Japan to fund firms to shift production out of China | Hacker News Reader

Japan to fund firms to shift production out of China

bloomberg.com

513 pointsundefined1439 comments

All: using HN for nationalistic flamewar is against the site rules. Please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. We ban accounts that break them, regardless of country, politics, or ideology and regardless of how wrong some other commenter is or you feel they are.

HN is for curious conversation. The idea is: if you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; if you don't, please don't comment until you do. Specifically, if you can't respect the person you're talking to, do yourself and all of us a favor and don't reply. You'll only make the thread worse, and it's wretched enough already.

If you don't want to see nagging announcements like this at the top of a thread, I sympathize; I don't want to write them either. Unfortunately, if users don't contain themselves, we end up in hell: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22823753. Please contain yourselves.

Thank you.

At the very least, medical supplies and drugs manufacturing will get pulled back into each country. The 3M spat between Canada and the US makes it abundantly clear that in a time of true crisis, you can't even trust your closest friends when something terrifying happens to the world like this pandemic.

Whether it means all manufacturing will move away from China or if it means that they will spread it globally, is an interesting question. China will have more incidents of pandemics for sure, because they haven't learned from the last one, and they won't learn from this one. It's certainly less efficient to have the same products being produced everywhere, but maybe ruthless efficiency isn't good for the world or its citizens, especially when it comes to income inequality.

Got a link detailing what happened between Canada and the US? My understanding of the 3M debacle is that they use a distributor model for their consumables, and essentially "wash their hands" of what their distributors do once they have product in hand - and in the 3M case, the PPE was just going to the highest bidder, regardless of national origin.

Not at all applicable in this case. Some federal authorities in the US attempted to halt some 3 million (or 500,000 depending on reports, it seems) purchased shipments destined for Canada from 3M.

It was only the intervention at the highest level of the Canadian government that stopped this.

It's worth pointing out that without Canadian nurses from Windsor who cross the border every day to work in Detroit hospitals, the healthcare system in Detroit wouldn't function.

Or that apparently the pulp used to make the 3M masks comes from softwood from British Columbia.

I'm sure Chrystia Freeland made these points and many others abundantly clear when she got on the phone with the Trump administration.

Which is why Canada keeps losing. Canada loses more than the U.S. does it they stop exporting pulpwood. The U.S. can replace Canadian forestry products easily. Canada can't find a new buyer so easily. Detroit makes up one fifth of one percent of the US population. Windsor nurses aren't going to set national policy for the United States. Chrystia Freeland keeps bargaining from positions of absurd weakness and gets the expected results. Not sure why any Canadian likes her but maybe they care more about the perception of eye poking than actual productive results for the Canadian public.

Having 1/10th the population of the United States, and correspondingly smaller economy, puts us in a weak position no matter what.

I never voted Liberal, never have, but honestly, Freeland is decent.

Trudeau's dad said it best, to Nixon, in 1969:

"Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt," said the late Pierre Trudeau.

The N95 masks are made out of plastic, not pulp.

I looked into the pulp claim, and it's true that pulp is used to make some types of lesser surgical masks. But there's no reason to think there is anything all that special about that pulp - it could be sourced from the US too at somewhat higher cost.

Taleb describes this well: globalism allows for optimization (cost, efficiency), but increases risk. To reduce risk, add redundancy (locally).

Sorry, trying not to nitpick, but you mean Globalisation, not globalism.

In some ways it decreases risk though, too. The risk of war, specifically. The US and Chinese governments are far from friends but our economies are much too interconnected to allow either side to instigate too much of a disagreement.

For the most part globalization is good but the pandemic has certainly highlighted the value of strategic redundancy or at least an emergency plan B.

Isn't WWI the usual counterargument to globalization reducing the risk of war? Or were the countries back then not interconnected enough?

That's a good point. Perhaps globalization alone only marginally reduces the risk and it's the combination of globalization + trust (or at least not mistrust) that reduces the likelihood of war.

If that's the case then the US government's efforts to take supplies away from some of our closest allies is even more dangerous and short-sighted than I initially thought.

A month ago I would have said a mask factory in Canada vs. US is nearly equal in terms of national security because Canada could be trusted to help in a time of crisis. I'm sure many Canadians felt the same way. Now I'm not so sure that's true and I certainly don't blame the Canadians.

No shortage of ink was spilled on the wishful thinking that globalization will prevent future wars... All through the 1910s.

I wasn't familiar with this counterargument, and did a quick dig and found this primer:

https://www.economist.com/buttonwoods-notebook/2017/06/14/th...

Do you have any particular recommendations/sources for further discussion around this argument?

Not really, it's just something I've seen used as the most common counterargument to "tighter economic connections decreases risk of war", given that apparently in 1914 people thought international war was nearly impossible due to all the trade interdependencies. I honestly never dug deeper into the similarities and differences between then and now.

Back then every component of a battleship, the most powerful and advanced weapon of the time could be built independently by Britain, France, Germany, Italy, USA, Japan etc. Today, there are very few weapons systems that do not depend on allied countries for a critical component. E.g. it is quite well known that Britain's nuclear powered subs use US reactors and US missiles, but even the steel plate for the hull is likely sourced from another country as there is only one steelworks left in the UK which probably is not able to produce the right alloy in the desired thicknesses. In fact, industry in the UK has declined to the extent that we could not independantly produce a WW1 era battleship any more without a vast restructuring of the economy which would take decades.

If a half-arsed backward place like N Korea can produce ships , rockets and nuclear weapons I am pretty sure the UK could pull it off.

That's the thing, though: being self-sufficient in manufacturing is now considered "backwards".

"Reducing" and "completely eliminating" are very different things.

This was the prevailing thought before World War 1

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Illusion

The economist Norman Angell (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Angell) published a highly influential book, The Great Illusion, making this exact argument. In 1909.

It has, let’s say, not aged gracefully.

I think one of the greatest mistakes made over and over by sociologists, futurists, and economists, is to assume that people are rational.

The problem with this argument is ignoring the counterfactual cases: the wars that have not occurred, that would have occurred otherwise.

Europe was mired in endless wars for millenia. It's now in the longest stretch of peace in centuries and, by sheer coincidence, at its highest levels of trade.

In the rest of the world trade has steadily risen and wars and deaths from wars have fallen steadily. Correlation might not be causation, but it would interesting know what third factor explains both "more trade" and "fewer wars" other than "it's hard to fight a war with the people who feed you".

I suggest that the third factor is US policy.

Before World War II, Britain had its trading empire, France had its empire, Japan had its empire, etc. Oceanic trade between nations not in the same empire ran a high risk of the cargo simply being confiscated or destroyed by one of the imperial navies. A key pillar of the US's strategy in the Cold War was to use its naval supremacy to prevent the return to the imperial trading system; in other words, it extended to nations an offer of the ability to trade freely on the world's oceans in exchange for that nation's joining the US in opposing the Soviets.

The United States also suppressed wars. For example, the 2 nations that arguably had the most powerful pre-WWII militaries (Britain and France) allied with Israel to attack Egypt after Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal, but the United States, worried that the Soviets could enter the conflict, threatened Britain and France with economic sanctions unless they withdrew, which they did.

Or rather, it was the nuclear “balance of terror” that emerged between the US and the USSR. Neither of those powers wanted to risk a confrontation that could turn into World War III, so they both had a strong incentive to limit their own ambitions and to restrain their allies/client states.

Europe fought the two most destructive wars in the history of the world in the three decades immediately following the publication of that book.

I guess you could argue that things could somehow have turned out even worse than that, but that feels like a reach.

You could just as well argue that the highest levels of trade are the result of peace, not the other way around. Especially given that levels of trade were already high enough for people to make this same argument before WW1, as this book illustrates.

It did quite well for its author though. It appears he got a Nobel Prize in 1933. Maybe he was pulling the illusion thing.

The book didn't argue that the war wouldn't happen, only that it would be economically disastrous for everybody involved, and thus to choose to go to war is foolishness, since everybody is strictly worse off than they were before - i.e. there are no absolute winners. Countries did go to war anyway, and, exactly as predicted, it was a disaster for all of them, proving the point.

Most people think WW1 was so bad because people kept killing each other (with machine guns, artillery and poison gasses). Less so because they severed their commercial ties.

Today, yes. But in that era? The notion of declaring a war to profit from the plunder (or reparations, or whatever you call it) was not yet dead back then.

Empirically, I'd say it's doing very well.

The world has more trade than ever, and fewer wars than ever.

If you're referring to WW1, lowering a risk and completely eliminating it are different things.

> It has, let’s say, not aged gracefully.

It's aged wonderfully. The Europeans proved its premise in spades between 1914 and 1945.

Trade barriers, price controls, stimulus, etc. -- remarkable how fast economic liberalism goes out the window in a crisis.

What I get from this is it's remarkable how inept the model established by 'economic liberalism', with its just-in-time delivery and 'globalized production to cheapest labour zone' is at delivering on people's real needs in time of crisis.

It's amazing how quickly the very proposition that we can get by without any state-level macroeconomic planning, -- and that the free market organically produces superior results -- is shown to be an ideological fantasy the moment s*hit hits the fan, with bare shelves and missing medical equipment and millions set to be without health insurance in the US...

My opinion: States that retain some capacity of a planned economy will do better in scenarios like this. And with climate change becoming more serious, there will be more of these kinds of crisis.

> What I get from this is it's remarkable how inept the model established by 'economic liberalism', with its just-in-time delivery and 'globalized production to cheapest labour zone' is at delivering on people's real needs in time of crisis.

Indeed. The PPE/toilet paper/tasting kit/flour shortages are becoming farcical at this point. It feels like the Soviet Union, where wonderful pronouncements about the plenitude of _______ are made, but then you discover otherwise at the grocery, or the doctor.

Of course, in 2020, the solution to these problems is rationing.

It's almost as if rationing is the only way to solve these kinds of shortages. But since the rationing is per-shopping visit, people just hoard by hitting up multiple stores in one shopping trip...

> with bare shelves

yes, this is a mystery. Free market should have fixed that. Even if the last roll of toilet paper would cost $1000000 the shelf should not be empty. Is the price regulated in some way?

> China will have more incidents of pandemics for sure, because they haven't learned from the last one, and they won't learn from this one.

I disagree. They took many months to report SARS to WHO, yes. But this time, reporting to WHO took ~5 days. It was discovered by dr Zhang Jixian on Dec 26, then reported to WHO on Dec 31. Then it took them about another week to sequence the genome and share it with the world. Plus the whole lockdown shows that they obviously made plans beforehand. The difference is huge.

Take a look at this timeline by the American Medical Association: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2762130

We've now been able to trace the earliest case back to November, but nobody knew about it until late December, so that doesn't count as cover-up.

It wasn't good enough, that's true. And before human-to-human transmission was confirmed, they should have been a bit faster, though I would argue they couldn't have been much more faster than about a week or two.

Mistakes definitely have been made, and it still isn't good enough, but "they haven't learned and they won't learn" is quite simply not true, and is more based on prejudice than fact.

> Plus the whole lockdown shows that they obviously made plans beforehand.

And the hospitals. Not even China can just one day decide, out of the blue, to build two large-scale specialized hospitals in 10 days. Having that capability requires recognizing the need for it and preparing beforehand - which is another thing they've learned from the past pandemics.

> But this time, reporting to WHO took ~5 days. It was discovered by dr Zhang Jixian on Dec 26, then reported to WHO on Dec 31.

False. It took much longer than five days. The WHO was indeed notified on the 31st but the Chinese government organs knew about this long before. First CCTV report that I recall was around the 15th. First confirmed cases were early December. There’s even US intel reports dating back to November.

But when this started, the Chinese system did what the Chinese system always does: try to save face and pretend all is okay. I do not share any optimism that this trait will change especially given the crushing blows to press freedom in the last ten years.

We heard about it just before Xmas time in Singapore. Basically that there was another SARS outbreak in china. It was definitely known before the 26th.

Well doesn't the fact that they mention "SARS" confirm that they didn't know it was a new virus?

COVID-19 is not SARS. It's less lethal but far more contagious. SARS would not have been such a big issue because it doesn't spread as easily.

COVID-19 is SARS2. Not sure what your point is unless it's to be pedantic that Novel Coronavirus is not what is colloquially known as "SARS".

https://www.niaid.nih.gov/diseases-conditions/covid-19

The initial scientific name is similar, but it is still a different virus with very different characteristics. As I said: it is less lethal than SARS but MUCH more contagious, plus a much longer incubation time and possibility of asymptomatic spread. Sars cannot be spread asymptomatically. About the only things similar are that they are both coronaviruses, and the symptoms. I am not being pedantic at all, these characteristics are key.

Sars 2 is to Sars 1 as Mario 2 is to Mario 1. About the only thing similar is the characters.

How many times have we seen another variant of bird flu in the past 15 years? I lost count. Some of them even jumped to humans. But when that happened, we didn't immediately raise alarms of an upcoming pandemic: a virus jumping to humans does not always mean human to human transmission is possible.

I don't agree. SARS-1 and SARS-2 are both highly contagious and had similar effects on decimating hospital staff.

You can read the effect on Toronto hospitals in 2002 by SARS-1 to get an idea of the panic it caused, wiping out whole ICU teams. Just like SARS-2 (Covid-19.)

Wiping out ICU teams is a property of lethality, not so much contagiousness. Only 8000 people was infected by sars 1 and China didn’t even have lockdown at the time. The contagiousness and long incubation times are key this time. Otherwise you may as well compare it to Ebola.

Apparently a lady heard it appeared in September, somewhere not in China.

FYI: there was a powerful, contagious flu-like disease circulating already in SE Asia between Dec. 6 and Dec. 15.

If anybody in public healthcare seriously wants to know more, contact me and I'll narrow down the dates, symptoms and locations and you can verify if it was corona virus or a different illness.

Fascinating ... the dates Dec. 1, Dec. 6 and Dec. 16 are mentioned in this article, which almost match the flu dates I mentioned above:

https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/chinas-devas...

Based on those dates, it's possible Covid-19 was on Chinese airliners as early as Dec. 1 - 8. Wuhan has an international airport that connects to Shanghai (Pudong), which is a major international hub.

So that moves the onset possibly back into November.

Researchers should be looking at Chinese death certificates for the month of November if they're looking for patient zero.

(I've read about one unconfirmed US flu case in October that sounds like corona, but I'll look around for some more info.)

Not to mention there are direct flights from Wuhan to both LA and SFO (China Southern). Wuhan may not be very well known in the US, but it is absolutely a major city in China. I’m not sure what the best comparison would be, but maybe a St Louis or Denver of sorts.

Haven't the Chinese already traced a case back to November? That the earliest case is from November is not exactly news nowadays, is it?

Yes, Chinese interneters set the date to mid November when the number of cases exceeded 200, and somebody first put an official notice

Any source for your claims? What you're saying contradicts all the reporting, including from Caixin, which has seemed to have the inside scoop throughout this crisis.

The first patient was admitted to the hospital on 16 December 2019,[1] and the first lab result indicating a SARS-like coronavirus came back on 27 December 2019.[2]

> First confirmed cases were early December.

Those cases were not known about in early December. They were discovered after-the-fact, when people went over hospital records to try to find earlier, previously undetected cases. As I wrote above, nobody had any idea that there was a new coronavirus until 27 December, when the first lab results came in.

1. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

2. https://www.caixinglobal.com/2020-02-29/in-depth-how-early-s...

3. The Caixin article is reprinted here: https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/how-early-signs-...

> First CCTV report that I recall was around the 15th.

Could you link to a source? I have not been able to find any sources that definitively point to something concrete (as opposed to merely rumors and heresay).

> There’s even US intel reports dating back to November.

Ah yes, the CIA reports from November. I find this highly suspicious. How did the CIA know about it that early? And if they did know about it that early, why did they not do anything about it, like preparing America for the coming onslaught?

And please forgive me but US reports about China are not exactly the most trustworthy given the current environment.

> But when this started, the Chinese system did what the Chinese system always does: try to save face and pretend all is okay.

Believe what you will. I believe otherwise (or at least, I believe in a more nuanced story than you do): there was indeed face-saving going on by city-level authorities, but once human-to-human transmission was confirmed, the central government stepped in and kicked the city-level authorities on their asses. Now, the city-level authorities have been fired, and I believe the central government will do something to discourage similar behavior in the future.

The Chinese government is not a monolith. See also https://twitter.com/dbey85/status/1246370465209188357?s=20

See my comments just below. There is a link with a timeline, and it's very likely this started in November.

The comment you replied to asked for a source, the fact you can't produce any despite all this bluster is revealing.

To be honest, I don't understand what efficiency gains this kind of globalization was supposed to bring anyways... A factory in China is just as efficient as a factory in Spain or USA.

Obviously, cheaper workers work for less, but that's not exactly efficiency, (1) more a question of fairness, (2) can be done domestically (low-cost immigrant workers) and (3) there's plenty of cheap workers worldwide, not just in China.

Another potential advantage could be, factories are closer to natural resources, but it seems to me that that's not as much a question of efficiency, as it is of lax (enforcement of) environmental standards. Which I personally don't see as a net gain, even if it results in cheaper production.

The only real advantage I can see is concentration of skill - e.g. people say that you basically have to develop electronics in Shenzhen, there's simply not enough talent in the US and EU - but I wonder if the efficiency gains are offset by innovation losses. Again, IMO it would be better to have a local high-skilled population of engineers & entrepreneurs.

> The only real advantage I can see is concentration of skill - e.g. people say that you basically have to develop electronics in Shenzhen, there's simply not enough talent in the US and EU - but I wonder if the efficiency gains are offset by innovation losses. Again, IMO it would be better to have a local high-skilled population of engineers & entrepreneurs.

There are probably advantages for many large corporations. e.g. Nike, Apple. Design in the US, manufacture in China (or equivalent), reap profits in the US

What perhaps we should be thinking about is the second order effects of unfettered globalization. In the good times we only see the advantages. Ultimately, it looks like it is better to have some redundancy (in certain areas/sectors at least) to be able to deal with situations like these

Why do the design in the US? Chinese engineers are doing great designs themselves, and for less than American salaries... And they can visit right there on the factory floor, talking to the manufacturers directly about how to make their designs, in the same time zone and the same language...

Are US engineers imagining the same ideas about being irreplaceable that an earlier generation of American machinists, tool-and-die experts, and manufacturing workers also did?

> cheaper workers work for less, but that's not exactly efficiency

Never thought of it this way, but you're right, at least in spirit. Efficiency is probably not the right word but I couldn't agree more. This drive towards ruthless efficiency actually hurts us in being more productive. We all need to rethink the endgame that capitalism, low cost - high efficiency systems inevitably leads us towards.

> To be honest, I don't understand what efficiency gains this kind of globalization was supposed to bring anyways... A factory in China is just as efficient as a factory in Spain or USA.

A factory in China is just as efficient as a factory in Spain. But if China has most of the factories, and supporting industries, and supporting education, etc. it suddenly becomes more efficient. But then if China decides it doesn't like you, you're screwed. So it's the concentration of skill you mention, but also concentration of all kinds of relevant infrastructure.

As for cheaper workers - it's a temporary "efficiency" in financial terms, in forms of price arbitrage. Over time it evaporates. Even as the 2019 was coming to an end, China was already too expensive for many industries - being the world's factory enabled them to enrich their citizens, and suddenly there was a middle class that demanded humane working conditions and employee protection and what not. So suddenly poorer countries became of interest for future manufacturing...

>> To be honest, I don't understand what efficiency gains this kind of globalization was supposed to bring anyways... A factory in China is just as efficient as a factory in Spain or USA.

> A factory in China is just as efficient as a factory in Spain. But if China has most of the factories, and supporting industries, and supporting education, etc. it suddenly becomes more efficient.

But I'd argue that shouldn't be considered "globalization": there's nothing "global" about concentrating things in one country. It's just outsourcing.

> A factory in China is just as efficient as a factory in Spain or USA.

I'm not sure how you're defining efficiency, but in the Netflix special American Factory, it would seem like the chinese workers were not only cheaper but also more productive.

Totally agree. It take time and management skills to be a efficient factory.

anecdotally, but comparisons of model 3s produced in China showed a much higher attention to detail than those in the US. There appeared to be a strong focus on the product as it represented those who built it. This level of "pride" if you want to call it that is a cultural issue that some nations have lost. While I am not saying workers should put the manufacturer before themselves many have taken that so far as to put themselves before their fellow employees as well.

that didn't happen overnight, that happened by politicians playing people against each other and invoking the all too common negative traits of envy, jealousy, and even anger. The mantras of you did not win life's lottery, its not fair, you deserve, they stole, has really done a number at not just manufacturing levels but in all aspects of life.

> but in the Netflix special American Factory

A single, sensationalized data point.

1 > 0, but if you have details on why that is not indicative of reality please share.

> cheaper workers work for less, but that's not exactly efficiency

It is efficiency, really, because it's making better use of an underutilized resource. Over time, of course, the price of labor evens out because the resource is no longer underutilized.

> more a question of fairness

If it's fairness you want, telling companies to hire locally isn't going to cut it. That's the opposite of fairness, really—you would be subsidizing local workers whose wages are already higher at the expense of foreign labor that has more need for the income.

> Another potential advantage could be, factories are closer to natural resources, but it seems to me that that's not as much a question of efficiency, as it is of lax (enforcement of) environmental standards.

Locating factories near their required materials is a net gain even when ideal environmental standards are maintained. It's almost always cheaper (economically and environmentally) to ship end products where they need to go than it would be to ship raw materials around to distributed factories. Concentrating manufacturing in one area also makes it easier to confine the environmental impact.

> If it's fairness you want, telling companies to hire locally isn't going to cut it. That's the opposite of fairness, really—you would be subsidizing local workers whose wages are already higher at the expense of foreign labor that has more need for the income.

It sounds to me like you're saying that it is unfair to strangers that you would help out your family first before helping them.

Most countries do subsidize local workers and industry. Should it be another way?

The United States actually does heavily subsidize foreigners for the benefit of the rich and powerful, at the expense of its citizens. Most work visa programs are an example of this.

This is the problem with the globalist mindset. Chinese workers are ultimately working for China. Chinese companies are always inclined to help Chinese people and the Chinese government. So telling domestic firms to be neutral in national loyalty is essentially telling them to be loyal to China.

A government not pressuring firms to hire and buy locally is deeply unfair to the point where I would argue it is a dereliction of their duty to the people.

Anyone care to respond instead of just downvoting?

i would disagree with you on two points

- work visas aren't subsidized. not even close. it costs a lot to sponsor and the workers pay taxes without benefits. not to mention the brain drain.

- you've grouped people as working for countries. people work for their own benefit and compete globally. as long as countries ensure their trading partners have humane working conditions, it's up to each person to remain globally competitive. your wage is a loose function of value generated for the employer.

> It sounds to me like you're saying that it is unfair to strangers that you would help out your family first before helping them.

Well, yes, it is unfair to the strangers that you're favoring the people you personally care about when others are worse off. Being unfair doesn't necessarily make it wrong. You're free to help whoever you want—with your own resources. However, organizations distributing resources they took by force, or enforcing their own rules on others, ought to be held to higher standards.

> Chinese workers are ultimately working for China.

Chinese workers are ultimately working for themselves and their own families, just like all workers everywhere. Not for the Chinese government. If you have a problem with the Chinese government forcibly and unjustly profiting from the labor of Chinese workers, great! So do I. The same goes for every other government, both foreign and domestic.

> Well, yes, it is unfair to the strangers that you're favoring the people you personally care about when others are worse off. Being unfair doesn't necessarily make it wrong. You're free to help whoever you want—with your own resources. However, organizations distributing resources they took by force, or enforcing their own rules on others, ought to be held to higher standards.

And I think that a government has an obligation to prioritize its own citizens before foreigners. And it appears that people here disagree with me.

Most governments do this. The Chinese government certainly does this for its own citizens. I wish that US government was as protectionist as the Chinese government is.

As it is now, American citizens pay taxes to subsidize our exploitation. The only people who benefit from the current immigration system are billionaires. The government is more concerned with the pursuit of capital for the elites than they are with the welfare of the people.

Thankfully, this administration has actually been enforcing the rules with H1-B visas. So lots of people I know have gotten great jobs in the last few years as visas are no longer rubber stamped. H1-B is nothing but a scam to help tech billionaires.

But yeah, putting outsiders above those you have a responsibility to care for is wrong. Volunteering at a soup kitchen does not excuse neglecting your own children. It brings me no comfort that the American middle class was eviscerated to help China. And yet that is trotted out whenever an American expresses frustration at how they have been harmed by globalization. It would be like if someone said: Sure, your bike was stolen, but at least the bike thief is happy, so it is ok.

> Over time, of course, the price of labor evens out because the resource is no longer underutilized.

The price would have evened out if labor could cross borders as freely as the goods that it produces - then it would flow to areas where it's in high demand. But with borders and immigration controls and different laws (esp. environment and labor) in different jurisdictions, it's not really a free market. Instead, it looks a great deal like a contraption that's deliberately designed to allow transnational corporations to extract massive economic rents from otherwise pointless brokerage (outsourcing).

> The price would have evened out if labor could cross borders as freely as the goods that it produces.

Not really, if that was the case for ex, everyone doing similar jobs would be getting paid the same in US or EU. I am not saying things dont get evened out to an extent, but people are harder to move than the goods they produce.

True. Still, though, it's drastically easier to move within a single country (or economic area like EU), then it is to move across the border with immigration controls - even if moving across the border is much closer geographically. You can bet there'd be a lot more Chinese workers competing for jobs directly in US if they could.

> The price would have evened out if labor could cross borders as freely as the goods that it produces…

That would certainly speed up the process. However, labor prices are still gradually rising in China and other common outsourcing areas despite these restrictions. As are environmental standards. I'm not saying it's an ideal free market—there are governments involved, after all. But free or not, the trade is still advantageous for both sides.

>> cheaper workers work for less, but that's not exactly efficiency

> It is efficiency, really, because it's making better use of an underutilized resource. Over time, of course, the price of labor evens out because the resource is no longer underutilized.

It's not efficiency at all, it's stagnation. Since the 80s instead of trying to innovate and automate production lines too many companies have been hopping from country-to-country looking for the cheapest labor pool. We lost 40 years of manufacturing innovations because they were economically unnecessary due to offshoring.

Can you blame them? It was cheaper to outsource than automate, so why wouldn't they have outsourced?

I can't blame them, just like I can't blame a company for becoming a monopoly. We need to regulate them like we do with antitrust, worker's rights, and other things. The free market unabated is terrible for humanity.

It's worse then that, we all live in a socialist society, it's just a corporate socialism. A free market would be a fantastic start. There is a real lack of competition and innovation in our socialist model.

Yes, a true free market can only exist via governmental regulation, as otherwise, companies tend towards monopolies and collusion. It would be nice to have such a market, but I do wonder how we'll get there with moneyed interests at the door.

I can't "blame" a corporation, because it's not a person.

But they are run by people, those people are the ones crafting the legal and regulatory environment that encourages this behavior, and we can certainly blame them.

I can't blame the workers either. They are driven by incentives, so of course they'll fulfill their incentives. Expecting them to do the right thing without incentivizing them to do so doesn't effect any change. If you want to change them, change their incentives, whether through money, government regulation, or other.

I think the problem is in allowing capital to continuously seek out higher profits by finding places and people that they can exploit.

Unrestrained capitalism leads to slavery (J. Pournelle). So we have to regulate it so that it doesn't get to that state. Capitalism is built around exploitation; either workers, physical resources, or knowledge. This has the benefit of increasing prosperity over time, though at a cost. As unfortunate as these costs are, Capitalism is the worst economic system, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

(Apologies to Sir Winston Churchill)

Not at all. Being close to your inputs means you don’t have to ship them as far to make use of them. And the shorter the distance you have to ship them, the less you will pay for shipping. Lower overhead equals higher efficiency.

It’s like, why were car factories in the U.S. clustered around the Great Lakes? Because car factories need steel, and the steel mills were in Pennsylvania. And why were the steel mills in Pennsylvania? Because steel mills need coal, and the coal mines were in Appalachia. You could theoretically build these factories anywhere, but the company that built close to their inputs would have an economic edge over the company that didn’t.

Shipping is very cheap in the era of globalization and containerized shipping so it doesn't mean much.

Companies focused on cost cutting, outsourcing and the like, but in doing so sacrificing agility and deep knowledge, and sometime even cost.

>The only real advantage I can see is concentration of skill - e.g. people say that you basically have to develop electronics in Shenzhen, there's simply not enough talent in the US and EU - but I wonder if the efficiency gains are offset by innovation losses.

This is why a factory in Spain or the USA is not as efficient as one in China (or vice-versa). Institutional knowledge has to be built up over time. You can't just start a factory in a place with no skilled labor for it. It's going to be way too expensive.

Just look at the US and compare to the EU. The EU has very few influential (or large) tech companies. The US has many of them. There's clearly some kind of concentration going on there and some of it probably is due to skill and thus efficiency. It's not that individual European developers are necessarily worse, but rather that as a collective (for some reason) they don't produce the same results as Americans do. I imagine that the same applies to factories.

What about US based 3m workers going on strike at unfortunate moment?

Exactly. By outsorcing to China, they’re not actually seeking “efficiency”, they’re just seeking to skirt labour rights and other regulations.

Unions and strikes are a political topic, and we should probably figure out how to handle it better, probably some middle ground between fairness and efficiency (I’m not really well versed in the topic), but regardless companies bypassing the discussion completely by just having a factory in China is wrong and anti-competitive.

That's exactly the argument that Tim Cook used a few years ago. He said that an iPhone not manufactured in China would cost 30k USD...before quickly moving manufacturing out of China. These arguments sound nice, but are lies. When offshoring first started the cheap labor pool was the only thing that mattered, and it still is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage

There was a spat btwn Sweden and France too. A Swedish company kept masks in a French warehouse and wanted to ship them home because they finally needed them. France blocked it till it eventually relented.

To explain: a Swedish company warehoused millions of masks in France. Two million of these masks (million each) were supposed to be sent to Spain and Italy. France had confiscated all of these masks. It took two weeks of pressure by Sweden (and other EU countries) for them to release the masks and for them to finally be sent to Spain and Italy.

