Orlins: You focus a lot on, kind of Alipay or WeChat Pay. How does that change the landscape for AI in China versus the United States, where we still are heavily reliant on a credit card system that seems quite old and outdated when you're in China?
Lee: It's a very unique opportunity for China to leapfrog. The U.S. had the world's most leading transaction tool, which was the credit card, but it became outdated. It charges too much, it's inconvenient, it's only customer to merchant. In China, with WeChat and Alipay, anybody can pay anybody. We can do micro payments and there are no fees, almost no fees, so the 2% extra charge is almost like a tax on the American economy charged by the credit cards. But with respect to AI, now everybody, including WeChat and Alibaba, but also, if you build an app, you know who your customers are, and what they paid and why. And if you're a retail shop and people scanned you, you know who pays you and why. There are even beggars in the street holding up a sign, "Scan me and give me money," and they know who paid them and why. So I think this is creating a huge amount of data that will help AI.
The merchant fee sucks for poor people because businesses likely raise margins to cover it (if they see significant volume via credit cards, like grocery stores).
Every transaction I make nets me 2-5% 'cashback'. Great for me since I get 5% back even on things like my electric bill and Internet.
But for everyone else paying cash at places where credit is primarily received, they're basically being fined for my benefit.
Honestly, it's not even that great for you. For starters, you're basically giving your credit card company a free loan.
If given a choice between paying 100% and being done, or paying 105% and getting the 5% back later, almost no one would chose the 105% option. (I know it doesn't actually work this way, but it's still a good illustration.)
Additionally, that program necessarily adds some cost, which is just rolled into higher prices that you (and everyone else) pay.
All that said, I completely agree with your point. I wish credit card reward schemes would just go away.
I guess you're both giving each other loans, but even if you pay your bill in full each month, yours still isn't free. If you're getting 5% back, then the item was almost certainly marked up more than 5%. So you're still paying something for that loan in the form of higher up-front pricing.
And, of course, if you don't pay your bill in full each month, then you're likely looking at 15-20% or more (APR) on whatever balance you left unpaid.
> If you're getting 5% back, then the item was almost certainly marked up more than 5%.
How though? The 5% back is not a rebate coming from the merchant, it's coming from the card issuer. Don't they (generally -- barring special agreements for specific cards) get the same amount of money regardless of what cards people use?
When I ran a business that accepted credit cards, I had to pay different levels of fees depending on the type of card and rewards scheme associated with it. I had to set my prices based on the highest rewards card fees, and if someone paid with a lower fee card, I just kept the difference as extra profit. (My agreement with the CC processor explicitly required me to give everyone the same price regardless of how they paid.)
I think 5% is a special case that's limited to specific vendors or products, I'm not aware of any general rebate higher than 2%.
I know Stripe and Square and other companies have come along now that charge the same fees regardless of the type of card - but note that they're all above 2%.
I think the only difference now is that Stripe/Square/etc. keep the difference as profit when someone pays with a non-rewards card, instead of the vendor. (But, in their defense, they're able to negotiate lower rates than I was ever able to get on my own.)
This is a good point. But realistically, that choice is not an option. Therefore, I'm at a disadvantage if I don't use the most "rewardy" type of card available. The cost of these points/rewards are priced in. So the only way to recapture that is to use a high reward card. It's a sucky model, but we're all caught in it and the folks paying with alternatives like cash are the ones holding the bag.
Isn’t this against the merchant agreements between them and the credit card companies? If it was allowed, wouldn’t you see separate cash and credit prices all over the place?
I see those. Dentist, Gas, Pub. My dentist is 10% off for cash. Gas I bought last week in New Hampshire, $0.07 cheaper with cash. Pub has a minimum and sur-charge for card. And my coffee place too.
An interesting fact is in China even traditional credit cards have significantly lower fee. UnionPay only charges around 0.6%. Not comparable to Alipay or WeChat Pay's effectively 0% but still.
As an American, the only thing I don't spend on a credit card is rent (because my landlord doesn't accept it).
It's silly not to pay for everything on credit cards here, when you can get 3-5% back on anything with the right card. That's around $4k/year if you spend $100k before even accounting for doubling on some cards and other benefits like travel vouchers, Uber credits, and free insurance coverage. (Minus a $600-$1000 a year in annual card fees for high end cards.)
I imagine that spending is dominated by a few major categories, which you can find specific cards to cover. There are spending limits, but you can always get multiple cards. I do that with BoA, I have 2 basically identical credit cards, but each has a different bonus category set, or I can set both to use the same category like dining out.
So unless you're spending like 200k net a year on life expenses, it's pretty easy to get the max returns.
You can get a pretty good, simple system set up with Chase CSR and FU, supplemented with the Amazon card. Just have to remember to use the CSR for the relevant categories, which isn't that hard.
As an American, I don't care if I get 0% back, I'm still using a credit card because the identity theft protection discrepancy between credit and debit cards is enormous. I say this to people and those who have had to deal with identify theft before immediate are on board with me. Those who haven't proceed to argue.
Basically, when you purchase something with a credit card the bank fronts the money to the merchant and bills you for purchases later. If a transaction is fraudulent, either the merchant or the credit card company take the hit, and you're never out any money, even temporarily. For credit cards the market has settled on 0 consumer fraud liability pretty much no matter the circumstances (and very hassle-free too).
On the other hand, with debit cards money is withdrawn from your account when a fraudulent purchase is made, and you need to wait for your bank to complete an investigation to reimburse you. They also tend to have rather stricter reporting standards in that if you don't report fraud promptly, you might be stuck with (some) liability.
Either way you'll typically get your money back, but the hassle is much reduced with credit cards.
The US (and Canada) have much weaker consumer protections for debit than credit.
If a merchant posts a fraudulent transaction against a credit card, you'll most likely get your money back. If a merchant posts a fraudulent transaction against a debit card, you might not get your money back.
More dangerously, if your debit card credentials are skimmed and used to withdraw money from your account by any means other than the retail debit-card payment system, you won't get your money back.
to what extent? They might take a few days to settle, but the authorizations show up in my bank almost immediately. For all intents and purposes they're real time.
>Alipay provides more agile context by integrating location data real time.
The usefulness of this is questionable. Merchant terminals are mostly fixed, so correlating a merchant id/name to a physical location isn't too hard. Apple pay already has this, where it will show a map of where the transaction happened if you click into a transaction. This works even without location services enabled on your phone.
Think 600 million integrated surveillance cameras.
Think every aspect of consumer behaviour, pre and post every sale of every magnitude and every configuration, being fed through AI sieves every moment of every day, everywhere.
Arguably the big improvement in data coverage is at the small scale retailers, big chains have already spent the time and money need to investigate customer behaviour in that sort of detail.
As far as I can tell, there isn't much political will to fix it. Merchants already have the freedom to offer lower prices, and some do for paying with cash/debit. But for the most part, I think merchants are betting that people will spend more with credit cards.
Similarly, consumers also like the cash back/rewards game. Plus there are benefits to having an arbiter when dealing with an unknown party in a transaction.
