China Using Net Censorship As a Trade Weapon? 111
angry tapir writes "The Chinese government is using Internet censorship as a trade weapon against U.S. tech companies trying to do business there. China's ongoing censorship of the Internet is applied unevenly, with foreign companies often facing stricter rules than their Chinese counterparts, said Ed Black, president and CEO of the Computer and Communications Industry Association, to the U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission on China. (Of course, a lot of countries aren't thrilled by U.S. net censorship efforts.)"
Net censorship, another U.S. job going to China (Score:5, Funny)
They took yer job, U.S. government!
Re:Net censorship, another U.S. job going to China (Score:5, Insightful)
They took yer job, U.S. government!
Not sure if this is meant cynically or in humour, but the Chinese government is highly creative and quite indirect when it comes to the tit-for-tat of diplomacy. They've been at it for a bit longer.
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That is a rather narrow minded view of things.
Let us say that the United States is the offspring of a mostly European culture, that emerged from the dark ages about a thousand years ago. And, China has a culture that has been ongoing for more than 5000 years. Not GOVERNMENT, but culture. What with the worship of ancestors, I'll bet that a lot of Chinese can trace their ancestry back thousands of years. (I actually tried to test that idea once, but since I can't read Chinese, I couldn't tell if I found l
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On the subject of the dark ages... that was a few hundred years. Europe has thousands of years of histor
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I'm sure if you want to read through the history of China, you'll find some pretty damn grim periods too.
For instance, 1966-1976 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_revolution [wikipedia.org]).
Also probably not so hot:
An Shi Rebellion (China, 755–763)
Qing dynasty conquest of Ming dynasty (1616–1662)
Taiping Rebellion (China, 1850–1864) (see Dungan revolt)
Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945)
Warring States Era (China, 475 BC–221 BC)
Dungan revolt (China, 1862 –1877)
Yellow Turban Rebellion (China, 184–205)
Heck, that's 7 out of the top 16 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_ [wikipedia.org]
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"China has a culture that has been ongoing for more than 5000 years. Not GOVERNMENT"
By that definition Europe has a 5000 years of culture as well. Although at that time some of them were still in Asia.
Also, for a 5000 years they have a pretty shitty standard of living and literacy rates.
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Find me some Americans who can trace their ancestry back past the renaissance, and I'll think about conceding the point.
You ought to think about it anyway; it doesn't matter whether you can actually trace your family tree back to a particular long-dead relative or not, or how far back you can go; we all go back to the same Mitochondrial Eve, and that means that all of us have about the same claim to ancientness in our genes.
Find me some Americans who can trace their ancestry back past the renaissance, and I'll think about conceding the point.
I think I just did that for everyone.
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Nope. You didn't. You're dismissing the importance of culture, and heritage. "We ain't got it, so it doesn't matter very much." That's the attitude I read from your, and the above comments. A few other peoples have an unbroken history going back thousands of years - the Jews for instance. Europeans? Nope.
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You said ancestry, not culture. We all *have* ancestry, whether we know what it is or not.
However, tradition is never sufficient justification to do a thing. Culture that goes back thousands of years is overrated. What year is it now? Some people are still subjecting their women to clitoridectomies. But their culture goes back thousands of years and they can trace their ancestry back to the gods, so it must be OK, right?
Re:Net censorship, another U.S. job going to China (Score:5, Funny)
Oh, is it time for another of Herman Cain's foreign policy proposals?
SOPA in action (Score:2)
see how the American Government like it!
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Is just a new weapon that the US doesn't have... YET.
SOPA: Punish the man for the sins of a few.
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This is nothing like SOPA. The only similarity one can draw is that they're both using unethical methods to protect domestic businesses. However, the Chinese government is protecting their businesses from legitimate competition, whereas the US government is protecting their businesses from illegitimate competition (piracy).
Re:SOPA in action (Score:4, Insightful)
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This is nothing like SOPA. The only similarity one can draw is that they're both using unethical methods to protect domestic businesses. However, the Chinese government is protecting their businesses from legitimate competition, whereas the US government is protecting their businesses from illegitimate competition (piracy).
If you allow each country to define "legitimate" for themselves, there is a great similarity between SOPA and this stuff on such an abstract level.
Re:SOPA in action (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't quite get how sourcing labour in one country then exporting the fruits of that labour to another (think Chinese kids putting iPads together for $0.10 a day to get around US employer taxes then those iPads being sold for upwards of $600 or whatever in the States) can in any way be considered legitimate. OK, so it keeps Chinese kids off the streets (laughably), but child slavery does nothing for the esteem of the country, its perceived Human Rights record (I can tell you right now that the UK is no halo'd angel when it comes to Human Rights), nor its "carbon footprint" compared with per capita GDP.
