is about tech hegemony. Specifically, who will control the next internet age, and by whose rules will it be run?
Until recently, that answer was clearly the United States, from which the Internet sprang, wiring the world together and, in the process, resulting in the greatest creation of power and wealth in history. While China has always had a strong technology sector, in recent years it has significantly escalated its investment, expertise and innovation, with major support from the government. That hand-in-glove relationship creates obvious issues, and the Trump administration is right to stop pretending that China does not present a threat both from security and innovation perspectives. Further reading: China summons U.S. ambassador, warns Canada of 'grave consequences' if Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou is not released.
No one I spoke to would talk on the record, out of fear of antagonizing either side and also because no one knows exactly what is happening. But many expressed worry about the possibility of tit-for-tat arrests. While everyone focuses on the drama of the arrest -- Ms. Meng was grabbed while changing planes at the airport -- and its effect on the trade talks and stock prices, to my mind there is a much more important fight brewing, and it is about tech hegemony. Specifically, who will control the next internet age, and by whose rules will it be run?
Until recently, that answer was clearly the United States, from which the Internet sprang, wiring the world together and, in the process, resulting in the greatest creation of power and wealth in history. While China has always had a strong technology sector, in recent years it has significantly escalated its investment, expertise and innovation, with major support from the government. That hand-in-glove relationship creates obvious issues, and the Trump administration is right to stop pretending that China does not present a threat both from security and innovation perspectives. Further reading: China summons U.S. ambassador, warns Canada of 'grave consequences' if Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou is not released.
controlling the Internet, which is global.
We really, really need to make a geography-free distributed encrypted storage layer (e.g. IPFS) much more of a reality, so that no country is in control. Preferably with TOR-like obfuscated routing also.
The Internet should become a platform on which we can build global society, economy, and democracy.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
We can but hope. I, too, am wondering how long over a billion people will put up with this 'god-emperor' bullshit their current 'leader' is pulling. Also, while I can't say things are all Hearts and Flowers and good-times-for-all here in the West, and despite Chinas' best efforts, the Chinese people know damned well what life is like outside of China, and without a doubt many of them would rather have our lifestyle and our problems than continue living the way they are under the thumb of the Communist Party. Never know, the Horse May Learn to Sing yet.
Well, that's one solution: convince corporations to act as if liberty is as important as profit. But unfortunately it's an "assume we had a can opener" solution. Business equates profit with liberty because from the position of corporate leadership that actually makes sense.
Another solution would be to get government to regulate business in a way that would protect American values. But that's also an "assume we had a can opener" solution. Government equates corporate profits with American values, because corporate money plays a king maker role in our system.
You know, Marx is starting to look kind of prescient. I don't mean all the stuff that was done in his name over the years, stuff like vanguard bodies and "communist" states. He didn't foresee or advocate any of that. He thought capitalism would annihilate itself, not because of external pressure or force, but through following its own unchecked nature. The only thing is I seriously doubt the aftermath will resemble any kind of worker's paradise.
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They'll put up with it as long as conditions continue to improve. It may not be perfect, but as long as they have a path towards greater personal wealth, there won't be widespread complaints. Perhaps this will change as future generations are born without the knowledge of what China was like prior to economic reforms it enacted, but the people who remember a time when things were far worse will not be so easy to stir up so long as things continue improving. Whether or not the Chinese government can continue to make that happen while maintaining the same level of control that they have historically had is an open question.
China is investing a lot of money in Africa in the same way that the U.S. invested a lot into China, so in some ways it seems as though they are trying to have our lifestyle. Unlike the western world, the Chinese aren't going to feel any guilt over colonialism or the like. Whether they'll be successful or not is another matter, but it's naive to think that the Chinese government is incompetent or incapable of trying to keep itself afloat as China continues to industrialize.
That's silly, what if they were never actually Communist, but Confucian Autocrats?
Westerns don't realize this, but Chinese and Korea societies are deeply Confucian, and the Confucian system is all about meritocracy; with the understanding that different types of merit exist. So they have traditional ways to make different types of governments based on the same underlying philosophy. For example in North Korea they are a Confucian Dictatorship, not any sort of "Communism." Merit in this case is believed to be inherent merit of the original ruler which he passed to his offspring. Very different than the European idea of kings being placed by God; instead they would presume that whatever natural powers they believe in endowed the leader with extra talents and skills for leadership, and his right to rule comes merely from ending up with more merit for the task.
