The swap of Meng Whenzhou for the two Canadian Michaels demonstrates why it doesn't matter if Huawei's equipment is trustworthy or not.
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.
Almost every international company that has tried to do business in China has had it's IP stolen, and quite often has been blocked from ever really being profitable. I remember in Business school in 2008, the hot trend was businesses trying to open markets in China and offshore there. Is this still the case? Why would any responsible CEO do business in China after seeing what happened to the two Canadians, what happened in Hong Kong, and seeing countless international businesses robbed?
> letting foreign countries take your citizens hostage without repercussion can threaten your chances of being reelected.
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.
Imagine being so brainwashed as to think the two Michaels were anything but tourists and expats living in a foreign country, they had lives friends and family in China with no reason to be spies.
One of them was a great friend of SerpentZa and C-Milk, and a contributing factor for running out of China for them.
haha fine, say they weren't spies then. I don't know 100%.
My main point is that Meng was detained for BS reasons. So sure, I'm fine with the story that China detained two Canadians without cause, because that does not detract at all - why can Canada/the US do this but China cannot?
what I see is the US not getting away with the strong-arm tactics its accustomed to, and I applaud it.
False equivalency. The company/Meng broke US laws, ones which were actually on the books. If Huawei wants to operate in the US it is subject to US laws. Meanwhile the Canadian hostages broke no laws, they were simply convenient political pawns.
Here's Kovrig's friend playing coy about his intelligence past.
>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.
I won't pretend like I know anything about tradecraft beyond reading Clancy and Forsyth, but I would've thought that "ex-diplomat working for a NATO funded NGO" is about the worst non-official cover one could think of.
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.
Every nation has a counter-intelligence dossiers ready to be used in court, some light spying might be tolerated because every nations spies on each other.
But when the situation needs it they can grab the known spies as a trump card.
This whole Meng situation has shown that rule of law is really flexible and that US lawfare reaches far and deep.
> They arrive in military aircraft, salute to military officers, is this normal for Canadian tourists?
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.
Please don't break the site guidelines like this, regardless of how wrong another comment is or you feel it is. There's a very specific rule against it, because when internet users do this (and they do it a lot), they're pouring poison into the community.
In this case it's extra ironic because your comment does exactly what you're arguing against. No more of this on HN, please.
Again, there is sooo much talk around it in all directions.
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.
The US has never proved that there is any kind of Chinese surveillance going on with Huawei equipment. 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.
The NSA has been hacking Huawei for years. If it had anything concrete, it would have shared it years ago rather than forcing its NATO allies to dump Huawei based on vagueries like "I know we wiretapped your chancellor, but trust us, Huawei is evil, we're just not going to prove it to you".
I don't think anyone needs to prove malfeasance here - a threat to national security doesn't require wrongdoing, only the existence of attack vectors by a foreign hostile nation/entity. Publishing those attack vectors would be a hilariously terrible idea as it would have ramifications in every country with Huawei in its infrastructure. Plenty of products are deemed essential and produced domestically or only by close allies, this goes for just about every country, I'm not sure why communications infrastructure is somehow different.
The US already has secret and higher security internet networks for the communication that is deemed ‘essential’. And I would bet there are no products that have not gone thorough vetting deployed on those networks.
There is a very large amount of evidence that the CCP can and does exert its influence to "encourage" vendors to support its policies, such as the censorship of terms like "Free Tibet", "Long live Taiwan independence", and "democracy movement" on consumer-grade hardware[1].
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.
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...).
I view this as inevitable. Networking infrastructure has a valid national security interest.
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.
> 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.
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.
It's a sign of the times that the top comment here seems to be tacitly endorsing discrimination against Chinese Americans, and the top reply is explicitly doing so.
It's literally a requirement for TS/SCI clearance due to conflict of interest and national security. Natural born citizenship and they look at relationships fairly deeply. Even higher requirements can be needed for these positions too.
For security clearances, country of birth is not a direct factor. SEAD 4 is used as an adjudication guideline and uses a holistic approach towards clearance suitability determination. For every risk factor, SEAD 4 outlines possible mitigation factors. There are plenty of naturalized citizens (yes incl. from high-risk countries) working in IC, DoD, DoE.
