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Japan to fund firms to shift production out of China

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Re: Japan to fund firms to shift production out of China

#251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally enjoyed the hypocrisy of China initially requesting Nations to not "overreact" and close borders to its travelers (mid February), then proceeding to do exactly this towards these same nations (mid March) when things became worse overseas.

CCP does not understand that playing asymmetric games from business laws (booting Uber off of China for example), diplomacy and global influence, etc is damaging long term brand and goodwill. In this pandemic, democratic nations are suffering more than authoritarian regimes purely by choice - complete Wuhan style measures are unacceptable say in Sweden. This asymmetry is going to give a short term boost to China. Lon…

I sincerely hope most foreign businesses move their factories away from China.

On top of that, China has to be held responsible for crime against humanity and must be punished.

Re: Japan to fund firms to shift production out of China

#252
post #46

Actually this pandemic has shown some true colors of many nations. 1) US trying to unsuccessfully hoard supplies, issues with the German testing company 2) China trying to use soft power, but the whole drama feels fake. It is good that they are sending supplies (often faulty and not up to the quality, see dutch story around this) but it doesn't feel genuine. 3) European countries are in-fighting for supplies. Switzer…

2) China trying to use soft power, but the whole drama feels fake. It is good that they are sending supplies (often faulty and not up to the quality, see dutch story around this) but it doesn't feel genuine. I am curious what will be considered not fake and genuine support? Damned if they and damned if they don’t. AFAIK Dutch issued a article clarify the mistake they made which nobody seems to care. I don’t think any…

For instance this makes it fake:

"Unsurprisingly, Sweden has received no assistance from China. Instead, one of the country’s hospitals had to secure philanthropic funding to buy Chinese medical gear. Sweden happens to be China’s European bête noire, the result of its support for the imprisoned Hong Kong bookseller Gui Minhai, who became a Swedish citizen in the 1990s."

"Though an airplane would reach the desperate Spaniards (some 85,000 coronavirus infections, more than 7,000 deaths) much faster, Beijing made sure that the Chinese supplies currently heading for Spain would travel by train along the Belt and Road route, a journey that takes 17 days."

https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/03/30/russia-china-coronaviru....

"Some propaganda campaigns are more brazen still. According to recent analysis, 46% of tweets using the hashtag #forzaCinaeItalia, which translates as “come on China and Italy,” were generated by automated bots. For #grazieCina, meaning “Thanks China,” it was 37%. China’s Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Hua even posted a video on Twitter of Italians in Rome applauding health workers at noon from their balconies—but dubbed with the Chinese national anthem and claiming, spuriously, they were chanting “Grazie, Cina!”"

https://time.com/5814940/china-mask-diplomacy-falters/

Re: Japan to fund firms to shift production out of China

#253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is false, by the time they shut down movement out of Wuhan, the airport was closed. There were, however, people who already left Wuhan who then left the country. There were also repatriation flights out of Wuhan.

I think people forget that they gave 48h warning before the lockdown happened causing a huge amount of what was likely infected people to flee.

It was 8 hours: "At 2 am on 23 January 2020, authorities issued a notice informing residents of Wuhan that from 10 am [..] residents of Wuhan were also not allowed to leave the city without permission from the authorities."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Hubei_lockdowns

where is the 48h come from?

Re: Japan to fund firms to shift production out of China

#254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's interesting to me that you find this surprising or view it as bad behavior. It's not surprising in the sense that it fits the definition of a "nation state". It's surprising because one would think that in XXI century, people understood that global problems require global coordination; competition of selfish actors fails spectacularly in such cases.

Why then have nations?

Nations were useful, particularly when almost all problems were local problems. Doesn't mean it's an ideal top-level organization for XXI century.

You have bodies like Germany or the US, which function as a federation of states. Looking at Germany and EU, you essentially have states within a state within a sort-of state. You can stack governments recursively, so it's possible and in some ways desirable to have a single one at the top level.

Re: Japan to fund firms to shift production out of China

#255

Actually this pandemic has shown some true colors of many nations. 1) US trying to unsuccessfully hoard supplies, issues with the German testing company 2) China trying to use soft power, but the whole drama feels fake. It is good that they are sending supplies (often faulty and not up to the quality, see dutch story around this) but it doesn't feel genuine. 3) European countries are in-fighting for supplies. Switzer…

> There are some good stories too, especially the sacrifice of the healthcare workers What is good about that? They are terrified to come to work. This heroism stuff is just bullshit so we can shame people who refuse to die. After crisis is over, there will be no financial compensation (overtimes, hazardous environment, no protective equipment).

It is a good story as in if they didn't do what they are doing today - say every healthcare worker quits tomorrow, we are in a huge trouble.

They are identical to soldiers. Some healthcare workers are being exposed to Coronavirus and dying.

In fact, we should have similar veteran-like benefits for healthcare workers for their sacrifice during this time. Same with delivery workers - they are the logistics arm of this war.

Re: Japan to fund firms to shift production out of China

#256
post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that the WHO communication was proportionate to the current knowledge at the time of each of their interventions. First of all they said, when it was clear there was a problem "We have a simple message for all countries: test, test, test." (and then Trump and almost everybody else did not want to hear that) And moreover they said more exactly, some time before the previous item, that "Preliminary investigatio…

No. The WHO constantly downplayed this pandemic and kowtowed to China to the point of disgracefully delaying calling it a pandemic and then playing catch-up when individual countries started ignoring the WHO and implemented their own measures. Then the WHO switched gears and complained that the countries were doing too little too late. They've been almost completely worthless in this crisis.

