Since I assume there is no recourse for these users on a censorship level, is there such a thing as a class action lawsuit for removing a feature in Hong Kong?
https://qz.com/224821/see-how-borders-change-on-google-maps-...
At the same time it's a good gauge for them to figure out what else they can do.
Start with "hey man don't show that one pic" and the company figures "it's one pic, whatever we're not really compromising our values".
A few more steps and then it seems less dramatic when it comes to "give us that information on that one user"... and so on.
Personally I would expect an external social credit score coming soon too. It doesn't have to be all encompassing like the social credit score, but good luck getting a job with a company who wants to work with China if you're on the list...
There are (generally) very few "solutions" in these things, so it's best to focus on small gains, cracks that things slip through, and temporary safe spaces.
This is from people that actively try to avoid being insensitive. But it means there are always limitations in perspective. It requires that any one person represent the 'truth' for an entire group of people, and never understanding if that 'truth' has consensus. Cohesion in American society means never challenging the consensus of someone representing a group that you aren't a part of.
If one would never hear about Taiwan, would we really "know" it exists?
It's a sort of reverse branding exercise. If you can reduce exposure as much as possible there's not going to be a lot of sentiment for supporting the cause. What would be of Palestine today without the exposure that has been directed at it.
How would we feel, in that world, if the US government wanted to censor people mentioning Florida? Of course there would be complicated questions about whether that censorship was ethical or helpful, and about the government's real motivations for proposing it. But I think it would be clear to everyone involved that "kindergarten levels of pettiness" wasn't the right starting point for understanding those motivations.
https://www.cnet.com/news/how-eight-pixels-cost-microsoft-mi...
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030822-00/?p=42...
Instead, I think China does this sort of thing to control discourse and/or to send constant reminders that certain lines should not be crossed or there will be consequences.
Both are bad things, but they are different types of bad thing.
Yea they want to head back (now that they realize nobody cared), but they pulled out of China entirely back in 2011 over censorship.
China—the people and country—are spectacular. China—the Party—is an malevolent force obsessed with self-preservation. Such is the nature of autocratic regimes.
A quote from Czech dissident Václav Havel bears repeating:
> The post-totalitarian system touches people at every step, but it does so with its ideological gloves on. This is why life in the system is so thoroughly permeated with hypocrisy and lies. Depriving people of information is called making it available...the lack of free expression becomes the highest form of freedom. Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics. It pretends not to possess an omnipotent and unprincipled police apparatus. It pretends to respect human rights. It pretends to persecute no one. It pretends to fear nothing. It pretends to pretend nothing.
Status re Taiwan is unlikely to radically change in near future, as far as my understanding of the situation goes.
As an aside, while in times like these any information may turn out to be propaganda, this looks like a thoughtful analysis of the current situation in Hong Kong (Google Translate works adequately with it): https://gateway.pinata.cloud/ipfs/QmUg7C7s7umWp24Qr9x9kc68zE...
This also means that you cannot easily add non-existent countries. They do not have country codes
EDIT: s/against/for/
That has already happened. Only instead of handing over data on specific users upon request, Apple has simply handed over all iCloud data of all its (mainland) Chinese users to a government owned company:
On a related note, now you have movies with different scenes in China.
https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/the_extra_looper_scenes_y
https://kotaku.com/why-many-in-china-hate-iron-man-3s-chines...
It's probably somewhat risky strategically, but they likely realize they're now strong enough to do such things with absolute impunity, and it will make their eventual victory that much sweeter.
The situation is markedly different from Hong Kong.
I frequently come across, in America, people who are genuinely surprised that Taiwan is a sovereign state.
All I know is that I'm glad the TPP is dead and I'll be happy if nobody with the last names Clinton or Bush ever sits in the White House again.
I say this as someone who leans more toward the 'woke' side of the present culture wars.
This is scarey.
This seems to suggest the populace is at fault, wanting and buying cheap gadgets no matter what the consequences are?
In truth, I think most people are simply unaware of the many problems caused both by consumerism, and the moral spinelessness of pretty much all large corporations and how that is brought about by market forces. Even in politics I'd say that there is, besides some malfeasance, also limited understanding of complicated issues. (Remember the congressman asking Zuckerberg how Facebook made any money?)
It's completely reasonable for larger countries with different values to expect customization that comport to local markets. At the end of the day China isn't forcing Apple or any other companies to make changes in global markets.
We would never be like that.. I mean, we're better than them. We're number one.
I bet people have already begun weaning themselves off Apple products!
Just kidding. Most people expect others to do something, but take no direct action themselves. Pity.
China is extremely attractive to businesses because of its gigantic market. There are tons of cars to be sold in a country with over one billion people. Tons of phones. There are tons of chinese hotel guests, chinese search requests, etc.
These are all real things. There shouldn't ever be a reason to hide the fact that they exist no matter if todays reality wasn't todays reality.
Taiwan is the result of a civil war. No one says Americans are petty when they try to remove Confederate flags or when Germany bans the Nazi flag.
My understanding has been that the TPP was about opening China to further outsourcing of white collar work by regularizing IP law on paper (which the Chinese would just ignore of course). This would have allowed more paralegal, contract writing, engineering, and even things like radiology (X-ray and scan interpretation) to be outsourced, further gutting the US middle class and transferring more expertise to China. In other words it would have started the outsourcing of non-physical forms of service work and more lower-level intellectual labor. What would even be left of the US middle class after that?
Seeing your town in a movie is incredibly rewarding. Just like a musician is basically required to shout “Hello $PLACE” at some point during a performance
PS: for the downvoters, that’s what the linked article cites as the reason that movie gets extra scenes in China. Chinese audiences liked seeing their city in a scene that Western audiences didn’t care about.
Guantanamo Bay (disputed between US/Cuba) used to be marked as US territory in Google Maps at least when viewed from the US, although interestingly, I'm looking at it now it doesn't say Cuba / United States along the border anymore.
I can't imagine the amount of crap they must go through on the backend to deal with these idiotic human politics. Humans suck.
You're right that it was corporate captured but the original goal was geopolitical.
Edit, cite: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Pacific_Partnership
Often because it’s the only power some groups can exert on others (in this case China's gov to western companies) so they push it as far as they can into the realm of ridiculousness. Plus people get job promotions or feel-good emotions about "doing something".
Eventually you run out of legitimate things to ban so you expand the scope. Then you can start banning people who complain about bannings, which naturally generating groups with victim complexes warranting more bannings, etc.
This is not unique to China.
I'm sorry it came off that way, as I do not blame people for the propaganda of their government (U.S. or China).
I do absolutely believe that we shouldn't be able to off-shore environmental/worker's rights policies. If you want to sell something in California, it should be made with the same environmental standards that making it in California would require.
I didn't read GP's "others" as "populace". One reading would have the U.S. and other [governments] have given in to excessive demands of China.
Now the "devil" in the question doesn't necessarily have to be China. It could be Global Finance -- an abstraction which believe it or not is reasonably reducible to actual people and families, the fabled "1%" [sic].
They had a civil war and the other side fled to Taiwan. This is a major issue for China.
If they weren't struggling to get by on the wages they make, they could afford to be a little more picky about what they buy and how it's created.
It's also not our fault, infar as we didn't literally pull any triggers. We're probably still complicit to some degree, however, by our general lack of support for reparation actions.
I don't remember if we deleted the icon or just renamed it, but the product never ended up shipping, so it probably doesn't matter much.
The frog, in reality, just jumps out of the pot when the water gets too hot.
For the partisans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_republic (ever noticed that bananas are the cheapest fruit?)
The dispute is about whether the lease agreement which allowed the US to use that territory as a naval base is still in force. Early after the Cuban Revolution, one of the US's regular rent cheques was mistakenly cashed, and the US claims this is recognition on the part of Cuba that the lease remains valid.
I would rather wait the day our beloved western world agrees on a single, objective, independent definition on what censorship is, then I would want to see people like Snowden, Manning, Assange and similar others walk free and unharmed. That day I could concede we would have superior moral grounds to exclude and isolate other countries.
I'm not supporting any political stance here, but just saying that it's a bit weird to ban a symbol that was part of the mainland's history as well, and on its own, carries more historical significance than just Taiwan independence.
[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/office/de...
I agree. A better list of places to look in the maps are the current disputed areas between USA and Canada https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_areas_disputed_by_Cana... In particular, what do you see in this map? https://www.google.com/maps/place/Machias+Seal+Island/@44.33...
https://www.roboticsbusinessreview.com/manufacturing/china-d...
It is of increasing relevancy as imperialist governments around the world put pressure on minority populations. Just yesterday the Trump admin opened the doors to Turkish expansion into a Kurdish region of northern Syria.
1. http://www.unthinkingly.com/2006/12/07/ubuntu-in-kurdish/
Which facts? How are they presented?
Obviously, at some point realpolitik caught up and they reversed their stance, though they continue to help Taiwan because... more realpolitik.
Yes. While seemly small, removing the emoji is an instance of political censorship.
On the other hand, it would be easier for at least some of these people to get by if having a large TV or this year's smartphone wasn't part of "getting by".
The PRC is the result of the civil war. The ROC never stopped existing nor did it start to exist as the result of the civil war.
I doubt it. The PRC is far more important to Apple than Apple is to the PRC. If I had to guess, I'd say the government didn't talk to Apple at all, but Apple has a department whose tasks is to proactively ensure their products do not offend Chinese government sensitivities.
The US refuses to see China as a strategic threat, and only as a economic challenge. Australia is looking into getting 16-32 submarines ordered right now, to cover for future defense outcomes. Aus and the SEA middle powers are having talks about obtaining nukes simply to prevent them being used against the countries.
China is projected to grow to be double the size of the US's econony. China is willing to spend those benefits in the south China sea and on BRI. Make no mistake about the military of China. It is a concern. This is as big as power politics get.
We live on a continent taken from a people by violence, betrayal, and disease -- some of it intentionally spread through government policies. Sorry, the average American are direct beneficiaries of the atrocities of the past. Some of us don't know or chose to ignore it.
Update: I didn't say this to justify terrible things people are doing. We can't play this game of "only the most moral of us can criticize". Something is immoral in and of itself, it doesn't matter who calls it out.
But according to the PRC the ROC no longer exists (that's what they mean by "Taiwan is part of China" and I'm guessing that they see the flag used by people opposing the (PRC) government, so the standard procedure is to ban it.
I'm curious, though, if this comes from a specific demand or if, for example Apple has moved to releasing the same version of iOS in HK and the mainland (I'm guessing that the flag isn't in the mainland's version of iOS here, but I don't know for a fact).
I remember a NPR broadcast a few years ago (when the female ghost busters movie came out) about how movies have become less progressive because they are targeted at world audiences. I think a lot of Westerners feel weird about this, but I think getting involved in the politics is even a step further (especially when we're seeing an human rights violations).
[0] https://southpark.cc.com/full-episodes/s23e02-band-in-china
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/one-thing-north-k...
If you zoom in on South Korea you'll notice that the map tiles are raster-based instead of vector-based like the rest of the map. At certain zoom levels, South Korea looks like it has no roads or cities, compared to the much more industrious North. It's kind of hilarious.
I believe this is one of the fundamental flaws and challenges of capitalism. Corporations are great usability wise because serve as an abstraction for accessing a product. You put some money in and you get a widget out, without having to worry or know about where that widget came from.
