Chinese hacking spree hit an ‘astronomical’ number of victims
wired.com
wired.com
I'm not sure Apple and others who either sell product there or have large manufacturing there are as willing to forgo the 'promise market', but it looks more and more we will have to. More or less the next Russia in terms of sanctions.
We'll see how Biden handles this. I'm sure it's a tough call.
The CCP doesn’t allow the us companies the same.
Why our government let that happen. Letting so much business leave to the CCP will be one of the greatest failings of the us government.
Many of the biggest companies in China are from the US. This is a Fox News tier talking point that gets mindlessly parroted without any logical scrutiny.
Hundreds of billions are earnt yearly by US domiciled companies. Google alone brings in $50 billion from China to the US and they have been "banned" there for years.
Some others: Nike, Intel, GM, Walmart, Coke, KFC, McDonalds, Proctor and Gamble, Qualcom, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, 3M, Texas Instruments, Starbucks, Nvidia, AMD, the list goes on and is extensive.
Starbucks has around 70% marketshare. Have any of the people commenting here even step foot inside China before making comments like "US companies can't compete there"?
Who exactly in the us(sic) is locked out again? Garbage social media companies like Facebook and Twitter? Who cares? The world in general needs less of them.
Now they're a global power and, gasp, they act like one. Nobody could have seen this coming.
Anyone who was critically thinking saw this coming a long way out.
No one with half a brain thought anything else would happen. Even if China was a liberal democracy, this would still happen.
It was just arrogant and short term thinking.
I read a dozen books on post-Nixon US politics.
The amount of allegations from both sides of US politics that the other benefitted in the personal capacity from trade with China is staggering.
At least some of them must be genuine.
It comes to a very simple explanation that communists have indeed been influencing US politics for decades with very crude means, and that they were successful in that.
This is an embarrassing admission US has to do first before any recovery can be started.
Here's what lead me to come back to HN:
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2021/03/is-china-hacking-rando...
Like, actually impressive.
It has nothing to do with infiltration or influence. It's simply the basic structure of the American political system that, since its very founding (who was able to vote?) oriented the government into the facilitation of profit above all else.
That is actually the realization the US has to do, but it seems somehow even more embarrassing than the conclusion that the US government is infiltrated by commies, for some odd reason.
But... but one can't believe into any other explanation as any much credible.
Do hundreds of US political insiders lobby for China in one voice just for nothing?
You don't have closet communists, just a lot of very greedy, amoral, and easy to exploit power holders.
American legal system prohibits jailing people for anything but being caught red handed in cases of political corruption.
I have no idea what you can do about that without doing political persecution, but on other hand if you leave it be it will keep being exploited like hell.
Lol you’ve just described capitalists.
Capitalism vs Communism is a useless debate if the will isn't there to hold the corrupt accountable and ensure that the average citizen is empowered (with said power secured both physically and legally.)
- The US needs access to China's goods to be viable. For half a century US companies improved their efficiency/competitiveness by moving their process to China. They now have too many dependencies in the form of Chinese manufacturing and development capabilities and do not have the skills/knowledge/talents/infrastructure in the US. Because of this China can dictate their rules with zero pressure (though India and other countries will surely be a difficult competition at some point, or maybe already are).
- China owns more than 1 trillion of US debt. In the past the country bought a massive amount of US debt to inflate USD vs RMB and boost their own economy. Currently China has no reasons to sell their reserve as that would impact their economy negatively. If the US blocks them they may start massively selling US debt, which would impact USD and the US economy.
I think you have this backwards. China bought US treasuries to weaken their currency and increase demand for their goods. If they now sell, they will face significant appreciation of the yuan and become uncompetitive. At the same time the US would become more competitive. There would be short term disruption but China would suffer more.
I was answering to someone talking about cutting China off the US market (or at minimum adding strong restrictions). In that situation China’s economy is already suffering.
My response was that such an act by China would actually help the US economy, not hurt it (while simultaneously hurting China).
Some replacements might be slower and more expensive to spin up than people and industries have wanted or been willing to do, but there's literally nothing unique in China.
The cost advantage, at this point, has eroded greatly and is on trajectory to continue doing so (especially if they are to meet their own stated and industrial policy goals).
Also, China is dependent on lots of thing from other countries, including the US, so the notion that they can dictate rules "with zero pressure" is wrong.
