7 ms·

It's scary how effective the US and China are at propaganda warfare. It seems like only yesterday everyone was on friendly terms, now we hate each other. As so

by geowwy 7y ago

It's scary how effective the US and China are at propaganda warfare. It seems like only yesterday everyone was on friendly terms, now we hate each other. As someone with family all across Asia and the West I really hope the US and China can resolve their disputes soon. This is really not a nice position for us to be in.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
point78 7y ago
Hopefully, the west doesn't budge until China stops commuting human rights violations (won't happen but would be nice)
- geowwy 7y ago
  Maybe I'm a cynic but I don't believe that's the real issue. We're friendly with plenty of countries that do far worse. I think it's about economics and strategic interests.
  - theferalrobot 7y ago
    Not nearly on the same level economically though. The problem is that China both denies basic human rights and is big enough to push these viewpoints in the west. The same can't be said of minor trading partners.
    - geowwy 7y ago
      I don't agree. The Saudis have been extremely effective at pushing Wahhabism across the world. In many places traditional (usually more tolerant) forms of Islam have basically disappeared.
      - adventured 7y ago
        The Saudis are not a minor trading partner or minor player in the global economy though. For decades they've been the cornerstone of the global fossil fuel economy and the controlling member of OPEC. While the US has been able to heavily shift off of Saudi oil more recently, now the Chinese are picking up that supply and are becoming increasingly dependent on the Saudis. That's a remarkable position of power & influence across multiple decades, to have superpowers vested in your stability and well-being (the well-being of the House of Saud specifically). Very few countries have ever had the sort of oil-derived slush fund (which enabled the Wahhabism push) that the Saudis have had since the early 1970s. However, for the Saudis those days are ending, as their population has skyrocketed and their oil output has not kept up (and can't), so they're under persistent budget crunch and their domestic population is increasingly growing restless as stagnation (more realistically they're seeing rapidly declining average standards of living) and unemployment become serious problems. Saudi Arabia's population has doubled since 1990, while their private industry has gone nowhere and their oil output has been near the ceiling. All you have to do is run that population growth forward another 20-30 years and it's obvious what's about to happen. The loose funding capabilities of the Saudis will decline markedly in the coming decades.
        rjf72 7y ago
        US dependency on Saudi Arabia is not just about our access to their oil. Due to quite prescient agreements dating back all the way to 1974 is the reason that Saudi Arabia, to this day, only sells oil in the dollar. [1] We made them a deal that seemed too good to be true. They simply sell their oil in the dollar (and only the dollar) while investing any surplus resources in US treasuries, and we'll provide them with military aid and equipment. Essentially getting a free military alliance with the strongest military power in the world in exchange for nothing. Of course it's not nothing. Imagine we do things some might consider a bit dubious. Perhaps accepting the running of a deficit in the trillions of dollars, or injecting trillions of dollars into the economy and calling the resultant price inflation growth. The natural consequences of these sort of actions are things such as inflation and a weakened dollar on the international scene. But now here's the interesting thing. Imagine we do create inflation or weaken the dollar and so there is a surplus of USD in circulation and things start to increase in price. And now imagine a country wants to go buy oil from Saudi Arabia ( though now a days, it's not just Saudi Arabia but the majority of oil producing nations ). The first thing they need to do is accumulate the USD. And since they're getting less oil for the same USD (due to said inflation and/or a weakened USD) they need to take even more USD out of circulation than usual. They then go buy their oil. Saudi Arabia then ends up using that USD to secretly buy US treasuries. That money is now back in the hands of the government and out of circulation and, like magic, the inflation and/or weakening of the dollar starts to revert. --- This was an extremely clever strategy. This is why things like China and/or Russia increasingly becoming buddy buddy with Saudi Arabia is such a big deal. It's also why Saudi Arabia can get away with practically, if not literally, anything (so long as they keep on the petrodollar agreement). But the petrodollar also ended up creating a bit of a funny relationship. We thought we were using Saudi Arabia, but ultimately we ended up dependent on them as our economic behavior took them for a given. So we now have the nation with the largest military force in world and the largest economy in the world behaving in an oddly deferent way to one little nation in the Mideast. So I do fully agree with you - the next 20-30 years are going to be incredibly interesting. But not just for Saudi Arabia. The interplay between oil, economic power, and all of these other major issues (let alone huge wildcards like space) mean we're in for one terrifically unpredictable and interesting future. [1] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-05-30/the-untold-story-behind-saudi-arabia-s-41-year-u-s-debt-secret https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-05-30/the-untol... [2] - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/27/saudi-arabia-prince-american-women-sexual-assault-beverly-hills https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/27/saudi-arabia...
    - mdorazio 7y ago
      I have to agree with geowwy on this one. I think the issue is more that China hasn't been playing by the US's normal business rules for a while now, while most other bad actors the US is friendly with do play. For example, currency manipulation, outright IP theft, state-sponsored propping up of US business clones, mandatory dual-ownership of companies, and now strong-arming US companies if they want unfettered access to the China market. Enough influential people's feathers got ruffled to get the ball rolling, which just happened to coincide with worse-than-usual human rights violations.
  - daliusd 7y ago
    What other countries USA is friend with has concentration camps? Turkey and Saudi Arabia have problems but I believe human rights situation is better there than in China. What else?
    - knzhou 7y ago
      The USA itself has by far the highest incarceration rates of any developed country, over 5x that of China. In certain demographics this rate is as high as 1/3. By the numbers this is more than what the Uighers experience in China, and e.g. Europeans can and do criticize the USA relentlessly for it. If you're wondering how people in China justify the government's treatment of the Uighers, the answer isn't that they have different moral instincts than you. They justify it to themselves in the exact same way you justify America's incarceration rate to yourself. (If you're thinking that it's different, because what they're doing just feels dystopian and evil, while we're just doing the best we can, obviously realize that this is pure tribal bias. Others might have the reverse associations.) Of course, what I am doing is textbook whataboutism. But that is the correct response to a claim that some foreign country is uniquely evil.