But the consequence of that is that you are insulated from all of the negative externalities involved in creating that widget. You just wanted some cheap eggs, and you didn't realize you were inadvertently causing chickens to be raised in inhumane factory settings. You wanted a bottle of water and you didn't realize it was being pumped out of a national park.
It's like using some really nice, convenient API and only discovering later that every time you called getFoo(), the backend went out and killed a kitten.
edit: I just checked, it's accessible from mainland China, though quite slow.
You are missing my point. The fact that it is status quo is the scary part.
I do not accept that companies should be let off the hook for empowering and enriching oppressive reigns because of "local laws and customs". I do accept that companies should be let off the hook for destroying environments and ecosystems because of local laws and customs.
What should a country have to do for a person / corporation(group of people) to stop supporting it? I don't expect everyone to have the same answer, or even that my answer is better than another, but if you are in a privileged life-situation you should think of your personal line and decide if it has been crossed.
I'm sorry if this comes off as nit-picky as it is not my intention, but comparing the mapping services requirements of China and SK are worlds apart. The intent of each policy is important to think about.
Instead, there are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_Indicator_Symbol — an symbol-alphabet where any pair of successive symbols from the alphabet are meant to be considered a ligature (so, a space of 36^2 = 1296 possible ligatures), where a subset of these ligatures are considered valid representations of a locale from the Unicode's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Locale_Data_Repository.
Unicode doesn't say that you should render these CLDR-valid locale meta-codepoints as flags, though. It just says they're locales. In other words, it's up to a given font to decide whether to draw these as flags, and which of them to draw as flags.
With this move, they've abdicated the political determination over to, mostly, the OS manufacturers (since right now most OSes just have one OS emoji font that gets used for the graphical-pictograph-rendering process, rather than allowing user-installed emoji font-families.)
Personally, I like this choice. No matter what any government says, Taiwan is its own locale—it has its own time zone, clock and currency display formats, etc. Locales are locales no matter who declares ownership over them. Having "locale icons" rather than geopolitical-region flags is probably the most stable arrangement we can have, even if it means that some OSes will just render a particular locale-icon as nothing.
A much simpler real world analogy would be the DPRK forcing censorship of the South Korean flag, or the ROK doing the same to North Korea. Or something involving Israel and Iran. Or India and Pakistan.
If my boss/product manager wanted me to do something like this, I'd be calling them out for shitty politics, and telling them they need to find a new engineer because I'd quit immediately - and likely incite others to come with me.
Maybe I have a higher sense of morality than others, but I'm no shill for China's power over Taiwan. I can use my entitlement/privilege as an engineer to say "fuck off" to anyone who wants me to do things I find immoral. Furthering the needs of a power hungry regime looking to assert dominance over others? Nope. I spend all my day working to further democracy and freedom, not to enable free thought and self-determination to be squashed.
Whoever coded this change and approved this PR, shame on you.
"It profit a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world... But for Wales?"
Thomas More is convicted and will be executed, on the false evidence of a man who he now sees is wearing a chain of office, he asks to see the chain (thereby establishing for the audience what the reward was for lying to secure More's conviction). The chain is for the Attorney General for Wales, prompting this line.
In reality Richard Rich was given a slightly different job with a longer title that doesn't afford such a fun line and of course we can't prove he got it for his deceits, though he does seem like he wasn't on the whole a truthful and upstanding person.
I'd probably have made the same decision as you (I'm fortunate to have a safety net), but many people don't have that luxury.
You want to ensure your design team and product matches the demographic you're trying to target so you can choose which ones are approved for that area. Completely reasonable, not a malicious feature to build either.
Except when it prevents you from selling your device in China.
There might have been several resignations over this change - you do not have the full picture. However, any number of resignations would not impact this directive being implemented.
The one to implement it - yes, they are anti-democratic. But we also need to acknowledge that one of the richest, most influential institutions on the planet is also anti-democratic...
What makes you think that it was an engineer in the US who made the change? Apple's got employees all over the world, including in China. If anything, my first guess was the update was made from a team based in shanghai or shenzhen, since the emoji is already banned there.
Nonsense. The existence of proprietary platforms in no way reduces the possibility of free and open platforms. Using iMessage or Facebook Messenger or any other closed communication platform is a choice you can opt out of right now.
Sometimes I wonder if this all-too-common "the open Internet is dead" defeatism isn't some kind of false flag to make people think the open Internet is actually dead so they don't try to leave their walled garden. That is absolutely not the case and people need to stop saying it.
Edit: latest demographic data from Wiki, from 2010, says 63% Asian and 26% Chinese
But seriously, moral is the thing that applies not only when it's convenient.
Disclaimer: I have no moral right to preach this.
Empirically, slippery slopes have always been an extremely common way change is driven in mass social thinking. This has been formalized as the "Overton window": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window
Apple is tying itself in knots trying to tread a line here, and it just makes them look pathetic. They seem to want to be seen as a shining light in terms of human progress and human rights, but that ends as soon as they hit their Chinese market.
This is true for most humans alive in nearly all nation-states today. At some point in the linear chain of humanity that allows my existence today, atrocities were committed. Whether an ancient ancestor strangling a potential threat with their bare hands, or the nation-state I was born in acquiring land through militaristic expansion.
Notably, the code specifically looks for the "CN" locale, and calls "removeEmoji".
Without a clear territory under exclusive control, recognition from other governments, or independence from the mainland, what's so sovereign about it?
According to the book "Bullshit Jobs" [1] there are quite some people around the world -especially in FIRE and IT- who (partly) perform useless or downright harmful jobs.
That is extremely viable how this could of played out in a tech firm. From there, such actions are in management hands. Management have a predisposition towards company loyalty and head nodding over morals and ethics - not all obviously, just from my experience - more inclined over engineers. When you have such a facility, then if management misuse it, is that the engineers fault all the time?
Let's not presume shame upon some engineer(s) who may of done such a change for other morally good reasons only to see their work abused for something they would never of intended their work to be used for. Then imagine that person reading presumptions that it was coded solely for this in mind and the hate bestowed upon them, with them already feeling bad about such abuse (as they will probably see it) and perversion of their good intentioned work.
Disclaimer: I work for Apple, but I don't work on iOS.
I don't blame anyone who is making $30k a year for going along with bad-politics at a company. But if you're making over 100k a year as an engineer? Yea, I hold you accountable for your actions and implementing bad politics.
My point wasn't a specific developer (as you point out, they might have been in China themselves and unable to do otherwise), but that anyone in the chain who is "safe" and in a position of power and privilege to not-play China's game, I find morally dubious. Engineers in the US are people I count as having this safety and privilege, but not engineers in China.
Executives, PMs and management in the US I also count as being able to tell China to shove it with their demands.
In the same vein, many people in the US and abroad would find Taiwan's view of Tibet to be surprisingly uncollaborative over different points in recent history.
Many people are so focused on Greater-China satellite victim complexes such that many assume they all see each other the same way when thats not the case at all.
Though I'd go with the ability to add or remove emojis or restrict them was a facility engineered for more moral motives and was a point and click level of solution that those with access could do such a change with ease.
Or
It was upper management...
Either way - I do not expect an announcement from Apple saying "Zach in engineering did it, his bad, sorry for that", or indeed anything at all as that would fuel this and unless it is still trending as an issue after a few weeks, then they might. But in general, such things PR wise, blow over and Apple like most have found that not fueling it with any response unless it is exactly what the populus want to hear, it is best to say nothing. At least, that is how many such comparable matters play out with such large corporations throughout history, though they have improved.
EDIT[ s/hold/old/ ]
Getting fired for not acceding to a demand like this isn't the result of an individual manager making a decision but the entire apparatus of corporate governance coming to bear on the person. It can be only be meaningfully resisted and fought with an equally organized group of engineers.
If you're on Hacker News, and our industry's willingness to compromise on fundamental values to maintain access to "the world's largest market" upsets you -
Join or start a union.
For-profit corporations are systemically unfit to solve this problem on their own. We should stop wishing for them to be something they cannot consistently be.
This would have to be done on a federal level. Just because Apple stopped doing this doesn't mean China would be any worse off. Google, Amazon, and every other tech company would still get in line to do whatever it takes to get that sweet, sweet money.
I would expect the Chinese to laugh as they've probably already stolen sufficient institutional and technical knowledge to respond with a "Bye Felicia" of their own.
Don't make it right, but it is a common theme by many countries and how they put business of trade ahead of moral and for the right price, will look the other way. Not singularing out any country as more righteous or guilty than others, as not the motives here or the point. Just that it does happen and sadly, I don't see that changing. Which is sad as it is in corruption/bribery on many levels and just not seen for what it is.
The story also reminds me of one dev's solution to conflicting instructions on how he was to label a button. So, he hard-coded special rules for each individual boss and both thought they got what they wanted.
Most countries have petty border disputes.
A famous country occupies territory in Cuba where it built a military prison. Cuba claims that the military presence is occupation of territory it rightfully owns. The famous country refuses to leave; it claims it only leases it based on a hundred-year-old document, and sends $4k checks yearly. Cuba denies, and refuses to cash the checks.
By what fraction do you think Apple's profits would drop if it had to rebuild all of its factories outside of China? By what fraction do you think China's GDP or tax revenue would drop if it kicked Apple out of China?
Even if that situation were reversed, Tim Cook answers to shareholders via a board of directors. He's legally obligated to maximize shareholder value. Who do you think the Chinese officials who want power over Taiwan answer to? What legal obligations of any kind do you think they are under?
Yes, when people debate Taiwan’s sovereignty (for, independent foreign relations and a military, against, limited recognition) they understand the local context. That there is legitimate dispute with respect to its status is news to a surprising number of Americans.
'South Park' Scrubbed From Chinese Internet After Critical Episode https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/south-park-banned-chi...
If you think you disagree, please discuss your reasons.
From: https://www.state.gov/u-s-relations-with-taiwan/
Why should Apple be expected to take a political stance at odds with the official Chinese and US government policies?
Every country imposes requirements on manufacturers of devices or service providers that some person(s) might object to.
If you choose to do business in that country, you play ball, or you leave. How you pick which ones that are tolerable enough to live with is the question -- and don't imagine that it's moral principles that define it. It's how much a company wants to stomach the loss of that business.
Saudi Arabia (and many others) prevent the installation of Whats App, etc. on phones activated there.
Israel (and the US by the way) censor imagery of certain places on the maps shown in those countries.
Japan for chrissake even forces devices to emit a camera shutter sound when a picture is taken.
And you're singling out China for censoring the Taiwan flag emoji?
How about those other cases? Where does it start / end? Are you saying engineers should quit over every one of these infringements?
This is a joke right?
Let's see some new places from South America or Africa or Europe or anywhere else.
Hiding an emoji is tiny, turning over all of someone’s files is much more intrusive, killing someone would be far worse again.
To say they are the same seems deeply illogical.
Huh? The new Commandant of the Marine Corps has flat-out said it.[1] And he's not the first in the Pentagon to take China seriously.[2] And from [3]:
"Emblematic of this mistake was the roll-out of the Air-Sea Battle doctrine. First outlined in a then-classified memo in 2009, ASB became official doctrine in 2010. From the beginning, it was an effort to develop an operational doctrine for a possible military confrontation with China and then-U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates openly discussed the need to counter China’s growing military capabilities. The signal received in Beijing was the U.S. had hostile intentions toward China and was trying to contain it militarily. The result was that the entire pivot was seen by Beijing as part of a broader effort to encircle China."
[1]https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3031445/us...
