Trump’s WeChat curbs halted by judge on free speech concerns
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
If TikTok and WeChat's usage becomes more widespread in the voting population of the US, they would have a lot of influence by controlling what kind of content its users sees; e.g., FB has been criticized many times for this, namely performing psychological experiments on its users
I recall this quote by former KGB informant Yuri Bezmenov:
> The main emphasis of the KGB is not in the area of intelligence at all. Only about 15% of time, money, and manpower is spent on espionage and such. The other 85% is a slow process which we call either ideological subversion or active measures ... or psychological warfare
The difference between TikTok and WeChat and FB/Google/Twitter is obvious: the former are to some degree controlled by China and the latter are private entities.
I understand there are services part of WeChat that are essential to users, so I would hope there is a good compromise here. I don't see why the communication component of the app can't continue to exist but WeChat is a lot more than a chat app.
How is for example Facebook better because it isn't somehow tied in to the US government? On the one hand the state still have access to all the data from Facebook it wants (NSA, warrants) but on the other they have a hard time protecting its users privacy rights. I'm not convinced private entities are any better. For a US citizen maybe Facebook is better as a private entity but for everyone else outside the US?
Personally I would rather put my data in a Chinese-owned Tiktok than an American one because of the extreme amount of data already flowing into US services. Even if Tiktok is used to spy on me I can't see how it would be any worse for an European than putting more data into US services.
But my point wasn't really about data collection, it was about influence and content-control. People are readily influenced by memes, ads, headlines, etc which is why such platforms are so problematic because people are not comfortable with how much influence they have and how easily misinformation is spread.
What am I less comfortable with is leaving a path open for China to have that same kind of control in the US as FB/Google/etc, but without being subject to US laws like our private entities are.
I think that difference is not that wide as people believe. Throwing money into advertising on any platform will get you close or beyond ideological subversion or active measures.
All you have to do is look at the radicalization and the polarization of left and right in the US and you will see you don't need a state controlled entity at all.
It is much easier to enforce laws on a US-based company than a foreign one.
Continue is the wrong word. Nothing is done by legislation or these companies themselves to properly regulate these platforms.
There is also nothing preventing foreign influence on U.S.-based company platforms, which is already happening, and has been happening, unchecked.
I have used WeChat daily for over three years. There is not a single instance in which I have been unduly influenced. I use it to message, video chat, and pay for things. That simply is not true for YouTube, Twitter, Google, Apple, etc. I can't even go to YouTube without having unremovable, unhidable ads for Trump. We also have a situation where the sitting president has rented out the YouTube homepage for an entire week prior to the election. It's naivety, and frankly delusional, to think the U.S. is somehow at threat by WeChat and not the multitude of sly behavior going on with U.S.-based companies.
U.S.-based companies and culture have long been driven by highly concentrated special interest groups, from Hollywood to Wall Street to Silicon Valley, and all of this amounts to undue influence and control upon the American people, who have been manipulated into playing the game.
FB/Twitter/Tiktok are different because they control WHAT you see. None of them show things chronologically. Their algorithms show things that are popular, and the weights they use are trade secrets. Being able to influence ideas takes classic advertising, or even targeted advertising, to an entirely new level. It has an entirely different set of legal and ethical challenges.
To bypass the filter then I slightly modify images to change their hash, or record video of the video/image/text. Maybe soon they’ll start making fake likes from friends so that people can’t use inactivity as a way of detecting shadowbans, or maybe they’ll make the posts only visible to a small subset of friends.
https://battlepenguin.com/tech/facebook-and-the-silent-bob-e...
In the 1960s it created a government-funded television network to offer alternative programming. But television is an old medium, and less of a source of information today -- partly because it's been supplanted by social media.
It seems like there's inevitably going to be a need for some kind of content moderation -- but maybe that could be handled by local librarians, local newspapers. (At least that's a solution that actually scales.)
It is documented fact that FB, Google and the rest are tapped by US intelligence agencies. Anyone remembers Snowden? We know for fact that pretty much every single global US network works with the US government, but when comes to TikTok and WeChat something yet to be proven(I am sure they do but the evidence is weaker than the evidence if US internet companies working with the US government on surveillance). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)
EU was trying to fix this through GDPR and such but US seems to desperately wanting to embrace the Chinese model and with US cultural lead, this will inevitably open the way to other governments ban FB, Google and the others because if TikTok is a national security risk to the USA then obviously Facebook and Google are to them. Probably Amazon and all other ad networks too. Anything that can be started from a dorm room will no longer be able to go global.
This will lead to a world where if you want to do a global project you will have to incorporate in every country you want to operate. It is even possible that internet to break up in patches and operating even a forum website becomes like Coca-Cola opening a plant in another country.
