US Senator Marco Rubio calls Intel cowards for scrubbing remarks about Xinjiang and apologizing to China US Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) has blasted Intel for scrubbing any mentions of China's Xinjiang region from an annual letter to its suppliers after Chinese netizens threatened on social media to boycott the US chip behemoth. In an earlier version of the letter, published on Intel’s website on December 23, the semiconductor …
Every nation other than China with citizens/resources located in China (or a China-controlled region) pulled said citizens/resources out until further notice?
Yes it would affect the global economy (because so much manufacturing is based in China), but it would also hurt China as demand for the goods/services sourced there suddenly evapourated like smoke in a stiff breeze.
Got a chip making plant there? Close it up, bring your non-Chinese citizens home, bring home all your IP, equipment, supplies, etc, and just refuse to do business there until further notice.
Using Chinese programmers to write code? Pull out all your IP, revoke their license to code on your behalf, & hire talent to do the job locally instead.
Using ultra cheap Chinese (slave?) labour to build your stuff? Close up shop in China, pull back all your IP, revoke their license to work on your behalf, & bring all your manufacturing back home.
What would such a massive vote of "We Do Not Approve Of Human Rights Violations" coupled with a serious economic kick in the trousers do to wake up the Chinese government?
Whilst I agree wholeheartedly with your sentiments, I must point out that you're perhaps being a little naïve if you think the CCP will pay a blind bit of attention to "pulled IP" or "revoked licenses". They've been stealing IP and trade/military secrets from the West on a vast scale for years; why would you think they give a fetid panda's kidney about our obsession with "intellectual property"?
They wouldn't. But they might find it a lot more difficult to steal technology if everyone else also decided to ... strengthen ... their "great firewall" for them. It's a lot harder to find people willing to risk their corporeal existence breaking the law in a hostile foreign land than it is to take skr1pt kiddies off the streets, slap uniforms on them, and tell them to break into foreign computers. If that's not enough, I'll also point out that no country has any moral obligation to issue visas to Chinese nationals.
The proper counterargument isn't that an economic blockade and effective security measures can't make spying much harder. They can and would. It's that isolation of bad actors has not proven to be effective as a means of altering their bad behaviour. Probably the best example is the DPRK, which is about as much an international pariah as any country can be. Yet there's always someone who will keep such a bad actor in business, and wouldn't you know it, that's China. I guarantee there would be a couple dozen countries willing to give China whatever international cover it needs to bypass the economic blockade in exchange for something (*cough* Belt and Road *cough*). Sure, you can then extend it to all of them too, but that entire approach ultimately requires being able to definitively split the planet into two nonintersecting groups: one that absolutely approves of China and one that does not. I'll leave it to professional diplomats to laugh uproariously at the idea of achieving that kind of consensus. And even if you could, the group that does not has to be sufficiently small to change the CCP's behaviour. I guarantee they'd start a war rather than change one bloody thing about their behaviour.
Sound arguments, but ...
DPRK's economy is small enough that they can (barely) get by trading with China and Russia. If there was the political will to back such a blockade with trade agreements, with America Nato-leaning Europe and independant pacific-asian countries in one pact, that would have a material effect. And I'm not sure African countries for example want to re-visit a western embargo.
I think that these sort of attacks are in fact the war - China & Russia targeting commercial & political interests (I think armies and arms will be used in situations like Crimea, and internally) If national governements see it that way, they might find the resolve to act effectively. Promoting democracy in a non-partisan fashion would be beneficial as well.
If any company tried to do that, the CCP would confiscate the facility before the plan executed very far. The Chinese citizens at the plant (a) are loyal Chinese citizens, (b) think all this human rights stuff, if they have heard anything about it at all, is just anti-China propaganda and (c) are going to make sure the CCP knows about this plan that will put them out of work.
I deal with the Chinese citizens at my company's Chinese facility almost every day.
You say that like it's a bad thing. =-)p
*COUGH*
Ok, snark aside, it would cripple the company & probably put a lot of their employees out of work, a massive unemployment surge our nation doesn't need at the moment, but given all the stories about Amazon workers forced to urinate in bottles because they can't take a potty break, worker deaths in foreign-country-located-wharehouses getting swept under the rug, yadda yadda yadda, I'm not sure that the closing of the company on grounds that they're inhumane is such a bad thing.
*Sigh*
In short : Chinese industrial output would plummet, influx of foreign currency would grind to a halt, China would call in the overseas debts to plug the hole (they own half the world and about the whole of the US), they would dump their stock portfolios sinking the stock markets, collapse the major economies of the world and then there would be war.
But whatever you did, you would not unseat the Chinese government, and you would not 'free' the 1+ billion Chinese.
Pete
This post has been deleted by its author
"Every nation other than China with citizens/resources located in China (or a China-controlled region) pulled said citizens/resources out until further notice?"
Thumbs up for the sentiment, but never going to happen that way. Most companies (and probably a higher percentage of them the bigger they get) are slaves to the god Moolah. Human rights, environmental etc concerns are only lip service or minimum required to keep the brand credentials (ie only happen whe th eperceived dollar benefit in 'marketing value' exceeds the dollar value of the concrete measures taken).