I thought Democratic countries are designed to let the people fixing their own problem?
Funny people nowadays mentioning "political will", somehow this reminds me how domesticated Chinese people think about changing society: don't bother, the government does not want to do that...
Lee is a smart guy. But I think his missed one important point: It's not about fees. No it's not even about easy to use.
In China, technically anyone can setup a "business" account on Alipay with just one tap and then start to collect payment right way, the story is completely different if you have to deal with banks. Then with all that, you add the fact that not everybody here uses credit card which raises the bar for credit card adaption up yet again.
I'd recommend people who interested about the related development to checkout the DC/EP project. Which is aimed to be an alternative to Alipay and WeChat Pay, but backed by the banks.
It's definitely about the fees and underlying structures.
No economy is 'suffering' because businesses have to 'deal with a bank'. It could be smoother, but it's mostly not a big deal.
Since the world has 'gone digital' the '2%' system setup became the natural medium and it's possibly a bigger problem than Google and FB, it's just that nobody wants to talk about it.
First, Stripe, despite it's mega valuation, is small peanuts. They are just a part of something much bigger, and they are not really enabling new markets.
Second, they didn't invent anything new, they just made the process a easier. There are plenty of non-Stripe solutions you can use today.
To a teenage software developer without business exposure or experience, who thinks 'opening a merchant account' is a big deal, or that 'incorporating' is a big deal, Stripe seems like some kind of magic.
But none of that is hard. People do it all the time. Your plumber, hairdresser and local cafe probably have some kind of incorporation and collect/pay a VAT and business tax. It's not rocket science. You can usually do it online in a few minutes.
'Dealing with banks' is not a problem with scale. 2% of every transaction however, and the underlying power structures that want to keep it that way ... that's a problem.
> Your plumber, hairdresser and local cafe probably have some kind of incorporation and collect/pay a VAT and business tax. It's not rocket science. You can usually do it online in a few minutes
I'm in the UK.
Setting up a company is easy. The last time I did it, took an hour or so of filling out forms online, but it's cheap and a few hours later, or the next day, you have a legal company.
Registering for tax/VAT etc takes longer. The forms took me longer to fill and the system took a few weeks to proceed through each step (codes sent in the post, figures in online forms checked by a person, etc), but you can start trading before they are done if you follow the transitional arrangements.
Getting a bank account is much slower. Recently I did it with Starling, because they offered a much faster online process than the high street banks. It still took a frustrating 4 working days, with support messages back and forth because they kept challenging me for "proof" that I was a business. Having a company was not sufficient proof. Lots of money laundering requirements, having to prove the type of business, having to provide evidence of online presence, etc.
I temporarily altered my LinkedIn profile (which I saw they did check) to satisfy their requirements.
The time before that was a high street bank, Barclays. The process took about 2 months. They interviewed me twice, and another of the directors, and conducted background checks on everyone. In the interviews they asked a lot of challenging questions about the nature of the business, even though it was a non-profit with 5 independent directors, handling only a small amount of money.
Other people, in more regular types of small business (plumber, hairdresser, cafe etc) report that getting business accounts can often take 1-2 months, and be quite frustrating because you want to start trading and that's a bottleneck.
Merchant accounts (for taking credit cards) are no longer necessary because of services like Paypal and Stripe. It used to be that merchant accounts were a challenge to get as a small business, because they didn't serve early businesses.
But even now, with Paypal, last time I did it, they set a cap on £1000/year of transactions until certain documentation was received by them. Despite sending them 10 different forms of business documentation at their request, they were never satisfied, and so that business stopped using Paypal, relegating it to a handful of users that couldn't pay any other way.
I understand that we're talking about feeding "AI" data here, so it's kind of moot, but I'd like to point out anyway that most of us don't want the merchants to know who we are (or to feed the "AI" in general).
It may surprise some folks here on HN, but in the real world, the vast majority of people don't care if merchants "know who they are". I'd bet that there are more people want merchants to know who they are than there are people who explicitly don't want them to know. But that said, the vast majority simply don't care. Just my opinion, of course.
I think it's more like "the vast majority simply don't care, until they do". That is, I think most people think "Who cares if merchant XYZ knows I changed my shampoo brand", but when people are actually shown the full set of data that is known about them, and how that data is correlated with with tons of other data sources, and that data is used to make fairly accurate predictions about your behavior which affects what products and services are promoted to you, that's when your average person goes "holy shit!"
Right now it's just "out of sight, out of mind" and the full capabilities of what is possible with aggregated data is just not apparent to your average person.
meh, people here in Germany are privacy focused as hell and even here nobody cares for more than five minutes when some data scandal breaks, of which we have at least one every year now.
AI, surveillance capitalism, manipulation and so on have been in pop-culture and news for years now, 'the social dilemma' just aired on netflix and a lot of people seem to have watched it, there's a documentary about 'big data' on TV every month, every other sci-fi movie has it as a plot point, we're all aware of it. People are genuinely indifferent about it. People will complain about it in theoretic debates but the number of people who actually delete the apps off their phone is basically zero, which tells you what you need to know.
His point is less about what customers want but more about the value of the data being collected. By providing a payment service you are harvesting a large amount of data "for free" that can be directly turned into money.
Why would I want to give up my various credit/debit cards and use a single app? I would be giving a single app all the payment power. This works well in a highly regulated Government controlled market. The EU and US allow anyone to compete. China does not.
A better and more realistic solution in the US is the personal bank to bank transfers people can easily do in the UK/EU.
There are two major credit card networks and essentially 0 new entrants in that space. Your "various credit/debit cards" are most likely with the same two networks, linked to different bank accounts, just as they could be with Alipay. They just have different branding.
Two is a lot more than one, for competition purposes, but it's hardly a wide open market where "anyone can compete", and it's the same as the number of major consumer payment networks in China (Alipay and Wechat pay).
Are these cashbacks truly gifted to you though, or is the price of another product or service from the provider simply adjusted to compensate? Like Black Friday discounts, where product prices are raised so that the "discount" only drives sales volume, rather than offer a truly marked-down/discounted price to the consumer.
It’s even worse. A significant portion of cash back/rewards are financed from fees and interest payments charged to other credit card holders. So in effect, you’re getting money from poorer and/or less responsible people who carry balances and use their cards to get cash advances.
Where do you think those fees come from? You! Rebates are your own money you have to optimize to get back, and those who are less well off are usually the ones who are disproportionally impacted by the aggregate costs of reward cards (because they're paying with cash, debit cards, or other mechanisms where they don't receive a rebate).
Rewards for payments and unregulated interchange fees need to die. They are a financial transaction tax on everyone.
No, they are partially a cut of the fees the CC company charges. Show me proof that they're 100% from fees and I'll believe you. Otherwise a quick google search shows that you're not correct here.
6% back on groceries with a $6,000 cap for the Amex, $95 fee, cap met in July, gas is 3% back. Chase visa has 5% back on groceries with a 12k cap, no fee. Bank of America visa has 3% back online orders, no fee.
