U.S. to open program to replace Huawei equipment in U.S. networks
reuters.com
reuters.com
Canada was obeying international treaties when it detained Meng. The Chinese state took Canadian hostages and held them in questionable conditions until they were eventually able to force a swap. It is now clear that the Chinese government expects certain Chinese executives and corporations to be above both international law and the law of foreign countries in which they operate.
If your country permits Huawei to do business within it's borders, that puts your own citizens at risk of being taken hostage. Let's not kid ourselves that national governments care more about people than economics, but letting foreign countries take your citizens hostage without repercussion can threaten your chances of being reelected.
Thanks to this episode, public opinion in Canada is now overwhelmingly against letting Huawei operate in Canada. Given this and pressure from its allies in the five eyes, it seems almost inconceivable that the Canadian government won't soon ban Huawei from participation in 5G networks.
This episode has also raised questions about permitting the operations of other Chinese corporations that are too closely associated with the Chinese government. e.g. If a Chinese mining corp operating in a foreign country had it's operations shut down for environmental law infractions, would there be reprisals in the form of trade sanctions, etc. from China?
This kind of lawless behaviour is going to have a chilling effect on all commerce with Chinese companies.
Hence why two Canadian spies were detained.
How this episode could possibly be framed as Chinese aggression, I have no idea.
Your claims are also disingenuous. Why do you emphasize "international"? Only one party was interested in prosecuting Meng on ridiculous charges - the US.
>Edith Terry: Michael Kovrig is a friend, and I am very conscious of the privations he has endured. And while his background is complex and possibly included intelligence gathering for the Canadian government during his diplomatic career, he was very open about his research interests and contacts.
Kovrig, ex-diplomat working for a NATO funded NGO - textbook spy cover. Spavor's North Korean activities speak for themselves. The charges were Spavor providing Kovrig with photos of classified military equipment. I don't see why folks insist on being such useful idiots and pretend Canada doesn't have intelligence assets in PRC or PRC's formidable counter-intelligence mechanisms developed in last decade that has exposed every CIA asset somehow can't round up a few Canadian spies out of the thousands of Canadian expats in PRC. Canadian Spy Agency CSIS also didn't tweet "Welcome home, #Michaels" is just icing on cake.
This whole Meng situation has shown that rule of law is really flexible and that US lawfare reaches far and deep.
Textbook spy cover would be a mid-level manager for a Canadian auto parts company, on assignment to the Chinese office.
In real life, career diplomats wind up in NGO circles where their skills are more transferrable. NGOs are also easier to spinup where needed and raises less eyebrows when they communicate and develop relevant contacts working within the established track 2/2.5 people to people system. 1000s of NGOs operated in PRC without much scrutiny until the NGO crackdown following CIA purge explicitly to reduce espionage/influence, i.e. Kovrig's International Crisis Group wasn't licensed to operate at the time of his arrest. There's also Spavor publically spamming his NK credentials. The TLDR is that PRC retaliation is calibrated, these two were rounded up because they were the most obvious spies, and while Canada/West can fool public by insisting they're just innocent individuals, to others in the IR community the message is obvious.
They arrive in military aircraft, salute to military officers, is this normal for Canadian tourists?
https://twitter.com/DadingLi/status/1442344903032262665
welcomed by Canadian intelligence, does this happen a lot to Canadian tourists?
https://twitter.com/csiscanada/status/1441571942721593345
One Michael met Kim Jong-un, is this a common thing among Canadian tourists?
The article you linked to explains the link to NK.
It's quite normal for freed hostages to be flown back by their home country's military, yes.
As for the salute? It's not unusual for civilians to return salutes.
> welcomed by Canadian intelligence, does this happen a lot to Canadian tourists?
I don't think you can take a public tweet from CSIS as any evidence, either for or against, that they're spies.
> One Michael met Kim Jong-un, is this a common thing among Canadian tourists?
Michael Spavor runs (ran?) a North Korea-based consulting business. It's not entirely unsurprising that he's met Kim Jong-un. I would think, if anything, he would be spying on the North Koreans, not the Chinese. North Korea doesn't seem like a convenient home base for a Canadian intelligence operative who's spying on the Chinese.
One of them was a great friend of SerpentZa and C-Milk, and a contributing factor for running out of China for them.
what I see is the US not getting away with the strong-arm tactics its accustomed to, and I applaud it.
But has there actually been a backdoor exposed?
With all the attention turned towards it and that it has been a topic in geopolitics since years - there should have been some ressources allocated towards some reverse engeneering, that clearly shows it is not trustworthy?
If not, why not? I mean it surely is not easy - but I always only hear blame without proof.
(And I don't need proof, that the ccp is not nice. I know that.)
In either case, my takeaway is, that we need more open hardware, that can be easily verified to do what it claims.
And if the US govt intelligence community did find a backdoor, what makes you think they'd tell you or me about it?
https://www.computerworld.com/article/2488962/nsa-hacked-int...
1) This is the NSA. They only talk when attention serves their goals.
2) They may well have, just not with you. We have no idea what conversations have happened amongst NATO members (let alone among 5 Eyes).
How do you know there is no proof? Unlike some dimwitted administrators, the US doesn't have a policy of disclosing actively classified information.
If Xiaomi's consumer-facing devices are subject to this, that suggests that Huawei's enterprise-facing products are subject to the same.
Moreover, they're not doing something like forbidding Chinese-made devices to be sold in the US - instead, they're providing a program to reimburse telecoms for replacing Chinese-made networking hardware - and for national security reasons, which (as other commentators have correctly pointed out) does not require proof (or even accusations) of a backdoor in order to be valid - you can merely be concerned about your supply chain for critical infrastructure.
Furthermore, if the government had discovered a backdoor, there's a strong incentive for it to keep that knowledge hidden, as revealing the nature of the backdoor (or which one they found, if there are several) would give an advantage to those who placed it there.
> Lying and anti-market strategies seem to be the tool of choice of the US government to block the advance of societies that are not deemed to be part of their empire.
As a matter of fact, your whole comment is illogical flamebait that does not deserve to be on HN.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/lithuania-say...
Although, the Huawei stuff definitely needs to go, so your characterization is still off.
Huawei did sell plenty of pure Ethernet / IP switches and firewalls in the US.
Cisco does have plenty of Carrier-grade, Telco-grade and ISP-grade equipment that are used by operators (4G core, Network Functions, BRAS, GGSN/PGW...).
The Intel model of stimulus. Now TSMC runs the show in high end semiconductors.
Companies in China are extensions of the state and tools of foreign policy. Sure these companies are notionally private but the people who own them exist because the CCP allows them to and the price for that is loyalty.
I believe this will continue and I fully expect that at some point the United States will deem those born in mainland China, regardless of current citizenship, to be a security risk and they won't be allowed to work in areas of national security or national interest.
This goes beyond classified material and extends to China cheating on trade including, but not limited to, the wholesale theft of intellectual property through "partnerships" and other means as the price Western companies pay for "access" to the Chinese market.
Western companies won't "win" in China because the CCP won't allow it to happen. They're literally giving away their secret sauce chasing a phantom. There's a reason why there are Chinese versions of every Western company you can think of that's dominant in China.
Why the issue with those born in mainland China? Because China doesn't allow dual-citizenship. Those that become naturalized in the United States, for example, lose their Chinese citizenship. This then becomes a carrot the CCP can dangle in front of those wishing to return: restoration of citizenship. That is, of course, if you happen to have a particular set of knowledge or skills deemed important to China.
What I believe is most needed immediately is reciprocity in trade. That is, if Western companies aren't given fair access to the Chinese market (for the record, it's China's right to restrict this for whatever national interest they wish) then Chinese companies should be similarly restricted in the West.
For example, the US has the FISA courts with all that entails (eg National Security Letters, pen registers). There is a legal framework for this whether you like it or not. My personal view is that the whole FISA system is overreach open to abuse that lacks transparency. But at least Federal judges are still involved in the process.
Or are you talking about something else? Something extrajudicial perhaps?
For example, countries (including the US) use allied intelligence agencies as an end run around their own laws. The NSA has certain restrictions on spying on US citizens that, say, Germany or Israel do not. So the NSA can get counterparts to do their dirty work and in turn the NSA does their dirty work.
Is that what you mean? If so, what's the relevance here? If not, then what?
In any case, we do have examples of exactly what the gp is talking about.
For instance, this one, which subsequently backfired:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-09-02/juniper-m...
The Snowden revelations made it clear that those regulations are toothless, unenforced, and effectively just propaganda.
