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Huawei 5G kit must be removed from UK by 2027

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293 points doener | 4 comments | 14 Jul 20 12:06 UTC | HN request time: 0.8s | source
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room271 ◴[14 Jul 20 12:32 UTC] No.23831071[source]▶
This kind of thing is going to play out a lot over the next few years. It's a tough question: how to marry globalisation with the political realities. When China was very poor, it didn't really matter, or perhaps the assumption was that China would liberalise more quickly than it has. But China, while increasingly mature economically, has not developed proper civil society, human rights, freedom of expression, democracy, and so on. Let us hope they do so as quickly as possible, not least for the sake of the Chinese people themselves. And let us work to improve our example and unity too in countries where we do have these things, however imperfectly.
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free_rms ◴[14 Jul 20 13:14 UTC] No.23831513[source]▶
Different != Improper.

They're not perfect, but over the last 30 years they lifted half a billion out of poverty and didn't wage war all over the world.

Not everything needs to be wrapped in our style of propaganda, sometimes it can be wrapped in other brands instead.

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HideousKojima ◴[14 Jul 20 13:18 UTC] No.23831568[source]▶
Percentagewise, China hasn't done any better than South Korea or Taiwan at lifting their populace out of poverty. So I don't see how that comes anywhere close to excusing China's human rights abuses. And while SK and Taiwan only became democracies relatively recently, their human rights abuses even before then pale in comparison to what China is currently doing to Uighurs, Tibetans, and religious minorities in general. So yes, if anything improper is putting things too lightly.
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free_rms ◴[14 Jul 20 13:25 UTC] No.23831625[source]▶
I think you're understating the human rights impact of going from third world to first world living standards. You like having your teeth?
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1. HideousKojima ◴[14 Jul 20 13:39 UTC] No.23831798[source]▶
No, I'm saying that similar countries were able to lift their populations out of poverty without creating concentration camps for millions of political dissidents and religious minorities in the process. China's economic success isn't tied to its authoritarian regime, and it's actually pretty easy to argue that they would have lifted even more of their population out of poverty even faster if they hadn't had harebrained/genocidal schemes like the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and communism in general. China didn't begin to see any significant economic success until after they abandoned most of their communist policies and began liberalizing markets in the late 80's and early 90's.
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2. ferest ◴[14 Jul 20 17:03 UTC] No.23834563[source]▶
Lifting 100 millions people out of poverty is totally different from lifting 1 millions people out of poverty. Moving a car involves much more engineering than moving a carpet.

If they haven't done great leap forward and cultural revolution it would be better, that is true. But by "abandoning all communist policies and began liberalizing markets", not all countries see economic success, ukraine, iraq and all recent "liberated" countries, and russian living quality in 90s was even worse than their late 80s.

And ironically enough, the fast developing era of taiwan, south korea, by today's standard, are not under any form of democracy.

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3. chrischen ◴[14 Jul 20 19:52 UTC] No.23836916[source]▶
I lifted myself out of poverty. You canmt exactly compare myself (population of 1) with the efforts to move a country of over 1 billion people out of poverty. It's not as if I have somehow figured this out and can scale this up to 1 billion people.
4. chillacy ◴[14 Jul 20 20:33 UTC] No.23837468[source]▶
> And ironically enough, the fast developing era of taiwan, south korea, by today's standard, are not under any form of democracy.

This is I think an under-appreciated point... Taiwan and SK both made the most economic gains under military dictatorships. Social liberalization followed economic growth.

Something similar might have happened in Singapore, they're technically a democracy but have been governed by the PAP forever and don't really subscribe to freedom of press in the way the US does (but have their own ways of building accountability).

All very fascinating stuff. 10 years ago I would have said that China would follow the same path but in that case social liberalization still hasn't come yet. Certainly the GDP per capita has not yet caught up but the PPP was pretty close last I checked.