Delta Amex with 100,000+ miles is used for automated bills, $95 fee. Pre-covid I made back the $95 fee by saving on checked bags etc. Will be cancelled in January due to covid.
I have United-branded Visa. I was going to cancel it but the rep said that I could pay the annual fee of $95 with miles. I have it to avoid paying bag fees. Haven't traveled with United for more than a year. I guess I'll keep it until the miles run out.
I don't know if you can do the same with your Delta Amex but FYI.
> Yes and I make about $1500-$2000 in cash back a year using my various branded credit cards. How can you do that with Alipay?
Which are essentially funded through merchant fees. CC's will gladly give you $2k in cash back for all of the fees that it charges merchants. If those fees didn't exist, your overall cost of goods would likely be ~3% cheaper.
There are two major networks, but many vendors of credit cards, with very difficult qualities from each other.
If you have any problems, it's the vendors you will deal with and who decide things like your credit limit, how often that's revised (up or down), whether payments are blocked and how to unblock them, how you are notified about transactions, whether paying off the card turns into credit instantly or takes a few days, your interest rates, whether the interest is applied immediately or not, whether you have balance transfer and money transfer, whether you have 0% transfers, cashbacks and other deals, and the kind of customer service you get (whether it's on the phone or forced to be via chat, whether they answer quickly and are helpful or take forever and are not), and whether their website and app are down "for maintenance" regularly.
Almost everything you'd care about is up to the vendor of which there are many, not the network.
Because it's a lot more convenient, for the customer to just carry their cell and scan a QR code to pay, and a lot more convenient and cheaper for a small seller to just print a paper showing a QR code. Yeah for sure there are security issues (e.g. thieves changing the QR code pic so the money goes into another account) but most people out there put more value in that convenience. Plus they are a lot cheaper than cc.
Personal bank to bank transactions, at least in Canada, still involves a lot of trouble.
The fun thing is that you have a number of ways to pay electronically in the US, PayPal and Venmo are pretty widespread.
What is missing is an effortless way of asking to pay, like by scanning a QR code. Contactless payments using NFC in cards and phones do not quite cut it, and require a terminal.
How is QR any different than NFC from a user perspective? Both require a terminal to be effortless for the consumer (an LCD or e-ink display that shows a real time QR with transaction details like amount, or an NFC chip that does the same thing).
I think QR is slightly worse since I have to open my camera app, or open my payment app and select camera, vs just waving my watch/phone at a terminal.
Things like metro payments are 100% doable with NFC and would be an awful nightmare with QR.
> How is QR any different than NFC from a user perspective?
Back when AliPay and others were scaling up not too many phones had NFC.
However, more importantly, QR is way better from merchant's stand point. A static QR code is a thing of beauty. A tiny mom-and-shop merchant could take a printout and stick it up on their physical store front. It allowed AliPay to onboard of hundreds of thousands of merchants with minimal or no operations team on the ground. This strategy was almost 100% replicated in India by Paytm and their ilk. It was incredible to see even the smallest of shops with a printed QR codes stuck to their push carts, rickety shops etc.,
Until everyone starts faking receipts, and then you’re back to terminals and someone validating they did receive a payment.
Or they go the other way and they’re scanning your QR code.
Basically, it isn’t actually better than NFC, just different. And maybe a little worse for speed, but better for donations or things that anything is better than nothing.
"Anything is better than nothing" is exactly the point. We are talking about businesses that run on a shoestring here. Peddlers, street vendors, people who may not even have a phone of their own but one of their family members does, and that's whose QR code they have printed out to accept payments. In a society where nobody carries cash any more, the best you can hope for as a bottom-rung vendor is that your customers aren't desperate enough to try cheat you out of a few kuai.
At the next level up, of course, vendors will have their own phone so they can check their notifications to make sure that a payment went through. And that is a big step forward for vendors in developing countries - there's no risk of receiving counterfeit currency with electronic transactions.
Unfortunately the bottom rung can least afford the fraud.
If the currency is good enough to fool a street vendor, it’s probably good enough to spend with their suppliers. Not like they’re sticking it in a bank. I suspect those street vendors are also not accepting bills so large they’re worth counterfeiting.
Chargeback fraud of course being more likely with credit card payments - but again, unlikely for small vendor transactions. It’s not worth it for anyone.
The argument that people don’t carry cash anymore is certainly real enough - and the beggars/window washer at a red light types are the most impacted rather than real merchants.
Most QR systems (in merchant presented mode, anyway) require good internet connectivity, which may not be a given in developing markets. This isn't a problem for NFC.
Using WeChat or Alipay in China does not require anything other than the app, which is quickly opened. Merchants just have pieces of paper with their QR code on them, and the payment is nearly instant. NFC is extremely finicky and much slower. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen lines held up by people needing to wave their phone or credit card around to get the NFC recognition to work.
As someone who has visited China, it truly feels like stepping back in time when coming to the U.S. with regards to payments.
How do you validate I've paid and let me through with a static QR code for something like the metro, or a ticketed event, or even a coffee? How do you know they paid the right amount? I turn and show you my receipt, and you hope it's not faked?
The answer is they don't do that - and they do it the other way around. The user shows THEIR QR code to the merchant (or automated kiosk).
Which means they still need a terminal - and it's going to be slower than NFC.
It goes both ways and depends. The point is there are options and your statement is not correct.
Some merchants, like street merchants or drivers, will simply have their code printed out. You scan it and pay them and they get a notification on their phone or tablet that you've paid. Other places, like at bigger restaurants, have QR screen readers that will scan the purchaser's phone.
Either way, I don't see what you're getting at. The terminal is the phone in many cases, and other cases, there is a terminal in the sense of an integrated scanner system, but why does that matter? For the user it is much more convenient and faster. It's essentially instant, and I have never waited for the amount of time it takes for a credit card or NFC payment method to process. Further, it allows basically anyone to have this method because, again, the terminal is your phone and can be so for both parties in the transaction.
> And NFC works when my battery dies.
So what? You can charge your phone essentially anywhere in China.
> How do you validate I've paid and let me through with a static QR code for something like the metro, or a ticketed event, or even a coffee? How do you know they paid the right amount? I turn and show you my receipt, and you hope it's not faked?
By and large when I've used these systems, the vendor just checks they received the correct amount of payment in their app. It's largely immediate
Only foreign visitors carry cash these days in China in cities in my personal experience :-) Some shops actually don't accept cash at all - so you have to pay a colleague in cash and they'll pay the vendor with Ali or Tencent Pay on your behalf.
China netizen population is estimated around 900 million. So essentially all adults in Urban and many in rural excepting small kids. Generally for the elderly, their kids or grand kids will help.
It's also pretty easy to take an item and walk out without paying. But it doesn't happen. At least, it doesn't happen that much, and I would guess it happens much less in China than in the USA (though I'd be curious to see actual shrinkage numbers).
QR codes seem to have largely supplanted cash and credit cards in mainland China, whatever hypothetical downsides they might have. And the very limited hypothetical advantages of NFC (it's unclear to me what they actually are, but let's grant they exist) don't compensate for the fact that an expensive terminal is needed, so NFC isn't displacing QR codes in the near future.
