I love this sort of reporting. It's enlightening to learn about the infrastructure that makes our way of life possible. I love learning how these projects are funded and who's funding them, who is implementing the projects, how they are implemented, what some of the concerns are, and the related political drama surrounding these projects.
I feel similarly about oil, energy, and food production and delivery.
So much goes on without most people even giving it a second thought.
Every one of those has hundreds ro thousands of people involved. Researched, seeds, planted, grown, harvested, collected, processed, quality controlled, containerized, packaged, distributed, opened, preparedz put on your bun, served.
All those steps have at least one person involved, plus management, plus sales, plus quality, plus food scientist research, plus people's tastes research. Plus the manufacturing of the tractors, packaging systems, quality control equipment, processing equipment... hundreds more people.
We eat like kings of old with hundreds of people working to feed us one meal, and we don't think anything of it.
Your comment reminds me of Leonard Read's classic essay, "I, pencil" [1] about the many thousands of hands that make a simple pencil, all guided by local decisions and price signals, without a single mastermind.
Thanks for linking this! I read the introduction and skimmed the text. The details of manufacturing such a simple object are fascinating, of course. I certainly agree that they demonstrate one of the reasons why centralized planning doesn't work.
Going from "central planning doesn't work" to "therefore we have proven that unregulated capitalism leads to utopia" is...odd.
The irony is that central planning would be more possible now than ever.
Previously, there was a data collection, storage, and processing limitation. Manual collection, entry, and early computers simply couldn't process quickly enough to continually model the economy at the requisite fidelity.
But now, we still have the human data reporting problem, where the storage, network, and computational resources are possible, but the first mile "getting true numbers, reliably" still prevents the implementation of an effective centralized system.
That's the economy right? We can take it a step further. If you are getting a burger from McDonalds, and you are using their self-service kiosk, there is a whole world/economy behind that. Software, Hardware, Touch Screens, CPUs, Connection, etc... If you are using an international card to process your order, there is a whole set of banks (throughout the world) involved in that particular and single transaction.
This kind of makes you think: All that efficiency comes at a cost (fragility). There should be contingencies to that. (ie: Cash acceptance is mandatory, at least one human kiosk, a list of close food suppliers that you can use in case your supply chain breaks, etc...)
Basically covers (not too deeply) how a 12-pack of Coke cans in your local grocer involved work on every continent except Antarctica. The book itself was pretty good too, but this was probably the best chapter.
That is what I have been stating on HN since the start of HN? Commodities are the basic fabric of our economy, but Silicon Valley ( and by extension on HN, ) treat it as if some simple, unimportant, easy to optimise and automate domain.
You would expect COVID could force them to learn or think about some of these things. But most still dont.
I found the book maybe a bit overly optimistic/idealistic about how he thought infrastructure dependencies would impact the world, but a lot of the information was fascinating nonetheless.
Me too! To add to that, whenever I see good visuals of global energy markets, and traders in a room full of screens, I get excited in a way I use to get excited seeing a terminal being used before I knew anything about coding.
I still randomly will encounter people who asked what I do and then happened to see terminal on the screen and are like oh wow you're a really technical person. One time it was a stewardess and a court reporter who saw me tailing logs on an application I was debugging. And they're like how can you even tell what's going on when all I was doing was looking for the obvious patterns of java stack traces.
Another was a guy sitting at a bar next to me who turned out to be a NFL sports reporter. And same deal I opened up the terminal and he's like oh shit your real smart. As I'm literally just listing a directory and then doing a git status.
What's even more fun is when you have actual experts doing things with the very computer you're fixing; using tools and datasets way beyond my comprehension, get amazed by opening a terminal or CMD and fixing something.
One of my proudest moments in masters was they had the masters students demo each week to the undergrads. So I'm in a big auditorium on a pc with a projector behind me. This was in 2000, computer still had a floppy drive. They wiped the computer every week, Windows NT.
I popped in the floppy did D: and typed `ls`... and error, and the whole class laughed at me. Having been switching a lot lately I typed, I believe, `echo dir > C:\Windows\ls.bat` and (or whatever the right pipe command is, it's been a while), and typed `ls` again. Then double birded the whole class. And started launching the demo.
There were audible gasps esp from the professor who was like, hold up, what did you just do. So I spent 3 minutes explaining it to the class, then we did our demo.
I was at the time quite proud of them all being flabberghasted while I also flipped off over 75 students, actually still am.
I seemed like a genius once to it support at big co when I heard him having issues with "ok I fixed the text what do I do now" which I just said esc:wq. Guy was like what the helly you say, I repeated. He was like thanks and wrote it on the bottom of the white board. From them on I skipped the line at that office.
"Why does he get to skip the line. Oh this is his 3rd time in here this week" (8 am on a Monday).
There is a scene in Orwells Homage to Catalonia that reminds me about this:
A young italian peasant militia man, stands with open mouth, astonished off his genious officers, who were reading a simple map. So, this is an old trope.
Education is important it seems and while I don't think that everyone needs to get along with a terminal, everyone should at least understand what it is. For most people computers are essentially dark magic. And I think this us not doing good to society that has become so dependant on Computers.
jokes on you, a new generation of people are coming up having known nothing but smartphones. I work with one as a developer. She only uses her macbook because she has to. Very little insight of how the underlying OS and fundamental computing stacks works and yet she writes good fast code.
The companies are all colluding to lock down computing more and more and who do you think will push back against this? Not them thats for sure. If you never let the greater population understand the freedom they have now, they wont fight back when it comes time to try and take it away. Its probably too late anyway.
Pretty soon you'll be writing code in a locked down appliance with no freedom (or AI takes your job).
Bet when you started the greybeards of the time were miffed you couldn't just do assembly or read a hex dump like it was a newspaper, and you turned out alright (maybe).
I work with developers like that too. When they see me doing rudimentary things in Linux, they view me as a wizard. My job is safe and my skills are rare and valued.
If you have enough abstraction (like with the web) and understand basic performance principles, like instructing the computer to only do, what is neccessary, then one doesn't need to understand the system beneath, to get performant code.
It is mostly enough to know that method A is expensive (e.g. drawing a big image) so if you avoid it, than this what brings you good enough performance.
So sure, no one is talking about high performance low level graphic engine code. For this you clearly need to understand the bare bone metal interface.
And of course the baseline is pretty low these days. The ordinary web is full of horrible inefficient ways of doing things, so you are probably already above standard, if you avoid the worst habits..
For me, it was sitting in the back of a lecture hall, with a law prof, showing how AOL instant messenger danced across on the school's wifi unencrypted. I miss those days of easy ethereal magic.
Well, not showing how a bullet is made, but an attempt at coarsely portraying the assembly of one rifle round, and then its shipment, firing, and the flight of its constituent bullet.
> "But the U.S. government, concerned about the potential for Chinese spying on these sensitive communications cables, ran a successful campaign to flip the contract to SubCom through incentives and pressure on consortium members."
The U.S. government is equally concerned about losing the ability to spy on cables itself, although the above statement is not false either. Both parties want to collect, filter and mine all the traffic on the global Internet trunks, that's obvious enough. There's always the submarine spy option I suppose:
> "(2014, pdf) In 2005 it was reported that the submarine USS Jimmy Carter was being used to transport technicians to the bottom of the ocean to tapfiber-‐optic cables. This would indicate that the NSA continued the practice of mid-ocean cable taps until at least as recently as nine years ago..."
That's a risky operation, however, compared to:
> "...the easiest and most reliable way is to have the consent of the transit
company and split the wires. Given the apparent relationship the NSA has with
telecommunications companies and its history of tapping AT&T’s cables, it seems likely that it has gained companies’ consent and access to landing stations or otherwise to install splitters."
We take for granted the fact that we even have a globally connected world. The US spearheaded this with free trade and security guarantees during the Cold War.
Is it illegal to spy on communications under sea in deeply international water?
It should be a crime to communicate across any public link without encryption. I’m surprised there anything of value on these links besides flow analysis.
If you know the src and dst IPs, you can impose arbitrary firewall rules and cut down specific connections. That’s what China is already doing with their national firewall. I’m not sure if there is an additional layer of encryption at both ends that would encrypt packet headers as well.
Even before the American colonies rebelled, they were drinking tea and wearing silks from China, using ink made with Syrian ingredients, and eating South American chocolate.
The main thing that has changed isn't American power, but how cheap shipping has gotten.
Just because they can't decrypt it now doesn't mean they won't be able to eventually. The Utah data center is storing a lot of encrypted internet traffic with the expectation that it will be decryptable at some point.
Projected to be within the next couple of decades using quantum computers, I believe, although obviously there's a lot of uncertainty in that estimate.
Any channel that really cares about eavesdropping transmits constantly, at the same rate, mixing real encrypted packets and random data to keep the bit rate unchanged.
This, of course, eliminates any possibility to share the bandwidth with any other users, so it's more expensive.
>Eavesdropping is a worry too. Spy agencies can readily tap into cables landing on their territory
Well if the US and other western countries got fully behind with End to End encryption without backdoors, eavesdropping would be no issue. Instead they are trying to force "backdoors" into encryption people already use.
If you have access to the cable, you know who is connecting to whom. That's valuable information, and it can't be protected with end-to-end encryption.
And then it took us three or four major iterations of HTTPS before we stopped revealing a bunch of metadata about the question you're asking the server.
Also if you know what service I'm talking to, and you know anything about me, you can get some statistically relevant information from the traffic patterns. You might be able to tell if I'm using a chat application, or watching videos. And if I'm being surveilled by state actors, then the fact that I'm chatting might suggest what I'm getting up to.
The Ethernet address isn't the final destination. The IP address is the final destination in practice. Of course you can also have proxies and port forwarding and whatnot but that's a whole different topic.
Yes, it is a problem now because of SNDL: Store Now Decrypt Later programs running around the world.
Capture is performed and encrypted data is stored, waiting for quantum computers to be available and cheap to then break in the future what we exchanged securely today. It counts on having the half life of data greater than the average time for quantum computers to arrive.
Post quantum cryptography algorithms exist (PQC) and some open source implementations are there. Even for SSH. and NIST has an active crypto challenge on that.