It is a very bleak future for humanity if you ask me. Can be good for local businesses though.
I wish the US went the EU path(regulating data handling) instead of Russa/China path(banning) so we could still have global networks and kids in their dorms could continue creating products with global impact.
What a shame.
> Yeah these are real problems, I agree. And US citizens should continue to put pressure on their politicians to pass more privacy-related legislation
> But my point wasn't really about data collection, it was about influence and content-control. People are readily influenced by memes, ads, headlines, etc which is why such platforms are so problematic because people are not comfortable with how much influence they have and how easily misinformation is spread.
> What am I less comfortable with is leaving a path open for China to have that same kind of control in the US as FB/Google/etc, but without being subject to US laws like our private entities are.
US can regulate the internet companies to mitigate the risk when keeping the global community intact. Make foreign services run on US servers when serving US citizens, make them disclose what and how they process the data. Then if they don't obey the laws can be enforced to obey the laws. Which law TikTok broke? There is no law forbidding being Chinese and successful, that's the US political system failing to have what they want and embracing Chinese ways of doing things. It could be also a failure of the US market to stay competitive due to monopolies, giving lead to China in innovation.
But somehow the freedom loving Americans cannot be told to wear a mask but can be told which app the can use, just like in China. It's mind boggling.
Also, the Chinese communist party/government has recently decided to tighten the noose on its private companies: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/17/business/china-communist-... which makes wechat a national threat.
So either WeChat, Facebook, and whoever can facilitate protected speech among their users (in this case you're protecting the users specifically) or the various platforms are treated as publishers which still wouldn't allow the US government to prevent or compel speech (protecting the organization).
It's possible they can get away with banning the payment portions of the app but the outright ban appears to be prior restraint of free speech by the government.
As a non-American, my question is why does WeChat have first amendment rights? It's not an American company.
Note the subject.
So yes, the First Amendment is okay with any censoring of information by a foreign government or company.
"Article 19.
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers."
I don't see any mention of government there. Why limit the interpretation of free speech to the US constitution? How do you reconcile ideologically or philosophically that it is not ok for US Congress to limit speech but ok for other powerful entities?
Because that's literally what the grandparent asked. You appear to have a completely different question.
> Yes.
We might also observe that the only mention of "people" in the first amendment gives them the rights to assemble and to petition the government.
Freedoms of speech and the press are phrased as restrictions on Congress, not as rights given to anyone (and this is probably the main justification for extending first amendment rights to foreigners, which appears to be a popular but not universal viewpoint).
of Free Speech is arbitrarily granted, then it's not free speech, and that violates Prior Restraint, at least, if the Courts are not also arbitrarily deciding who's free speech deserves to be protected.
In that framework, the US government is not to violate anyone's freedom of speech anywhere in the world. That doesn't seem to be what's at issue in this case though; the case was brought by a group of US-based WeChat users on grounds that the ban would restrict their freedom to communicate with people in China who are unable to use other communication services.
Also, as Snowden has shown us, the line between private and state control is very, very thin.
Trust, but verify.
to some degree? No, they are completely controlled by China.
> "WeChatApp spies on the content that all users send to each other, including Americans. The results are fed into their censorship of Chinese users" [1]
-
Key findings rom the Citizen lab research report, which is quite comprehensive [2]:
> Documents and images transmitted entirely among non-China-registered accounts undergo content surveillance wherein these files are analyzed for content that is politically sensitive in China.
>Upon analysis, files deemed politically sensitive are used to invisibly train and build up WeChat’s Chinese political censorship system.
[1] https://twitter.com/jsrailton/status/1258391908319137797
This is a matter of perspective.
Do you think the question is "if the CCP tells Tencent to do something, will they do it?", or "does Tencent do anything the CCP doesn't tell it to do?"?
Believe it or not, US foreign policy people put out enormous amounts of propaganda and they got the US to repeal a ban on importing news from state regime change news like Radio Free Europe in 2012.
Personally, I am suspicious of all of these corporations, but I'd rather all of them be allowed than the USG be able to dictate who is allowed to say what. That always works out so well. Foreign government news agencies and companies are much more likely to criticize the (obviously insane) USG on grounds that fundamentally disagree with policy direction rather than the tactical disagreement you find in the US mainstream press.
There's a very good (but LONG) documentary you can watch about the FP community called "A Very Heavy Agenda". Part 2 covers how the US FP community responded to the Ukraine presidential election crisis and Russian interference in 2014-2015. https://averyheavyagenda.com/
The fact that we regard their coverage as propaganda and not ours is quite telling given the entanglements between government and the media here, the ownership by a small group of large corporations, and the ability of larger corporations to yank ad dollars when they hear something they don't like.
