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Comment by AdamHominem | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, kinda points to battery failure, but "our rivals haxxored us!!!" is certainly a nice cover story for the company and the local government.

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I'd prefer for the story to be battery failure tbh.

In China, both are equally probable.

Okay I don't care if my account gets banned but why in the FUCK does everything about China has to do with the government?

Everyone here and on Reddit are bitching about Chinese propaganda bots but the only thing I see is people with new accounts attacking China and an immediate accusation of shilling to anyone who doesn't criticize China or even draws a parallel between whatever is being criticized and the U.S..

Seriously, y'all need help if you keep thinking China is the most evil bogeyman in the world. First it was Iraq, then Iran, now it's China.

I am not saying China is great or even good but this whole immediate "fuck China" whenever anything happening in China is reported, is just pathetic and a symptom of brainwashing.

It's not brainwashing to suspect s government are up to no good. I'm in the west and assume that my government is up to no good at times, but at least we have a free media which keeps it in check. That the CCP are a dangerous bunch of authoritarian control freaks really should not be that much of a stretch.

Anywhere that expressing "fuck <dear leader>" in public can result in police interrogation deserves all the scrutiny it gets.

Agree. My niece and many of her friends were arrested in Minneapolis MN (USA) last spring for protesting against police violence.

For context, I'm an expat who has traveled extensively in Asia and currently lives in Taiwan. I have spent time in China, and had personal and business dealings with Chinese, Taiwanese, Vietnamese, Japanese, Indonesians, Filipinos, Koreans, etc. while living in the region. So I think I probably have a more informed perspective about the region than people who haven't spent any time here.

My comment is straightforward: in China, it would not be surprising if an "incident" was the result of negligence (Google search "chabuduo") or sabotage, or if sabotage was used as an excuse to "save face" (Google it).

Since nothing in my comment called China "the most evil bogeyman in the world", your hyperbolic response is curious to me. In China, at a certain level of business, the state in some form is omnipresent. Feel free to not explore the implications of that and make value judgements, but this is a simple fact that you'd know if you spent any time here.

I believe nobody said "evil boogyman". But saying "government controlled" isn't much of a stretch for any Chinese company. I expect they do have some level of "de facto" control on over any company operating in the Mainland

I think that's not a reasonable expectation. Unless you believe that setting regulatory clauses in doing business as "de facto" control. But then so does any business.

Much like every other nation on Earth, the government will seek to take a hand in the largest businesses operating in their jurisdiction.

"Expecting" the Chinese government to control every business in China is very dystopian and baseless. They couldn't do it even if they wanted. The same way my country can't regulate a simple scooter ride-sharing startup during a pandemic...

I wouldn't question China's control over companies like Alibaba. I wouldn't question the US' control over companies like Google. Which again is a totally different ballpark.

My understanding is there has been a large push to have communist party members have a formal and active role in businesses. The economist had a nice article on this: https://archive.is/HGX2L

This is at the very least much more explicit than the control political parties in the US exert over businesses.

Being explicit in your doings is not necessarily evil. Governments frequently push to control everything that they think might benefit themselves. China just has everyone's balls in a vice and so can do it publicly.

But yeah. I'm only here to say that equating control of giants to be very different to control of everyone.

In the US, "human resources" is a misnomer for a corporate department that ensures regime compliance. Thankfully, most policies exist for the sake of worker's and minority's rights.

Every government has some level of "de facto" control over companies through legislation and whatnot. Sure that control may be more direct in China (and that's a big maybe in my opinion because I doubt a huge country with complex interactions can be handwavely summarized as that) but I just don't see the need to bring that up whenever anything happens in China.

then you've probably never worked in the Chinese tech sector because it is the literal Wild West. The competitor manipulation story in this case is utterly believable to anyone who has ever seen in what kind of quasi feudal wars Chinese tech companies are often engaged, because there is virtually no government oversight. Regulators on the mainland were generally so far behind the curve that tech companies until very recently more or less did whatever they wanted, which accounts for their enormous growth over the last two decades.

About ten years ago there was the infamous "3Q war" where Tencent and Qihoo engaged in pretty ridiculous measures over the messenger market by blocking each others usage on consumer machines when the other one was installed, orchestrating fake media articles about pornography, police raids and at some point calling on users to go into a general strike. The war basically only ended because at some point the government stepped in and for the first time enforced anti-trust law.

This has changed to some degree but China's tech sector always was so hilariously under-regulated it makes most Western countries look socialist in comparison

I genuinely don't understand how the parent comment triggered this response for ... just saying they think both battery failure being "covered up" or sabotage are likely?

Btw, all comments here explaining rationally why immediate hate on China does not belong in a lot of places, but shows up anyway, are being flagged.

So you can actually tell how well the propaganda has worked on a lot of people. They just love the outrage so much that they'll censor anyone who questions them.

The brainwashing has been complete. Poor US citizens.

>why in the FUCK does everything about China has to do with the government?

Because it's... a single-party Communist state? Stories about North Korea also tend to talk about its government a lot.

It's because they are actively, right now, as we type fluff about cute drones, engaged in the rounding up, brainwashing, rape, torture, and murder of millions of ethnic uyghurs and other "undesirables" like homosexuals, political dissidents, and have implemented armed imprisonment and starvation of people suspected of having covid. Because their oblivious middle class is blithely and ignorantly enabling an evil the likes of which the world hasn't seen since Nazi fucking Germany.

It's not about US interests or anything external. It's entirely and only about the atrocities being performed. It's about the forceful harvesting of human hair from prisoners for sale to blissfully ignorant western nations. It's about the organ harvesting of the poor and disenfranchised for the medical privilege of the elite. It's about the chattel slavery of tens of millions of Chinese citizens who are put to use at gunpoint by the power of the communist party. Kept in this world living conditions, brainwashed by the party to know their given role in life is to do nothing but farm, or labor in the fields or factories. Thedrug cartels, the human trafficking, the weapons and money provided to bad actors around the world, the unmitigated environmental destruction and pollution all over the globe.

It's about the soul corrupting oppression of hundreds of millions of human fucking beings who deserve more than willful disregard by us in the west, who'd rather not be inconvenienced by having to think about what the plight of those people means to our own place in the world. About the supply chains and economic advantages in life we enjoy because of the exploitation of those people. About what I it means to ignore the evil in favor of the easy.

So yeah, bub, sorry to burst your bubble. Some of us just aren't comfortable with the "just like us" modern happy narrative crafted by the CCP.

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