> The 3M spat between Canada and the US makes it abundantly clear that in a time of true crisis, you can't even trust your closest friends when something terrifying happens to the world like this pandemic.

I think the Canadians worked that out a few years ago when the Trump administration declared Canadian steel a security threat to the United States so they could impose trade restrictions in contravention of our treaty obligations.

The last time Canada had a military backstop against the US was when the British empire was still around, back in the 1920s when stuff like War Plan Red and Defence Scheme No. 1 was floating around about how a US-Canada/British war would play out. After WW2 and the collapse of the British empire, Canada had no military last resort against the US. 100 years is a hell of a long time to develop Stockholm syndrome.

To be fair, before WW2 Canada was a protectorate of Britain as well. Such is the fate of smaller players on the world stage.

Absolutely.

For example, companies in New Zealand are pursuing a coronavirus vaccine. Do you think they really doubt the willingness of Moderna [0] (Boston based biotech company) to sell them the vaccine if it is successful? I'd be willing to bet that no, the primary concern is how long they would have to wait to buy it.

[0] Arbitrary choice, replace with anyone who gets a vaccine past trials

People have friends, countries do not. The country that doesn't understand this sets up its own misery. Also no government that wants to remain in power is going to ship out goods that are already in short supply in their own country. Excess goods of course will continue to be traded for economic benefit.

We have seen a lot of talk about a single point of failure but localizing the manufacturing isn't a pancaea by any means as they also shut down during pandemics. The only things immune are automated and unable to be contaminated.

Also technically it is better for income inequality in global terms if it converges to a global median. That is why so many hate it because they are the ones with their ox gored by reduced inequity and they don't even consider themselves that rich!

I recognize that is a glib and misleading truth in many ways given PPI differences mean that a salary to be locally comfortable in one locale could lead to homeless starvation in another, that inequality exists both locally and globally. It is more a note about the irony than any statement of morals.

> localizing the manufacturing isn't a pancaea by any means as they also shut down during pandemics

But you eliminate other failure modes related to the pandemic that don't involve the plant physically not operating due to worker sickness or curve-flattening measures. If Canada produces their own masks then the US can't take them.

In this pandemic, we aren't shutting down things that are deemed essential - and any manufacturing facilities used in pandemic response would, of course, also be essential.

Whereas the current state of affairs is that China just stops exporting masks, and there's nothing we can do about it.

No, it won't.

Speaking as someone who is currently spending his days sourcing medical equipment for his medical center: the cheapest US-based face shield costs nearly 3x what the average face shield in China does (the most expensive US face shield is >10x). Even with shipping hiccoughs and the desire to buy American, I can't justify purchasing 1/3 the personal protective equipment.

In the current situation they probably don't have a lot of incentive to lower prices.

But the question is:

how much premium would you be willing to pay for a local supplier?

If the american company was "only" 50% more expensive, would it work out after the pandemic?

Probably not?

I mean, as a personal consumer, yes - I'd pay a premium on my own products to buy American. I do, in fact, do that when it's an option.

As an organizational representative, though, that's iffier. Healthcare reimbursement is pretty heavily regulated (most of the wild price fluctuation you see has to do with numbers used for public-facing negotiations, not the contracted rates we actually ever get paid.) The only way we get by is by minimizing costs; we can't really increase revenue effectively, except by increasing volume of services. As it is, operating margins in hospitals tend to run at about 2% - it's razor, razor thin. Upping expenses 50% on "critical" items (which for us is, you know, a huge proportion of our stuff) would put us out of business.

It's not something we can do unilaterally. Either it has be funded through an increase in funding earmarked for that, or something equivalent.

Or we could all just prepare for pandemics the way we’re supposed to. Otherwise moving manufacturing will be a band aid at best.

I disagree that China has not learned from the last one:

https://www.theguardian.com/global/commentisfree/2020/jan/23...

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0771-1

What they should do is come up with a trade pact for countries outside China and increase production there. Sort of like a Pacific-wide partnership...

So Japanese companies move operations to China because it's cheaper, leaving Japanese jobs behinds. Those businesses profit from cheap labor, emissions, and materials. Now Japan is subsidizing their return to Japan with $2.2 billion.

I really hope the US doesn't adopt this (narrator: they will). It's a slap in the face to tax payers.

While I agree in part that it's not fair, I would argue against the idea that jobs were lost in Japan. Maybe temporarily lost, but in the end economically you end up finding another way to contribute value and be paid. Moreover the companies can't be blamed for taking the most profitable route. It's up to the governments to regulate.

I disagree. Many of the jobs that left Japan and the United States in the 80's and 90's are not coming back - they've already been replaced by robots. This is just the tip of the iceberg. Cashiers, accountants and drivers are all being replaced by robots and automated systems. These jobs are going away and aren't going to be replaced by a comparable entry-level job. This automation is picking up pace now and will only continue.

If that was truly the case it would be cheaper to have manufacturing locally, vs shipping things across the world from China.

Its difficult because japan is not a resource region country. They don't want to reshore production because its costly to source all of the materials they need.

China is not a resource region county for a lot of things it needs produce products either. That is why they import raw materials from places like Africa and are more than happy to help pave roads to make it easier to get things out.

Sorry meant to say resource rich. Its hard to overstate how few resources japan has at its disposal. This caused their aggression during WWII. China has some resources just far fewer than their population plus they are attempting to export their way to affluence which means they are also producing the world's goods, not just goods for the population of china. China is definitely not resource rich but better off than japan in that way.

While this is true, it's become extremely cheap to move raw materials around these days. Shipping ore from Australia to China was at something like $8 a ton (I assume changed due to recent crisis).

I'd expect with Japan internal shipping costs may be a greater problem. They intentionally distributed their industries around the country.

Oh I agree with the view that automation will eventually cause mass unemployment, and is already having an impact. All I'm saying is that at the time that production for these things moved overseas (decades ago), this did not suddenly increase the unemployment rate for the country that lost the jobs. New jobs end up being created.

Moving back to Japan is particularly not appealing anyway, Japan is having a severe labor shortage due to rabidly aging population.

And 2.2B is surely not enough to persuade firms anyway on national scale, might work on targeted industry however.

Maybe an attempt to get some of the 500k+ hikikomori back into the workforce could be made. A majority are working age men.

I don't think this is likely. It's a societal problem with no real fix. If people don't feel like they're part of society then the government is unlikely to be able to fix it. It becomes even harder when those people are more or less okay with what their life is like.

it's more of a workaround against WTO rabid crusade against tariffs. can't retaliate for tariffs if they are incentives.

Small amount compared to the trade volumes between Japan and China.

Also just last year in this weird universe, Trump's great Trade War with both Japan and China, actually got both to start looking for ways to increase those volumes as a counterbalance.

The world is just too complex.

Why? Isn’t it good to bring the jobs back?

I don't think the citizens of Japan should fund that. If Japan wants manufacturing in their country and it isn't appealing enough on its own then it should be done through regulation, not tax payer subsides.

If you do it through regulation, the tax payers would still fund it through increased prices. You also risk business failing, which again the tax payers would pay for.

It's a "socialize the losses, privatize the profits" sort of deal. That said, it may nevertheless be for the best in the long run, given that they can't change the past.

Japan is a particular case where it actually makes sense to move the production overseas without fear of leaving people behind simply because there isn't a labor force to build anything, no natural resources to use in production, and wonky currency problems due to a disproportionately structured demography.

But they can tax the workers who now have gainful employment and make that tax money back (I’d say also saves social benefits, in on JP, the requirements to be on the dole are strict.

I pray they do its a long time coming and then put barriers from it happening again

Even if japan (or any other country) manages to pull production back within its boarders, wouldn't China still be more competitive due to cheaper labor/supply chain costs?

IMO, the reason why companies outsourced their production to china still holds today. Companies pulling out will be at a competitive disadvantage against companies who don't.

That ought to depend on how heavily the Japanese government is willing to subsidize them

It may be that rather than put all production eggs in the China basket, advanced economies diversify both by having domestic production and having a diversified global production basket.

Factor in the cost of the pandemic, and the question becomes is it worth it for that cheap TV etc.?

Even if japan (or any other country) manages to pull production back within its boarders, wouldn't China still be more competitive due to cheaper labor/supply chain costs?

Not everyone makes purchasing decisions based on price alone.

My wife is into vintage things as a hobby. She says the demand for anything "made in USA" has gone through the roof in the last five years simply because people don't want to support China anymore. Even used Made in Mexico, Taiwan, and Hong Kong items have seen a surge.

The trick is to move that view of China as a bad option from a subset of people to the majority of people.

Her full-time work is in retail, and she says people will happily pay 3x the price for "Made in Italy" items instead of "Made in China."

China knows this, which is why it has factories in both the E.U. and the United States filled with Chinese laborers churning things out so they can be labeled "Made in {$anywhere_but_China}."

> China knows this, which is why it has factories in both the E.U. and the United States filled with Chinese laborers churning things out so they can be labeled "Made in {$anywhere_but_China}."

Can you mention one major factory in the US with Chinese laborers?

Probably means Vietnam, Laos and the Philippines? Since less tariff and cheaper labor pool and especially in Vietnam, less individual rights.

A lot of Chinese production had moved to Vietnam and Cambodia, partly due to tariffs, partly cheaper labour. Mostly the factories are Chinese owned and managed but with local workers.

Define "major."

There have been a number of articles in newspapers about this, including in a city where I lived recently. They set up entire self-contained communities.

More than 1000 employees.

If those Chinese-staffed factories comply with US and EU laws, especially stuff like minimum wage, benefits, and environmental regulations, that's perfectly fine - they're competing on even ground with any other factory in the country.

I think a better way to look at this is not as domestic supply chains, but diversified supply chains.

There may be reason to encourage domestic, especially for certain kinds of things, but I don't think it needs to be a huge push into trade isolationism. There are lots of industrialized countries we can do business with, and lots of countries with lagging industry that might be improved with increased trade or investment in whatever industry they do have.

The USA really needs to stop rewarding the quarterly profit driven stock market approach to management. It's the same thing that caused Boeing to build bad airplanes and the same thing that causes companies to build insecure software. We need to get back to engineers and architects (who actually know what they are doing) making decisions and building solid solutions and products. Companies can be reasonably profitable and have sound products and software too without farming everything out to the cheapest bidder of the week.

I don’t think this was ever a real thing. DC-10 had terrible problems. When you bought a car in the 50-60s you’d have a notepad in the car and write down the issues you found. You’d then have warranty work. I agree with your goals but let’s not get into a Make America Great Again mindset.

We must start asking: is this good for the bottom line and the country. Fiduciaries, including business executives are currently required to do everything within the law to maximize profits for shareholder - even if that means doing things that are bad for the country in the long term. The current "race to the bottom" approach seems like a great way to run a country into the ground - which is now on spectacular display as we see the impacts of relying on an authoritarian, communist regime for PPE and many other essentials.

This fiduciary responsibility is often brought up, but is largely inaccurate. Many companies, quite legally, do things that don't contribute to the bottom line, and in fact may damage it. And the courts have been fairly lenient in ruling in these companies favor.

Easy to say now. How many people would be willing (and able) to pay, say, 20% more for an iPhone?

If you rephrase that as, "pay 20% more for an iPhone, but your chances of dying in the next pandemic or war are reduced by an order of magnitude", it might prove more popular. Of course, that depends on how convincing you are... but the present events will provide a basis for those arguments for a long time to come.

We'd see some adaptations though.

Apple would make cheaper, less fancy versions.

A lot of people would stop upgrading every year or two. That's hugely wasteful anyway.

More people would buy used.

It's also the think that drove innovation in those industries to begin with

Actually this pandemic has shown some true colors of many nations.

1) US trying to unsuccessfully hoard supplies, issues with the German testing company

2) China trying to use soft power, but the whole drama feels fake. It is good that they are sending supplies (often faulty and not up to the quality, see dutch story around this) but it doesn't feel genuine.

3) European countries are in-fighting for supplies. Switzerland wants supplies from Germany who is unwilling to supply them. Austria and Germany butt heads.

4) India banning critical medical exports

There are so many stories of how each nation is behaving. Even within the US, states are bidding against each other and the federal government has not shown solid leadership.

When times are grim, humans tend to invoke strong tribal instincts (for e.g. brotherhood that forms between soldiers). If we hypothetically had a more deadly virus than Coronavirus, say with a CFR of 50% and we were unable to stop it, there would be in-fighting between counties and neighborhoods.

There are some good stories too, especially the sacrifice of the healthcare workers, delivery staff and politicians.

When times are great -> Globalism

When times are tough -> Isolation and tribalism

I personally enjoyed the hypocrisy of China initially requesting Nations to not "overreact" and close borders to its travelers (mid February), then proceeding to do exactly this towards these same nations (mid March) when things became worse overseas.

During Swine Flu outbreak in 2009 china closed it's borders to Mexico, but turns around and says it's unfair when people close their borders to china. Then proceeded to close their borders AGAIN. facepalm

SARS happened in 2002-2004, no?

You're right, I'm thinking Swine Flu. Thanks.

SARS was closer to 1999-2000.

No, it wasn't

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr...

I remembered incorrectly. Thanks for the link.

No one has to listen to the CCP. The CCP acts offended by everything.

The problem is, the WHO does, they even said this thing wasn't transmitted person to person. And they're supposed to be the authority everyone was saying to listen to.

I think that the WHO communication was proportionate to the current knowledge at the time of each of their interventions.

First of all they said, when it was clear there was a problem "We have a simple message for all countries: test, test, test." (and then Trump and almost everybody else did not want to hear that)

And moreover they said more exactly, some time before the previous item, that "Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission". So your position is a deformation of their words.

No. The WHO constantly downplayed this pandemic and kowtowed to China to the point of disgracefully delaying calling it a pandemic and then playing catch-up when individual countries started ignoring the WHO and implemented their own measures.

Then the WHO switched gears and complained that the countries were doing too little too late.

They've been almost completely worthless in this crisis.

The WHO constantly downplayed this pandemic and kowtowed to China

See also: The whole WHO/Taiwan debacle, which is still ongoing.

The WHO is OK risking the lives of people in Taiwan in order to keep the mainland happy. You would think that the WHO would put the health of people, regardless of where they live, ahead of politics.

WHO does not officially recognize Taiwan because the UN does not officially recognize Taiwan, and the WHO is a UN organization. It is as simple as that.if you disagree then you gotta take it to the UN.

It's not about recognition. It's about doing the right thing.

If the virus' impact in Puerto Rico was very different than it was in the rest of the United States, the WHO would note it publicly. But Taiwan't situation was actively suppressed by the WHO because of Beijing.

When has any organization put peoples' lives over politics?

Anyway, the WHO/Taiwan debacle seems to resulted in Taiwan handling this pandemic better than anyone else, considering their proximity to China and the huge amount of trade and travel between them. Taiwan just ignored the WHO and did their own thing, which was the best thing.

Well, they at least published that anti-covid disinfection recipe. At least here in Czech Republic everyone uses that to make emergency disinfection mixtures.

There is no downplaying in "test test test". That could not be farther from downplay. The emergency sense is vibrant in their declaration. Previous declarations were done with a lack of scientific knowledge.

Btw only South Korea did "test test test". And that succeded very very much.