This sounds almost like it was taken from a political sound-bite. In reality the US have forced the hand of other countries through diplomacy, sanctions, war, etc. to a far higher degree than China (at least so far) if nothing else than because of a longer history of being in a position to do so. It is pure politics and have little or no base in actual reality of the hardware made by the companies mentioned in the articles or Chinese behaviour towards Western businesses.
This is just Us Versus Them. The US have no high road to take here at all and I'm surprised HN seems to believe this has anything to do with China cheating, stealing IPs or whatever they newest accusation is when in reality it should be clear as day to anyone that it is simply the US trying to remain top-dog and force its way on others and nothing else. If China didn't do as they do it would just be some other accusations.
https://www.ft.com/content/c78b69e3-82bd-4f72-881c-12b2ca1ce...
Those agreements really only got started with the Berne Convention-- mainly creative works-- and the Paris Convention-- basically industrial patents. (Yes there were some other smaller agreements before, but these brought things into much larger scale with many, many more signatories to the agreements)
Besides, your line of reasoning amounts to "Other people got away with bad things so it's not fair that I do to" As a parent, I spot that line of logic often in with my kids, and it doesn't hold together very well there either.
China definiately has the upper hand when it comes to exploiting the natural human resources that would otherwise be thorns in the political landscape.
So no it is not "whataboutism", which a bs term anyway because it is almost always used in situations where someone implicitly claims that the US cares about human rights and that's why US atrocities must be brought up as counterargument.
I also think the comparison is wrong to begin with: I doubt you will find prisons in China that allow inmates to have a TV in their cell, or access to Xbox or other videogames.
Why cant we just acknowledge that both are bad.
No nation genuinely cares about human rights, especially the US. They have toppled way too many governments and installed way too many dictators to claim otherwise (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...). The US is relatively "nice" right now, which means that we're skip the second step of appointing a dictator. Even then, it's not because American leaders suddenly became nicer, it's because unlike their Chinese counterparts, they don't have any real long-term goals. If they get into another Cold War or feel the need for a canal in another nation, they'll go right back to being evil again.
China's long term goal is to become the top superpower. USA's long term goal is to stay the top superpower. Everything else flows from this but it should be very clear that "staying in power" is very much a real goal on any horizon. It also involves a lot of military, economic, and political effort. As a democracy the US can't have an equally concentrated aim but as the saying goes, getting to the top is easy, staying at the top is hard.
The biggest difference is really that the US is already in a top position, and a good chunk of the world, particularly the EU, have interests that are mostly aligned with the US. When they're not it usually takes no more than a bit of economic and political pressure from the US to get the desired results.
China does not have this support. The Western world does not have any reason to trust them, no real "relationship", and no guarantee that China would be a "benevolent dictator" like the US. I say "dictator" because the US successfully imposed its views/demands on the Western world almost whenever this was needed by dangling a tiny carrot and a giant stick, a situation most of the world is more or less comfortable with. So no reason to take chances on a country that could forgo the carrot completely, or just have completely misaligned interests.
To the point, people are arguing that China could use Chinese companies to undermine a foreign country, clearly making them a no go for anything secure. In contrast we also know that for all intents and purposes the US can do and did the same with US based companies. It's just about picking the view that supports your personal beliefs and interests. As a regular person, would you rather be spied on by the US via Cisco or by China via Huawei? As the US government this understandably isn't even a question.
How about Taiwan or New Zealand? Can we vote for Spain?
The US wants to keep a lock on all future innovations. They want to maintain their seat. They want to create any barrier to entry that will help them keep living high on the hog. But if an HIV vaccine were invented in China today, the USA would do everything they could to steal it or invalidate any patents on it. The U.S. is opposed to Chinese stealing ideas from a U.S. company. Except for the part of the U.S. that didn't own stock in the U.S. company but does own stock in the Chinese company. And of course everyone in the U.S. who can buy the Chinese product cheaper than the U.S. product.
This seems to not match the behavior that we actually see in other fields. In the situation of folding smartphones, for example, the first manufacturer was Korean. The Chinese solution was to poach staff and steal trade secrets from a contract manufacturer, while the US solution has been to just buy the resulting devices as consumer products.
Parent's point is that US wants IP laws mostly because it has a trove of extremely valuable IPs and is in the leading position far ahead of any other player.
The same way Disney wants strong copyright and trademark protection, with low labor protection, lax tax enforcement etc. They would have different demands and priorities if they were still scrapping existing IPs from the public domain.
If you want to have a conversation on US economic coercion, that's probably a valid topic. But it doesn't dismiss the issue of yet another government, with values much less compatible with most of the developed world, also doing those things at an every increasing pace.
Moreover, IP theft is not remotely comparable to diplomacy or sanctions. The latter are normal ways of doing politics and negotiations. The former is theft, and is immoral under most moral systems (hopefully including the mainstream Chinese one itself). Category error.
> It is pure politics and have little or no base in actual reality of the hardware made by the companies mentioned in the articles or Chinese behaviour towards Western businesses.
Just less than a week ago, there was a frontpage HN post about how Xiaomi phones came with censorship code on them that enforced the CCP's policies[1]. That's the "reality of the hardware made by the companies mentioned in the articles".
Moreover, the "Chinese behaviour towards Western businesses" is characterized by persistent IP theft. Remember Operation Aurora[2], where big names like Raytheon and Google, who has some of the best security in the world, got pwned? Or the aerospace companies that their intelligence agents tried to solicit secrets from[3]? Or the guy who helped the PLA to steal C-17-related material from Boeing[4]? Or when ARM China just "stole" ARM's IP just a month ago[5]? Or when Chinese firms cloned the designs of maglev trains when their European+Japanese developers tried to sell them in China[6]? Or you could look at this wikipedia page with more instances, including theft of nuclear technology[8].
This isn't new, either - they tried to clone a Boeing 707 all the way back in 1980[7], four decades ago.
Moreover, you can't actually claim that this is US politics, because other countries are also reporting this happening to them[6][9][10], and because the US isn't going around and accusing every single country that stands to rival them economically (e.g. India) of IP theft.
> I'm surprised HN seems to believe
Meanwhile, you make baseless claims like "In reality the US have forced the hand of other countries through diplomacy, sanctions, war, etc. to a far higher degree than China" that are backed up by nothing whatsoever, and then drop emotionally-manipulative statements like the above, in lieu of providing a good supporting argument or avoiding using whataboutisms.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/lithuania-say...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Aurora
[3] https://www.industryweek.com/the-economy/article/21118569/ho...
[4] https://www.osi.af.mil/News/Features/Display/Article/2350807...
[5] https://semianalysis.substack.com/p/the-semiconductor-heist-...
[6] https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704814204575507...
[7] https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1980/05/09/c...
[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_espionage_in_the_Unite...
[9] https://www.ft.com/content/0d48a5dc-9362-11ea-899a-f62a20d54...
[10] https://www.aninews.in/news/world/europe/canada-alberta-prov...
> Sure these companies are notionally private but the people who own them exist because the CCP allows them to and the price for that is loyalty.
The government does not by any means micromanage or control even a tiny fraction of companies in China in the way you're implying. The government could theoretically exert pressure on companies for various reasons, but that's not at all unique to China. How tightly connected is Silicon Valley to the US government?
> the wholesale theft of intellectual property through "partnerships"
First of all, these partnerships were not theft. Be careful about making these sorts of accusations. China made a pretty simple deal with foreign companies: you get to access our massive pool of cheap labor, and in return, you transfer some amount of technology to a local partner. I don't actually see anything immoral with this. It's a fair trade.
Second of all, these requirements for local partnerships have been phased out over time, and are limited now to certain sectors. For example, Tesla wholly owns its operations in China.
> Western companies won't "win" in China because the CCP won't allow it to happen.
Western companies have been "winning" in China for decades. Not only have they been able to exploit cheap labor, but they have conquered many sectors of China's internal market. VWs are ubiquitous in China, and as of last year, Tesla was the top-selling EV car manufacturer in China. China is one of the largest markets for Boeing and Airbus. Qualcomm gets 2/3 of its revenue from China. I could go on, but you get the point.
> That is, if Western companies aren't given fair access to the Chinese market
American and European brands are far more dominant in China than the other way around. If anything, the story of Huawei shows that once Chinese companies try to move beyond selling low-value-added products in the West, they are viewed as strategic rivals and face discrimination on poorly explained national security grounds.
This is a straw man argument. No one accused China of micro-managing companies. It's never that overt. For example of how this works in the real world, look at Vladimir Putin in Russia and the case of Mikhail Khodorkovsky [1]. He was, at the time, one of the most richest and powerful oligarchs in Russia. By imprisoning him, Putin sent the message that no other oligarch was safe and if they wanted to continue to exist they had to fall in line, which they did.