> U.S. tech behemoths Google LLC, Meta Platforms Inc and Amazon.com Inc were major investors in at least one, or in Meta’s case both, of those cables, according to public announcements made about the projects. The delays and rerouting of the cables cost each of those companies tens of millions of dollars in lost revenue and additional costs, four sources who worked on the projects said.
I wonder if the U.S. government would somehow compensate those American companies for disrupting their business plans. A bit surprised to see Meta here but totally understand the need for ever more cables for Amazon and Google.
I worked at WhatsApp until 2019. Without details, Meta has a large global userbase, serves lots of video, and stores a large amount of user data in several datacenters (sometimes with replication across oceans). Being a partner in undersea cables is a good way to get committed international bandwidth at relatively low prices. Meta has lots of cash, and there's a clear ROI, so it's an easy decision.
Take a look at peering DB, Meta is at many (most?) major peering points, because it improves their product, and having dedicated backhaul from peering points to the datacenters makes the service from the peering points better too.
An (possibly) apocryphal story at Google is that when Gmail first launched, they figured that email delivery isn't latency-sensitive, so they purposefully set up compute-intensive jobs (like spam analysis) to be cross continent. When it's night time in the U.S. people aren't doing a lot of web searches, so U.S. servers are relatively idle and the entire world's email delivery processing happens in the U.S.; when the U.S. wakes up all those email processing gets done in Europe.
My takeaway is that for large companies cost of international bandwidth isn't such a big factor, at least relative to compute.
One of the things I wish I had exfiltrated from a FAANG was the datasheet of ram/cpu/bandwidth/eng hours equivalences for the engineers to make informed decisions on exactly this question.
"Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet" by Andrew Blum - This book takes readers on a tour of the physical infrastructure that underpins the internet, including the network of undersea cables that connect countries around the world.
"The Undersea Network" by Nicole Starosielski - This book explores the history and politics of undersea cables, including the way that they have been used to connect and control different parts of the world.
"The Global War for Internet Governance" by Laura DeNardis - This book examines the complex political and legal issues surrounding the governance of the internet, including the role of different countries and organizations in managing the global network.
"Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War" by Fred Kaplan - While this book is focused more broadly on the history of cyber war, it includes some fascinating details about the role that undersea cables have played in international conflicts and espionage.
"The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google" by Nicholas Carr - This book explores the history of technological infrastructure, including the development of the telegraph, telephone, and internet, and how these innovations have transformed the way we live and work.
“Blind Man's Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage” - Sherry Sontag & Christopher Drew - Indirect, but the title is the summary. I recommend familiarizing yourself with Operation Ivy Bells.
Ivy Bells is arguably the Cold War’s signature known clandestine undersea cable tapping operation. Contextualizes lengths nations will go to for physical access. It is far easier to own a cable than use a nuclear powered sub to sneakily deploy a tap.
Mine too. The consistent and concise formatting is part of it, but the lack of any actual expressed opinion about the books is the big trigger I think.
Weirdly at one point I would have thought being neutral and easily digestible would be positive qualities in a comment. How the world changes..
I feel like there was a Neal Stephenson book that touched on this too but can't remember which off the top of my head... Cryptonomicon? I mention it because I found no matter how many international relations, management books, etc. I go through, I almost always learn more from scifi.
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Some_Remarks This book also has a copy of the Wired arrticle and is probably the superior way to read it. Wikipedia link so you can choose your own bookstore.
Neal Stephenson explored international internet infrastructure in other works as well:
Reamde (2011) involves the hijacking of an undersea fiber-optic cable and the resulting disruption of internet connectivity in various parts of the world.
Interface (1994) involves a corrupt presidential candidate who seeks to control the internet through the manipulation of network infrastructure
When they say that these cables are susceptible to "espionage" what does that actually mean?
How does one do espionage on an undersea fiberoptic cable?
I can imagine not wanting to hand over management of the optical transport link to a Chinese company-- because they could then do anything they want with the signals once the cables enter their own facility.
But an undersea cable? What kind of James-Bond-type operation would that require? Is it even possible? Wouldn't the extended outage from such an operation raise flags and be obvious?
OK, but that would require a submarine or a very advanced ROV. And then, there's the matter of actually opening up the cable without interrupting the signal. These are not trivial housings. They're not like patch cables in a datacenter. (https://www.reddit.com/r/cableporn/comments/3asakn/cross_sec...).
I'm aware that it has happened, my issue is claiming that it happens regularly. Operation Ivy Bells took place in the 70s. Was it a fiber cable? There are no other examples between then and now?
You want someone to give you examples of ongoing realtime intelligence collection programs? How about some missile launce codes and the iff setting for NATO aircraft? Any responce to such requests would be either illegal or a lie.
Your understanding is flawed, because people with relevant knowledge are pointing out truth and you’re asking for more and more.
You are not trying to find truth, you’re trying to argue.
Yes, people can claim stuff that they know and nobody else can prove. Not every idea requires a double blind study with a large sample size. Sometimes you take things and assign probability values. “This guy sounded like he knew what he was talking about”
Sometimes that’s all you ever get. You should be thankful you got a peek behind the curtain at how the real world works.
Imagine an alternate universe where the US built up Mexico and 99% of everything was made there instead of China
The only thing holding back China from more aggressive takeovers like Russia is doing the the US is such a massive consumer.
But China also could destroy the US without launching a single missile, all they have to do is turn off exports for a month and we'd be killing each other over the last item in stock anywhere that is now 100 times the price because of no availability.
Just imagine everything out of stock or 100 times the price, we only have a glimmer of that these days.
Mexico was vastly wealthier than China through the 70's and 80's[1], this wouldn't have worked. Western notions tend to partition the world into "rich" and "poor" countries, but in fact there's a lot of variety even there. Mexico has been growing alongside the US economy for centuries and is only "poor" in comparison. And people tend to wildly misunderstand the depth of poverty seen in post-war China (and thus how radical a change the last two generations have been there, which explains a lot of "why do the Chinese people tolerate the CCP?").
This is starting to happen now. We are shifting manufacturing to onshore and nearshore. I believe Mexico will pick up a lot of where China left off in the future.
Personally, I disagree we would kill each other for goods but I'm an optimist like that.
Lots of factories are moving to Mexico (and even back to the USA) because they're so automated that the employees aren't a major cost; the biggest cost now is shipping - which hits the cheap bulky good the most. Check where trash cans at Walmart are made, for example.
Mexico is much smaller population wise and won't be able to pick up major part. Not talking about tuned manufacturing processes, facilities, toolings etc.
The US is less than 7% of the world's population, they can manage to survive without us. It's wouldn't be easy for them, but it won't cause the same level of disaster in China as what you would see in the US.
A big irony in this situation is that scaling manufacturing in the US super fast to fight that ban would require importing a lot of tools/materials/machines/etc that either come directly from china or have parts made in china.
> all they have to do is turn off exports for a month and we'd be killing each other over the last item in stock anywhere that is now 100 times the price because of no availability.
What do you think happens when you turn off exports to the #1 consumer economy in the world?
Do you think that economy disappears, or takes it's money elsewhere?
The US maintains very close ties with the EU. And while EU citizens would relish in even cheaper goods from China, EU would prefer stronger and preferential economic terms with the US, where businesses face far less meddling from governments than they do in China.
This seems unlikely. Only 18% of our imports come from China. In fact, 14% of our imports come from Mexico and 14% from Canada. Given that China has 11.1x the population of Mexico and 39x the population of Canada, we don't actually get that much from China.
It would certainly hurt. I remember the early days of the pandemic when I had to wait 45 days for my new laptop. However, I don't need a laptop to survive. I need food and shelter.
> all they have to do is turn off exports for a month and we'd be killing each other over the last item in stock anywhere that is now 100 times the price because of no availability
What items would we be fighting over? iPhones? Because I need to eat at least one iPhone a week as part of a balanced diet? We love our phones and other consumer goods and we've certainly seen how interconnected our supply chains are, but the idea that we'd fall into murderous anarchy seems incredibly unlikely.
Let's look at what we import from China: computers ($151B), apparel ($56B), electrical equipment ($36B), misc. manufacturing ($35B), furniture ($18B), machinery ($20B), fabricated metals ($18B), and plastics ($16B). We're actually an exporter in both the food and agriculture categories to China. Yes, some of those are economically important fields, but the idea that I'd be stabbing you over a sweater or laptop within a month is nuts. "I don't care who I have to kill to get my JCrew!"
Yea, China is an important trading partner and it would certainly hurt if China shut off trade. I'm not arguing it wouldn't hurt. At the same time, China is 17-18% of our imports.
And the thing is that it would hurt for China too. Right now, China is appeasing its citizens with an export-driven economy. Imagine the massive unemployment rates if China cut off exports to the US. People who are presently happy or at least neutral toward the regime might end up being really angry.
Plus, the second China cuts off the US, it kinda has to go the (figurative) nuclear route and cut off the whole world. EU leaders aren't going to sit around saying "Wow, it sucks to be an American. I'm glad nothing like that can happen to us!" No, they're going to immediately start moving their economy away from reliance on China in preparation to cut off China. If it happens to America, it'll happen to Europe as well. Even if EU leaders were like, "nah, China would never do that to us," the US would apply a ton of pressure - and EU leaders aren't that stupid.
It's pretty clear that cutting off exports to the US in that manner would bifurcate the world Cold War style. It seems clear that Aus/NZ/EU/UK/Japan/SK/Israel/Canda/Mexico would end up with the US. The US currently has free trade agreements with all of Central America, Colombia, and Peru so I'd guess they'd be with the US and cutting off China. Brazil and Argentina are major non-NATO allies. India would love the opportunity presented by most of the world cutting off China. Apple is already moving manufacturing to India and the Indian government wants the kind of economic growth that China has seen.
It would certainly hurt if China cut off exports to the US. We're not prepared for it. However, it would leave China a lot worse off than us.
> Imagine an alternate universe where the US built up Mexico and 99% of everything was made there instead of China
I do agree US foreign policy toward Mexico hasn't always been great, but we actually have built up a lot of industry in Mexico. As I noted, we import nearly as much from Mexico as we do from China despite China having 11x the population.