Pedant point: the term "piracy" has been co-opted by the Entertainment and Media industry from its original meaning which referred to crimes against the Person and Ship committed on the High Seas. The co-opted meaning refers to the unauthorised bootlegging (ie copying and distribution) of recorded works. It has nothing to do with rape and pillage and murder on the High Seas, but it invariably carries a harsher sentence because why? Because E&M owns Government (and writes the rules to serve itself - what would you do in that position?), and E&M controls the flow of information.
When you control the flow of information you can make people believe what you want them to believe and get it to the point where any oppositional thinking is regarded as delusional paranoia, rejected and mocked by the masses, any repitition of which is further regarded as inflammatory and slanderous. Many of those historically considered as evil (Mussolini, Hitler, Gadhafi, Hussein) knew of those techniques and used them to advantage in ways that would (and do) give DHS and MI5 wet dreams.
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Firstly, you are conflating moral legitimacy in labor exploitation with legitimacy of having a competitive and distinct product in an open free market. Yes, Apple loses moral legitimacy when they source from exploitative suppliers. However, that is not in any way related to the sort of legitimacy under scrutiny when we speak of legitimacy in terms of foreign companies competing with domestic ones in the Chinese market. I'm happy to agree with you on the issue of Apple's moral failings, and I'm sure we'd rar
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Pedant point: the term "piracy" has been co-opted by the Entertainment and Media industry from its original meaning which referred to crimes against the Person and Ship committed on the High Seas.
Pedantic counterpoint: "Piracy" has carried that meaning for over 300 years now. It's a bit late to worry about it now.
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=pirate&allowed_in_frame=0 [etymonline.com]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_infringement#.22Piracy.22 [wikipedia.org]
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If only it's aim wasn't to just protect the 1%ers who run companies in the U.S. but export all the other jobs to China.
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This is nothing like SOPA. The only similarity one can draw is that they're both using unethical methods to protect domestic businesses. However, the Chinese government is protecting their businesses from legitimate competition, whereas the US government is protecting their businesses from illegitimate competition (piracy).
I'd say a better comparison is that China is protecting their businesses at the expense of foreign businesses, while the US is protecting their businesses at the expense of... their other businesses.
And of course, if I was in China's shoes, I would be cheerfully putting the boots to US companies, since the US has abdicated any sort of moral authority in the matter.
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I'd say a better comparison is that China is protecting their businesses at the expense of foreign businesses, while the US is protecting their businesses at the expense of... their other businesses.
Hey hey hey, you need to use the correct terminology here. It's not "their other businesses". It's "filthy stealing pirates" and "lazy entitled kids who got loans they couldn't afford for an unmarketable degree"
Unless they're a person who attacks and robs ships at sea, pirate is the wrong word (no matter what rich media moguls would have you believe). Your second point is probably more accurate - old money is never fond of new money. (Even if the "old money" used to *be* new a generation ago).
Shocking. (Score:5, Insightful)
News. At. 11.
just dont get it (Score:1)
WTO sanctions (Score:2)
Maybe it is time for the WTO to set some anti-sensorship restrictions. Not that what is happening in the U.S. couldn't happen at the international level.
Re:WTO sanctions (Score:4, Interesting)
Tariff the B@stards! (Score:5, Interesting)
Enough playing Tiddly Wings with China. Tariff them until our trade between them balances. If we keep rewarding lopsided trade, it will keep happening.
Plus, the US gov't can use the revenue right now.
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How about we just fire up the printing press to insane levels and make them choose between rampant inflation or maintaining their currency's exchange rate?
Consequences (Score:4, Insightful)
Enough playing Tiddly Wings with China. Tariff them until our trade between them balances.
That's fine. How do you plan to deal with the large increases in prices of a huge number of goods? A lot of goods are made in China because of cost and it is highly non-trivial, not to mention expensive, to relocate all of that production. Much of the burden of the increased costs of goods will fall on the low income portion of the the population.
Riding your high horse isn't without a cost.
Plus, the US gov't can use the revenue right now.
What revenue? You think there would be no consequences? Raise prices suddenly on a wide variety of goods and you are almost certainly going to send the US economy into the tank again. Tax revenues would plummet much more than any money that would be raised from tariffs.
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Comparative advantage (Score:3)
Stuff from China is poor quality and has a high markup.
That's complete nonsense which doesn't stand up to even the basic scrutiny. I've been to China myself and been in factories where they make parts for Dell, Emerson Electric, and about 10 other Fortune 500 companies with well deserved reputations for good to excellent products. While there is of course some shoddy production from China there is a lot of very high quality manufacturing as well - every bit as good as anything in the US.
I think the low income portion of the population (that spends almost all its money on rent/transportation/food anyway) wouldn't mind paying a little more if it meant they got factory jobs.