The only honest position imo is to allow all comers to state their viewpoint, which is the foundation of liberal democracy and enshrined in the first amendment. Just keep their viewpoint in mind when watching as you would for an American network. Also, don't just accept something because someone authoritative said something, it has to fit into a logical picture of the world.
We're not at war with Russia lol and god help us if we were. They have nukes!
The irony is that we were just about to witness US govt forcing said "private entities" to ban specific applications.
A good example: in a discussion of this case I was reading today in Chinese the author ironically noted that he couldn't summarize the US government's position because in a large WeChat group the content would be "deemed as against the rules" (视为违规)
Such is the state of WeChat discourse in 2020.
Is sending physical mail / calling someone on the phone impossible in China?
It's easier to run
`SELECT * FROM messages where messages.body LIKE '%tiananmen square%'`
I also feel for my friends who have family in China, and want to stay connected with them through a medium that is widely adopted.
There is a cultural standard that is just different in China when it comes to free speech, and it's hard for most people in the US to accept that.
As to the censorship point, from my experience using wechat in the past people rarely discuss politics on there, unless it's to make fun of the US political reality TV. Perhaps not actively discussing internal Chinese politics is considered a form of self-censorship.
That's the reason email still exists today and will continue to exist long after today's fad app goes out of style.
On the one hand, I am risking causing the group I am a member of to be banned, or my personal data being locked out from myself.
On the other hand, my friends are mostly higher class of the society that naturally align with the government, just like elite capitalists like neoliberal doctrine. The discussion seldom ends in pleasant outcomes.
I also fear what I say on American sites for similar reasons, and because I’ve dealt with normal people trying to hunt me down just because of online comments.
https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/News/visas-news/2...
Maybe falsifying the documents counts as another charge to pressure someone they are holding, or legal counsel suggested it to ensure that any information found could be readily used against the person in a legal preceding, or plausible deniability cover for FOIA requests. I can think of a lot of ways that asking someone for something you already know about can be beneficial and no ways that it is detrimental.
They used to ask if you had been involved in persecutions associated with Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945. It still asks
> Do you seek to engage in or have you ever engaged in terrorist activities, espionage, sabotage, or genocide?
I don't think anybody would ever seriously answer "yes" to that question, but if the US government wants to deport an individual and it's discovered they lied on their ESTA application, it's more straightforward to deport them.
For example, it's pretty normal for Americans to bicker about politics and criticize the government, especially because of its highly polarized political landscape.
Many mainland chinese vehemently defend the idea that the government is truly representative of the people (similar to how the US constitution envisioned the state being a true representation of the People)
Debating that the government is an evil brainwashing machine with these people would be akin to coming out as gay in a conservative religious family, i.e. it would be bound to negatively affect relationships
The question is, why CCP won given that KMT is backed by the US (advanced weapons supply, money, and so on) while CCP was so weak in terms of army?
Because the vast majority of the people (most are farmers and industry workers) joined and helped CCP.
I think that's why.
I prefer a team of government which has proved it has a true vision, which has proved its ability to execute the vision, which has proved its ability to the lead the people to a better future, which has proved its ability to protect the people from imperialism such as what we're seeing in recent years, which is aiming at and actually eliminating poverty from the vast majority of people... rather than a government which is elected by big corps.
Edit 1: BTW, I myself believed in the so-called US-style democracy and election, until I saw what happened in those "taught by the US" democracy countries such as the Middle-east, Ukraine, Taiwan, Hong Kong, India, several South American countries, and especially, in America itself, in the past decades, especially in recent years. Trust me, I believed it in my heart.
Edit 2: I just got to know the name of Andre Vltchek the independent journalist who got killed recently, I read several excerpts of his reports. I think he knows something about the international things.
"I prefer a team of government which has proved it has a true vision"
And how is this team formed - lottery, nepotism ?, military take over ?
Use of the 'Moments' function (a photo-orientated miniblog) that was quite popular when WeChat was newer has declined significantly and is not mainly focused on self-promotion (selling products, often food products) via WeChat, the odd personal post, photos of the odd teambuilding exercise. Groups popular for colleagues, ex-colleagues, ex-classmates to keep in contact with each other, even this use-case has been cracked down on especially international companies. The demographic for these friends/colleagues is mainly 20s-40s professionals in business services or IT; out of ~500 contacts there'll typically be 10-15 Moment posts. In chats people ask about VPNs and such things offline.
Political discussion for younger people happens much more on Weibo than WeChat.
For older people I see using on the bus or subway Groups are still a big social thing, and this group isn't going to be very anti-government as they're the generation that's benefited from the housing and associated booms of the last couple of decades.
Two anecdotes that partially answer your question.
Many Chinese do indeed think about this. I've heard people quite literally say, "Don't put that in the chat, we don't want trouble". I've seen group chats get blocked for saying the "wrong" thing.