This comment is libelous, emotionally-manipulative flamebait, and does not belong on HN.
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.
Some would say that the two highly upvoted comments calling for racial discrimination are what's causing the "race conflict." The parent comments are what doesn't belong on HN.
Nobody called for racial discrimination. Vetting needs to be done based on potential risks posed by connections (possible or confirmed) to a hostile foreign power that is both an autocratic regime and capable of using its influence to coerce people into committing espionage.
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.
The argument you're making is identical to the argument that was made for interning Japanese Americans during WWII.
There's a growing hysteria and paranoia about China, and suggestions that Chinese Americans should be put under blanket suspicion are incredibly disturbing.
You're employing a red herring - the internment of Japanese Americans is not relevant to a security and vetting procedure. Whatever justification they used shouldn't change your assessment of how the specific justification used here bears on the present issue.
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.
> your average Chinese American shouldn't be the subject of racist discrimination
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.
You're factually wrong. Neither of the parent comments are calling for race discrimination - you're pulling that out of thin air in an attempt to incite conflict, or silence their legitimate points that you don't agree with.
Go ahead, prove me wrong - quote the sentences that explicitly call for racism.
Discriminating against people because they're of Chinese ancestry is racist. I'm surprised that this is a claim that you feel requires further justification.
You not only failed to "quote the sentences that explicitly call for racism" that I asked you to (while continuing to baselessly assert your original claim), but you also inserted more emotional manipulation ("I'm surprised that this is a claim that you feel requires further justification.") in your response and you used a strawman argument (claiming that I had asserted that "Discriminating against people because they're of Chinese ancestry is racist." was false, when in reality I did no such thing, as I was asserting that there was no discrimination based on ancestry in the first place).
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.
You're bending over backwards to excuse what is quite clearly racial discrimination.
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.
> You're bending over backwards to excuse what is quite clearly racial discrimination.
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.
That's not a valid reason to not use it. Why? Because, just like there are some really malicious people who will call anything they see "racism" without there actually being racism, there are also really malicious people who will be racist for any reason at all, without even needing some cover like "national security".
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...
It need not be a policy to be applied in practice at the governmental level. Writing things down is FOIA bait both on the USG side and the prime side (which your Lockheed scenario is a good example of, actually, despite your distinguishing of the two environments). Primes and feds are able to communicate about matters like this without communicating, and do it routinely.
>China cheating on trade including, but not limited to, the wholesale theft of intellectual property through "partnerships"
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.
"The US does bad things" is not a justification for living with the bad things done by another country.
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.
The US wants IP laws so it can protect it's innovation. The rest of the Western world agrees. The US is also more likely to maintain human rights, which China absolutely does not care about. I would much rather the US be top dog than China, even though it has plenty of issues and has made mistakes.
Please don't take HN threads into nationalistic flamewar. We don't want this sort of generic flamewar tangent here—they're extremely predictable and therefore tedious, and they nearly always turn nasty.
> The US is also more likely to maintain human rights, which China absolutely does not care about.
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.
> unlike their Chinese counterparts, they don't have any real long-term goals
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.
> The US wants IP laws so it can protect it's innovation.
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.
Go to a prison in the Midwest and ask prisoners about their human rights. The US is full of abuse, but the wealthy are really good at pretending it doesn't exist and the poor are so busy fighting with the middle class that they don't have the time or money to do anything about it.
Prison vs Forced labour camps that keep you alive just long enough to sell off your organs to the highest bidder.
China definiately has the upper hand when it comes to exploiting the natural human resources that would otherwise be thorns in the political landscape.
All you've done is acknowledge that China has a bad record on human rights while saying that some prisoners in the US are also not treated well. So you have effectively conceded the issue with respect to China, while the rest is "but the US also does bad things".
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.
This sort of whataboutism isn't an argument, but a concession to the person you're replying to. Instead of meeting an example with a counter, all you've done in this conversation is show that there are now TWO examples.
The OP explicitly claimed that US cares about human rights.
