China Warns Canada of ‘Heavy Price’ Over Huawei Arrest | Hacker News Reader

China Warns Canada of ‘Heavy Price’ Over Huawei Arrest

nytimes.com

68 pointsvaultcool64 comments

I still do not know why Canada is carrying water for the USA on this. Trudeau just spent several billion of taxpayers money to build a pipeline to export dirty Canadian tarsands to the Chinese.

What is the USA doing for Canada apart from tearing up existing trade deals?

Not suggesting I have the answer, but here's a thought.

Canada has prospered from sharing a land border with the U.S. We are the largest trading partner because of this geography. For better or worse, we are tied to the U.S. by umbilical cord. I get a sense that no matter what the mood of the day is about our relations, we need to find a way to cooperate as much as possible.

Trump will come and go. China will probably keep growing in economic power and relevance. But Canada won't ever physically find itself not in North America.

There is no need to physically detain and deport someone over what amounts to "illegally" selling routers to Iranians.

Do you know how many weapons the US has sold to Taiwan, and no CFOs have been arrested by China?

Yes you should detain someone. Rule of law is something that separate countries that prosper and those who don't. Letting the rich do whatever they want is a very bad thing to do.

Also, of course, the US can sell weapons to Taiwan. Theres no international sanctions on Taiwan, and not only that they've been peaceful for years.

>Taiwan has been peaceful for years

China literally has laid claim to their island and they defend it by force

Yeh because it's there island. The war is over give it up. No internationally agrees with china. Therefore it's not there island. Also you forgot the important word there. Defend, They are defending not attacking anyone.

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-12-11/china-arrests-form...

China arrested a former Canadian diplomat in reprisal, what a surprise that the West was the original aggressor

It's this thing called the law that -- in western democracies -- applies to everyone equally.

I cannot tell whether this is being said with a straight face.

Yes, it is. The law of Canada says this woman should be arrested. Thus, independent of what Mr Trudeau thinks, she will be arrested, and tried, in accordance with the law.

I don't know Canadian law, but Huawei did not break laws it is bound by. The US cannot require people and organizations in other countries to apply international sanctions it wishes to apply. China is committed to the JCPOA, Huawei is a Chinese company and it is ridiculous - and legally baseless, AFAICT - to demand otherwise.

... which means Canada should not have honored the request to arrest.

Huawai isn't charged (but given that it has facilities in the US it probably can't pretend to be totally free of US law, and at least some reports say executives have avoided traveling there after the US parts were subpoenaed for information).

Apparently the executive is charged with financial fraud: misrepresenting the nature of financial transactions to banks. That's probably a crime in Canada too (I'm sure some government lawyers spend a lot of thought on the right wording for this so it does translate to Canadian law, even if the specific sanctions that are the reason she did that don't exist in Canada), and so she can be arrested and extradited if the courts agree.

You are bound by any laws of the jurisdictions you enter, including if those laws are unjust or apply to things you did outside that jurisdiction.

> Legally baseless

according to whom? I will never understand the appeals to legality on an international level. These questions could only be answered in the context of a particular jurisdiction, and -- according to the jurisdiction this lady was detained in -- the actions of the government were legal.

OK I see, thank you.

Your original comment made the blanket statement that the law applies equally to all citizens in western democracies. Make all the statements you want saying that western democracies have a better rule of law than China but making blanket statements like the above hurts your argument.

This must be a rule of law issue. CEOs are just people here, even if they have more power through money in western countries. The us has arrested its own ceos when they break the law. On the other hand, china absolutely goes farther than that such as these refusal to allow people to exit china even when they haven't apparently done anything (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/25/us/politics/china-exit-ba...).

Norway was heavily punished for the Nobel Peace prize being awarded to an incarcerated Chinese human rights activist[1].

[1]

> [1]

You're missing something there. Might wanna edit that. Here's a suggestion:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China%E2%80%93Norway_relations...

liberty is a use it or lose it proposition, good for norway. And good for Canada, theft from Canadian companies should not be ignored when executed by state actors. "how Huawei's rise was at the expense of Nortel." -- https://www.networkworld.com/article/2223272/cisco-subnet/60...

They capitulated in the end. It was extremely humiliating and not strongly covered in the west.

This is not what standing up for freedom of expression looks like:

“The Norwegian Government reiterates its commitment to the one China policy, fully respects China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, attaches high importance to China’s core interests and major concerns, will not support actions that undermine them, and will do its best to avoid any future damage to the bilateral relations.”

Honestly I've seen this repeated over and over again, but nortel's down fall is ultimate the result of its bet on circuit switching while rest of the telecom world was moving towards packet switching.

Was the lack of retribution an intentional omission?

What I'm curious to know is if she is "Chinese" in this situation - meaning was she traveling under a Chinese passport.

She's traveling under either a normal Chinese passport or a Hong Kong passport

Thanks for clarifying. I had read that she probably wasn't traveling with a Chinese passport. I didn't know about the Hong Kong passport until now.

http://shanghaiist.com/2014/07/01/why_hong_kongs_passport_mi...

