I think it's easy to say the ban doesn't make sense when it is perhaps a preventative measure. We have seen social networks take over others many times in terms of popularity.
If TikTok and WeChat's usage becomes more widespread in the voting population of the US, they would have a lot of influence by controlling what kind of content its users sees; e.g., FB has been criticized many times for this, namely performing psychological experiments on its users
I recall this quote by former KGB informant Yuri Bezmenov:
> The main emphasis of the KGB is not in the area of intelligence at all. Only about 15% of time, money, and manpower is spent on espionage and such. The other 85% is a slow process which we call either ideological subversion or active measures ... or psychological warfare
The difference between TikTok and WeChat and FB/Google/Twitter is obvious: the former are to some degree controlled by China and the latter are private entities.
I understand there are services part of WeChat that are essential to users, so I would hope there is a good compromise here. I don't see why the communication component of the app can't continue to exist but WeChat is a lot more than a chat app.
> The difference between TikTok and WeChat and FB/Google/Twitter is obvious: the former are to some degree controlled by China and the latter are private entities.
The irony is that we were just about to witness US govt forcing said "private entities" to ban specific applications.
Except WeChat is a nation state owned actor. So it's completely different. It's like executing a trade embargo with a foreign nation instead of physical goods it's a digital service provided by a nation state.
>The difference between TikTok and WeChat and FB/Google/Twitter is obvious: the former are to some degree controlled by China and the latter are private entities.
to some degree? No, they are completely controlled by China.
> "WeChatApp spies on the content that all users send to each other, including Americans. The results are fed into their censorship of Chinese users" [1]
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Key findings rom the Citizen lab research report, which is quite comprehensive [2]:
> Documents and images transmitted entirely among non-China-registered accounts undergo content surveillance wherein these files are analyzed for content that is politically sensitive in China.
>Upon analysis, files deemed politically sensitive are used to invisibly train and build up WeChat’s Chinese political censorship system.
> to some degree? No, they are completely controlled by China.
This is a matter of perspective.
Do you think the question is "if the CCP tells Tencent to do something, will they do it?", or "does Tencent do anything the CCP doesn't tell it to do?"?
And at the same time FB/Google/Twitter are controlled by US government. If they do something "wrong", they get called to Congress to talk and change their mind. This is not what a truly independent company would do. Truly independent company would tell Congress to mind their own business and not bother them.
There has never existed a time that ''truly independent businesses'' existed. The closest we got was the Gilded Age and it was an absolute mess, with child labor here and rampant exploitation of people there. Companies simply cannot be trusted to do what is right or to prioritize anything except making money for their shareholders, so they most definitely should be restricted by democratic institutions.
Congress can't actually tell the companies what to do. They can call them to testify, and they are obligated to show up, but they can stonewall or spout PR, and Congress can't do anything.
Ah. Bunch of 60+ ppl trying to figure out how tech works and then think of laws governing the said tech which should appear to be fair and useful. Sweet.
"The difference between TikTok and WeChat and FB/Google/Twitter is obvious: the former are to some degree controlled by China and the latter are private entities."
I think that difference is not that wide as people believe. Throwing money into advertising on any platform will get you close or beyond ideological subversion or active measures.
All you have to do is look at the radicalization and the polarization of left and right in the US and you will see you don't need a state controlled entity at all.
With chat programs, the concern is over monitoring. The US can issue warrants to get your chat records from Messenger/Hangouts. Those warrants are obtained a bit too easily due to FISA/Security Letters, but that's another due process issue/policy issue. With Chinese companies, they don't even need the illusion of warrants or due process.
FB/Twitter/Tiktok are different because they control WHAT you see. None of them show things chronologically. Their algorithms show things that are popular, and the weights they use are trade secrets. Being able to influence ideas takes classic advertising, or even targeted advertising, to an entirely new level. It has an entirely different set of legal and ethical challenges.
Tencent/WeChat also control what you see in your feeds. I often notice when I share information/pictures related to Hong Kong/Xinjiang then my posts doesn’t always appear in my friends feeds (because the image hash/phrase cause the post to be shadowbanned). Their approach is quite evil because it will make you think people might not like your post (since they don’t “like” it) when in fact they simply can’t see it.
To bypass the filter then I slightly modify images to change their hash, or record video of the video/image/text. Maybe soon they’ll start making fake likes from friends so that people can’t use inactivity as a way of detecting shadowbans, or maybe they’ll make the posts only visible to a small subset of friends.
Interesting. For Facebook/Twitter, if you don't interact and only post occasionally, few people will see your posts (which the opposite of someone in real life who rarely talks; when they do, people tend to listen). I wrote a post about it:
I agree, these are problems. But at least in the US we can continue to pass legislation as we learn more about how to properly regulate these platforms
It is much easier to enforce laws on a US-based company than a foreign one.
In the US we pass legislation in favor of these big corps to continue to grow, but its all good since they are US companies, they should decide our laws. What a joke. We don't control the policy makers, they are owned by your big corp. Yeah, super easy. I'd rather the state decide laws and not your entitled CEO. Delusional democracy.
> But at least in the US we can continue to pass legislation as we learn more about how to properly regulate these platforms
Continue is the wrong word. Nothing is done by legislation or these companies themselves to properly regulate these platforms.
There is also nothing preventing foreign influence on U.S.-based company platforms, which is already happening, and has been happening, unchecked.
I have used WeChat daily for over three years. There is not a single instance in which I have been unduly influenced. I use it to message, video chat, and pay for things. That simply is not true for YouTube, Twitter, Google, Apple, etc. I can't even go to YouTube without having unremovable, unhidable ads for Trump. We also have a situation where the sitting president has rented out the YouTube homepage for an entire week prior to the election. It's naivety, and frankly delusional, to think the U.S. is somehow at threat by WeChat and not the multitude of sly behavior going on with U.S.-based companies.
U.S.-based companies and culture have long been driven by highly concentrated special interest groups, from Hollywood to Wall Street to Silicon Valley, and all of this amounts to undue influence and control upon the American people, who have been manipulated into playing the game.
Exactly, that is how Chinese gov take control of your mainstream media and social media, it's much cheaper easier than building aircraft carriers, and more effective.
Your McCarthyist fear and paranoia and the President's cynical manipulation of the same don't trump people's First Amendment rights. The court upheld that principle, thankfully.
This is 100% the US foreign policy community saying we want 100% control over what US persons see. They've been waging a similar assault on RT. If you think Google, Facebook, et al aren't deeply intertwined with the US state and consult regularly with the pentagon, you haven't been watching the news.
Believe it or not, US foreign policy people put out enormous amounts of propaganda and they got the US to repeal a ban on importing news from state regime change news like Radio Free Europe in 2012.
Personally, I am suspicious of all of these corporations, but I'd rather all of them be allowed than the USG be able to dictate who is allowed to say what. That always works out so well. Foreign government news agencies and companies are much more likely to criticize the (obviously insane) USG on grounds that fundamentally disagree with policy direction rather than the tactical disagreement you find in the US mainstream press.
There's a very good (but LONG) documentary you can watch about the FP community called "A Very Heavy Agenda". Part 2 covers how the US FP community responded to the Ukraine presidential election crisis and Russian interference in 2014-2015. https://averyheavyagenda.com/
Considering RT is the propaganda arm of the Russian government, I don't blame them. That's like saying Russia is bad because they want to hamper Voice of America or the Ad Council.
It is, but at the same time the US government is so easy to criticize that much of RT's coverage is simply stating things that aren't widely disseminated because they are embarrassing and make fools of the people running US foreign policy. I won't say that RT coverage of Russia specifically won't have a slant, but foreign coverage of your country has the chance to be more honest in some regards because they are not under the same power structure.
The fact that we regard their coverage as propaganda and not ours is quite telling given the entanglements between government and the media here, the ownership by a small group of large corporations, and the ability of larger corporations to yank ad dollars when they hear something they don't like.
The only honest position imo is to allow all comers to state their viewpoint, which is the foundation of liberal democracy and enshrined in the first amendment. Just keep their viewpoint in mind when watching as you would for an American network. Also, don't just accept something because someone authoritative said something, it has to fit into a logical picture of the world.
We're not at war with Russia lol and god help us if we were. They have nukes!
I don't know if you get to have it both ways without trampling on WeChat's first amendment rights as well as those of their users unless you pass data privacy laws for US citizens/persons (which might have first amendment implications anyway) and deal with WeChat through whatever mechanisms this newly-passed (and yet-to-be created) privacy law contains.
So either WeChat, Facebook, and whoever can facilitate protected speech among their users (in this case you're protecting the users specifically) or the various platforms are treated as publishers which still wouldn't allow the US government to prevent or compel speech (protecting the organization).
It's possible they can get away with banning the payment portions of the app but the outright ban appears to be prior restraint of free speech by the government.
The bill of rights treats rights as existing in morality (whether based on natural law philosophy or religion) prior to and outside of written law. It does not purport to grant rights, but to prohibit the government from violating them.
In that framework, the US government is not to violate anyone's freedom of speech anywhere in the world. That doesn't seem to be what's at issue in this case though; the case was brought by a group of US-based WeChat users on grounds that the ban would restrict their freedom to communicate with people in China who are unable to use other communication services.
Yes. The supreme court has found consistently that pretty much anywhere the constitution says "people", it refers to all people regardless of citizenship, given that it also calls out "citizens" in many places.
We might also observe that the only mention of "people" in the first amendment gives them the rights to assemble and to petition the government.
Freedoms of speech and the press are phrased as restrictions on Congress, not as rights given to anyone (and this is probably the main justification for extending first amendment rights to foreigners, which appears to be a popular but not universal viewpoint).
Julian Assange's right to Free Speech has been denied.
of Free Speech is arbitrarily granted, then it's not free speech, and that violates Prior Restraint, at least, if the Courts are not also arbitrarily deciding who's free speech deserves to be protected.
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
Note the subject.
So yes, the First Amendment is okay with any censoring of information by a foreign government or company.
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers."
I don't see any mention of government there. Why limit the interpretation of free speech to the US constitution? How do you reconcile ideologically or philosophically that it is not ok for US Congress to limit speech but ok for other powerful entities?
Trampling on WeChat users' first amendment rights would be a violation. Many of the users are American citizens, like myself. I'd like to talk to my grandparents and cousins in China. They don't or can't use other social networks, so WeChat it is.
I am not sure it is 1A issue to begin with. US prohibiting US companies to work with overseas entities is commercial problem. A lot of gambling websites were shut down by court order and a lot of domains seized by FBI. So there is a lot of precedents about restricting US citizens access to foreign parts of the internet.
You can shut down anything with sufficient justification, the issues is this app is primarily for speech and the bar is correspondingly high. It would be the same if it were a newspaper or a conference, rather than a casino, where surely speech also takes place.
>The difference between TikTok and WeChat and FB/Google/Twitter is obvious: the former are to some degree controlled by China and the latter are private entities.
It is documented fact that FB, Google and the rest are tapped by US intelligence agencies. Anyone remembers Snowden? We know for fact that pretty much every single global US network works with the US government, but when comes to TikTok and WeChat something yet to be proven(I am sure they do but the evidence is weaker than the evidence if US internet companies working with the US government on surveillance).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)
EU was trying to fix this through GDPR and such but US seems to desperately wanting to embrace the Chinese model and with US cultural lead, this will inevitably open the way to other governments ban FB, Google and the others because if TikTok is a national security risk to the USA then obviously Facebook and Google are to them. Probably Amazon and all other ad networks too. Anything that can be started from a dorm room will no longer be able to go global.
This will lead to a world where if you want to do a global project you will have to incorporate in every country you want to operate. It is even possible that internet to break up in patches and operating even a forum website becomes like Coca-Cola opening a plant in another country.
It is a very bleak future for humanity if you ask me. Can be good for local businesses though.
I wish the US went the EU path(regulating data handling) instead of Russa/China path(banning) so we could still have global networks and kids in their dorms could continue creating products with global impact.
Ok I might've been a little unclear because I received a couple replies now about privacy and that wasn't really my point, so apologies for that. This is what I said to other person:
--
> Yeah these are real problems, I agree. And US citizens should continue to put pressure on their politicians to pass more privacy-related legislation
> But my point wasn't really about data collection, it was about influence and content-control. People are readily influenced by memes, ads, headlines, etc which is why such platforms are so problematic because people are not comfortable with how much influence they have and how easily misinformation is spread.
> What am I less comfortable with is leaving a path open for China to have that same kind of control in the US as FB/Google/etc, but without being subject to US laws like our private entities are.
They can be subject to US laws like US companies being subject to EU laws. That's what I mean by "I wish US choose to be more like the EU instead of China".
US can regulate the internet companies to mitigate the risk when keeping the global community intact. Make foreign services run on US servers when serving US citizens, make them disclose what and how they process the data. Then if they don't obey the laws can be enforced to obey the laws. Which law TikTok broke? There is no law forbidding being Chinese and successful, that's the US political system failing to have what they want and embracing Chinese ways of doing things. It could be also a failure of the US market to stay competitive due to monopolies, giving lead to China in innovation.
But somehow the freedom loving Americans cannot be told to wear a mask but can be told which app the can use, just like in China. It's mind boggling.
Maybe the U.S. should fund its own social network?
In the 1960s it created a government-funded television network to offer alternative programming. But television is an old medium, and less of a source of information today -- partly because it's been supplanted by social media.
This has been one of my favorite thought experiments in a while.
It seems like there's inevitably going to be a need for some kind of content moderation -- but maybe that could be handled by local librarians, local newspapers. (At least that's a solution that actually scales.)
Join the Fediverse! Join a Mastodon, Pleroma or MissKey instance, or set on up. Follow some random people and start talking. It's like 90s chat rooms all over again!
Nosenko was a famous defector who confused CIA and James Jesus Angleton for years whether he was "bona fide" or a double agent sent to spread disinfo as a fake defector. the number of fake Soviet defectors was so enormous that it made CIA doubt the credibility of many legit defectors, which was a great counter intel strategy on the KGB's part.