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.
No one's is claiming the US is anywhere near perfect, but the question is do we let China win or the US. And if that question doesn't have an obvious answer to you, you just haven't been paying attention. We have more freedom, more rights, and aren't actively genociding minority populations. We have our flaws, and we absolutely should strive to be better, but I would much rather be under American rule than China.
The concept of "intellectual property" is a novel myth circulated by the industries that benefit from it, and it always has been. There was a time before copyrights, and I personally think we are already living in a post-copyright age (and, for all their complaining, the major copyright industries seem to agree -- why else pursue things like DRM?). Some future generation is going to be scratching their heads trying to figure out why this current generation wasted so much time, effort, and money trying to stop everyone from using the most effective copying machines ever conceived of to make copies of things.
Have you heard of Sam Slater, the father of the American factory system? He's a hero in America for stealing IP from Britain, where he was known as "Slater the Traitor"
Have you heard of Louis Pasteur? He discovered Germ Theory in 1861. This man or his legacy is of course is not what we're talking about, which is why I bring it up. To change the subject.
Large scale international IP Treaties weren't really a thing until the near the end of the the 19th century, so "theft" isn't really the correct term when there were no agreements or laws governing trans-national IP rights.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
This is whataboutism. "The US does bad thing x, therefore you can't complain about China doing bad thing y." Not valid.
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.
>> 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.
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.
I'm not sure it isn't. It is naturally unpopular among USians to contemplate that they might not be perfect rulers of the world. But it is pretty obvious that one party rule is not a good idea. The US is bad enough with checks on its absolute power. Heaven forbid they should be unchecked.
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.
Your Polish example is laughable. Poland offered $2 billion to have permanent U.S. bases in Poland but, obviously, did not welcome Russian invasion. "Christus vincit! Christus regnat! Christus imperat!"
So the Soviets defended their helpless neighbors for free; the U.S. occupied Poland then demanded that Poland pay money to wealthy war-profiteering capitalists for the privilege?
It is funny that denizens on Madison Avenue think they have a corner on spin. "Caveat emptor!"
You're relativising and disregarding how power balances occur in practice.
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.
> 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?
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.
It would be perfectly possible to be a chinese shill in an american site like hackernews, spreading chinese propaganda e misinformation all day long, while living in the US.
Try to do the same, but spreading american propaganda, in a chinese forum, while living in China.
Ah, the misleading comparison. We are talking about freedom of expression and then you conveniently conflate it with the freedom to have work or business relationships with an enemy or sanctioned foreign entity.
The original point still apply, you have freedom in the USA to defend and express your favorable opinion even when this goes counter the government interests. You could even protest against the us military during a war.
You can do this in China unlike you really want to be imprisoned and tortured.
China is a dictatorship. América is a democracy. Sure, there are plenty of abuse from the police, the federal government, but those abuses once exposed and questioned in the court of law, have severe consequences for their perpetrators. China engages routinely in torture, censorship and genocide, a truly criminal state.
It was not for the oil it was to make sure that the oil would continue to be traded in US dollars if you ask me.
Trade happening in dollars is something the US can control. Maybe 10~15 years ago I would say the Euro was a possible alternative to the dollar but in 2021 and the spinelessness of brussels its pretty much the dollar with a different stamp on it.
The US didn't invade countries and kill millions of people, and the US gained absolutely nothing in terms of natural resources including Oil. Iraqi Oil contracts went to European players like Total. There is no Oil or anything else of material value in Afghanistan.
Lol. It's conspiracy theories that US Imperialism is driven by defence contractors who can 'make a few billion'. They obviously err on one side of the equation, and can have some influence but they are not the drivers of anything. The Defence Establishment is well aware of the cost of war, they're more likely than the White House to be be realistic about engagements.
plus, it's hard to compartmentalize science. Once you get the bomb, it's not that hard for other people to figure out. So do you ban all German scientists and get the bomb 20 years later (and maybe let the Russians poach them, because...well it is a market with demand...), or get the Germans, and lose a few to espionage/traitors.
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.