China is an Authoritarian Confucian Bureaucratic state. Not communist, not capitalist. There is only one party because it is not representative; merely being alive is enough to be presumed to have equal merit in choosing leaders. Instead, people with more Merit rise through the bureaucratic system and get additional access to decision-making.
Of course they made room for the rich, by definition they've either proven their merit in actual practice, or used criminal acts to get there. If you're starting from the understanding that it is Confucianism wearing a Communist uniform then that was obvious all along.
One child policy was replaced once they got better at tracking the merit of individuals, and to gain data about what sort of tax structure would merely limit additional children to those with more merit.
You can't understand China with a view that only goes back to the Age of Empire, their system is a lot deeper than you think. And it isn't about the uniform that they wear so that foreigners can place them on an international team.
None of the different ideas about how to implement Confucian meritocracy involve being anti-business. None of them. They all assume that merit leads to prosperity; money, nice things, power, personal freedom, happiness, etc. But they have very different theories about which types of government lead to merit for a nation; eg, what leads to prosperity. They're always going to be pro-business, and they're always going to view unity as essential; once you figure out which system you're using, everybody needs to use that system.
None of their systems contain the western idea that open competition has more merit in government than purposeful unity. But that doesn't imply that they're against trade competition, or against individual economic freedom. They like individual economic freedom. They just consider political "freedom" to be anti-social and without merit; the thrashing of people without enough merit to participate in the decisions.
But that doesn't mean you should have that economic freedom as some sort of "right." You're expected to have enough merit to achieve it.
Except for the following market failures:
1) Inability to slow down and stop anthropogenic global warming (and ocean acidification) due to fossil fuel use
2) Inability to stop worldwide rapid ecosystem and biodiversity destruction (terrestrial, oceanic)
3) Inability to stop the rapid reduction of clean freshwater resources worldwide
4) Inability to use sustainable agricultural practices, leading to worldwide soil degradation.
5) Inability to prevent unsustainable increasing rates of consumption of non-renewable resources
6) Near future inability to distribute wealth to rapidly increasing unemployed percentage of population due to automation and AI
and I would be a little cautious about holding up US government as a shining example, being as how it is led by a cartoon character and serves the interests of large corporations over the interests of people.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
China has a method of tracking every online user as an ip range in and out of China.
That internet use then adds or takes from their social credit (Social Credit System) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The Communist party has a fear that people in China will read about:
Democracy
Tiananmen square
Term limits.
Find a cartoon bear funny.
Talk about protests and protesting.
In the USA a person has the freedom to talk online about politics and freedom.
To freedom to petition the Government.
The freedom of the press as a profession. A freedom of religion.
That makes the USA a much better location for publishing and networking political/art/faith/sport/mil content to and from.
All China can offer the USA and EU is the tracking of dissidents and Communist police reporting methods. Not something "internet" freedom needs more of.
The USA offers freedom of speech and freedom after speech.
Something the US internet can use to keep "publishing" and stay fun and interesting.
Who wants an internet controlled by Communist China? The political and publishing laws of a Germany, France, Spain? The UK laws of who and what a website can publish about?
The USA looks great against a list of EU nations police doing investigations and Communist party laws in China.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
"You're so vain / You probably think this [comment] is about you / You're so vain / I'll bet you think this [comment] is about you / Don't you? / Don't you?" - slightly adapted from Carly Simon
A lot of people would take my argument and use it to say that's why they would not visit the United States. I would argue that their concerns about arbitrary arrests are unjustified, but apparently my comment hit an authoritarian nerve -- you instead argued that the Chinese people would live up to all the stereotypes of a totalitarian state.
If China does not want their international-criminal citizens to be arrested and subjected to good-cause hearings to be extradicted for their crimes, maybe they should keep those criminals at home instead of complaining that they are being "kidnapped" when treaties about nuclear sanctions are used.
It's also richly ironic that China complains about a suspected criminal being arrested when they are still holding hostages to lure a fugitive back into their clutches.
She broke a law that she signed an argreement to follow.
Were you so passionate last may when US citizens were arrested in China for a crime one of their relatives might have done? They sit in a Chinese prison without charge to this day.