I also hate to see the US essentially giving credence to China's approach of blocking things by following suit. The US could take the high road (there are a number of legal approaches that would help and still be "American" in spirit) but has chosen to take the bait instead.
I've heard people say exactly the same thing about Facebook. I guess the difference is that it's usually in regards to incriminating messages (e.g. drugs), and not censorship of ideological speech.
Self-censoring on non-secure, non-anonymous messaging platforms, and especially in group chats, is not necessarily a bad thing. Consider anything you write in a group chat as public, because there's it easily could be.
As for me, I believe allowing WeChat to become anything like the structural institution it is in China in any part of the US would be a mistake. Imagine if Google was as controlled by and as much of a cheerleader for the US government as WeChat is for the Chinese, and the kind of threat that would pose to European sovereignty.
Yet that didn't happen. Why are things turning out differently in the internet age?
If you ask a random Chinese citizen "are you okay with the government listening in to your phone calls?", most people would say Yes. Having the government listen in and having government presence on the streets makes us feel safe, because most of us trust our government. Sure, it has it's issues, but in general, the government acts in our favor, and without it we'd have far lower standards of living.
The US is a total polar opposite in this regard.
Another is that in days before the internet, the technology for small numbers of people to cause mass violence did not exist.
The USPS did do exactly that. Read about how abolitionists attempted to spread anti-slavery literature through the federal postal system in the antebellum era, and how the post office decided it would suppress those mailings for being supposedly insurrectionary.
But also, the government in the 19th century was much weaker than it became in the 20th and now 21st centuries.
- "allow WeChat to gain an even greater foothold on American soil" - does this mean have more users?
- "minimize total damage" - it would be good if you articulated the damage being done
- "Imagine if Google was as controlled by and as much of a cheerleader for the US government as WeChat is for the Chinese" - according to Julian Assange, https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/
Maybe they have lost some influence in the current administration (maybe not), but Facebook has by all appearances been eager to take their place.
The US government can’t be seen openly wielding large internet companies for its interests. But any modern state needs to. And so it does it within the paradigm of the West: public denial, private understandings.
The difference between China/Wechat and US/FB/Google is one is out in the open, and the other is covered by a fig leaf.
Imagine that! Imagine if some US agency had a global dragnet surveillance network!
Do the Hong Kong protest crackdown not scare anyone else?
Now they have an excuse. It won’t look suspicious if they communicate to each other on channels that can’t be monitored by their oppressive government.
There’s great alternatives to wechat that are secure by design, rather than spy-by-design, such as telegram or signal.
And the US has done hundred of renditions without trial, so while far from the scale of China, US spy agencies still do some awful things.
And _their_ point, which came first and you came here to argue against, is CCP monitoring is especially bad for particular political reasons.
This is an interesting argument against walled gardens I don't often see: that it gives your government an easy chokepoint to prevent users from using software it doesn't like.
Much easier than having to bother with a VPN, and many Chinese people are already used to jumping through such hoops.
Apps are truly no different.
The only time they happen to coincide is, by definition, in the case of autocracy.
And if that power isn't properly applied, the courts will intervene.
What "autocracy" are you referring to?
If you feel that that’s autocratic, then your beef is with the folks back in 1776.
Or are you arguing Obama was an autocrat because his decisions were struck down by the Supreme Court?
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/06/the-sup...
All Chinese companies operate under the direction and control of the CCP; we can arrive at the conclusion that a company is a public minister if companies are people, and they act at the behest of their home government.
https://law.justia.com/constitution/us/article-2/32-the-cond...
1) The CCP has to have a representative on the board. The ccp say it's like a union rep(!) since they are communists. But they don't have a veto, just a vote like other board members.
2) This condition is only for companies over a certain size.
3) This also applies to large foreign companies not just domestic.
1. The CCP has advanced access to the company’s plans.
2. The representative can always say something like, “this would meet with disapproval by the party”.
It’s not a formal veto, but it is an implied threat.
In the US at least, the claim that “all Chinese companies are controlled government” is thrown around way too often without evidence backing it up. People seem to accept it as common sense that doesn’t need fact-checks anymore. I’m not saying you are one of them; I just wish we all verify non-obvious claims for our own benefits
These are obvious consequences of being required to have a CCP board member.
The government having a board member is by definition a form of government control.
These are not ‘non-obvious’ claims and as such they don’t need citations.
If you want to argue that somehow these conclusions aren’t reasonable, by all means do so. But no citation is needed.
Board members have access to the CEO and other managers, therefore the CCP board member can obviously make statements to management about what the CCP does and does not approve of.
No citation is needed to know that these are the consequences of having a CCP board member.
That may not be the case for much longer:
"According to the new provisions, private firms will need a certain amount of CCP registered employees, which is already a long-term practise in large private firms but not smaller ones."
https://www.asiatimesfinancial.com/ccp-announces-plan-to-tak...