It doesn't have a bearing on which method is riskier, but it does have a bearing on the idea that everyone is going to be generating fake receipts on their phones.
And, yeah, most places do verify based on another phone.
weird, must be a regional thing. both NFC cards and apple pay are pretty reliable for me. as for speed, I don't see how getting out your credit card and waving it next to a terminal can be slower than getting out your phone, unlocking it, opening wechat, selecting the qr scanner, lining up the camera, waiting for it to focus/scan, and confirming the transaction.
The difference is that for most people their phone is always in their pocket or easy to grab, 24/7. A credit card may be tucked away somewhere for emergencies, or left at home. I lost my credit card somewhere years ago and didn't care when I lived in China because the physical object was irrelevant. It's only when I got back to North America that I realized some retailers still awkwardly require you to present the physical thing.
Just like the phone made wrist watches and portable music devices obsolete, it's also made the wallet obsolete. I agree that both NFC and QR code are equally convenient (although obviously QR codes are more accessible because they work on all phones and no special scanning devices are required), but I think the main issue is with NFC in a card versus NFC in a phone. The phone is always going to be more convenient, because people today are rarely - if ever - without their phone.
WeChat's QR scanning is basically instant and doesn't need to be lined up. In my experience, it basically has scanned and processed the QR code when I've barely realized I got it in view.
Regarding NFC, I've just seen too many times of having to put the phone in the right place in the right orientation to get the communication to work, and then it still takes time to make the payment. It's faster than credit cards when it just works but slower when it doesn't. And Alipay and WeChat are faster than both.
In China, you don't need a wallet. You just need a phone. So you get used to knowing what you need. There's an initial learning curve, but then you can be paying and biking around and everything else with just your phone.
No need to come close and touch. This can be important in some scenarios, like paying to a street musician, or donating to a cause by just pointing your camera at a billboard, or a graffiti, or a printout on something.
I think I need to restate the well-known: the gulf between reasonably easy and zero effort is quite large, and crossing it changes a lot in user behavior.
> This can be important in some scenarios, like paying to a street musician, or donating to a cause by just pointing your camera at a billboard, or a graffiti, or a printout on something.
Pointing a camera at something that deducts money from you seems extremely ripe for abuse, what’s to stop someone from putting fake QR code’s over real ones and hijacking payments?
The act of paying indeed should involve pressing a button "pay $amount to $party", and the flow should go through a server verifying both parties.
I'd say that paying with a contactless card has a problem here, an NFC credit card lacks a confirmation button, and the one on the terminal is controlled by the receiving party.
> Pointing a camera at something that deducts money from you seems extremely ripe for abuse, what’s to stop someone from putting fake QR code’s over real ones and hijacking payments?
How would that work? If someone somehow put a fake QR code over a merchant's real one, the merchant or person you're paying would not get a notification when you scanned their code to pay them. Thus, both parties involved in the transaction would be alerted to the situation immediately. The wrong QR code would be tied to someone's account and be easily found by the system.
A camera has been available on lower end phones for at least 10 years, NFC not so much. QR codes are also ubiquitous in China so it's a familiar concept to people there, even less tech savvy/educated people.
Yes, they have everything in place, except the zero-effort contactless payment feature, a way to show or export / print a QR code.
Paypal.me works great on the web as a clickable link, even though the commission is several percent (don't remember exactly), not the 0.3% which Alipay boasts.
The credit card fees are made up of multiple smaller fees: the largest part, the interchange fee goes to the issuing bank wherever it is in the world. The scheme fee goes to the scheme (e.g. Visa, MasterCard, ...) which is indeed ultimately a fee that goes to America, however it is much lower than 2%.
Yes, and I'm not saying that's a good thing, but I do think it's important to stay factual in complaints.
However another massive issue except the fees is data flow. I don't need US corporations to know about all my transactions that otherwise do not relate to them at all.
It should be in the interest of all countries to have a payment scheme that is not reliant on the US or another massive foreign power. Thankfully, many countries do have their own scheme, though it seems Kenya unfortunately doesn't.
Haven't used Alipay but Wechat is really annoying because they get your Wechat contact info and text you ads. Other than that, yeah it blows away US payment system. Amazon Go store has potential to get us back on top, though.
Venmo, Paypal and other forms of digital payment are extremely popular. It's not as ubiquitous as WeChat but it's not some unknown quantity. The US has a hybrid system with mixed credit card and digital pay systems.
By massive volume? Or by targeted ads, since the company has an idea of what you buy. And your phone is just a convenient personalized billboard in your pocket.
You are correct. I was wrong in using Wall Street as a generic term for investment bankers when this is a record and ground breaking offering on Shanghai and Hong Kong exchanges.
Still it’s being priced by Chinese bankers at such a ridiculous level that it is almost certain to work out very poorly for buyers.
I am not sure if I share Mr. Lee's enthusiasm about this massive spending control in the hands of a single company and the government that routinely puts people in concentration camps. Also helping some AI is also not on my list of life priorities, delicately speaking.
This is not an IPO by a private company. This a wholly owned subsidiary of a government, just like Saudi Aramco. Jack Ma is a high ranking CCP member with government money, not a private businessman: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-46353767
Financial institutions are semi governmental branches in most countries. Jack Ma also admitted if the Chinese government demands, he would handle Ant's control back to the government. This is also the reason I believe Ant didn't plan to go to oversea for IPO in the first place, regardless of the political climate in US. It needs the buying from Chinese government, so the CCP.
Frankly speaking, in a country such like China where capital is strictly controlled, Ant's existence itself is pretty significant.
Ok, I read it. At no point does it say Alibaba is owned by the Chinese government. Jack Ma's not even the CEO anymore so dunno what you think this proves.
1) Jack Ma is neither the CEO nor the majority shareholder in Ant. [1]
2) Jack is one of > 91.2M party members in China. As are most high-ranking managers and professionals, it's simply a fact of life. [2]
Nothing about 1 or 2 makes Alibaba Group or Ant a state owned enterprise (SOE) more than any other company in China. Everything in the world need _not_ be late stage capitalist democracy. There are plenty of ways to attain success and happiness. Lastly, Ant isn't even IPOing in the West. If you disagree then vote with your wallet (or don't).
I would have expected being a party member to just be the default in order for anyone to do anything of substance in China, but he comes across extremely poorly in that interview.
So poorly, that I find it more likely that the companies are being propped up/operated by the government than someone like him could successfully build/run them.
Maybe I'm indexing too much on that, but watch it for yourself, definitely weird.
I worked at Ali and have seen 马云 speak in person. I get that it seems a bit weird because he's _not_ technical, nor particularly enlightened in any area, but the success of the company is in part due to his excellence as a manager. It's part of the reason Ali wasn't, until very recently, in gaming because he wanted to focus the company and to abide by a certain set of principles.
To your second point: doing business in China is partially owed to the niche that the government carves for you. Look at the debacle of Ofo vs Mobike. You need to grow at all costs until you can overtake competition then you're protected.