> How tightly connected is Silicon Valley to the US government?
I'll assume good intent here and that this isn't simply "butwhataboutism". US companies need to obey US laws of course. This includes, for example, the FISA court nonsense. You can argue that Chinese companies are simply following Chinese law. While that's technically true, it's a question of degree.
US companies are more independent from the US government than Chinese companies are from the Chinese government.
> First of all, these partnerships were not theft.
I beg to differ. For example, look at the case of ASMC and Sinovel [2].
> ... and as of last year, Tesla was the top-selling EV car manufacturer in China
Now to much this year [3].
> China is one of the largest markets for Boeing and Airbus.
Yes, because China currently cannot make commercial aircraft at scale to compete with Boeing and Airbus. I guarantee you that's a problem they're working on and they're going to be aided by the boards of both companies giving away the keys to the kingdom for access to that market.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Khodorkovsky
[2]: https://money.cnn.com/2018/01/25/technology/china-us-sinovel...
[3]: https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/10/investing/tesla-china-sales/i...
It's not just a small difference. Facebook doesn't give data over to the US gov, sometimes not even law enforcement requests They do sometimes, but rarely.
Contrast that with data laws in China, there is no need for the state to ask for data, it's already being handed over to them.
China doesn't even ask before taking said data. That's the difference.
So again, where’s the difference?
Domestic state intel (FBI, DHS, etc.) have 0 privileged access to American companies and their data. In China, the law is literally "the state doesn't even need to ask, it's just given".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybersecurity_Law_of_the_Peopl...
Do you honestly not see the difference?
> Do you honestly not see the difference?
The difference I see is that there has been extensive, proven, unconstitutional surveillance of Americans by US intelligence agencies, but there is, to date, no evidence that Huawei has spied on Americans.
0. Read about "writs of assistance," a type of general warrant used by the British in colonial America, and which inspired the 4th Amendment's ban on general warrants: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writ_of_assistance.
1. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone-reco...
I can't tell if you are hopelessly native or arguing with typical cynical flippancy. Huawei is a global tool for Chinese espionage. And while global espionage occurs in the US, they don't compel US companies to help them. In China, there is literal legislation that compels every Chinese company to treat their data as property of the state. Either you don't understand that difference, or you are so hopelessly partisan in the matter you'll argue the cultural revolution was fake news.
> Recall that the NSA was given an unconstitutional
Yes it was a giant scandal and they have since stopped. Just a story wouldn't even be a story in China, and such actions continue today, legally.
> Read about "writs of assistance," a type of general warrant used by the British in colonial America
Oh ffs.
You never answered my previous question btw, does your work involve Chinese state industry in anyway?
The only problem is there's no evidence of this at all. The entire claim is hypothetical.
> Either you don't understand that difference, or you are so hopelessly partisan in the matter you'll argue the cultural revolution was fake news.
I just regard the proven, illegal mass surveillance of Americans by the US government as more concerning than the completely hypothetical spying by the Chinese government on Americans. I also think that if the Chinese government were carrying out anything approaching the level of surveillance of Americans that the US government conducts, it would have come out by now.
> Yes it was a giant scandal and they have since stopped.
We really have no idea if they've stopped, and I rather doubt it. The first time around, in 2005, Bush's warrantless wiretapping program was retroactively legalized by Congress, and the telecom companies that had participated in the illegal domestic spying program were shielded from liability. I'm sure that this time around, the NSA has made some sort of superficial changes to formally avoid some of the illegality they were previously engaged in, but I very much doubt that they've given up on mass surveillance of Americans (not to mention their surveillance of the rest of the world).
> Just a story wouldn't even be a story in China, and such actions continue today, legally.
I very much admire the rights to privacy and confidentiality set out in the 4th Amendment to the US Constitution. Those are certainly important rights, which people in China do not have. I just wish that the US government would not blatantly violate those rights (and in secret).
> You never answered my previous question btw, does your work involve Chinese state industry in anyway?
You should know that insinuations that people are shills are a violation of HN's commenting guidelines.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Huawei#Espionage_...
Ignoring evidence doesn't mean it doesn't exist, it means you look silly in public arguing black is white, up is down, etc.
> I just regard the proven, illegal mass surveillance of Americans
You so effortless change subjects I wonder if you even realize you're doing it. The topic at hand is foreign espionage. And even comparing the dystopian nightmare that is Chinese warrantless spying on their own citizens to any other country is the height of absurdity: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/08/business/china-surveillan...
And you still haven't answered my question.
> the dystopian nightmare that is Chinese warrantless spying on their own citizens
Now who's changing the subject? If you're in China, yes, the government has enormous power to surveil you. If you're outside of China, there's no evidence that the Chinese government is using Huawei to spy on you. Given the level of interest in Huawei, I think we'd have heard by now if there were concrete evidence. Instead, all we get are endless hypotheticals. If you're in the US, it's simply a fact that you're much more likely to be surveiled by the US government than by the Chinese government.
The level of naïveté you need to believe an authoritarian government building a dystopian surveillance state at home (including targeting and funneling undesirable ethnicities to prison camps) wouldn't extend that collection to foreign countries via a de facto state controlled company...well I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. Great price, get in touch.
But of course you know better. You aren't a liar, you are cynical. You say things you know aren't true, in the service of protecting your greater worldview. The other word for that is "troll" - which means I won't waste my time here any longer.
Its not the existence of the court that is a secret. Its the cases it hears and the rulings it makes that are secret. From you.
Quoting you: "Do you honestly not see the difference? "
NSA collected by breaking their security (not good), but that's not the same as handing over data. Both of these companies vehemently deny any kind of information sharing agreement with the government (and no evidence of such a program has ever been made public).
China vigorously denies that there was ever such a deal. If you recognize this as the status quo, it speaks against your first point: this is not an official policy, and it never was. Any such requirement was always entirely unofficial, and an example of what you call theoretical pressure.
When it comes to Huawei, the national security implications are obvious. Just read China's national security laws. Chinese intelligence agencies can walk into Huawei at any time and force their cooperation. Of course, the CIA/NSA can do that domestically too (perhaps with more oversight), and that is why I wouldn't blame China for not using US sourced devices in their critical infrastructure.
For example, the United States clearly has dark stains in its history. Slavery obviously, Japanese interment in WW2, the treatment of Native Americans (eg Trail of Tears), segregation, etc. And these are all raised as counterpoints when criticizing China for human rights abuses.
But here's the difference. You can't end up in prison of a "re-education" camp in the US for discussing any of these. Now compare that to China's treatment of political "dissidents", the treatment of the Uighurs, Tibet, the Tiannemen Square massacre and the censorship of these and other issues.
So no, they're not equivalent.
It's the same for "pressure" on US companies. It's a question of degree. The US has courts that can check the power of executive or legislative overreach. US companies can (and have) resisted the US governments efforts within these legal frameworks.
Twitter and Facebook, both US companies, removed a sitting US president from their platforms after excessive policy violations (and justifiably so) so whatever "geopolitical pressure" you imagine, it's simply less in the US.
* Occupied Afghanistan for 20 years, and its last act there was to drone strike an aid worker and his family.
* Invaded Iraq based on false claims of WMD, leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.
* Helped overthrow the government of Libya, plunging the country into a decade of chaos.
I'm not going to defend China's actions (though I would push back against some of the absurd exaggerations that are often made), but some perspective is needed here.
You aren't providing "prospective" by desperately trying to shift the focus away from China onto the US, you are running interference for them.
Oh, and Libya was a NATO operation in which the US largely took a back seat to the French, British, and Canadian Air Forces.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_military_intervention_in_...
If you are going to propagandize, you might as well be accurate.
Only once it was clear he was out the door.
No, it is not its shady history, is its present. The US still has policies against African Americans. It still has Guatanamo Bay. It is bombing innocent civilians in the middle east. It is still detaining children for the crime of crossing its borders and expelling people who came to ask for legal Asylum. It is still persecuting whistle blowers. It still has a world wide program of wiretapping. It is pure hypocrisy to talk about China as a human rights abuser when the list of US abuses is this long.
China is operating prison camps for somewhere between 1 and 3 million of its own citizens. Guantanamo Bay at it's height housed 143 people. The US treats whistleblowers harshly, China disappears people without so much as a legal case against them.
My goodness does anyone have a sense of proportion of the scale criminally here?
