“Pursuing protectionism is just like locking oneself in a dark room,” Mr. Xi told business leaders at the World Economic Forum in January.
I might agree with Mr. Xi, but the Great Firewall of China is a higher wall of protectionism than anything the West has against the Chinese. Forcing foreign companies to partner with Chinese companies and then transfer all of their closely held technologies and industrial processes to China seems pretty protectionist also. Maybe in Chinese culture being able to lock oneself in a dark room is a positive?
LOL nothing compared to China. China partners with startups, steals their IP and then escapes back to the homeland and no course of legal action. They get all the access to the West's markets and then give almost no access to their own. Their companies are all backed by the government and it's rigged in their favor. They cheat constantly, check out the EU scandal where they smuggle goods into London don't pay equal taxes as the EU companies, beat out competition who is playing fairly and then jack up prices.
Their immigration policies are one of the worst in the world. Human rights violations insanely high. They purchase our movie studios and then force on them Chinese propaganda and nothing negative on China ever. America is one of the least protectionist countries in the world if not the least.
China doesn't even allow its own citizens to read about things like the Tiananmen square massacre. If they could censor the rest of the world they would.
Even their citizens abroad will tow their party's line [0]
>China partners with startups, steals their IP and then escapes back to the homeland and no course of legal action.
Where have I heard of something like that in US history class?
> He learned of the American interest in developing similar machines, and he was also aware of British laws against exporting the designs. He therefore memorized as much as he could and departed for New York in 1789. Some people of Belper called him "Slater the Traitor", as they considered his move a betrayal of the town where many earned their living at Strutt's mills.[4]
ok sure. we suspect China does all these things under the cover. But what are we going to do about it? Are we just going to shut ourselves in border and let China take these developing markets?
Negotiating international trade agreements with the purpose of limiting the flow of information by means of "IP" is the very definition of protectionism.
Mutual IP agreements are not protectionism just an equal playing field. Protecting domestic companies, but not foreign ones on the other hand is the definition of protectionism.
PS: Abolishing IP would also be a level playing field, but again that's not what they are doing.
If you think China's IP practices are intended to create an equal playing field, you're more than just a little bit naive.
Also mostly Chinese domestic companies' protectionism is about the same thing as the European version of the same is : getting enough Chinese people jobs so they don't revolt.
Umm I don't think you are getting the fundamental logic here. America has pushed propaganda, but they also allow movies that make America look bad: botched CIA missions true or not, slavery, different look at revered historical figures, greedy American leaders/FBI/CIA or whatever. They don't purposefully stop what makes America look bad. China does, there is a huge difference in that. Secondly, the government itself doesn't control what gets pushed out (in very rare classified instances .001% they have before) the free market does. Some audiences love pro American movies, some love anti-American but it's capitalism not propaganda
What you're witnessing is manufactured consent[1]. There is no need for the crude methods of propaganda here because it's not even necessary. Compare that with China; people there are fully conscious of government propaganda. From the SMH article, they expected the west to be a land of freedom and democratization of ideas, but what they end up finding is that it more or less is the same thing.
> [2] "A lot of them are PRC students who migrated to Australia or come here to study. I think they are quite ambivalent about Australia, and China. Culturally and emotionally they still identify with China, but they don't like the corruption, pollution, propaganda or the regime. So they migrate here and they have some perception about this country, that it's beautiful, clean, prosperous, there is press freedom and the media is objective, not like the propaganda in China. "Here they expect the media to do a lot better than the media they're used to back there. When they realise that the media here is just as one-track mind about these things as the Chinese side but exactly the opposite, they find it really hard to reconcile with what they're experiencing."
Personally, I find that even more worrying. People here seem to think they are free-thinkers not subject to propaganda when really, the more "oppressed" people have way more understanding of what's going on in the world.