As a corollary, the only way companies will pull out of China is if consumers refuse, in large enough numbers, to buy anything made in China. But that's not happening either, because for every person boycotting there are dozens who either don't care, or can't afford to buy something not made in China for double the price of the made in China one.
it would also hurt China as demand for the goods/services sourced there suddenly evapourated like smoke in a stiff breeze
Their 1.4 billion population with an average annual income of $17,000 (in real terms though $54,000 in a straight exchange rate comparison) would provide some cushion to China. The impact to the rest of the world that relies on goods where the supply chain starts in China could be far worse. The main reason why it would hurt China is that their population are big savers and low consumers which is a hang over from the days of Mao Zedong when the people were dirt poor.
Foreign trade is a significant part of the Chinese economy but even trade with the US is only a relatively small percentage of the whole. So what would happen is that there will be some dislocation in the short term but in the longer term -- nothing. Except we'd suffer shortages and higher prices for things (so what's new?).
You also have to recognize that neighboring countries don't see Xinjiang in quite the same way as we do. One person's 'freedom fighter' is another's 'terrorist' so actions the Chinese have taken to reduce the threat in "East Turkmenistan" also reduce the pressure on adjacent governments. We may look on this with disfavor but we're not the rest of the world.
As for IP, knowhow and the like, you need to look at the output of academic papers and patents and see the preponderance of Chinese names on them. Its true that the Entity List attacks on their technology industry have slowed them down but its merely spurred efforts to become self-sufficient. Since they're also somewhat critical to our supply chains precipitate political action will only end up shooting ourselves in the foot. (..."Chip shortage", anyone?)(It doesn't seem to have affected Chinese manufacturers, in case you haven't noticed).
Our Congress is readying legislation to severely sanction Russia in case it invades Ukraine or whatever. Congress can't do squat usually; its dysfunctional, we can't get any legislation passed that might help people domestically, we've got all sorts of attacks on our democratic institutions but when it comes to empty threats against them Reds we're right on it. It makes me sick.....
The security theatre must be played. How else is the MIC supposed to justify its existence except through posturing, bluster, grandstanding, and fear mongering?
Ever notice the US always has an enemy on tap to divert blame and attention to while demanding increased "defense" budgets?
Over the course of my life, I recall it being South America, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Canada (briefly under Drumpf), most of Europe, Russia, China, and I think they've even made overtures at blaming India. But always somebody.
George Orwell's "1984" was not an instruction manual!
I presume the downvotes are from the American readers. No matter; the truth often is unpleasant.
But the posturing in the US over the past umpteen decades to continually justify greater and greater military expenditures, invasions, and "policing operations" around the world, which just happen to end up being profitable for private industry is so glaringly obvious when you aren't wearing the blinders of patriotism. The MIC and the theater itself are just to justify the money taken from the taxpayers, and redistributing it to private industry. This whole sham really got under way under Reagan, I think. It was present before that, but the Reagan era turned it into a whole industry.
Its money making money for the sake of money; nothing more. Those people who are "employed" by the MIC could just as easily be employed in high tech private industry doing very similar research and development, just designed for civilian use instead of military. Believe me, there is no shortage of market for the latest gizmo and gadget in the world; you don't need a captured military market to make money.
The same is true of any industry that cries "but jobs" to justify its existence. Skills are needed globally, unless your "workforce" is truly untrainable deadweight, which I find highly unlikely.
Yes, the downvotes are probably going to be Americans.
They still think they're the good guys despite all the evidence to the contrary.
You are exactly right about America's need for an enemy. I'm old enough to remember the existential despair from the US military after the Berlin Wall fell, and the terrified casting about for a new one. I also remember the attempt to use India for the role but I'm not sure why it failed. India seems like a pretty good choice.
Meanwhile, here I am working for a huge American corporation that makes nearly $1 billion in profit from its Chinese holdings every year, and these idiots think the US (or anybody else) wants to stop doing business with them. Capitalism cares not a jot about human rights and they should stop pretending differently.
It's called capitalism.
Also, boycotting the Xinjiang region, if it would even be effective, probably would mostly hurt workers and their families there. That's not to say there shouldn't be any boycott, but it's something many people seem to either not think or not care about (or maybe neither).
Gentle reminder that countries committing genocide when they think they can get away with it is the norm - not the exception.
Also gentle reminder that Rubio is far more concerned about the increasing Economic and Military power of China and probably doesnt give 2 fudges about the fate of the Uigars, apart from the fact that its a useful stick to beat China with.
If he actually gave a crap about genocides and human rights he'd be supporting domestic measures to repair centuries of damage to Native and non-white Americans.
where i totally back a republican's words or declarations. This is a true issue with China. Reeducation camps , internment , slave labor is all in the mix for those people. The only way we have to protest is pull out business and pull out IP from over there. With Hong Kong and Taiwan in the mix , we got a boiling kettle and we got to do something. Stopping to buy goods from China and sending them the production we got to face a hard decision : let's bring back jobs and plants here even if we do have to pay a bit more for our goods. In other words , stopping money going to China and voicing concerns openly and criticising the regime is the way to go. The more they provoke , the harsher the response. China is not our ally .. it is the enemy and pariah of the world. Time the governments anc companies face up to this fact and start acting accordingly. Bit of a backbone helps us .. not them ..
So Senator Rubio is definitely heading over to China for the Winter Olympics then?
Or is he too gutless to stand up for what he believes in? But would rather try score easy points attacking someone else or a company.
As the third doctor in the joke says: I like working on politicians because they are spineless, gutless and their heads and a-holes are interchangeable.
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