> And if blackmailing families back home becomes an issue or real fear
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.
That’s not how IP works. Having access to documents but without the culture and the human capital to implement it is almost useless.
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!
> Having access to documents but without the culture and the human capital to implement it is almost useless.
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.
There was good discussion about Nortel yesterday. With nice details from insiders. It’s always nice to blame somebody for local management mistakes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28656445
> 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
Worthy adversaries can turn each other's strengths into weaknesses
>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.
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.
As a complete aside. What is it that China offers that is making so many western companies go and do business in China?
If it is cheap labour then India has it as well. I feel like I'm missing something, but not sure what.
Can someone ELI5 please?
So there are four major draws to China for Western companies:
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.
For manufacturing, a large portion of existing supply chains already exist within China, so even if it's not the cheapest, it's practical to set up your factory closer to where all your input components are manufactured.
> What is it that China offers that is making so many western companies go and do business in China? If it is cheap labour then India has it as well. I feel like I'm missing something, but not sure what. Can someone ELI5 please?
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.
I think that being an authoritarian country, where you don't expect surprises in every election was a strong incentive for american companies to invest in China instead of India.
Of course, the idea that a country that doesn't give a damn about human rights would also not be completely invested in the protection of IP never was a an idea too advanced for the simple minds of the Jack Welchs eager to exploit cheap chinese manpower.
Probably to counter the totalitarian communists by turning them into freedom-loving capitalists or something. But it so happens that freedom can't be bought so we ended up with a totalitarian capitalist (AKA fascist) China.
Way back I interned at Nokia-Siemens-Networks, before they were sold to Nokia. I wondered two things: How do these people think they can compete with the Chinese? And why is the EU giving all the orders to the Chinese?
Still not sure what the answers are, but I'd really like to have "local" suppliers for critical infrastructure and hardware.
The CCP is requiring Chinese banks to fund Huawei customers with extremely cheap financing terms.
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.
everyone keeps saying loyalty like people sign blood pacts with the CCP or something. it's no different from companies abiding by US laws (and provide backdoors etc) in order to stay operating.
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.
While it may not be a literal blood pact with the government, there have been numerous accounts of Chinese (ex)-citizens being coerced into taking actions under the threat of harm to their family and relatives that remain on the main-land.
Blood pact is a poor choice of wording, but not too far off from the reality. Perhaps blood-line persuasion is better?
The difference is in the structuring of the 'law' and government, which are very different between those countries. I put 'law' in quotations because from my perspective, US citizen, CCP's form of government doesn't work within anything similar to a framework of democracy, rights, and founding principles like the US.
Replace "China" with "The USA" and "Eastern" with "Western" and the other way around and not much of meaning or value would be lost.
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.
The increasingly bad news for the US is that countries are siding with China in the world. Due to strikingly different approaches to foreign policy. For example, China went into Africa and is building up their roads, factories, and infrastructure.
Now consider how the US spent decades doing drone strikes in the middle east. That doesn't build trust.
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 countries have spent decades doing similar things in Africa, often with blank checks thru institutions such as the IMF. And of course the ROI is rarely there; but China has played the game differently. When these poor countries ultimately cannot afford to pay back the loans, they take land/ports/infrastructure, which they also built to Chinese standards (requiring Chinese products forever). They also use their own citizens as the laborers, so the total risk is far more minimized. It’s a new more modern version of colonialism except with less violence and everyone thinks it’s a good deal to begin with. They’re not doing these things out of the goodness of their heart.
Less violence for now. Colonialism didn't start off with armies, it too started off with trade. Only later forms of colonialism when with war from the get go.
> Replace "China" with "The USA" and "Eastern" with "Western" and the other way around and not much of meaning or value would be lost.
> > 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.
Except when the CIA "transforms" the country in a "democracy" and american conpanies syphon all patents from those "democracies'". It happenned in eastern europe for example.
Network infrastructure is just a microcosm of the issues facing small countries. They need protection, access to markets and resources, investment, and access to technology just to name a few.
> Replace "China" with "The USA" and "Eastern" with "Western" and the other way around and not much of meaning or value would be lost.