The WHO is obviously in China's pocket. I mean they can't even bring themselves to use the word Taiwan in public communications.

WHO does not officially recognize Taiwan because the UN does not officially recognize Taiwan, and the WHO is a UN organization. It is as simple as that, got nothing to do with being in China’s pocket. If you don’t like that, pressure your government to recognize Taiwan, and pressure them to pressure UN.

OK, but let's ignore the recognition of Taiwan for a second.

China censoring social media chat about the virus[0], tons of talk among experts that China faked their numbers and dates[1], meanwhile the WHO praises 'Chinese Transparency'[2][3], while hinting that the actions of censorship and moderate reporting were the right idea to avoid widespread panic.[4]

I'm not anti-WHO, but it's getting harder to believe that they are working objectively. China did a lot wrong in regards to response, but the WHO seems to want to heap on the praise. It makes one wonder. The weird non-response and hangup regarding Taiwan was just the topping on the cake, and it was entirely irresponsible on the WHOs part.

[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/05/chinese-social...

[1]: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/02/08/8037667...

[2]: https://www.who.int/news-room/detail/28-01-2020-who-china-le...

[3]: https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/transcr...

[4]: https://apnews.com/16cd6173232a01ec04780db3eea4de79?fbclid=I...

Statements in sources you cite seem rather deceptive, for example insinuating that censorship delayed response. Wiki has a pretty factually sourced timeline with precise dates, and it shows the infamous Dr. Li in question messaged a private group about a lab report he saw from Dec 30 (authorities found out because it was reshared on public forum), when the WHO was notified if it on Dec 31. He was also reprimanded for claiming it was a sars outbreak, when there's no evidence at the time. I suspect many of these news sources are aware of these underlying facts, if they're the sort to do any research before publishing, so the only interesting question here is why they chose to be deceptive anyway.

The WHO technically said they were looking into it and that they had not confirmed it spread human to human. That’s totally different from “we have looked into it and can confirm it does not spread human to human.”

“Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China”

It takes some serious mental gymnastics to interpret this in any way other than the obvious one. This isn’t a philosophical discussion about the limitations of empiricism, it’s a tweet that goes out to millions of people from an organization imbued with serious authority.

And what is the obvious interpretation? Mine is ‘it is preliminary, so results can still change’ and ‘found no clear evidence does not mean evidence will not be found later’.

Or maybe we can agree that there is no such thing as obvious, and different people will necessarily have different interpretations, for better or worse.

I see it as yours but recognize it as probably being read like the parents as not only is the default behavior for absense of evidence to treat it as evidence of absense or subtly of magnitude the fine distinction is lost on most.

It is anti-communication in context as cunningly putting effort into /not/ being clear. If they truly weren't sure a more honest form would be "We have neither confirmed nor denied the possibility of human to human transmission." (Putting aside any biological questions like are there even any crossspecies transmissions which cause propagative symptoms like coughing or sneezing but do not transmit through it.)

Well then it's a good thing that we aren't governed by people who just spend 5 seconds misinterpreting tweets.

Actually they, did say that they could neither confirm nor deny: https://www.euronews.com/2020/01/15/china-says-it-s-possible...

but the only reason this statement would come out is to refute any rumors that its spread person-by-person.

So its implied. They cant confirm anything but they need to refute that its spread through humans

By even posting this tweet, it is implied that there is no human-to-human transmission. They could have easily said, "So far, preliminary tests have found no evidence of human-to-human transmission, however we have only just begun research into the matter and thus still recommend social distancing."

Why didn't they say this? Because China seems to have pressured the WHO the entire time, including saying that the borders shouldn't be closed.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/04/02/china-coronavirus-who-h...

>And what is the obvious interpretation? Mine is ‘it is preliminary, so results can still change’ and ‘found no clear evidence does not mean evidence will not be found later’.

If that's what they meant, then they should have said so. They didn't. As I said before, this is a major health organization that needs to be clear in its communication, not speak in riddles.

They did say, within 24h of that tweet, that they have not ruled out human to human transmission: https://www.euronews.com/2020/01/15/china-says-it-s-possible...

There was very clear evidence, the WHO were just ignoring it like they pretend Taiwan isn't it's own independent entity, they won't talk about Taiwan or interact with them for the sake of politics. It's no coincidence that the one country that has the most reason to mistrust the CCP and took the alternate sources from on the ground reporting as trusted that has managed to not get overrun by this virus.

They literally just repeated whatever the CCP said, plenty of information was leaking out of the country through alternate channels, reports about doctor/journalist arrests, and the way the Chinese public was reacting about how serious this virus was. What did they think it was if not human to human transmission? Hundreds of people in multiple cities ate at the same restaurant or tainted meat? People were talking about this virus in China publicly in early January and it was known it was spreading.

The WHO said there's no clear evidence of h2h on Jan 14. The Chinese cdc team didn't conclude their investigation until a few days after, and the advisory was changed after. Your sort know perfectly well why your statements are misleading but will continue to make them for obvious reasons.

Everyone has to listen to the CCP. They control access to the world's second-largest economy.

Seems like a pretty common thing from major powers doesn't it. Maybe it's just human nature? e.g. US banning exports of respirators but throwing a tantrum when India tries to ban the export of hydroxychloroquine.

Not sure what the solution here is, but it certainly does seem it's everyone for themselves in these situations.

Not just China but the WHO, who recommended no international travel restrictions very late into this crisis (https://www.who.int/news-room/articles-detail/who-advice-for...), then ignored Taiwan’s requests in favor of Beijing propaganda and claimed the virus does not transmit between humans (https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-04-05/taiwan...), and has repeated failures seen in their response to other health crises (https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/14/asia/coronavirus-who-china-in...).

In addition, WHO is heavily influenced by China; here is an interview with a senior WHO official who was asked about Taiwan - he simply hangs up the phone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlCYFh8U2xM

WHO does not officially recognize Taiwan because the UN does not officially recognize Taiwan, and the WHO is a UN organization. It is as simple as that. If you disagree then you gotta take it to the UN.

The poor guys at the WHO just want to focus on fighting diseases, and yet everybody is trying to use them for political agendas. If I was that guy I would be inclined to shut down too.

His behavior was nonetheless completely unprofessional. He could easily have stated, exactly as you did, the situation and asked to move on.

Unfortunately for him life is political, and the UN and WHO very much so. I think those organizations should have space for governing entities that might not have complete international support or they aren’t really representing the world population as the name might lead one to believe.

Taiwan is clearly a self governing entity with that is not governed by the CCP. Whatever policy and assistance WHO is giving to CCP does not go to Taiwan. Taiwan has taken a very different approach to coronavirus and the world has a lot to learn from them.

you could still recognize Taiwan exist without saying its a separate entity.

Especially important when they actually are the one handling the issue the best way possible. The way he act is truly abominable. Its like Taiwan is in a separate dimension that didnt exist in this reality, and anything they did didnt happen

when china shutdown domestic movement into/out of Wuhan they kept open international movement into/out of Wuhan ... at the same time neighbor countries with china tried to block cross boarder movement yet china forced those trade routes to stay open well after Wuhan had entered lockdown - pure evil

>when china shutdown domestic movement into/out of Wuhan they kept open international movement into/out of Wuhan

I'd like someone else to confirm this because I've not heard about this before now.

A quick Googing indicates that Wuhan airport closed when the city was put into lockdown and re-opened yesterday when the lockdown of the city was lifted.

This makes sense considering that, when the lockdown started, many countries had to discuss with the Chinese government in order to allow special flights to evacuate their citizens.

> when china shutdown domestic movement into/out of Wuhan they kept open international movement into/out of Wuhan

Evidence for this claim? I believe they closed all movement, including international flights.

This is false, by the time they shut down movement out of Wuhan, the airport was closed.

There were, however, people who already left Wuhan who then left the country.

There were also repatriation flights out of Wuhan.

I think people forget that they gave 48h warning before the lockdown happened causing a huge amount of what was likely infected people to flee.

It was 8 hours: "At 2 am on 23 January 2020, authorities issued a notice informing residents of Wuhan that from 10 am [..] residents of Wuhan were also not allowed to leave the city without permission from the authorities."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Hubei_lockdowns

where is the 48h come from?

Creating a throw-away account just to prove to someone that China did something right...

Because HN and the english speaking world is usually so anti-China, that people who are neutral of China get angry responses or are downvoted badly. Note: I am not even saying supportive of China; even being neutral is already considered unacceptable or lunacy by many people.

Things are so bad that many people are afraid to speak up for China using their own identities. I used to be one of those people who were afraid.

But now I have had enough. I personally experienced the lockdown in China and how distorted the western reporting is. That is why now I am stepping out and letting my voice known.

China is to blame for all of this, and the fact that they did some things right, doesn't clean their fault.

You have bought into the CCP is China bullshit. Without the murdering CCP China could have been Taiwan. Instead you are a new country with 70 years of history that only occupies the space of the great historic nation of China.

From the armchair--I think China is rather hard to govern, and if you study its dynastic history, most existential challenges tended to come from popular revolts from within. Also, the Republic of China's Nationalist Party-led government isn't much older and was no saint for most of their existence. After being ousted to Taiwan in 1949, they kept martial law on the island for almost 4 decades, and famously imprisoned over a hundred thousand perceived enemies of the party, executing thousands during the White Terror. Political and democratic reforms that did emerge in the late 80's were not guaranteed. In a way the same pressures emerged concurrently in the mainland and we know how that turned out.

Edit: The "CCP is China" issue is a great point, and I wish that the distinction between government, nationality, culture, and race could be made a lot clearer (speaking as an American living in the US who is ethnically Chinese). What's personally distressing is how easily the media and politicians here leap from 'China lies and steals,' which is a debatable topic from a political science perspective at least, to 'The Chinese (people) lie and steal,' which is a subjective take on motives. Not sure if that's what you were talking about but wanted to get that out there...

Total false claim.

> when china shutdown domestic movement into/out of Wuhan they kept open international movement into/out of Wuhan

The first result I found on Google says the airport was shut down to all departures, along with all public transit. They didn't immediately shut down international driving in private cars, I suppose. https://www.ifn.news/posts/china-shuts-down-wuhan-airport-am...

> at the same time neighbor countries with china tried to block cross boarder movement yet china forced those trade routes to stay open well after Wuhan had entered lockdown

Are you referring to trade of goods? That has been the general approach in most countries even after restricting human travel, as the prevalent thought is that non-living goods don't replicate and shed the virus.

I don't think it's hypocrisy.

At the time the vast majority of the cases in China were in Wuhan and Hubei, which had been put on lockdown with airports closed, but the rest of the country has much fewer cases.

No country imposed full ban on travels with countries that had the number of cases seen in China outside Wuhan/Hubei.

Whether this was the right or wrong decision to make is another issue.

The same discussion can be had about travellers from Italy just a few weeks later.

At the end of the day it is also down to each country to make its own decision on who to accept.

The much fewer cases thing was because doctors were being told to lie about the numbers or attribute it to viral pneumonia, they were carrying off bodies and quarantining sections of cities elsewhere too, you just had to look at WeChat to see it.

Can we please stop this?

HN sinks to the gutter every time China pops up as a subject and no discussion is possible, as seen from the reaction to my previous comment.

HN isn't sinking into the gutter calling out a government for doing horrifying things, spreading misinformation, suppressing accurate information, all to save face/embarrassment and keep its economy.

People here read alternate sources of news, see the videos leaking out on the Internet, they're very savy and know that any reporting that rely on CCP as primary source of info are bird cage liner. The CCP acted in bad faith, and the world suffered for it, and this isn't the first time.

You are proving my point with this bigoted response so please no need to bother 'replying' to my comments. Thanks.

My response is from Chinese people. This is what the ones on the ground in China are saying.

Or are you one of those bigots that can't separate the government from the people? Calling out the CCP has zilch to do with bigotry. Taiwan, HK and Chinese-Americans and diaspora (hence why they got out) aren't the same people and don't endorse the actions of the CCP. Calling out the jailing of journalists, arresting of doctors, and actions like currently rounding up black people in Guangzhou and putting them out in the street. Unless calling out racism by the government authorities is racist? It's as silly as saying calling out British government is calling out all white people, or bigotry towards the Scotish. China is 50+ ethnicities, besides the Han Chinese, so its a dumb argument to say China and race are equivalent, its a border and a government, that's it.

Chinese ex-pats know exactly what's going on there. They still have family there and see what's going on in Chinese social media and what's getting censored.

You can't scream racism and bigotry because someone criticizes a government, that's how we know you're a joke and likely a 50 center.

CCP does not understand that playing asymmetric games from business laws (booting Uber off of China for example), diplomacy and global influence, etc is damaging long term brand and goodwill.

In this pandemic, democratic nations are suffering more than authoritarian regimes purely by choice - complete Wuhan style measures are unacceptable say in Sweden. This asymmetry is going to give a short term boost to China. Long term, my opinion is that western democracies will realize what they’re against - all eggs in a single totalitarian basket - is a bad idea. Manufacturing and reliance on China will change.

It is already changing: https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/articles/2020-04-08/japan...

booting off Uber? Have you ever used Uber and its local competitor Didi in China? I've used both multiple times. The competition was just too much, both companies were losing money at a pace that's not sustainable. The Uber China business was acquired, and in return Uber received cash and stakes in Didi.

Oh come on, there is no denying that China subsidizes local businesses asymmetrically.

I've lived in China and have used Didi.

I don’t think you can claim definitively that that is why Uber lost. Uber lost in other markets too, like in Southeast Asia.

I don’t think anyone can win this argument with you since you can always claim that the Chinese government favors local companies, so therefore ____ lost.

But at least I can give some counterpoints: Tesla hasn’t lost in China.

If you look into the details you'll find out that in typical CCP fashion they were tipping the scales on Didi.

> It is already changing: https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/articles/2020-04-08/japan....

This is the same article as the OP.

that's the joke; ggp proves the point

>>In this pandemic, democratic nations are suffering more than authoritarian regimes purely by choice

This is no evidence of this either. You can't believe what authoritarian regimes publish. They also are willing to shoot on site if they want to positive-COVID people. There are estimates that the deathtoll under CCP for COVID is > 10x what's reported, and will probably go up.

do you have evidence for your claims?

i know people who live in china, including those who work in hospitals, and the situation handling there is night and day compared with that found in the u.s.

it's unbelievable the amount of biased, subjective anti-chinese propaganda found on hacker news. and most of it is by people who only repeat the propaganda found in u.s. media and/or have never even been to china. there are of course legitimate, serious problems there, but you won't find accurate portrayals of them here, and you will certainly see the same problems in the u.s. and west ignored.

asking for evidence for a comment that requests evidence themselves and then makes unfounded claims gets downvoted. and you see comments like this everywhere. meanwhile, the u.s. is literally failing on nearly every vector which is very scary.

> In this pandemic, democratic nations are suffering more than authoritarian regimes purely by choice

South Korea, Taiwan, New Zealand, Australia, Finland, Norway and Malaysia all look to have handled the crisis very well. India is as well - as far as their figures are to be believed. We'll also find out if Japan's handling of the crisis has been effective in the coming weeks.

I'm not really seeing a pattern in democracies handling this badly. Meanwhile while the Chinese figures probably aren't completely made up, it's also extremely doubtful how reliable they are.