>The difference between TikTok and WeChat and FB/Google/Twitter is obvious: the former are to some degree controlled by China and the latter are private entities.
How is for example Facebook better because it isn't somehow tied in to the US government? On the one hand the state still have access to all the data from Facebook it wants (NSA, warrants) but on the other they have a hard time protecting its users privacy rights. I'm not convinced private entities are any better. For a US citizen maybe Facebook is better as a private entity but for everyone else outside the US?
Personally I would rather put my data in a Chinese-owned Tiktok than an American one because of the extreme amount of data already flowing into US services. Even if Tiktok is used to spy on me I can't see how it would be any worse for an European than putting more data into US services.
Yeah these are real problems, I agree. And US citizens should continue to put pressure on their politicians to pass more privacy-related legislation
But my point wasn't really about data collection, it was about influence and content-control. People are readily influenced by memes, ads, headlines, etc which is why such platforms are so problematic because people are not comfortable with how much influence they have and how easily misinformation is spread.
What am I less comfortable with is leaving a path open for China to have that same kind of control in the US as FB/Google/etc, but without being subject to US laws like our private entities are.
You shouldn't think that the US laws will save the day, just remember the debacle of 2016 election, where multiple foreign organizations had access to millions of voters with the tacit consent of FB. Since then FB hasn't done anything to properly address this problem.
The US government does things that aren't too good. But as far as having my data in Chinese or US intelligence's hands, I'll go with the country that won't put me in jail if one of my WeChats they monitor says something like "I don't like this country."
But if you live outside PRC and USA, who is the most likely (however unlikely) to kick down your door? I'd wager that in most of the world that would be the FBI or CIA. Maybe I'm reading the wrong news sites because I live far from Asia but I have heard of lots of raids where the FBI were involved (Piratebay for example) or CIA (extraordinary rendition) but never heard of a single time Chinese police were operating in a foreign country. Maybe I'm wrong but in my understanding it happens weekly with the US and never with the PRC.
I think loss of control is the 'quiet part' that you've hit on in this issue. Political regimes from Latin America, the Philippines, Myanmar, have used US based social media products to organize and incite harassment and violence against critics and minority groups. This is a lucrative and powerful racket that the current US administration is leveraging in a similar way and at Chinese expense. But if US eyeballs move to a platform owned by China you can envision them turning off the attention tap to vested and opposing US interests.
Honest question for Chinese users of WeChat: have you ever thought twice about WeChat posts and communications, whether they'll be deemed "acceptable" to censors? Everyone I know self-censors nearly constantly, if unconsciously.
A good example: in a discussion of this case I was reading today in Chinese the author ironically noted that he couldn't summarize the US government's position because in a large WeChat group the content would be "deemed as against the rules" (视为违规)
No. I need it to conduct business, and that's more important to me than posting or discussing controversial topics. People in China literally do not use email, so this is the only effective method to get things done (which I'm totally ok with!). This ban would be an absolute disaster for me, given that my entire rolodex are WeChat contacts, not email addresses.
I also feel for my friends who have family in China, and want to stay connected with them through a medium that is widely adopted.
There is a cultural standard that is just different in China when it comes to free speech, and it's hard for most people in the US to accept that.
The average American has no idea how disruptive this is to the Chinese American community; as you stated they basically do not use email, and this is essentially the only way to communicate to friends and family in China. I know a lot of older Chinese Americans who were freaking out for weeks because banning this app would essentially cut them off with no clear alternatives.
As to the censorship point, from my experience using wechat in the past people rarely discuss politics on there, unless it's to make fun of the US political reality TV. Perhaps not actively discussing internal Chinese politics is considered a form of self-censorship.
If you willingly talk about other politics but not your own, that does seem to be a bit of self-censorship. I mean in that case it does demonstrate that they aren't just avoiding politics in general (out of lack of interest). That or turning a blind eye, but that may or may not be meaningfully different.
So you're admitting that WeChat is too big to fail. Let them be banned (the same way the CCP bans external apps) and let them get a taste of their own medicine.
Maybe they will decouple the app from the backend. Publish the interface, set up an auth system and let the community build their own apps to interface with it.
That's the reason email still exists today and will continue to exist long after today's fad app goes out of style.
And that's the problem. The CCP has been left to do whatever it wants and it reached a point where it is "too big to fail". Is this the kind of world we want the next generation to live in? The sooner we put a stop to this mess the better.
They should. If not votes, then at least a couple of representatives in the Congress to complain loudly every time the US wants to do something to make life harder for other countries.
The CCP has already decided to be a bully, and it seems its people are supporting them (except the poor ones being murdered like the Uighurs). Let them get a taste of their own medicine.
I don't use wechat myself but my wife is chinese. From what she tells me, many of her mainland china childhood friends, (including those she considered progressive) strongly disagree with many ideas americans consider fundamentally correct.
For example, it's pretty normal for Americans to bicker about politics and criticize the government, especially because of its highly polarized political landscape.
Many mainland chinese vehemently defend the idea that the government is truly representative of the people (similar to how the US constitution envisioned the state being a true representation of the People)
Debating that the government is an evil brainwashing machine with these people would be akin to coming out as gay in a conservative religious family, i.e. it would be bound to negatively affect relationships
And then let the ordinary people to elect a president like Trump who "knows anything better then everyone else" and just got laughed at by the entire World in an UN conference? No, not a good thing in my view.
I prefer a team of government which has proved it has a true vision, which has proved its ability to execute the vision, which has proved its ability to the lead the people to a better future, which has proved its ability to protect the people from imperialism such as what we're seeing in recent years, which is aiming at and actually eliminating poverty from the vast majority of people... rather than a government which is elected by big corps.
Edit 1: BTW, I myself believed in the so-called US-style democracy and election, until I saw what happened in those "taught by the US" democracy countries such as the Middle-east, Ukraine, Taiwan, Hong Kong, India, several South American countries, and especially, in America itself, in the past decades, especially in recent years. Trust me, I believed it in my heart.
Edit 2: I just got to know the name of Andre Vltchek the independent journalist who got killed recently, I read several excerpts of his reports. I think he knows something about the international things.
Very interesting to hear what the perspective is from the other side (and a little scary to imagine that even if Chinese people were free to elect their government, that they might still choose the current form). Thank you stranger!
I don't use WeChat myself but it seems WeChat is the modern equivalent of sending mail into or inside the Soviet Union. You know it will be read by censors, but what is the alternative? Not sending mail?
Voice calls are a slightly more "secure" alternative to text messaging. It's more resource intensive to store and analyse audio/video than text, and less accurate to boot.
It's easier to run
`SELECT * FROM messages where messages.body LIKE '%tiananmen square%'`
than it is to run speech-to-text over bulk data and run the same search. Obviously that's a trivial example, but digital text (i.e. not handwritten) is always going to be easier to parse than speech.
"have you ever thought twice about WeChat posts and communications, whether they'll be deemed "acceptable" to censors?"
Many Chinese do indeed think about this. I've heard people quite literally say, "Don't put that in the chat, we don't want trouble". I've seen group chats get blocked for saying the "wrong" thing.
I also hate to see the US essentially giving credence to China's approach of blocking things by following suit. The US could take the high road (there are a number of legal approaches that would help and still be "American" in spirit) but has chosen to take the bait instead.
> Don't put that in the chat, we don't want trouble
I've heard people say exactly the same thing about Facebook. I guess the difference is that it's usually in regards to incriminating messages (e.g. drugs), and not censorship of ideological speech.
Self-censoring on non-secure, non-anonymous messaging platforms, and especially in group chats, is not necessarily a bad thing. Consider anything you write in a group chat as public, because there's it easily could be.
I’m not Chinese, but I do fear what I say on wechat because I know there’s a possibility I’ll be blocked from entering China again, or worse, blocked from exiting.
I also fear what I say on American sites for similar reasons, and because I’ve dealt with normal people trying to hunt me down just because of online comments.
The US Government only "asks" because it further benefits them.
Maybe falsifying the documents counts as another charge to pressure someone they are holding, or legal counsel suggested it to ensure that any information found could be readily used against the person in a legal preceding, or plausible deniability cover for FOIA requests. I can think of a lot of ways that asking someone for something you already know about can be beneficial and no ways that it is detrimental.
I was told (but don't quote me on this) that this is the reason why they require you to answer so many questions as part of the ESTA process. It more or less serves to cover the govt's ass and give cause for deportation if you lie on your application.
They used to ask if you had been involved in persecutions associated with Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945. It still asks
> Do you seek to engage in or have you ever engaged in terrorist activities, espionage, sabotage, or genocide?
I don't think anybody would ever seriously answer "yes" to that question, but if the US government wants to deport an individual and it's discovered they lied on their ESTA application, it's more straightforward to deport them.
I've noticed the use of WeChat has changed quite a bit for over the past 4 years:
Use of the 'Moments' function (a photo-orientated miniblog) that was quite popular when WeChat was newer has declined significantly and is not mainly focused on self-promotion (selling products, often food products) via WeChat, the odd personal post, photos of the odd teambuilding exercise. Groups popular for colleagues, ex-colleagues, ex-classmates to keep in contact with each other, even this use-case has been cracked down on especially international companies. The demographic for these friends/colleagues is mainly 20s-40s professionals in business services or IT; out of ~500 contacts there'll typically be 10-15 Moment posts. In chats people ask about VPNs and such things offline.
Political discussion for younger people happens much more on Weibo than WeChat.
For older people I see using on the bus or subway Groups are still a big social thing, and this group isn't going to be very anti-government as they're the generation that's benefited from the housing and associated booms of the last couple of decades.
Two anecdotes that partially answer your question.
On the one hand, I am risking causing the group I am a member of to be banned, or my personal data being locked out from myself.
On the other hand, my friends are mostly higher class of the society that naturally align with the government, just like elite capitalists like neoliberal doctrine. The discussion seldom ends in pleasant outcomes.
I have been studying Chinese for 7 years. Many of my Chinese friends live in Los Angeles and WeChat is central in their life... Getting a job, taking orders, doing all kinds of business, paying for things. They don't know the phone numbers of their friends. Many don't speak English or their English is not very good. If it is completely cut off they will still find ways to communicate but arguably it will be more likely to create new ways for scammers to take advantage of people. I think it is possible to ban WeclChat, but there needs to be a well thought out plan.
Just to be clear, the USA doesn’t have the infrastructure or legal framework in place to actually block internet traffic. The best they can do is remove DNS entries.
They could block WeChat from app stores, which would basically be fatal. Especially for iPhone users, who don't even have the option to sideload without jailbreaking.
This is an interesting argument against walled gardens I don't often see: that it gives your government an easy chokepoint to prevent users from using software it doesn't like.
Facebook is not listed on the Chinese App Store, but you can install it easily by switching your region to the USA, installing Facebook, and then switching your region back to China, without losing apps from either region. (I know this because I owned an iPhone while living in China)
Much easier than having to bother with a VPN, and many Chinese people are already used to jumping through such hoops.
China puts up with it for whatever reason, but the US doesn't have to. The US can just as easily order Apple and Google to remove it from every region of every app store.
They can’t actually do that. There are good reasons apples Chinese App Store is run by their Chinese subsidiary. That would be like China ordering Apple to remove Facebook from their American App Store.
They really can’t. They would need some kind of firewall to do it, and ISPs simply aren’t setup for that. They can’t even ban child porn sites effectively (instead the police must rely on catching viewers of such and shutting down sites physically if possible).
Must feel good to say China's getting what they deserve but it's the ordinary people who are suffering the most. The ban is a victory to no one, and just shows the US is the copycat this time around.
Their usage of wechat is more likely a liability than a benefit. It gives a foreign adversary visibility into their activities in US. How can they become activist or work for change if their government is monitoring everything they say?
Do the Hong Kong protest crackdown not scare anyone else?
Now they have an excuse. It won’t look suspicious if they communicate to each other on channels that can’t be monitored by their oppressive government.
Why are you assuming an average Chinese citizen would want to be an activist or work for change? Most likely they have positive views of their government just like the average American citizen.
Those are valid concerns. I also think the opposite side of that coin is worth considering. That is to say, should we allow WeChat to gain an even greater foothold on American soil or should we minimize total damage by cutting it off now instead of later?
As for me, I believe allowing WeChat to become anything like the structural institution it is in China in any part of the US would be a mistake. Imagine if Google was as controlled by and as much of a cheerleader for the US government as WeChat is for the Chinese, and the kind of threat that would pose to European sovereignty.
You really need to explain your point more thoroughly.
- "allow WeChat to gain an even greater foothold on American soil" - does this mean have more users?
- "minimize total damage" - it would be good if you articulated the damage being done
- "Imagine if Google was as controlled by and as much of a cheerleader for the US government as WeChat is for the Chinese" - according to Julian Assange, https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/
Google was an active collaborator with the state, on not just intelligence gathering but on soft-power influence-pushing (according to that article).
Maybe they have lost some influence in the current administration (maybe not), but Facebook has by all appearances been eager to take their place.
The US government can’t be seen openly wielding large internet companies for its interests. But any modern state needs to. And so it does it within the paradigm of the West: public denial, private understandings.
The difference between China/Wechat and US/FB/Google is one is out in the open, and the other is covered by a fig leaf.
Yes. A ban now will be less disruptive than a ban later when WeChat has far more American users. The damage I refer to is the damage to to the lives and habits of WeChat's current American and immigrant users caused by WeChat's removal.
> Imagine if Google was as controlled by and as much of a cheerleader for the US government as WeChat is for the Chinese, and the kind of threat that would pose to European sovereignty.
Imagine that! Imagine if some US agency had a global dragnet surveillance network!
For a long time, USPS was directly controlled by government, yet was also one of the only ways for people to communicate long distance. Government could easily have made laws like "we will read all your mail", or "we won't deliver mail to political enemies".
Yet that didn't happen. Why are things turning out differently in the internet age?
The USPS did do exactly that. Read about how abolitionists attempted to spread anti-slavery literature through the federal postal system in the antebellum era, and how the post office decided it would suppress those mailings for being supposedly insurrectionary.
