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Huawei 5G kit must be removed from UK by 2027

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293 points doener | 1 comments | 14 Jul 20 12:06 UTC | HN request time: 0.193s | 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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flohofwoe ◴[14 Jul 20 12:47 UTC] No.23831210[source]▶
I think the simplistic sort of thinking that capitalism and human rights are 'inseparable' from each other and can be 'exported' like Coca Cola or Blue Jeans is just a leftover from the Cold War. The reality is much more complicated unfortunately, together with the slowly growing realisation that the USA has quickly lost it's 'role model' status as the leader of the 'Free World' after the Cold War has ended.

The West needed 30 years to realize that (some are still working on this I think) because it thought that it had actually 'won' the Cold War through it's actions during the Cold War, when the reality was much more likely that the East had collapsed also without much 'help' from the West.

The countries on the 'losing side' in this battle of ideologies (like the Soviet Union and China) had adapted to this new reality much more quickly, both in different ways though, but none of them copied the 'obviously superior' model of the Free West.

Of course hindsight is 20/20, but sometimes I've got the impression that many people in the West still wear their rose-tinted Cold War glasses ;)

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Ekaros ◴[14 Jul 20 19:10 UTC] No.23836326[source]▶
Considering the actions of these capitalist nations during Cold War it's pretty clear in retrospective that promoting human rights and democracy wasn't very high priority. Propping up dictators and terrorist don't seem very much in those lines.
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1. arp242 ◴[15 Jul 20 03:16 UTC] No.23840830[source]▶
In the minds of the people at the time Communism was such a great evil and afront to personal freedom, that "propping up dictators and terrorist" was seen as the lesser evil and preferable.

It's perhaps easy to forget now, but during the 30s, 40s, and 50s the face and "leader" of communism was Stalin – not exactly a friendly chap – and things like China's Great Leap Forward left over 20 million dead (mostly due to incompetence, not malice), and let's not forget Cambodia.

Details differ per care of course, but in quite a few cases all of this was done in the name of "freedom and democracy", which was perhaps not entirely unreasonable too. I'm not saying that it was the right thing to do (many other issues like national sovereignty etc. which come in to play), but I do think it's a bit more complex than your comment. I'm not sure if idly sitting by and doing nothing would have been that great of an option either.

There's a reason that communist symbolism and the like is considered taboo in many formerly communist Eastern European countries, somewhat akin to Nazi symbolism.