Nations exist to protect it's citizens. So yeah, as they should, each country is prioritizing their own needs before exporting any surplus to other countries. The challenge is no one really has any idea how much of the supplies they actually need.

It's interesting to me that you find this surprising or view it as bad behavior.

States use serving a “nation” as a retroactive justification for doing what they have always done.

In a global crisis, selfish actions help nobody.

Leaders face a rather difficult situation: the governments of nations exist to protect their own citizens. Were they to export supplies to others, citizens wouldn't be happy. Even were it to save twice as many citizens in a foreign nation as it would have saved in the exporting one. Would you be happy with a national government that placed the lives of foreigners above yours? Even if you would, most people wouldn't be.

This isn't limited to international relations, of course. The federal stockpiles of PPE are nearly depleted [0]. If the virus situation in America worsens, some states will be extremely pissed that the early states got a large chunk of the federal stockpiles, leaving none later on for them. Were the federal government to reserve supplies for states that were affected later, they would face anger from those that are peaking now.

> In a global crisis, selfish actions help nobody.

This is untrue. Keeping supplies does help some people, the ones with whom they are kept. It may hurt others, but it does help people.

I wonder if this is something like a prisoners' dilemma situation. A co-ordinated global response might be the best option, but it would require a sacrifice from each nation. Even if they might benefit in the end, in the days of non-stop media coverage, no government is willing to take the heat for making that sacrifice.

[0]: https://nypost.com/2020/04/09/federal-government-stockpile-o...

> In a global crisis, selfish actions help nobody.

Officials are elected to serve the need of their own constituants first and foremost, not foreign interests. There is nothing selfish about that. The American government doesn't have to consult with Canada or Mexico before taking a decision in times of crisis. This is the very core idea behind a representative democracy.

Where politicians failed is with their lack of foresight when it comes to stocking masks and ventilators, they didn't fail because they were "selfish" toward other nations.

> It's interesting to me that you find this surprising or view it as bad behavior.

It's not surprising in the sense that it fits the definition of a "nation state".

It's surprising because one would think that in XXI century, people understood that global problems require global coordination; competition of selfish actors fails spectacularly in such cases.

I think that, in XXI century, we're realizing that the human race is not yet ready for globalization. Heck, we still can't even assimilate into respective cultures properly. People emigrate from places with problems, then insist the place they immigrated to should be like the place they emigrated from.

As much as it pains me, I think you might be right. Perhaps we're not ready yet.

Then again, who's ready the first time they do something? This pandemic has made obvious a lot of places where our attempt at globalization doesn't work. I hope our societies will learn from it and do better next time.

Nah. Europe, most of the liberal world, are ready and recognize people add value.

How would it work if we got globalism "right"? What if instead of a virus, it was an asteroid which instantly destroyed all the factories in Country X, so there's no way for Country X to send supplies overseas even if they wanted to? If we want to be safe from events like that, we better not outsource any critical production to Country X. But if we don't outsource any critical production to any foreign countries, what's even left of globalism then?

I think doing globalism right would require everyone to mandate some amount of redundancies be left in the supply chains. Some amount of fat left uncut. All in order to derisk the economy in case a random piece of it gets shut down by force majeure.

I mean, imagine if all of AWS was just a single data centre labeled us-west-1. Imagine something happened to it. This is comparable to how Wuhan shutting down impacted the global supply chains.

(I lack a good web comparison for what happened afterwards - the EU, and recently the US, shutting down, hitting the global supply chains again, this time on the demand side.)

Since you mention web comparisons, imagine your lead dev announces that to improve redundancy, the project shall use both React and Angular for the same application. "This way, if one of the dependencies shuts down, we'll already be partly using the other dependency! What could possibly go wrong?"

This makes no sense, because the only reason React would suddenly fail on you is if your project is so very badly engineered that you don't pin dependencies and cache them locally. And even then, your deployed instances would remain unaffected.

A dependency is something you own (a checked-out copy of). A better comparison is with services. So you may be using a payment gateway in your product, and maybe you need just a single one - but at the very minimum, you should have a plan in place to switch to a different one at a moment's notice. That's reasonable redundancy.

I think I've come up with an analogy for demand-side supply chain issues though. Imagine you have a web service that's constantly under 90% load during normal operations, and that eats almost exactly as much money in the infrastructure costs as it earns. Imagine that service gets mentioned on Hacker News. It almost immediately fails due to increased demand, you can't provision new instances because you don't have enough money in the bank, and then when suddenly the demand drops, you can't afford to keep it on at all.

Only a series of very bad decision would cause the above scenario to happen, and yet it's almost exactly like how supply chains operate in physical space.

We could easily imagine that suddenly it is revealed that React contains some super-well-hidden malware that phones home to Facebook, and that's been built into React since early versions. As doubtful as that sounds, it's actually not unlike recent scares about China embedding secret transmitters deep inside of circuitboards, etc.

Again, you own your code dependencies[0]. A patch would be quickly released by software security experts, which every half-competent developer could apply to their product on their own. That's the benefit of ownership - you get to fix things. With software, you don't even need spare parts.

Depending on services is where the fragility starts. They're single points of failure, unless you have a plan to quickly switch to an equivalent competitor.

[0] - Unless they have a time-limited commercial license. Then they're essentially a service.

Doing globalism "right" requires that there are no borders at all, so it would be solved in exactly the same manner as if the factories and the supplies were in two different corners of Country X.

We are also not getting there anytime soon.

> People emigrate from places with problems, then insist the place they immigrated to should be like the place they emigrated from.

the majority of the time, the problems you speak of were caused by the big western powers in the first place

I think that comment was about Californians moving to other states.

Well that's kinda rich. California does a remarkably good job of integrating people from distant lands. Only thing that grates is people from other states coming here and demanding the government be as shitty and regressive as the one they left behind. Frankly that's something foreign immigrants typically don't do.

I think the thing is that people are /never/ ready for changes even if they actually prepare and waiting for to "be ready first" is to wait forever and get even less ready over time.

The reason that the flight attendants tell you to put on your own mask before helping others is so you CAN help others, otherwise everybody dies.

Wether it cleanly fits into your political ideology or not, The United States is the most powerful country in the world, and in the coming years as less powerful countries work to stamp this out, we are going to be doing a lot to help them.

As the US goes, so goes the world. The US restricting medical supply exports looks bad on the short term, but it will end up being a net benefit to the planet.

> Wether it cleanly fits into your political ideology or not, The United States is the most powerful country in the world

It's not a matter of my ideology. I recognize that the US was the most powerful country in the world before the pandemic, but looking at the news about the US response, I have a feeling it will no longer be once the coronavirus is finally dealt with. Then again, maybe I'm just biased by the disproportionate amount of headlines the US is taking in international media.

What are you seeing the suggests that the US is anything other than almost comically more powerful than any other country in the world?

In terms of military might, yes. In terms of economy? We'll see when the pandemic passes. The thing I see is US being too slow to react to COVID-19 threat and its economy being probably one of the most fragile (because of being most market-optimized).

If the US is not the most powerful country then who is? The US has the strongest economy and the strongest military. What other measure are you looking at? Even if you want to look at Europe as a single country then that would be debatable. UK just left and its looking like there is growing support for Spain and Poland to leave. It looks like the EU may be falling apart.

I think you need to look at individual US states vs the US as a whole. The federal government doesn't really have authority to do everything that other country's federal governments do. For example its generally accepted that the federal government cannot force every citizen to be in lockdown while the states can.

The US is extremely divided. Even in these times the political class and society could not get over their differences.

The lack of a social net and out of control capitalism are also massive issues.

The president was downplaying the virus.

The US doesn't look like the most powerful country in the world, nor as a leader.

Who looks like most powerful country then?

Well it's pretty obvious that China is vying for the position, and the likeliest to achieve it.

In the long term, perhaps. But US is still dominant today, and that will not suddenly change next year - the gap is just too great.

Besides, China would need to grow its power a lot to even be able to fit the same tier that US does today. And if they can't or don't want to, then the end result is likely a more decentralized world. Not every era is "Pax ..." - there are long gaps in between the fall of the old empire and the rise of a new one.

China has shitty positioning too. USA was positioned to be a beacon of freedom since it's founding. Meanwhile China is position as what... Authoritarian country that loves to slaughter it's citizens in various ways? That's not exactly a great idea to sell to the world. The only way China can get on top is by holding the rest of the world hostage. Either by military or commerce backed by military. But as all relationships built on fear, that'd be quite a fragile position.

China's positioning is rapid growth and "social harmony". I'm not saying that they actually deliver on this, but that's how it's being sold.

That's their selling point for country managers and boy do they deliver. But it's not that interesting for the general population. Very few people want rapid growth and "social harmony" by themselves.

You'd be surprised, actually. This is more true in third world countries, and other areas that have experienced instability relatively recently (e.g. ex-USSR countries, including Russia) - at some point people start demanding a "strong hand" and whatnot.

Fun thing is, I am from ex-USSR country.

People still remember Soviet-style "social harmony" and there's a big allergy for that path.

Rapid growth is not exactly popular too for multiple reasons.

Growth-over-ecology brings bad memories from soviet era

Growth-over-labour-rights brings bad memories from 90s and somewhat soviet era

Rapid change itself brings bad memories from 90s and 00s too

Trying to become one doesn't make you one. China is a long long long way to go.

OP was claiming "The US doesn't look like the most powerful country in the world, nor as a leader.". If US doesn't count for him.. I'd say China is 3rd world country compared to US.

Coordination (or cooperation) only works up to a point. If resources are truly scarce, then being selfish may be the only way to survive no matter what century you’re in.

If resources are truly scarce, then competition means most players won't survive - whatever resources they manage to hoard for themselves won't be enough for their needs. Cooperation means more will be saved.

(A simple thought experiment: imagine there are 10 equally capable competitors, each needing 2 units of resources to survive, and there are only 10 available globally. Under cooperation, 5 competitors will need to be sacrificed, but 5 will live. Under competition, all 10 will perish, each holding their hard-won single unit of resources.)

If you can figure out how to turn off the part of people’s brains that wants to avoid them being part of the 5 to be sacrificed, you will have created world peace.

Otherwise, this is what peaceful cooperation looks like (I’ll give you this in exchange for that, where obviously the one with more desireable goods or services to trade will survive).

>If you can figure out how to turn off the part of people’s brains that wants to avoid them being part of the 5 to be sacrificed, you will have created world peace.

Most cultures have very strong social mores that sanction against hoarding or even general unwillingness to share. It's not THAT beyond the pale. What makes it hard is when society becomes disconnected enough, and community bonds get weak enough that social mores no longer bind behavior.

Under competition, one or two will survive by killing off the rest.

And from the perspective of the victors, it will be a better result, because winning guaranteed survival, whereas cooperation is essentially a lottery. So anybody who has a better chances to win a conflict than a lottery would choose conflict, if they are deciding solely on utilitarian rather than ethical grounds.

> It's surprising because one would think that in XXI century, people understood that global problems require global coordination; competition of selfish actors fails spectacularly in such cases.

More globalists isn't going to solve globalism.

American politicians answer to their constituants, not the China or India. If it looks like policitians didn't first and foremost prioritize the need of their own citizens who elected them then it's treason.

> competition of selfish actors fails spectacularly in such cases.

The irony, it's the very definition of economic liberalism and what led to the current paradigm, globalism. The pandemic is only global because trade is global and people can easily travel between countries.

So no the solution isn't "a world government", the solution is to take back western industrial force from China.

Today, This is just the bill coming due, this is the real cost of the last 40 years of western industrial policies.

> The irony, it's the very definition of economic liberalism and what led to the current paradigm, globalism.

It doesn't mean it's the only path to a global economy.

> The pandemic is only global because trade is global and people can easily travel between countries.

The pandemic wouldn't be anywhere near as severe if there was a coordinated global response.

> the solution is to take back western industrial force from China

For that, you'll have to shut down economic liberalism, because otherwise the forces that caused the move of western industrial force into China will still be present, and will cause it again once the public forgets about the pandemic (i.e. in a year), and beancounters everywhere will be free to optimize the corporate balance sheets once again.

Except in this case the only countries that got out unscathed took unilateral action rather than listening to the recommendations of the corrupt multi national organizations that are supposedly trying to protect global public health.

In a way. WHO was way too cautious and severely underplayed the issue in January and February, but even then, the small recommendations they did make were completely ignored by the entire Western world.

> In a way

In a way? Taiwan has less than 350 cases. They didn't wait for the WHO recommendation. Hundreds of thousands of people are going to die because of greed and bureaucratic incompetence.

Giant centralized institutions are not the solution to humanities' ills and dealing and cooperating with corrupt foreign powers isn't either.

Lots of writing in international relations circles right now about how the slapshod global response to this crisis, in contrast to previous pandemics like ebola and H1N1, is evidence that the era of US hegemony is over. Without a hegemonic entity putting its imprimatur on what the "right way" to do things is, everything ends up being kind of a mess.

I guess we can look forward to Chinese hegemony in the future, since the US doesn't want to do it any more.

Maybe. But there's a lot of doubt as to whether China is cut out to exercise broad hegemonic influence the way the US has. They might not have the cultural cachet or a compelling enough ideological framework for international cooperation the way America's Wilsonian institutionalism was. It's more likely we're heading for a more chaotic and unstable multi-polar world.

Why then have nations?

Nations were useful, particularly when almost all problems were local problems. Doesn't mean it's an ideal top-level organization for XXI century.

You have bodies like Germany or the US, which function as a federation of states. Looking at Germany and EU, you essentially have states within a state within a sort-of state. You can stack governments recursively, so it's possible and in some ways desirable to have a single one at the top level.

There are places where even posing this question - at least if it clearly applies to the corresponding nation - is extremist speech. Nations, like all other corporations, are like organisms themselves. They might still act beneficial to their population, but never at the cost of their own survival.

> 2) China trying to use soft power, but the whole drama feels fake. It is good that they are sending supplies (often faulty and not up to the quality, see dutch story around this) but it doesn't feel genuine.

Allow me to disagree with this one. I see people questioning China's motives on helping other countries, but in my opinion this is a baseless and overly cynical view of things, not truth. People want to buy into the "China has motives" story so much, that they jump on every incident that may imply that.

The Dutch situation is typical. FYI: I am Dutch. Research has shown that mistakes were made on the Dutch side: because of haste and pressure (because supplies are low), and because the buyers didn't fully understand Chinese mask standards, they ordered the wrong thing. China did not intentionally send bad masks, nor was it a manufacturing quality problem.

The CCP don't have a great track record of giving a shit about people at home. What makes you think they care for anything but the opportunity/ability to project more power abroad?

I will also have to disagree on that one. I was born in China, I now live in Europe, and "CCP doesn't give a shit about people" is a bad western stereotype.

Of course, define "caring". Does any other government, including democratic ones, truly care about people? Debatable. But what I'm saying is that CCP is not the mass-murdering villain that Hacker News makes it out to be.

What about censorship, etc? Yes bad things do happen. Lots of good things also happen. Just like all countries, nothing is perfect. I don't need to remind you of all the human rights violations by the US. The point is: you need to have a more nuanced understanding of the CCP than that of a cartoon villain.