I guess I'm skeptical that you can be an excellent manager with that level of inability to discuss anything of depth. The excellent managers I've interacted with (especially at the exec level) have always been really sharp and had a pretty deep understanding of the stack even if they're not themselves programmers. The ones that don't or can't are usually bad.
> doing business in China is partially owed to the niche that the government carves for you...You need to grow at all costs until you can overtake competition then you're protected.
I suspect this protection is what allows people to succeed that would otherwise fail in a real competition. In that interview he comes across like an empty suit/figurehead. It wasn't a huge surprise to me that they got rid of him.
"Everything in the world need _not_ be late stage capitalist democracy. There are plenty of ways to attain success and happiness."
- You meant to say "early stage" and of course there are many ways to attain success and happiness. That's why we allow people to make their own choices, elect their own representatives, and speak freely. We don't force them into accepting one single system, like they do in China. In America, we believe humans have inalienable rights that the government has no authority to usurp. The government exists subserviently to protect our rights to pursue happiness as we see fit, provided we don't infringe on the rights of others. If you want to go live in a communist community within a free society, you're more than welcome to share your income with a group of people. What you have in China is totalitarianism / authoritarianism, which we believe is axiomatically immoral, as it removes option for people to decide on their own, it removes the inalienable rights that all humans naturally have at birth. Don't you agree that you own your physical body, and you own the fruits of your labor? Don't you think you have the right to express criticism against leaders? From where exactly do they derive their authority? It's not by elected mandate. I would love to hear why you think restricting freedom and being a cheerleader for totalitarianism / authoritarianism can (even in theory) lead to greater happiness. Thank you!
It was very frustrating to see, as a former Alibaba shareholder, Ant Financial get spun off with zero compensation or new share distribution. My primary reason for buying Alibaba in the first place was for Alipay.
It was a good learning experience though to be honest. Since then, I stay away from Chinese stocks on principle. I was lucky enough to be able to sell off my shares without losing anything this time, but who knows what could have happened.
Does the US have protections that prohibit companies from doing that? Or is it just that there's more faith in our legal system if a company does what isn't in the shareholders' best interest?
I believe that the managers of the company that sells/spins off a subsidiary have a fiduciary duty to get the best price for shareholders in such a transaction. This is even more so the case when a major stakeholder gets to benefit from such a transaction.
I evaluated it for our company a few years ago (the entire Ant design system, not just React UI Components) and although everyone had heard of Alibaba few knew about Ant Financial (now the Ant Group) even though it's absolutely massive.
Funny how our 2 leading candidates, AntDesign and BluePrint, both come from less than "ideal" companies with similar baggage, though from opposite sides of the spectrum!
I wrote a comment pointing out the lunacy of this situation, and it got flagged almost immediately. Do you also refuse to use the Linux kernel? It's got plenty of that dirty Chinese code these days. I see @huawei.com and others on LKML all the time.
The world's unwillingness to do so boils down to two reasons.
Firstly, all of the proposed courses of action involve giving more power to the US, which shall I remind you, kills millions of people in wars like it's nothing. It's not clear at all that decreasing China's power but increasing that of the US will do any good to anyone. Just in Iraq, the US killed more people than anyone accuses China of imprisoning illegitimately. So unless you can find a way to reduce China's power without also increasing that of the US, no one outside of those under US propaganda or interest will want to do much of anything.
Secondly, China is a nuclear armed country. Intervening in their domestic affairs is not easily done.
Finally, comparing the CCP to the NSDAP is frankly absurd. They are not comparable. The Nazi party wanted to kill around a third of the world's population and enslave another third. The CCP is accused, at worst, to be trying to change the culture of one of their provinces using inhumane tactics and torture, which sadly is just par for the course for the world in general.
Also really good, even if you need to get past the default stylings and behaviours. They have continually moved upstream beyond basic components into more enterprise patterns that are as useful IMO if you need specialization but great for getting started (ex: login workflows, portals)
Yeah, I absolutely love the consistency and ease of customization. Typescript integration is great as well. I just wish I could read the comments in source sometimes.
I like that AntD has a more 'enterprise' feel than other component libs that tend to be based on material design.
I use it in Hong Kong, it's very convenient to pay utility bills with. Some merchants also accept it for online payments, and you can pay with it at convenient stores, although Octopus card is far easier there.
As an American ignorant of Alipay/WeChat, I don't understand why they are perceived to be more convenient/advanced than the credit card system here. I tap my phone/card to pay at the register, enter the card number once for utilities in a webpage, that pretty low friction.
For paying at stores, I also just use credit cars (Apple Pay), it’s indeed more convenient.
For utilities, I open the app, check if I have a bill and click “pay”. It’s nice to be able to pay all utilities from one app, instead of having to log in to different sites and enter my details.
But I think one of the main things is also that you can connect it to your bank account, so it essentially becomes what a debit card is.
But it's still processed via the visa/mastercard network. It's "alipay" in the same sense that the recent magnetic accessories for the iPhone 12 is "magsafe". Totally different things, same branding.
Agreed - but if you live in China, the government already has your face mapped and is tracking you wherever you go... so maybe it is a zero additional cost for their citizens to give their face away to another application.
I was in an airport in China. A screen said "Walk up to the camera and we'll tell you which way to your gate.". I did so, the screen highlighted my face on the camera feed, showed me my name and my gate. Geezus Christ, they don't hide the fact that they're tracking faces...
When you first enter China, you have to let a machine scan your face (IIRC fingerprints too?), and locals have to scan their (RFID-enabled) IDs to enter airports or train stations; so they seem to really have total control.
London Heathrow has face-tracking gates. Entering the US has required fingerprints for many years, at least for me.
I can't imagine how an international traveller could in good faith single out China as having "total control" on these grounds in a way that is qualitatively different from Western countries.
Some flights from Europe to US do this at the gate -- there's no opt-out. I remember flying AA from AMS and everybody had to get scanned before boarding (CBP agents were present).
> requires internet connection for both parties (credit cards only require the merchant to be connected)
In China it's quite common for the merchant to have a static printed-out QR code for receiving payment. This requires a connection only for the payer (and merchants will often have WiFi available, so you're likely to be able to connect one way or another). These merchants tend to just trust you when you pay and then show them the "paid" screen on your phone. You could fake it, but I guess in general people don't, and the "paid" screen does include the merchant's chosen profile image, so you would have to have done your homework to fake it.
> scanning is worse ux than tapping
This is really true. When I lived in Shanghai it was pretty common to be stuck behind someone at the metro turnstile who was trying to use the stupid QR scanning thing to get in. Contactless is much smoother, but at one time QR code was the only way to use your mobile device to get into Shanghai's metro. Now Apple Pay supports the Shanghai transit card.
>These merchants tend to just trust you when you pay and then show them the "paid" screen on your phone. You could fake it, but I guess in general people don't, and the "paid" screen does include the merchant's chosen profile image, so you would have to have done your homework to fake it.