This is effectively the default for the Chinese market for foreign companies. Whatever "absurd" push you are thinking of, it's nowhere close to even basic reciprocation for Chinese policy.
https://www.justice.gov/usao-ma/pr/mit-professor-arrested-an...
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/us-navy-officer-his-wife-and-...
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/former-cia-case-officer-charg...
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3104566/ch...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/us-citizen-...
Edit: Not to mention the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII.
I had a Lance Corporal who worked for me who's father was a member of the Aryan Brotherhood. He had to get a waiver for his security clearance because he had a direct connection to a known criminal and racist organization. "Do you, or any of your family, have connections to the CCP?" should probably be a question added to the next version of the SF86 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Form_86 ), and should trigger additional scrutiny. I'm not sure what is measures are in place now but they are clearly insufficient.
Edit: also, is there any evidence that banning people of a certain birth place is actually effective? We already do background checks, and if those don’t screen out the risks, why would an additional blanket ban help?
It's the rest of the world that's really up the creek without a paddle in this respect, they have no options other than to side with either behemoth and hope for the best.
This is nonsense, and basically textbook whataboutism. Companies in the US are not an extension of the state in anyway near the way Chinese firms are, even if some collude. The US allows dual citizenship.
Does the US Government control GitHub? Imgur? Do they have monitors implanted at the organizations to control them?
Do you know why there was so much anti-Trump content on services like Imgur, Reddit or Twitter, during those administration years? It's precisely because the US Government does not control such services, and fortunately it's an area of real freedom that the US still largely excels at.
In the US I can set up a file/media hosting service tomorrow morning, with zero oversight by the US Government. I can make it a politically focused service for the left or right as I see fit. I can blast Biden 24/7 via the service, hosting media that is anti his administration, or focus that against Republicans instead.
Or I can set up an encrypted data service, where you can post encrypted files, text notes, whatever. I can do that any time I see fit, the US Government has nothing to do with it. Try that in China and see what happens to you.
Those are intentionally simple examples to make a point. You can do none of that in China, starting from step one of just setting up an open file hosting service that can take in almost any content you want it to (outside of things like CP).
The US Government does not control the US Internet other than with some quite basic regulations. In China, the CCP now directly controls all relevant corporations, all Internet services, anything that matters whatsoever.
Stop focusing on the government and look at how the whole system works. Post something critical of a government official and it gets censored. It happens on Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, Hacker News, Nextdoor, YouTube, etc... We aren't talking Trump or antivaxxers either.
Of course, right now, in the 21st century, the government of China is using its various powers to, among other things, send its citizens who members of a particular minority ethnic group to concentration camps. Criticize the US all you want, but the US government are not rounding people up, torturing them, and then forcing them to work in jobs the government picked out for them. The US does plenty of awful things, sometimes as part of its official policies, but it is still a far cry for the sort of things that the CCP is doing.
Ever hear of the Indian reservation system? The US government rounded people up, took their land, and forced them into concentration camps. If they left the reservation, they were hunted by the US cavalry.
It is so rich to conquer a people and then show remorse while continuing to occupy the land.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trail_of_Tears
How would you compare that part of American history to the Nazis? Or how about comparing that to the Japanese in WW2? Is the US really any better?
Given how the US is allies with Saudi Arabia, has conducted wars killing over a million people the last 30 years, do you actually think the US changed its ways?
There is no morality. There is mostly propaganda on both sides.
I am glad to be a US citizen, but for us to not acknowledge bad mistakes that we have made in the past (and including the recent past) is wrong, and diminishes our chances to do better morally and to improve our future chances of continued prosperity.
The US generally doesn't use espionage to steal trade secrets, it might happen now and again, but it's not a strategic policy.
The US is also fairly open. TikTok is the #1 app in the US and it's literally Chinese owned!
The US is selective about where it gets protectionist / nationalist. Even the populist chest-thumping is not a reflection of what's actually going. That's just for Twitter politics.
For whatever reasons, China is very authoritarian/controlling and that has to be folded into the equation.
Aside from complicated moral issues with Taiwan/Tibet/Uyghurs - really all of that protectionist stuff is 'their choice'.
It's up to them how they want to play the game.
We have to just accept that reality and collectively respond to it rationally.
Dropping Huawei is a reasonable choice as is dropping any company known to be involved in shenanigans. Some data laws for where traffic can travel and under what terms would be reasonable as well (I'm looking at you Zoom!).
We can get along but we need good boundaries.
You guys really need to substitute "state" with "elites", then it's pretty much the same story globally. You have to learn to unlearn the trick that they feed you (OH the state is evil but private is good).
'Even if some collude' -> those are the largest companies in the world, see 'Snowden'.
Yes, the US allows for dual citizenship. And will then proceed to levy those with US citizenship the world over for taxes, no matter where they actually reside, a practice few other countries follow.
In the US, the state is an extension of the corporation.
Even this year, the consequence is now that the Taliban is now actively working with China, to build a oil pipeline to Iran. So it makes sense that these countries will end up buying network/software/hardware in the future from China too. Not to mention the price advantage China is offering to developing countries on their products.
Western Nations help is more or less shipping pallets of cash to a corrupt government on the promise they will build a school or road, or something..
Any bets on how often that school or road actually gets build after the cash is delivered?
> > This goes beyond classified material and extends to China cheating on trade including, but not limited to, the wholesale theft of intellectual property through "partnerships" and other means as the price Western companies pay for "access" to the Chinese market.
> > Why the issue with those born in mainland China? Because China doesn't allow dual-citizenship. Those that become naturalized in the United States, for example, lose their Chinese citizenship. This then becomes a carrot the CCP can dangle in front of those wishing to return: restoration of citizenship. That is, of course, if you happen to have a particular set of knowledge or skills deemed important to China.
Those things aren't true of the US though.
The second is true, but that gets balanced out by the USA wanting its income from its passport holders no matter where they reside in the world.
Be specific: which American companies exactly are using stolen IP from foreign countries?
it's not loyalty or some secret pact. it's just them acting in their best interest to follow regulations (however dubious) in order to keep making money.
Blood pact is a poor choice of wording, but not too far off from the reality. Perhaps blood-line persuasion is better?
Ideas should be free. Attempts to inhibit the freedom of information are sisyphean futility, inevitably doomed just like the endless War on Drugs.
I think this kind of policy is already in practice, maybe not in the federal government but in some highly sensitive private business.
I heard, forgot the source, business like Lockheed martin has secret programs won’t hire you if your parents are born in mainland China. I found it reasonable, because the CCP will definitely take your remaining family members in China as hostages to make you do things.
Source: Need to know.
It's not much of a stretch to suggest that they'd do the same to get sensitive information.
I'd honestly be surprised if they're not doing this already.
These security issues, and the surrounding discussion, are due to citizenship, loyalty to one's country, cultural differences, and the presence of family in a country that is a hostile foreign power, and have nothing to do with ethnicity (and nor were the GP's implying that), despite your claims to the contrary.
Please don't turn random discussions into a race conflict.
Those same considerations would not apply to Taiwanese Americans.
All western countries dealing with China need to consider their security policy carefully and comments like yours poison the well of debate by conflating racial discrimination with legitimate security concerns.
There's a growing hysteria and paranoia about China, and suggestions that Chinese Americans should be put under blanket suspicion are incredibly disturbing.
I agree there is a problem of China paranoia, and your average Chinese American shouldn't be the subject of racist discrimination. While wanting to reduce this is admirable, national security is not the field to do it. The geopolitical forces shaping this shift are much larger than the national security apparatus - negating it at the expense of security is not their remit and never will be.
Yet you're arguing for precisely that. Discrimination is bad, unless it's done in the name of national security, which will be defined by people who have an extremely aggressive, clash-of-civilizations foreign policy vision.
Go ahead, prove me wrong - quote the sentences that explicitly call for racism.
It's clear that you're not arguing in good faith and, as I said originally, just trying to stir up conflict using race as a cover.
Future HN readers, take note of these tactics as a way that bad actors will try to avoid answering your questions or try to manipulate you (or others).
Furthermore, unlike the parent, I'll actually cite sections from the two comments under consideration, and show how they're not suggesting racism.
From the topmost comment:
> I fully expect that at some point the United States will deem those born in mainland China, regardless of current citizenship, to be a security risk
Note the italicized section "those born in mainland China", which is, tautologically, not the same as race/ethnicity. You can be American, French, Indian, or Canadian born in China and this condition would still apply to you - or Chinese born in America, and this condition would not. Moreover, beyond the wording being sound, the logic is sound - those born in mainland China are a security risk because of the citizenship issues mentioned in the rest of the comment.