A counterpoint is that the telephone infrastructure has been tapped by the US government to monitor even citizens conversations. My opinion is that since it requires fewer people it is easier to do. I don't think the CCP is as concerned with chinese citizens knowing what they are doing like the US seems to
> I don't think the CCP is as concerned with chinese citizens knowing what they are doing
If you ask a random Chinese citizen "are you okay with the government listening in to your phone calls?", most people would say Yes. Having the government listen in and having government presence on the streets makes us feel safe, because most of us trust our government. Sure, it has it's issues, but in general, the government acts in our favor, and without it we'd have far lower standards of living.
If they are against it, then yes they may likely say no out of fear. But make no mistake, many are for it. Not everyone shares the same values we do in America.
All sovereign nations reserve the right to regulate foreign goods, vessels, diplomats, currency, and peoples distinctly from their native counterparts.
I think there is a strong case to be made that WeChat is, as a practical matter, a public minister as defined in Article 2. Therefore, the executive has the right to refuse their presence in the US.
All Chinese companies operate under the direction and control of the CCP; we can arrive at the conclusion that a company is a public minister if companies are people, and they act at the behest of their home government.
There absolutely is a case. I was not meaning to imply that there wasn't. I was meaning specifically to address the idea that the rights of a sovereign nation can be invoked to decide whether any particular action legal under the laws of the United States.
As long as the USA remains a country that is bound by rule of law rather than rule of dictate, one can't reasonably argue with due process simply by invoking the fact that the USA is a sovereign nation, because the US government is comprised of more than just its executive leadership. The executive branch is bound by laws as drafted by the legislative branch and interpreted by the judicial branch.
1) The CCP has to have a representative on the board. The ccp say it's like a union rep(!) since they are communists. But they don't have a veto, just a vote like other board members.
2) This condition is only for companies over a certain size.
3) This also applies to large foreign companies not just domestic.
> 2) This condition is only for companies over a certain size.
That may not be the case for much longer:
"According to the new provisions, private firms will need a certain amount of CCP registered employees, which is already a long-term practise in large private firms but not smaller ones."
Can you link reports on this or the source where you obtained this information?
In the US at least, the claim that “all Chinese companies are controlled government” is thrown around way too often without evidence backing it up. People seem to accept it as common sense that doesn’t need fact-checks anymore. I’m not saying you are one of them; I just wish we all verify non-obvious claims for our own benefits
You actually think that the largest communication app in China isn't under complete control of the CCP and that they don't have complete access to every transaction that flows through Wechat servers?
Since people don’t seem to think this is obvious - the board has access to the company’s plans, therefore so does the CCP if there is a CCP board member.
Board members have access to the CEO and other managers, therefore the CCP board member can obviously make statements to management about what the CCP does and does not approve of.
No citation is needed to know that these are the consequences of having a CCP board member.
Same thing as a political officer. They don't officially have a veto, but if you cross them, you'll find yourself promoted to permanent deputy assistant undersecretary at the branch office in Nyingchi.
On the contrary, if the courts are powerful protectors of rights they'll inevitably come into conflict with the executive. I'd like to see a touch fewer conflicts than American presidents tend to get into, but if I saw no conflicts I'd conclude that the courts just have no power to stop the executive from doing what he'd like.
Sovereign nations also have the right to set rules and laws that restrict the actions of their executives. The people who govern America are subject to a lot of laws that restrict their power to channel sovereign rights, and for good reason.
If this is your legitimately held view (and I agree to some extent with the core idea), at least let's not be naive about it.
Don't think that this was a well-reasoned decision with careful justification about the causes, potential, solutions, and impacts on US economics and society. It was a guy asking "what can we do to create some leverage over this adversary I don't like? (and was just told about yesterday)"
Don't deceive yourself that this is some step in a principled fight. If it were that, we'd have slapped tariffs/embargoes and more on Russia a couple of years ago. We'd be implementing measures against Venezuela, Myanmar, North Korea, a whole host of countries doing similar or worse. I haven't heard a peep about those.
It's not good when government operates on a whim. Don't deceive yourself about what principle (and person) you're getting behind.
If that's what you think, you should really learn more about government. I don't think you have a clue.
Many, many powers falling under executive branch (and agencies') regulatory authority, which Congress does not go into N-th level detail about how to implement, have to go through significant public and internal review, and have good explanation.
We are talking about two different things. Legislation is different from the inherent powers delegated by the Constitution. The Executive certainly can act in many ways without explaining itself to and obtaining authorization from Congress.
It seems reasonable to assume that you’re familiar with this concept, so I’ll just chalk it up to a misunderstanding.
Executive agencies have to obey the Administrative Procedures Act which is not a high bar and yet the current administration doesn't always manage to clear it; it has had several policies turned back by SCOTUS for not being able to come up with a facially valid reason.
Sure, the executive has constitutional powers, but the powers used in this WeChat ban come from the National Emergency act and the International Economic Emergency Powers Act, not the constitution. So I think the misunderstanding comes from the fact that you’re talking about constitutional powers, which are not at issue here. Powers created by legislation are constrained by the statutes themselves and Administrative Procedure Act requirements.
They often do. Trumps own supreme court ruled that this year.
“ Did Trump lawfully repeal the Obama-era order that shielded young immigrants who were brought to this country as children?
No, the court said in a 5-4 ruling written by Chief Justice Roberts. He said that while the president had the legal authority to revoke the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, his administration failed to give a reasoned explanation for ending a policy that encouraged about 700,000 immigrants to register with the government to obtain work permits and avoid deportation. ”
And that was just because the Trump administration didn't manage to satisfy the requirements of the Administrative Procedures Act, which just requires the executive to provide a reason.
The standard of review for free speech cases are way, way higher than the APA. The APA just means the executive can't blatantly lie about why it did enacted some regulation, and has to come up with a facially valid reason. The standard under the 1st Amendment requires a good reason.
We are not killing anyone or hurting any chinese, just making sure China does not control the world - ie hurting their top brass financially and strategically
This is why it needs to be dealt with via data privacy laws, not a one-off shoot-from-the-hip bit of executive action.
Privacy laws with escalating penalties up to a ban would accomplish the same thing, not just for for the high-profile panic examples of the moment, but for problems of this sort in general.
If it truly is a national security concern and not politics, this should be the obvious conclusion. How do we know some Facebook employee isn't siphoning data to the CCP right now? How do we know the US won't someday abuse the data Facebook/Google/whoever are collecting? The data is either weaponizable or it's not, and if it is weaponizable (and I believe it is), this needs to be a much larger discussion than TikTok and WeChat.
I think the best way to do this would be American Congress passing a law giving President power to directly "Ban equivalent companies of other countries, which ban American companies on their respective jurisdiction". This is full of subjective opinionated law to pass, but at least courts would have some ground to held the bans. Courts are good at deciphering "intent" of the law.
I always wondered how we squared disallowing things like WeChat and TikTok with freedom of speech. This whole thing feels a bit hyperbolic. Is there real danger lurking around the corner if we allow people to shit post on TikTok, for instance? Genuinely curious here.
The US government has the ability to make my life absolutely miserable. The Chinese government doesn’t without invading the US. So I’d much prefer Chinese surveillance since it’s inconsequential to me.
Maybe not, but manipulating emotions is proven to have happened, and that seems pretty dangerous. Then it's the next mental hop to having the gov push their agenda that way.
As someone who fervently supports freedom of speech my stance is all bets are off when you have a known bad actor in the room. The PRC will use this data to sensor and oppress, full stop.
Theory is that both of these platforms seem to be a threat to trumps election. For tiktok he has to balance banning all his fans. So he tries to control the data, effective or not. I bet he could control moderation and crack down of news opposed to him on tiktok. This is “national security” of course. Politicians play a meta game.
When trying to understand China's commercial policies which America is supposedly retaliating against, consider that China has experienced a different mercantile history to America.
America has never been invaded by foreign gunships and forced to allow foreign merchants to import opium to addict its citizens in order to fix their own countries balance of payments problems.
How long is China going to put on the mantle of victimhood over events 160 years in the past?!
By that standard surely Korea can complain endlessly about China and Yuan Shikai lording it over their kingdom in the 1880s, and the Czechs can cry over their subjugation for centuries by Austria-Hungary, etc. etc.
In 1949 Mao Zedong famously declared "China has stood up." Apparently though he meant, "We're such a weak people that we cry to mommy everytime others demand reciprocity."
> How long is China going to put on the mantle of victimhood over events 160 years in the past?!
160 years in the past?
The Chinese reparations, totalling $US 61 billion is today's dollar equivalents, were only completed in 1940. Then China sided with the Allies in WWII. 15 million Chinese lost their lives in that war.
But I wouldn't characterise Chinese trade policy as victimhood. Chinese entrepreneurs don't rely on any such arguments. They just make products that western consumers want to buy.
The families and friends of the dead didn't flee to Taiwan.
This is like saying that the Poles didn't deserve reparations from Germany for WWII because the pre-war republic wasn't restored and instead there was a new regime. The country and people exist independently of the governing system.
You do know that Japan had been invading China and trying to influence it in the decades before WW2 don't you? Joining with the Allies was the common sense thing to do
This doesn't really make sense. The Second Sino-Japanese war predates the European theater by 2 years. It'd be more accurate to say the US sided with China to help them fight a mutual enemy.
Except the native americans never got their lands & resources back, & similarly blacks have never been given a chance at their own self rule.
These other national examples are nation vs nation, where an outside oppressor came & then went. Missing from your anti-empathy sentiments is recognition that these peoples never were given their own sovereignty & resources to rebuild themselves. The most injurious piece may have ended but they remain bound up in the impacts all the the same.
If I’m reading between the lines accurately (and sans sarcasm, inform me if I’m mistaken), you presuppose any individual of color (a bit of a loaded term, but you get the idea) has a debt owed to them of land and wealth separate from other people.
I vaguely say “other people” because this notion is what entices racial sentiments. It’s no different than changing the adjective for a different skin tone, and saying they too deserve their “own self rule”
This implies “blacks” don’t have self rule as it stands today, which I disagree with. In 2020, there exists no legislature that disfavors someone based on their skin color or ethnic background. We do however have the inverse, policies that give advantages to those who have specific skin color.
This predilection for a specific kind of racism, a one-way street attitude, is what fuels our current divide. I need not say more.
Mainly just trying to call a distinction between nations & people that did get their own a chance, versus people who still had to live under other's laws & who we attempted to restore fair rights under law to.
In one case, the oppressors left & sovereignty was restored.
In the other case, the law decided it had to change to try to bring itself into alignment with some basic human rights & regards.
I do think the people living under now-more-just law still struggle, still face discrimination, and are victim to a system that was imposed on them & a system which does not favor them. I don't think it's unreasonable to identify this gap, and this "one way street" attitude seems, to me, restorative & to be what equity & justice demands. And at times, it feels like it's still not enough, that some people- some persistent negative forces- remain fixed & focused on exclusion & discrimination & their biases, in a way that makes me think perhaps these victim-folk do deserve entirely higher levels of freedom from these oppressive forces that they still face, beyond merely our ongoing & too-controversial attempts at rebalacing.
Please. At this point, both blacks and Indians are able to take various Federal and State monies to be the best they can be. The Indians have relative sovereignty. They could take their federal and casino monies and plow them into an R&D bonanza. Blacks in the US have a golden ticket to pretty much any institution they wish to attend. Both have had trillions of US dollars plowed into their communities over the year via various government spending.
At this point they have redress. They have agency. They even have adulthood, much to the chagrin of the Democratic party. Blacks and Indians should be like a wiser Arab nation. They have a pool of funds. Use it to make a better world for their people. Stop keeping people on the plantation/reservation.
My parents were in high school while segregation still existed. There's no question they got opportunities many black americans the same age did not, which absolutely had a direct and significant impact on my life.
Redlining remained legal into the 70s, and was continued with the thinnest of fig leafs concealing it into the 90s. Covert discrimination in loan and rental applications continues to this day.
Many studies repeated even today continue to confirm that racial discrimination in job applications remains a very real thing.
Wealth is strongly generational, and we aren't even 1 generation away from dramatic and legalized inequalities.
Your last paragraph is the most telling. Were black and native americans somehow not adults before today? Pools of funds? Have you ever driven through a reservation that wasn't a casino? The many underinvested urban areas that remain from the era of white flight and redlining?
We see you and what you are thinking here clearly. The world is moving on from such bigotry, as should you.
You called me a bigot. I can’t respond. I’m stuck. Nowhere to go.
Native Americans can invest in themselves. When they take the patrimony of the Federal government, they don’t. https://youtu.be/pQ4lnDy2xnQ
The same is true of the blacks. Before LBJ decimated them, they were on their way to be independent. They were starting to make money equal to whites. They were establishing their own cities with arts like Harlem. Then the Democrats came in offering free government money. The women just had to kick out their men to get it. They should also pursue abortions since that was empowering. Now blacks have stayed at 13% of the population for decades. They are impoverished. They believe they are victims.
But I a person that won’t vote Democrat because of this and continuing evil. I am the bigot. Ok. I’ll take that title. I am a bigot for knowing that blacks can govern their own destiny without the white man from the Federal government. The same for natives.
Do you live near any of the Indian reservations mentioned in your video? I was born in SD and adopted to white parents. I'm a member of the Lakota Sioux Nation. I'm intimately aware of the hardships facing Native American people and have seen both sides of it.
Native American children were effectively kidnapped from their families well into the 1970s. To imply the suffering, segregation, and racism ceased 160 years ago shows how entirely misinformed the general populace is. Wounded Knee was only 110 years ago.
The implication that their poverty is self-inflicted is a massive exercise in reductionism, and completely neglects to mention the hardships that manifest in these areas exclusively due to the inaccuracies you're spouting.
Single purpose accounts aren't ok on HN, and obviously not when the purpose is ideological battle, so we've banned this one. Please don't create accounts to break the site guidelines with.
What if it wasn't a single purpose account? What if it was an account that partakes in conversations both technical and political? What if HN has become more and more political and threatening to the health of the nation and the commentator was simply saying thing that are sane?
