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Intel apologises in China over Xinjiang supplier statement

reuters.com

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Re: Intel apologises in China over Xinjiang supplier statement

#221

Post by syshum »

whoopdedo wrote: post #176
gelert wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's toxic to democracy is politicians lying, and then telling us that p;ointing out their moments of hypocrisy is what's doing the real damage. Describing reality is never bad.

There's a world of difference between "This politician is lying to you." and "All politicians are lying to you." One is a statement against a single incident which can be refuted or supported by additional facts. The other is an unprovable blanket statement which begs the question of whether the government can be trusted.

The question "can government be trusted" is long answered with a resounding NO it can not

Government like fire is a useful servant, but a fearful master.

This is why we have separation of powers, checks and balances, and a federalist system in the US, because we understand government can never, and should never be trusted.

Government is control, government is fear, government is power. Power Corrupts, and the only way to prevent that corruption is to deny power, to check power, to distribute power.

Re: Intel apologises in China over Xinjiang supplier statement

#222

Post by kerneloftruth »

themitigating wrote: post #145

Karry Wang said he would no longer serve as brand ambassador for Intel, adding in a statement that "national interests exceed everything". Everything?

Yes, that's the mentality. And, by "national interests", they mean "CCP interests" -- there's no distinction between "the party" and the nation.

Re: Intel apologises in China over Xinjiang supplier statement

#223

Post by tombh »

Archio wrote: post #196
tombh wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are so out of your league here. Whilst you state facts, it is comical to imply that China can hold a candle to the West's atrocities. 18 different border disputes, 18!?? I mean how can you seriously think that's a big number? Just take the American continent itself. Honestly, think about it for a second, what if North America was inhabited by Mandarin-speakers from northern China and South America was inhabited b…

Don’t you see that an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind? Hey you know what, at least we can both criticize the West’s atrocities and not fear being disappeared by an authoritarian government.

In what way did George Floyd not disappear? Blackness isn't even an outspoken geopolitical position, yet significantly more African Americans have disappeared, whether literally, or effectively in prisons, than Chinese dissidents. I don't want to suggest your white and middle-class, but the world really is only politically safe for what is actually a global minority, namely the white middle class.

But it's way, way worse than that. At the most surface level there's Julian Assange, he's not even from the country that he'll be disappeared in. But deeper than his case are the cases that he actually highlighted, US war crimes. The US with formal support from Europe has had a decades long foreign policy of violently destroying communism (see the history of South America and South East Asia). Communism has its fair share of evil, but like it or not, it is a fundamentally valid criticism of the West's capitalism. 10s of millions of innocent well-meaning communist supporters have been killed whether directly or through Western support, by the West.

China is not good, but it's just not comparable in scale to the West's evils. Indeed I believe it shows a profound, albeit typical, ignorance of history to think that China is a comparable threat to the world.

Re: Intel apologises in China over Xinjiang supplier statement

#224

Post by temp8964 »

mrweasel wrote: post #139

I really don't understand China, but China also don't care to understand the west one bit. China has zero cultural understand about anything beyond its borders and basically only survives on other cultures being either extremely flexible or completely dependent on China for manufacturing (or both). We're basically just waiting for companies to pull manufacturing from China, because they can deal with the backlash at…

It's really not about "China". It's all about CCP.

It's also not the CCP doesn't care. The CCP does care about its international image. But it's making choice between domestic control and international image. It's obvious to CCP right now that the world is heavily rely on China's market and manufacturing power. So the CCP can use it to suppress any backlash, and do terrible things domestically. The whole HK affair has firmly proved that the western world can't do anything to it. Invading Taiwan is definitely in its calculation.

Re: Intel apologises in China over Xinjiang supplier statement

#225

Post by kwere »

chloerei wrote: post #59

As a Chinese, I think the logic of certain Western countries is ridiculous. Because Xinjiang’s human rights situation is considered to be problematic, so Xinjiang’s companies are banned. As an analogy, can I think that the human rights situation of African Americans is terrible, so I need to ban companies that employ African Americans? These bans will only make the living conditions of minorities worse, because they…

the scale is the problem

Re: Intel apologises in China over Xinjiang supplier statement

#226

Post by ZoomerCretin »

elihu wrote: post #58

> "Intel (INTC.O) recently published what it described as an annual letter to suppliers, dated December, that it had been 'required to ensure that its supply chain does not use any labour or source goods or services from the Xinjiang region', following restrictions imposed by 'multiple governments'." As policies go, that one seems kind of clumsy. Assuming for the sake of argument that Uighurs are being used for force…

> isn't "workers in Xinjiang region are forced labor, workers outside of Xinjiang are not" a bit of an oversimplification?

Not if you knew there was no forced labor in that region at all, and this was all just atrocity propaganda to turn opinion against China. If it's difficult for western corporations to avoid suppliers who depend on suppliers (and so on) who have factories in Xinjiang, then there will be constant stories like this which puts this ridiculous allegation back in the news and social media so we can have our two-minutes hate against the evil empire that's ~~challenging our imperialistic grip on the world~~ ""committing genocide"".

Re: Intel apologises in China over Xinjiang supplier statement

#227

Post by davidzweig »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #178
mrweasel wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clothing isn’t to bad, most is made in other countries, who are terrible in their own way. For stuff like electronics is impossible, it’s almost all made in China. The only solution I see it keeping stuff for longer or buying used.