Here are some facts: all coronavirus patients got free treatment, free stays in isolation hotels, all Wuhan residents got free food delivered to their homes. In contrast to what happened here in Europe, the CCP took a strong stance to save as many of their own citizen as they can instead of worrying about economic impact.

You may not believe me. But take a look at these:

"I'm sitting home in Wuhan and eating free vegetables and fish govt sent me and you tell me it hurts my human rights???" -- https://twitter.com/ClaireRChen/status/1241971786062770176?s...

New Wuhan Doctor Speaks Out From Ground Zero -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyUHz62Uan8

American and Canadian, living & studying in China, talk about how it is actually like there -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufxfSJgQuSI

> I was born in China

Did you earn your red scarf?

Yes I did. Not even kidding. You get it when you generally behave like a good student at school. Maybe you associate it with something else (probably Mao mass murdering or w/e) but most Chinese see it as a pretty normal school thing.

I am quite surprised to see those stereotypes on hacker news . Looking at all the accounts with names like systemxxx and throwawayxxx, I feel conspiracy theory is no joke

Unfortunately, this kind of thing makes it on to HN. That's inevitable when a forum has millions of users, anonymity is ok, and the topic is divisive. We do what we can to try to convince people to follow the rules (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), and we ban accounts that violate them repeatedly.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Slurs like this will get you banned here. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22827309 also.

People have been hounded off this site because of their national origin. I'm sure you'll agree that that's utterly shameful. Unfortunately it's what we end up with when people allow baser instincts to drive their posts.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> "I'm sitting home in Wuhan and eating free vegetables and fish govt sent me and you tell me it hurts my human rights???"

Delivered via rubbish trucks.

https://mothership.sg/2020/03/garbage-trucks-wuhan/

> American and Canadian, living & studying in china, talk about how it is actually like there

Actual videos from china

https://archive.nothingburger.today/Videos/

Agree but not the good hero you make them out to be either. Does any other nation have Muslim concentration camps. Invasive tracking? And extreme sensorships measures?

I didn't claim they are heroes. I explicitly said that bad things do happen. I just want to stress that that doesn't negate the fact that good things also happen, and that all countries have good and bad things. Pointing out bad things is one thing; stereotyping and overly focusing only on the bad things is another.

As for Muslim camps: forced reeducation and deradicalization, yes; concentration/killing/genocide: no. Try these:

Daniel Dumbrill (Canadian living in China) on Uygurs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6grvHceQsQ

Kim Iversen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ff4YZBi4UTc

CGTN discussion on Xinjiang situation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2yMjbB1q24 (disclaimer: yes this is Chinese state media, believe whatever you want, but I think it's still worth it to have heard this viewpoint)

And then there is also the fact that tens of Muslim countries officially approved of the Xinjiang situation. That's a bit odd, isn't it?

Now let me be clear: I am not claiming it's all roses and sunshine over there. It isn't, there are real problems, and people are indeed forced into things (though not killed), which is not good. But this is a more complex, nuanced situation than "China doesn't like Muslims so they kill them all".

> "China doesn't like Muslims so they kill them all".

You should know that it's the han way or death for the CCP. I don't understand the point of to your posts. Whataboutism is a poor excuse.

The point is to provide a more balanced and fair view of things. Accusations of whataboutism is disingenuous, especially because I didn't even engage in it: I talked about China only. If anything, the parent I replied to is the one that talked about other nations.

And there you go with the "or death" thing. Forced reeducation and detention, yes. But where is the proof that systematic killing is happening? All the proof of the latter I've seen so far come from US government or US-funded sources with poor research methodology (see for example https://thegrayzone.com/2020/03/26/forced-labor-china-us-nat...).

And what do you say about the fact that a dozen of Muslim nations officially approve of China's conduct in Xinjiang?

>I don't need to remind you of all the human rights violations by the US.

Whataboutism

>And what do you say about the fact that a dozen of Muslim nations officially approve of China's conduct in Xinjiang?

That's completely irrelevant. Do the people being repressed approve because that's all that matters. And for the record they do not approve of their families being raped and basically held captive by CCP employees despite BS CCP propaganda to the contrary.

Whataboutism is dropping a dead cat on the table in order to steer the conversation towards that cat. I did not steer the conversation to the US, I stayed on the topic of China, therefore it is by definition not whataboutism.

You seem to say that whataboutism is anything that mentions similar crimes committed by another party, implying that the actions of others are completely irrelevant. No. My criticism is not "China does no bad things". It is "China is not represented in a balanced manner and is not held to the same standards as other countries". Since the discussion is about standards, context absolutely matters.

> That's completely irrelevant. Do the people being repressed approve because that's all that matters [...] their families being raped

There you go with the "families being raped" thing. My point with the aprovals of Muslim countries is: maybe those allegations of rape are false?

Like I said: forced reeducation and deradicalization, yes. Rape/killing/concentration/genocide, no. The Gray Zone articles show that claims of the latter rest on shaky sources that are either circular, or funded by US interests and agendas.

We can debate whether forced reeducation and deradicalization is appropriate. But genocide/rape/murder/etc is false.

It is not that they are a good hero. It is that they are a system, not an evil cartoonish villain as a few in the west seems to think.

You could argue that Guantanamo Bay is a Muslim concentration camp, and that the rendition program was (likely is) the most organised torture program since the Nazis.

You could further argue that the overreaching mass surveillance outed by Snowden is invasive tracking.

In a way, you could also argue that all the boogeyman-style news in the west is a form of censorship too - it keeps the masses focused on their hatred of communists, Russians, Chinese, Islam (or whoever), so they don't focus so much on real issues at home.

And all this is just in direct response to your comment - it doesn't even touch on racism (very much alive in the US in particular), wars started on false pretenses and/or for profit, the CIA being able to lie to congress, refusing to not use cluster munitions, etc.

I think sometimes we're so focused on the perceived evils of other nations, that we lose sight of the highly dubious things are own nations are involved in. Perhaps that's the point...

Part of the issue is that we tend to see things that are far away more clearly. It is that much harder to see things clearly up close. Outsider sees most of the game kind of deal. For the record, I am not defending Guantanamo Bay, but even simple things like discussing prison system in US is complicated with anyone, who was born here, because, and it is probably the worst human trait, it has always been this way.

> Does any other nation have Muslim concentration camps

India, according to John Oliver.

Of course, bring up India should not normalize the severity of locking people up in camps in China. This is the point: asking for examples of worse behavior is a moot point because camps are bad even if every nation in the world does it. At the same time, camps in China is not necessarily suitable context in all facets of discussion.

When it comes to topics (like whether supplying masks from China makes it a good actor) with too much subjective variables, I personally like to think about issues as independently as possible. Using this logic, PPE from China, whether purchased or donated, is an act of appreciable good gesture; regardless, hard condemnation is a must regarding their abuses.

> Does any other nation have Muslim concentration camps

Burma / Myanmar.

EDIT:

https://news.un.org/en/focus/rohingya-refugee-crisis

> I have no doubt that the Rohingya people have always been one of, if not the, most discriminated people in the world, without any recognition of the most basic rights starting by the recognition of the right of citizenship by their own country – Myanmar.

> Secretary-General António Guterres in press remarks on his visit to Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh – 02 July 2018

https://www.un.org/sg/sites/www.un.org.sg/files/atoms/files/...

> [...] This led to the destruction of villages, numerous dead and wounded, and the internal displacement of up to 140,000 people, mostly confined to IDP camps, which persist to the present (and under the most deplorable conditions). [...]

The CCP are an ideological cult who will stop at nothing until everyone conforms to their ideology. Yes they have created a system, a cold techno-dystopian system that is my worst nightmare. Just because Hitler also built autobahns doesn't mean he was a good guy or his systems were OK.

Considering this is an English site, most of the participants here are probably from the Anglosphere which, being led by the US, would tend to mistrust China. It's interesting how you mention that as Dutch and European, you don't have the same level of mistrust. Without a measure of how China is viewed, not just in the Anglosphere, but in Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, South Asia, the Islamic world, Central Asia, and other cultural and linguistic spheres that a typical native English speaker wouldn't be able to communicate with, it's really hard to tell how effective China's soft power moves are.

The soft power only works on those that haven’t been exposed to it long enough. If you’ve dealt with China for a while, you know the real deal.

Want to give which geographical region you're from so I can put it down as an anecdotal datapoint?

Lived in China. Also lots of African friends who don’t appreciate how the Chinese do business in their country.

How do they do business?

Are those Chinese representing private companies, or state companies?

Care to give yours?

Canada, currently working in the States.

Sorry posted in response to wrong comment and so not direct response to the comment replied to, more the thread above and editing this in as unable to delete and redo, sorry my bad.

When outsourcing of production and labour suits, it's ignored for the underlying issues, when those underlying issue come to the surface, the same people who shifted for a shareholder appeasement dividend are just as quick to point the finger in every direction apart form themselves.

That in many forms is how things have played out in resource supply chains, this with margin nibbling away and with that a shift from local sourcing todwards, saving some money short-term are only a disaster away from being seen. Alas even those disasters need to be blatant enough to get noticed and the response and excess transportation of products and true impact/cost upon the environment as bit by bit, gets slower in acknowledgement.

But easy to reduce everything as tribal politics when convenient and carry on paying lip service and then wonder why we are in the state we are in. Of course it is akin to claiming everything is down to aliens and when you look at it like that, it's crazy and ignores the real issue of accountable and responsible buying and selling, something that is hard to account and balance upon the company books and with that, the drive for profit being the goal, bad things happen and until the system truly accounts for such things and the impact - the same mistakes will carry on transpiring and the people blamed for crimes they did not commit and those that commit true crimes are allowed to carry on as the law and rules are so slow in catching up that by the time they do, the problems have shifted.

Maybe why tax havens and the like are still a thing as are many other forms of unfairness that play out in the world today.

But we do live in a society that is more geared towards reactive handling of issues over proactive handling.

You posted on the wrong comment mate

I did, sorry, my bad thank you for pointing out i'll fix that mess. ok added edit at start, can't delete now so fixed that context drift.

I don't think this has got anything to do with China's soft power. The Dutch generally look at things in a calm and less emotionally-loaded manner, at least compared to the Americans. There is still a slight slant towards mistrust but it's nowhere near how it is in America.

I see the US social media villanizing China for the most insane things that can be easily disproven. The Dutch at least make an attempt at being objective.

It's a matter of stakes. The Netherlands has no power and very few responsibilities globally. It's often easy to be objective about topics when your stakes are low and distant.

How's that supposed Dutch calm looking when it comes to Italy and fiscal matters these days? I've been following that closely, they've been anything but calm, rational, objective. They're being emotional and subjective, making poor decisions, because it's a very personal subject that is nearby.

The US directly leads the entire military power base of the Western nations, as represented by NATO. And it is the sole backbone to that system. The French and Germans barely have militaries that can project outside of their own borders at this point, and the British are not far behind. China is going the opposite direction, they're a rapidly expanding superpower that is about to project militarily to nearly every corner of the globe, with obvious consequences.

The Netherlands isn't militarily facing off against China in Asia. The US is, every day - and at the eager welcome of numerous nations including Vietnam, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan. The US is the only nation that has directly confronted China and slowed down their annexing of the South China Sea. It won't be the Netherlands that has to make a decision about going to war with China when or if China invades Taiwan to annex them. The Netherlands will barely so much as lift a finger to help; first, they can't do anything because they're weak compared to China; and second they have little real stake in the matter. The US has dozens of allies it is militarily responsible to, countries that count on the US to shield them; the Netherlands has no comparable situation.

The Netherlands has little at stake in the China matter, compared to the US. They're a small trader nation at this point, shielded by larger nations in numerous ways.

So yeah, having dramatically more at stake in every possible way, the US is more charged about the topic than the ... calm and rational Dutch (about a topic they have very little stake in) that don't have to militarily confront China every day.

What you say may have some truth in it. However, does having a stake mean that it is okay to act overly emotional and occasionally throwing out rational analysis?

I also disagree on one thing here: the claim that China is projecting power to the rest of the world, that is trying to conquer the world or becoming an American style militaristic empire. In my opinion this is pure projection (in the psychological sense). China wants to defend themselves from a US invasion or blockade. They are not interested in controlling or occupying other countries, they just want to be able to do business.

What about South China Sea you may ask? They do it in order to deny the US from using that area to blockade them, not to conquer other countries or deny other countries from normal usage. See https://www.quora.com/Why-does-China-want-to-control-almost-...

Note, I am not saying whether this is a good or a just thing. But it certainly is different from how most westerners understand it.

The topic is not Captain America saving the world again, it's Chinese medical supplies to Holland. That seems like something the Dutch have far more stake in than Americans.

And a country that has dramatically more at stake by permanently looking for fights all around the world should probably be more rational and calm than one that isn't.

>The French and Germans barely have militaries that can project outside of their own borders at this point

Pardon ? The French military is the one that projects the most in Europe.

> “ but in my opinion this is a baseless and overly cynical view of things, not truth.”

It’s neither baseless or overly cynical if you’ve ever lived in China or have just spent enough time observing the CCP’s actions.

I was born in China. I have family there. My wife is Chinese. I disagree.

> they ordered the wrong thing. China did not intentionally send bad masks, nor was it a manufacturing quality problem.

That doesn't align with what's being reported (by other countries as well):

> "Thousands of testing kits and medical masks are below standard or defective, according to authorities in Spain, Turkey and the Netherlands."

> "Dutch officials said that the masks did not fit and that their filters did not work as intended, even though they had a quality certificate,"

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-52092395

That's what they initially said, before the research happened. That caused China to be upset. After the research it turns out to be an order problem on the Dutch side after all.

My sources: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22825391

Anytime the CCP does something bad it's some systemic issue with insane conspiratorial motivation that every citizen is complacent in. Anytime the US does something bad it's 'realpolitik', or 'just a bad government, not everyone believes that'.

If you enumerate all the domestic human rights abuses of the US it doesn't look much better. Internationally, it's much worse. Hell, the US barely has 'democracy'. The chance of your vote _actually_ counting is small, and the two parties are barely better than a strict illusion of choice.

It's nothing more than another red scare. And before people jump down my throat... I don't think the CCP is _good_ either, I would dissolve both governments if it was up to me.

The amount of anti China sentiment in the US media is hyperbolic, that it is not possible to trust most US based media houses reports in this topic.

This topic has become too politicised by people and organisations with hawkish motives that sane discussion on this has become impossible.

As it should be. A nation's government should ABSOLUTELY put its citizens over everything else. Not sure what you would have them do instead?

What is happening is unfair to some, but the individual governments are doing exactly what they should be doing, valuing their people above all else.

That's true, but at the same time, it shows the need for a global government to coordinate responses to global problems like this pandemic.

Unless that global government is dominated by Chinese communist government ideology or shows the same judgement as the WHO. Thanks but no thanks. At least with nation states you have some checks and balances. It's also way too much concentrated power for my liking.

> Unless that global government is dominated by Chinese communist government ideology or shows the same judgement as the WHO.

Or like the federal government of the United States. I think we've been having pretty bad luck this year with large and influential organizations, which is a fair counterpoint to a global government proposal.

A global government would have led to a more uniform response, but arguably that's exactly what we don't want in a crisis like this.

