It's definitely the government's SOP to try and exfiltrate data from the west, and it's no small secret. I feel everyone is getting pretty nonchalant about it.
It is very much possible that Chinese hackers got this data because they could and it is lucrative and then sold to players including govt. And US intelligence is only passing selective info. to show Chinese govt as the primary perpetrator.
The Snowden leaks showed without a doubt that US intelligence has no qualms collecting and admitting to spying on ALL communication between non-US citizens. Without telling anyone... hacking a marriot database is peanuts in comparison.
Somehow whatever the US does to protect its interests is moral but when another country does the same its evil or "concerning". Bullshit US paternalism.
Whataboutism is about responding to a criticism of your countries internal problems with a criticism of theirs. This is not about internal problems, its about what one country can do to another.
But surveillance is one issue (which is valid and we should talk about it). Stealing intellectual property using your intelligence apparatus in a way that benefits your state-sponsored businesses is another. We can talk about that too.
I’m talking about the Chinese governments perspective. From their perspective, until the the NSA stops spying (whether its criticized by US citizens or not) it does not make sense for China to stop spying either, purely to equalize the playing field. I’m against spying too but i can understand why any country wants to protect its interests.
In China, that is not possible. Freedom of speech does not exist nor does freedom of press. Whether critizing made a difference (btw, yes it did. Snowden’s revelations has had a profound impact on spying on citizens, not just in the US but in the history of mankind in the digital age) is irrelevant.
China deserves criticism and so does US. The difference is that in the US, we can freely critize everything without the fear of anything. China has no such luxury and therefore, it needs even more criticism.
The closest you come to that is with the CIA Vault 7 stuff (from WikiLeaks) which as we now know probably came from Russian sources, was probably also exaggerated, and we don't have any proof that it was used outside of targeted operations. It would be dumb for government not to develop tools for dealing with other nation-state hackers.
In fact, maybe that's exactly how we can pin attribution to China in this case.
I'll repeat my previous position:
> [...] surveillance is one issue (which is valid and we should talk about it). Stealing intellectual property using your intelligence apparatus in a way that benefits your state-sponsored businesses is another. We can talk about that too.
There is a difference, imo, and we should continue to talk about what China is clearly doing.
Yes, there is equally horrible shit going on with both sides. But that is absolutely no justification for accepting it.
I'm against spying too, but if everyone else does it I can understand why China would want to also purely to equalize power. Its the same situation as nukes - i dont like them, it would be great if no one had them, but if some already do i fully understand why others would want to get them.
My answer is this - what we are seeing I feel is a build-up to a massive power shift in the coming decades. As the climate changes and resources undoubtedly become scarce (water, food, etc) something will eventually trigger a conflict between the major nations, which currently people refuse to believe is a possibility. I'd guess the relative economic stability of the last several decades has lead to this.
When the curtain inevitably falls, which would you prefer to take the baton. A quasi-democratic nation (US) that has clear pitfalls but at least a large portion of people living in relative freedom of thought, or the nation which has revoked the need to run elections, actively black-bags people for saying the wrong thing about their government, and institutes wide ranging censorship on a variety of important issues?
Neither side is perfect, but it must be objectively said that the humanitarian state of affairs in China is dismal.
Currently we are seeing the government in China stifling dissent as well as preparing to quash as much possibility of it in the future, while actively probing "the other side" for weaknesses.
In any strategic sense, what's going on right now should be concerning. And while the thought of 'picking sides' does honestly suck, I'll throw the question back at you.
What would you prefer?
None of the above, as the U.S. is pretty much an oligarchy at this point. There was a study showing that unless you have a sizable sum of money, your priorities simply aren't worth much to lawmakers.
Why is there no single payer for example, even as the majority of the population is for it?
So to answer your question, I'd much prefer a world where the U.S., China, Russia, India, Brazil and the European Union are roughly on equal footing and then there are a bunch of smaller states that can try different systems, without getting economically strangled by the U.S. the moment their system isn't 100% predatory capitalist like in the U.S.
That way, any of these will have to think long and hard before commuting to a significant unilateral action, resulting in a much better equilibrium than we have now.
Anyways, as to your question -
In short:
The way I see it, China will not displace the US as a global power anytime soon. It may become a 2nd global power in addition to the US. I think a multipolar world is healthier than a unipolar world for the same reasons competition makes markets better.
I think much of the frenzy around China is a US-centric reaction to the them potentially losing its spot as clear #1, but the world is better off without a clear #1.
More details:
China is absolutely not a democracy the way the US is. I do agree the US treats its OWN people better than China. But I'm not a US citizen - thats not really relevant to me.
The US is historically much crueler to foreign enemies than any other country - no one else comes close to how many countries they have invaded, bombed, etc. We have already seen them invade and kill millions in Iraq under scarcity of oil. If things head towards scarcity again, who is to say they wouldn't do the same things again? China by comparison has mostly left other countries alone.