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.
You misunderstand the term 'whataboutism'. Besides being a shallow dismissal you should at least apply it properly. 'Turnabout is fair game' would be more applicable here.
'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.
Hint: In China officials control capitalists more or less, while in the US it's probably a different story.
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).
It's never whataboutism to replace US with China. People often love the whataboutism argument, but logically it only applies when it's a digression of the original issue. A citizen applies for FOIA request shouldn't be answered 'see what China is doing'. In terms of global politics, comparing the major players is definitely valid.
It's not 'just the same as China' - that backdoors exist is true, but that's where the comparison ends.
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!).
How do you think the US government gets access to Internet and phone traffic? The exchanges give the US government direct access including letting the government install their own equipment.
The parent comment is quite obviously correct. The US Internet isn't just some large exchanges. It consists of many tens of thousands of services/companies/sites with private data exchanged over TLS. The US Government does not control those services/sites; in China it directly controls all of it, top to bottom and without exception.
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.
The US is a set of entrenched interests that are now working in concert with the government. The government doesn't have to do things directly. They just have the companies do it.
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.
So what? The government of China also maintains a network of roads, just like the US. By narrowing your focus you can always find ways that the US is "just like China."
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.
The US government did round people up, torture them, and put them in concentration camps. How do you think the WHOLE country was built? We living in this country benefited and are CONTINUING to benefit from it.
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.
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?
I am sorry that you got downvoted. In 6th grade civics class (in California) we learned about the wide scale killing of the native populations. I live in Arizona, and we have a landmark nearby called Bloody Gulch where a US general who was supposed to march a tribe a few hundred miles to a new reservation, after about a few dozen miles decided it was simpler to just gun the whole large tribe, babies, children, and adults.
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.
I think you're resting on a very strict interpretation of 'the US fed' for any of these to be true. Power in our nation isn't highly centralized, it is a network of entrenched players - mostly corporations but also federal bodies. The US power structure arguably does all of these things both historically and currently.
(with "own being used in the pwned sense - the ability to influence action absolutely)
As one should. Cisco or facebook can't put me in jail. Maybe they can throw money around to push the needle on laws, but the will of a middle manager will never be what persecutes me. This is not a small distinction.
> There's a reason why there are Chinese versions of every Western company you can think of that's dominant in China.
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.
I doubt that LVMH products are as hard to replicate as technology. People who pay for luxury goods do not care for the product itself but for the prestige it carries. The products LVMH sells are proof of social standing, which are the final token in a chain of trust that would also include LVMH retail stores in which one can be publically verified to be actually shopping and buying - the elite wouldn't be caught dead in a mall selling counterfeit products.
There's a huge amount of false "conventional wisdom" here.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> The government does not by any means micromanage or control even a tiny fraction of companies in China
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.
> US companies are more independent from the US government than Chinese companies are from the Chinese government.
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.
> Erm, what? We know Facebook and Google cooperate with NSA since Snowden.
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).
Wow that's a lot of misrepresentation. There is a secret court called FISA, which we all know about and therefore isn't secret. NSA collects on everyone but by breaking in, which while not ideal (and might not be legal) is not the same as an information sharing agreement, which is what we are discussing. And of course America still has laws about such things, even if they aren't always followed.
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".
Recall that the NSA was given an unconstitutional[0] general warrant in secret by the FISA court to spy on all Verizon customers.[1]
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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...
The Wikipedia section you linked is a collection of evidence-free "concerns." I think most people at HN are aware of the basic situation with Huawei: there are hypothetical "concerns" but no evidence of Huawei ever having engaged in espionage. You can say that it's black and white that Huawei is a tool of Chinese espionage, but you're just speaking from your priors, not from the evidence.
> 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.
> If you're outside of China, there's no evidence that the Chinese government is using Huawei to spy on you.
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.
Not to mention the Chinese state is using this data provided by "private companies" (in China increasingly there is no such thing) to target their own citizens for harassment, arrest, and worse: https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/12/09/china-big-data-program-t...
Disclaimer: I am neither a supporter of China or CCP. I have my own thoughts on them but they're besides the point for now.