From the comment that replies to that:
> secret programs won’t hire you if your parents are born in mainland China. I found it reasonable, because the CCP will definitely take your remaining family members in China as hostages to make you do things
Again note the italicized section: "if your parents are born in mainland China". This still has nothing to do with race - your parents could be British, Indian, American, Japanese, or whatever, and the sentence (and the general idea behind it) still apply. The part about "the CCP will definitely take your remaining family members in China as hostages to make you do things" is also sound - there's many instances of this exact thing happening, with Operation Foxhunt[1][2] coming to mind.
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-07-08/fbi-chief-says-china-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Fox_Hunt
Discrimination against people born in mainland China is apparently fine because they're a security risk - perhaps they're suspected of disloyalty. Discrimination against people whose parents were born in China is apparently fine, because they might have family who could theoretically be taken hostage.
If you follow this logic, discrimination against anyone with familial relations in China is fine. That essentially means discrimination against all Chinese Americans is fine - but of course, this is completely kosher and not in any way racist.
This is the same logic used to justify the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII, to accuse Irish Americans of disloyalty (because of the Vatican), and the same argument used by antisemites to argue that Jewish Americans are disloyal (because of Israel).
> your parents could be British, Indian, American, Japanese, or whatever
But those aren't the ethnic groups being targeted in the US right now. If there were widespread paranoia about India, just as there now is about China, and if there were calls to discriminate against anyone with Indian relatives, then I would also be alarmed about that.
> just trying to stir up conflict using race as a cover.
Not in the slightest. I'm genuinely alarmed by how far attitudes in the US have changed since Trump came into office. Hostility towards and paranoia about China have reached levels I never would have imagined possible, and that is now putting Chinese Americans at risk in the US (not to mention the fact that it's increasing the likelihood of war between China and the US).
Just to give one example: the FBI has a major initiative that focuses on ethnic Chinese academics in the US. It was launched under Trump, but it continues under Biden. There have already been several disturbing cases, including that of Anming Hu,[1] a Canadian citizen born in China, who taught at the University of Tennessee. The FBI first tried to pressure him into spying on China, and after he refused, tried to investigate him for espionage, told his university he was a spy (leading to him being fired), and harassed him and his son for over a year. When the FBI found there was no evidence whatsoever that he was a spy, they charged him with whatever they could dig up - in this case, failure to disclose some minor honorarium. The guy's entire life has been turned upside down and he's been branded a spy in the public mind, all because some overambitious FBI agent wanted to find a Chinese spy and started trying to dig up dirt about the first Chinese academic he could find.
That's where this kind of thinking leads to.
1. https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/27/1027350/anming-h...
Blatantly false. I used actual logic to show how the other posters' points were not racism, and then challenged you to cite the exact words of their comments that were racism.
You failed to cite anything. You didn't use any logic whatsoever - you merely repeated the "it's racism" claim without any evidence at all.
Again, HN readers from the future: this is textbook "duck and weave" at work - don't respond to the other's points at all, just repeat your claims of racism like a broken record in hope that it'll stick after the tenth time.
You know who's bending over backward to try to make something that is factually not racism seem like racism? You.
> Discrimination against people born in mainland China is apparently fine because they're a security risk - perhaps they're suspected of disloyalty. Discrimination against people whose parents were born in China is apparently fine, because they might have family who could theoretically be taken hostage.
Yes - neither of those things are racism, because they are not. Discriminating. Based. On. Race. Why is this so difficult to understand?
> If you follow this logic, discrimination against anyone with familial relations in China is fine.
Correct. Again, this is logical, because those people are a security risk, for reasons mentioned above, which you have completely and utterly failed to address.
> That essentially means discrimination against all Chinese Americans is fine - but of course, this is completely kosher and not in any way racist.
False. "Chinese American" has nothing to do with having family in China. You can be a Chinese-American with all of your family outside of China (and, against someone arguing in good faith, I wouldn't have to point out that there's a limit to this (e.g. at some point, you'll have fifth cousins who are in China), but you're clearly not acting in good faith, as evidenced by your refusal to actually use logic, and instead merely repeat "racism" over and over and over again), or you can have absolutely zero Chinese ethnicity and have all of your family in China.
Let me repeat again: whether your family is in China or not has nothing to do with race.
Moreover, as further evidence of your bad faith - your sarcastic "but of course, this is completely kosher and not in any way racist." is clearly meant to imply that it's actually racist, but again, like every single comment you make, you fail to provide any evidence or logic whatsoever.
> This is the same logic used to justify the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII, to accuse Irish Americans of disloyalty (because of the Vatican), and the same argument used by antisemites to argue that Jewish Americans are disloyal (because of Israel).
I shouldn't have to explain that that's in invalid use of logic, but because you're not capable of seeing that: it's an invalid use of logic. There are two arguments that could be made: (1) people with family in Japan are security risks (which is valid) and (2) ethnic Japanese are security risks (which are invalid).
Point (1) is valid, but doesn't have anything to do with racism. Point (2) is invalid, and also not the thing that the parent posters were arguing. This sentence has nothing to do with the parent posters' points - you literally just brought it up to try to make it seem like they were being racist by association/similarity.
> But those aren't the ethnic groups being targeted in the US right now.
That's completely irrelevant. Racism is racism, regardless of who's being "targeted" - and non-racism is non-racism, regardless if you think a group is being "targeted".
> Not in the slightest.
If you were serious ("genuinely alarmed"), you would use logic, you would be able to cite the parts of the other commenters' posts that were actually racist, and when you failed to do that, you would have realized that you were incorrect, and stopped trying to pull allegations out of thin air. You've done none of those three things.
> That's where this kind of thinking leads to.
No, that's where thinking from confused and illogical minds that are unable to separate racism from security risks leads to.
Your entire argument has been "it sounds kind of racist, therefore it is." As far as I can tell, you haven't made a single sound argument in this entire thread. You are inciting - driven by emotion and fear and rage, instead of actually using your mind to think carefully and inquisitively. HN is not meant for this kind of illogical blathering.
Racism is already illegal, and some people are going to be racist without a good excuse anyway, and given the massive amount of IP theft coming from the CCP (and Chinese nationals), and the coercion campaigns that we've already seen happen (Operation Foxhunt and the Canadian "prisoner swap" being the two biggest) - there's a really strong argument for taking the measures described above.
Now, provided that you don't call "wolf" like the GP poster - you should look at what our leaders are doing, and call them out if they're doing something wrong. But maybe figure out what that looks like, first...
For top secret programs, maybe that makes sense, but if you’re thinking it should apply to any science/engineering areas with broad national interest/security applicability, it’s not a good idea at all. First, besides the moral implications (handled by others), there’s the fact that it preemptively disarms the US of one of its greatest strengths: the ability to brain drain other countries of their top talent and add it to its own. How did we do the Manhattan Project? By taking in all the scientists fleeing Germany and about-to-be-occupied mainland Europe (and after that, Operation Paperclip gave us a leg up in the Cold War). This would be a massive self-own, and it’s not worth it just because it might somewhat reduce industrial espionage a bit. What we should do is give every STEM graduate school graduate in good standing from other countries full status and ideally a job.
Having a Chinese grad student as an asset on a science project is practically a meme, and China is indeed a huge labor pool from which we can cherry pick the best and the brightest. It makes no sense for us to educate their elites and then force them to go home even when they want to stay and become Americans.
And if blackmailing families back home becomes an issue or real fear, then the State Department should do something about it. We’re not powerless here.
Having seen how the actions driven by fear of industrial/national espionage can often be far worse than the industrial/national espionage ever would’ve been, I’m wary of taking measures that would directly mitigate our greatest strengths. Let’s lean into the whole “Statue of Liberty” Nation of Immigrants mythology, and build on it. It is our strength and it’d be foolish to give it up due to fear that China will copy our stuff. I mean, they’re going to do that anyway, even if we put Chinese background people in internment camps. Our only chance is winning based on speed of innovation (which can’t happen if we spend all our resources on paranoia… paranoia has a MASSIVE overhead and slows innovation to a crawl… no one can steal our inventions if we stop inventing stuff!) and the cultural victory of acting like the good guys and being the city on the hill. Remember, this is a game we now have to play by convincing people to like us and be our allies. We are no longer the unchallenged hegemon like in the 90s; we need our allies.
Threats of blackmail against families have long been a reality and a key tool the CCP uses against overseas students and businessmen.
There are 8bn people in the world, US can definitely afford to pay close scrutiny to Chinese citizens, they don’t hold a monopoly on skilled labor.