Finally, the debt piece is not something I understand well, but I almost exclusively see that addressed by experts as a faulty notion. At least, the notion that all China has to do to cripple the US suddenly start selling tons of US debt or dollars is total fantasy.
Realistically, what would china do? If you "start massively selling US debt", what does that mean? Someone has to buy it. You're increasing the supply while demand probably stays pretty constant. But realistically, I don't think it could go below 90-cents on the dollar. I mean, who wouldn't take US government debt at a 10% discount? Compared to commercial debt from a company with way more risk than the US government, that's way better. So, are we talking about raising the US government's cost to borrow by a few percentage points for a few months?
China can't really disrupt the US economy via its debt holdings. Actually cutting China off from the US would have a far greater impact. Heck, Trump's tariffs were a tiny move and created intense disruption in a lot of industries like bicycle sales. That's not even cutting off China or anything. Imagine if smartphones couldn't be imported into the US for a year or two?
But I don't think the original poster is talking about "cutting China off" in whole. I think the issue in question is about a company like ByteDance/TikTok getting to operate in the US while Google, Facebook, Clubhouse, etc. get blocked from accessing China. If TikTok doesn't need to compete with US companies in China, but Twitter/Instagram/Clubhouse need to compete with TikTok in the US, it means that Chinese companies will have double the market to sell into.
China's GDP is around $24T and the US's is around $21T so a service like TikTok can get access to all $45T while a US-based company like Facebook can't get access to the Chinese market. If you're able to service both countries, your investment in software, infrastructure, etc. goes further.
I don't think it's about cutting China off, but rather wanting a more level playing field. When we're talking about something like smartphones, Apple, Samsung, and others sell into the Chinese market a lot and while China might do things to help its own companies like Huawei, it's open enough to placate a lot of people. That's very different from Facebook and Twitter which are banned in the country. Apple is 20% of the Chinese smartphone market.
If a US company makes the Next Big Thing in social networking, a Chinese company gets to copy it for the Chinese market. If a Chinese company makes the Next Big Thing, they can launch it in the US market as TikTok did.
I don't think this is about cutting Chinese manufacturing off. I think this is a question of whether firms like ByteDance/TikTok should be allowed to come into the US while US firms like Facebook or Twitter can't enter China.
If Facebook created a similar sibsidiary social network for China, and called it '脸书' would China care about the distinction?
Better question, who wants to be the guy that goes, "I have a great idea. It'll really piss off those yanks. It'll just cost us about $100 billion (the price of like 7 Gerald Ford class carriers) along with the interest payments. A small price to pay to piss them off and have their private corps and allies buy their debt at a discount."
That's borderline a scenario like that comic meme at a board meeting for ideas and the dude gets thrown out the window.
We just printed four trillion dollars out of thin air and the sky didn't fall.
What makes you think that printing one quarter of that amount in order to sterilize a dump of treasuries will cause the sky to fall?
Treasury bonds are issued and put on the bond market. When purchased, those funds are the "money printer go brrrr". It's not so much printing money, just getting deeper into debt. Call it what it is, so it can be approached properly. Calling a tiger a duck isn't going to save you from getting mauled to death.
No, they aren't.
You are confusing fiscal deficits with monetary expansion. Worse yet, seem to be complaining that GP is failing to confuse monetary expansion with fiscal deficits, when suggesting use of the former to deal with the adverse effects of a particular source of constraints on the ability to leverage the latter.
All of these treasuries are sold to primary dealers and the secondary market transactions are of little interest to any macro variable. Some treasuries are held by China in its Federal Reserve account. Should China sell the treasuries to another buyer, they will be transferred to a different account in the same bank. The nationality of the account holder makes no difference to the price of the asset.
The real issue is can China force the price of treasuries to be lower than it is? The answer to that is, maybe a little on the margin. Treasuries are priced as the expectation of average short term rates which are policy decisions by the Federal Reserve. So the real question is can China force the Federal Reserve to raise short term rates over a prolonged period? The Fed does this as part of an inflation fighting policy so this is a question about inflation and has nothing to do with China "dumping" anything.
