Gitlab considers not hiring SREs and Support Engineers in China and Russia

> It claims that the islands have belonged to China for hundreds of years, and points to various old maps, historical use by Chinese fishermen, mentions in various treaties, and so on.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/13/world/asia/south-china-se... "... the tribunal rejected China’s argument that it enjoys historic rights over most of the South China Sea. "

> I mostly hope that the situation doesn't escalate, but many sides are capable of escalation - the US, China, the Philippines, Vietnam, and others.

Only one of those countries has been building / extending artificially reefs / islands in this area.

Xi lost face over this decision, and just said "tough, we aren't going to abide by it anyway". Hardly the actions of a reasonable government as good world citizens.

> I can think of much more serious issues than some uninhabited islands and rocks

China has deemed it very, very important to seize this area. It's pretty clear why to most people.

> US military actions is the South China Sea could be viewed as highly provocative. I can see why China would respond by putting anti-aircraft batteries on the islands.

You think it's reasonable to respond to freedom of navigation operations (also conducted by other countries than the USA) by militarising islands that aren't even theirs?

It is a completely necessary action.

The National Intelligence Law of China, passed in 2017, demands that all its citizens "support, assist and comply with works on national intelligence", aka proactively collect intelligence for the regime. (Article 7)

(《国家情报法》第七条 任何组织和公民都应当依法支持、协助和配合国家情报工作，保守所知悉的国家情报工作秘密。 )

This also explains why Huawei devices SHALL be excluded from core communication networks of the free world.

Additionly, unless Jingping 11th go off from his power, the nation should simply be considered another Soviet Union, or even worse, the Nazi.

Could someone "in the know" elaborate on what specifically prompted them to contemplate this? e.g. They mention concerns from enterprise customers.

I commend the transparency of debating it in the open, but I suspect it'll get hard to maintain reasonable discourse once the issue hits mainstream headlines and becomes sensationalized.

The suggestion does feel like a giant cudgel. I get there are genuine concerns, and I don't have better ideas to offer. I can't help feeling bad for legitimate future job applicants who will feel discriminated against. I'm sure if a bad actor wants to do something adversarial, they'll find ways around it (like agents in a non-banned country).

It used to feel like attitudes of major world powers were slowly converging (Russia got some democrazy, China started to open up its economy, tolerance seemed to be growing). Now it scares me how fast they're diverging. Politics is seeping deeper into tech, and it's going to get more fervent. Curtailing trade is loosening the ties between disparate cultures (https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/peace-earth-fre...).

The internet was supposed to connect us all and help bring us closer together. What happened?

Your friends are presumably not detained for continuing to believe in the religions of their parents, so they're going to have a more positive outlook based on the state of the economy.

Even if you think that it's desirable for the government to try to accelerate secularization with its "re-education camps," the implementation is guaranteed to cause a lot of suffering. The rushed timeline for construction, involuntary detention in the resulting cramped quarters, guards and teachers who were hired quickly with essentially zero training... all of this is just setting things up for physical and psychological abuse of inmates. Just look at the cases of 杨永信 and 豫章书院 torturing children to cure them of internet addiction to see how far people are willing to go if there's no oversight and their aims are supported by mainstream opinion. That the government tries so hard to suppress negative reporting doesn't exactly inspire confidence that abuse will be prosecuted.

My personal prediction is that the majority of inmates are going to come out of "re-education" traumatized and with a justified hatred of the government. I'm sure they'd prefer it if the government stuck to their business of modernizing the economy, instead of trying to force loyalty in the most ham-fisted way possible.

This is very U.S. centrist, I'd grant you the relative peace and stability if you're in the West. But 70 years isn't that long and you could find empires with long stretches of time where relatively nothing was fundamentally changing for the dominant population of some of the long-lived empires. The U.S. in its modern form and position isn't around even as long as the golden age of democratic Athens was around.

Sure, there were historically always some tensions at the border regions of these empires, but there are pressures of such nature felt in Europe now too, (the U.S. has the advantage of being physically very, very far from the regions in unleashes its worst policies on, so of course it's less felt there).

Also, all empires saw themselves as in some way policing, keeping peace and bringing their enlightened values to what they saw as the lesser. If we see that kind of thinking now as wrong, then I really don't see how the U.S. is so much different from the empire model of old.

As for China, I agree its regional foreign policy is not great, the problem is the U.S. doesn't just keep it regional. It treats the whole world as its backyard.

If you're a non-U.S. citizen, the unipolar world is not so great. I don't want China to say replace the U.S. as the dominant superpower, I want it to offer a counter-balance. I want the EU to be its own great power, offering counter balance to both, bringing both democratic values & a more humane treatment of its own citizens than the U.S. has, especially the less fortunate.