Each nation was able to react differently, and those different responses have provided us the closest thing we have to controlled experiments. Those experiments have allowed us to understand the spread of this disease better.

The global response is pretty uniform (almost every country following the same strategy). But it was too slow, and too uncoordinated in the sense that different countries enacted their protective measures at different times, with little to no warning to others, resulting in unnecessarily severe disruptions of the supply chain.

We're all following the same strategy now because of the countries that didn't follow that strategy taught the rest of us what not to do.

Imagine if a world government had responded the way China did. That is, lie about the problem until it gets too big then forcibly lock people into their homes. What reason do we have to think that a world government would do anything different?

> then forcibly lock people into their homes

Turns out, that's the right thing to do. Now almost everyone is doing it to some extent.

Also: after China stopped pretending there's no problem and locked down Wuhan, it immediately coordinated the rest of the country to support the virus control efforts in Hubei. The western equivalent of that would be if the UN ordered isolation of Italy, and then ordered the rest of the EU, the UK and the US to ship food, personnel and PPEs to Italy, all in the space of days.

But UN doesn't have that power, EU doesn't have that power either, so here we are.

>> then forcibly lock people into their homes

> Turns out, that's the right thing to do. Now almost everyone is doing it to some extent.

When I say "forcibly locking people in" I mean welding the doors shut[0]. Last I checked that's not something the rest of us are doing.

> Also: after China stopped pretending there's no problem and locked down Wuhan, it immediately coordinated the rest of the country to support the virus control efforts in Hubei.

Which if they hadn't pretended in the first place, would not have been necessary. So why did they pretend, and why did they stop?

My guess is that the deceit was somehow connected to protecting the Chinese government's legitimacy, and that only once news of the outbreak spread and deceit was untenable did they own up to it.

A world government has every incentive to suppress any information that may challenge it's legitimacy, and no external entities capable of publicizing the truth.

[0] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/04/01/coronav...

A global government could very well have planned this diversity. Just like hospitals organize different test groups.

Could have does not imply would have.

Neither the difficulty of planning at that scale, nor the failure modes of a centralized government entity, should be underestimated.

Have morals that aren't a function of geographic location, presumably.

Isn’t it clearly immoral to sacrifice the interests of the people who elected you to support another nation?

Maybe, in the sense that it could be politically destabilizing or something like that.

The morality argument here considers countries (defined as government + population) as actors, rather than governments. So the question is rather whether it's immoral for the people who elect a government to demand that it represents solely their interests to the point of sacrificing other people.

That’s not what is happening if it is a tragedy of the commons.

If you only have limited supplies its immoral to help somebody geographically closer than you than somebody further away?

Ceteris paribus I don't think many people would find that immoral, no.

Some things are a zero sum game, some aren't. Vaccine IP is absolutely in the latter class. You want everyone in every country to be vaccinated, and you absolutely don't want to be poisoning and derailing this universal goal by talk of putting up national barriers around vaccine IP.

Some countries behave even more strangely. India barred entry of its own citizens into India. One KLM flight was turned back from Delhi because it had Indian citizens on board.

The flight was allowed to land 2 days later. The earlier decision was taken in mistake.

Does this attitude almost guarantee we don't reach a global optimum? I mean I get the rationale to protect your own citizens or your own tribe of any sort like family. But in the degenerate case when no one cooperates on anything seems like you have a strong likelihood of everyone losing. If you don't help me then I won't help you, and neither of us gets what we need.

> There are some good stories too, especially the sacrifice of the healthcare workers

What is good about that? They are terrified to come to work.

This heroism stuff is just bullshit so we can shame people who refuse to die.

After crisis is over, there will be no financial compensation (overtimes, hazardous environment, no protective equipment).

> This heroism stuff is just bullshit so we can shame people who refuse to die.

Every medical worker who goes into the fray to help save people in this pandemic deserves the highest praise. Every medical worker who doesn't on the grounds that it's extremely unsafe deserves understanding - after all, as the EMS mantra goes, the safety of the rescuer takes priority over the rescue; a sick or dead medical practitioner can't help anyone anymore.

Every hospital administrator and every politician who did anything but their absolute best to help ensure a safe working environment for medical workers, and every private company that continued to fleece healthcare, deserve to be called out, shunned and stripped of their possessions. I have doctors in my family, and I worry about their lives every day. Talking with them, I wouldn't blame my Poland's medical staff if they all decided to just pack up and leave. It's an absolute tragedy that medical personnel has to fight an uphill battle just to have a chance of not dying, trying to save people from COVID-19. As much as I can believe the news, it's the same in most of Europe and in the US.

I hope that after the dust settles, there will be a reckoning. That people will finally demand that their governments unbreak their healthcare.

> after all, as the EMS mantra goes, the safety of the rescuer takes priority over the rescue

Years back when I was trained as a lifeguard, this point was repeatedly emphasized. The first thing you do when you see somebody who needs help is to review the situation for any environmental hazard that could harm you too. It makes no sense to run up to somebody laying on the ground only to slip on the same puddle and crack your skull too. That would only make the situation worse.

Certified first responder here. It was drilled into our training that our safety comes first.

Imagine you rush to help someone and get hurt. Now, you can't help that person AND now there are 2 people that need aid instead of 1. So that 1 ambulance you called out is no longer sufficient.

I agree with most of what you wrote here, but I wish people would stop listing “praise” as the primary thing that healthcare workers deserve. Why not say they deserve money?

Fair, and I absolutely agree with that.

Unfortunately, it would have to be mandated by fiat for it to happen, because market economy tends to reward people in proportion to the inverse of the value they provide to the society at large.

Market economy rewards people in proportion to what costs to replace them, so unskilled jobs get rewarded less. There is no chance in hell writing a crud app delivers more value to society than saving one single life.

> Market economy rewards people in proportion to what costs to replace them

Mostly true. I'd say true, if by "replace" you mean "replace with someone equally capable of earning business the same amount of money". In this sense, top celebrities get absurdly high payouts because they cannot be easily substituted by someone who can bring in equivalent fanbase (=money).

> so unskilled jobs get rewarded less

Not necessarily. A CRUD app often pays more than medicine, but then again sometimes plumbing or construction work pays more than either.

> There is no chance in hell writing a crud app delivers more value to society than saving one single life.

Depends on an app. A one that helps move medicine around more efficiently, or reduce pollution in a city, effectively saves lives. But I've noticed that building such apps tends to be low on the pay scale. What pays best in this industry is usually something that's a net negative to society, like adtech or gambling.

They already get paid, getting paid should really go without saying.

Of course maybe they should be paid more. I don't really know how much they get paid and how much more they should get paid. I've heard the industry is abusive in some ways, but from what I've heard most of the abuse seems like institutionalized hazing; particularly the sleep deprivation stuff. In those respects, I think it's probably on that industry to clean up their own act. The AMA is a professional association for doctors, by doctors. It seems to me they should be able to do something about the abuse.

It is a good story as in if they didn't do what they are doing today - say every healthcare worker quits tomorrow, we are in a huge trouble.

They are identical to soldiers. Some healthcare workers are being exposed to Coronavirus and dying.

In fact, we should have similar veteran-like benefits for healthcare workers for their sacrifice during this time. Same with delivery workers - they are the logistics arm of this war.

I am curious what will be considered not fake and genuine support? Damned if they and damned if they don’t. AFAIK Dutch issued a article clarify the mistake they made which nobody seems to care. I don’t think any single nation can or will survive this alone unless they want to serve all connections to the world. So why it is not in China best interests to offer genuine support when they can? Not like a short sighted prick?

> So why it is not in China best interests to offer genuine support when they can?

It's definitely in their interest, because in terms of realpolitik, this is their golden opportunity one-up the US on the world stage, possibly even making Europe more aligned with them than with the States.

Turns out everyone is just flailing and drunk on the dance floor, geopolitically.

I just hope they stay away from their respective red button consoles.

All democratic nations should get together and invest in manufacturing. If democracy falls, the treaty would asymetrically punish those that give up rights and freedom of their people.

There are a ton of sources here:

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/china-floods-europe-d...

China is trying the same thing that US did for many decades after WWII - to rally up global support through humanitarian aid: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_foreign_aid

The problem is that the whole thing feels fake for 2 reasons (this is my personal opinion):

1) They are an authoritarian state using soft power for a democratic nation (Italy, Netherlands) - there is a real conflict of interest.

2) It is "pull" rather than "push" when it comes to soft power. You cannot muscle your way through it. As a superpower, you need to influence other nations such that those nations "want" to collaborate and be influenced - leading by example, helping them gain foothold after the catastrophy, long term investments in shared interests, etc. You can't buy your way into it.

IMO - China has a branding and goodwill problem :-). You're seeing that in HK. People outside of this propaganda sphere have no trust in the CCP.

Those sources are not being honest. Yes countries initially claimed that kits and masks were defective. But later researches showed that countries made wrong orders because of haste, not understanding Chinese standards, etc. I already said elsewhere that the Dutch ordered wrong masks. In case of the Spanish: they ordered kits for testing whether a recovered patient had the virus, not for testing whether one is infected.

Those sources are not being honest because they still present the initial claims as the final truth. No word about later research results that invalidate those claims.

China has now put in stricter export regulations in order to ensure that quality is as expected. But not much mention of that in mainstream western media either.

As for pull rather than push: did the Chinese force aid on countries? No: countries accepted and allowed aid on their own will. In my opinion, this "pull vs push" perception is based on prejudice that China must be pushing something, rather than what is actually happening.

Sources: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22825391

Sources please ( I am Dutch and I am surprised about your claims ).

Let op! Niet elk mondmasker geeft voldoende bescherming tegen corona! -- Explains the different Chinese standards -- https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/let-op-niet-elk-mondmasker-ge...

Trouw -- "Als gevolg van de tekorten zijn de criteria voor het gebruik van de mondmaskers verlaagd" (because of the shortages, they lowered the standards for masks, making it easier to purchase the wrong thing) -- https://www.trouw.nl/politiek/ministerie-van-volksgezondheid...

An analysis of the Chinese standards: https://twitter.com/Gpzy4/status/1244437584815828993?s=20 and https://www.igj.nl/actueel/nieuws/2020/03/23/mondmaskers-uit...

Chinese side of the investigation (believe what you will): https://twitter.com/PRCAmbNL/status/1245739420969570304?s=20

China has now introduced export regulations to prevent these incidents from happening again: https://twitter.com/ZichenWanghere/status/124513282016031539...

So you have no source for the claim that 'The Dutch made an ordering mistake'.

I won't read LinkedIn btw, that is not a source.

Why do you not find those sources convincing? Yeah nobody is explicitly making the statement "sorry, I messed up" but if I put the facts together then that's still what happened, in my opinion.

I think you dismiss LinkedIn way too quickly. Hedda Sasburg is a business development consultant specialized in trade with China. I think this counts as expertise w.r.t. what Chinese different products and standards are. Why do you dismiss it so easily?

And okay, how about this then: https://nos.nl/artikel/2329316-afgekeurde-mondkapjes-waren-w...

From the article:

> Maar "de Chinese kwaliteitsstandaard KN95 van de mondmaskers is een medische code", zegt een woordvoerder van de IGJ.

> But "the Chinese standard KN95 means that it's for medical use", said the Dutch ministery of health.

Hedda Sasburg (and not sure why the article doesn't point this out):

> Ik lees dat het KN95 [aka GB2626] mondmaskers zijn; maskers die in China niet zijn bestemd voor medisch gebruik in ziekenhuizen.

> KN95 masks [aka GB2626] are not for medical use.

Note: the Chinese KN95 is not equivalent to the American N95.

Also from the article:

> "De producten stonden beschreven als 'niet-medische maskers' in de douanepapieren"

> The customs paper said that these are non-medical masks.

Even if you don't believe Hedda Sasburg and the Chinese statements, the customs paper seems pretty definitive to me.

The only loose end I still see is why IGJ ruled KN95 to be equivalent to the European EN-149:2001+A1:2009 when even the Chinese don't use them for medical purposes.

Anyway, the issue is now solved. China now sent masks that the Dutch do approve of: https://twitter.com/mjrijn/status/1246154161152045056

The issue with faulty PPE is that demand has surged and tons of Chinese factories are trying to retool to meet that demand.

At the same time, international demand for other types of goods is dropping off a cliff, so Chinese factories have an even greater incentive to retool and produce PPE. With so many inexperienced manufacturers and such a rush to get to market, quality suffers.

There are also all sorts of unscrupulous middlemen and faudsters who are taking advantage of the crisis to sell non-existent, mislabeled or shoddy supplies. Buyers are desperate to obtain PPE quickly, and are willing to spend enormous amounts to get it, so it's a seller's market and fraud is easy. There's an interesting account of the current situation here: [1].

Allowing foreigners to get defrauded is bad for China's brand, so the government recently (in the last few days) issued new regulations on exports of medical equipment.[2] The regulations should improve quality, but will also make it more difficult to obtain PPE from China. Pick your poison: more PPE with poor quality control, or less PPE with better quality control.

1. https://www.chinalawblog.com/2020/03/buying-face-masks-and-o...

2. https://www.chinalawblog.com/2020/04/buying-face-masks-and-o...

> The regulations should improve quality, but will also make it more difficult to obtain PPE from China.

This is actually a great idea! We should all be finally supporting this.

People have been complaining for the past 20 years of poor quality from China made goods. But, what do they expect?

They want to buy a $1 USD dollar item, and expect it to be as good quality as a $10 USD dollar item.

What kind of moron failed at basic math, that they can't understand this?

By having all China made goods be labeled as: "Made in China", then you mix the crap with the spectacular. It tarnishes the national brand. There needs to be more distinction.

The China government, should now create 2 or 3 classes.

1) High Quality Products, certified by the China Government

2) International Products, certified by foreign companies

3) Low Quality Products, not certified by anyone, so buy it at your own damn risk, and don't blame China for it

This can actually help shift poor products to other countries. Then, the new "Made in OtherCountry" products, can be known as the crap products. Or, every country should probably do this, if they want to avoid being known as a low quality manufacturer.

One reason people don’t trust China’s aid is that the shortage is caused by China.

They bought up the worlds supply of PPE (over 2 billion masks) and nationalized factories owned by foreign companies (such as 3m) so their masks produced stay internal.

It’s almost as if I cornered the food market and then when people were starving I start selling them food but disguising it as a loving donation. People can see through that

Nonsense.

Here [1] is a fine article of an all-American company in Texas that is too nervous to get back into the business of making masks since they lost a ton of money and had to lay off over 100 staff when demand vanished after the last SARS panic.

They still have the equipment and know-how. They just don't trust the market.

Not a single Chinese government official involved in this sad saga.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/02/15/coronavir...

Just like with oil, any industry can be gamed if a single player accumulates a massive stockpile of a commodity, then floods the market to drive prices down and make production unprofitable for competitors.

Shhh, just join us, "China is bad" is all you had to say, don't waste your own time.

For instance this makes it fake:

"Unsurprisingly, Sweden has received no assistance from China. Instead, one of the country’s hospitals had to secure philanthropic funding to buy Chinese medical gear. Sweden happens to be China’s European bête noire, the result of its support for the imprisoned Hong Kong bookseller Gui Minhai, who became a Swedish citizen in the 1990s."

