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43·16 days agoAffordable housing and the threat by malicious actors to attack digital payment systems are two different things. Homelessness has to be addressed, of course, but we are dealing here with something else.
9·19 days agoIn a piece published in November 2022, Nobel Economist Daron Acemoglu argues that China’s economy is rotting from the head.
For a while, [China’s leader] Xi, his entourage, and even many outside experts believed that the economy could still flourish under conditions of tightening central control, censorship, indoctrination, and repression [after Xi secured an unprecedented third term (with no future term limits in sight), and stacked the all-powerful Politburo Standing Committee with loyal supporters]. Again, many looked to AI as an unprecedentedly powerful tool for monitoring and controlling society.
Yet there is mounting evidence to suggest that Xi and advisers misread the situation, and that China is poised to pay a hefty economic price for the regime’s intensifying control. Following sweeping regulatory crackdowns on Alibaba, Tencent, and others in 2021, Chinese companies are increasingly focused on remaining in the political authorities’ good graces, rather than on innovating.
The inefficiencies and other problems created by the politically motivated allocation of credit are also piling up, and state-led innovation is starting to reach its limits. Despite a large increase in government support since 2013, the quality of Chinese academic research is improving only slowly.
[…] The top-down control in Chinese academia is distorting the direction of research, too. Many faculty members are choosing their research areas to curry favor with heads of departments or deans, who have considerable power over their careers. As they shift their priorities, the evidence suggests that the overall quality of research is suffering.
Xi’s tightening grip over science and the economy means that these problems will intensify. And as is true in all autocracies, no independent experts or domestic media will speak up about the train wreck he has set in motion […]
Addition:
TikTok Has Pushed Chinese Propaganda Ads To Millions Across Europe – ( July 2024, updated September 2024)
According to TikTok’s newly public advertising library, ads from China’s largest state media outlets touting everything from China Covid lockdowns to tourism in the troubled Xinjiang region have been broadcast to millions of the platform’s European users.
TikTok Ads Paid for by Chinese Media Target European Users – (August 2023)
Chinese media sponsored over a thousand ads on TikTok targeting European audiences. Additionally, accounts that carefully obscure their connections to China may pose further risks in coordinated information manipulation campaigns.
This are just two examples, there is much more across the web.
Let us not forget the people in Xinjiang who pay a harsh price for cheap Chinese EV cars. Unfortunately, forced labour and supply chain transparency wasn’t an issue here.
I’m from Europe and I’m kinda getting tired of reminding people from the US that your blind patriotism is just that…a blind spot that is used against the US citizens on every corner.
For starters, I/m from Europe, but my friends from the U.S. might not need to be reminded where they live, they know that themselves. And we are all tired of this whataboutism all over the place. There is a lot of criticism on the U.S., the surveillance there, and Clarence Thomas. The thing is that in these posts, there are no whataboutisms, no one commenting, “but in China …”.
As an addition:
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In 2015, two years after kicking off its massive Belt and Road initiative, China launched its “Digital Silk Road” project to expand access to digital infrastructure such as submarine cables, satellites, 5G connectivity, etc. In a report published this year, the UK-based human rights group ‘Article 19’ argues that the project is about more than just expanding access to Chinese technology, but rather to export its brand of digital authoritarianism across the word. Here is a brief article about it where you can also download the 80-page report (April 2024): China: The rise of digital repression in the Indo-Pacific – (Archived link)
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There is also an interesting first-hand research about how Chinese people cope with constant surveillance in their country by Canadian researcher Professor Ariane Ollier-Malaterre (March 2024): Digital surveillance is omnipresent in China. Here’s how citizens are coping (in French: La surveillance numérique est omniprésente en Chine. Voici comment les citoyens y font face)
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I guess they can’t say much in this case. Maybe a bit whataboutism (chat control? Google does the same?), but you can’t defend this imo.
Thanks for this.
Maybe you know Total Trust, a documentary.
Total Trust is an eye-opening and deeply disturbing story of surveillance technology, abuse of power and (self-)censorship that confronts us with what can happen when our privacy is ignored. Through the haunting stories of people in China who have been monitored, intimidated and even tortured, the film tells of the dangers of technology in the hands of unbridled power. Taking China as a mirror, Total Trust sounds an alarm about the increasing use of surveillance tools around the world – even by democratic governments like those in Europe. If this is the present, what is our future?
