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Comment by SilasX | Hacker News Reader

Is it just me, or are there a lot of stories now about China throwing its financial weight around to influence speech?

We had the Blizzard/War of Omens thing [1], and the Houston Rockets remark being rescinded [2], and the South Park cancellation [3], and now this, all in the span of about a week.

[1] https://www.cnet.com/news/blizzard-removes-blitzchung-from-h...

[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/07/houston-rockets-gm-morey-del...

[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/dek3kl/south_par...

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Well, there's a common cause right? The protests in HK

Yeah but that’s been going on for months and it feels like there’s a sudden surge (though I don’t have the stats to rigorously prove a sudden change).

I agree with you. It's even now the talk of the relatively apolitical office.

Also the UBS pig incident:

https://fortune.com/2019/06/17/ubs-china-pig-paul-donovan/

That one wasn't even anything apparently political, just absurd snowflake-scale sensitivity on the part of a whole country:

Donovan made the “Chinese pig” comment on Wednesday as he attempted to explain why the country’s swine flu outbreak shouldn’t concern investors eyeing the international inflation outlook.

“Does this matter? It matters if you are a Chinese pig,” Donovan said. “It matters if you like eating pork in China. It does not really matter to the rest of the world. China does not export a lot of food. The only global relevance would be if Chinese inflation influenced politics and other policies.”

Somehow the second sentence got interpreted as an insult - or was it just part of a trend of throwing weight around, as you suggest?

One of China’s biggest state-owned infrastructure companies excluded UBS Group AG from a bond deal after the bank’s global chief economist sparked a furor with his use of the phrase “Chinese pig.”

The comment was condemned by two Communist Party publications and by trade groups representing Chinese brokerages. Haitong International Securities Group, which competes against UBS for China-related business, said on Friday that it had suspended its activities with the bank.

Honestly, having watched this sort of stuff for years my own business interest in China is dead. Yes, it's a big market. But you can live very comfortably serving the rest of the world. Facebook and Google are banned there, they still mint more money than they can spend. Ignoring that market completely seems like a recipe for a much simpler life.

> serving the rest of the world.

what about sourcing manufacturing?

this is the crux.

I didn't follow this at the time but I can immediately see that there exactly two ways to interpret the "Chinese pig" comment and one is very insulting. I'm guessing that the person who said the quote did not mean it as an insult

No, there's really no sane way to interpret that statement as being insulting. The entire statement was about swine flu, pork production and other very obviously pig-related things. Only a terribly incompetent mistranslation could have yielded an insult out of it, and such a mistranslation would surely have been detected immediately.

There's just no sensible explanation for why anyone would get upset by that statement.

The reality is, our political and corporate elites made a deal with the devil two decades ago, because the $ to be made off-shoring manufacturing and gaining access to Chinese markets was too good to pass up. They lied to the public that China posed no economic or military threat going forward, and that our glorious free markets would inevitably lead to a bottom-up liberalization of China.

Instead, we've played ourselves for absolute suckers, and as China's economy and military muscle continues to rapidly expand and the rest of the world is increasingly dependent on its products and markets, they're beginning to throw their weight around. All the pearl-clutching over Trump's tariffs and attempt at a renewed industrial policy (however poorly executed) elided the question of what exactly anyone else was proposing to do, with the default being the continuation of business-as-usual.

People need to wake up and realize China is a far greater geopolitical threat than the USSR ever was. They have a massive population and they've melded together free-ish market strategic industrial capitalism with a totalitarian panopticon state unlike anything the world has ever seen. Their military is rapidly catching up with if not in some areas surpassing our own, and we're sitting on our asses arguing over idiotic domestic squabbles assuming the unipolar post-cold war world will continue on forever. Because Muricuh!

Frankly, thank god this is finally bleeding out into popular culture, because maybe average citizens will start to realize what a straight-line projection of our current situation is going to look like in a decade or two.

20 years ago? I'd pin it on Nixon's visit in 1972, nearly 50 years ago. Without that I'd bet China would have civil warred and bootstrapped its self into Democracy.

Acceptance into the WTO in 2001 and the subsequent mass technology transfer from the West to China (corporate CEO's) combined with a decade of turning a blind eye to trade violations (Western politicians) and lack of monitoring (Western corporate media) is what really put the nail in the West's coffin though.

> Without that I'd bet China would have civil warred and bootstrapped its self into Democracy.

orr.. gotten over the sino-soviet split and bolshevized europe and latin america, leaving the US without a leg to stand on geopolitically.

Every single Chinese Civil war in history is brutal and could cause tens of millions deaths. Let alone with the huge population and peculiar culture it might not necessarily end up in a democracy system. I don’t really think it would be better in that parallel universe

China's neighbours Vietnam and N Korea haven't done well at such things. I'd bet the other way.

Billions of people got lifted out of poverty. WTO accession was inevitable because China met the criteria. Trump hasn't done anything close to industrial policy. I say this as someone who has a lot of criticisms of US policy in this area, but WTO accession was inevitable.

We have started talking about it but this has been going on for a while.

south park was not aired in China. They took down content on pirate dl or illegal streaming services.

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