> Our only chance is winning based on speed of innovation
Advantage of speed in innovation is rendered useless when the Chinese just sit & wait while you spend billions on r&d only to steal all your IP when your ready to launch your product.
Our problem is that some entities think that speed of innovation is secondary and always takes a back seat to secrecy. That has a stifling effect on innovation, as it’s impossible to be perfectly careful, and the end result is progress stalls… which means China doesn’t steal anything because there’s nothing to steal… so they’ll just innovate stuff themselves and we’ll have nothing. What a victory!
I don't think I'd consider it "almost useless". Having source code, material compositions, trade secrets, etc is a significant step towards just outright copying your innovations and using it against you. It takes countless dollars and hours to incept the most basic building blocks of innovation. Hell, consider how much is discovered by accident.
Politely, I think it almost borders on arrogance to believe that intangibles like "culture" are required to compete. On the topic of human capital, China's already got it. They've also shown they view their human capital like human cattle.
Given that the same Germans (Klaus Fuchs) then leaked the bomb to the soviets, I’m not sure this is the best example.
That's not anti-American. The sentiment applies equally to everyone. Russia should not have complete control of the world. Nor should Holland or Iceland. The USA has way too much power and influence as it stands. Thank goodness there is some opposition to provide some balance.
USians watch a movie like "The Courier" or "Hunt for Red October" and applaud the courage and foresight of a man who was willing to be a traitor to the USSR in order to save the world. But they villify anybody who would be so treacherous as betray the USA. NATO missiles in Poland: good. Warsaw Pact missiles in Poland: bad.
Unproven vulnerabilities in Huawei equipment: unacceptable. Replace it all with American products proven repeatedly to be espionage vectors of the USA government: good.
I wonder if a post like this one will attract more interest from Chinese intelligence or from USA intelligence.
It is funny that denizens on Madison Avenue think they have a corner on spin. "Caveat emptor!"
First, there is a massive difference between empires. Sure, the US has done and is doing a bunch of shitty things in the world, but between two evils, would you prefer the American jackboot or the Chinese jackboot?
Second, nobody volunteers to surrender power for the sake of some power balance. Power balance occurs because there's a stalemate.
In the case of countries like Poland, these countries have an interest in playing empires against each other. Let them "bid" for influence and may they check each other's power.
Seems crazy to do that since we’ve got so much we export the stuff now.
Try to do the same, but spreading american propaganda, in a chinese forum, while living in China.
Try to do the same while living in the US.
Which is to say - your point being? Is being able to efficiently spread misinformation and propaganda really such an important factor?
Afghanistan? What oil?
When this kind of question comes up on Internet, I'm always a bit troubled, because there is some sort of hidden faith that the respondent won't be from a place that suffered from the US. Even though the person asking the question knows about the events, they never think about it when asking. On the other hand, positive events are remembered vividly (e.g. discussions about Europe almost invariably involve some WW2 references).
In reality, the answer will probably vary depending on whether the respondent is European or Iraqi, Vietamese or Cuban, etc.
I would say that it's some kind of heavy confirmation bias that makes people genuinely ask these questions, when an objective analysis makes the answer not evident.
I feel these national borders on comms equipment will eventually be a paper tiger of sorts, because, well, tech is tech, and it's hard to stop the flow. And things work best with open standards anyway.
Worthy adversaries can turn each other's strengths into weaknesses
If Western companies can only operate in China via 50/50 partnership and technology transfer requirements, then the same should apply to Chinese companies in the West.
If Western social media companies are banned in China, then Chinese social media companies should have whatever restrictions are constitutionally possible in the West, with a caveat [1].
Etc.
That said, I think Western governments need to realize that their Chinese citizens are going to be put under pressure by the CCP as you said, but to presume innocence and err on the side of protecting them.
The CCP will use both carrot and stick to coerce ethnic Chinese back to China, or to enlist them in espionage operations. Western governments need to develop strategies to counter that, to ensure their Chinese citizens remain safe and welcomed in their adopted homelands, and that they can safely reject CCP coercion and be protected by their adopted homelands' governments [2].
Some spies and agents will of course slip through the cracks, but Western governments can deal with those as they happen. Better to protect the majority of innocent Chinese who emigrated to the West for a better life, than to implicitly criminalize them all. The latter would play right into the CCP's hands.
[1]: The 1st Ammendment may make banning social media companies impossible. It's also possible that allowing Chinese social media companies in the West is still a net gain for spreading the ideals of free speech and anti-censorship.
The "west" does not consist solely of the USA. Not even most of North America has first amendment protections, and Europe most certainly does not.
Further it's not obvious that "freedom of speech" is even a defence if the US government has decided you shouldn't exist - look at Mega or The Pirate Bay for examples to the contrary.
Freedom of Expression and Assembly are Article 11 and 12 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, which has had legal force since 2009: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:12...
> look at Mega or The Pirate Bay for examples to the contrary.
I personally don't consider those to be examples 1st Amendment violations. It's almost all people claiming an entitlement to free entertainment, nothing more.
Copyright law may be broken in the digital age, and manipulated by private interests at the expense of the public domain, and deserve reform, or maybe even civil disobedience.
But nothing about that situation prevents anyone from making and posting media critiquing the government, or of generating political support for reform, and running on a platform promising to enact that reform. That's what the 1st Amendment is designed to protect above all.
It's not just cheap labor, a robust supply chain, etc. Those are definitely factors, but today, a lot of companies invest (or remain invested) in China because it significantly helps them access the Chinese domestic consumer market.
India, of course, has a huge population too, but China's consumer market is a lot more developed and therefore attractive.
1. It's a market of >1B people, hundreds of millions of whom are rapidly developing disposable income. That in itself is probably enough;
2. Cheap labour;
3. Supplier proximity; and
4. Political stability
I can't stress how important (3) is.
The net effect of all this is there's a network effect of suppliers in China. Those phones that are made in, say, Shenzhen require parts that are made by a factory down the road. This could be everything from chips to tiny screws.
Anywhere else and you'd need to ship various parts from China and have the supply chains and inventory management that that entails.
If you look past the fact that worker conditions are Dystopian, it's quite a wonder of the modern world, really.
But when I (and I'm sure others) talk about the perils of kowtowing to China, it's because they want the market not the manufacturing capacity.
Think of a movie studio that wants to distribute content in China. To get permission to do so that content has to be acceptable to the CCP.
Many suspect this is why the movie "First Man" had no scene of planting the American flag in lunar soil (an iconic historical moment). Some pseudo-artistic defenses have been unenthusiastically lobbed on this issue. Personally I find these unconvincing at best.
Western companies willingly engaging in self-censorship (or even the credible allegation of such) to pander to a foreign totalitarian government is not something I, personally, approve of.
Most markets are locked up by entrenched players, new, growing previously less developed places offer massive, new greenfield customer base.
Everyone and their aunt wants in.
Very sad to see this comment voted to the top of hn.
Still not sure what the answers are, but I'd really like to have "local" suppliers for critical infrastructure and hardware.
So HW competes on their own terms - and apparently they are a good 'one stop shop' combined with the Chinese mentality of 'always saying yest to everything' - but then you add in hugely generous 'no money down' financing provided by entities acting in concert with foreign policy, and you have something awesome.
BT can rollout a massive new network while paying for it much later.
Arguably, this sort of financing should be regarded as a trade violation. There's nothing wrong with Chinese banks offering those terms, but when it's coordinated/mandated by the government, and, the Central Bank is politicized for this reason, it's a form of economic dumping.
The main issue is not this. Born in mainland means your family lifes there and can be used as hostages or coercion bargaining chips. The bureaucracy and "rules&laws" are just decoration, for something that is more resembling of a mob-extortion racket by the CCP. Not mentioning this, is repackaging what is done by these hostages as a "choice" on their side. They have no choice, never had, they live at gunpoint since birth.
And Huawei do offer the best kit on the market at the moment, with no actual evidence of security flaws...
I don't mean to attack you but your post reeks of American exceptionalism and elitism. Allow me to explain:
Your post is based on an underlying assumption that 'Western companies' lose because CCP / China creates a very uneven playing field. Thats the only reason in your mind that Western companies lose. This is not true. Western companies have lost in foreign markets due to variety of reasons not the least of which is a hostile local government.
The Chinese government's job is to ensure a level playing field for everybody and regulate its market in its own best interests not foreign interests. They're doing exactly what the US government and other Western countries have been doing for a long time. In fact Western companies and countries have had a long head start and several factors in their favor historically. Some that come to my mind are investment capital availability, ability to take on more debt due to different regulatory policies in domiciled country, US government's ability to impose trade sanctions, tariffs, favorable currency exchange rates, etc.