[2]https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/05/15/a-novel-about-war-with-...
[3]https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2017/01/23/commentary/w...
Do you have anything more I can read about the Isrealy/USA map censorship?
We have a worldwide network of real users that install a relay app on win/mac and we proxy customer requests through their home ISP connections like this:
```
developer@Developers-MacBook-Pro-2:~% curl -x http://xxxx:xxxx_country-China@proxy.packetstream.io:31112 https://ifconfig.co/json
{"ip":"223.166.106.16","ip_decimal":3752225296,"country":"China","country_eu":false,"country_iso":"CN","city":"Qingpu","latitude":31.1539,"longitude":121.1141,"asn":"AS17621","asn_org":"China Unicom Shanghai network"}
```
```
developer@Developers-MacBook-Pro-2:~% curl -v -x https://xxxx:xxxx_country-China@proxy.packetstream.io:31111 https://news.ycombinator.com/
* Trying 34.234.216.249...
* TCP_NODELAY set
* Connected to proxy.packetstream.io (34.234.216.249) port 31112 (#0)
* Establish HTTP proxy tunnel to news.ycombinator.com:443
* Proxy auth using Basic with user 'xxxx'
> CONNECT news.ycombinator.com:443 HTTP/1.1
> Host: news.ycombinator.com:443
> Proxy-Authorization: Basic xxxx
> User-Agent: curl/7.54.0
> Proxy-Connection: Keep-Alive
>
< HTTP/1.1 502 Proxy Error (destination unreachable)
< Proxy-agent: PacketStream Proxy
< Content-Type: text/html
<
* Received HTTP code 502 from proxy after CONNECT
* Closing connection 0
curl: (56) Received HTTP code 502 from proxy after CONNECT
```
Basically, what a company is required to do is serve the BEST INTERESTS of its shareholders. This might not necessarily be the same as maximising shareholder value.
https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co...
I believe the applicable phrase here is "courage of your convictions."
I've been fired twice for refusing to do things that I thought were unethical. Neither time did I have a safety net ready. But my life still continued.
A few years ago I stood up to a middle manager over privacy issues in a feature request. It went far enough to get HR and the legal department involved. It took half a year, but I won.
Bully managers count on people being afraid to lose their jobs. If more people stood up to them, they'd be afraid to make stupid requests in the first place.
Saying, "We're still three steps from my issue but this thing that, in and of itself I have no problem with, can't happen because it might lead to the thing I have a problem with." is not a valid argument.
To try and bring it back into focus, it's a real problem that this "one pic" isn't being shown. It's not a slippery slope conversation, because we're already at the thing I/we have a problem with. No need to argue the "this paves the way for worse things" because this is the worse thing! We're here!
There is no unified code of ethics that all software developers must abide by, so getting unethical work done is just a matter of moving the work to the next developer in line.
No he cannot. He would be immediately removed at CEO and replaced with someone who played ball.
Remember, Apple is a publicly traded company. What you're suggesting is, at a whim, Tim Cook could just completely tank the company. China has far, far more leverage over Apple than Apple has over them plus it's a huge market they're making progress in.
And therein lies the problem. We want to blame a programmer, or a flack. But it's never one or two people.
The real issue is a bureaucratic system or corporate culture that allows things like this to happen. Everyone can point fingers at someone else and absolve themselves internally of blame.
Taiwan should block shipments to Apple of whatever parts are made there that Apple needs. And I say this as a shareholder.
But until I get a confirmation on this unselfish act I'm gonna go with probably didn't think much about it and took the next ticket on his list.
Which hey. I'm not on a high enough horse here to berate the guy, but not on a low enough horse to speculate how noble he must be in secret. (excuse the gender specific pronouns)
That’s just the great power of influence over an American company, in spite of the clear position from its own government regarding Taiwan.
Say goodbye to all those ideals of universal rights and freedom in the cyber world as it was once long ago theorized. Somehow what sci-fi cyberpunk became almost true without bionic implants nor anarchy in the streets.
Really, the pressures should be on Apple and on China, not some low level engineer who had to write the code for this.
Sure he can. Google bailed on China once. Apple certainly has the money and talent to do the same.
He would be immediately removed at CEO and replaced with someone who played ball.
Would he? Why do you assume that this would be bad for it share price, or that the majority of shareholders would be against it?
However, now that the US exists, it does a lot of good for many, many people. As a first generation immigrant, I'm glad that I was able to come here, as I think conditions are much better than my country of origin.
That being said, am I complicit in everything bad that has happened here simply because I'm living here now? What amount of reparations are appropriate for me to give, considering neither I nor my ancestors likely had any involvement with any of those things.
Can any amount of money even make up for what happened?
Taipei,
According to the article, even this is still 'out of compliance,' because it should say 'Taipei, Taiwan China,' blown away this is how the booking page appears on the Delta website when loaded from the United States.
Makes me worry, localization takes effort, and effort often leads to blanket solutions that 'check everyone's boxes.' The most worrying examples of this in my opinion have been the superhero movies of the past decade. These blockbuster franchises were all written to accommodate distribution in China (and worldwide for that matter) as a goal. This led to simplified dialogues for translation, story lines that avoided pushing controversial buttons, and the result was a decade of moderately entertaining and decidedly safe cinema. Sure, blockbusters are not the best barometer for a nation's ability to push artistic boundaries, but they have historically spoken to the sentiments, dreams, and challenges of a time. Unfortunately with the sequels and superheros era, it seems the tone has been one of risk-averse idealism, which strikes me as a particularly low form of entertainment, entertainment that is truly disposable, unable and unwilling to stand the test of time. Possibly straying into problems with corporate consolidations, but I think it's all related as larger corporations tend to take smaller risks in efforts to appeal to broader audiences. If very few companies are able/willing to tell China no, censorship features become acceptable, and then they become normal, and then maintaining two branches becomes burdensome, so then censorship becomes the compliant option, and at that point the dream of technology empowering regular people to do amazing things, to become real superheros, fighting corruption, injustice and oppression, that dream will be truly dead. Think about how much things have changed since the Arab spring... it happens quickly.
Talleyrand
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-10-16/best-b...
It could be configuration. Emoji settings are configured by region. So maybe someone with no dev experience could go into the iOS deployment package and simply change some config files around.
For engineer it’s just another rule, they get update like “locale X passed the law to do Y, update software to comply”. It’s not their job to do legal or ethical evaluations, and it’s unreasonable to expect it from them.
If you think it’s obvious, and any engineer should be well-equipped to do so, there is a story from inside the Big G. When Google employees had a protest-du-jour about Google planning to implement restricted version of search in China, it turned out that many Google employees of Chinese descent actually supported implemented restricted search in China arguing that restricted search is better than no search. Now, if you were an internatialization engineer working on restricting features, how would you evaluate claims of both groups and is it your responsibility to do so?
All the more reason why they (the replacement) should be blamed. Obviously, those who might have refused to comply and were replaced made a moral stand and deserve commendation, not blame.
> Maybe those engineers don't quit exactly because they want to hinder such actions by the management.
Perhaps. There are a lot of hypothetical scenarios we could construct that might absolve the implementor of blame but this is possible in any scenario where we're not privy to the internal process that culminates in a corporate decision.
Cuba started a war for independence. The US sunk their own ship, the USS Maine to get an excuse to go to war (according to the Northwoods document declassified in 1998). This kicks off the Spanish-American war where Teddy Roosevelt rises to prominence (the perhaps biggest point of note was the butchering of whole villages, mass rapes, and what were essentially concentration camps in the Philippines).
After liberating Cuba, the US government drafted the Platt Amendment as conditions for giving up the Cuban territory they had won from Spain. There were 7 conditions and one of those was the establishment of Guantanamo Bay. Fidel Castro and his chief gestapo butcher Che Guevara overthrow the previous government and then proceed to break most of the other conditions (though it could be argued that the US should have exercised article 3 and prevented the coup).
Cuba later argues that the Vienna convention on treaties overrules the previous agreement, but the Vienna convention is explicitly non-retroactive (and more to the point, agreements due to a war are by their very nature coercive). It could be argued that the US created an excuse for war isn't very savory and most Americans of the time would have opposed involvement if an honest case had been made (I agree with this). If they had not, it's most likely that Cuba would have remained a Spanish colony and that point is immaterial.
International law doesn't leave room for "pettiness" in this case. If the US were trying to pretend the Cuban government didn't exist and was trying to force non-US entities to comply with that non-reality, that go far beyond petty.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guantanamo_Bay_Naval_Base#Guan...
I'm sure lots of tax money is wasted, or used for bad things, but also a lot of good as well. Roads, police (that keep the peace), firefighters, education, foreign aid, etc.
If it's your company, maybe you have that privelege. But in the USA you're probably an "at will" employee. I would admire your moral stance but you'd probably get fired.
Refusing to do work you're asked of will probably only get the company to find someone who is willing.
So you're better off complying and using your talents to find other ways to allow users to circumvent this issue if they really wanted to.
China holds a lot of weight, but a company with a trillion dollar market cap also can make its own decisions.
Google didn't have much of any foothold into China when it dropped. It was also purely based on software which can be toggled off relatively easy (then you just have to wind down offices).
All of Apple's products require China to produce. All of them.
> Would he? Why do you assume that this would be bad for it share price, or that the majority of shareholders would be against it?
The majority of their manufacturing and assembly is in China. China is their big growth market. Not only would it tank the share price by cutting out their huge growth opportunity but it's completely within China's power to stop almost all of their production.
The stock market reflects what wallstreet things will grow. When you stagnate your share price drops (there is no reason to hang onto it if you won't become more profitable).
Please post the link again, this time as a Show HN link-post and put the text description as the first comment (I've noticed that increases chances of success. ) (given the fact your previous post from 6 months ago didn't get any traction). Of course, if you want.
https://jobs.apple.com/en-us/search?location=china-CHNC&page...
Is it reasonable to believe Apple might have signed that task to a team sympathetic to the One-China policy, or just generally someone who was happy to do it?
Why do people think there was some sort of circumstance that caused the engineer to compromise on their morals?
In practice, their official policy lets Taiwan exist as an independently governed region more than the US even allows Hawaii or Cuba to be independent. Even Canada has more of a attachment to the US and its laws than Taiwan does.
This is probably a fact lost on most foreigners unaware of the situation.
If China really wanted to assimilate Taiwan they would not have such deeply connected bilateral trade, cross-border tourism, or give access to their market by Taiwanese companies like Foxconn, HTC, Asus, and hundreds more.
China does impose tourism restrictions to pressure Taiwan, but if they really wanted to crush Taiwan they can easily do so without raising so much as a hand gun.
The funny thing is armchair Chinese nationalists (people on the other side of the planet reading hacker news) are more up in arms about this than actual Taiwanese people because the de-jure stance has always been like this, and the de-facto independence of Taiwan has been pretty stable.
Did you mean safety net as in another job lined up or substantial personal savings? Having a safety net generally means that your situation might be tough but you're okay if you quit/lose your job.
Getting deported because of your H1B would be an example of "doesn't have a safety net". The definition has gray area (such as if your family in your birth country is rich), but as a rule of thumb if deportation is the likely outcome, then you don't have a safety net.
IF you are an immigrant family, this is a trolley problem. Regardless of the courage of your convictions, you are making a choice for not just yourself, but your spouse and kids. It's not purely your own choice.