But that's only if they don't want to verify themselves. Which is not an issue, really. Or, if they do not have internet, in which case with NFC they couldn't do the transaction at all.
I feel like it's a case of abuse being so rare that they don't care.
One consequent advantage of cheap that you leave off:
Ubiquity.
I can't assume that every place, even in the most sophisticated cities in the US, will support NFC payments. Most don't, actually. So I still have to carry around a credit card and use it, with all the inconvenience and security issues associated with it.
Also, that cheapness allows for user experiences that are prohibitively expensive for NFC. E.g., paying at your table after eating.
Isn't this classic innovator's dilemma? On one hand we have the incumbent that provides a good, polished solution to the problem (credit card companies), on the other we have the innovator that can focus on markets that are too small for the incumbent (micro transactions, small shops etc).
> Doesn't require active internrt connection. There is an SMS and credit based fallback for when connectivity is low.
How does this work? Do you manually compose a text message to alipay with the payment information?
>Scanning is better than tapping as it can be done from range.
In what context would this be advantageous? If you're at a supermarket checkout, you're already standing close enough to the cashier that you can easily tap/swipe. The same applies to most other situations I can think of.
Plenty of corner cases which collectively add up to a majority of cases.
Pandemic: you don't want to get too close to the checkout, so you can do it from a six foot distance.
Retail locations with limited space: all you need is a flat wall to put a QR code on, and you can put it up in multiple areas. You could even put it on the floor or hang it from the ceiling.
Forced serialization: multiple people can scan a QR code simultaneously, while the NFC nearness requirement means that only one person can tap at once.
Restaurant table: put a QR code on the menu, scan.
Websites on your desktop or laptop: can't tap, but can scan as usual
That's all just talking about payer UX, not even considering seller UX. QR codes are cheaper and more flexible than NFC.
And, most of all, the fact that QR codes work in such a wide range of scenarios enables the biggest advantage: ubiquity. When they're ubiquitous, they become a single payment interface that you can assume will be available no matter where you go, which is game changing.
The way "passive" payments work is that your phone generates a new QR code every few seconds, same way that those one-time password authenticator apps work. The vendor scans your code and charges an amount, then you get an SMS receipt (or confirmation request, for larger amounts).
The other way around - the internet-lacking vendor has a static QR printout (or one-time code) which the buyer scans, keys in the amount, then pays with their internet connection. Vendor gets SMS receipt.
Either way, I do think one of the two parties needs to have internet for a payment to successfully go through.
Tap/swipe requires you to be able to extend hand to a specific terminal. QR tags can be:
- Printed all around the store/restaurant
- Zoomed in from distance and still scanned
yea there are a few use cases where scan is better. For example when you're too far to comfortably tap, like a drive through / toll station. With a tap you often have to reach over, of they have to bring the terminal out of the window / booth. Scan they just hold it up and you scan.
I paid for my diner earlier by scanning a QR code. It's only something I do when I have forgotten my card, as it is much more of a bother than contactless.
Well in China people also scan QR stick on the wall when exiting the parking lot, which seems handy. Also in some places You could start paying while you are in the line by scanning the QR. Anyway it has seen vast success in China
> You could start paying while you are in the line by scanning the QR
You can save them in the app and not have to scan every time too. It's pretty common at people's regular lunch places for them to pay while they wait in line. There's no deep technical reason this couldn't be implemented with the card system either, of course.
If you want to learn more about Jack Ma's story I highly recommend Alibaba: The House That Jack Ma Built [1]. Chinese tech is this separate bubble that has grown independently from the rest of the world and it is fascinating to me.
Also worth noting that all the Chinese companies that operate popular browsers (Tencent, Alibaba, Xiaomi, and Qihoo 360, etc.) ended up censoring that specific GitHub page because they didn't like it (https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/3/18294030/tencent-xiaomi-ch...).
And the way they did it was so shady. They basically revealed to the world that they are able and willing to replace the content on any website and as a user then you'll have no idea if they did it or not (for instance, one of the browsers made the repo visible but prevented people from starring the repo). CCP could easily order all these browsers (which come pre-installed with their cheap phones) to rewrite the content on any website. Imagine them rewriting the content of Wikipedia articles, Twitter posts, Google search results, hijacking download links to download software bundled with spyware (e.g. if you were to download Chrome), etc.
If they're willing to engage in such shady behaviour and break all users' trust just because they didn't like a repo complaining about long work hours, then imagine what they would do with all your financial transactions. My god. The fact that we're allowing these companies into our markets truly saddens me.
>The company I work for follows several practices Google and Spotify follow, even though they don't make sense for us.
So your company is cargo culting "thought leadership" from Google, you can see it's a poor fit and you're still there because...? Let me guess, the money?
As with the 996 stuff, if you're not happy to work in those conditions then don't.
He's a person with influence who is endorsing a labor practice. I'm pretty sure no one was ever forced to work for Karl Marx or Adam Smith, yet somehow their opinions on labor managed to affect peoples' working conditions.
Please don't post generic flamebait like this to HN, especially not on classic flamewar topics. These discussions are all the same at this point, which makes them tedious and off topic here.
You realize what has happened in the last four years, right? Four peace accords in the Middle East. ISIS has been destroyed. The US has basically pulled out of Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria. The Kurds and Turks aren't killing each other any longer. AND the US hasn't started another war - something that hasn't happened in decades as in going back to WWII.
The Kurds and Turks are for sure still killing each other, and Turkey is expanding further into Kurd-controlled areas in Iraq & Syria. And Afghanistan is and has been a failure; the Taliban have been regaining land and power, and further US withdrawal from Afghanistan will set it back to 2000 ( the war and misery would be for nothing ). One of the primary missions in Syria was to oust Al Assad, but he is still in power and controls near-entire Syria. Iraq is still a war hotbed, and it seems like more entities are joining the fight to control it. Then there is also all the proxy wars, for example, Yemen.
The peace accords are for sure good for the region and are setting it on a brighter path. But the US deserves no credit for withdrawing or starting new wars.
And none of this is to dismiss or "whatabout" China's horrible actions but lets not lie to ourselves about the actions of US and allies - We have committed plenty of evil.
Should the US not starting a new war and finally pulling out of a region it wasn't supposed to be in in the first place really be something to applaud?
Those are heartening to see from up here in the cheap seats, but from the outside this by no means looks like a new direction that the political class have gotten behind. The majority of actors in the US who benefited from the Bush-Clinton consensus are still in place and don't look like they intend to take the changes lying down.
I think we'll all breath a sigh of relief if the US still has a pacifist foreign policy in 2029, but until then I'm waiting for an 'empire strikes back' moment.
It is not at all whataboutism if the existance and behavior of other actors in the system influence each other, and removing one actor has a big negative effect on the whole system.
It is not at all whataboutism to say that we must tackle problems holistically.
If we're going to talk about orders of magnitude, nothing remotely compares to killed civilians in the middle east. But I'm not going to advocate removing only the party responsible for that event, while preserving the other. We're much better off if they can keep each other in check.