If you speak German, you can watch it on Arte TV, but it is only available 3 more days.
As @Deceptichum@quokk.au already said, this is about safety, and it’s not a geopolitical thing.
Space debris expert: Orbits will be lost—and people will die—later this decade – (2022)
Dual-use products can be used for civilian use cases and potentially also for the military, that’s why it’s called ‘dual-use’. That is pretty obvious.
It really helps if you read the article and try to understand. What is arguably more important is to stay away from this propaganda channels. It’s all on you, of course, you can do what you want, but if you keep reading and parroting these garbage propaganda and you’ll never learn how to think on your own, you’ll never get a life.
[…] called quantum technologies “potentially revolutionary and disruptive” and classed them as “an element of strategic competition” with rival states […] for components that can have military as well as civilian uses [and potentially] give China a scientific and military edge.
So the article is quite clear, just read it.
Basically, it is what China has always been doing, too. Many argue that China has even harsher rules regarding international collaboration -in both science and economy- and does not show any willingness for reciprocity.
Well, it’s probably a blend of many things. The ad industry (and the web in general?) is completely broken, but for disinformation to be spreading you need malicious actors exploiting the system and trying to benefit from this. It’s a human thing at its core imo.
https://feddit.org/u/sigmaklimgrindset@sopuli.xyz, thanks for this. I added an archived version now.
1·4 months agoI am not lawyer, but it’s another war crime that needs to be investigated. It’s also not only Putin, there have been many other involved.
No, you cannot walk around freely. This exactly is the point. There is no full supply chain transparency. Company executives and auditors say that, human rights experts, even some politicians who visited the country. Audits are just based on interviews, and these are useless, as even if workers would be aware of human rights violations, they cannot say that in an interview. This is said by those who have been there and conducted the audits. Read the sources.
At the start of this years, the Chinese government itself has -once again- openly rejected critical calls for human-rights reforms at the U.N. meeting, just to name another example, including a call for an end to persecutions of Uyghurs. It also rejected all recommendations calling on the government to end reprisals against individuals engaging with the international human rights system, even a message of disdain on the ten-year anniversary of the death of Cao Shunli in detention, a former Chinese human rights defender taken into custody on her way to Geneva for China’s 2014 UPR (Universal Periodical Review).
Prior to the U.N. meeting this year, China had even lobbied non-Western countries to praise its record by asking them to make “constructive recommendations”, which were essentially bland questions, make vague recommendations, and use their platform to praise the Chinese government’s rights record. And China has been blocking any domestic civil society groups from participating in the preparation of the state report or from making contributions to the review by the U.N. for decades, very much as it does with supply chain audits.
And, again, these additional examples are a VERY TINY sample of what is evident.
What a rubbish. Even Turkey, a country whose government is not exactly a role model for democracy itself, has long called out China’s treatment of its Muslim ethnic Uighur minority “a great cause of shame for humanity”. Volkswagen closed its Xinjiang-plant it ran with joint venture partner SAIC as “no full supply chain transparency exists”.
Markus Löning, Germany’s former commissioner for human rights who oversaw an audit on forced labour for Volkswagen last year (this the one report that is often cited in this ignorant communities where wumaos and ziganwus have given up their own personal developments just for parroting propaganda that is out of touch with world) conceded that the basis for the audit had been a review of documentation rather than interviews with workers, which he said could be “dangerous.” He also said that “even if they [workers] would be aware of something, they cannot say that in an interview.” And when asked about potential links between SAIC-Volkswagen and an aluminum producer in Xinjiang, Volkswagen responded: “We have no transparency about the supplier relationships of the non-controlled shareholding SAIC-Volkswagen.”
In addition, there are numerous Uyguhr people who survived the so-called ‘re-education camps’ who spoke out. A 10 seconds search has found this and that.
This is a VERY TINY sample of what’s wrong with Chinese supply chains and the country’s stance against human rights, and it’s no limited to cars but spans practically all industry sectors. There is ample evidence.
Forced labour and other severe human rights abuses are evident in China’s Xinjiang region, even though there is no full supply chain transparency in China. Your remarks regarding the US are true, but here this apparently is a blatant whataboutism.
I fully agree.
I didn’t miss the point, but this is a different topic. We need to provide housing, end homelessness and possibly the right to a bank account for everyone. These are different things.