Trying to guess the inflationary effects of something is hard, so I will throw out some theories and you can decide which one you like:
1. To the degree that US (and global) corporations have been outsourcing manufacturing to China to avoid paying higher wages to first world workers, then this results in driving down wage increases which could create an inflationary spiral, depending on your theory of inflation. Old school people thought inflation was the result of wages being too high. So if they are right, then yes, a very tight labor market could increase inflation more than expected and perhaps the Fed would need to keep rates a bit higher, but again to fight inflation, not because nation X no longer wants access to the US capital markets. I think most Americans would welcome this greatly, although stock prices would take a hit.
2. At the same time this would create an economic shock and the Fed may lower rates to stimulate the economy during the shock. So the short run effects are really mixed.
3. But there is another aspect here, which is that the trade deficit with China creates a loss of income for the US, which is made up for by increased government spending, whether disability payments to laid off workers, or welfare payments or other costs. Thus a reduction in the trade deficit will drive a reduction in the government deficit and thus a reduced demand to sell treasuries that moves in lockstep with the reduced demand to buy treasuries. So if you are of the newer school that says euler consumption trade offs are going to control investment demand, and sticky prices cause nominal interest rates to generate inflation, then once you adjust for the reduced government deficits created by trade deficits, you end up with a model that predicts higher short run rates and then stable long run rates.
4. There is the issue of international capital flows. Let's say we block China from purchasing dollar assets, so investment demand for the dollar decreases, therefore the dollar itself depreciates against the global basket, which causes US exports to be more competitive and we export more, which increases domestic income, which threatens an increase in inflation, which causes a small increase in rates as the economy is booming, up until the higher rates offset the depreciated dollar and things are back into equilibrium. This is why nations such as China intentionally devalue their dollar when they want to stimulate the economy.
Note that financial market beauty contests has zero impact on the US risk-free rates and thus on the price of treasuries. US treasuries are priced by arbitrage against the time path of future short rates, not by how popular the US is or whether some nation wants to hold treasuries.
You can pick among all of these or make your own scenario, but the bottom line is that rates go up only because the Fed raises rates in response to inflation. They do not go up because China decides to give away a bunch of its dollar assets.
China, of course, can sell the treasuries at a discount. Hell, they can give them away. That wont change the equilibrium price, it will just give windfalls to someone else at China's expense.
Capital markets are pretty elastic -- they will not run out of money to lend someone who is buyig treasuries from China on the cheap. Absolutely every bank will be willing to lend you money if you have treasuries as collateral, and the haircuts are small indeed. Hell, you can even borrow from the Fed itself to buy treasuries. Life-Pro Tip: If someone is offering to sell you treasuries at a discount, then buy them!
There will be no shortage of buyers ready and eager to relieve China of the burden of having treasuries.
No, it really isn't. The thing the US is indeed does very little for an economy of its size.
Washington can slam fist on the table, and US industry will be out of China by tomorrow, without much impact at home besides no iToys this season, and few percents off its stock market.
Lack of consumer goods would of course be upsetting, but people wouldn't die from lack of them.
Yeah, I think you're under estimating the interconnectedness of the supply chain there. Would definitely make the pandemic disruption look small.
And you're assuming China won't retaliate. I wouldn't like to be a US national in China when that happened.
Pandemic disruption is small. A disruption on this scale was nothing unheard of historically. Infectious diseases were taking millions of lives in the developed world before the advent of antibiotics, and to lesser extend until the bio-technological revolution of seventies.
What was unheard of was world's biggest power being rendered utterly impotent, and in complete stupor by such minor events.
I see a country like US being otherwise fully capable of dealing with a crisis on this scale easily.
> And you're assuming China won't retaliate. I wouldn't like to be a US national in China when that happened.
Of course they will! You will be cutting into personal coffers of their highest elites. It will be a very personal challenge to them. Having them eat watery gruel like lowly peasants will infuriate them.
That's exactly the POINT. You see a bad guy, you challenge him to beat him. You don't beat a bad guy by avoiding him.
Nobody wins a fight without fighting it to the end. Escalate until you win.
The old Cold War was very clear that final victory involved civilian deaths in the millions. Be very clear: are you advocating for that?
I'm advocating for people to understand that not being ready for this will be their demise.
Tell me, what would've been a better solution for WW2.
Let Adolph, Stalin, Hirohito, or worse both of them together, have Europe, and then have their free way to use the completely overwhelming resource advantage to kill you, or go and fight to the bitter end before they have it?
