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> Our president has already been attacking China with rhetoric and trade sanctions, and this story is meant to turn public opinion broadly against China. Ah ye

> Our president has already been attacking China with rhetoric and trade sanctions, and this story is meant to turn public opinion broadly against China. Ah yes, Bloomberg, well-known for protectionist rhetoric and support for Trump. > top universities are 10x more competitive (or more) than top US universities. A citation would be very helpful here. And no, number of paper's published isn > This is foolhardy, because China is led by a group of highly rational people whose policy responses to the administration's trade threats have been masterful and precise, and have conveyed with no uncertainty that China will not be bullied. Citation also needed. They're so rational, they just detained the president of Interpol, have committed mass internment of Muslim citizens, and can't go six months without trying to ram NATO ships in international waters. > but China has likely weaponized many aspects of US infrastructure via these sorts of supply chain attacks Wait, what? So doesn't that mean the hawks were right to be suspicious? And that this really should be a national security concern? "This is all just a pretense to make people afraid of the PRC! By the way, you should be afraid of the PRC."

alehul 8y ago
> Ah yes, Bloomberg, well-known for protectionist rhetoric and support for Trump. To be fair, many of Bloomberg's sources were government, so the government could easily have said "we'll leak this to Bloomberg." It doesn't require Bloomberg to have a protectionist agenda more than being a pawn. I agree with you on the rest though; "masterful and precise" in particular seems pretty farfetched and ridiculous, and many parts of China's economy look like a house of cards.
cmurf 8y ago
You're conflating rationality with propriety. China wanted Meng Hongwei to make it easier to use Interpol to track down Chinese dissidents, directly in conflict with the Interpol charter; and merely two years later they kidnap, disappear him, and charge him with disloyalty to the Chinese Communist Party. He was supposed to be their stooge pigeon, but was clearly ineffective. Again from their point of view, entirely rational to have him removed because he wasn't doing what was expected. And that's what's so conspicuous, they openly admit China was his master, not Interpol. China, Xi, and the Party are in a sense all one in the same thing. There is nothing more important than loyalty to the one Party, and the concept of one Party rule. And Uighurs are a threat to that, so they're labeled terrorists. If you accept the idea that one party rule is necessary, it's entirely rational to aggressively, perhaps even violently, ban all possible opposition. That's the nature of any autocracy.

alehul 8y ago

> Ah yes, Bloomberg, well-known for protectionist rhetoric and support for Trump. To be fair, many of Bloomberg's sources were government, so the government could easily have said "we'll leak this to Bloomberg." It doesn't require Bloomberg to have a protectionist agenda more than being a pawn. I agree with you on the rest though; "masterful and precise" in particular seems pretty farfetched and ridiculous, and many parts of China's economy look like a house of cards.

cmurf 8y ago

You're conflating rationality with propriety. China wanted Meng Hongwei to make it easier to use Interpol to track down Chinese dissidents, directly in conflict with the Interpol charter; and merely two years later they kidnap, disappear him, and charge him with disloyalty to the Chinese Communist Party. He was supposed to be their stooge pigeon, but was clearly ineffective. Again from their point of view, entirely rational to have him removed because he wasn't doing what was expected. And that's what's so conspicuous, they openly admit China was his master, not Interpol. China, Xi, and the Party are in a sense all one in the same thing. There is nothing more important than loyalty to the one Party, and the concept of one Party rule. And Uighurs are a threat to that, so they're labeled terrorists. If you accept the idea that one party rule is necessary, it's entirely rational to aggressively, perhaps even violently, ban all possible opposition. That's the nature of any autocracy.