And China is going to be declining over the next 50 years. Their population is projected to decline from 1.4B to 700M-1B by 2100 (depending on what estimate you look at) and they're going to have a lot of old people compared to working-age people. Their workforce is already down 2.5% from its 2015 peak. The US, on the other hand, will still be a growing nation thanks to immigration.
I get that it seems like "everything comes from China", but that really isn't the truth. China is a very important trading partner. However, cutting off trade isn't going to bring anarchy to the US. It will make every country reliant on trade with China start working toward isolating China. China would need to start invading its neighbors to build up an isolated trading block against the juggernaut that would likely be the US, EU, India, Canada, Mexico, and so many other countries who would start treating China like the Soviet Union.
"If you come at the king, you best not miss." This would certainly be a miss. It would hurt for sure. In the long run, China would face a world where they were no longer a welcome trading partner, where they'd lost their advantages as the rest of the world recreated what China once offered, and where they'd face huge domestic unrest from such a major economic upheaval.
We're at one of the lowest points of American influence since World War II. That's not even a criticism of the state of politics in the US. It's simply a realistic view of the fact that Europe, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, etc. don't need the US nearly as much as they did when US money was rebuilding Europe or when the US was the bulwark against the Soviet Union. If China cut off trade to the US, they'd catapult the US back into that position of de-facto leadership. Maybe the US would share that position a little with the EU this time around, but we would see a world where countries looked toward the US for their future leaving China really isolated. China doesn't want to hand leadership of the world back to the US. They want to make China look like a reasonable trading partner that countries should look toward so that they can hold some of the leadership.
> but the idea that I'd be stabbing you over a sweater or laptop within a month is nuts. "I don't care who I have to kill to get my JCrew!"
Reminded me of something. My folks moved the summer before my senior year to a large school district, which I found intimidating, so I enrolled in a small private school for my last year of high school. The nearby JCrew Outlet wasn't doing well, and I overheard a few underclassmen talking:
Underclassman 1: I just heard the JCrew Outlet is closing.
Underclassman 2: What are we going to wear!?
I disagree with just about everything in this post, but I find one particular thing very interesting.
>And China is going to be declining over the next 50 years. Their population is projected to decline from 1.4B to 700M-1B by 2100 (depending on what estimate you look at) and they're going to have a lot of old people compared to working-age people. Their workforce is already down 2.5% from its 2015 peak. The US, on the other hand, will still be a growing nation thanks to immigration.
Even if we assume these predictions are correct (They aren't. You don't cite sources, but they generally come from the same people who have predicted China's end for the past 40 years, such as Gordon Chang and Michael Pettis), China also has the option of allowing immigration.
It's interesting that America has tried to transfigure its settler-colonial, genocidal and slaver history into a kind of Thanksgiving-esque "Nation of Immigrants" storytale, but it doesn't make it actually true, and it certainly doesn't mean that other countries cannot avail themselves of immigration as a demographic strategy (in case it's needed).
I think the Christian narrative that America is "the chosen ones" clouds not just moral judgment but geostrategic judgment as well.
Everything I've seen, including from the CCP, projects that Chinese population is already in decline, and will likely halve by the end of the century. Do you have projections that shows otherwise?
Yes, immigration could change this in China, but it is not currently significant.
English is a huge plus for the US thanks to British imperialism. Chinese is just much harder to learn. I’m curious to know what percent of chinas population is immigrants
This is a bit hyperbolic. History is full of examples of countries and economies adapting. If China stopped producing, supply chains would move, people would make do.
The power of the USD was used to sanction Iran and Russia into serious economic harm, but people will find ways to make it work.
I'm sure it's been explored before, but that's not how it works. If China started dumping their Treasuries lead to significant domestic inflation, which they definitely don't want.
Also, minor point, Japan holds more Treasuries than China.
That's not how US debt works. It pays back on a schedule. China could stop buying new US debt, and will continue to receive payments on US debt it owns, but China can't call up the US and demand full repayment immediately.
They could sell the debt that they currently hold, sure. The response would likely be a short term rise in interest rates followed by the Fed simply intervening and purchasing Treasurys.
And we could sanction the PBoC and freeze the accounts into which we repay the debt they hold. The China-owns-our-debt line ignores the realities of sovereign debt.
The US fails to see that the more they hold other down for their own benefit, the less others will tolerate it, and the more other countries will push for self sovereignty.
When that happens, the whole dollar based global financial system will collapse like a house of cards.
The US is over playing their hand, and the results will be disaster.
>When that happens, the whole dollar based global financial system will collapse like a house of cards.
The common rebuttal to this is what will replace it? Whenever Chinese open up capital controls for their currency people rush to get their money out and into USD/Euro so much so that they have to shut it down again. They also manipulate it like crazy. The currency with the highest trust is the one that stays on top and it appears that the USD is the least worst option for the foreseeable future.
Heard it in a video somewhere that it won't be a one big blow that takes down USD, instead, it will be thousand-little-cuts.
USD won't be replaced by a single currency instead countries pissed off by US will start using their local currency as and when possible. E.g. India buying oil from Russia in dubai dirhams/rubles. China and Russia doing their trades in yuan amd ruble.
Here are few more examples:
https://www.google.com/amp/story/s/www.wionews.com/web-stori...
I personally feel that USD dollar circulation will go down a lot in not so far away future and the domino effect will be significant on US political and economical dominance.
The reason why USD are used so much is multi-factorial: a) a huge float so massive currency exchanges don't move the price much [unlike say Dubai's currency], b) predictable US government monetary policy [so no sudden changes in value], c) no capital controls so you can move it anywhere in the world easily [unlike China], d) widespread use because of a,b,c.
China's entire economy is dependent on undervaluing the currency to goose exports, so they have very strict currency controls otherwise the value would rapidly increase.
And what people don't realize is that it's not exactly going to hurt the US if suddenly some other currency becomes more dominant. GBPs, CHFs, SGDs are all strong, stable currencies that aren't a global reserve currency and those countries do just fine.
I don't think anyone can deny the benefits of having USD as a default currency for global trade as of today but just think once from the perspective of a country against whom USD is used as a political/economic weapon. Iran/Russia won't care much about the points you mentioned. They would come up with some workaround/compromise instead just to keep things going.
USA has a great currency but they use it as a tool of bullying others way too often. Other countries have started noticing and are now taking concrete steps to come up with an alternate/backup plan.
And it may not have a direct effect on US economy if some other currency becomes dominant but they would certainly lose out on their political dominance (they would no longer be able to strongly impose economic sanctions and coarse others to do as they please) and that could have snowball effect on its economy.
The United States has the largest external debt in the world thanks to dollar as the default international reserve currency. Removing this extraordinary privileged position and having a bucket of trading currencies is a very good thing for the rest of the world. It will take quite some time for this to happen.
A massive amount of US dollars is held purely because countries and companies are forced to use it for many types of transactions (eg. trading oil). It's not by choice, they have a gun to head. The US has proven over and over again that they will kill state leaders and invade entire countries in order to preserve that economic power.
When the US loses that power and other countries start using whatever currency they prefer, the USD you are holding in your account will lose a lot of value. It doesn't matter what other countries prefer to use (euro, yen, rubles, CAD, bitcoins, etc.), anything other than the USD will fuck up the US economy really badly. I personally wouldn't trust current US politicians (both sides) to deal with this successfully.
All this connectivity and yet the country is hampered by the incredibly slow Great Firewall. The filtering is bad enough as it is, but even locations that are supposed to be accessible are hampered by high latency, packet loss and bandwidths that sometimes get to dial-up speeds.
Compare the narrative of this Reuters article, that the construction of the SeaMeWe-6 submarine cable is a proxy war and cold war between US and China, with the narrative in the Wired article Mother Earth Mother Board (1996) [0] by Sci-Fi writer Neal Stephenson, that the construction of the FLAG submarine cable was the beginning of the new Internet age, which would eliminate national boundaries, end monopolies, bring diversity and create a multi-polar world order...
One has to say that the era has really changed, and the utopian dream by digital libertarians is coming to an end. It's hard to imagine that 1996 was almost 30 years ago by now.
No violence? Maybe no deaths, but when you do something shady so that a company loses its contracts and is forced to fire swathes of employees, then that's a competition only if you're another company. If you're a nation state, that's not competition - that's plain aggression that puts people's livelihoods at risk. War? Maybe not, but definitely not a fair competition.
It's hilarious how the "free trade" propaganda is collapsing before our eyes, unraveling so quickly despite decades of indoctrination.
I’ve become increasingly convinced as I age it’s not government that’s the problem it’s nations. I hold no I’ll will towards any people on this earth. I hate the fact we’ve Balkanized into these “nations” that pit peoples against peoples arbitrarily. I’m not picking sides here, both sides jockeyed unfairly and in ways that were there no nations wouldn’t matter. The world is too small now, we are too interrelated, and I just wish we could focus on making the world better - science, technology, arts, improving efficiency and sustainability, etc, without all the nation induced BS.
Most war operations are nonviolent - what you are thinking of is called kinetic warfare. What determins if it is a war or not varies by country policy but can usually be boiled down to whether there are militant operations involved or if a leader has publicly or nonpublicly declared it.
Agreed it's totally clickbaity and misleading, especially for reuters. I could see if it said cold war, otherwise I was concerned that something real had happened for a moment.
I thought the title was worded poorly (shouldn't it be "US and China wage war over internet cables beneath the waves"?) so I clicked through - that missing hyphen really does make a difference. "US and Chine wage war beneath the waves - over internet cables"
How worried are we really about surveillance on undersea cables, by China or otherwise? Almost everything over those fibers is already encrypted. Are we worried about metadata? Assuming the hostile power in question already has a bunch of TLS private keys to work with?
Not just the surveillance. The other fear is that an adversary can just shut out countries at a whim.
Of course, it's easier to just change a policy at an endpoint you control, rather than cutting up undersea cables and shooting down satellites.
"Oh, a fishing trawler has cut your country's internet access ? Tzz, tzz, tzz, those sub-par american cables ... No worry, you can buy ours that happens to be much sturdier and at the low, low price of whatever you paid before the cable was cut".
An idea is that nations are storing the encrypted packets now to decrypt them once they have access to a number of sufficiently fast quantum computers (store/harvest now decrypt later). This assumes the data will still be useful in the future.