      - spectramax 7y ago
        The Uighers do not have access to due process and a trial. I find that a glaring, obtuse omission in your argument besides doing whataboutism. It is a terrible situation in the US in regards to incarceration and our politicians (Bernie Sanders for example) openly, freely, fearlessly oppose it. I urge you to take a deeper look into China's state powers and complete lack of liberty, due process or law (yes, there are courts and written law in China but they do not appease the dissidents of the CCP's agenda). What you're comparing is a regional regression of a particular demographic or culture. Imagine locking down 1.4 million people of Seattle metropolitan region because they worship no god and enjoy particular rituals, sending them all to re-education camps and then building HUGE projects to house them - all sponsored by the Federal government with strict orders from Washington, and the entire operation carried out by military and special police forces, setting up checkpoints in Seattle. Oh and I forgot that the threat is simply to sell your organs if you squeak and then kill you.
  - Ambele 7y ago
    I think the issue is that China wants to be #1 while America doesn't want to be #2. No one wants to be #2.
- jcampbell1 7y ago
  In 2010 I asked two different party members* about the western Muslim relations. Both had the same answer that it was the same as the black people prison population in the US, and a red herring the US used for leverage. My Chinese and their English was never good enough to discuss things like due process. At any rate, the pressure on human rights needs to come from countries other than the US. * being a party member not quite what you’d expect. Requires being in the top 10% of your HS class plus learning a bit of propaganda, and agreeing to harsher punishment for committing crimes. The ones I spoke to were successful business people, and willing to criticize the party.
chillacy 7y ago
Reading the news the past year or so has been like watching a slow motion bar fight break out. One person says something nasty, the other gets right in their face, the first gives a slight shove, and both can't back down or they'll look weak...
mdorazio 7y ago
Maybe "friendly" in the sense that both sides were deliberately ignoring the things they didn't like about the other in the interest of keeping global business chugging along. But not actually friendly. Part of the reason things heated up so quickly is that there was a lot of stored propaganda ammo to use. For example, US condemnation of China's human rights violations dates back decades, and only got swept under the carpet by Clinton in the interest of pumping economic ties instead of continuing trade sanctions [1]. [1] https://www.heritage.org/report/the-collapse-clintons-china-policy-undoing-the-damage-the-mfn-debate https://www.heritage.org/report/the-collapse-clintons-china-...
MichaelMoser123 7y ago
I too wonder how the nytimes seems to be pushing an agenda of isolationism, whereas that used to be a policy of Trump - and the nytimes used to oppose Trump. Is it possible that protectionism is now part of a consensus thing in the US? It still may that all of this is for show and part of the trade negotiations, go figure. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-10-09/china-open-to-partial-u-s-trade-deal-despite-tech-blacklist?srnd=premium-europe https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-10-09/china-ope... (Trying to read between the lines here)
jinushaun 7y ago
Not really, it's really the result of Xi's consolidation of power. People have been writing about this for a long time, but no one was reading until now.
- munmaek 7y ago
  Even the US govt has written about China's influence in media. [0] [0]: (2015) https://www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/Research/Directed%20by%20Hollywood%20Edited%20by%20China.pdf https://www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/Research/Directed%2...
clairity 7y ago
you know what you miss out on on the internet? being able to take little moments of silence to mull over things while sharing a pitcher of beer with your debate antagonist. we lose out on bonding time and unspoken comraderie and the straight-up emotional information content that invisibly flows between people near each other. despite such words on the web, most americans and chinese folks don't hate each other, and we'd get along fine if circumstances put us in close proximity. don't lose your faith in humanity because you can't feel the other person at their keyboard.
mncharity 7y ago
> It's scary how effective the US and China are at propaganda warfare. Consider discussion on HN. TPP is said to have been about "free trade". I've seen little mention of hegemony, or of corporate capture of US policy. None of TPP's ISDS enabling companies to sue governments for profits lost to health regulations, even as the public health disaster of junk food is extended throughout the Americas. Nor of requiring China to change its industrial policy, to optimize for industries shaped like US pharma. This on a site focused on an industry with a different shape, that has long recognized itself as ill served by patent policies optimized for pharma. When the current round of trade negotiations was breaking down, there was some discussion in business press, that pharma was perhaps pushing too hard, and would be wiser to get a less aggressive deal signed now, and push further later, rather than risking all. But on HN, you'd not even hear they were a player. You'll see no mention here of the Unequal Treaties, nor analogies to the Opium Wars. China must change it's laws to be more like ours, as is only proper. Even those laws, like copyright term extension, which we feel were against the public interest, and pushed through by corruption. It's the principle of the thing...? Sure, HN's competence is largely localized to tech. It's been observed that its discussion of other fields, like medicine, can get quite bad. International trade policy is not a core competency. But I feel like I'm watching a page out of history. Yet another war frenzy, and the choice to set aside institutional and societal intellectual integrity and competence. Perhaps someday, the NYTimes will yet again apologize, and FOX won't... and neither will undo harm and lost opportunities, raise dead and wreckage. But HN does have a core competency of tech. So what would it take, to create a discussion medium which might do better? In which topics like this could fruitfully be worked through? Regardless of ignorance and emotion. And of well-funded expert disruption. Where pro-life and pro-choice communities could coexist, incentivized to remain, and productively engage? /r/The_Donald and Sanders. #TSLA and bulls. What would it take to create a sane public dialog in the United States?