As long as the USA remains a country that is bound by rule of law rather than rule of dictate, one can't reasonably argue with due process simply by invoking the fact that the USA is a sovereign nation, because the US government is comprised of more than just its executive leadership. The executive branch is bound by laws as drafted by the legislative branch and interpreted by the judicial branch.
Don't think that this was a well-reasoned decision with careful justification about the causes, potential, solutions, and impacts on US economics and society. It was a guy asking "what can we do to create some leverage over this adversary I don't like? (and was just told about yesterday)"
Don't deceive yourself that this is some step in a principled fight. If it were that, we'd have slapped tariffs/embargoes and more on Russia a couple of years ago. We'd be implementing measures against Venezuela, Myanmar, North Korea, a whole host of countries doing similar or worse. I haven't heard a peep about those.
It's not good when government operates on a whim. Don't deceive yourself about what principle (and person) you're getting behind.
Many, many powers falling under executive branch (and agencies') regulatory authority, which Congress does not go into N-th level detail about how to implement, have to go through significant public and internal review, and have good explanation.
If you're unfamiliar with this, you should read:
https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R41546.pdf
https://www.federalregister.gov/uploads/2011/01/the_rulemaki...
It seems reasonable to assume that you’re familiar with this concept, so I’ll just chalk it up to a misunderstanding.
“ Did Trump lawfully repeal the Obama-era order that shielded young immigrants who were brought to this country as children?
No, the court said in a 5-4 ruling written by Chief Justice Roberts. He said that while the president had the legal authority to revoke the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, his administration failed to give a reasoned explanation for ending a policy that encouraged about 700,000 immigrants to register with the government to obtain work permits and avoid deportation. ”
The standard of review for free speech cases are way, way higher than the APA. The APA just means the executive can't blatantly lie about why it did enacted some regulation, and has to come up with a facially valid reason. The standard under the 1st Amendment requires a good reason.
Right now, all things happened according to the slated procedures, including the challenge in court.
Trump and his supporters shouldn't expect otherwise, if they truly believe in rule of law.
Privacy laws with escalating penalties up to a ban would accomplish the same thing, not just for for the high-profile panic examples of the moment, but for problems of this sort in general.
This ban is effectively a Tit-for-tat. Thats it.
Or, you could say, Tik-for-Tok.
But for me as a german, I actually neither want the chinese, nor the US-government (nor the german government) to controll my communication.
IMO those laws are being abused in this case to suppress speech, but the laws themselves had a legitimate purpose.
America has never been invaded by foreign gunships and forced to allow foreign merchants to import opium to addict its citizens in order to fix their own countries balance of payments problems.
Opium Wars
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars
If America were to experience something like that, how might the experience change America's future commercial policies?
If Pearl Harbour and 9/11 are any guide, America might become less tolerant of foreign businesses operating in its markets.
But then, America is a complicated marketplace.
The Promotion and Marketing of OxyContin: Commercial Triumph, Public Health Tragedy
It might be helpful to understand why China does what it does. It doesn't really excuse it though.
Boxer Rebellion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boxer_Rebellion
Eight-Nation Alliance
China lost, was forced to cede Hong Kong to the British for 99 years, and paid 668,661,220 taels of silver from 1901 to 1939, equivalent in 2010 to $US 61 billion on a purchasing power parity basis.
A large portion of the reparations paid to the United States was diverted to pay for the education of Chinese students in U.S. universities under the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Program. To prepare the students chosen for this program an institute was established to teach the English language and to serve as a preparatory school. When the first of these students returned to China they undertook the teaching of subsequent students; from this institute was born Tsinghua University.
The China of that history has been displaced by an undemocratic revolutionary regime that conquered the Chinese people.
Tsinghua University is a world leader in AI and software technology.
Chinese engineers and entrepreneurs are competing in world markets with innovative products and services, not gunships. 100 million American users of TikTok appreciate this.
Have you considered the possibility that China is not trying to take over the world, but rather to be a part of it?
https://uwaterloo.ca/tsinghua-uwaterloo-joint-research-centr...
I know symbolically this is of great importance to the Chinese, but at the time it was an easy thing for the Emperor to give up given he was on the losing end of a war.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong_Island#British_colon...
It’s rational for China to limit Apple and Google and for the USA to limit WeChat.
This will remain so as long as a basically lawless state exists internationally, which seems to be the case following the collapse of post Cold War globalism in the 20-teens.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirteen_Colonies#Economic_pol...
1 - http://community.weber.edu/weberreads/salutary_or_benign_neg...
Even taking New York was kind of a side effect of New England being nearby and English gradually settling down from Connecticut, rather than part of some grand strategy.
