Category Archives: defense policy

A TikTok Partnership

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Oracle Corp has become the frontrunner in the race to do a deal with the People’s Republic of China company ByteDance, which owns TikTok, for an acquisition of that app. That status seems solidified by ByteDance having submitted a proposal to the US government that lays out the terms of a deal in which Oracle would become the junior partner in a TikTok-Oracle(-ByteDance?)…alliance.

Recall that President Donald Trump has required that ByteDance divest itself of TikTok as a condition of TikTok’s being allowed to continue operating in the United States. Trump’s objection to TikTok is centered on the app’s scooping up of a vast range of personal and personally identifying data and the subsequent transmittal of those data to back to ByteDance inside the PRC.

Recall further that three years ago the PRC passed a law requiring every single company based or operating inside the PRC to cooperate with every single request for information that the PRC’s intelligence community might have.  That would include the personal and personally identifying data that TikTok vacuums up on each of its users, including the 100 million American users.

Critical aspects of this proposed “partnership” include these two:

  • the ByteDance proposal will involve expanding TikTok’s US offices to become the global headquarters
  • hav[e] Oracle certify the security of the app’s data….

The first is an insult to our intelligence, intended as it is solely to distract from the security problem.

The second is insufficient to the point of irrelevancy. Under the PRC law, to repeat, every PRC domiciled or headquartered company must comply with every information request from the PRC’s intelligence community. It matters not a whit how “secure” TikTok’s data might be; so long as a PRC company owns even a smidge of TikTok, that company will be bound by law to submit any and all TikTok data—those personal and personally identifiable data, for instance—to the PRC’s intelligence agency when asked, and TikTok will be bound to submit those data to that company for passing along.

And that should be a deal breaker.

Ethnic Cleansing

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It isn’t limited to the Uighurs, and it’s much more insidious and consideredly humiliating than merely killing or exterminating through forced sterilization.

The People’s Republic of China is trying to exterminate Mongol culture and force them to live mainland Chinese culture.

Thousands of students in Inner Mongolia have taken to the streets during the past week to rally against the government’s three-year plan to push Mandarin-language education across the northern region and phase out local history, literature and ethnic textbooks in favor of national coursebooks, according to rights group Southern Mongolian Human Rights Information Center.

And

Under President Xi Jinping, the Chinese Communist Party has intensified efforts to promote Mandarin and push the country’s ethnic minorities to adopt a uniform Chinese identity.

And

On Tuesday, the first phase of the new policy in Inner Mongolia launched to coincide with the start of the fall semester. It requires all schools to teach Mandarin using national instead of local course material starting in first grade—one year earlier than under the old system.
That means ethnic Mongolian children won’t be able to master the fundamentals of their own language before starting their Mandarin studies, [clothes seller in Xilinhot] Daguulaa said.

This is part of the threat all of us face from an acquisition-minded People’s Republic of China.

Kidnap, Inc.

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That’s the new company headquartered in Beijing.

Here’s a partial list of the People’s Republic of China’s iconic business’ products:

  • Cheng Lei, Australian citizen, television anchor for a Beijing media outlet
  • Yang Hengjun, Australian citizen, writer held on vague “espionage” accusations since last year
  • Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, Canadian citizens, held in the PRC since 2018 as hostages to pressure Canada not to extradite to the US Huawei’s CFO
  • threats that Czech Republic Senate President Milos Vystrcil would “pay a heavy price” after he led a business delegation to the Republic of China

And these are just the famous ones, the VIPs.  It’s not very useful—nor is it particularly safe—for foreign nationals to travel to or within the PRC.

The Size of the Drift

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ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos is the latest member of the media to portray Senator Kamala Harris (D, CA) as a moderate choice for Joe Biden’s running mate.

Stephanopoulos went on to add

Kamala Harris comes from the middle of the road, moderate wing of the Democratic party….

Harris’ positions include

  • supporting vastly raising tax rates, beginning with—but not ending there, rescinding the 2017 tax rate cuts
  • eliminating private insurance altogether and replacing it with Senator Bernie Sanders’ (I, VT) Medicare for All
  • limiting, in contravention of the 2nd Amendment, Americans’ access to weapons of which she personally disapproves
  • legalizing marijuana, never minding the damage marijuana chemicals do to developing brains
  • pushing for the Green New Deal
  • supporting far more open borders than currently exist—no more wall
  • canceling outright up to $20,000 in student loans for selected groups of students
  • heavily limiting the ability of oil and gas companies to produce the energy our economy needs
  • raising the minimum wage to $15/hr
  • “studying” reparations
  • eliminating the Electoral College
  • removing most of the existing limits on abortion.

She’s likened police departments to the KKK.

She’s also the most liberal and least inclined to bipartisanship of all the Progressive-Democrats in the Senate according to GovTrack.

It’s a strong measure of how far left the Progressive-Democratic Party has gone that a person with those positions is considered a member of the moderate, middle of the road wing of the party.

“Corporate America Worries WeChat Ban Could Be Bad for Business”

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As President Donald Trump contemplates barring the People’s Republic of China-originated and -based communications app WeChat from operating in the US, some businesses worry.

US companies whose fortunes are linked to China are pushing back against the Trump administration’s plans to restrict business transactions involving the WeChat app from Tencent Holdings Ltd, saying it could undermine their competitiveness in the world’s second-biggest economy.

Couple things about that.

Those companies shouldn’t make themselves so dependent on the People’s Republic of China for their business health.

The other thing is that those companies aren’t actually competitive in the PRC. They’re “competing” against domestic companies that get the benefit of PRC government subsidies and preferential legal treatment. Those companies also operate inside the PRC only at the suffrage of the PRC government—a suffrage that requires access to their intellectual property, backdoors in their core business software, and since 2017, PRC-based subsidiaries’ cooperation with the PRC intelligence community.