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.
"The Chinese government's job is to ensure a level playing field for everybody"
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.
re: the post you responded to: I think that they meant that the Chinese government wants a level playing field and good competition between local Chinese companies. No country would ever want a level playing field that includes foreign companies.
'Free Trade' is the attempt, more or less, to provide 'level playing field' for companies, even of other nations. It's why the WTO exists, it's why USMC exists etc..
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.
Can't believe a comment that openly discriminated China-born US citizens is now a top comment. The whole logic behind the argument (around China-born US citizens) is so weak.
Isn't citing some example cases pretty poor argument in this case? There are lots of examples of muslim terrorists, so we should just ban all muslims? There are examples of Mexican criminals, so we should just ban all Mexicans?
Edit: Not to mention the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII.
The internment of Japanese Americans is actually a pretty good example. As far as the outcome of events is concerned, it doesn't matter whether any of them actually were traitors (as far as I know there were no significant cases), it only matters whether they were depicted as traitors by politicians eager to stoke public xenophobia.
GP stated "the logic behind the argument is weak". I cited cases to demonstrate the legitimate security concerns related to naturalized citizens.
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.
It is pretty weak though. It’s the same argument trump made in his Muslim ban and wanting to build a wall along the Mexican border. He had cases he can point to as well.
Ok. What is YOUR threshold for major national security breaches of consistent origin past which we should implement focused control measures to mitigate the risk? And what would your control measures be?
I don’t have a definite answer, but it’s not by country of birth. We’ve had too many ugliness in history stemming from that type of grouping. Because if it’s guilty by association (and not even association of one’s choice), then how is this different from the Japanese internment of WW 2?
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?
why only companies in china? we know for a fact that apple or microsoft have backdoors that US government (and Israeli looking at this year events) can leverage to enact pretty much what they deem as natitonal interest
You're going to have to clarify what you're talking about. These claims I've tended to find actually confuse several issues and misconstrue reality, intentionally or unintentionally.
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?
Oddly, you're trying to challenge a claim about covert technical intelligence mechanisms with descriptions of legal mechanisms governing surveillance. That's like responding to complaints about trespassing with the legal code governing rentals.
In any case, we do have examples of exactly what the gp is talking about.
For instance, this one, which subsequently backfired:
> 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.
The Snowden revelations made it clear that those regulations are toothless, unenforced, and effectively just propaganda.
Seems like if you are neither in China or the US you are now some kind of third world citizen and must choose which of the above can monitor your communications
Well, you can buy from European companies like Ericsson if you want to avoid the US and China. Really though, it might be worth bringing your complaints to the European Parliament, which has allowed the EU's tech sector to stagnate almost to the point of irrelevance.
I agree that Western companies operating in China are chasing a phantom carrot that the CCP will never allow them to catch, and that reciprocity, or "equalization" as I think of it, is necessary in trade.
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 1st Ammendment may make banning social media companies impossible. It's also possible that allowing Chinese social media companies in the West
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.
> 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.
The US exerts a lot of pressure on US companies for geopolitical reasons, so this puts them in the same level as the Chinese government. Everybody knows that the US compiles "avoid-lists" of countries they want to attack, and companies have to comply or suffer huge penalties. This absurd push to remove Chinese products from the market is just the latest example.
> This absurd push to remove Chinese products from the market is just the latest example.
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.
I see a lot of this on this topic. It's the fallacy of false equivalence.
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.
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.
I think the big difference here is that you're allowed to talk about those things on Hacker News without getting your internet shut off or a talking to by the appropriate authorities.
> 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?
I don't think a contest of who is the worse human-rights abuser brings much, but recall that 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.
Do people already need a reminder of the Juniper JunOS situation?
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.
I don't know if Huawei firmware has backdoors, but I can tell you I've looked at it (when evaluating their network switches) and it's a humongous mess of NIH. They even wrote their own SSH server and userspace IP stack (but still use the Linux one internally). It's rather buggy; simply scp'ing a file off of the switch leaked memory leading to a crash and reboot. It's just very poor quality.