Mercantilism was the law, but by defacto neglect Americans were trading with everyone with very few consequences until after the French and Indian war. It simply was too expensive for the British to enforce.
By contrast, the British Empire continued to interfere with American trade long after the American Revolution, prompting the War of 1812 where the British Empire burned the first White House to the ground. Imagine if the British had burned the Daoguang Emperor's palace to the ground?
My point is I'm not belittling the subjugation of the Chinese under the British Empire. But at the same time, lets not attempt to rewrite American history. In regards to the British Empire, the Americans and Chinese have more in common than propagandists on both sides would have us believe.
The American Revolution was much more about representation and the rights that British Parliament held (or, from the American perspective, didn't hold) over the colonies. The primary effect of mercantilism is exclusive trading agreements with the ruling empire, which was not being argued against by the colonials. It even says as much in the paragraph you linked:
"However, the colonists took pains to argue that they did not oppose British regulation of their external trade; they only opposed legislation which affected them internally."
It's not an equal comparison to China and the Opium Wars.
But to counter your claim that mercantilism wasn't the inspiration for the American Revolution, I recommend reading up on the "Sons of Liberty" movement that rose up after the Stamp Act of 1765. [0]
The point I am making is that the primary instigator for the war was not "we can't legally trade with the Dutch/French/whomever", which is the monopolistic cornerstone of mercantilism. I'm curious if you consider taxation to be a mercantilist policy.
China has a long history with isolationism or distrust of foreign powers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haijin
By that standard surely Korea can complain endlessly about China and Yuan Shikai lording it over their kingdom in the 1880s, and the Czechs can cry over their subjugation for centuries by Austria-Hungary, etc. etc.
In 1949 Mao Zedong famously declared "China has stood up." Apparently though he meant, "We're such a weak people that we cry to mommy everytime others demand reciprocity."
These other national examples are nation vs nation, where an outside oppressor came & then went. Missing from your anti-empathy sentiments is recognition that these peoples never were given their own sovereignty & resources to rebuild themselves. The most injurious piece may have ended but they remain bound up in the impacts all the the same.
I vaguely say “other people” because this notion is what entices racial sentiments. It’s no different than changing the adjective for a different skin tone, and saying they too deserve their “own self rule”
This implies “blacks” don’t have self rule as it stands today, which I disagree with. In 2020, there exists no legislature that disfavors someone based on their skin color or ethnic background. We do however have the inverse, policies that give advantages to those who have specific skin color.
This predilection for a specific kind of racism, a one-way street attitude, is what fuels our current divide. I need not say more.
In one case, the oppressors left & sovereignty was restored.
In the other case, the law decided it had to change to try to bring itself into alignment with some basic human rights & regards.
I do think the people living under now-more-just law still struggle, still face discrimination, and are victim to a system that was imposed on them & a system which does not favor them. I don't think it's unreasonable to identify this gap, and this "one way street" attitude seems, to me, restorative & to be what equity & justice demands. And at times, it feels like it's still not enough, that some people- some persistent negative forces- remain fixed & focused on exclusion & discrimination & their biases, in a way that makes me think perhaps these victim-folk do deserve entirely higher levels of freedom from these oppressive forces that they still face, beyond merely our ongoing & too-controversial attempts at rebalacing.
Yeah, it's absurd. It's like if somebody would appeal to the memory of the Battle of the Alamo.
160 years in the past?
The Chinese reparations, totalling $US 61 billion is today's dollar equivalents, were only completed in 1940. Then China sided with the Allies in WWII. 15 million Chinese lost their lives in that war.
But I wouldn't characterise Chinese trade policy as victimhood. Chinese entrepreneurs don't rely on any such arguments. They just make products that western consumers want to buy.
That was under the Kuomintang regime, who fled to Taiwan in 1949
This is like saying that the Poles didn't deserve reparations from Germany for WWII because the pre-war republic wasn't restored and instead there was a new regime. The country and people exist independently of the governing system.
This doesn't really make sense. The Second Sino-Japanese war predates the European theater by 2 years. It'd be more accurate to say the US sided with China to help them fight a mutual enemy.
While it's true that the Sino-British Joint Declaration placed some temporary restrictions on China's policies regarding that region, this is an agreement between sovereign nations, thus reaffirming China's sovereignty.
I suppose that, in a sense, all international treaties are a loss of some degree of sovereignty, but in that sense nearly every country in the world has lost sovereignty in that time.
Rather, it justifies it by saying that 1) it's communist and 2) a developing country.
The trade relations that many Americans consider unbalanced are the result of the US and China being at very different stages of economic development. When China began opening up to foreign investment in the 1980s, China had no capital to invest abroad. It didn't matter if the US market was technically open to Chinese investment - there was no possibility of Chinese investment in the first place. The only question was what conditions would be placed on foreign investment in China. Reciprocity didn't matter, because trade flows were entirely in one direction.