As you pointed out by “their people,” they clearly have a distinct cultural community. And if nepotism and inheritance, and favoritism has any effect in the preservation and continuation of wealth within cultural and racial bounds across generations, then it stands the damage done to black people can last for many generations. This is of course before even considering the hurdles and barriers actively placed upon black people by people who seem to think they must be fundamentally oppressed.
Yes affirmative action is just a bandaid, but it’s necessary due to the symptoms of injustice and oppression still being present.
So by your comment I think you agree with me. I'm not going to be prescriptive in how this power imbalance should be addressed as I really don't know.
You seem to be of the opinion that we have as a society attempted to resolve this imbalance with wealth and government programs. However due to the unfortunate characteristics of those affected communities they have failed. Likewise, if these communities would only be like other groups of your choosing they would be much better off and societies' efforts at redress would not have been wasted. Is this correct?
Yeah honestly what more could these people want - it's not like people are calling them Indians to this day or suggesting they can't think freely enough to "escape" the Democratic "plantation". Read some books not written by Candace Owens you tool.
You can't post like this regardless of how bad another account is. It's against the site rules because it destroys the commons, which helps no one and makes nothing better.
I love how you dislike a black woman thinking on her own and coming to a different conclusion. You’d support her as long as she stayed on the plantation and thanked you for the provisions. As soon as she thinks contrary to you, she’s at best a maker of tools.
Remember any black person having the audacity of thinking on their own is not black. https://youtu.be/We6Qr9-dDn8
In what sense is China not "sovereign" over Hong Kong?
While it's true that the Sino-British Joint Declaration placed some temporary restrictions on China's policies regarding that region, this is an agreement between sovereign nations, thus reaffirming China's sovereignty.
I suppose that, in a sense, all international treaties are a loss of some degree of sovereignty, but in that sense nearly every country in the world has lost sovereignty in that time.
Remember even during the WW2, the US view was that concessions like HK taken by European countries from China through "Unequal Treaties" needs to be returned to China eventually.
Chinese trade policies aren't caused by the Opium War.
The trade relations that many Americans consider unbalanced are the result of the US and China being at very different stages of economic development. When China began opening up to foreign investment in the 1980s, China had no capital to invest abroad. It didn't matter if the US market was technically open to Chinese investment - there was no possibility of Chinese investment in the first place. The only question was what conditions would be placed on foreign investment in China. Reciprocity didn't matter, because trade flows were entirely in one direction.
China progressively opened up from the 1980s onward. WTO membership brought a huge number of changes, including drastic reductions in tariffs and a lot of privatization, breakup and restructuring of state industries.
Just to illustrate my point: people complain that China used to not let foreign auto manufacturers own a majority stake in their Chinese subsidiaries. The unfairness is supposedly that Chinese auto companies can own their American subsidiaries. But there were no Chinese auto companies that could possibly have competed in the American market anyways. The reciprocity argument was entirely theoretical. China now has more competitive electric vehicle companies, and it also has more open foreign investment policies for auto manufacturing.
One final point is that foreign companies benefitted massively from the ability to invest in China. The idea that China pulled a fast one and took advantage of the developed world just doesn't align with reality.
Americans don't need to try to understand the effects of mercantilism. They were subject to the same draconian economic policies by the British Empire. This is largely what prompted the American Revolution. [0]
I think it's more accurate to say the US had a temporary (1 decade) diversion from the norm of "Benign Neglect"[1] which pissed off Americans to the point they sought explicit Independence. China has a much longer cultural history of being "self contained" (and suspicious of outsiders) which was deeply reinforced in the 19th century Opium Wars, etc.
The American colonies were subject to mercantilism for 170 years before the American Revolution started. To suggest that the American colonies weren't subject to foreign gunships forcing trade policies upon them is simply a ridiculous statement. The American colonies were prevented, by force, from trading with the French, Spanish and Dutch. The British Empire captured New Amsterdam in 1664 in the Second Anglo-Dutch War and renamed it New York. Just because the British Empire's economic policies escalated in the decade leading up to the American Revolution doesn't mean that is either where mercantilism began or ended. Please don't belittle American history, there are far more parallels than you may realize.
While there was always some fear of foreign war, it never rose to the level of century-long occupation or and domination that China experienced. The American colonies were just too unimportant until the French and Indian War compared to the Sugar colonies.
Even taking New York was kind of a side effect of New England being nearby and English gradually settling down from Connecticut, rather than part of some grand strategy.
Mercantilism was the law, but by defacto neglect Americans were trading with everyone with very few consequences until after the French and Indian war. It simply was too expensive for the British to enforce.
One of the provisions of the Treaty of Nanking is that the British Empire agreed to not interfere with Chinese trade with other foreign powers. They also withdrew from mainland China in exchange for the island of Hong Kong. Hong Kong was not an economic power at the time and became one as a British colony. [0]
By contrast, the British Empire continued to interfere with American trade long after the American Revolution, prompting the War of 1812 where the British Empire burned the first White House to the ground. Imagine if the British had burned the Daoguang Emperor's palace to the ground?
My point is I'm not belittling the subjugation of the Chinese under the British Empire. But at the same time, lets not attempt to rewrite American history. In regards to the British Empire, the Americans and Chinese have more in common than propagandists on both sides would have us believe.
Yep. A better analogy would be if the US had lost the revolutionary war, and was subjected to a century or more of British mercantilism, which they were only now starting to recover from.
Is the claim that British mercantilism caused all of this? The Qing dynasty had many problems, the British being one. The Taiping rebellion killed millions, Japanese imperialism further weakened the empire, losing their own colonial status over Korea - we can go on as the events cascade. To solely blame British mercantilism is to drive a wholly western narrative for what was not.
They were subjected to 170 years of mercantilism prior to the American Revolution. Any American ship that dared trade with any power other than the British Empire was deemed a "pirate" and was fired upon by cannon.
America did not exist. It was a settler colony of the British Empire. It was, if anything, the beneficiary of mercantilism, and not being allowed to trade with other nations is pretty much just how things were at the time.
> This is largely what prompted the American Revolution
The American Revolution was much more about representation and the rights that British Parliament held (or, from the American perspective, didn't hold) over the colonies. The primary effect of mercantilism is exclusive trading agreements with the ruling empire, which was not being argued against by the colonials. It even says as much in the paragraph you linked:
"However, the colonists took pains to argue that they did not oppose British regulation of their external trade; they only opposed legislation which affected them internally."
It's not an equal comparison to China and the Opium Wars.
You're quoting an attempt in 1761 to resolve this economic dispute with King George by legal means. The American colonies, on their own, were in no position to counter the mercantile system. They would need the support of another Empire for that.
But to counter your claim that mercantilism wasn't the inspiration for the American Revolution, I recommend reading up on the "Sons of Liberty" movement that rose up after the Stamp Act of 1765. [0]
I'm familiar with the Stamp Act - which I think reinforces my point because it was about direct taxation on the colonies. Even indirect taxation, e.g. on paper, tea, and glass through the Townshend Acts led to violent confrontation, infamously the Boston Massacre.
The point I am making is that the primary instigator for the war was not "we can't legally trade with the Dutch/French/whomever", which is the monopolistic cornerstone of mercantilism. I'm curious if you consider taxation to be a mercantilist policy.
I understand the sentimentality of your argument but fail to see the logic. So because China was treated badly by other countries 150 years ago they should ban our apps while we shouldnt ban theirs?
That's what they're saying, that China is a victim and gets special treatment while they put Uyghers in concentration camps, have the second largest economy in the world, and surveil every citizen as if they're guilty of treason.
So the argument is china was once invaded by foreign gunships (not american) so they should be allowed to ban american companies (Google, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Whatsapp, Netflix & hundreds more) but allowed to operate any company they want in the U.S?
China fought a land war against a coalition of invaders who attempted to subvert its economic, political and religious sovereignty.
China lost, was forced to cede Hong Kong to the British for 99 years, and paid 668,661,220 taels of silver from 1901 to 1939, equivalent in 2010 to $US 61 billion on a purchasing power parity basis.
A large portion of the reparations paid to the United States was diverted to pay for the education of Chinese students in U.S. universities under the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Program. To prepare the students chosen for this program an institute was established to teach the English language and to serve as a preparatory school. When the first of these students returned to China they undertook the teaching of subsequent students; from this institute was born Tsinghua University.
In 1842, Hong Kong was considered by both the Chinese and British to be uninhabited, there were only a few thousand inhabitants when the island was seceded. [0]
I know symbolically this is of great importance to the Chinese, but at the time it was an easy thing for the Emperor to give up given he was on the losing end of a war.
Are you sure you have your timeline straight, srtjstsj? When were the Chinese people "conquered"?
Tsinghua University is a world leader in AI and software technology.
Chinese engineers and entrepreneurs are competing in world markets with innovative products and services, not gunships. 100 million American users of TikTok appreciate this.
Have you considered the possibility that China is not trying to take over the world, but rather to be a part of it?
China's commercial policies seem designed to ensure that the CCP can deliver on their grand bargain with the Chinese people. Specially, in exchange for political subserviance to the dictates of the party the CCP will make China a economically prosperous nation. So I expect the CCP to hold on to their current exclusionary policies toward non-domestic apps as an more open playing field would endanger the dominance of domestic players.
The war of 1812 was fought because Great Britain had spent a decade boarding US ships to impress US sailors into their navy, controlling US trade, and funding Native American attacks on US settlers.
The Opium Wars happened long before Pearl Harbour, yet America is happy to do business with the Japanese. Actually the Opium Wars is often referenced more by Western commentators than the Chinese, for whom the event is simply history and irrelevant to modern events.
I had an interesting conversation with a Lyft driver, they were clearly from China from the knowledge/insights they shared. It was their belief that China's populations are much more densely populated, the family unit remaining - parents living with their children and their parents - because the previous generations didn't have pensions to rely on; another pressure I imagine is that I don't believe health care and other costs are covered in China?
Chinese elderly have pensions, and they do cover health care etc. But the extremely rapid economic growth in the past decades means they have no chance to cover living cost today.
It’s a bit different from the states, rather than big deductibles and no caps, you have small deductibles and lowish caps. So if you break a leg, things are very affordable, but you are quickly on your own if you get cancer.
Of course there are differences, but I think the main takeway is that the variation within each country (and over time -- ACA is new and not necessarily going to stay stable long term) is larger than the difference between the countries. ACA hasn't ended medical bankruptcy.
In China there is no such thing as medical bankruptcy, because they make you pay up before treatment, they don’t send you a bill. It’s just one of those things that distinguish between developed world and developing world healthcare.
I don't think this is a useful argument simply because China and America are so massively different in culture, history, geography, language and demographics that there's no way you can say with any certainty that the opium wars caused any particular change.
Its nearly tautological that any nation with a "long history" would distrust foreign powers. Foreign powers have a strong tendency to end the history of a nation.
The Opium Wars story is a cautionary tale that should apply equally to China and to the USA. Every country should think twice about excessively powerful foreign mercantile forces, especially digital ones in this era of mechanized propaganda and surveillance.
It’s rational for China to limit Apple and Google and for the USA to limit WeChat.
This will remain so as long as a basically lawless state exists internationally, which seems to be the case following the collapse of post Cold War globalism in the 20-teens.
Indeed! Perhaps instead of deplatforming them like college social justice warriors would we should instead put forward our own, superior, conception of what free expression means?
>Sidenote, I've noticed more and more people joining Telegram to evade a potential WeChat ban. I wonder if they're going to stay on Telegram.
Isn't the whole point of using wechat is its large chinese userbase? AFAIK telegram is banned in china, so I'm not sure why that'd be the logical choice.
Telegram cannot replace the use case of Chinese living in the US keep contact with their family in China (because Telegram is blocked in China, as you said), but it could replace the use case of Chinese living in the US contact each other.
I hate wechat for its user experience, when my mom need to say something to me she usually send wechat message to my wife, because I check my wechat for, maybe, once per week. But a lot of Chinese living in the US seem to not mind its user experience, and like to use wechat as the way of contact each other. I think one of the reason might be that in the US there's not one dominate IM app that everyone is using, so wechat is like the next best thing that at lease every Chinese is using. Now a lot of Chinese also start to use Telegram there's hope (but I won't hold my breath for it).
If WeChat and all US-China apps are banned due to the conflicting US and Chinese policies on communications control, those Chinese users don't matter anymore because they have no options.
There was never an actual ban for WeChat coming. It was just so they could point to WeChat and say "See, the ban wasn't entirely to force the sale of TikTok but one of protecting national interest!"
A preliminary injunction makes perfect sense considering how immediate and widely impactful a ban on WeChat would be to the Chinese-American community.
The onus is on the Trump administration to show that the immediate national security risk of letting WeChat continue to operate during legal proceedings exceeds the impact on Chinese Americans. Clearly there was no proof to make this case, because this was hardly about national security in the first place.
I'm sure the Trump legal team anticipated this, and also know that the injunction will continue into next year, so this entire "ban" is probably a political move. Trump can go into the debates/ads: "look how tough I am on China, Biden will lift the WeChat ban first chance he gets!"
Also it's a great distraction from Russian interference in the election, which the intelligence community is more concerned with than it is Chinese interference, but helps Trump.
I really don't understand how they thought this would work.
If they at least wanted to be consistent they should have banned smartphone chat apps (and there are some good reasons to do this.) That probably still wouldn't have been legal because of the free speech thing.
I wish there was something decent I could recommend to people but Apple has done a fantastic job of killing internet chat apps.
That's a correct decision. No way does the Executive Branch have the authority to ban speech without a court order.
Like a lot of what this administration does in foreign trade restrictions, this was more of a bargaining threat than an actual action. This is really about control of TikTok by a foreign government, which is an actual foreign trade issue.
"The U.S. has claimed that WeChat is a threat because its owner, Tencent Holdings Ltd., is intertwined with the Chinese Communist Party, which can use the app to disseminate propaganda, track users, and steal their private and proprietary data. It's a similar argument that the administration has used to target the TikTok app, while also forcing a sale of that app's U.S. operations."