Traditionally the US (and other western countries, Europe included) have used various tactics to gain advantage in foreign markets. When the host government is weak, they have typically won. However in markets such as China (and India to an extent), the local government has created effective competitors that have crushed foreign rivals in some situations. In others their western counterparts have flourished. For example, Coke, Tesla and various companies have done really well as opposed to Google, Uber, etc.
One of the greatest reasons Western companies have failed in markets such as China (and India) is because they enter it with an air of arrogance. They assume the market works in the same way as the rest of the world. Let me cite an example from India which arguably is more open at welcoming Western goods and services than China.
When Dominoes first entered the Indian market, they sold the same pizzas that they sold in the US. Sure, the average Indian consumer would love to eat at Dominoes because of the brand value. However they got 2 things terribly wrong which caused them to wind down operations. First, the pizzas tasted like crap to the average Indian consumer. Even though they had money to spend, American Pizza recipes do not jive well with Indian taste buds. Second, the pricing was all wrong. The Indian market was price sensitive. Nobody was willing to pay for a crappy tasting pizza (to the Indian taste buds) when there were so many other local foods that could be had for lesser price. It wasn't a question of affordability, Dominos simply did not provide enough value for the customer. They eventually failed. Learned from their mistakes, relaunched with better pricing and Indianized their pizza offerings. They're doing pretty well now. Had they done their research well they wouldn't have made the mistake. In case of Dominos they were able to relaunch after taking massive losses. However, many others choose to exit the market. In this specific instance it wasn't the government, but the company's fault for launch such a crappy product at the wrong price.
This is very upside down.
The Chinese government actively opposes a 'level playing field and strongly prefers local companies, especially those with deep ties to the state.
Even export policy is natinalized. Huawei can offer it's customers internationally amazing financing terms (pay nothing down, and pay small amounts over time) provided by Chinese banks at the behest of the Chinese Government, facilitate by a politicized Central bank.
It would be like Biden/Trump ordering JP Morgan to finance Boeing deals, and to coordinate it all with the Treasury and the Central Bank.
That's a violation of basic trade norms - and that's just the export stuff.
Internally, there's much more control.
"One of the greatest reasons Western companies have failed in markets such as China (and India) is because they enter it with an air of arrogance."
This is not factual and you've provided no real evidence of that.
When US companies have 'hard protections', particularly in Brand, they do very well. Nike, Apple, Pizza Hut etc. all do very well.
But trains? China requires that train makers hand over their IP, the IP is given to local companies who then get a head start while the Chinese government holds the foreign company up in red tape.
The Chinese government 'role' is to absolutely minimize the amount of success foreign companies have to the extent they can duplicate/copy/reproduce locally, that's what they do.
Even foreign initiatives cannot actually be foreign owned: 51% has to be owned by Chinese.
The CCP puts a cadre of it's party staff within every company to ensure national guidelines are followed.
Your 'Dominos in India' example is countered by 'Yum Brands' i.e. KFC, Pizza Hut who were very successful in China.
Grandfather poster: is my interpretation correct?
Most of China's actions described above are fairly perfectly against the spirit of those deals, and probably the letter of the deals as well, and they should have never been allowed in.
Capitol controls, direct control of the banking sector, arbitrary regulations that affect valuations fundamentally such as refusing to allow listing on US exchanges 'out of the blue', similarly.
It's not really an open economy, and Western economies shouldn't be entirely open to it either. The best 'trade policy' we could put in effect would be to put in place all the same barriers that they have.
No need for that - the US government already finances Beoing's deals.
There is a reason the US-government owned Export-Import Bank is known world-wide as "Boeing's Bank".
https://www.mercatus.org/publications/government-spending/ex...
Luxury brands, e.g. LVMH, seem like a notable exception. If part of the value prop for the product is that it's being made by a fancy, long-established, foreign company, it's inherently hard to replicate.
The next question will be how much trust can we place in the networks of our allies that still use compromised equipment from Huawei?
https://www.wired.com/story/huawei-5g-polar-codes-data-break...
This is simply not true.
Source: worked for Ericsson for 17 years. Worker on both 4G and 5G / cloud native. Also worked with ex Nortel people.
Citation needed here.
The company was dead years before they drafted the first spec for 4G.
Some of the Nokia routers from the early 2000s made in Oregon also did allegedly.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/02/phone_tapping...
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/06/greek_wiretap...
https://theintercept.com/2018/03/01/nsa-global-surveillance-...
Darknet Diaries produced a podcast on the whole affair which makes for great listening. The podcast episode includes additional details which have surfaced after the IEEE article mentioned [2]
On the one hand, your trusted and long-term partner shares a credit card and bank account with you, so you're aware that they know how and where you're spending money. You spend a lot of time together at home, so it's likely they're listening into your phone calls.
On the other hand, a malicious individual has infiltrated your bank account and installed surveillance equipment in your home.
These two situations are not the same.
We might not like everything our partners do, but there's a reason we have a basis of trust with them and not with clearly adversarial and malicious entities.
The US democracy is fake. Entrenched interests hold virtually all power.
You have 6 trillion dollars and thousands of lives lost over fake wars. Where are those WMDs? Why didn't we pull out after getting bin Laden in Pakistan?
Go back a generation to the Vietnam War. 50k American lives lost.
History keeps on repeating itself and people are oblivious.
I'm not American, and I'm rather proud that my elected representatives voted against joining the USA in the Iraq invasion. Americans voted for the Iraq invasion. It was popular[0]. It still remains reasonably popular, with slightly more Americans opposing it than supporting it in 2018[1]. Despite two decades of expenditure, pain and suffering.
0: https://news.gallup.com/poll/8038/seventytwo-percent-america...
1: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/03/19/iraq-war-co...
You are a pawn. Pawns have NO value in of themselves. They are used solely to advance the cause of a side. They will be sacrificed to do so.
You can take solace in identifying with an entity that cares for you not one iota.
Waitbutwhy writes extensively about this phenomenon. It is called tribalism and delusion.
https://waitbutwhy.com/2019/08/story-of-us.html
us vs them, good vs evil
It has all the hallmarks.
"A superglue story also jacks up the Us > Them values. The story needs to be all about good guys and bad guys, with a crisp, clear distinction between the two. The good guys must be good in every way—in knowledge, talent, motivation, and virtue. They’re good now, they were always good in the past, and they’ll continue to be good in the future. The bad guys are the opposite—they are and always have been stupid, ignorant, malicious, and morally backwards. Strife between the good guys and bad guys is always the fault of the bad guys"
Weapons of mass destruction
LOL
That's democracy. It's not great, but it's better than the alternatives.
Democracies can be perverted and also have a history of destroying themselves. See Greek history.
https://web.archive.org/web/20190823053520/https://www.cbsne...
296-133, 77-23
As for the media, the foreign and public press weren't so in favor. But I'll be the last to suggest that American media isn't terrible. It is.
Especially if we’re talking about five eyes countries, the other countries involved are on board with this sort of thing. It’s not about what’s being done but who has control when we’re talking about national security. As for how much it matters to the citizens what the difference is…well I’m probably less likely to get in trouble if China has my information actually.
Antopomorphism of giant bureaucracies is either naivity or schisophrenia.
Just like "Consumers Have Human-like Relationships with Brands". I work in a big corp, it's a constant battle to make it treat humans as humans, and a losing one.
You’ve got weird friends.
Building alliances is nearly synonymous with building trust.
Start a similar program to replace their equipment, too.
I don't think this is a good thing.
On one had we have Huawei which is untrusted by default, everyone assumes it has a backdoor but yet there are no reports of said backdoor and no evidence that networks using the hardware have suffered from exfiltration or infiltration.
On the other hand Juniper was very publicly compromised and networks running their hardware were most definitely subject to attack.
That said; this is probably primarily focused on wireless networks and if they are replacing Huawei it will be with Ericson or Nokia gear which I think we can have some manner of trust in.
EDIT: My point is I think the Huawei equipment being assumed untrusted is a better model than assumed "trusted" suppliers that can easily be back doored because no-one is looking as hard.
Bloomberg "allegedly" found HW backdoors in huawei, Vodafone also "allegedly" found backdoors in their equipment from huawei back in the day(i think about a decade ago).
When you go talk to your red-team pentester friends, you quickly find out that the black market is full of 0days or full-blown backdoors for huawei equipment, from routers to consumer-grade mobile phones.They're not the only ones, but there's a clear discrepancy.