by geowwy 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

point78 7y ago

Hopefully, the west doesn't budge until China stops commuting human rights violations (won't happen but would be nice)

geowwy 7y ago
Maybe I'm a cynic but I don't believe that's the real issue. We're friendly with plenty of countries that do far worse. I think it's about economics and strategic interests.
- theferalrobot 7y ago
  Not nearly on the same level economically though. The problem is that China both denies basic human rights and is big enough to push these viewpoints in the west. The same can't be said of minor trading partners.
  - geowwy 7y ago
    I don't agree. The Saudis have been extremely effective at pushing Wahhabism across the world. In many places traditional (usually more tolerant) forms of Islam have basically disappeared.
    - adventured 7y ago
      The Saudis are not a minor trading partner or minor player in the global economy though. For decades they've been the cornerstone of the global fossil fuel economy and the controlling member of OPEC. While the US has been able to heavily shift off of Saudi oil more recently, now the Chinese are picking up that supply and are becoming increasingly dependent on the Saudis. That's a remarkable position of power & influence across multiple decades, to have superpowers vested in your stability and well-being (the well-being of the House of Saud specifically). Very few countries have ever had the sort of oil-derived slush fund (which enabled the Wahhabism push) that the Saudis have had since the early 1970s. However, for the Saudis those days are ending, as their population has skyrocketed and their oil output has not kept up (and can't), so they're under persistent budget crunch and their domestic population is increasingly growing restless as stagnation (more realistically they're seeing rapidly declining average standards of living) and unemployment become serious problems. Saudi Arabia's population has doubled since 1990, while their private industry has gone nowhere and their oil output has been near the ceiling. All you have to do is run that population growth forward another 20-30 years and it's obvious what's about to happen. The loose funding capabilities of the Saudis will decline markedly in the coming decades.
      - rjf72 7y ago
        US dependency on Saudi Arabia is not just about our access to their oil. Due to quite prescient agreements dating back all the way to 1974 is the reason that Saudi Arabia, to this day, only sells oil in the dollar. [1] We made them a deal that seemed too good to be true. They simply sell their oil in the dollar (and only the dollar) while investing any surplus resources in US treasuries, and we'll provide them with military aid and equipment. Essentially getting a free military alliance with the strongest military power in the world in exchange for nothing. Of course it's not nothing. Imagine we do things some might consider a bit dubious. Perhaps accepting the running of a deficit in the trillions of dollars, or injecting trillions of dollars into the economy and calling the resultant price inflation growth. The natural consequences of these sort of actions are things such as inflation and a weakened dollar on the international scene. But now here's the interesting thing. Imagine we do create inflation or weaken the dollar and so there is a surplus of USD in circulation and things start to increase in price. And now imagine a country wants to go buy oil from Saudi Arabia ( though now a days, it's not just Saudi Arabia but the majority of oil producing nations ). The first thing they need to do is accumulate the USD. And since they're getting less oil for the same USD (due to said inflation and/or a weakened USD) they need to take even more USD out of circulation than usual. They then go buy their oil. Saudi Arabia then ends up using that USD to secretly buy US treasuries. That money is now back in the hands of the government and out of circulation and, like magic, the inflation and/or weakening of the dollar starts to revert. --- This was an extremely clever strategy. This is why things like China and/or Russia increasingly becoming buddy buddy with Saudi Arabia is such a big deal. It's also why Saudi Arabia can get away with practically, if not literally, anything (so long as they keep on the petrodollar agreement). But the petrodollar also ended up creating a bit of a funny relationship. We thought we were using Saudi Arabia, but ultimately we ended up dependent on them as our economic behavior took them for a given. So we now have