> nothing remotely compares to killed civilians in the middle east
The US didn't kill millions of civilians in the Middle East as you've been attempting to claim. It did attempt to prevent the Iraq civil war however, an inevitable result of the fall of Saddam Hussein's dictatorship. I'm curious if your premise is that Saddam, or his family, was going to rule as a dictator forever - denying all human rights to the Iraqi people - so as to prevent that civil war from ever happening.
And if you really want to talk orders of magnitude: Mao genocided 45 million people in just four years from 1958 to 1962.
Washington Post: "Remembering the biggest mass murder in the history of the world"
Brought about by an unprovoked invasion, in violation of international law.
> Mao genocided 45 million people in just four years from 1958 to 1962.
Mao seriously mismanaged the economy, leading to famine. Life expectancy also increased from 40 years at the time of the revolution to 60 years at the time of his death. A lot of Chinese people have mixed feelings about him.
The US is supplying weapons to Saudi-Arabia which they use to fight in Yemen. The US has helped replace democratic governments to military / authoritarian regimes in Latin America (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...), leading to countless deaths and the very same refugee crisis that Trump is so worried about.
The US does NOT have the moral high ground here. At least acknowledge that the US sucks. China sucks too. Everybody sucks.
> and which has killed millions of civilians in the middle east
The US didn't kill millions of people in the Middle East. In fact it lost thousands of soldiers and a trillion dollars trying to keep the Iraqis from killing eachother. The US stepped inbetween two warring factions that have been killing eachother for hundreds of years and tried to stop it.
> and which is sterilizing women in border camps
The US doesn't have border camps, it has detention facilities for illegal immigrants, which most every nation with a border possesses. Trying illegally sneaking into Canada (or Australia, or most any nice country), you will be detained at a facility until they can remove you from their country for violating their immigration laws.
The US Government doesn't force sterilize women at the border or at non-existent border camps.
There is one specific doctor - Mahendra Amin - at one facility that has performed eight surgeries over three years, with wide debate still on-going as to whether all or none of those surgeries were requested. From that basis you're attempting to proclaim the US Government is broadly doing something, which is obviously exceptionally misleading.
> The US didn't kill millions of people in the Middle East. In fact it lost thousands of soldiers and a trillion dollars trying to keep the Iraqis from killing eachother. The US stepped inbetween two warring factions that have been killing eachother for hundreds of years and tried to stop it.
This must be one of the most apologist takes I have ever read. Deeply disturbing that people can actually convince themselves this for something that's relatively recent.
> sent the army to suppress protesters against racism
Trump did not send the army. He sent federal law enforcement agencies to defend federal property against rioters when local governments failed to do so.
> sterilizing women in border camps
The allegations of forced hysterectomies were not supported by the evidence, which is why the story dropped out of the news so quickly.
Without expressing support or condemnation for the CCP, I think being 'bored and numb' is a poor justification for disregarding concerns about potential bad actors. Sets bad precedent for engaging with sources who can intentionally pollute information streams.
The problem isn't so much overlooking CCP's problems, it's that the CCP boogeyman becomes an excuse for overreactions. Everything remotely related to Chinese becomes under attack "because CCP bad".
Imagine a world in which every article that mentions any American company, receives a torrent of comments calling for the banning of that company, because "US government bad". And then, when one says that the company in question isn't a state company, commenters simply say "but they pay US taxes/have to follow US national security law/are monitored by PRISM, so they're effectively a mouthpiece of the US govt".
If the above scenario happens, I can very well imagine many Americans getting pissed off at the unfair treatment, and becoming more nationalist in response. Actually, that is already happening in China: since COVID-19 many Chinese are absolutely dismayed at the international response, which they view as unfair and biased. Nationalism and support for the CCP is at an all-time high in China.
To people who hate CCP it sure feels good to criticize and oppose everything remotely CCP-related (even private Chinese companies) at every turn. But my point is: you can't solve actual problems with this sort of attitude. Do you want to FEEL good, or DO good? I think more dialog and cooperation with China will do more to improve China, than by attacking CCP and Chinese companies at every turn, because the latter alienates Chinese people (already happening) and paradoxically make them more supportive of the CCP.
If China and the west come together, the whole world wins. If they attack each other, everybody loses.
I think it would help if we consider US companies potentially equally bad. For example, a US bank has the potential to make a lot of money from our personal data, and should be treated with suspicion just like any foreign company in that position.
lol what? i'm sorry but this is IMO A really unrealistic and way too optimistic take. if you look at the trajectories there is no happy hand holding here at the end. both countries cooperate so much as to benefit each other for the time being, but make no mistake they are gunning to be and keep #1.
it's not an overreaction to say that the CCP has been undermining other countries for decades to gain the upperhand. whether that's "justified" is up for debate, but they do what they can to advance their country.
and we're already written off in ways like you mentioned when the US makes world news. the nationalism isn't just some reaction by their citizens to unfairness, it's 100% cultivated by their gov't on purpose.
I think saying that "they are both gunning to be #1" and "undermining other countries" is more of a projection than reality. Yanis Varoufakis, former Minister of Finance of Greece, who has participated in the Belt and Road Initiative, makes it quite clear that China is "non-interventionist to the point where we can't imagine it": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tJatdtv4jQ
The current trajectory of sinophobia based on incorrect, overblown and unrealistic readings of CCP, indeed does not have a happy ending. That's why the trajectory should be changed.
> the nationalism isn't just some reaction by their citizens to unfairness, it's 100% cultivated by their gov't on purpose.
I'm sorry, try talking to large number of mainland Chinese people first, they'll disagree with you. Blaming everything on "but Chinese people are brainwashed" is just an attempt to deny reality.
You have an extreme view of the CCP's brainwashing capabilities. If they're that good at brainwashing, they would have eradicated many more down-to-earth societal problems a long time ago, such as the societal disdain for vocational jobs. They've been trying to get rid of the social stigma of vocational schools for years now, in order to prevent the job market from being crowded out by too many university graduates, but they've only had limited success.
Try watching some actual Chinese propaganda for a while. You'll see that it's very primitive, not very convincing, and frankly quite bad. I don't know why everybody keeps thinking they're brainwashing masters without even having looked at all the materials.
>China is "non-interventionist to the point where we can't imagine it"
There are territorial, sovereignty or security issues with Mongolia/Inner Mongolia, Japan, Taiwan, S. Korea/N. Korea, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia, India, Nepal, Tibet and Xinjiang.
There are other countries in the region which have additional issues.
I mean you're misrepresenting what I said. I'm not handwaving away what they say as brainwashing. I'm just saying that the gov't has an inordinate effect of influence on their population. I don't view propaganda as a gov't drone on the TV telling you what to do ala NK, but just like the US, it's this permeating effect in the media and culture.
I don't think every Chinese person thinks exactly the same way. But if you just look at the effects, they have a way of stirring nationalism that we do not have. Trump tried so hard to do the "China Virus" thing and look where that got him. And it's disingenuous to suggest because they can't hand wave away social problems inside the country that they somehow have "weak" influence. It's not an all or nothing.