Today. But maybe not tomorrow. India, Vietnam, Brazil, and a dozen other countries are more than willing to take on that production. Heck, most of Apple's contractors in China (think Foxconn) already have manufacturing in other countries.
People are buying based on price, quality and for some products image.
The products purchased based on image can be shamed away. The other two cannot. No matter what some will buy the best quality and some the cheapest. Government can't help with the first but can control the second.
Or, hell, maybe the person is an American citizen, not even of Chinese descent, and agrees with the PRC's stance on Taiwan.
(Frankly I probably wouldn't get along with someone like this, but at a company the size of Apple, there are bound to be more than a few.)
I had neither. I took menial temp jobs and short-term manual labor jobs for a while until I could get something full-time in my field. Took about six months the first time, and nine months the second time.
Getting deported because of your H1B would be an example of "doesn't have a safety net".
Is it? It's not like if you lose your job when you're on an H1B they send you to the suicide booth. You just end up back in your old country, but with a much better resume. Yes, life is harder than it was in the United States, but you start again.
That's what people do — they get back up when they're knocked down. I've done it four times now. Losing an H1B is not the end of someone's life.
Germany bans the swastika.
I do think it is well within the sovereign right of a nation to ban symbols of a competing government. In Taiwan’s case it is claiming itself as a rightful government to China, which is actually somewhat different than simply a historical symbol. Allowing it can be a tacit acknowledgement of legitimacy.
I think you need to distinguish between actions against society and actions against an individual. Censorship is almost always an action against society; turning over files is sometimes against society but often just against an individual.
Two days later: Apple reinstates ROC flag emoji in HK apps just like the U-turn they did with HKmap.live
Taiwan unfortunately needs to be careful. China is just waiting for provocation strong enough to justify an invasion. Would that be it? Maybe, maybe not.
> If you think you disagree, please discuss your reasons.
Because it's not going to work that way, since that "access" actually amounts to authoritarian leverage over the ecosystem. Apple feels it needs the Chinese market more than the PRC feels it needs Apple [1]. As a result Apple's already haded over the Chinese iCloud to a local company (state owned, I think), which will undoubtably hand over encryption keys to the authorities whenever it's asked. It's not inconceivable to me that the PRC may use its leverage over Apple further weaken the iPhone ecosystem (either for Chinese phones or worldwide).
[1] The PRC has many domestic manufacturers like Huawei, Xiaomi, Oppo (~OnePlus), Vivo, etc. The domestic costs for them for banning a foreign maker with a sub-10% marketshare like Apple are approximately zero.
If we blame anyone, it should be the CEOs, board members, and large shareholders.
Palestine has a UN seat, Taiwan doesn't. Taiwan has control of their territory, Palestine doesn't.
Which one is more 'a country'?
If this act didn't stand to hurt anyone, why did China care in the first place so much? Let's look at the converse, what does having a flag in a phone do that hurts China?
Bring forced to move to a different community is always bad. The fact that states often force you to do it is a big reason I am an anarchist.
I think you meant the flag of (what would be) the preceding national government against which the Confederacy would have won, the Stars and Stripes.
The Stars and Bars is a different flag [0] that it would be odder (and not parallel to any construction of the PRC/ROC issue that I can see) for the Confederacy to ban.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flags_of_the_Confederate_Sta...
Your response doesn’t really address the issue though. Say you can find a company that conforms most to your own moral standards (which is already unlikely, depending on where you arbitrarily choose to draw that line), that’s not good enough. You need to find a company that meets those standards, that only does business with other companies who also meet those standards, and only employs people who again meet those standards. That’s simply not realistic in any way.
The real answer to this question is that in order to participate in society, you need to accept that you’re going to have to interact with people you disagree with. Otherwise you can choose between trying to exclude all those you disagree with, or excluding yourself. Neither of which are tenable. If a company goes further than you’re willing to participate in, then your only option is to not work for them. Anybody working at Apple today likely started knowing that Apple did business with China. If they can’t handle that they should leave, and prepare themselves for a difficult job search for a company that doesn’t. But trying to force others to make the same decision is just completely unreasonable.
The truth is, these companies were never competitive in China because they never put in the work. Established western companies are not use to the level of competition in China. It's simplistic to say CCP is just arbitrarily picking domestic winners. Thousands of domestic companies (as in the case with ecommerce going toe-to-toe with Amazon) were busy out competing each other and western challengers. When it came to western social media bans post 2007, Chinese companies were hiring tens of thousands of content moderators with understanding of Chinese filtering rules for compliance. Western companies simply gave up and didn't learn how to scale content moderation until the last few years when social media had to deal with the same violent extremism that China did during the Tibetan and XinJiang riots that lead to FB/Twitter ban. As evidenced by current Youtube debacles, Google still can't / refuse to get human content control right. BTW both these companies can reenter anytime as long as they conform the same rules like Bing. Regardless, the government didn't have to tip the scale much to crown a domestic champion over western companies.
See AI Superpowers by Lee Fu Lee,previous head of Google.cn for an overview of Chinese competitive environments. There's lots of extremely technical fields where China is actively conducting industrial espionage and coercing tech transfers in (IC, airplane engines, military stuff). But cloning and improving software is not really one of them.
Professionally and philosophically it's another interesting wrinkle in the implications of the emoji technology.
It reminded of something we saw a couple years ago when Apple changed the depiction of the gun emoji [0]. Interestingly, that blog post's proposed solution (note: same author as the OP article):
> Hide it.
This speaks to how fragile Unicode is, that things that were written in the past may so easily be changed in the future (like the replacement for Taiwan in China) or hidden in various ways. Another article mentions how emoji might be used by e.g. fascists to minimize uncomfortable concepts [1]. Even after you apply Hanlon's razor, there's still opportunity for good old-fashioned miscommunication [2].
[1] specifically mentions the mosquito emoji being introduced for health awareness, but what if we eradicate Malaria or even the mosquito as a whole, and then the irrelevant emoji is replaced with something not widely feared or hated, or maybe even beloved (like another social awareness campaign)? Then there'd be a lot of "Man I hate :positive-thing:" messages out there.
I'm not saying let's ban emoji, it's just interesting to think about. Still, I hope the whitewashing effect mentioned in [1] doesn't gain more ground, here or otherwise.
[0]: https://blog.emojipedia.org/apple-and-the-gun-emoji/ (discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12240386)
[1]: https://openspace.sfmoma.org/2018/07/the-absolute-denial-of-... (discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17552067)
[2]: https://grouplens.org/blog/investigating-the-potential-for-m... (discussed briefly, couldn't find a better thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11446047)
However this may be different in China. Just saying it’s possible for the cloud to be kept in the dark in some cases and that’s what Apple supposedly does whenever they can. Yeah some weasel words there, I realize.
That means little. The US has de-facto diplomatic relations with Taiwan, and has made official commitments to its defense against threats (which realistically could only ever come from the PRC), such as selling it arms. The weirdness and official ambiguity here are driven by the PRC's sensitivities, and do not represent any real commitment to the PRC's position.
Trying to tie trade to morality is exactly why Chinese influence is increasing - they are ideologically agnostic when it comes to trade relationships. That's just the new competitive environment we're in. The alternative is withdrawal and decoupling at the cost of hundreds of billions in trade and feel good points for some people at best and a long-term national security concern by pushing Chinese tech independence and future competitiveness at worst. Current administration already wasted that card IMO.
I think your real question is what does the west have to do to contain Chinese ascent which many people think runs counter to Western interests. The answer is I don't know. Though I don't think bilateral trade belligerency helps or individual action in the west. Developing countries are looking to the China model because it looks like it works - conflating the good and the bad with necessary and sufficient. I think western influence would go a long way if they managed to solve the myriad of problems at home and offer and offer an appealing alternative. Other countries aren't stupid, they're look at what works / is working. Too many things in the west is broken right now.
This later led to Poland going Atlantis, when MS removed its timezone instead of moving it to another timezone.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20061027-00/?p=29...
https://content.spiceworksstatic.com/service.community/p/pos...
The unicode standard doesn't care, as explained above, since it just defines an alphabet and takes no position in which country/locale codes are to be rendered with a flag.
The U.S. has no laws requiring specific depictions, nor does its government cajole movie producers to depict regions in certain ways. Many countries are similar. Map makers choose borders largely based on what they expect their audience wants or needs.
But yes, any true moral posturing they make is baloney.
Whatever Google depicts is what Google chooses to depict; and what they pick, at least in the U.S., is a function of what they believe people expect to see or need to see. They depict Taiwan as a separate state despite the U.S. government not recognizing them as such because it's what people expect to see. It's trivial to find maps in the U.S. depicting any alternative you desire. Equivocating popularity with government-mandated depictions is not constructive.
Taiwan is not part of China. Period.
Agreed. The only other way to draw locales would be to country outlines: which would most certainly open a Pandora's Box of socio political issues.
What Apple has effectively done by invalidating the locale, is to remove the Taiwanese language.
As an aside though: from a personal point of view there's quite a few emoji that I'd like to see hidden, such as the poop and middle finger. There's no need for such things, & yet this locale is removed? Weird politics.
[1] https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/united-states/a...
That isn't an easy thing to do and it certainly wouldn't give Tim Cook any leverage. It would take them probably a decade to fully move their pipeline out of China and even if they did it, it would be very capital intensive so even if it was cheaper it would take quite some time to recoup those costs (and I'm not really convinced it would be cheaper overall but that's a separate exercise).
Well, depends on what you're going back to. Say it's China, and you morally disagree with a lot more of the Chinese tech industry's politics than you do the US's. Is it worth taking the one particular stand here to lose the long game?
Obviously I'm specifically crafting counterexamples, but the point I'm trying to get across is that it's not purely a matter of courage of conviction.
In your case, good for you - you went further than most would. I would not have held that particular line. If that was the choice I would have to make, I would start to look for a new job at that moment, not to quit.
(I mainly included that parenthetical as a signal to the kinds of people on HN who would likely consider my post, without it, as some sort of support for China's denial of Taiwan's existence, which is absolutely not the case.)
It makes me uncomfortable to have China be able to influence all these other global countries into global (or in this case localized) censorship. Hollywood, News Companies, anything else that China invests heavily has no choice but to fall in line with the censorship.
In national politics, there's a government and that government has a police force and a military. Regardless of which political party or coalition is in control, the government goes on, day to day, running things, which includes holding elections, the magic which gives legitimacy to the process. As long as elections are real, the people are mostly willing to go along with it, so the consequences of utterly disregarding legitimacy remain remote.
International politics has no such entity, or at least none that has sufficient recognition. Therefore, it is essential that everyone play along with the norms, because deviating from those norms is more likely to spark a war.
Ultimately, a country is what a majority recognize as such; before you go away, however, consider how long you'd live if you insisted you were human but couldn't get anyone else to agree with you.
How can I, as a person, talk with my money to prevent this? How can Lockheed Martin, a corporation whose fiduciary obligation is to generate profit for its shareholders, prevent this? How can the US government, who benefits greatly from a prosperous diplomatic relationship with the Monarch, prevent this?
> not caving to them
Fundamentally what I am saying is these institutions are not "caving in" - they are doing what they are doing because, from an emotionless game-theoretical perspective, it is beneficial to the success and longevity of the institution.
Apple benefits from an increasingly strong business relationship (the new diplomacy of the multinational) with mainland China - not just for their supply chain, but also for their marketshare.
These benefits have cost. For US-KSA the cost is tens of thousands of Yemeni civilian lives; for Apple the cost is decreased mindshare of the sovereign nationstate of Taiwan.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2019/jun/20/h...