Why does the issue have to be framed as being with the "owner" instead of the "conduct". The conduct being "to disseminate propaganda, track users, and steal their private and proprietary data". It seems reasonable that such conduct should be always a "threat", regardless of where the "tech" company is domiciled.
Let's regulate propaganda (advertising), tracking users and stealing users' private and proprietary data.
I hang out on WeChat with a bunch of mostly western hardware hackers from all over the world who visit Shenzhen regularly .... the irony that in Trump's America you will soon need an illegal VPN to access some services, just like in China, has not escaped us
IMO the forced sale of TikTok is very worrying for American production in China; in any future escalation China will likely use that same move as a card to play.
Haven’t they been doing that already? At least requiring companies to use data centers in country so they can siphon/spy on the data? Is that any less nefarious than a forced sale in order to operate in the country?
Requiring data centers in the country is something Americans and all nations desire. How is that an argument in your mind?
China came into the US and is operating under the rules, while the US is forcing TikTok to sell or die. This is the US seizing TikTok. What US firm has China seized?
It would be shocking if in the next round of escalations, China doesn’t respond in a way which sufficiently addresses the magnitude of Huawei, TikTok, WeChat, Tencent.
They already banned US companies by the dozens. What next, force American companies to do joint ventures which the Chines parters hold a majority share? Oh that's right China has already done that.
What are they gonna do? Ban Google, Facebook, et al.? Oh wait, they’ve already been banning foreign companies for decades.
Or maybe they’ll force foreign companies to give up ownership to Chinese locals? Oh wait, they’ve already been doing that for decades (see GM, Volkswagen, Toyota, etc.)
Or maybe they’ll force foreign companies to let Chinese local companies to take control of their Chinese operations? Oh wait, they’ve already been doing that for decades (see Apple iCloud, Blizzard, etc.)
yeah if a company wants to come in and do business, china will usually force the company (especially if it has trade secrets) to create a partnership with a local firm for production, etc
The President's job is managing foreign affairs including foreign agents operating in the USA. There are disputable details with regard to proportionality, but not in the broad strokes.
You are reading it correctly but misinterpreting the implication.
At the minimum, you can’t publish an app on the Google’s or Apple’s app stores without a financial transaction. It’s essentially impossible to conduct business abroad (even “free” business) if you can’t legally transact.
Because "we can do it because some other country does it" is not a good thing. China can, and has arrested US citizens without due process, should we now be able to arbitrarily detain Chinese citizens in retaliation?
While I don't agree with surveillance capitalism, this does not seem the way to win while maintaining the moral high ground? Why not something like GDPR and more transparency.It may end up accomplishing the same thing, while providing more protection to US (and world) citizens. We don't have to stoop to their levels, we're trying to avoid authoritarianism, not fight fire with fire.
Like so many other attempted Trump executive actions, it really needs to be passed by Congress. Trump doesn't even have anyone competent in the White House telling him what he can and can't do.
Well this is the situation we're in because everyone since Bush abused executive orders. Obama's DACA order is a great example. It grants "Equitable Entitlements," which are pretty much Unalienable Rights.
Imagine if a president after Lincoln decided that they were going to reverse the Emancipation Proclamation. Would they be in authority to do so? Probably. But you're taking away rights at that point. DACA promised a bunch of kids with, "Hey, give us your names and addresses and we promise not to ever deport you," without a clear path to residence/citizenship for their family members.
It's a Pandora's Box that's been abused by both parties and it's going to come back to bite everyone at some point.
> Imagine if a president after Lincoln decided that they were going to reverse the Emancipation Proclamation. Would they be in authority to do so? Probably. But you're taking away rights at that point.
The emancipation proclamation was in no way a binding document. It was simply a "proclamation" of the stated position of the executive branch regarding slavery during Lincoln's administration, that they would cease to recognize its' legitimacy as law. The 13th amendment, (an act of congress which created a new law), legally freed the slaves. DACA is a very similar situation. An executive may choose which laws to prioritize for enforcement, and in this case that's exactly what Obama did. The president cannot, however, enforce a law that does not exist or that he wishes existed, which Trump is attempting to here.
> The emancipation proclamation was in no way a binding document.
It was a wartime military order during a war in which much of the relevant part of the country came under military occupation. It absolutely was binding.
> It was simply a "proclamation" of the stated position of the executive branch regarding slavery during Lincoln's administration, that they would cease to recognize its' legitimacy as law.
Not only was it not only that, it wasn't at all that. It was an order applied to the rebel territory then under occupation and other rebel territory as it came under occupation.
> The 13th amendment, (an act of congress which created a new law),
The 13th Amendment, as the name suggests, was a Constitutional Amendment. It was proposed to the States by an Act of Congress, but new law was created by ratification by the states. But most slaves were actually freed by the military occupation under the emancipation proclamation, not the 13th Amendment.
The emancipation proclamation was absolutely an executive order. It was issued on September 22, 1862. The 13th amendment didn't get passed federally and ratified by the states until 1865.
I agree the way it SHOULD work is that congress passes laws and executive orders describe how those laws get enacted.
But we've seen more powerful executive orders, with the most dangerous coming about during the W Bush administration. People are fine when a candidate they like uses those increasing powers of "good" but then scream when it's used by Bush/Trump for the same purposes.
Executive orders have limits, specifically to offices that are directly under the Executive Branch (military, homeland security, intelligence, etc.) and so far Trump's orders actually fallen carefully within those limits.
He's been testing the limits of those jurisdictions and federal judges have struck them back. In reality, they should have been doing that years ago with other presidents, but instead we got decades of predator drones, warrantless wiretapping and secret kill lists.
So a federal judge blocks something based on their opinion/interpretation and you interpret that as something having "no legal basis whatsoever"? You look at life through an interesting lens...
There is absolutely only censorship in Wechat(by China) and no free speech for that app. The lawsuit is based on that banning it violates someone's free speech. Ironic.
The key is that it's in a CA court, which historically will ban all Trump's orders, it does not really matter what those orders are about at all these days.
If an application were, positively and indisputably, spying on the conversations and data which takes place in the households of people with the highest security clearances, again if this were proven to be true, then a judge in San Francisco can stay an emergency (or other) executive order from the POTUS to ban the application because it is a national security threat.
I am just trying to understand exactly what power this judge has. It's really incredible. Is she determining as a matter of fact the application is not as POTUS asserts? Is she claiming that such a spy-ap, if in any way engaging with civilians and their communication, cannot be banned by the US government?
Last I knew, the tech companies are claiming that their conduct is their private conduct and anything they do to their users does not intersect with any 1st Amendment rights of their users.
So this is a private company and POTUS's order is about this company and therefore not infringing on anyone's 1st Amendment rights by banning it.
This positions the maker of any communcation-related app beyond the power of POTUS and his national security team and even Congress itself, unless the Constitution is suspended, as in time of war.
How is that irony? The freedom of speech in the first amendment restricts the govt, not to private enterprises. Are you complaining that a US judge ruled according to US law?
By far the most egregious overreach of Federal authority in recent memory. Noting about this is reasonable. Its 100% the act of a desperate and weak minded despot who knows nothing about technology but acts out of ignorance and pettiness. A truly illegal and Anti-American act.
Please don't post political flamewar rants to HN, regardless of how right you are or feel you are. It leads to more predictable and usually nastier discussion.
Treating foreign businesses on equal footing to domestic ones is a recent phenomena. Historically the US has leveraged trade policy to block foreign enterprise through the use of tariffs during periods of instability ( reconstruction ) and to protect early industries ( Pennsylvania steel industry in the mid-1800s ).
In the event that a country lacks a comparative advantage sufficient to balance trade and maintain local employment and economic growth; Then some degree of trade restriction is useful to ensure both stability and future growth. At 15-20% local unemployment, losing the perceived future growth engine(s) of the economy to foreign competition would not be politically acceptable to a majority of Americans.
How this plays out in the digital age is interesting. Tariffs are largely ineffective due to the nature of services. China has successfully grown a domestic tech industry from 0 - FANG equivalent by blocking all foreign competitors. It will be interesting if the EU seeks a similar strategy to grow its tech sector.
Just because some Magistrate Judge declares this a First Amendment violation does not mean it will stand up.
My guess is it goes to a Federal Judge who overturns it.
Presidents are allowed wide latitude in National Security matters.
I expect the sanctioning of WeChat will happen eventually.
I agree with where you're coming from, but really the underlying feeling is basically a rational response to the growing problem of surveillance capitalism. The rest of the world has just been a frog slowly boiling while USG siphons more and more of their citizens' information, but now there is a significant non-US player.
The right response would be something like a US GDPR, allowing US persons to opt out of surveillance foreign and domestic. But that would upset the Silicon Valley gravy train, so instead we get a ham-fisted response that deflects concern onto a tiny slice of the overall problem.
It's definitely executive overreach, but looking at how reasonable it is is the wrong approach. Trump regularly makes overreaching, token executive actions because they excite his base and distract the media from a larger scandal.
If you read the Executive Order (https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/executive-or...)
you'll see that this is yet another aspect of Trump's overall policy of confronting China's growing influence. You may disagree with that policy but I think it is a mistake to attribute these actions to "ignorance and pettiness".
In this case its hard not to... These two entities, not the thousands of other Chinese and foreign entities that do business in our country, are being targeted by what is effectively an authoritarian action. There is no national security issue here, at least none that has been disclosed nor processed by our national security teams or Congressional members. Instead, it - like most of Trump's actions, are done for personal gain and spite. And as a result is the most overreaching act by any POTUS in modern history.
Heaven forbid we treat Chinese businesses the same way they treat our businesses in China. You assholes want us to operate without reciprocity at a disadvantage to China and their behaviors because “China.” It’s gets really old. You accept their controls as the nature of affairs but demand we hold ourselves to a different standard.
I also expected the same arguments to prevail for TikTok though. It feels hard to argue that TikTok is somehow not a first amendment platform? The fact that political organising occurred on the platform should be case closed...
I don’t think Tiktok ever made it that far in the process so the question simply became moot after a change in ownership. Though I’ll be honest, I don’t really understand what’s going on with TikTok.
Is that your legal opinion? I mean the executive order does reference:
Emergency Economic Powers Act (50 U.S.C. 1701 et seq.) (IEEPA), the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1601 et seq.), and section 301 of title 3, United States Code,
Anybody have reference to a good legal analysis relative to those laws?
Are you okay with China banning Google, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Whatsapp, Netflix & hundreds more American companies (which have no ties to the U.S Government), but you're *not okay with the U.S banning one app that has ties to the chinese government?
My guess for the "real reason" Trump is after these companies: the demographics of their users skews younger and more liberal, and they're using these platforms for political organization. Specifically, my guess is that it's retaliation for the tanking of the Trump rally in Tulsa [0].
Free speech concerns on an app built by a nation where people have no rights that bans people for bringing up the Tiananmen Square massacre and Uyghur genocide, unreal.
The unreal part is that your don’t understand free speech rights, ie that the users possess them.
Are you claiming that ByteDance controlled the tanks used in Tiananmen square massacre or is conducting the Uyghur massacre? If so, the Trump administration screwed up by not presenting that evidence.
A quick search on TikTok shows that neither of those topics are banned on the platform, and they're not even banned from its autocomplete functionality - start typing either of them and it'll suggest it for you.
Imagine the Chinese government has dirt on tens of millions of American teenagers, a select few who will go on to become future leaders of this country. Really. Really. Bad. idea.
Banning an app is the typical move of an authoritarian regime. A democratic regime would first create laws to regulate Tiktok as well as domestic social networks. Of course, the authoritarian tactic is defended by American companies for two reasons: killing outside competition (in the name of patriotism) and at the same time avoiding the necessary regulation.
American companies aren’t supportive of this. Also, the USA doesn’t give the president unchecked power, which is why this injunction simply shuts the ban down until the government can prove in court that it is legal. An authoritarian regime would have no concept of independent judicial review.
The American democracy didn't respond to the authoritarian plans other than hoping that the judicial system will do its work. This is too little too late, especially when republicans are in a frenzy run to shape judicial benches all over the country. The democratic answer, as I mentioned above, would be for Congress to introduce proper legislation to answer to this new situation where a foreign company operates a social network.
Separation of powers and checks and balances are key to the USA not being an authoritarian country, otherwise we would be more like China where the official branch is only checked by their superiors (if any).
Congress is another check on executive power and is also checked itself. However, the judicial system is designed to be way more responsive and definitive than the legislative branch.
Exactly he opposite, Congress is (or should be) the main focus in a democracy because it has elected officials representing the nation. The judiciary should be the last resort in the case of indecision between the other two branches. In the dysfunctional American democracy exactly the opposite happens: people hope that judges will save democracy and the legislative becomes each year more powerless against the executive.
Seeing as Trump can’t do much without congress, I don’t get your point. His executive orders are limited m, and the judiciary is the branch that tells him that, the legislative branch has more power but doesn’t get to tell trump what his executive orders can do like the judicial system.
The point is that Congress should not let in the hands of a person like D.T. the important task of defining which companies should operate in the country. There should be legislation to determine this.
That isn't how our democracy works. Congress doesn't get to decide who gets to be president, the voters do. We don't have a prime minister.
An executive order can literally declare anything it wants. If it goes against the law, that is where the courts come in. Congress can't tell the president what he can and cannot write, if the president writes an order that goes against the law, that is where the courts come in (and that is what is happening).
Complete non-sense. The Congress has a prerogative of creating laws. It can decide what will happen in situations exactly like the social media case we see now. Executive orders, in a functioning democracy, should be the last resort for situations in which the president needs to act fast, for example, a war (already declared by Congress, by the way) or natural disaster situation.
What we see happening in the US is the fossilization of an authoritarian regime where the president creates de facto laws in the stroke of his pen and the Senate supports his undemocratic behavior, while Congress is kept powerless. The only thing left to check for abuses is the judiciary system, which has not been elected in the first place, and by the way can only limit the worst illegal excesses. It is essentially a "constitutional autocracy" in practice.
This ridiculous. WeChat is the least free speech platform there is. It exists to monitor Chinese abroad and have pro-China news.