Yeah, folks are celebrating here at successfully applied U.S. bullying. Scrolling to see whether anyone expressed concern at super-powers applying extreme pressure and dominance in infrastructure business deals. Crickets.
Bet you that the outrage if it is applied successfully the other way will be utterly deafening - 24x7 press coverage, dozens of opinions, etc.
That actually can make things significantly worse. Most school districts are chronically underfunded to begin with and many of the federal dollars are the difference between a 30:1 teacher ratio and 60:1 ratio.
In many school districts where voucher programs have been implemented, they are facing HARD financial burdens, since they had 10/20/30 year plans based on a certain amount of income from taxes. I am generalizing, but the people who could afford or want to send their kids to non-public schools already have been doing so for years. As more money pours out of public school districts, the more cost cutting has to take place to have a budget that works, which means the quality of education goes down, which accelerates anyone who was on the fence to remove their kids from public schools.
The problem with private schools is they are effectively subsidized by all the work from public schools, yet don't contribute in the same way. Think about coursework that is developed with state / local funds, testing standards that are built in these schools and decades of experience administering these programs.
Because the post started off inflammatory and stupid. Schools barely mention trans people, but if they did it would take one lesson. And if half a percent or one percent of people are trans that seems like it's worth the time. Also not being distracted by dysphoria should help with learning effectively.
There's a lot of talking points that don't come at the expense of real education at all. If you want to discuss real problems let's look at school district funding and curriculums that are overly focused on standardized test results. You don't need to make fun of non-binary people as if that's some kind of wasteful hobby rather than just an attribute.
I like Jiang Shigong's perspective on all of these "Two Sides" "Cold War" articles:
>The reason why I emphasize here that this is a new type of “world empire,” instead of accepting Darwin’s “world-system” designation or the usual “liberal international order” from international political theory, is that the theory of sovereign states obscures the imperial essence of Western hegemony. This “new imperial history” narrative, based on postmodern theory, diminishes the political dimension of imperialism. The framing of “U.S.-China relations” or “U.S.-China competition” that is so commonplace today, premised on the concept of sovereign states, is actually deceptive and misleading. It is deceptive and misleading to portray China and the United States as two equal sovereign states, ignoring the three faces of modern Western imperialism, and the fact that the imperial system of the United States is even more complex than the British Empire’s ever was. The United States operates an imperial arrangement within its continental territory, followed by a second imperial core in the form of the Five Eyes alliance, followed by a system of vassal states in the guise of allies such as the military domination systems of Europe, East Asia, and the Middle East, operates Latin America as a “backyard,” and, of course, it also has control over other supplementary “world-systems” such as the Internet, finance, and trade. Thus, the U.S.-China relationship is better characterized as China, a rising sovereign state, facing the U.S.-dominated world empire or world system. It’s not a question of managing a relationship between two sovereign states, but a question of how China faces the U.S.-dominated world empire. The “U.S.-China decoupling” that has been the focus of public discussion in recent years would be better understood as an effort on the part of the U.S. to expel China from the “world imperial system.” Therefore, the U.S.-China struggle is not only about the fate of the two countries, but also about the future of the world order itself, i.e., is the whole world subservient to the U.S.-dominated world empire, or will it establish truly equal international relations between sovereign states? When the U.S. and Soviet superpowers were trying to build two different types of world empires, the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) that emerged in countries like India and China intended to create a more fair and rational international order. Today’s U.S.-China rivalry represents a struggle over these two world visions and the shared destiny of humanity.
edit: Some HN anti-"spam" mechanism is restricting me from replying to people downstream. I'll try to get around to it later. Anyone saying "China also wants an empire" or "Empire is inevitable" is categorically wrong, though, or at the very least has not at all engaged with the essay above.
As Jiang Shigong points out, Lenin's imperialism isn't the incorrect and idealist "power thirst expansionism" of liberal theory, which doesn't really explain anything. It's the inevitable outcome of fully developed capitalism. If China continues to be socialist and repress their capitalists, they'll easily be able to inaugurate a new and pluralist peaceful era.
It has nothing to do with idealism or with good morals, but rather with optimal economic planning and carving out one's own course.
After all, fewer and fewer people in China covet the arrangement that the U.S. built up for itself:
>Eurasia Group Foundation finds “28% of Chinese respondents reported an unfavourable view of the US, up from 17% a year earlier, while the number reporting a favourable view fell to 39% from 58%.”
>According to Harvard University’s large-scale 2003-2016 study tracking the evolution of public opinion via 32,000 individual respondents, at the time of the study’s conclusion “95.5 percent of respondents were either ‘relatively satisfied’ or ‘highly satisfied’ with Beijing.”
>According to data from polling firm Dalia Research cited by Bloomberg News, 84% of Chinese believe “Democracy is important” and 73% agree with the statement “My country is democratic.” For comparison, here are some other countries and their equivalent scores: Brazil (83/51), Japan (60/46), U.S. (73/49), Germany (85/67).
>Though it came as a shock to Western audiences, who understand China to be a tyrannical state-capitalist authoritarian regime, observers in the imperial periphery have always seen things rather differently. As far back as 2004, Fidel Castro argued that “China has objectively become the most promising hope and the best example for all Third World countries,” [4] and in August 2014, he reaffirmed this sanguine outlook: “Xi Jinping is one of the strongest and most capable revolutionary leaders I have met in my life.” [5] In May 2018, Professor Yanis Varoufakis, former Greek Minister of Finance, assuaged an anxious member of the audience at a Cambridge Forum: “I have to tell you that, from my understanding of China, it’s a very interesting social experiment, in the sense that at the local level or the regional level you now have a boisterous democracy, with popular success stories in overthrowing local authorities, local bureaucrats who have been corrupt.” [6] Later that same year, before his 2019 ouster in a US-backed coup, Evo Morales said “I trust China very much. China has always accompanied us in many of our aspirations in the social, cultural, political and economic spheres” [7] and that “China’s support and aid to Bolivia’s economic and social development never attaches any political conditions.” [8] In 2020 the former Liberian Minister for Public Works W. Gyude Moore bluntly wrote “China has built more infrastructure in Africa in two decades than the West has in centuries, China is also our friend,” [9] and in 2021 Iran signed a 25-year cooperation agreement with China. Despite the vehement insistence of Western punditry, world consensus against China’s “tyranny” fails to materialize.
Generally speaking the world doesn't envy America, and those who do envy America tend to go there, creating a distorted idea that everyone would go to America if they could. In reality, America is something that the rest of us have had to deal with without recourse. Its driving principles—capitalism—are not eternal, nor inevitable.
> Anyone saying "China also wants an empire" or "Empire is inevitable" is categorically wrong
Ridiculously naive. China wants an empire to match or surpass the US.
I don't necessarily blame them for that in and of itself -- I'd blame them more for being non-democratic -- but it's comical to act like China doesn't want an empire as it goes about building outposts in the South China Sea.
> The United States operates an imperial arrangement within its continental territory, followed by a second imperial core in the form of the Five Eyes alliance, followed by a system of vassal states in the guise of allies such as the military domination systems of Europe, East Asia, and the Middle East
This is also incredibly silly.
Sure, categorizing military bases all over the world as imperial is reasonable, but looking at it as "military domination" over all those countries is simplified tankie reasoning.
If it was just a matter of militarily dominating those countries, the US wouldn't frequently push for allied countries to strengthen their own independent militaries, as it has.
And what does "imperial arrangement" over the continental US even mean? Sure, manifest destiny was empire building, but at this point it's largely a singular nation with a federal system.
>If it was just a matter of militarily dominating those countries, the US wouldn't frequently push for allied countries to strengthen their own independent militaries, as it has.
Oh yes, the US has military bases in 80 countries around the world in the interests of the "host" countries, and not for strategic military reasons. As soon as the hosts catch up on military spending, the US will leave, no doubt!
I never said that. Obviously it's for the US' own interests, but it's also mostly based on alliances and shared interests, rather than "domination", which is why they want their allies to also have strong militaries.
For example, the reason the Philippines is now allowing the US to establish semi-permanent bases on its territory is obviously because it's more worried about China in the South China Sea. The US military is simply the lesser of the two evils from the Filipino perspective. (And of course it helps that so many Filipinos have positive feelings towards the US)
It's probably more realistic to believe that neither countries really want to be world hegemon, or at least to bear all the responsibilities such an arrangement implies.
The hardliners may fantasize about the benefits of world hegemony, and conveniently ignore the downsides, but in reality there's much less enthusiasm in pursuing such a goal than often boasted about.
For example, when the Cold War was already over in 1991, even Bush Sr. gave a big speech in Ukraine to emphasize that they really shouldn't rush to break up the Soviet Union.
> It's probably more realistic to believe that neither countries really want to be world hegemon, or at least to bear all the responsibilities such an arrangement implies.
As an American I'd say the US has very mixed feelings about this, but isn't 100% opposed.
You're right that the US doesn't exactly want to be world police, not most Americans anyway. That said, there's definitely a certain sentiment of, "if not us, then who?" and seeing acting as world police to be the lesser evil.
Like in principle, Americans want to be somewhat more isolationist (especially militarily), particularly since the Iraq war was such a disaster, but then something like the Syrian civil war happens and many Americans feel an obligation to help out the 'right' side.
The whole "shining beacon on a hill" thing is ingrained into the American mindset. Even people on the left within American politics who are self-critical of US history just have the stance of, "well, the US hasn't really behaved like that in the past, but it should".
This definitely doesn't address that the Chinese government is centrally only interested in furthering their own interests, often without care or regard to its expense, and nothing can hold them accountable.
With the US and US hegemony, you can actually hold someone accountable. Bad actors can be protested, outed, and dealt with peacefully.
What I am not saying is the US acts with best interests of others in mind all the time - this isn't true either, and I'm not taking an extreme here on this, US has plenty of issues on the world stage (and as an American, at home too) - but centrally, we can be held accountable (and often are, esp. if you can get the US public opinion on your side).
You have zero recourse with China, if they decide to muscle into something, or support a horribly oppressive dictatorship to extract your national resources, there is zero - and I mean zero - way to appeal to any authority for intervention.