The most logical action to do if you can't win, is to fight. One must be ready to fight, even if it is a completely hopeless battle.
Second, I want to make you guys understand that, for now, NATO has 100% genuine ability to do something about its adversaries. Wait just a few more years at the current pace, and it wouldn't.
Third, if you chicken out, your weakness will rile the beast(s) even more, and fire up its appetites. It's showing your back to the tiger, an invitation for disaster.
Also, it's funny you bring up the Axis powers considering that America would have entirely sat out the entire war if it wasn't for Pearl Harbour and Japan constantly provoking a response with their actions in the pacific. I have also never seen the US ever go into a war where they did not have overwhelming power advantage over their enemies. By the time D-Day happened, the supply lines for the Axis were crippled beyond repair and the war was essentially already lost. It was just a matter of time before supplies ran out.
China has more than enough nuclear capability to cripple the entirety of NATO and they also are well aware that NATO has the capability to do likewise. Hence, neither parties are ever going to even contemplate an outright war with each other despite the wet dreams of war mongers from both sides.
First, no it isn't. Second, in a few more years, China will be the only country in the world with material, and military capacity to take the second strike, and keep on offence.
Third, you haven't learned anything if you ever studied WWII. While Germany was running on vapours in the late war, it was still running. They had few years more of small arms supplies, and still some food, which was indeed better than what union's officers had even in reich's final days. Last reserves of fuel were enough for more than a year of low intensity warfare. And yes, Germany fought to the bitter end. Otherwise, where did you thing hundred of thousand American casualties came?
Please don't comment on this matter anymore. You don't know anything about war.
What isn't? That China has enough nuclear capability to cripple the entirety of NATO or vice versa? I'd like to see you justify that tall claim. Your second "point" just sounds like fear mongering without substance. If any country could develop that capability, it is Russia with the largest land area of any country.
Also, my point about the Axis having essentially already lost the war thanks to crippled supplies was incorrect because "they had a few years more of small arms supplies, and still some food" and enough fuel to "last more than a year of low intensity warfare"? That's just an inevitable loss but with extra steps in between! I might not know anything about war but clearly you don't know anything about my argument if you thought this was an actual rebuttal.
Low intensity warfare? The Allies had enough bombers to collapse entire cities! Even the hundreds of thousand Americans dead were minor compared to the millions of Germans that perished.
That's kind of why we don't engage in these kinds of large scale ground invasion type wars anymore (at least without one side being completely overwhelmingly more powerful) - the costs are so astronomically high, both in money and in causalities.
Lack of consumer goods means lack of jobs for people who transport, warehouse, and sell consumer goods.
Lack of jobs means lack of money to pay for things like food, shelter, medical care, etc, only some of which the US has adequate safety nets for.
People will, indeed, die from lack of consumer goods.
Your comment makes it seem like this would lead to catastrophe or collapse.
It would more likely lead to industry rotation and employment change.
Yes, you can reduce any macro factor to a death count, but those are always trading off in all directions. It's meaningless to categorically single out a particular scenario of swapping production as more deadly than the others.
I'd like to regain industrial capacity too but we're missing an entire population base of expertise and relationships.
People barely making ends meet aren't very interested in those kinds of political statements.
You could, of course, try to lie to them about what the consequences of your policies are going to be.
If you can't do this, you can't do this.
And you certainly wouldn't be able to do even more painful things which are truly needed for the West to have any chance to put the genie back into the bottle.
China, and Russia have effectively conditioned the NATO countries over the decades into "self-beneficial inaction." Now, seeing words like yours proves their strategy worked.
What has the US really lost? No territory, no people; there's no stream of refugees to the "winning" Chinese side.
Trump was anything but. Your writing just makes no sense.
This isn't some insurmountable problem. Yes, there are scenarios where you go "too fast" and raise too many prices too quickly and piss people off. Or, you go slower and make it more palatable.
We need in total embargo China. She are largest threat among existence for continuing America.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holding_Foreign_Companies_Acco...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EQUITABLE_Act
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-12-03/China-slams-new-audit-...
https://journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/CBLR/announc...
In 2015, the SEC reached a settlement with the Chinese branches of the Big Four accounting firms on non-compliance with the PCAOB’s regulation, and the administrative proceeding against these firms was dismissed for four years.[15] Now, four years have passed, and the conflict of regulation remains unresolved.