But in the West the media is not state run. The Chinese government decides what to run and clearly that is propaganda. In America the media is controlled by 2 political parties and they are either pro or anti government. The media in the West can run any content they wish and it is up to the free market to determine if they can survive. You can listen to whatever viewpoint or angle. CNN, Fox, Huffpo, Brietbart everyone is telling you different angles it is up to you to decide. This unbiased media you are referring to is an unachievable utopia. The Western system is far superior to state run propaganda and is the best system we can realistically have. If there were a better system, through the free market it will replace the old.
China wields formal control where in the US this is achieves via peer pressure and social manipulation/control. Anytime something shocking is revealed reporters end up losing thier jobs, sometimes be suicided or at worst end up like Assange.
What absolute falsehoods. Ask Woodward and Bernstein if they got "suicided." America has not yet fallen to China or Russia's level of cynical censorship acceptance.
It looks like your account has been HN primarily for political arguments lately. Would you please not do that? It's an abuse of the site.
HN is for the gratification of intellectual curiosity, and political argument—especially the flamewar kind, which it inexorably degrades to—is destructive of that.
Hey, just saw your comment. I agree with your reasoning and am happy to comply. I assume you will pass the same message along to users who start such discussions in the first place.
I generally only comment on issues I know about. Outside of technology, history and civics is a focus of mine, hence the comments.
Perhaps deleting comments like the parent (made on a throwaway account, apparently) would be a good idea. It would stop folks like me who feel compelled to reply to perceived propaganda from doing so.
The alternative is for everyone who feels strongly about political issues to create throwaways for such HN discussions (see parent), to avoid retribution on their main accounts. I doubt that's a world you'd want to moderate, or that I'd want to live in. (Not suggesting I'd go in for such sock-puppet account shenanigans, but it's the limiting case that comes to mind.)
Anyway, I suspect political stories will always provoke political discussion. If you'd prefer not to have this on the site, I'd humbly suggest flagging and removing such stories.
EDIT: Your point about flame wars is well-taken, however. I could certainly have highlighted the history and facts of American press freedom in a more constructive way here.
Far superior for manufacturing consent? Sure. The western system of propaganda is far more competitive, innovative, or you can call it distributed in the way it hides its agenda in a network of proxies of capital instruments, which is exactly what it would evolve into with the free market. But what is dangerous about it is that this mode of propaganda is smarter than the people. In states with state-run propaganda, the people are smarter than the propaganda.
For State run propaganda, there is never any alternative. In the West system I can start my own news org and run it. Huffpo and Brietbart were started in response to the monopolies of the 2 parties and were started with very little in capital and are the top 50 most visited sites in the world top 5 news sites.
Self determinism and free choice thwart state run propaganda. Manufactured consent is not controlled by the government but by a whole bunch of competing sources that can be defeated. I can think of no more effective system aside from ours in which all the knowledge is free and accessible. Aside from new technology that lessons the effects, increase of critical thinking and knowledge are the only solutions. In this country anyone is free to provide this through news, education or whatever other medium they devise.
This is a well put thought:
> But what is dangerous about it is that this mode of propaganda is smarter than the people. In states with state-run propaganda, the people are smarter than the propaganda.
It had been my hypothesis. Julian Assange said it better:
> The west has fiscalised its basic power relationships through a web of contracts, loans, shareholdings, bank holdings and so on. In such an environment it is easy for speech to be "free" because a change in political will rarely leads to any change in these basic instruments. Western speech, as something that rarely has any effect on power, is, like badgers and birds, free. In states like China, there is pervasive censorship, because speech still has power and power is scared of it. We should always look at censorship as an economic signal that reveals the potential power of speech in that jurisdiction.
Recently I found Slavoj Zizek had even better criticism:
> The US doesn't treat prisoners as brutally – because of its technological priority, it simply does not need the openly brutal approach (which it is more than ready to apply when needed). But this is why the US is an even more dangerous threat to our freedom than China: its measures of control are not perceived as such, while Chinese brutality is openly displayed. In a country such as China the limitations of freedom are clear to everyone, with no illusions about it. In the US, however, formal freedoms are guaranteed, so that most individuals experience their lives as free and are not even aware of the extent to which they are controlled by state mechanisms.