China progressively opened up from the 1980s onward. WTO membership brought a huge number of changes, including drastic reductions in tariffs and a lot of privatization, breakup and restructuring of state industries.
Just to illustrate my point: people complain that China used to not let foreign auto manufacturers own a majority stake in their Chinese subsidiaries. The unfairness is supposedly that Chinese auto companies can own their American subsidiaries. But there were no Chinese auto companies that could possibly have competed in the American market anyways. The reciprocity argument was entirely theoretical. China now has more competitive electric vehicle companies, and it also has more open foreign investment policies for auto manufacturing.
One final point is that foreign companies benefitted massively from the ability to invest in China. The idea that China pulled a fast one and took advantage of the developed world just doesn't align with reality.
Sidenote, I've noticed more and more people joining Telegram to evade a potential WeChat ban. I wonder if they're going to stay on Telegram.
Isn't the whole point of using wechat is its large chinese userbase? AFAIK telegram is banned in china, so I'm not sure why that'd be the logical choice.
I hate wechat for its user experience, when my mom need to say something to me she usually send wechat message to my wife, because I check my wechat for, maybe, once per week. But a lot of Chinese living in the US seem to not mind its user experience, and like to use wechat as the way of contact each other. I think one of the reason might be that in the US there's not one dominate IM app that everyone is using, so wechat is like the next best thing that at lease every Chinese is using. Now a lot of Chinese also start to use Telegram there's hope (but I won't hold my breath for it).
The onus is on the Trump administration to show that the immediate national security risk of letting WeChat continue to operate during legal proceedings exceeds the impact on Chinese Americans. Clearly there was no proof to make this case, because this was hardly about national security in the first place.
I'm sure the Trump legal team anticipated this, and also know that the injunction will continue into next year, so this entire "ban" is probably a political move. Trump can go into the debates/ads: "look how tough I am on China, Biden will lift the WeChat ban first chance he gets!"
If they at least wanted to be consistent they should have banned smartphone chat apps (and there are some good reasons to do this.) That probably still wouldn't have been legal because of the free speech thing.
I wish there was something decent I could recommend to people but Apple has done a fantastic job of killing internet chat apps.
Like a lot of what this administration does in foreign trade restrictions, this was more of a bargaining threat than an actual action. This is really about control of TikTok by a foreign government, which is an actual foreign trade issue.
Why does the issue have to be framed as being with the "owner" instead of the "conduct". The conduct being "to disseminate propaganda, track users, and steal their private and proprietary data". It seems reasonable that such conduct should be always a "threat", regardless of where the "tech" company is domiciled.
Let's regulate propaganda (advertising), tracking users and stealing users' private and proprietary data.
Because focusing on the owner lets us shoehorn this into a nationalistic us versus them argument.
Focusing on the conduct will turn it into a "The people" versus "Powerful media magnates".
I’d argue at least it’s more explicit (to sell).
The issue with being forced to sell is that it's essentially economic warfare.
China came into the US and is operating under the rules, while the US is forcing TikTok to sell or die. This is the US seizing TikTok. What US firm has China seized?
It would be shocking if in the next round of escalations, China doesn’t respond in a way which sufficiently addresses the magnitude of Huawei, TikTok, WeChat, Tencent.
Or maybe they’ll force foreign companies to give up ownership to Chinese locals? Oh wait, they’ve already been doing that for decades (see GM, Volkswagen, Toyota, etc.)
Or maybe they’ll force foreign companies to let Chinese local companies to take control of their Chinese operations? Oh wait, they’ve already been doing that for decades (see Apple iCloud, Blizzard, etc.)
Here’s a list: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_...
Imagine if a president after Lincoln decided that they were going to reverse the Emancipation Proclamation. Would they be in authority to do so? Probably. But you're taking away rights at that point. DACA promised a bunch of kids with, "Hey, give us your names and addresses and we promise not to ever deport you," without a clear path to residence/citizenship for their family members.
It's a Pandora's Box that's been abused by both parties and it's going to come back to bite everyone at some point.
The emancipation proclamation was in no way a binding document. It was simply a "proclamation" of the stated position of the executive branch regarding slavery during Lincoln's administration, that they would cease to recognize its' legitimacy as law. The 13th amendment, (an act of congress which created a new law), legally freed the slaves. DACA is a very similar situation. An executive may choose which laws to prioritize for enforcement, and in this case that's exactly what Obama did. The president cannot, however, enforce a law that does not exist or that he wishes existed, which Trump is attempting to here.
I agree the way it SHOULD work is that congress passes laws and executive orders describe how those laws get enacted.