You can’t have $5 T-shirts and also a $15 minimum wage.
with $15 minimum wage there is no need for $5 T-shirts.
When that is not the case, it's usually in sectors where Chinese companies don't have full access to the Chinese market either. If Facebook or Google were Chinese companies but hosted the same content, do you think they'd be allowed inside the Great Firewall? Actually, we don't need to guess: when Qihoo 360 tried to provide censored access to Western social media, they were quickly shut down: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/12/chinese-app-that-let-users-a...
Western companies who don't operate in China aren't shut out because the government treats them differently. On the contrary, the government would treat them like Chinese companies, and some aren't willing to put up with that. Chinese companies don't get a choice.
"Made in China" is exactly the type of curse that the global elite like to put on people. It's plain as day what's coming next and yet, everybody has just accepted it since the 70s. China will be the world superpower to replace the US and apparently we're all fine with that.
the next hack will be using one of these Microsoft Exchange Servers most likely at a government or contractor's facility/account, and intelligence agencies will say Putin signed off on it himself. its all the information they have, just erase the idea about their omniscience. they are doing the same traceroute's that you are doing.
I don't see how he can. I don't see how the next 2-3 US administrations can.
If the current level of China's "scare power" is enough to paralyze the US, you will have less, and less options on the table with each year as you go.
Time works against the US, and the West at large.
They have a very anti immigration culture, and the one child policy means they’ll have more retirees than working age in a decade or two.
And it’ll only get worse as given their less than replacement birth rate and substantially more males than females.
A slightly aged China will still be able to field more military age men than the whole of Western bloc combined.
In the age of nuclear weapons having a large population might actually be a liability since you have more civilians that need to be defended.
You probably never heard of Mao's most famous catchphrase, reflecting perfectly on the thinking of people like Xi Jinping.
You know, the one that went over like a lead ballon and likely cost Hillary the 2016 election?
Likelihood that this kind of treaty coming into force now is essentially nil.
US is a corporate republic. The republic that founders dreamed of has waned and frailed from generations of corporate sellout political, legal, media, and business conglomerate establishments. Shareholders will come first and will continue to do so. With 33 trillion dollars debt there is not really any other option left now other than to continue to sail the sinking ship the same way.
> We'll see how Biden handles this. I'm sure it's a tough call.
He won't. He is just the face of the same old thinking that brought us here. Just like all of his predecessors in last 40 years.
And it's a good thing. Only Trump was bold enough to entertain the idea of a commercial war with China.
I live in the US, but I don't want that. I want peace and freedom. China and the US are natural allies given the complementarity of the industries.
Let's make peace not war.
The US has been the origin for not only the literally largest pandemic in the history of humanity [0], but also responsible for the last pandemic before COVID-19 [1].
Would you be okay with holding the US similarly responsible for disease emerging in it's sphere of influence, or is that something you only reserve when looking for why "evil countries be evil"?
- Lowest approval ever of China from US citizens (20%). similar decline/rates in other democratic countries this year. That means people are boycotting "made in china" goods.
- Japan self defence force, UK aircraft carrier, France submarines, and Germany frigates are now (and will be) patrolling south china sea along with US carriers.
- UK and Canada offering citizenships to Hong Kong citizens
- QUAD alliance (Japan, India, Australia, US), as well as 4 out of the 5 eyes alliance, increasing activities
- Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, US and other countries offering continued incentives for companies to move back from China
- Apple moving iPhone, iPads and MacBook productions out of China
- Even Angela Merkel, China's most important ally in europe, has openly warned China to open up its markets or suffer. Also, she will be stepping down later this year (THANK GOD), and anti-China sentiments are rising in Germany
- US to build anti-China missile network along first island chain on Japan, Taiwan https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/International-relations/Ind...
BUT. An encircled crazed maniac will do strange things. It will probably do something ridiculously stupid like attacking Taiwan. The attack will fail, and china will be sanctioned by the world just like russia.
> But as with the Russian SolarWinds hackers, investigators have yet to identify who exactly the Hafnium hackers are—beyond Microsoft's assertion that they're state-sponsored and operate out of China—or to pin down the full extent of their motivations.