Yes, I'm perfectly aware we propped up dictatorships and overthrew governments, but I'm also aware of the fact that there were massive protests in the streets upon revelations of many doings that ultimately lead to them being undone or the US backing off, you have something of recourse there, you can deal with the US government in some discernible way you just can't with the CCP & Chinese government actors.
This has to be accounted for in the conversation when talking about international relations, especially when talking about "new hegemony" as it were.
I also question the assertion that the "world" has some massive distaste for the US. Unless world means China.
When Europe needs military assistance, who shows up?
When Australia, Taiwan, South Korea, New Zealand need assistance, who's right there, hands open?
Which nation has taken a very public and consistent stance against Russian military intervention in the Ukraine and committed billions of dollars in assistance without blinking?
> Yes, I'm perfectly aware we propped up dictatorships and overthrew governments, but I'm also aware of the fact that there were massive protests in the streets.
While I generally agree with you, but there's a false choice presented here. I don't think the massive protests did anything in regards to foreign policy. And for most Latin American countries that the US has traditionally been doing whatever it wants to - there's not even an avenue for them to recourse. "and often are, esp. if you can get the US public opinion on your side" is an impossible ask that basically equates to no recourse in most situations.
So for those countries that do not fall inside the protection and alliance of the United States, China presents a true recourse, it's also true for the reverse.
There's been alot of changes to US foreign policy because of public pressure. I think the Cuba embargo being softened under President Obama (as well as his official state visit) was a huge step in the right direction and can be traced to public pressure on normalizing relations with Cuba.
The trade agreements across Latin America lifted millions out of poverty (though results have been lopsided at home)
Billions in foreign aid[0][1] to Latin America since the 90s
Billions in Foreign Aid to Africa since the 90s
Numerous laws passed that criminalize foreign corruption practices (you can indeed hold corporations responsible for corruption, though not a perfect process)
Trade Treaties (which we have a history of honoring)
[0]: I am speaking of non military aid specifically, I'm excluding military aid in these numbers
[1]: Crucially, in most instances, this aid isn't given to governments directly that have proven human rights abuses, but instead directed to NGOs and non profits (see https://harvardpolitics.com/debunking-myths-foreign-aid/)
> There's been alot of changes to US foreign policy because of public pressure. I think the Cuba embargo being softened under President Obama (as well as his official state visit) was a huge step in the right direction and can be traced to public pressure on normalizing relations with Cuba.
US Cuba relations simply comes down to a small segment of US society called Cuban-Americans in Florida. Florida is a massive swing state providing a huge amount of electoral votes. As it currently stands, Republicans need a majority in Florida to have a chance at winning the Presidency. Cuban-Americans are the most opposed to normalizing relations. This is why Trump and Republicans push against normalizing relations, so they can get the Cuban-American block and win Florida. Democrats have to walk a fine line. Even when normalizing relations is the right thing, doing the opposite is what wins you the US presidential election.
> US has plenty of issues on the world stage (and as an American, at home too) - but centrally, we can be held accountable (and often are, esp. if you can get the US public opinion on your side).
Were George W. Bush and Tony Blair held accountable for lying about WMD and launching an illegal war of aggression against Iraq? Was anyone in the Bush administration held accountable for ordering torture of detainees, and was anyone at the CIA held responsible not only for engaging in torture, but then destroying evidence? There are more than just "issues" with the US on the world stage, and virtually no one is ever held accountable for them.
> You have zero recourse with China ... there is zero - and I mean zero - way to appeal to any authority for intervention.
This isn't true. Public pressure actually plays a large role in how the Chinese government acts. You do not have the same recourse to the legal system, but the government cannot simply ignore what people by and large think. It is incredibly sensitive about maintaining popular support.
Yes, they were. Not immediately, but in many ways that may feel foreign to non US citizens, it happens at the polls, in the electorate, the way the government handles itself going forward, new policies and ideas etc.
Obama was elected in no small part due to outsized opposition to policies of the previous administration.
Practicing democracy isn't always fast nor is it perfect, but it does work. The question of what to do once we realized we needed to reverse course is up for debate, but yes, things changed, people lost their positions, power, and there are reforms and accountability - the CIA is subject to more congressional oversight, for example. They're banned from using blacksites and the CIA is no longer allowed to hold foreign nationals for extended periods without representation.
There's this weird thing about how the US waged two wars too, in regards to the rules of engagement. There were 100% bad actors, and many (unfortunately not all) were held by military and civilian court for war crimes, re: blackwater contractors, the case of Pvt 1st Class Andrew Holmes etc.
The US military has official rules of engagement for treating people humanely - which are in fact expected to be followed - and people were held accountable for not doing so.
Not perfect mind you - but yeah, there were huge changes as these revelations came to light.
International relations can be bizarre, and again, I'm no apologist, we shouldn't have even invaded in the first place, but do you think the Russian soliders in the Ukraine will be held internally accountable for war crimes?
Do you think the Chinese would?
Do you think they are held accountable in any way for other types of crimes, like foreign bribery, corruption, supporting human rights abuses?
Can you even freely appeal to the Chinese population?
No one went to prison. Bush served out two terms (the first one unelected, but that's an entirely different question). The US occupied Iraq for 9 years. If this is the "accountability" you're touting, it's frankly pathetic.
> Practicing democracy isn't always fast nor is it perfect, but it does work.
That's a major understatement, in the case of the US. The US killed hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq, in an illegal war of aggression, justified to the public on the basis of outright lies, with the complicity of much of the established media.
> the CIA is subject to more congressional oversight, for example
The CIA, on orders from the Bush administration, carried out a global torture program, in which it kidnapped people off the street, including in Europe, and smuggled them off to black sites for torture. The Obama administration decided not to prosecute anyone. In Obama's words, "We tortured some folks," but we have to leave the past behind us. When there was eventually a Senate investigation, the CIA spied on the Senators involved. When that came to light, the CIA apologized, but no one in a position of responsibility faced any serious consequences. The same goes for when the CIA destroyed evidence of torture - no consequences.
> They're banned from using blacksites and the CIA is no longer allowed to hold foreign nationals for extended periods without representation
That's very reassuring. I'm sure the CIA has mended its ways and is now staffed and led by boyscouts. They wouldn't do anything like, say, plan to assassinate or kidnap Julian Assange out of an embassy in London.
>That's very reassuring. I'm sure the CIA has mended its ways and is now staffed and led by boyscouts. They wouldn't do anything like, say, plan to assassinate or kidnap Julian Assange out of an embassy in London.
The current CIA director got promoted BECAUSE of their role in the torture program, not in spite of it.
I'm not sure you're really presenting a good faith discussion of issues and the complex nuances that underpin them.
What, exactly, makes China a better partner than the US then? What makes them a global thought leader in any respect? Is it stealing technological secrets from supposed allies? The fact you can't hold the Chinese government accountable in any way what so ever (please demonstrate a single instance where a foreign entity could do so)
And this just by passes the lack of understanding you may have for our democratic process and reforms in practice, judging from how you may think noone was held accountable for what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan (this just isn't true, heads rolled. No, not everyone served a tribunal or trial, but that isn't the only form of justice, and yes, people did go to prison)
I'll also throw you this: I'd love to see Bush serve jail time for those two wars. I'd also love to se Jinping serves time for the genocide of the Uyghurs.
I'd also love to know if you can go to the middle of Beijing and shout from the rooftops that he should be tried for the genocide of the Uyghurs and see how it goes
> you may think noone was held accountable for what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan (this just isn't true, heads rolled.
I'm sorry, but I prefer to discuss reality. Maybe heads rolled in an alternate universe, but not in the one I live in.
> the genocide of the Uyghurs.
There is no "genocide of the Uyghurs." This would be the first "genocide" in history in which nobody died. Using that word in this case is offensive. Genocide is an important word, and shouldn't be thrown around for cheap rhetorical points.
I don't have a rosy view of the Chinese government either, but I object to this whitewashing of the US government, which has behaved especially egregiously on the world stage over the last 20+ years.
You intentionally misrepresented my quote by leaving the latter part out, w/r/t it may look different to people not used to our democratic process and how our government works, which already makes me think you aren't engaging me in good faith here.
As per genocide, well, multiple countries call it genocide, including France[0], Belgium[1], the UK[2], Canada[3] and many others.
> You intentionally misrepresented my quote by leaving the latter part out
The rest of your quote doesn't substantially change the meaning. This is what I left out: "No, not everyone served a tribunal or trial, but that isn't the only form of justice, and yes, people did go to prison." Nobody of any importance went to prison. The highest levels of the Bush administration ordered torture, and publicly justified it. None of them went to prison. The CIA officers who tortured people? No prosecutions. The only people I'm aware of who went to prison were a few sadistic privates in the Abu Ghraib prison who took pictures that got leaked.
> it may look different to people not used to our democratic process and how our government works
People who don't think Bush et al. were held accountable for the Iraq War and for ordering a global kidnapping/torture program just don't understand the democratic process? Intriguing.
> As per genocide, well, multiple countries call it genocide, including France[0], Belgium[1], the UK[2], Canada[3] and many others.
Again, this is a "genocide" with a death toll of zero, even according to the people who are calling it a "genocide." This must be the first genocide in history in which no one died. I've rarely seen a propaganda campaign as transparent as this - even the disinformation campaign about Iraqi WMD had more plausibility.
> What, exactly, makes China a better partner than the US then? What makes them a global thought leader in any respect?
How about thinking of the global south, especially Africa, as something more than a basket case and a billion mouths to feed and actually investing in them.
> Is it stealing technological secrets from supposed allies?
Yeah that's pretty crappy but so is spying on our supposed allies and pretty much the rest of the world, even our own companies. In fact, it is built into our laws -- FISA Section 702 can compel US companies to help us do that and I believe this doesn't even require a warrant.
> The fact you can't hold the Chinese government accountable in any way what so ever (please demonstrate a single instance where a foreign entity could do so)
In what way has that happen to the US?
> I'll also throw you this: I'd love to see Bush serve jail time for those two wars. I'd also love to se Jinping serves time for the genocide of the Uyghurs.
Neither of those things have happened yet you seem to hold the US as being a better global partner. Rather than engage in this debate over who's the better leader for the world, let me present a model that avoids that: a multi-polar world where there is no one dominant power. Since neither China nor the US seems to be someone the world can fully trust, why not have a multi-polar world? With EU, US, China, India, African Union, etc. as centers of great power. Why should the world be dominated by one power? A multi-polar world is one that's much more likely to hold people or even countries accountable. A world dominated by one power means that one power will have to answer to no one but itself.