the nation with the largest military force in world and the largest economy in the world behaving in an oddly deferent way to one little nation in the Mideast. So I do fully agree with you - the next 20-30 years are going to be incredibly interesting. But not just for Saudi Arabia. The interplay between oil, economic power, and all of these other major issues (let alone huge wildcards like space) mean we're in for one terrifically unpredictable and interesting future. [1] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-05-30/the-untold-story-behind-saudi-arabia-s-41-year-u-s-debt-secret https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-05-30/the-untol... [2] - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/27/saudi-arabia-prince-american-women-sexual-assault-beverly-hills https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/27/saudi-arabia...
  - mdorazio 7y ago
    I have to agree with geowwy on this one. I think the issue is more that China hasn't been playing by the US's normal business rules for a while now, while most other bad actors the US is friendly with do play. For example, currency manipulation, outright IP theft, state-sponsored propping up of US business clones, mandatory dual-ownership of companies, and now strong-arming US companies if they want unfettered access to the China market. Enough influential people's feathers got ruffled to get the ball rolling, which just happened to coincide with worse-than-usual human rights violations.
- daliusd 7y ago
  What other countries USA is friend with has concentration camps? Turkey and Saudi Arabia have problems but I believe human rights situation is better there than in China. What else?
  - knzhou 7y ago
    The USA itself has by far the highest incarceration rates of any developed country, over 5x that of China. In certain demographics this rate is as high as 1/3. By the numbers this is more than what the Uighers experience in China, and e.g. Europeans can and do criticize the USA relentlessly for it. If you're wondering how people in China justify the government's treatment of the Uighers, the answer isn't that they have different moral instincts than you. They justify it to themselves in the exact same way you justify America's incarceration rate to yourself. (If you're thinking that it's different, because what they're doing just feels dystopian and evil, while we're just doing the best we can, obviously realize that this is pure tribal bias. Others might have the reverse associations.) Of course, what I am doing is textbook whataboutism. But that is the correct response to a claim that some foreign country is uniquely evil.
    - spectramax 7y ago
      The Uighers do not have access to due process and a trial. I find that a glaring, obtuse omission in your argument besides doing whataboutism. It is a terrible situation in the US in regards to incarceration and our politicians (Bernie Sanders for example) openly, freely, fearlessly oppose it. I urge you to take a deeper look into China's state powers and complete lack of liberty, due process or law (yes, there are courts and written law in China but they do not appease the dissidents of the CCP's agenda). What you're comparing is a regional regression of a particular demographic or culture. Imagine locking down 1.4 million people of Seattle metropolitan region because they worship no god and enjoy particular rituals, sending them all to re-education camps and then building HUGE projects to house them - all sponsored by the Federal government with strict orders from Washington, and the entire operation carried out by military and special police forces, setting up checkpoints in Seattle. Oh and I forgot that the threat is simply to sell your organs if you squeak and then kill you.
- Ambele 7y ago
  I think the issue is that China wants to be #1 while America doesn't want to be #2. No one wants to be #2.
jcampbell1 7y ago
In 2010 I asked two different party members* about the western Muslim relations. Both had the same answer that it was the same as the black people prison population in the US, and a red herring the US used for leverage. My Chinese and their English was never good enough to discuss things like due process. At any rate, the pressure on human rights needs to come from countries other than the US. * being a party member not quite what you’d expect. Requires being in the top 10% of your HS class plus learning a bit of propaganda, and agreeing to harsher punishment for committing crimes. The ones I spoke to were successful business people, and willing to criticize the party.