(Beijing won the civil war in 1950.)
Today, in 2019, Taiwan still does not recognize China.
Recognition is a chip in the game of geopolitics.
Free economics tends to promote liberal democracy.
This is debatable of course. Historical patterns are complex:
https://www.economist.com/buttonwoods-notebook/2017/11/06/wh...
Unicode does not define code points for individual country flags. It defines 26 code points "Regional Indicator Symbol Letter A" through "Regional Indicator Symbol Letter Z" and implementations use that to represent two-letter ISO codes as the region or country's flag. To use a more neutral example, one implementation might recognize the combination of SU to represent the Soviet flag while another might not.
This is more than a political dodge by the Unicode Consortium (though it is that too), it also uses fewer code points than the 200+ that would be needed for all countries, plus it allows new countries to be represented without a new Unicode version.
One useful definition of politics is this: systems and behavior that result from people disagreeing without violence.
Politics can occur in convincing a group of people where to go to dinner, that your technical idea is worthy of effort, or that a President must be held accountable to the rule of law.
* https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=thewholeview
* https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=surajama
* https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=thrwy_01
* https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=7u5432throw
I think you would be hard-pressed to argue that the Department of State, and its counterparts in Canada, the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Greece, Brazil, Japan[1], etc, etc, etc, have been 'highly leveraged by China for political gain'.
Oh, and to throw another monkey wrench in your argument, consider that both China and Taiwan believe that Taiwan is not an independent country, but that it is part of China.
What they disagree on is who is the legitimate government of China.
The question of whether or not ISIS is therefore a country is left as an exercise for the reader.
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email us and we'll look at the data.
Both governments make claims against the other's land but that doesn't make them the same government.
Edit: if you look at the font in question, it does have flags for England and Aruba, for example, so offering the flags doesn't imply that you are recognizing the places as sovereign states.
https://twitter.com/markmackinnon/status/1152241649893945346
It is really a political stance to have Unicode Emoji 1.0 as a feature?
The ROC government has for some time used some variation of "Taiwan (Republic of China)" when using English - passports, visa entry stamps, embassies, etc.
With your personal money? You can't. Can you convince extremely wealthy people to spend their money in a way that will ultimately lose them money? Possible, but still losing odds.
See Confessions of an Economic Hitman by John Perkins for an example of what this fight looks like. (he was one of the guys who paved way for the original deals between the US and Saudi Arabia that you mention)
Taiwan’s partial recognition is due to pressure from China, not any logical impossibility of recognizing two different countries that officially claim to be one.
Compelling other people to do things, with either a carrot, or a stick, is an incredibly normal state of affairs in life. My landlord will have me out on my ass if I don't cut him a check on the first of every month - does that mean that my recognition of his authority to my apartment is illegitimate, or somehow coercive?
edit: or maybe that's your point and that's why you mentioned the definition?
2. Is Taiwan a distinct nation, or is it part of the Chinese Nation?
Both the PROC and the ROC currently seem to think that it is the latter. Most of the world agrees with them.
(Bonus points: Is Catalonia a country? What about Cascadia? What about Transnistria, and South Ossetia? What about Crimea? By your definition, it seems to quite clearly be part of Russia... Be careful where you express that viewpoint, though, it's not one shared by most of the world's governments, or most Ukranians...)
-Order of Malta. De Jure recognition, no territory or population to speak of. Basically a forgotten joke country left over from a bygone era.
-Trasnistaria. Has population, land, flag, collects taxes. Only recognized by Russia. There's a few Russian backed puppets like this, I won't name them all.
-Taiwan. Already discussed.
-Hong Kong. Mainland Chinese media calls the protestors terrorists. Yet another example of "terrorist" meaning simply "whoever the establishment wants to de-legitimize". If you follow the CCP narrative, the thing they care about isn't Democracy but separatism. "One China" is about not recognizing Taiwan and HK as a matter of ethno-nationalist principal.
-Palestine. Recognized by majority of UN countries. Still not recognized by US, Israel, and associated power block. Why? Because of the stupid belief that recognition will somehow legitimate it.
-ISIS. At their peak they had a sizeable chunk of land, a flag, a capital, civic functions like a court system, an oil industry, handed out passports, were fighting a conventional land war using conventional (not terrorist/guerilla) tactics, had a uniformed army, and the word "state" was right there in the name. But don't you dare call them a state lest someone mistake you for a terrorist sympathizer.
This is why I subscribe to De Facto nationhood instead. A nation is a nation when it satisfies the following properties:
-A plot of land with well defined borders.
-A permanent population on said land.
-A Monopoly on violence over said land.
-An organization capable of credibly making peace, declaring war, and otherwise accepting agreements with other nations.
The last one is tricky as it only specifies the capability not the actualization. For example, if the organization agrees to peace but the individual factions of the army keep fighting then this condition is not satisfied and what you have is a stateless warlord situation. For another example, the ISIS situation clearly had an organization which was capable of agreeing to a surrender or appointing an ambassador, but they never wanted to or were allowed to. The condition is still satisfied even though they never did it.
Even if a dictionary didn't define a particular word, people would still use that word. You just wouldn't be able to find out what that word means from your dictionary. The word wouldn't be harmed; only the dictionary would be made less useful.
Likewise, even without an assigned codepoint for an emoji, people would still create encodings of it—in chat programs and the like. They'd just be proprietary encodings that wouldn't be able to be copied-and-pasted to other software, and would likely suffer bit-rot. (Can any program that exists today—and that runs on a modern computer—correctly parse out the emoji-like symbols from the binary transcript files of a 90s IM program like AIM or ICQ?) The emoji symbols—at least at the time—wouldn't be harmed by this (people would still use them just as often); only Unicode's goal of "one universal text encoding" would be harmed.
Almost no one, including the Order itself, considers the Sovereign Military Order of Malta a country; it's the usual textbook example of a sovereign entity that is not a state/country by those who see it as sovereign (a point on which there is considerable dispute, despite the claim in its name and it's wide diplomatic interactions and grants of extraterritoriality, and, for it's headquarters, concurrent sovereignty with Italy.)
It's basically a NGO with a sui generis diplomatic status and disputed (among scholars) international legal status.
Of course, when I set my region to Israel, the Palestine flag is still available. Likewise for Serbia and Kosovo.
That being said, many companies fail to establish a foot-hold in certain international markets, including Yelp, Uber (which ceded southeast Asia to Grab, and China to Didi). Even Amazon does poorly internationally, and that's headed by the richest man on earth (which by your logic implies that it's impossible for Amazon not be able to dominate)[1].
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/955796/global-amazon-e-c...
Here's a question for you: If the US were to collapse into anarchy, and there was suddenly a void in the world where the US military used to exist, do you think would there be more or fewer civilian/child deaths (in total, from other forces) and why?
That's playing a bit fast and loose with the facts there. ISIS conducted public executions, crucifixions, desecration of cultural sites and enslaved people for a labor force. That's textbook asymmetric warfare/terrorism.
I will gladly agree that Chinese companies have a competitive advantage over Western companies in terms of enforcing state-mandated censorship. I hope Western companies never get comfortable with that particular competency.
To me that just sounds like textbook nationhood. The defining feature of the state is having the monopoly on violence within its borders.
First of all, I don't want them to do "human content control". That is stupid.
I will happily concede that China is better at nightmarish Orwellian censorship policies, congratulations, big accomplishment. I hope America never catches up.
How uncivilized must China be, if they need an army of censors to edit what everyone says? Americans have gotten along well without that. Based on how Chinese government treats its people, you must conclude that Chinese people are monsters that are constantly plotting violence. I choose to believe that the Chinese government is just too authoritarian and controlling.
Any American corporation that kowtows to the Chinese government's demands has nothing to be proud of.
It should be illegal for American companies to facilitate the evil that the PRC government commits. I don't want Google making money sending ethnic minorities to "re-education" camps.
Taiwan can do anything it wants without repercussions inside Taiwan, thus ‘monopoly on force’.
China using force in Taiwan would just be a declaration of war.
Everyone is tiptoeing around them for fear of waking the dragon.
Anyone in these departments of state is aware that Taiwan is a separate country. They’re just not able to say it.
I'd define terrorism as something along the lines of "using guerrilla tactics against civilian targets in order to achieve political ends". I would differentiate that from atrocities committed against a state's own people in order to keep them in line (for example Stalin's purges), human rights violations (e.g. witch trials or killing homosexuals), ethnic/religious cleansing, or guerrilla attacks against targets with legitimate strategic value.
My understanding, although I am definitely not super informed on this, is that ISIS's atrocities were mostly keeping people in line, human rights abuse, and religious cleansing. Therefore I would not consider those acts to be terrorism. However, that doesn't make them any less evil.
The larger area you call the Netherlands that includes Belgium and Luxembourg is currently called the Benelux[1]
What the gp is referencing is the argument that the concept of free trade has only obfuscated colonialism. Rather than colonialism by France or UK it’s colonialism by Nestle or De Beers. To someone harvesting cacao for $2/day nothing is materially different from living under colonialism, except their landowner might be some well-connected member of the regime rather than a European.
On another note, it was refreshing to see South Park creators giving some love to Chinese censorship.
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/tv/story/2019-10-...
I am confused tho, as an NBA fan, should I support the Rockets now that the Chinese are boycotting it. Or should I boycott them cause they bowed down to Chinese pressure?
That is blatantly a false statement. I can't believe the negative reaction towards pointing that out.
You're comparing this to an official policy of appeasing German and Italy's annexation of territory (and various other violations of the treaty), in an era of raising fascism and communism? Really?
It's fine if you want to say that this is bad, worrisome or even evil, but lets call it what it is: the strong bully the weak. This is how the world works.
So far China has largely been about flexing its economic power. This seems completely reasonable; why shouldn't they negotiate hard? I agree it's terrifying for those in the region that they could flex their military..but that's what superpowers do.
The policy did fail because Hitler was going to go to war no matter what but that is only with 20/20 hindsight.
Appeasement wasn't the right policy, it was literally the only policy available to the UK at the time.
I agree that we need to take a hard line with China though, I can't see how this is going to end given their massive increase in military size and technology plus we are all so tied together financially that we could cripple each other long before a shot is fired.
My friends seem to think that war is the only way this will end and I've got a young son so I sincerely hope not.
If you didn't intend a parallel between 1930s Germany and 2019 China, there is, again in my opinion only, probably a better way of making your point.
I often think that if Germany had won the war people today would be talking about how it wasn't pragmatic not to do business with the greater reich. "Sure they ethnically cleansed eastern europe but whataboutamerica?"
I just watched two history professors debate this very topic here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmyecSXOla8
A very interesting watch because unlike hit and run downvoters, I am interested in learning.
side note: I now don't know what I think - both arguments were very good.
But the fact remains, the Chinese model promises political serenity (i.e. recent revelation of TikTok guidelines against divisive politics) which is valued in unstable countries without strong institutions, and those countries are by far the majority out the ~200 countries around the world. You many not like it, but calls for Social media accountability is obviously also happening all across western liberal democracies, including the US. People are screaming for more censorship. Techniques are converging and the only reason IMO the west can't match Chinese mechanical turk censoring is labour costs, but I surmise gig economy will eventually figure out a way to source the headcount.