I'm curious what you're readings are on things softer things like the NBA ban over the tweet, things like ban on Korea products over THAAD (less off an over-reaction, but still), arm twisting Chinese/Korean actors/stars to support their worldview (see BTS stuff going on), Blizzard, etc. I can point to l0s of other examples where it is indeed an "over-reaction" on their part. This isn't even scratching the surface of their harder initiatives like in Africa.
The "trajectory changing" as you mention is basically the rest of the world submitting to how China sees the world. And to be honest, I don't think that's "unfair" or anything, it's what they do as a country in position of power. It's also a cultural thing, pride, etc. (my personal opinion on this as well). I'm ethnically Chinese so yeah, I understand the mindset to some extent.
I think the Chinese govt sometimes does overreact. Banning people/companies over tweets, urgh. But whereas many westerners view this as a morality/value issue ("censorship bad") I see this as clumsiness, and generally being bad at understanding western perspectives. The way they behave wrt public communications is not in their best interest. They can get what they want without triggering so much outrage.
With regards to nationalism, it's true that it's not an all or nothing thing. In general however, I think that many people overestimate the amount of nationalism that they deliberately stir up, as opposed to nationalism that was already there. I think the western understanding of the CCP vastly underestimates the legitimacy that they enjoy, and where that legitimacy comes from. The CCP owes its very legitimacy to nationalism: people chose the CCP over the KMT because the KMT was corrupt and incompetent, and they expect the CCP to do a better job, "or else".
With regards to how China views the world vs how the west does, I'm hoping that China and the west can move towards each other, rather than it manifesting as a conflict. There is both value and problems in both the western and the Chinese viewpoints. They should understand and learn from each other.
"it's not an overreaction to say that the CCP has been undermining other countries for decades to gain the upperhand"
That is most certainly an overreaction. One based on projecting the current situation backwards in time. China has been engaging in foreign intervention to widen its influence for, at most, 10 years. 20 years ago, China's GDP was 12% that of the US (hell, Japan's GDP was 4x larger than China then). 30 years ago, it's GDP was just 6% that of the US. China was simply too damn poor to have much global influence. Even today, China's per capita GDP is on par with Mexico, not any developed nation -- it's just a lot lot bigger.
More to the point, its various infrastructure/resource extraction projects are still quite minor in comparison to the existing US/European ones. China has a handful of military/pseudo-military bases outside its borders. The US has bases in dozens of nations.
From a western governmental perspective, the general "problem" with spreading Chinese influence in developing nations is simply that they are not part of the western (read US) hegemony. This is something the modern era has never seen before. Over 100 hundred years of western nations/cultures being without rival is nearing its end and this scares many people in the west. Which is fair enough, the power/influence game is zero-sum, after all.
From western ethical perspective, the problem is that China tends to not give a damn what the governments they ally with do. They seem to have specific goals and outside of those, they don't care. For good or for ill. This strikes some people in the west as unethical. Many westerners seem to feel that other people's would be better off if they adopt western morality. But at the same time, other westerners feel that the west should leave other nations alone -- except when the Chinese behave that way, of course.
All that said, projecting your feelings forward may be more appropriate, IMO. The rivalry between the US (aka "the west") is only going to increase as the Chinese economy (and thus foreign influence) grows. This is mostly based, IMO, on US insecurity about losing its dominant position. But, currently, and for the next decade or two, the US still overshadows China by a huge margin.
> Imagine a world in which every article that mentions any American company, receives a torrent of comments calling for
I don't have to imagine it because that's how it is. Heaven forbid we also call out the CCP when they do something much worse!
Can't have any of that rational self interest, either. When China has rational self interest it's smart, but when the USA has rational self interest it's hypocrisy.
> I don't have to imagine it because that's how it is.
I really don't know what world you live in. I don't see widespread criticism against US non-state companies BECAUSE of their involvement with the US. Even talks about privacy issues are mostly about how those companies could abuse the data, not about how the US govt could abuse that data.
I don't see many people calling for the banning of US non-state companies.
I don't see US students and researchers being ousted out of other countries for being potential spies, even though there's no proof.
I don't see people, who have a US background but living in other countries for a long time, being taken to parliament to unconditionally condemn the US govt before they're trusted as normal citizen.
> Heaven forbid we also call out the CCP when they do something much worse!
Calling out the CCP, and blanket banning all Chinese companies, are not at all the same thing, or even on the same level.
> I don't see widespread criticism against US non-state companies BECAUSE of their involvement with the US.
I do. The NSA comes up all the damn time. As it should.
> I don't see many people calling for the banning of US non-state companies.
People don't call for it because they just do it. It's not controversial. It was half of China's strategy and it has worked out spectacularly well for them because the US turned the other cheek.
> I don't see US students and researchers being ousted out of other countries for being potential spies, even though there's no proof.
If there's no proof, it's really an economic thing, not a spy thing. I got kicked out of Cambridge because my prospective PhD advisor had chosen to fund me with a grant that, it turned out, was exclusive to EU citizens. Outside the US this sort of protectionism doesn't merely exist, it exists and isn't controversial.
> Calling out the CCP, and blanket banning all Chinese companies, are not at all the same thing, or even on the same level.
We do the former because it's right and the latter because it's in our rational self interest. Just like China.
>I don't see widespread criticism against US non-state companies BECAUSE of their involvement with the US
On most threads regarding privacy in FB or Google there will be a mention of the intelligence tie-in. Past sins of the anglosphere or the west generally might make an appearance.
However, I never see users make the leap that these concerns represent anti-americanism or anglophobia.
>Everything remotely related to Chinese becomes under attack "because CCP bad".
Which is why it is reasonable to discern between the CCP and China. I don't see sinophobia in criticism of the CCP. The counter-argument you present is closer to the straw man you're criticizing.
Jack Ma is a CCP member. The CCP has a centrally planned command and control economy. Major players cannot exist without the sanction of the CCP.
But on the other hand, Jack Ma being a CCP member clearly doesn't mean that Ant is automatically a state-controlled company, as evidenced by this event: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24979327
https://www.ncuscr.org/media/podcast/uschinainsights/kai-fu-...
Orlins: You focus a lot on, kind of Alipay or WeChat Pay. How does that change the landscape for AI in China versus the United States, where we still are heavily reliant on a credit card system that seems quite old and outdated when you're in China?
Lee: It's a very unique opportunity for China to leapfrog. The U.S. had the world's most leading transaction tool, which was the credit card, but it became outdated. It charges too much, it's inconvenient, it's only customer to merchant. In China, with WeChat and Alipay, anybody can pay anybody. We can do micro payments and there are no fees, almost no fees, so the 2% extra charge is almost like a tax on the American economy charged by the credit cards. But with respect to AI, now everybody, including WeChat and Alibaba, but also, if you build an app, you know who your customers are, and what they paid and why. And if you're a retail shop and people scanned you, you know who pays you and why. There are even beggars in the street holding up a sign, "Scan me and give me money," and they know who paid them and why. So I think this is creating a huge amount of data that will help AI.