I believe there was a video where a Chinese United Nations member was telling a Chinese audience that every member of the United Nations has a nationality. This opposes the values of the United Nations and clearly China is there to abuse the system.
> who argued that prohibitions would violate the free-speech rights of millions of Chinese-speaking Americans who rely on it for communication.
By the same thinking Comcast should not be able to cut off someone's internet service (for not paying a bill) because doing so would violate that person's free speech rights (the ability to send email). Ditto for hosting providers, registrars and so on.
In this case the government sees a threat to the general public and believes it is right for getting rid of that threat. Really in a way like the classic 'can't yell fire in a crowded theater' argument.
But government did not establish the precise nature of imminent "national security" threat by these apps, nor did establish that these apps violated American laws.
Just to play devil’s advocate, I can imagine a game theoretic scenario in which revealing what we know about let’s say a deliberate cryptographic vulnerability will potentially make the other party switch to another vulnerability we don’t know, or reveal our capabilities in discovering the specific class of such vulnerabilities, therefore withholding information is advantageous. I.e they can’t go “nobody tell China, but this is the precise reason” in certain scenarios. Not saying that is necessarily the case here, but definitely a possibility.
The Supreme Court if the United States disagrees with you. Free Speech rights are projected in public forums operated by private entities. Shopping malls are a classic example.
ISPs, as a utility, should not be allowed and indeed in most places in the world aren't allowed to cut service from people unless it is necessary to maintain their operations.
The analogy breaks down here, allowing WeChat does not infringe on positive or negative liberty of much of anyone.
If TikTok and WeChat's usage becomes more widespread in the voting population of the US, they would have a lot of influence by controlling what kind of content its users sees; e.g., FB has been criticized many times for this, namely performing psychological experiments on its users
I recall this quote by former KGB informant Yuri Bezmenov:
> The main emphasis of the KGB is not in the area of intelligence at all. Only about 15% of time, money, and manpower is spent on espionage and such. The other 85% is a slow process which we call either ideological subversion or active measures ... or psychological warfare
The difference between TikTok and WeChat and FB/Google/Twitter is obvious: the former are to some degree controlled by China and the latter are private entities.
I understand there are services part of WeChat that are essential to users, so I would hope there is a good compromise here. I don't see why the communication component of the app can't continue to exist but WeChat is a lot more than a chat app.
The irony is that we were just about to witness US govt forcing said "private entities" to ban specific applications.
They're completely different.
to some degree? No, they are completely controlled by China.
> "WeChatApp spies on the content that all users send to each other, including Americans. The results are fed into their censorship of Chinese users" [1]
-
Key findings rom the Citizen lab research report, which is quite comprehensive [2]:
> Documents and images transmitted entirely among non-China-registered accounts undergo content surveillance wherein these files are analyzed for content that is politically sensitive in China.
>Upon analysis, files deemed politically sensitive are used to invisibly train and build up WeChat’s Chinese political censorship system.
[1] https://twitter.com/jsrailton/status/1258391908319137797
[2] https://citizenlab.ca/2020/05/we-chat-they-watch/
This is a matter of perspective.
Do you think the question is "if the CCP tells Tencent to do something, will they do it?", or "does Tencent do anything the CCP doesn't tell it to do?"?
I think that difference is not that wide as people believe. Throwing money into advertising on any platform will get you close or beyond ideological subversion or active measures.
All you have to do is look at the radicalization and the polarization of left and right in the US and you will see you don't need a state controlled entity at all.
FB/Twitter/Tiktok are different because they control WHAT you see. None of them show things chronologically. Their algorithms show things that are popular, and the weights they use are trade secrets. Being able to influence ideas takes classic advertising, or even targeted advertising, to an entirely new level. It has an entirely different set of legal and ethical challenges.
To bypass the filter then I slightly modify images to change their hash, or record video of the video/image/text. Maybe soon they’ll start making fake likes from friends so that people can’t use inactivity as a way of detecting shadowbans, or maybe they’ll make the posts only visible to a small subset of friends.
https://battlepenguin.com/tech/facebook-and-the-silent-bob-e...
It is much easier to enforce laws on a US-based company than a foreign one.
Continue is the wrong word. Nothing is done by legislation or these companies themselves to properly regulate these platforms.
There is also nothing preventing foreign influence on U.S.-based company platforms, which is already happening, and has been happening, unchecked.
I have used WeChat daily for over three years. There is not a single instance in which I have been unduly influenced. I use it to message, video chat, and pay for things. That simply is not true for YouTube, Twitter, Google, Apple, etc. I can't even go to YouTube without having unremovable, unhidable ads for Trump. We also have a situation where the sitting president has rented out the YouTube homepage for an entire week prior to the election. It's naivety, and frankly delusional, to think the U.S. is somehow at threat by WeChat and not the multitude of sly behavior going on with U.S.-based companies.
U.S.-based companies and culture have long been driven by highly concentrated special interest groups, from Hollywood to Wall Street to Silicon Valley, and all of this amounts to undue influence and control upon the American people, who have been manipulated into playing the game.
Believe it or not, US foreign policy people put out enormous amounts of propaganda and they got the US to repeal a ban on importing news from state regime change news like Radio Free Europe in 2012.
Personally, I am suspicious of all of these corporations, but I'd rather all of them be allowed than the USG be able to dictate who is allowed to say what. That always works out so well. Foreign government news agencies and companies are much more likely to criticize the (obviously insane) USG on grounds that fundamentally disagree with policy direction rather than the tactical disagreement you find in the US mainstream press.
There's a very good (but LONG) documentary you can watch about the FP community called "A Very Heavy Agenda". Part 2 covers how the US FP community responded to the Ukraine presidential election crisis and Russian interference in 2014-2015. https://averyheavyagenda.com/
The fact that we regard their coverage as propaganda and not ours is quite telling given the entanglements between government and the media here, the ownership by a small group of large corporations, and the ability of larger corporations to yank ad dollars when they hear something they don't like.
The only honest position imo is to allow all comers to state their viewpoint, which is the foundation of liberal democracy and enshrined in the first amendment. Just keep their viewpoint in mind when watching as you would for an American network. Also, don't just accept something because someone authoritative said something, it has to fit into a logical picture of the world.
We're not at war with Russia lol and god help us if we were. They have nukes!
So either WeChat, Facebook, and whoever can facilitate protected speech among their users (in this case you're protecting the users specifically) or the various platforms are treated as publishers which still wouldn't allow the US government to prevent or compel speech (protecting the organization).
It's possible they can get away with banning the payment portions of the app but the outright ban appears to be prior restraint of free speech by the government.
As a non-American, my question is why does WeChat have first amendment rights? It's not an American company.
In that framework, the US government is not to violate anyone's freedom of speech anywhere in the world. That doesn't seem to be what's at issue in this case though; the case was brought by a group of US-based WeChat users on grounds that the ban would restrict their freedom to communicate with people in China who are unable to use other communication services.
> Yes.
We might also observe that the only mention of "people" in the first amendment gives them the rights to assemble and to petition the government.
Freedoms of speech and the press are phrased as restrictions on Congress, not as rights given to anyone (and this is probably the main justification for extending first amendment rights to foreigners, which appears to be a popular but not universal viewpoint).
of Free Speech is arbitrarily granted, then it's not free speech, and that violates Prior Restraint, at least, if the Courts are not also arbitrarily deciding who's free speech deserves to be protected.
Note the subject.
So yes, the First Amendment is okay with any censoring of information by a foreign government or company.
"Article 19.
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers."
I don't see any mention of government there. Why limit the interpretation of free speech to the US constitution? How do you reconcile ideologically or philosophically that it is not ok for US Congress to limit speech but ok for other powerful entities?
Because that's literally what the grandparent asked. You appear to have a completely different question.
Also, the Chinese communist party/government has recently decided to tighten the noose on its private companies: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/17/business/china-communist-... which makes wechat a national threat.
It is documented fact that FB, Google and the rest are tapped by US intelligence agencies. Anyone remembers Snowden? We know for fact that pretty much every single global US network works with the US government, but when comes to TikTok and WeChat something yet to be proven(I am sure they do but the evidence is weaker than the evidence if US internet companies working with the US government on surveillance). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)
EU was trying to fix this through GDPR and such but US seems to desperately wanting to embrace the Chinese model and with US cultural lead, this will inevitably open the way to other governments ban FB, Google and the others because if TikTok is a national security risk to the USA then obviously Facebook and Google are to them. Probably Amazon and all other ad networks too. Anything that can be started from a dorm room will no longer be able to go global.
This will lead to a world where if you want to do a global project you will have to incorporate in every country you want to operate. It is even possible that internet to break up in patches and operating even a forum website becomes like Coca-Cola opening a plant in another country.
It is a very bleak future for humanity if you ask me. Can be good for local businesses though.
I wish the US went the EU path(regulating data handling) instead of Russa/China path(banning) so we could still have global networks and kids in their dorms could continue creating products with global impact.
What a shame.
> Yeah these are real problems, I agree. And US citizens should continue to put pressure on their politicians to pass more privacy-related legislation
> But my point wasn't really about data collection, it was about influence and content-control. People are readily influenced by memes, ads, headlines, etc which is why such platforms are so problematic because people are not comfortable with how much influence they have and how easily misinformation is spread.
> What am I less comfortable with is leaving a path open for China to have that same kind of control in the US as FB/Google/etc, but without being subject to US laws like our private entities are.
US can regulate the internet companies to mitigate the risk when keeping the global community intact. Make foreign services run on US servers when serving US citizens, make them disclose what and how they process the data. Then if they don't obey the laws can be enforced to obey the laws. Which law TikTok broke? There is no law forbidding being Chinese and successful, that's the US political system failing to have what they want and embracing Chinese ways of doing things. It could be also a failure of the US market to stay competitive due to monopolies, giving lead to China in innovation.
But somehow the freedom loving Americans cannot be told to wear a mask but can be told which app the can use, just like in China. It's mind boggling.
In the 1960s it created a government-funded television network to offer alternative programming. But television is an old medium, and less of a source of information today -- partly because it's been supplanted by social media.
It seems like there's inevitably going to be a need for some kind of content moderation -- but maybe that could be handled by local librarians, local newspapers. (At least that's a solution that actually scales.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_LifeLog
Also, as Snowden has shown us, the line between private and state control is very, very thin.
Trust, but verify.
How is for example Facebook better because it isn't somehow tied in to the US government? On the one hand the state still have access to all the data from Facebook it wants (NSA, warrants) but on the other they have a hard time protecting its users privacy rights. I'm not convinced private entities are any better. For a US citizen maybe Facebook is better as a private entity but for everyone else outside the US?
Personally I would rather put my data in a Chinese-owned Tiktok than an American one because of the extreme amount of data already flowing into US services. Even if Tiktok is used to spy on me I can't see how it would be any worse for an European than putting more data into US services.
But my point wasn't really about data collection, it was about influence and content-control. People are readily influenced by memes, ads, headlines, etc which is why such platforms are so problematic because people are not comfortable with how much influence they have and how easily misinformation is spread.
What am I less comfortable with is leaving a path open for China to have that same kind of control in the US as FB/Google/etc, but without being subject to US laws like our private entities are.
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/08/ch...
First they came for the uighurs, and I didn't speak up...
A good example: in a discussion of this case I was reading today in Chinese the author ironically noted that he couldn't summarize the US government's position because in a large WeChat group the content would be "deemed as against the rules" (视为违规)
Such is the state of WeChat discourse in 2020.
I also feel for my friends who have family in China, and want to stay connected with them through a medium that is widely adopted.
There is a cultural standard that is just different in China when it comes to free speech, and it's hard for most people in the US to accept that.
As to the censorship point, from my experience using wechat in the past people rarely discuss politics on there, unless it's to make fun of the US political reality TV. Perhaps not actively discussing internal Chinese politics is considered a form of self-censorship.
That's the reason email still exists today and will continue to exist long after today's fad app goes out of style.
For example, it's pretty normal for Americans to bicker about politics and criticize the government, especially because of its highly polarized political landscape.
Many mainland chinese vehemently defend the idea that the government is truly representative of the people (similar to how the US constitution envisioned the state being a true representation of the People)
Debating that the government is an evil brainwashing machine with these people would be akin to coming out as gay in a conservative religious family, i.e. it would be bound to negatively affect relationships
The question is, why CCP won given that KMT is backed by the US (advanced weapons supply, money, and so on) while CCP was so weak in terms of army?
Because the vast majority of the people (most are farmers and industry workers) joined and helped CCP.
I think that's why.
I prefer a team of government which has proved it has a true vision, which has proved its ability to execute the vision, which has proved its ability to the lead the people to a better future, which has proved its ability to protect the people from imperialism such as what we're seeing in recent years, which is aiming at and actually eliminating poverty from the vast majority of people... rather than a government which is elected by big corps.
Edit 1: BTW, I myself believed in the so-called US-style democracy and election, until I saw what happened in those "taught by the US" democracy countries such as the Middle-east, Ukraine, Taiwan, Hong Kong, India, several South American countries, and especially, in America itself, in the past decades, especially in recent years. Trust me, I believed it in my heart.
Edit 2: I just got to know the name of Andre Vltchek the independent journalist who got killed recently, I read several excerpts of his reports. I think he knows something about the international things.
"I prefer a team of government which has proved it has a true vision"
And how is this team formed - lottery, nepotism ?, military take over ?
It's easier to run
than it is to run speech-to-text over bulk data and run the same search. Obviously that's a trivial example, but digital text (i.e. not handwritten) is always going to be easier to parse than speech.Is sending physical mail / calling someone on the phone impossible in China?
Many Chinese do indeed think about this. I've heard people quite literally say, "Don't put that in the chat, we don't want trouble". I've seen group chats get blocked for saying the "wrong" thing.
I also hate to see the US essentially giving credence to China's approach of blocking things by following suit. The US could take the high road (there are a number of legal approaches that would help and still be "American" in spirit) but has chosen to take the bait instead.
I've heard people say exactly the same thing about Facebook. I guess the difference is that it's usually in regards to incriminating messages (e.g. drugs), and not censorship of ideological speech.