This is a hard pill to swallow for western minds that hedges softpower on moral superiority. Many westerners refuse to accept that the CPC is modelling it's evil development method after what has been successful in the west, i.e. all the industrial espionage and protectionism, even the current Uyghur situation (which I do not endorse) is result of 2nd generation ethnic policy directly based off US melting pot concept and not far from indigenous residential school systems that emphasis integration. Previously it was based on autonomous soviet oblasts that tried to make distinct ethnic identities work - salad bowl - that has failed after riots and terrorism caused by unrestrained western social media (hence the bans). China will happily copy outdated, evil strategies employed by the west if it provides serenity, don't be surprised when the west copies fresh, evil Chinese innovations to address their social ills as well.
It's not like Nazi germany only had followers because they were being mind-controlled. They were slow-boiling the frog back then as well and those who didn't want to notice could easily justify everything.
Well, sure, nazi germany ran concentration camps, keeping hundreds of thousands prisoner based on ethnicity and religion. It's not like China is doing that after all…
… right?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_re-education_camps
(Asking again: What's overblown about GP's comparison?)
And it's plausible that anything short of Churchillian intransigence would have lost that war. Even a "smarter" craftiness could have failed.
I think 2019 China is pretty damn close to 1939 Germany, the only thing required to push it over the edge is a looming economic collapse.
If Apple turns over the files of one individual to the government, then whole society is vulnerable to that, and this is incomparably more oppressive than removing a one of the UI buttons that displays a particular flag.
The things ISIS members did to subpopulations people within that territory were almost universally condemned across the world as large-scale serious human abuse, and the territories were obtained through quite recent violence from other nations whose administrative borders had not stopped being recognised internationally.
So I think it was widely regarded that ISIS should not be granted the international respect and autonomy of legal recognition, nor should it keep any power it had of a monopoly on violence within its borders (or any borders).
That's not to say there aren't widely condemned things going on in other countries. But there is a kind of collective, sometimes grudging, but systematised respect for the autonomy of countries as nations, which I think was widely regarded as not something that would be right to grant to ISIS (or take away from the nations that ISIS had taken territory from).
1. Germany annexed the Rhineland, Sudetenland, and Austria using the justification of unifying German-speaking peoples under a single banner. The Chinese line for Hong Kong and Taiwan is the same -- you look Chinese, you are Chinese and to say otherwise is treason and will get you labeled an American lap-dog. I can tell you this firsthand as a Chinese-American and if you need a more concrete example, just look at how the Chinese treated Gary Locke.
2. Revenge for the perceived humiliation of Versailles was a core driving factor for the rise of Nazism in post-Weimar Germany. If you can give me another explanation for the state of Chinese-Japanese relations, I will eat my words.
3. Go on any Chinese social media site and the amount of nationalist rhetoric you'll find is quite disturbing. Having pride in your country is one thing, to insist on your national, racial, and cultural supremacy is another.
4. Google what's going on in Xinjiang and tell me that doesn't stink of something.
Maybe I'm wrong and just being an alarmist, and it would certainly be in the best interest for the world if I were, but ask yourself -- what are the stakes this time if I'm not?
But the US has some confusing things too going on, like people from American Samoa are considered US nationals but they aren't US Citizens. They still get US passports, but can't vote, etc. I guess they aren't technically citizens of any country then but aren't completely stateless since still considered a national. It's like they aren't really citizens anywhere but are kinda like a half citizen in a way since they still get a passport. John Oliver did a segment on this, https://youtu.be/CesHr99ezWE
I saw you made a comment earlier that both countries say "China" on their passports missing the point of this whole conflict.
I think you should spend at least an hour reading about the history of this conflict (not through China's censored Internet).
When that happens you don’t want to be on the PRC’s most wanted list.
No military or nation is invincible including China or the U.S.
From Apple's historically more oppressive stance against freedom of expression in their own wallet garden, and the recent actions against the HK protest movement ("legitimate" app ban, the present article), my opinion is that Apple is a less ethical choice than Android which is more permissive and respectful of user freedom.
Where did they say this? I don't see anything about ISIS not using terrorism as a tactic, just that if you recognize ISIS as a state, you get called a terrorist sympathizer. Besides, plenty of countries use terrorist tactics when at war, unfortunately.
It's insane. The Native American example was just the first one that came to my mind that demonstrates that the "average" American of today does indeed benefit from atrocities committed hundreds of years ago.
Though I don't think it's a boolean, "Well you did it, you made up for the damage your ancestors caused" situation, but more of a, "Well now we are better equipped than we were before to handle the fallout of the damage your ancestors caused". And it's not just money (though money does fund everything), there's a lot more that the US government could be doing for the Native American people. Am I a bad person for not doing more? No. Could I probably do a bit more to help? Yeah.
2. This point appears to be about how unfair historical treatment can lead to fascism. Are you saying that the people of China are headed in this direction?
3. I'll defer to your judgement as I presume you read mandarin/canto, but I don't see a big difference from western social networks there, except for probably in terms of number of users (larger userbase) . I can read Korean fairly well and see those kinds of nationalist comments on Korean social media sites as well (funnily enough, they also aren't fans of Japan at the moment. )
4. I know what's happening there and am a little hurt you'd assume I'd get into a discussion like this without knowing. Human rights abuses are bad. That seems like the most one can say without getting accused of whataboutism. Are there gas chambers in those camps? (edit:clarification below)
>Maybe I'm wrong and just being an alarmist
Maybe you're right and I'm just trying to hope for the best.
My original post on this thread came mostly from shock as I was raised on the internet era where it was considered a faux pas to do blithe Nazi comparisons. so I was mildly astounded to see that the top voted comment in here boiled down to "China is Weimar/Nazi Germany."
You are summarising that as "ISIS did not use terrorist tactics"
I think that is a misleading summary. I don't think the poster meant to dispute that ISIS was behind terrorist attacks, both in the Middle East and also in other parts of the world. What they were saying, is that ISIS was engaging in conventional (non-terrorist) military operations against the Syrian and Iraqi governments, other rebel groups, etc. Terrorism and conventional military tactics are not mutually exclusive, one can pursue both strategies at the same time. But the second strategy is a sign that one is dealing with something having de facto statehood, as opposed to a non-state terrorist group.
If you are getting heavily down-voted, a possible explanation is that people perceive you to be engaging in an uncharitable reading of the remarks you are responding to
Censoring an emoji is just insane.
What on earth does it change whether there's gas chambers in there? If you're trying to claim they're not 1940s nazi germany, just say they don't speak german and be done with it.
If you're aware of what's happening over there then you are aware of the torture, yes?
Well .. subjectively I did not find it very funny so maybe not an all time high episode, but the critic was absolutely on point and something that very few people are talking about.
China has a lot of control on what can be included in a hollywood movie.
Propaganda is not exactly new ... after all the US army also has a lot of control when they give support to a movie and demand that they are portrayed favorably but this time it is from one country to another.
EDIT: seems HN removes emoji. I understand why, but it makes discussions like this one somewhat annoying.
EDIT: I've removed a somewhat vulgar reference to what those alternate meanings are, as it seems to have upset some people. I was trying to make a real point about how users will fill in the gaps when demand exists, even if Unicode omits them.
Same identical country, different rules.
Ironically, China shows you exactly why that comparison is absurd. Colonial powers carefully controlled production to keep colonies from moving up the value chain. Indian raw materials were gathered by Indian labor, shipped to Britain, finished, and shipped back to India. Foreign direct investment, by contrast, allowed countries like China and South Korea to rapidly move up the value chain. Foreign investors get a return when the foreign company moves up the value chain, even if that takes business away from a company in the investor’s own country.
For the one China thing, see Wikipedia[1]. Essentially, China split into the PRC (mainland China, referred to as just "China") and the ROC (referred to as "Taiwan"). The split was caused by civil war[2]; each side essentially views themselves as "China", the other side being a rebellion. (Though I think Taiwan is split on this, and I believe some of the politics there acknowledges the more defacto reality of two countries.)
Mainland China (the PRC), AFAICT, in propaganda really, really wants you to believe that there is really only one China (them), and that Taiwan is part of that. Hence why they would want the removal of the Taiwan flag emoji. I think to anyone with their eyes open, the de facto state of things is that there exists two countries. But b/c mainland China has a lot of political weight, and only wants everyone else to not recognize Taiwan as a real, independent nation, there is a lot of political dancing-about-the-point to maintain relations with two countries but without outright calling it as it is.
Hong Kong is weird. It used to be a British territory[3]:
> Hong Kong became a colony of the British Empire after Qing China ceded Hong Kong Island at the end of the First Opium War in 1842. The colony expanded to the Kowloon Peninsula in 1860 after the Second Opium War, and was further extended when Britain obtained a 99-year lease of the New Territories in 1898. The territory was transferred to China in 1997.
As you see, that "99-year lease" expired, and it's now part of China again. Hong Kong has operated sort of (but not fully) separately from China, see "One country, two systems"[4]. Then we come to the recent Hong Kong protests[5], in particular:
> The inclusion of mainland China in the amendment is of concern to different sectors of Hong Kong society. Pro-democracy advocates fear the removal of the separation of the region's jurisdiction from mainland Chinese laws administered by the Communist Party, thereby eroding the "one country, two systems" principle in practice since the 1997 handover.
Hence, I think, the rebellions. They (Hong Kong) are worried (I believe rightly) that they'll lose what freedoms they have.
> US has some confusing things too going on, like people from American Samoa are considered US nationals but they aren't US Citizens. They still get US passports, but can't vote, etc. I guess they aren't technically citizens of any country then but aren't completely stateless since still considered a national.
Yep. This never really made sense to me, since supposedly one of the reasons we fought for independence in the first place was things like "taxation without representation". I think you have it mostly correct: they are technically "US nationals", not "citizens". It doesn't make "sense" to me, in that it seems against the principles on which we were founded.
These sort of apply here: "The difference between a terrorist and a freedom fighter is a matter of perspective: it all depends on the observer and the verdict of history." "One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter." You have to view this with the context of history, and that there are multiple entities trying to write very different histories if they emerge the victor.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-China_policy
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Civil_War
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong
It's a really difficult problem. The world can be rightfully indignant at America's post-war history of barely paying attention to the mess it makes. From the inside, foreign policy has all this classist baggage that makes it really had to touch from the left.
The problem is people in the west can only "think about it" in western lens which leads to readily accessible Godwin's Law. Chinese mental schema is not preoccupied with Hitler, most Chinese aren't familiar with Nazi death camps and the ones that are, don't attribute any particular significance to them because China is a 5000 year old country with a long legacy of extermination but also integration (i.e. manchu, mongol rulers got subsumed into broader Chinese culture).
Anyway, these are "vocational training camps" because ostensibly that's their goal - forced integration into society not elimination. Yes many people died under disastrous CPC policies, but in terms of genocide and extermination, the victims of CPC purges are constrained and not ethnically targeted. Compared to say FaLunGong pratitionres. CPC isn't aiming to eliminate and entire Chinese minority, 1 one of 55 officially recognized by the constitution, if only because they have to change the constitution to 54 after to reflect it and that would look bad for Xi domestically.
To contextualize what's happening in Xinjiang, it's useful to think of US melting pot analogy combined with brutal indigenous residential schools that are conceptually based around integration. Because that is literally the inspiration behind it. Yes, awkward golf clap for US inspiring Nazi and Chinese concentration camps.