Well, they at least published that anti-covid disinfection recipe. At least here in Czech Republic everyone uses that to make emergency disinfection mixtures.

Re: Japan to fund firms to shift production out of China

#257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no vilification about China. China is by far the biggest non-existential threat to individual liberty in the world today. Great firewall of China. No Freedom of Speech or Religion. Ethnic Cleansing Camps. Militarizing the South China Sea. Massive corporate espionage operations. Claiming Taiwan is a breakaway island. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength

Yeah their strategy is to grow so large that they can just call the shots. I would be a ton of "western" politicians and business leaders are in their pockets too. Instead of a head on conflict they are going to slowly absorb the enemy. This is one area that I think Trump was right in, and the Dems (and neo-cons) seemed to be mostly in their pockets. I don't fully understand what Obama's China plan was.

> I don't fully understand what Obama's China plan was.

Built a strong United Front comprises of countries around China with the US at the top, especially the IP monopoly. While it takes a long time it will subliminally erode China's competitiveness. Quite similar to the plan to erode USSR's economy without a hot war between NATO and Warsaw's pact.

Re: Japan to fund firms to shift production out of China

#258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let op! Niet elk mondmasker geeft voldoende bescherming tegen corona! -- Explains the different Chinese standards -- https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/let-op-niet-elk-mondmasker-ge... Trouw -- "Als gevolg van de tekorten zijn de criteria voor het gebruik van de mondmaskers verlaagd" (because of the shortages, they lowered the standards for masks, making it easier to purchase the wrong thing) -- https://www.trouw.nl/poli…

So you have no source for the claim that 'The Dutch made an ordering mistake'. I won't read LinkedIn btw, that is not a source.

Why do you not find those sources convincing? Yeah nobody is explicitly making the statement "sorry, I messed up" but if I put the facts together then that's still what happened, in my opinion.

I think you dismiss LinkedIn way too quickly. Hedda Sasburg is a business development consultant specialized in trade with China. I think this counts as expertise w.r.t. what Chinese different products and standards are. Why do you dismiss it so easily?

And okay, how about this then: https://nos.nl/artikel/2329316-afgekeurde-mondkapjes-waren-w...

From the article:

> Maar "de Chinese kwaliteitsstandaard KN95 van de mondmaskers is een medische code", zegt een woordvoerder van de IGJ.

> But "the Chinese standard KN95 means that it's for medical use", said the Dutch ministery of health.

Hedda Sasburg (and not sure why the article doesn't point this out):

> Ik lees dat het KN95 [aka GB2626] mondmaskers zijn; maskers die in China niet zijn bestemd voor medisch gebruik in ziekenhuizen.

> KN95 masks [aka GB2626] are not for medical use.

Note: the Chinese KN95 is not equivalent to the American N95.

Also from the article:

> "De producten stonden beschreven als 'niet-medische maskers' in de douanepapieren"

> The customs paper said that these are non-medical masks.

Even if you don't believe Hedda Sasburg and the Chinese statements, the customs paper seems pretty definitive to me.

The only loose end I still see is why IGJ ruled KN95 to be equivalent to the European EN-149:2001+A1:2009 when even the Chinese don't use them for medical purposes.

Anyway, the issue is now solved. China now sent masks that the Dutch do approve of: https://twitter.com/mjrijn/status/1246154161152045056

Re: Japan to fund firms to shift production out of China

#259
post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since you mention web comparisons, imagine your lead dev announces that to improve redundancy, the project shall use both React and Angular for the same application. "This way, if one of the dependencies shuts down, we'll already be partly using the other dependency! What could possibly go wrong?"

This makes no sense, because the only reason React would suddenly fail on you is if your project is so very badly engineered that you don't pin dependencies and cache them locally. And even then, your deployed instances would remain unaffected. A dependency is something you own (a checked-out copy of). A better comparison is with services. So you may be using a payment gateway in your product, and maybe you need just…

We could easily imagine that suddenly it is revealed that React contains some super-well-hidden malware that phones home to Facebook, and that's been built into React since early versions. As doubtful as that sounds, it's actually not unlike recent scares about China embedding secret transmitters deep inside of circuitboards, etc.

Re: Japan to fund firms to shift production out of China

#260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even with China lying at the beginning of the pandemic, there were then whole two months when the rest of the world watched it spread and didn't do anything to protect themselves. The severity of the pandemic is not China's fault.

I'm not sure I follow. The rest of the world was acting with the (false) information that China, and the WHO, were putting out there - including that there was "no evidence of human-to-human" transmission. So perhaps when you say it's "not China's fault", this is technically true in the sense that it's the fault of the rest of us for taking what were obvious lies at face value.

At the end of January, it was obvious that it's a severely infectious disease. On 22th of January WHO agreed that there is evidence of human-to-human transmission[0]. By the end of January, the virus was in Italy. By mid-February, it was clear it's going to be a problem for the West. By the end of February, it was obvious to anyone with half a brain and access to a spreadsheet that this is going to be a devastating global pandemic unless swift and extreme actions are taken.

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[0] - https://www.who.int/news-room/detail/08-04-2020-who-timeline...

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