Backdoors or not, I have very little doubt their equipment is full of exploitable security issues.
In the UK we have an agreement with Huwawei and access to firmware, which can be bit-for-bit compared to what ships. We don't for other manufacturers. But guess which one we're told not to trust.
I don't know what you're talking about with "allegedly".
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.
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.
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.
There is hard proof that both Belgium and Germany had various networks/major telcos compromised. And I would not be at all surprised if there were others.
Of course they're interested in my welfare; even a pawn has value to the state. Moreover, the five eyes are all representative democracies; China is not.
A pawn has value to the state as a tool. One such example is to be used as cannon fodder.
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.
Even tools have value; better to be a tool of the state than an obstacle of an adversary.
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.
"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"
There's nothing shocking about that many representatives voting in favor of something that had over two thirds public support. In fact, it looks appropriate.
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.
And all the protests accomplished jackshit. Can't you see that that is the point? Your opinion and protests have no effect. Your protests are just plausible deniability.
The protests failed to invigorate change, not unlike anti mask protests today, because the message wasn't persuasive enough to sufficiently many people.
That's democracy. It's not great, but it's better than the alternatives.
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.
If you have an agreement with [country A] to work together in pursuit of the same goals, and you don't have an agreement with [country B] to work together in pursuit of the same goals. Which one would you trust more?
Building alliances is nearly synonymous with building trust.
Any country that doesn't want others to read its communications is going to have to produce its own telecoms equipment, because the temptation of a country to put backdoors in it is just too high.
Shouldn't be too much of a worry since the next 2 largest vendors of telecom equipment are European (Nokia and Ericsson). Although, Nokia owns the remnants of a bunch of US companies like Lucent and Motorola Networks so they may be more connected to the US.
The Greek wiretapping case involving Ericsson equipment was not due to a “trapdoor” but a malicious implant installed by a threat actor. This is documented in an excellent article by the IEEE [1]
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]
I would say the biggest and most important chunks of both came from Nortel. Vast majority of what we consider as 4G and 5G was developed at Nortel and during the collapse was scooped up by Ericson/Nokia and Huawei (though the latter mostly just hired ex-Nortel researchers and engineers).
Not 5G. The reason why Huawei became a leader in 5G is that they created all their technology around the discoveries of Erdal Arikan and bet the whole farm on it:
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.
> 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.
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.
Not very likely IMO. Even if they US paid for the hardware many (most?) users of Huawei tele equipment would not want to touch it (especially not US made). Huawei had a much better reputation (and in my experience they still do with people that actually touch the hardware) for listening to requests from users/buyers than pretty much any other manufacture. There's a reason their equipment is widespread and unlike what most seem to believe price is at best on par with them being better. The difference in what I have heard and read from people that work with this and the mainstream-media etc. is mindbogglingly different. Only in a few articles in mainstream-media have I seen those people even asked their opinion and then the picture is much, much less one-sided.
This issue seems to have been tiptoed around and many governments have tried to "play fair" about some aspects of critical infrastructure.
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.
US really need to think hard on why Huawei gets ahead in 5G. And how can they make US telecoms more innovative. I think they should introduce more competitions.
Not really. You still have to do that last step, the one that gets you ahead, yourself. Thats the step we're talking about.
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.
> US really need to think hard on why Huawei gets ahead in 5G.
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.
id go so far as to say this is more a one-time 1.9 billion dollar bailout for the telecom industry.
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.
It's simpler than that. The Chinese Development Bank offered very generous credit to Huawei in a time where the West was letting some of it's most innovative companies collapse or languish (the 2008 financial crisis). 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.
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.
Err ... not sure if you're aware, but it's common knowledge that Nortel's sensitive IP was hacked by the Chinese.
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.
Well, I mean, especially the ones benefiting from nation-state level corporate espionage.
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.
Maybe it is different when it comes to enterprise equipment, but for consumer routers and APs I find Huawei's offerings to be extremely poorly designed. They have the minimum amount of hardware capability, badly designed bug-ridden ugly software, missing and misleading configurations. I would never buy a Huawei product unless I absolutely had to have the cheapest crap in the market. If people/ISPs would just pay for quality, Huawei would be out of business tomorrow.