"Though an airplane would reach the desperate Spaniards (some 85,000 coronavirus infections, more than 7,000 deaths) much faster, Beijing made sure that the Chinese supplies currently heading for Spain would travel by train along the Belt and Road route, a journey that takes 17 days."

https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/03/30/russia-china-coronaviru....

"Some propaganda campaigns are more brazen still. According to recent analysis, 46% of tweets using the hashtag #forzaCinaeItalia, which translates as “come on China and Italy,” were generated by automated bots. For #grazieCina, meaning “Thanks China,” it was 37%. China’s Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Hua even posted a video on Twitter of Italians in Rome applauding health workers at noon from their balconies—but dubbed with the Chinese national anthem and claiming, spuriously, they were chanting “Grazie, Cina!”"

https://time.com/5814940/china-mask-diplomacy-falters/

Given that China seems to force countries to pay for PPE the same countries previously donated to China, you're right for being skeptical.

https://abc14news.com/2020/04/06/china-forces-italy-to-buy-s...

I would find this report more reliable if it quotes Italian officials, not Trump administration said this, Pence said that. Basing an entire article on the hearsay of an unrelated third party (that has a less than stellar track record of telling the truth) is just... odd.

I think people may also be mixing up the two parallel streams of PPEs - there were equipment donations, and at the same time, Chinese manufacturers are selling PPEs like they normally do.

Some of the PPEs were paid orders placed on Chinese private companies, of course they will have to be paid, since they are being purchased. This is not to be confused with donations of equipment.

This claim is false. An interview with an Italian official confirms it to be false. https://twitter.com/honglilai/status/1247163875339800577?s=2...

>US trying to unsuccessfully hoard supplies, issues with the German testing company

This is bullshit. At least three of those stories have been quietly retracted. Also you're damn right US should be putting itselt first when in crisis.

This has also confirmed the true colors of the media - hypocrites who spent months comparing COVID to the flu and yelling "sinophobia!" For closing the border, before turning on a dime to shit on the president for not being prepared.

>When times are great -> Globalism

>When times are tough -> Isolation and tribalism

When times are great, people become naive and forget that we live in a world with scarce resources and different cultures. When times are tough we are suddenly reminded of the way things actually are, that life is not the utopian vision that some people seem to think.

Yeah being President sucks. Supposed to be well-informed and make correct decisions, not rely on journalist's whining to create policy and take action. But so much easier to just issue sound-bytes and respond to whatever is the issue of the day.

Everybody screwed up. But journalists have a serious problem with exaggerating and outright falsifying controversies when their party is out of office.

That doesn't excuse the actions of Republican party members but it does destroy the credibility of the journalistic establishment. Which has devolved into a total cash grabbing, activist joke. And this happened before Trump.

Agreed. Sometime after web publishing became a thing, and Editors left the equation.

> India banning critical medical exports

India did allow export for humanitarian purposes (last month).

In times of a global crisis, it makes sense to first take care of those who are near you. Many nations have sent aids to other nations to fight this pandemic, so I won't say it's complete tribalism. More like this situation has shown us one of the downsides of globalism.

I am particularly saddened by how Europe has handled the situation.

Not that I can blame the EU because I'm pretty sure it couldn't have done (as in imposed) anything there and it clearly highlights the deficiencies of being somewhere in the middle.

It was a litmus test and it's pretty obvious that we need to take it further rather than competing with each other.

Unsurprising. The whole concept of 'state' is a group with its own interests.

And not a lot different from the century-old pandemic "Spanish Flu". Essentially civilized reciprocity broke down then too.

French seized supplies bound for Britain. Everyone is doing it.

You always protect your own citizens first, then once you're in a position of strength, then you help your neighbor. If you're both in a hole, you have to get out of the hole first before you help your friend out, otherwise you're just both going to be in the hole. Put your mask on before assisting other passengers, etc. So many analogies, but this is very basic behavior and expected. Until a country no longer has a shortage themselves, its only when they have an abundance should they give needed supplies away.

There's got to be a difference between putting on your own mask first and taking your friend's mask...

But when you don’t make your own masks then the one who does is free to shape their own relations and deals.

>India banning critical medical exports

At this point I need to mention this:

The USA has managed to successfully enforce bogus patents of drugs that should be generics in the EU. So instead of producing them at home we import them from India. The ICU I did my rotation on would be impossible to work without drugs produced in India.

You forgot: 5) Rich nations hoovering up all coronavirus related supplies leaving poor nations precious little.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/09/world/coronavirus-equipme...

"Scientists in Africa and Latin America have been told by manufacturers that orders for vital testing kits cannot be filled for months, because the supply chain is in upheaval and almost everything they produce is going to America or Europe."

Reducing dependence on China is a good idea. A single point of failure leads to a lot of the problems we're experiencing now.

However that doesn't mean we should abandon global trade or the movement of people. Isolationism isn't the lesson we should be learning from this whole mess.

It is difficult to compete with a strategic program like "Made in China 2025". We'll see. I'd guess, no change - the subsidy program in China will remain largest and most competitive, market will seeks subsidies of the largest program. The externalities, like the single point of failure that you've pointed out, will be ignored.

The subsidies from Made in China 2025 won't be going to foreign companies since it's supposed fund Chinese companies and domestic innovation so they can have replacements for foreign tech IP. There should be no reason for the international market to think they can get some of that money.

The subsidies are used by foreign companies, by purchasing products subsidized by Made in China programs.

> There should be no reason for the international market to think they can get some of that money.

Unless the Chinese companies receiving the subsidies are barred from exporting their products, then the global market will buy those subsidized products and global unsubsidized competitors will suffer.

You are not allowed to export state subsidized products per WTO rules.

You are not allowed to export state subsidized products per WTO rules.

The Chinese government is well known for propping up domestic companies and playing favorites, and now suddenly you think it cares about international rules?

No, I don't think they care, but the rule is there on the books.

It is obviously up to the other members of the WTO to enforce the rules.

Surely the US stimulus package counts as a government subsidy to uneconomic private business?

This is a really smart move on Japan's part and hopefully other countries quickly follow suit with more substantial sums of money. $2.2B isn't going to go very far, but pumping trillions in to local manufacturing might, and would also act as a decent stimulus for local economies. Any products that can be manufactured domestically, or might suffer from shortages during global pandemics or other worldwide issues, need to be manufactured domestically. This ought to be pretty obvious at this point.

We should be using this opportunity to determine which must have manufacturing capabilities locally, making that happen, then sticking to it long term for national defense. This doesn't just apply to Japan, or the US, but every country on the globe. Global supply chains are really showing their weaknesses over the last couple months.

Additionally, anything that countries can do to pry away CCP control of global supply chains should be done, with a long term goal of weakening the CCP as they have certainly shown they can't be trusted. They can't be trusted by their people, they can't be trusted by other nations. They've shown now multiple times they will do everything that they can to cover up growing pandemics within their boarders, hide actual infection and death numbers, downplay problems, silence whistleblowers, and lie. Beyond that, they continue to support genocide inside their own boarders, and they continue their aggressive expansion in the South China Sea. They are a bad actor.

I would be shocked if we don't see more countries fund similar packages. This won't destroy China's production capabilities but will give them less leverage over everyone else.

I'm surprised that Japan's government is feeling this as a priority right now... There are no problems for goods importation between Japan and China now, and as in China the pandemics has been largely reduced, there should not be in the near future neither.

PS: Japan and more precisely Tokyo is on the brink to imitate the human tragedy of Italy and US, so maybe they could vote some different budgets for now... (like, BUYING TESTS)

PPS: economical decoupling is typically building the path for war, instead of reinforcing cooperation. Humanity needs to cooperate to progress swiftly, and the more there are wars the more the efforts of everybody are wasted (or worse destroy others).

psst: for people downvoting, I'd love your counter-arguments

From my personal Japanese perspective the issue is clear: the situation isn’t tangibly horrible, so the higher up politicians aren’t amused. They’re feeling underwhelmed, betrayed even, that the experts they think who represent the virus are still demanding more out of the government.

Yes, exactly. How can we teach them "to fscking look 10 days from now on the graph!"... It feels like they are used to gambling thinking "oh look, the new cases are slightly reduced today, so there is maybe no problem!". A failure to understand simple modeling and statistics.

You are correct but in this situation there is fear and anger which leads to isolationist policies.

The path out of this, both the handling of the virus and the economic fallout, is more corporation and trade. For Japan it means more trade with China as it is dependent both on Chinese supply and Chinese demand.

I think the policies will be walked back or just become overshadowed and insignificant.

I am disappointed that only people who agree with me want to present their arguments :)

I love Japan, but there is such a disconnect between planning management and crises management in the country. Watching NHK live while the PM’s office read from their TepCo supplied everything-is-fine talking points while Fukushima #3 exploded in the background was just... sublimely surreal.

Even the commentators hesitated to note the exploding nuclear reactor building because it was no doubt disrespectful to the PM.

Well, if you want to move something to Southern Africa, I can help with that.

One brick on the road out of CCP's China.

Every country needs to distance themselves from China until they sort out their food hygiene laws and they prove they can handle epidemics without lying. I have no problem with the Chinese people. But their government caused this and then lied to make it worse. You can't keep trading with someone like that.

Add in the treatment of minorities and the lack of progress towards democracy or rule of law, and they're basically North Korea with a working economy...

It's not just the laws they need to figure out. Domestic pangolin use is illegal, so they just illegally import it

It's unsolvable problem. People will go to wet markets in Myanmar on a trip.

The only way out is an antiviral that is cheap, safe and effective.

It baffles me. China has zero issue eliminating the slightest threat to the party. From book sellers in Hong Kong to religious minorities to the great firewall, no job too big, no threat too small.

But apparently eliminating wet markets was unpopular and thats a no no. It worked when they did it after SARS. It saved a shit tonne of lives, it brought them one step closer to being a first world nation. But now its impossible and undemocratic?

I don't know why they won't do this. But it's "won't", not "can't". And to me, that's unacceptable.

> I don't know why they won't do this

The number of Chinese (still a minority) that want to eat exotic meats greatly outnumber the Chinese who want to read dissident books or use Twitter instead of Weibo.

Censorship is not very unpopular there, but diet restrictions would be.

>Censorship is not very unpopular there, but diet restrictions would be.

That may well be true.

But necessary is necessary.

I honestly don't care if they want to eat bat or anything else (no one should be eating anything endangered). That's fine. But it needs to be done in a hygienic, responsible way.

I approve of decentralizing a lot of these critical things.

I do think that unweaving the weave and actually keeping these industries competitive / efficient at home ... will be an incredibly difficult task.

It never really made sense to me why after this pandemic, people think it's better to move supply chains out of china.

Having supply chains scattered around different smaller nations would introduce MORE risk not LESS.

Instead of waiting 2 months for production in china to ramp up, now I gotta wait for production in X different countries to ramp up. Rach country with different ability to deal with a pandemic.

I can understand maybe every country should have some manufacturing capacity for the essentials, but on average I don't see how it's more efficient.

Is coincidence that I found most outrageous comments are by throw away accounts? I expected much more for hacker news

https://archive.md/bn51z

It should have been done years ago. Otherwise one day you may wake up and realize all your critical supplie chains (including not only iPhone, but also medicine and medical equipment) could be broken by communist totalitarian state, so you grip your teeth and love Communist Party and Comrade Xi, so as average Chinese citizen.

Isn’t China the only place that’s (At least partly) open now though?

But yes!

More of this--mercantilism for all!

Trump has a limitless number of flaws (I didn't vote for him) but goddamn has he been prescient about Chinese trade, their never-ending shenanigans (hacking, spying, stealing, anti-competitive actions), and bringing back manufacturing and supply chain jobs back. I'm glad to see other countries wake up to this, even if it's without the fanfare of Trump. Let China make plastic toys and other nonessentials, the rest I'd be happy to see come home even if it meant higher prices - think of it as the cost of an embedded insurance policy.

He wasn't prescient: he gets his ideas from Fox News and conservative ideologues, and if he made any prophecies, they were self-fulfilling, because his administration has intentionally created the current circus around China.

A step in the right direction!

Finally. Once this has been completed, China will lose a lot of political leverage as the threat of blocking/impeding trade will be something other countries can actually go on and ignore.

Easier said than done, given that the Chinese government is pretty much writing blank checks to attract, retain and gather just about every form of IP and manufacturing processes known. You see the same thing with 5G, where the goals of the Chinese government isn't so much to produce a price competitive product but crush global competition in the marketplace by whatever means possible.

How can you compete with subsidies so heavy it's basically free?

The game they're playing isn't free market.

> How can you compete with subsidies so heavy it's basically free?

Well we need to acknowledge the treat that is China first and foremost, which is hard for a entire generation of people who grew up addicted to China cheap goods.

China is a (bloody) dictatorship, they can plan a global strategy 50 years in advance. Our western countries are weak because of political whims and are unable to trace a clear strategy because we have been all about short term profit for 40 years now.

> they can plan a global strategy 50 years in advance. Our western countries are weak because of political whims and are unable to trace a clear strategy because we have been all about short term profit for 40 years now.

This sort of alarmism about "our enemies are outmaneuvering us with long-term planning while we only pay attention to the immediate future" is common, but historically these predictions have never panned out. Go back and read Michael Crichton's Rising Sun sometime, he goes on and on for pages with arguments totally isomorphic to yours: Japan is going to take over the world because of their crafty long-term planning and investment, etc. It was published in 1992, at which point the Japanese bubble had already burst and Japan entered a period of stagnation that continues to this day. People said the same thing about Germany in the 70's, the Soviet Union in the 60's, and on and on.

Der mentsh trakht un got lakht.

Just today telsa sold 10000 cars in the Shanghai factory in March and Tesla stock jumped as result. I have a feeling that with Europe and US in continue lock down, China is going to support a huge number businesses. Looking at a number of Western business, all cite china has a very important market. Everyone of them earned a ton of money from that market. Some manufacturing will leave china, but if business want to access that market, they will continue to be near that market meaning involve China as part of the supply chain. On side note, ccp and China has brought a lot to Chinese people, wealth, stability, and education. 800 million was lifted out of property in the last 30 years. Chinese middle class is more than the entire US population. As a Chinese person, I no longer has to worry about whether I will have enough food or clothing. Nowadays I am interested which iPhone I can buy and which Nike shoes I like. To say the government doesn't care about the well being of the citizens is dishonest at best. All of this has given and will continue give a massive opportunity to foreign business. Hundreds of billion of dollars of cooperate profits per year. If we cut earnings from China out of companies on SPY, how much is the stock market valuation is going to drop by? So next time if you want to bash and vilify China and ccp using fake news, think about how much China and ccp contributed to your retirement fund. I have more than happy to discuss China and it's policies using facts, data and reason. But it's the smearing and vilification using fake news I cannot stand. And of course it's not perfect in anyway. Internet information regulations and media control is one of them. But I feel people outside don't really understand this country and it's government. They say the government oppresses and doesn't care about the people. Yet a majority of people feels the complete opposite in their daily lives.

The question is not about China being villiefied, but what happens with critical supplies sourced from abroad (from China and others) in critical times. With current manufacturing largely skewed to China, the results are pretty obvious as far as medical supplies go. It won’t take long before that gets corrected, together with some other industries.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com