With the US, break the law and go to jail. With China, know someone who broke the law and go to jail. Take your pick and stop being such a "butthurt fucktard."
Your guesses and assumption would be wrong. Skycom is a subsidiary of Huawei. Because of that, she's on the board of Skycom and was directly involved in the prohibited transactions reselling HP equipment to Iran.
From the various details which are available publicly, Huawei bought prohibited products from a U.S. company and then resold them to Iran as a way around the U.S. sanctions prohibiting a direct sale. Their CFO (the arrestee) used her control of a subsidiary (Skycom) to try and hide the transactions.
When prohibited technology equipment made by a U.S. company magically showed up in use in Iran, it probably didn't take a rocket scientist at the FBI to realize something was wrong and start tracking the equipment back through how it got there, which resulted in the arrest warrant for one of the people directly responsible for circumventing the sanctions.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
You mean the CFO who was directly involved in the sale and runs the subsidiary company used to try and minimally hide the sale? That CFO? Yeah, no idea why anyone would think she was involved in her own actions...
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
Can China control the next internet age when they cut themselves off from the internet?
Hmm... I think you have some serious issues. I mean really, you might want to consider visiting someone that can observably identify whether you're a danger to yourself and/or others.
The one child policy has been relaxed.
You are correct in one sense. The Chinese government is and has been Communist for a long time. Much of what the West sees as competition from the Chinese is completely misconstrued. The Chinese government really doesn't bother with competition... they really don't care who the best is. They focus instead on reaching the goal of a self-sustaining economy.
An example of this has been China's willingness so far to collect and take in much of the world's trash. Not only does it provide China massive amounts of natural resources, it also provides the money required to recycle it. They didn't accept the trash for free you know?
China has systematically focused on three key points
- Housing
- Food
- Energy
They have an incredible effort underway that will completely collapse the world housing market by making it basically free. If you want a house, the Chinese government will be able to provide one to you free of charge. They are simply recycling all our trash into the materials needed to provide them and using our money to recycle the materials.
They have many massive efforts underway to eliminate the need for classical farming. Whether this includes mass scale meat printing or massive underground automated farms able to yield 6-12 crops a year. The Chinese are moving incredibly fast to become 100% independent from the world market with regards to food. And thank goodness they're doing it. I believe this might be one of humanity's most desperate needs.
As for energy, they have the world's largest solar farms, they are taking wind power extremely seriously. They have managed to take control of massive oil interests and if they manage to arrange a "silk road" pipeline to Africa, then they have energy complete sorted out. Of course, I think they'll manage to go almost entirely renewable far faster than most western countries as their government has less bureaucracy involved in such decisions.
You are entirely wrong about China hating us. This is a major shortcoming in most people's understanding. They simply don't see us as anything other than tools to accomplish their goals. They want to achieve one China and are doing extremely well working towards it.
If they can use the world market long enough to become self sufficient, eventually they can simply withdraw from the world market and operate entirely internally. Once they pretty much collapse all the non-Chinese markets by withdrawing, countries like Taiwan will be forced to beg for entry to the One China and China won't make them beg, they'll simply embrace them with open arms and accept them in.
You are right, as designed by Plato so long ago, they will need to have a ruling class and a working class. Chinese Communism has a believe that they've improved on the Republic and hopefully have worked out the serious kinks. It does however require a simple belief.... the government will let you be so long as you don't rock the boat. This means that there will be none of this American style "everyone is the enemy except me and mine" instead, everyone will contribute the best they can and a balance will eventually be struck.
China is not what you think it is. It's actually a lot closer to the American dream than when America offers today. Chinese Communism rewards people looking for the American dream.
But I guess anger and hate is a much easier thing for you to understand?
I really wish you would write better comments.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The charges against her (which she may be guilty of or not), is that she set up a fraudulent subsidiary of Huawei and defrauded US banks to do business with Iran several years ago when there were UN sanctions against doing business with Iran.
That violates US law, Chinese international agreements and UN resolutions. Further, there were other, related, crimes in other countries. Hence, the charges.
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She's being arrested for things she (allegedly) did in NYC, and the US requested an extradition for that. Are the charges made up? Probably not. But the Canadian government is giving her a chance to demonstrate it's BS before they extradite her. That's pretty much how extradition works.
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