Here's a brief write up of the politics behind the scene:
China is unofficially moving towards a 2nd generation MingZu (minority/ethnic) policy. The original ethnic policy was based around Soviet oblasts, autonomous regions with extra freedoms, i.e. tax break, family planning exceptions, affirmative action. These perks designed to ingratiate ethnic minorities to Chinese rule have not maintained serenity, post 2009 violent uprisings in Tibet and XinJiang which has led some thinkers to believe that ethnic autonomy and local identity has backfired. One of the extreme but prominent thinker was important at United Work. Forgot whom. Supposedly Xi pushed back on the idea initially. But the ground campaign happening now speaks for itself despite no official policy shift or changes in article 4 of the constitution (minority rights).
The new MingZu policy emphasized national unity, instead of local identity. The new focus is on GuoZu (State race), abandon individual identity to one national identity. HanYu (Han language) / PuTongHua (common language) has been renamed to GuoYu (national language) in official documentation. In response to Uyghur intellectuals / upper class teaching Uyghur languages to their kids, promotion of ethnic languages has (supposedly) been internally elevated to great evil status after extremist, separatism, terrorism. Increasing Han migration to autonomous regions to promote ethnic mingling. New restrictions on religion that will likely touch all religions.
Ironically, the proponents drew inspiration from US melting pot analogy that aims to treat everyone equally and eventual integration. Contrasting to the current 'salad bowl' approach - citing the division seen in extreme multiculturalism (European Islamic enclaves I think) as a point of failure. There's a lot going on: equalizing - read: repressing - legally "privileged" minorities back to equality status of the average Han without acknowledging other structural privileges of being Han in a Han dominated culture. Something, something, intersectionality.
Edit: As always, I have to clarify that I do not endorse what is happening in XinJiang. I think CPC is capable of doing better without committing mistakes the west already learned. My prediction is something like the cultural revolution / cultural genocide that will last years and a few generations from now if the situation stabilizes the CPC will express some remorse and platitudes for past mistakes under different leadership (sounds familiar as a Canadian). The difference is XinJiang will be better off compared to the prognosis in the west because China has the infrastructure capability to uplift XinJiang living standards. Contrast to the shithole reserves without plumbing and dependent on water boiling in Canada.
My biggest concern is that the CPC will probably pull it off, and the model for rapid integration will be exported around the world. Why do you think authoritarian muslim countries support China? The western narrative is Chinese $$$, but I think rulers of these countries are waiting on the sidelines trying (and secretly hoping) that the XinJiang experiment will work - you can easily swap out desecularizing with secularizing. Also see how sentiment towards muslim immigrants are shifting in Europe to see another possible future application. It wouldn't be the same of course, but vocation training center with European characteristics is more than plausible to me.
Edit2: To add, one of the fundamental characteristics about Chinese growth/rejuvenation whatever is doing big things fast. Integration is something that takes generations to cultivate, but of course China going to try to rush it. It worked in industrial widgets, it worked in academic papers, it's crazy to think it will work on hearts and mind, but who knows, maybe it will. Xi himself is a product of work camps. He's a believer.
Just a very odd concept to someone from North America. If you fly to Miami you are allowed to visit New York or Seattle all the way across the country. Same with Canada.
I know Mexico has some odd things like that too though, you can visit border towns or cruise ports but if you want to go so much more inland you need a Visitor Permit called a FMM, or tourist card some refer to it as. Read conflicting amount of miles, seems about 12 miles though in. So seems like if your cruise final departure was in Mexico and you flew back home you might need to worry about it, but a port of call at the beach seems like most wouldn't need it. However read also flights and cruises will also include it with your ticket, but if you were taking a road trip across Mexico you'd for sure need to get one yourself it seems. But seems more like a tax than anything, since not the same as a visa.
If you want to know where the threat of genocide exists, you don't look merely at rhetoric. Genocide happens across several discrete stages. It usually starts with popular sentiments such as "you are not like us, you are not one of us", proceeds to "you may not live among us", then ultimately ends in "you may not live". China is at the step immediately before extermination. The number one predictor of extermination isn't rhetoric, it's ghettoization and internment.
China is one of those rare countries in today's world which has border conflicts with each and every of its neighbors and is openly ignoring international norms. On top of that I don't think that it is investing heavily in military just for show.
"Beijing's attempt to punish Taiwan by throttling tourism from the mainland hasn't made much impact. Taiwan set a new tourism record last year by successfully courting visitors from the rest of Asia."
Yes Taiwan has the sovereignty to do that, but China also has exit restrictions (USA does not have exit restrictions, which I assume is why you may be unfamiliar with this concept).
Thank you for pointing this out. The amount of nationalistic remark from some HN commenters is also quite disturbing.
Denial, ad hominem, and cynicism seems to be their strategy. Most China submissions that they don’t like suddenly forum slide like crazy by triggering the flame war detector; downvoting anything they don’t want to hear without merit.
I'm pretty sure OP meant that it's similar because it's a dictatorship, it is very aggressive internationally, it uses propoganda against its own civilians like no other country, right now with a very strong air of nationalism and "the world is against us", it isn't shy about killing opposition, it built a huge army. The powers at be in the west (today's powers are large international corporations) are intent on appeasing China.
Do I think China is 1930s Germany? No, you can only get in the same river once. Is this parallel interesting? Yes
I'm suggesting it's fake in the sense that it pretends things are real which are not physically real, like national boundaries and countries and other jurisdictions. Los Angeles County has no physical existence beyond the people who pretend it's real.
> One useful definition of politics is this: systems and behavior that result from people disagreeing without violence.
I agree with this, but it doesn't capture people pretending administrative jurisdictions exist. How taxes work is a good example of the charade becoming useful: Services have to be paid for, so taxes must be collected somehow. How do you do that without making people feel like they're paying for a lot of stuff they're not getting? By drawing lines on a map and saying that everyone who lives within those lines pays these taxes, and everyone who lives outside of those lines pays those taxes, and so on. Poof: You have a way to pay for things which gives people some kind of choice in the matter beyond just voting. That's important because other, more real, effects of the economy can determine which areas have rich people and which areas have poor people.
>openly ignoring international norms.
Could you explain a bit more about what this means exactly? If you are talking about international law, plenty of world powers ignore it when it suits them.
2. Japan committed some horrific atrocities they have yet to atone for and Shinzo Abe is certainly not helping the situation with his nationalist rhetoric either, but China is chomping at the bit to justify a conflict with Japan (see the Diaoyu/Senkaku island situation). I take it you're familiar with Korean history and current events, so it's effectively the whole comfort women dispute x10.
3. What the rest of the world sees of Chinese social media is likely a filtered version, and some platforms like Tik Tok straight up have different versions for China/the rest of the world. Who knows, perhaps the excessive rhetoric there is just users trying to buff up their social credit score, but the fact that there are different versions for Chinese users and external users feeds the divide (probably by design).
4. Nobody can know the full extent of what goes on there given how deep Chinese surveillance runs, but we can draw a negative inference from that itself. Why does Xinjiang need special surveillance programs and restricted access even beyond the measures already imposed in the rest of China?
I get the comparisons can be a touchy subject but I think the world ought to have its moment of reckoning with China sooner rather than later, since later might turn out to be too late.
If they wanted to say that ISIS was using conventional _AND_ terrorist tactics that would be one thing. They specifically said "not". You even quoted.
If my options are either to stay silent or charitably read someone's claim that ISIS' tactics don't meet their definition of the word terrorism, because they're a state, then honestly I don't want an account on this site anymore.
Or, for a far less conspiratorial take on the same phenomenon, read "Globalization and its Discontents" by Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz.
In it you'll learn how institutions like the IMF treated open markets and no currency flow restrictions as a religion regardless of whether they made sense for the stage of development of the countries on which they imposed those as terms of their loans.
Don't expect corporations to stand up for what's right, especially overseas; you're always going to be disappointed.
China is actual, undisputed world leader. They don't tolerate other nations telling them what to do on their land, and like economical expansion to neighbor states. They can afford it.
I don't see parallels.
[1] https://www.news.com.au/travel/travel-updates/incidents/qant...
Really? Does your government officially call Taiwan "a country"? Show us the proof. Considering only 15 countries in this universe still do this, it's almost safe to guess NO.
The US has done all of these except crucifixions. Arguably, we've done all of them (except crucifixion) within the last decade. I'm not sure we can claim "not crucifying" as moral high ground when Americans did things like the following (warning: what follows is horrifying):
"He was chained by his neck and dragged out of the county court by observers. He was then paraded through the street, all while being stabbed and beaten, before being held down and castrated. He was then lynched in front of Waco's city hall."
"Over 10,000 spectators, including city officials and police, gathered to watch the attack. There was a celebratory atmosphere among whites at the spectacle murder, and many children attended during their lunch hour. Members of the mob cut off his fingers, and hung him over a bonfire after saturating him with coal oil. He was repeatedly lowered and raised over the fire for about two hours. After the fire was extinguished, his charred torso was dragged through the town and parts of his body were sold as souvenirs. A professional photographer took pictures as the event unfolded, providing rare imagery of a lynching in progress. The pictures were printed and sold as postcards in Waco."[1]
This happened in 1916--most would consider the US to have been a nation for over a century by this point.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching_of_Jesse_Washington
Many countries have territorial disputes. India has territorial disputes with China and Pakistan. Japan has territorial disputes with Russia, South Korea and China (and Taiwan, if you count them as a country). Basically every country bordering the South China Sea has territorial disputes with every other country bordering the sea.
Yet China hasn't fought a war since 1979, which is something that gets lost in all these discussions. It doesn't fit with the China = expansionist Nazi Germany narrative, I guess.
> is openly ignoring international norms
There's a very good case to be made that China respects international norms much more than the United States does. The US has repeatedly violated the most important post-WWII international norm - the ban on aggressive war. For citizens of the country that invaded Iraq without provocation and caused the deaths of a million people there, it's a bit rich to go on and on about China not respecting international norms.
> I don't think that it is investing heavily in military just for show.
Definitely not for show. They're afraid of the United States military, which is funded to the tune of $700 billion/year. China spends a tiny fraction of that on its military. Even as a fraction of GDP, China's military spending is small compared to that of the US.
http://www.zuljan.info/articles/0302wwiigdp.html
China is still second in the world by nominal GDP, although they're closer to us now than Germany was then.
Different nations have different ways of doing things. The policies that they have in China might indeed be the best thing for them. But the only time I care is when American corporations start trying to do that.
I can not disagree about the Uyghur question. The melting pot policy is stupid and must end anyway because it will fail, as we are seeing in Europe. Hopefully it will burn itself out before too much damage is done. I actually feel guilty that these stupid immigration/integration concepts have been exported to other countries.
Calls within the United States for censorship are just flimsy pretexts for consolidation of power, and actually I think are less sincere than Chinese efforts for harmony. Mass shootings and other evils would not be significantly hampered by censorship. People saying that the internet has caused the rise of extremist terrorism are absolutely wrong. Just the last few weeks they kept going on and on about chaos that would happen from the Joker movie. It is nonsense. It is very hard to connect things said on the Internet to any real world deaths here. But I can see how in less stable countries, rumors and misinformation could lead to real problems. Maybe in a place like Indonesia or The Philippines they should censor misinformation, when there is a very real chance of conflict breaking out.
https://www.hongkongfp.com/2019/10/05/taiwan-flag-emoji-disa...
It is also limited to just the keyboard and not enforced in 3rd party apps or websites:
https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/7/20903613/apple-hiding-tai...