On a positive note, most modern electronics have a bunch of "bent metal", screws, and memory + microprocessors. The first two are very low value and frequently produced directly in China. The last two are high value and most frequently produced in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the United States, and various parts of Europe. When you look at the "value added" by assembly of an iPhone in China, it is astonishingly low. T…

Chinese companies also make low-middle-end microcontrollers (gigadevice etc.), passive components, switches and connectors (clones of Japanese designs mostly) that are much lower cost and 'ok'. There's also PCB manufacturing and stuffing, tooling, injection molding (using Chinese or German machines), final assembly. For things like Bluetooth speakers, it's all local.. a wifi router might me be all local appart from the SOC.. iPhones yeah different story.

Re: Intel apologises in China over Xinjiang supplier statement

#228

Post by bscphil »

viktorcode wrote: post #56

[flagged]

I disagree. They genuinely don't believe it is genocide. There's even international disagreement about the proper characterization of it. Most countries sufficiently propagandize their own citizens to inoculate them against the view that their own actions represent crimes against humanity, regardless of how they come to be viewed decades or centuries later.

I don't think the core of your idea is wrong though. The disturbing thing, to me, is that pro-China writers both in this thread and elsewhere think that disproving the charge of genocide (by linking to blogs or China's own view on the subject, mostly) they have cleared China of wrongdoing. It's obvious to me as someone with a modicum of moral intelligence that this is not really the case.

As an American, I am happy to admit that my understanding of the situation in Xinjiang is probably tainted by anti-China ideas being spread in my country. However, even if I take China entirely at its word about what it is doing, it's still quite obvious that this is horrifically bad and wrong. I would support boycotts entirely on the basis of China's own characterization of its actions.

That's really the sad, disturbing thing; people are supporting China by "showing" that Western media characterizations of the camps are inaccurate. I'm happy to admit they might be, but I believe it is a great moral failing to not denounce China's actions on its own terms.

What is uncontested: China is sending members (~1.3M per year) of a religious / ethnic minority (Uyghur) to internment camps for the purpose of preventing / deterring terrorism and to promote their social integration into China as a whole.

This is chilling to anyone who knows anything at all about the history of interning ethnic minorities. It was bad and wrong when the United States sent 125,000 Japanese people to live in camps during World War II. Anyone who protested or boycotted the United States for the purpose of ending that internment was, or would have been, justified. I am fully ready to apply the same standards to other countries, including my own, as I apply to China.

Likewise, whether it fully qualifies for the term "forced labor" or not, work done by people while imprisoned is inherently questionable and deserves heavy scrutiny. I believe that the conditions in prisons in the United States and the very-low-wage labor done by our prisoners are an abject moral horror, and it's important to turn the same critical eye to China's use of Uyghur labor.

Again, that's just looking at China's own view of it. The facts of the matter are likely to lie somewhere in between, which is even more concerning. It's hard not to see the shadow of some of the 20th century's fascistic horrors in China's discriminatory policies towards the Uyghur population, especially if anything in this piece turns out to be true: https://apnews.com/article/ap-top-news-international-news-we...

Re: Intel apologises in China over Xinjiang supplier statement

#229

Post by HillRat »

mpol wrote: post #157
mrweasel wrote: post #139

I really don't understand China, but China also don't care to understand the west one bit. China has zero cultural understand about anything beyond its borders and basically only survives on other cultures being either extremely flexible or completely dependent on China for manufacturing (or both). We're basically just waiting for companies to pull manufacturing from China, because they can deal with the backlash at…

If you allow me to throw in an idea, and please correct me if you see fit. In earlier times the Confucian pacifist ways of China were not up to the aggression of Western Europe, the US and Japan. In more recent times they learned to deal better with these foreign powers. The last thing they want is to give up their autonomy and culture and get run over by all these well meaning politicians that are very much after po…

Don’t let the propaganda fool you — like any other empire, China has never been “pacifist,” whether we’re talking about the PRC that established itself through a long and brutal civil war, or the Qing dynasty and its endless internal and external military conflicts.

The modern mainland state has been very clear — all the more so since the 3rd and 4th plenums under Xi — that every aspect of the Chinese sociopolitical superstructure is there to ensure the Party remains paramount. In today’s China, 法治 means not that law rules the Party, but that the Party rules by law.

In their syllogism, any threat to Party leadership is a threat to the Party; any threat to the Party is a threat to its ability to legitimize itself to the people of China; any threat to their legitimation is a threat to the nation. Therefore, any attack on Party leadership or actions is, to them, existential. (I say this the same week the Tiananmen Square “pillar of shame” memorial came down in Hong Kong.)

Thus, the big lie they’re promulgating is that Intel et al. are disparaging the nation or government of China, rather than the Communist Party, because the theoretical basis of the state admits no light between them. Anyone doing business on the mainland needs to understand that they will have to subordinate every interest and goal they have to whatever the Party considers important — hence the “we apologize for pointing out that slave labor is not popular” walkback.

Re: Intel apologises in China over Xinjiang supplier statement

#230

Post by dnautics »

shkkmo wrote: post #217
dnautics wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's also become increasingly difficult, and in some cases nigh impossible, to avoid items from China. I have the opposite experience. I find it's becoming increasingly easy. I'm finding myself surprised that most things aren't made in china. So far the only thing I haven't been able to get was a waffle maker -- I can do without! Or I should just actually get a $300 waffle maker instead of something stupid that wil…

Even if something doesn't say "Made in China", the chances are that many or most of it's components were made in China. You have a bit better chances if you instead whitelist countries with stricter rules of origin (for example, Made in USA requires 50% of the components to be made here) but even then much of the supply chain for that item will probably trace back to China.

> but even then much of the supply chain for that item will probably trace back to China.

You're still doing one stage better; but also you'd be surprised how much of that supply chain doesn't come from china, especially now, with supply chain issues and manufacturers using it as opportunity to re-tool their sourcing.

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