Good quotes. Thank you. Reminded me of Neil Postman's comparison between Orwellian world in "1984" vs huxleyan in "brave new wolrd". I Postman made a lot of similar comparison in his book Amusing ourselves to death.
As an Indian who has worked and lived in the US, I wholeheartedly agree with the parent.
That which needs force outside is achieved via self censorship in the US. This is a fact. A sampling of NyT/WaPo pieces on wars US has fought published right before they were begun shows this quite well.
Then there is racist stereotyping of Asian cultures which often gets a pass under various high sounding titles ending with '-rights'.
> When they realise that the media here is just as one-track mind about these things
Yes. When I got access to the internet, 25 years ago or so (only a few years after we got rid of communism in Romania), I was shocked to discover this about the US. In Romania, we had state propaganda and we knew it about what it was. It was everywhere and nobody believed it.
In the US, state propaganda is also everywhere, but everyone accepts it as fact. ("America is the greatest country in the world", "the US government would never do something like that", "we leave nobody behind", "we defend freedom"... I could probably come up with dozens of obviously false things that all Americans believe.)
Is there any other source than that chart? I was looking for a supporting document to explain those figures but there's nothing apparently on that link besides that chart, which looks impressive but without context is as good as meaningless.
edit:
So Googling this, I came across this article, which agrees with the trends, but also notes:
But the vast majority of the actions — 89 of the 145 — came in the form of anti-dumping and other cases aimed at alleged unfair behaviour by trading partners. Of those, more than 40 were aimed at the trade in steel and other metals.
The global steel sector has been roiled by a collapse in prices blamed on China and its production of more of the metal than it can use. That has led to a growing number of anti-dumping cases in the US and EU and a backlash against Beijing’s bid to be recognised as a market economy in the WTO.
Not to be pedantic (It's an unfortunate consequence of nuance), but just so you know, there is no country called "America." We have north, central, and south American continents with many countries; the U.S is one country in North America.
The name of the country is "United States of America" or you could say America as a shorted version, so there really is a county called America. If you said America to most people in the world they are pretty much going think the USA. BTW, you in your post used the other shorted version "U.S.". Not to be padantic or anything :)
There is no other country on the American continents with America in its name.
That's fair, but many of my fellow American's in other countries within the continents think it is arrogant (I now realize that typing 'America' into wikip redirects to the US).
I think of the United States as a reasonable shorthand because I believe in state sovereignty as supreme; Still unlike anything else in the America's. My terminology and ideas are considered antiquated, but I like to believe nuance is important, and the history of the terms we use can inform how we think about these concepts. "Often copied, never duplicated."
None of that matters. China is spending hundreds of billions to "support" several countries. In reality to own those countries and to bring business back to China. In corrupt countries about 10-20% of the total is going to the elite (cost of doing business) and they'll never forget that China made it possible. If they do, China will undoubtedly remind them.
Also, whatever the cost, China is not spending that much anyway: the engineers are Chinese, probably the workers are Chinese, the tech and materials where possible are Chinese so a nice chunk of that money if flowing back to China. Brilliant, especially since China has a lot of $$ reserves.
And they made this possible by co-opting authocrats or wannabe authocrats like Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orban, along with other corrupt leaders. I just wonder if they play to build their silk road railway through Ukraine. The Chinese bought an area bigger than Belgium in this country which are using for agriculture.
It's going to be an interesting test. No government that I know of was able to both squelch information while also winning technologically and economically.
But, I'm not sure if any of those previous governments paid their scientists and engineers well. So, maybe China can win by just paying everyone off.
I might agree with Mr. Xi, but the Great Firewall of China is a higher wall of protectionism than anything the West has against the Chinese. Forcing foreign companies to partner with Chinese companies and then transfer all of their closely held technologies and industrial processes to China seems pretty protectionist also. Maybe in Chinese culture being able to lock oneself in a dark room is a positive?