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Comment by theboywho | Hacker News Reader

Why not mention the startup name instead of saying China, which just makes it sound like if the Chinese government is behind it ? Do Chineses newspapers say US phone instead of iPhone ?

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In this specific case I think it is clickbait. "China Drone Attack" is a hook, and the drone seems to play almost no significant role in this story (it is essentially about spraying Bayer Chemical insect poison onto the crops).

Absolutely clickbait, but this is what I've come to expect from Bloomberg.

But as the article mentioned, the role of the drone(s) are to spray the insecticide after dark when the worms are most active.

“China drone attack” gets more attention than “random Company inc uses drones to spray pesticides”

Internet needs a dedicated button to report clickbaity titles to kill this awful trend.

This is a really common thing with articles about Chinese companies. People seem to collectively equate them to the government. Perhaps it’s a holdover from communism?

For example, people will say things like “Reddit is controlled by China” when in reality Reddit has an investment from Tencent, not China.

Some percentage are mixed in with the government pretty tightly, though, and the ones who aren't can effectively be assumed to pass any kind of data to them, or be forced to do their bidding if the occasion ever arises. That's true in the US, too, of course, but at least in the US the companies can (secretly) fight it out in court, and actually sometimes win.

> That's true in the US, too, of course,

Do people really believe still this, or is this something everyone says reflexively to avoid committing the faux pas of coming across as believing that the U.S. is better than a communist country? Trump should have exploded this idea. He can't even get his own executive bureaucracy, which he is theoretically in charge of, to do his bidding, much less random U.S. companies.

False equation. It is silly to compare the operation of the entire US government to a small special ops team from a 3-letter agency using a small special ops court to compel a small special ops team within a corporation to do something.

The teams that do that kind of thing are very intentionally separate from the bureaucracy.

Of course the situation is far, far worse in China than in the US, but look at some of the recent-ish litigation involving corporations and the NSA and FBI to see what I mean. Who the current president is has little to do with it.

If I hadn't added that, I would've received the opposite comment about American bias towards China.

It's not just online that this happens. I was listening to some people talk on DMR ham radio last night, on Talkgroup 91 Worldwide. (DMR is a digital voice mode used in commercial and amateur radio, and talkgroups let you talk with people who are on the same talkgroup, roughly akin to tuning into a common frequency.)

John Miklor jumped into the conversation; he has a website [1] where he reviews various handheld and mobile radios.

Someone else jumped in and started thanking John for the good work he does "reviewing ChiCom radios." He kept saying ChiCom over and over again and I started wondering what he was talking about. I thought he must mean radios made by Chinese Companies like Baofeng, AnyTone, or Wouxun.

It slowly dawned on me that this was not what he meant at all. He was talking about Chinese Communist radios!

I guess I'm writing this on my Chinese Communist ThinkPad!

[1] http://www.miklor.com

A big part of it is the fact that the Chinese government hold enormous sway over private companies. The US for example has a constitution which protects private ownership, and which the courts have upheld. China has no such protection for its private companies.

Take for example the recent law requiring companies in China to “support and cooperate in national intelligence work“. Private companies in China have no ability to fight against such a law.

So I wouldn’t say it’s a “holdover”... let’s not forget that even with China’s economic modernizations, it’s still a totalitarian regime.

See:

https://www.afr.com/policy/foreign-affairs/no-such-thing-as-...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/25/china-business...

Because any business in china is much more an extension of the Chinese government. There's a perception of Chinese people and companies doing things for the reward they'll get in treatment by the government.

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