Self-censoring on non-secure, non-anonymous messaging platforms, and especially in group chats, is not necessarily a bad thing. Consider anything you write in a group chat as public, because there's it easily could be.
I also fear what I say on American sites for similar reasons, and because I’ve dealt with normal people trying to hunt me down just because of online comments.
https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/News/visas-news/2...
Maybe falsifying the documents counts as another charge to pressure someone they are holding, or legal counsel suggested it to ensure that any information found could be readily used against the person in a legal preceding, or plausible deniability cover for FOIA requests. I can think of a lot of ways that asking someone for something you already know about can be beneficial and no ways that it is detrimental.
They used to ask if you had been involved in persecutions associated with Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945. It still asks
> Do you seek to engage in or have you ever engaged in terrorist activities, espionage, sabotage, or genocide?
I don't think anybody would ever seriously answer "yes" to that question, but if the US government wants to deport an individual and it's discovered they lied on their ESTA application, it's more straightforward to deport them.
Use of the 'Moments' function (a photo-orientated miniblog) that was quite popular when WeChat was newer has declined significantly and is not mainly focused on self-promotion (selling products, often food products) via WeChat, the odd personal post, photos of the odd teambuilding exercise. Groups popular for colleagues, ex-colleagues, ex-classmates to keep in contact with each other, even this use-case has been cracked down on especially international companies. The demographic for these friends/colleagues is mainly 20s-40s professionals in business services or IT; out of ~500 contacts there'll typically be 10-15 Moment posts. In chats people ask about VPNs and such things offline.
Political discussion for younger people happens much more on Weibo than WeChat.
For older people I see using on the bus or subway Groups are still a big social thing, and this group isn't going to be very anti-government as they're the generation that's benefited from the housing and associated booms of the last couple of decades.
Two anecdotes that partially answer your question.
On the one hand, I am risking causing the group I am a member of to be banned, or my personal data being locked out from myself.
On the other hand, my friends are mostly higher class of the society that naturally align with the government, just like elite capitalists like neoliberal doctrine. The discussion seldom ends in pleasant outcomes.
This is an interesting argument against walled gardens I don't often see: that it gives your government an easy chokepoint to prevent users from using software it doesn't like.
Much easier than having to bother with a VPN, and many Chinese people are already used to jumping through such hoops.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Do the Hong Kong protest crackdown not scare anyone else?
Now they have an excuse. It won’t look suspicious if they communicate to each other on channels that can’t be monitored by their oppressive government.
There’s great alternatives to wechat that are secure by design, rather than spy-by-design, such as telegram or signal.
And the US has done hundred of renditions without trial, so while far from the scale of China, US spy agencies still do some awful things.
And _their_ point, which came first and you came here to argue against, is CCP monitoring is especially bad for particular political reasons.
As for me, I believe allowing WeChat to become anything like the structural institution it is in China in any part of the US would be a mistake. Imagine if Google was as controlled by and as much of a cheerleader for the US government as WeChat is for the Chinese, and the kind of threat that would pose to European sovereignty.
- "allow WeChat to gain an even greater foothold on American soil" - does this mean have more users?
- "minimize total damage" - it would be good if you articulated the damage being done
- "Imagine if Google was as controlled by and as much of a cheerleader for the US government as WeChat is for the Chinese" - according to Julian Assange, https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/
Maybe they have lost some influence in the current administration (maybe not), but Facebook has by all appearances been eager to take their place.
The US government can’t be seen openly wielding large internet companies for its interests. But any modern state needs to. And so it does it within the paradigm of the West: public denial, private understandings.
The difference between China/Wechat and US/FB/Google is one is out in the open, and the other is covered by a fig leaf.
Imagine that! Imagine if some US agency had a global dragnet surveillance network!
Yet that didn't happen. Why are things turning out differently in the internet age?
The USPS did do exactly that. Read about how abolitionists attempted to spread anti-slavery literature through the federal postal system in the antebellum era, and how the post office decided it would suppress those mailings for being supposedly insurrectionary.
If you ask a random Chinese citizen "are you okay with the government listening in to your phone calls?", most people would say Yes. Having the government listen in and having government presence on the streets makes us feel safe, because most of us trust our government. Sure, it has it's issues, but in general, the government acts in our favor, and without it we'd have far lower standards of living.
The US is a total polar opposite in this regard.
Another is that in days before the internet, the technology for small numbers of people to cause mass violence did not exist.
But also, the government in the 19th century was much weaker than it became in the 20th and now 21st centuries.
Apps are truly no different.
The only time they happen to coincide is, by definition, in the case of autocracy.
All Chinese companies operate under the direction and control of the CCP; we can arrive at the conclusion that a company is a public minister if companies are people, and they act at the behest of their home government.
https://law.justia.com/constitution/us/article-2/32-the-cond...
As long as the USA remains a country that is bound by rule of law rather than rule of dictate, one can't reasonably argue with due process simply by invoking the fact that the USA is a sovereign nation, because the US government is comprised of more than just its executive leadership. The executive branch is bound by laws as drafted by the legislative branch and interpreted by the judicial branch.
1) The CCP has to have a representative on the board. The ccp say it's like a union rep(!) since they are communists. But they don't have a veto, just a vote like other board members.
2) This condition is only for companies over a certain size.
3) This also applies to large foreign companies not just domestic.
That may not be the case for much longer:
"According to the new provisions, private firms will need a certain amount of CCP registered employees, which is already a long-term practise in large private firms but not smaller ones."
https://www.asiatimesfinancial.com/ccp-announces-plan-to-tak...
1. The CCP has advanced access to the company’s plans.
2. The representative can always say something like, “this would meet with disapproval by the party”.
It’s not a formal veto, but it is an implied threat.
In the US at least, the claim that “all Chinese companies are controlled government” is thrown around way too often without evidence backing it up. People seem to accept it as common sense that doesn’t need fact-checks anymore. I’m not saying you are one of them; I just wish we all verify non-obvious claims for our own benefits
These are obvious consequences of being required to have a CCP board member.
The government having a board member is by definition a form of government control.
These are not ‘non-obvious’ claims and as such they don’t need citations.
If you want to argue that somehow these conclusions aren’t reasonable, by all means do so. But no citation is needed.
Board members have access to the CEO and other managers, therefore the CCP board member can obviously make statements to management about what the CCP does and does not approve of.
No citation is needed to know that these are the consequences of having a CCP board member.
And if that power isn't properly applied, the courts will intervene.
What "autocracy" are you referring to?
Or are you arguing Obama was an autocrat because his decisions were struck down by the Supreme Court?
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/06/the-sup...
If you feel that that’s autocratic, then your beef is with the folks back in 1776.
Don't think that this was a well-reasoned decision with careful justification about the causes, potential, solutions, and impacts on US economics and society. It was a guy asking "what can we do to create some leverage over this adversary I don't like? (and was just told about yesterday)"
Don't deceive yourself that this is some step in a principled fight. If it were that, we'd have slapped tariffs/embargoes and more on Russia a couple of years ago. We'd be implementing measures against Venezuela, Myanmar, North Korea, a whole host of countries doing similar or worse. I haven't heard a peep about those.
It's not good when government operates on a whim. Don't deceive yourself about what principle (and person) you're getting behind.
Many, many powers falling under executive branch (and agencies') regulatory authority, which Congress does not go into N-th level detail about how to implement, have to go through significant public and internal review, and have good explanation.
If you're unfamiliar with this, you should read:
https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R41546.pdf
https://www.federalregister.gov/uploads/2011/01/the_rulemaki...
It seems reasonable to assume that you’re familiar with this concept, so I’ll just chalk it up to a misunderstanding.
“ Did Trump lawfully repeal the Obama-era order that shielded young immigrants who were brought to this country as children?
No, the court said in a 5-4 ruling written by Chief Justice Roberts. He said that while the president had the legal authority to revoke the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, his administration failed to give a reasoned explanation for ending a policy that encouraged about 700,000 immigrants to register with the government to obtain work permits and avoid deportation. ”
The standard of review for free speech cases are way, way higher than the APA. The APA just means the executive can't blatantly lie about why it did enacted some regulation, and has to come up with a facially valid reason. The standard under the 1st Amendment requires a good reason.
Right now, all things happened according to the slated procedures, including the challenge in court.
Trump and his supporters shouldn't expect otherwise, if they truly believe in rule of law.
Privacy laws with escalating penalties up to a ban would accomplish the same thing, not just for for the high-profile panic examples of the moment, but for problems of this sort in general.
This ban is effectively a Tit-for-tat. Thats it.
Or, you could say, Tik-for-Tok.
But for me as a german, I actually neither want the chinese, nor the US-government (nor the german government) to controll my communication.
IMO those laws are being abused in this case to suppress speech, but the laws themselves had a legitimate purpose.
America has never been invaded by foreign gunships and forced to allow foreign merchants to import opium to addict its citizens in order to fix their own countries balance of payments problems.
Opium Wars
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars
If America were to experience something like that, how might the experience change America's future commercial policies?
If Pearl Harbour and 9/11 are any guide, America might become less tolerant of foreign businesses operating in its markets.
But then, America is a complicated marketplace.
The Promotion and Marketing of OxyContin: Commercial Triumph, Public Health Tragedy
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2622774/
By that standard surely Korea can complain endlessly about China and Yuan Shikai lording it over their kingdom in the 1880s, and the Czechs can cry over their subjugation for centuries by Austria-Hungary, etc. etc.
In 1949 Mao Zedong famously declared "China has stood up." Apparently though he meant, "We're such a weak people that we cry to mommy everytime others demand reciprocity."
160 years in the past?
The Chinese reparations, totalling $US 61 billion is today's dollar equivalents, were only completed in 1940. Then China sided with the Allies in WWII. 15 million Chinese lost their lives in that war.
But I wouldn't characterise Chinese trade policy as victimhood. Chinese entrepreneurs don't rely on any such arguments. They just make products that western consumers want to buy.
That was under the Kuomintang regime, who fled to Taiwan in 1949
This is like saying that the Poles didn't deserve reparations from Germany for WWII because the pre-war republic wasn't restored and instead there was a new regime. The country and people exist independently of the governing system.
This doesn't really make sense. The Second Sino-Japanese war predates the European theater by 2 years. It'd be more accurate to say the US sided with China to help them fight a mutual enemy.
These other national examples are nation vs nation, where an outside oppressor came & then went. Missing from your anti-empathy sentiments is recognition that these peoples never were given their own sovereignty & resources to rebuild themselves. The most injurious piece may have ended but they remain bound up in the impacts all the the same.
I vaguely say “other people” because this notion is what entices racial sentiments. It’s no different than changing the adjective for a different skin tone, and saying they too deserve their “own self rule”
This implies “blacks” don’t have self rule as it stands today, which I disagree with. In 2020, there exists no legislature that disfavors someone based on their skin color or ethnic background. We do however have the inverse, policies that give advantages to those who have specific skin color.
This predilection for a specific kind of racism, a one-way street attitude, is what fuels our current divide. I need not say more.
In one case, the oppressors left & sovereignty was restored.
In the other case, the law decided it had to change to try to bring itself into alignment with some basic human rights & regards.
I do think the people living under now-more-just law still struggle, still face discrimination, and are victim to a system that was imposed on them & a system which does not favor them. I don't think it's unreasonable to identify this gap, and this "one way street" attitude seems, to me, restorative & to be what equity & justice demands. And at times, it feels like it's still not enough, that some people- some persistent negative forces- remain fixed & focused on exclusion & discrimination & their biases, in a way that makes me think perhaps these victim-folk do deserve entirely higher levels of freedom from these oppressive forces that they still face, beyond merely our ongoing & too-controversial attempts at rebalacing.
At this point they have redress. They have agency. They even have adulthood, much to the chagrin of the Democratic party. Blacks and Indians should be like a wiser Arab nation. They have a pool of funds. Use it to make a better world for their people. Stop keeping people on the plantation/reservation.
Redlining remained legal into the 70s, and was continued with the thinnest of fig leafs concealing it into the 90s. Covert discrimination in loan and rental applications continues to this day.
Many studies repeated even today continue to confirm that racial discrimination in job applications remains a very real thing.
Wealth is strongly generational, and we aren't even 1 generation away from dramatic and legalized inequalities.
Your last paragraph is the most telling. Were black and native americans somehow not adults before today? Pools of funds? Have you ever driven through a reservation that wasn't a casino? The many underinvested urban areas that remain from the era of white flight and redlining?
We see you and what you are thinking here clearly. The world is moving on from such bigotry, as should you.
Native Americans can invest in themselves. When they take the patrimony of the Federal government, they don’t. https://youtu.be/pQ4lnDy2xnQ
The same is true of the blacks. Before LBJ decimated them, they were on their way to be independent. They were starting to make money equal to whites. They were establishing their own cities with arts like Harlem. Then the Democrats came in offering free government money. The women just had to kick out their men to get it. They should also pursue abortions since that was empowering. Now blacks have stayed at 13% of the population for decades. They are impoverished. They believe they are victims.
But I a person that won’t vote Democrat because of this and continuing evil. I am the bigot. Ok. I’ll take that title. I am a bigot for knowing that blacks can govern their own destiny without the white man from the Federal government. The same for natives.
Native American children were effectively kidnapped from their families well into the 1970s. To imply the suffering, segregation, and racism ceased 160 years ago shows how entirely misinformed the general populace is. Wounded Knee was only 110 years ago.
The implication that their poverty is self-inflicted is a massive exercise in reductionism, and completely neglects to mention the hardships that manifest in these areas exclusively due to the inaccuracies you're spouting.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Yes affirmative action is just a bandaid, but it’s necessary due to the symptoms of injustice and oppression still being present.
You seem to be of the opinion that we have as a society attempted to resolve this imbalance with wealth and government programs. However due to the unfortunate characteristics of those affected communities they have failed. Likewise, if these communities would only be like other groups of your choosing they would be much better off and societies' efforts at redress would not have been wasted. Is this correct?
I think this might be relevant.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/01/08/how-democr...
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and not post in the flamewar style generally, we'd be grateful.