I'd argue we shouldn't have polars at all. FWIW, that wasn't the "ask" of this conversation either.
If we are shifting gears - I'd like no polars, rather a more neutral, flat world, with open ideas and borders, where human rights are respected and laws are fair and courts provide actual redress to citizens and non citizens alike.
I also realize this is...fantasy, but thats my preferred world, if thats the question.
Now I'd like to see a more good faith attempt at the conversation at hand. US has many critical flaws, and I readily acknowledge them, I also point out why the US political structure still makes it realistically amendable to being a net good force in the world (and I don't - at all - suggest it should be the only one).
Where is the equal and equivalent conversation coming from on the other side here? I'm not seeing it.
Lets try to have a good faith discussion about this, and one that doesn't just focus on the US issues (which I've been open and forcoming with). China has them too, yet we're suppose to ignore that?
Is it the same as the rule of law as we know it? No. But that sort of conversation is happening.
You and I may be simply talking past each other despite largely having the same goals/vision for this world. My point is the debate over if the US or China is better becomes irrelevant if the world isn't dominated by one or two countries. In a world that's closer to your "fantasy", we don't need to hope for countries to be better actor because the other countries are collectively strong enough to compel better behavior. In a world like that, a system based on rules can truly emerge instead of the de facto might makes right.
The notion that losing an election is "accountability" for mass murder and the deliberate demolition of an entire state is genuinely deranged. Accountability would be Bush, Cheney, Bremer, Tenet, et al getting the Mussolini treatment in the middle of Baghdad, anything less is a farce.
Democracy offers more accountability (at the very least removal from power) than any authoritarian regime. And it does so automatically every few years.
>Which nation has taken a very public and consistent stance against Russian military intervention in the Ukraine and committed billions of dollars in assistance without blinking? I'll give you a hint: its not China
You say this as if the Ukraine invasion is the ethical bar, meanwhile the US has been invading countries for 50 years.
And Ukraine is still an ethical bar, a big one, as to when push comes to shove, China isn't a great partner. I don't think the Ukrainians are going to look fondly on how China has acted here. Remind me again why China supports Russian aggression in the Ukraine?
> Remind me again why China supports Russian aggression in the Ukraine?
Prolonging the war harms Russia (so long as Russia doesn't win). It increases tensions between NATO and OPEC. It's a drag on economic productivity for most of the countries engaging. If resulting shortages hurt the developing world, that's another anti-NATO talking point for China in its relations with those states, and weakened economies or state-stability might open up new opportunities for China. Meanwhile, China gets cheap fuel and can generally do as they like with Russian relations, since, what're the Russians gonna do, push them away?
Meanwhile, what would they gain from flipping hard against Russia?
China's whole deal, to paint with a broad brush, is avoiding entanglements and prodding things the way that suits them... from the sidelines. Their foreign policy doesn't really follow some kind of moral narrative like we like to (try to) apply to ours in the West, to the point that the narrative they do have is about how they won't screw with foreign countries for reasons of morals or ideology—though neither their narrative nor ours fully fits the facts of their or our behavior. We play our cards, they play theirs. Our favored move right now is to help Russia wreck its military and economy while embarrassing itself. China's favored move is swooping into the resulting trade vacuum to their own benefit, and keeping this mess going as long as possible, because it's hurting everyone involved while helping them and improving their overall diplomatic/strategic position.
> Remind me again why China supports Russian aggression in the Ukraine?
China is bordering Russia. If you think that somehow doesn't change the type of relationship both parties are forced to have you don't understand geopolitics.
The United States has extremely weak neighbors and huge oceans separating us from threats. Obviously our situation is very different.
Yet those "weak" neighbors feel just fine criticizing the US and entering disputes[0][1], to which we don't respond by just invading them, clearly.
China can defend itself just fine, is the general assertion they make, so what are they worried about exactly? If Finland can speak out against Russia, why can't China?
This bypasses my central point, which is they're clearly continuing to support Russia and not act in any way to diminish their ability to stop being an aggressor, despite this press release, the reality is clear: they don't care about the Ukraine or applying pressure to Russia to resolve this
> China is bordering Russia. If you think that somehow doesn't change the type of relationship both parties are forced to have you don't understand geopolitics.
Can you explain what you are thinking? One implication is that China is supporting Russia because they are afraid of a Russian military actin, but is that what you mean?
Basically it means you should be friendly to your neighbors.
To use a crude analogy - if you're in a apartment complex you would probably be nicer to your neighbor than if they lived in another building, and not literally next to you, right?
Russia, China and India are the three neighbors living in a triplex. Meanwhile the United States is in a mansion surrounded by a moat a mile away.
If one of your neighbors was beating up and stealing from another of your neighbors, are your really saying you’d cosy up to them? By this logic you’d expect Finland to be Russia’s best friend.
I am critical of the Chinese system of government, but I’d never think of them as cowards.
>By this logic you’d expect Finland to be Russia’s best friend
"Finlandization is the process by which one powerful country makes a smaller neighboring country refrain from opposing the former's foreign policy rules, while allowing it to keep its nominal independence and its own political system. [...] The Finnish political cartoonist Kari Suomalainen once explained Finlandization as "the art of bowing to the East without mooning the West"." [0]
The Soviet Union's collapse allowed Finland to spread its wings a bit more broadly, but it's worth pointing out that yes, Finland was cozying up to the Soviet Union like mad, in order to best survive their physical proximity. The logic does seem to check out, at least while the bogeyman of the USSR still shambled around.
Is China cozying up to Russia? By what metric, and for reference, using the same metric, how much is the United States, and other countries "cozying" up?
Xi expressed China's unconditional support for Russia, and then Xi's foreign minister later came back and said that the unconditional support was actually conditional. So they are actually playing the whole conflict from both sides, which is much more of a traditional Chinese position.
Kind of like how (some) Republicans support Russia indirectly by criticizing the Ukraine war expenses from the USA's behalf, yet continuing to vote for the arms deals.
China doesn't support aggression in Ukraine and have made that much clear.
They also don't support poking a fucking insane leader of a nation with nukes that shares a massive land border with them and which they are heavily reliant on for natural resources.
Those positions aren't at odds with each other. Wanting peace but also not wanting to sour relationship with perhaps your most important neighbour aren't unreasonable things to want at the same time.
China was a great partner to Ukraine and invested a shit ton of money there, they are probably very upset that Russia has decided to go in there and fuck up the infrastructure they built.
I just don't understand what people expect from China here?
Turn around and say, "Hey Russia, I know you provide like 1/3rd of our energy and commodities imports but I would like you to go fuck yourself until you abandon your invasion of a small country that we like but isn't critical to our economy. kthxbye".
Yeah. That is entirely unrealistic and everyone should know that.
The US provides weapons to Ukraine because it's convenient. They send them surplus old crap and it hurts the Russians. Good for Ukraine, good for the US and costs them essentially nothing in the grand scheme of things, in fact it's probably the cheapest $/russian_damage they can currently purchase. They get to fight a war (their favourite pasttime) with none of the negative domestic consequences. Win win!
On the other hand there is nothing China can do here on either side that isn't negative expected value for them.
Them backing Russia would fuck them over with Europe which is actually a really good trading partner. Most people agree it's all negatives here so I don't think I need to elaborate.
Them going against Russia would just obliterate the relationship they have spent decades fixing and probably buy them absolutely nothing with anyone else.
The US isn't going to turn around and be like "Hey! China doesn't like Russia anymore, now they are our best friend!". That shit ain't happening. The US will continue to contain and suppress China because that is their prerogative and has nothing to do with their alliance with Russia. US can't allow a world were there is a power that rivals theirs, it violates every current US doctrine of "world order".
TLDR: China doesn't have anything to gain by directly rebuffing Russia and plenty to gain by staying relatively neutral in the matter.
So, in essence, as I correctly asserted, China is just looking out for itself, and isn't the ally you want when the heat gets turned up and you need economic and/or military support, at a minimum.
> You have zero recourse with China, if they decide to muscle into something, or support a horribly oppressive dictatorship to extract your national resources, there is zero - and I mean zero - way to appeal to any authority for intervention.
I keep hearing rumors of chinese buying brazilian farm lands, even assassinating land owners. Not exactly sure how much truth there is to this but I don't doubt it.
> Europe is a vassal. If the US didn't show up that would be a problem for the US.
The definition of a vassal and how European countries act and engage do not match. This is both factually false and even subjectively false. European countries are not vassal states of the US. No country is, in fact.
>It's a good thing we held one random trader from Credit Suisse accountable for 2008.
This makes no sense. The US is not singularly responsible for the mortgage crisis that swept the world. No one country is.
Not even sure how to address the rest, since there is no real attempt to engage the issues at hand, nor provide counter points to how it would be better with China helming global issues
Mao's entire army was outfitted with American weapons & vehicles in WWII which they then used to run Chiang Kai-shek out of the country to what is now Taiwan. We were initially going to arm Chiang Kai-shek but he was refusing to use the arms against the Japanese, believing he would need them for the civil war that would follow.
How about this for a counterfactual: if not for China, the Japanese would have seized India, and from there raise hell in Iran (oil supplies!) and put serious pressure on the Suez Canal.
China had nothing to do with the European theatre. US military and economic assistance was critical to pushing back Nazi Germany forces into unconditional surrender. Meanwhile China had no part in it whatsoever. Critical versus zero, seems pretty clear, how did you make this massive mistake?
Even in the Pacific theatre, the US Navy was absolutely critical to collapsing Japan's empire.
Somewhat agree, but I would argue that this is a one sided counter-narrative, in reaction to another one-sided narrative. Most of the complexity is figuring out which parts of each are true, and what happens when you add them together. To pick a specific example:
>The “U.S.-China decoupling” that has been the focus of public discussion in recent years would be better understood as an effort on the part of the U.S. to expel China from the “world imperial system.”