"After the handover to Chinese sovereignty in 1997, Hong Kong continued to maintain its own passport separate from that of the standard PRC issue. Replacing the erstwhile British National (Overseas) passport, the HKSAR passport inherited much of the privileges afforded to UK passport holders: free access to commonwealth nations such as Canada and New Zealand as well as the European Schengen area."

The world leaders should refer to China as a dictatorship. It has abandoned all of the communist principles except for the rule by one. So it’s a dictatorship by all means and so should Ben called as such.

And should start admitting to their own complicity in it.

Agree, any western company that has shifted production to China is even more complicit, it's the factories that give them control.

Here is a list [1] of current authoritarian regimes. There is a pattern or rather multiple patterns. They're poor, hostile and struggling in all aspects (pick your favorite ranking metric) with only one exception - Singapore. The world doesn't need authoritarianism. Human psyche, at the top and at the bottom of the societal hierarchy is fragile and barbaric without education, science and free thought.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authoritarianism

> They're poor, hostile and struggling in all aspects (pick your favorite ranking metric) with only one exception - Singapore.

What about Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and more notably Russia and China? I don't think any of them qualify as poor and struggling?

Also, causation and correlation. Poverty might be related to authoritarian, but not necessarily caused by it. For example, many counties are poor because of colonialism and the political vacuum left over when they gained independence.

In addition, looking at stats in this way is prone to sampling bias. If you take a look at the list of non authoritarian counties, many of them might not be necessarily doing better.

> Poverty might be related to authoritarian, but not necessarily caused by it.

There are some good arguments for why it might be the cause of it. A book I really enjoyed on this subject is called "The Dictator's Handbook".

One of the arguments in the book is that in dictatorships, the rulers have much less need to please ordinary people, and they are better off utilizing their available resources to enrich themselves and buy loyalty from other powerful players. If they are not able to gain loyalty from other powerful players they risk a coup. Where as in democratic societies, the leaders need to please the people, otherwise they risk losing power by being voted out.

A reasonable explanation for the few authoritarian counties that do not have poor and struggling populations is that they have an outside player that is threatening them. In these cases, they have demands for something more than what they can bully out of their populations. So you are going to see widespread education, and ideally, prosperity. This gives them advanced military technology and economic power.

I am likely doing the book injustice in my representation of it, but it is able to provide a very solid argument for the above being true. Both from an analytical perspective, as well as a historical one.

Saudi Arabia and Qatar have a notable underclass that's pretty much for all intents and purpose slave labor. Russia's living conditions improved but you're still in for a big surprise once you step outside of Moscow or St-Petersburg. The average (or more accurately, median) Russian or Chinese is not an affluent middle-class urban dweller posting loftily about the downfall of the West, they're a rural worker living under what would be considered miserable conditions in any Western country.

It's almost as if authoritarian rule was inefficient and wasteful in resources due to having to spend most of its energy staying in power and favoring corruption and political favoritism at the expense of good policies. Sure you may offset that with incredible amounts of natural resources (oil and large territory) but inequality does not go away. Also, sooner or later natural resources run out.

Plenty of democratic countries are also poor, hostile and struggling in all aspects. China, for example, are doing much better overall compared to democratic India, and arguably Taiwan at this point. India has been democratic since long time ago, but the government had been heavily corrupted. Little improvements can be done under their democratic system. Taiwan basically entered a downward spiral in all aspects since it fully adopted democracy. The recent elections are full of shit shows like that in US. People are getting more and more angry with their government. If Singapore and China were operating under a democratic government like US, there's no way they can achieve what they achieved so far, and they'd probably be just irrelevant right now.

China is doing well, really? Are you ignoring the literal billion of people living below the most abject standards for poverty in the West, or do you just think people outside cities don't exist?

I don't know where you got your stats from, but Wikipedia says otherwise.

In the most strict definition of poor (living under 1.90USD a day), only 0.7% of Chinese are poor. Even if you go up to 3.20USD per day, it's still only 7%, way less than billion.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_percent...

History is repeating itself. The world leaders were too slow to deal with Hitler, just like they'll be too slow to deal with Xi Jinping. Trauma of past wars, fear for the economy, and underestimation of their true intentions.

China does have some parallels to the socialists of old. USSR and Nazi Germany.

The regimes helped raise a lot of people from grinding poverty through central planning. But also have very heavy-handed approaches to social issues. For example:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Falun_Gong

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/jun/6/chinas-chris...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/oliviaenos/2018/03/28/growing-r...

Side note, but I've been seeing this propaganda pop up the past few weeks all over, and now I'm starting to see it come from people I don't think are spreading propaganda, like yourself.

The Nazis were no socialists. Socialism isn't part of naziism. Yes it was in their name, but republic is in China's official name, and north korea is know as the Democratic People's Republic of North Korea. We wouldn't claim either country is a democracy.

By throwing in Nazis and socialism in the same pot, you are equating those two ideas in people's minds when they are absolutely not

How deeply you wish to read Hitler and Xi Jinping or China and Nazi Germany comparison is up to you. The two dictators and countries share a lot of similarities.

