Daily Archives: 21 April 2020

A Crackdown

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Or maybe a purge beginning. Fourteen (so far) Hong Kong protestors now are under arrest by the People’s Republic of China Hong Kong police for their rudeness in objecting to the PRC satrap government’s behavior.

Among those arrested Saturday were 81-year-old activist and former lawmaker Martin Lee and democracy advocates Albert Ho, Lee Cheuk-yan and Au Nok-hin. Police also arrested media tycoon Jimmy Lai, who founded the local newspaper Apple Daily.
The sweeping crackdown amid a coronavirus pandemic is based on charges of unlawful assembly stemming from huge rallies against proposed China extradition legislation….

Naturally, the PRC has defended those arrests and the West’s objections to them. Here’s the Office of the Commissioner of the Chinese Foreign Ministry in Hong Kong:

It is completely wrong that the UK Foreign Office spokesperson has distorted the truth by painting unauthorized assemblies as “peaceful protests….”

Because, after all, when a Government official uses a word, it means just what he chooses it to mean—neither more nor less.

This is what the Republic of China can look forward to. “One country, two systems” really means that second system is subjugation. And the dictionary will have only Government-approved definitions.

在中国, Newspeak 还活得很好.

Overseeing PRC Telecomm

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The Senate has started looking into tightening oversight of People’s Republic of China telecomms that are operating in the US.

In a forthcoming report, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations will level sharp criticism at a group of telecom regulators for failing to scrutinize the Chinese companies and the way they handle data going back nearly two decades. Senate investigators who briefed The Wall Street Journal on their findings said that without proper oversight the Chinese companies “present an unacceptable amount of risk.”

It’s a start.

But even with suitably proper oversight, a larger question remains unaddressed, much less unanswered: why are these companies allowed to operate in the US at all? They are, after all, arms of the PRC government, not free enterprise entities competing on their own recognizance and beholden to the laws of the political jurisdiction within which they operate.

And this:

Representatives for American carriers warned the Senate investigators that the US moves could cause Beijing to retaliate by cutting off their business with Chinese carriers to provide services. That, the carriers have said, would potentially hurt their customers in China, such as US companies, and hinder the carriers’ ability to cooperate with US intelligence-gathering requests.

Couple things about this. Cutting off American carriers’ business inside the PRC would be relatively minor for operations in a nation that demands domestic partners and technology sharing as a condition of doing business within that nation and that demands government-accessible backdoors into foreign companies’ critical software suites as a condition of doing business within that nation.

The bit about hindering US carriers’ ability to cooperate with US intelligence-gathering requests emphasizes a critical difference between us and the PRC. US carriers’ cooperation with our government’s intel requests is entirely voluntary, for all the political pressure a carrier might face for noncompliance. PRC telecomm companies operating in the US have no such option: PRC government requests for intel-related information are required to be satisfied. The only request aspect relates to the type of information the PRC government requires to be collected.