While in the consumer space Huawei might not be ever fully-banned (imo even though they should, because people are f*cking stupid and it's already too late), in gov & military(especially NATO) infrastructure, i'm guaranteeing they're already(US,AUS,JP,PL,RO) or soon to be banned.
Now the what-about argument is gonna follow here, saying "how about western companies that also engage in privacy-violating and espionage policies?".Yes that's also obviously true, but to a much lesser degree, and those companies/corporations main concern is money&profit,unlike Huawei.They might collude with governments and institutions, but they're not fully controlled by one, like in the fascistic China at the moment.And i say fascistic because chinese companies conveniently use 'free'-markets inside China and Western countries up to the point where their gov. notices and dictates their every move.
Backdoors or not, I have very little doubt their equipment is full of exploitable security issues.
Even if we assume that all Huawei products are currently backdoored, the security of commercial IT products is so bad that they pose no impediment to any organization more talented than a group of script kiddies. A complete replacement of all Huawei equipment does not in any way materially improve security of the network against a competent nation state attacker. At most it might cause their operational budget to increase by 0.1% to fund exploit development of the replacement equipment on the off chance that they are utterly incompetent and do not already have a hoard of hundreds of exploits in all existing systems like the CIA did as revealed in the Vault 7 hack.
A material increase in security would require switching from Huawei to systems around 1000x better than prevailing systems otherwise you should have exactly zero trust that the security of the network can even minimally impede an adversary like China.
The primary issue that the USG has with Huawei equipment is not technical security. It’s trust and governance.
I’ll give you a really simplistic hypothetical example: Let’s say a Cisco and a Huawei box have the same exact vulnerability, and the US and China engage in an all-out cyber war. China can simply block Huawei’s support staff with sanctions. They don’t need a back door. Meanwhile the Cisco tech is already patching the Cisco box. Equal technology, unequal results.
Not all issues regarding technology are about purely technical issues. Technology has to be implemented, maintained, patched, supported, etc. Those are primarily concerns of trust.
If we really cared about trust, we would mandate that all national infrustructure be open source and, at a minimum, independantly security reviwed, and written in a safe language.
This comes across just political posturing as usual.
If the strategic importance of a company like ASML hasn't taught western governments how much is at stake when it comes to getting a technology edge then I'm not sure what will.
Does this mean it belongs to America's 5G portfolio?
There is a very real issue here imho, for the Anglo-sphere (the EU seems much better at this, full disclosure, im a brit but i think the us and uk are the ssme in this). We don't invest and increasingly we're not competitive. Cisco dropped the ball, Huawei picked it up. Maybe every previous step was stolen, but that's the step that have given Huawei their success. They have an advantage because no one else is making a comparable product.
As long as we just complain and blindly insist the chinese are cheating, we won't address the actual issues that are really holding us back.
The chinese are investing in education? Maybe we should. The chinese force their companies to take a view past the next quarter profit report? Maybe we should. If whatever their advantage is, its not stealing (not anymore at least) and until we address it, we will be whining and they will be winning.
Good question, and a lot of of the answer is truly banal.
The GSM/UMTS/LTE/… telephone network was designed on the concept of standardised, layered message protocols. And itself built on the ISDN standards.
The idea was to foster competition by allowing a Siemens HLR to communicate with an Ericsonn MSC and support a Nokia radio network. This meant that you had to licence a particular protocol whenever you added a new piece of equipment - on both ends.
What Hauwei did is offer two licencing models: a pricey licence if you wanted to connect non-Hauwei kit (X) to an Hauwei network element, and a really, really, really cheap (often free) licence if you wanted to use the licence to connect said box to Hauwei's version of whatever X was (also cheap).
The numbers worked out to make adding new equipment vendors prohibitive.
So once you have enough Hauwei equipment, it spread quickly.
Then they offer to run it for you.
the bitter truth is nobody in the USA made it to market as fast as Huawei with 5G for a number of reasons. AT&T and others rested on their laurels, content with a monopoly market where they defined what 4g speeds were and werent. They became convinced they could extend this monopoly assertion to the rest of the world either through sheer hubris or through blind ignorance. Once the global market called their bluff, they scrambled for protectionism from the US government in the form of unsubstantiated sinophobic rhetoric, and stoked an elderly congress still rife with bubbling anticommunist sentiment. Trump gave them their trade war and it wasnt until Canadian bourgeoise faced chinese prisons that they were forced to acquiesce. Huawei's CFO signed off on largely symbolic US charges, and resumed her life.
Now the only damage control can come from US taxpayers, forced to pay twice for inferior 5G.
Say what you will about Chinese companies but damn some of them execute well.
Nortel was the main reason this all happened.
They were the ones that were doing all the cutting
edge wireless network research and when they
collapsed Huawei was the one that executed the
best in the wake of said collapse.
In fact it went on over almost a full decade, from the late 1990's to 2009 when it was brought widely to light. [1]
Say what you will about Chinese companies but
damn some of them execute well.
Of course empires stealing tech from each other has happened many times historically; we don't have to all act shocked that it can happen.
But neither is it irrelevant that it did, in fact, happen, and specifically in the case that you mention of Nortel and Huawei.
It's definitely not just a simple case of "generous credit", though the wider point about Western governments not supporting their core digital infrastructure companies in strategic ways during those years is certainly correct.
---
[1] https://mindmatters.ai/2021/04/why-do-huaweis-inventions-loo... -- well-sourced article referencing much of the earlier reporting on the matter
She resumed her life in return for selling out Huawei. Huawei was put in such a position as to make their further operations in the US very difficult.
https://twitter.com/freekorea_us/status/1441822007897690115
The replacement program is really a bailout for US telecom operations, now that Huawei can barely support them.
https://www.nrtoday.com/print_only/huawei-ban-threatens-wire...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/25/technology/huawei-rural-w...
Etc. Not a mention of features or bug fixes. It's all about price.
> But, if the tech cold war comes down to a choice between Chinese or American internets and technology, Africa’s choice has already been made. Its current internet and technology boom is in significant part because of the investment of Chinese tech companies and the sale of affordable, quality components.
[1] https://mg.co.za/article/2019-03-06-china-wins-the-tech-war-...
Also these equipments have been produced in China for decades, even western branded ones, and there is still no proof that they pose any security risk. As opposed to USA companies well documented to spy USA allies, and their own population, for government agencies
There's a whole section[0], and another entire page[1] on Wikipedia detailing accusations against them. China, too, has quite the detailed presence[2]. So let's not pretend they're trustworthy.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huawei#Controversies
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Huawei
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_intelligence_activity_...
If you really do want to compare you could compare proven backdoors (which would destroy Cisco but not Huawei) instead of looking at accusations, which is pointless.
Also, the US could seem to care less if the home routers, modems, phones, and other equipment made in China are backdoored that these business employees are still using.
But when the USA spies, it does so in the interests of the American state and in the shared interests of the Five Eyes. When China spies it does so in the interest of China. For Americans, or citizens of the Five Eyes, there is at least some aligned interest with the state they inhabit and some political recourse available within it. Nothing like that exists for them with China.
The FVEY surveilliance sharing mechanism is designed explicitly to circumvent limits on domestic spying by domestic agencies. It is quite literally an institution designed to undermine the civilian interests of Five Eye countries. AU Prime Minsiter Turnbull literally admitted the reason why Huawei was banned from AU networks was because Huawei hardware made it harder to surveil on AU/FVEY citizens.
At the very least, citizens of Five Eyes nations can attempt to end it by contacting their representatives.
The US and China are closer to being at war than they are to being allies in the sense that the US and Britain or Germany are allies.
The US and Germany, for example, have a more tense relationship at present than, say, 30 or 40 years ago. And yet we'd still send a million soldiers over there to help defend them if Russia decided to march west again with their eyes on Berlin. That's because they're an ally. The same is true of many other nations, like Canada, Australia, Japan, South Korea, Poland, and so on.
I don't believe for a second anyone in this thread is actually confused in the way in which they're pretending to be confused, when it comes to whether one would prefer the US or China to be the top dog of espionage globally. It almost entirely depends on whether you're in the US or in a liberal democracy allied with the US or in China (or one of its few allies).
Whataboutism isn't an argument but a concession to the person you're replying to.
Also for most points, you could just replace Huawei with any big USA technology company
I’m curious to know what recourse you think western citizens have for unknown abuses from their governments’ surveillance states.
https://web.archive.org/web/20110915023155/http://www.busine...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10485560675556000
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/06/business/t-mobile-accuses...
All of that is ignoring Nortel...
After first insisting there was no crime.