The key point is that they're both hungry for power, evil and brutal, wish to force their ideology upon the world, and most importantly, are in a position where it's possible for them to achieve their goals. Do I believe that Hitler/Xi Jinping were/are the most evil people on earth? No, but unlike others, they're both in a position where they can conquer the world (no matter how much we want to pretend otherwise) and cause great suffering to people outside their own borders. To dismiss the comparison because one put jews in concentration camps while the other is putting muslims, or whatever ideological difference you can find, is missing the point.

I find that the comparison between them as dictators has merit. No question there. Same on the camps they are putting specific ethnic "others" into, to get their people to rally behind them.

My point specifically was about equating Nazis to socialists. There's been a concentrated campaign the past few weeks to say that Nazis were socialists, so socialists today are the real Nazis and not the guys with SS tattoos who are advocating for ethnic purity.

If you don't like socialists for whatever reason, that's a position you can hold. I just don't like this muddying of waters for political reasons.

Also again, I don't think you are spreading this on purpose. I've seen it start on alt right influenced subreddits and seen it spread the past few weeks, to the point that I am now seeing it casually mentioned in neutral forums as an offhand fact.

Just to be clear, I thought the propaganda you were referring to was comparing China to pre WW2 Nazi Germany, like Steve Bannon did in his book. I had written a long post about the similarities but thought better of it - the more I analyed them (eg Tibet) the more I realied China is closer to the USSR.

So I scrapped the whole thing and wrote the post above. No, they were all in fact socialists. You may not like it, and I do make a YUGE distinction between socialism and social democracy. For example Bernie is wrong, he is a social democrat and not a “democratic socialist”. Scandinavian countries are social democracies.

Having said that, I admit that there are other TYPES of socialism that are not acknowledged. Like Kibbutzes and the Public Stock Market. Socialism is just collective ownership of the means of production.

But when most people say socialism, they mean State Socialism.

Please explain how Nazis were socialists. It wasn't ownership by the people it's was ownership by the party

Well, state socialism is ownership by “the people” through the state.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volksgemeinschaft

Take Volkswagen for example: the people’s car. Isn’t it similar to China’s initiatives to build electric cars and buses, or to own the corporations?

The problem wasn’t the socialism but the nationalization of everything:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_People%27s_...

To slow dealing with Trump

At least the world is dealing with Trump. He'll soon be replaced and there's reason to believe that a lot of the damage he's causing can be repaired. As for Xi Jinping, Tibet is gone, Xinjiang is gone, Hong Kong is all but gone, Taiwan and the South China Sea is next. This should be obvious to everyone, the only question is who will be the next to suffer, and how many territories and countries will be conquered, and how many people must die, before the world take action.

There is little reason to believe that China would expand beyond its historical borders, they have enough people and land as is.

Tell that to Hong Kong, Tibet and Taiwan, as well as all the countries suffering from their South China Sea territorial claims. Not to mention the countless times China has been caught fishing in other countries territory in recent months. Also, China have invaded other countries in 'recent history', such as India, Vietnam, Russia.

Americans killed native Indians and Mexicans. We made a lot of Chinese and African immigrants suffer for decades. The foreign policy is one of the sources of many troubles world wide including terrorism.

It's very easy to pointing fingers on others but self. Double standard is the weakest and most stupid culture characteristics from the West. No one will follow a leader like that.

It's not a standard at all. It's part of the answer to "Should the West be worried about China?" The West's plentiful historical/present wrongdoings don't really affect the answer.

> There is little reason to believe that China would expand beyond its historical borders, they have enough people and land as is.

The GP asserted that China wouldn't expand beyond its historical border, which was false. Not sure why you change the subject.

Also, if you feel the need to bring Indians and Mexicans to prove your point, Chinese dynasties invaded neighbor countries over many centuries, bringing hardship and brutality with them. That was how China came to be in the first place.

Why is it false? It's basically the same territory Taiwan is claiming

“We”? ;)

China is literally building land and has invaded international waters. You are living in a fantasy world

https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/09/25/taiwan-can-win-a-war-wi...

Taiwan is probably well prepared for any military invasion.

I agree, a Total Surveillance system than the most dystopian Sci-Fi movies could barely imagine, a Social Score to keep control over people act & thoughts and now non-consenting Human DNA Experiments to build a stronger race... But unlike with Hitler I'm afraid other countries will not fight it but actually embrace it because this is "progress" (no more diseases and no more terrorism what's not to like right ?)

Bring it.

I hear very little of Western CEO’s being detained or arrested.

People aware of the concept of Orientalism?

This is a great 3 min summary - https://youtu.be/1aNwMpV6bVs

Never heard of Jeff Skilling? Bernie Madoff? Martha Stewart?

Plenty of western CEOs have been arrested, convicted and jailed. I guess the difference is that they don't benefit from their government threatening severe consequences unless the rule of law is suspended.

Or, as a very recent example of arrests, Carlos Ghosn.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Holmes#Criminal_char...

Quite a few from my own little country alone.

Rio Tinto's Stern Hu jailed for a decade due to acquiring business intel on competing companies.

Crown Casino execs jailed for promoting gambling (who would have thought?)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stern_Hu

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-26/crown-casino-staff-ja...

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