chillacy 7y ago

Reading the news the past year or so has been like watching a slow motion bar fight break out. One person says something nasty, the other gets right in their face, the first gives a slight shove, and both can't back down or they'll look weak...

mdorazio 7y ago

Maybe "friendly" in the sense that both sides were deliberately ignoring the things they didn't like about the other in the interest of keeping global business chugging along. But not actually friendly. Part of the reason things heated up so quickly is that there was a lot of stored propaganda ammo to use. For example, US condemnation of China's human rights violations dates back decades, and only got swept under the carpet by Clinton in the interest of pumping economic ties instead of continuing trade sanctions [1]. [1] https://www.heritage.org/report/the-collapse-clintons-china-policy-undoing-the-damage-the-mfn-debate https://www.heritage.org/report/the-collapse-clintons-china-...

MichaelMoser123 7y ago

I too wonder how the nytimes seems to be pushing an agenda of isolationism, whereas that used to be a policy of Trump - and the nytimes used to oppose Trump. Is it possible that protectionism is now part of a consensus thing in the US? It still may that all of this is for show and part of the trade negotiations, go figure. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-10-09/china-open-to-partial-u-s-trade-deal-despite-tech-blacklist?srnd=premium-europe https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-10-09/china-ope... (Trying to read between the lines here)

jinushaun 7y ago

Not really, it's really the result of Xi's consolidation of power. People have been writing about this for a long time, but no one was reading until now.

munmaek 7y ago
Even the US govt has written about China's influence in media. [0] [0]: (2015) https://www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/Research/Directed%20by%20Hollywood%20Edited%20by%20China.pdf https://www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/Research/Directed%2...

clairity 7y ago

you know what you miss out on on the internet? being able to take little moments of silence to mull over things while sharing a pitcher of beer with your debate antagonist. we lose out on bonding time and unspoken comraderie and the straight-up emotional information content that invisibly flows between people near each other. despite such words on the web, most americans and chinese folks don't hate each other, and we'd get along fine if circumstances put us in close proximity. don't lose your faith in humanity because you can't feel the other person at their keyboard.

mncharity 7y ago

> It's scary how effective the US and China are at propaganda warfare. Consider discussion on HN. TPP is said to have been about "free trade". I've seen little mention of hegemony, or of corporate capture of US policy. None of TPP's ISDS enabling companies to sue governments for profits lost to health regulations, even as the public health disaster of junk food is extended throughout the Americas. Nor of requiring China to change its industrial policy, to optimize for industries shaped like US pharma. This on a site focused on an industry with a different shape, that has long recognized itself as ill served by patent policies optimized for pharma. When the current round of trade negotiations was breaking down, there was some discussion in business press, that pharma was perhaps pushing too hard, and would be wiser to get a less aggressive deal signed now, and push further later, rather than risking all. But on HN, you'd not even hear they were a player. You'll see no mention here of the Unequal Treaties, nor analogies to the Opium Wars. China must change it's laws to be more like ours, as is only proper. Even those laws, like copyright term extension, which we feel were against the public interest, and pushed through by corruption. It's the principle of the thing...? Sure, HN's competence is largely localized to tech. It's been observed that its discussion of other fields, like medicine, can get quite bad. International trade policy is not a core competency. But I feel like I'm watching a page out of history. Yet another war frenzy, and the choice to set aside institutional and societal intellectual integrity and competence. Perhaps someday, the NYTimes will yet again apologize, and FOX won't... and neither will undo harm and lost opportunities, raise dead and wreckage. But HN does have a core competency of tech. So what would it take, to create a discussion medium which might do better? In which topics like this could fruitfully be worked through? Regardless of ignorance and emotion. And of well-funded expert disruption. Where pro-life and pro-choice communities could coexist, incentivized to remain, and productively engage? /r/The_Donald and Sanders. #TSLA and bulls. What would it take to create a sane public dialog in the United States?