Remember any black person having the audacity of thinking on their own is not black. https://youtu.be/We6Qr9-dDn8
While it's true that the Sino-British Joint Declaration placed some temporary restrictions on China's policies regarding that region, this is an agreement between sovereign nations, thus reaffirming China's sovereignty.
I suppose that, in a sense, all international treaties are a loss of some degree of sovereignty, but in that sense nearly every country in the world has lost sovereignty in that time.
Yeah, it's absurd. It's like if somebody would appeal to the memory of the Battle of the Alamo.
The trade relations that many Americans consider unbalanced are the result of the US and China being at very different stages of economic development. When China began opening up to foreign investment in the 1980s, China had no capital to invest abroad. It didn't matter if the US market was technically open to Chinese investment - there was no possibility of Chinese investment in the first place. The only question was what conditions would be placed on foreign investment in China. Reciprocity didn't matter, because trade flows were entirely in one direction.
China progressively opened up from the 1980s onward. WTO membership brought a huge number of changes, including drastic reductions in tariffs and a lot of privatization, breakup and restructuring of state industries.
Just to illustrate my point: people complain that China used to not let foreign auto manufacturers own a majority stake in their Chinese subsidiaries. The unfairness is supposedly that Chinese auto companies can own their American subsidiaries. But there were no Chinese auto companies that could possibly have competed in the American market anyways. The reciprocity argument was entirely theoretical. China now has more competitive electric vehicle companies, and it also has more open foreign investment policies for auto manufacturing.
One final point is that foreign companies benefitted massively from the ability to invest in China. The idea that China pulled a fast one and took advantage of the developed world just doesn't align with reality.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirteen_Colonies#Economic_pol...
1 - http://community.weber.edu/weberreads/salutary_or_benign_neg...
Even taking New York was kind of a side effect of New England being nearby and English gradually settling down from Connecticut, rather than part of some grand strategy.
Mercantilism was the law, but by defacto neglect Americans were trading with everyone with very few consequences until after the French and Indian war. It simply was too expensive for the British to enforce.
By contrast, the British Empire continued to interfere with American trade long after the American Revolution, prompting the War of 1812 where the British Empire burned the first White House to the ground. Imagine if the British had burned the Daoguang Emperor's palace to the ground?
My point is I'm not belittling the subjugation of the Chinese under the British Empire. But at the same time, lets not attempt to rewrite American history. In regards to the British Empire, the Americans and Chinese have more in common than propagandists on both sides would have us believe.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Nanking#Terms
The American Revolution was much more about representation and the rights that British Parliament held (or, from the American perspective, didn't hold) over the colonies. The primary effect of mercantilism is exclusive trading agreements with the ruling empire, which was not being argued against by the colonials. It even says as much in the paragraph you linked:
"However, the colonists took pains to argue that they did not oppose British regulation of their external trade; they only opposed legislation which affected them internally."
It's not an equal comparison to China and the Opium Wars.
But to counter your claim that mercantilism wasn't the inspiration for the American Revolution, I recommend reading up on the "Sons of Liberty" movement that rose up after the Stamp Act of 1765. [0]
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stamp_Act_1765
The point I am making is that the primary instigator for the war was not "we can't legally trade with the Dutch/French/whomever", which is the monopolistic cornerstone of mercantilism. I'm curious if you consider taxation to be a mercantilist policy.
It might be helpful to understand why China does what it does. It doesn't really excuse it though.
Boxer Rebellion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boxer_Rebellion
Eight-Nation Alliance
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-Nation_Alliance
China lost, was forced to cede Hong Kong to the British for 99 years, and paid 668,661,220 taels of silver from 1901 to 1939, equivalent in 2010 to $US 61 billion on a purchasing power parity basis.
A large portion of the reparations paid to the United States was diverted to pay for the education of Chinese students in U.S. universities under the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Program. To prepare the students chosen for this program an institute was established to teach the English language and to serve as a preparatory school. When the first of these students returned to China they undertook the teaching of subsequent students; from this institute was born Tsinghua University.
I know symbolically this is of great importance to the Chinese, but at the time it was an easy thing for the Emperor to give up given he was on the losing end of a war.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong_Island#British_colon...
The China of that history has been displaced by an undemocratic revolutionary regime that conquered the Chinese people.
Tsinghua University is a world leader in AI and software technology.
Chinese engineers and entrepreneurs are competing in world markets with innovative products and services, not gunships. 100 million American users of TikTok appreciate this.
Have you considered the possibility that China is not trying to take over the world, but rather to be a part of it?
https://uwaterloo.ca/tsinghua-uwaterloo-joint-research-centr...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_China
China has a long history with isolationism or distrust of foreign powers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haijin
Rather, it justifies it by saying that 1) it's communist and 2) a developing country.
It’s rational for China to limit Apple and Google and for the USA to limit WeChat.
This will remain so as long as a basically lawless state exists internationally, which seems to be the case following the collapse of post Cold War globalism in the 20-teens.
Sidenote, I've noticed more and more people joining Telegram to evade a potential WeChat ban. I wonder if they're going to stay on Telegram.
Isn't the whole point of using wechat is its large chinese userbase? AFAIK telegram is banned in china, so I'm not sure why that'd be the logical choice.
I hate wechat for its user experience, when my mom need to say something to me she usually send wechat message to my wife, because I check my wechat for, maybe, once per week. But a lot of Chinese living in the US seem to not mind its user experience, and like to use wechat as the way of contact each other. I think one of the reason might be that in the US there's not one dominate IM app that everyone is using, so wechat is like the next best thing that at lease every Chinese is using. Now a lot of Chinese also start to use Telegram there's hope (but I won't hold my breath for it).
The onus is on the Trump administration to show that the immediate national security risk of letting WeChat continue to operate during legal proceedings exceeds the impact on Chinese Americans. Clearly there was no proof to make this case, because this was hardly about national security in the first place.
I'm sure the Trump legal team anticipated this, and also know that the injunction will continue into next year, so this entire "ban" is probably a political move. Trump can go into the debates/ads: "look how tough I am on China, Biden will lift the WeChat ban first chance he gets!"
If they at least wanted to be consistent they should have banned smartphone chat apps (and there are some good reasons to do this.) That probably still wouldn't have been legal because of the free speech thing.
I wish there was something decent I could recommend to people but Apple has done a fantastic job of killing internet chat apps.
Like a lot of what this administration does in foreign trade restrictions, this was more of a bargaining threat than an actual action. This is really about control of TikTok by a foreign government, which is an actual foreign trade issue.
Why does the issue have to be framed as being with the "owner" instead of the "conduct". The conduct being "to disseminate propaganda, track users, and steal their private and proprietary data". It seems reasonable that such conduct should be always a "threat", regardless of where the "tech" company is domiciled.
Let's regulate propaganda (advertising), tracking users and stealing users' private and proprietary data.
Because focusing on the owner lets us shoehorn this into a nationalistic us versus them argument.
Focusing on the conduct will turn it into a "The people" versus "Powerful media magnates".
I’d argue at least it’s more explicit (to sell).
The issue with being forced to sell is that it's essentially economic warfare.
China came into the US and is operating under the rules, while the US is forcing TikTok to sell or die. This is the US seizing TikTok. What US firm has China seized?
It would be shocking if in the next round of escalations, China doesn’t respond in a way which sufficiently addresses the magnitude of Huawei, TikTok, WeChat, Tencent.
Or maybe they’ll force foreign companies to give up ownership to Chinese locals? Oh wait, they’ve already been doing that for decades (see GM, Volkswagen, Toyota, etc.)
Or maybe they’ll force foreign companies to let Chinese local companies to take control of their Chinese operations? Oh wait, they’ve already been doing that for decades (see Apple iCloud, Blizzard, etc.)
Here’s a list: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_...
At the minimum, you can’t publish an app on the Google’s or Apple’s app stores without a financial transaction. It’s essentially impossible to conduct business abroad (even “free” business) if you can’t legally transact.
Congress can pass such a law and the President can sign it.
Because we are a nation of laws, not autocratic whims.
Imagine if a president after Lincoln decided that they were going to reverse the Emancipation Proclamation. Would they be in authority to do so? Probably. But you're taking away rights at that point. DACA promised a bunch of kids with, "Hey, give us your names and addresses and we promise not to ever deport you," without a clear path to residence/citizenship for their family members.
It's a Pandora's Box that's been abused by both parties and it's going to come back to bite everyone at some point.
The emancipation proclamation was in no way a binding document. It was simply a "proclamation" of the stated position of the executive branch regarding slavery during Lincoln's administration, that they would cease to recognize its' legitimacy as law. The 13th amendment, (an act of congress which created a new law), legally freed the slaves. DACA is a very similar situation. An executive may choose which laws to prioritize for enforcement, and in this case that's exactly what Obama did. The president cannot, however, enforce a law that does not exist or that he wishes existed, which Trump is attempting to here.
It was a wartime military order during a war in which much of the relevant part of the country came under military occupation. It absolutely was binding.
> It was simply a "proclamation" of the stated position of the executive branch regarding slavery during Lincoln's administration, that they would cease to recognize its' legitimacy as law.
Not only was it not only that, it wasn't at all that. It was an order applied to the rebel territory then under occupation and other rebel territory as it came under occupation.
> The 13th amendment, (an act of congress which created a new law),
The 13th Amendment, as the name suggests, was a Constitutional Amendment. It was proposed to the States by an Act of Congress, but new law was created by ratification by the states. But most slaves were actually freed by the military occupation under the emancipation proclamation, not the 13th Amendment.
I agree the way it SHOULD work is that congress passes laws and executive orders describe how those laws get enacted.
But we've seen more powerful executive orders, with the most dangerous coming about during the W Bush administration. People are fine when a candidate they like uses those increasing powers of "good" but then scream when it's used by Bush/Trump for the same purposes.
Executive orders have limits, specifically to offices that are directly under the Executive Branch (military, homeland security, intelligence, etc.) and so far Trump's orders actually fallen carefully within those limits.
He's been testing the limits of those jurisdictions and federal judges have struck them back. In reality, they should have been doing that years ago with other presidents, but instead we got decades of predator drones, warrantless wiretapping and secret kill lists.
Given that a federal judge's ruling is the textbook definition of a legal basis...yeah? At least until it goes to a higher court.
The key is that it's in a CA court, which historically will ban all Trump's orders, it does not really matter what those orders are about at all these days.
If an application were, positively and indisputably, spying on the conversations and data which takes place in the households of people with the highest security clearances, again if this were proven to be true, then a judge in San Francisco can stay an emergency (or other) executive order from the POTUS to ban the application because it is a national security threat.
I am just trying to understand exactly what power this judge has. It's really incredible. Is she determining as a matter of fact the application is not as POTUS asserts? Is she claiming that such a spy-ap, if in any way engaging with civilians and their communication, cannot be banned by the US government?
Last I knew, the tech companies are claiming that their conduct is their private conduct and anything they do to their users does not intersect with any 1st Amendment rights of their users.
So this is a private company and POTUS's order is about this company and therefore not infringing on anyone's 1st Amendment rights by banning it.
This positions the maker of any communcation-related app beyond the power of POTUS and his national security team and even Congress itself, unless the Constitution is suspended, as in time of war.
Wow. Just. Wow.
DATA COLLECTION
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariff_in_United_States_histor...
In the event that a country lacks a comparative advantage sufficient to balance trade and maintain local employment and economic growth; Then some degree of trade restriction is useful to ensure both stability and future growth. At 15-20% local unemployment, losing the perceived future growth engine(s) of the economy to foreign competition would not be politically acceptable to a majority of Americans.
How this plays out in the digital age is interesting. Tariffs are largely ineffective due to the nature of services. China has successfully grown a domestic tech industry from 0 - FANG equivalent by blocking all foreign competitors. It will be interesting if the EU seeks a similar strategy to grow its tech sector.
The EU is indeed slowly taking that direction: https://www.ft.com/content/7738fdd8-e0c3-4090-8cc9-7d4b53ff3...
Presidents are allowed wide latitude in National Security matters.
I expect the sanctioning of WeChat will happen eventually.
The right response would be something like a US GDPR, allowing US persons to opt out of surveillance foreign and domestic. But that would upset the Silicon Valley gravy train, so instead we get a ham-fisted response that deflects concern onto a tiny slice of the overall problem.
Edit: that’s what I thought (and I agree with you), but I wanted to make sure since some other commenters sensed the ambiguity.
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/17470217/us-wechat-user...
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/21/style/tiktok-trump-rally-...
Are you claiming that ByteDance controlled the tanks used in Tiananmen square massacre or is conducting the Uyghur massacre? If so, the Trump administration screwed up by not presenting that evidence.
> Uyghur genocide This is a lie being spread by far right fundamentalist Adrien Zenz that the U.S. media had eaten up.
Is the video fake?
Congress is another check on executive power and is also checked itself. However, the judicial system is designed to be way more responsive and definitive than the legislative branch.
An executive order can literally declare anything it wants. If it goes against the law, that is where the courts come in. Congress can't tell the president what he can and cannot write, if the president writes an order that goes against the law, that is where the courts come in (and that is what is happening).
What we see happening in the US is the fossilization of an authoritarian regime where the president creates de facto laws in the stroke of his pen and the Senate supports his undemocratic behavior, while Congress is kept powerless. The only thing left to check for abuses is the judiciary system, which has not been elected in the first place, and by the way can only limit the worst illegal excesses. It is essentially a "constitutional autocracy" in practice.
I believe there was a video where a Chinese United Nations member was telling a Chinese audience that every member of the United Nations has a nationality. This opposes the values of the United Nations and clearly China is there to abuse the system.
By the same thinking Comcast should not be able to cut off someone's internet service (for not paying a bill) because doing so would violate that person's free speech rights (the ability to send email). Ditto for hosting providers, registrars and so on.
In this case the government sees a threat to the general public and believes it is right for getting rid of that threat. Really in a way like the classic 'can't yell fire in a crowded theater' argument.
The analogy breaks down here, allowing WeChat does not infringe on positive or negative liberty of much of anyone.