Obviously, countries do this kind of thing all the time. And an operation of this scale is likely to come from someone with government resources. But it continues to bother me that the requirements for attribution of these attacks never rise above the level of hearsay.
Is nobody even slightly skeptical of Microsoft? The company that eagerly collaborates with the alphabet soup agencies gets to write off an exploit in its own software, courtesy of Chinese state hackers, when we all know _for a fact_ that the NSA pays these companies to keep such exploits around for their own use.
It's one thing to acknowledge that one explanation is likely; it's another thing to give up on skepticism entirely.
If so, is it possible that the mass accumulation of hatred for the Chinese is a byproduct of state driven media?
The equivocation of hatred for the Chinese and hatred for it’s government is itself Chinese government propaganda.
Any time criticism comes up of the actions of their government, the deflection method is to say it’s just hatred for the Chinese. This is done to prevent the Chinese people from realizing that people in the West are on their side and they are not their government.
If it was the case that your empathy stretches across the pacific ocean for the Uighurs, then why does it not stretch for the Palestinians? I think the actions taken by Israel is way worse of a human rights violation than China is doing, but because the West supports Israel, it turns a blind eye against the Palestinians?
Moreover, one can formulate and theoretically, yes accusations should not equivocate as hatred for the Chinese.
But in practice, this isn't true at all.
and people in the West assuming they know best is as much of a problem as anything else. you're not on their side, you're speaking as if you're above them
This is a common sentiment with American conservatives. They think liberal people look down upon them from their ivory towers. Honestly, they do. Your average conservative is malnourished with a fox news media diet and isn't educated enough to critically think about their own positions, you can't even engage in a rational conversation with most of them. The GOP at large is a bad faith party who rules for power and dominance, not for the improvement of peoples lives. Rhetoric is their weapon not reason.
While liberals are not in favor of white supremacy, religion, or "easy fixes" they do favor policy that would benefit the average conservative person. In the sense that liberals want to see conservative peoples lives meaningfully improve, liberals are on the side of conservatives. In the sense that liberals want to preserve conservative culture and reinforce their world views, liberals are clearly not on the side of conservatives.
China has it's own Han supremacy problem (just like America has a white supremacy problem), and while the west is not interested in supporting Han supremacy, I think the average [educated] westerner does want to see the average chinese persons life improve, just not at the cost of Taiwanese lives, Uigher lives, Tibetan lives, or Hong Konger lives, and not at the cost of our own prosperity.
All this talk of "the CCP" is just a very thin veil of self-deception, allowing you to pretend that you are "on the same side" of the Chinese people. You're not. The best future for China is to become the dominant world power, and you don't want that in any form or shape, am I wrong?
[1] https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/07/long-term-sur...
And guess which country disappears citizens for “re-education” if they speak out against said government. You’d have to be daft to respond to those surveys negatively in China if there was any kind of chance your response could be traced back to you.
> The best future for China is to become the dominant world power, and you don't want that in any form or shape, am I wrong?
Yes, you are wrong. Becoming “the” dominant world power has little to do with the good of the people. Norway’s citizens are better off than US citizens on average and Norway is irrelevant on the global power scale.
Regardless, you are still confused about what people are against. It’s not China becoming a world power (it already is). It’s literally the abusive way the CCP treats dissidents. Look at the Muslim camps, look at Honk Kong, look at Winnie the Pooh.
Let it sink in that most people are happy the Chinese lives are improving. The issue is with the fascists at the top.
Personally I doubt it, and I imagine that the average Chinese citizen understands this reality very well indeed as they give their positive answers to the nice poll agent with the sincerest smile they can muster.
Everyone knows how the game is played.
Currently there are more than 919.14 million CPC members in China (data point circa 2019), and this does not include the people working for 事业单位 (gov. funded public institutes). So for a random Chinese citizen, Western people have a, like, 3% chance of hate and 97% of love? If we propagate one hop further to the relatives/friends (let's say it knows 100 people in his/her life), the number goes to 4% of love and 96% of hate.
:-(
Less directly, much of news reporting is dependent upon access to exclusive and sometimes anonymous sources. There's little to prevent some of those sources from being honeypots meant to indirectly manipulate reporters into parroting a given narrative.
Even so, I doubt that antipathy towards China's being driven by any centralized authority. We're entering an era of great power competition with the country, its (ostensible) ideology has historically existed in opposition to the US, and many still see it as the poster-boogyman for the hollowing out of American industries.
