Comment by vneumanarc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vneumanarc | Hacker News Reader

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Just huawei? Isn't that the case for china's rise overall? Wasn't the basis of US-China relations the past 50 years a simple transfer of technology/capital for cheap labor/lax environmental regulations? We looked the other way while china took our technology and money. And they looked away as we exploited cheap labor and lax environmental law. It was a wage, technology, capital and environmental law arbitrage. It terribly skewed the wealth/income inequality in both countries, it destroyed large segments of the US ( rust belt ), it has been an environmental disaster and it's significantly altered the global power balance. But at least the elites got ridiculously wealthy.

For 50 years, the wsj and the ny times defended this. Bloomberg defended this since their inception in the early 80s. It's odd to see the entire establishment media shift from supporting it to now suddenly attacking it. Also, you would think independent media would offer differing opinions rather than speaking with the same voice. But it's always complete support or complete rejection as if someone flips a switch on and off.

"Theft and dubious ethics" has been the basis of the US-China relationship from the very beginning and it went both ways. This is something everyone and their mother knew from the very beginning. Why did it take 50 years for the wsj and the rest of the media to figure it out.

If the wsj is concerned with "theft and dubious ethics", are they planning on an expose' of the US-Saudi relation and US-Israeli relation? Maybe in another 50 years?

Yeah, it strongly reminds me the media of USSR. They switched narratives in a perfect unison with politics like that. Sometimes they even did it ahead of politics preparing ground for changes in politics.

I wonder what the mechanics of it might be in a democratic society. It was easy to do in USSR: top-down structure allowed state to rule media by orders. But democracy is more nuanced than that I believe. At least I've never witnessed ahead-of-time switch in narratives of democratic media.

> "I wonder what the mechanics of it might be in a democratic society. It was easy to do in USSR: top-down structure allowed state to rule media by orders."

In this case I doubt there is any sort of formal command structure, or in fact any centralized orchestration at all. Rather what we're seeing is an emergent phenomenon, not unlike fish schooling or birds swarming. All the actors involved are taking cues from their peers and otherwise consume more or less the same information from the environment. Combine that with a relatively uniform philosophy or worldview and the appearance of orchestrated activity emerges.

Well, in socialist countries there was no index that would spell out explicitly what is strictly verboten. Ordinary people were expected to know that via hints and rumours. Well if the official media was calling genetics nasty names then that was a strong indicator that genetics is verboten. I guess that the media used to be more directly orchestrated.

Centralized orchestration is certainly a possibility. I think it's far from certain though, because the observed effect of uniform messaging could also be explained as emergent behaviour. Centralized coordination is probably more likely in some countries, and emergent swarming seems more likely in others.

But either way, the end result is pretty similar.

I think it is more a difference in editorial style rather than in substance: all media outlets still have an editor who in turn has to answer to the owner of a news outlet - an author can't always write just the stuff that he wants and also get his work published, don't think it works like this.

In other words I find it hard to follow the comparison of an author to a fish.

Still there is definitely more freedom in a system that doesn't censor every single utterance.

It's in all states. It just becomes more noticable in times of stress ( economic, military, societal ).

Go read about the mccarthy era, the red scare before that or the yellow peril before that. Or go read about how how china and the chinese were viewed pre-1970 to how the media changed perceptions during the 1970s with deng's visit, etc as they prepared to open trade relations. Read about how chinatowns historically were stereotyped as the worst kind of ghetto with drugs, crime, etc by the media for much of history. During the 1970s, the media turned chinatown from a ghetto to a hip ethnic enclave.

The same thing with the natives, blacks, mexicans, japanese, germans, russians, chinese, italians, catholics, irish, jews, etc in the US. There were periods where they were demonized and then some switched got flipped and the media softened or completely reversed their stance. Why and at whose request, who knows.

Go look at sino-soviet relations. They are "best buds" and their respective media praised each other. Things go sour and the media pushes anti-sino and anti-russo rhetoric. Same thing with sino-american relations. The interests of the ruling class determine what perceptions the media creates.

Remember when Bush looked into putin's eye and saw a good man? The media was praising putin for stabilizing russia and improving living conditions? It was only 15 years ago, but in media terms, it feels like a lifetime ago. How things quickly change.

I think it is the Trump 2020 campaign.

Essentially Trump has figured out he can win the 2020 election by going to war with China.

So it is anti-China all over; from smearing of political opponents to policy to information campaigning.

>top-down structure allowed state to rule media by orders. But democracy is more nuanced than that I believe. At least I've never witnessed ahead-of-time switch in narratives of democratic media.

If you're referring to "western" or american media, it's not democratic, it's primarily corporate, which is top down, ruled by orders. Straying too far outside the narrative/overton window will get you fired

In every society, there are accepted narratives everyone is expected to subscribe to. This doesn’t need to happen by coercion; humans have an innate need to repeat and strengthen the basic narratives that are part of their society.

Most financial powers when rising up have stolen technology. This is very much not unique to US-China. Maybe reading up on the history of America brazenly stealing from other countries could provide some contrast here.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2012/12/06/we-were-pirates-too/

The British were at it before the US, post-war Japan was at it. The US was built on it. The first few incarnations of US patent law only allowed US citizens to hold a patent - so foreign inventors and corporations could not protect their inventions in the US.

It's such a common phase of growth that it is surprising people are surprised at China following along.

I'm not surprised or even judgemental about it - given a choice between respecting foreign-imposed IP law and the prosperity of your own people, who wouldn't choose the latter? Especially after such wonderful things as the opium wars.

What I am surprised by is how long the US ignored the threat of moving production and knowledge to China, under the dogma of free trade.