I care about how the power balance affects the rest of the world besides US/China. As do 6B others. I absolutely support people’s right to argue for their own benefit, but they must atleast recognize that is what they are doing. Honestly im really tired of seeing a constant default equivocation between “whats good for the US” and “whats good for the world”. Those are often different things.
Before you put US on the same pedestal of morality as China, you must equate them on apples to apples basis. Picking and choosing horrible things US has done in the past is very convenient.
I immigrated to US and I’ve travelled extensively over the world. If you’re picking and choosing Guantanamo, Iraq war, etc. then I can do the same about Tianman square.
Let’s objectively assess the situation without picking and choosing - I can do the same about positive aspects of US: functioning justice system, representative democracy, cultural diversity and acceptance, LGBT rights, freedom of speech, freedom of press, right to run for public office, ... we could go on and on about this with no end.
I have a humble request: When arguing about A, please do not talk about B to escape the reality and scrutiny that A deserves. It’s distracting and tiring.
Digital espionage/cyberintelligence/hacking is a boring standard part of intelligence for ANY country that has the capability.
I brought up the Snowden stuff only as evidence that the US does it too. The point is not to criticize the US, the point is any country that can do digital espionage, China included, is doing it, simply because no one wants to fall behind in a global arms race. I don’t think that makes China the evil boogie man.
And I don’t appreciate the straw manning and condescension. I’m not trying to make some broad “China is better than the US” argument.
> And I don’t appreciate the straw manning
If you have to turn "scrutiny" into "makes it the evil boogie man", that's kind of a giveaway. I would call this the compiler error of online comments, and static typing can catch errors without having to run the program every time. Which doesn't only save you time, but the readers too; starting the program, getting bogus results, freeing memory and writing a bug report takes much more time.
> I’m not trying to make some broad “China is better than the US” argument.
I don't know what you tried, but going by what's written here, you responded to the criticism of nonchalance with "the problem is that $random_stuff_about_the_US_nobody_denies", as if that refutes said criticism.
When there is an article about a disease, wouldn't it make sense to talk about all sorts of other diseases instead, so nobody thinks that disease is "the evil boogie man"? Are comments about US spook stuff also riddled with comments about China or Israel or any other the hundreds of nations, just so nobody gets the impression that "the US is the only country doing this"?
Why not simply assume everybody knows these very basic things? It's not like any comments (I saw) imply that they don't, unless you read that into them.
I think the mistake you make here is that we're talking about China's interaction vs the rest of the world and comparing that to U.S. interaction vs the rest of the world, which is more important to many than what is done domestically, because most of the people on here aren't in China, but the U.S. interference affects them even if they're not in the U.S., which is mostly not true for China.
How many coups has China been involved in as compared to the U.S. for example? Because these affect people on the other end of the globe from the U.S.
Why was there a military-style raid on Kim Dotcom in NZ, for something that is possibly a crime in the U.S.?
Why was there pressure put on Sweden to prosecute TPB from the U.S. side?
How come the U.S. claims to believe in the free market, but when a Chinese firm gets competitive there, they try to block them?
How come U.S. feels entitled to bomb in foreign territory, where they were not invited by the local government? Without UN approval at that?
How come U.S. feels entitled to bully other nations at the UN to vote their way on Palestine?
How come is it OK for the U.S. to attack a country that did not attack them?
How is it OK to go to war on a completely false pretext?
How is it OK for the U.S. to use chemical weapons?
How is it legal for the U.S. to commit terrorist acts in other countries?
How is it OK for the U.S. to tell other countries that they can't have nuclear weapons even as the U.S. is the only country to ever use the in war?
How is it moral for the U.S. to block civilian and medical goods, starve a country and help commit war crimes?
There are plenty of more local issues too, like the War on Drugs, the targeting of minority communities, the infiltration of civil rights groups, the jailing of whistleblowers and intimidation of journalists etc. but the above affects much of the world in some way or another.
This is why U.S. behavior is seen as such a problem outside its own borders. China has nowhere near the worldwide reach the U.S. does.
I think there might be a lot of confirmation bias going on
It feels to me either my personal bias of where I think the world opinion stands is off (e.g. # of ulta-defensive of China comments > I expect), or there is in fact organized pro-china comments. Maybe a mix of both!
https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/details/y-combi...
With that said, China has a history of bad behavior, especially with regards to cyber-warfare against US companies.
There also seems to be more acceptance of that even in the business world. I get contacted by Chinese tech companies offering partnership deals because I've made YouTube videos about electronics and they tend to have interesting contractual agreements surrounding social media.
For instance, no other tech company has ever asked me to censor negative user comments if I review their product but multiple Chinese companies have requested exactly that. One of them worded it as "silencing the slanderous tiny trumpets".
Love it!
Edit: witness the downvotes - my point exactly.
It doesn't take much.