There's always been tension, and ever since the Trump administration began imposing tariffs and clamping down against Chinese IP and technology theft, it's incidentally become more present in the public's consciousness.
What are you referring to? You mean articles that attribute hacking to actors with connections to the PRC?
I'm sure there's some of that, but I suspect that even if there wasn't we'd see much the same results. In the US, the state and the mainstream media are essentially the same thing. The people who run the state and the people who make up the mainstream media are part of the same social circles, they go to the same restaurants, they tend to have the same worldviews.
1) sanctions against China
2) a Greater Firewall outside China, right on all fiber cables, blocking/filtering all traffic from China.
China is a hostile nation and we need to treat it as such.
I don't like China's behavior (toward us and it's own). I don't believe for a minute that I know how to solve the problem, because every solution is bound to have unintended side effects, some which may be worse than the original problem.
Gather the experts in the fields (there are likely more than one field at play) and manage their discussion. I would ask them questions and observe how they discuss. If I felt that one or both were not intellectually honest, I would replace them with other people, and repeat.
Once I felt an intellectually honest discussion had reached a conclusion, then I would act (vote, provide legislation, etc).
It is sad to me that we are moving away from a process like this and not toward it.
Given the amount of suspicious Chinese devices and traffic, you'd imagine we should be doing something though?
Who is 'we'? Chances are you live in a country founded in democratic principles. This means after each election, priorities change, based on the politicians that are voted into office.
Take the USA as a good example. The priorities of the 2008-2016 administration were undermined by the 2017-2020 administration, and the priorities of the 2017-2020 administration are being undermined by the 2021-now administration.
Both sides think they're right, and were doing what was right for the country. Both sides think the other was an existential threat to the nation, and use similar rhetoric to justify their actions.
That ship sailed long ago.
If the only alternate is status quo, then it's not working very well is it for:
1) Tibetans, Uighurs and other minorities
2) Taiwan, India, and basically any country that shares a border which China, since China has border issues with every country that it shares a border with
3) US, and Western world whose IP is being stolen everyday and is being constantly under attack from China
I really have no idea where this narrative comes from. Chinese government is evil, hostile, and cruel even to (some of) their own citizens. However, China as a nation are people - just like you and me. Why should we treat them as "hostile"? It makes no sense at all. This kind of crooked reasoning and blurred thinking is one of the main causes of all wars in the history of mankind.
The problem is that the Chinese government, who ARE hostile, take advantage of the fact that we treat most Chinese as non-hostile. Nobody knows how many Chinese students and workers in the West are essentially spies for the Chinese government, but we do know it is enough to be worried about.
I'm not sure what we can do about that but I don't think we can pretend it's not an issue.
But we do know how many of them are contributing domestically. A growing percentage of American PHD graduates came from China and the vast majority of them are planning to stay.
https://cset.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/CSET-Trends-i...
A nation is generally its government, CCP in the example of China and yes it is hostile against every non-China nation. Chinese are people just like every other people.
This is exactly the argument I object to. As per definition, "A nation is a community of people formed on the basis of a common language, territory, history, ethnicity, or a common culture." Keeping this distinction (between the government and the citizens) is crucial because the discourse influences actions.
Now, the point you're making - that there is a difference between the government and the people, and we need to remember it - is a valid point, and an important one. But you're splitting the wrong hair to make that point.
And this is more or less fine. Not just in the news, in normal conversation we do the same. Not just "China is doing this" but also "Chinese are doing this." That's also logically true, because some subset (however big or small) of Chinese is doing this.
However, I object to this particular expression - "China is a hostile nation." I don't know why it's even a point of contention. Maybe when people use the term 'nation' they actually mean 'state'? Because 'nation' by and large refers to people the country consist of.
Yes, they do.
> Because 'nation' by and large refers to people the country consist of.
No, it doesn't. We keep telling you this, over and over and over, and you keep not listening, but I'm going to say it one more time: No, it doesn't. When you're talking about international things - things between countries - "nation" by and large refers to the government, not the people.
Definition 1.b. in your link includes the government explicitly.
None of them exclude the government, and they can all reasonably include the government.
I'm discussing this apparently insignificant issue ad nauseam only because repeated conflation of government and citizens in discourse, media, and ultimately our minds are not without consequences.