When you have a culture where short-term returns trump long-term strategy - never mind political wisdom - it's absolutely predictable that you're going to be blindsided by the realisation that other countries can out-compete with you, and don't just exist to be used and discarded.

Neither am I.

What does surprise me is that nations and industries keep doing it expecting "this time is different". Despite the regularity across history of first supplying the tools and training - whether shipbuilding, looms, steel making or iPhone assembly and chip fab, then claim they'll never be able to design as well, and can only copy. Sometime later another industry sails inevitably off to some far flung region.

Since free trade almost nothing is considered strategic like the Chinese and others once thought tea, rubber, spices or early inventions that were guarded most carefully. Neither seems quite the right balance. :)

> opium wars

Palmerston's opium war, kicked off by an out-of-control East India Company giving themselves an opium monopoly, and the Tory party loosely falling into step. One of the two wars had parliament winning a vote against the government for entering an illegal war. Difficult to understand the thinking of the era yet at the same time feels strangely familiar.

Course the French, US and others joined in, and the US was marketing cheaper Turkish opium. Roosevelt or Hoover had an opium smuggling ancestor, I forget which of the two.

I was surprised to read that some WASPs are distantly related to 19th vent opium smuggling. For example the Forbes family made their fortune in opium and now they have a business magazine

I'd say most people were probably more hopeful that the world had moved past that modus operandi for bootstrapping growth. There are many things that might have been considered par for the course decades ago that we think of as beyond the pale today.

slightly off topic but IIRC the only time Adam Smith mentioned 'an invisible hand' in his Wealth of Nations book was to explain why English companies _wouldn't_ do this. Nothing to do with a market reaching equilibrium etc.

It was very much a cultural assumption that doing something like that 'just wasn't cricket' and no true Englishman would offshore their company!...

wiki: The only use of "invisible hand" found in The Wealth of Nations is in Book IV, Chapter II, "Of Restraints upon the Importation from foreign Countries of such Goods as can be produced at Home."

This is a classic case of common knowledge in game theory, explained here [1] and here [2].

In short, change does not happen until most people believe that everyone else believes a piece of information (the information becomes common knowledge).

That US-China relations were in such a state was, until very recently, something that everyone knew, but not something that everyone knew that everyone else knew as well. Until something becomes common knowledge, no action occurs. Once it becomes common knowledge, the change in everyone's behavior is incredibly rapid.

We've had similar "watershed" moments in the past, for example the Vietnam war and #metoo, where public opinion changed, seemingly overnight.

So yes, it's absolutely believable and predictable that WSJ et al would be singing the same tune.

[1] http://www.gametheory.net/dictionary/commonknowledge.html

[2] https://www.epsilontheory.com/harvey-weinstein-common-knowle...

Trade has made it possible to have fewer wars, I personally wonder if the fracturing of globalisation by automation technologies will lead to harder borders, a less open world, less trade and more wars. America is always looking for an enemy to win against.

I think America is less interested in an enemy to win against and simply one to dangle out in front. It's less about winning and more about continually justifying the military industrial complex. It's also probably why the conservative spectrum of political thought is has a sharp split with respect to foreign policy at the moment, with one side leaning towards isolationism and the other towards a more hawkish stance. That's not intended as a knock on conservatism, just a fairly surface-level observation.

The US economy has benifited enourmously from its trade with China; that those benifits have not gone to the rust belt is really America's own choice.

Some of the US economy has benefited enormously from its trade with China.

It's hard to imagine anything more cynical than the US blaming China for the poverty and job losses caused knowingly by US corporations taking advantage of cheap Chinese labour and resources.

It's like coal mining. What politician is going to say "Mechanization and the economics of renewables are taking your jobs", as opposed to "Environmental regulations are taking your jobs"?

The former is worse in every way, with the exception of being true.

> It's hard to imagine anything more cynical than the US blaming China for the poverty and job losses caused knowingly by US corporations taking advantage of cheap Chinese labour and resources.

Yet that seems to have become the popular narrative in many places.

No surprise the rust belt is Trump's campaigning grounds.

Americans didn't choose for the great lakes economies to collapse. It was the collective decision of the ownership class.

But didn't consumers also win from being able to buy cheaper goods manufactured abroad?

Why would anyone buy a $1000 phone when with the same amount of money, one could buy a laptop, smartphone, and digital camera (with a decent lens)?

> But at least the elites got ridiculously wealthy.

Not just the rich, it also lead to the creation of a Chinese middle-class by lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty and developing the country as proper economy [0].

A factor that regularly gets underplayed in favor of a narrative where US Americans, still living in the wealthiest country on the planet, blame the Chinese for "missing out".

Yes, just because the US is a wealthy country doesn't mean everybody there is rich, but the wealth discrepancy is a home-made problem and not something China forced on the US.

In that context, this turn on China just feels extremely weird. If you'd explain to anybody 30 years ago how China would develop, the progress they would make and how they embrace capitalism, most people would probably consider you crazy.

Even more so if you then tell them that the US would spite and fight them for it. It's like no matter what they do it's wrong: If they are miserable they need "intervention", if they are doing great they need "containment".

[0] https://www.business-standard.com/article/international/chin...

People are fine with foreign countries with good economies. What isn't fine is an asymmetric trade imbalance caused by one sided protectionism, currency manipulation, espionage, and tariffs that aren't reciprocated.

The real question to ponder is who controls that on off flip switch?

The same billionaires and billion-dollar corporations that control the media control the politicians.

The past was alterable. The past never had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.

Not so far-fetched now, is it?

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