It is different sadly. For a long time Huawei were the only company offering actual 5G base stations for instance (they might still be). That's one reason they are in so many infrastructure systems right now...
This is, of course, pure politics with no meat or foundation in reality. If they are exchanged with equipment like Cisco or other US made (well, designed) products it is a big step backwards. Not only do they have a much worse proven track-record (especially Cisco) but no US manufacture (and really no EU either that I have heard of) can match Huawei in getting your own custom stuff pushed through to release. I have never heard someone from the industry acknowledge anyone beating Huawei in R&D and time to deliver custom requests to code or hardware. They are light-years ahead of most other manufactures in those areas IMO and if they were a US company everyone would praise them (they still do but not too loudly). They are like Ubiquiti - before they started to suck.
Not only that, but Cisco has acquired so many Chinese companies that they are practically Chinese at this point. Working in one of their US government cloud environments, we were constantly talking internally about the odd changes coming from their China-based employees but superiors didn't seem to care.
Well you started to support local suppliers with real dough, which is a start. The real question is, is Nokia or whoever can grab the opportunity and put down more cash on RnD?
You would have to be far, far more specific in what areas they are "light-years ahead". Huawei are nothing approaching light-years ahead in the areas this programs is targeting, they're just cheaper. The primary complaint from small ISPs wasn't that Cisco or Arista or Calix or insert vendor don't have competing or even better products, it's that they are "too expensive".
Maybe in a small deployment, yes, but in bigger deployments the price is not the main point. If you need a specific software fix pushed through quickly, good luck if you have US made equipment. Even when (if) you succeed it is often fixed by Chinese or other Asian coders anyway. It is insanity.
So you don't have a specific product set or even example bug to point to? I've never had an issue getting critical security fixes out of Cisco or Arista or Aruba, and given the fact you've completely ignored my question with more vague insinuations I'll assume you're making it up as you go.
Here's a pretty interesting article on that exact topic from a couple of years back [1]. The closing paragraph sums up the (South African) author's sentiment:
> 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.
Make sense for the US to do - though again can be easily used by CCP to incite nationalism. Although more and more people in China does not admire US as a whole anymore, after Trump, Afghanistan shitshow
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
I'm curious which US manufacturer directly stole source code from a Chinese manufacturer to create a competing product. China has never been interested in free trade. They've been interested in free flow of trade secrets into China and free flow out of competing products at a reduced price built off those trade secrets.
Nortel collapsed long before Huawei even began expanding out of China. The recent attempts to blame China for Nortel's collapse don't even make basic chronological sense.
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.
I'm sorry but this is a very low effort post that a quick look at any article about Snowden's revelations would crush. Wikipedia simply cannot be used like this. You might as well count words on pro and against articles. Especially not useful as most facts in this area are at best poisoned facts -knowledge that has a biased source that cannot be trusted like the US intelligence community- and you are using a mainly US English site which in itself will have a bias against China.
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.
Yes, American companies also engage in surveillance; we know that to be true. For Americans, and citizens of the Five Eyes, that is a world of difference than being spied on by China. At least those citizens have aligned interests and political recourse with their states; with China, they have no such relationship.
I would mention that you can find an equal amount of controversies, if not vast amounts more, about the US government, and that there are entire agencies that manipulate media and Wikipedia articles. An accusation is far from a finding of fact and a discovered peer-reviewed exploit.
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.
Of course there exists plenty of evidence of American surveillance.
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.
>citizens of the Five Eyes, there is at least some aligned interest
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.
How is it worse? I also don't have a lot of faith in representatives passing the same legislation you'd be trying to argue against, especially with the near-trillion dollar lobbying industry.
Adversaries have malicious intent, or at least self-serving intent; our countries and their allies have a greater interest in preserving our well-being than malicious adversaries.
It's worse because I'm an American and China is a superpower competing rival to the US, not an ally. My interests accordingly are aligned with China not being able to hoover up all US data and intellectual property.
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).
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.