Imposing tariffs won't bring jobs back and we're not talking about "a lit
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Imposing tariffs won't bring jobs back
It will, so long as manufacturing locally is less expensive than manufacturing overseas with tariffs apply, but still cheap enough to turn a profit. USA is a big enough market to be ignored.
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While there is of course some shoddy production from China there is a lot of very high quality manufacturing as well - every bit as good as anything in the US.
Sure, everything is made in China, and there's plenty of capable manufacturing in China, but on the other hand, I've never EVER seen anything from a Chinese brand that wasn't canned crap. So one might argue that the Chinese never make anything worth a shit unless someone forces them to.
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America's comparative advantage is marketing bullshit to ignorant consumers. It may pay the bills, but rots our soul and makes us unpleasant liars.
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"because of cost and it is highly non-trivial, not to mention expensive, to relocate all of that production. Much of the burden of the increased costs of goods will fall on the low income portion of the the population."
True, but it was expensive to move it all to China to begin with, and that worked.
And, bonus, to go along with the uptick in costs, we might well have an uptick in employment. And those poor people might have a bit more money to offset the increase in prices. They did manage to get by befor
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And, bonus, to go along with the uptick in costs, we might well have an uptick in employment
Huh? Increasing prices will increase employment? What universe are you living in? Increasing prices in the face of competition pretty much has exactly the opposite effect. Burying our head in the sand an pretending China doesn't exist isn't going to magically make things better. Furthermore increasing prices on some goods like steel makes everything you make out of those goods more expensive. It hurts economic growth in a very easy to demonstrate way. There is a reason virtually all economists think
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Huh? Increasing prices will increase employment? What universe are you living in?
If you increase the prices of foreign goods then you can increase the price of local goods. This is the same reason why a family of Texas oilmen would want to make war in oil-producing countries even if they can't get their hands on the oil which is there.
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"Huh? Increasing prices will increase employment?"
If the prices on the import items go up, that will leave room for local sourced items to become competitive.
Never did I call for us to bury our heads and ignore China.
And things wont get magically better. Ignoring the fact that jobs are in a sad state because we are moving them to China and India and other places doesnt help.
"Furthermore increasing prices on some goods like steel makes everything you make out of those goods more expensive. It hurts economic
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Actually, the economy is doing "fair" right now. The rich are doing fine and profits are up. It's just that the middle class and poor are hosed.
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Jobs are more important than cheap trinkets in my opinion. Actually, the manufacturing costs are often less than half the final purchase price on most items. True, the trade-off choice between jobs or cheap is a political decision and some may want it the other way. Idle people tend to get into trouble, and their skills rot.
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That's a silly argument. Let's assume you're right: Bob has made his fortune, no longer cares about profit, and won't move back. Well, if the head of the company no longer cares, that's a short-term problem that will be resolved by the market. So let's look first at Carol, who still produces things in the US (there are some of these left) and is considering moving to China today. She sees we're about to create a tariff on goods manufactured in China (or even are just thinking about doing so) and hesistates.
No big deal (Score:5, Interesting)
They fear outside influence on their populace, but the truth is China will eat its self politically from the inside out, you can not give your population a "taste" of capitalism and expect to maintain the same level of political control, it doesn't work.
So rather than outside influences driving the change it will be the inside influences that do this, they went from “Practice Marxism and not Revisionism” to “Praise profit. Praise profit. Praise profit. Praise profit. Praise profit.”
We live in interesting times.
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Plus, with their one-child policy they're a demographic powder keg waiting to go off (eventually). Either they are going to have too many sex-selected men looking for women or they are going to have too few young people to support all the old people.
Not worried about China. Ultimately, we want them to do well. Economics isn't always a zero-sum game.
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That excess of males concerns me, if you think about it an excess of sexually frustrated males makes for a great army, and the military is something China is growing as fast as their economy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_People's_Republic_of_China [wikipedia.org]
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Plus, with their one-child policy they're a demographic powder keg waiting to go off (eventually). Either they are going to have too many sex-selected men looking for women or they are going to have too few young people to support all the old people.
Or, they'll just reinvent the mail order bride business.
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I'm not saying anything about whether the one-child policy is popular or not. I'm saying it will create an unsustainable demographic trend.
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Ah the old trickle down democracy theory. It hasn't worked and I don't think it will. Still it's another excuse to keep our factories over there and our fingers crossed over here, right?
Right?
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Nothing unsightly has been done by the US in the last 100 years, that China or Russia have not been outdone several times over in the last 50... Our moral ground is as high as ever compared to the rest of the world's (super)powers.
Nagasaki.
Hiroshima.
Game over.
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Tokyo 1943. 100,000 civilians deliberately incinerated in 1 day.
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Cultural Revolution or Great Leap forward or Stalin much?