I don’t see how you can make this claim so strongly.
The government is not independent of the people even if it is authoritarian.
Any hostility enacted by the government will necessarily involve the people. Governments need people in order to do anything.
A government without people can speak hostile words, but can’t be hostile, because by definition it can’t do anything if it isn’t governing anyone.
You will need to explain.
The Communists are the problem, and even then not unqualified: the CCP has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of relative poverty to economic prosperity, even as they do terrible things to Tibetans, Uighurs, and Falun Gong, among others.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overseas_Chinese
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Chinese_New_Year...
The important difference between the “West” and China is that everyone knows CCP is going to look out for China. It’s not immediately clear that governments in the west do the same for their own.
Right, and increasingly those "stakeholders" don't include the actual citizens of those nations.
How do you propose to coordinate hundreds of countries to cut one country off the internet?
Oh, and targeted sanctions - aren't. Entities will view any sanctions as a legal risk and find it easier to just stop trading with the country at all. See Iran with medical supplies during the pandemic.
This idea that sanctions are a peaceful or nonviolent alternative to bombing things needs to die. In the 90s the sanctions against Iraq led to the deaths of half a million civilians and caused multiple successive UN humanitarian coordinators in Iraq to resign, calling the sanctions regime "genocidal". How anyone can continue to view sanctions as a favorable option is beyond me.
The sanctions on Iran aren't targeted. They're blanket sanctions with specific exceptions. The problem there is asking international companies to do a bunch of stuff otherwise forbidden by the sanctions (financial, logistical, etc) which I assume is either a pain to get approved ahead of time or frightening to justify after the fact.
A better example of targeted sanctions is what's happening in response to the poisoning of Navalny. Specific Russians were sanctioned. That doesn't hurt uninvolved citizens nearly as much.
So does doing nothing.
Sorry, but it is time that the world is sanctioning the united states in the way that you propose to sanction China that is finding back to its old strength.
best regards from a white person from europe, not a chinese.
And they are quite ineffective.
Insinuates some grand conspiracy. Part I take issue with.
Some recent ones that e remember seeing in the news:
https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2021-03-01/chines...
https://www.livemint.com/news/india/chinese-hackers-targeted...
//Why a state-sponsored hacker group did this?
Great foundation being laid.
"Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter."
The White House acting as a PR unit for MS (or is it vice versa?) is a serious problem.
If you think the current White House administration and Microsoft aren't on the more trustworthy side of the trust spectrum, then who in your opinion is more trustworthy?
Who would I trust? I’ll start with someone providing some sort of proof. Which is entirely absent here.
Here's a community that contains minority beliefs but in English. I've pasted in another post. Judge by yourself they are rational people or not.
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2021/03/is-china-hacking-rando...
Remember Bush/The New York Times falsely claiming that Iraq had WMD? A lesson we shouldn't quickly forget. Especially when the current admin has already initiated illegal military action. I'm weary of war hawks and the propaganda that supports them.
Microsoft has done untrustworthy things. They've also build the most successful (esp. in the longer view) commercial computing ecosystem because it hit the right balance between stability/robustness/usability. Many elements of that include proving some minimum burdens of trustworthiness (not to be confused with earning absolute trust).
The US government... cf the 20th century? You mean the greatest secular advancements in the human condition in history? And as for the age of "American Empire" (post WW2? Post Cold War?)... are you referring to the relatively most peaceful, humane, self-effacing hegemon that has ever been known the planet (not to be confused with a perfectly peaceful and human hegemon)?
This flippant stance combined with absolutely no countervailing context and fantasy burdens of proof... please.
I don't really doubt the allegations, as the motive makes sense, but I'm hoping there will be a good postmortem.
Millions of bombed, displaced and otherwise sanctioned to oblivion might disagree with this level of modesty and humility.
Maybe America wouldn't be top of the list but the point is made in distinction to other regimes that achieved remotely similar power differentials.
The US murdered massive amounts of people in East Asia and the Middle East during that time period. Napalm, Agent Orange, war crimes... We were as bad as any hegemony. Much worse actually, due to technical superiority. We also have the largest prison population of any country (per capita and in total) due to the "war" on drugs.
So yes, I'd say we're near the bottom of the list. Especially if you go back past the 20th century (slavery, genocide).