But we've seen more powerful executive orders, with the most dangerous coming about during the W Bush administration. People are fine when a candidate they like uses those increasing powers of "good" but then scream when it's used by Bush/Trump for the same purposes.
Executive orders have limits, specifically to offices that are directly under the Executive Branch (military, homeland security, intelligence, etc.) and so far Trump's orders actually fallen carefully within those limits.
He's been testing the limits of those jurisdictions and federal judges have struck them back. In reality, they should have been doing that years ago with other presidents, but instead we got decades of predator drones, warrantless wiretapping and secret kill lists.
It was a wartime military order during a war in which much of the relevant part of the country came under military occupation. It absolutely was binding.
> It was simply a "proclamation" of the stated position of the executive branch regarding slavery during Lincoln's administration, that they would cease to recognize its' legitimacy as law.
Not only was it not only that, it wasn't at all that. It was an order applied to the rebel territory then under occupation and other rebel territory as it came under occupation.
> The 13th amendment, (an act of congress which created a new law),
The 13th Amendment, as the name suggests, was a Constitutional Amendment. It was proposed to the States by an Act of Congress, but new law was created by ratification by the states. But most slaves were actually freed by the military occupation under the emancipation proclamation, not the 13th Amendment.
Congress can pass such a law and the President can sign it.
Because we are a nation of laws, not autocratic whims.
At the minimum, you can’t publish an app on the Google’s or Apple’s app stores without a financial transaction. It’s essentially impossible to conduct business abroad (even “free” business) if you can’t legally transact.
Given that a federal judge's ruling is the textbook definition of a legal basis...yeah? At least until it goes to a higher court.
The key is that it's in a CA court, which historically will ban all Trump's orders, it does not really matter what those orders are about at all these days.
Edit: that’s what I thought (and I agree with you), but I wanted to make sure since some other commenters sensed the ambiguity.
Presidents are allowed wide latitude in National Security matters.
I expect the sanctioning of WeChat will happen eventually.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariff_in_United_States_histor...
In the event that a country lacks a comparative advantage sufficient to balance trade and maintain local employment and economic growth; Then some degree of trade restriction is useful to ensure both stability and future growth. At 15-20% local unemployment, losing the perceived future growth engine(s) of the economy to foreign competition would not be politically acceptable to a majority of Americans.
How this plays out in the digital age is interesting. Tariffs are largely ineffective due to the nature of services. China has successfully grown a domestic tech industry from 0 - FANG equivalent by blocking all foreign competitors. It will be interesting if the EU seeks a similar strategy to grow its tech sector.
The EU is indeed slowly taking that direction: https://www.ft.com/content/7738fdd8-e0c3-4090-8cc9-7d4b53ff3...
The right response would be something like a US GDPR, allowing US persons to opt out of surveillance foreign and domestic. But that would upset the Silicon Valley gravy train, so instead we get a ham-fisted response that deflects concern onto a tiny slice of the overall problem.
Emergency Economic Powers Act (50 U.S.C. 1701 et seq.) (IEEPA), the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1601 et seq.), and section 301 of title 3, United States Code,
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/17470217/us-wechat-user...
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/21/style/tiktok-trump-rally-...
Are you claiming that ByteDance controlled the tanks used in Tiananmen square massacre or is conducting the Uyghur massacre? If so, the Trump administration screwed up by not presenting that evidence.
> Uyghur genocide This is a lie being spread by far right fundamentalist Adrien Zenz that the U.S. media had eaten up.
Is the video fake?
Congress is another check on executive power and is also checked itself. However, the judicial system is designed to be way more responsive and definitive than the legislative branch.
An executive order can literally declare anything it wants. If it goes against the law, that is where the courts come in. Congress can't tell the president what he can and cannot write, if the president writes an order that goes against the law, that is where the courts come in (and that is what is happening).
What we see happening in the US is the fossilization of an authoritarian regime where the president creates de facto laws in the stroke of his pen and the Senate supports his undemocratic behavior, while Congress is kept powerless. The only thing left to check for abuses is the judiciary system, which has not been elected in the first place, and by the way can only limit the worst illegal excesses. It is essentially a "constitutional autocracy" in practice.
I believe there was a video where a Chinese United Nations member was telling a Chinese audience that every member of the United Nations has a nationality. This opposes the values of the United Nations and clearly China is there to abuse the system.
By the same thinking Comcast should not be able to cut off someone's internet service (for not paying a bill) because doing so would violate that person's free speech rights (the ability to send email). Ditto for hosting providers, registrars and so on.
In this case the government sees a threat to the general public and believes it is right for getting rid of that threat. Really in a way like the classic 'can't yell fire in a crowded theater' argument.
The analogy breaks down here, allowing WeChat does not infringe on positive or negative liberty of much of anyone.