The death tolls from those policies dwarfs any from firebombing, or nuclear explosions.
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You are joking.
After the war, Japan was not made part of a US empire. Nor Germany.
What happened with the states bordering Russia after the war? You know why there was an east and west Germany, right?
Also,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasion_of_Okinawa#Civilian_losses [wikipedia.org]
If things were this bad close to Japan, what would actually landing on mainland Japanese soil have been like?
The predictions were for many more civilian casualties than the bombs produced.
The US has not been perfect, and has plenty of faults,
aaah sarcasm (Score:2)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Gladio [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_Orange [wikipedia.org]
https://www.google.com/search?q=cia+drug+running&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a [google.com]
but especially in the same page :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_drug_trafficking#Panama [wikipedia.org]
despicable.
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lol go back to sleep
you mean like you ? no.
Copyright / "IP Rights Chapters" (Score:1)
How different is this from the US shoving "Intellectual Property Rights Chapters" down everyone else's throat in every Trade Agreement?
How will things be in the USA in 10 years? (Score:5, Insightful)
We all talk about how terrible is Internet censorship in China, while in the meantime out own US congress (which by large does no longer represent the interests of US citizens) is considering laws to centralise control of the Internet, in the name of "security" and defending the interest of a small number of companies that heavily lobby on these regulations. This is happening right now, people. Wake up. You can keep criticising China, or maybe you can use that energy to do something about your own country. Or you can wait some years, and try to explain to your grandchildren why their freedom of speech is nowhere to be found.
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Look at it this way: earlier, dissidents from all countries used to host their sites in the US, because of the freedom of speech. In 10+ years, US dissidents will host their sites in countries like Ukraine, Russia, etc.., because of an out-of-control US government. And some of them already do: we call them file sharers here (or pirates, depending on perspective).
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You're preaching to the choir. Stop telling us to wake up, we already know.
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Well, we already have COPA (however you feel about it, it's centralization of authority) and the DMCA. There's plenty more where that came from. Anything that gives the federal government the power to regulate anything on the internet is centralization. So far things have worked amazingly well in the current model, with Net Neutrality as the first big problem that the industry can't solve, since the industry IS the problem.
Perhaps a fatal mistake? (Score:3)
(This is hinged of course on SOPA not passing)
I see this as a mistake by the Chinese gov't. The american companies should come back here where we dont' have such (restrictive) practices.
A win-win situation for us.
Course it'll never happen but it's nice to dream
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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No your entire post is bullshit of the rankest kind.
Merely participating in the voting process you are handing over legitimacy to an illegitimate system. There is literally no point in voting when there are only two official parties, and they are both essentially the same with the exception of having a few different corporate sponsors.
Maybe - Maybe Not (Score:1)
Last time I was over there, I noticed Internet censorship varied city by city, and even in Beijing differently from one hotel to another. It might have a lot to do with the local service provider. Also, the service providers vary wildly from city to city. I don't believe there is a unified telco provider in China that provides you the ability to make phone calls in all cities, though that was two or three years ago.
Hmm. Ask Tuvalu about that. (Score:1)
Ask those people who run internet gambling sites who are being closed down because the US is censoring the net.
Ask Wikileaks about US censorship on the internet.
I experienced it first hand. (Score:3)
Net Neutrality (Score:1)
China is selectively filtering and shaping its own internet traffic, including that of US companies operating in their country. Aren't these exactly the kinds of capabilities the US wants to give its own ISPs by preventing Net Neutrality, on top of forcing them to pay for the priority of their traffic?
Of course they are. So what? (Score:2)
Look, China has spies all over the west stealing technology. WHen they are not stealing, they simply buy and count on presidents like W to allow them to take it out (just one example from W was magnaquench; that allowed C
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Let me tie this into Net Neutrality (Score:3)
Here, the Chinese government is deciding which businesses will be featured more prominently on the internet, which makes a big impact on that companies business. I keep getting called a tinfoil hat when I propose that ISPs could do the same thing. But here is a real world example of it. If you can filter and prioritize web sites, you can control business.
Some Web content blocked from appearing on U.S.-based sites in China appears on Chinese sites, he said. In some cases, China has redirected searches through U.S. services to a Chinese service, and its censorship of foreign services drives consumers to Chinese alternatives, he added.
The latter example sounds much like Verizon (and others) who redirect DNS lookup failures to their own search engine.
And why not. (Score:2)
I was feeling sick (Score:2, Funny)
without a real China bashing post on /. for almost a day, now I feel better.
Time to some tricks of our own (Score:1)
like maybe have the USN use submarines to start sinking every Chinese cargo ship they can find and sink em in deep water so there is no chance of investigation or recovery, and take no prisoners and make sure the captain & crew all die so there are no witnesses, if China wants an economic war then lets give them one