271–280 of 333 posts
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Yeah, for example Japan had crazy rate of growth for quite a while after WW2.
Japan already was a rich industrialized nation before WW2. China was one of the poorest countries on earth in the 1980s.
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> China was never really not a police state of some sort. Even ancient Imperial China was very much like this. To the point where China basically had no such thing as a legal system in the Western sense! The only kind of dispute resolution was mutually-assured destruction via criminal-like prosecution, basically "If I think you've been trying to cheat me out of something, I can get government goons to beat you up, fo…
Why is it surprising? Maybe the Chinese have discovered the only way to build a lasting civilization that doesn't bomb itself into oblivion every century like Europe does.
No poison gas, no aerial strategic bombing, no blitzkrieg, dive bombers or machine guns. But 20-70 million people dead nevertheless.
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Yeah, for example Japan had crazy rate of growth for quite a while after WW2.
Japan already was a rich industrialized nation before WW2. China was one of the poorest countries on earth in the 1980s.
Look at the previous century and how quickly they modernized.
As for other examples of extreme growth this century. Look at South Korea, Taiwan, the USSR etc... China shows a difference in scale due to population size, but it's growth rate was certainly not unprecedented.
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Others can chime in, but I believe that most serious companies doing business with China have a burner-device policy for employees travelling to China. Your devices will all be hacked with industrial espionage malware, and just in case you don't have anything on those devices, you will be given devices as "gifts"—like flash drives and WiFi-equipped smart home devices--that will exploit any devices you didn't bring wi…
I'm always confused when I hear this about why malware researchers don't obtain a huge trove of malware samples (and/or zero-day exploits) by obtaining some of these "gifts" and then connecting them to honeypot devices. If all you have to do to receive one is travel to China as an employee of a major U.S. company, they must be quite easy to get ahold of.
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/2189605/us...
Before I went to China I bought a burner phone, mainly to install WeChat (which is also a kind of malware and also "required" in China). Basic Android phones are not too expensive these days - I wonder if it will become commonplace to own several and physically separate your life across them? FWIW I got a Huawei phone (Honor 10 Lite) for under 200 EUR, but much cheaper phones than that are available. Edit: To be clea…
Not sure what's wrong with avoiding Chinese surveillance. And why you think having a burner phone to separate US and Chinese life is not an act to avoid surveillance.
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Next time when you buy a burner phone, please try to be more conscious. Huawei is likely one of the companies that contributed to this very Xinjiang endeavour [0]. Even if it's not directly related, by buying a Huawei phone, you are voting with your money to support a company that's been hurting innovation with IP theft through the years [1]. [0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2019/05/25/huawei-ac... [1] htt…
> Huawei is likely one of the companies that contributed to this very Xinjiang endeavour The article you cite just says that they supplied networking equipment, how is that different than, for example, U.S. conecetration camps using Dell laptops? Would you also blame Dell? I swear whenever China/Huawei is mentioned on HN, the comments transform into a huge propaganda machine.
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> It's good to have diversity in governance systems and be able to see the different outcomes... I've been lucky not to experience this myself, but I imagine it is bad to experience the "different outcomes" firsthand when the governance system -- novel as it might appear from a distance -- has foundations in violent suppression of individual freedom.
Of course. Then again, when some lunatic American colonists tried an alternative system of governance everyone knew was absurd and evil, it worked out surprisingly well. I guess what I most of all am arguing against is unified world government.
Are you sure they did? At the time republicanism was in vogue because Roman classicalism was currently in fashion. However these same men (particularly Hamilton) spoke very negatively about democracy, considering it a road to tyranny.
So at the time, democracy was considered absurd and perhaps evil. But were republics? The UK had an experience with republicanism before America, under Cromwell (that left a bad taste in the mouths of many monarchists) but even so it changed the way a lot of people thought. John Locke for instance predates the American revolution.
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Call it what it is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
Can you explain what's wrong with whataboutism?
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> It's good to have diversity in governance systems and be able to see the different outcomes... I've been lucky not to experience this myself, but I imagine it is bad to experience the "different outcomes" firsthand when the governance system -- novel as it might appear from a distance -- has foundations in violent suppression of individual freedom.
Of course. Then again, when some lunatic American colonists tried an alternative system of governance everyone knew was absurd and evil, it worked out surprisingly well. I guess what I most of all am arguing against is unified world government.
For the United States, many land owners were concerned with these radical ideas of free people and a republic, e.g. breaking away from autocracy, because they believed that people would be inherently prone to chaos and violence.
For China, the opposite is true. People are concerned about the autocratic dictatorship that subdues personal freedom to the goal of the PRC and state, as they believe human progress, kindness and trust will be stifled and ultimately destroyed in such a system.
I find it quite interesting.