Twitter and Facebook took the moral high road only to be confronted with the same problems now and converging onto the same solutions. Anyway these incidents led Chinese thinkers to reexamine the ethnic policy based around oblast multiculturalism + carrots which was suppose to produce stability but ended up challenging serenity. Now the policy is forced integration via work camps. Somewhat tried and true. Chen QuanGuo was appointed Party Secretary of Tibet, he began security policies that enabled Tibet to see some of the highest GDP growth in the country. He was moved to Xinjiang a 5 years later to replicate his work, expanded the security architecture into the camps (however people want to label it) and increased anti-terrorism efforts. There's been no attacks since his reign, many before. Got promoted to political bureau member for his work.
MingZu policy change is not well known, mostly information disseminated between China scholars. TBH most western reporting on China is naive because western news room simply don't have sufficient assets covering China which is already a very difficult reporting environment. It doesn't help that foreign desks are full of white dudes who can't speak the language. Regardless, since the subject is justifiably mass human rights abuse, I think people don't really care about nuance even why something is happening, just that it is. Which is fair, you can't expect much on Chinese reporting when folks exposure to Chinese affairs outside of MSM are two youtubers playing the clickbait game. It's a ridiculous state of affairs.
I don't know about future timeline, Xinjiang is 7x larger than Tibet which took 5 years and is still ongoing. CPC probably hoping to do a reeducation "lite" policy in HK via CPC textbooks. They blame the current protests on a generation raised by British civics textbooks. I think the summation is, we focused too much on 2 systems instead of 1 country. Salad Bowl instead of melting pot.
Such cheap accusations of brigading get made all the time from both sides and have proven to be completely unreliable.
So users with newer devices would be impacted.
"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
Source?
I suggest fixing it ASAP. For example, the op can protest to urge his/her government to recognize Taiwan as a country, which will be "a beautiful landscape" as described by Nancy Patricia Pelosi.
The UN absolutely has provisions in its charter for approved wars. The Korean war was UN approved. A regime that is violent against civilians and outwardly genocidal towards religious minorities like ISIS is exactly the situation UN approved intervention was made for (designed with the Nazi's in mind).
I reject the premise that calling them a state would entail granting them anything.
Despite continuous friction with the Chinese government, Google's share of the search engine market in China had grown to over a third before it decided to pull out: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703465204575207...
Google hasn't pulled out of other markets where it faces strong local competitors, such as Yandex in Russia, and it remains popular in Chinese-speaking markets outside of mainland China such as Hong Kong and Taiwan. That the developers of the Google Pinyin input tool were found to have copied data (something other companies in and out of China have also been guilty of from time to time) is hardly evidence that Google in general was not competitive.
Ironically, the fact that under Pichai a return to China was seriously contemplated would suggest that financial reasons alone can't explain the original decision to leave.
Similarly, YouTube wasn't forced to pull out of other markets where it faced competition. Also, YouTube was frequently blocked by Chinese authorities even before Google decided to pull out: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703465204575207...
Competition may explain in part why Google hadn't conquered the Chinese market before it left, but conflict with the Chinese government, in the form of official censorship as well as illicit hacking, would seem to be the main reason why Google pulled out of China but not elsewhere.
Unless of course learning to comply with such demands and intrusions is included under "understanding the Chinese market".
Coulda been any nation with 1.3+ billion, with their stereotypical eating utensils.
Well, in many countries it absolutely is. And there is no way to fix this.
And even if a government was really elected legitimately and chosen not to recognize Taiwan I doubt this meant the people didn't know Taiwan is a de-facto independent country and actively wanted to keep it unrecognized. To be honest I myself have only found out Taiwan recognition is limited a couple of years ago. I always knew there is such a country and never knew about its diplomatic problems.
That a legal government of a modern democratic country cannot represent its people is a horrendous claim. As a strong believer of democracy, I'd rather assume that you were the minority in this case. The everyone claim may hold true for everyone you know (among the minority of your country of course).
Now they're aiding the repression of an entire nation trying to defy a much more tyrannical government?
Regarding Taiwan, I haven't been there, but from what I've seen/read about the country and spoken to the people from there, their situation seems like such a shame too. They deserve better recognition. China has long been acting like a petty schoolyard bully, "If you're their friend you can't be our friend!"
I know I shouldn't be feeling this way about an entire people, but this whole situation is making me cold towards Chinese people in general, for letting such a government carry on like this for so long.
I'll put the emphasis on "Chinese position"
1. US sells $8B of fighter jets to Taiwan (https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/08/approves-8bn-sale-66-...)
2. US passes the TAIPEI act, which outlines the US's strategy in dissuading Taiwan's few remaining diplomatic allies from switching recognition to China. (https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/senate-bill/340...)
3. Visa free travel in the US for Taiwanese citizens (https://www.export.gov/article?id=Taiwan-Visa-Requirements)
The US might officially not recognize Taiwan as a country, but would it sell $8B of military equipment to a country it truly believed to be China?
As a strong believer of democracy are you naive enough to believe all the elections are perfectly fair, no party at power ever cheats to imitate democracy and that democracy is about everybody sacrificing themselves to obey "the majority"? Do you believe the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea is actually democratic? Do you believe the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia is liberal?
It looks like you've been creating accounts for the purpose of nationalistic/political battle. That's against the site guidelines, and we ban accounts that do it, regardless of which side you're for or against. A lot of the time, we don't even look at which side an account is for or against—it isn't necessary, and we don't care.
Creating accounts to break the site guidelines with well eventually get your main account banned as well, so please don't.
Turning over files to the government can be a normal law enforcement thing, and many societies have figured out how to do that and preserve civil liberties. It can be non oppressive.
But when I see other people (in China, in Europe, really in most places that aren't the US) supporting tighter speech restrictions than we do, I understand that that's for some reason other than them being assholes, or childish, or hypersensitive, or whatever. I probably wouldn't like their reasons if I fully understood them, but I also accept that being an American means I don't fully understand them.
[As a side note not directed at you but at some others in this thread, it sounds like trying to draw this distinction gets me labeled as some kind of communist shill. What the fuck ever.]
I reckon Hong Kong is a speed bump. China could likely roll tanks in and slaughter thousands and the West would do little more than hold some important looking meetings and press conferences with Very Serious looks on their faces, before issuing some "demands" on China's behavior, that would be promptly forgotten. Western culture has become weak, we are ruled by false ideology, propaganda, and the almighty dollar. If you ask me, we deserve whatever it is we get.
Stop buying goods that support these policies. Stop supporting politicians that support these policies. Stop patronizing companies that lobby for these things. Use apps like "Goods Unite Us" to find out where your money is going.
The only way to do anything as an individual is to vote with your wallet, your feet, and your actual vote. When that cumulative change affects the bottom line of these companies, they'll have no choice but to change.
1) At points, they were waging a war that did not rely on terrorist/guerrilla tactics. OP did not claim they don't do 'terrorist stuff' at all. Waging conventional war requires control of territory, which is why this is important.
2) Saying ISIS is/controls a state would have you labeled as a terrorist sympathizer in the media or in conversation. This demonstrates that calling something a 'state' has an implicit moral connotation in popular culture. OP is arguing this should not be true.
None of OPs points were a _moral_ judgement of ISIS. I think we can all agree ISIS is bad.
For instance, I strongly believe Palestine should be an independent, free state distinct from Israel. However, the UN _recognizing_ it as a state does not mean it magically becomes one. The UN is just making a political point, but sadly one that has little impact on the reality in Palestine.
I would love to see how you justify Apple's actions as "historically oppressive" when it comes to App Store rejections. Even the case that you specify in Hong Kong wasn't Apple's actions "against the HK protest movement". The App was rejected initially because it was thought to violate specific terms and it was appealed and approved within days. To try and frame that as Apple being morally or ethically deficient is really, really disingenuous.
The opposite side is that Apple is the only company that's not actively selling user data and/or using it against users. Android may be more permissive from a general standpoint but even that comes at the huge, huge cost of a lack of privacy and a completely lack of concern for personal freedom. Even from a security standpoint, I would argue that Google is less ethical simply because they don't act on nefarious actors that they know about. Being permissive isn't the same thing as being ethical.
You continue to make an absurd and indefensible false equivalence.
You're stridently insisting on your interpretation, when there's more than one way to look at it. I'm just asking you to not dismiss the emoji thing so easily.
I'm pointing out though that the influence the US has through Hollywood is effectively global, and therefore also "from one country to another".
I finally got to look at this. There's no single pattern with these accounts. For starters, their comments are not all on the same political side. Some are defending Chinese policy and some are criticizing it. I don't see much of a pattern in the provenance of the accounts, either. Some are throwaway accounts being used by established users; in one case it's because we warned them to stop engaging in nationalistic flamewar, in other cases who knows. Some are breaking the guidelines by making a new account for each comment or two that they post. One account has existed for 3 years and the rest are new. To judge by IPs, one is posting from Hong Kong, one from Taiwan, and the rest from North America.
Based on the comments and other data I looked at, my best guess is that these accounts are all people who have spent time in both China and the West. Perhaps some are Westerners of Chinese background while others are from China, Hong Kong, and/or Taiwan and are either working in North America or did so in the past. Most likely they were motivated to create new accounts either because the active discussions going on provoked some reaction in them, or because they don't want their main account to get banned after we warned them, or because they're creating new accounts routinely. Some of their behavior definitely breaks the HN guidelines, but I didn't see anything that suggested more systematic abuse. Nor are they breaking the guidelines in ways that plenty of older users aren't already doing a lot of, unfortunately.
It's always possible, of course, that I missed something important. We don't know what we don't know. But we've spent years working with this data and user behavior and, to judge by the occasions when some real-world verification has been possible, have learned to make reasonably informed guesses.
It's really, really important not to jump to conclusions about other posters. When people do that they usually make serious mistakes and sometimes quite regrettable ones, such as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21195898 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19403358. In the latter case the user really was hounded off the site.
While accusations of brigading are common, I don't think the accusation is cheap in this case, you and I are both aware that the brigading happens on China related articles - we've spoke about it directly with each other via email. I would assume per the above you're looking at the data.
The last part is a bit of a deliberate trap - I've stated a fact, that the CCP agreed to provide HK with 'a high degree of autonomy'. If the anti-democracy suspects should downmod it, because it promotes allowing HK to do what the CCP agreed, they would be accusing their masters of lying. I quite deliberately did not make any allegation that the CCP would lie.
> you and I are both aware that the brigading happens on China related articles - we've spoke about it directly with each other via email
That's not accurate at all, and I have no idea what I said in email that would have made you think this. I've been looking at this data for years and have basically never seen anything remotely like what you're talking about. What you posted was a perfect example of the cheap accusations that the guidelines ask you to refrain from. You broke other guidelines there too, with going on about downvotes and flamey rhetoric ("Enjoy being disciplined by your masters"—please keep that kind of thing off HN).
If you want more explanation, I spent the whole day and half the night posting about this yesterday:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21200971
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21201077
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21199884
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21195089
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21195898
Previous comments on this at:
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
As believer of HEALTHY democracy, I've never made any such implications. Guys from US/UK/EU claiming Taiwan is a country should go protesting right away, don't let democracy down!
As I already said, if democracy doesn't work in your country, don't waste your time caring about China/TW/HK unless you actually live there.
The Chinese government is known to own the media and pump worldwide propaganda to its citizens and ex-citizens living abroad. These are facts, and they are only related to race because they apply to Chinese people. Please stop with the bullshit. It's embarrassing.