The US would love nothing more than to have China as part of the "world imperial system". China and the US simply can not come to agreeable terms on the relative power balance. Conversely, China would love nothing more than to lead the globally dominant imperial system, but at least for now, this is not a realistic possibility. Both nations behave rationally and predictably within the a real politick framework, as most counties do. They try to exert as much power as they possibly can for their own benefit, and their sucess or failure is largely determined by a combination of real world conditions, their capability to execute, and chance.
> Anyone saying "China also wants an empire" or "Empire is inevitable" is categorically wrong, though, or at the very least has not at all engaged with the essay above.
This is frankly, silly. The essay is just doublespeak.
If you can’t articulate clearly why it’s not in China’s interest to extend its influence throughout the world, it’s because you don’t have a coherent position.
For what it’s worth, I think most of the criticisms of the American system are valid, and the extent to which we are aware of them is because it’s founded on being open to criticism.
We’re faced with humanity being deeply flawed and not having developed a utopian system of government anywhere, ever.
A central question we are facing is - do we want a world in which governments can be criticized, or one in which such criticism is brutally repressed?
This take fails to fairly address the ulterior motive of the Belt and Road initiative, or the level of repression the average Chinese citizen faces (the Great Firewall is a great example. Don't forget tiananmen square or hong kong)
Sure, it's an alternative to the US' imperialism, but make no mistake that the Chinese government has the capacity to be just as evil.
The US government is rather limited there in how much it can actually tell companies to censor, due to the first amendment. The government can whine about a lot of things, but actually legally forcing action? That's much more limited.
> When the U.S. and Soviet superpowers were trying to build two different types of world empires, the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) that emerged in countries like India and China intended to create a more fair and rational international order. Today’s U.S.-China rivalry represents a struggle over these two world visions and the shared destiny of humanity.
Nitpick, but China's Maoist Communism was more like the fourth of four major axes of that arrangement, than it was part of the non-aligned/3rd-world movement. At times pals with the Soviets, at times not, but practically never pals with the US—like, at times they fought alongside the Soviets against US forces, hardly non-aligned, but also definitely not part of the Soviet bloc. They had their own alignment, rather, separate from worlds one through three.
Hmmm, I think it's an arguable point perhaps, but the history of the NAM is not ambiguous:
>But it soon after became the name to refer to the participants of the Conference of Heads of State or Government of Non-Aligned Countries first held in 1961. The term "non-alignment" was established in 1953 at the United Nations. Nehru used the phrase in a 1954 speech in Colombo, Sri Lanka. In this speech, Zhou Enlai and Nehru described the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence to be used as a guide for Sino-Indian relations called Panchsheel (five restraints); these principles would later serve as the basis of the Non-Aligned Movement.
China was involved in meetings before the movement was formally declared, both because they were seen as important to others organizing the beginnings of the movement (they were seen as a kind of pivot-state by everyone—their strategic and negotiating strength was tied up with a kind of potential energy, should they throw their weight behind any other player) and (probably) because China was angling to steer the movement as their own bloc, but they weren't part of the actual founding conference in the quoted paragraph, and only obtained observer status in the group in '92.
If I'm honest, this comes off like an attempt to write off their inarguable and central role in the creation of the NAM in order to push a theory that they're some scary fourth thing.
I don't agree with it but I also don't think I have more to say about it.
What a strangely inaccurate nitpick. China and the USSR were mortal enemies in the 70s, and the threat of Soviet invasion drove China and USA closer together and led to Nixon's visit. Your comment implies that China was closer to the USSR than USA, which is flagrantly false for a significant part of the century.
As a counterpoint; the reason we have a US-dominated world empire is _every single competitor_ went mad and destroyed themselves. The Europeans reduced their empires to rubble, the Russians starved millions of their own people then imploded. The Chinese killed their own economy. India had a handicap from the British colonisation, but then decided that wasn't enough and also tried socialism. The Africans can't organise their way out of a paper bag.
By process of elimination, the world order was dominated by the US.
The US does have a world empire, but its core feature is they consistently haven't exhausted themselves on silly wars or socialist internal policies. If any other power tried policies that promoted their own prosperity they'd have an easy time of it. China dipped their toe into saving and accumulating wealth and look how they've gone. If they could just stick to sane policies for 50 years in a row we'd probably have room for a few great powers in the world.
If China was still using Maoist policies we'd be talking about how they were put in an impossible position by Japanese, Russian, Indian, US and British aggression. Instead, they have allowed businessmen to flourish and everyone is grudgingly accepting that they are a new great power. Surrounded by wealthy neighbours who came out of WWII in terrible shape and just kept working hard, saving and accumulating capital.
Compare and contrast to Zimbabwe. Inflation at ~80%! Still printing money and refusing to let the economy stabilise. It'd be funny except the policy decisions have consequences for real people. They have had some handicaps. But their biggest problem is a refusal to abandon failed local policies.
I'm sure there are some success stories in Africa that will eventually show them all the way. But the success and failure have been primarily a result of their own choices for a while now. Just because foreigners are trying to destabilise a country doesn't mean they can't adopt growth-based policies. If Asia can do it, Africa can.
And even with that the Chinese are quite authoritarian. If they would liberalise a bit more they'd probably speed past the US too. There are a lot of low policy bars to clear before blaming problems on foreigners.
I don't think you can compare China to Africa. Just look at the borders of the different states of Africa - they come from a drawing board. That and countless CIA operations, colonization and century old hostility between different tribes. Vast rare earth resources, which are valuable for the West, make this an ongoing effort to exploit.
You throw in unsourced atrocity propaganda ("starved millions of their own people then imploded") which is like the U.S. abusing someone then asking them "why they keep punching themselves."
It's worth reading American imperial architects like Washington's "Wise Man" George Kennan in 1948:
>We have about 50% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3% of its population. This disparity is particularly great as between ourselves and the peoples of Asia. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction.
>499. Memorandum From the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs (Mallory) to the Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs (Rubottom) [Washington, April 6, 1960]
SUBJECT: The Decline and Fall of Castro
Salient considerations respecting the life of the present Government of Cuba are:
The majority of Cubans support Castro (the lowest estimate I have seen is 50 percent).
There is no effective political opposition.
Fidel Castro and other members of the Cuban Government espouse or condone communist influence.
Communist influence is pervading the Government and the body politic at an amazingly fast rate.
Militant opposition to Castro from without Cuba would only serve his and the communist cause.
The only foreseeable means of alienating internal support is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship.
If the above are accepted or cannot be successfully countered, it follows that every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba. If such a policy is adopted, it should be the result of a positive decision which would call forth a line of action which, while as adroit and inconspicuous as possible, makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.
Kennan's comment is strongly linked to the outcome of WW2. The US was the beneficiary of the war in sheer economic terms. Europe was either destroyed or bankrupt. China was devastated by it's war that predated WW2 with Japan, and then faced a civil war. The USSR was devastated as well, and had put almost all its resources into its military.
It's important to recognize the roots of the US's dominance post war.
You throw in unsourced atrocity propaganda ("starved millions of their own people then imploded") which is like the U.S. abusing someone then asking them "why they keep punching themselves."
Told myself I wouldn’t get baited by this thread but I guess Holodomor denial is my weak spot. The Holodomor isn’t “atrocity propaganda”. It was a factual event in history perpetrated purposefully by malicious actors.
Both the USSR and China did a wonderful job with killing their own citizens during WW2 and afterwards. Holodomor, The Great Leap Forward, and even worse the Four Pests campaign (I'm a bird lover).
The idea that the PRC is some benevolent country striving to break free of the Evil Capitalist Dogs is out of bounds with facts.
Nation-states have an anarchistic relationship with one another. For any system to be successful it has to recognize there are other nation-states with competing interests. So I find this argument unconvincing. If it wasn't the US, it would be someone else.
> The term Holodomor (death by hunger, in Ukrainian) refers to the starvation of millions of Ukrainians in 1932–33 as a result of Soviet policies. The Holodomor can be seen as the culmination of an assault by the Communist Party and Soviet state on the Ukrainian peasantry, who resisted Soviet policies. This assault occurred in the context of a campaign of intimidation and arrests of Ukrainian intellectuals, writers, artists, religious leaders, and political cadres, who were seen as a threat to Soviet ideological and state-building aspirations.
> The Holodomor (Ukrainian: Голодомо́р, romanized: Holodomor, IPA: [ɦolodoˈmɔr];[7] derived from морити голодом, moryty holodom, 'to kill by starvation'),[a][8][9][10] also known as the Terror-Famine[11][12][13] or the Great Famine,[14] was a human-made famine in Soviet Ukraine from 1932 to 1933 that killed millions of Ukrainians. The Holodomor was part of the wider Soviet famine of 1932–1933 which affected the major grain-producing areas of the Soviet Union.[15]
> While scholars universally agree that the cause of the famine was human-made, whether the Holodomor constitutes a genocide remains in dispute.[16] Some historians conclude that the famine was planned and exacerbated by Joseph Stalin in order to eliminate a Ukrainian independence movement.[b][17] Others suggest that the famine arose because of rapid Soviet industrialisation and collectivization of agriculture.[18][19][20]
Europeans didn't give up their empires because they matured, they gave them up because they lost the capacity to hold them themselves and the US was not keen to help them do so.
By the same token, China has it's own complex empire of influence. It's been said that Africa is China's second continent. China further projects great influence across Asia, Latin America, and even the West as well, in many ways including economic and political
International trade and investment are not remotely comparable to the system of global military and monetary dominance led by Washington. China is a huge and influential civilization-state, but it is not (yet) an empire.
China sure acts in an imperialist manner in Tibet, parts of Kashmir, Xinjiang, perhaps Inner Mongolia and the SCS + has obvious designs on Taiwan. I think you could characterize their activities in Sri Lanka has imperialist overtones too.
It's interesting that your argument for China's imperialism includes China governing three of their own provinces ("America sure acts in an imperialist manner in Alaska, Hawaii...") and the debunked Sri Lankan debt-trap story.
The parent comment I'm responding to explicitly makes this point: "The United States operates an imperial arrangement within its continental territory"
China is guilty of Uyghur genocide. They just depend on people engaging in wishful thinking or spaghetti logic to explain how reeducation camps and mass sterilization of a populace doesn't count.
This is a nice way of covering up enforced sterilization and contraception, which is absolutely genocide. Like, it's literally getting rid of a people, by making them physically incapable of reproducing: https://apnews.com/article/ap-top-news-international-news-we...
