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Comment by xrd | Hacker News Reader

Can someone explain how a Chinese company is subject to a US embargo?

And, at the risk of getting political, whether the idea raised in the article about the success of China in the last forty years being due to abandoning their isolationism is at direct odds with a trade embargo anyway.

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No need to worry about it getting political because it is a political rather than a judicial act. Otherwise, imagine private citizen board members or executives of HSBC being arrested or extradited (US-UK have extradition) for actually 'violating sanctions' with Iran, Libya, Sudan, Burma and Cuba in 2012.

The sanction itself is purely political as well. The US overthrows the Iranian democratically elected government to maintain BP's regional dominance because the government threatened to use their country's natural resources' profits to benefit its people. Installs puppet and helps the puppet plan to build 23 nuclear reactors (and the secret police Savak among other things). Puppet gets overthrown by the people and now Iran has 'nuclear ambitions'. And that's after getting the other puppet Saddam to go to war with Iran and then getting rid of the other puppet because now he's US armed like ISIS. And now Iran has a sanction and the sanction is used against other countries.

This is a pyramid scheme of imperialism.

You mean like when Mike Turner the CEO of Britain's largest defense company was arrested upon landing in America for arms sales to Saudi-Arabia?

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/...

One might be able to find dozens of non-snatched executives from sanction breaking companies per each arrested one such as:

Banco do Brasil, Bank of America, Bank of Guam, Bank of Moscow, Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi, Barclays, BNP Paribas, Clearstream Banking, Commerzbank, Compass, Crédit Agricole, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, ING, Intesa Sanpaolo, JP Morgan Chase, National Bank of Abu Dhabi, National Bank of Pakistan, PayPal, RBS (ABN Amro), Société Générale, Toronto-Dominion Bank, Trans-Pacific National Bank (now known as Beacon Business Bank), Standard Chartered, and Wells Fargo.

Since we're all about making light-hearted fun of China's non rule of law, I think it's consistent to be at least concerned about the selective enforcement of Western rule of law.

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/trump-war-on-hu...

Huawei buys tech from American companies. If that tech ends up in infrastructure which gets sold to embargoed countries, then it’s a felony on US soil and some allied countries as well. Huawei says it didn’t happen, U.S. prosecutors maintain that it did happen, through a shady HK subsidiary, while Meng was purportedly well aware of that.

This particular case was about the individual I think, buying up HP gear and sending it to Iran. I don't even think it was a Huawei thing, just an elitist level money grab.

But Huawei is also being accused of enabling the Chinese government spying apparatus. Many governments are wary of using their gear, and are considering taking their gear out of network.

this is so intellectually lazy. you don't have to look very hard at Cisco (and many other "US" companies) to find Five Eyes assistance embedded in their products (either purposefully or by willful ignorance)

I'm not at all denying that Cisco and others might be a gateway to five eyes. But there's also the fact that there is incredibly more oversight in 'five eyes' countries, and of course they are 'my side'. I naturally care less about 'us' spying on 'them' than I do 'them' spying on 'me'.

As natural as it might be, it's wrong. If you are, for example, a US resident, the US government is in a great position to use any information they have about you. The Chinese government, not so much, especially if you have no desire or plans to travel to China.

what if you have skeletons in your closet (infidelity, drug use, fetishes, etc.), and China used them as leverage to get you to do stuff against your employer?

There is more oversight in the five eyes countries, but that isn’t as reassuring as it sounds. Is anyone in those countries comfortable with what those organisation do and how they are controlled?

There is more oversight because a) 5 eyes are all democracies and b) there are elected bodies that have direct oversight of these activities. For example, in the US, there are both House and Senate committees which have oversight into various bodies and operations which are highly secretive. Example [1]

Finally, c) there is an open and free press, and quite a number of whistle blowers and informants to the press, which have legal protection.

That's very different from an authoritarian entity that answers to no-one, and does what they please.

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

> Five Eyes assistance embedded in their products

You don't see the Five Eyes nations harvesting organs of their citizens.

Would you like me to list the other human rights violations China commits?

Your reasoning makes no sense:

China violates human rights therefore it is OK for the Five Eyes nations to spy on people?

Your reasoning structurally unsound.

That’s a what-aboutism. The organisations that participate in five-eyes are just as opaque as their Chinese counterparts from a citizens perspective and they have been monitoring their own populations. This aspect of five eyes government behaviour is uncomfortably close to Chinese government behaviour in my view.

Obviously China’s human rights record is abysmal, and the five eyes countries are vastly closer to civilised.

Five Eyes operate under political oversight (various committees of elected officials), the rule of law and an independent judiciary, there is a free press with protected informants, whistle blowers etc. etc.. Quite different than an authoritarian system.

I am very far from convinced of these things. The complete lack of transparency and the dubious things that have happened and been revealed by the likes of Wikileaks lead me to believe that their oversight is deeply flawed.

She's actually accused of fraud, for (allegedly) lying to US companies that what they were doing would not be in violation of any US embargo. The legal theory here is that when she made materially untrue statements that caused US organizations to commit a crime she committed the crime.

In broader terms, any financial interaction in dollars likely goes through a US financial institution of some kind, who will be legally obligated to carry out all US embargo rules. There are ways around this, but they are, at present weird hacks that you have to go out of your way to do.

> Can someone explain how a Chinese company is subject to a US embargo? From the article: "She was detained at the behest of the U.S. for allegedly misleading financial institutions about the company’s Iran business, causing them to violate U.S. sanctions."

US sanctions apply to any company that does business in or with the USA (including USA companies). Think of it as trying to be a transitive closure.

> Can someone explain how a Chinese company is subject to a US embargo?

AFAIK, the actual charges are fraud relating to representations to third parties relevant to requirements from the embargo on those third parties, but, that aside, there is nothing that stops a sovereign country from making it's laws applicable to foreign acts of foreign actors (in fact, this is mandated under international law for local law implementing certain provisions of international law), though there may sometimes be practical constraints in enforcement of such provisions.

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