> The state regularly subjects minority women to pregnancy checks, and forces intrauterine devices, sterilization and even abortion on hundreds of thousands, the interviews and data show. Even while the use of IUDs and sterilization has fallen nationwide, it is rising sharply in Xinjiang.
If it was just a matter of making IUD's or other contraceptives available, obviously that would be fine. But what's happening is forcing them across the Uyghurs, and that's genocide.
Important to remember this is often on behalf of willing member states, re: NATO, the military pacts that span through Southeast Asia (there are many).
The US official policy (and they do follow this) is that nations reserve the right to ask us to leave, too, and yet, few do.
We don't always get it right, but I don't think the Chinese are interested in global peace keeping even on the surface. Its much more "winner take all". I think that does speak to a real difference.
I readily acknowledge our misadventures. We're a complex nation, same as any other, with real costs and unfortunately many ruined lives at home and abroad.
I'm not pleading ignorance, there are aspects of "American Exceptionalism" that are problematic and indefensible. I never (as many Americans) supported invading Afghanistan or Iraq. The CIA should have never messed around in many countries, (including but not limited to Iran, Cuba and Argentina)
I also want to recognize that I can freely talk about this publicly, openly, and take to the streets with protests against such things, without fear the government will lock me up in a labor camp or "disappear" people (re: Jack Ma).
Its foolish to think that just because we've made mistakes that we don't have real advantages on the world stage that may still be far preferable to some alternatives, for starters.
Nuance is required here, no? Its important to evaluate all aspects of what you're dealing with.
> I also want to recognize that I can freely talk about this publicly, openly, and take to the streets with protests against such things, without fear the government will lock me up in a labor camp or "disappear" people (re: Jack Ma).
It's because those protests are almost totally impotent and actually reinforce state power. The protests against the Iraq war were some of the largest in history and achieved precisely squat. When there is some seed of real potential, like the Floyd protests, everything you're saying doesn't happen absolutely can and does.
> Its foolish to think that just because we've made mistakes that we don't have real advantages on the world stage that may still be fair preferable to some alternatives, for starters.
Please embellish. What does USA do that offsets its constant warmongering and economic coercion, and how can you possibly know that outside of blind faith?
China's massive military spending and rapid modernization of its armed forces has made it a formidable military power in the world. The country's nuclear arsenal, advanced missile technology, and expanding naval capabilities have given it a significant military advantage in the Asia-Pacific region and beyond.
Additionally, China has been expanding its presence and influence through strategic investments and development initiatives like the Belt and Road Initiative, which aims to create a network of infrastructure and trade routes across Asia, Africa, and Europe. This expansionist strategy has allowed China to increase its economic and political influence globally, and some experts argue that it reflects an imperialist mindset
Have they actually been to war or tested? The last time they were close to actual war was the border skirmish in the late 70s with Vietnam when they were fighting for influence over Laos (or was that Cambodia?). It's been almost half a century without any real action. The wooden stick and stones border disputes with India do not count. What are their actual capabilities?
Military power is not just about the number of bases. The simplest example is cyber warfare, where China has invested heavily and is arguably the world's most formidable power in that area
Scale isn't the same as capability though, and cyber talent isn't exactly hard to find, just ask the Israelis (or maybe HN readers can do a bit of navel gazing). It's not fair to compare script kiddie levels tools like ransomware and cryptominer bots in the same breath as the toys from NSO group and Stuxnet. If we are counting cyber warfare capability by quantity of malware released, I would expect Africa to become a cyber "power" too in the next decade or so, because they have a large somewhat educated population and no good opportunities.
I don't think most HN software engineering folks realize how easy it is to train script kiddies. Most of the big "cybersecurity" consultancies (yes even the big IPOed ones) are primarily staffed by people who basically went through a bootcamp and gained a few certifications. Corporate "security" especially is more about checklists and compliance. You are not getting any real talent like the ICs' blogs that get posted here on HN. The typical staff at cybersecurity companies won't be able to subvert broken branch predictors and post networking stacks exploits on twitter. Those sort of low level application security engineers are a lot rarer and more expensive. Many of the "cybersecurity" companies provide script kiddies and consultants without a STEM background. Forget about fizzbuzz, they are closer to McKinsey than Accenture.
Many reports that China has surveillance embedded in cell tower equipment across the US and in container cranes in every major port. Who knows if they have been behind past cyber attacks on our oil infrastructure and electric grid. We don't hear about it because it's classified/ not diplomatically wise to share that info all the time
I'm amazed anyone still buys China's "weather balloon" lie. A weather balloon that large and expensive is a major project. It would have a project leader, project webpage, articles and conference papers, sharing of data, government permits for operation, and all kinds of other artifacts that China could trivially point out proving it was a weather balloon. Instead, China has consistently refused to even give a single name or company associated with it. It is the most secretive "weather balloon" I have ever seen.
Buddy, I never said anything about the subsequent balloons. Don’t try to deflect from the point you know I’m making: the first balloon was clearly not a weather balloon.
Said by who? Americans, people under the american hegemony described in that comment?
A large network isn't imperialism. China's international projects certainly have some empire-like qualities; they probably do have imperial aspirations not too different in scope from the US's.
That may provide a framework to help you decide which empire you'd like to live under, if you get to influence the choice. But it's not particularly helpful in understanding the dynamic described in the quote imo, or a refutation of its premise that US-vs-china is not the most effective way to understand these systems.
Anyway though while we're on the subject, it's worth noting that in africa particularly, states & institutions are often choosing entanglement with china as an alternative to engaging with the US in similar ways. Would certainly be worthwhile to get some african opinions on china and US vis-à-vis empire.
The Belt and Road Initiative is China exerting power over weaker nations in Asia, Africa, and Europe. China's strategic investments in infrastructure and resources in these regions have allowed it to gain much control over their economies and political systems.
Additionally, China's military presence in the South China Sea and its territorial claims over disputed islands demonstrate imperialist aspirations
I think presenting the situation like "China and the U.S. are fighting beneath the waves" sweeps under the rug how the preceding state of affairs—unchallenged U.S. dominance—was utilized by the U.S. to cut off countries like Cuba from the internet or finance with impunity, and makes it seem like China's challenge to this system is a scary departure from "peaceful normalcy" rather than the slow and difficult return of justice.
Just look at this map of undersea water cables to see how embargoes and sanctions designed to torture Cubans have led to silly and wasteful design decisions:
That map shows ALBA-1 (which lands in two places in Cuba, neither Guantanamo, and connects to Jamacia and Venezuela), which opened in 2012. Since then another cable - ARIMO - opens this year and connects Cuba to Martinique [0]
The two cables into Guantanamo -- GTMO-PR (opened 2019) and GTMO-1 (2016), after that map opened.
Nobody cares about the missiles anymore, nor the embarrassment of our failed invasion of the island. I mean, hell, we're friendly with Vietnam these days.
It's almost entirely due to one of the shitty aspects of how US elections work.
Enough Floridian ex-Cubans and their descendants, who got their land and businesses seized, are against warming relations at all, that moving that direction is seen as risky for Presidential hopefuls—which would hardly matter if we had a national popular vote for President, but instead, it's state-by-state and (mostly) winner-take-all at the state level, so that constituency's power is greatly multiplied by their mostly living in one "swing" state with a high elector count.
Miami doesn't want us to stop stepping on Cuba's throat, so we keep doing it. Why do we listen to Miami? Because our elections are dumb and bad and we (and Cuba) were unlucky with where Cuban refugees/exiles settled.
This is definitely a realistic take . Many people don't agree with you and prefer to see china as the enemy though.
I would say that the view point is a little biased as it doesn't mention all three possibilities.
1. US world empire
2. Equal international relations between china and the US
3. Chinese world empire
3 Is the thing not mentioned in your passage. Like the US, china itself is not some morally idealistic state, when given an opportunity for dominance they will take it.
I don't think it is really accurate to think of these as "options", which implies the possibility of choice between them. There is and always has been one possibility:
A global balance determined by real world economic and military power. This is the way it always has been and always will be. I dont think this is a cynical take, but simple realism. Counties take what they can get and dont ceed more power than they have to.
I agree, but think I am making an even broader point. Im not just desccribing a cold war stalemate, but the fundamental power relation between nation states going back 5,000+ years.
History is littered with empires. Nothing is ever stable. Both situations of multitudes of nation states and a single monolithic empire don't have staying power.
My comments are typically pro-American when the topic is international relations and highly critical of the US government when the topic is domestic policy. That is not the only content of my entire comment history as is the case with the referred-to account. Glancing over my comment history, less than ten percent of them are even peripherally related to politics.
Just look at how often Russian sources brag about destroying Western equipment sent to Ukraine before it's even been sent yet. Or the dogged insistence that Russia has no intention invading Ukraine and this is all silly Western propaganda mere days or weeks before yeah, they invaded Ukraine and acted like all those previous proclamations never even happened.
Having a free and independent press is extremely important and if a country doesn't have that I'm automatically skeptical of their claims. China and Russia only have state-backed reporting.
Reporting on Ukraine is pure wartime propaganda. Western and Russian sources both do it. Look at how often Western sources cite the Ukrainian ministry of defense and no one else in their reporting. You see western sources claiming russia is losing or that there's a six figure death toll on the Russian side and then documents get leaked and whoopsie it's actualy less than 20,000. It's hard to blame anyone for not knowing what the hell is really going on because it's intentionally obfuscated from basically everyone except the militaries involved.
However this type of thing happens at a larger scale than just the Ukraine war. I mean look at the "uigher files" that contain like actors from hong kong and shit lol. If you think just Russia and China exaggerate in their news you're not looking hard enough at our news.
Both sides do propaganda, it's just that Russia's is way more unbelievable, like how they've destroyed more than 100% of HIMARS sent so far, or how the Moskva died to an "accident" instead of a missile.
There's a reason "whoops dropped a cigarette" has become a running joke any time there's an explosion deep within Russian lines.
"Chinese scientists have developed a high-speed quantum key distribution (QKD) system to generate secret keys at a rate exceeding 110 Mb/s over a 10 km standard optical fiber, setting a new world record in the field."
https://archive.ph/SsHVp